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XVI.—The Troilus-Cressida Story From Chaucer to Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hyder E. Rollins
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Extract

Viewed from any angle Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is an unattractive play. The heroine is a wanton. Ulysses reads her at a glance and finds

      language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
      Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
      At every joint and motive of her body.

He sets her down at once as “a daughter of the game,” and at every opportunity the foul-mouthed Thersites corroborates this description. “They say Diomedes keeps a Trojan drab,” he monologizes, “and uses the traitor Calchas his tent. I'll after; ”2 and in the rather awkward scene in which Cressida's perfidy is revealed to Troilus, he gleefully whispers: “Any man may sing her, if he can take her cliff. She's noted.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , 1917 , pp. 383 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1917

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References

1 iv, v, 54 ff.

2 v, i, 104.

3 v, ii, 10.

4 iii, ii, 19 ff.

5 iii, ii, 32.

6 R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer, pp. 104-105.

7 The Stage Quarrel, p. 155.

8 Troilus and Cressida, Tudor edition, pp. xix-xx. In articles on “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Hey wood” (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxx, pp. 673-770) and “The Chief Problem in Shakespeare” (Sewanee Review, April, 1916), which appeared after the present article was completed, Professor Tatlock has even more clearly and convincingly developed this view, and has also called attention to the relation of Heywood's Iron Age to Shakespeare's play.

9 A Life of William Shakespeare (1916), p. 370.

10 Troilus and Cressida, First Folio edition, p. 131. It may be remarked that the two title-pages to the First Quarto run “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida” and “The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid,” the spelling used in the Edinburgh, 1593, edition of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Shakespeare's favorite form, if indeed he had a favorite, was Cressid, and this had been used for years before he wrote. Even in mss. of Chaucer's own poems the name is found with the spelling “Crisseyde,” “Creseyde,” “Criseida,” “Creseide.” In this article the spelling used by the authors who are quoted is retained.

11 Bk. v, st. 151-152.

12 In H. Bergen's edition of the Troy Book (E. E. T. S., 1906-1910) the story may be followed in Bk. ii, 11. 4676-4762, Bk. iii, 11. 3664-3754, 4077-4263, 4343-4448, 4619-4659, 4820-67, Bk. iv, 2132-77, 2401-2779.

13 L. 9053 (ed. Wülfing, E. E. T. S., 1902-03). The main events of the story occur at 11. 9065-92, 13427-38, 13543-64, 14857 ff.

14 Ed. H. O. Sommer, vol. ii, p. 601.

15 Ibid., p. 604. These allusions are not in Miss Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion. Unless her book is directly referred to, it may be assumed that other allusions to Chaucer noted in this article are not there printed.

16 C. W. Wallace, Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 1912, p. 48.

17 Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 95.

18 Dodsley-Hazlitt's Old Plays, vol. vi, p. 155. This play reminds one of the Troilus-Cressida burlesque—over which wars of words have been waged—in Histriomastix. Nobody, I believe, has noticed that the latter is closely paralleled by this passage in Samuel Rowlands's The Letting of Hvmovrs Blood in the Head-Vaine … At London, Printed by W. White for W. F. 1600, signs. E b-E 2 (Hunterian Club edition, vol. i, pp. 66-67):

My hartes deare blood sweete Cis, is thy carouse,
Worth all the Ale in Gammer Gubbins house:
I say no more affaires call me away,
My Fathers horse for prouender doth stay.
Be thou the Lady Cressit-light to mee,
Sir Trollelolle I will proue to thee.
Written in haste: farewell my Cowslippe sweete,
Pray lets a Sunday at the Ale-house meete.

The early date of Hvmovrs Blood makes this passage of much importance in connection with the supposed allusion in Histriomastix to Shakespeare's Troilus.

19 Works, ed. A. Dyce, 1855, vol, ii, p. 208. Cf. Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 74.

20 Arber's reprint, pp. 192-194. There were eight editions of this miscellany by 1587.

21 J. P. Collier's Old Ballads, p. 26 (Percy Society, vol. i). The ballad is reprinted also in H. L. Collmann's Ballads and Broadsides, Roxburghe Club, 1912, p. 111.

22 Available to me only as reprinted (pp. 72-73) in Paul Wolter's William Fullwood, Diss. Rostock, Potsdam, 1907.

23 See A Handfull of Pleasant Delights, 1584, Spenser Society edition, pp. 45, 56; Richard Johnson's Crown Garland of Golden Roses, 1612, Percy Society Publications, vol. vi, pp. 52, 67.

24 The Palice of Honour, Works, ed. J. Small, 1874, vol. i, p. 23.

25 Works, ed. Dyce, 1855, vol. i, pp. 84-85.

26 Songs and Ballads … Edited from a ms. in the Ashmolean Museum by Thomas Wright, Roxburghe Club, 1860, pp. 195-197. The ballad is also reprinted in vol. xxxi, pp. 102-105, of the old Shakespeare Society Papers by Halliwell-Phillipps as well as in his edition of Troilus (Folio Shakespeare, vol. xii, p. 307). This is almost certainly the “ballett intituled ‘the history of Troilus, Whose throtes [i. e., troth] hath Well bene tryed‘” which was registered for publication by T. Purfoote in 1565-66 (Arber's Transcript, vol. i, p. 300).

Another ballad on Troilus and “Cressus,” preserved in the Percy Folio MS., ed. Hales and Furnivall, vol. iii, pp. 301-302, depends solely on Chaucer's poem. It begins:

Cressus: was the ffairest of Troye,
whom Troylus did loue!
the Knight was kind, & shee was coy,
no words nor worthes cold moue,
till Pindaurus [!] soe playd his part
that the Knight obtained her hart
the Ladyes rose destroyes:
[They] held a sweet warr a winters night
till the enuyous day gaue light;
which darkness louers ioyes.

It is most surprising that Henryson's story was not worked into many lugubrious moralizing ballads of the type so dear to Elizabethan readers. One of these is mentioned on p. 24, below; and probably there were others not now preserved.

27 Cf. especially Troilus and Cressida, iv, ii, 36-40.

28 I have observed that one of the ballads in this ms. was registered in October, 1564, and yet was printed under Richard Johnson's name in his Crown Garland, 1612. The ballad on Troilus and Cressida could easily have been in circulation in Shakespeare's day.

29 The quotations in this article are from Thynne's text (as normalized in Gregory Smith's Henryson, vol. iii, pp. 177-198), because this was long the only text known in England. Otherwise the Scottish text (1593) would be preferable.

30 Henryson's Works, ed. Gregory Smith, Scottish Text Society, vol. i, p. xlv ff.

31 Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, pp. 154-155.

32 The allusions to Chaucer in the Testament are, of course, in Miss Spurgeon's book (vol. i, p. 56).

33 Troilus and Criseyde, Bk. iv, st. 222.

34 So thought also Sir Francis Kinaston, who circâ 1635 began to translate Troilus into Latin and pointed out that the “Sixt & Last Booke of Troilus and Creseid” was not by Chaucer but by “Mr. Robert Henderson,”—surprising news to most of his contemporaries. “This Mr Henderson,” he said, “wittily obseruing that Chaucer in his 5th booke had related the death of Troilus, but made no mention what became of Creseid, he learnedly takes vppon him in a fine poeticall way to expres the punishment & end due to a false vnconstant whore, which commonly terminates in extreme misery” (G. Smith's Henryson, vol. i, p. ciii; cf. also Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 207). Both Henryson and Kinaston were quite modern in their attitude toward Cressid.

Ballad-mongers naturally took an unfavorable view of Cressid's relations with Troilus. So “A Ballade in Praise of London Prentices, and What They Did at the Cock-Pitt Playhouse” (Collier's Hist. Eng. Dramatic Poetry, 1879, vol. i, p. 387), of the date of March, 1616/7, tells us that

King Priam's robes were soon in rags,
And broke his gilded scepter;
False Cressid's hood, that was so good
When loving Troylus kept her… .

The ballad, if genuine, perhaps throws some light on the way in which actors played the part of Cressid. The author of “A New Ballad of King Edward and Jane Shore,” 1671 (Roxburghe Ballads, vol. viii, p. 424), is quite as uncomplimentary to “young Troyalus” as his predecessors were to Cressid.

35 Ll. 76-77.

36 Ll. 337-343.

37 Ll. 61-67.

38 Professor Skeat thought that these lines threw some doubt on Henryson's authorship. Cf. his Chaucerian and Other Pieces, p. 522.

39 Registered, I have observed, under the title of its refrain, “I will say nothing,” in 1564-65 (Arber's Transcript, vol. i, p. 270); printed in Thomas Wright's Songs and Ballads, Roxburghe Club, 1860, p. 163.

40 In J. P. Collier's reprint of the Epitaphes, pp. 223-226. On p. 10 occurs this little known allusion to Chaucer and Boccaccio:

Pause, pen, a while therefore,
and use thy woonted meane:
For Boccas braine, and Chaucers quill
in this were foyled cleane.
Of both might neither boast
if they did live againe;
For P[yndara]. would put them to their shifts
to pen hir vertues plaine.

41 In Tragical Tales, translated by Tvrbervile, In time of his troubles, 1587 (Edinburgh reprint, 1837, p. 330). The Tales, as I shall prove elsewhere, was first printed in 1574-75.

42 Ibid., p. 369. On p. 334 we read:

When Cresid clapt the dish,
and Lazer-like did goe:
She rewde no doubt that earst she did
the Troyan handle so.
And might she then retirde
to beuties auncient towre:
She would haue stucke to Priams sonne,
of faithful loue the floure.
But fond, too late she found
that she had been too light:
And ouerlate bewaild that she
forewent the worthy knight.

So in the Epitaphes, 1567 (Collier's reprint, pp. 108-109):

Let Creside be in coumpt
and number of the mo,
Who for hir lightnesse may presume
with falsest on the row;
Else would she not have left
a Trojan for a Greeke.
But what? by kinde the cat will hunt;
hir father did the like.

There are similar long allusions on pp. 54, 56-57. The Epitaphes was issued in ?1565, 1567, 1570, 1579, 1584. Turbervile had a brother and various nephews and cousins named Troilus (Hutchins, History and Antiquities of Dorset, 3rd edition, vol. i, pp. 139, 201), but whether there were likewise Cressids in the family, the record telleth not!

43 Originally licensed in 1567-68, but no copy of the first edition remains. The present edition claims to be “newly augmented, corrected and amended. Imprinted at London in Flete-streete, at the signe of S. Iohn Euangelist, by Thomas Colwell.” Colwell's last license (for a ballad) was secured in July, 1571 (Arber's Transcript, vol. i, p. 444); he is last heard of in a marginal note beside the entry of a book he had registered in 1568-9: “solde to Benyman, 19 Junij 1573” (Arber, vol. i, p. 378); so that Howell's Newe Sonets probably appeared about 1570. Grosart, reprinting the second edition, does not attempt to date it. Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 100, merely refers to the work under its original date. But cf. Herbert-Ames, Typographical Antiquities, ii, p. 932.

44 The Poems of Thomas Howell, ed. A. B. Grosart, pp. 121-122. Cf. Chaucer's Troilus, Bk. v, st. 262, 265.

45 In Grosart's edition. A separate edition was edited by Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford, 1906.

46 Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 105.

47 Ibid., p. 110.

48 Ll. 579-581. The belt is Henryson's addition. The Scottish poet Wedderburne (Bannatyne MS., 1568, ed. Hunterian Club, vol. iv, p. 761; Sibbald's Chron. Scot. Poetry, vol. iii, p. 236), following both Henryson and Chaucer, piles an alarming assortment of articles on the weapon of Diomedes:

God wait quhat wo had Troyelus in deid,
Quhen he beheld the belt, the broch and ring,
Hingand vpoun the speir of Diomeid,
Quhilk Troyellus gaif to Cresseid in luve taikning.

This last line is almost an exact quotation of Henryson, 11. 500-501 (quoted above). But Wedderburne, like his English contemporaries, thought he was quoting Chaucer. In this same poem there is a stanza (unnoticed by Miss Spurgeon) in which he summarizes the Miller's Tale.

The limits of this article necessarily preclude an attempt to trace the story through the Scottish poets. A remarkable poem, “The Laste Epistle of Creseyd to Troyalus,” attributed to William Fowler (Works, vol. i, pp. 379-387, ed. H. W. Meikle, 1914), should be mentioned, however. This aims to finish Henryson's poem, and does so by borrowing his situation and retelling the whole story of the Testament plus details presumably from Lydgate and certainly from Chaucer. The date of this poem is, I should guess, about 1603, when Fowler came to London with Queen Anne. (The second volume of Meikle's edition has not appeared, and he has not expressed his opinion.) At any rate, Fowler was unaware of, or totally unimpressed by, Shakespeare's play.

49 Complete Poems, ed. Hazlitt, vol. i, p. 114.

50 Bk. V, st. 262, 265. Cf. Howell, p. 404, supra.

51 Hazlitt's ed., vol. i, p. 115.

52 Ibid., vol. i, p. 90. Henryson's lines are:

Sigheng ful sadly, sayde, “I can no more;
She was vntrewe, and wo is me therfore!“

53 Similar allusions may be found in Hazlitt's edition, vol. i, pp. 54, 55, 92, 98, 101, 105-106, 133, 139, 140, 363, 493, 495, and elsewhere.

54 Rocke of Regard, J. P. Collier's reprint, p. 35.

55 Ibid., p. 39 (Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 113).

56 Ll. 433-437.

57 Collier's reprint, p. 40. Thomas Deloney's ballad of “Jane Shore” (Works, ed. F. O. Mann, p. 304, st. 9-11) seems to be imitating both Whetstone and Henryson, though the resemblance is probably accidental. Whetstone has other allusions to Cressid on pp. 134, 279. Cf. also his mention of Achilles and Briseis on p. 140.

58 Collier's reprint, p. 91.

59 Common Conditions, ed: Tucker Brooke, 1915, 11. 801, 820-823. See also 1. 1281.

60 “Beyng in Loue, he complaineth,” J. P. Collier's reprint of 1578 edition of the Paradyse, p. 132. There were eight editions by 1600.

61 Sign. C b (Three Collections of English Poetry, ed. Sir Henry Ellis, London, 1845).

62 Sign. E iii b (ibid.) Similar allusions may be found at signs. B ii b, B iii, E ii b, F iii b, G iv b, H ii, K iii b, and elsewhere.

63 Sign. B iiii b (Ellis's Three Collections). The phrase “Pandor his Neece” is used again at sign. D ii b, and of course comes only from Chaucer's story.

64 Ll. 577-578.

65 Sign. D iii b.

66 Signs. F-F b. Cf. also sign. I iii. In W. A.'s Speciall Remedie against the furious force of lawlesse Loue, 1579 (reprinted in Ellis's Three Collections), sign. F ii b, there is a rather interesting reference to Cressid:

What madnesse then remaines, in mens vnruly mindes,
to feede one fruits of vaine desire, ye which so soone vntwindes[?]
For wher is now become, dame Cressids glorious hue,
whose passing port, so much did please, young Troilus eyes to vew?
W. A., of course, is alluding to the leprosy story.

67 Edited by Sir E. Brydges, 1812, pp. 100-102. Published also in Gascoigne's Poems, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, vol. ii, pp. 331-333.

68 This absurd phrase may come from Henryson, 1. 464: “a leper lady rose, and to her wende.”

69 That the Handfull of Pleasant Delights first appeared in 1566, as an entry in the stationers' Registers for that year (Arber's Transcript, vol. i, p. 313) would naturally lead one to expect, and that most of the ballads printed in the 1584 Handfull had actually been published before 1566, I have attempted to prove in an article presently to appear in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

70 A Handefull, etc., Spenser Society edition, p. 32. Henryson does not mention Pandarus.

71 In his Works of Shakespeare (1902), vol. iii, pp. 359-60.

72 Greene's Prose Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, vol. vi, p. 233.

73 Historie of Orlando Furioso, Malone Society reprint, 11. 1065-66. For similar slurs see Greene's Never Too Late, 1590, Prose Works, ed. Grosart, vol. viii, pp. 26, 59, 68.

74 Ed. Charles Hughes, 1904, Canto xviii, p. 51.

75 Ed. Hughes, p. 133, Canto lxxii.

76 Ibid., pp. 138-139. The third verse is a rendering of Henryson's “And go among the grekes early and late, So gyglotlyke, takyng thy foule plesaunce” (11. 82-83). The ugly phrase in the first half of the fifth line is also used by Gascoigne, Poems, ed. Hazlitt, vol. i, p. 105.

77 Life of Shakespeare (1916), pp. 219-221.

78 Troy was entered in Henslowe's Diary (ed. Greg, vol. ii, p. 180) as a new play on June 22, 1596, and was performed five or six times during June and July (ibid., vol. i, p. 42). Greg (ibid., vol. ii, p. 180) thinks that this was an earlier and shorter part of the Iron Age, which was later expanded into a two-part play. The Iron Age was first published in 1632; in the preface to the two parts Heywood wrote that they had been “often (and not with the least applause,) Publickely Acted by two Companies, vppon one Stage at once.” This performance may have been given during the autumn of 1597, when from October 11 to November 5 Pembroke's and the Admiral's men played together at the Rose. Fleay (Biographical Chronicle, vol. i, p. 285) believed this, but Greg (Diary, vol. ii, p. 180) denies it. Nevertheless, among the inventory of properties owned by the Admiral's men (Heywood's company) on March 10, 1597/8, there was a “great horse with his leages” (Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, p. 118), a property absolutely necessary for the second part of the Iron Age and very probably used for it during the performances of the preceding winter. Heywood's Golden. Age, Silver Age, and Brazen Age seem to have been first performed on March 5, 1594/5, May 7, 1595, and May 23, 1595 (Dairy, ed. Greg, vol. ii, p. 175; Fleay, Biog. Chron., vol. i, pp. 283-284, and History of the Stage, p. 114); and it seems highly probable that the Iron Age immediately followed these. The best discussion of the date of the Iron Age is that in Professor Tatlock's “Siege of Troy,” PMLA., vol. xxx, pp. 707-719. He decides (p. 719) that “an earlier date for Iron Age than for Shakespeare's Troilus (1601-02) is favored by some of [the] evidence and opposed by none of it.”

79 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, vol. i, 104.

80 Ibid. The play of Agamemnon which was entered on May 26 and May 30, 1599 (ibid., p. 109), Greg (ibid., vol. ii, p. 202) does not believe to have been the same as the Dekker-Chettle Troilus.

81 Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, p. 142.

82 But in his Troia Britanica, 1609 (note to Canto xi, p. 254), Heywood refers to the story of Troilus and Cressida written by “the reuerent Poet Chaucer.”

83 Pt. ii, Act V (Plays, ed. Pearson, vol. iii, p. 428).

84 It is altogether improbable that, as almost all critics have said, Shakespeare took his Thersites directly from Chapman's Iliad. Instead he must have been chiefly influenced by Heywood's play, or by an older play which they both used. Perhaps he knew John Heywood's (?) interlude of Thersites, which was printed by Tyndale, 1552-1563; and certainly the scenes in which this Thersites abuses his old mother are as disgusting from the modern point of view and as amusing from the Elizabethan point of view as anything said by Shakespeare's Thersites. Shakespeare also knew Thersites from Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses (1567). The epigram on Thersites in Bastard's Chrestoleros (Spenser Society reprint, p. 28), which was published in April, 1598, some time before Chapman's Iliad first appeared, probably was suggested by the popularity of the Thersites in Heywood's Iron Age. Shakespeare's Thersites, like his Pandar, was intended to be purely a comic figure. See Heywood's comments on Thersites in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 1637 (no pagination or signatures).

85 III, ii, 205 ff.

86 The Stage-Quarrel, p. 155.

87 Troilus and Cressida, First Folio ed., p. 138.

88 Lodge's Works, Hunterian Club ed., vol. iv, pp. 5-6, 57.

89 Ibid., p. 44. So in Beaumont and Fletcher's Woman Hater, 1607, one of the characters is called Pandar (the common noun), and has quite as much individuality as Shakespeare's Pandarus. “Sir Pandarus, be my speed !” they make him exclaim when the proper noun is meant. Cf. the poetical description of “A Pander” in Rowlands's Knave of Clubs, 1609, sign. A4 (Hunterian Club ed., vol. ii, p. 7).

90 Merry Wives, v, v, 176.

91 Much Ado, v, ii, 31.

92 Henry V, iv, v, 14.

93 Merry Wives, i, iii, 83.

94 All's Well, ii, i, 100.

95 As You Like It, iv, i, 97.

96 Taming of the Shrew, iv, i, 153.

97 Merchant of Venice, v, i, 6.

98 Twelfth Night, iii, i, 55 ff.

99 Henry V, ii, i, 76.

100 In 1748 John Upton, in his Observations on Shakespeare (Miss Spurgeon, vol. i, p. 397), wrote: “Plausible as this reading [”he is a very man per se“] appears, it seems to me originally to come from the corrector of the press. For our poet I imagine made use of Chaucer's expression [i. e., Henryson's ”A per se“], from whom he borrowed so many circumstances in the play.” Upton was right, I think; and if he confused Chaucer and Henryson in 1748, surely it was not surprising for Shakespeare to do this in 1600 and to borrow, perhaps unconsciously, the phrase which he had read in Chaucer's works.

According to the New English Dictionary, Henryson first used the phrase. It came early to be a commonplace among the Scotch poets—see, for example, Sibbald's Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, vol. iii, pp. 169, 187, 361, 363, 495; Gude and Godlie Ballatis, ed. A. F. Mitchell, p. 147—but was not especially common in England before 1600. In Turbervile's Tragical Tales, 1587 (Edinburgh reprint, 1837, p. 297), occur the lines:

That famous Dame, fayre Helen, lost her hewe
When withred age with wrinckles chaungd her cheeks,
Her louely lookes did loathsomnesse ensewe,
That was the A per se of all the Greekes.

The fact that Turbervile was so fond of referring to the Henryson story, as well as the context of the above lines, makes it practically certain that he borrowed the phrase from Henryson.

101 William Shakespeare (English translation), London, 1898, pp. 193-194.