SOURCE: Glasser, Marvin. “Baroque Formal Elements in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.” Upstart Crow 6 (1986): 54-70.

In the following essay, Glasser studies those formal effects of Troilus and Cressida that bear a resemblance to the visual effects common in paintings contemporary with the play, contending that both types of effects suggest a collapse of sixteenth-century thought concerning the relationship between time and space, and between subject and object.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida has been described as a “keystone in the arch of Shakespeare's intellectual development,” a result of his “consciously experimenting with structure” after 1600 (of wider significance because of his being “in the mainstream of the radical change in European aesthetics of his day”), and “almost … a design of philosophical positions.”¹ The tenor of these comments is that the play is less an impassioned response to a dissolving order of things than a deliberate effort to craft a new dramatic...