From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (Buffalo, NY: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 523-26.
[This section was prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
1606-7
The | Famous Historie of | Troylus and Cresseid. | Excellently expressing the beginning | of their loues with the conceited wooing | of Pandarus Prince of Licia. | Written by William Shakespeare. | LONDON | Imprinted by G. Eld for R. Bonian and H. Walley, and | are to be sold at the spred Eagle in Paules | Church-yeard, ouer against the | great North dore, | 1609. -- TITLE PAGE OF FIRST EDITION, 1609.
A NEVER WRITER TO AN EVER READER. NEWS. Eternal reader, you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical; for it is a birth of your brain, that never undertook anything comical vainly and were but the vain names of comedies changed for the titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors, that now style them such vanities, flock to them for the main grace of their gravities; especially this author's comedies, that are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of wit, that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. Amongst all there is none more witty than this: and had I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not (for so much as will make you think your testern well bestowed), but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it. It deserves such a labour, as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus. And believe this, that when he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition. Take this for a warning, and at the peril of your pleasures' loss and judgments, refuse not, nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude, but thank fortune for the scape it bath made amongst you, since by the grand possessors' wills I believe you should have prayed for them rather than been prayed. And so I leave all such to he prayed for (for the states of their wit's healths) that will not praise it. Vale. -- PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION, 1609.
Troy. Come, Cressida, my cresset light
Thy force doth shine both day arid night
Behold, behold thy garter blue
Thy knight his valiant elbow wears,
That The he SHAKES his furious SPEARE
The foe, in shivering fearful sort
May lay him down in death to snort.
Cress. O knight, with valour in thy face
Here take my skreene, wear it for grace
Within thy hornet put the same
Therewith to make thy enemies lame.
ANON, 1603, Histriomastix.
The Poet AEschylus was held in the same veneration by the Athenians of after Ages as Shakespear is by us; . . . though the difficulties of altering are greater, and our reverence for Shakespear much more just, than that of the Grecians for AEschylus. . . . Yet it must be allowed to the present age, that the tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespear's time that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible. And of those which wee understand, some are ungrammatical, others coarse, and his whole stile is so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure. It is true, that in his latter plays he had worn off somewhat of the rust; but thetragedy, which I have undertaken to correct, was in all probability one of his first endeavours on the stage . . . Shakespeare (as I hinted), in the apprenticeship of his writing, modeled it in that play, which is now called by the name of "Troilus and Cressida," but so lamely is it left to us, that it is not divided into acts, which fault I ascribe to the actor who printed it after Shakespear's death and that too so carelesly, that a more uncorrect copy I never saw. For the play itself, the author seems to have begun it with some fire; the characters of Pandarus and Thersites are promising enough but as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets them fall: and the latter part of the tragedy is nothingbut a confusion of drums and trumpet excursions and alarms. The chief persons, who give name to the tragedy, are left alive: Cressida is false, and is no punished. Yet, after all, because the play was Shakespear's, and that there appear in some places of it the admirable genius of the author. I undertook to remove the heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried. -- DRYDEN, JOHN, 1679, Troilus and Cressid, Preface, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, vol. VI, pp. 244, 255.
This play, though miserably lame in its plan, has lines in which all the genius of Shakspeare burns out. -- CARY, HENRY, FRANCIS, 1797, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 108.
The historical play of "Troilus and Cressida" exhibits as full a specimen of the different styles in which this wonderful writer was qualified to excel, as is to be found in any of his works. . . . The great beauty of this play, as it is of all the genuine writings of Shakespear, beyond all didactic morality, beyond all mere flights of fancy and beyond all sublime, a beauty entirety his own, and in which no writer ancient or modern can enter into competition with him, is that his men are men; his sentiments are living, and his characters marked with those delicate, evanescent, undefinable touches which identify them with the great delineations of nature. . . . The whole catalogue of the dramatic personae in the play of "Troilus and Cressida," so far as they depend upon a rich and original vein of humour in the author, are drawn with a felicity which never was surpassed. The genius of Homer has been a topic of admiration toalmost every generation of men since the period in which he wrote. But his characters will not bear the slightest comparison with the delineation of the same characters as they stand in Shakespeare. -- GODWIN, WILLIAM, 1803, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. I, pp. 503, 505, 509.
Hector quotes Aristotle; Ulysses speaks of the bull-bearing Milo, and Pandarus of a man born in April. Friday and Sunday and even minced-pies with dates in them are introduced. -- DOUCE, FRANCIS, 1807, Illustrations of Shakspeare, vol. II, p. 291.
This is one of the most loose and desultory of our author's plays: it rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together with some indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things in its way. Troilus himself is no character: he is merely a common lover: but Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off with proverbial truth. -- HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1817-69, Characters of Shalcespear's Plays.
There is no one of Shakspere's plays harder to characterize. . . . I am half inclined to believe, that Shakspere's main object, or shall I rather say, his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more featurely, warriors of Christian chivalry -- and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama, -- in short, to give a grand history-piece in the robust style of Albert Durer. -- COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1818, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, ed. Ashe, pp. 306, 308.
Would you see his mind unfettered, read "Troilus and Cressida," where he treats the materials of the "Iliad" in his own fashion. -- ECKERMANN, JOHN PETER, 1825, Conversations of Goethe.
The play is, in all respects, a very remarkable and singular reproduction; and it has perplexed many a critic, not, as usual, by smaller difficulties of readings and interpretation, but by doubts as to the author's design and spirit. Its beauties are of the highest order. It contains passages fraught with moral truth and political wisdom -- high truths. in large and philosophical discourse, such as remind us of the loftiest disquisitions of Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, on the foundations of social law. . . . Nor is there any drama more rich in variety and truth of character. . . . With all this, there is large alloy of inferior matter, such as Shakespeare too often permitted himself to use, in filling up the chasms of the scene, between loftier and brighter thoughts. More especially is there felt, by every reader, a sense of disappointment at the unsatisfactory effect of the whole, arising mainly from the want of unity in that effect, and in the interest of the plot -- at the desultory and purposeless succession of incident and dialogue, all resembling (as Walter Scott well observes) "a legend, or a chronicle, rather than a dramatic composition." -- VERPLANCK, GULIAN CROMMELIN, 1844-47, ed. The Illustrated Shakespeare.
"Troilus and Cressida" is Shakespeare's wisest play in the way of worldly wisdom. It is filled choke-full of sententious, and in most cases slightly satirical revelations of human nature, uttered with a felicity of phrase and an impressiveness of metaphor that make each one seem like a beam of light shot into the recesses of man's heart. . . . If we would know what Shakespeare thought of men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is; but with what other character, who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragicomic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death of heroes. -- WHITE, RICHARD GRANT, 1877, On Reading Shakespeare, Galaxy, vol. 23, pp. 233, 235.
This is the most difficult of all Shakspere's plays to deal with, as well for date as position.... The play is evidently written in ill-humour with mankind it is a bitter satire. Its purpose is not to show virtue her own feature, but contemptible weakness, paltry vanity, falsehood (like scorn), their own image. . . . Shakspere's treatment of Chaucer's heroine, Cressida, is, too, a shock to any love of the early poet's work. To have the beautiful Cressida, hesitating, palpitating like the nightingale, before her sin, driven by force of hard circumstances which she could not control her unfaithfulness to her love; to have this Cressida, whom Chaucer spared for very rush, set before us as a mere shameless wanton, making eyes at all the men she sees, and showing her looseness in the movement of every limb, is a terrible blow. But whatever may have been Shakspere's motive in this play, we certainly have in it his least pleasing production. There is no relief to the hatchery, the jugglery, and the knavery, except the generous welcome of Nestor to Hector in the Grecian camp, and his frank praise of the gallant Trojan, who, labouring for Destiny, made cruel way through ranks of Greekish youth. -- FURNIVALL, FREDERICK JAMES, 1877, ed. The Leopold Shakspere.
The point of special import and significance is that Shakespeare always shows a predilection for the Trojans, while the Greeks find but little favour in his sight. This undoubted bias on his part exhibits itself in an especially lively manner, and has widest scope, in "Troilus and Cressida." There are far grander works amongst Shakespeare's plays, but there is none more curious, -- there is none that affords more matter for reflection and commentary in the realms, not only of learning and of history, but also of aesthetics, than does "Troilus and Cressida." -- STAPFER, PAUL 1880, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, tr. Carey, p. 157.
In spite of the admirable characterization in "Troilus and Cressida," and in spite of the host of imperishable sayings marked by a wealth of practical wisdom there is no other drama of Shakespeare which appeals to us so little, which creates so unpleasing an impression. -- TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1892 95, Five Lectures of Shakespeare, tr. Franklin, p. 93.
The effect of anti-climax and of all diminishing series is an unsatisfactory one. But the theme of the play is the destruction of system and unity, the factious disorganization of the Grecian camp; it is a picture of disorder and the overthrow of rule and it is quite possible that the dramatist, whose genius was of the boldest and most innovating character, designedly left the picture without aesthetic totality in order to enhance the effect and deepen the impression made by the portrayal of principles which are the source of all imbecility. -- RUGGLES, HENRY J., 1895, The Plays of Shakespeare Founded on Literary Forms, p. 399.
It was a curious coincidence that Shakespeare should lay hands on this material just at the most despondent period of his life; for nowhere could we well receive a deeper impression of modern crudeness and decadence, and never could we meet with a furler expression of German-Gothic innate barbarism in relation to Hellenism than when we see this great poet of the Northern Renaissance make free with the poetry of the old world. -- BRANDES GEORGE, 1898, William Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol.II, p. 206.
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