ABSTRACT
PREFACE THE plays treated in this volume have little in common, but they are all based on themes which, if not classical in any modern historical sense, were in the sixteenth century regarded as authentically of the ancient world. Thus Timon, the prototype misanthrope, emerged from the pages of Plutarch to become a vehicle of Lucianic satire and a favourite 'Morality' allusion during the Renaissance. Troilus and Cressida were to Chaucer and later writers as real as the more truly Homeric participants in the Troy story. Apollonius-Pericles was a typical hero of Greek romance as Christianized by the Middle Ages and revived for Elizabethan popular reading. And Titus Andronicus was a figure (whether fictitious or not made no odds) from the last days of divided Rome when the darkness of savagery was falling over the Mediterranean world. Being written at very different periods of Shakespeare's career the plays afford scope for interesting comparative studies in his handling of source-material at the beginning, middle and towards the end of his development. In bringing together the chief sources and analogues I have tried to provide texts as full as possible within the limits of my space; but I have not sacrificed what Shakespeare may have used in order to include what he certainly did not. His omissions are often significant, but by no means always. There seemed, also, no good reason for giving the whole of the anonymous Timon, which he almost certainly never saw; on the other hand for Pericles I print Twine's and Wilkins's narratives entire, the latter because it is still a centre of controversy and because it may derive in part from a previous Pericles play.
