When Andrew Weems walks into the sand of Peter Hall's stage as the "deformed and scurrilous Greek," Thersites, he is armed with a well-worn copy of the Arden Shakespeare edition of the play from which he reads the opening lines of the preface to the 1609 quarto.  “Eternal reader, you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical . . .” With these lines we are introduced to the first puzzle of this contentious play:  was it ever performed in Shakespeare's time, and, if so, where and when?

Modern scholars, attempting to determine where and by whom the surviving plays of Renaissance England were performed, look first for evidence to the title pages of the earliest published editions.  Publishers were more apt to advertise the theater or the playing company connected to an offered play than they were the identity of its author.  But Troilus and Cressida presents the scholar with a dilemma.

Its original edition, the quarto of 1609, raises as many questions as it answers.  It survives in two "states.” It was apparently first published with a title page that told the purchaser it “was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe."   At some time after the process of printing the play was begun, or perhaps after it was completed, a change was made to the title page.  The original page was removed from some copies and replaced with another.  The title changes from The Historie of Troylus and Cesseida to The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid.  Gone, also, is the assertion that the play was “acted” by Shakespeare's company, The King's Men.  After the title appears instead, in addition to the title identifying the play as the story of Troilus and Cressida: "Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince of Licia."

Both title pages attribute the play to William Shakespeare, place its publication in London, and tell us that these copies were printed by G. Eld for R. Bonian and H. Walley and "are to be sold at the spred Eagle in Paules Church-yeard, over against the great North doore."   Both also agree on the play's publication date of 1609.  However, inserted after the title page in the second "state" is a note from the publisher to his hoped for readers, assuring them that this "new play" was "never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," which strongly implies that the play was never performed.

But does it really assure us of that?  The London theater included more than merely the open-air public auditoriums in which the leading companies played: The Rose, The Curtain, The Fortune, The Hope, The Swan, The Red Bull, and, most famously, Shakespeare's Globe on the Bankside.  Plays were also put on in what were called "Private Houses," smaller, indoor venues, attracting wealthier and often more sophisticated audiences, like Blackfriars, in which Shakespeare's company began performing the year before the publication of Troilus and Cressida.  Some plays, including Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, were known to have been staged by the professional companies for the entertainment of the lawyers and legal students at the Inns of Court, west of the London city walls.  In addition, in the Christmas season, the monarch often hosted exclusive engagements in royal venues for the companies that played in the public houses in the warmer months.

By claiming that the play was not debased by performance for the vulgar, the "Never Writer" may, therefore, not be ruling out performances for the more sophisticated audiences that gathered elsewhere than the public stages.  The lack of evidence of any such performance is not evidence that there were none.  These private venues kept no better records of what was acted in them than the public houses did.  Even the King's Master of Revels, though he sometimes referred in his account books to approximate titles of the plays performed for the court, more often noted what was paid and to whom than of what the evening's literary fare consisted.

The theory that Troilus and Cressida had entertained the legal professionals and students of the Inns of Court has been particularly popular.  The dense and intricate rhetoric of the arguments in the Greek and the Trojan councils mimics in many ways the exercises in legal logic used in training for the practice of law.  The cynical point of view and the satiric swipes at popular values like chivalric militarism and romantic love would also appeal to the sophisticated, and irreverent tastes of law students.

The puzzling evidence of the 1609 quarto, and the lack of any contemporary record of performance, has also prompted speculation of official suppression or censorship in reaction to the play's subversive tone; or, to some, has merely suggested the play’s commercial failure, perhaps because of its challenging, "avant garde" form.  All that is certain is that no record of early seventeenth-century performance survives. Though we cannot rule out performances of the play, either at the Globe or elsewhere, during this period, the absence of any record  suggests that, if there were stagings, they were few in number.  The fact that no further published editions of Troilus were called for after 1609 also seems to testify to the failure of the play to find the wide and appreciative audience that Hamlet, for example, which was written about the time of Troilus and is similar in thematic content, was clearly able to attract.

After the Restoration the play first found its way to the stage not in London, but at Dublin's new Theatre Royal, popularly known as the "Smock Alley Theatre."  There Shakespeare's text escaped the radical "improvements" that were the rule on the London stage after Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1660, ending the Interregnum.  The Smock Alley company played their Shakespeare out of a copy of the Third Folio, heavily annotated with handwritten stage directions, and, though they cut and trimmed, they did not perform the radical transformations of Shakespeare's text that London audiences routinely witnessed.  Shakespeare's Trojan play, however, would not long escape the attentions of Restoration adapters.

John Dryden's adaptation, Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late, premiered in London at Dorset Garden in 1679, with Thomas Betterton, the foremost actor of the period, as the Trojan lover.  Dryden, like many other Restoration adapters of Shakespeare’s play’s, sought to make Shakespeare acceptable to the late seventeenth-century audiences. “[B]ecause the play was Shakespeare’s, and that there appeared in it the admirable genius of the author,” wrote Dryden in his preface,” I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried.”  Dryden changes and rearranges events to focus on the tragic story of the lovers. He keeps Cressida faithful to Troilus, finally having her kill herself rather than betray her lover. Troilus at last sees her remarkable fidelity (hence the sub-title of Dryden’s adaptation), kills Diomedes, and is in turn killed by the other Greeks.

Thirty years later Betterton assumed the role of Thersites, this time at London’s Drury Lane in 1709.  The text, though, remained Dryden's, and this adaptation was revived from 1720 to 1723 at Drury Lane and again from 1733 to 1735 at Covent Garden, in both cases featuring the era's most celebrated Shakespearean romantic lead, Lacy Ryan, as Troilus.  These are the only productions of Troilus and Cressida that we know of for over two-hundred and fifty years, and they are all of Dryden’s transformed text.

The beginning of a reversal of almost three centuries of neglect can perhaps be dated with some precision: February 29, 1884.  That evening, London's New Shakespear Society heard an address written, but not delivered, by George Bernard Shaw.  The acerbic young critic and novelist, who had not yet tested his own developing theories of drama by writing a play, went over the plot of Troilus and Cressida, which may not have been familiar to even these Shakespeare enthusiasts after the play's long absence from the stage.  Shaw was interested in the development of Shakespeare’s career, particularly in “considering carefully the great gap between Henry V and Hamlet.” Shaw was convinced that “there must be a bridge across that great gap.  And the only bridge which fits it is Troilus and Cressida, with its cynical history at one end and pessimistic tragedy at the other.”

By positing the neglected Trojan play as the mediator between two of Shakespeare's most popular stage hits, Shaw strongly suggested that it deserved a stage life of its own.  Moreover, he spotlighted a number of stage-worthy incidents in the text, which had never been produced in his lifetime, and accurately predicted how effective they could be in performance.  Shaw returned to Troilus and Cressida often in his later critical writings as he championed a new theater for the new century that would build on the achievements of European realists.  In an 1896 essay, "Ibsen Ahead!," he pointed to Troilus as Shakespeare's nearest approach to the naturalism of the most daring of the modern dramatists:  "Shakespear (sic) made exactly one attempt, in Troilus and Cressida, to hold the mirror up to nature; and he probably nearly ruined himself by it.  At all events he never did it again; . . ."

The English stage was slow to follow Shaw's advice that the play be re-examined, but on the continent the play's odd modernity was noticed.  The first German production was probably an 1898 private performance for Ludwig II of Bavaria featuring Josef Kainz as Troilus.  In April of the same year the Münchner Litterarische Gesellschaft mounted a production at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz, directed by Ernst von Wolzogen.  He presented a severely abridged version of the play and represented it as he imagined it first staged at the Globe.  Around the scenes from the play he built a framing tale of London street life.  He interpreted the play as broad farce and presented the London public as brutishly stupid.   The only feature of the production that found any sympathy from the critics was Albert Heine's performance of Thersites.  Heine repeated his triumph in a more straightforward production the following year at Theater des Sewtens in Berlin, but for a single performance only.

Subsequent German productions in the next few decades often used the play as commentary on German politics and militarism.  Elsewhere in middle Europe, the play was produced in Hungary in 1900, Vienna in 1902, Prague in 1921, and in various other cities, most using the play to comment on contemporary politics.  Indeed the play was produced almost every year somewhere in continental Europe in the decades preceding World War II, though it attracted only occasional attention in England.

A staged reading in 1907 at Great Queen Street Theatre directed by Charles Fry was followed in 1912 by William Poel's production at King's Hall, Covent Garden, which featured a young milliner's assistant, with little previous stage experience, as Cressida.   Edith Evans' triumph in the role launched one of the most brilliant careers of the twentieth century stage.  (Peter Hall later claimed that it was Evans who taught him the correct way to play Shakespearean verse on stage.)  Poel himself played Pandarus, and Hermione Gingold's distinctive voice added urgency to Cassandra's warnings.  The production was remounted the following year at Stratford.

Though he made liberal cuts in the script, what Poel did stage was Shakespeare's text.  As in his pioneer Early Modern productions, directed for the Elizabethan Stage Society from 1894 until it disbanded in 1905, Poel tried as best he could to recreate the theatrical conditions of Elizabethan London.  The stage was bare, with only a dark blue curtain for background instead of the elaborate painted drops that were the norm for Victorian productions.  The players were dressed in Elizabethan attire and delivered their lines at a much livelier pace than audiences brought up on the histrionic excesses of the previous century were used to.  Unlike Shakespeare's theater, Poel's employed actresses, but Poel went further than most producers in redressing their absence from Shakespeare’s stage.  He cast women not only in the female roles, but also as Aeneas, Paris and Thersites.

Poel's radical new methods for staging the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries reshaped twentieth century practices.  The poet Rupert Brooke, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, was an ardent admirer, and the student troupe he and some of his fellow students, including Poel's nephew Reginald Pole, founded there, The Marlowe Society, was influenced from its inception by Poel's experiments.  Poel himself came to Cambridge to see Reginald, who was to go on to a distinguished career as an actor and a director, play Richard II in their 1910 production of Shakespeare's play.

It was The Marlowe Society, in 1922, that mounted the next English Troilus and Cressida and, like Poel's, it would have a lasting influence.   The all-male cast, directed by Frank Birch, included undergraduate George Rylands as Diomedes.  The show moved in June to London, where it played at the Everyman Theater in Hampstead, this time with actresses in appropriate roles.  Rylands was to do more than almost anyone else in England to retrieve the play for the modern stage.  As a Fellow of King's College and director of The Marlowe Society, Rylands directed the play in 1940 and 1948, both times featuring David Beves as Pandarus and again in 1954.  He recorded it for the Marlowe Society's complete Shakespeare plays on LP and directed the first television production on the BBC in 1954.  Perhaps more importantly, though, Rylands taught several generations of Cambridge students, many of whom graduated to distinguished careers in England's professional theater, including John Barton and Peter Hall.

Troilus and Cressida clearly was at least limping its way back into the repertory. Lillian Baylis, who began her ambitious plan to stage all of Shakespeare's plays at The Old Vic in 1914 with The Taming of the Shrew, completed the project on November 5, 1923, in time for the tercentenary of the First Folio, with the first fully professional English production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Robert Atkins.  The play was seen again in Cambridge at the Festival Theatre in 1932, again under the direction of Frank Birch, this time with Anthony Quayle as Hector and Dennis Robertson as Pandarus.

In 1938, The Mask Theater Company presented the play at London's Westminster Theatre in a modern dress version staged by Michael Macowan.  Robert Speaight was Ulysses and Max Adrian played Pandarus, a role to which he would return.  Macowen’s modern dress production, on the eve of Europe’s plunge back into conflict, was notably anti-war.  Thersites (Stephen Murray) was a left-wing journalist.  The Trojans were dressed in military khaki and the Greeks in contrasting blue uniforms.

The play's cynicism about traditional military values perhaps made it unwelcome on English stages during the war years.  It did not see another London production until it appeared at Regent's Park's Open Air Theatre on June 28, 1946, under the direction of Robert Atkins. But, with the war over, the play became a regular, if not inevitable, presence on the English stage, usually in edgy, imaginative productions that found the play particularly adaptive to contemporary concerns.

One of the most influential stagings opened in 1956 when Tyrone Guthrie directed it at The Old Vic.  John Neville and Rosemary Harris played Troilus and Cressida, Wendy Hiller was Helen, John Wood played Helenus and Jeremy Brett Patroclus.  The play was, in Kenneth Tynan's words, "set … in a Shavian Ruritania faintly redolent of Arms and the Man."  The Greeks were uniformed as pre-WWI Germans or Austrians, while the Trojans were in a more fanciful version of the same era.  Though many critics complained of Guthrie's playful excesses, Tynan claimed that he "made Troilus and Cressida seem like a new play."  The production later transferred successfully to Broadway's Winter Garden.

In 1960 Peter Hall, then twenty-nine, succeeded Glen Byam Shaw as director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford. In the first season, Hall collaborated with fellow Cambridge graduate (and fellow Rylands student), John Barton to stage Troilus and Cressida.  There Hall, working with designer Leslie Hurry, pioneered the sand-covered platform that he would develop further in his New York staging for Theatre for a New Audience.  The title roles were played by Dorothy Tutin and Denholm Eliot, but Ian Holm took over the role of Troilus when the production was remounted at the Edinburgh Festival two years later.  Max Adrian again played Pandarus and Eric Porter played Ulysses.  Thersites was played by Peter O'Toole.  The production was very much a play of 1960, the martial plot became a virtual allegory of the cold war; the love plot, an allegory of the sexual revolution. The play’s dispiriting tone caught the mood of a country itself disillusioned by the 1956 Suez crisis.

No more than the British were Americans able to see the play on stage before the twentieth century.  The first known US production was in 1916 by the Yale Dramatic Association under the direction  of Edgar M. Wooley and featured an all-male cast.  An all-female cast did another student production in 1927 at Rockford College in Illinois.  The next appearance of the play in America was a fully professional, and co-educational, New York staging by the Players Club as one of their "Annual Revivals".  This production, the first on Broadway, opened June 6, 1936,  in an adaptation by Henry Herbert, with songs arranged by Robert Armbruster.  The reknowned American actor Otis Skinner played Thersites and the lovers were James Lawler and Edith Barrett. This was followed the following year by a west coast staging at the Pasadena Playhouse, in which Gilmor Brown directed Henry Bromdon and Patricia Walsh.

(Continued...)