Troilus - Modern Versions

Modern Versions

After Dryden's Shakespeare, Troilus is almost invisible in literature until the 20th century. Keats does refer to Troilus and Cressida in the context of the "sovereign power of love" and Wordsworth translated some of Chaucer but, as a rule, love was portrayed in ways far different from how it is in the Troilus and Cressida story. Boitani sees the two World Wars and the 20th century's engagement "in the recovery of all sorts of past myths" as contributing to a rekindling of interest in Troilus as a human being destroyed by events beyond his control. Similarly Foakes sees the aftermath of one World War and the threat of a second as key elements for the successful revival of Shakespeare's Troilus in two productions in the first half of the 20th century, and one of the authors discussed below names Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam as the trigger for his wish to retell the Trojan war.

Boitani discusses the modern use of the character of Troilus in a chapter entitled Eros and Thanatos. Love and death, the latter either as a tragedy in itself or as an epic symbol of Troy's own destruction, therefore, are the two core elements of the Troilus myth for the editor of the first book-length survey of it from ancient to modern times. He sees the character as incapable of transformation on a heroic scale in the manner of Ulysses and also blocked from the possibility of development as an archetypal figure of troubled youth by Hamlet. Troilus' appeal for the 20th and 21st century is his very humanity.

Belief in the medieval tradition of the Trojan War that followed Dictys and Dares survived the Revival of Learning in the Renaissance and the advent of the first English translation of the Iliad in the form of Chapman's Homer. (Shakespeare used both Homer and Lefevre as sources for his Troilus.) However the two supposedly eye-witness accounts were finally discredited by Jacob Perizonius in the early years of the 18th century. With the chief source for his portrayal as one of the most active warriors of the Trojan War undermined, Troilus has become an optional character in modern Trojan fiction except for those which choose to retell the love story itself. Lindsay Clarke and Phillip Parotti, for example, omit Troilus altogether. Hilary Bailey includes a character of that name in Cassandra: Princess of Troy but little remains of the classical or medieval versions except that he fights Diomedes. However, some of the over sixty re-tellings of the Trojan War since 1916 do feature the character.