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This chapter describes how the word ‘epic’ spread from its early usages in sixteenth-century Cambridge to influence London poets and dramatists around Shakespeare. The word was associated with the highest of the three ‘characters’ of style, and by William Scott (in his recently discovered treatise The Model of Poesie, 1599) with the differentiation of particular speaking voices, or ‘characters’ in the modern sense. The chapter shows how arguments about ‘epic’ in the period cast light on Shakespeare’s allusions to the Aeneid in general and on the language of Troilus and Cressida in particular. This is an ‘epic’ drama in that it is pitched rhetorically between grandeur and excess, but also because it extends the rhetorical characters of style into a characterization of individual spoken voices. Shakespeare’s conception of ‘epic’ was a fully theatrical one, in which different characters manifest different, and often deviant, versions of the epic character of style.
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