ABSTRACT

The ambiguous if not directly satiric treatment of epic and romantic themes in Troilus and Cressida has been variously explained by critics who have usually regarded the playas harsh and repellent. Dowden thought it full of 'inexpressible pain •.• bitterness and loss of faith in man'. 'Did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida to unburden his heart of some bitterness by an indictment of the illusions of romance, which had misled him?'2 Middleton Murry thought it the product of 'a wounded and bewildered spirit'. 3 Tucker Brooke imagined that Shakespeare was 'however subconsciously, anatomizing the England of the dying Elizabeth'.4 G. B. Harrison made a brilliant parallel between the sulking Achilles and Essex's

86 withdrawal from court in 1598, noting that Chapman not only dedicated his first Homer translation to Essex, but wrote of his 'Achilleian virtues' and apostrophized him as 'Most true Achilles'. Harrison therefore concluded that Shakespeare was mocking at Essex either in 1598 or in 1600 after his return from Ireland. (In that event Shakespeare must have blushed to remember his own Prologue to Henry V.) J. D. Wilson suggested that on the contrary he was trying 'in the last bitter months of 1600 when Essex moped and sulked ... to goad the earl into action'.