Troilus and Cressida

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1. AidevahFeb 2022
   I do not deny the existence of creative peaks after 35, which is of course not a rarity (just look up Elliott Carter for a truly awe-inspiring example). What I mean to say is that there seems to be a certain (mental? physiognomical? spiritual?) obstacle at 35 which affects all artists but especially those who relied on their precocity or talent which was more abundant in their early years. Those who cruised through their youth using the gifts they were born with are faced with a difficult decision in their 30s: they can either accept the decline in the rate and quality of their works or shift to methods which requires much more effort. Of course, not all artists were prodigies and they are not equally affected by this obstacle.

   I don't know how sickness affects creativity, although quality of health has never seemed to be a disqualifying factor for the production of great works. Thomas Mann of course utilised this as his central idea in The Magic Mountain. The sickness of Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven does not see to have negatively impacted their creativity; Schubert seems even more sublime when he realised death was near, and Beethoven's deafness hasn't affected the quality of his late works.

   The case of Shakespeare is peculiar in itself. If you read all his plays in sequence of composition, you would notice a certain weariness that becomes gradually apparent. Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida contain an undisguised bitterness which is largely absent in the earlier tragedies (although you can glimpse a hint of it in Anthony and Cleopatra). The late romances, Winter's Tale and The Tempest, are of course unusually heavy in their subject matter. Harold Bloom interprets this as a certain melancholy in Shakespeare which made him weary of the theatre business altogether, which certain explains his early retirement. The health complaints in his 30s doesn't square with the fact that most of his greatest works were still to come at that stage.

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2. justifierJan 2017
   professors teach to their opinion

   i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer

   i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me!

   i failed the exam

   frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes

   first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work

   chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure

   but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped

   (o) http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html

   (i) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06

   (i/2) https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee

   (ii) http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf

   (iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato

   front page of reddit right now.. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i... ;P

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