Troilus and Cressida 5 of 9

Troilus and Cressida 5 of 9

THE BACONIAN ARGUMENTS

Point 1

It would not have been economic for a professional author to write a play solely for performance at an Inn of Court, for the reasons we’ve also made when making the same point in relation to The Comedy Of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost  (see posts in the “Baconian Misc. forum”). Indeed the point has even more force here because Troilus And Cressida is a long play and a great deal of thought has obviously gone into it. The Arden editor, showing some awareness of this difficulty, comments at p. 309: “Such a play must have been written with the expectation that it would serve subsequently (perhaps slightly cut) at the Globe”. But could there have been this expectation if the play was unsuitable for the public Theatre? Though it was first entered in the S.R. in 1603, we know from the Epistle of 1609 that it had not been publicly performed by then. Surely it would have been in those 6 years, if considered suitable for the public stage.

Point 2

Quite apart from the economic consideration, it seems to have been a tradition of Gray’s Inn to write its own plays – (this was mentioned in the post on The Comedy of Errors, but the lengthy and detailed evidence has not been presented here, at least not yet). So if Troilus and Cressida was performed at that Inn, that fact by itself would cast grave doubt on whether Shakspere can be the author.