The Life of Shakespeare

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 1602. .previously to the publication of the first ten books of the Iliad in 1581 by Arthur Hall, who translated them from the French, and the gradual transfusion, between 1596 and 1614, of the whole of Homer's works from the Greek into English by Chapman, the only sources of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 1602. .previously to the publication of the first ten books of the Iliad in 1581 by Arthur Hall, who translated them from the French, and the gradual transfusion, between 1596 and 1614, of the whole of Homer's works from the Greek into English by Chapman, the only sources of information open to the unlearned reader, relative to the history of Troy, were the Troy Book of Lydgate, and Caxton's Recuyel of the Histories of Troy. Lydgate's book was a poetic translation, with alterations and additions, from a, Latin history of Troy, written in 1287 by Guido of Colonna. Lydgate's work was printed in 1513, and subsequently modernised, and reduced into regular stanzas, under the title of The Life and Death of Hector. Caxton's Recuyel of the Histories of Troy, printed in1471, was a prose version of a French book, with a similar title, by Raoul le Fevre. That Shakspeare was indebted to one of the preceding writers is fully proclaimed by his drama, but to which of them has been made a question; two words, however, appear to decide the matter. The numerous passages that have often been quoted from Lydgate to show that his book was the authority, prove nothing; for the pages of Caxton are equally illustrative of the poet's text. All doubt, however, is removed by the fact, that Shakspeare names the entrances to Priam's six-gated city after Caxton's Recuyel, and not from Lydgate's Troy Book: Shakspeare's orthography of Antenorides agrees in every letter with that of Caxton; while Lydgate designates the sixth gate Anthonydes. Caxton's Recuyel, and Chaucer's Booke of Troilus and Creseide, were the chief materials used by Shakspeare in the construction of his drama. There is also to be traced the influence of some portions of Homer's Iliad, which had ...