SOURCE: Introduction to Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998, pp. 1-29.

In the following excerpt, Bevington presents the debates surrounding the historical context of Troilus and Cressida and discusses whether or not Shakespeare was using the play to mock some of his fellow playwrights; Bevington also takes a close look at the classical subject matter of the play itself and how it has been interpreted in twentieth-century productions.

‘a New Play, Never Staled with the Stage’: Genre and the Question of Original Performance

An enigmatic publicity blurb inserted in a revised Quarto edition of Troilus and Cressida in 1609, addressed to ‘an ever reader’ from ‘a never writer’, offers to the ‘eternal reader’ a ‘new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical’. In praising the dramatist...