[83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of similar drift in the anonymous play of Edward III. ("To die is all as common as to live" etc., Act iv., sc. 4) it will be seen that the querying form as well as the elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne

[84] APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE.

[85] ii, 6, Of Exercise or Practice.

[86] Apology.

[87] Ibid., near end.

[88] On Isis and Osiris, c. 26.

[89] Canto v.

[90] Canto xxxii.

[91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends that the mediaeval Inferno was built up. The torture of cold was the northern contribution to the scheme. Compare Warton, History of English Poetry, sec. 49, and Wright's Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 1844, p. 18.

[92] Paradise Lost, B. II, 587-603.

[93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.

[94] Ibid. p. 621.

[95] Act iv, sc. 5.

[96] iii, 3.

[97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. Cf. vi, 2, 3.

[98] B. v, cc. 22-25.

[99] ii, 32.

[100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his Essays on Shakspere (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the Tempest was written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's Darius must have been written immediately after the publication of that work. The argument is (1) that Shakspere must have seen Darius when it came out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or never.

[101] Act v, sc. 3.

[102] i, 31.

[103] ii, 13.

[104] Act i, sc. 2.

[105] Act iv, sc. 3.

[106] i, 2.

[107] Hippolytus, 615 (607).

[108] See the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour, first ed., preserved by Gifford.

[109] The 29th.

[110] See his Characteristics of English Poets, 2nd. ed. p. 222.

[111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove Shakspere classically learned is that made in the Critital Observations on Shakspere (1746) of the Rev. John Upton, a man of great erudition and much random acuteness (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax are peculiarly unconvincing.

[112] It may not be out of place here to say a word for Farmer in passing, as against the strictures of M. Stapfer, who, after recognising the general pertinence of his remarks, proceeds to say (Shakspere and Classical Antiquity, Eng. trans, p. 83) that Farmer "fell into the egregious folly of speaking in a strain of impertinent conceit: it is as if the little man for little he must assuredly have been—was eaten up with vanity." This is in its way as unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against, not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative—and in the preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote: "Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him above all other men."

[113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.

[114] The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 66-67.

[115] Hercules Furens, ad fin. (1324-1329.).

[116] Hippolytus, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)

[117] Choephori, 63-65.

[118] Carm. lxxxviii, In Gellium. See the note in Doering's edition.

[119] Gerusalemme, xviii, 8.

[120] The Insatiate Countess, published in 1613.

[121] Hamlet, Act iv, sc. 3.

[122] Agamemnon, 152-153.

[123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)

[124] Hercules Furens, Act. V. 1261-2.

[125] Act iv, Sc. 3.

[126] Hercules Furens, 1258-61.

[127] Macbeth, Act v, Sc. 2.

[128] Ibid. Act iv, Sc. 2.

[129] Ibid. Act i, sc. 7.

[130] B. ii, ch. 10.

[131] Tschischwitz, Shakspere-Forschungen, i. 1868, S. 52.

[132] "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie enthaelt so masslose Obscoenitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen staerksten Stellen daneben fast jungfraeulich erscheint" (Work cited, S. 52).

[133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's translation, so far as syntax permits.

[134] Act i, Sc. 4.

[135] Work cited, Sc. 59.

[136] See Frith's Life of Giordano Bruno, 1889, pp. 121-128.

[137] Act v. Sc. 1.

[138] Cited by Noack, art. Bruno, in Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon.

[139] Act i, Sc. 2.

[140] Work cited, p. 90.

[141] It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr. Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakspere, even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President of the New York Shakspere Society, entitled Shakspere in Fact and Criticism (New York, 1888), is certainly not open to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially rationalistic attitude is indicated in a sentence of his preface: "My own idea has been that William Shakspere was a man of like passions with ourselves, whose moods and veins were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings, employments, vocations ... and that, great as he was, and oceanic as was his genius, we can read him all the better because he was, after all, a man...." In recognising the good sense of Mr. Morgan's general attitude, I must not be understood to endorse his rejection of the "metrical tests" of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to be about the most important English contribution to the scientific comprehension of Shakspere. On the other hand, it may be said that the naturalistic conception of Shakspere as an organism in an environment was first closely approached in the present century by French critics, as Guizot and Chasles (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted by Green, having been founded on a study by Chasles); that the naturalistic comprehension of Hamlet, as an incoherent whole resulting from the putting of new cloth into an old garment, was first reached by the German Ruemelin (Shakspere Studien); and that the structural anomalies of Hamlet as an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix (Die Shakspereomanie) these two critics thus making amends for much vain discussion of Hamlet by their countrymen before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America. The admirable work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in the analysis of the text and the revelation of its non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make little impression on English culture; while such a luminous manual as Mr. Barrett Wendell's William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook and appreciation, points to decided progress in rational Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the Shakspere Primer of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently scientific throughout.

[142] Life of Shakspere, 1886, p. 128.

[143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's Shakspere's Venus and Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect.

[144] Professor Dowden notes in his Shakspere Primer (p. 12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe, the theatrical lessee, vary from L4 to L8, and not till later did it rise as high as L20 for a play by a popular dramatist.

[145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;—

But thou art all my art, and dost advance As high as learning my rude ignorance.

[146] Life of Shakspere, pp. 29, 128.

[147] See it in his Life of Shakspere, pp. 120-124. Mr. Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best "documented" of all, has received little attention in comparison with Mr. Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.

[148] Only in Chaucer (e.g., The Book of the Duchess) do we find before his time the successful expression of the same perception; and Chaucer counted for almost nothing in Elizabethan letters.

[149] See Fleay's Life of Shakspere, pp. 130-1.

[150] Cp. the Essays, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol. ii, pp. 40, 231.)

[151] Essays, i, 25; cf. i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i, pp. 304, 429.)

[152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)

[153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)

[154] Pensees Diverses. Less satisfying is the further pensee in the same collection:—"Les quatre grand poetes, Platon, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Montaigne."

[155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.

[156] Port Royal, 4ieme edit., ii. 400, note.

[157] B. iii, Chap. 13.

[158] "In the midst of our compassion, we feel within I know not what bitter sweet touch of malign pleasure in seeing others suffer." (Comp. La Rochefoucauld, Pensee 104.)

[159] B. iii, Chap. 1.

[160] i, Chap. 38.

[161] L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle, p. 133.

[162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.

[163] Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's [sic throughout book] gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne, von G. F. Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.

[164] B. i, Chap. 26.

[165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra; and there was probably an intermediate drama.

[166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.

[167] Oxford Essays, p. 279. Sterling, from his Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne that "All that we find in him of Christianity would be suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral beings" (London and Westminster Review, July, 1838, p. 340.)

[168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.

[169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the Cornhill Magazine, August, 1880.

[170] Art. cited, end.

[171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to Leopold Shakspere p. lxxxvii.

[172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion goes no further.

[173] See the passage cited above in section iii in connection with Measure for Measure.

[174] Act iv, Sc. 2.

[175] Act i, Sc. 2.

[176] B. i, Chap. 20.

[177] B. i, Chap. 30.

[178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.

[179] Ibid., pp. 477-478.

[180] Here, it may be said, there is a trace of the influence of Bruno's philosophy; and it may well be that Shakspere did not spontaneously strike out the thought for himself. But I am not aware that any parallel passage has been cited.

[181] Fleay's Life, pp. 138, &c.

[182] B. i, Chap. 42.

[183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)

[184] Midsummer Nights Dream, Act ii. Sc. 2.

[185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden

[186] Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakspere, 5th ed., p. 175.

[187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless difficulty on this head. In his Shakspere in Fact and Criticism, already cited, he writes (p. 316): "I find him ... living and dying so utterly unsuspicious that he had done anything of which his children might care to hear, that he never even troubled himself to preserve the manuscript of or the literary property in a single one of the plays which had raised him to affluence." As I have already pointed out, there is no reason to suppose that Shakspere could retain the ownership of his plays any more than did the other writers who supplied his theatre. They belonged to the partnership. Besides, he could not possibly have published as his the existing mass, so largely made up of other men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after his death, being simply bent on making money.

[188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.

[189] B. ii, Chap. 10.

[190] B. i, Chap. 38.

[191] This may be presumed to have been written between 1603 and 1609, the date of the publication of the Sonnets. As Mr. Minto argues, "the only sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, containing the reference to the death of Elizabeth" (Characteristics, as cited, p. 220). As the first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take those remaining as of later date.

[192] It more particularly echoes, however, two passages in the nineteenth essay: "There is no evil in life for him that hath well conceived, how the privation of life is no evil. To know how to die, doth free us from all subjection and constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I shall do. The deadest deaths are the best"

[193] ii, 12.

[194] iii, 11.

[195] iii, 4.

[196] In all probability this character existed in the previous play, the name being originally, as was suggested last century by Dr. Farmer, a mere variant of "Canibal."

[197] iii, 4.

[198] Act ii, Sc. 2.

[199] iii, 9.



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