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The Homeric Wars through Shakespeare

My topic is a part of a larger work in progress on war, chivalry and accountability in Shakespeare, a study of the canon in light of Shakespeare's historical and literary sources and contemporaneous normative principles. I am thus primarily interested in identifying the literary reflections of early humanitarian law. My object is to examine how two great works of literature, composed some twenty-three centuries apart, address the humanitarian principles or norms of chivalry supposedly practiced in the Trojan Wars. These wars, certainly established legend and probably fact, are estimated to have taken place between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries B.C. The Iliad and Troilus and Cressida, written by Homer and Shakespeare, respectively, address important normative issues of chivalry in the Trojan Wars. Chivalric or humanitarian values certainly play a lesser role in the Iliad than in Shakespeare, but there are some normative standards nonetheless. For both authors, the oath and its sanctity provide the basis of the normative system. Homer's Iliad, probably written down in the eighth century B.C. at the latest, is a poem of 15,693 lines, divided into 24 books, and was originally an oral composition. Shakespeare may have read the Iliad in English in George Chapman's partial translation that appeared in 1598. He also learned the story of the Trojan Wars through important secondary sources, such as William Caxton, John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer, which influenced his play, Troilus and Cressida (1601-1602). Part chronicle and part epic poem, the Iliad is a story about a few weeks of nearly constant fighting during the tenth year of the siege of Troy. Episodes of courage, honor and occasionally even mercy are almost submerged in the sheer horror of war. Akhough the Iliad primarily describes a mass of people slaughtering each other, there are also scenes of single combat, champions and challenges, somewhat similar to the armed encounters between knights in the Middle Ages, including some that were intended to determine the victor and put an end to a bloody war. Although chivalry was a concept of the Middle Ages and was closely linked to the Catholic Church, Shakespeare also drew chivalric principles from mythology and