The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
Page 505
That my report is just and full of truth.
But soft, methinks I do digress too much,
115
Citing my worthless praise. O pardon me,
For when no friends are by, men praise themselves.
MARCUS [aloft] Now is my turn to speak.
[Points to Aaron’s baby.] Behold the child:
Of this was Tamora delivered,
The issue of an irreligious Moor,
120
Chief architect and plotter of these woes.
The villain is alive in Titus’ house,
And as he is to witness this is true,
Now judge what cause had Titus to revenge
These wrongs unspeakable, past patience,
125
Or more than any living man could bear.
Now have you heard the truth: what say you, Romans?
Have we done aught amiss, show us wherein,
And from the place where you behold us pleading,
The poor remainder of Andronici
130
Will hand in hand all headlong hurl ourselves
And on the ragged stones beat forth our souls
And make a mutual closure of our house.
Speak, Romans, speak, and if you say, we shall,
Lo, hand in hand, Lucius and I will fall.
135
EMILLIUS Come, come, thou reverend man of Rome,
And bring our emperor gently in thy hand,
LUCIUS, our emperor, for well I know
The common voice do cry it shall be so.
MARCUS [aloft] Lucius, all hail, Rome’s royal emperor!
140
[to others] Go, go into old Titus’ sorrowful house
And hither hale that misbelieving Moor
To be adjudged some direful slaughtering death
As punishment for his most wicked life.
[Exeunt some into the house. A long flourish till the Andronici come down.]
ALL ROMANS Lucius, all hail, Rome’s gracious governor!
145
LUCIUS Thanks, gentle Romans. May I govern so
To heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe.
But, gentle people, give me aim awhile,
For nature puts me to a heavy task.
Stand all aloof, but, uncle, draw you near
150
To shed obsequious tears upon this trunk.
[Kisses Titus.]
O, take this warm kiss on thy pale cold lips,
These sorrowful drops upon thy bloodstained face,
The last true duties of thy noble son.
MARCUS [Kisses Titus.]
Tear for tear and loving kiss for kiss,
155
Thy brother Marcus tenders on thy lips.
O, were the sum of these that I should pay
Countless and infinite, yet would I pay them.
LUCIUS [to his son]
Come hither, boy, come, come and learn of us
To melt in showers. Thy grandsire loved thee well:
160
Many a time he danced thee on his knee,
Sung thee asleep, his loving breast thy pillow;
Many a story hath he told to thee,
And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind
And talk of them when he was dead and gone.
165
MARCUS
How many thousand times hath these poor lips,
When they were living, warmed themselves on thine!
O now, sweet boy, give them their latest kiss:
Bid him farewell, commit him to the grave;
Do them that kindness and take leave of them.
170
BOY [Kisses Titus.]
O grandsire, grandsire, e’en with all my heart
Would I were dead, so you did live again.
O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping,
My tears will choke me if I ope my mouth.
Enter AARON under guard.
A ROMAN You sad Andronici, have done with woes,
175
Give sentence on this execrable wretch
That hath been breeder of these dire events.
LUCIUS Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him;
There let him stand and rave and cry for food.
If anyone relieves or pities him,
180
For the offence he dies. This is our doom;
Some stay to see him fastened in the earth.
AARON
Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done.
185
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did
I do repent it from my very soul.
LUCIUS
Some loving friends convey the emperor hence,
190
And give him burial in his fathers’ grave;
My father and Lavinia shall forthwith
Be closed in our household’s monument;
As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,
195
No mournful bell shall ring her burial,
But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey:
Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,
And being dead, let birds on her take pity.
Exeunt with the bodies.
Troilus and Cressida
Published in quarto in 1609 as The Famous History of Troilus and Cressida, the play was to have followed Romeo and Juliet as the fourth of the tragedies in the First Folio of 1623, and its first three pages had been printed before it was removed and replaced by Timon of Athens. It does not appear in the table of contents, and some copies of the Folio had already gone on sale without it before it was hastily printed and inserted between King Henry VIII, last of the histories, and Coriolanus, first of the tragedies, in a text which adds the Prologue and shows minor but frequent variation of word or phrase from that of the Quarto, of which the version printed in the Folio is possibly a revision. The play was written about 1601–2, in the aftermath of the abortive rising of the Earl of Essex and his execution in February 1601. It may be in part the Chamberlain’s Men’s response to an earlier play on the subject by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle performed by the rival Admiral’s Men in 1599 (now known only from a damaged stage ‘plot’).
A first setting of the title-page of the 1609 Quarto claimed that the play had been acted by the King’s Men at the Globe – a claim retracted when that title-page was cancelled and replaced, deleting all reference to performance, and an epistle ‘from a never writer to an ever reader’ was added, in which the play, ‘never clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar’, is praised as a comedy which readers are lucky to see in print, contrary to the will of its ‘grand possessors’. This epistle has given rise to the hypothesis that the play was written for a private occasion, although no positive evidence exists for such a performance. The Epilogue, which may not have been included in all performances, has struck some scholars as more appropriate to an audience of lawyers at one of the Inns of Court than to public performance at the Globe. This chequered history of publication may result from disputes over copyright, or it may reflect the political sensitivity of its subject at a time when the association of Essex with Achilles was commonplace.
Many English plays (now lost) had been written on the ‘matter of Troy’ before Troilus and Cressida, which presents a sour, minor-key variation on familiar themes and characters. Shakespeare himself had often alluded to Troy in earlier works, notably Lucrece, which contains a lengthy discourse on a painting of the Fall of Troy, The Merchant of Venice, which alludes to the separation of Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet, where it supplies apt and familiar material for the Player’s tragic speech. Medieval mythology derived the British people from the Trojan line
of Aeneas, and London could still be popularly referred to as Troynovant or New Troy. The Troy story reached Shakespeare in part through George Chapman’s translation of seven books of the Iliad (1598) but more importantly through medieval retellings and expansions. The play makes use of at least two of them. For the love story, itself a medieval addition to the ‘matter of Troy’, he adapted Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde (c. 1385) (earlier a minor source for Romeo and Juliet, whose love story is sourly parodied by that of Troilus and Cressida) and, for the war plot, William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (1474). Shakespeare was the first to balance the war story against the love story, although unevenly, as the war story occupies two thirds of his action and the love story only one third. Whether history, tragedy or comedy, the play offers a destructive analysis of chivalric honour and romantic love which culminates in the double shock to Troilus of the infidelity of Cressida with Diomedes and of the murder of Hector by Achilles’ Myrmidons.
After an adaptation by John Dryden which attempted to turn it into an exemplary tragedy, Troilus and Cressida disappeared from the stage for some two hundred years. Its disillusioned tone and inconclusive action recommended it to the twentieth century and it has been regularly revived in productions many of which have urged its topicality by setting it in the historical periods of all the major wars since the Crimean War and the American Civil War.
The 1998 Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio, supplemented and corrected from the 1609 Quarto.
LIST OF ROLES
PROLOGUE
THE TROJANS
PRIAM
King of Troy
CASSANDRA
Priam’s daughter, a prophetess
ANDROMACHE
Hector’s wife
CRESSIDA
Calchas’daughter
CALCHAS
Cressida’s father, a Trojan priest, a defector to the Greeks
PANDARUS
a lord, Cressida’s uncle
ALEXANDER
Cressida’s servant
BOY
Troilus’ servant
SERVANT
attending on Paris
Attendants, Soldiers, Musicians, Torchbearers
THE GREEKS
AGAMEMNON
general commander of the Greeks
MENELAUS
King of Sparta, his brother
HELEN
Menelaus’ wife, living with Paris in Troy
PATROCLUS
Achilles’ companion
THERSITES
a deformed and scurrilous Greek
SERVANT
attending on Diomedes
MYRMIDONS
Attendants, Soldiers, Trumpeter
Troilus and Cressida
PROLOGUE
Enter Speaker of the Prologue, in armour.
PROLOGUE
In Troy there lies the scene. From isles of Greece
The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
Have to the port of Athens sent their ships
Fraught with the ministers and instruments
Of cruel war. Sixty and nine, that wore
5
Their crownets regal, from th’Athenian bay
Put forth toward Phrygia, and their vow is made
To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures
The ravished Helen, Menelaus’ queen,
With wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel.
10
To Tenedos they come,
And the deep-drawing barks do there disgorge
Their warlike freightage. Now on Dardan plains
The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch
Their brave pavilions. Priam’s six-gated city –
15
Dardan and Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troien
And Antenorides – with massy staples
And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts,
Spar up the sons of Troy.
Now expectation, tickling skittish spirits
20
On one and other side, Trojan and Greek,
Sets all on hazard. And hither am I come,
A Prologue armed, but not in confidence
Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited
In like conditions as our argument,
25
To tell you, fair beholders, that our play
Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,
Beginning in the middle, starting thence away
To what may be digested in a play.
Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are;
30
Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war. Exit.
1.1 Enter PANDARUS and TROILUS.
TROILUS Call here my varlet; I’ll unarm again.
Why should I war without the walls of Troy,
That find such cruel battle here within?
Each Trojan that is master of his heart,
Let him to field; Troilus, alas, hath none.
5
PANDARUS Will this gear ne’er be mended?
TROILUS
The Greeks are strong, and skilful to their strength,
Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant;
But I am weaker than a woman’s tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
10
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And skilless as unpractised infancy.
PANDARUS Well, I have told you enough of this; for my
part, I’ll not meddle nor make no farther. He that will
have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding.
15
TROILUS Have I not tarried?
PANDARUS Ay, the grinding; but you must tarry the
bolting.
TROILUS Have I not tarried?
PANDARUS Ay, the bolting; but you must tarry the
20
leavening.
TROILUS Still have I tarried.
PANDARUS Ay, to the leavening; but here’s yet in the
word hereafter the kneading, the making of the cake,