'
These words being spoken openly, he spake a little apart with his
mother and wife, and then let them return again to Rome, for so they
did request him; and so remaining in the camp that night, the next
morning he dis-lodged, and marched homeward unto the Volsces'
country again.
Shakespeare has, in giving a dramatic form to this passage, adhered
very closely and properly to the text. He did not think it necessary
to improve upon the truth of nature. Several of the scenes in JULIUS
CAESAR, particularly Portia's appeal to the confidence of her
husband by showing him the wound she had given herself, and the
appearance of the ghost of Caesar to Brutus, are, in like manner,
taken from the history.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
This is one of the most loose and desultory of our author's plays:
it rambles on just as it happens, but it overtakes, together with
some indifferent matter, a prodigious number of fine things in its
way. Troilus himself is no character: he is merely a common lover;
but Cressida and her uncle Pandarus are hit off with proverbial
truth. By the speeches given to the leaders of the Grecian host,
Nestor, Ulysses, Agamemnon, Achilles, Shakespeare seems to have
known them as well as if he had been a spy sent by the Trojans into
the enemy's camp--to say nothing of their being very lofty examples
of didactic eloquence.
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