Part 5 (1/2)
There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was published apart, from Ficinus' version, in 1560, with the sub-t.i.tle, Concerning the Nature of Man. Who had read it?--Shakespeare, or one of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus and Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood's Unknown? Which of these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long before Homer? Which of them followed the Ionic and mediaeval anti- Achaean view of Homer's heroes, as given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus' version of the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war. ”That was his fun,” as Charles Lamb said in another connection.
Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the ”small Latin”
with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare. He could read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French--that is, as easily as he reads English. Still further, Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the Greek drama ”that the characteristics which differentiate his work from the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these dramatists.”
Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much acquaintance with Euripides, AEschylus, Sophocles, and do not often remind us of these masters. Shakespeare does remind us of them--the only question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession of a genius akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all the treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling up through the wells of Avon?
But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, CANNOT be demonstrated) that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins by saying that he will not bottom his case ”on the ground of parallels in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely to be” (fortuitous) ”coincidences.”
Three pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow.
”Curiously close similarities of expression” are also barred. Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and AEschylus, plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!). Again, ”ident.i.ties of sentiment under similar circ.u.mstances” are not to be cited; two pages ARE cited; and ”similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,” cannot safely be used; several pages of them follow.
Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the Aias of Sophocles, and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from t.i.tus Andronicus, which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non- Shakespearean, or not by his unknown great author. Troilus and Cressida, whatever part Shakespeare may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author or authors knew of Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first translated by Chapman and published in 1598. But he or they did know the Aias of Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did the author of Romeo and Juliet.
Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians. ”We have obviously to be on our guard”
{77a} against three kinds of such parallels, which ”may be mere coincidences,” {77b} fortuitous coincidences. But these coincidences against which ”we must be on our guard” fill sixteen pages (pp. 46- 63). These pages must necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading the reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately as Mr. Collins did. Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels to readers of Mr. Collins's essay.
Indeed, what more can we do? Who would read through a criticism of each instance? Two or three may be given. The Queen in Hamlet reminds that prince, grieving for his father's death, that ”all that live must die”:
”That loss is common to the race, And common is the common-place.”
The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,--and here is a parallel! Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof. Greece agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that it is not lucky to be ”a corby messenger” of bad news; or that all goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,--and so on as long as you please. Of such wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs.
Vestigia nulla retrorsum is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.
Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was saturated in Greek tragedy. But page on page of such facts as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of ”the belly- pinched wolf,” the other of ”the empty-bellied wolf,” are apt to impress the reader--and verily both Shakespeare and AEschylus talk of ”the heart dancing for joy.” Mr. Collins repeats that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up. It was a theory of Shakespeare's time that the apparent ghost of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil. Hamlet knows this -
”The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”
Orestes (Electra, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging daemon (alastor) in the shape of a G.o.d, that bids him avenge his father. Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?
A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in Romeo and Juliet, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her bridegroom. Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology -
”For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”
One needs the s.p.a.ce of a book wherein to consider such parallels.
But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.
To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.
The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephorae and Electra, are so close that resemblances in some pa.s.sages must and do occur, and Mr.
Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.
Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Nors.e.m.e.n and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel pa.s.sages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick's The Heroic Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, ”The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.
But, to be short, Mr. Collins's case can only be judged by readers of his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare. To me, Hamlet's soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phoenix of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that ”of death we know nothing” are bound to do,--though Shakespeare's are infinitely the richer. For Shakespeare's reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-AEschylean Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves, Shakespeare's highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet's lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr.