ON SHAKSPEARE'STROILUS AND CRESSIDA.' .xi and can boast more of the propriety of abstraction than of the vivacity of a moving scene of absolute life. The Achilles, the Ajax, and the various Grecian heroes of Shakspeare, on the other hand, are absolute men, deficient in nothing which can individualise them, and already touched with the Promethean fire that might infuse a soul into what, without it, were lifeless form. From the rest, perhaps, the character of Thersites deserves to be selected (how cold and school-boy a sketch in Homer !), as exhibiting an appropriate vein of sarcastic humour amidst his cowardice, and a profoundness and truth in his mode of laying open the foibles of those about him, impossible to be excelled.'-GODWIN. 'Cressida is the exception to Shakspeare's general idea of the female character. She is beautiful, witty, accomplished,—but she is impure. In her, love is not a sentiment, or a passion,it is an impulse. Temperament is stronger than will. Her love has nothing ideal, spiritual, in its composition. It is not constant, because it is not discriminate. Setting apart her inconstancy, how altogether different is Cressida from Juliet, or Viola, or Helena, or Perdita! There is nothing in her which could be called love; no depth, no concentration of feeling,nothing that can bear the name of devotion. Shakspeare would not permit a mistake to be made on the subject; and he has therefore given to Ulysses to describe her, as he conceived her. Considering what his intentions were, and what really is the high morality of the characterisation, we can scarcely say that he has made the representation too prominent.'-KNight. 'The far-sighted Shakspeare most certainly did not mistake as to the beneficial effect which a nearer intimacy with the high culture of antiquity had produced, and would produce, upon the Christian European mind. But he saw the danger of an indiscriminate admiration of this classical antiquity; for he who thus accepted it must necessarily fall to the very lowest station in religion and morality; as, indeed, if we closely observe the character of the 18th century, we see has happened. Out of this prophetic spirit, which penetrated with equal clearness through the darkness of coming centuries and the clouds of a far-distant past, Shakspeare wrote this deeply-significant satire upon the Homeric herodom. He had no desire to debase the elevated, to deteriorate or make little the great, and still less to attack the poetical worth of Homer, or of heroic poetry in general. But he wished to warn thoroughly against the over-valuation and idolatry of them, to which man so willingly abandons himself. He endeavoured, at the same time, to bring strikingly to view the universal truth that everything that is merely human, even when it is glorified with the nimbus of a poetic ideality and a mythical past, yet, seen in the bird's-eye perspective of a pure moral ideality, appears very small.'ULRICI. ACHILLES, a Grecian commander Act II. sc. 1; sc. 3. sc. 5. Act V. sc. sc. 9. Act II. sc. 1; sc. 3. Act III. sc. 3. Act IV. 1; sc. 5; sc. 6; sc. 7; AJAX, a Grecian commander Act IV. sc. 5. Act I. sc. 3. Act IV. sc. 5. Act V. sc. 1; sc. 5; sc. 10. Act II. sc. 3. Act III. sc. 3. sc. 3; sc. 4; sc. 5. Act V. sc. sc. 5 ; Sc. 6 ; sc. 10. Act II. sc. 1; sc. 3. sc. 5. Act V. sc. 1. Act III. sc. 3. Act IV. Act II. sc. 1; sc. 3. Act III. sc. 3. Act V. sc. 1; sc. 4; sc. 8. ALEXANDER, servant to Cressida Act I. sc. 2. SCENE-TROY, AND THE GRECIAN CAMP BEFORE IT. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. PROLOGUE. IN Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece The princes orgulous,' their high blood chafed, With wanton Paris sleeps; and that's the quarrel. And the deep-drawing barks do there disgorge 3 1 Orgulous] Haughty. From the French orgueilleux. 2 Immures] Walls. Latin, murus. In 2 K. Henry IV. iv. 4 the King's body is called the mure of his mind, the mure that should confine it in.' Brave] Making a grand show. |