Chapter 4
Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne that sent him to Seneca, to whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we have here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the point of contact with Montaigne in HAMLET, where the saying that reason is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is more subtly and deeply developed in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and still more subtly and philosophically in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. The fact of the process of development is all that is here affirmed, over and above the actual phenomena of reproduction before set forth.
As to these, the proposition is that in sum they constitute such an amount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about habitual "stealings." There is no justification for applying that to the passage in the TEMPEST, since not only is that play not known to have existed in its present form in 1605,[100] when VOLPONE was produced, but the phrase plainly alleges not one but many borrowings. I am not aware that extracts from Montaigne have been traced in any others of the English contemporary dramatists. But here in two plays of Shakspere, then fresh in memory--the Second Quarto having been published in 1604 and MEASURE FOR MEASURE produced in the same year--were echoes enough from Montaigne to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have owned, as did Shakspere, the Florio folio, and to have been Florio's warm admirer. And there seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the fact that, while we find detached passages savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of the same period, as in one of the concluding period, the TEMPEST, we do not again find in any one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we have seen in HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE, though the spirit of Montaigne's thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may be said to tinge all the later tragedies.
(a) In OTHELLO (? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase--
"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me.... He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."
--a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in the Fortieth Essay.
(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--
"And take upon's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies;"
--which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays, THAT A MAN OUGHT SOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where Montaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of imposters the
"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incomprehensible motives of its works."
This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the argument of the APOLOGY is typified in the sentence:--
"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our proportions and conjectures to guess at God?"
(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a passage in the essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104] on the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference of the stars--which very superstition he was later to support by his own authority in the APOLOGY, as we have seen above, in the passage on the "power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Cæsar's sayings as to his star, and the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning his death a year.
"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least actions. 'There is no such society between heaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as mortal as we are.'"
There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this passage in Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:
"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on...."
(d) Again, in MACBETH (1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff[105]:
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak, Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"
--an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart"--recalls the essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which Montaigne remarks on the
"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us," and on the way in which "the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself"; going on to tell how the German Lord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground."
The parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that drawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:
Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent[107]--"Light troubles speak: the great ones are dumb."
Certainly no one of these latter passages would singly suffice to prove that Shakspere had read Montaigne, though the peculiar coincidence of one word in Edgar's speech with a word in Florio, above noted, would alone raise the question. But even had Shakspere not passed, as we shall see cause to acknowledge, beyond the most melancholy mood of Montaigne into one of far sterner and more stringent pessimism, an absence or infrequency of suggestions of Montaigne in the plays between 1605 and 1610 would be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe in VOLPONE. That gibe, indeed, is not really so ill-natured as the term "steal" is apt to make it sound for our ears, especially if we are prepossessed--as even Mr. Fleay still seems to be--by the old commentators' notion of a deep ill-will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. There was probably no such ill-will in the matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust banter being enough to account for the form of his remark. As a matter of fact, his own plays are strewn with classic transcriptions; and though he evidently plumed himself on his power of "invention"[108] in the matter of plots--a faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack--he cannot conceivably have meant to charge his rival with having committed any discreditable plagiarism in drawing upon Montaigne. At most he would mean to convey that borrowing from the English translation of Montaigne was an easy game as compared with his own scholar-like practice of translating from the Greek and Latin, and from out-of-the-way authors, too.
However that might be, the fact stands that Shakspere did about 1604 reproduce Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the reproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.
III.
But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne influence is unique or exceptional. Of the many literary influences which an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, was Montaigne's the only one which wrought deeply upon Shakspere's spirit, apart from those of his contemporary dramatists and the pre-existing plays, which were then models and points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere must have thought much and critically of the methods and the utterance of his co-rivals in literary art, as he did of the methods of his fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players in HAMLET was hardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet[109] which speaks of its author as
"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"
is one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110] that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:
"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"
has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here concerned with influences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example; and the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact comparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of Montaigne's Essays?
The matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even the Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As regards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research during two centuries; and of collations of parallel passages, apart from Montaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the dramatist's mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our own generation. As regards many of the parallel passages, the ground has been pretty well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship brought to bear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean school, as represented by Knight, did much to retard scientific conclusions on this as on other points.
Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical knowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further investigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;[113] and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as against the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W. Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's tragedies on Shakspere's. Unquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valuable research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its technique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we have seen, apparent echoes from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we have seen, Dr. Cunliffe suggests sources for some Shaksperean passages in the Senecan tragedies, he is doubtful as to whether they represent any direct study of Seneca by Shakspere.
"Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to Seneca," he writes, "is a question as difficult as it is interesting. As English tragedy advances, there grows up an accumulation of Senecan influence within the English drama, in addition to the original source, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the direct and the indirect influence of Seneca. In no case is the difficulty greater than in that of Shakspere. Of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Massinger, we can say with certainty that they read Seneca, and reproduced their readings in their tragedies; of Middleton and Heywood we can say with almost equal certainty that they give no sign of direct indebtedness to Seneca; and that they probably came only under the indirect influence, through the imitations of their predecessors and contemporaries. In the case of Shakspere we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Professor Baynes thinks it is probable that Shakspere read Seneca at school; and even if he did not, we may be sure that, at some period of his career, he would turn to the generally accepted model of classical tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."[114]
This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere's are but cases of citation of sentences likely to have grown proverbial; and the most notable of the others that have been cited by Dr. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes, points to Æschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red:"
certainly corresponds closely with that of Seneca's Hercules:[115]
"Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens, Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet Mæotis in me gelida transfundat mare, Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus, Haerebit altum facinus"
and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]
"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris, Mæotis undis pontico incumbens mari. Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater Tantum expiarit sceleris."
But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from Æschylus,[117] are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediæval. The phrases used were already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:
"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."[118]
In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published after, MACBETH[120]:--
"Although the waves of all the Northern sea Should flow for ever through those guilty hands, Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"
--a sad foil to Shakspere's
"The multitudinous seas incarnadine."
It is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe. Shakspere's
"Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all,"[121]
which he compares with Seneca's
"Et ferrum et ignis sæpe medicinæ loco est. Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"[122]
--a passage that may very well be the original for the modern oracle about fire and iron--is really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates, that "Extreme remedies are proper for extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated by Florio:
"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."
Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's
"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, "Litteræ, syllabæ, dictio et oratio, partes propinquæ et remotæ," 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: