Although the difficulties of determining the date of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ are very great, there are many grounds for assigning its composition to the early days of 1603. In 1599 Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Henslowe to prepare for the Earl of Nottingham’s company—a rival of Shakespeare’s company—a play of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ of which no trace survives. It doubtless suggested the topic to Shakespeare. On February 7, 1602-3, James Roberts obtained a license for ‘the
booke of Troilus and Cresseda as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men,’ i.e. Shakespeare’s company. [226a] Roberts printed the Second Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ and others of Shakespeare’s plays; but his effort to publish ‘Troilus’ proved abortive owing to the interposition of the players. Roberts’s ‘book’ was probably Shakespeare’s play. The metrical characteristics of Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’—the regularity of the blank verse—powerfully confirm the date of composition which Roberts’s license suggests. Six years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9, a new license for the issue of ‘a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida’ was granted to other publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, [226b] and these publishers, more fortunate than Roberts soon printed a quarto with Shakespeare’s full name as author. The text seems fairly authentic, but exceptional obscurity attaches to the circumstances of the publication. Some copies of the book bear an ordinary type of title-page stating that the piece was printed ‘as it was acted by the King’s majesties servants at the Globe.’ But in other copies, which differ in no way in regard to the text of the play, there was substituted for this title-page a more pretentious announcement running: ‘The famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the beginning of their loues with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, prince of Lacia.’ After this pompous title-page there was inserted, for the first and only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare that was
published in his lifetime, an advertisement or preface. In this interpolated page an anonymous scribe, writing in the name of the publishers, paid bombastic and high-flown compliments to Shakespeare as a writer of ‘comedies,’ and defiantly boasted that the ‘grand possessers’—i.e. the owners—of the manuscript deprecated its publication. By way of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and unacted. This address was possibly the brazen reply of the publishers to a more than usually emphatic protest on the part of players or dramatist against the printing of the piece. The editors of the Folio evinced distrust of the Quarto edition by printing their text from a different copy showing many deviations, which were not always for the better.
Treatment of the theme.
The work, which in point of construction shows signs of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the least attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare’s middle life. The story is based on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which is of mediæval origin. Shakespeare had possibly read Chapman’s translation of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ but he owed his plot to Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Cresseid’ and Lydgate’s ‘Troy Book.’ In defiance of his authorities he presented Cressida as a heartless coquette; the poets who had previously treated her story—Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Robert Henryson—had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on their
scorn. But Shakespeare’s innovation is dramatically effective, and accords with strictly moral canons. The charge frequently brought against the dramatist that in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ he cynically invested the Greek heroes of classical antiquity with contemptible characteristics is ill supported by the text of the play. Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon figure in Shakespeare’s play as brave generals and sagacious statesmen, and in their speeches Shakespeare concentrated a marvellous wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has fortunately obtained proverbial currency. Shakespeare’s conception of the Greeks followed traditional lines except in the case of Achilles, whom he transforms into a brutal coward. And that portrait quite legitimately interpreted the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride with which the warrior was credited by Homer, and his imitators.
Shakespeare’s treatment of his theme cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman. Although Shakespeare knew the Homeric version of the Trojan war, he worked in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ upon a mediæval romance, which was practically uninfluenced either for good or evil by the classical spirit. [228]
Queen Elizabeth’s death, March 26, 1603.
Despite the association of Shakespeare’s company with the rebellion of 1601, and its difficulties with the children of the Chapel Royal, he and his fellow actors
retained their hold on Court favour till the close of Elizabeth’s reign. As late as February 2, 1603, the company entertained the dying Queen at Richmond. Her death on March 26, 1603, drew from Shakespeare’s early eulogist, Chettle, a vain appeal to him under the fanciful name of Melicert, to