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The New Cambridge Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida. Edited by ANTHONY B. DAWSON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Illus. Pp. 280. $50.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.
Perhaps because of its resolute ambiguity or sheer heterogeneity, Troilus and Cressida has lent itself to strikingly different stage productions. One of the pleasures of Anthony B. Dawson's fine new edition of the play is his lively introductory account of its one hundred years of theater productions. His account suggests that the richest responses to Troilus and Cressida have resulted from transformative encounters between Shakespeare's early modern text and later historical moments that illuminate different aspects of this complex play. Thus, during the Vietnam War, the play came to be seen as a ferocious assault on militarism and colonialism, though Dawson's introduction makes clear that in the 1960s and '70s the play could be framed in terms of a broad range of political registers. In Michael Langham's 1963 production, for example, the Trojan War revealed the face of American racial terrorism with the Myrmidons as the Ku Klux Klan. On the eve of World War II, by contrast, the message of the play seemed to be the danger of appeasement and political diffidence, as it was in Michael Macowan's 1938 modern-dress production that put the Trojans in British khaki and the Greeks in blue military uniforms reminiscent of German military dress. Among other innovations, Macowan's production apparently inaugurated the mini-tradition of turning the railing and satirical Thersites into a hard-bitten war correspondent, a move that goes a long way toward rendering this difficult character more comprehensible to modern audiences.
It is fascinating to read Dawson's account of how, during the 1980s and '90s, such political interpretations were gradually displaced by productions that made gender and sexuality the play's central concerns. This reorientation began with John Barton's 1968 production, which sought to...