Copyright, 1008 BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS Entered at Stationers' Hall, London PR 2753 13 1906 48796 8.16 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S. A. F all Shakespeare's plays, none presents a more formidable array of difficulties to the student of his mind and art than this "tragical-comical- historical poem unlimited" of "Troilus and Cressida"; and these difficulties are not invented by the critics. A simple reader, who approaches the play with no other desire than to hear a moving story well told, will find himself stumbled before he reaches the end of it. A story there is one which had already, before Shakespeare's time, been told by the greatest story-teller among English poets. But here it is not told frankly; it is interrupted continually by the insinuations of hostile criticism, and the narrator seems to speak with a mocking voice. Chaucer's poem is a tale of love and fate, of amiable and pitiful human frailty sunning itself for a brief season, and broken by the wind of adversity. Shakespeare's play is a riddle, a two-edged satire on love and politics, a carnival of doubt and denial, a romance of the charnel-house of life, where "cold hopes swarm like worms within the living clay." He who in many of his plays asks for sympathy for all his characters, here seems to ask for sympathy for none. He stands aside, while the blended motives of human life— love, pride, ambition, loyalty-pass before him in review, and in each of them he finds something scandalous. The very spirit of criticism, which prompts men to stand aside, does not escape condemnation; it is ennobled in Hamlet, it is made infinitely delightful in Falstaff; in Thersites it is exhibited as the spirit of the deformed cur. There is none that doeth good, no, not one; and there is no day of judgment. a It is worth while to examine more in detail the impression that this play leaves upon the reader. The heroine, Cressida, is a marvel among Shakespeare's creations woman merely base. She is judged by the dispassionate Ulysses. "Her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. And daughters of the game." |