Perhaps no reader will fail to recognise his hand in the beautiful
blank verse of many passages. I am not familiar enough with the
works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable
passages. Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo of Swift's might poison
with such phrases as his the name and nature of love, loyalty, and
military courage. But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly,
and if he were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he
may have written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim
of "a daughter of the game," and the knightly Hector is butchered to
sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles. If Shakespeare read the
books translated by Chapman, he must have read them in the same
spirit as Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry of the
Achaean could not be combined with the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman
perversions, as he knew them in the mediaeval books of Troy, in the
English of Lydgate and Caxton. The chivalrous example of Chaucer he
did not follow. Probably Will looked on the play as one of his
failures. The Editor, if we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio
clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly that it is not paged,
and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.
"The Grand Possessors" of the play referred to in the Preface to one
of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare's
Company.
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