It is significant that the 'noble green-goose' of one distinguished critic can be compared by another 1 to the great soldier-king of England.

The story of Troilus and Cressida was known to Shakespeare, beyond doubt, in Chaucer's noble version. To Chaucer the story was a 'tragedy,' full of the matter of high and pathetic romance. The 'double sorrow' of Troilus is its theme, and the successive epochs, the ascending and descending phases, of his sorrow, regulate its pauses and divisions. Cressida, destined to become a by-word for falseness, is invested by Chaucer with a charm of naive good faith and artless grace which make her seem rather a piteous victim of the mysterious tyranny of love. Even Pandarus discharges his base office with so hearty a belief in it, and diffuses over it such an engaging atmosphere of humanity, good humour and good sense, that he triumphs over the associations of his name.

Yet Chaucer's temperament was too complex for the pure fervour of romance. Even the exuberant eloquence of the poet of Troilus hardly conceals the subtle smile, half wistful, half ironic, of Germanic fervour tempered by Gallic wit. But in Shakespeare's version the subtle smile seems to break into derisive laughter. His Troilus and Cressida is a story of fatuous passion; Troilus is from the outset visibly deluded, Cressida from the outset a wanton coquette, Pandarus an odious and disreputable 'broker-lackey.' The dainty virtue of Romance, dexterously refashioned but carefully preserved by Chaucer, flutters in shreds and patches, and naked realism freely obtrudes. What the precise bearing of these facts may be upon the history of Shakespeare's mind and art, is one of the most elusive of Shakespearean problems. 1 Kreyssig, Vorlesungen über Shakespeare.

But, however anomalous and enigmatic among the works of Shakespeare, this familiar travesty of classic story was in perfect keeping with the temper of the time.

The Elizabethan Humanists paid a somewhat ironical homage to the classical world. They delighted to give a new and piquant turn to its venerable forms, and the zest of caricature to its solemn heroics. Alexander, Hector, Pompey were 'Worthies,' staled like the rest of the Nine by the burlesque glories of fairs and shows. The Trojan story itself had been handled a few years earlier than Shakespeare with a familiar realism closely resembling his, by Robert Greene, in his Euphues, His Censure to Philautus (1587). This romance consists of a series of tales told by Greek and Trojan ladies and cavaliers at the social reunions which they have devised to enliven the 'dull truce.' The stories are interspersed with lively debate and repartee, in the esteemed manner of Lyly's supper-parties,-a manner which effectively dispels the enchantment of Homeric names and fames. The speakers are introduced each with his appended label of explanatory antithesis: Hector, as choleric. as she was scrupulous'; 'Ulysses, desiring to have insight into the manners of men'; Andromache, [who] thought a little to be pleesant and yet satyricall.' Among the rest appear the lovers of our play: 'Troilus, willing to show that the weapons of Troy were as sharp ground as the swords of the Grecians'; and Cressida, tickled a little with half-conceit of her own wit,' even to the point of interrupting Ulysses. Here we have, it would seem, the germ of the flippant and witty Cressida of Shakespeare. Greene's Trojans and Greeks are indeed far less akin to their Homeric prototypes than Shakespeare's, self-conscious classic and 'Master of Arts of both Universities' though he was; and he is still freer than Shakespeare from the

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niceties of chronological pedantry. An incidental allusion to Aristotle escapes the lips of the Shakespearean Hector; but the whole of Greek literature and philosophy is a familiar topic to the Dardans and Argives of Greene. 'Doe wee not know,' asks Polyxena, 'our enemies are Grecians, taught in their schooles amongst their philosophers, that all wisdome is honest that is profitable,' etc. Others quote Theocritus, that ancient poet of ours,' Hermes Trismegistus, even Epictetus. The Greenian Troyscenes cannot for a moment be compared with Shakespeare's in brilliance; but they belong to the same genre; and, however ludicrous may be the position of Greene, with his insipid and faded romances, as a mediator between Chaucer and Shakespeare, he has in literary history some title to that position. It has been seen that Shakespeare was concerned with the story as early as 1599. The finished portrait of Cressida in the extant play may be later, but cannot be much earlier than that date. In power of psychological revelation, in absolute subordination of lyric to dramatic expression, in naturalness of dialogue, her character is the creation of a riper art than either Juliet or Portia.

The germ of the Camp-scenes is also obvious in Greene. He too had presented the prodigies of Greek and Trojan valour in familiar undress, and ironically emphasised their weaker moments. But the dramatic incidents were taken over from the accredited histories of the siege,-from Caxton's Recuyell of the histories of Troye and Lydgate's Troyboke the one translated from Raoul le Fèvre, the other from Guido di Colonna. In 1598 Chapman published the first instalment of his translation of the

1 Cf. a fuller treatment of this point, by the writer, in the

Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1887-90, pp. 186 f.

Iliad. Shakespeare undoubtedly 'looked into ' it; and the issue of the process was, significantly, not a sonnet, but the character of Thersites. The scenes which have any connexion whatever with the Troilus story are comparatively few and slight; they begin in the third act, with Calchas' appeal for the exchange of Antenor for Cressida. This business is but a passing episode in the great debates and conflicts which turn, like the Iliad itself, upon the wrath of Achilles; debates full of magnificent rhetoric, but irrelevant to the plot and tedious to the stage-goer as such. It is natural to suspect that they had some purpose beyond theatrical effect.

An elaborate attempt to demonstrate such a purpose has been made by Mr. Fleay. This part of the play is in his view a prolonged topical allusion to the feud which raged in 1599-1601 between Jonson of the one part and Dekker of the other, with Marston as Dekker's fierce but fluctuating ally. Jonson had in Every Man out of his Humour (1599) and then in Cynthia's Revels (1600), heaped upon both poets insults not easily forgiven; Dekker in 1601 retorted with the Satiromastix, which had the merit of evoking, by anticipation, the greatest topical comedy in the language, Jonson's Poetaster. In the following year Jonson and Marston were again on good terms. That Shakespeare mingled in this fray there is no entirely decisive evidence. But the language of Kempe in the Return from Parnassus 1602, 'O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill [in the Poetaster] but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit,' certainly gives colour to the view that some of his work had a direct bearing on it; and there are beyond question certain scenes and passages in Troilus and Cressida

which gain in point and humour when read in this light. Alexander's elaborate description of Ajax in i. 1. 18-31 applies at least as well to Jonson;1 'rank' Thersites 'with his mastic jaws' looks very like a reference to the flagellant Dekker of the Satiromastix, whom Jonson himself had called 'one of the most overflowing rank wits of Rome'; and the burlesque upon Homeric heroes would have a certain point as a rejoinder to Jonson's satirical travesty of Augustan poets.

It is equally clear, however, that in their present state, and as a whole, these scenes cannot be regarded either as an attack upon Jonson, or as even a distant reflection of the 'battle of the Theatres.' If the 'dull, brainless' Ajax, whom Ulysses befools and who replies with inarticulate oaths and curses to Thersites' biting gibes, was meant to ridicule the most powerful intellect, next to Shakespeare's own, then engaged in the drama, satire never more egregiously missed its mark, or better deserved to be flung back upon the satirist. Moreover, if Shakespeare intervened on Dekker's side, the portrait of Thersites was a singular mode of defending his ally. That Shakespeare should have condescended, in the year of Hamlet, to make his art the vehicle of a serious personal attack, is in any case hardly credible. But the battle of the theatres had its ludicrous aspects, and he may have availed himself of the machinery provided by the Iliad to exhibit these from the standpoint of a genial Olympian, whose large humanity apprehended the strength and weakness of the combatants better than

1 Mr. Fleay aptly compares the description of Ajax here as one 'into whom nature hath crowded humours' with CritesJonson's self-estimate in Cynthia's Revels, ii. 1, as 'a creature

of a most divine temper, one in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met,' to which he regards it as a good-humoured reply.'