Chapter 4

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well. I read it in the grammar long ago.

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes and Nathaniel in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably due to some elementary phrase-book no longer to be identified. It is to be noted how prominently this early comedy figures in the list of evidences of his school-day memories.

Among the first pieces of connected Latin prose read in the Elizabethan schools was _Æsop's Fables_, a collection which, after centuries of rewriting and re-compiling for adults, had come in the sixteenth century to be regarded chiefly as a school-book, but allusions to which are everywhere to be found in the literature of the day. In _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 343, and _Richard II_, III. ii. 129, we find references to the fable of "The Countryman and a Snake"; in _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 69, and _Timon of Athens_, II. i. 28, to "The Crow in Borrowed Feathers"; in _2 Henry VI_, III. i. 77, to "The Wolf in the Sheep's Skin"; in _King John_, II. i. 139, to "The Ass in the Lion's Skin"; in _Henry V_, IV. iii. 91, to "The Hunter and the Bear"; in _As You Like It_, I. i. 87, to "The Dog that Lost his Teeth"; in _All's Well_, II. i. 71, to "The Fox and the Grapes"; besides a number of slighter and less definite allusions. The most detailed fable in Shakespeare, that of "The Belly and the Members," in _Coriolanus_, I. i. 99, is derived, not from _Æsop_, but from Plutarch's _Life of Coriolanus_.

The traces of the well-known collection of sayings from various writers called _Sententiæ Pueriles_, and of the so-called _Distichs of Cato_, both of which were commonly read in the second and third years, are only slight. Battista Spagnuoli Mantuanus, whose _Eclogues_, written about 1500, had become a text-book, is honored with explicit mention as well as quotation in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii. 95. Cicero, who was read from the fourth year, has left his mark on only a phrase or two, in spite of his importance in Renaissance culture; but Ovid is much more important. The motto on the title-page of _Venus and Adonis_ is from the _Amores_, and the matter of the poem is from _Metamorphoses_, X. 519 ff., with features from the stories of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (_Meta._ IV. 285 ff.), and the hunting in Calydon (_Meta._ VIII. 270 ff.). Ovid is quoted in Latin in three early plays; and even where a translation was available, the phrasing of Shakespeare's allusions sometimes shows knowledge of the original. Most of Ovid had been translated into English before Shakespeare began to write, and Golding's version of the _Metamorphoses_ (1567) was used for the references to the Actæon myth in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, IV. i. 107 ff., and for a famous passage in _The Tempest_, V. i. 33. Livy, who had been translated in 1545 according to Malone, seems to have been the chief source of _Lucrece_, with some aid from Ovid's _Fasti_, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in _Titus Andronicus_; to the Medea myth in four or five passages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of classical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ gives but a slight basis for proving literary relations.

[Page Heading: Ovid]

Virgil followed Ovid in the fifth year, and with Virgil, Terence. Of direct knowledge of the latter the plays bear no trace, but of the former there seems to be an influence in the description of the painting of Troy in _Lucrece_, 1366 ff., and in two short Latin sentences in _2 Henry VI_, II. i. 24, and IV. i. 117. Horace, Plautus, Juvenal, Persius, and Seneca were the new authors taken up in the last years in school. All the Horace in the plays may have been taken from other works, like the passage already quoted from Lily's Grammar. Juvenal and Persius have left no mark. The _Menæchmi_ and _Amphitruo_ of Plautus furnish the basis for _The Comedy of Errors_, and no English translation of either of these is known before that of the _Menæchmi_ in 1595, which some critics think Shakespeare may have seen in manuscript. But no verbal similarities confirm this conjecture, and there is no reason why the dramatist should not have known both plays at first hand.

The influence of Seneca is dramatically the most important among the classical authors. All the plays that go by his name had been translated into English in the first part of Elizabeth's reign; he was the main channel through which the forms of classical tragedy reached the Renaissance; and when Shakespeare began to write he was the dominant force in the field of tragedy. This makes it hard to say whether the Senecan features in _Titus Andronicus_, _Richard III_, and even _Hamlet_, are due to Seneca directly, or to the tradition already well established among Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries.

[Page Heading: Results of Schooling]

The impression which the evidence from the textbooks as a whole leaves on one is that Shakespeare took from school enough Latin to handle an occasional quotation[3] and to extract the plot of a play, but that he probably preferred to use a translation when one was to be had. The slight acquaintance shown with authors not always read at school, Caesar, Livy, Lucan, and Pliny, does not materially alter this impression. Much more conclusive as to the effect of his Latin training than the literary allusions are the numerous words of Latin origin either coined by Shakespeare, or used in such a way as to imply a knowledge of their derivation. The discovery of a lost translation may modify our views as to whether a particular author was used by him in the original, but the evidence from his use of Romance words gives clear proof that his schooling was no unimportant element in his mastery of speech.

[3] See the list in the appendix to Schmidt's _Lexicon_.

Greek was occasionally begun in the Elizabethan grammar school, but we do not know whether this was the case in Stratford. Certainly we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare could read Greek, as all his knowledge of Greek authors could have been obtained from translations, and only two Greek words, _misanthropos_ and _threnos_, occur in his writings. Yet no single author was so important in providing material for the plays as the Greek Plutarch. His _Lives of Julius Cæsar, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Antonius_, and _Caius Martius Coriolanus_, in Sir Thomas North's translation, are the direct sources of the great Roman tragedies, and in a less important way the _Lives of Antonius_ and _Alcibiades_ were used in _Timon of Athens_. Homeric elements are discoverable in _Troilus and Cressida_, which derives mainly from the medieval tradition. As the Trojan story was already familiar on the stage, these need not have come from Chapman's Homer. The knowledge of Lucian which seems implied in _Timon_ was probably not gained from the Greek original. The late Greek romances, which were popular in translation, may have been read by Shakespeare, since the reference to the "Egyptian thief" in _Twelfth Night_, V. i. 120, is from the _Æthiopica_ of Heliodorus, translated in 1569. Attempts have been made by the assembling of parallel passages to prove a knowledge of Greek tragedy on the part of Shakespeare, but such parallelisms are more naturally explained as coincidences arising from the treatment of analogous themes and situations.

Of modern languages, French was the easiest for an Elizabethan Englishman to acquire, and the French passages and scenes in _Henry V_ make it fairly certain that Shakespeare had a working knowledge of this tongue. Yet, as in the case of Latin, he seems to have preferred a translation to an original when he could find it. Montaigne, whose influence some have found pervasive in Shakespeare, he certainly used in Gonzalo's account of his ideal commonwealth in _The Tempest_, II. i. 143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here. Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in _As You Like It_, III,