SOURCE: “The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 295-313.

In the following essay, Hillman contends that Shakespeare wrote and produced Troilus and Cressida with a view to concentrating on the grossly physical aspects of the human body in order to bring life to a tale that had already been frequently told and whose language had thus been rendered abstract through overtelling.

Ignorance in physiologicis—that damned ‘idealism.’ 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo¹

1. the Matter of Troy

Why did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida? Why, that is, did he turn his attention to a story that was so overdetermined as to have become, by the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a compilation of clichés? The Trojan story was enormously popular during the decades preceding composition of the play,² and the most obvious motive suggested by this popularity is the play's...