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Shakespeare's Attitude Towards Love and Honor in Troilus and Cressida

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George C. Taylor
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Extract

In a series of discussions of the problem of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, published between 1915 and 1917, Professors Tatlock, Lawrence, and Rollins, applying essentially the same critical method, argued that since the bulk of the material in this play had become fixed by tradition, Shakespeare found himself compelled to treat it as he did. Rollins quotes with approval the following statement by Tatlock:

Shakespeare came to the material of this play, then, precisely as he came to that of the English historical plays, finding incidents and characters largely fixed beforehand, and too intractable to be greatly modified, even had he wished to modify them.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1930 , pp. 781 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930

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References

1 “The Chief Problem of Shakespeare,” Sewanee Review, XXIV, pp. 129ff.; “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature,” PMLA, XXX, pp. 673 ff.

2 “The Love Story in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Studies, Columbia Univ., 1916.

3 “The Troilus Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA XXXII, pp. 383 ff.

4 Albert S. Cook had in 1907 studied the history of the character of Cressida in Chaucer and Shakespeare. “The Character of Creseyde,” PMLA XXII, pp. 539 ff.

5 Tatlock, Tudor Shakspere ed. Troilus and C, Introd. p. xx.

6 Shakespeare: A Survey, London, 1925.

7 “Shakespeare's Study in Culture and Anarchy,” The Yale Review, XVII, 573.

8 Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature,” PMLA, XXX, 767.

9 Rollins, op. cit., p. 383.

10 The Chief Problem, etc., p. 147.

11 Lawrence, op. cit., p. 204.

12 Ibid., p. 207.

13 For bibliography see Sewanee Review, XXIV, pp. 129 ff.

14 H. B. Charlton, “A Note on Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies,” Palœstra, vol. 148, pp. 144 ff., contends that only in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare purely romantic. Very pertinently he insists on the unromantic aspects of Shakespeare's comedy, as did Rymer and Johnson before him.