Editing Troilus (section)

===Reinventing the love story===
A feature already present in the treatments of the love story by Chaucer, Henryson, Shakespeare and Dryden is the repeated reinvention of its conclusion. Boitani sees this as a continuing struggle by authors to find a satisfying resolution to the love triangle. The major difficulty is the emotional dissatisfaction resulting from how the tale, as originally invented by Benoît, is embedded into the pre-existing narrative of the Trojan War with its demands for the characters to meet their traditional fates. This narrative has Troilus, the sympathetic protagonist of the love story, killed by Achilles, a character totally disconnected from the love triangle, Diomedes survive to return to Greece victorious, and Cressida disappear from consideration as soon as it is known that she has fallen for the Greek. Modern authors continue to invent their own resolutions.<ref>Boitani (1989: pp.297–300)</ref>

[[William Walton]]'s ''[[Troilus and Cressida (opera)|Troilus and Cressida]]'' is the best known and most successful of a clutch of 20th-century operas on the subject after the composers of previous eras had ignored the possibility of setting the story.<ref>Boitani (1989: pp.287, 289, 294).</ref> [[Christopher Hassall]]'s libretto blends elements of Chaucer and Shakespeare with inventions of its own arising from a wish to tighten and compress the plot, the desire to portray Cressida more sympathetically and the search for a satisfactory ending.<ref>Boitani (1989: p.294).</ref>  Antenor is, as usual, exchanged for Cressida but, in this version of the tale, his capture has taken place while he was on a mission for Troilus. Cressida agrees to marry Diomedes after she has not heard from Troilus. His apparent silence, however, is because his letters to her have been intercepted. Troilus arrives at the Greek camp just before the planned wedding. When faced with her two lovers, Cressida chooses Troilus. He is then killed by Calchas with a knife in the back. Diomedes sends his body back to Priam with Calchas in chains. It is now the Greeks who condemn "false Cressida" and seek to keep her but she commits suicide.

Before Cressida kills herself she sings to Troilus to

<blockquote><div>
...turn on that cold river's brim
<br />beyond the sun's far setting.
<br />Look back from the silent stream
<br />of sleep and long forgetting.
<br />Turn and consider me
<br />and all that was ours;
<br />you shall no desert see
<br />but pale unwithering flowers.<ref>Walton/Hassall ''Troilus and Cressida'' quoted by Boitani(1989: p.297)</ref>
</div></blockquote>

This is one of three references in 20th century literature to Troilus on the banks of the [[River Styx]] that Boitani has identified. [[Louis MacNeice]]'s long poem ''The Stygian Banks'' explicitly takes its name from Shakespeare who has Troilus compare himself to "a strange soul upon the Stygian banks" and call upon Pandarus to transport him "to those fields where I may wallow in the lily beds".<ref>Shakespeare ''Troilus and Cressida'' iii, ii, 7–11.</ref> In MacNeice's poem the flowers have become children, a paradoxical use of the traditionally sterile Troilus<ref>Boitani (1989: p.293)</ref> who

<blockquote><div>
Patrols the Stygian banks, eager to cross,
<br />But the value is not on the further side of the river,
<br />The value lies in his eagerness. No communion
<br />In sex or elsewhere can be reached and kept
<br />Perfectly for ever. The closed window,
<br />The river of Styx, the wall of limitation
<br />Beyond which the word beyond loses its meaning,
<br />Are the fertilising paradox, the grille
<br />That, severing, joins, the end to make us begin
<br />Again and again, the infinite dark that sanctions
<br />Our growing flowers in the light, our having children...
</div></blockquote>

The third reference to the Styx is in [[Christopher Morley]]'s ''The Trojan Horse''. A return to the romantic comedy of Chaucer is the solution that Boitani sees to the problem of how the love story can survive Shakespeare's handling of it.<ref>Boitani (1989: p.288)</ref> Morley gives us such a treatment in a book that revels in its anachronism. Young Lieutenant (soon to be Captain) Troilus lives his life in 1185 BC where he has carefully timetabled everything from praying, to fighting, to examining his own mistakes. He falls for Cressida after seeing her, as ever, in the Temple of Athena where she wears black, as if mourning the defection of her father, the economist Dr Calchas. The flow of the plot follows the traditional story, but the ending is changed once again. Troilus' discovery of Cressida's change of heart happens just before Troy falls. (Morley uses Boccaccio's version of the story of a brooch, or in this case a pin, attached to a piece of Diomedes' armour as the evidence that convinces the Trojan.) Troilus kills Diomedes as he exits the [[Trojan Horse]], stabbing him in the throat where the captured piece of armour should have been. Then Achilles kills Troilus. The book ends with an epilogue. The Trojan and Greek officers exercise together by the River Styx, all enmities forgotten. A new arrival (Cressida) sees Troilus and Diomedes and wonders why they seem familiar to her. What Boitani calls "a rather dull, if pleasant, ataraxic eternity" replaces Chaucer's Christian version of the afterlife.<ref>Boitani (1989: p.292)</ref>

In [[Eric Shanower]]'s [[graphic novel]] ''[[Age of Bronze (comics)|Age of Bronze]]'', currently still being serialised, Troilus is youthful but not the youngest son of Priam and Hecuba. In the first two collected volumes of this version of the Trojan War, Shanower provides a total of six pages of sources covering the story elements of his work alone. These include most of the fictional works discussed above from Guido and Boccaccio down to Morley and Walton. Shanower begins Troilus' love story with the youth making fun of Polyxena's love for Hector and in the process accidentally knocking aside Cressida's veil. He follows the latter into the temple of Athena to gawp at her. Pandarus is the widow Cressida's uncle encouraging him. Cressida rejects Troilus' initial advances not because of wanting to act in a seemly manner, as in Chaucer or Shakespeare, but because she thinks of him as just a boy. However, her uncle persuades her to encourage his affection, in the hope that being close to a son of Priam will protect against the hostility of the Trojans to the family of the traitor Calchas. Troilus' unrequited love is used as [[comic relief]] in an otherwise serious retelling of the Trojan War cycle. The character is portrayed as often indecisive and ineffectual as on the second page of this episode sample at the official site [https://web.archive.org/web/20070923195810/http://age-of-bronze.com/aob/samples/aobiss23_1.pdf]. It remains to be seen how Shanower will further develop the story.

Troilus is rewarded a rare happy ending in the early ''[[Doctor Who]]'' story ''[[The Myth Makers]]''.<ref>The episode has been released on CD and as a novelisation. Most of the original footage is lost. The script is available at [http://homepages.bw.edu/~jcurtis/Scripts/Myth/intro.html]</ref> The script was written by [[Donald Cotton]] who had previously adapted Greek tales for the [[BBC Third Programme]].<ref>[https://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/mythmakers/detail.shtml BBC website description] compiled from [[Paul Cornell]], [[Martin Day (writer)|Martin Day]] and [[Keith Topping]] (1995) ''Doctor Who: The Television Companion'' and [[David J. Howe]] and [[Stephen James Walker]] (1998, 2003) ''Doctor Who: The Television Companion''. Link checked 19 August 2007.</ref> The general tone is one of high comedy combined with a "genuine atmosphere of doom, danger and chaos" with the BBC website listing ''[[A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum]]'' as an inspiration together with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil.<ref>BBC website quoting [[Mark Wyman]]</ref> Troilus is again an ''andropais'' "seventeen next birthday"<ref>''The Myth Makers''
Episode 3 – ''Death of a Spy'' Sc.3.</ref> described as "looking too young for the military garb".<ref>''The Myth Makers'' Episode 3 – ''Death of a Spy'' Sc.5.</ref> Both "Cressida" and "Diomede" are the assumed names of the Doctor's [[Companion (Doctor Who)|companions]] [[Vicki (Doctor Who)|Vicki]] and [[Steven Taylor (Doctor Who)|Steven]]. Thus Troilus' jealousy of Diomede, whom he believes also loves Cressida, is down to confusion about the real situation. In the end "Cressida" decides to leave the Doctor for Troilus and saves the latter from the fall of Troy by finding an excuse to get him away from the city. In a reversal of the usual story, he is able to avenge Hector by killing Achilles: they meet outside Troy and the Greek hero, despite being more than a match for the young Trojan, [[Achilles' heel|catches his heel on some vegetation and stumbles.]] Subsequently the two lovers join up with [[Aeneas]], implying a role in the events of ''[[The Aeneid]]''. The story was originally intended to end more conventionally, with "Cressida", despite her love for him, apparently abandoning him for "Diomede", but the producers declined to renew co-star [[Maureen O'Brien]]'s contract, requiring that her character [[Vicki (Doctor Who)|Vicki]] be written out.{{citation needed|date=December 2018}}