Allan Bloom, "Troilus and Cressida" in Love and Friendship, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1993.

Excerpt:

“Troilus and Cressida, perhaps the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays, presents itself as a wildly witty travesty of antiquity’s greatest heroes. Shakespeare’s message seems to be that heroes are not heroes, because they are either fools or knaves, and that love is a sham and deception. The atmosphere is very different form that of Antony and Cleopatra, so different that many interpreters can render the change intelligible only by supposing disappointments in love undergone by the bard. Such explanations appeal to modern readers, who, under the persisting influence of Romanticism, understand writers as chroniclers of their own personal histories or their moods, sublime reproductions of the way most of us approach things. The notion that a writer overcomes his particular experience or feeling in the name of a more comprehensive and less personal view of things is rejected and treated as antipoetic, although this suggestion is enunciated by Shakespeare himself and discussed even in this play.”

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