Pride and Defeat-- Troilus and Cressida takes place in the seventh year of the Trojan War. The Trojan prince Troilus falls in love with Calchas' daughter Cressida. The two secretly marry, and predictably, tragedy quickly follows. Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing.

This fast-moving Modern English version of Chaucer's greatest tragic romance highlights the poem's rapid shifts in register and diction as well as its subtle and elusive characterizations, while preserving the enchanting rhyme-royal stanza of the Middle English original. Christine Chism's Introduction illuminates the work's historical context, poetic devices, first audiences, sources and non-traditional re-conception of a traditional female protagonist...