F all Shakespeare's plays, none presents a more formidable array of difficulties to the student of his mind and art than this "tragical-comical- historical poem unlimited" of "Troilus and Cressida "; and these difficulties are not invented by the critics. A simple reader, who approaches the play with no other desire than to hear a moving story well told, will find himself stumbled before he reaches the end of it. A story there is one which had already, before Shakespeare's time, been told by the greatest story-teller among English poets. But here it is not told frankly; it is interrupted continually by the insinuations of hostile criticism, and the narrator seems to speak with a mocking voice. Chaucer's poem is a tale of love and fate,

of amiable and pitiful human frailty sunning itself for a brief season, and broken by the wind of adversity. Shakespeare's play is a riddle, a two-edged satire on love and politics, a carnival of doubt and denial, a romance of the charnel-house of life, where "cold hopes swarm like worms within the living clay." He who in many of his plays asks for sympathy for all his characters, here seems to ask for sympathy for none. He stands aside, while the blended motives of human life-love, pride, ambition, loyalty-pass before him in review, and in each of them he finds something scandalous. The very spirit of criticism, which prompts men to stand aside, does not escape condemnation; it is ennobled in Hamlet, it is made infinitely delightful in Falstaff; in Thersites it is exhibited as the spirit of the deformed cur. There is none that doeth good, no, not one; and there is no day of judgment.

It is worth while to examine more in detail the impression that this play leaves upon the reader. The heroine, Cressida, is a marvel among Shakespeare's creations — a woman merely base. She is judged by the dispassionate Ulysses.

"Her wanton spirits look out

At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every tickling reader! set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity

And daughters of the game."

Now and again her speech awakens in the memory distant and perverted echoes of the loved speech of Juliet. But what in Juliet is simple modesty in Cressida is skilful acting. She expounds her own principle:

"Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is ;'

and, in a burst of candour, laments that she weakly departed from it:—

You men will never tarry.

"Prithee, tarry;

O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried."

Like Juliet, she is troubled with foreboding apprehensions when she grants her love. But Juliet's divinations are tragic :

"I have no joy of this contract to-night:

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens."

Cressida's, equally true in forecast, are expressed in
another key. "What too curious dreg espies my sweet
lady," says Troilus, "in the fountain of our love?" And
she makes answer: "More dregs than water, if
my fears
have eyes." When nothing but the dregs is left, she
passes out of the play with a reflection on her own fickle
and shallow desires: -

and Thersites is at hand as epilogue to translate her last speech into his own lewd dialect.