"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
and the sentence of Hercules:
"Nemo polluto queat
Animo mederi."[124]
Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and in THE TWO
NOBLE KINSMEN (in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we
have the doctor protesting: "I think she has a perturbed mind, which I
cannot minister to."[125]
And so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules' cry:
"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,
Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,
Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,
Etiam furorem."[126]
and Macbeth's:
"I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have."[127]
Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the
versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a
lament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct
reproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again
only perfecting some previous declamation.
There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:
"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To that they were before;"[128]
and
"We but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor."[129]
--which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere's hand than
Seneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above
considered, there was really little or nothing in the tragedies of
Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a
deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of
reflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding
intellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed
have drawn from one or two of Seneca's treatises, which do, in their
desperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual
ground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests
alike of quantity and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the
indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere
was slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. Nor
is it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at
hand in translation. Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as
compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne
says of the latter, that "his manner of writing seemeth very tedious."
Over the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as
the essayist does[130] over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what
death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise
them." For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either
goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of
feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and
even to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious
examination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman's lantern,
leaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. Under no
stress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a
man of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages.
It is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between
fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man
of genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for
stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in
Shakspere's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.
Even before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation
about dismissing the only other outstanding theory of a special
intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere--the theory of Dr. Benno
Tschischwitz, that he read and was impressed by the Italian writings of
Giordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the hypothesis are of the
scantiest and the flimsiest. Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586,
before Shakspere came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and
Leicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings
only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence
with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In
Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio,
"Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae,
syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio
again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] So far
as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius's question to
Hamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet's answer, "Words, words." But the
scene is obviously a stock situation; and if there are any passages in
HAMLET which clearly belong to the pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of
Hamlet with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's
parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put
themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy
recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] but he goes on to find
analogies between other passages in HAMLET and some of Bruno's
philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's theorem that all things are made
up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.
Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:
"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"
It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite
impossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to
be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet's
figure of the melting of flesh into dew is an illustration of Bruno's
"atomic system," and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in
Hamlet's jeering answers to the king's demand for the body of Polonius.
Of these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he
translates from Bruno's CENA DE LE CENERI:--
"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death
and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all
nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by
a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts,
rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily
taking place in a determinate series, under which everything
assumes the place of another."[133]
In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which anticipates so
remarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe,
"elucidates" Hamlet's talk about worms and bodies, and his further
sketch of the progress of Alexander's dust to the plugging of a
beer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest
supererogation. The passages cited from HAMLET, all of them found in the
First Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than
Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of
the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case
approaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on
the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind," in the TEMPEST, is an
expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an
endless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would
naturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is
merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr.
Tschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the
other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of
drunkenness,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence
in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of
drunken practices.[135] Yet again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, "Sol
et homo generant hominem," beside Hamlet's gibe about the sun breeding
maggots in a dead dog--a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period.
That the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself
indirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of
affirmation:
"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,
or that Shakspere otherwise went any deeper into Bruno's
system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show
Shakspere, at the time of his writing of HAMLET, to have
already reached the heights of the thought of the age
(Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with
the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost
unintelligible passages in HAMLET are now cleared up by the
poet's acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the
writings of the Nolan."
All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German
Shakspere-criticism of the days before Ruemelin. It is quite possible
that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his
friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have
profoundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at Oxford on the
immortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the
subject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore
concerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from
Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the
verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the
poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in Bruno
as this:--
"The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the
phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration
that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or
is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine
breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit
expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other
principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense
painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the
painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and
philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There
is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore
is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive
the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or
is nothing without it."[138]
But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which he would
have been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known
it, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much
less read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his
work and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to
passages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of
these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere
got his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous passage in
HENRY V.,[139] in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely
framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato's
REPUBLIC and Cicero's DE REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide
with M. Stapfer[140] that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but
got his suggestion from some English translation or citation.
In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere,
as well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general
as a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of
others; and among the books in his own language which we know him to
have read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back
to Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most important and the most
potential for suggestion and provocation.