The characters of Cressida and Pandarus are very amusing and instructive.  The disinterested willingness of Pandarus to serve his friend in an affair which lies next his heart is immediately brought forward.  ’Go thy way, Troilus, go thy way; had I a sister were a grace, or a daughter were a goddess, he should take his choice.  O admirable man!  Paris, Paris is dirt to him, and I warrant Helen, to change, would give money to boot.’  This is the language he addresses to his niece; nor is she much behindhand in coming into the plot.  Her head is as light and fluttering as her heart.  It is the prettiest villain, she fetches her breath so short as a new-ta’en sparrow.’  Both characters are originals, and quite different from what they are in Chaucer.  In Chaucer, Cressida is represented as a grave, sober, considerate personage (a widow—­he cannot tell her age, nor whether she has children or no) who has an alternate eye to her character, her interest, and her pleasure:  Shakespeare’s Cressida is a giddy girl, an unpractised jilt, who falls in love with Troilus, as she afterwards deserts him, from mere levity and thoughtlessness of temper.  She may be wooed and won to anything and from anything, at a moment’s warning:  the other knows very well what she would be at, and sticks to it, and is more governed by substantial reasons than by caprice or vanity.  Pandarus again, in Chaucer’s story, is a friendly sort of go-between, tolerably busy, officious, and forward in bringing matters to bear:  but in Shakespeare he has ‘a stamp exclusive and professional’:  he wears the badge of his trade; he is a regular knight of the game.  The difference of the manner in which the subject is treated arises perhaps less from intention, than from the different genius of the two poets.  There is no double entendre in the characters of Chaucer:  they are either quite serious or quite comic.  In Shakespeare the ludicrous and ironical are constantly blended with the stately and the impassioned.  We see Chaucer’s characters as they saw themselves, not as they appeared to others or might have appeared to the poet.  He is as deeply implicated in the affairs of his personages as they could be themselves.  He had to go a long journey with each of them, and became a kind of necessary confidant.  There is little relief, or light and shade in his pictures.  The conscious smile is not seen lurking under the brow of grief or impatience.  Everything with him is intense and continuous—­a working out of what went before.—­ Shakespeare never committed himself to his characters.  He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he chose.  He has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems a matter of perfect indifference whether he shall be in jest or earnest.  According to him, ’the web of our lives is of a mingled yam, good and ill together’.  His genius was dramatic, as Chaucer’s was historical.  He saw both sides of a question, the different views taken of it according to the different interests of the parties concerned, and he was at once an actor and spectator in the scene.  If anything, he is too various and flexible; too full of transitions, of glancing lights, of salient points.  If Chaucer followed up his subject too doggedly, perhaps Shakespeare was too volatile and heedless.  The Muse’s wing too often lifted him off his feet.  He made infinite excursions to the right and the left.