Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown Part 4

Perhaps few modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.

The opinion of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought Shakespeare's scholars.h.i.+p "inexact," as we shall see.

I conceive that Shakspere "knew Latin pretty well," and, on Ben Jonson's evidence, he knew "less Greek." That he knew ANY Greek is surprising. Apparently he did, to judge from Ben's words. My att.i.tude must, to the Baconians, seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive. I cannot pretend to know what was Shakspere's precise amount of proficiency in Latin when he was writing the plays. That between his own knowledge, and construes given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.

Mr. Greenwood says "the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere must have done, and a.s.similated, during his brief sojourn at the Free School is positively amazing." {62a} But I have shown how an imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and romances, might continue to read Latin "for human pleasure" after he left school. As a professional writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they are rare in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in his reading. Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of genius. "And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this prodigious industry. . . . " I am not speaking of "prodigious industry," and of that--at school. In a region so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr.

Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will's early reading (even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to exist, from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the memories of the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none of these things. The thing is not reasonable. {62b}

Let me take one example {62c} of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare's debt to Seneca's then untranslated paper De Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I). It inspires Portia's speech about Mercy. Here I give a version of the Latin.

"Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief magistrate (principem) . . . No one can think of anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher office . . . But if the placable and just G.o.ds punish not instantly with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power.

What? Holds not he the place nearest to the G.o.ds, who, bearing himself like the G.o.ds, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for the better? . . . Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would absolve."

The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia's speech:

"Consider this That in the course of Justice none of us Should see salvation."

Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia's eloquence.

Now take Portia:

"The quality of Mercy is not strain'd; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;"

(Not much Seneca, so far!)

"'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But Mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to G.o.d himself; And earthly power doth then show likest G.o.d's, When mercy seasons justice . . . "

There follows the pa.s.sage about none of us seeing salvation, already cited, and theological in origin.

Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections, without having read Seneca's De Clementia, whether, if he could not conceive the ideas "out of his own head," he might not hear Seneca's words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for himself. Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero.

My view of Shakespeare's Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter Raleigh. {64a} As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach the subject, and who have had a cla.s.sical education. An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following chapter.

In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing). Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.

"His plays," says Sir Walter Raleigh, "are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris of popular literature,--sc.r.a.ps and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs. In this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . . Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Bened.i.c.k, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . " {65a} He is rich in rural proverbs NOT recorded in Bacon's Promus.

Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, "was making himself all the time."

The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete rural words. Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the tags of song, ballad, story, and DICTON. But so may Shakespeare.

CHAPTER IV: MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE'S LEARNING

That Shakspere, whether "scholar" or not, had a very wide and deep knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr.

Greenwood seems to admire in that "violent Stratfordian," Mr. Churton Collins. {69a} I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade cla.s.sical scholars who have never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their merits the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide cla.s.sical knowledge? Does he use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?

My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay's. It was his native tendency to find coincidences in poetic pa.s.sages (which, to some, to me for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to explain coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing. One remarked in him these tendencies long before he wrote on the cla.s.sical acquirements of Shakespeare.

While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned coincidences. The question is of the widest range. Some inquirers explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales, proverbs, and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a single centre (usually India). Others, like myself, do not deny cases of transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and independent, though coincident invention. I do not believe that the Arunta of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central feature of the myth of Isis and Osiris.

It is not on Shakespeare's use, now and then, of Greek and Latin models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins himself, and not earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the saturation of Shakespeare's mind with Roman and Athenian literature.

Consequently we can only do justice to Mr. Collins's system, if we compare example after example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare's borrowing. This is a long and irksome task; and the only fair plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins's Studies in Shakespeare, compare the Greek and Roman texts, and weigh each example of supposed borrowing for himself. Baconians must delight in this labour.

I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare to obtain a view of the ma.n.u.script translation of plays of Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the Menaechmi as the model of The Comedy of Errors. He does not borrow phrases from it, as he does from North's Plutarch.

Venus and Adonis owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple patches, scattered in different parts of the Metamorphoses. Lucrece is based on the then untranslated Fasti of Ovid. I do not think Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or too proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor young University man in London. That is a simple and natural means by which he could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.

Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare's wide and profound knowledge of the cla.s.sics, opens with the remark: "Nothing which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in p.r.o.nouncing with certainty that he read the Greek cla.s.sics in the original, or even that he possessed enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those cla.s.sics in the Greek text." {71a} In that case, how did Shakespeare's English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek idioms, while he only knew the Greek plays through Latin translations?

However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove Shakespeare's close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic literature by a method of which he knows the perils--"it is always perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel pa.s.sages which may be mere coincidences." {72a} Yet this method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for himself.

He thinks it "surely not unlikely" that Polonius's

"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 pa.s.sage "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 pa.s.sages are from plays (t.i.tus 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, x.x.xviii. 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sages 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 Achaeans!