APPENDIX I
“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”
TO myself _Troilus and Cressida_ is, with _Henry VI_, Part I, the most
mysterious among the Shakespearean plays. Here we find, if Will wrote
it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern world in touch
with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient world; but the
English author’s eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust of post-Homeric
perversions of the Tale of Troy. The work of perversion began, we know,
in the eighth century before our era, when, by the author of the
_Cypria_, these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were
represented as scoundrels, assassins, and cowards.
In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer
is no scholar. He makes the Achæan fleet muster in “the port of
_Athens_,” of all places. Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-place,
Aulis, in Bœotia. (This Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.) Six
gates hath the Englishman’s Troy, and the Scæan is not one of them.
The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are from
the mediæval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer, whose Pandarus
is only notable for loosing a traitor’s shaft at Menelaus, in time of
truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede. The play begins after
the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus: in the play, not in
Homer, Paris “retires hurt,” as is at first reported. Hector has a
special grudge against the Telamonian Aias. As in the Iliad there is a
view of the Achæans, taken from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the
play, Pandarus and Cressida review the Trojans re-entering the city.
Paris turns out not to be hurt after all.
In Act i. Scene 3, the Achæans hold council, and regret the disaffection
of Achilles. Here comes Ulysses’ great speech on discipline, in armies,
and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly thought to be a
leaf in Shakespeare’s crown of bays. The speeches of Agamemnon and
Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats Agamemnon much more kindly
than Homer is wont to do. But the poet represents Achilles as laughing
in his quarters at Patroclus’s imitation of the cough and other
infirmities of old Nestor, to which Homer, naturally, never alludes.
Throughout, the English poet regards Achilles with the eyes of his most
infamous late Greek and ignorant mediæval detractors. The Homeric
sequence of events is so far preserved that, on the day of the duel
between Paris and Menelaus, comes (through Æneas) the challenge by Hector
to fight any Greek in “gentle and joyous passage of arms” (Iliad, VII).
As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by
the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on
Aias. In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as Porthos in _Les
Trois Mousquetaires_. The play makes him as great an eater of beef, and
as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Achilles, save in a passage quite out
of accord with the rest of the piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is
discourteous, and is cowardly! No poet and no scholar who knew Homer’s
heroes in Homer’s Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the
revilings of Thersites are loathsome in their profusion of filthy
thoughts. It does not follow that Will did not write the part of
Thersites. Some of the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse
adorn the play; one would say that no man but Will could have written
them. Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear “to dally with the
innocence of love”; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the
lines in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the
Greek camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love. But
the Homeric and the alien later elements,—the story of false love,—cannot
be successfully combined. The poet, whoever he was, appears to weary and
to break down. He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the death of
Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while resting unarmed,
without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of sumptuous mail from
a nameless runaway. In the play he has slain Patroclus, but has not
stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which, in Homer, he is wearing.
Achilles then meets Hector, but far from rushing to avenge on him
Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters his men, and makes them
surround and slay the defenceless Hector.
Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a day
becomes “the sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and of Diomede, and the
comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid
tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o’ love, and the
base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector. Yet there seemed
to be muffled notes from the music, and broken lights from the splendour
of Homer. When Achilles eyes Hector all over, during a truce, and
insultingly says that he is thinking in what part of his body he shall
drive the spear, we are reminded of Iliad, XXII, 320–326, where Achilles
searches his own armour, worn by Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him,
and worn by Hector, for a chink in the mail. Yet, after all, these
points are taken, not from the Iliad, but from Caxton’s popular Troy
Book.