She has also worked as an actress and singer/multi-instrumentalist at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in Matthew Dunster’s acclaimed production of Troilus and Cressida and Lucy Bailey and Django Bates’s production of Timon of Athens.
Some commentators (like Georg Brandes, the Danish Shakespeare scholar of the late 19th century) have attempted to reconcile these contradictory claims by arguing that the play was composed originally around 1600–02, but heavily revised shortly before its 1609 printing.
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The story of Troilus and Cressida is a medieval tale that is not part of Greek mythology; Shakespeare drew on a number of sources for this plotline, in particular Chaucer's version of the tale, Troilus and Criseyde, but also John Lydgate's Troy Book and Caxton's translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.
Troilus and Cressida | Cressida | Troilus and Cressida (opera) | ''Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene II''. 1795 engraving by Luigi Schiavonetti | Cressida Granger | Cressida Cowell |
In 1936, Goffin went to the Westminster Theatre in London, working with Harley Granville Barker and Michael MacOwan on a range of productions, from classics such as Volpone, Uncle Vanya and Troilus and Cressida, to modern works including Mourning Becomes Electra, Heartbreak House, and T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion. In 1938 Goffin was invited by the government to supervise a course on stagecraft and to lecture on the subject.
In the Roman, the daughter of Calchas is called Briseis, but she is better known under a different name, becoming Criseida in Boccaccio's il Filostrato, Criseyde in Chaucer, Cresseid in Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid and ultimately Cressida in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.