Troilus and Cressida. / William Shakespeare ; edited by David Bevington.

and Achilles ,the butcherer of Hector.Shaespeare's language has to deal with shattered identities ,with unstabe subjectivity of human willfulness,and with spiritual exhaustion and neurosis.

It is a bitter play about an inclusive war and a failed love affair quite unlike anything Shakespeare had written before his romantic comedies and English history plays.Its bleak satire of political stalemate seems directed,in part at the unhappy story of the abortive rebellion of the Earl of Essex in 1601

like many of hte warriors in Troilus and Vressida ,Essex was a tarnished hero whose charisma fell victim to his own egomaniacal ambitions and to the mood of anxious helplessness that hovered over Queen Elizabeth's last years.The play is unususally elliptical in its language ,as though Shakespeare deliberately adopted a new ,contorted style to express the unfavorable paradoxes of the poltical and psychological no-man's -land he wanted to describe . A major topic the play is fame ,or rather notoriety ,for most of Shakespeare's major characters came to him in the story with full- blown legendary identities as antiheroes:Cressida ,the faithless woman

Pandarus,the go-between

Troilus ,the rejected male