Troilus and Cressida: A Tragic Misreading?

I'm reading Troilus and Cressida, one of Shakespeare's darker plays that has often been categorized as one of his "problem plays." This play is so rich and full of material that one of my initial reactions was that I didn't know where to start dissecting the play. Its a deeply cynical play that critiques war, love, and human nature. However, it's also a fairly philosophical play.

I found this video of Rob Melrose, who directed a version of the play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as he discusses why he likes the play, why it's such a difficult play to dissect, and what the specific themes of the play are.

I've started working on a few ideas for my paper. I have a few loosely-formed ideas that I'm developing. In class we've been calling them "proto-papers," or preliminary paper ideas. Originally, I had developed three distinct proto-papers that dealt with textual, contextual, and critical issues, but now I have paired it into two separate but related ideas. 

My first proto-paper focuses on the idea that although sometimes grouped in the category of “tragedy,” Troilus and Cressida is an anti-tragedy because what would traditionally be seen as the linguistically “tragic” language (e.g. Romeo and Juliet) is reduced to anticlimactic and unsatisfying language that departs from this traditionally romantic language.

            Most of the play centers on what seem to be very tragic moments, but these moments are never as amplified or as dramatic as we would expect them to be. Additionally, the characters that seek revenge never get that revenge, and the conclusion is unsatisfying. Because Shakespeare is limited to the story lines of the original Greek and Trojan wars, his story line is already sporadic and difficult to follow, but his choice to end the play with a distinctly unromantic ending goes against the tragic trends that he usually used.

Going along with this idea, I also thought it would be interesting to argue that although Troilus and Cressida was based on previous texts such as the Iliad and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s version is distinctly more modern and even forward-looking because of its anti-climatic nature and its criticism of traditional tragic values. “Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century. ... This is tragedy of a special sort—the 'tragedy' the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy” (Oates). Shakespeare leads the reader to believe that something dramatic will happen. Perhaps it is the fight between Achilles and Hector, or the revenge of Troilus. Yet, these events are unsatisfying, and just seek to draw out a deeper theme of the play—namely, that human nature is vile, lustful, and untrustworthy, and because of that, the primarily noble desires of a tragedy remain unrealized within the play. However frustrating and unsatisfying one of Shakespeare’s traditional tragedies may seem, Troilus and Cressida frustrates readers even more with a nontraditional tragedy that seems more closely aligned to the disappointed hopes and unexplained events of real life.

I'm wondering if I can weave together these two ideas into one mega-thesis about the status of Troilus and Cressida as a distinctly anti-tragedy play. Of course, this may be a large claim to take on, or may even be too simplistic, but for now, it's where I'm at. Feedback is much appreciated.

Oates, Joyce. “The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.” Originally published as two separate essays, in Philological Quarterly, Spring 1967, and Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 1966.