What cause, in want of time or other inconvenience, left this uncultivated play to be ascribed to Shakspeare is past conjecture. In many respects it is like the modern burlesque, and may be regarded as a remote ancestor of the rollicking English fun which brings out the latent absurdities in ancient and mediæval chivalry. There is, for instance, a play called "The Field of the Cloth of Gold," which makes ridiculous the pomp of the courts of Kings Henry VIII. and Francis I., and represents the famous tournament as a tilt upon hobby-horses ending in a milling match with bottle-holders and all the pugilistic cant. There are plenty of blond women who appear to be out of employment at present on purpose to lend a zest to this drollery, and everybody seems to welcome with democratic delight the slur upon obsolete solemnities, and the insinuation that the surviving ones are no more imposing. With all the devices of the modern theatre, such a play manages to be vastly more ludicrous than Troilus and Cressida, but it does not start with such a cutting motive, and it is in the matter of morality simply neutral. But the play attributed to Shakspeare is one prolonged assault upon the foibles and indecencies of greatness, upon the trivial pretexts that mar and vulgarize an epoch of heroism. The period of the Trojan war is borrowed, and the characters of Homer's Iliad, to throw into a salient light what was after all the real occasion of the famous siege. Paris went to Greece, as Troilus says,--
"And, for an old aunt, whom the Greeks held captive, He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness Wrinkles Apollo's, and makes pale the morning. Why keep we her? The Grecians keep our aunt. Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl, Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants."
Several scholars dissatisfied with this reputed motive of the siege, and of Homer's Iliad, take refuge in a theory of light-worship, and of a conflict between the Orient and the Occident, the Dawn and the Dark, such as no doubt underlies many of the ancient myths whose names bear allusion to such phenomena. These commentators torture the names and incidents of the Iliad to clear it of the stigma of having no motive-power beyond the stealing of a light wife, and a re-delivery of her to a complacent husband who makes no inquiries. Ten years of siege and battle, of domestic broil and murder, of Odyssean adventures by sea and land, that Helen may be transferred, warm from the arms of Priam, back to the condoning embrace of Menelaus! Truly, when the ugly thing stands thus stripped of its Homeric mantle, we hurry to demand that it shall be decently clothed in travesty.