Tuesday 22 November 2016

Troy And Shakespeare

There are two previous posts entitled "Troy." See here and here.

Since I was listing a literary tradition referring to Troy, how could I have omitted Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida? Set during the siege of Troy, this play features Paris and Ulysses who appear in SM Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy as Alaksandrus and Odikweos, respectively. The play also features Aeneas, a character in Homer's Iliad and the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, who mythologically links Troy to Rome and thus, indirectly, to the historical successors of Rome.

For another Shakespearean connection, the Greek hero, Theseus, appears as the Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream and as a very different character in Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis. As we know, Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest is a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest and is set in a timeline where Shakespeare was the Great Historian so that Hamlet, Lear etc were historical characters. Also, Anderson's The Last Viking Trilogy refers to the historical Macbeth.

Our literary tradition of Troy comprises, at least:

Homer
Virgil
Ovid
Shakespeare
CS Lewis
SM Stirling

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

You know from my combox comment in your previous piece how I would have included Dante's DIVINE COMEDY in this list. How about Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's INFERNO and ESCAPE FROM HELL?

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Could be - if they mention Troy enough.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I'm not sure, but perhaps some of the heroes of Homer's poem are seen in Niven/Pournelle's version of Limbo in INFERNO.

Sean