ons, improved those characters which were begun and
left unfinished, as Hector, Troilus, Pandarus, and Thersites, and
added that of Andromache. After this, I made, with no small trouble,
an order and connection of all the scenes; removing them from the
places where they were inartificially set; and, though it was
impossible to keep them all unbroken, because the scene must be
sometimes in the city and sometimes in the camp, yet I have so ordered
them, that there is a coherence of them with one another, and a
dependence on the main design; no leaping from Troy to the Grecian
tents, and thence back again, in the same act, but a due proportion of
time allowed for every motion. I need not say that I have refined his
language, which before was obsolete; but I am willing to acknowledge,
that as I have often drawn his English nearer to our times, so I have
sometimes conformed my own to his; and consequently, the language is
not altogether so pure as it is significant. The scenes of Pandarus
and Cressida, of Troilus and Pandarus, of Andromache with Hector and
the Trojans, in the second act, are wholly new; together with that of
Nestor and Ulysses with Thersites, and that of Thersites with Ajax and
Achilles. I will not weary my reader with the scenes which are added
of Pandarus and the lovers, in the third, and those of Thersites,
which are wholly altered; but I cannot omit the last scene in it,
which is almost half the act, betwixt Troilus and Hector. The occasion
of raising it was hinted to me by Mr Betterton; the contrivance and
working of it was my own. They who think to do me an injury, by
saying, that it is an imitation of the scene betwixt Brutus and
Cassius, do me an honour, by supposing I could imitate the
incomparable Shakespeare; but let me add, that if Shakespeare's scene,
or that faulty copy of it in "Amintor and Melantius," had never been,
yet Euripides had furnished me with an excellent example in his
"Iphigenia," between Agamemnon and Menelaus; and from thence, indeed,
the last turn of it is borrowed. The occasion which Shakespeare,
Euripides, and Fletcher, have all taken, is the same,--grounded upon
friendship; and the quarrel of two virtuous men, raised by natural
degrees to the extremity of passion, is conducted in all three, to the
declination of the same passion, and concludes with a warm renewing of
their friendship. But the particular ground-work which Shakespeare has
taken, is incomparably the best; becau