Shakespeare has, in giving a dramatic form to this passage, adhered very closely and properly to the text.  He did not think it necessary to improve upon the truth of nature.  Several of the scenes in Julius Caesar, particularly Portia’s appeal to the confidence of her husband by showing him the wound she had given herself, and the appearance of the ghost of Caesar to Brutus, are, in like manner, taken from the history.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

This is one of the most loose and desultory of our author’s plays:  it rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together with some indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things in its way.  Troilus himself is no character:  he is merely a common lover; but Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off with proverbial truth.  By the speeches given to the leaders of the Grecian host, Nestor, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Achilles, Shakespeare seems to have known them as well as if he had been a spy sent by the Trojans into the enemy’s camp—­to say nothing of their being very lofty examples of didactic eloquence.  The following is a very stately and spirited declamation: 

Ulysses.  Troy, yet upon her basis, had been down,
And the great Hector’s sword had lack’d a master,
But for these instances. 
The specialty of rule hath been neglected.

. . . . .

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order: 
And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol,
In noble eminence, enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad.  But, when the planets,
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents? what mutinies? 
What raging of the sea? shaking of earth? 
Commotion in the winds? frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture!  O, when degree is shaken,
(Which is the ladder to all high designs)
The enterprise is sick!  How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
(But by degree) stand in authentic place? 
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.  The bounded waters
Would lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe: 
Strength would be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son would strike his father dead: 
Force would be right; or rather, right and wrong