"Troilus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... writer. These ten acts do really constitute something like a play, and a play of serious, various, progressive, and sustained interest, beginning with the elopement and closing with the suicide of Helen. There is little in it to suggest the influence of either Homer or Shakespeare: whose "Troilus and Cressida" had appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered admiration of an eternally mystified world, just twenty-three years before. The only figure equally prominent in either play is that of Thersites: but Heywood, happily and wisely, has made no manner of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Bridges indeed, ("Achilles in Scyros"), finds that this character has been always with us, and gives it a place in the Heroic Age. The passage has almost the note of Troilus and Cressida:— ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," the "Tempest," "Cymbeline," and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,' etc. 'In such a night, Troilus, methinks, mounter! the Trojan walls, And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents Where Cressid ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... mawkish verse: My periods all are rough as nutmeg graters. The doggerel poet, wishing thee to read, Reject not; let him glean thy jests and stories. His brother I, of lowly sembling breed: Apollo grants to few Parnassian glories. Menac'd by critic with sour furrowed brow, Momus or Troilus or Scotch reviewer: Ruffle your heckle, grin and growl and vow: Ill-natured foes you thus will find the fewer, When foul-mouth'd senseless railers cry thee down, Reply not: fly, and show the rogues thy stern; They are not worthy even of a frown: Good taste or breeding ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... interest these passages have supplied many analogies. When Troilus is piling up his lover's oaths to ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... The story of Electra is, broadly speaking, the same for Aeschylus, Sophocles, {59} and Euripides: but each contributes to it himself, and the result differs. Virgil's tale of Troy is not Homer's: Chaucer gives us one Troilus and Cressida, and Shakespeare another: the fable of the Fox and the Goat takes prose from Phaedrus and poetry from La Fontaine. So Pope's Homer is not Homer, the thing in itself, the unrelated, absolute Homer, but Pope additus Homero; and it is not Euripides pure and simple which is the ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... stanza is the rime royale or Chaucer (or Troilus) stanza, ababbcc^{5}. In the Parlement of Foules, the Man of Law's Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer made it a splendid vehicle both for narrative and for reflective analysis, for humor, satire, description, and all the gamut of emotions; in the fifteenth and sixteenth ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... of an unhappy sire! Why did not all in Hector's cause expire? Wretch that I am! my bravest offspring slain. You, the disgrace of Priam's house, remain! Mestor the brave, renown'd in ranks of war, With Troilus, dreadful on his rushing car,(293) And last great Hector, more than man divine, For sure he seem'd not of terrestrial line! All those relentless Mars untimely slew, And left me these, a soft and servile crew, Whose days the feast and wanton dance employ, Gluttons ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... adult actors in their rivalry with the boys, but he wrote more like a disinterested spectator than an active partisan when he made specific reference to the strife between the poet Ben Jonson and the players. In the prologue to 'Troilus and Cressida' which he penned in 1603, he warned his hearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson's battles, that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor or poet. {217} Passages in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster,' moreover, pointedly suggest that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... often yields to the temptations of "Hyperbole" in this sense of the word, lays down the law against impertinent decorations, in the rhetorical instruction of Pandarus to Troilus, about Troilus's letter to Cressida ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Troilus and Cressida is an inexplicable play. It is a justification of those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence, refuse to believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare really belongs to him. It is absolutely ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, in such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... mention of Aristotle is in Troilus and Cressida, and raises points of greater interest. Hector scornfully likens his brothers Troilus and Paris, when they urge persistence in the strife with Greece, to "young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy" (II., ii., 166). The words present the meaning, but not the language, of a sentence in ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... fierce companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus, in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Cretan Dictys, one of the besiegers. Episodes were added, in which, on a slender suggestion, Benoit set his own inventive faculty to work, and among these by far the most interesting and admirable is the story of Troilus and Briseida, known better to us by her later name of Cressida. Through Boccaccio's Il Filostrato this tale reached our English Chaucer, and through Chaucer it gave rise to the strange, half-heroic, half-satirical ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... (destiny) 152. Adv. on the watch &c. adj.; with breathless expectation &c. n.; with bated breath, with rapt anticipation; arrectis auribus[Lat]. Phr. we shall see; nous verrons[Fr]; "expectation whirls me round" [Troilus and Cressida]; the light at the end of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... word is as the first: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty as we ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... who took part with the Greeks. Cressida is not a character of classic story, but a mediaeval creation. Pope says her story was the invention of Lollius the Lombard, historiographer of Urbino, in Italy. Cressida betroths herself to Troilus, a son of Priam, and vows eternal fidelity. Troilus gives the maiden a sleeve, and she gives her Adonis a glove, as a love-knot. Soon after this betrothal an exchange of prisoners is made, when Cressida falls to the lot of Diomed, to whom she very soon yields her love, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... never liv'd "One woman true enough such tryst to keep!" "I'd swear by Kate," said Max; "and then, I had "A mother, and my father swore by her." "By Kate? Ah, that were lusty oath, indeed! "Some other man will look into her eyes, "And swear me roundly, 'By true Catherine!' "And Troilus swore by Cressed—so they say." "You never knew my Kate," said Max, and pois'd His axe again on high, "But let it pass— "You are too subtle for me; argument "Have I none to oppose yours with—but this, "Get you a Kate, and let her sunny eyes "Dispel the doubting ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... bright:—In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise,—in such a night, Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... Tales, but his version of one of these—'The Manciple's Tale'—has never been printed. Of the three poems which were published, the first—'The Prioress' Tale'—was included in the edition of 1820. The 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' were included in the "Poems of Early and Late Years" (1842); but they had been published the year before, in a small volume entitled 'The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernised' (London, 1841), a volume to which Elizabeth Barrett, Leigh Hunt, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... prophetics of the Abbess of Gracedieu, with her gentle smile and her locked lips. Maulfry talked by the hour together while she and Isoult sat weaving a tapestry. For the philosopher which it seemed she was, the subject of the piece was very pleasant. It was the story of Troilus and Cresseide, no less, wherein Sir Pandarus, (departing from the custom) was represented a young man of tall and handsome presence, and the triangle of lovers like children. Diomede was an apple-cheeked school- boy, Troilus ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... Shakspeare had not the Iliad before him, but the chivalrous romances of the Trojan war derived from Dares Phrygius. From this source also he took the love-intrigue of Troilus and Cressida, a story at one time so popular in England, that the name of Troilus had become proverbial for faithful and ill-requited love, and Cressida for female falsehood. The name of the agent between them, Pandarus, has even been adopted into the English language to signify those personages (panders) who dedicate themselves to similar services for inexperienced persons ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Lee, than whom no greater authority is needed, is inclined to set "Troilus and Cressida" next in the list of plays, and to give it date 1603. Some hold that the play hides a satire upon some of the poet's contemporaries, but there is insufficient evidence to justify the rather laboured conclusions that uphold the contention, which at least is of no more than ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... thirty-fourth year. During the next eight years he produced "King Henry V.," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "As You Like It," "Hamlet," "Twelfth Night," "Measure for Measure," "Othello," "Macbeth," and "King Lear." In this list are the four great tragedies in which his genius culminated. Then came "Troilus and Cressida," "Timon of Athens," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Cymbeline," "King Henry VIII.," "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," and "Coriolanus." If heed be paid to this order of the plays, it will be seen at once that a quotation from Shakespeare carries with it a very different ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... of Heracles; for which the hero recompensed him by placing him on the throne. Many and distinguished were his sons and daughters, as well by his wife Hecuba, daughter of Cisseus, as by other women. Among the sons were Hector, Paris, Deiphobus, Helenus, Troilus, Polites, Polydorus; among the daughters, Laodice, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Scrivener, that I may speak as Chaucer doth, than to any unconning or oversight in the Author. For how fearful he was to have his works miswritten, or his verse mismeasured, may appear in the end of his fifth book of Troilus and Cresside, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... grief the less by advancing his son-in-law to such station as may enable him to give an honourable support to his bride. Thou shalt not be forgotten thyself, Tressilian—follow our court, and thou shalt see that a true Troilus hath some claim on our grace. Think of what that arch-knave Shakespeare says—a plague on him, his toys come into my head when I should think of other ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... of sleep betrayed, 470 Tydides red with many a death a waste of nothing made, And led those fiery steeds to camp ere ever they might have One mouthful of the Trojan grass, or drink of Xanthus' wave. And lo again, where Troilus is fleeing weaponless, Unhappy youth, and all too weak to bear Achilles' stress, By his own horses, fallen aback, at empty chariot borne, Yet holding on the reins thereof; his neck, his tresses torn O'er face of earth, his wrested spear a-writing ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... inevitably ignore the official formula and are suppressed. If the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex relations on stage were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the only result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs Dane's Defence, and Iris would be swept from the stage, and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... nought only the sentence, As writ myn auctour called Lollius, But pleynly, save our tonges difference, I dar wel seyn, in al that Troilus Seyde in his song; lo! every word right thus As I shal seyn ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... written in all probability by some Italian wit, in a former age; as I shall prove hereafter. The tale of Grizzild was the invention of Petrarch; by him sent to Boccace; from whom it came to Chaucer. Troilus and Cressida was also written by a Lombard author; but much amplified by our English translator, as well as beautified; the genius of our countrymen in general being rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... he flies the rapid approach of the sun. But the aged man who lived three generations, did not lament the amiable Antilochus all the years of his life: nor did his parents or his Trojan sisters perpetually bewail the blooming Troilus. At length then desist from thy tender complaints; and rather let us sing the fresh trophies of Augustus Caesar, and the Frozen Niphates, and the river Medus, added to the vanquished nations, rolls more humble tides, and the Gelonians riding within a prescribed boundary in a narrow tract ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... bird music. It began with the larks, closely followed by the robins, and then the noise of the crows. No change in the program since the days of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida when: ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... by the large, fat green caterpillar, speckled with blue, whose two great black "eyes" stare up at you as he reposes in his comfortable nest - a cradle which also combines the advantages of a restaurant? This is the caterpillar of the common spice-bush swallow-tail butterfly (Papilio troilus), an exquisite, dark, velvety creature with pale greenish-blue markings on its hind wings. (See Dr. Holland's "Butterfly Book," Plate XLI.) The yellow stage of this caterpillar (which William Hamilton Gibson calls the "spice-bush bugaboo") ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Deiphobus, Hippothous, and Dius. These nine did the old man call near him. "Come to me at once," he cried, "worthless sons who do me shame; would that you had all been killed at the ships rather than Hector. Miserable man that I am, I have had the bravest sons in all Troy—noble Nestor, Troilus the dauntless charioteer, and Hector who was a god among men, so that one would have thought he was son to an immortal—yet there is not one of them left. Mars has slain them and those of whom I am ashamed are alone left me. Liars, and light of foot, heroes of the dance, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... towers smothering o'er their blaze, Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, Struggling, and blood, and shrieks—all dimly fades 10 Into some backward corner of the brain; Yet, in our very souls, we feel amain The close of Troilus and Cressid sweet. Hence, pageant history! hence, gilded cheat! Swart planet in the universe of deeds! Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds Along the pebbled shore of memory! Many old rotten-timber'd ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... The disappointment of a life is its Nemesis. Who was ever successful in true love? Success in love argues that the love is false. True love is always despondent or tragical. Juliet loved, Haidee loved, Dido loved, and what came of it? Troilus loved and ceased ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... in the "Earthly Paradise," charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory. The Helen of "Troilus and Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women, and Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat false in tone—a romantic pastiche. Where Euripides twice failed, in the "Troades" and the "Helena," it can be given to few to succeed. Helen is best left to ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And what could have been the nature of this "purge"? Among several suggestions, "Troilus and Cressida" has been thought by some to be the play in which Shakespeare thus "put down" his friend, Jonson. A wiser interpretation finds the "purge" in "Satiromastix," which, though not written by Shakespeare, was staged by his company, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... were before unknown. A Pompeiian fresco, representing the twelve gods, hitherto little esteemed, is made the subject of a profound investigation by E. Gerhard. Among the essays on vases, a long one by Welcker deserves especial mention. It discusses all the known representations of the Death of Troilus. The sphere of numismatics is filled by a long essay by Cavedoni on the Roman coins of the time of Augustus. There are also many other articles of no less interest to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... them into shivers': Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. 1. We refer specially to the jolly boatswain, having already noticed the fact, that sailors as a class, from retaining more of the simplicity and quick susceptibility belonging to childhood, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... from words indicating family relationship we come across some survivals of terms no longer used, or occurring only in rustic dialect. The Mid. Eng. eme, uncle, cognate with Ger. Oheim, has given Eames. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the heroine addresses Pandarus as "uncle dere" and "uncle mine," but ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Priam dies, Here manly Hector faints, here Troilus swounds; Here friend by friend in bloody channel lies, And friend to friend gives unadvised wounds, And one man's lust these many lives confounds: Had doting Priam check'd his son's desire, Troy had been bright with fame and not ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb to sleeve. To sleeve silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of silk with the point of a needle till it becomes floss. (A.S. slefan, to cleavedivide.) This, I think, explains the 'sleeveless errand' in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... entertainment of her majesty at Oxford. In connexion with this latter piece it may be remarked, that of the chivalrous idea of Theseus in this celebrated tale and in the Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as of all the other gothicized representations of ancient heroes, of which Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, his Rape of Lucrece, and some passages of Spenser's Faery Queen, afford further examples, Guido Colonna's Historia Trojana, written in 1260, was the original: a work long and widely popular, which had been translated, paraphrased and imitated in French and English, and which ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... to the praise given by Troilus to her wisdom, replies, "That lovers are never wise; that it is beyond the power of man to bring love and wisdom to ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... his Troilus and Cressida; of whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly after him. Yet had he great wants, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. * * Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright."—Troilus and Cressida. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... play;"—chase pro chuse. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed—the breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare—the tent scene with Diomede—and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening.—The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... words. Another secondary meaning is "to re-vive or to re-kindle" in its metaphoric sense. This may be said well, as of life, health, or hope; or ill, as of war, hatred, grief; or indifferently, as of love. What difficulty Mr. Tyrwhitt could find in "the revival of Troilus's bitter grief" being called "the reheating of his sore sighs," I cannot imagine. Even literal heat is not wanting to sighs, and is often ascribed to them by poets: and lovers' sighs are warm in every sense. I think Tyrwhitt has thrown upon this passage ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... in which he is figuratively supposed to lay up past treasures. So in Troilus, Act III. Scene 3, "Time hath a wallet at ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... likeness of the man. I should say, in height, he was about five-feet eleven-inches; of spare and sinewy frame, with an elastic tread, that those who knew him, and seeing him in the distance, might truly say, as Ulysses of Diomede in Shakspeare's play of "Troilus ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... upon questions relating to the immaterial world is only recoil that adds force to a succeeding wave of cynicism with regard to the physical world around. "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Othello" give place to "Lear," "Troilus and Cressida," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Timon." So true is it that "unfaith in aught is want of faith in all," that in these later plays it would seem that honour, honesty, and justice were virtues not possessed by man or woman; or, if ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... an excellent place: here we may see most bravely. I'll tell you them all by their names as they pass by: but mark Troilus above the rest. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Priam dies, Here manly Hector faints, here Troilus swounds, Here friend by friend in bloody channel lies, And friend to friend gives unadvised wounds, And one man's lust these many lives confounds: Had doting Priam check'd his son's desire, Troy had been bright with ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... received an annual pension. He died in 1400. His writings are in a language so different from modern English that many persons cannot enjoy their beauties. His principal poems are "Canterbury Tales," "The Legend of Good Women," "The Court of Love," and "Troilus ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various |
