The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are from the mediaeval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer, whose Pandarus is only notable for loosing a traitor’s shaft at Menelaus, in time of truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede.  The play begins after the duel (Iliad, iii) between Paris and Menelaus:  in the play, not in Homer, Paris “retires hurt,” as is at first reported.  Hector has a special grudge against the Telamonian Aias.  As in the Iliad there is a view of the Achaeans, taken from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the play, Pandarus and Cressida review the Trojans re-entering the city.  Paris turns out not to be hurt after all.

In Act i.  Scene 3, the Achaeans hold council, and regret the disaffection of Achilles.  Here comes Ulysses’ great speech on discipline, in armies, and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly thought to be a leaf in Shakespeare’s crown of bays.  The speeches of Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do.  But the poet represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at Patroclus’s imitation of the cough and other infirmities of old Nestor, to which Homer, naturally, never alludes.  Throughout, the English poet regards Achilles with the eyes of his most infamous late Greek and ignorant mediaeval detractors.  The Homeric sequence of events is so far preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and Menelaus, comes (through AEneas) the challenge by Hector to fight any Greek in “gentle and joyous passage of arms” (Iliad, VII).  As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on Aias.  In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as Porthos in Les Trois Mousquetaires.  The play makes him as great an eater of beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  Achilles, save in a passage quite out of accord with the rest of the piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is discourteous, and is cowardly!  No poet and no scholar who knew Homer’s heroes in Homer’s Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites are loathsome in their profusion of filthy thoughts.  It does not follow that Will did not write the part of Thersites.  Some of the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse adorn the play; one would say that no man but Will could have written them.  Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear “to dally with the innocence of love”; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.  But the Homeric and the alien later elements,—­the story of false love,—­cannot be successfully combined.  The poet, whoever he was, appears to weary and to break down.  He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the death of Hector, but Hector,