Troilus and Cressida is loaded with some heavy language that can be daunting to unravel. It would seem that sometimes editors of the plays go too far in trying to pick out the “perfect” emendation when a certain reading of a line doesn’t strike their fancy. It can be very annoying when you’re reading a seemingly well-edited version of a play and then all-of-a-sudden there is an editorial choice that is so out of left field you wonder how the editor came up with it. Such an instance is what I experienced with Kenneth Muir’s Troilus and Cressida from The Oxford Shakespeare. It comes from one of Nestor’s speeches from Act I Scene iii. The full sentence reads thus:
“For in her ray and brightness the herd hath more annoyance by the breese than by the tiger; but when the splitting wind makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks and flies flee under shade, why then the thing of courage, as roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize, and with an accent tuned in selfsame key ‘rechides’ to chiding fortune.”
That word ‘rechides’ seems so bizarre. Never seen that word in print anywhere nor heard it spoken, and to top it off the reading in both the quarto and the folio makes perfect sense; the word used there is ‘retires’. I love the original word ‘retires’ for this passage because it is cohesive with the language of the passage. “As roused with rage with rage doth sympathize” balances perfectly with “retires to chiding fortune”. “Roused with rage” and “retires” are almost perfect opposites, and bringing together opposites is a universal poetic device that Shakespeare can’t get enough of. The word “rechides” doesn’t even sound remotely like a word; it almost sounds ridiculous. Kenneth Muir, the editor of this edition of Troilus and Cressida, was adopting an emendation that went too far in the imagination department. I do see how the passage “rechides to chiding fortune” might appear poetic in a vacuum with the repetition of ‘chide’, however, inventing an otherwise erroneous word, that makes little sense on behalf of the great Shakespeare himself, when both sources published fourteen years apart make perfect sense (Quarto 1609, Folio 1623), appears painfully sophomoric. Please! Editors of Shakespeare: I beg of you: don’t try too hard! The passage is beautiful:
“For in her ray and brightness the herd hath more annoyance by the breese than by the tiger; but when the splitting wind makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks and flies flee under shade, why then the thing of courage, as roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize, and with an accent tuned in selfsame key retires to chiding fortune.”
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