in the play, is murdered, while resting unarmed, without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of sumptuous mail from a nameless runaway.  In the play he has slain Patroclus, but has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which, in Homer, he is wearing.  Achilles then meets Hector, but far from rushing to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless Hector.

Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a day becomes “the sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and of Diomede, and the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o’ love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector.  Yet there seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and broken lights from the splendour of Homer.  When Achilles eyes Hector all over, during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking in what part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of Iliad, xxii, 320-326, where Achilles searches his own armour, worn by Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn by Hector, for a chink in the mail.  Yet, after all, these points are taken, not from the Iliad, but from Caxton’s popular Troy Book.

Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men to

“cry amain, Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,”

we think of Iliad, xxii, 390-393, where Achilles commands the Myrmidons to go singing the paean

“Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!”

The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus.  But, in fact, this passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from Caxton, except as regards the paean.

It may be worth noting that Chapman’s first instalment of his translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, ii, and VII-XI, appeared in 1598, and thence the author could adapt the passages from Iliad, Book VII.  In or about 1598-9 occurred, in Histriomastix, by Marston and others, a burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing Cressida, speaks of “thy knight,” who “Shakes his furious speare,” while in April 1599, Henslowe’s account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and Chettle for a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of Nottingham’s Company. {297a} Of this play no more is known, nor can we be sure that Chapman’s seven Books of the Iliad (I, ii, VII-XI) of 1598 attracted the attention of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to Trojan affairs.  The coincidences at least are curious.  If “Shakes his furious speare” in Histriomastix refers to Shakespeare in connection with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker and Chettle were doing a Troilus and Cressida for a company not Shakespeare’s, then there were two Troilus and Cressida in the field.