SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Troy," in Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay, Routledge, 1990, pp. 91-120.

In the following essay, the Martindales examine Shakespeare 's picture of the Greek world by focusing on the playwright's treatment of the story of Troy in Troilus and Cressida.

Shakespeare's Iliad?

In the view of Gilbert Highet [in his The Classical Tradition, 1949], Shakespeare offered, in Troilus and Cressida, only 'a distant, ignorant, and unconvincing caricature of Greece'. It is doubtless true that Shakespeare, even if he had wanted to, could not have given a historically convincing picture of the archaic or classical Greek world, still less of the Bronze Age (but then who could?), in the way that he did of the various stages in the history of Republican Rome in the three Plutarchan plays. Part of the reason for this, no doubt, is the overwhelming emphasis on Latin literature and Roman...