It is a proof of the stultifying effect of the too close attention of philological critics to metrical peculiarities (peculiarities which a poet can always accommodate as he thinks proper) upon the finer psychological sense, that either the whole or a greater part of Troilus and Cressida has been taken for the work of Shakespeare's youth, and has been attributed to the Romeo and Juliet period. This view has been taken by L. Moland and C. d'Hericault in their Nouvelles Françaises du 14me Siècle, and not a few undiscerning biographers of Shakespeare.
The contrast between the two plays is remarkable and instructive. Romeo and Juliet is a genuine work of youth, a product of truth and faith. Troilus and Cressida is the outcome of the disillusionment, suspicion, and bitterness of ripe manhood. The critics have been deceived by the apparently astonishing youthfulness of parts of Troilus and Cressida, some upon the ground of its occasional euphuisms and bombast (evidently satirical), others by the enthusiasm of youth and absorption in love which some of Troilus's replies express; for instance:
"I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid's love: thou answer'st 'She is fair,'
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice," &c.
In his most ardent raptures there sounds a note of ridicule.[1].
All this is a complete inversion of Romeo and Juliet. His youthful tragedy portrayed a woman so staunchly true in love that she is driven thereby to a bitter death. Troilus and Cressida deals with a woman whose constancy fails at the first proof. There is no abyss between the soul and the senses in Romeo and Juliet; the two melt into one in fullest harmony. But it is the lower side of love's ideal nature which is parodied in Troilus and Cressida, and causes it to resemble the flippant accompaniment to the serenade in Mozart's Don Juan, which caricatures the sentimentality of the text.
It is true that there is a chivalrous fine feeling and sensual tenderness in Troilus's love, which seems to foreshadow, as it were, that which some centuries later found such full expression in Keats. But the melancholy of Shakespeare's matured perception sets its iron tooth in everything at this period of his life, and he looks upon absorption in love as senseless and laughable. He shows us how blindly Troilus runs into the snare, giddy with happiness and uplifted to the heavens, and how the next moment he awakes from his intoxication, betrayed; but he shows it without sympathy, coldly. Therefore, the play never once arouses any true emotion, since Troilus himself never really interests. The piece blazes out, but imparts no warmth. Shakespeare wrote it thus, and therefore, while Troilus and Cressida will find many readers who will admire it, few will love it.
Shakespeare deliberately made Cressida sensually attractive, but spiritually repulsive and unclean. She has desire for Troilus, but no love. She is among those who are born experienced; she knows how to inflame, win, and keep men enchained, but the honourable love of a man is useless to her. At the same time she is one of those who easily find their master. Any man who is not imposed upon by her airs, who sees through her mock-prudish rebuffs, subdues her without difficulty. All her sagacity amounted to, after all, was that Troilus would continue ardent so long as she said "No;" that men, in short, value the unattainable and what is won with difficulty,—the wisdom of any commonplace coquette. Never has Shakespeare represented coquetry as so void of charming qualities.
Cressida is never modest even when she is most prudish; she understands a jest, even bold and libertine ones, and she will bandy them with enjoyment. With all her kittenish charm she is uninteresting, and, in spite of her hot blood, she betrays the coldest selfishness. She is neither ridiculous nor unlovely, but as little is she beautiful; in no other of Shakespeare's characters is the sensual attraction exercised by a woman so completely shorn of its poetry.
Her uncle Pandarus is as experienced as she is in the art of exciting by alternately thrusting forward and holding back. He has been named a demoralised Polonius, and the epithet is good. He is an old voluptuary, who finds his amusement in playing the spy and go-between, now that more active pleasures are denied to him. The cynical enjoyment with which Shakespeare (in spite of his contempt for him) has drawn him is very characteristic of this period of his life. Pandarus is clever enough, and often witty, but there is no enjoyment of his wit; he is as comical, base, and shameless as Falstaff himself, but he never calls forth the abstract sympathy we feel for the latter. Nothing makes amends for his vileness, nor for that of Thersites, nor for that of any other character in the whole play. Here, as in other plays, Timon of Athens in particular, is shown that deep-seated Anglo-Saxon vein which, according to the popular estimate, Shakespeare entirely lacked,—that vein in which flows the life-blood of Swift's, Hogarth's, and even some of Byron's principal works, and it shows how, after all, there was some sympathy between the Merrie England of those days and the later Land of Spleen.
We have noticed the harsh strength of Ulysses' judgment of Cressida, and in the decisive scene, in which Troilus is the unseen witness of Cressida's perfidy, are written words so weighty and so full of emotion that we feel Shakespeare's very soul speaks in them.