that she has fallen for the Greek. Modern authors continue to invent their own resolutions. William Walton's Troilus and Cressida is the best known and most successful of a clutch of 20th-century operas on the subject after the composers of previous eras had ignored the possibility of setting the story. Christopher Hassall's libretto blends elements of Chaucer and Shakespeare with inventions of its own arising from a wish to tighten and compress the plot, the desire to portray Cressida more sympathetically and the search for a satisfactory ending. Antenor is, as usual, exchanged for Cressida but, in this version of the tale, his capture has taken place while he was on a mission for Troilus. Cressida agrees to marry Diomedes after she has not heard from Troilus. His apparent silence, however, is because his letters to her have been intercepted. Troilus arrives at the Greek camp just before the planned wedding. When faced with her two lovers, Cressida chooses Troilus. He is then killed by Calchas with a knife in the back. Diomedes sends his body back to Priam with Calchas in chains. It is now the Greeks who condemn "false Cressida" and seek to keep her but she commits suicide. Before Cressida kills herself she sings to Troilus to ...turn on that cold river's brim beyond the sun's far setting. Look back from the silent stream of sleep and long forgetting. Turn and consider me and all that was ours; you shall no desert see but pale unwithering flowers. This is one of three references in 20th century literature to Troilus on the banks of the River Styx that Boitani has identified. Louis MacNeice's long poem The Stygian Banks explicitly takes its name from Shakespeare who has Troilus compare himself to "a strange soul upon the Stygian banks" and call upon Pandarus to transport him "to those fields where I may wallow in the lily beds". In MacNeice's poem the flowers have become children, a paradoxical use of the traditionally sterile Troilus who Patrols the Stygian banks, eager to cross, But the value is not on the further side of the river, The value lies in his eagerness. No communion In sex or elsewhere can be reached and kept Perfectly for ever. The closed window, The river of Styx, the wall of limitation Beyond which the word beyond loses its meaning, Are the fertilising paradox, the grille That, severing,