Contra/Predictive Expectations and Questions

As I re-read Troilus and Cressida, I find myself thinking back on Hamlet. Well, not so much Hamlet, but the podcast I had discussing Hamlet with Amir Khan, who has written a book, Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy, due out later this year from Edinburgh University Press. A chapter of that book has been printed in the current issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, under the title “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.” If you remember back to that podcast, Amir talked about how our expectations are set by our first reading (or experience) of a play. But what if, he asked, if events in the play didn’t play out like they did… would our expectations be met?

My question is what if that experience is a priori to the reading, from before and independent of that reading?

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Podcast 106: Troilus and Cressida: Bawdy, Videos, but not Bawdy Videos

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[EXPLICIT CONTENT AHEAD… This podcast contains adult language and adolescent humor … if you don’t want to blush, save yourselves, and just move along until the next one…]

This week’s podcast continues our two month-long discussion of Troilus and Cressida with a overview of the videos available and a discussion of bawdy in the play.

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Troilus and Cressida: parallel, sadly

Shakespeare has been called the king of rhetorical parallel and opposition. A prime example of this can be found in Act Three, Scene Two of Troilus and Cressida, as the scene in which the two lovers confirm and state their love comes to a close.

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The joke’s on Ajax, who’s full of —

Quick note:

I wasn’t aware of the aural joke in Troilus and Cressida:

In the mid-1590’s, a man by the name of John Harington developed (or at least is credited with developing) the first flush toilet in Britain. Until this time, toilets were known by the slang term “jakes,” so it is no surprise that Harington called his invention the “Ajax”… punning on the idea of this being “a jakes” … a toilet.

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Quick review of a Maori Troilus…

Troilus and Cressida is not a well-known play, and when it came time to review the video versions, the BBC version from their Collected Works series was the only one I could find. Or so I thought.

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The Bill / Shakespeare Project presents: This Week in Shakespeare news, for the week ending Monday, June 22nd, 2015

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This week’s Shakespeare news review includes–as summer heats up–mostly previews and reviews of productions, like The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Macbeth (in a cemetery, no less), Kings of War, and The Taming of the Shrew. PLUS our usual recap of this week’s daily highlights in Shakespearean history.

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Troilus and Cressida: The Trip to Bawdy-ful, Part Three–lost in disease

[EXPLICIT CONTENT, ADULT LANGUAGE AND POTTY HUMOR AHEAD… SKIP IF EASILY OFFENDED.]

A couple of days back, I kicked off our Trip to Bawdy-ful and our exploration of bawdy in Troilus and Cressida. Yesterday, I looked at the view of homosexuality in the play (both negative/bawdy and positive/touching). Today, let’s slip back into the purely bawdy and nasty, as we look at what is one of the final destinations of sex: disease.

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Troilus and Cressida: The Trip to Bawdy-ful, Part Two–taking the back road

Yesterday, I began the trip to Bawdy-ful, i.e. Troilus and Cressida, with a look at the basic signposts along the way. Today, let’s take a back-road, so to speak, with a look at the depiction of homosexuality in the play.

In the project thus far, there hasn’t been a lot homosexuality explicitly depicted in the plays. Sure, there were some overly obsessed male friendships (see The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and a subtle unrequited homosexual love (see The Merchant of Venice), but nothing requited, returned, or anywhere near positive.

That ends here.

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Troilus and Cressida: The Trip to Bawdy-ful, Part One–signs along the way

[EXPLICIT CONTENT, ADULT LANGUAGE AND POTTY HUMOR AHEAD… SKIP IF EASILY OFFENDED.]

According to Eric Partridge’s discussion of the naughty bits in Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Troilus and Cressida is “only slightly bawdier than Hamlet” (Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Partridge, Eric. New York: Routledge Classics, 2001; page 57). I’m not sure I buy the “only slightly” (given I know I spent two entries on Hamlet’s nudge-nudge wink-wink, and I figure it’ll take three to do Troilus and Cressida’s), but I would agree to his addendum: “yet, all in all, it leaves a nasty taste in the literary mouth” (Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 57).

And, of course, now I’m thinking back on the statement I made about the bawdy in Hamlet… that it has had the fun sucked out of the bawdy… that would indeed lead to that “nasty taste in the literary mouth.”

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