Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Emil Roy

Critical Essay by Emil Roy

SOURCE: "War and Manliness in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida" in Comparative Drama, Vol. VII, No. 2, Summer, 1973, pp. 107-20.

In the essay that follows, Roy provides a psychoanalytical assessment of Troilus and Cressida, presenting Troy as "fraternal and feminized" and Greece as "patriarchal" and "masculine."

The primary area of conflict in Shakespeare's psyche, Norman Holland has said, was the phallic or oedipal stage. "The plays express over and over again the two basic oedipal wishes, to get rid of the father and possess the mother."¹ A pychoanalytic study of Troilus and Cressida (1600-02) enriches and qualifies the conclusion Professor Holland has drawn from his excellent and illuminating examination of Shakespeare. In this very difficult and enigmatic play, as in Hamlet, fathers and sons clash over their claims to motherfigures and their differing valuations of her. Moreover, the oedipal issues in the play are tinged (to a degree unusual in...
(read more)