It must be remembered, besides, that the years 1597 to 1599 were marked by a group of dramas which may be called plays of political adventure. Nash had got into trouble over a performance of “The Isle of Dogs” at the Rose in 1597. In the same year complaints were made against Shakespeare for putting Sir John Oldcastle on the stage in the character of Falstaff. Also at the same period Shakespeare’s “Richard the Second” was published, but not without exciting suspicions at Court, for the play had a political significance in the eyes of Catholics: Queen Mary of Scotland told her English judges that “she remembered they had done the same to King Richard, whom they had degraded from all honour and dignity.” Then on the authority of Mr. H. C. Hart we are told that Ben Jonson brought Sir Walter Raleigh, the best hated man in England, on to the stage in the play of “Every Man Out of His Humour,” in 1599, and, as a consequence, in the summer of the same year it was decided by the Privy Council that restrictions should be placed on satires, epigrams, and English histories, and that “noe plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have an authoritie.” Dramatists, therefore, had to be much more circumspect in their political allusions after 1599 than they were before.
There are two new conjectures therefore put forward in this article: (1) That the underplot in the “Poetaster” contains allusions to Shakespeare’s play, and (2) that the withdrawal of Achilles is a reflection on the withdrawal of Essex from Elizabeth’s Court. Presuming that further evidence may one day be found to support these suppositions, it is worth while to consider them in relation to the history of the play.
And first to clear away the myth in connection with the idea that this is one of Shakespeare’s late plays, or that it was only partly written by the poet, or written at different periods of his life. It may be confidently asserted that Shakespeare allowed no second hand to meddle with a work so personal to himself as this one, nor was he accustomed to seek the help of any collaborator in a play that he himself initiated. We know, besides, that he wrote with facility and rapidly. As to the date of the play, the evidence of the loose dramatic construction, and the preference for dialogue where there should be drama, place it during the period when Shakespeare was writing his histories. The grip that he ultimately obtained over the stage handling of a story so as to produce a culminating and overpowering impression on his audience is wanting in “Troilus and Cressida.” In fact, it is impossible to believe that this play was written after “Julius Cæsar,” “Much Ado,” or “Twelfth Night.” Nor is there evidence of revision in the play, since there are no topical allusions to be found in it which point to a later date than 1598 except perhaps in the prologue, which could hardly have been written before 1601, and did not appear in print before 1623. Again, it is contended that there is too much wisdom crammed into the play to allow of its being an early composition. But the false ethics underlying the Troy story, which Shakespeare meant to satirize in “Troilus and Cressida,” had been previously exposed in his poem of “Lucrece”:
“Show me the strumpet that began this stir,
That with my nails her beauty I may tear.
Thy heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur
This load of wrath that burning Troy did bear:
Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here;
And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye
The sire, the son, the dame, and daughter die.
“Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many moe?
Let sin, alone committed, light alone
Upon his head that hath transgressed so;
Let guiltless souls be freed from guilty woe:
For one’s offence why should so many fall,
To plague a private sin in general.
“Lo, here weeps Hecuba, here Priam dies,
Here manly Hector faints, here Troilus swounds,
Here friend by friend in bloody charnel lies,
And friend to friend gives unadvisèd wounds,
And one man’s lust these many lives confounds;
Had doting Priam check’d his son’s desire,
Troy had been bright with fame, and not with fire.”
The difficulty with commentators is the knowledge that the play might have been written yesterday, while the treatment of the subject, in its modernity, is as far removed from “The Tempest” as it is from “Henry V.” Now, if the drama be recognized as a satire written under provocation and with extraordinary mental energy, the date of the composition can be as well fixed for 1598, when Shakespeare was thirty-four years old, as for the year 1609. There is, besides, something to be said with regard to its vocabulary, as Mr. Richard Simpson has shown, which is peculiar to this play alone. Shakespeare introduces into it a large number of new words which he had never used before and never employed afterwards. The list is a long one. There are 126 latinized words that are coined or used only for this play, words such as propugnation, protractive, Ptisick, publication, cognition, commixture, commodious, community, complimental. And in addition to all the latinized words there are 124 commoner words simple and compound, not elsewhere to be found in the poet’s plays, showing an unwonted search after verbal novelty.
We will now, with the help of the new information, attempt to unravel the mystery as to the history of the play. The creation of the character of Falstaff in “Henry IV.” (Part I.) brought Shakespeare’s popularity, as a dramatist, to its zenith, and he seized the opportunity to reply to the attacks made upon himself, as a poet, by his rival poet, Chapman, and wrote a play giving a modern interpretation to the story of Troy, and working into the underplot some political allusion to Essex and the Court. The play may have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598, or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or, perhaps, privately at some nobleman’s mansion, who might have been one of Essex’s faction. It was not liked, and Shakespeare experienced his first and most serious reverse on the stage. But he quickly retrieved his position by producing another Falstaff play, “Henry IV.” (Part II.), in the summer of 1599, followed by “Henry V.” in the same autumn, when Essex’s triumphs in Ireland are predicted. Shakespeare, none the less, must have felt both grieved and annoyed by the treatment his satirical comedy had received from the hands of the “grand censors.” So at Christmas, 1601, when Ben Jonson produced his “Poetaster” at Blackfriars, the younger dramatist defended his friend from the silly objections which had been made to the Trojan comedy. Then early in 1603 a revival of “Troilus and Cressida” may have been contemplated at the Globe, and also its publication, but the death of Essex was still too near to the memory of Londoners to make this possible, and the suggestion may have been dropped on the eve of its fulfilment; Shakespeare, meanwhile, had written a prologue, to be spoken by an actor in armour, in imitation of Jonson’s prologue, with a view to protect his play from further hostility. In 1609 Shakespeare was preparing to give up his connection with the stage, and may have handed his copy of the play to some publishers, for a consideration, and the book was then printed. The Globe players, however, demurred and claimed the property as theirs. The publishers then removed their first title page and inserted another one to give the appearance to the reader of the play being new. They also wrote a preface to show that the publication, if unauthorized, was warranted, since the play had not been acted on the public stage. The real object of the preface, however, was to defend the play from the attacks of the “grand censors,” who thought that the comedy had some deep political significance, and was not merely intended to amuse and instruct. It also shows the writer’s resentment at the high-handed action of the “grand possessors,” the Globe players, who were unwilling either to act the play themselves or yet to allow it to be published.
III
SOME STAGE VERSIONS