SOURCE: Domenichelli, Mario. “Renaissance Chivalry and ‘Handsome Death’ in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.” In Shakespeare and Intertextuality: The Transition of Cultures between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period, edited by Michele Marrapodi, pp. 85-99. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000.

[In the following essay, Domenichelli alleges that in his cynical portrayal of the duel between Hector and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare documented the end of the chivalric code in Renaissance England. In addition, Domenichelli states that by transforming the heroic Hector's death into a pointless and ignoble one, Shakespeare also overturned the traditional rules of tragedy.]

Voltaire did not like Shakespeare. Certainly, as he wrote in his Lettre sur les Anglais, the English bard was “a vigorous genius, a fecund, a natural, a sublime genius”; however, unfortunately, he had “no notion of good taste, no knowledge of rules”.¹ As Voltaire wrote D'Alembert in 1776, “cet abominable Shakespeare […] n'est en verité qu'un Gilles de village […] qui n'a pas écrit deux lignes honnêtes”.² The fact is that in that same year Pierre Letourneur published the first two volumes of his translation of Shakespeare, and Voltaire had consequently dismissed the English Bard as a “vilain singe”.³ Voltaire took the publishing event as a kind of personal outrage. He became very unreasonably enraged and began campaigning against that horrible translation of a poet he considered even worse in the original language. In any case, the French maître read that translation as the sign that the realm of Reason and good taste was over, and that France was sinking back into barbaric times. In order to defend France from that danger, as Voltaire triumphantly announced to d'Argental,⁴ he had written a letter to the French Academy. The letter was publicly read out on August 25, 1776. Not content with this, Voltaire wrote a second letter to the Academy in which he exposed the theatrical malpractices in the English staging of Shakespeare's works. Voltaire's second letter closed with an account of Troilus and Cressida. What was really sickening to Voltaire was the utter unconventional vulgarity of what he insisted on defining as a tragedy. The pièce was the most perfect illustration of Shakespeare's lack of taste, so that no doubt could remain about Corneille's, Racine's, and Molière's superiority over that English “saltimbanque”, that “Gilles couvert de lambeaux”.⁵ But what is most meaningful from our point of view is that the scene epitomizing theatrical abomination in Voltaire's eyes was the scene of Hector's death.⁶ In Voltaire's classicistic unitarian logic of decorum, Hector's indecent, unheroic and therefore unlikely death marked the broadest possible fracture between two opposing ideas of theatre, and of the world in a crisis of transition from an old to a new Weltanschauung.

The duel between Achilles and Hector in the Iliad, as one may remember, is the very focus of the whole action, and may well be considered the very terminal point of attraction of the whole poem, which may even be described as an account of the war of Troy told through the story of the duel between the two major heroes. All this considered, Shakespeare's curt treatment of Hector's death poses a problem. In Troilus and Cressida there is no insistence on Achilles' grief for Patroclus' death at the hands of Hector. Thus Hector's death is almost unjustified, or only justified as an act of violence through which Achilles falsely asserts his own individual superiority as a warrior, with the result that the sequence of Hector's death becomes a sort of tragical-grotesque parody of the “knightly encounters” of the classical and Italian epic tradition. What is being deconstructed is the epic chivalric topos of the so-called bella morte, the chivalric ideal of “handsome death”. One may remember that in Tolstoy's War and Peace written in the 1860s, at a certain point, after the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon visits the battlefield covered with the bodies of the fallen. Among them there lies the noble and very distinguished body of Prince Andréy Bolkonsky who still holds in his hand the regimental banner. On seeing this the Emperor says: “Voilà la belle mort”. Indeed, the idea of la belle mort, and “heroic defeat” is one of the most powerful and most persistent icons in what Curtius called the system of chivalric virtues,⁷ and in the aristocratic system of values.

Troilus and Cressida generally deals with the crisis of the aristocracy at the Renaissance crux of the end of the sixteenth century, and more in detail with the defeat of the aristocratic faction and ideology at the close of the Elizabethan Age.⁸La belle mort is a well-known commonplace in what we might call chivalric hagiographies. Let us consider three of these, briefly. In 1524, le Chevalier Bayard died at Romagnano, struck by an unknown musketeer; in 1527 it was Giovanni delle Bande Nere's turn, with his right leg bone broken by some springald shot; some sixty years later, Sidney too was wounded in the thigh by an unknown firearm, and had, as he said, “la cuisse rompue” which killed him in the end. The same story of unvanquished valour in the face of death seems to be told in Le Loyal Serviteur's Joyeuse histoire of Le Chevalier Bayard, and in Fulke Greville's Life of Sidney. Both le Chevalier Bayard and Sir Philip Sidney⁹ were “chevaliers sans peur et sans reproches” and the very flowers of Renaissance Chivalry and martial gentility. In his famous letter relating Giovanni de' Medici's last hours, Pietro Aretino described another such perfect gentleman's and gallant soldier's perfect death.¹⁰ We may also recall the episode in which Essex, after a quarrel with Ralegh for the Queen's favour, decided to leave the court for the Dutch war, and wrote: “If I return I will be welcomed home; if not una bella morire is better than a disquiet life.”¹¹ During the Trojan council in Act II, scene 2 of Troilus and Cressida, Troilus says that Helen cannot be given back as she is “a theme of honour and renown”,¹² and the very embodiment of the Trojan and chivalric value-system. As a matter of fact the Trojan prince he is affirming the extreme value of what is to be obtained through Helen, that is a perfect knight's ideal “handsome death” as the final perspective point from which the worth (in honour and renown) of a whole life-itinerary is to be judged.

Of course the figure of la bella morte is a commonplace feature in Renaissance chivalry romances and epic poems. Consider the martial deaths in Ariosto and Tasso and the destiny of characters such as Agramante or Soliman. In Tasso's Liberata—Fairfax's translation, Jerusalem Delivered, was published in 1600—, the topos of la bella morte is clearly embodied in Clorinda's tragic death in Canto XII. Clorinda is the woman-warrior killed by Tancred who is tragically in love with his bella inimica (beautiful enemy). Clorinda's beauty in extremo spiritu is not only the representation of the melancholy union between love and death, it is the very semi-allegorical icon of the Renaissance chivalric ideal of la bella morte:

D'un bel pallor ha il bianco volto asperso,
come a' gigli sarian miste viole,
e gli occhi al cielo affisa, e in lei converso
sembra per la pietate il cielo e ‘l sole;
e la man nuda e fredda alzando verso
il cavaliero in vece di parole
gli dà segno di pace. In questa forma
passa la bella donna, e par che dorma.

(Stanza 69).¹³

In Shakespeare this “handsome death” topos is frequent. Hotspur and Richard III are two extreme examples of the antagonist's obduratio: Hotspur represents aristocratic pride as an eccess of magnanimitas; and Richard III embodies in his warrior's death the satanic perversion of fortitudo. Weak Richard II is given la belle mort, and dies while defending his life with valour. Even a scoundrel like Edmund is granted a chivalric death after the knightly encounter with Edgar in King Lear. It is in Hamlet, of course, that the whole problem is dealt with in a problematic key. There is no problem of a fine death but of the choice between a “good” or “bad” death. Hamlet's father was killed in the full bloom of his sins, and had no time for repentance. Hamlet has his chance to kill Claudius after the representation of the Tragedy of Gonzago. Claudius, however, is praying in the chapel, and Hamlet does not kill him, considering that, killed while repenting, Claudius would not receive eternal punishment. Hamlet himself, at the end of the play, is decreed martial honours by Fortinbras, as if the pale prince were a soldier fallen in the battle-field, which in a way he certainly is. Of course Hamlet is a gentleman, “a courtier, a scholar, and a soldier” who has fought an obviously losing battle against mutability in order to reassert his identity broken, indeed shattered by his father's murder and by the terrible Italianate knowledge Hamlet has acquired of the world as a theater. The world appears to be a huge lie, yet unveiling murder and lust, and desire for endless acquisition, and unlimited greed in a series of figures which can well be summed up by the universal Wolf of Ulysses' prophecy in Troilus and Cressida.

Troilus and Cressida, written one or two years after Hamlet, deals with exactly the same problem of the loss of identity, and indeed of the loss of the world of the aristocracy in the face of the fortunes quickly made by a new class of self-made homines novi; it deals with Essex's last attempt to win back the aristocracy's traditional role, and the right to the interpretation, and perception of reality according to the aristocracy's existential poetics, in contrast with the vulgarity of what in Italian were called la gente nova (new people). Shakespeare's play may be defined as a cynical (philosophically so), and hopeless comment on the Elizabethan chivalric revival brought to a sudden end by Essex's failed revolt, and consequent execution in 1601.¹⁴

Troilus and Cressida was no remake of Homer's Iliad (however, Chapman's Seven Books had a great importance for Shakespeare's play), but of Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide (1385-6?), even if Shakespeare was also much influenced by William Fiston's 1596 re-writing of Caxton's 1474 translation-compilation of Raoul Le Fèvre's Recueil. This in its turn was a re-writing of Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae (1287) which was a Latin version of Benoît de Saint-Maure's long epic poem Le Roman de Troye (1170-1180 ca). In all these, as in all the other versions of the story of the two lovers told in the Troy Book (Boccaccio's Filostrato, 1338?, also Greene's almost forgotten Euphues, His Censure to Philautus, 1587),¹⁵ Hector's death is either not mentioned at all (and the one who gets very ungentlemanly killed by Achilles is Troilus), or is as briefly mentioned as in Shakespeare. In Chaucer, Hector's death takes four lines describing Achilles' felony:

For as he drough a king by thaventayle,
Unwar of this, Achilles through the Mayle
And through the body gan him for to ryve;
And thus this worthy knight was brought of lyve.

(vv.1558-1561)

Benoît de Saint-Maure dealing with the same subject matter in his Roman de Troye, had long before very curtly described Hector's death in the following way:

Hector a un rei abatu,
Prendre le volt et retenir,
At as lor par force tolir.
Par la ventaille le tenit,
Fors de la presse le tracit,
De son escu iert descoverz;
At quant l'aparceit li coverz,
Vers lui broche dreit lo destrier,
Nel pot souffrir hauberc doublier
Que le feie et le polmon
Ne li espandist sor l'arçon;
Molt le trebuche toz envers.

(vv. 16166-16177)¹⁶

Guido delle Colonne in his Historia troiana tells the same story in a more laconic way: “Achilles accepta quadam lancea valde forti non advertente Hectore, velociter in Hectorem irruit.” In Benoît, after Hector's death, Troilus too gets killed by Achilles. In both cases Achilles is previously wounded and granted truce, and in both cases he takes advantage of an unarmed opponent. After Hector's death, Troilus takes his brother's place in ten battles as the most prominent Trojan warrior. In the nineteenth battle Troilus is surrounded by the Myrmidons Achilles has sent against him. Troilus gallantly defends himself against an overwhelming mass of enemies until his horse is killed and falls over him. Achilles does not give quarter, and comes to murder prince Troilus who is absolutely defenceless (“Grant crualté, grant felonie / en fist”, vv. 21176-21424). In Boccaccio's Filostrato, Hector's death is not told, and Troilus is the one who gets killed by Achilles; but even so the episode takes up little space. Prince Troiolo, deceived by Criseida, rages throughout the battle-field in search of revenge. He inconclusively fights many times against Diomedes, then he dies at Achilles' hands:

L'ira di Troiolo in tempi diversi
a' Greci nocque molto sanza fallo,
tanto che pochi ne gli uscieno avversi
che non cacciasse morti dal cavallo,
sol che ei l'attendesser si perversi
colpi donava; e dopo lungo stallo,
avendone già morti più di mille
miseramente un di l'uccise Achille.

(VIII.27)¹⁷

Or, in Chaucer's rephrasing of Boccaccio's lines:

The wratthe […]
Of Troilus the Greekes boughten dere,
For thousandes his handes maden deye,
As he that was withouten any pere,
Save Ector, in his time, as I can heere:
Butt wailaway, save only Goddes wille:
Despitously him slow the firse Achilles.

(V, 1800-1807).

In any case Achilles' role, even if somewhat undefined, seems to preserve a taint of felony. In Caxton's Recueyl of the historyes of Troye (the first English printed book, ca. 1474, a compilation from Raoul Le Fèvre's own Recueil des histoires de Troyes), the focus, as in Boccaccio, is on Troilus' death. The sequence of Troilus' death in Caxton's (or Fiston's) Recueil seems to be followed very closely by Shakespeare's staging of Hector's death. In Caxton's Recueyl Achilles orders his Myrmidons to surround Troilus who has to fight against more than two thousand men. Troilus fights back with courage and valour. At the end he loses his horse, and gets multiple wounds, loses shield and helmet, and still fights on. Only when it is clear that the Trojan prince is exhausted and cannot defend himself any longer, does Achilles come to kill him. Achilles then ties Troilus' body to his horse's tail and drags the body around the battle-field.¹⁸

Shakespeare's brief sequence comes from a long-established tradition in which it is clear enough that Hector (and/or Troilus) is the magnanimous knight, and Achilles the felon, the traitorous knight, or he is at least unloyal, even though everything is to be understood within the boundaries of the chivalric system, and knightly codification. The brief brutality through which either Troilus's, or alternatively Hector's death is told must be essentially due to the necessity of keeping close to, and swerving as little as possible from the main theme thread of Cressida's lack of faith and betrayal. Be that as it may, that “miserable death”, Boccaccio's “misera morte”, or Chaucer's “despituous death” (“cruel, pitiless death”) do not seem to take any really noticeable ideological space. And it must be remembered that the version of Troilus' death in Bênoit definitely follows all the traits of Rolland's handsome chivalric death at Roncevaux. This is why the importance of Hector's indeed “miserable death” in Troilus and Cressida must not be undervalued as it entails a reversal of the whole value-system of chivalry. It is clear that Shakespeare's treatment of Hector's death is no hapax. Yet it assumes focus relevance to become in its brutality the true and main figure of the complex problem dealt with in Shakespeare's revisitation of the Troy Book tradition. In Troilus and Cressida the paradigmatic trait of Achilles' felony is even more enhanced through a different, somewhat expanded articulation of the elements inherited from the tradition. In Act V, sc. viii, Hector has just killed an enemy clad in a rich armour. Hector comments on his cowardly opponent's ugly death by saying: “Most putrefied core so fair without”. Hector's “day's work” is over, and he unarms himself. “Enter Achilles” with his Myrmidons. In a previous scene, Hector had surprised Achilles with his arms “out of use”, and had granted him truce according to the rules of chivalry (5.6). Now Achilles shows his intention to take advantage of the situation. Hector asks for a truce: “I am unarmed: forego this vantage, Greek”(9). Achilles shouts to his men: “Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.” (10). Hector is slain in a sort of Mafia settlement of accounts, or as in one of those London street-fights which were quite common among the Elizabethan aristocracy. Achilles then explains the meaning of Hector's death: “So, Ilion, fall thou next! Come, Troy sink down; / Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone”(11-12), and then he adds, multiplying fellony with lies: “On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain / ‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain.’” (13-14) Then he orders the body of Hector to be tied to his horse's tail and drags it up and down the battle-field. Of course, no mention is made of the story of Priam's request to have his dead son's body back, and there is no hint at any funerary pyre in the dawn (which is exactly how The Iliad ends), or to any honour reserved to the dead hero, which is exactly what happens also in the Troy Book tradition. In Shakespeare, however, the laconicism characterizing the treatment of Hector's death seems to acquire a different, and a wider resonance. There is no heroic death of any kind in Troilus and Cressida. During the representation of the battle in the last act, there is only one other direct reference to a warrior “fallen in action”. It is true that the audience is reminded of Patroclus' death which, however, is very quickly announced as a matter of no importance, while the only other death almost represented on stage is the death of the cowardly warrior with the fair armour who gets killed by Hector. Thus, we must conclude that the only one directly accompanying Hector to the land of the dead is that warrior defined as a “most putrefied core so fair without”. I do not know of any other similar example of what I might call a rhetorically contrived subtraction of la bella morte. Shakespeare's perspective on the decline of chivalry must be therefore extremely radical and hopeless. In the aristocratic, chivalric mentality, death counts more than life, since it is mainly through the handsome death that one can acquire honour and renown, and la belle mort is the very climactic moment in which all the worth of life is judged and the perspective in which it is to be seen is defined once for all. A perfect knight's “handsome death” gives the only correct political perspective according to which life is seen and is considered worth living. The absence, or indeed the subtraction of la belle mort decrees the end of what Huizinga once defined the chivalric dream of the heroic and loving life.¹⁹

I said I do not know of any other example of subtraction of la belle mort. This is not completely true. In a recent article of mine²⁰ I tried to underline a partial similarity of perspective between Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Pietro Aretino's epic fragmenta, L‘Orlandino (1536-47, prob. 1542) that was well-known during the sixteenth century,²¹ and the less fortunate L‘Astolfeide.²² While Thersites seems to be translating almost literally into English Aretino's “frankly speaking manner”, Shakespeare's Ulysses represents the very ideological core and soul of what we might call a sound Renaissance interpretation of Machiavelli in the protestant line of such Italian fuoriusciti as Petruccio Ubaldini, or Jacopo Castelvetro (one of these wrote the Preface to John Wolfe's Italian edition of Machiavelli's Il Principe, London, 1584). On the whole, Aretino's approach to epic and chivalric romance is quite close, in its protolibertine, cynical key, to Shakespeare's re-make of the Trojan war, in which all the aristocratic myths of heroism, of love and honour, including la bella morte as the key figure of the system of chivalric virtues, are given for “dead and gonne”.

Knights, as they have always been fabled—writes Aretino—never existed. They were no knights errant but a bunch of “arrant knaves”. “Ruggiero, a most fair youth, / was both Agramante's and Charles' fag, / Gradasso and Mandricardo both stallions / who never left the tavern, / Rinaldo a beastly man, with no brain, / knight errant from tavern to brothel”(1,4).²³ As regards the ladies, “Of Angelica, Marfisa, Bradamante, / Of Fiordiligi, of Morgana and Alcina—writes Aretino—I won't sing; anyone who is not unlearned can guess their loving life, / I shall compare it to the whore-errant's, Antea, Origilla and Fallerina. / Ancroia too was errant and a whore / And Gabrina was of the whole bunch the very bawd” (I.8) The whole chivalric tradition of love seems to take place in a brothel. And, of course “This is the very truth! Only my own Aretino never tells fables / like sir Pulci, the Count, and Ariosto” (I.9). In Shakespeare, Thersites, talking about Ajax defines him “an ass” (2.1.42-3), Menelaus is “the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds” (5.1.53), Achilles has no brain, (2.1.96-99), Patroclus is Achilles' bitch (2.1, 111), and the whole war, considering that “all the argument is a whore and a cuckold” (2.3. 69-72) is a kind of brothel fight. Diomedes talking to Paris about Helen, defines her a whore (and Paris a lecher and a whore-monger, while Menelaus is a cuckold, but ça va sans dire) and therefore considers that terrible cormorant war swallowing money and friends as sheer nonsense (4.1. 533-76). Both Thersites and Diomedes are in the same Aretinian philosophical line developing Renaissance cynicism into libertine thought.

It is true that in Aretino's epic fragmenta nobody dies. This is easily understandable since death is a serious thing, while in Aretino's perspective chivalric romances are only a huge heap of lies that must be exposed through mock-epic. However, a kind of multiple comic subtraction of the topos in question here is to be found in L'Orlandino which is to be considered not as a mere divertissement but as a part of a much wider genealogy and deconstruction of morals which include I Ragionamenti d'amore and Ragionamenti delle corti as a sort of satyric analysis of Castiglione's ideal Courtier, and Bembo's Neoplatonism. Of course one must remember that Chaucer's Troilus and Criseide was for the English court what Petrarch's Canzoniere and Triumphi (Collected in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, the so-called Petrarchino) were for Italian Courts, and for Italian cortegiani. Chaucer's poem, like Petrarch in Bembo's linguistic theory and practice, defined an English high-mimetic linguistic model of lingua cortigiana (courtier's language), and a way of perceiving one's own emotions, and therefore structuring the inner reality of one's own soul, or psyche.²⁴ This must be understood if one wants to see the whole scope of ideological implications in Troilus and Cressida.

In L'Orlandino, Canto II (and the last), Astolfo, the English knight, fights against Cardus. “Mirror of Prudence” as he is (meaning that he is a coward), Astolfo gets soon unhorsed and surrenders immediately: “Do not unsheath thy sword, for pity's sake / My lord, please, Miserere mei! / Cardus laughed and said: meeseems / thou must go back to thy lord as an unarmed footman.” (II.6). In short, the defeated knight does not get killed. Being a coward he has no right to death, not to mention la bella morte; he has only the right to lose his status of knight, and to be reduced to unarmed footman. In L'Astolfeide the same question is posed in even clearer terms. The “heroes” (a bunch of drunkards, boasters, rakes and brothel-goers) must face the terrible Arcifanfano, a giant. The first knight sent to fight against Arcifanfano is Berlinghieri who “taken by shame and fear at the same time / goes into the field forcing his own cowardly nature”. Berlinghieri tries his best, but he soon gets unhorsed by his terrible opponent after a very grotesque fight, and flies to Paris. Berlinghieri too becomes an unarmed footman and loses his aristocratic status. Astolfo then is sent against the terrible giant and finds himself soon with his bum on the ground. Then, the ‘heroes’ decide to send Ugieri the Dane who is a stout fellow. Ugieri unhorses the giant and takes him prisoner. Arcifanfano is not killed. Once the heroes have him in their hands, they very cowardly decide to calm him down in the way this is usually done with bulls, and the whole sequence that follows is described as a bull's castration. Death has no right of residence in Aretino's mock heroic realm and is comically substitued by figures of degradatio, and uncrowning, and, on top of it all, by the grotesque figure of castration.

Shakespeare's play, that had begun with an armed Prologue preparing the audience to a “tragical historie”, closes on Troilus indeed furioso seeking revenge on Diomedes in the battle-field. The play ends on the wilful subtraction of all tragical catharsis. Troilus is as dead as Hector at this point. He has lost his own chivalric identity and the world of values on which it was grounded. Troilus is utterly lost and does not seem to belong to anywhere any longer since: “Hector is dead: there is no more to say” (5.11.22). In the shaping of his experience of the new world there is the reversal of the traditional ideological and self-fashioning itinerary of the young knight (Ruggiero, Tancredi, Rinaldo) finding his path ad perfectionem virtutis through Love and War, “l'armi e gli amori” of the chivalry romance tradition. It is true that Troilus becomes as furioso as Ariosto's Orlando, and for a very similar reason; Mars has gone mad because of Venus's continual flight away from him, with inconstant Cressida taking Angelica's place. Yet through love, because of love, Troilus suffers the most terrible and remediless desengaño, to use the Spanish topically baroque word. The world for him has lost the only meaning it used to have of “glory and renown”; now the meaning of the world is nothing but “ignomigny and shame” which are Troilus' last words addressed to Pandarus. In Shakespeare, the character of Pandarus, a Trojan noble man in all the previous versions of the Troy Book, becomes a pimp tainted by Neapolitan bone-ache which will take him to his grave in two months' time (5.11. 50-53). The play that had begun with the armed prologue under the sign of Mars, closes under the sign of a debased Venus with Pandarus' epilogue and threat to spread contagion throughout the whole world, and of course among the audience in the first place. The contagion being threatened is of a metaphorical and ideological kind; it is a syphilis of the mind, a philosophical disease opening holes, and flaws in the axiological value-system, in what Greenblatt might perhaps call “master fiction” or old Lyotard and Foucault would once define as “récit du pouvoir”. That contagion, those “diseases” are Mutability's time-markers, and they represent an ideological space which is exactly the opposite of the ideological space covered by the chivalrous figures of la belle mort. Death is not handsome in Pandarus' epilogue; it is disfigured, instead, together with love, into some grotesque emblem of putrefaction and disorder belonging to Ulysses' dark wolvish world.

Voltaire was right, after all, and after his own fashion. Hector's death in Troilus and Cressida powerfully symbolizes not only the end of Troy, and of the chivalric world identified with the Trojan warriors' Weltanschauung. Hector's death also came to symbolize, for aught Voltaire might see, the end of the old heroic world, and, therefore, indeed, the end of the high-mimetic world of tragedy denied through the grotesque and total genre disorder and confusion. It came to symbolize the end of Voltaire's theatrical world of rules, too. In defining the shape of some minor ideological apocalypse for its own times, Shakespeare's generically undefinable play also came to perfectly portray the senescence of the ancien régime through the senescence of its poetics of the aristotelian rules. Voltaire had grown too old to bear all that.

Notes

1. Lettre VIII in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire avec des notes et une notice historique sur la vie de Voltaire par Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Marquis de Condorcet (Paris: chez Furne, 1835-42), 13 vols., vol. V, p. 30.

2. Ivi, vol. 13, p. 381, lettre to D'Alembert, September 3, 1776.

3. Ivi, vol. 13, p. 572, lettre to de la Harpe, August 15, 1776.

4. Ivi, vol. 13, p. 370, July 30, 1776.

5. Ivi, vol. IX, p. 307.

6. Ivi, vol. IX, p.307. I am referring to Voltaire's two letters to the Académie on the occasion of the publication of Shakespeare's Oeuvres (two volumes) in Pierre Letourneur's translation (Paris, 1776).

7. Ernst Robert Curtis, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, A. Francke AG Verlag, 1948). Engl. Transl. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York and Evanston, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1963).

8. See my “Italianate Cynicism … and the Collapse of Chivalry in Troilus and Cressida”, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), pp. 427-59.

9. La très joyeuse, plaisante et récréative histoire, composée par le Loyal Serviteur (1527), ed. by Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1882) (containing also extracts from other biographies of Bayard, including Du Bellay's Les mémoires), cfr. pp. 426-7; Fulke Greville, Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (publ. 1652), ed. by Nicholas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907); also Mark Caldwell has edited The Life in The Prose of Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, “The Renaissance Imagination”, n. 26 (New York and London: Garland, 1987), cf. p. 82.

10. Pietro Aretino, Lettere, a cura di Paolo Procaccioli (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1997), tomo I, Libro I, pp. 54-59.

11. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (London: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1928), p. 33.

12. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. The Oxford Shakespeare, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988). Act 2, Scene 2, line 199. All quotations will be taken from this edition.

13. I shall give my own translation seeing that Fairfax's version would be somehow misleading: “A beautiful pallor is spread on her white visage, / and it is as if the colour of the lilies was intermingled with violets, / Her eyes are cast to heaven; / and both sky and sun seem to be moved downward to her by pity. / Her naked cold hand instead of words / As a sign of peace she raises to the knight / Bent over her. And in this shape / The beautiful woman passes away as if she were asleep.” See Fairfax, Jerusalem Delivered, 1600, ed. Henry Morley (New York and London: The Cooperative Publication Society, 1901), p. 255.

14. See Bevington's edition of Troilus and Cressida; see also Eric Mallin, “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry”, Representations 29 (1990); repr. In Idem, Inscribing the Time. Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); James E. Savage, “Troilus and Cressida and Elizabethan Court Factions”, in University of Mississipi Studies in English, 5 (1964), pp. 43-66, see also Paul N. Siegel, “Shakespeare and the New Chivalry Cult of Honour”, in Centennial Review, 86 (1964), pp. 9-70; Elaine Eldridge, “Moral Order in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. The Case of the Trojans”, in Anglia, 104 (1986), pp. 33-44.

15. Much has been written on this subject: see Carl Young, The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus and Cressida (London: Chaucer Society, 1908); Piero Boitani, ed., The European Tragedy of Troilus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); see also Montague Sommers, Introduction and notes to Druden's Troilus and Cressida, in John Dryden, The Dramatic Works six vol. (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1930); Robert K. Presson, Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison: Madison U.P., 1953). On Hector's death in particular see Sommer, cit.; and Idem, ed., Caxton, Recueyll (London: Nutt, 1894); see also Skeat's preface to Chaucer's poem; see also Bevington, pp. 33-37; Stephen J. Lynch, “Hector and the theme of honour …”, The Upstart Crow, 7, 1987, pp. 68-79; Curtis Brian Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honour (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960); Alice Shalvi, “Honour in Troilus and Cressida”, Studies in English Literature, 5 (1965), pp. 292 ff. As regards Greene and Shakespeare, there is Herford's Greene Romances and Shakespeare, New Shakespeare Society (London, 1888).

16. A. Joly, Benoît de Sainte-More et ‘Le roman de Troye’ ou ‘Les métamorphoses d'Homère et de l'epopée Gréco-latine au Moyen-Age (Paris: A. Franck, 1870) (it contains the critical edition of Benoît's poem). My translation: “Hector is oppressing a fallen king; and wants to seize and kill him, and holds him by the sallet, and takes him out of the melée, and does not cover himself with his shield. Achilles sees him uncovered and spurs his horse against him. Hector's harness cannot defend him, and Achilles' spear pierces Hector's liver and lungs; Achilles unhorses him, and makes his own horse tread over the fallen ennemy.”

17. My translation: “Troilus' fury many times / never failed to inflict much damage on the Greeks, / And few faced him who were not unhorsed and killed, / If they stayed to fight / so wickedly did he strike, and after a long while / when he had killed more than a thousand Greeks / One day he was miserably killed by Achilles.”

18. Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, written in French by Roul Lefèvre, transl. and printed by William Caxton (c. 1474), edit. by H. Oskar Sommers (London: Nutt, 1894), cf. 638-39.

19. See J. Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Harlem, 1919), English transl. The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924), chapt. V.

20. See “‘The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword’. Italianate cynicism …”, cit.

21. It went through a series of editions and pirate prints before 1600. One of these is in the British Library Catalogue under the title of Le valorose prove degli arcibravi paladini printed by Baleni in Florence between 1570 and 1580.

22. See Danilo Romei, ed., Aretino, Poemi cavallereschi (Roma: Salerno, 1995).

23. My translations.

24. On Chaucer see H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 143 ff. As regards Petrarch see Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (Venezia 1525), in Pietro Bembo, Opere in volgare, a cura di Mario Marti (Firenze: Sansoni, 1961), pp. 265 ff.