HAMLET).
24. Few of the plays present so many difficulties as Troilus and Cressida, and it cannot be said that its literary history has as yet been thoroughly worked out. A play of the name, "as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men" was entered in the Stationers' Register on Feb. 7, 1603, with a note that "sufficient authority" must be got by the publisher, James Roberts, before he printed it. This can hardly be any other than Shakespeare's play; but it must have been "stayed," for the First Quarto did not appear until 1609, and on Jan. 28 of that year a fresh entry had been made in the Register by another publisher. The text of the Quarto dif fers in certain respects from that of the Folio, but not to a greater extent than the use of different copies of the original manuscript might explain. Two alternative title-pages are found in copies of the Quarto. On one, probably the earliest, is a statement that the play was printed "as it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe"; from the other these words are omitted, and a preface is appended which hints that the "grand possessors" of the play had made difficulties about its publication, and de scribes it as "never staled with the stage." Attempts have been made, mainly on grounds of style, to find another hand than Shakespeare's in the closing scenes and in the prologue, and even to assign widely different dates to various parts of what is ascribed to Shakespeare. But the evidence does not really bear out these theories, and the style of the whole must be regarded as quite consistent with a date in 1601. It has been thought that the de scription of Ajax and his humours in the second scene of the first act is Shakespeare's "purge" to Jonson in reply to the Poetaster (i6oi), alluded to, as already mentioned, in the Return from Parnassus, a Cambridge play acted probably at the Christ mas of 1601-02. It is tempting to conjecture that Troilus and Cressida may have been played, like Hamlet, by the Chamber lain's men at Cambridge, but may never have been taken to London, and in this sense "never staled with the stage." The only difficulty of a date in 16oi is that a parody of a play on Troilus and Cressida is introduced into Histriomastix (c. 1599), and that in this Troilus "shakes his furious speare." But Henslowe had produced another play on the subject, by Dekker and Chettle, in 1599, and probably, therefore, no allusion to Shakespeare is really intended. The material for Troilus and Cressida was taken
by Shakespeare from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, and Chapman's Homer.
26. Measure for Measure was played at court on Dec. 26, 1604. The evidence for this is a list of plays in one of the account books of the Office of the Revels. This was formerly thought to have been forged, but is now satisfactorily rehabilitated. The play was probably produced when the theatres were reopened after the plague in 1604. The plot is taken from a story already used by George Whetstone, both in his play of Promos and Cas sandra (1578) and in his prose Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), and borrowed by him from Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatom mithi (1566) .
27. A performance at court of Othello on Nov. 1, 1604, is noted in the same list as that recording Measure for Measure, and the play may be reasonably assigned to the same year. An alleged performance at Harefield in 1602 certainly rests upon a forgery. The play was revived in 1610 and seen by Prince Louis of Wiirttemberg at the Globe on April 3o of that year. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on Oct. 6, 1621, and a First Quarto was published in 1622. The text of this is less satisfactory than that of the First Folio, and omits a good many lines found therein and almost certainly belonging to the play as written. It also contains some profane expressions which have been modi fied in the Folio, and thereby points to a date for the original production earlier than the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players passed in the spring of 1606. The plot, like that of Measure for Measure, comes from the Hecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio.