Troilus and Cressida

From Claude: What makes these one play rather than two is that they are both, at their cores, about the same thing: the destruction of what you believed in by what actually is. Troilus believed in Cressida's absolute fidelity; the war believed in the heroic code of honour. Both beliefs are destroyed not by exceptional villainy but by the ordinary pressure of circumstance on people who were never entirely what the believers needed them to be. What happens when the ideal meets the real? — and both plots return the same answer: the ideal does not survive, and the mechanisms by which it fails are neither spectacular nor cathartic. They are just dull, ordinary, and relentless.