SOURCE: Oates, J. C. “The Ambiguity of Troilus and Cressida.” Shakespeare Quarterly 17, no. 2 (spring 1966): 141-50.

In the following essay, Oates studies the conflict between tragic and anti-tragic elements in Troilus and Cressida, contending that the play is best understood as a tragedy that has been purposefully undermined by brutal comic insight.

The mock ritual of its structure and its corrupted “opposites” of reason and intuition explain partially the problem of Troilus and Cressida. Anti-tragic aspects of characterization and plot undermine the apparent tragic conception. It is this incomplete assimilation of tragic and anti-tragic elements which makes Troilus and Cressida a “problem” play long baffling to critics. That the assimilation is incomplete, however, does not suggest that Shakespeare's art here was not controlled, or that it was inferior to that of his other works, but rather that Shakespeare was dealing with a different problem in writing Troilus and Cressida...