SOURCE: Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre. “When Playing is Foiling: Troilus and Cressida.” In Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays, pp. 118-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Maquerlot compares the style of Troilus and Cressida to the Mannerist mode of painting popular during Shakespeare's time, and contends that Shakespeare was attempting to portray the Trojan War as presented by Homer, as well as the love story of Troilus and Cressida as depicted by Chaucer, in a way that highlighted the modern disillusionment with the ideal of chivalry.

When Hamlet welcomes the players in Elsinore (II, ii), he asks one of them to give him an insight into his acting skills; he does this less as an audition (Hamlet's advice on the art of acting comes later during a rehearsal of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’), than to taste forthwith the pleasures of the theatre...