Troilus and Cressida is a tricky play to categorise: part tragedy of love and loss, part cynical comedy, part bitter parody of the heroic idea. Its tonal instability mirrors the instability and fragility of the love relationship that Cressida and Troilus try to sustain in the hostile environment of the Trojan war.
Othello is a very different play: by common consent, one of Shakespeare’s most overwhelming and unequivocally tragic tragedies. Yet it was written soon after Troilus – it may have been the very next play Shakespeare wrote – and, like that play, it has at its centre a lover who is also a warrior. By juxtaposing passionate love to the quintessentially male world of warfare and army life, it asks radical questions about how men and women relate to one another across and despite the conventions and constructions of gender that separate them.
Jealousy is central to both plays. How well do lovers know one another – or know themselves, once love has entered into their lives? How much of his identity does a warrior risk when he becomes a lover? Anxiety about possible infidelity spills over into wider concerns with the power of reputation, or what Iago calls ‘good name’ – the power of language, or of representation more generally, to make and to destroy the sense of who we really are.
Women, in this respect just like the warriors at Troy or indeed Moors in Venice, come entangled in assumptions about how they ought to behave, or how they are bound to behave. In Cressida and in Desdemona, Shakespeare gives us women who resist the patriarchal stereotyping which determines their fate – or are his plays themselves conditioned by such stereotypes?
These are some of the areas we shall explore, and no doubt debate, by working through both plays, looking closely at selected passages.
