Genre identification problems
The difficulties about the date of the play are insignificant compared with the difficulties of its genre identification.
A famous 19th century literary critic named Frederick S. Boas argued that Troilus and Cressida (along with Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well), deserves its own special category: "Problem Play."[8] The term problem play was drawn from the socially conscious drama of playwrights contemporaneous with Boas, like Ibsen and Shaw, and describes a play centred on a social or political problem in such a way as to promote debate but not easy resolution.[9] Yet the deep sense of Troilus and Cressida, according to Anthony B. Dawson, lies exactly in its perplexity: "It is still full of puzzles, but that fact has been recognized as a virtue rather than a defect – its difficulties are generative, its obstacles fruitful".[10]
Jonathan Bate is one of many modern authors who regard the play as a satire, deliberately undermining the heroic and romantic style of George Chapman's new and popular translation of Homer. He instances the cynical attitude of Pandarus towards the overnight tryst arranged between the lovers, and the weak, "feminine" language of the supposedly valiant warriors. The warrior in magnificent armour delivering the prologue to the play may have been a parody of Ben Jonson's Poetaster.[11]
Although positioned between the Histories and the Tragedies in the First Folio, the editors' initial intention was for it to follow The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, placing it unequivocally with the tragedies it resembles, notwithstanding the lack of typical tragic plot structure. It was only a delay in the typesetting process which caused it to be "slotted in" after The Famous History of Henry VIII, when the volume was finally published.[3] Nowadays Troilus and Cressida is often grouped with the so-called "problem comedies" with Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. Throughout this work we can observe Shakespeare's tone changing from light comic to intensely tragic.
Literary critic and scholar Joyce Carol Oates wrote that in reality these shifts complemented the values Shakespeare questioned in the play: love, honour, and hierarchy. To Oates Troilus and Cressida is one of the most intriguing plays ever written, and in her opinion appears remarkably 'modern'. Oates considered the play a new kind of contemporary tragedy – a grand existential statement:
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.[12]
