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Updated: June 12, 2025
I cannot but conjecture that the habitual students of Shakespeare's printed plays must have felt startled as by something of a shock when the same year exposed for the expenditure of their sixpences two reasonably correct editions of a play unknown to the boards in the likeness of Troilus and Cressida, side by side or cheek by jowl with a most unreasonably and unconscionably incorrect issue of a much older stage favourite, now newly beautified and fortified, in Pericles Prince of Tyre.
Fragments of "The Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings: Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or that.
The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander.
Troilus and Cressid, the hero sinned against and the sinning heroine, are the VICTIMS OF FATE. Who shall cast a stone against those who are, but like the rest of us, predestined to their deeds and to their doom; since the co-existence of free-will with predestination does not admit of proof?
Its singularity in this respect gives it a peculiar value to the student of Shakespeare's style and of his mental development. There is not an interweaving of styles as in "Troilus and Cressida"; the two are distinctly separable; and there is external historical evidence which supports the internal.
Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear "to dally with the innocence of love"; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love. But the Homeric and the alien later elements, the story of false love, cannot be successfully combined.
Shortly before his death, at the seventh hour, he cried out to two Spaniards who were standing by the bed that he had suffered such great torture from the working of Troilus, and that he was dying therefrom. "Therefore," he cried, "in your presence I summon him with my dying words to appear before God's tribunal, that he may give an account of all the evil he has wrought against me."
This is the pettiest Low-borne Lasse, that ever, Ran on the greene-sord: Nothing she do's or seemes," where "seems" is changed to "says," by striking out all but the first and last letters, and writing ay in the margin. In a passage given from "Troilus and Cressida," Act V. Sc. 2, we have this line: "Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloathes,"
And suddenly he determined to settle the affair of his nephew at a blow, and at the same time to eliminate every danger which might threaten him. "He is in love, as was Troilus with Cressida. Permit him, lord, to visit Rome, for he is dying on my hands.
Inasmuch as both this poem and "Troilus and Cressid" are mentioned in the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women," they must have been written earlier than it; and the dedication of "Troilus" to Gower and Strode very well agrees with the relations known to have existed about this time between Chaucer and his brother-poet.
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