The most ancient poems on the story of Troy belonging to the Middle Ages are composed in Latin, and were written by French ecclesiastics. An English monk, Josephus Iscanus, produced a poem, De Bello Trojano, in the thirteenth century, using the above authorities; and in the same century a German ecclesiastic, Albert of Stade, composed a poem called Troilus, but dealing with the general subject of the siege, and not with the particular hero. This, like the Norse Trojumanna Saga, which adapts the heroes of antiquity to the nomenclature of Scandinavian mythology, and appeals to the 'Scald Homerus' as an authority, principally follows Dares.

With the second period of mediaeval poetry on this subject begins the tendency to transform the Trojan heroes into mediaeval knights seeking honour in the service of their ladies, and the gods into magicians adored by men for their superhuman powers. In short, everything is transfused by the spirit of the Middle Ages; and where any ancient custom is described abhorrent from the manners of the times in which the poets write, they are careful to assure their hearers that they are telling the truth.

The earliest of these romantic singers of the Trojan war is Benoît de Sainte-More, the author of the Destruction de Troyes (commonly called the Roman de Troyes), a long poem dating from about the middle of the twelfth century. Where its author thought his authorities (i. e. Dictys, and more particularly Dares) dull or insufficient, he supplemented them not only from Ovid and other such sources, but by ornamentation and even invention due to his own knightly and courtly fancy. This was particularly the case with the episode of Briseida and Troilus, of which Benoît is the inventor. Dares had made Calchas a Trojan priest who deserts Troy for the Greek camp, leaving his daughter Briseïda behind him. Quite in the spirit of mediaeval romance, Benoît causes her to engage in an amour with Troilus, one of the sons of Priam. Calchas, during the interval of a truce, demanding the extradition of his daughter, she is obliged, to her deep grief, to quit her lover, both vowing eternal fidelity at parting. But in the Greek camp Briseïda soon forgets her vow, and Diomed succeeds in effacing the image of Troilus from her heart.

Here then we have the origin of the immortal story of Troilus and Cressid, which was to become the poetical type of a lover's perjury; but for which Benoît had no authority beyond his own imagination. His poem became the chief source of the Trojan

romances of German literature,-above all of the Trojan War of Conrad of Würzburg, who wrote towards the close of the thirteenth century; Spanish as well as Italian versions direct from Benoît, besides others using later versions of him, have been noted by a recent contributor to the literature of this inexhaustible subject (A. Mustafia, in two pamphlets published at Vienna); and a Middle-Dutch version, identified as by Mærlant, has been quite recently discovered (see The Academy, March 1, 1872). But the most noteworthy version of Benoît was a Latin prose novel by Guido de Columna, of Messina, the Historia Destructionis Trojac, completed in 1287; of which, with the occasional use of earlier sources, translations are stated to have been made in Italian. French, Spanish, English, High and Low German, Dutch, Bobemian, and Danish.

From Guido Boccaccio took the subject of his Filostrato, 1348; and on the Filostrato Chaucer based his poem, though working with much originality of arrangement as well as detail, and also using Benoît directly, as well as other authors for details. The Lollius to whom he appealed as an authority on the Trojan war was doubtless an inexcusable, though ingenious misinterpretation of a well-known Horatian line (Epist. i. 2. 1); while the Trophe which Lydgate (Prologue to The Falls of Princes) states Chaucer to have translated was, as Mr. Rossetti has shown, no other book than the Filostrato itself (the two terms both signify the victim of love). Boccaccio created the character (not the name, which is Homeric) of Pandarus.

Lydgate's Troy-Booke, on the other hand (before 1460), was a version taken directly from Guido de Columna. Neither Chaucer, nor of course Lydgate, were however the first who attempted to reproduce the story of Troy, or part of it, in English verse. This distinction appears to belong to an anonymous writer of the fourteenth century, whose Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Try (printed for the Early English Text Society, 1869) first introduced the tale of Troilus to English readers. Finally the French Recuei des Histoires de Troyes by Raoul le Fèvre (1463 or 1464), which in three books gives an account of the three destructions of Troy, either follows or epitomises Guido; and the Recuyell of the historyes of Troye, translated and drawen out of frenshe into englishe by W. Caxton (1471) seems merely a faithful translation of its French original.

It was from Caxton and Lydgate, or both, that Shakspere de

rived the more general elements of his play, the characters and
mutual relations of the several heroes, and the events of the siege.
In the main action, however, the love-story of Troilus and
Cressida, he has exclusively followed Chaucer. (The Storry of
Troylous and Pandor' was the subject of a 'komedy' presented
before Henry VIII among the Christmas entertainments at Eltham
in 1515; but though a detailed record exists of some of the
costumes worn by the performers, we do not know whether this
'komedy' was more than a pageant.) Whether Shakspere de-
rived Thersites from Chapman's Homer, or from other books
(the 'Pindarus Thebanus,' Ovid, Juvenal, and Seneca De Ira, as
Hertzberg thinks), he seems to owe little or nothing else to such
knowledge of Homer as he might have acquired, and he certainly
was at no pains to modify the ordinary mediaeval view of the
merits of the two sides in the war. (As to the play Thersytes of
1537, cf. ante, p. 139.)

The most recent editors of Bacon (Ellis and Spedding, i. 739; cf. iii. 440) have pointed out that a passage in this play (ii. 2, Hector's quotation, which is a misapplication, from Aristotle) was suggested by Bacon's Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, where the same misapplication is made. (Aristotle speaks of political, not of moral philosophy. The editors of Bacon show that the Italian Virgilio Malvezzio, in his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito, made the same mistake.)

Dryden's version of this play under the title Truth found too late (1678) has been already noticed (ante, p. 288, note 1).

Though the story of Troy has continued to furnish poetic literature and especially that of the drama-with themes, I am not aware that any other hand has followed Shakspere's in reproducing the episode, mediaeval rather than antique in its essence, of Troilus and Cressida.

(33) CORIOLANUS. (III) (31) (F 4).

It will not be denied by any student of Shakspere that in this and the two other Roman plays remaining on the list of Shaksperean dramas we have works of the poet's maturest period, even if the conclusion of H. Viehoff's plausible argument (Shakespeare's Coriolan in Jahrbuch, vol. iv, 1869) be considered daring, that no other of Shakspere's plays can be ranked above Coriolanus, and hardly any beside it, as to perfection in every point F f

Coriolanus.

of artistic composition. Nor is it necessary to subscribe to Ulricï's view, as summarised by the same writer, according to which 'Certslanus is the first play of a historic tetralogy, presenting the history of the political growth of the Roman people in its most essential phases. Coriolanus brings before us the conflict of the Patricians with the Plebeians and the developement of the Republic, Caesar the last futile efforts of the dying Republic against the newlyarising monarchical form of polity, Antony and Cleopatra the fall of the oligarchy and the character of the imperial government, finally Titus Andronicus the irresistible decay of the spirit of antiquity and at the same time the position of the Roman Empire towards the Germanic people rushing in as a new element of life." (!) This species of combination is best treated apart from questions of date and source.

Malone dates Coriolanus 1610, and perhaps this or a rather earlier date is as near the mark as any which could be suggested. In any case the style of the play belongs to Shakspere's latest period; while the source is a work which lay open to him at any time in his career as a dramatist. Sir Thomas North's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grate learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaerona, first printed in 1579, was a version of the French translation by James Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre, published in 1559. This work occupies a prominent place in the early history of French prose literature; the French,' says Hallam (Literature of Europe, Part chap. vii), date from it 'the beginning of an easy and natural style in their own language,'-nor is there any literary growth which has experienced a more successful cultivation than that of French narrative prose. North's translation, though disparaged by Dryden, is now regarded as a work of genuine literary merit; see e. g. the tribute to it in the present Archbishop of Dublin's delightful Plutarch (Four Lectures, 1873), p. 49. Archbishop Trench dwells on the peculiar relations of Shakspere to Plutarch as a source-relations differing widely enough from those in which he stands eg. towards the Italian novelists—‘to justify, or almost to justify, the words of Jean Paul, when in his Titan he calls Plutarch.. the biographical Shakespeare of universal history.' It is, continues the Archbishop-and this all but exhausts what it is necessary to say of the source of Coriolanus-scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole play is to be found in Plutarch. Some of the expressions in Menenius' apologue (i. 1) appear how

ever to have been suggested by a version of the same fable in Camden's Remains, which were published in 1605. Staunton quotes Douce to the effect that Camden derived his version of the fable from John of Salisbury, who professed to have received it from Pope Hadrian IV. It is of course also to be found in Livy (ii. 32).

The subject of Coriolanus was treated by Calderon in a play (which, according to Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, ii. 374, note, defies classification as to species) called the Armas de la Hermosura.

(34) CYMBELINE. (III) (30) (F 3). Acted 1610 or Cymbeline.

1611.

Dr. Simon Forman, whose Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof was discovered by Mr. Collier, saw Cymbeline (of which he describes the plot) acted, and as his book belongs to the years 1610 and 1611, the performance, of which he fails to give the date, probably took place about that time. The general style of the play is certainly that of Shakspere's latest period; and the rhymetest' can hardly be accepted as decisive to the contrary. The episode in rhymed verse inserted in v. 4 was doubtless, like the Mask introduced into the Tempest, in accordance with the taste of the period; there is no reason, on account of its style, which reminds one of the prefatory lines to the Cantos of the Faerie Queene, to impugn Shakspere's authorship of it.

From Holinshed (indirectly from Geoffrey of Monmouth) Shakspere derived the names of Cymbeline and of his two sons, as well as some historical facts concerning the King. But the story of the stealing of the two princes and of their residence in the wilderness appears to be his own invention.

The story of Imogen, which the poet has so skilfully interwoven with that of the sons of Cymbeline, was taken-probably indirectly -from Boccaccio, in whose Decamerone the history of Ginevra forms the ninth novel of the Second Day. For the version of the story contained in a tale in a tract called Westward for Smelts (stated by Steevens and Malone to have been published as early as 1603; but no edition exists of an earlier date than 1620; the tale is reprinted in Collier's Shakespeare's Library, vol. ii) lacks some most striking details which Shakspere has in common with Boccaccio. An English translation of the Italian novel therefore very probably existed, unless we are to suppose Shakspere to have read the original.