Troilus and Cressida's Folio Prologue in the Poets’ War: Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston

Abstract

Although many scholars have denigrated Troilus and Cressida, the Folio version of the play—with a prologue—offers a more tractable, even winsome play than does the quarto version. As a buffer between the real world of an audience and the imagined world of a play, the prologue adjusts the expectations of an audience, highlighting at once its own potency and the interpretive potential of this textual difference between quarto and Folio. This Prologue conveys an appeal neither obsequious nor arrogant—as do its respective models in John Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Ben Jonson's Poetaster—but rhetorically sinuous and eminently tactful, at once calming the war of the theaters and previewing the subtle tonal shifts in the play that follows it. In Poetaster, Jonson presents “An armed Prologue,” which has often been mentioned as a precursor to Shakespeare's Troilus Prologue, but I argue that its surface similarities only highlight its differences in goals, methods, and most importantly tone. And by contrast with the epilogue in Antonio and Mellida, the Troilus Prologue presents a more subtly nuanced attempt to win the favor of an audience not wholly by self-effacement but by complex honesty and mimetic rhetoric, counterbalanced to anticipate the perplexing world of Shakespeare's play.