that it was the second issue-appeared with the following remarkable and almost unique preface:

"A NEVER WRITER TO AN EVER READER. NEWES.

"Eternall reader, you have heere a new play, never stal'd with the stage, never clapperclaw'd with the palmes of the vulger, and yet passing full of the palme comicall; for it is a birth of your braine, that never undertooke any thing commicall, vainely; and were but the vaine names of commedies changde for the titles of commodities, or of playes for pleas; you should see all those grand censors, that now stile them such vanities, flock to them for the maine grace of their gravities; especially this authors commedies, that are so fram'd to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, shewing such a dexteritie and power of witte, that the most displeased with playes, are pleased with his commedies. And all such dull and heavy-witted worldlings, as were never capable of the witte of a commedie, comming by report of them to his representations, have found that witte there, that they never found in them-selves, and have parted better-witted then they came: feeling an edge of witte set upon them, more then ever they dreamd they had braine to grind it on. So much and such savord salt of witte is in his commedies, that they seeme (for their height of pleasure) to be borne in the sea that brought forth Venus. Amongst all there is none mor 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 thinke your testerne well bestowd) but for so much worth, as even poore I know to be stuft in it. It deserves such a labour, as well as the best commedy in Terence or Plautus. And beleeve this, that when hee is gone, and his commedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English inquisition. Take this for a warning, and at the perill of your pleasures losse, and judgements, refuse not, nor like this the lesse, for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude; but thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst

you since by the grand possessors wills I believe you should have prayd for them (?it). rather then beene prayd. And so I leave all such to bee prayd for (for the states of their wits healths) that will not praise it. Vale."

I shall return to this preface again. There is one more point in the history of the publication of the play to be noticed before we can gather up the threads and give the general impression derived from study of the evidence. The First Folio of 1623 had, as all students know, a list of the plays at the beginning, arranged under the different heads of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Troilus and Cressida is omitted from this list. It is printed in the middle of the volume, between Henry VIII. and Coriolanus, i.e. between the last of the Histories and the first of the Tragedies; and practically it is unpaged. From these facts it has been conjectured that the insertion of the play in the Folio was an afterthought upon the part of the editors, Heminge and Condell. Collier thinks that the printing of the drama had been intrusted to some other publisher: hence the mistake. Really it seems most probable that the editors did not know how to class the play, and eventually compromised the matter by leaving it altogether out of the list, while a niche was found for it in the body of the work, between the Histories and Tragedies, as having something of the character of both.

Roughly summarized, then, these are the main facts with which we have to deal; they must, of course, be supplemented by such internal evidence as metrical and æsthetic criticism can extract from the play. Let us look at some of these points in detail. In the first place, why did Dekker and Chettle change the title of their work? Perhaps, as Mr. Stokes suggests, because it was an infringement upon the name of some other play upon the same subject which already existed; perhaps because the "Tragedy of Agamemnon sounded more telling and impressive. And, whatever the reason for the alteration, should their tragedy be identified with "the booke of Troilus and Cresseda" that was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1603?

Some critics are inclined to answer in the

affirmative. But it can scarcely be so; for several reasons, one of which seems quite fatal to the hypothesis-viz., the fact that the 1603 play was "acted by my Lord Chamberlen's men;" and the Chamberlain's Company was long the rival of that directed by Henslowe. The theory, therefore, that the 1603 entry refers to Dekker and Chettle's play can be dismissed, and the entry, so far as Shakespeare's predecessors are concerned, may allude to the real Troilus and Cressida. I definitely think that it does. I believe that we must assign two dates to the play. Troilus and Cressida, as entered upon the Register in 1609, was, I think, the drama that lies before us: Troilus and Cressida, as entered at the earlier date, 1603, represented the first draft or version. One is always loth to introduce this muchused and, perhaps, much-abused theory of revisions, but in the present case I can see no other way out of the difficulties which beset us, whether we would believe the writers of the above-quoted preface and allow that Troilus. and Cressida was "a new play" in 1609, or, disregarding their statement as a mere publisher's artifice, would fix on the earlier date suggested by the 1603 entry. In favour of 1609, or thereabouts, there are two things that must be allowed to carry some weight: the statement that the piece had "never been stal'd with the stage, never clapper-claw'd with the palmes of the vulger," if absolutely untrue, would have been equally unhappy and pointless, because few people could have been deceived by it; hence the preface cannot be altogether ignored. Again, there is the palpable fact that a considerable portion of the drama is strongly penetrated by the tendency to bitter cynicism which we note in the parallel comedy of disillusion; I mean, of course, Timon of Athens. It is impossible to read the latter without feeling how close an affinity of thought and emotional undercurrent unites it with the scenes in Troilus and Cressida, where worldliness and the wisdom of those who are wise in their generation are held up to admiration, while the moral is pointed with exceeding keenness against the enthusiasm and buoyant idealism that begin in froth and end in failure. Taken together these two points of external

and internal evidence might lead us to assign Troilus and Cressida to the group which includes Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra; but, unfortunately, the metrical critics here step in and assure us that the verse-structure of the play is radically different from that which is usually associated with Shakespeare's later manner. According to Hertzberg (quoted by Professor Dowden), Troilus and Cressida does not contain a single weak ending, and only six light endings, whereas these verse-peculiarities appear with increasing frequency in all plays written after Macbeth. Verse-tests cannot be ignored, and this is precisely one of the cases where conclusions reached on other grounds must, if possible, be readjusted and brought into harmony with their testimony.

I think that the difficulties will be met to some extent if we suppose that Troilus and Cressida is a composite work, the main part of which dates from 1602-3, while some of the scenes-those, for instance, in which Ulysses appears were subsequently expanded, with the addition, perhaps, of fresh characters. In this way the statements of the piratical printers would be partially explained and accounted for, while æsthetically the tone of brooding irony that is only too traceable throughout would harmonize with the general gloom and despair of a period that, pretty certainly, produced Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and many of the later sonnets. Mr Fleay, I should say, carries the theory of revision and subsequent additions still further

He traces three distinct stories in the play, stories that were written at different periods and that overlap only very slightly. They are the Troylus and Cressida episode-approximate date, 1594-6; "the story"-I give Mr. Fleay's words--" of the challenge of Hector to Ajax, their combat, and the slaying of Hector by Achilles, on the basis of Caxton's Three Destructions of Troy; and finally, the story of Ulysses' stratagem to induce Achilles to return to the battlefield by setting up Ajax as his rival, which was written after the publication of Chapman's Homer, from whom Thersites, a chief character in this part, was taken."

1 Shakespeare Manual, pp. 232, 233.

Myself, I do not quite understand the idea of a poet writing odd scenes at different periods of his life and afterwards patching them together. A play that can be subdivided and split up in this way must be strangely inorganic, and Troilus and Cressida does not seem to me to be of this nature; there are parts, no doubt, where the work is unequal, notably in the fifth act, where not improbably we have the débris of some old play, perhaps of Dekker's tragedy, but the scheme of the drama is, to my mind, symmetrical and nicely thought out. How, for instance, can we separate Troilus from Ulysses? Dramatically they are complementary: they serve, and are meant to serve, as foils, antitheses. Troilus, in Dr. Furnivall's graceful phrase, is "a young fool," full of hopes and beliefs, buoyed up by noble ideals and ambitions: Ulysses is the man of gray worldly wisdom, who has seen

Cities of men

It is

And manners, climates, councils, governments. Once, no doubt, he too had his dreams, but time has taught its bitter lesson, and his idols have been long since broken, the temple long since turned into a counting-house. grotesque to separate these characters. They developed side by side in the dramatist's brain, and we can no more divide them than we can divide Troilus and Cressida themselves. Again, can we believe that the love scenes in this play date from the period which gave the world Romeo and Juliet? It seems to me that Romeo and Juliet is to Troilus and Cressida very much what Troilus is to Ulysses. The love-note in the one play is wholly lyric, in the other quasi-satiric. It is the difference between a spring day and an autumn day. In Romeo and Juliet we might think of the poet as partially identifying himself with his characters: in Troilus and Cressida we cannot help feeling that he is rather laughing at them, exaggerating the passionate, somewhat sensuous effects solely for the purpose of making the dénouement more bitterly telling and effective.

Upon this point, then, of the date of the play I can only repeat my belief that it was in the main written and acted before 1603,

and subsequently revised about 1609. As to the authorities used by Shakespeare, enough has already been said; moreover, his debts are pointed out in some detail in the notes. He had Chaucer's poem to draw upon, Caxton's Destruction of Troy, Lydgate's Troy-Booke, and Chapman's translation. He availed himself of them all very considerably.

STAGE HISTORY.

The materials for the stage history of this play are very scanty. In fact there does not appear to be a single record in Genest of any performance of Shakespeare's play itself, but only of Dryden's adaptation. Unfortunately the old play on this subject by Dekker and. Chettle has been lost. The allusions to it in Henslowe's Diary are five, and all relate to payments on account of the book; the first being on April 7th, 1599, of iijli (£3); the next on the 16th of the same month of xx* (20/); the next is probably some time after April 23rd, 1600, and is simply an entry "Troyeles and creasseday" (pp. 147-149); the fourth is on the 26th of May, 1599, when a payment was made to the authors of 30 shillings on account of the book (p. 153); and it is there called "the tragedie of Agamemnone."1 The fifth entry, on May 30th in the same year, is for “iijli vs” (£3, 5/), being "in full paymente of the Boocke" (p. 153), and the very next item is for the payment "unto the My of the Revelles man, for lycensynge of a Boocke called the tragedie of agamemnon," on June 3rd of the same year. There is no record of the absolute production of the piece, but we may suppose that it was played shortly after it was licensed. Whether Shakespeare made use of this version of the story for his play, or whether he himself had any hand in "the tragedie of Agamemnone" we do not know. It would appear from an entry which I found in one of the domestic papers of the reign of Henry VIII. that in the early part of his reign an interlude called Troilus and Cressida was played before the court;2 so that Dekker and

1 See above, in the Literary History, p. 246, column 2. 2 Unfortunately the reference to this entry has been mislaid.

Chettles' play may have been founded on a yet earlier dramatic version of the story.

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As to Shakespeare's play itself, the only record we have of its performance is an entry in the Stationers' Register on February 7th, 1603, from which it would appear that the play was then being played "by my Lord Chamberlen's men;" and also a statement on one of the titlepages of the Quarto of 1609 that it was "acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe." This title-page appears to have been withdrawn, and in the extraordinary preface appended to the Quarto, as published in 1609, it is stated that it was 'neuer stal'd with the Stage, neuer clapper-claw'd with the palmes of the vulger." That the above statement was a deliberate falsehood there can be little doubt. It is a short step from stealing to lying, either backward or forward; and the enterprising publishers, who sought to deprive Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists of their acting rights in a play by publishing it, and so enabling other companies to play it with impunity, would not have stuck at such a trifle as a lie of this sort. We can learn nothing decisive from these allusions to the acting of the play; but we may fairly deduce that it was not a very popular one, or Roberts would not have abandoned his idea of publishing it; and indeed the title-page as it stands in the Quarto of 1609 would lead one to believe that the play was more likely to be read than to be acted. In fact, what popularity it did enjoy was, as the stock phrase goes, in the closet and not on the stage. Nor can this be wondered at, for there are at most only two plays of Shakespeare which can dispute with Troilus and Cressida the palm of being eminently undramatic; unless it be as a vehicle for spectacular display there is absolutely nothing in this play to interest an audience. The love story, such as it is, is but feebly handled; it has no exact ending, either happy or otherwise; the character of the heroine is decidedly unsympathetic, while the admiration one feels for the hero is rather lukewarm and tinged with pity if not with contempt. Hector is the only character in the play who really bids fair to win our sympathy; but the treatment adopted by Shakespeare, or by the

older dramatists from whom he may have taken his play, rendered it impossible to bring out Hector's character strongly, or that of Andromache, who might have made a noble heroine. In fact, as Mr. Verity has pointed out in note 311, the parting of Hector and Andromache is not nearly as pathetic in this play as it is in Homer; but Hector stands out amongst the men, almost more than Troilus, as at once a brave man and a gentleman. He is not a clumsy lout like Ajax, or a sensual bully like Achilles, or a complacent cuckold like Menelaus, or a conceited and insolent fop like Diomede. Ulysses and Nestor are admirable in the abstract, and the former has some telling speeches from an elocutionary point of view; but neither of them has anything to do with any dramatic situation whatever, and by a general audience there is little doubt that both of them would be ranked as bores. The long discussions that take place in the Grecian camp are great blots upon the play; in fact, when regarded from a dramatic point of view, they are inexcusable. Whatever the faults of Dryden's alteration, from a poetic point of view, may be, there is no doubt that his version of Troilus and Cressida serves its purpose better, as an acting drama, than Shakespeare's tragicomedy, as I suppose we should call it.

The theatre, known as Dorset Gardens, was oponed in the year 1671 by the Duke of York's company. Genest it says was perhaps built

66

on the site of the old one which stood there before the civil wars" (vol. i. p. 121). It would appear that the situation of this theatre was on the south side of the Strand, opposite Shoe Lane, and close to the ancient Bridewell Palace; in fact, very near to what is known now as Salisbury Square. It was here that Dryden's alteration of Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found Out Too Late was produced in 1679. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on April 14th of that year. The exact date of the production of the play is not given by Genest. The cast was as follows:-" Agamemnon= Gillow: Achilles David Williams: Ulysses= Harris: Ajax = Bright: Nestor = Norris: Diomedes Crosby: Patroclus Bowman: Menelaus = Richards: Thersites = Underhill:

=

Trojans Hector = Smith: Troilus = Betterton: Eneas Joseph Williams: Priam and Calchas = Percival: Pandarus = Leigh: Cressida Mrs. Mary Lee: Andromache = Mrs. Betterton--the Prologue was spoken by Betterton as the Ghost of Shakspeare" (Genest, vol. i. p. 266).

There are many plays of Shakespeare on which the adapter's hand cannot be laid without committing an act of sacrilege; but Troilus and Cressida is certainly not one of them. If ever there was a play that could be altered with advantage from beginning to end, this is certainly one; that is to say, if a play is to be made of it at all. While one resents most strongly the wretched stuff introduced into the version of The Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, one cannot but admit that what "great and glorious John" has done for this unsatisfactory play is, in the main, done well. Most of his additions are, from a dramatic point of view, improvements; indeed one feels rather inclined to blame him that he did not do more, and did not get rid of some of the superfluous characters altogether, concentrating the interest more on those which are the best drawn in the original play. Dryden's arrangement of the first act was undoubtedly a judicious one, and, as will be seen hereafter, was followed by John Kemble when he prepared Shakespeare's play for the stage. In Act II. Dryden commences with what is the second scene in Shakespeare, and he has introduced Andromache with some effect, omitting Helen altogether; and the scene ends with the incident of Hector sending a challenge to the Grecian camp by Æneas. The next scene is between Pandarus and Cressida and Pandarus and Troilus. He concludes the act with a scene, nearly entirely his own, in which Thersites plays a very prominent part. Act III. is chiefly remarkable for the concluding scene between Troilus and Hector, which is certainly a great improvement, as far as the dramatic interest of the play is concerned. It is said that he was indebted to Betterton for the hint of this scene, which, according to Genest, is partly an imitation of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus in the Iphigenia in Aulis by

Euripides. It is certainly an effective acting scene, though the dialogue between the two is somewhat too prolonged. Dryden saw that some attempt must be made to render the character of Cressida more sympathetic. He therefore makes Calchas recommend her to make pretended love to Diomede, which she consents to do with the object of being able to return to Troy. Troilus is witness to the scene between them, as in Shakespeare, and believes Cressida to be false; though Dryden makes it clear to the audience that she never is so either in intention or fact. The act concludes with a quarrel between Troilus and Diomede, at which both Æneas and Thersites are present. In the last act considerable liberty is taken with the story. The scene between Andromache and Hector is retained very much as in Shakespeare, and Troilus persuades Hector to fight in spite of his wife's remonstrances. Cressida enters with her father in search of Troilus, in order to justify herself with him; and then Diomede and Troilus come in fighting. Cressida appeals to Troilus, and asserts her innocence; but Diomede implies indirectly that she has been false with him. Troilus is reproaching her in a violent speech, when she interrupts him and stabs herself, but does not die before Troilus has forgiven her. After that there is, as Genest remarks, a great deal of fighting. Troilus kills Diomede, and is, in his turn, killed by Ulysses. The piece ends with a speech of Ulysses; the death of Hector being only related by Achilles and not shown on the stage. No doubt all this, from a strictly poetic point of view, is very indefensible; but the end of Shakespeare's play is so confused and so wretchedly abortive, that some such violent change in the story was necessary if it was to be effective on the stage. To alter the catastrophe of such a play as Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, or Othello, is a crime; but to alter such a play as Troilus and Cressida is a meritorious work, and can scarcely be considered disrespectful to Shakespeare, even if he were, as I very much doubt, the sole author of the work. Certain it is that it cannot have been a favourite play with him; for he does not seem to have expended on it much of that dramatic ability which is so