Montaigne and Shakspere Part 9

[62] B. III, Chap. 3.

[63] B. II, Chap. 17.

[64] It may fairly be laid down as practically certain, from what we know of the habit of circulating works in ma.n.u.script at that period, and from what Florio tells us in his preface, that translations of some of the essays had been pa.s.sed about before Florio's folio was printed. [65] _Varia Historia_, XII, 23.

[66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. - 1) gives it further currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.

[67] B. II, Chap. 5.

[68] B. II, Chap. 3.

[69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.

[70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893, p. 80-5.

[71] Actus III, 865-866.

[72] Actus IV, 1526-7.

[73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in Doering's edition.

[74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._

[75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the commentators have noticed the same sentiment.

"Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."

It was in fact a poetic commonplace.

[76] Act 5, Scene 6.

[77] Act v, sc. 1.

[78] I, 22.

[79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3

[80] ii, 2

[81] ii, 10.

[82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).

[83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ ("To die is all as common as to live" etc., Act iv., sc. 4) it will be seen that the querying form as well as the elaboration const.i.tutes a special resemblance between the speech in Shakspere and the pa.s.sages in Montaigne

[84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._

[85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.

[86] _Apology._

[87] _Ibid._, near end.

[88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.

[89] Canto v.

[90] Canto x.x.xii.

[91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends that the mediaeval Inferno was built up. The torture of cold was the northern contribution to the scheme. Compare Warton, _History of English Poetry_, sec. 49, and Wright's _Saint Patrick's Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.

[92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.

[93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.

[94] _Ibid._ p. 621.

[95] Act iv, sc. 5.

[96] iii, 3.

[97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.

[98] B. v, cc. 22-25.

[99] ii, 32.

[100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on Shakspere_ (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the _Tempest_ was written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight whatever. He goes so far as to a.s.sume that the speech of Prospero in which Shakspere trans.m.u.tes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written immediately after the publication of that work. The argument is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came out, and (2) that he would imitate the pa.s.sage then or never.

[101] Act v, sc. 3.

[102] i, 31.

[103] ii, 13.

[104] Act i, sc. 2.

[105] Act iv, sc. 3.

[106] i, 2.

[107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).

[108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first ed., preserved by Gifford.

[109] The 29th.

[110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed.