of it among the ancients, not so much as the name Cressida once mentioned. Shakspeare (as I hinted), in the apprenticeship of his writing, modelled it into that play which is now called by the name of "Troilus and Cressida.'" Chaucer himself speaks of "Myne Auctor Lollius ;" and in his address to the Muse, in the beginning of the second book, he says, "To every lover I me excuse That of no sentiment I this endite, But out of Latin in my tongue it write." Without entering into the question who Lollius was, or believing more than that "Lollius, if a writer of that name existed at all, was a somewhat somewhere,”* we at once receive the 'Troilus and Creseide' of Chaucer as the foundation of Shakspere's play. Of his perfect acquaintance with that poem there can be no doubt. Chaucer, of all English writers, was the one who would have the greatest charm for Shakspere. "The Rape of Lucrece' is written precisely in the same versification as Chaucer's 'Troilus and Creseide.' When Lorenzo, in 'The Merchant of Venice,' exclaims,— "In such a night, Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night," we may be sure that Shakspere had in his mind the following passages of Chaucer :— "Upon the wallés fast eke would he walk, And on the Greekés host he would ysee, And to himself right thus he would ytalk: 'Lo! yonder is mine owné lady free, Or ellés yonder there the tentés be, And thence cometh this air that is so sote, That in my soul I feel it doth me bote.' consideration of Chaucer's poem of "Troilus and Creseide' without noticing the high honour it has received in having been made the foundation of one of the plays of Shakespear. There seems to have been in this respect a sort of conspiracy in the commentators upon Shakespear against the glory of our old English bard. In what they have written concerning this play, they make a very slight mention of Chaucer; they have not consulted his poem for the purpose of illustrating this admirable drama; and they have agreed, as far as possible, to transfer to another author the honour of having supplied materials to the tragic artist. Dr. Johnson says, 'Shakspeare has in his story followed, for the greater part, the old book of Caxton, which was then very popular; but the character of Thersites, of which it makes no mention, is a proof that this play was written after Chapman had published his version of Homer.' Mr. Steevens asserts that 'Shakspeare received the greatest part of his materials for the structure of this play from the Troye Boke of Lydgate.' And Mr. Malone repeatedly treats the 'History of the Destruction of Troy, translated by Caxton,' as 'Shakspeare's authority' in the composition of this drama. The fact is, that the play of Shakespear we are here considering has for its main foundation the poem of Chaucer, and is indebted for many accessory helps to the books mentioned by the commentators. "We are not, however, left to probability and conjecture as to the use made by Shakespear of the poem of Chaucer. His other sources were Chapman's translation of Homer, the 'Troye Boke' of Lydgate, and Caxton's 'History of the Destruction of Troy.' It is well known that there is no trace of the particular story of Troilus and Creseide' among the ancients. It occurs, indeed, in Lydgate and Caxton; but the name and actions of Pandarus, a very essential personage in the tale as related by Shakespear and Chaucer, are entirely wanting, except a single mention of him by Lydgate, and that with an express reference to Chaucer as his authority. Shakespear has taken the story of Chaucer with all its imperfections and defects, and has copied the series of its | Criticism in Tragedy,' thus speaks of Shakincidents with his customary fidelity; an spere's performance :exactness seldom to be found in any other dramatic writer."* Although the main incidents in the adventures of the Greek lover and his faithless mistress are followed with little deviation, yet, independent of the wonderful difference in the characterization, the whole story under the treatment of Shakspere becomes thoroughly original. In no play does he appear to us to have a more complete mastery over his materials, or to mould them into more plastic shapes by the force of his most surpassing imagination. The great Homeric poem, the rude romance of the destruction of Troy, the beautiful elaboration of that romance by Chaucer, are all subjected to his wondrous alchemy; and new forms and combinations are called forth so lifelike, that all the representations which have preceded them look cold and rigid statues, not warm and breathing men and women. Coleridge's theory of the principle upon which this was effected is, we have no doubt, essentially true: "I am half inclined to believe that Shakespear'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." + To Dryden's alteration of "Troilus and Cressida' was prefixed a prologue, "spoken by Mr. Betterton, representing the Ghost of Shakspere." The Ghost appears to have entirely forgotten what he was on earth, and to present a marvellous resemblance, in his mind at least, to Mr. John Dryden. He says, "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 nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name to the tragedy are left alive Cressida is false, and is not punished. Yet, after all, because the play was Shakspeare's, and that there appeared in some places of it the admirable genius of the author, I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried." Dryden got rid of the rubbish, and built up his own edifice, is very characteristic of the age and of the man : The mode in which "I new modelled the plot; threw out many unnecessary persons; improved those characters which were begun and left unfinished,- -as Hector, Troilus, Pandarus, and Thersites; and added that of Andromache. After this I made, with no small trouble, an order and connection of all the scenes, removing them from the places where they were inartificially set." The result of all this is, that the Ghost of Shakspere, in the concluding lines of the Prologue, thus enlightens the audience as to the dominant idea of the Troilus and Cressida :'— "My faithful scene from true records shall tell How Trojan valour did the Greek excel; Your great forefathers shall their fame regain, And Homer's angry ghost repine in vain." Coleridge says, "there is no one of Shakspere's plays harder to characterize." He has overlooked the circumstance that, when the "rubbish" was removed, it became a true record, a faithful chronicle, of the heroic actions of the Trojans,-our "great “In this my rough-drawn play you shall behold forefathers." With every admiration for Some master-strokes." Dryden, in his elaborate 'Preface to Troilus and Cressida, containing the grounds of *Life of Chaucer,' vol. i. (4to) p. 315. +Literary Remains,' vol ii. p. 183. "glorious John" in his own proper line, we must endeavour to understand what Shakspere's 'Troilus and Cressida' is, by comparing it with what it is not in the alteration before us. The notion of Dryden was to convert the 'Troilus and Cressida' into a regular tragedy. He complains, we have seen, that "the chief persons who give name to the tragedy are left alive: Cressida is false and is not punished." The excitement of pity and terror, we are told, is the only ground of tragedy. Tragedy, too, must have "a moral that directs the whole action of the play to one centre." To this standard, then, is Shakspere's Troilus and Cressida' to be reduced. The chief persons who give name to the tragedy are not to be left alive. Cressida is not to be false; but she is to die: and so terror and pity are to be produced. And now comes the moral : "Then, since from home-bred factions ruin springs, is the high morality of the characterization, To shun the heaven that leads men to this It was this morality that Shakspere meant to teach when he painted this one exception to the general purity of his female characters. He did not, like the dramatists of the age of the Restoration, make purity the exception: his estimate of women was formed upon a truer standard. But when Dryden undertook to remodel Shakspere, female morality, like every other morality, was merely conventional: virtue was an affair of expediency, and not of principle. With an entire submission, then, to the genius of his age, does Dryden retain and heighten the scenes between Troilus and Cressida until she quits the Trojan camp. But in all this, as we are to see in the sequel, Cressida is a perfectly correct and amiable personage. We are told, indeed, of her frank reception of the welcome of the Grecian chiefs; but there is no Ulysses to pronounce a judgment upon her character. She admits, indeed, the suit of Diomedes, and she gives him pledges of her affection; but this is all a make-believe, for, like a dutiful child, she is following the advice of her father : Let subjects learn obedience to their kings." The management by which Dryden has accomplished this metamorphosis is one of the most remarkable examples of perverted ingenuity. He had a licentious age to please. He could not spare a line, or a word, of what may be considered the objectionable scenes between Pandarus, Troilus, and Cressida. They formed no part of the "rubbish" | he desired to remove. He has heightened them wherever possible; and what in Shakspere was a sly allusion becomes with him a positive grossness. Now let us consider for a moment what Shakspere intended by these scenes. Cressida is the exception to Shakspere's general idea of the female character. She is beautiful, witty, accomplished, but she is impure. In her, love is not a sentiment, or a passion,-it is an impulse. Temperament is stronger than will. Her love has nothing ideal, spiritual, in its composition. It is not constant, because it is not discriminate. Setting apart her inconstancy, how altogether different is Cressida from Juliet, or Viola, or Helena, or Perdita! There is nothing in her which could be called love; no depth, no concentration of feeling,-nothing that can bear the name of devotion. Shakspere would not And draw him on, and give him line again." permit a mistake to be made on the subject; Upon this very solid foundation, then, are and he has therefore given to Ulysses to built up the terror and pity of Dryden's describe her, as he conceived her. Consider- tragedy and so Troilus, who has witnessed ing what his intentions were, and what really | Cressida's endearments to Diomede, refuses "You must dissemble love to Diomede still : But by strong arts and blandishments of love. to believe that she is faithful; and then Cressida kills herself; and Troilus kills Diomede; and Achilles kills Troilus; and all the Trojans are killed and the Greeks who remain upon the field are very happy ; and Ulysses tells us,― "Now peaceful Order has resumed the reins, Old Time looks young, and Nature seems renew'd." Here is a tragedy for you, which "is an imitation of one entire, great, and probable action, not told, but represented; which, by moving us to fear and pity, is conducive to the purging of those two passions in our minds." So Dryden quotes Aristotle; and so, not understanding Aristotle, he takes upon himself to mend Shakspere, ("incomparable," as he calls him,) according to the notions of "my friend Mr. Rymer," and of "Bossu, the best of modern critics." The feeling which the study of Shakspere's 'Troilus and Cressida' slowly but certainly calls forth is that of almost prostration before the marvellous intellect which has produced it. But this is the result of study, as we have said. The play cannot be understood upon a superficial reading: it is full of the most subtle art. We may set aside particular passages, and admire their surpassing eloquence, their profound wisdom; but it is long before the play, as a whole, obtains its proper mastery over the understanding. It is very difficult to define what is the great charm and wonder of its entirety. To us it appears as if the poet, without the slightest particle of presumption, had proposed to himself to look down upon the Homeric heroes from an Olympus of his own. He opens the 'Iliad,' and there he reads of "Achilles' baneful wrath." A little onward he is told of the "high threatening" of "the great cloud-gatherer." The gods of Homer are made up of human passions. But he appears throned upon an eminence, from which he can not only command a perfect view of the game which men play, but, seeing all, become a partisan of none, perfectly cognizant of all motives, but himself motiveless. And yet the whole representation is true, and it is therefore genial. He does not stand above men by lowering men. Social life is not made worse than it is, that he who describes it may appear above its ordinary standard. It is not a travestie of Homer or of Nature. The heroic is not lowered by association with the ridiculous. Shakspere's heroes of the 'Iliad' show us very little of the vulgar side of human life, not much even of the familiar; but the result is, that they cease to be heroic. How this is attained is the wonder. It is! something to have got rid of the machinery of the gods,-something to have a Thersites eternally despising and despised. But this is not all. The whole tendency of the play, its incidents, its characterization,—is to lower what the Germans call herodom. Ulrici maintains that "the far-sighted Shakspere most certainly did not mistake as to the beneficial effect which a nearer intimacy with the high culture of antiquity had produced, and would produce, upon the Christian European mind. But he saw the danger of an indiscriminate admiration of this classical antiquity; for he who thus accepted it must necessarily fall to the very lowest station in religion and morality :-as, indeed, if we closely observe the character of the eighteenth century, we see has hap pened. Out of this prophetic spirit, which penetrated with equal clearness through the darkness of coming centuries and the clouds of a far-distant past, Shakspere wrote this deeply significant satire upon the Homeric herodom. He had no desire to debase the elevated, to deteriorate or make little the great, and still less to attack the poetical, worth of Homer, or of heroic poetry in general. But he wished to warn thoroughly against the over-valuation and idolatry of them, to which man so willingly abandons himself. He endeavoured, at the same time, to bring strikingly to view the universal truth, that everything that is merely human, even when it is glorified with the nimbus of a poetic ideality and a mythical past, yet, seen in the bird's-eye perspective of a pure moral ideality, appears very small.” All | this may seem as super-refinement, in which | the critic pretends to see farther than the poet ever saw. But to such an objection there is a very plain answer. A certain result is produced :—is the result correctly described? If it be so, is that result an effect of principle or an effect of chance? As a proof that it was the effect of principle, we may say that Dryden did not see the principle; and that, not seeing it, he entirely changed the character of the play as a work of art. For example, there is no scene in the drama so entirely in accordance with the principle as that in which Ulysses stirs up the slothful and dogged Achilles into a rivalry with Ajax. It is altogether so Shaksperean in its profundity,—it presents such a key to the whole Shaksperean conduct of this wonderful drama,-that we cannot be content merely to refer to it. Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection; A chil. Salutes each other with each other's form. Till it hath travell'd, and is married there Where it may see itself: this is not strange at all. Ulyss. I do not strain at the position, It is familiar; but at the author's drift: Who, in his circumstance, expressly proves, That no man is the lord of anything (Though in and of him there is much consisting), Till he communicate his parts to others: The voice again; or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. I was much rapt in this, And apprehended here immediately Heavens, what a man is there! a very horse; That has he knows not what. Nature, what things there are, Most abject in regard, and dear in use! morrow An act that very chance doth throw upon him, Ajax renown'd. O heavens, what some men do, While some men leave to do! How some men creep in skittish fortune's hall, Whiles others play the idiots in her eyes! They clap the lubber Ajax on the shoulder, Achil. I do believe it; for they pass'd by me As misers do by beggars; neither gave to me Good word, nor look: What, are my deeds forgot? Ulyss. Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, As fast as they are made, forgot as soon Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail way; For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons, Or, like a gallant horse fallen in first rank, |