What ever hurly-burly wrought doth Phasis understand,

What mighty monstrous bloudy feate I wrought by Sea or land:
The like in Corynth shalbe seene in most outragious guise. etc.

The Pre-Hamlet was largely influenced by Seneca's dramas, as Nash tells us in his Epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, 1589: 'English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, 'as Bloud is a begger', and so foorth: and if you intreate him faire 'in a frosty morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches.' The Hamlet Tragedy, as we have it, still bears marks of Senecan influence. The appearance of the Ghost crying for Revenge is due to the Roman tragedian. Madness, murder, the guilty wife are all motifs which pervade the dramas of the Seneca; but they are also present, or fore-shadowed, in SaxoBelleforest.

LIVY.

See under Ovid, the legend of Lucrece. (A translation of Livy by A. Nevill was entered on the Stationers' Registers in 1577 (Arber's Transcr. II, 312). Malone, I, 385, mentions a translation by Anth. Cope, 1545; and one by Holland in 1600.)

PLINY.

With Pliny's Historia Naturalis Shakespeare seems to have been acquainted in some form or other. Philemon Holland's English translation appeared in 1601. But if the passage in As You Like It (1599) quoted below contain a reminiscence of Pliny, Shakespeare must have familiarized himself with the Natural History before the publication of Holland's translation. This he may have seen in MS. Or did he acquire a knowledge of Pliny through some other medium?

Book I. is nothing but a table of contents of the whole work. Book II. contains an interesting account of the world, the earth, and the sea, and their wonders.

1) The eighty-third chapter, which has the heading 'Monstrous 'Earthquakes seene never but once', records 'a great strange wonder 'of the Earth', which happened 'whiles L. Martius and Sex. Iulius were 'Consuls':

,

for two hilles encountred together, charging as it were, and with violence assaulting one another, yea and retiring againe with a most mightie noise.

Compare As You Like It, III, 11, 194:

O Lord, Lord! it is a hard matter for friends to meet; but mountains may be removed with earthquakes and so encounter.

11) Book II., chapter 97. concludes with the following sentence: And the sea Pontus evermore floweth and runneth out into Propontis, but the sea never retireth backe againe within Pontus.

Compare Othello, III, 1, 452:

Iago. Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change.
Oth. Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont,

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.

1) Shakespeare is supposed to have derived his knowledge of the Nilometer, to measure the fall and the rise of the waters of the Nile (Antony, II, VII, 20 ff.), from Pliny, Book V, chapt. 9, or from Leo's History of Africa, translated by John Pory, in 1600 (see Malone's Var. Ed.). But this seems uncertain. Compare a later chapter.

IV) There is a curious coincidence between King Lear, IV, VI, 182-4:

we came crying hither:

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,

We wawl and cry

and the following passage in the Proem to the Seventh Book of Holland's Pliny:

man alone, poor wretch, she [nature] hath laid all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently from the very first houre that he is borne into this world.

LUCAN.

There is some resemblance between Timon's verses on the curse of the gold (Tim. IV, 1) and the following passage from Lucan's Pharsalia, bk. 1., vv. 161 seq., in Marlowe's translation,' published in 1600:

And then we grew licentious and rude;

The soldiers' prey and rapine brought in riot;

1 vol. III., p. 259 of Bullen's editon of Marlowe. Marlowe translated only the 1st book of the Pharsalia.

Men took delight in jewels, houses, plate,
And scorn'd old sparing diet, and ware robes
Too light for women'

Quarrels were rife; greedy desire, still poor,

Did vild deeds; then 'twas worth the price of blood,
And deem'd renown, to spoil their native town;
Force mastered right, the strongest govern'd all;
Hence came it that th'edicts were over-rul'd,

That laws were broke, tribunes with consuls strove,
Sale made of offices

But Lucan's words are tame compared with those of Timon. Perhaps there was a passage to the same effect in the pre-Timon.

JUVENAL.

Warburton supposed that 'the satirical rogue' of Hamlet, II, III, 198, from whom the hero of the play professes to be quoting, is Juvenal, who gives a description of old age in Sat. X, 188. This seems very likely.

For the

GESTA ROMANORUM

comp. Giovanni Fiorentino, post.

A NOTE.

Lord Say hath gelded the common-wealth, and made it an eunuch. (2. Henry VI., Act IV, 11, 174).

This expression occurs in Cicero, De Oratore, bk. III, 41: Nolo dici morte Africani castratam esse rem publicam. Quintilian quotes it, 'Institutio Oratoria', bk. VIII., 6. I find the expression also in Talaeus's Rhetoric, a book used in schools in the sixteenth century." 'Geld' in the sense of diminishing or curtailing is, however, by no means peculiar to Shakespeare. Compare also 1. Henry IV., Act III, I, 110; Love's Lab. Lost, II, 1, 149; Rich. II., Act II, 1, 237. A writer in Notes and Queries, April 14. 1900., thinks that the following lines in Henry V., Act III, v, 50:

Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow

Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon—

1 S. Baynes, Fras. Mag., 1880, Jan., p. 90 f.

allude to the conceit of Furius Bibaculus, quoted as far-fetched by Quintilian (ut sup.), and jeered at by Horace (Sat. II, 5, 41):—

Jupiter hibernas cana nive conspuit Alpes.

But on looking at the two passages carefully, I find that, though there is a slight resemblance, the difference is far greater. It is absurd to say 'Jupiter spits upon the Alps with white snow', when you mean 'it snows'. But it does not sound so ridiculous to hear the French King comparing himself to the high Alps, and his enemy to the low valleys which the mountain can spit upon in contempt.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

As the reader will have noticed, I have made no attempt at drawing a hard and fast line between school-classics and Roman authors whom Shakespeare may have perused in later life. The distinction would be practically impossible.

Taking a final review of the matter already dealt with in the present chapter, we may now safely assert, that Shakespeare's knowledge of the Latin language was considerable, and that he must have read some of the more important Latin authors. Besides the reasons already adduced, there are others which confirm this view. Even Ben Jonson allows that he knew 'small Latin',-where the word 'small' should not be underlined. Malone gives us further, indirect, evidence on the point in his Prolegomena (vol. II., 102), where he refers to letters written by one Sturley (High Bailiff of Stratford in 1596) to Richard Quiney of Stratford (High Bailiff in 1601), a friend of Shakespeare's, whose daughter Thomas Quiney, the son of Richard, married in 1616.' These letters by Abraham Sturley are interlarded with Latin sentences, and one is entirely in Latin (Malone II, 561), and surely Sturley would not have written what his brother-in-law could not understand. Moreover, Malone draws attention to a Latin letter (probably a school exercise) written by Richard Quiney, the son. The inference by analogy which Malone draws in Shakespeare's case seems perfectly legitimate.

Alexander Schmidt, in his Shakespeare Lexicon (Appendix), gives a long list of Latin words and 'phrases in Shakespeare's plays. Further evidence of Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin is supplied by English

1 A letter written by Richard Quiney, the elder, to Shakespeare is still extant.

words like the following:-disjunct, acerb, sequent, exsufflicate, indign, segregated, cadent, intenible, extirpate, pedascule, pudency, pestiferous, antre, admired Miranda, multipotent, etc.

Lastly, Shakespeare has the ancient mythology and history at his fingers' ends, and throughout his plays and poems we find frequent allusions introduced with ease and naturalness.

GREEK LITERATURE.

On Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek there is less to say. Jonson tells us that the poet had small Latin and less Greek. What Jonson meant by 'less Greek' each reader must interpret for himself. We have no evidence that Shakespeare read any Greek author in the original. Alexander Schmidt gives only two Greek words in his list: misanthropos (Timon, IV, 1, 53) which Shakespeare could find in a marginal note to Plutarch's Life of Antonius and in the text of the Life of Alcibiades; and the word threnos, a superscription in "The 'Phoenix and the Turtle', while we have 'threne' in the text, v. 49. Words like cacodemon (Rich. III., Act I, III, 144), and anthropophagi (Othello I, III, 144), may be taken as indicative of the poet's knowledge of a few simple Greek terms, at least.

1

PLUTARCH.

Plutarch's celebrated biographies were known to Shakespeare in North's English translation, as Farmer satisfactorily proved. HalliwellPhillipps, in his Outlines II, p. 285, points out that the great dramatist most likely used the edition of 1595, which is much the same as the first edition published in 1579.2 The third edition appeared in 1603 with fifteen additional lives, and the fourth in 1612.3

On the Lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, and Marcus Antonius, Shakespeare founded his 'Julius Caesar'. This play, written about 1601, could not be indebted to North's Life of Augustus, which

1 Skeat, Shakespeare's Plutarch, 1892, pp. 216, 296.

2 The title of the 1595 edition is this: "The Lives of the Noble Grecians 'and Romanes, compared together by that Grave Learned Philosopher and 'Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: Translated out of Greeke into French 'by Iames Amiot, . . . and out of French into English, by Thomas North. Imprinted 'at London by Richard Field for Bonham Norton. 1595.'

3 It has been asserted, but not proved, that a copy of the 1612 edition, now in the Greenock Library, with the initials W. S., was the poet's property.