“Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,”
may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (_Trinummus_, iv.
3). Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there were a
well-known reflection from experience it is this of the borrowers and
lenders.
Next, take this of Plautus (_Pseudolus_, I, iv. 7–10), “But just as the
poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among
men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere fiction.”
We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus’s theory of the
origin of the belief in fairies:
“And as imagination bodies forth
The _forms_ of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to _shapes_, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth _forms_, and the poet’s
pen turns them to _shapes_. But to suppose that Shakespeare here
borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.
These are samples of Mr. Collins’s methods throughout.
Of Terence there were translations—first in part; later, in 1598, of the
whole. Of Seneca there was an English version (1581). Mr. Collins
labours to show that one passage “almost certainly” implies Shakespeare’s
use of the Latin; but it was used “by an inexact scholar,”—a terribly
inexact scholar, if he thought that “_alienus_” (“what belongs to
another”) meant “slippery”!
Most of the passages are from plays (_Titus Andronicus_ and _Henry VI_,
i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually) to _his_ author, the
Great Unknown. Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes
Shakespeare’s to resemble Seneca’s _Latin_ style: Shakespeare, then, took
up Greek tragedy in later life; after the early period when he dealt with
Seneca. Here is a sample of borrowing from Horace, “_Persicos odi puer
apparatus_” (_Odes_. I, xxxviii. I). Mr. Collins quotes _Lear_ (III, vi.
85) thus, “You will say they are _Persian attire_.” Really, Lear in his
wild way says to Edgar, “I do not like the fashion of your garments: you
will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.” Mr. Collins changes
this into “you will say they are _Persian attire_,” a phrase “which could
only have occurred to a classical scholar.” The phrase is not in
Shakespeare, and Lear’s wandering mind might as easily select “Persian”
as any other absurdity.
So it is throughout. Two great poets write on the fear of death, on the
cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination in nature,
on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified by
poetry,—and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius or
Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study the
Latin passages which he does not quote. So arbitrary is taste in these
matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently, finds
Shakespeare putting a thought from the _Alcibiades I_ of Plato into the
mouth of Achilles in _Troilus and Cressida_, while Mr. J. M. Robertson
suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca—where Mr. Collins does not
find “the smallest parallel.” Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author
of _Troilus_ makes Ulysses quote Plato as “the author” of a remark, and
makes Achilles take up the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.
Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by the
Achæans!
There were Latin translations of Plato; the _Alcibiades I_ was published
apart, from Ficinus’ version, in 1560, with the sub-title, _Concerning
the Nature of Man_. Who had read it?—Shakespeare, or one of the two
authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another _Troilus and Cressida_ (now
lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown? Which of these Platonists
chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long before Homer? Which of
them followed the Ionic and mediæval anti-Achæan view of Homer’s heroes,
as given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book
VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? _Troilus
and Cressida_ is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read
Ficinus’ version of the _Alcibiades_; {75a} and yet made the monstrous
anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. “That
was his fun,” as Charles Lamb said in another connection.
Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the “small Latin” with
which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare. He could read Latin,
Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French—that is,
as easily as he reads English. Still further, Shakespeare, through Latin
translations, was so saturated with the Greek drama “that the
characteristics which differentiate his work from the work of his
contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists
are actually attributable to these dramatists.”
Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as far
as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much
acquaintance with Euripides, Æschylus, Sophocles, and do not often remind
us of these masters. Shakespeare does remind us of them—the only
question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession of a genius
akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all the
treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling up
through the wells of Avon?
But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, _cannot_ be demonstrated)
that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins by
saying that he will not bottom his case “on the ground of parallels in
sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely
to be” (fortuitous) “coincidences.” Three pages of such parallels, all
from Sophocles, therefore follow. “Curiously close similarities of
expression” are also barred. Four pages of examples therefore follow,
from Sophocles and Æschylus, plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer
too (once!). Again, “identities of sentiment under similar
circumstances” are not to be cited; two pages _are_ cited; and
“similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,”
cannot safely be used; several pages of them follow.
Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the _Aias_ of Sophocles, and
tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from _Titus Andronicus_,
which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-Shakespearean, or not by his
unknown great author. _Troilus and Cressida_, whatever part Shakespeare
may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author or authors knew of
Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first translated by
Chapman and published in 1598. But he or they did know the _Aias_ of
Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did the author of _Romeo and
Juliet_.
Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks are,
Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew the
Greek tragedians. “We have obviously to be on our guard” {77a} against
three kinds of such parallels, which “may be mere coincidences,” {77b}
fortuitous coincidences. But these coincidences against which “we must
be on our guard” fill sixteen pages (pp. 46–63). These pages must
necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading the
reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately as Mr.
Collins did. Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels to
readers of Mr. Collins’s essay. Indeed, what more can we do? Who would
read through a criticism of each instance? Two or three may be given.
The Queen in _Hamlet_ reminds that prince, grieving for his father’s
death, that “all that live must die”:
“That loss is common to the race,
And common is the common-place.”
The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,—and here is a
parallel! Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious
expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof. Greece
agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that it
is not lucky to be “a corby messenger” of bad news; or that all goes ill
when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from
the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a
righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to
Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that, having lost
a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,—and so on as long
as you please. Of such wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and
Europeans have many parallel proverbs. _Vestigia nulla retrorsum_ is as
well known to Bushmen as to Latinists. Manifestly nothing in this kind
proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was saturated in Greek
tragedy. But page on page of such facts as that both Shakespeare and
Sophocles talk, one of “the belly-pinched wolf,” the other of “the
empty-bellied wolf,” are apt to impress the reader—and verily both
Shakespeare and Æschylus talk of “the heart dancing for joy.” Mr.
Collins repeats that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling
them up. It was a theory of Shakespeare’s time that the apparent ghost
of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil. Hamlet
knows this—
“The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”
Orestes (_Electra_, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging
dæmon (_alastor_) in the shape of a god, that bids him avenge his father.
Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any
contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?
A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in
_Romeo and Juliet_, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her
bridegroom. Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology—
“For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”
One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels. But
confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that
Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.
To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such
commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their
latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own
names.
The situations, in _Hamlet_ and the _Choephoræ_ and _Electra_, are so
close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr.
Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all:
the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of
Agamemnon.
Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between
Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and
_Beowulf_ and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not
students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the
Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous
and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred
to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no student of Irish and
Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early
Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek. The curious may
consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s _The Heroic Age_ (1912), especially Chapter
XV, “The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and
to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.
But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers of his
most interesting _Studies in Shakespeare_. To me, Hamlet’s soliloquy on
death resembles a fragment from the _Phœnix_ of Euripides no more closely
than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that “of death we
know nothing” are bound to do,—though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the
richer. For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians
die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean
Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins
proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But
of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats,
who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of
Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric,
though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet’s lines on
old age, _sine amore jocisque_, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a
thing as congruity of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis—not his
own—“that _by a certain natural affinity_ Shakespeare caught also the
accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of
Greek tragedy.”
Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of Greek
parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by congruity of genius,
Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.
One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed from Greek
poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew it; and
remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary tenacity of
memory.
Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor. The author, on
Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent
student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its fragments.
The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon’s works, that
he was such a student.
Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case. If his
proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well
as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so learned, the
actor was not the author, in my opinion—he _was_, in the opinion of Mr.
Collins.
If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus meet, it is
because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with “the poet’s
sad lucidity” the same “pageant of men’s miseries.” But how dissimilar
in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the
austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels.
Polynices, in the _Phœnissæ_ of Euripides (504–506), exclaims:
“To the stars’ risings, and the sun’s I’d go,
And dive ’neath earth,—if I could do this thing,—
Possess Heaven’s highest boon of sovereignty.”
Then compare Hotspur:
“By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.”
What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur’s mind! Is
Shakespeare thinking of the _Phœnissæ_, or is he speaking only on the
promptings of his genius?
V
SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY
A PHRASE has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare’s
work, namely, “congruity of genius,” which is apt to be resented by
Baconians. Perhaps they have a right to resent it, for “genius” is hard
to define, and genius is invoked by some wild wits to explain feats of
Shakespeare’s which (to Baconians) appear “miracles.” A “miracle” also
is notoriously hard to define; but we may take it (“under all reserves”)
to stand for the occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action
which, to the speaker who applies the word “miracle,” seems “impossible.”
The speaker therefore says, “The event is impossible; miracles do not
happen: therefore the reported event never occurred. The alleged
performance, the writing of the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a
miracle, therefore was done by some person or persons other than the
actor.” This idea of the _impossibility_ of the player’s authorship is
the foundation of the Baconian edifice.
I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood’s view
of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere. If Will were
what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will’s authorship of the plays
seems to me, “humanly speaking,” impossible. But then Mr. Greenwood
appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance that Will _may_
have been, not merely “a sharp boy” but a boy of great parts; and not
without a love of stories and poetry: a passion which, in a bookless
region, could only be gratified through folk-song, folk-tale, and such
easy Latin as he might take the trouble to read. If we add to these very
unusual but not wholly impossible tastes and abilities, that Will _may_
have been a lad of genius, there is no more “miracle” in his case than in
other supreme examples of genius. “But genius cannot work miracles,
cannot do what is impossible.” Do what is impossible to whom? To the
critics, the men of common sense.
Alas, all this way of talking about “miracles,” and “the impossible,” and
“genius” is quite vague and popular. What do we mean by “genius”? The
Latin term originally designates, not a man’s everyday intellect, but a
spirit from without which inspires him, like the “Dæmon,” or, in Latin,
“Genius” of Socrates, or the _lutin_ which rode the pen of Molière.
“Genius” is claimed for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford
monument, erected at latest some six years after his death. Following
this path of thought we come to “inspiration”: the notion of it, as
familiar to Australian savages as to any modern minds, is that, to the
poet, what he produces is _given_ by some power greater than himself, by
the _Boilyas_ (spirits) or Pundjel, the Father of all. This palæolithic
psychology, of course, is now quite discredited, yet the term “genius” is
still (perhaps superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose
intellectual faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals, and who
do marvels with means apparently inadequate.
In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put—in place
of the Muses or the _Boilyas_, or the Genius—what they call the
“Subliminal Self,” something “far more deeply interfused than the
everyday intellect.” This subconscious self, capable of far more than
the conscious intelligence, is genius.
On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher
in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect
which, for example, pens this page.
Thus as soon as we begin to speak of “genius,” we are involved in
speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical; in
difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by
physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical
research, or by the study of heredity. When I speak of “the genius of
Shakespeare,” of Jeanne d’Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly
have a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood,
when he uses the term “genius”; so we are apt to misunderstand each
other. Yet we all glibly use the term “genius,” without definition and
without discussion.
At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against “that fool of a word,” as
Napoleon said, “impossible.” At once, on either side, we assume that we
know what is possible and what is impossible,—and so pretend to
omniscience.
Thus some “Stratfordians,” or defenders of the actor’s authorship,
profess to know—from all the signed work of Bacon, and from all that has
reached us about Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, from 1590 to
1605—that the theory of Bacon’s authorship of the plays is “impossible.”
I, however, do not profess this omniscience.
On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that _he_ knows, or
thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor’s education, conditions of
life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of the actor is
“impossible.”
Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more
about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life,
than we know about the actor; while about “the potentialities of genius,”
we know—very little.
Thus, with all Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, he had, the
Baconians will allow, _genius_. By the miracle of genius he _may_ have
found time and developed inclination, to begin by furbishing up older
plays for a company of actors: he did it extremely well, but what a
quaint taste for a courtier and scholar! The eccentricities of genius
_may_ account for his choice of a “_nom de plume_,” which, if he desired
concealment, was the last that was likely to serve his turn. He may also
have divined all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom,
conceivably, he did not much frequent.
I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written _Hamlet_ “if
he had the mind,” as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth. Not at all; I am
the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too had
genius in that amazing degree which, in _Henry V_, the Bishop of Ely and
the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss in the case of the
young king. In this passage we perceive that the poet had brooded over
and been puzzled by the “miracle” (he uses the word) of genius. Says
Canterbury speaking of the Prince’s wild youth,
“Never was such a sudden scholar made.”
One Baconian objection to Shakespeare’s authorship is that during his
early years in London (say 1587–92) he was “such a sudden scholar made”
in various things.