Part 4 (2/2)

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!

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