bereave you o' the deeds too, if she call your activity in question"; or, again, dropping all veil of decency, says, "if my lord get a boy of you, you'll give him me”; the coquetry of a wanton who, as the scene closes, accepts without demur his coarsely worded proposal that she should lose no time in gratifying her lust. The deed done, she receives with scarcely a pretence of shame the flouts with which that worthy greets her on the following morning. When the news comes that she is to be exchanged for Antenor, her grief is no doubt violent; and in the scenes immediately succeeding we have the only semblance of a love that is anything but mere animal passion. At the moment of parting from Troilus her professions of fidelity are abundant, and for that moment perhaps sincere. Yet it is something more than a lover's fears that prompts Troilus to exact so many vows of constancy and to suggest with reiteration the dangers to which she will be exposed from the fascination of the Grecian youth. He might well suspect that a love so lightly won would be as lightly lost. At any rate her passionate grief is of the shortest duration. Without rebuke she allows Diomed to protest his admiration even before she starts on her journey and while in the act of bidding farewell to Troilus. On arrival at the Grecian camp all traces of her better emotions have vanished. With easy insouciance she bandies risqué jests, with easy compliance she bandies kisses, among the assembled chiefs. Well may Ulysses say:

Fie, fie upon her!

There's 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.

O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader! set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity

And daughters of the game.

Her latest appearance shows her as having in a short ten days been "tempted" to "folly," as, indeed, already notorious for a "drab," as using her reminiscences of Troilus to fire the passion of Diomed, as confessing to herself that— Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

In short, while Chaucer's Cressida is a woman at the outset modest and reserved, who, exposed to strong temptation and beset by wily lures, yields to the promptings of passion, and, probably as a consequence of her first lapse, adds to that offence the stain of inconstancy, Shakespeare paints a character who at her best betrays the manners and morals of a grisette, at her worst can boast little more refinement and purity than Doll Tearsheet herself. If Shakespeare was in a pessimistic frame of mind, his pourtrayal of Cressida is easily accounted for. But we may further conjecture that his insight showed him how ill-suited for dramatic treatment was the view conceived or accepted by Chaucer; how impossible the reconcilement between the Cressida of the clear dawn and the Cressida of the murky sunset. I say this on the assumption that Shakespeare did take Chaucer and Chaucer alone as the source of the Cressida myth. Is this proven? The absence of any other known source-play, poem, or romance-dealing with the story in a cynical spirit does not seem conclusive./ Nor is it improbable that a theme handled in so many

་

languages by so many diverse artists should have varied
in its conception and treatment, or impossible that Shake-
speare
should have had access to translations of which we
know nothing.

For the romance literature dealing with the Tale of Troy is a large one. Earliest among the narratives that supplied material for that literature are the Historia de Excidio Trojae of Dares the Phrygian and the Ephemeris Belli Trojani of Dictys the Cretan, both of which writers pretended to belong to the Homeric age, but probably lived between the fifth and seventh centuries, and wrote in Latin. Next to these works perhaps come two Latin elegiac poems of the twelfth century, one anonymous, the other by Simon Chèvre d'Or, a canon in Paris. These, however, may be passed over as containing no mention of the Cressida myth. It is in the great Roman de Troi by Benôit de Sainte More, dated 1160, and running to close upon 30,000 lines, that we first meet with the loves of the faithless Briseida, daughter of Calchas. From this poem Boccaccio took the theme of his Filostrato,1 the heroine in the Italian becoming Griseida in place of Briseida. The Roman was evidently very popular, for it was translated into German, sobibere about the end of the twelfth century, and in the thirteenth into Latin prose by Guido delle Colonne, who, however, did not mention that his work was a translation, but left it to be taken as an original

1 Mr. Boas, whose Shakespeare and his Predecessors I had not the opportunity of seeing till this part of my Introduction was completed, says Boccaccio worked upon Guido's translation. Mr. Boas takes almost exactly the same view with myself on the Cressida question, and I may cheerfully add, writes with a charm which my narrative does not possess.

an

Cre

production. It was from this prose version that Lydgate derived the materials for his Troy Book. By a curious fate, Guido's work was in part retranslated from the Latin into French by Raoul le Fevre. This translation had a great vogue, as we may judge by the fact that the first book printed in English was a translation of Raoul le Fevre which Caxton entitled Recuyell of the Histories of Troye.

Chaucer's story was continued by the Scottish poet Henryson, who thought that punishment ought to be meted out to Cressida. Here is his portrait of her, stanza xii. of The Testament of Cresseid :

O, fair Cresseid! the floure and A per se
Of Troy and Grece, how was thou fortunait!
To change in filth all thy feminitie,
And be with fleschelie lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Greikis air and lait,

Sa giglotlike, takand thy foull plesance;

I have pietie thou suld fall in sic mischance.

He goes on to relate the sentence passed on her by Saturn and Cynthia, whereby she is afflicted with leprosy, con demned to the "spittail hous," and made to wander about as a beggar with "cop ar Did Shakespeare ryson? So far back Says:

take his first idea of Cressidade

as Henry the Fifth, II. ii. 78-81,

O hound of Crete, think'st thou my spouse to get?

No; to the spital go,

And from the powdering-tub of infamy

Fetch forth the lazar kite of Cressid's kind,

Doll Tearsheet she by name, and her espouse:

again, in Twelfth Night, III. i. 58-62, we have:

:

Clown. I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a

Cressida to this Troilus.

D 1600

?

Viol. I understand you, sir; 'tis well begged.

Clown. The matter, I hope, is not great, sir, begging but a beggar: Cressida was a beggar.

Heywood who, in his Iron Age, parts i. and ii., treats
the same story, abounds with reminiscences of Shakespeare
and paints Cressida in even darker colours. Her defection

from Troilus is represented as due to a conversation of
some half-a-dozen lines with her father in which she prefers
safety with Diomed to danger with Troilus; later on she
excuses herself not as having yielded to a passion for the
Greek, but merely as having obeyed her father's command;
on the appearance of Sinon, who unblushingly avows to
her his treacherous nature, she is persuaded after a five
minutes' conversation to grant him her love; is on Diomed's
reappearance contemptuously cast off by Sinon as "a fair
Troian weather-hen"; and on the taking of Troy has
already been "branded with leprosy ".

If, however, in our play Cressida fares worse than any
of the characters presented in this part of the story, the
same acrid and depreciatory touch is upon nearly all of
them. Pandarus, at all events in the earlier parts of
Chaucer's poem, is represented as really fond of his niece
and careful of her interests; while towards Troilus his
attitude is rather that of an over-zealous friend who is
ready to use every effort to rescue him from the unhappy
plight into which love has brought him. Later on, it is
true, his unscrupulous nature and love of intrigue reveal
themselves, and when his mischief is accomplished he only
chuckles over the villainous plot that has been the undoing
of Cressida. But at his worst he never approaches in
baseness the filthy, prurient, self-appointed tool who revels