[In the essay below, Leech argues that in such plays as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's choice of a Greek setting "was bound up with his desire for experiment and for the taking of an oblique view of the world. "]

One of the things which demonstrate the variety of Shakespeare's work is the difficulty we sometimes experience in attaching a generic label to an individual play. When the great Folio was published in 1623, its contents were divided into comedies, histories, and tragedies. This was a fairly rough classification, putting Cymbeline among the tragedies and keeping the label 'history' for plays immediately dependent on the sixteenth-century prose chronicles and concerned with events of comparatively recent date. Since that time there has been some disputing about whether Troilus and Cressida is tragedy or comedy, though we know that the editors' original intention was to put it among the tragedies. And scholars at different times have isolated small groups of plays and seen them as cohering within themselves, although perhaps also belonging within one of the three types named on the Folio title-page. In 1904 A. C. Bradley published his famous book Shakespearean Tragedy. It was concerned only with Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, and the inference was that in some fashion these four were more fully 'tragic' than, for example, Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra. In 1910 M. W. MacCallum published his book called Shakespeare 's Roman Plays, which restricted itself to Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus is set in Rome, and Cymbeline deals with a Roman war with Britain; but these did not, in MacCallum's view, qualify as fully 'Roman' plays. At different times, moreover, books have been published on 'Shakespeare's Problem Plays' or 'Shakespeare's Problem Comedies,' though there has been some notable disagreement as to which plays have the right to inclusion in this group.

Perhaps there are two major considerations for us to hold in mind. One is the essential separateness of any piece of creative writing that has escaped from pastiche or from the simple attempt to reproduce the effect of another piece of writing, or a group of writings, already in existence. The character and the effect of Lear differ notably from the character and the effect of Othello. In spite of the fact that each of them is a greater play than The Duchess of Malfi, the two Shakespeare tragedies are as different from one another as either is from Webster's masterpiece. Criticism is indeed concerned with identifying the genre, because that helps us to see how the play has come into existence and thus helps us to understand it better. But critism is concerned with far more than the identification of genre: at his best the critic will enable us to grasp the unique character of the separate work.

Nevertheless, our second major consideration is that a dramatist writing at a time when the notion of traditional Kinds is strong will be likely, at the outset of any process of composition, to have in mind the characteristic marks of a particular Kind. The general direction of his writing will be along lines normally associated with that Kind. He may—he will, if he is a major writer-in some measure permanently modify the reader's expectancies in relation to that Kind, through the very fact that he has made a contribution to it which is essentially 'new.' As, for example, Shakespeare writes Twelfth Night with a traditional idea of Comedy in his mind, but Comedy has never been quite the same since that plays was completed.

Groupings not dependent on a traditional Kind are more slippery things to work with. Shakespeare did not inherit a notion of a 'problem play,' or of a 'Roman play.' Such things were growing up sporadically in his time. Yet there is a family resemblance to be seen among many plays with a Roman setting: the audience must have come to expect some sense of the massiveness of the Roman achievement, some conveying of the gravity and the eloquence that were Roman ideals, some sense of a major European civilisation that existed before Christianity. And from the last years of the sixteenth century we can see an occasional tendency for some plays to take on a mode of existence which, whether the obvious affiliation was to tragedy or to comedy, was marked by a concern with a problem of human behaviour for which no solution was firmly offered, no reference to a securely held scale of values was firmly made. Among 'problem plays' we can see Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Jonson's Volpone, perhaps Chapman's Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, as well as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All's Well. To see any one play in relation to such a grouping enables us to see how it differs from, as well as in some ways closely resembles, other plays of its time and of other times. And labels are not exclusive. Antony and Cleopatra is Roman play and tragedy and perhaps, as Ernest Schanzer has recently argued, problem play as well. Cymbeline is in some measure Roman play and, more fully, tragicomedy—thus bringing together two types of recent development in Shakespeare's time. Volpone is comedy and in some measure problem play; and so on.

When, therefore, one suggests a new grouping, among Shakespeare's plays or among the plays of his or any other time, it is as well to guard against the misapprehension that one is claiming more than a type of connection between the plays of the group, a connection that may be useful in drawing attention to certain features of the individual plays. It does not equate the plays of the group with one another, either in quality or in what I may call 'total Kind'—which is in any event an abstract idea, and not an ideal, for live imaginative literature. Thus it does not preclude other groupings which cut across the one that is currently being offered.

All this by way of caveat. What I want to do now is to discuss a grouping which has, I think, a special interest for us at Stratford this year. We may call it 'Shakespeare's Greek plays'—that is, those plays that prominently make use of a Greek or Hellenistic setting. And when one comes to look at Shakespeare's writings with this in mind, one may at first be surprised at how many such plays there are. In chronological order we have The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale. Perhaps the last of these may seem dubious, but the Sicily of four acts of the play is manifestly a Hellenistic island where recourse is had to the oracle of Apollo. Now there is no question that here we have a most diverse collection of plays. They range from one of Shakespeare's earliest, The Comedy of Errors, to one of his last, The Winter's Tale. They include two comedies (Errors and the Dream), two tragicomedies of the last period (Pericles and The Winter's Tale), one particularly strange tragedy (Timon), and one play (Troilus) which was called a 'history' on its quarto title-page in 1609, a 'comedy' in the anonymous preface printed in one issue of that quarto edition, and a 'tragedy' according to the place originally intended for its printing in the 1623 Folio. There has been some debate on whether Timon can be called a tragedy, much more debate on the Kind to which Troilus belongs. Moreover, all of these plays have something of an oddness about them. The Comedy of Errors is based on two Roman comedies of Plautus, a writer of importance for Elizabethan playwrights but nowhere else in Shakespeare used as a direct source. If we think of his other early comedies—The Two Gentlemen of Verona with its romantic story, its character-comedy in Launce, its Italian setting; Love's Labour's Lost with its witty lords and ladies, its minimal plot, its strain of high and precarious love-play—we must recognise something of a gulf between them and the Plautan story of the twins. In the somewhat later A Midsummer Night's Dream we have an extraordinary bringing together of diverse elements. In some ways it is very English in atmosphere: the fairies are partially the figures of a native fancy, living in an English woodland and beguiling human beings as English folk-lore would have them do; Bottom and his companions have all the manner of English artisans, and their very names derive comfortably from the native tongue. The Pyramus and Thisbe interlude is from antiquity, and Shakespeare doubtless knew in principally from Ovid in Latin and in translation. But the play's setting is nominally Athens and a wood near that city. The prince is Theseus, the city's legendary king. His bride is his conquered Queen of the Amazons. The four young lovers have Greek names. The fairies themselves have an exotic element in their make-up, being linked with antique pagan cults and with an eastern world that lay remotely on the other side of Athens. If we compare the Dream with other comedies of Shakespeare's early and middle years, we shall nowhere else find such a variety of material. If we want an analogue, we must go to the plays of his final period, where The Winter's Tale juxtaposes its Hellenistic Sicily with a seaside Bohemia which, more perhaps than any other setting in Shakespeare, is divorced from any land he or we might visit, and where the Greek-named Autolycus is an English rogue who makes free with, and is made free of, a timeless world. Pericles is a partially dramatised version of Hellenistic romance, in which the narrator Gower distances character and incident, in which the hero's suffering comes without guilt and is ended when the gods will: it is the loosest in structure of all Shakespeare's plays, the most simply charactered, the most varied in its use of locality. And Troilus and Timon, taking us respectively to Troy and the Dardan plain and to Athens and its woods once more, are alike bold in their structural principles, alike the source of critical puzzlement as to their total effect. It may indeed appear that, when the writing of a play involved the use of a Greek or Hellenistic setting, Shakespeare was encouraged both to technical experiment and to a certain, but varying, oddness in his presentation of human beings. Or perhaps the very choice of such a setting was bound up with his desire for experiment and for the taking of an oblique view of the world.

The point becomes clearer, perhaps, if we think once again of the Roman plays. These, it is true, are neither wholly Roman nor uniform with one another in manner and treatment. The common people of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus are native Elizabethans. The Senecan and Ovidian horrors of Titus are remote indeed from the austere world of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, where the sudden violence suffered by Coriolanus himself and by Cinna the poet are momentary incursions of savagery, making us aware of the fragility of a generally sustained decorum. And the presentation of Antony's and Cleopatra's love not only has a psychological depth otherwise foreign to the Roman plays but also has an element of challenge in it, a defiance of the Roman idea itself. Nevertheless, all four of these plays, under the impress of first Seneca and later Plutarch, have strong affiliations with an ancient notion of the tragic. All of them, though with varying degrees of success, cultivate a marmoreal kind of language appropriate, in Elizabethan ears, for the men of Rome. Each of them has at its centre a man of power and of dominant personality—Titus, Brutus, Antony, Coriolanus—whose ultimate fall is the crashing of a tower. Even the casual appearance of a Roman army in the romance Cymbeline brings into that play a touch of authority from the ancient world. Through all these plays, diverse as they are (and of course they grow in diversity as one looks at them more closely), there runs the single Roman thread, binding them together in dignity and in awe. In the Greek plays, on the other hand, there is far greater diversity, dignity is evanescent, and the tragic note is rare and muted.

Partly, this is connected with the different attitudes taken up by the Elizabethans towards the Greeks and the Romans respectively. There was no question about Roman Stature. The achievement and the language of the Republic and the Empire formed the main substance of Elizabethan education; Latin was still the vehicle for communication between the scholars of Europe, and Francis Bacon wrote sometimes in Latin for fear that English might not survive as a literary language. For much of Christendom the tongue of the Romans was that in which a man addressed and celebrated God. The medieval Empire was called 'Roman' as well as 'Holy'. The Second Rome in Byzantium lingered on into the fifteenth century. The Roman state had left its impress on European law, and fragments of Roman architecture, traces of Roman road-building, were there as reminders of the wealth and ambition of the ancient world. Vergil was everyman's epic poet, Cicero his philosopher, Ovid his advisor on the conduct of a love-affair. No wonder that Montaigne could say he felt closer to the figures of the Roman republic than he did to the politicians of his own time, that the Tiber was more his river than the Seine could be.

But the Greeks were another matter. Their language and their writings were known only to a small number of scholars. Athens itself was remote and rarely visited. The Pope ruled in Rome, but it was the non-Christian Turk whose flag flew in south-eastern Europe. And while the Roman empire had become Christian through Constantine, the legend of Athens was uniformly a pagan thing. Moreover, as T. J. B. Spencer has pointed out in an article he published last year in the Festschrift presented to Hardin Craig ['"Greeks" and "Merrygreeks": A Background to Tintori of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, ' Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. R. Hosley, (1962)], the Elizabethans were inevitably led to see the Greeks through Roman eyes and through the eyes of St. Paul. In the time of the republic, Cicero could see Greek influences at work in Rome, and see them as a source of decadence. Greek literature provided, of course, models for the Romans to imitate, standards for emulation, and yet its subject-matter was dangerously questionable. Horace could say of The Iliad that 'in seditions, in trickery, in crime and lust and anger' it showed the commission of sin inside and outside the walls of Troy. Vergil's Aeneid had an anti-Greek bias, presenting Rome as the city willed by the gods to take the place of the Troy the Greeks had treacherously and savagely destroyed. A Roger Ascham might praise a host of Greek writers above all Romans but Cicero, and he could rejoice in the eminence in Greek studies achieved in the mid-sixteenth-century in St. John's College at Cambridge. But Ascham knew Greek as common men, and nearly all poets and dramatists, did not; and even he might have doubted the wisdom of making Greek literature totally available in his time. For the generality of Elizabethans, as Spencer has pointed out in his article, a 'Greek' was a boon companion, a twister, a sharper, a crook. The women of Hellas, from Helen, wife of Menelaus, to the hetairai of Periclean Athens, were notoriously of loose life. And the words of St. Paul were available to show his dissatisfaction with the men who constituted his first mission-field among the gentiles. Spencer assures us that we should not be surprised at the kind of men Shakespeare shows us in Troilus and Timon. They are 'merely "Greeks",' he says, as the Elizabethans imagined Greeks to be—dissolute, full of tricks, avid for luxury, prone to wrath and butchery.

And yet surely that is altogether too simple a picture. First of all, let us note that Troilus and Cressida is no simple pro-Trojan, anti-Greek play—despite the legend that Britain, like Rome, had been colonised by a descendant of King Priam, a legend that commonly gave the name 'New Troy' to London and that still enjoyed some popular currency in Shakespeare's own day. The very prologue to the play refuses to make a distinction between Trojans and Greeks. If the splendour of 'Priam's six-gated city' is here celebrated, so too are the 'brave pavilions' of the Greeks on the Dardan plain, so are the sixty-and-nine crowned heads that brought their ships from the port of Athens. And the two sides in the war are embroiled over the ludicrously small matter of determining where Helen shall sleep. And on both sides there is the simple-minded thrill of a large-scale armed encounter:

Now expectation, tickling skittish spirits
On one and other side, Troyan and Greek,
Sets all on hazard—
                               (Prologue, 20-22)

an encounter whose rebrs depends, not on the Tightness of the quarrel, not even on military skill, but on the mere chances of war. In the prologue's last words, the issue of the fighting is seen as totally haphazard, unrelated to the merit, just as the success or failure of a play might be in Shakespeare's theatre. And as the play proceeds, we are reminded that the fighting men are 'Fools' on both sides,' and that suffering and destruction have through the long years of the siege been impartially dealt out to Trojans and to Greeks. In the fourth act Diomed the Greek has spoken sharply of Helen's worthlessness, and her protector Paris protests: 'You are too bitter to your country-woman.' To that Diomed replies in a speech where for a moment he is no longer the partisan but can look with compassion on the Trojans as well as on his own people, seeing them alike as victims of a senseless war for a light woman:

She's bitter to her country. Hear me, Paris:
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Troyan hath been slain; since she could speak,
She hath not given so many good words breath
As for her Greeks and Troyans suff' red death.
                        (Act IV, Scene i: 68-74)

And a Troy which includes Paris and Pandarus among its citizens, that has taken Shakespeare's Helen to its bosom, that squanders its own blood, is not the 'right side' in the war. There is no right side. The madness is shared.

In fact, though Shakespeare does defferentiate the Trojan city from the Greek camp (making the Trojans go astray in their wanton pursuit of an 'honour' which has no valid relation either to the cause of the fighting or to the realities of death and maiming, and showing the Greeks as equally deluded by their belief that events can be planned and guided by reason or ingenuity), he is nonetheless concerned with a single world in this play. Ajax the Greek is partly Trojan. Calchas the priest has deserted from Troy and given his services to the Greeks. Cressida, Troilus's love, must follow her father. Helen, the toast of Troy, comes from Greece and will return to it. In a time of truce, the men on both sides practise courtesy and compliment. It is surely no accident that Shakespeare, giving us one of his most remarkable anachronisms, makes Hector quote the Greek Aristotle when he is rebuking his brothers Troilus and Paris for their shallowness in moral philosophy. Moreover, in this same speech in the council-scene in Troy, Hector invokes the law of Nature and the law of 'each well-order'd nation' as alike providing on overwhelming argument that they must give Helen back and bring the war to an end. Here the nations are brought together in the uniformity of their law and in their existing within the total frame of Nature. One of the things that Troilus and Cressida surely says to us is that men belong together, and kill themselves when they kill each other.

And within this one world of the play we have by no means a wholly adverse picture of human behaviour. Hector's yielding to his brothers, despite the strength and firmness with which he has argued for the ending of the war, marks him as a man who rejects the light that reason has given him. And he can be foolish in dressing up the war as a medieval game, challenging the Greeks to prove by battle that any Grecian woman could be more fair or more chaste than his wife Andromache. We are bound to ask whether Andromache would be the less fair, the less chaste, if, by ill fortune or lesser skill, Hector lost his fight. And he can kill a man for the sake of the fine armour that he wears, as he does just before he is himself killed by Achilles' Myrmidons. Nevertheless, there is distinction in the man. When he is even mentioned in the dialogue, the medium almost always changes to bank verse, and it seems that he represents for all the Trojans an ideal that they must try to live up to. And it is made abundantly clear that the whole city's safety depends on him. When chance has delivered him unarmed to Achilles' slaughtermen, the tissue of the war has been decided. The Trojans may exert themselves to win revenge, but the city is doomed. Chance has operated decisively; now the avalanche will move downhill. Then, too, his clearsightedness goes beyond his recognition of the moral duty which he shirks in his decision to continue the war. He is aware that his efforts on the field will not ultimately affect the larger pattern of events. When, on his visit to the Greek camp in Act IV, Ulysses assures him that Troy will fall:

Yond towers, whose wanton tops do buss the
  clouds,
Must kiss their own feet—
                        (Act IV, Scene v: 220-1)

he does not contest the prophecy. Only, he says, he must not let himself be affected by the thought that the end is already settled. 'I must not believe you,' he says:

There they stand yet; and modestly I think
The fall of every Phrygian stone will cost
A drop of Grecian blood. The end crowns all;
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.
                      (Act IV, Scene v: 222-6)

For an instant Hector and the rest seem to see the city in ruins, the men slaughtered, the women captive and humiliated; and thus Hector leads us from the immediate dramatic situation to a position outside time where the whole temporal pattern is at once visible. For such a purpose a dramatist does not use a character that is meant to invite our condescension. In his Hector, Shakespeare does not give us a merely traditional figure, one of the Nine Worthies, nor does he display him as a braggart and a bully. Rather, we see a manifestly imperfect man who yet has the power and the right to win and hold his fellows' esteem.

So in a simpler way it is with several other figures in this play. Cressida is faithless, but she is alive and witty. Her love is shallow, and it can be a bit cheap, as when she reproaches Troilus for leaving her early in the morning after they have become lovers:

        Prithee, tarry.
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.
                     (Act IV, Scene ii: 15-18)

But that her feeling is rightly to be called 'love' can, I think, hardly be questioned. When she first meets Troilus, the two of them fence, a little smuttily, in awkward prose, and then suddenly, in blank verse, she declares herself:

Boldness comes to me now and brings me heart.
Prince Troilus, I have lov'd you night and day
For many weary months—
                      (Act III, Scene ii: 121-3)

And to Troilus' question 'Why was my Cressid then so hard to win?' she responds by asserting again the long continuance of her love, while at the same time showing concern for what she feels to be the imprudence of her confession:

Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord,
With the first glance that ever—pardon me.
If I confess much, you will play the tyrant.
I love you now; but till now not so much
But I might master it. In faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown
Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!
Why have I blabb'd? Who shall be true to us,
When we are so unsecret to ourselves?
But, though I lov'd you well, I woo'd you not;
And yet, good faith, I wish'd myself a man,
Or that we women had men's privilege
Of speaking first. Sweet, bid me hold my
  tongue,
For in this rapture I shall surely speak
The thing I shall repent.
                       (Act III, Scene ii: 125-39)

It is true that she protests too much when the order comes for her to join her father: hers is not the grief that silently cuts the heart-strings. It is true that, away from Troy and Troilus, she can jest with and at the Greek leaders and distribute her kisses with some readiness. And of course it is true that she quickly abandons Troilus for the strong-purposed Diomed. But not without regret, not without self-reproach, not without the realisation that Troilus gave her a love she will not again have. Thersites calls her 'a commodious drab,' Ulysses' words are 'sluttish spoil of opportunity' and 'daughter of the game,' but these utterances have not a full choric force. Such judgments are not comprehensive accounts of any human being, or of any character in a play that gives us an impression of human personality.

And I shall take one further example of the way in which Shakespeare humanises his characters. Achilles would seem a difficult choice for this purpose, but I think insufficient attention has hitherto been given to this figure. We see him sulking in his tent, a deserter from the war for merely splenetic reasons, jesting at Agamemnon and the rest with his 'male varlet' Patroclus. We see him frightened and disturbed when Ulysses speaks to him of the necessity of emulation, of the way men's short memories put into Time's wallet those good deeds past whose remuneration is not a continuing thing. This of course is Ulysses the dog-fox, talking in very different terms from those he used in the council of the Greek leaders, where he saw emulation as the evil which destroyed the army's good order and success. But his argument for Achilles, so eloquent in phrasing, so rich in imagery, works on the man as he had intended. It seems incredible and absurd that Achilles should believe that now the Greeks are ready to 'worship' Ajax, but Ulysses knows that a man's credulity and fear can be widely stretched: in this speech he drives home the lesson that he began to administer to Achilles when he proposed a lottery as the means of determining who should meet Hector's challenge to single combat, and then with Nestor's help rigged the lottery to ensure that Ajax was chosen. There is every sign that Ulysses' stratagem will work. Achilles turns away from the jesting of Patroclus and Thersites, resuming the blank verse that he had a few minutes before been using with Ulysses:

My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd;
And I myself see not the bottom of it.
                     (Act III, Scene iii: 311-12)

And this turning to blank verse, always a sign that we should probably take a character with seriousness, is characteristic of Achilles in the play. He is never wholly at ease in the prose he exchanges with his hangers-on. And when soon after he sees Hector on his visit to the Greek camp, there is a dreadfulness which we cannot despise when he asks himself in what part of Hector's body his death-wound shall be given:

Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall I destroy him? Whether there, or there, or
  there?
That I may give the local wound a name,
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Hector's great spirit flew. Answer me, heavens!
                                 (Act IV, Scene v: 242-6)

This contemplation of the living body as if it were a thing of brick or stone or wood and one were examining it for the likeliest place to make a breach, this physical insult amounting to a verbal violation, deliberately spoken moreover for Hector to hear, is more deeply pathological than the killing itself. We are made to feel in the play that Achilles' reputation is inflated: when he meets Hector on even terms in Act V, Hector wins the advantage and characteristically lets him escape till he shall be readier for the fight. But, as Ulysses knows, it is Achilles' reputation that matters—both to himself and to the Greek cause. So he appears to have won the man back to the field, for the sake of keeping that reputation fresh. Achilles, inwardly insecure, must be brutal in words, must cry 'Timber!' before the axe is lifted. But Ulysses does not bargain for the letter from Queen Hecuba that Achilles receives. He loves Hecuba's daughter Polyxena and a word from her mother overcomes Achilles' resolution again:

Fall Greeks; fail fame; honour or go or stay;
My major vow lies here, this I'll obey.
                          (Act V, Scene i: 48-9)

And so his attachment to the girl makes him care nothing for reputation, and Ulysses' plans have proved vain. But there is a further twist. Patroclus has gone to the fighting, and Hector has killed him. The loss of Patroclus does what argument could not do; the loss of the man is more powerful than the threatened loss of Polyxena. He enters in comic rage calling for Hector, 'thou boy-queller.' And when he does not get the better of his enemy in even fight, he comes with his Myrmidons, who surround an unarmed Hector and murder him. Achilles here speaks a kind of dramatic rhetoric that belongs rather with the early Senecan imitations than with the rest of this play, invoking the spectacle of night. Thus first he addresses his victim:

Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set;
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels;
Even with the vail and dark'ning of the sun,
To close the day up, Hector's life is done.
(Act V, Scene viii: 5-8)

And when the man is dead and a retreat is sounded:

The dragon wing of night o'erspreads the earth
And, stickler-like, the armies separates.
My half-supp'd sword, that frankly would have
 fed,
Pleas'd with this dainty bait thus goes to bed.
                               (Act, V, Scene viii: 17-20)

Indeed Achilles' sword has not devoured much: there is irony in its sheathing as a 'half-supp'd' weapon. And there is mockery too in the inflation of the language. And yet Shakespeare makes us feel the element of frustration here. The very bogusness of Achilles is something he must live with. His sword would have liked to have fed 'frankly,' fully. But that is not for him when the adversary is a Hector. The Trojan goes to the underworld, but Achilles too must lie in the darkness of self-knowledge. That he had to resort to a mass-ambush, that he failed when he met Hector face-to-face, are things he will not be able to put away. And when he says that the onset of night separates the armies 'stickler-like'—that is, like an umpire—he admits the smallness even of his imagined accomplishments. Time, still the arbitrator, declares what and how and when. To be the best of butchers becomes a small thing.

No one could claim that Achilles makes a favourable impression on us, as Cressida from time to time does. I have used words like 'bogus' and 'pathological' to describe his reputation and his speech. But Achilles, we can see in this, is very different from Ajax, the beef-witted and companionable fighter. Achilles is a menace as Ajax never is, because he is more fully alive, because he can practise evil in an attempt to banish fear. There is no question of our sympathy being involved, but there is a sense of our knowing human nature more profoundly because we have seen into this man's being. His evil is petty as well as appalling; much of his conduct is merely trivial; but this is no simple embodiment of a simple Greekish folly or vice. Shakespeare is telling us something about his world and ours, not just echoing a libel on the past. The one world of Troilus and Cressida, in fact, is our world too.

When we turn from Troilus to Timon of Athens, it must be remembered that we are dealing with a less full-wrought play. Probably Timon in the version that we have, the play as it was apparently inserted at a late stage in the printing of the 1623 Folio, had not been brought to a point of completion. It bears many of the marks of a rough draft, and we cannot know what changes Shakespeare would have made if he had worked on it further. Nevertheless, we can discern in this play, as in Troilus, the presentation of a human life that we can recognize, not merely in its painfulness but in its diversity. Timon is a man who knows well enough that men flatter, that human fortune is subject to mutability, but he cannot apply this knowledge to his own situation. When at last he realizes that his wealth is gone, he encourages himself to think he is still rich in friends, that he will get help from them as so often in the past they were helped by him. When that proves an illusion, he not only rails on his false friends, but—in a whole series of soliloquies—he curses the city of Athens, all the race of men, and the Nature that has hitherto given men life. Once he believed that gold was the outward sign so friendship, the giving of it a demonstration of the bond between man and man; now he sees it as the corrupter of men, the ready instrument for the fulfilling of his curse. Digging for roots, he has found a new supply of the metal. He will stay in the woods, away from a society he now sees as wholly corrupt. But he will give gold to whores and bandits, to encourage them in their professions; he will give it to Alcibiades, because the army that Alcibiades leads will, he thinks, bring Athens to ruin.

He was wrong in his trust of false friends; he is equally wrong in his total denunciation of human nature. We have evidence enough in the play that loyalty and compassion are to be found in Athenian society. Timon's Steward tries to preserve his master from the effects of his extravagance. When Timon is poor, the Steward seeks him out with no thought of reward but in the hope that somehow he may yet serve him. And the Steward is not alone in his loyalty and grief. In the latter half of the play there is one scene for which we return to Timon's house, and its separateness from the immediate dramatic context gives it a special emphasis. There we see the Steward along with others of Timon's servants, and they take farewell of each other, not merely regretting the 'better days' they knew when their lord was rich, but lamenting his fall as that of a man they knew and loved.

When Apemantus the cynic visits Timon in the woods, he claims that Timon has no right to rail on men because he ought to have seen what they were like even while they flattered him. And of course Apemantus is right in this. But he is wrong in the contempt he pours indiscriminately on all men's behaviour. There is worth and dignity in the servants, and there is a flawed but striving virtue in Alcibiades, the one among Timon's friend, who was not false to him. Before Timon's wealth was gone, Alcibiades had been banished by the Senate because he pleaded for the life of one of his followers who had killed in fair fight a man who had slandered him; when his petition was refused, Alcibiades in hot terms claimed that his own deserts should be remembered. This scene before the Senate comes into the play without preparation, and its suddenness is puzzling to a reader or spectator. But it displays the mixed nature of Alcibiades' character. He pleads eloquently for mercy, which the Senators on principle reject—thus damning themselves, for in the eyes of Shakespeare's contemporaries as well as in, surely, our own eyes, the obligation to accept mercy as a principle, and to apply it where it can be applied, is the keystone of the social fabric. Alcibiades is perhaps on more disputable ground when he refuses to distinguish between a valour shown in war and a valour privately exercised. He is manifestly in the wrong when, at the end of the scene, he plans rebellion out of personal spleen, and asserts the right of 'Soldiers' to 'brook as little wrongs as gods.' When we see him again, meeting Timon in the woods, he is on his way to Athens at the head of his rebel army. We learn that his soldiers are unruly, because he has not had the money to pay them. His following includes Timandra and Phrynia, whores whom Timon welcomes as instruments for human destruction. But Alcibiades, though he accepts Timon's gold to pay his soldiers, makes it evident that he will not destroy Athens as Timon thinks and hopes he will. 'I'll take the gold thou givest me, Not all thy counsel,' he says. And when he appears before the walls of Athens and the city yields to him, he proclaims his intention to punish only his and Timon's enemies. He promises, too, that there will be no sacking of the city, that his concern will be that the citizens shall join with each other in the task of rooting out the ills that have come upon all of them. Alcibiades is no simple embodiment of virtue; he is, for example, utterly unlike the Richmond who, at the end of Richard III, was in a simple way to bring good in place of evil. Rather, he is an imperfect man who yet at his best wants justice for Timon and good order and honour in Athens.

Alcibiades, in fact, is right to the best of his ability; Timon is wrong. Yet in Timon's rejection of mankind, in his refusal to return when once again he has gold, in his withdrawal from life (whether that is death through weariness of heart or plain suicide Shakespeare does not make clear), in his choice of a grave covered each day by the sea (so that finally he escapes from the earth where man lives and is nourished), there is in all this at least the virtue of totality. Alcibiades will, on the whole, do men good; Timon challenges them to contemplate his desertion. And in the play we do not enter the city with Alcibiades: our thoughts remain outside, along with that other imperfect man, who dreamt a dream of human brotherhood and could not live when the dream vanished.

It will be evident that in this play, as in Troilus and Cressida, there is no simple exposure of decadent Greeks. Timon's conduct is a challenge to us, as in the flawed heroism of Hector, the shallow love (but still love) of Cressida, the dark mania of Achilles. I have spoken mainly of the characters of these two plays, because they perhaps first of all make us aware of the dramatist's peculiar sharpness, and sharpness of compassion, in the Greek setting that here he chose. And it is impossible not to notice the structural boldness of both plays. But it is also evident that both Troilus and Timon are plays in which ideas are held up for scrutiny: in Troilus the idea that human reason and human prowess are without effect on the march of events, which in detail are affected only by passion and in the larger sense only by time; in Timon the idea that our social need is to support the imperfect Alcibiades, our personal need to recognize the force of Timon's rejection. The choice of a Greek theme gave to Shakespeare a special liberty: he could use Plutarch's Lives for the story of Alcibiades as he had used that book for the story of Coriolanus, the man whom Plutarch gave as his Roman parallel to Alcibiades; but in the Greek instance, Shakespeare departed almost wholly from his historical source: Plutarch's Alcibiades never led an army against Athens. And similarly the Greek setting gave him a freedom to speculate, to contemplate figures possessing authority—after all, the fact of being Greek gave a kind of authority, however suspect—yet caught up in the meshes of circumstance, the trammels of illusion and corruption.

I have spoken almost wholly of Troilus and Timon. There are oddities in all Shakespeare's Greek plays, including The Comedy of Errors, which we are seeing in Stratford. There Shakespeare transferred the scene from Plautus' Epidamnum to St. Paul's Ephesus, a setting appropriate for confusion, for the suspicion of magic, for a measure of fear. In this play he gives us a Duke of Ephesus who condemns Aegeon to death unless he can pay a thousand marks, regretting his inability to override the law, but who overrides the law with alacrity at the end of the play, when he refuses the payment offered by Aegeon's son. The Comedy of Errors was written at or near the beginning of Shakespeare's career, but, like the mature Troilus and Timon, it has a strangeness which Plautus knew nothing of. "Whose word can we trust?" is a question that is discreetly asked here. It is a merry comedy, Plautan but with special complications of its own. Shakespeare was perhaps puzzled by the notion of Greece and its citizens, but it seems he felt curiously free when he was in their company.