The edition of 1609, it seems, went to a second issue in the course of the same year; the prefatory address being withdrawn, and the title-page changed so as to read thus: "The History of Troilus and Cressida : As it was acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe." We speak of these as two issues of one and the same edition, because the text of both copies is in all respects the same, with the exception of two or three typographical corrections. It will be observed, no doubt, that the play must have been acted on the public stage soon after the first issue, and that this was a good reason for suppressing the editor's preface and changing the title-page in the second.

How Bonian and Walley should have obtained their copy for the press, is a question more likely to be raised than satisfactorily answered. From the title-page to the quarto edition of King Lear, which was issued in 1608, we learn that that play was acted "before the King's Majesty at Whitehall upon St. Stephen's night in Christmas holidays, by his Majesty's servants playing usually at the Globe." It is not unlikely that, before the first issue, Troilus and Cressida had been acted at the same place and by the same persons; as this would nowise conflict with the statement, in the preface, of its being "a new play, never stal'd with the stage," nor "sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude." whether the play had been so acted or not, we can easily conceive how it might have got into the publishers' hands without the owners' consent. For copies of it must of course have been given out to the players some time before the day of performance. And so the most likely account of " the scape it hath made amongst you" seems to be, that the copy leaked somehow through the - players' hands, and was put through the press before it could be got ready for the stage.

But

In both issues of the quarto edition, Troilus and Cressida is called a "history;" while in the prefatory address it is reckoned amongst the Poet's "comedies." In the folio of 1623, where it was next published, it was called a "tragedy." The circumstances of its appearance in the latter edition are in some respects quite peculiar. It is not included in the list of plays prefixed to the volume, and is printed without any numbering of the pages, save that the pages of the second leaf are numbered 79 and 80. In that edition, as we have several times remarked, the plays are distributed under the three heads of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Each of these divisions is paged by itself, and in that of Tragedies the paging begins with Coriolanus. Troilus and Cressida is placed between the Histories and Tragedies, with nothing to mark which of the two divisions it falls under, except that in the general title it is called a " tragedy," as at the head of this Introduction. From its not being included in the list of plays nor in the paging, some have inferred that its insertion in the folio was an after-thought; and that either the existence of it

was unknown or unregarded by the editors, or else the right of printing it was withheld from them, till all the rest of the volume had been made up and struck off. We do not believe any thing of this; the most probable explanation of the whole matter being, in our judgment, that the editors of the folio simply did not know where to class the play. Nor has any headway since been made towards clearing up the puzzle that seems to have proved too much for them. The play is a perfect non-descript, and defies the arts of classification: it may with equal propriety be included in either of the three divisions, or excluded from them all.

The old copies of the play, both quarto and folio, are without any marking of the acts and scenes, save that at the opening we have "Actus Primus. Scena Prima." That a copy of the quarto was used in printing the folio, is probable, as several misprints of the former are repeated in the latter; while, again, each copy has several passages that are wanting in the other; which shows that in making up the folio recourse was had to some authority besides the quarto. There are also divers other variations in the two copies; which puts us occasionally upon a choice of readings. The printing, too, of both copies abounds to an unusual extent in errors, though most of them are of a kind easily corrected.

Nearly all the critics have remarked upon the great inequalities of style and execution met with in this play. In fact, scarce any of the Poet's plays show more of ripeness or more of greenness in his art, than we find in different parts of this: it has some of his best work, and some of his worst; insomuch that Coleridge, in attempting a chronological classification of his plays from the internal evidence, at one time set this down to the third epoch of the Poet's authorship, when with "all the world of thought" there were still joined "some of the growing pains, and the awkwardness of growth;" and at another time, to the fifth and last epoch, when his genius was moving in its highest cycle.

Nearly connected with this point is the fact that the play is singularly defective in unity of interest and impression: there is little constancy or continuity of purpose or design apparent in it; where the real centre of it lies, what may be the leading and controlling idea, nobody can tell. The characterization, individually regarded, is of a high order; but there is almost no composition among the characters; and, as they do not draw together towards any perceptible conclusion, we cannot gather why they should be consorted as they are. And the play abounds most richly, withal, in the far-sighted eloquence of moral and civil wisdom and discourse, such as carries our thoughts into the highest regions of Hooker and Burke; moreover, it is liberally endowed with noble and impressive strains of poetry; yet one is at loss to conceive why such things should be here, forasmuch as the use of them does not seein to be regulated by any final cause, or any uniform law. So that,

though ranking among the Poet's greatest and best efforts in respect of parts, still as a work of art the piece is exceedingly lame, because the parts do not duly converge in any central purpose, and so round up into an artistic whole. In other words, the whole does not, as in an organic structure, give form and law to the parts, so as to yield an adequate reason why they are so and not otherwise.

All which naturally starts the question whether the play were originally written as we have received it; or whether, in its present shape, it were an improvement on some older drama; and, if so, whether the older drama were by Shakespeare or some other hand. We have seen that in the prefatory address of the first issue it was said to be a "new play." We see no cause to question the accuracy of this statement, as it probably need not be held to infer any thing more than that the play was new in the form it then bore. In several instances, the Poet's earlier pieces are known to have been afterwards rewritten, enlarged, and replenished with the strengths and graces of his riper years. was the case with Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, among those published during the author's life; and it is all but morally certain that of those first published in 1623 All's Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, and perhaps some others, underwent a similar process.

This

The inequalities of workmanship in Troilus and Cressida are so like those in the plays thus rewritten, as to suggest a common cause. And the argument growing from thence is not a little strengthened by an entry in the Stationers' Register, dated February 7, 1603: "Mr. Roberts: The book of Troilus and Cressida, as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain's men." The "Lord Chamberlain's men" were the company to which Shakespeare belonged, and which, being specially licensed by King James soon after his accession, in the spring of 1603, became known as "His Majesty's servants." "Mr. Roberts," no doubt, is the James Roberts whom we have already met with as the publisher of the second quarto editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice. In both of those cases there is good reason to think that his issues were unauthorized. For The Merchant of Venice was entered by him in the Stationers' Books in July, 1598, with the proviso, "that it be not printed by the said James Roberts, without licence first had from the right honourable the Lord Chamberlain." Something over two years later the same play was entered again by Thomas Heyes, and published soon after the entry. In the course of the same year an edition was put forth by Roberts. In like manner, A Midsummer Night's Dream was entered by Thomas Fisher, and was published in 1600; and an edition was published by Roberts the same year, without any entry at the Stationers'. Which may sufficiently account for the fact, if it be a fact, that there was no edition of