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TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

15

VOL. VII.

BEFORE this play of Troilus and Cressida, printed in 1609, is a bookseller's preface, she wing that first impression to have been before the play had been acted, and that it was published without Shakspeare's knowledge, from a copy that had fallen into the bookseller's hands. Mr. Dryden thinks this one of the first of our author's plays: but, on the contrary, it is to be judged, from the fore-mentioned preface, that it was one of his last; and the great number of observations, both moral and politic (with which this piece is crowded more than any other of his) seems to confirm my opinion. POPE.

Shakspeare received the greatest part of his materials for the structure of this play from the Troye Boke of Lydgate. Lyd. gate was not much more than a translator of Guido of Columpna, who was of Messina in Sicily, and wrote his History of Troy in Latin, after Dictys Cretensis, and Dares Phrygius, in 1287. On these, as Mr. Warton observes, he engrafted many new romantic inventions, which the taste of his age dictated, and which the connection between Grecian and Gothic fiction easily admitted; at the same time comprehending in his plan the Theban and Argonautic stories from Ovid, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus. It appears to have been translated by Raoul le Feure, at Cologne, into French, from whom Caxton rendered it into English in 1471.

Chaucer had made the loves of Troilus and Cressida famous, which very probably might have been Shakspeare's inducement to try their fortune on the stage. STEEVENS.

The Troye Boke was somewhat modernized, and reduced into regular stanzas, about the beginning of the last century, under the name of The Life and Death of Hector-who fought a Hundred mayne Battailes in open Field against the Grecians ; wherein there were slain on both sides Fourteene Hundred and Sixe Thousand, Fourscore and Sixe Men. FARMER.

This play is more correctly written than most of Shakspeare's compositions, but it is not one of those in which either the extent of his views or elevation of his fancy is fully displayed. As the story abounded with materials, he has exerted little invention; but he has diversified his characters with great variety, and preserved them with great exactness. His vicious characters sometimes disgust, but cannot corrupt, for both Cressida and Pandarus are detested and contemned. The comic characters seem to have been the favourites of the writer; they are of the superficial kind, and exhibit more of manners than nature; but they are copiously filled, and powerfully impressed. 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. JOHNSON.

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