Troilus and Cressida has always been something of a puzzle. The title-page of the Quarto described it as a History, the Epistle to the Reader spoke of it as a Comedy, and the Folio as an afterthought put it between the Histories and the Tragedies. Oscar J. Campbell calls it a comical satire. John Palmer spoke of it as a tragedy in 1912, and as a comedy in 1914. To Hazlitt it was loose and desultory; Coleridge found it hard to characterize; Swinburne said it was a hybrid which “at once defies and derides all definitive comment”. Heine said much the same thing more decoratively:

The stage-history has been equally baffling. We do not know whether it was ever performed in Shakespeare's lifetime and the first recorded performance—apart from those of Dry den's adaptation— was at Munich in 1898. We do not know whether the play was Shakespeare's contribution to the War of the Theatres; we do not know whether Achilles was intended as a portrait of Essex; we do not even know when the play was written. After the first modern performance in England, The Times said that the play was better left unacted; and after the first performance in New York, as recently as 1932, most of the critics said the same thing. If the play has now become relatively popular on the stage, and if modern critics have come to appreciate it more in the study, we may suspect that audiences and critics have been taught by two world wars and by changes in society to see what Shakespeare was trying to do.