Montaigne and Shakspere Part 4

"And take upon's the mystery of things As if we were G.o.d's spies;"

--which recalls the vigorous protest of the essays, THAT A MAN OUGHT SOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where Montaigne avows that if he dared he would put in the category of imposters the

"interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of G.o.d, setting about to find the causes of each accident, and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incomprehensible motives of its works."

This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the argument of the APOLOGY is typified in the sentence:--

"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our proportions and conjectures to guess at G.o.d?"

(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a pa.s.sage in the essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104]

on the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference of the stars--which very superst.i.tion he was later to support by his own authority in the APOLOGY, as we have seen above, in the pa.s.sage on the "power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The pa.s.sage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the ill.u.s.tration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which pa.s.seth not so easily, nor without a solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Caesar's sayings as to his star, and the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning his death a year.

"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least actions. 'There is no such society between heaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as mortal as we are.'"

There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this pa.s.sage in Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on...."

(d) Again, in MACBETH (1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff[105]:

"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak, Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"

--an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart"--recalls the essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which Montaigne remarks on the

"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when accidents surpa.s.sing our strength overwhelm us," and on the way in which "the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself"; going on to tell how the German Lord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground."

The parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that drawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:

Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent[107]--"Light troubles speak: the great ones are dumb."

Certainly no one of these latter pa.s.sages would singly suffice to prove that Shakspere had read Montaigne, though the peculiar coincidence of one word in Edgar's speech with a word in Florio, above noted, would alone raise the question. But even had Shakspere not pa.s.sed, as we shall see cause to acknowledge, beyond the most melancholy mood of Montaigne into one of far sterner and more stringent pessimism, an absence or infrequency of suggestions of Montaigne in the plays between 1605 and 1610 would be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe in VOLPONE. That gibe, indeed, is not really so ill-natured as the term "steal" is apt to make it sound for our ears, especially if we are prepossessed--as even Mr. Fleay still seems to be--by the old commentators' notion of a deep ill-will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. There was probably no such ill-will in the matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust banter being enough to account for the form of his remark. As a matter of fact, his own plays are strewn with cla.s.sic transcriptions; and though he evidently plumed himself on his power of "invention"[108] in the matter of plots--a faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack--he cannot conceivably have meant to charge his rival with having committed any discreditable plagiarism in drawing upon Montaigne. At most he would mean to convey that borrowing from the English translation of Montaigne was an easy game as compared with his own scholar-like practice of translating from the Greek and Latin, and from out-of-the-way authors, too.

However that might be, the fact stands that Shakspere did about 1604 reproduce Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the reproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.

III.

But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne influence is unique or exceptional. Of the many literary influences which an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, was Montaigne's the only one which wrought deeply upon Shakspere's spirit, apart from those of his contemporary dramatists and the pre-existing plays, which were then models and points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere must have thought much and critically of the methods and the utterance of his co-rivals in literary art, as he did of the methods of his fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players in HAMLET was hardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet[109] which speaks of its author as

"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"

is one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110]

that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:

"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"

has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his most formidable compet.i.tors in poetry. But we are here concerned with influences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example; and the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact comparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of Montaigne's Essays?

The matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even the Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As regards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research during two centuries; and of collations of parallel pa.s.sages, apart from Montaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the dramatist's mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our own generation. As regards many of the parallel pa.s.sages, the ground has been pretty well cleared by the dispa.s.sionate scholarship brought to bear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean school, as represented by Knight, did much to r.e.t.a.r.d scientific conclusions on this as on other points.

Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed cla.s.sical knowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further investigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Cla.s.sical Knowledge;[113]

and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as against the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W.

Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's tragedies on Shakspere's.

Unquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valuable research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its technique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we have seen, apparent echoes from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we have seen, Dr. Cunliffe suggests sources for some Shaksperean pa.s.sages in the Senecan tragedies, he is doubtful as to whether they represent any direct study of Seneca by Shakspere.

"Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to Seneca," he writes, "is a question as difficult as it is interesting. As English tragedy advances, there grows up an acc.u.mulation of Senecan influence within the English drama, in addition to the original source, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the direct and the indirect influence of Seneca. In no case is the difficulty greater than in that of Shakspere. Of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Ma.s.singer, we can say with certainty that they read Seneca, and reproduced their readings in their tragedies; of Middleton and Heywood we can say with almost equal certainty that they give no sign of direct indebtedness to Seneca; and that they probably came only under the indirect influence, through the imitations of their predecessors and contemporaries. In the case of Shakspere we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Professor Baynes thinks it is probable that Shakspere read Seneca at school; and even if he did not, we may be sure that, at some period of his career, he would turn to the generally accepted model of cla.s.sical tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."[114]

This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere's are but cases of citation of sentences likely to have grown proverbial; and the most notable of the others that have been cited by Dr. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes, points to aeschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red:"

certainly corresponds closely with that of Seneca's Hercules:[115]

"Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens, Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare, Et tota Tethys per meas currat ma.n.u.s, Haerebit altum facinus"

and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]

"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris, Maeotis undis pontico inc.u.mbens mari.

Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater Tantum expiarit sceleris."

But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from aeschylus,[117] are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediaeval. The phrases used were already cla.s.sic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:

"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Ocea.n.u.s."[118]

In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Ta.s.so;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published after, MACBETH[120]:--

"Although the waves of all the Northern sea Should flow for ever through those guilty hands, Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"

--a sad foil to Shakspere's

"The mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine."

It is very clear, then, that we are not here ent.i.tled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the pa.s.sage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe.

Shakspere's

"Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all,"[121]

which he compares with Seneca's

"Et ferrum et ignis saepe medicinae loco est.

Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"[122]

--a pa.s.sage that may very well be the original for the modern oracle about fire and iron--is really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates, that "Extreme remedies are proper for extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated by Florio:

"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."