Cressida
Cressida (/ˈkrɛsɪdə/; also Criseida, Cresseid or Criseyde) is a character who appears in many Medieval and Renaissance retellings of the story of the Trojan War.
Initially, after the Roman appeared, other authors who refer to the story, for example, Azalais d'Altier in her poem Tanz salutz e tantas amors and Guido delle Colonne in his Historia destructionis Troiae, continue to use names derived from that of Briseis.
It is the Italian author and poet Boccaccio who makes the decisive shift in the character's name in Il Filostrato.
This poem is the first work dedicated to telling the story of the love triangle rather than to the larger tale of the Trojan War.
Chaucer's poem, however, at least portrays a more sympathetic Criseyde showing a self-conscious awareness of her literary status: "Alas, of me until the world's end shall be wrote no good song".
Such is the case in John Dryden's rewriting of Shakespeare in an attempt at "remov[ing] that heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay bury'd".
Jack Lindsay's novel Cressida's First Lover: A Tale of Ancient Greece explores another area untouched in standard narratives, some of her earlier life.
When Troilus walks by Pandarus tries to convince Cressida of his merit, but she teases him, saying she has heard Achilles, a Grecian warrior, is far more impressive.
Troilus has crept into the camp and is accompanied by Ulysses, and they are watch the scene unfolding between Diomedes and Cressida unnoticed.
Thersites is also present and unseen, the clown of dark humour making distasteful comments exaggerating the sexual inference of what he sees.
She appears to lust after him, even giving him Troilus's sleeve as a love token, though quickly tries to retrieve it from him in a struggle, offering her own body in trade.
In All's well that ends well act 2 scene 1 line 97 Lafew says: I am Cressida's uncle that dare leave two together i.e. the king and Helena who has come to cure him.
She writes "[...] the challenge Shakespeare constructs for this play is to put before us a Cressida, who, like the fair (but dark) lady of the sonnets is, in Eve Sedgwick's memorable term, 'oxymoron militant', a genuine contradiction.
[...] the speech is neurotic, pragmatic, anti-romantic – yet its form is a sonnet [...] it discloses strategic schizophrenia [...] by this agenda, to win at love, a woman must play false, act double.
[3] Juliet Stevenson commented in Rutter's book Clamorous Voices that such roles inspire an actor to "react against the way tradition and prejudice have stigmatised them – Cressida the whore [...] every time they're judged you feel protective.
"[4] The main question as regards Shakespeare's Cressida is centralised around whether she is simply a "whore", or if she is more complex, and worth further attention due to her obvious intelligence and duality.
In "The Myth Makers", a 1965 storyline by Donald Cotton in the time-travel–based British science fiction television series Doctor Who, the character Vicki (played by Maureen O'Brien), a teenaged travelling companion of the Doctor, meets Priam, King of Troy who, disliking her name, dubs her Cressida.
The story inverts the traditional fates of Troilus and Cressida, a change made to facilitate the departure of the Vicki character (and actress O'Brien) from the series.
In his 1969 novel Clean Straw for Nothing George Johnston's wife Charmian Clift is the basis for the character Cressida Morley; academics Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell suggest in their 2018 book Half the Perfect World that it was the impending publication of Johnston's novel, which Clift knew would lay bare her infidelities whilst on the island of Hydra, which prompted her to suicide in 1969.
