maintiendrai que la querelle du rois est plus juste que celle de la ligue, et que ma Maitresse est plus belle que la votre." And AEneas, the Trojan, brings a challenge in almost identical words from Hector to the Greeks. It is true that this incident is in the Iliad together with the incidents connected with the withdrawal of Achilles, but Shakespeare selected his material from many sources and appears to have chosen what was most likely to appeal to his audience. Now it is not presumed that Achilles is Essex, nor that Ajax is Raleigh, nor Agamemnon Elizabeth, or that Shakespeare's audience for a moment supposed that they were; although it is to be noticed that the Achilles who comes into Shakespeare's play is not the same man at the beginning and end of the play as he is in the third act, where, in conversation with Ulysses he suddenly becomes an intelligent being and not simply a prize-fighter. To the injury of his drama, Shakespeare here runs away from his Trojan story, and does so for reasons that must have been special to the occasion for which the play was written. For about this time, the Privy Council wrote to some Justices of the Peace in Middlesex, complaining that certain players at the Curtain were reported to be representing upon the stage "the persons of some gentlemen of good descent and quality that are yet alive," and that the actors were impersonating these aristocrats "under obscure manner, but yet in such sorte as all the hearers may take notice of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby. This being a thing very unfit and offensive." The protest seems almost to suggest that the Achilles's scenes in Shakespeare's play express, "under obscure manner," reflections upon contemporary politicians. But, indeed, the growing political unrest which marked the last few years of Elizabeth's reign could not fail to find expression on the stage.