Troilo e Cressida

When I was young and naive, I loved Troilus and Cressida for its brave cynicism, but now that I am older--and my outlook is bleaker--I appreciate it for its realism and compassion. Shakespeare shows us a world in which lovers yearn to be true and warriors strive to be brave, but both inevitably fail Leggi tutto

It’s a timeless story, really: sensitive young guy gets carried away by the noble delirium of first love and goes all mushy over the dirty ho who punched his v-card. Complications ensue. If you think my synopsis sounds crude, all I can say is, don’t read Troilus and Cressida , because it gets a whole Leggi tutto

One of Shakespeare's problem plays because, well, for one, it's really difficult, but mainly because it's comedy but not really. Actually it's a very cynical comedy. Troilus and Cressida is long, generates a lot of confusion and frustration and has a limited stage history, but it's complicated i

So a lot of people seem to think this is really boring and difficult. I'll give them the second one, but boring? This tale of a tangential "romance" (if you can call it that) to the Trojan War is rife with all kinds of awesome feats du language (oh yeah, I wrote that) and lots of tiny but cool momen Leggi tutto

Being a devoted fan of the Bard, it really pains me to rate this play so low. Yet let me elaborate a bit. This play was never really on my to-be-read list. However, I stumbled across a reference to it while reading Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own—you know, in the serendipitous kind of way in which you go Leggi tutto

This is a rather difficult Shakespeare play to evaluate. Its genre is a problem: neither a comedy, nor a tragedy, nor even a tragicomedy—it leaves an ambiguous emotional aftertaste on the palate. Shakespeare himself seems to have felt ambivalent about the work, since he never staged it. Harold Bloom Leggi tutto

Originally, I rated this play 3 stars. But then I watched a fantastic adaption and liked the play a lot more. Upon rereading it I kind of loved it. Which just goes to show how important it is to also watch adaptations of plays when reading them and critiquing them as they are first and foremostly me Leggi tutto