Archives 2006-07
Cressida and “The ill he had”
By Paddy Salmon
La pièce de théâtre anglophone est lancée. L’article résume l’histoire écrite par un de nos professeurs cet été.
Freely inspired by both Homer’s “Iliad” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”, the musical drama I have written tries to combine Homer’s “Iliad” with the passionate but bitter love story of two young Trojans.
Troilus and Cressida fall in love just as the forces of fate gather to destroy the city of Troy : he, a younger brother of Hector, and she, the daughter of Calchas, the seer who had switched sides from the Trojans to the Greeks.
Although Troilus is mentioned in the “Iliad”, as is Pandarus, there is no mention at all of Cressida, nor of their involvement with any such girl. That leads in Shakespeare’s play to an intriguing slant on the Trojan War (Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” has, indeed, been called his most “feminist” play). This suits my purposes admirably, as we need dramatically to balance the “masculinity” of the “Iliad” as far as female roles are concerned. The gods and goddesses, whom we encountered in “Odd Issues”, also make an appearance, which they don’t in Shakespeare’s drama ; on the contrary, he is content to sideline much of the Iliad story leading up to the fight between Hector and Achilles, and to use it more as ironic background.
I have, therefore, in this drama, tried to combine more of the Homeric story, alongside a more updated version of ‘Troilus and Cressida’. Whether this is entirely successful remains to be seen on stage, but it has the benefit at least of providing lots of roles !
In preparation for writing this, I enjoyed rereading (and recommend for those wishing to read more deeply) the Shakespeare and the Chaucer dramas, as well as the E.V. Rieu and the Richmond Lattimore translations of the “Iliad”, both of them equally excellent in their own way. The “Iliad” itself needs no introduction, I hope.
I have kept to the basic storyline, more so than Shakespeare did, but have obviously had to cut a lot of the battles and lists of soldiers, in the interests of including Cressida’s story, the main details of which I have kept, with only slight modifications often based on the clues offered by Shakespeare.
Briefly, Troilus is one of King Priam’s sons and he falls in love with a Trojan girl, Cressida, whose father, Calchas, a seer, has gone over to the Greek side. Pandarus, whose name has given us in English the verb “to pander”, is her uncle, and he rather slimily, sets up the initial “encounter” between Troilus and Cressida.
Everything starts to go wrong for the couple, when there is a prisoner exchange involving Calchas’ daughter...... Meanwhile, the war at the gates of Troy is entering its final stages after the ten long years of fighting. The doomed love story is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the refusal of Achilles to fight until the death of Patroclus, of Hector’s “heroism”, of the gods and goddesses’ internal fighting between themselves, as well as the imminence of the fall of the city of Troy.
All heady stuff ! Homer missed a trick here, perhaps.... ?
Dernière modification le 28-03-09 par
