Shakespeare's Roman plays and their background

by Sir Mungo William MacCallum

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	Roman Plays in the Sixteenth Century	[1]
	1.“Appius and Virginia.” The Translation of “Octavia”	[2]
	2. The French Senecans	[19]
	3. English Followers of the French School.
	“The Wounds of Civil War”	[44]
II.	Shakespeare’s Treatment of History	[73]
III.	Ancestry of Shakespeare’s Roman Plays
	1. Plutarch	[95]
	2. Amyot	[119]
	3. North	[141]
JULIUS CAESAR
I.	Position of the Play between the Histories and the
	Tragedies. Attraction of the Subject for Shakespeare
	and his Generation. Indebtedness to Plutarch	[168]
II.	Shakespeare’s Transmutation of his Material	[187]
III.	The Titular Hero of the Play	[212]
IV.	The Excellences and Illusions of Brutus	[233]
V.	The Disillusionment of Brutus. Portia	[255]
VI.	The Remaining Characters	[275]
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
I.	Position of the Play after the Great Tragedies.
	Shakespeare’s Interest in the Subject	[300]
II.	Antony and Cleopatra, a History, Tragedy, and
	Love Poem; as shown by its Relations with
	Plutarch	[318]
III.	The Associates of Antony	[344]
IV.	The Political Leaders	[368]
V.	Mark Antony	[391]
VI.	Cleopatra	[413]
VII.	Antony and Cleopatra	[439]
CORIOLANUS
I.	Position of the Play before the Romances.
	Its Political and Artistic Aspects	[454]
II.	Parallels and Contrasts with Plutarch	[484]
III.	The Grand Contrast. Shakespeare’s Conception of
	the Situation in Rome	[518]
IV.	The Kinsfolk and Friends of Coriolanus	[549]
V.	The Greatness of Coriolanus. Aufidius	[571]
VI.	The Disasters of Coriolanus and their Causes	[598]
APPENDICES
A.	Nearest Parallels between Garnier’s Cornélie
	in the French and English Versions and
	Julius Caesar	[628]
B.	The Verbal Relations of the Various Versions
	of Plutarch, illustrated by Means of
	Volumnia’s Speech	[631]
C.	Shakespeare’s Alleged Indebtedness to Appian in
	Julius Caesar	[644]
D.	Shakespeare’s Loans from Appian in
	Antony and Cleopatra	[648]
E.	Cleopatra’s One Word	[653]
F.	The “Inexplicable” Passage in Coriolanus	[657]
	INDEX	[660]

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I
ROMAN PLAYS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Plays that dealt with the History of Rome were frequent on the Elizabethan stage, and all portions of it were laid under contribution. Subjects were taken from legends of the dawn like the story of Lucretia, and from rumours of the dusk like the story of Lucina; from Roman pictures of barbarian allies like Massinissa in the South, or barbarian antagonists like Caractacus in the North; as well as from the intimate records of home affairs and the careers of the great magnates of the Republic or Empire. But these plays belong more distinctively to the Stuart than to the Tudor section of the period loosely named after Elizabeth, and few have survived that were composed before the beginning of the seventeenth century. For long the Historical Drama treated by preference the traditions and annals of the island realm, and only by degrees did “the matter of Britain” yield its pride of place to “the matter of Rome the Grand.” Moreover, the earlier Roman Histories are of very inferior importance, and none of them reaches even a moderate standard of merit till the production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1600 or 1601. In this department Shakespeare had not the light to guide him that he found for his English Histories in Marlowe’s Edward II., or even in such plays as The Famous Victories of Henry V. The extant pieces that precede his first experiment, seem only to be groping their way, and it is fair to suppose that the others which have been lost did no better. Their interest, in so far as they have any interest at all, lies in the light they throw on the gradual progress of dramatic art in this domain. And they illustrate it pretty fully, and show it passing through some of the main general phases that may be traced in the evolution of the Elizabethan Tragedy as a whole. At the outset we have one specimen of the Roman play in which the legitimate drama is just beginning to disengage itself from the old Morality, and another in which the unique Senecan exemplar is transformed rather than translated to suit the primitive art of the time. Then we have several more artistic specimens deriving directly or indirectly from the French imitators of Seneca, which were the most dignified and intelligent the sixteenth century had to show. And lastly we have a specimen of what the Roman play became when elaborated by the scholar-playwrights for the requirements of the popular London stage.

A survey of these will show how far the ground was prepared for Shakespeare by the traditions of this branch of the drama when he turned to cultivate it himself.

1. APPIUS AND VIRGINIA.
THE TRANSLATION OF OCTAVIA

The crudest if not the earliest of the series is entitled A new Tragicall Comedie of Apius and Virginia, by R. B., initials which have been supposed with some probability to stand for Richard Bower, who was master of the Chapel Royal at Windsor in 1559. It was first printed in 1575, but must have been written some years before. A phrase it contains, “perhaps a number will die of the sweat,” has been thought to refer to the prevalence of the plague in 1563, and it may be identified with a play on the same subject that was acted at that time by the boys of Westminster. At any rate several expressions show beyond doubt that it was meant for representation, but only on the old-fashioned scaffold which was soon to be out-of-date. Its character and scope belong too, in part, to a bygone age. The prologue proclaims its ethical intention with the utmost emphasis:

You lordings all that present be, this Tragidie to heare

Note well what zeale and loue heerein doth well appeare,

And, Ladies, you that linked are in wedlocke bandes for euer

Do imitate the life you see, whose fame will perish neuer:

But Uirgins you, oh Ladies fair, for honour of your name

Doo lead the life apparent heere to win immortall fame.[1]

It is written in commendation of chastity and rebuke of vice:

Let not the blinded God of Loue, as poets tearm him so,

Nor Venus with her venery, nor Lechors, cause of wo,

Your Uirgins name to spot or file: deare dames, obserue the life

That faire Verginia did obserue, who rather wish(ed) the knife

Of fathers hand hir life to ende, then spot her chastety.

As she did waile, waile you her want, you maids, of courtesie.

If any by example heere would shun that great anoy,[2]

Our Authour would rejoyce in hart, and we would leap for joy.

No Moral Play could be more explicit in its lesson, and the Moral Play has also suggested a large number of the personages. Conscience, Justice, Rumour, Comfort, Reward, Doctrine, Memory, are introduced, and some of them not only in scenes by themselves, but in association with the concrete characters. Occasionally their functions are merely figurative, and can be separated from the action that is supposed to be proceeding: and then of course they hardly count for more than the attributes that help to explain a statue. Thus, when Appius resolves to pursue his ruthless purpose, he exclaims:

But out, I am wounded: how am I deuided!

Two states of my life from me are now glided:

and the quaint stage direction in the margin gives the comment: “Here let him make as thogh he went out, and let Consience and Justice come out of[3] him, and let Consience hold in his hande a Lamp burning, and let Justice haue a sworde and hold it before Apius brest.” Thus, too, another stage direction runs: “Here let Consience speake within:

‘Judge Apius, prince, oh stay, refuse: be ruled by thy friende:

What bloudy death with open shame did Torquin gaine in ende?’”

And he answers: “Whence doth this pinching sounde desende?” Here clearly it is merely the voice of his own feelings objectified: and in both instances the interference of the Abstractions is almost wholly decorative; they add nothing to the reflections of Appius, but only serve to emphasise them. This however is not always the case. They often comport themselves in every respect like the real men and women. Comfort stays Virginius from suicide till he shall see the punishment of the wicked. Justice and Reward (that is, Requital) summoned by the unjust judge to doom the father, pronounce sentence on himself. In the end Virginius enters in company with Fame, Doctrina, and Memory.

Other of the characters, again, if more than general ideas, are less than definite individuals. There is a sub-plot not at all interwoven with the main plot, in which the class types, Mansipulus, Mansipula, and their crony, Subservus, play their parts. With their help some attempt is made at presenting the humours of vulgar life. They quarrel with each other, but are presently reconciled in order to divert themselves together, and put off the business of their master and mistress, hoping to escape the punishment for their negligence by trickery and good luck. But we do not even know who their master and mistress are, and they come into no contact with either the historical or the allegorical figures.

The only personage who finds his way into both compartments of the “Tragicall Comedie” is Haphazard the Vice, who gives the story such unity as it possesses. His name happily describes the double aspect of his nature. On the one hand he stands for chance itself; on the other for dependence on chance, the recklessness that relies on accident, and trusts that all will end well though guilt has been incurred. In this way he is both the chief seducer and the chief agent, alike of the petty rogues and of the grand criminal. To the former he sings:

Then wend ye on and folow me, Mansipulus,[4] Mansipula,

Let croping cares be cast away; come folow me, come folow me:

Subseruus is a joly loute

Brace[5] Haphazard, bould blinde bayarde![6]

A figge for his uncourtesie that seekes to shun good company!

To Appius’ request for advice he replies:

Well, then, this is my counsell, thus standeth the case,

Perhaps such a fetche as may please your grace:

There is no more wayes but hap or hap not,

Either hap or els hapless, to knit up the knot:

And if you will hazard to venter what falles,

Perhaps that Haphazard will end all your thralles.

His distinctive note is this, that he tempts men by suggesting that they may offend and escape the consequences. In the end he falls into the pit that he has digged for others, and when his hap is to be hanged, like a true Vice he accepts the contretemps with jest and jape.

Yet despite the stock-in-trade that it takes over from Morality or Interlude, Appius and Virginia has specialties of its own that were better calculated to secure it custom in the period of the Renaissance. The author bestows most care on the main story, and makes a genuine attempt to bring out the human interest of the subject and the persons. In the opening scene he tries, in his well-meaning way, to give the impression of a home in which affection is the pervading principle, but in which affection itself is not allowed to run riot, but is restrained by prudence and obligation. Father, mother, and daughter sing a ditty in illustration of this sober love or its reverse, and always return to the refrain:

The trustiest treasure in earth, as we see,

Is man, wife, and children in one to agree;

Then friendly, and kindly, let measure be mixed

With reason in season, where friendship is fixed.

There is some inarticulate feeling for effect in the contrast between the wholesomeness of this orderly family life and the incontinence of the tyrant who presently seeks to violate it. And the dramatic bent of the author—for it is no more than a bent—appears too in the portraiture of the parties concerned. The mingled perplexity and dread of Virginius, when in his consciousness of right he is summoned to the court, are justly conceived; and there is magnanimity in his answer to Appius’ announcement that he must give judgment “as justice doth require”:

My lord, and reason good it is: your seruaunt doth request

No parciall hand to aide his cause, no parciall minde or brest.

If ought I haue offended you, your Courte or eke your Crowne,

From lofty top of Turret hie persupetat me downe:

If treason none by me be done, or any fault committed,

Let my accusers beare the blame, and let me be remitted.

Similarly, the subsequent conflict in his heart between fondness for his daughter and respect for her and himself is clearly expressed. And her high-spirited demand for death is tempered and humanised by her instinctive recoil when he “proffers a blow”:

The gods forgeue thee, father deare! farewell: thy blow do bend—

Yet stay a whyle, O father deare, for fleash to death is fraile.

Let first my wimple bind my eyes, and then thy blow assaile,

Nowe, father, worke thy will on me, that life I may injoy.

But the most ambitious and perhaps the most successful delineation is that of Appius. At the outset he is represented as overwhelmed by his sudden yearning. Apelles, he thinks, was a “prattling fool” to boast of his statue; Pygmalion was fond “with raving fits” to run mad for the beauty of his work, for he could make none like Virginia. Will not the Gods treat him as they treated Salmacis, when Hermophroditus, bathing in the Carian fountain near the Lycian Marches, denied her suit?

Oh Gods aboue, bend downe to heare my crie

As once ye[7] did to Salmasis, in Pond hard Lyzia by:

Oh that Virginia were in case as somtime Salmasis,

And in Hermofroditus stede my selfe might seeke my blisse!

Ah Gods! would I unfold her armes complecting of my necke?

Or would I hurt her nimble hand, or yeelde her such a checke?

Would I gainsay hir tender skinne to baath where I do washe?

Or els refuse her soft sweete lippes to touch my naked fleshe?

Nay! Oh the Gods do know my minde, I rather would requier

To sue, to serue, to crouch, to kneele, to craue for my desier.

But out, ye Gods, ye bend your browes, and frowne to see me fare;

Ye do not force[8] my fickle fate, ye do not way my care.

Unrighteous and unequall Gods, unjust and eke unsure,

Woe worth the time ye made me liue, to see this haplesse houre.

This, we may suppose, is intended for a mad outbreak of voluptuous passion, “the nympholepsy of some fond despair”; and, as such, it is not very much worse than some that have won the applause of more critical ages. It may suggest the style of the Interlude in the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, or more forcibly, the “King Cambyses’ vein” that was then in vogue (for Preston’s play of that name, published about a couple of years later than the probable date when this was performed, is in every way the nearest analogue to Appius and Virginia that the history of our stage has to offer). But in comparison with the normal flow of the Moralities, the lines have undoubtedly a certain urgency and glow. And there are other touches that betray the incipient playwright. Appius is not exhibited as a mere monster; through all his life his walk has been blameless, and he is well aware of his “grounded years,” his reputation as judge, and the value of good report. He is not at ease in the course he now adopts; there is a division in his nature, and he does not yield to his temptation without forebodings and remorse.

Consience he pricketh me contempnèd,

And Justice saith, Judgement wold haue me condemned:

Consience saith, crueltye sure will detest me;[9]

And Justice saith, death in thend will molest me:

And both in one sodden, me thinkes they do crie

That fier eternall my soule shall destroy.

But he always comes back to the supreme fact of his longing for Virginia:

By hir I liue, by hir I die, for hir I joy or woe,

For hir my soule doth sinke or swimme, for her, I swere, I goe.

And there are the potentialities of a really powerful effect in the transition from his jubilant outburst when he thinks his waiting is at an end:

O lucky light! lo, present heere hir father doth appeare,

to his misgivings when he sees the old man is unaccompanied:

O, how I joy! Yet bragge thou not. Dame Beuty bides behinde.

And immediately thereafter the severed head is displayed to his view.

Nor was R. B., whether or not he was Richard Bower, Master of the Chapel children, quite without equipment for the treatment of a classical theme, though in this respect as in others his procedure is uncertain and fumbling in the highest degree. The typical personages of the under-plot have no relish of Latinity save in the termination of the labels that serve them as names, and they swear by God’s Mother, and talk glibly of church and pews and prayer books, and a “pair of new cards.” Even in the better accredited Romans of Livy’s story there are anachronisms and incongruities. Appius, though ordinarily a judge, speaks of himself as prince, king or kaiser; and references are made to his crown and realm. Nevertheless the author is not without the velleities of Humanism. He ushers in his prologue with some atrocious Latin Elegiacs, which the opening lines of the English are obliging enough to paraphrase:

Qui cupis aethereas et summas scandere sedes,

Vim simul ac fraudem discute, care, tibi.

Fraus hic nulla juvat, non fortia facta juvabunt:

Sola Dei tua te trahet tersa fides.

Cui placet in terris, intactae paludis[10] instar,

Vivere Virginiam nitere, Virgo, sequi:

Quos tulit et luctus, discas et gaudia magna,

Vitae dum parcae scindere fila parant.

Huc ades, O Virgo pariter moritura, sepulchro;

Sic ait, et facies pallida morte mutat.

Who doth desire the trump of fame to sound unto the skies,

Or els who seekes the holy place where mighty Joue he lies,

He must not by deceitfull mind, nor yet by puissant strength,

But by the faith and sacred lyfe he must it win at length;

And what[11] she be that virgins lyfe on earth wold gladly leade,

The fluds that Virginia did fall[12] I wish her reade,

Her doller and hir doleful losse and yet her joyes at death:

“Come, Virgins pure, to graue with me,” quoth she with latest breath.

In the same way there is throughout a lavish display of cheap boyish erudition. Thus Virginius, reckoning up his services to Appius, soliloquises:

In Mars his games, in marshall feates, thou wast his only aide,

The huge Carrebd his[13] hazards thou for him hast[14] ofte assaied.

Was Sillas force by thee oft shunde or yet Lady Circe’s[15] lande,

Pasiphae’s[16] childe, that Minnotaur, did cause thee euer stande?

We are here indeed on the threshold of a very different kind of art, of which, in its application to Roman history, a sample had been submitted to the English public two years previously in the Octavia ascribed to Seneca.

The Latin Tragedy, merely because it was Latin, and for that reason within the reach of a far greater number of readers, was much better known than the Greek at the period of the Renaissance. But apart from its advantage in accessibility, it attracted men of that age not only by its many brilliant qualities but by its very defects, its tendency to heightened yet abstract portraiture, its declamation, its sententiousness, its violence, its unrestfulness. It had both for good and bad a more modern bearing than the masterpieces of Hellenic antiquity, and in some ways it corresponded more closely with the culture of the sixteenth century than with our own. It was therefore bound to have a very decisive influence in shaping the traditions of the later stage; and the collection of ten plays ascribed to Seneca, the poor remainder of a numerous tribe that may be traced back to the third century before Christ, furnished the pattern which critics prescribed for imitation to all who would achieve the tragic crown. And if this was true of the series as a whole, it was also true of the play, which, whatever may be said of the other nine, is certainly not by Seneca himself, the poorest of them all, with most of the faults and few of the virtues of the rest, Octavia, the sole surviving example of the Fabula Praetexta, or the Tragedy that dealt with native Roman themes. The Octavia, however, was not less popular and influential than its companions, and has even a claim to especial attention inasmuch as it may be considered the remote ancestress of the Modern Historic Play in general and of the Modern Roman Play in particular. It inspired Mussato about 1300 to write in Latin his Eccerinis, which deals with an almost contemporary national subject, the fate of Ezzelino: it inspired the young Muretus about 1544 to write his Julius Caesar, which in turn showed his countrymen the way to treat such themes in French. Before eight years were over they had begun to do so, and many were the Roman plays composed by the School of Ronsard. Certainly Seneca’s method would suit the historical dramatist who was not quite at home in his history, for of local colour and visual detail it made small account, and indeed was hardly compatible with them. And it would commend itself no less to men of letters who, without much dramatic sympathy or aptitude, with no knowledge of stage requirements, and little prospect of getting their pieces performed, felt called upon honoris causâ to write dramas, which one of the most distinguished and successful among them was candid enough to entitle not plays but treatises. It is worth while to have a clear idea of the Octavia from which in right line this illustrious and forgotten progeny proceeded.

The date of the action is supposed to be 62 a.d. when Nero, who had for some time wished to wed his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, and had murdered his mother, partly on account of her opposition, divorced his virtuous wife, his step-sister Octavia, and exiled her to Pandataria, where shortly afterwards he had her put to death. The fact that Seneca is one of the persons in the piece, and that there are anticipatory references to Nero’s death, which followed Seneca’s compulsory suicide only after an interval of three years, sufficiently disposes of the theory that the philosopher himself was the author.

The text accepted in the sixteenth century suffered much, not only from the corruption of individual expressions, but from the displacement of entire passages. Greatly to its advantage it has been rearranged by later editors, but in the following account, their conjectures, generally happy and sometimes convincing, have been disregarded, as they were unknown to Thomas Nuce, who rendered it into English in 1561. In his hands, therefore, it is more loosely connected than it originally was, or than once more it has become for us; and something of regularity it forfeits as well, for the dislocated framework led him to regard it as a drama in only four acts. Despite these flaws in his work he is a cleverer craftsman than many of his colleagues in Senecan translation, whose versions of the ten tragedies, most of them already published separately, were collected in a neat little volume in 1851.[17]

An original “argument” summarises the story with sufficient clearness.

Octauia, daughter to prince Claudius grace,

To Nero espousd, whom Claudius did adopt,

(Although Syllanus first in husbandes place

Shee had receiu’d, whom she for Nero chopt[18]),

Her parentes both, her Make that should have bene,

Her husbandes present Tiranny much more,

Her owne estate, her case that she was in,

Her brother’s death, (pore wretch), lamenteth sore.

Him Seneca doth persuade, his latter loue,

Dame Poppie, Crispyne’s wife that sometime was,

And eake Octauias maide, for to remoue.

For Senecks counsel he doth lightly passe[19]

But Poppie ioynes to him in marriage rites.

The people wood[20] unto his pallace runne,

His golden fourmed shapes[21]; which them sore spytes,

They pull to ground: this uprore, now begunne,

To quench, he some to griesly death doth send.

But her close cased up in dreadful barge,

With her unto Compania coast to wend

A band of armed men, he gave in charge.

This programme the play proceeds to fill in.

In the first act Octavia, unbosoming herself to her nurse, relieves her heart of its woe and horror. She recounts the misfortunes of her house, the atrocities of her lord, his infidelities to her, her detestation of him. The nurse is full of sympathy, but admonishes her to patience, consoling her with assurances of the people’s love, and reminding her of the truancies that the Empress of Heaven had also to excuse in her own husband and brother:

Now, madam, sith on earth your powre is pight

And haue on earth Queene Junos princely place,

And sister are and wyfe to Neroes grace,

Your wondrous restles dolours great appease.[22]

The chorus closes the act with a variation on the same themes, passing from praises of Octavia’s purity and regrets for the ancient Roman intolerance of wrong, to the contrasted picture of Nero’s unchallenged malignity.

The second act commences with a monologue by Seneca on the growing corruption of the age, which is interrupted by the approach of his master in talk with the Prefect. His words, as he enters, are:

Dispatch with speede that we commaunded haue:

Go, send forthwith some one or other slaue,

That Plautius cropped scalpe, and Sillas eke,

May bring before our face: goe some man seeke.[23]

Seneca remonstrates, but his remonstrances are of no avail; and in a long discussion in which he advocates a policy of righteousness and goodwill and the sacredness of Octavia’s claims, he is equally unsuccessful. The act, to which there is no chorus, concludes with Nero’s determination to flout the wishes of the people and persist in the promotion of Poppaea:

Why do we not appoynt the morrow next

When as our mariage pompe may be context?[24]

The third act is ushered in with one of those boding apparitions of which the Senecan Tragedy is so fond. The shade of Agrippina rises, the bridal torch of Nero and Poppaea in her hand:

Through paunch of riuened earth, from Plutoes raigne

With ghostly steps I am returnd agayne,

In writhled wristes, that bloud do most desyre,

Forguyding[25] wedlocke vyle with Stygian fire.[26]

She bewails her crimes on her son’s behalf and his parricidal ingratitude, but vengeance will fall on him at last.

Although that Tyrant proude and scornful wight

His court with marble stone do strongly dyght,

And princelike garnish it with glistering golde:

Though troupes of soldiours, shielded sure, upholde

Their chieftaynes princely porch: and though yet still

The world drawne drye with taskes even to his will

Great heapes of riches yeeld, themselues to saue;

Although his bloudy helpe the Parthians craue,

And Kingdomes bring, and goods al that they haue;

The tyme and day shall come, when as he shall,

Forlorne, and quite undone, and wanting all,

Unto his cursed deedes his life, and more,

Unto his foes his bared throate restore.[27]

As she disappears, Octavia enters in conversation with the chorus, whom she dissuades from the expression of sympathy for her distress lest they should incur the wrath of the tyrant. On this suggestion they denounce the supineness of the degenerate Romans in the vindication of right, and exhort each other to an outbreak.

In the fourth act, Poppaea, terrified by an ominous dream of Nero stabbing her first husband, and of Agrippina, a firebrand in her grasp, leading her down through the earth, rushes across the stage, but is stayed by her nurse, who soothes and encourages her, and bids her return to her bridal chamber. Yet it seems as though her worst fears were at once to be realised. The chorus, acknowledging the charms of the new Empress, is interrupted by the hurried arrival of a messenger. He announces that the people are in uproar, overthrowing the statues of Poppaea, and demanding the restitution of Octavia. But to what purpose? The chorus sings that it is vain to oppose the resistless arms of love. It is at least vain to oppose the arms of Nero’s soldiers. Confident in their strength he enters, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter, and expectant of a time when he will exact a full penalty from the citizens:

Then shall their houses fall by force of fire;

What burning both, and buildings fayre decay,[28]

What beggarly want, and wayling hunger may,

Those villaines shall be sure to have ech day.[29]

Dreaming of the future conflagration, he is dissatisfied with the prefect, who tells him that the insurrection has been easily quelled with the death of one or two, and meanwhile turns all his wrath against the innocent cause of the riot. The play does not, however, end with the murder of Octavia. She informs the chorus that she is to be dispatched in Agrippina’s death-ship to her place of exile,

But now no helpe of death I feele,

Alas I see my Brothers boate:

This is the same, whose vaulted keele

His Mother once did set a flote.

And now his piteous Sister I,

Excluded cleane from spousall place

Shall be so caried by and by;[30]

No force hath virtue in this case.[31]

And the final song of the chorus, with a touch of dramatic irony, wishes her a prosperous voyage, and congratulates her on her removal from the cruel city of Rome:

O pippling puffe of western wynde,

Which sacrifice didst once withstand,

Of Iphigen to death assignde:

And close in Cloude congealed clad

Did cary hir from smoking aares[32]

Which angry, cruell Virgin had;

This Prince also opprest with cares

Saue from this paynefull punishment

To Dian’s temple safely borne:

The barbarous Moores, to rudenesse bent,

Then[33] Princes Courtes in Rome forlorne

Haue farre more Cyuile curtesie:

For there doth straungers death appease

The angry Gods in heauens on hie,

But Romayne bloude our Rome must please.[34]

There could be no greater contrast than between Appius and Virginia, with its exits and entrances, its changefulness and bustle, its mixture of the pompous and the farcical; and the monotonous declamation, the dismissal of all action, the meagreness of the material in the Octavia. And yet they are more akin than they at first sight appear. Disregard the buffoonery which the mongrel “tragicall comedie” inherited from the native stock, and you perceive traits that suggest another filiation. The similarity with the Latin Play in its English version is, of course, misleading, except in so far as it shows how the Senecan drama must present itself to an early Elizabethan in the light of his own crude art. The devices of the rhetorician were travestied by those who knew no difference between rhetoric and rant, and whose very rant, whether they tried to invent or to translate, was clumsy and strained. Hence the “tenne tragedies” of Seneca and the nearly contemporary Mixed Plays have a strong family resemblance in style. In all of them save the Octavia the resemblance extends from diction to verse, for in dialogue and harangue they employ the trailing fourteen-syllable measure of the popular play, while in the Octavia this is discarded for the more artistic heroic couplet. In this and other respects, T. N., as Nuce signs himself, is undoubtedly more at his ease in the literary element than others of the group; nevertheless he is often content to fly the ordinary pitch of R. B. This is most obvious when their performances are read and compared as a whole, but it is evident enough in single passages. The Nurse, for example, says of Nero to Octavia:

Eft steppèd into servile Pallace stroke,

To filthy vices lore one easly broke,

Of Divelish wicked wit this Princocks proude,

By stepdames wyle prince Claudius Sonne auoude;

Whome deadly damme did bloudy match ylight,

And thee, against thy will, for feare did plight.[35]

These words might almost suit the mouths of Appius and his victims.

But leaving aside the affinities due to the common use of English by writers on much the same plane of art, the London medley is not immeasurably different from or inferior to the Roman Praetexta, even when confronted with the latter in its native dress. In both the characterisation is in the same rudimentary and obvious style, and shows the same predilection for easily classified types. There is even less genuine theatrical tact in the Latin than in the English drama. The chief persons are under careful supervision and are kept rigidly apart. Nero never meets Octavia or Poppaea, Poppaea and Octavia never meet each other. No doubt there are some successful touches: the first entrance of Nero is not ineffective; the equivocal hopefulness of the last chorus is a thing one remembers: the insertion of Agrippina’s prophecy and Poppaea’s dream does something to keep in view the future requital and so to alleviate the thickening gloom. Except for these, however, and a few other felicities natural to a writer with long dramatic traditions behind him, the Octavia strikes us as a series of disquisitions and discussions, well-arranged, well-managed, often effective, sometimes brilliant, that have been suggested by a single impressive historical situation.

2. THE FRENCH SENECANS

These salient features are transmitted to the Senecan dramas of France, except that the characterisation is even vaguer, the declamation ampler, and the whole treatment less truly dramatic and more obviously rhetorical; of which there is an indication in the greater relative prominence of monologue as compared with dialogue, and in the excessive predilection for general reflections,[36] many of them derived from Seneca and Horace, but many of them too of modern origin.

At the head of the list stands the Julius Caesar of Muretus, a play which, even if of far less intrinsic worth than can be claimed for it, would always be interesting for the associations with which it is surrounded.

Montaigne, after mentioning among his other tutors “Marc Antoine Muret,” que le France et l’Italie recognoist pour le meilleur orateur du temps, goes on to tell us: “J’ay soustenu les premiers personnages ez tragedies latines de Buchanan, de Guerente et de Muret, qui se representerent en nostre college de Guienne avecques dignité: en cela, Andreas Goveanus, nostre principal, comme en toutes aultres parties de sa charge, feut sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France; et m’en tenoit on maistre ouvrier.”

The Julius Caesar written in 1544 belongs to the year before Montaigne left Bordeaux at the age of thirteen, so he may have taken one of the chief parts in it, Caesar, or M. Brutus, or Calpurnia. This would always give us a kind of personal concern in Muret’s short boyish composition of barely 600 lines, which he wrote at the age of eighteen and afterwards published only among his Juvenilia. But it has an importance of its own. Of course it is at the best an academic experiment, though from Montaigne’s statement that these plays were presented “avecques dignité,” and from the interest the principal took in the matter, we may suppose that the performance would be exemplary in its kind. Of course, too, even as an academic experiment it does not, to modern taste, seem on the level of the more elaborate tragedies which George Buchanan, “ce grand poëte ecossois,” as Montaigne reverently styles his old preceptor, had produced at the comparatively mature age of from thirty-three to thirty-six, ere leaving Bordeaux two years before. It is inferior to the Baptistes and far inferior to the Jephthes in precision of portraiture and pathos of appeal. But in the sixteenth century, partly, no doubt, because the subject was of such secular importance and the treatment so congenial to learned theory, but also, no doubt, because the eloquence was sometimes so genuinely eloquent, and the Latin, despite a few licenses in metre and grammar, so racy of the classic soil, it obtained extraordinary fame and exercised extraordinary influence. For these reasons, as well as the additional one that it is now less widely known than it ought to be, a brief account of it may not be out of place.

The first act is entirely occupied with a soliloquy by Caesar, in which he represents himself as having attained the summit of earthly glory.

Let others at their pleasure count their triumphs, and name themselves from vanquished provinces. It is more to be called Caesar: whoso seeks fresh titles elsewhere, takes something away thereby. Would you have me reckon the regions conquered under my command? Enumerate all there are.[37]

Even Rome has yielded to him, even his great son-in-law admitted his power,

and whom he would not have as an equal, he has borne as a superior.[38]

What more is to be done?

My quest must be heaven, earth is become base to me.... Now long enough have I lived whether for myself or for my country.... The destruction of foes, the gift of laws to the people, the ordering of the year, the restoration of splendour to worship, the settlement of the world,—than these, greater things can be conceived by none, nor pettier be performed by me.... When life has played the part assigned to it, death never comes in haste and sometimes too late.[39]

The chorus sings of the immutability of fortune.

In the second act Brutus, in a long monologue, upbraids himself with his delay.

Does the virtue of thy house move thee nought, and nought the name of Brutus? Nought, the hard lot of thy groaning country, crushed by the tyrant and calling for thine aid? Nought the petitions in which the people lament that Brutus comes not to champion the state? If these things fail to touch thee, thy wife now gives thee rede enough that thou be a man; who has pledged her faith to thee in blood, thus avouching herself the offspring of thine uncle.[40]

He raises and meets the objections which his understanding offers:

Say you he is not king but dictator? If the thing be the same, what boots a different name? Say you he shuns that name, and rejects the crowns they proffer him: this is pretence and mockery, for why then did he remove the tribunes? True, he gave me dignities and once my life; with me my country outweighs them all. Whoso shows gratitude to a tyrant against his country’s interest, is ingrate while he seeks to be stupidly grateful.[41]

And his conclusion is

The sun reawakening to life saw the people under the yoke, and slaves: at his setting may he see them free.[42]

To him enters Cassius exultant that the day has arrived, impatient for the decisive moment, scarce able to restrain his eagerness. Only one scruple remains to him; should Antony be slain along with his master? Brutus answers:

Often already have I said that my purpose is this,

to destroy tyranny but save the citizens.

Cass. Then let it be destroyed from its deepest roots,

lest if only cut down, it sprout again at some time hereafter.

Brut. The whole root lurks under a single trunk.

Cass. Think’st thou so? I shall say no more. Thy will

be done: we all follow thy guidance.[43]

The chorus sings the glories of those who, like Harmodius with his “amiculus,” destroy the tyrants, and the risks these tyrants run.

In the third act Calpurnia, flying in panic to her chamber, is met by her nurse, to whom she discloses the cause of her distress. She has dreamed that Caesar lies dead in her arms covered with blood, and stabbed with many wounds. The nurse points out the vanity of dreams and the unlikelihood of any attempt against one so great and beneficent, whose clemency has changed even foes to friends. Calpurnia, only half comforted, rejoins that she will at least beseech him to remain at home that day, and the chorus prays that misfortune may be averted.

In the fourth act Calpurnia tries her powers of persuasion. To her passionate appeal, her husband answers:

What? Dost thou ask me to trust thy dreams?

Cal. No; but to concede something to my fear.

Caes. But that fear of thine rests on dreams alone.

Cal. Assume it to be vain; grant something to thy wife.[44]

She goes on to enumerate the warning portents, and at length Caesar assents to her prayers since she cannot repress her terrors. But here Decimus Brutus strikes in:

High-hearted Caesar, what word has slipped from thee?[45]

He bids him remember his glory:

O most shameful plight if the world is ruled by Caesar and Caesar by a woman.... What, Caesar, dost thou suppose the Fathers will think if thou bidst them, summoned at thy command, to depart now and to return when better dreams present themselves to Calpurnia. Go rather resolutely and assume a name the Parthians must dread: or if this please thee not, at least go forth, and thyself dismiss the Fathers; let them not think they are slighted and had in derision.[46]

Caesar is bent one way by pity for his wife, another by fear of these taunts; but, at last, leaving Calpurnia to her misgivings, he exclaims:

But yet, since even to fall, so it be but once, is better than to be laden with lasting fear; not if three hundred prophet-voices call me back, not if with his own voice the present Deity himself warn me of the peril and urge my staying here, shall I refrain.[47]

The chorus cites the predictions of Cassandra to show that it would sometimes be wise to follow the counsel of women.

In the fifth act Brutus and Cassius appear in triumph.

Brut. Breathe, citizens; Caesar is slain!... In the Senate which he erewhile overbore, he lies overborne.

Cass. Behold, Rome, the sword yet warm with blood, behold the hand that hath championed thine honour. That loathsome one who in impious frenzy and blind rage had troubled thee and thine, sore wounded by this same hand, by this same sword which thou beholdest, and gashed in every limb, hath spewed forth his life in a flood of gore.[48]

As they leave, Calpurnia enters bewailing the truth of her dream, and inviting to share in her laments the chorus, which denounces vengeance on the criminals. Then the voice of Caesar is heard in rebuke of their tears and in comfort of their distress. Only his shadow fell, but he himself is joined to the immortals.

Weep no more: it is the wretched that tears befit. Those who assailed me with frantic mind—a god am I, and true is my prophecy—shall not escape vengeance for their deed. My sister’s grandson, heir of my virtue as of my sceptre, will require the penalty as seems good to him.[49]

Calpurnia recognises the voice, and the chorus celebrates the bliss of the “somewhat” that is released from the prison house of the body.

It is interesting to note that Muretus already employs a number of the motifs that reappear in Shakespeare. Thus he gives prominence to the self-conscious magnanimity of Caesar: to the temporary hesitation of Brutus, with his appeal to his name and the letters that are placed in his way; to his admiration for the courage and constancy of Portia; to his final whole-heartedness and disregard of Caesar’s love for him; to his prohibition of Mark Antony’s death; to Cassius’ vindictive zeal and eager solicitation of his friend; to Calpurnia’s dream, and the contest between her and Decimus Brutus and in Caesar’s own mind; to Caesar’s fatal decision in view of his honour, and his rejection of the fear of death; to the exultation of Brutus and Cassius as they enter with their blood-stained swords after the deed is done. And more noticeable than any of these details, are the divided admiration and divided sympathy the author bestows both on Brutus and Caesar—which are obvious even in the wavering utterances of the chorus. We are far removed from the times when Dante saw Lucifer devouring Brutus and Cassius in two of his mouths with Judas between them; or when Chaucer, making a composite monster of the pair, tells how “false Brutus-Cassius,”

“That ever hadde of his hye state envye,”

“stikede” Julius with “boydekins.” But we are equally far from the times when Marie-Joseph Chénier was to write his tragedy of Brutus et Cassius, Les Derniers Romains. At the renaissance the characteristic feeling was enthusiasm for Caesar and his assassin alike, though it was Shakespeare alone who knew how to reconcile the two points of view.[50]

Of the admiration which Muret’s little drama excited there is documentary proof. Prefixed to it are a number of congratulatory verses, and among the eulogists are not only scholars, like Buchanan,[51] but literary men, members of the Pléiade—Dorât, Baïf, and especially Jodelle, who has his complimentary conceits on the appropriateness of the author’s name, Mark Antony, to the feat he has accomplished.

But this last testimony leads us to the less explicit but not less obvious indications of the influence exercised by Muret’s tragedy which appear in the subsequent story of literary production. This influence was both indirect and direct. The example of this modern Latin play could not but count for something when Jodelle took the further step of treating another Roman theme in the vernacular. In the vernacular, too, Grévin was inspired to rehandle the same theme as Muretus, obtaining from his predecessor most of his material and his apparatus. These experiments again were not without effect on the later dramas of Garnier, two of which were to leave a mark on English literature.

The first regular tragedy as well as the first Roman history in the French language was the Cléopatre Captive of Jodelle, acted with great success in 1552 before Henry II. by Jodelle’s friends, who at the subsequent banquet presented to him, in semi-pagan wise, a goat decked with flowers and ivy. The prologue[52] to the King describes the contents.

“C’est une tragedie

Qui d’une voix plaintive et hardie

Te represente un Romain, Marc Antoine,

Et Cleopatre, Egyptienne royne,

Laquelle après qu’Antoine, son amy,

Estant desjà vaincu par l’ennemy,

Se fust tué, ja se sentant captive,

Et qu’on vouloit la porter toute vive

En un triomphe avecques ses deux femmes,

S’occit. Icy les desirs et les flammes

De deux amants: d’Octavian aussi

L’orgueil, l’audace et le journel soucy

De son trophée emprains tu sonderas.”

But this programme conveys an impression of greater variety and abundance than is justified by the piece. In point of fact it begins only after the death of Antony, who does not intervene save as a ghost in the opening scene, to bewail his offences and announce that in a dream he has bid Cleopatra join him before the day is out.[53] Nor do we hear anything of “desirs et flammes” on his part; rather he resents her seductions, and has summoned her to share his torments:

Or se faisant compagne en ma peine et tristesse

Qui s’est faite longtemps compagne en ma liesse.

The sequel does little more than describe how his command is carried out. Cleopatra enters into conversation with Eras and Charmium, and despite their remonstrances resolves to obey. The chorus sings of the fickleness of fortune: (Act i.). Octavianus, after a passing regret for Antony, arranges with Proculeius and Agrippa to make sure of her presence at his triumph. The chorus sings of the perils of pride: (Act ii.). Octavianus visits the Queen, dismisses her excuses, but grants mercy to her and her children, and pardons her deceit when her retention of her jewellery is exposed by Seleucus. But Seleucus is inconsolable for his offence as well as his castigation, and exclaims:

Lors que la royne, et triste et courageuse,

Devant Cesar aux chevaux m’a tiré,

Et de son poing mon visage empiré,

S’elle m’eust fait mort en terre gesir,

Elle eust preveu à mon present desir,

Veu que la mort n’eust point esté tant dure

Que l’eternelle et mordante pointure

Qui jà desjà jusques au fond me blesse

D’avoir blessé ma royne et ma maistresse.

The chorus oddly enough discovers in her maltreatment of the tale-bearer a proof of her indomitable spirit, and an indication that she will never let herself be led to Rome: (Act iii.). Cleopatra now explains that her submission was only feigned to secure the lives of her children, and that she herself has no thought of following the conqueror’s car. Eras and Charmium approve, and all three depart to Antony’s tomb to offer there a last sacrifice, which the chorus describes in full detail: (Act iv.). Proculeius in consternation announces the sequel:

“J’ay veu (ô rare et miserable chose!)

Ma Cleopatre en son royal habit

Et sa couronne, au long d’un riche lict

Peint et doré, blesme et morte couchée,

Sans qu’elle fust d’aucun glaive touchée,

Avecq Eras, sa femme, à ses pieds morte,

Et Charmium vive, qu’en telle sorte

J’ay lors blasmée: ‘A a! Charmium, est-ce

Noblement faict?’ ‘Ouy, ouy, c’est de noblesse

De tant de rois Egyptiens venuë

Un tesmoignage.’ Et lors, peu soustenuë

En chancelant et s’accrochant en vain,

Tombe a l’envers, restans un tronc humain.”

The chorus celebrates the pitifulness and glory of her end, and the supremacy of Caesar: (Act V.).

Thus, despite the promises of the prologue, the play resolves itself to a single motif, the determination of Cleopatra to follow Antony in defiance of Octavianus’ efforts to prevent her. Nevertheless, simple as it is, it fails in real unity. The ghost of Antony, speaking, one must suppose, the final verdict, pronounces condemnation on her as well as himself; yet in the rest of the play, even in the undignified episode with Seleucus, Jodelle bespeaks for her not only our sympathy but our admiration. It is just another aspect of this that Antony treats her death as the beginning of her punishment, but to her and her attendants and the women of Alexandria it is a desirable release. The recurrent theme of the chorus, varied to suit the complexion of the different acts, is always the same:

Joye, qui dueil enfante

Se meurdrist; puis la mort,

Par la joye plaisante,

Fait au deuil mesme tort.

Half a dozen years later, in 1558, the Confrères de la Passion were acting a play which Muretus had more immediately prompted, and which did him greater credit. This was the Cesar of Jacques Grévin, a young Huguenot gentlemen who, at the age of twenty, recast in French the even more juvenile effort of the famous scholar, expanding it to twice the size, introducing new personages, giving the old ones more to do, and while borrowing largely in language and construction, shaping it to his own ends and making it much more dramatic. Indeed, his tragedy strikes one as fitter for the popular stage than almost any other of its class, and this seems to have been felt at the time, for besides running through two editions in 1561 and 1562, it was reproduced by the Confrères with great success in the former year. Of course its theatrical merit is only relative, and it does not escape the faults of the Senecan school. Grévin styles his dramatis personae rather ominously and very correctly “entre-parleurs”; for they talk rather than act. They talk, moreover, in long, set harangues even when they are conversing, and Grévin so likes to hear them that he sometimes lets the story wait. Nor do they possess much individuality or concrete life. But the young author has passion; he has fire; and he knows the dramatic secret of contrasting different moods and points of view.

He follows his exemplar most closely, and often literally, in the first three acts, though even in them he often goes his own way. Thus, after Caesar’s opening soliloquy, which is by no means so Olympian as in Muret, he introduces Mark Antony, who encourages his master with reminders of his greatness and assurances of his devotion. In the second act, after Marcus Brutus’ monologue, not only Cassius but Decimus has something to say, and there is a quicker interchange of statement and rejoinder than is usual in such a play. In the third act, the third and fourth of Muretus are combined, and after the conversation of Calpurnia with the Nurse, there follow her attempts to dissuade her husband from visiting the senate house, the hesitation of Caesar, the counter-arguments of Decimus; and in conclusion, when Decimus has prevailed, the Nurse resumes her endeavours at consolation. The fourth act is entirely new, and gives an account of the assassination by the mouth of a Messenger, who is also a new person, to the distracted Calpurnia and her sympathetic Nurse. In the fifth Grévin begins by returning to his authority in the jubilant speeches of Brutus and Cassius, but one by Decimus is added; and rejecting the expedient of the ghostly intervention, he substitutes, much more effectively, that of Mark Antony, who addresses the chorus of soldiers, rouses them to vengeance, and having made sure of them, departs to stir up the people.

Altogether a creditable performance, and a distinct improvement on the more famous play that supplied the groundwork. One must not be misled by the almost literal discipleship of Grévin in particular passages, to suppose that even in language he is a mere imitator. The discipleship is of course undeniable. Take Brutus’ outburst:

Rome effroy de ce monde, exemple des provinces,

Laisse la tyrannie entre les mains des Princes

Du Barbare estranger, qui honneur luy fera,

Non pas Rome, pendant que Brute vivera.

And compare:

Reges adorent barbarae gentes suos,

Non Roma mundi terror, et mundi stupor.

Vivente Bruto, Roma reges nesciet.

So, too, after the murder Brutus denounces his victim:

Ce Tyran, ce Cesar, ennemi du Senat....

Ce bourreau d’innocens, ruine de nos loix,

La terreur des Romains, et le poison des droicts.

The lines whence this extract is taken merely enlarge Muretus’ conciser statement:

Ille, ille, Caesar, patriae terror suae,

Hostis senatus, innocentium carnifex,

Legum ruina, publici jures lues.

But generally Grévin is more abundant and more fervid even when he reproduces most obviously, and among the best of his purple patches are some that are quite his own. He indeed thought differently. He modestly confesses:

Je ne veux pourtant nier que s’il se trouve quelque traict digne estre loué, qu’il ne soit de Muret, lequel a esté mon precepteur quelque temps es lettres humaines, et auquel je donne le meilleur comme l’ayant appris de luy.

All the same there is nothing in Muretus like the passage in which Brutus promises himself an immortality of fame:

Et quand on parlera de Cesar et de Romme,

Qu’on se souvienne aussi qu’il a esté un homme,

Un Brute, le vangeur de toute cruauté,

Qui aura d’un seul coup gaigné la liberté.

Quand on dira, Cesar fut maistre de l’empire,

Qu’on die quant-et-quant, Brute le sceut occire.

Quand on dira, Cesar fut premier Empereur,

Qu’on die quant-et-quant, Brute en fut le vangeur.

Ainsi puisse a jamais sa gloire estre suyvie

De celle qui sera sa mortelle ennemie.

Grévin’s tragedy had great vogue, was preferred even to those of Jodelle, and was praised by Ronsard, though Ronsard afterwards retracted his praises when Grévin broke with him on religious grounds. His protestantism, however, would be a recommendation rather than otherwise in England, and one would like to know whether some of the lost English pieces on the same subject owed anything to the French drama. The suggestion has even been made that Shakespeare was acquainted with it. There are some vague resemblances in particular thoughts and phrases,[54] the closest of which occurs in Caesar’s pronouncement on death:

Il vault bien mieux mourir

Asseuré de tout poinct, qu’incessament perir

Faulsement par la peur.

This suggests:

Cowards die many times before their deaths:

The valiant never taste of death but once.

(II. ii. 32.)

Herr Collischonn also draws attention to a coincidence in situation that is not derived from Plutarch. When the conspirators are discussing the chances of Caesar’s attending the senate meeting, Cassius says:

Encore qu’il demeure

Plus long temps à venir, si fault il bien qu’il meure:

and Decimus answers:

Je m’en vay au devant, sans plus me tormenter,

Et trouveray moyen de le faire haster.

It is at least curious to find the same sort of addition, in the same circumstances and with the same speakers in Shakespeare.

Cassius.But it is doubtful yet,

Whether Caesar will come forth to-day, or no....

Dec. Brut. Never fear that: if he be so resolved,

I can o’ersway him....

For I can give his humour the true bent

And I will bring him to the Capitol.

(II. i. 194, 202, 210.)

Such minutiae, however, are far from conclusive, especially since, as in the two instances quoted, which are the most significant, Plutarch, though he did not authorise, may at any rate have suggested them. The first looks like an expansion of Caesar’s remark when his friends were discussing which death was the best: “Death unlooked for.” The second follows as a natural dramatic anticipation of the part that Decimus actually played in inducing Caesar to keep tryst. They may very well have occurred independently to both poets; or, if there be a connection, may have been transmitted from the older to the younger through the medium of some forgotten English piece. There is more presumptive evidence that Grévin influenced the Julius Caesar of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling; but Stirling’s paraphrase of his authorities is so diffuse that they are not always easy to trace. His apparent debts to Grévin may really be due to the later and much more famous French Senecan Garnier, two of whose works have an undoubted though not very conspicuous place in the history of the English Drama generally, and especially of the Roman Play in England.

Cornélie, the earlier and less successful of the pair, written in Garnier’s twenty-eighth year, was performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1573, and was published in 1574. The young author was not altogether unpractised in his art, for already in 1568 he had written a drama on the subject of Portia, but he has not yet advanced beyond his predecessors, and like them, or perhaps more obviously than they, is at the stage of regarding the tragedy “only as an elegy mixed with rhetorical expositions.” The episode that he selected lent itself to such treatment.

Cornelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, had after the loss of her first husband, the younger Cassius, become the wife of Pompey the Great, of whose murder she was an eye-witness. Meanwhile her father still made head against Caesar in Africa, and the play deals with her regrets and suspense at Rome till she learns the issue of this final struggle. In the first act Cicero soliloquises on the woes of the country, which he traces to her lust of conquest; and the chorus takes up the burden at the close. In the second Cornelia bewails her own miseries, which she attributes to her infidelity in marrying again: Cicero tries to comfort her and she refuses his comfort, both in very long harangues; and the chorus describes the mutability of mortal things. In the third act she narrates an ominous dream in which the shade of Pompey has visited her. Scarcely has she left the stage when Cicero enters to announce the triumph of Caesar and the death of Scipio. Cornelia re-enters to receive the urn with Pompey’s ashes, the sight of which stirs her to new laments for herself and imprecations against Caesar. The chorus dwells on the capriciousness of fortune. In the fourth act the resentment against Caesar is emphasised by Cassius in discourse with Decimus Brutus, and the chorus sings of Harmodios and Aristogeiton; but after that Caesar and Antony come in and discuss the means to be taken for Caesar’s safety, Antony advocating severity and caution, Caesar leniency and confidence. This act is closed by a chorus of Caesar’s friends, who celebrate his services and virtues. The fifth act is chiefly occupied with the messenger’s account of Scipio’s last battle and death, at the end of which Cornelia at some length declares that when she has paid due funeral rites to husband and father, she will surrender her own life.

From this analysis it will be seen that Cornélie as a play is about as defective as it could be. The subject is essentially undramatic, for the heroine—and there is no hero—has nothing to do but spend her time in lamentations and forebodings, in eulogies and vituperations. Yet the subject is more suitable than the treatment. There is no trace of conflict, internal or external; for the persons maintain their own point of view throughout, and the issue is a matter of course from the first. There is no entanglement or plot; but all the speakers, as they enter in turn, are affected with a craving to deliver their minds either in solitude or to some congenial listener: and their prolations lead to nothing. Even the unity of interest, which the classicists so prized, and over-prized, is lacking here, despite the bareness of the theme. Cicero has hardly less to say than Cornelia, and in two acts she does not so much as appear, while in one of them attention is diverted from her sorrows to the dangers of Caesar. The heroine no doubt retains a certain kind of primacy, but save for that, M. Faguet’s description would be literally correct: “The piece in the author’s conception might be entitled Thoughts of various persons concerning Rome at the Date of Thapsus.”[55] The Cornélie is by no means devoid of merit, but that merit is almost entirely rhetorical, literary, and poetical. The language is never undignified, the metres are carefully manipulated; the descriptions and reflections, many of them taken from Lucan, though sometimes stilted, are often elevated and picturesque. But the most dramatic passages are the conversations in the fourth act, where the inter-locuteurs, as Garnier calls the characters with even more reason than Grévin calls those of his play entre-parleurs, are respectively Decimus Brutus and Cassius, Caesar and Mark Antony: and this is typical for two reasons. In the first place, these scenes have least to do with the titular subject, and are, as it were, mere excrescences on the main theme. In the second place, they are borrowed, so far as their general idea is concerned, from Grévin, as Grévin in turn had borrowed them from Muretus; and even details have been transmitted to the cadet in the trinity from each and both of his predecessors. Thus in the Cornélie Decimus not very suitably replaces or absorbs Marcus Brutus, but the whole tone and movement of the interview with Cassius are the same in all the three plays, and particular expressions reappear in Garnier that are peculiar to one or other of his elder colleagues or that the later has adapted from the earlier. For example, Garnier’s Cassius describes Caesar as

un homme effeminé

Qui le Roy Nicomede a jeune butiné.[56]

There is no express reference to this scandal in Muretus, but it furnishes Grévin’s Decimus with a vigorous couplet which obviously has inspired the above quotation:

N’endurons plus sur nous regner un Ganimede

Et la moitié du lict de son Roy Nicomede.

Here, on the other hand, is an instance of Garnier getting a phrase from Muretus that Grévin passed over. Decimus says in excuse of his former patron:

Encor’ n’est il pas Roy portant le diadême:

to which Cassius replies:

Non, il est Dictateur: et n’est-ce pas de mesme?

In the Latin both objection and answer are put in the lips of Marcus Brutus, but that does not affect the resemblance.

At vero non rex iste, sed dictator est.

Dum res sit una, quid aliud nomen juvat?

In other cases the parallelism is threefold. Thus Garnier’s Cassius exclaims:

Les chevaux courageux ne maschent point le mors

Sujets au Chevalier qu’avecque grands efforts;

Et les toreaux cornus ne se rendent domtables

Qu’à force, pour paistrir les plaines labourables.

Nous hommes, nous Romains, ayant le coeur plus mol,

Sous un joug volontaire irons ployer le col.

Grévin’s Marcus Brutus said:

Le taureau, le cheval ne prestent le col bas

A l’appetit d’un joug, si ce n’est pas contraincte:

Fauldra il donc que Rome abbaisse sous la craincte

De ce nouveau tyran le chef de sa grandeur?

In Muretus the same personage puts it more shortly:

Generosiores frena detrectant equi:

Nec nisi coacti perferunt tauri jugum:

Roma patietur, quod recusant belluae.

In the scene between Caesar and Antony the resemblances are less marked in detail, partly owing to the somewhat different role assigned to the second speaker, but they are there; and the general tendency, from the self-conscious monologue of Caesar with which it opens, to the dialogue in which he gives expression to his doubts, is practically the same in both plays.

And these episodes are of some importance in view of their subsequent as well as their previous history. Though neither entirely original nor entirely relevant, they seem, perhaps because of their comparative fitness for the stage, to have made a great impression at the time. It has been suggested that they were not without their influence on Shakespeare when he came to write his Julius Caesar: a point the discussion of which may be reserved. It is certain that they supplied Alexander, though he may also have used Grévin and even Muretus, with the chief models and materials for certain scenes in his tragedy on the same subject. Thus, he too presents Caesar and Antony in consultation, and the former prefaces this interchange of views with a high-flown declaration of his greatness. Thus, too, the substance of their talk is to a great extent adapted from Garnier and diluted in the process. Compare the similar versions of the apology that Caesar makes for his action. In Alexander he exclaims:

The highest in the heaven who knows all hearts,

Do know my thoughts as pure as are their starres,

And that (constrain’d) I came from forraine parts

To seeme uncivill in the civill warres.

I mov’d that warre which all the world bemoanes,

Whil’st urged by force to free my selfe from feares;

Still when my hand gave wounds, my heart gave groanes;

No Romans bloud was shed, but I shed teares.[57]

It is very like what Garnier’s Caesar says:

J’atteste Jupiter qui sonne sur la terre,

Que contraint malgré moy j’ay mené ceste guerre:

Et que victoire aucune où j’apperçoy gesir

Le corps d’un citoyen, ne me donne plaisir:

Mais de mes ennemis l’envie opiniatre,

Et le malheur Romain m’a contraint de combattre.

So, too, when Antony asserts that some are contriving Caesar’s death, the speakers engage in a dialectical skirmish:

Caesar. The best are bound to me by gifts in store.

Antony. But to their countrey they are bound farre more.

Caesar. Then loathe they me as th’ enemy of the state?

Antony. Who freedom love, you (as usurper) hate.

Caesar. I by great battells have enlarg’d their bounds.

Antony. By that they think your pow’r too much abounds.

The filiation with Garnier is surely unmistakable, though it cannot be shown in every line or phrase.

Antoine. Aux ennemis domtez il n’y a point de foy.

Cesar. En ceux qui vie et biens de ma bonté reçoivent?

Antoine. Voire mais beaucoup plus à la Patrie ils doivent.

Cesar. Pensent-ils que je sois ennemy du païs?

Antoine. Mais cruel ravisseur de ses droits envahis.

Cesar. J’ay à Rome soumis tant de riches provinces.

Antoine. Rome ne peut souffrir commandement de Princes.

The scene with the conspirators Stirling treats very differently and much more freely. It had had, as we have seen, a peculiar history. In Muretus it was confined to Marcus Brutus and Cassius, in Grévin Decimus Brutus is added, in Garnier Decimus is retained and Marcus drops out. Alexander discriminates. He keeps one discussion for Marcus and Cassius, in so far restoring it to the original and more fitting form it had obtained from Muretus, though he transfers to Marcus some of the sentiments that Garnier had assigned to Decimus. But the half-apologetic rôle that Decimus plays in Garnier had impressed him, and he did not choose to forego the spice of variety which this contributed. So he invents a new scene for him in which Cicero takes the place of Cassius and solicits his support. But though the one episode is thus cut in two, and each of the halves enlarged far beyond the dimensions of the original whole, it is unquestionable that they owe their main suggestion and much of their matter to the Cornélie.

Since then Garnier, when his powers were still immature, could so effectively adapt these incidental passages, it is not surprising that he should by and by be able to stand alone, and produce plays in which the central interest was more dramatic.

Of these we are concerned only with Marc Antoine, which was acted with success at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1578, and was printed in the same year. In it Garnier has not altogether freed himself from his former faults. There are otiose personages who are introduced merely to supply general reflections: Diomedes, the secretary, on the pathos of Cleopatra’s fall; Philostratus, the philosopher, on the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy. There is no interaction of character on character, all the protagonists being so carefully excluded from each other that Octavianus does not meet Antony, Antony does not meet Cleopatra, Cleopatra does not meet Octavianus. The speeches are still over long, and the “sentences” over abundant. Nevertheless there is a real story, there are real characters; and the story and characters admit, or rather demand, an effective alternation of passion.

The time comprises the interval between Antony’s final reverse and the suicide of Cleopatra: it is short, but a good deal longer than what Jodelle allowed himself in the companion play. Further, the situation is much more complex and less confined, so that Garnier, while borrowing many motifs from Jodelle, or from their common authority, Plutarch, is able to avoid the monotony of Cléopatre Captive. Nor does the coherence suffer. It is true that the account of Antony’s death, announced by Dercetas, occurs as with Shakespeare in the fourth act; but the play is rightly named after him and not after the Queen. He is the principal and by far the most interesting figure, and it is his tragic fate to which all that precedes leads up, and which determines all that follows.

The first act, as so often in these Senecan plays, is entirely occupied with a soliloquy, which Antony declaims; but even this has a certain share of dramatic life, though rather after the fashion of a dramatic lyric than of a dramatic scene. He rages against what he supposes to be the crowning perfidy of his mistress, he recalls all that his infatuation has cost him; the worst of his woes is that they are caused by her; but he must love her still. The second act has at the opening and the close respectively the unnecessary monologues of Philostratus and Diomedes, but they serve as setting for the animated and significant conversation between Cleopatra and her women. From it we learn that of the final treason at least she is innocent, but she is full of remorse for the mischief that her love and her caprices have done, and determines, despite the claims of her children, to expiate it in death. Then, entering the monument she despatches Diomedes with her excuses to Antony. To him we return in the third act, which is central in interest as in position, and we hear him disburden his soul to his friend Lucilius. His fluctuations of feeling, shame at his undoing, passion for the fair undoer, jealousy lest his conqueror should supplant him in love as in empire, are delineated with sympathetic power:

Ait Cesar la victoire, ait mes biens, ait l’honneur

D’estre sans compagnon de la terre seigneur,

Ait mes enfans, ma vie au mal opiniâtre,

Ce m’est tout un, pourveu qu’il n’ait ma Cleopatre:

Je ne puis l’oublier, tant j’affole, combien

Que de n’y penser point servoit non plus grand bien.

He remembers his past glory and past prowess, and it stings him that he should now be overcome by an inferior foe:

un homme effeminé de corps et de courage

Qui du mestier de Mars n’apprist oncque l’usage.

But he has only himself to blame, for he has debased his life:

N’ayant soing de vertu, ny d’aucune louange;

Ains comme un porc ventru touille dedans la fange,

A coeur saoul me voitray en maints salles plaisirs,

Mettant dessous le pied tous honnestes desirs.

Now it only remains for him to die. In the fourth act Octavianus dwells on the arduousness of his triumphs and the enormity of Antony’s offences, in order to justify a ruthless policy; and a discussion follows between him and Agrippa, like the one between Julius and Antony in the Cornélie, except that here the emperor and his adviser have their parts reversed. When his resolution seems fixed Dercetas enters in dismay with tidings that Antony has sought to take his own life, and that mortally wounded he has been drawn up into the monument to breathe his last in Cleopatra’s arms. For a moment his conqueror’s heart is touched. But only for a moment. He speedily gives ear to the warning of Agrippa, that to secure her treasures and preserve her life, Cleopatra must be seized. In the fifth act she has all her preparations made to follow her lord. In vain Euphron tries to stay her by gathering her children round and predicting their probable fate:

Eufron.Desja me semble voir

Cette petite enfance en servitude cheoir,

Et portez en trionfe, ...

Et au doigt les monstrer la tourbe citoyenne.

Cleopatre. Hé! plutost mille morts.

But she persists in her resolve and dismisses them. Her only regret is that she has delayed so long,

Et ja fugitive Ombre avec toy je serois,

Errant sous les cyprès des rives escartees.

She has waited only to pay the due rites, but now she is free to breathe her last on her lover’s corpse:

Que de mille baisers, et mille et mille encore

Pour office dernier ma bouche vous honore.

Et qu’en un tel devoir mon corps affoiblissant

Defaille dessur vous, mon ame vomissant.

3. ENGLISH FOLLOWERS OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL.
“THE WOUNDS OF CIVIL WAR”

The Marc Antoine is the best tragedy on a Roman theme, and one of the best imitations of Seneca that France in the sixteenth century has to show. It deserved to find admirers on the other side of the Channel, and it did. Among the courtly and cultured circles in whose eyes the Latin drama was the ideal and criterion to which all poets should aspire and by which their achievements should be tested, it was bound to call forth no little enthusiasm. In England ere this similar attempts had been made and welcomed, but none had been quite so moving and interesting, above all none had conformed so strictly to the formal requirements of the humanist code. In Gorboduc, the first of these experiments, Sidney, lawgiver of the elect, was pleased to admit the “honest civility” and “skilful poetry,” but his praises were not without qualification:

As it is full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtayne the very end of Poesie: yet in troth it is very defectious in the circumstaunces: which greeveth mee, because it might not remaine as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place, and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should be, both by Aristotles precept, and common reason, but one day: there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined.[58]

Nor in such respects were things much better in the Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes, which was composed in 1587, the year after Sidney’s death. But meanwhile France had been blessed with a play at least the equal of these native products in poetry and pathos, and much more observant of the unities that scholars were proclaiming. If the scene was not absolutely unchanged, at least the changes were confined within the area of a single town. If the time was not precisely marked, and in Plutarch’s narrative slightly exceeded the orthodox limits, still Garnier had so managed it that the occurrences set forth might easily be conceived to take place in a single day. It seems just the modern play that would have fulfilled the desire of Sidney’s heart; and since it was composed in a foreign tongue, what could be more fitting than that Sidney’s sister, the famous Countess of Pembroke, who shared so largely in Sidney’s literary tastes and literary gifts, should undertake to give it an English form? It may have been on her part a pious offering to his manes, and in 1590, four years after her brother’s death, her version was complete.[59] She was well fitted for her task, and she has discharged it well. Sometimes she may take her liberties, but generally she is wonderfully faithful, and yet neither in diction nor versification is she stiffer than many contemporary writers of original English verse. Here, for instance, is Diomed’s eulogy of Cleopatra’s charm:

Nought liues so faire. Nature by such a worke

Hir selfe, should seeme, in workmanship hath past.

She is all heau’nlie: neuer any man

But seing hir, was rauish’d with hir sight.

The Allablaster couering of hir face,

The corall colour hir two lipps engraines,

Hir beamie eies, two sunnes of this our world,

Of hir faire haire the fine and flaming golde,

Hir braue streight stature and her winning partes

Are nothing else but fiers, fetters, dartes.

Yet this is nothing to th’ enchaunting skilles,

Of her coelestiall Sp’rite, hir training speache,

Hir grace, hir Maiestie, and forcing voice,

Whether she it with fingers speache consorte,

Or hearing sceptred kings ambassadors

Answer to eache in his owne language make.

This excellently preserves many details as well as the pervading tone of the original:

Rien ne vit de si beau, Nature semble avoir

Par un ouvrage tel surpassé son pouvoir:

Elle est toute celeste, et ne se voit personne

La voulant contempler, qu’elle ne passionne.

L’albastre qui blanchist sur son visage saint,

Et le vermeil coral qui ses deux lévres peint,

La clairté de ses yeux, deux soleils de ce monde,

Le fin or rayonnant dessur sa tresse blonde,

Sa belle taille droitte, et ses frians attraits,

Ne sont que feux ardents, que cordes, et que traits.

Mais encor ce n’est rien aupres des artifices

De son esprit divin, ses mignardes blandices,

Sa maiestie, sa grace, et sa forçante voix,

Soit qu’ell’ la vueille joindre au parler de ses doigts,

Ou que des Rois sceptrez recevant les harangues,

Elle vueille respondre à chacun en leurs langues.

The most notable privilege of which the translation makes use is to soften or refine certain expressions that may have seemed too vigorous to the high-bred English lady. This, for example, is her rendering of the lines already quoted in which Antony denounces his voluptuous life:

Careless of uertue, careless of all praise,

Nay, as the fatted swine in filthy mire,

With glutted heart I wallow’d in delights,

All thoughts of honor troden under foote.

Similarly, in Cleopatra’s closing speech, the original expression, “mon ame vomissant,” yields to a gentler and not less poetical equivalent:

A thousand kisses, thousand thousand more

Let you my mouth for honor’s farewell give:

That, in this office, weake my limmes may growe

Fainting on you, and fourth my soule may flowe.

As the deviations are confined to details, it is not necessary to repeat the account of the tragedy as a whole. These extracts will show that Garnier’s Marc Antoine was presented to the English public in a worthy dress; and the adequacy of the workmanship, the appeal to cultivated taste, the prestige of the great Countess as “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” her personal reputation among literary men, procured it immediate welcome and lasting acceptance. Fifteen years after its first publication it had passed through five editions, and must have been a familiar book to Elizabethan readers who cared for such wares. Moreover, it directly evoked an original English play that followed in part the same pattern and treated in part the same theme.

In 1594 appeared the Cleopatra of Samuel Daniel, dedicated to Lady Pembroke with very handsome acknowledgments of the stimulus he had received from her example and with much modest deprecation of the supplement he offered. His muse, he asserts, would not have digressed from the humble task of praising Delia,

had not thy well graced Antony

(Who all alone, having remained long)

Requir’d his Cleopatra’s company.

These words suggest that it was not written at once after the Countess’s translation: on the other hand there can have been no very long delay, as it was entered for publication in October, 1593. The first complete and authorised edition of Delia along with the Complaint of Rosamond, which Daniel does not mention, had been given to the world in 1592; and we may assume from his own words that the Cleopatra was the next venture of the young author just entering his thirties, and ambitious of a graver kind of fame than he had won by these amatorious exercises. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with the result, and perhaps from the outset his self-disparagement was not very genuine. His play was reprinted seven times before his death, and these editions show one complete revision and one thorough recast of the text. Poets are not wont to spend such pains on works that they do not value. The truth is that Daniel’s Cleopatra may take its place beside his subsequent Philotas among the best original Senecan tragedies that Elizabethan England produced. Its claims, of course, are almost exclusively literary and hardly at all theatrical, though some of the changes in the final version of 1607 seem meant to give a little mobility to the slow-paced scenes. But from first to last it depends on the elegiac and rhetorical qualities that characterise the whole school, and in its undivided attention to them recalls rather Jodelle’s Cléopatre Captive than Garnier’s Marc Antoine. The resemblance to the earlier drama is perhaps not accidental. The situation is precisely the same, for the story begins after the death of Antony, and concludes with the account of Cleopatra’s suicide. Thus, despite Daniel’s statement, his play is not in any true sense a sequel to the one which the Countess had rendered, nor is it the case, as his words insinuate, that in the Antonius Cleopatra still delayed to join her beloved: on the contrary we take leave of her as she is about to expire upon his corpse. So though his patroness’s translation may very well have suggested to him his heroine, it could not possibly prescribe to him his argument. And surely after Garnier had shown the more excellent way of treating the subject so as to include both the lovers, this truncated section of the history would not spontaneously occur to any dramatist as the material most proper for his needs. It seems more than likely that Daniel was acquainted with Jodelle’s play, and that the precedent it furnished, determined him in his not very happy selection of the final episode to the exclusion of all that went before. A careful comparison of the two Cleopatras supports this view. No doubt in general treatment they differ widely, and most of the coincidences in detail are due to both authors having exploited Plutarch’s narrative. But this is not true of all. There are some traits that are not to be accounted for by their common pedigree, but by direct transmission from the one to the other. Thus, to mention the most striking, in Jodelle Seleucus is made to express penitence for exposing the Queen’s misstatement about her treasure. There is no authority for this: yet in Daniel the new motif reappears. Of course it is not merely repeated without modification. In Jodelle it is to the chorus that the culprit unbosoms himself; in Daniel it is to Rodon, the false governor who has betrayed Caesarion, and who similarly and no less fictitiously is represented as full of remorse for his more heinous treason. But imitators frequently try in this fashion to vary or heighten the effect by duplicating the rôles they borrow; and Daniel has done so in a second instance, when he happened to get his suggestion from Garnier. In the Marc Antoine, as we saw, there is the sententious but quite superfluous figure of the philosopher Philostratus; Daniel retains him without giving him more to do, but places by his side the figure of the equally sententious and superfluous philosopher Arius. In Rodon we have just such another example of gemination. It is safe to say that the contrite Seleucus comes straight from the pages of Jodelle; and his presence, if there were any doubt, serves to establish Daniel’s connection with the first French Senecan in the vernacular.

But the Countess’s protégé differs from her not only in reverting to an elder model: he distinctly improves on her practice by substituting for her blank verse his own quatrains. The author of the Defence of Ryme showed a right instinct in this. Blank verse is doubtless the better dramatic measure, but these pseudo-Senecan pieces were lyric rather than dramatic, and it was not the most suitable for them. The justice of Daniel’s method is proved by its success. He not only carried the experiment successfully through for himself, which might have been a tour de force on the part of the “well-languaged” poet, but he imposed his metre on successors who were less skilled in managing it, like Sir William Alexander.

Such, then, is the Cleopatra of Daniel, a play that, compared even with the contemporary classical dramas of France, belongs to a bygone phase of the art; a play that is no play at all, but a series of harangues interspersed with odds and ends of dialogue and the due choric songs; but that nevertheless, because it fulfils its own ideal so thoroughly, is admirable in its kind, and still has charms for the lover of poetry.

The first act is occupied with a soliloquy of Cleopatra,[60] in which she laments her past pleasure and glory, and proclaims her purpose of death.

Thinke, Caesar, I that liu’d and raign’d a Queene,

Do scorne to buy my life at such a rate,

That I should underneath my selfe be seene,

Basely induring to suruiue my state:

That Rome should see my scepter-bearing hands

Behind me bound, and glory in my teares;

That I should passe whereas Octauia stands,

To view my misery, that purchas’d hers.[61]

She has hitherto lived only to temporise with Caesar for the sake of her children, but to her late-born love for Antony her death is due. She remembers his doting affection, and exclaims:

And yet thou cam’st but in my beauties waine,

When new appearing wrinckles of declining

Wrought with the hand of yeares, seem’d to detaine

My graces light, as now but dimly shining ...

Then, and but thus, thou didst loue most sincerely,

O Antony, that best deseru’d it better,

This autumn of my beauty bought so dearely,

For which in more then death, I stand thy debter.

In the second act Proculeius gives an account of Cleopatra’s capture, and describes her apparent submission, to Caesar, who suspects that it is pretence. In the first scene of the third act Philostratus and Arius philosophise on their own misfortunes, the misfortunes of the land, and the probable fate of Cleopatra’s children. The next scene presents the famous interview between Caesar and Cleopatra, with the disclosures of Seleucus, to which are added Dolabella’s avowal of his admiration, and Caesar’s decision to carry his prisoner to Rome. In the fourth act Seleucus, who has betrayed the confidence of his mistress, bewails his disloyalty, to Rodon, who has delivered up Caesarion to death; but they depart to avoid Cleopatra, whom Dolabella has informed of the victor’s intentions, and who enters, exclaiming:

What, hath my face yet powre to win a louer?

Can this torn remnant serue to grace me so,

That it can Caesar’s secret plots discouer,

What he intends with me and mine to do?

Why then, poore beauty, thou hast done thy last

And best good seruice thou could’st doe unto me:

For now the time of death reueal’d thou hast,

Which in my life didst serue but to undoe me.

In the first scene of the fifth act Titius tells how Cleopatra has sent a message to Caesar, and in the second scene we learn the significance of this from the Nuntius, who himself has taken her the asps.

Well, in I went, where brighter then the Sunne,

Glittering in all her pompeous rich aray,

Great Cleopatra sate, as if sh’ had wonne

Caesar, and all the world beside, this day:

Euen as she was, when on thy cristall streames,

Cleare Cydnos, she did shew what earth could shew:

When Asia all amaz’d in wonder, deemes

Venus from heauen was come on earth below.

Euen as she went at firste to meete her loue,

So goes she now againe to finde him.

But that first, did her greatnes onely proue,

This last her loue, that could not liue behind him.

Her words to the asp are not without a quaint pathetic tenderness, as she contrasts the “ugly grimness” and “hideous torments” of other deaths with this that it procures:

Therefore come thou, of wonders wonder chiefe,

That open canst with such an easie key

The doore of life: come gentle cunning thiefe

That from our selues so steal’st our selues away.

And her dallying with the accepted and inevitable end is good:

Looke how a mother at her sonnes departing,

For some farre voyage bent to get him fame,

Doth entertaine him with an ydle parting

And still doth speake, and still speakes but the same:

Now bids farewell, and now recalles him backe,

Tels what was told, and bids againe farewell,

And yet againe recalles; for still doth lacke

Something that Loue would faine and cannot tell:

Pleased he should goe, yet cannot let him goe.

So she, although she knew there was no way

But this, yet this she could not handle so

But she must shew that life desir’d delay.

But this is little more than by-play and make-believe. She does the deed, and when Caesar’s messengers arrive, it is past prevention.

For there they found stretcht on a bed of gold,

Dead Cleopatra; and that proudly dead,

In all the rich attire procure she could;

And dying Charmion trimming of her head,

And Eras at her feete, dead in like case.

“Charmion, is this well done?” sayd one of them.

“Yea, well,” sayd she, “and her that from the race

Of so great Kings descends, doth best become.”

And with that word, yields to her faithfull breath

To passe th’ assurance of her loue with death.

One more example of the influence of the French Senecans remains to be mentioned, and though, as a translation, it is less important than Daniel’s free reproduction, the name of the translator gives it a special interest. The stately rhetoric of the Cornélie caught the fancy of Thomas Kyd, who from the outset had found something sympathetic in Garnier’s style, and, perhaps in revolt from the sensationalism of his original work, he wrote an English version which was published in 1594. When this was so, it need the less surprise us that the Senecan form should still for years to come be cultivated by writers who had seen the glories of the Elizabethan stage, above all for what would seem the peculiarly appropriate themes of classic history: that Alexander should employ it for his Julius Caesar and the rest of his Monarchic Tragedies even after Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had appeared, and that Ben Jonson himself should, as it were, cast a wistful, backward glance at it in his Catiline, which he supplies, not only with a chorus, but with a very Senecan exposition by Sylla’s ghost. If this style appealed to the author of The Spanish Tragedy, it might well appeal to the more fastidious connoisseurs in whom the spirit of the Renaissance was strong. It was to them Kyd looked for patronage in his new departure, and he dedicates his Cornelia to the Countess of Suffolk, aunt of the more memorable lady who had translated the Marc Antoine.

In execution it hardly equals the companion piece: the language is less flexible and graphic, and the whole effect more wearisome; which, however, may be due in part to the inferior merit of the play Kyd had to render, as well as to the haste with which the rendering was made. But he aims at preserving the spirit of the French, and does preserve it in no small degree. The various metres of the chorus are managed with occasional dexterity; the rhyme that is mingled with the blank verse of the declamation relieves the tedium of its somewhat monotonous tramp, and adds point and effectiveness. A fair specimen of his average procedure may be found in his version of the metaphorical passage in Cassius’ speech, that, as has been pointed out, can be traced back to Grévin and Muretus.

The stiff-neckt horses champe not on the bit

Nor meekely beare the rider but by force:

The sturdie Oxen toyle not at the Plough

Nor yeeld unto the yoke, but by constraint.

Shall we then that are men and Romains borne,

Submit us to unurged slauerie?

Shall Rome, that hath so many ouerthrowne

Now make herselfe a subject to her owne?[62]

Kyd was certainly capable of emphasis, both in the good and the bad sense, which stands him in good stead when he has to reproduce the passages adapted from Lucan. These he generally presents in something of their native pomp, and indeed throughout he shows a praiseworthy effort to keep on the level of his author. The result is a grave and decorous performance, which, if necessarily lacking in distinctive colour, since the original had so little, is almost equally free from modern incongruities. It can hardly be reckoned as such that Scipio grasps his “cutlass,” or that in similar cases the equivalent for a technical Latin term should have a homely sound. Perhaps the most serious anachronism occurs when Cicero, talking of “this great town” of Rome, exclaims:

Neither could the flaxen-haird high Dutch,

(A martiall people, madding after Armes),

Nor yet the fierce and fiery humord French....

Once dare t’assault it.

Garnier is not responsible: he writes quite correctly:

Ny les blons Germains, peuple enragé de guerre,

Ny le Gaulois ardent.

This, however, is a very innocent slip. It was different when another scholar of the group to which Kyd belonged treated a Roman theme in a more popular way.

But before turning to him it may be well to say a word concerning the influence which these Senecan pieces are sometimes supposed to have had on Shakespeare’s Roman plays that dealt with kindred themes.

And in the first place it may be taken as extremely probable that he had read them. They were well known to the Elizabethan public, the least famous of them, Kyd’s Cornelia, reaching a second edition within a year of its first issue. They were executed by persons who must have bulked large in Shakespeare’s field of vision. Apart from her general social and literary reputation, the Countess of Pembroke was mother of the two young noblemen to whom the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays was afterwards dedicated on the ground that they had “prosequutted both them and the author living with so much favour.” Some of Daniel’s works Shakespeare certainly knew, for there are convincing parallelisms between the Complaint of Rosamond on the one hand, and the Rape of Lucrece and Romeo and Juliet on the other; nor can there be much question about the indebtedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Daniel’s Delia. Again, with Kyd’s acting dramas Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted. He quotes The Spanish Tragedy in the Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear; and the same play, as well as Solyman and Perseda, if that be Kyd’s, in King John: nor is it to be forgotten that many see Kyd’s hand and few would deny Kyd’s influence in Titus Andronicus, and that some attribute to him the lost Hamlet. All these things considered, Shakespeare’s ignorance of the English Senecans would be much more surprising than his knowledge of them. Further, though his own method was so dissimilar, he would be quite inclined to appreciate them, as may be inferred from the approval he puts in Hamlet’s mouth of Æneas’ tale to Dido, which reads like a heightened version of the narratives that occur so plentifully in their pages. So there is nothing antecedently absurd in the conjecture that they gave him hints when he turned to their authorities on his own behalf.

Nevertheless satisfactory proof is lacking. The analogies with Garnier’s Marc Antoine not accounted for by the obligation of both dramatists to Plutarch are very vague, and oddly enough seem vaguer in the translation than in the original. Of this there is a good example in Antony’s words when he recalls to his shame how his victor

Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had

In the brave squares of war.

(A. and C. III. x. 39.)

There is similarity of motif, and even the suggestion of something more, in his outburst in Garnier:

Un homme effeminé de corps et de courage

Qui du mestier de Mars n’apprist oncque l’usage.

But only the motif is left in the Countess of Pembroke’s rendering:

A man, a woman both in might and minde,

In Marses schole who neuer lesson learn’d.

The alleged parallels are thus most apparent when Shakespeare is collated with the French, and of these the chief that do not come from Plutarch have already been quoted in the description of the Marc Antoine. They are neither numerous nor striking. Besides Antony’s disparagement of his rival’s soldiership there are only three that in any way call for remark. In Garnier, Cleopatra’s picture of her shade wandering beneath the cypress trees of the Underworld may suggest, in Shakespeare, her lover’s anticipation of Elysium, “where souls do couch on flowers” (A. and C. iv. xiv. 51); but there is a great difference in the tone of the context. Her dying utterance:

Que de mille baisers, et mille et mille encore

Pour office dernier ma bouche vous honore:

is in the wording not unlike the dying utterance of Antony:

Of many thousand kisses the poor last

I lay upon thy lips;

(A. and C. IV. xv. 20.)

but there is more contrast than agreement in the ideas. Above all, Cleopatra’s horror at the thought of her children being led in triumph through Rome and pointed at by the herd of citizens is close akin to the feeling that inspires similar passages in Shakespeare (A. and C. iv. xv. 23, v. ii. 55, v. ii. 207); but even here the resemblance is a little deceptive, since in Shakespeare she feels this horror for herself.

The correspondences between Shakespeare and Daniel are equally confined to detail, but they are more definite and more significant. It is Daniel who first represents Cleopatra as scorning to be made a spectacle in Rome; and her resentment at Caesar’s supposing

That I should underneath my selfe be seene,

might have expressed itself in Shakespeare’s phrase,

He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not

Be noble to myself.

(A. and C. V. ii. 191.)

Noteworthy, too, in the same passage, is her reluctance to pass before the injured Octavia, for there is no mention of this point in Plutarch, but Shakespeare touches on it twice. Further, her very noticeable references to her waning charms, her wrinkles, her declining years have their analogies in Shakespeare and in Shakespeare alone; for Plutarch expressly says that she was “at the age when a woman’s beawtie is at the prime.” The tenderness in tone of her address to the asp is common and peculiar to both English poets; and her adornment in preparation for death suggests to each of them, but not to Plutarch, her magnificence when she met Antony on the Cydnus.[63]

These coincidences are interesting, but they are not conclusive. They are none of them such as could not occur independently to two writers who vividly realised the meaning of Plutarch’s data; for he, as it were, gives the premises though he does not draw the inference. Thus he says nothing of Cleopatra’s disdain for the Roman populace, but he does make the knowledge that she must go to Rome determine her to die. He says nothing of her recoil from the thought of Octavia seeing her in her humiliation, but he does tell us of her jealousy of Octavia’s superior claims. He never hints that Cleopatra was past her bloom, but his praise of her as at her prime belongs to 41 b.c., and the closing incident to 30 b.c., when she was in her thirty-ninth year. He does not attribute to her any kindly greeting of the asp, but he does report that she chose it as providing the easiest and gentlest means of death. And though in describing her suicide he makes no reference to the meeting on the Cydnus, he dwells on the glorious array on both occasions, and the fancy naturally flies from one to the other. Each of these particulars separately might well suggest itself to more than one sympathetic reader. The most that can be said is that in their mass they have a certain cogency. In any case, however, characteristic and far-reaching as some of them are, they bear only on details of the conception.

The possible connection of Julius Caesar with the Cornélie is of a somewhat different kind. It is restricted almost entirely to the conversations between Cassius and Decimus Brutus on the one hand, and between Cassius and Marcus Brutus on the other. It is thought to show itself partly in particular expressions, partly in the general situation. So far as the former are concerned, it is neither precise nor distinctive; and it is rather remarkable that, as in the case of the Marc Antoine, more is to be said for it when Shakespeare’s phraseology is compared with that of the original than when it is compared with that of the translation.[64] In regard to the latter M. Bernage, the chief advocate of the theory, writes:

In the English play (Julius Caesar), as in our own, Brutus and Cassius have an interview before the arrival of the Dictator; the subject of their conversation is the same; it is Cassius too who “strikes so much show of fire” (fait jaillir l’etincelle) from the soul of Brutus.... These characters are painted by Garnier in colours quite similar (to Shakespeare’s), and he is momentarily as vigorous and great. In like manner ... Caesar crosses the stage after the interview of the two conspirators; he is moreover accompanied by Antony.[65]

In the whole tone and direction of the dialogue, too, Shakespeare resembles Garnier and does not resemble Plutarch. The Life records one short sentence as Brutus’ part of the colloquy, while Cassius does nothing more than explain the importance of the anonymous letters and set forth the expectations that Rome has formed of his friend. There is no denunciation in Plutarch of Caesar either for his overgrown power or for his “feeble temper”; there is no lament for the degeneracy of the Romans; there is no reference to the expulsion of the kings or appeal to Brutus’ ancestry; all of these matters on which both the dramatists insist. And at the end the two friends are agreed on their policy and depart to prosecute their plans, while in Garnier as in Shakespeare Brutus comes to no final decision.

It would be curious if this conjecture were correct, and if this famous scene had influenced Shakespeare as it was to influence Alexander. There would be few more interesting cases of literary filiation, for, as we have seen, there is no doubt that here Garnier bases and improves on Grévin, and that Grévin bases and improves on Muretus; so the genealogy would run Muretus, Grévin, Garnier, Kyd, Shakespeare.

Here the matter may rest. The grounds for believing that Shakespeare was influenced by Garnier’s Marc Antoine are very slight; for believing that he was influenced by Daniel’s Cleopatra are somewhat stronger; that he was influenced by Garnier’s Cornélie are stronger still; but they are even at the best precarious. In all three instances the evidence brought forward rather suggests the obligation as possible than establishes it as certain. But it seems extremely likely that Shakespeare would be acquainted with dramas that were widely read and were written by persons none of whom can have been strange to him; and in that case their stateliness and propriety may have affected him in other ways than we can trace or than he himself knew.

Meanwhile the popular play had been going its own way, and among other subjects had selected a few from Roman history. We may be certain that slowly and surely it was absorbing some of the qualities that characterised the imitations of the classics; and this process was accelerated when university men, with Marlowe at their head, took a leading share in purveying for the London playhouse. The development is clearly marked in the general history of the drama. Of the Roman play in this transition phase, as treated by a scholar for the delectation of the vulgar, we have only one specimen, but it is a specimen that despite its scanty merit is important no less for the name of the author than for the mode of the treatment. That author was Thomas Lodge, so well known for his songs, novels, pamphlets, and translations. As dramatist he is less conspicuous, and we possess only two plays from his hand. In one of them, A Looking Glass for London and England, which gives a description of the corruption and repentance of Nineveh, and was acted in 1591, he co-operated with Robert Greene. Of the other,[66] The Wounds of Civill War: Lively set forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and Scilla: As it hath beene publicquely plaide in London, by the Right Honourable the Lord High Admirall his Servants, he was sole author, and it is with it that we are concerned. It was printed in 1594, but was probably composed some years earlier.[67] In any case it comes after the decisive appearance of Marlowe; but Lodge was far from rivalling that master or profiting fully by his example, and indeed is inferior to such minor performers as Peele or Greene. Moreover, in the present case he adds to his general dramatic disabilities, the incapacity to treat classical history aright. In this respect, indeed, he improves on the Senecan school by borrowing graphic minutiae from Plutarch, such as the prefiguration of Marius’ future glory in his infancy by the seven eagles, the account of the Gaul’s panic in Minturnae, or the unwilling betrayal of Antonius by the slave. But on the other hand he astonishes us by his failure to make use of picturesque incidents which he must have known; like Sulla’s flight for shelter to his rival’s house, the relief of Marius by the woman whom he had sentenced, the response of the exile from the ruins of Carthage. And even when he utilises Plutarch’s touches, Lodge is apt to weaken or travesty them in his adaptation. The incident of the eagles, though it furnishes two of the best passages in the play, illustrates the enfeeblement. Plutarch had said:

When Marius was but very young and dwelling in the contry, he gathered up in the lappe of his gowne the ayrie of an Eagle, in the which were seven young Eagles; whereat his father and mother much wondering, asked the Sooth-sayers, what that ment? They answered, that their sonne one day should be one of the greatest men in the world, and that out of doubt he should obtain seven times in his life the chiefest office of dignity in his contry.

Plutarch is not quite sure about the trustworthiness of this story, for the characteristic reason that “the eagle never getteth but two younge ones,” and his hesitation may have led Lodge to modify the vivid and improbable detail. Favorinus the Minturnian tells the story thus:

Yonder Marius in his infancy

Was born to greater fortunes than we deem:

For, being scarce from out his cradle crept,

And sporting prettily with his compeers,

On sudden seven young eagles soar’d amain,

And kindly perch’d upon his tender lap.

His parents wondering at this strange event,

Took counsel of the soothsayers in this:

Who told them that these seven-fold eagles’ flight

Forefigurèd his seven times consulship.

And this version, with only another slight variation, is repeated rather happily in the invented narrative of the presage of Marius’ death:

Bright was the day, and on the spreading trees

The frolic citizens of forest sung

Their lays and merry notes on perching boughs;

When suddenly appeared in the east

Seven mighty eagles with their talons fierce,

Who, waving oft above our consul’s head,

At last with hideous cry did soar away:

When suddenly old Marius aghast,

With reverend smile, determin’d with a sigh

The doubtful silence of the standers-by.

“Romans,” he said, “old Marius must die:

These seven fair eagles, birds of mighty Jove,

That at my birthday on my cradle sat,

Now at my last day warn me to my death.”

But the other two passages Lodge modernises beyond recognition and beyond decency.

Of the attempt on Marius’ life at Minturnae, Plutarch narrates very impressively:

Now when they were agreed upon it, they could not finde a man in the citie that durst take upon him to kill him; but a man of armes of the Gaules, or one of the Cimbres (for we finde both the one or the other in wryting) that went thither with his sword drawen in his hande. Now that place of the chamber where Marius lay was very darke, and, as it is reported, the man of armes thought he sawe two burninge flames come out of Marius eyen, and heard a voyce out of that darke corner, saying unto him: “O, fellowe, thou, darest thou come to kill Caius Marius?” The barbarous Gaule, hearing these words, ranne out of the chamber presently, castinge his sworde in the middest of the flower,[68] and crying out these wordes onely: “I can not kill Caius Marius.”

Here is Lodge’s burlesque with the Gaul nominated Pedro, whose name is as unsuitable to his language as is his language to his supposed nationality.

Pedro. Marius tu es mort. Speak dy preres in dy sleepe, for me sal cut off your head from your epaules, before you wake. Qui es stia?[69] What kinde of a man be dis?

Favorinus. Why, what delays are these? Why gaze ye thus?

Pedro. Notre dame! Jésu! Estiene! O my siniors, der be a great diable in ce eyes, qui dart de flame, and with de voice d’un bear cries out, “Villain, dare you kill Marius?” Je tremble; aida me, siniors, autrement I shall be murdered.

Pausanins. What sudden madness daunts this stranger thus?

Pedro. O, me no can kill Marius; me no dare kill Marius! adieu, messieurs, me be dead, si je touche Marius. Marius est un diable. Jesu Maria, sava moy!

exit fugiens.

Things are scarcely better in the episode of Antonius’ betrayal. Plutarch has told very simply how the poor man with whom the orator took refuge, wishing to treat him hospitably, sent a slave for wine, and how the slave, by requiring the best quality for the distinguished guest, provoked the questions of the drawer. In Lodge the unsuspecting serving man becomes a bibulous clown who blabs the secret in a drunken catch that he sings as he passes the soldiers:

O most surpassing wine,

The marrow of the vine!

More welcome unto me

Than whips to scholars be.

Thou art, and ever was,

A means to mend an ass;

Thou makest some to sleep,

And many mo to weep,

And some be glad and merry.

With heigh down derry, derry.

Thou makest some to stumble

A many mo to fumble

And me have pinky neyne.[70]

More brave and jolly wine!

What need I praise thee mo,

For thou art good, with heigh-ho!...

(To the Soldiers):

You would know where Lord Antony is? I perceive you.

Shall I say he is in yond farm-house? I deceive you.

Shall I tell you this wine is for him? The gods forfend.

And so I end.

Lodge is not more fortunate with his additions. Thus, after Sylla’s final resignation, two burghers with the very Roman names of Curtall and Poppy are represented as tackling the quondam dictator.

Curtall. And are you no more master-dixcator, nor generality of the soldiers?

Sylla. My powers do cease, my titles are resign’d.

Curtall. Have you signed your titles? O base mind, that being in the Paul’s steeple of honour, hast cast thyself into the sink of simplicity. Fie, beast!

Were I a king, I would day by day

Suck up white bread and milk,

And go a-jetting in a jacket of silk;

My meat should be the curds,

My drink should be the whey,

And I would have a mincing lass to love me every day.

Poppy. Nay, goodman Curtall, your discretions are very simple; let me cramp him with a reason. Sirrah, whether is better good ale or small-beer? Alas! see his simplicity that cannot answer me; why, I say ale.

Curtall. And so say I, neighbour.

Poppy. Thou hast reason; ergo, say I, ’tis better be a king than a clown. Faith, Master Sylla, I hope a man may now call ye knave by authority.

Even more impertinent, because they violate the truth of character and misrepresent an historical person, are some of the liberties Lodge takes with Marius. Such is the device with the echo, which he transfers from the love scenes of poetical Arcady, where it is quite appropriate, to the mountains of Numidia, where it would hardly be in place even if we disregarded the temperament and circumstances of the exile.

Marius. Thus Marius lives disdain’d of all the gods,

Echo. Gods!

Marius. With deep despair late overtaken wholly.

Echo. O, lie!

Marius. And will the heavens be never well appeased?

Echo. Appeased.

Marius. What mean have they left me to cure my smart?

Echo. Art.

Marius. Nought better fits old Marius’ mind then war.

Echo. Then, war!

Marius. Then full of hope, say, Echo, shall I go?

Echo. Go!

Marius. Is any better fortune then at hand?

Echo. At hand.

Marius. Then farewell, Echo, gentle nymph, farewell.

Echo. Fare well.

Marius. (soliloquises). O pleasing folly to a pensive man!

Yet Lodge was a competent scholar who was by and by to translate The Famous and Memourable Workes of Josephus, a Man of Much Honour and Learning among the Jewes, and the Works both Moral and Natural of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. And already in this play he makes Sylla’s genius, invisible to all, summon him in Latin Elegiacs audible only to him. If then the popular scenes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays do not make a very Roman impression, it should be remembered that he is punctilious in comparison with the University gentleman who preceded him. Nor did the fashion of popularising antique themes with vulgar frippery from the present die out when Shakespeare showed a more excellent way. There is something of very much the same kind in Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece which was published in 1608.

But these superficial laches are not the most objectionable things in the play. There is nothing organic in it. Of course its neglect of the unities of time and place is natural and right, but it is careless of unity in structure or even in portraiture. The canvas is crowded with subordinate figures who perplex the action without producing a vivid impression of their own characters. A few are made distinct by insistence on particular traits, like Octavius with his unbending civic virtue, or Antonius with his ‘honey-dropping’ and rather ineffectual eloquence, or Lepidus with his braggard temporising. The only one of them who has real individuality is the younger Marius, insolent, fierce, and cruel, but full of energy and filial affection, and too proud to survive his fortunes. He perhaps is the most consistent and sympathetic person in the piece; which of itself is a criticism, for he occupies a much less important place than the two principals, expressly announced as the heroes in the title-page. It is difficult even to guess the intention of the author in this delineation of them, and in any case the result is not pleasing. Marius, despite a certain amount of tough fortitude—which for the rest is not so indomitable as in Plutarch—and a rude magnanimity displayed in the imaginary scene with Sylla’s daughter and wife, is far from attractive; and it comes as a surprise that after all his violence and vindictiveness he should meet his death “with a reverend smile” in placid resignation. But with Sylla matters are worse. He would be altogether repulsive but for his courage, and Lodge seems to explain him and his career only by appealing to his own adopted epithet of Felix or Fortunate. His last words are:

Fortune, now I bless thee

That both in life and death would’st not oppress me.

And when, “to conclude his happiness,” his sumptuous funeral is arranged, Pompey expresses the same idea in the lines that close the play:

Come, bear we hence this trophy of renown

Whose life, whose death was far from Fortune’s frown.

The problem of his strange story is not so much stated as implied, and far less is there any attempt at a solution. After all his blood-guiltiness, he too, like Marius, passes away in peace, but with him the peacefulness rises to the serenity of a saint or sage. To his friend he exclaims:

My Flaccus, worldly joys and pleasures fade;

Inconstant time, like to the fleeting tide

With endless course man’s hopes doth overbear:

Now nought remains that Sylla fain would have

But lasting fame when body lies in grave.

To his wife, who soon after asks:

How fares my lord? How doth my gentle Sylla?

he replies still more devoutly:

Free from the world, allied unto the heavens;

Not curious of incertain chances now.

There is thus no meaning in the story. The rival leaders are equally responsible for the Wounds of Civil War, but end as happily as though they had been benefactors of society. And this is by no means presented as an example of tragic irony, in which case something might be said for it, but as the natural, fitting, and satisfactory conclusion. Yet Plutarch tells of Marius’ sleeplessness, drunkenness, and perturbation, and of Sylla‘s debaucheries and disease. These were hints, one might have thought, that would have suited the temper of an Elizabethan dramatist; but Lodge passes them over.

It is the same with the public story. If Rome is left in quiet it is only because Sylla’s ruthlessness has been ‘fortunate’; it is not represented as the rational outcome of what went before, nor is there any suggestion of what was to follow after.

The merit of the play, such as it is, lies in its succession of stirring scenes—but not the most stirring that might have been selected—from the career of two famous personalities in the history of a famous State. It is almost incredible that in barely more than half a dozen years after its publication London playgoers were listening to Julius Caesar with its suggestive episodes, its noble characterisation, and full realisation of what the story meant.

Yet Lodge’s play is probably as good as any of those based on Roman History till Shakespeare turned his attention to such subjects. The titles of a number of others have come down to us. Some of these are of early date and may have approximated to the type of Apius and Virginia. Others would attempt the style of Seneca, either after the crude fashion of Gorboduc or subsequently under the better guidance of the French practitioners; and among these later Senecans were distinguished men like Lord Brooke, who destroyed a tragedy on Antony and Cleopatra in 1601, and Brandon, whose Vertuous Octavia, written in 1598, still survives.[71] In others again there may have been an anticipation or imitation of the more popular manner of Lodge. But the fact that they were never published, or have been lost, or, in one or two cases where isolated copies are extant, have not been thought worth reprinting, affords a presumption that their claims are inferior, and that in them no very characteristic note is struck. It is pretty safe to suppose that they did not contain much instruction for Shakespeare, and that none of them would bridge the gap between Lodge’s medley and Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

The progress made since the middle of the century was, of course, considerable. A pioneer performance, like Apius and Virginia, had the merit of pushing beyond the landmarks of the old Morality, and of bringing Roman story within the ken of English playgoers, but it did nothing more. It treated this precisely as it might have treated any other subject, and looked merely to the lesson, though, no doubt, it sought to make the lesson palatable with such dramatic condiments as the art of the day supplied. The Senecans, inspired by the Octavia, make a disinterested effort to detach and set forth the conception of old Roman greatness, as it was given that age to understand it, and these productions show no impropriety and much literary skill, but the outlines and colours are too vague to admit of reality or life. Lodge is realistic enough in his way, but it is by sacrificing what is significant and characteristic, and submerging the majesty of ancient Rome in the banalities and trivialities of his own time. No dramatist had been able at once to rise to the grandeur of the theme and keep a foothold on solid earth, to reconcile the claims of the ideal and the real, the past and the present. That was left for Shakespeare to do.

CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF HISTORY

The turn of the centuries roughly bisects the dramatic career of Shakespeare. In the first half he had written many comedies and a few tragedies; in the second he was to write many tragedies with a few plays which, on account of the happy ending and other traits, may be assigned to the opposite class. But beyond these recognised and legitimate subdivisions of the Romantic Drama, he had also before 1600 busied himself with that characteristic product of the Elizabethan Age, the Historical Play dealing with the national annals. In this kind, indeed, he had been hardly less abundant than in comedy, the proportions being nine of the one to eleven of the other. Then suddenly he leaves it aside, and returns to it only at the close in Henry VIII., which moreover is but partially his handiwork.

Thus, while the tragic note is not inaudible in the earlier period of his activity nor the comic note in the later, the third, that sounded so loud in the sixteenth century, utterly or all but utterly dies away in the seventeenth.

Why this should be so it is impossible to say. It may be that the patriotic self-consciousness stirred by the defeat of the Armada and the triumph of England waned with the growing sense of internal grievances and the loss of external prestige, and that the national story no longer inspired such curiosity and delight. It may be that Shakespeare had exhausted the episodes which had a special attraction for contemporaries and himself. It may be that he found in the records of other lands themes that gave his genius freer scope and more fully satisfied the requirements of his art. Or all these considerations may have co-operated.

For the last of them there is at any rate this much to say, that, though the play on native history virtually disappears, the Historical Play as such survives and wins new triumphs. The Roman group resembles the English group in many ways, and, where they differ, it has excellences of its own.

What are the main points in which respectively they diverge or coincide?

(1) There is no doubt that it was patriotic enthusiasm that called into existence the Chronicle Histories so numerous in Elizabeth’s reign, of which the best in Shakespeare’s series are only the consummate flower. The pride in the present and confidence in the future of England found vent, too, in occupation with England’s past, and since the general appetite could not be satisfied by the histories of every sort and size that issued from the press, the vigorous young drama seized the opportunity of extending its operations, and stepped in to supply the demand. Probably with a more definite theory of its aims, methods, and sphere there might have been less readiness to undertake the new department. But in the popular conception the play was little else than a narrative presented in scenes. The only requirement was that it should interest the spectators, and few troubled themselves about classic rule and precedent, or even about connected structure and arrangement. And when by and by the Elizabethan Tragedy and Comedy became more organic and vertebrate, the Historic Play had secured recognition, and was able to persist in what was dramatically a more rudimentary phase and develop without regard to more exacting standards. Shakespeare’s later Histories, precisely the superlative specimens of the whole species, illustrate this with conspicuous force. The subject of Henry IV., if presented in summary, must seem comparatively commonplace; the ‘argument’ of both parts, if analysed, is loose and straggling; the second part to a great extent repeats at a lower pitch the motifs of the first; yet it is hardly if at all less excellent than its predecessor, and together they represent Shakespeare’s grand achievement in this kind. In Henry V., which has merits that make it at least one of the most popular pieces that Shakespeare ever wrote, the distinctively narrative wins the day against the distinctively dramatic. Not only are some of the essential links supplied only in the story of the chorus, but there is no dramatic collision of ideas, no conflict in the soul of the hero, except in the scenes preliminary to Agincourt, not even much of the excitement of suspense. It is a plain straightforward history, admirably conveyed in scene and speech, all the episodes significant and picturesque, all the persons vividly characterised, bound to stir and inspire by its sane and healthy patriotism; but in the notes that are considered to make up the differentia of a drama, whether ancient or modern, it is undoubtedly defective.

In proportion then as Shakespeare realised the requirements of the Chronicle History, and succeeded in producing his masterpieces in this domain, he deviated from the course that he pursued in his other plays. And this necessarily followed from the end he had in view. He wished to give, and his audience wished to get, passages from the history of their country set forth on the stage as pregnantly and attractively as possible; but the history was the first and chief thing, and in it the whole species had its raison d’être. History delivered the material and prescribed the treatment, and even the selection of the episodes treated was determined less perhaps by their natural fitness for dramatic form, than by the influence of certain contemporary historic interests. For the points which the average Elizabethan had most at heart were—(1) The unity of the country under the strong and orderly government of securely succeeding sovereigns, who should preserve it from the long remembered evils of Civil War; (2) Its rejection of Papal domination, with which there might be, but more frequently among the play-going classes, there was not associated the desire for a more radical reconstruction of the Church; (3) The power, safety and prestige of England, which Englishmen believed to be the inevitable consequence of her unity and independence. So whatever in bygone times bore on these matters and could be made to illustrate them, whether by parallel or contrast, was sure of a sympathetic hearing. And in this as in other points Shakespeare seems to have felt with his fellow-men and shared their presuppositions. At least all the ten plays on English history in which he is known to have had a hand deal with rivalry for the throne, the struggle with Rome, the success or failure in France accordingly as the prescribed postulates are fulfilled or violated. It may have been his engrossment in these concerns that sometimes led him to choose subjects which the mere artist would have rejected as of small dramatic promise.

When he turned to the records of antiquity, the conditions were very different. Doubtless to a man of the Renaissance classical history in its appeal came only second, if even second, to the history of his own land; doubtless also to the man who was not a technical scholar, the history of Rome had far more familiar charm than the history of Greece. When, therefore, Shakespeare went outside his own England in search for historical themes, he was still addressing the general heart, and showed himself in closer accord with popular taste than, e.g. Chapman, whose French plays are perhaps next to his own among the best Elizabethan examples of the historical drama. But we may be sure that Ambois and Biron and Chabot were much less interesting persons to the ordinary Londoner than Caesar and Antony and Coriolanus. Not merely in treatment, but in selection of the material—which cannot fail to influence the treatment—Shakespeare was in touch with common feeling and popular taste.

All the same a great deal more was now required than in the case of the English series. In that the story of a reign or the section of a reign, the chronicle of a flimsy conspiracy or a foreign campaign might furnish the framework for a production that would delight the audience. It was otherwise when dramatist and spectators alike knew the history only in its mass, and were impressed only by the outstanding features. Just as with individuals so with nations, many things become significant and important in those of our familiar circle that would seem trivial in mere strangers and acquaintances. If the Roman plays were to be popular as the English ones had been, Shakespeare was bound to select episodes of more salient interest and more catholic appeal than such as had hitherto sometimes served his turn. In the best of the English plays we constantly wonder that Shakespeare could get such results from stories that we should have thought in advance to be quite unfit for the stage. But the fall of Caesar and the fate of those who sought to strangle the infant empire, the shock of opposing forces in Augustus and Antony and the loss of the world for Cleopatra’s love, the triumph and destruction of the glorious renegade from whose wrath the young republic escaped as by fire—that there are tragic possibilities in themes like these is patent to a casual glance. It is significant that, while of the subjects handled in the English histories only the episode of Joan of Arc and the story of Richard III. have attracted the attention of foreign dramatists, all the Roman plays have European congeners. One of the reasons may be, that though the events described in the national series are dramatic enough for national purposes, they do not like the others satisfy the severer international test.

And to a difference in the character of the material corresponds a difference in the character of the treatment. The best of the English plays, as we have seen, are precisely those that it would be hardest to describe in terms of the ordinary drama. The juvenile Richard III. is the only one that could nowadays without objection be included in a list of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But with the Roman plays it is quite the reverse. In the main lines of construction they are of tragic build; there is invariably a tragic problem in the hero’s career; and it reaches a tragic solution in his self-caused ruin. So they are always ranked with the Tragedies, and though here and there they may show a variation from Shakespeare’s usual tragic technique, it would occur to no one to alter the arrangement.

(2) Yet these little variations may remind us that after all they were not produced under quite the same presuppositions as plays like Hamlet and Othello, or even King Lear and Macbeth. In a sense they remain Histories, as truly histories as any of their English analogues. The political vicissitudes and public catastrophes do not indeed contribute the chief elements of interest. Here as everywhere Shakespeare is above all occupied with the career of individuals, with the interaction of persons and persons, and of persons and circumstances. Nevertheless in these plays the characters are always exhibited in relation to the great mutations in the State. Not merely the background but the environment and atmosphere are supplied by the large life of affairs. It is not so in Lear, where the legend offered no tangible history on which the imagination could take hold; it is only partially so in Macbeth, where Shakespeare knew practically nothing of the actual local conditions; nor, had it been otherwise, was there anything in these traditions of prerogative importance for later times. But in the Roman plays the main facts were accredited and known, and of infinite significance for the history of the world. They could not be overlooked, they had to be taken into account.

For the same reason they must no more be tampered with than the accepted facts of English History. The two historical series are again alike in this, that they treat their sources with much more reverence than either the Comedies or the other Tragedies show for theirs. Even in Lear the dramatist has no scruple about altering the traditional close; even in Macbeth he has no scruple about blending the stories of two reigns. But in dealing with the professedly authentic records whether of England or Rome, Shakespeare felt that he had to do with the actual, with what definitely had been; and he did not conceive himself free to give invention the rein, as when with a light heart he reshaped the caprices of a novel or the perversions of a legend. As historical dramatist he was subordinated to his subject much in the same way as the portrait painter. He could choose his point of view, and manage the lights and shades, and determine the pose. He could emphasize details, or slur them over, or even leave them out. He could interpret and reveal, so far as in him lay, the meaning and spirit of history. But he had his marching orders and could no more depart from them to take a more attractive way of his own, than the portrait painter can correct the defects of his sitter to make him an Apollo. It cannot always have been easy to keep true to this self-denying ordinance. Despite the suitability of the subject in general suggestion and even in many particular incidents there must have been a recalcitrance to treatment here and there; and traces of this may be detected, if the Roman plays are compared with the tragedies in which the genius of Shakespeare had quite unimpeded sway. To some of the chief of these traces Mr. Bradley has called attention. Thus there is in the middle of Antony and Cleopatra, owing to the undramatic nature of the historic material, an excessive number of brief scenes “in which the dramatis personae are frequently changed, as though a novelist were to tell his story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one group of his characters to another.” In Coriolanus, “if Shakespeare had made the hero persist and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of Rome, awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance on himself ... that would merely have been an ending more strictly tragic[72] than the close of Shakespeare’s play.” In Julius Caesar the “famous and wonderful” quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is “an episode the removal of which would not affect the actual sequence of events (unless we may hold that but for the emotion caused by the quarrel and reconciliation Cassius would not have allowed Brutus to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at Philippi).” Mr. Bradley discusses this in another connection, and here, as we shall see, Shakespeare only partially adheres to his authority. In the same play, however, we have the episode of the poet Cinna’s murder which, however useful in illustrating the temper of the mob and suggestive in other respects, is nevertheless a somewhat crude intrusion of history, for it leads to nothing and in no way helps on the action. But Shakespeare will put up with an occasional awkwardness in the mechanism rather than fail to give what he considers a faithful picture. As in the best English Histories he omits, he compresses, he even regroups; but he never consciously alters the sense, and to bring out the sense he utilises material that puts a little strain on his art.

Yet of course this does not mean that in the Roman any more than in the English plays he attempts an accurate reconstruction of the past. It may even be doubted whether such an attempt would have been intelligible to him or to any save one or two of his contemporaries. To the average Elizabethan (and in this respect Shakespeare was an average Elizabethan, with infinitely clearer vision certainly, but with the same outlook and horizon) the past differed from the present chiefly by its distance and dimness; and distinctive contrasts in manners and customs were but scantily recognised. A generation later French audiences could view the perruques and patches of Corneille’s Romans without any sense of incongruity, and the assimilation of the ancient to the modern was in some respects much more thorough-going in Shakespeare’s England. In all his classical pieces the impression of historic actuality and the genuine antique cachet is only produced when there is a kind of inner kinship between the circumstances to be represented and the English life that he knew. There was a good deal of such correspondence between Elizabethan life and Roman life, so the Roman Tragedies have a breath of historic verisimilitude and even a faint suggestion of local colour. There was much less between Elizabethan life and Greek life, so Timon and Troilus and Cressida, though true as human documents, have almost nothing Hellenic about them. But even in the Roman plays, so soon as there is anything that involves a distinctive difference between Rome and London Shakespeare is sure to miss it. Anachronisms in detail are of course abundantly unimportant, though a formidable list of them could be computed. In Julius Caesar there are clocks that strike, and the crowd throw up their sweaty nightcaps. The arrangements of the Elizabethan stage furnish Cleopatra and Comminius with similes. Menenius is familiar with funeral knells and batteries and Galen’s prescriptions.

These are minutiae on which students like Bacon or Ben Jonson might set store, but in regard to which Shakespeare was quite untroubled and careless. Perhaps they deserve notice only because they add one little item to the mass of proof that the plays were written by a man of merely ordinary information, not by a trained scholar. But for themselves they may be disregarded. It is not such trifles that interfere with fidelity to antiquity. But in weightier matters, too, Shakespeare shows an inevitable limitation in reproducing a civilisation that was in some aspects very different from his own, and for which he had no parallel in his own experience. He shows a precisely analogous limitation when he deals with themes from English History that were partly alien to the spirit of the time. Of this King John furnishes the grand example. We all know why that troublesome reign is memorable now, not merely to the constitutional historian, but to the man in the street and the child on the school bench. Yet Shakespeare makes no mention of Runnymede or the Great Charter; and we may assume that he, like most Elizabethans, if interested in such matters at all, would have been unsympathetic to a movement that extorted liberties by civil strife. To him the significant points are the disputed succession, the struggle with the Pope, the initial invasion of France by England when the Kingdom is of one accord, and the subsequent invasion of England by France, when it is divided against itself. So King John, though very true to human nature and even to certain aspects of the period, pays no heed to the aspect which other generations have considered the most important of all, and one which on any estimate is not to be overlooked. But if Shakespeare thus misses a conspicuous feature in a set of occurrences that took place among his own people less than four hundred years before, we need not wonder if he failed to detect the peculiar features of ancient Rome as it existed at a further distance of twelve or sixteen centuries. His approximation to the actual or alleged conditions varies indeed in the different plays. It is closest in Antony and Cleopatra. In that there is hardly a personage or circumstance for which he had not some sort of a clue. He knew about soldiers of fortune like Enobarbus and pirate-adventurers like Menas; a ruler like Henry VII. had in him a touch of Octavius, there were not a few notabilities in Europe who carried a suggestion of Mark Antony, the orgies of Cleopatra’s court in Egypt were analogous to those of many an Italian or French court at the Renaissance. It is all native ground to Shakespeare and he would feel himself at home. On the other hand, he is least capable of seeing eye to eye the primitive republican life which on Plutarch’s evidence he has to depict in Coriolanus. The shrewd, resolute, law-abiding Commons, whom some of the traditions that Plutarch worked up seem meant to exalt; the plebs that might secede to the Holy Mount, but would not rise in armed revolt; that secured the tribunate as its constitutional lever with which it was by and by to shift the political centre of gravity, this was like nothing that he knew or that anybody else knew about till half a century had elapsed. He could only represent it in terms of a contemporary city mob; and the consequence is that though he has given a splendid picture that satisfies the imagination and even realises some of Plutarch’s hints, it is not true to the whole situation as envisaged by Plutarch.[73] Julius Caesar occupies a kind of intermediate position, and for that reason illustrates his method most completely. He could understand a good deal of the political crisis in Rome on which that story turns, from the existing conditions or recent memories of his own country. In both a period of civil turmoil had ended in the establishment of a strong government. In both there were nobles who from principle or interest were opposed to the change, so he could enter into the feelings of the conspirators. In both the centralisation of authority was the urgent need, so he could appreciate the indispensableness of the Empire, the ‘spirit of Caesar.’ But of zeal for the republican theory as such he knows nothing, and therefore his Brutus is only in part the Brutus of Plutarch.

Thus Shakespeare in his picture of Rome and Romans, does not give the notes that mark off Roman from every other civilisation, but rather those that it possessed in common with the rest, and especially with his own. He even puts into it, without any consciousness of the discrepancy, qualities that are characteristic of Elizabethan rather than of Roman life. And the whole result, the quickening of the antique material with modern feeling in so far as that is also antique, and occasionally when it is not quite antique, is due to the thorough realisation of the subject in Shakespeare’s own mind from his own point of view, with all the powers not only of his reason, but of his imagination, emotion, passion, and experience. Hence his delineations are in point of fact more truly antique than those of many much more scholarly poets, who can reproduce the minute peculiarities, but not, what is more central and essential, the living energy and principle of it all. This was felt by contemporaries. We have the express testimony of the erudite Leonard Digges, who after graduating as Bachelor in Oxford, continued his studies for many years in several foreign universities, and consequently was promoted on his return to the honorary degree of Master, a man who, with his academic training and academic status, would not be apt to undervalue literal accuracy. But he writes:

So have I seen when Caesar would appear,

And on the stage at half-sword parley were

Brutus and Cassius: oh! how the audience

Were ravish’d, with what wonder went they thence;

When some new day they would not brook a line

Of tedious though well-labour’d Catiline,—

Sejanus too was irksome.

Ben Jonson in Sejanus and Catiline tried to restore antiquity in its exclusive and exceptional traits. Shakespeare approached it on its more catholic and human side, interpreted it by those qualities in modern life that face towards the classical ideal, and even went the length of using at unawares some that were more typical of his new world. And Jonson’s Roman plays were felt to be well-laboured and irksome, while his filled the spectators with ravishment and wonder.

In both series then, English and Roman alike, Shakespeare on the one hand loyally accepted his authorities and never deviated from them on their main route, but on the other he treated them unquestioningly from his own point of view, and probably never even suspected that their own might be different. This is the double characteristic of his attitude to his documents, and it combines pious regard for the assumed facts of History with complete indifference to critical research. He is as far as possible from submitting to the dead hand of the past, but he is also as far as possible from allowing himself a free hand in its manipulation. His method, in short, implies and includes two principles, which, if separated, may easily become antagonistic, and which, in point of fact, have led later schools of the historic drama in quite opposite directions. A short examination of these contrasted tendencies may perhaps help to throw a clearer light on Shakespeare’s own position.

The one that lays stress on the artist’s right to take counsel with his own ideas has been explained by Lessing in a famous passage of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, which is all the more interesting for the present purpose, that throughout it tacitly or expressly appeals to the practice of Shakespeare. Lessing starts with Aristotle’s doctrine that poetry is more pregnant than history, and asks why, when this is so, the poet does not keep within the kingdom of his imagination, why more especially the dramatist descends to the lower artistic level of the historian to trespass on the domain of prosaic fact. And he answers that it is merely a matter of convenience. There is advantage to be gained from illustrious position and impressive associations; and moreover the playwright finds it helpful that the audience should already have some idea of the story to be told, that they should, as it were, meet him half way, and bring to the understanding of his piece some general knowledge of the persons. He gains his purpose if he employs famous names which appear in a nimbus of associations, and saves time in describing their characters and circumstances; and thus they attune our minds for what is to come and serve as so many labels by means of which, when we see a new play, we may inform ourselves what it is all about. The initial familiarity and the prestige it implies are fulcra for moving the interest of the beholders. The historical dramatist, therefore, must be careful not to alter the current conceptions of character; but, with that proviso, he has almost unlimited powers, and may omit or recast or invent incidents, or forge an entirely new story, just as he pleases, so long, that is, as he leaves the character intact and does not interfere with our idea of the hero. In that case the historic label would be more of a hindrance than a help to our enjoyment.

Lessing’s view of the Historic Drama (and there is no doubt that he thought he was describing the method of Shakespeare) is therefore that it is a free work of fiction woven around characters that are fairly well known. He was certainly wrong about Shakespeare, and his theory strikes us nowadays as strangely inadequate, but it had very important results. It directly influenced the dramatic art of Germany, and it would be hard to overestimate the share it had in determining Schiller’s methods of composition. It was in the air at the time of the Romantic Movement in France, and is really the principle on which Hugo constructs his more important plays in this kind. Schiller’s treatment of history is very free; he invents scenes that have no shadow of foundation in fact, and yet are of crucial importance in his idealised narrative; he invents subordinate persons who are hardly less conspicuous than the authentic principals, and who vitally affect the plot and action. All his plays contain these licenses. Such episodes as the interview between Mary and Elizabeth, of Jeanne Darc’s indulgence of her pity illustrate the first, such figures as Mortimer or Max and Thekla illustrate the second; but what would Mary Stuart or the Maid of Orleans or Wallenstein be without them? And with Victor Hugo this emancipation from authority is pushed to even greater lengths. Plays like Le Roi s’amuse or Marion de Lorme might recall the vagaries of early Elizabethan experiments like Greene’s James IV., were it not that they are works of incomparably higher genius. Hugo has accepted the traditional view of a French king and a French court, but all the rest is sheer romance on which just here and there we detect the trail of an old mémoire.

Now, some of the extreme examples suggest a two-fold objection to Lessing’s account as a quite satisfactory explanation of the species.

In the first place, when the poet carries his privilege of independence so far, why should he not go a step further and invent his entire drama, names and all? As it is, we either know something of the real history or we do not. If we do not, what is the advantage of appealing to it? If we do, will not such lordly disregard of facts stir up the same recalcitrance as disregard of traditional character, and shall we not be rather perplexed than aided by the conflict between our reminiscences and the statements of the play?

And, in the second place, is the portrayer of human nature to take his historical persons as once for all given and fixed, so that he must leave the accepted estimate of them intact without attempting to modify it? Surely that would be to deprive the dramatist of his greater privilege and the drama of its greatest opportunity. For then we should only see a well-known character illustrated or described anew, displaying its various traits in this or that set of novel surroundings. But there would be little room for the sort of work that the historic drama is specially fitted to do, viz. the exposition of ambiguous or problematic natures, which will give us a different conception of them from the one we have hitherto had.

Hence there arose in Germany a view directly opposed to that of Lessing, and Lotze does not hesitate to recommend the most painstaking investigation and observance of the real facts. The poet, he thinks, will find scope enough in giving a new interpretation of the career and individuality of the hero, after he has used all the means in his power to bring home to his imagination the actual circumstances from which they emerged. Probably little was known in England of this theory of Lotze’s, though utterances to the same effect occur in Carlyle, especially in his remarks on Shakespeare’s English Histories; yet it seems to give a correct account of the way in which most English historical dramas were constructed in the nineteenth century. Sir Henry Taylor, while calling Philip van Artevelde “a dramatic romance,” is careful to state that “historic truth is preserved in it, as far as the material events are concerned.” Mr. Swinburne, in his trilogy on Mary Stuart, versifies whole pages of contemporary writers (e.g. in the interview of Mary and Knox taken almost verbatim from Knox’s History of the Reformation), and in his prose essay seems specially to value himself on his exact delineation of her career, and his solution of the problem of her strange nature. But the prerogative instance is furnished by Tennyson. In his dedication of Harold, he writes to Lord Lytton: “After old-world records like the Bayeux Tapestry and the Roman de Rou, Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and your father’s historical romance treating of the same theme have been mainly helpful to me in writing this drama.” He puts his antiquarian researches first, his use of the best modern critical authorities second, and only in the third place an historical romance, to which for the rest Freeman has said that he owes something himself. Nor would it be difficult to show that in Queen Mary and Becket he has followed the same lines. And on such lines it is clear that the historical dramatist’s only aim must be to present in accurate though artistic form a selection of the incidents and circumstances of the hero’s life and times, and place them in such mutual relation that they throw new light on the nature and destiny of the man.

But from this point of view the functions of the poet and the historian will tend to coalesce, and it is just this that at first sight rouses suspicion. After all can we so reproduce the past as to give it real immediate truth? It is hardly possible by antiquarian knowledge quickened by ever so much poetic power to galvanise into life a state of things that once for all is dead and gone. And meanwhile the mere effort to do so is apt to make the drama a little frigid, as Tennyson’s dramas are. We are seldom carried away on a spontaneous stream of passion; for after all the methods of the historian and the poet are radically different, and the painful mosaic work of the one is almost directly opposed to the complete vision, the creation in one jet, which may be rightly expected of the other.

But it is noteworthy that though the two schools which we have just discussed, make appeal to Shakespeare, his own procedure does not precisely agree with that of one or other. He is too much of the heaven-born poet for the latter; he has too genuine a delight in facts for the former. He has points of contact with both, but in a way he is more naïf and simple-minded than either. He at the same time accepts the current conception of character with Lessing, and respects the allegations of history with Carlyle. But though he begins with the ordinary impression produced by his hero, he does not stop there. Such an impression is bound to be incoherent and vague. Shakespeare probes and defines it; he tests it in relation to the assumed facts on which it is based; he discovers the latent difficulties, faces them, and solves them, and, starting with a conventional type, leaves us with an individual man. In doing this he treats the facts as a means, not as an end, but he does not sophisticate them. We hardly ever find fictitious persons and scenes in Schiller’s style, and when we do the exception proves the rule, for they have not the same function as in Schiller’s theatre. Falstaff plays his part aside, as it were, from the official history, he belongs to the private life of Prince Hal, and is impotent to affect the march of public events. People like Lucius in Julius Caesar, or Nicanor in Coriolanus, or Silius in Antony and Cleopatra do not interfere in the political story; they are present to make or to hear comments, or at most to assist the inward interpretation. No unhistorical person has historical work to do, and no unhistorical episode affects the historical action.[74] Yet he quite escapes from the chill and closeness of the book-room. He engages in no critical investigations to sift out the genuine facts. He does not study old tapestry or early texts. Unhampered by the learned apparatus of the scholar, undistracted by the need of pausing to verify or correct, he speeds along on the flood-tide of his own inspiration, which takes the same course with the interests of the nation. For it is the reward of the intimate sympathy which exists between him and his countrymen, that he goes to work, his personal genius fortified and enlarged by the popular enthusiasms, patriotic or cosmopolitan. And nothing can withstand the speed and volume of the current. There is a great contrast between the broad free sweep of his Histories, English or Roman, that lift us from our feet and carry us away, and the little artificial channels of the antiquarian dramas, on the margin of which we stand at ease to criticise the purity of the distilled water. Yet none the less he is in a sense more obedient to his authorities than any writer of the antiquarian school. Just because, while desiring to give the truth as he knows it, he is careless to examine the accuracy or estimate the value of the documents he consults; and just because, while determined to give a faithful narrative, he spares himself all labour of comparison and research and takes a statement of Holinshed or Plutarch as guaranteeing itself, he is far more in the hands of the guide he follows than a later dramatist would be. He takes the text of his author, and often he has not more than one: he accepts it implicitly and will not willingly distort it: he reads it in the light of his own insight and the spirit of the age, and tries to recreate the agents and the story from the more or less adequate hints that he finds.

Now, proceeding in this way it is clear that while in every case Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his historical sources must be great, it will vary greatly in quality and degree according to the material delivered to him. The situations may be more or less dramatic, the narrative more or less firmly conceived. And among his sources Plutarch occupies quite an exceptional place. From no one else has he ‘conveyed’ so much, and no one else has he altered so little. And the reason is, that save Chaucer and Homer, on whom he drew for Troilus and Cressida, but from whom he could assimilate little that suited his own different ideas, no other writer contained so much that was of final and permanent excellence. To put it shortly, in Plutarch’s Lives Shakespeare for the first and almost the only time was rehandling the masterpieces of a genius who stood at the summit of his art. It was not so in the English Histories. One does not like to say a word in disparagement of the Elizabethan chronicles, especially Holinshed’s, on which the maturer plays are based. They are good reading and deserve to be read independently of the dramatist’s use of them. But they are not works of phenomenal ability, and they betray the infancy of historical writing, not only in scientific method, which in the present connection would hardly matter, but in narrative art as well. Cowley in his Chronicle, i.e. the imaginary record of his love affairs, breaks off with a simile and jest at their expense. If, he says, I were to give the details,

I more voluminous should grow—

(Chiefly if I like them should tell

All change of weathers that befell)

Than Holinshed and Stowe.

Their intention is good, and they often realise it so as to interest and impress, but the introduction of such-like trifles as Cowley mentions, without much relevance or significance, may give us the measure of their technical skill. Again, though in the second and third part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was dealing with the work of Marlowe, we have to remember, first, that his originals were composite pieces not by Marlowe alone, and, further, that even Marlowe could not altogether escape the disabilities of a pioneer.

In Plutarch, however, Shakespeare levied toll on no petty vassal like the compilers of the Chronicles, or innovating conqueror like the author of Tamburlaine, but on the king by right divine of a long-established realm. And the result is that he appropriates more, and that more of greater value, than from any other tributary.

CHAPTER III
ANCESTRY OF SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS

1. PLUTARCH[75]

Plutarch, born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, about 45 or 50 a.d., flourished in the last quarter of the first and the earliest quarter of the second century. He came of good stock, which he is not reluctant to talk about. Indeed, his habit of introducing or quoting his father, his grandfather, and even his great grandfather, gives us glimpses of a home in which the prescribed pieties of family life were warmly cherished; and some of the references imply an atmosphere of simplicity, urbanity, and culture.

The lad was sent to Athens to complete his education under Ammonius, an eminent philosopher of that generation, though in Carlyle’s phrase, ‘now dim to us,’ who also took part in what little administrative work was still intrusted to provincials, and more than once held the distinguished position of strategos. Thus, as in childhood Plutarch was trained in the best domestic traditions of elder Greece, so now he had before his eyes an example of such active citizenship as survived in the changed condition of things.

The same spirit of reverence for the past presided over his routine of study. His works afterwards show a wide familiarity with the earlier literature and philosophy of his country, and the foundations of this must have been laid in his student days. It was still in accordance with accepted precedents and his own reminiscent tastes, that when he set out on his travels, he should first, as so many of his predecessors were reported to have done, betake himself to the storied land of Egypt. We know that this must have been after 66 a.d., for in that year, when Nero made his progress through Greece, Plutarch tells us that he was still the pupil of Ammonius. We know, further, that he must have visited Alexandria, for he mentions that in his grandfather’s opinion his father gave too large a banquet to celebrate their homecoming from that city. But he does not inform us how much of Egypt he saw, or how long was his stay, or in what way he employed himself. It is only a probable conjecture at most that his treatise on Isis and Osiris may be one of the fruits of this expedition.

Of another and later journey that took him to Italy, there is more to be said. Plutarch at an early age, whether before or after the Egyptian tour, had already been employed in public affairs. He tells us:

I remember my selfe, that when I was but of yoong yeres I was sent with another in embassage to the Proconsul: and in that my companion staid about I wot not what behind, I went alone and did that which we had in commission to do together. After my returne when I was to give an account unto the State, and to report the effect of my charge and message back again, my father arose, and taking me apart, willed me in no wise to speak in the singular number and say, I departed or went, but, We departed; item not I said (or quoth I) but We said; and in the whole narration of the rest to joine alwaies my companion as if he had been associated and at one hand with me in that which I did alone.[76]

Such courtesy conciliates good will, and he was subsequently sent ‘on public business’ to Rome. This must have been before 90 a.d., when Rusticus, whom Plutarch mentions that he met, was condemned to death, and when the philosophers were expelled from the city; and was probably some time after 74 a.d., the date of their previous expulsion, when, moreover, Plutarch was too young to be charged with matters so weighty as to need settlement in the capital. But it is not certain whether this was his only visit to Italy, and whether he made it in the reign of Vespasian or of Domitian. His story of a performing dog that took part in an exhibition in presence of Vespasian, has been thought to have the verisimilitude of a witnessed scene, and has been used to support the former supposition: his description of the sumptuousness of Domitian’s buildings makes a similar impression, and has been used to support the latter. All this must remain doubtful, but some things are certain: that his business was so engrossing, and those who came to him for instruction were so numerous, that he had little time for the study of the Latin language; that he delivered lectures, some of which were the first drafts of essays subsequently included in the Moralia; that he had as his acquaintances or auditors several of the most distinguished men in Rome, among them Mestrius Florus, a table companion of Vespasian, Sosius Senecio, the correspondent of Pliny, and that Arulenus Rusticus afterwards put to death by Domitian, who on one occasion would not interrupt a lecture of Plutarch’s to read a letter from the Emperor; that he traversed Italy as far north as Ravenna, where he saw the bust of Marius, and even as Bedriacum, where he inspected the battlefields of 69 a.d.

But though Plutarch loved travel and sight-seeing, and though he was fully alive to the advantages of a great city, with its instructive society and its collections of books, his heart was in his native place, and he returned to settle there. “I my selfe,” he says, “dwelle in a poore little towne, and yet doe remayne there willingly, least it should become lesse.”[77] And in point of fact he seems henceforth only to have left it for short excursions to various parts of Greece. One of these exhibits him in a characteristic and amiable light. Apparently soon after his marriage a dispute had broken out between the parents of the newly wedded pair, and Plutarch in his conciliatory way took his wife, as we should say, ‘on a pilgrimage,’ to the shrine at Thespiae on Mount Helicon to offer a sacrifice to Love.[78] This is in keeping with all the express utterances and all the unconscious revelations he makes of his feeling for the sacredness of the family tie. He was one of those whose soul rings true to the claims of kith and kin. He thanks Fortune as a chief favour for the comradeship of his brother Timon, and delights to show off the idiosyncrasies of his brother Lamprias. We do not know when his marriage took place, but if Plutarch acted on his avowed principles, it must have been when he was still a young man, and it was a very happy one. As we should expect; for of all the affections it is wedded love that he dwells on most fully, and few have spoken more nobly and sincerely of it than he. Again and again he gives the point of view, which is often said to have been attained by the Modern World only by the combined assistance of Germanic character and Christian religion. Thus he says of a virtuous attachment:

But looke what person soever love setleth upon in mariage, so as he be inspired once therewith, at the very first, like as it is in Platoes Common-wealth, he will not have these words in his mouth, Mine and Thine; for simply all goods are not common among all friends, but only those who being severed apart in body, conjoine and colliquate as it were perforce their soules together, neither willing nor believing that they should be twaine but one: and afterward by true pudicitie and reverence one unto the other, whereof wedlock hath most need.... In true love there is so much continency, modesty, loyalty and faithfulnesse, that though otherwhile it touche a wanton and lascivious minde, yet it diverteth it from other lovers, and by cutting off all malapert boldnesse, by taking downe and debasing insolent pride and untaught stubornesse, it placeth in lieu thereof modest bashfulnesse, silence, and taciturnity; it adorneth it with decent gesture and seemly countenance, making it for ever after obedient to one lover onely.... For like as at Rome, when there was a Lord Dictatour once chosen, all other officers of state and magistrates valed bonnet, were presently deposed, and laied downe their ensignes of authority; even so those over whom love hath gotten the mastery and rule, incontinently are quit freed and delivered from all other lords and rulers, no otherwise than such as are devoted to the service of some religious place.[79]

His wife bore him at least five children, of whom three died in childhood, the eldest son, “the lovely Chaeron,” and then their little daughter, born after her four brothers, and called by her mother’s name, Timoxena. The letter of comfort which Plutarch, who was absent at Tanagra, sent home after the death took place, is good to read. There is perhaps here and there a touch that suggests the professional moralist and rhetorician: as when he recounts a fable of Aesop’s to enforce his advice; or bids his wife not to dwell on her griefs rather than her blessings, like “those Criticks who collect and gather together all the lame and defective verses of Homer, which are but few in number; and in the meane time passe over an infinite sort of others which were by him most excellently made”; or warns her to look to her health because, if “the bodie be evill entreated and not regarded with good diet and choice keeping, it becometh dry, rough and hard, in such sort as from it there breathe no sweet and comfortable exhalations unto the soule, but all smoakie and bitter vapors of dolour griefe and sadnesse annoy her.” These were the toll Plutarch paid to his age and to his training. But the tender feeling for his wife’s grief, and the confidence in her dignified endurance of it are very beautiful and human. And his descriptions of the child’s sweet nature, which he does not leave general, but after his wont lights up with special reminiscences, and which, he insists, they must not lose from mind or turn to bitterness but cherish as an abiding joy, strike the note that is still perhaps most comforting to mourners. After telling over her other winsome and gracious ways, he recalls:

She was of a wonderfull kinde and gentle nature; loving she was againe to those that loved her, and marvellous desirous to gratifie and pleasure others: in which regards she both delighted me and also yielded no small testimonie of rare debonairetie that nature had endued her withall; for she would make pretie means[80] to her nourse, and seeme (as it were) to intreat her to give the brest or pap, not only to other infants but also to little babies[81] and puppets and such-like gauds as little ones take joy in and wherewith they use to play; as if upon a singular courtesie and humanitie shee could finde in her heart to communicate and distribute from her owne table even the best things that shee had, among them that did her any pleasure. But I see no reason (sweet wife) why these lovely qualities and such like, wherein we took contentment and joy in her life time, should disquiet and trouble us now after her death, when we either think or make relation of them: and I feare againe, lest by our dolour and griefe, we abandon and put cleane away all the remembrance thereof; like as Clymene desired to do when she said

“I hate the bow so light of cornel tree:

All exercise abroad, farewell for me,”

as avoiding alwaies and trembling at the commemoration of her sonne which should do no other good but renew her griefe and dolour; for naturally we seeke to flee all that troubleth and offendeth us. We oughte therefore so to demeane ourselves, that, as whiles she lived, we had nothing in the world more sweet to embrace, more pleasant to see or delectable to heare than our daughter; so the cogitation of her may still abide and live with us all our life time, having by many degrees our joy multiplied more than our heavinesse augmented.[82]

And then there is the confident expectation of immortality to mitigate the present pang of severance.

But Plutarch and his wife had other consolations as well. Two sons, Aristobulus and a younger Plutarch, lived to be men, and to them he dedicated a treatise on the Timaeus. We know that one of them at least married and had a son in his father’s lifetime. Beyond his domestic circle Plutarch had a large number of friends in Chaeronea and elsewhere, including such distinguished names as Favorinus the philosopher and Serapion the poet; and being, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, an eminently “clubbable man,” he was often host and guest at banquets, fragments of the talk at which he has preserved in his Symposiacs. Almost the only rigorous line in his portrait is contributed by Aulus Gellius, his later contemporary, and the friend of their common friend Favorinus. Gellius[83] represents the philosopher Taurus as telling about “Plutarchus noster”—a phrase that shows the attachment men felt for him—a story of which Dryden gives the following free and amplified but very racy translation:

Plutarch had a certain slave, a saucy stubborn kind of fellow; in a word one of these pragmatical servants who never make a fault but they give a reason for it. His justifications one time would not serve his turn, but his master commanded that he should be stripped and that the law should be laid on his back. He no sooner felt the smart but he muttered that he was unjustly punished, and that he had done nothing to deserve the scourge. At last he began to bawl out louder; and leaving off his groaning, his sighs, and his lamentations, to argue the matter with more show of reason: and, as under such a master he must needs have gained a smattering of learning, he cried out that Plutarch was not the philosopher he pretended himself to be; that he had heard him waging war against all the passions, and maintaining that anger was unbecoming a wise man; nay, that he had written a particular treatise in commendation of clemency; that therefore he contradicted his precepts by his practices, since, abandoning himself over to his choler, he exercised such inhuman cruelty on the body of his fellow-creature. “How is this, Mr. Varlet?” (answered Plutarch). “By what signs and tokens can you prove that I am in passion? Is it by my countenance, my voice, the colour of my face, by my words or by my gestures that you have discovered this my fury? I am not of opinion that my eyes sparkle, that I foam at the mouth, that I gnash my teeth, or that my voice is more vehement, or that my colour is either more pale or more red than at other times; that I either shake or stamp with madness; that I say or do anything unbecoming a philosopher. These, if you know them not, are the symptoms of a man in rage. In the meantime,” (turning to the officer who scourged him) “while he and I dispute this matter, mind your business on his back.”

This story, as we have seen, comes from one who was in a position to get authentic information about Plutarch, and it may very well be true; but it should be corrected, or at least supplemented, by his own utterances in regard to his servants. “Sometimes,” he says, “I use to get angry with my slaves, but at last I saw that it was better to spoil them by indulgence, than to injure myself by rage in the effort to amend them.” And more emphatically:

As for me I coulde never finde in my hart to sell my drawght Oxe that hadde plowed my lande a longe time, because he coulde plowe no longer for age; and much lesse my slave to sell him for a litle money, out of the contrie where he had dwelt a long time, to plucke him from his olde trade of life wherewith he was best acquainted, and then specially, when he shalbe as unprofitable for the buyer as also for the seller.[84]

Plutarch was thus fully alive to the social and domestic amenities of life, and to his responsibilities as householder, but he did not for them overlook other claims. He became priest of Apollo in Delphi, and for many years fulfilled the priestly functions, taking part in the sacrifices, processions and dances even as an old man; for philosopher as he was, his very philosophy supplied him with various contrivances for conformity with the ancient cult, and he probably had no more difficulty about it than a modern Hegelian has with the Thirty-nine Articles. His deeper religious needs would be satisfied by the Mysteries, in which he and his wife were initiated.

He was equally assiduous in public duties, which he did not despise for the pettiness to which under the Roman domination they had shrunk. In his view even the remnants of self-government are to be jealously guarded and loyally employed, though they may concern merely parochial and municipal affairs, and for them vigilant training and discipline are required.

Surely impossible it is that they should ever have their part of any great roial and magnificall joy, such as indeed causeth magnanimitie and hautinesse of courage, bringeth glorious honour abroad or tranquillitie of spirit at home, who have made choice of a close and private life within doors, never showing themselves in the world nor medling with publicke affaires of common weale; a life, I say, sequestered from all offices of humanitie, far removed from any instinct of honour or desire to gratifie others, thereby to deserve thankes or winne favour: for the soul, I may tell you, is no base and small thing; it is not vile and illiberal, extending her desires onely to that which is good to be eaten, as doe these poulpes[85] or pour cuttle fishes which stretch their cleies as far as to their meat and no farther: for such appetites as these are most quickly cut off with satietie and filled in a moment. But when the motives and desires of the minde tending to vertue and honestie, to honour and contentment of conscience are once growen to their vigour and perfection, they have not for their limit, the length and tearme onely of one man’s life; but surely the desire of honour and the affection to profit the societie of men, comprehending all aeternitie, striveth still to goe forward in such actions and beneficiall deedes as yield infinite pleasures that cannot be expressed.[86]

He was true to his principles. He not only officiated as Archon of Chaeronea, but, “gracing the lowliest act in doing it,” was willing to discharge the functions of a more subordinate post, which some thought beneath his dignity.

Mine answer is to such as reprove me, when they find me in proper person present, at the measuring and counting of bricks and tiles, or to see the stones, sand and lime laid downe, which is brought into the citie: “It is not for myselfe that I builde, but for the citie and commonwealth.”[87]

He was thus faithful over a few things; tradition made him ruler over many things. It is related that Trajan granted him consular rank and directed the governor of Achaia to avail himself of his advice. This was embellished by the report that he had been Trajan’s preceptor; and in the Middle Ages a letter very magisterial in tone was fabricated from him to his imperial pupil. It was even said that in his old age Hadrian had made him governor of Greece.

There is a poetic justification for such legends. The government of Trajan and Hadrian was felt to be such that the precepts of philosophy might very fittingly have inspired it, and that the philosopher might very well have been the administrator of their policy. And indeed it is perhaps no fable that Plutarch had something to do with the better régime that was commencing; for his nephew Sextus of Chaeronea, who may have inherited something of his uncle’s spirit, was an honoured teacher of Marcus Aurelius, and influenced his pupil by his example no less than by his teaching. The social renovation which was then in progress should be remembered in estimating Plutarch’s career. Gibbon says: “If a man were called to fix the period in the History of the World, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Probably this statement would need to be, if not greatly qualified, at least greatly amplified, before it commanded universal assent, but, as it stands, there is a truth in it which anyone can perceive. There was peace throughout a great portion of the world; there was good government within the Empire; there was a rejuvenescence of antique culture, literature, and conduct. Indeed, the upward tendency begins with the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and even the thwarting influence of Domitian’s principate would be felt in Rome rather than in the provinces. It was in this time of “reaction against corruption” that Plutarch flourished, and his later life especially fell well within that Indian summer of classical civilisation that Gibbon celebrates. The tradition that he survived till the accession of Antonine may be incorrect, but he certainly enjoyed eight years of Trajan’s government, and, by Eusebius’ statement, was still alive in the third year of Hadrian’s reign. It is to his latter days that his Lives as a whole are assigned, partly on account of the casual reference to contemporary events that some of them contain.

Plutarch’s character, circumstances, and career in a world which was reaching its close, well fitted him for the work that he did. This Greek citizen of the Roman Empire had cultivated his mind by study and travel, and had assimilated the wisdom of wide experience and pregnant memories which Antiquity had amassed in earlier times and to which this interval of revival was heir. Benevolent and dutiful, temperate and devout, with a deep sense of his public obligations and the ethos of his race, he sympathised with the best principles that had moulded the life of olden days, and that were emerging to direct the life of the present. And he combined his amplitude of traditional lore and enthusiasm for traditional virtue in a way that made him more than an antiquary or a moralist. The explorer and practitioner of antique ideas, in a sense he was their artist as well.

His treatment and style already suggest the manifold influences that went to form his mind. One of his charms lies in his quotations, which he culls, or rather which spring up of their own accord, from his reading of the most various authors of the most different times. He is at home in Greek literature, and likes to clinch his argument with a saying from the poets, for he seems to find that their words put his thought better than he could himself. But this affects his original expression. Dryden writes:

Being conversant in so great a variety of authors, and collecting from all of them what he thought most excellent, out of the confusion or rather mixture of their styles he formed his own, which partaking of each was yet none of them, but a compound of them all:—like the Corinthian metal which had in it gold and brass and silver, and yet was a species in itself.

There may be a suggestion of the curious mosaic-worker in his procedure, something of artifice, or at least of conscious art; and indeed his treatises are not free from a rhetorical and sometimes declamatory strain.[88] That in so far is what Courier means when he says that Plutarch writes in the style of a sophistes; but it was inseparable from his composite culture and academic training, and it does not interfere with his sincerity and directness.

His philosophy makes a similar impression. He is an eclectic or syncretist, and has learned from many of the mighty teachers of bygone times. Plato is his chief authority, but Plato’s doctrines are consciously modified in an Aristotelian sense, while nevertheless those aspects of them are made prominent which were afterwards elaborated by Neo-Platonism strictly so-called. But Plutarch, though he has the good word of Neo-Platonic thinkers, is not himself to be reckoned of their company. He is comparatively untouched by their mysticism, borrowed freely from the Theosophy of the East, and he stands in closer lineal relation to the antique Greek spirit than some, like Philo, who precede him in time. He was so indifferent to the Semitic habit of mind that, despite his almost omnivorous curiosity, he never thought it worth while to instruct himself in the exact nature of Judaism or its difference from the Syrian cult, far less to spend on Christianity so much as a passing glance. He approaches Neo-Platonism most nearly in certain religious imaginings which, as he himself recognised, have affinity with beliefs which prevailed in Persia and Egypt; but even so, he hardly ceases to be national, for these were the two countries with which in days of yore Greece had the most important historic connections. And moreover, his interest in such surmises is not, in the first place, a speculative one, but springs from the hope of his finding some explanation of and comfort for the trials and difficulties of actual life. For on the whole he differs from Plato chiefly in his subordination of theory to practice. This compels him to accept loans from the very schools that he most criticises, the Stoics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans themselves. It is his preoccupation with conduct, rather than eclectic debility, that makes him averse to any one-sided scheme, and inclined to supplement it with manifold additions. But as in his style, so in his thought, he blends the heterogeneous elements to his own purpose, and fixes on them the stamp of his own mind. It is not without reason that his various treatises are included under the common title of Moralia. He may dilate on the worship of Isis and Osiris, or The Face appearing within the Roundle of the Moone; he may discuss Whether creatures be more wise, they of the land or those of the water; What signifieth this word Ei engraven over the Dore of Appolloes Temple in the City of Delphi, and various other recondite matters; but the prevailing impression is ethical, and he is at his best when he is discoursing expressly on some moral theme, on Unseemly and Naughty Bashfulnesse, or Brotherly Love, or Tranquillitie and Contentment of Mind, or the Pluralitie of Friends, or the question Whether this common Mot be well said ‘Live Hidden.’ There is the background of serious study and philosophic knowledge, but against it is detached the figure of the sagacious and practical teacher, who wishes to make his readers better men and better women, but never forgets his urbanity and culture in his admonitions, and drives them home with pointed anecdote and apt quotation. And the substance of his teaching, though so sane and experimental that it is sometimes described as obvious and trite, has a generous, ideal, and even chivalrous strain, when he touches on such subjects as love, or devotion, or the claims of virtue; and his sympathy goes out spontaneously to noble words or deeds or minds.

It is an easy step from the famous Moralia to the still more famous Parallel Lives. “All history,” says Dryden, in reference to the latter, “is only the precepts of moral philosophy reduced into examples.” This, at least, is no bad description of Plutarch’s point of view; and his methods do not greatly differ in the series of essays and in the series of biographies. In the essays he did not let himself be unduly hampered by the etiquette of the Moral Treatise, but expatiated at will among Collections and Recollections, and embroidered his abstract argument with the stories that he delights to tell. As historian, on the other hand, he is not tied down to historical narration and exposition, but indulges his moralising bent to the full. He is on the lookout for edification, and is seldom at a loss for a peg to hang a lecture on. And these discourses of his, though the material is sometimes the sober drab of the decent bourgeois, are always fine in texture, and relieved by the quaintness of the cut and the ingenuity of the garnishing: nor are they the less interesting that they do not belong to the regulation historical outfit. Such improving digressions, indeed, are among Plutarch’s charms. “I am always pleased,” says Dryden, “when I see him and his imitator Montaigne when they strike a little out of the common road; for we are sure to be the better for their wandering. The best quarry does not always lie on the open field, and who would not be content to follow a good huntsman over hedges and ditches, when he knows the game will reward his pains.”[89]

Proceeding in this way it is not to be expected that Plutarch should compose his Lives with much care for dexterous design. Just as in his philosophy he has no rigidly consequent system of doctrine, so in his biographies he has no orderly or well-digested plan. The excellences that arise from a definite and vigorous conception of the whole are not those at which he aims. He would proceed very much at haphazard, were it not for the chronological clue; which, for the rest, he is very willing to abandon if a tempting by-path presents itself, or if he thinks of something for which he must retrace his steps. Yet, no more than in his metaphysics is he without an instinctive method of his own. The house is finished, and with all its irregularities it is good to dwell in; the journey is ended, and there has been no monotony on the devious track. There is this advantage indeed in his procedure over that of more systematic biographers, that it offers hospitality to all the suggestions that crowd for admission. None is rejected because it is out of place and insignificant. Gossip and allotria of every kind that do not make out their claims at first sight, and that the more ambitious historian would exclude as trivial, find an entry if they can show a far-off connection with the subject. And, lo and behold, they often turn out to be the most instructive of all.

But Plutarch welcomes them without scrutinising them very austerely. He submits their credentials to no stringent test. He is no severe critic of their authenticity. He takes them where he finds them, just as he picks up philosophic ideas from all quarters, even from the detested Epicureans, without condemning them on account of their suspicious source: it is enough for him if they adapt themselves to his use. Nor does he educe from them all that they involve. He does not even confront them with each other, to examine whether opposite hints about his heroes may not lead to fuller and subtler conceptions of them. This is the point of the charge brought against him by St. Évremond, that he might have carried his analysis further and penetrated more deeply into human nature. St. Évremond notes how different a man is from himself, the same person being just and unjust, merciful and cruel; “which qualities,” proceeds the critic, “seeming to belie each other in him, [Plutarch] attributes these inconsistencies to foreign causes. He could never ... reconcile contrarieties in the same subject.” He never tried to do so. He collects a number of vivid traits, which, like a number of minute lines, set forth the likeness to his own mind, but he is ordinarily as far from interrogating and combining his impressions as he is from subjecting them to any punctilious test. He exhibits characters in the particular aspects and manifestations which history or hearsay has presented, and is content with the general sense of verisimilitude that these successive indications, credited or accredited, have left behind. But he stops there, and does not study his manifold data to construct from them a consistent complex individuality in its oneness and difference. And if this is true of him as biographer, it is still truer of him as historian. He touches on all sorts of historical subjects—war, policy, administration, government; and he has abundance of acute and just remarks on them all. But it is not in these that his chief interest lies, and it is not over them that he holds his torch. This does not mean that he fails to perceive the main drift of things or to appreciate the importance of statecraft. Mr. Wyndham, defending him against those who have “denied him any political insight,” very justly shows that, despite “the paucity of his political pronouncements,” he has a “political bent.” His choice of heroes, in the final arrangement to which they lent themselves, proves that he has an eye for the general course of Greek and Roman history, for the impotence into which the city state is sunk by rivalry with neighbours in the one case, for its transmutation into an Empire on the other: “The tragedy of Athens, the drama of Rome,” says Mr. Wyndham, “these are the historic poles of the Parallel Lives.” And Plutarch has a political ideal: the “need of authority and the obligation of the few to maintain it—by a ‘natural grace’ springing on the one hand from courage combined with forbearance, and leading, on the other, to harmony between the rulers and the ruled—is the text, which, given out in the Lycurgus, is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives.” So much indeed we had a right to expect from the thoughtful patriot and experienced magistrate of Chaeronea. The salient outlines of the story of Greece and Rome could hardly remain hidden from a clear-sighted man with Plutarch’s knowledge of the past: the relations of governor and governed had not only engaged him practically, but had suggested to him one of his most pithy essays, Praecepta gerendae Reipublicae, a title which Philemon Holland paraphrases in stricter accordance with the contents, Instructions for them that manage Affaires of State. But this does not carry us very far. Shakespeare in his English Histories shows at least as much political discernment and political instinct. He brings out the general lesson of the wars of Lancaster and York, and in Henry V. gives his conception of the ideal ruler. But no one would say that this series shows a conspicuous genius for political research or political history. The same thing is true, and in a greater degree, of Plutarch. He is public-spirited, but he is not a publicist. He has not much concern or understanding for particular measures and movements and problems, however critical they may be. It is impossible to challenge the justice of Archbishop Trench’s verdict, either in its general scope or in its particular instances, when he says:

One who already knows the times of Marius and Sulla will obtain a vast amount of instruction from his several Lives of these, will clothe with flesh and blood what would else, in some parts, have been the mere skeleton of a story; but I am bold to say no one would understand those times from him. The suppression of the Catilinarian Conspiracy was the most notable event in the life of Cicero; but one rises from Plutarch’s Life with only the faintest impression of what that conspiracy, a sort of anticipation of the French Commune, and having objects social rather than political, meant. Or take his Lives of the Gracchi. Admirable in many respects as these are, greatly as we are debtors to him here for important facts, whereof otherwise we should have been totally ignorant, few, I think, would affirm that he at all plants them in a position for understanding that vast revolution effected, with the still vaster revolution attempted by them, and for ever connected with their names.

In Plutarch the historian, as well as the biographer, is subordinate to the ethical teacher who wishes to enforce lessons that may be useful to men in the management of their lives. He gathers his material for its “fine moral effects,” not for “purposes of research.”[90]

Plutarch, then, had already composed many disquisitions to commend his humane and righteous ideas, and it was partly in the same didactic spirit that he seems to have written his Parallel Lives. At the beginning of the Life of Pericles he says:

Vertue is of this power, that she allureth a mans minde presently to use her, and maketh him very desirous in his harte to followe her: and doth not frame his manners that beholdeth her by any imitation but by the only understanding and knowledge of vertuous deedes, which sodainely bringeth unto him a resolute desire to doe the like. And this is the reason why methought I should continew still to write on the lives of noble men.

And similar statements occur again and again. They clearly show the aim that he consciously had in view. The new generation was to be admonished and renovated by the examples of the leading spirits who had flourished in former times. And since he was addressing the whole civilised world, he took his examples both from Roman and from Grecian History, and arranged his persons in pairs, each pair supplying the matter for one book. Thus he couples Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Alexander and Caesar, Dion and Brutus, Demetrius and Antony. Such parallelism is a little far-fetched, and though some of the detailed comparisons with which it is justified, are not from Plutarch’s hand, and belong to a later time, it of itself betrays a certain fondness for symmetry and antithesis, a leaning towards artifice and rhetoric which, as we have seen, the author owed to his environment. He wishes in an eloquent way to inculcate his lessons, and is perhaps, for the same reason, somewhat prone to exaggerate the greatness of the past, and show it in an idealised light. But this is by no means the pose of the histrionic revivalist. It corresponds to an authentic sentiment in his own nature, which loved to linger amid the glooms and glories of tradition, and pay vows at the shrine of the Great Departed. “The cradle of war and statecraft,” says Mr. Wyndham, “was become a memory dear to him, and ever evolved by his personal contact with the triumphs of Rome. From this contrast flowed his inspiration for the Parallel Lives—his desire as a man to draw the noble Grecians, long since dead, a little nearer to the noon-day of the living; his delight as an artist in setting the noble Romans, whose names were in every mouth, a little further into the twilight of more ancient Romance.”

But this transfiguration of the recent and resurrection of the remoter past, in which Mr. Wyndham rightly sees something “romantic,” does not lay Plutarch open to the charge of vagueness or unreality. He was saved from such vices by his interest in human nature and suggestive ana and picturesque incidents on the one hand, and by his deference for political history and civil society on the other.

He loved marked individualities: no two of his heroes are alike, and each, though in a varying degree, has an unmistakable physiognomy of his own. There is no sameness in his gallery of biographies, and even the legends of demigods yield figures of firm outline that resist the touch. This is largely due to his joy in details, and the imperious demand his imagination makes for them. In his Life of Alexander he uses words which very truly describe his own method, words which Boswell[91] was afterwards to quote in justification of his own similar procedure.

The noblest deedes doe not alwayes shew men’s vertues and vices, but often times a light occasion, a word, or some sporte, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plaine, then the famous battells wonne wherein are slaine tenne thousande men, or the great armies, or cities wonne by siege or assault. For like as painters or drawers of pictures, which make no accompt of other parts of the bodie, do take the resemblaunces of the face and favor of the countenance, in the which consisteth the judgement of their maners and disposition; even so they must give us leave to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde only, and thereby shewe the life of either of them, referring you unto others to wryte the warres, battells and other great thinges they did.[92]

So he likes to give the familiar traits and emphasise the suggestive nothings that best discover character. But his purpose is almost always to discover character, and, so far as his principal persons are concerned, to discover great character. Though so assiduous in sharking up their mannerisms, foibles, and oddities, their tricks of gait or speech or costume, he is not like the Man with the Muck Rake, and is not piling together the rubbish of tittle-tattle just because he has a soul for nothing higher. Still less does he take the valet’s view of the hero, and hold that he is no hero at all because he can be seen in undress or in relations that show his common human nature. Reverence for greatness is the point from which he starts, reverence for greatness is the star that guides his course, and his reverence is so entire, that on the one hand he welcomes all that will help him to restore the great one in his speech and habit as he lived, and on the other, he assumes that the greatness must pervade the whole life, and that flashes of glory will be refracted from the daily talk and walk. Like Carlyle, though in a more naïf and simple way, he is a hero-worshipper; like Carlyle he believes that the hero will not lose but gain by the record of his minutest traits, and that these will only throw new light on his essential heroism. In the object he proposed to himself he has succeeded well. “Plutarch,” says Rousseau, almost reproducing the biographer’s own words, “has inimitable dexterity in painting great men in little things, and he is so happy in his selection, that often a phrase, a simile, a gesture suffices him to set forth a hero. That is the true art of portraiture. The physiognomy does not display itself in the main lines, nor the characters in great actions; it is in trifles that the temperament discloses itself.” An interesting testimony; for Rousseau, when he sets up as character-painter, belongs to a very different school.

It is not otherwise with his narratives of actions or his descriptions of scenes, if action or scene really interest him; and there is little of intrinsic value, comic or tragic, vivacious or stately, familiar or weird, that does not interest him. Under his quick successive strokes, some of them so light that at first they evade notice, some of them so simple that at first they seem commonplace, the situation becomes visible and luminous. He knows how to choose the accessories and what to do with them. When our attention is awakened, we ask ourselves how he has produced the effect by means apparently so insignificant; and we cannot answer. Here he may have selected a hint from his authorities, there he may derive another from the mental vision he himself has evoked, but in either case the result is equally wonderful. Whether from his tact in reporting or his energy in imagining, he contrives to make us view the occurrence as a fact, and a fact that is like itself and like nothing else.

But again Plutarch was saved from wanton and empty phantasms by his political bias. He was not a politician or a statesman or an historian of politics or institutions, but he was a citizen with a citizen’s respect for the State. “For himself,” to quote Mr. Wyndham once more, “he was painting individual character, and he sought it among men bearing a personal stamp. But he never sought it in a private person, or a comedian, nor even in a poet or a master of the Fine Arts.” He confines himself to public men, as we should call them, and never fails to recollect that they played their part on the public stage. And this not only gave a robustness of touch and breadth of stroke to his delineations; the connection with well-known and certified events preserved him from the worst licenses to which the romantic and rhetorical temper is liable. Courier, indeed, says of him that he was “capable of making Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia, if it would have rounded his sentence ever so little.” But though he may be credulous of details and manipulate his copy, and with a light heart make one statement at one time and a different one at another, the sort of liberty Courier attributes to him is precisely the one he does not take. Facts are stubborn things, and the great outstanding facts he is careful to observe: they bring a good deal else in their train.

2. AMYOT[93]

A book like the Parallel Lives was bound to achieve a great popularity at the Renaissance. That it was full of instruction and served for warning and example commended it to a generation that was but too inclined to prize the didactic in literature. Its long list of worthies included not a few of the names that were being held up as the greatest in human history, and these celebrities were exhibited not aloft on their official pedestals, but, however impressive and imposing the mise-en-scène might be, as men among men in the private and personal passages of their lives. And yet they were not private persons but historical magnates, the founders or leaders of world-renowned states: and as such they were particularly congenial to an age in which many of the best minds—More and Buchanan, L’Hôpital and La Boëtie, Brand and Hutten—were awakening to the antique idea of civic and political manhood, and finding few unalloyed examples of it in the feudalised West. It was not enough that Plutarch was made more accessible in the Latin form. He deserved a vernacular dress, and after various tentative experiments this was first satisfactorily, in truth, admirably, supplied by Bishop Amyot in France.

Jacques Amyot was born in October, 1513, in Melun, the little town on the Seine, some thirty miles to the south-east of Paris. His parents were very poor, but at any rate from his earliest years he was within the sweep of the dialect of the Île de France, and had no patois to unlearn when he afterwards appeared as a literary man. Perhaps to this is due some of the purity and correctness which the most fastidious were afterwards to celebrate in his style. These influences would be confirmed when as a lad he proceeded to Paris to pursue his studies. His instructors in Greek were—first, Evagrius, in the college of Cardinal Lemoine, and afterwards, Thusan and Danès, who, at the instance of Budaeus, had just been appointed lecteurs royaux in Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Stories are told of the privations that he endured in the pursuit of scholarship, how his mother sent him every week a loaf by the watermen of the Seine, how he read his books by the light of the fire, and the like; but similar circumstances are related of others, and, to quote Sainte Beuve, are in some sort “the legend of the heroic age of erudition.” It is better authenticated that he supported himself by becoming the domestic attendant of richer students till he graduated as Master of Arts at the age of nineteen. Then his position began to improve. He became tutor in important households, to the nephews of the Royal Reader, and to the children of the Royal Secretary. Through such patrons his ability and knowledge were made known to the King’s sister, Marguérite de Valois, the beneficent patroness of literature and learning. He had proceeded to Bourges, it is said, to study law, but by her influence was appointed to discharge the more congenial functions of Reader in the Greek and Latin Languages, and was soon promoted to the full professorship. The University of Bourges was at the time the youngest in France save that of Bordeaux, having been founded less than three-quarters of a century before in 1463, when the Renaissance was advancing from conquest to conquest in Italy, and when Medievalism was moribund even in France. The new institution would have few traditions to oppose to the new spirit, and there was scope for a missionary of the New Learning. For some ten or twelve years Amyot remained in his post, lecturing two hours daily, in the morning on Latin, in the afternoon on Greek. No doubt such instruction would be elementary in a way; but even so, it was a laborious life, for in those days the classical teacher had few of the facilities that his modern colleague enjoys. It was, however, a good preparation for Amyot’s peculiar mission, and he even found time to make his first experiments in the sphere that was to be his own. By 1546 he had completed a translation of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, the famous Greek romance that deals with the loves and adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea. Amyot afterwards, on the authority of a manuscript which he discovered in the Vatican, identified the author with a Bishop of Tricca who lived in the end of the fourth century, and of whom a late tradition asserted that when commanded by the provincial synod either to burn his youthful effusion or resign his bishopric, he chose the latter alternative. “Heliodorus,” says Montaigne, when discussing parental love, “ayma mieulx perdre la dignité, le proufit, la devotion d’une prelature si venerable, que de perdre sa fille, fille qui dure encores bien gentille, mais à l’aventure pourtant un peu curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale, et de trop amoureuse façon.”[94] In the case of the young French professor it had happier and opposite consequences, for it procured him from the king the Abbey of Bellozane. This gift, one of the last that Francis bestowed for the encouragement of letters, was partly earned, too, by a version of some of Plutarch’s Lives, which Amyot presented to his royal patron and had executed at his command.

With an income secured Amyot was now in a position to free himself from the drudgery of class work, and follow his natural bent. In those days not all the printed editions of the classics were very satisfactory, and some works of the authors in whom he was most interested still existed only in manuscript or were known only by name. He set out for Italy in the hope of discovering the missing Lives of Plutarch and of obtaining better texts than had hitherto been within his reach, and seems to have remained abroad for some years. For a moment he becomes a conspicuous figure in an uncongenial scene. In May, 1551, the Council of Trent had been reopened, but Charles delayed the transaction of business till the following September. The Italian prelates, impatient and indignant, were hoping for French help against the emperor, but instead of the French Bishops there came only a letter from the “French King addressed to ‘the Convention’ which he would not dignify with the name of a council. The King said he had not been consulted about their meeting. He regarded them as a private synod got up for their own purposes by the Pope and the Emperor and he would have nothing to do with them.”[95] It was Amyot who was commissioned with the delivery and communication of the ungracious message. Probably the selection of the simple Abbé was intended less as an honour to him than as an insult to the assemblage. At any rate it was no very important part that he had to play, but it was one which made him very uncomfortable. He writes: “Je filois le plus doux que je pouvois, me sentant si mal et assez pour me faire mettre en prison, si j’eusse un peu trop avant parle.” He was not even named in the letter, and had not so much as seen it before he was called to read it aloud, so that he complains he never saw a matter so badly managed, “si mal cousu,” but he delivered the contents with emphasis and elocution. “Je croy qu’il n’y eust personne en toute la compagnie qui en perdist un seul mot, s’il n’estoit bien sourd, de sorte que si ma commission ne gisoit qu’a présenter les lettres du roy, et à faire lecture de la proposition, je pense y avoir amplement satisfait.”

But his real interests lay elsewhere, and he brought back from Italy what would indemnify him for his troubles as envoy and please him more than the honour of such a charge. In his researches he had made some veritable finds, among them a new manuscript of Heliodorus, and Books XI. to XVII. of Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, only the two last of which had hitherto been known at all. His treatment of this discovery is characteristic,[96] both of his classical enthusiasm and his limitations as a classical scholar. He did not, as the specialist of that and perhaps of any age would have done, edit and publish the original text, but contented himself with giving to the world a French translation. But the Historic Library has neither the allurement of a Greek romance nor the edification of Plutarch’s Lives; and in this version, which for the rest is said to be poor, Amyot for once appealed to the popular interest in vain.

The Diodorus Siculus appeared in 1554, and in the same year Henry II. appointed Amyot preceptor to his two sons, the Dukes of Orleans and Anjou, who afterwards became respectively Charles IX. and Henry III. As his pupils were very young their tuition cannot have occupied a great deal of his time, and he was able to pursue his activity as translator. In 1559, besides a revised edition of Theagenes and Chariclea, there appeared anonymously a rendering, probably made at an earlier date, of the Daphnis and Chloe, a romance even more “curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale” than its companion. But it is with his own name and a dedication to the King that Amyot published almost at the same date his greatest work, the complete translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. If his Heliodorus gave him his first step on the ladder of church preferment, his Plutarch was a stronger claim to higher promotion. Henry II., indeed, died before the end of the year, but the accession of Amyot’s elder pupil in 1560, after the short intercalary reign of Francis II., was propitious to his fortunes, for the new king, besides bestowing on him other substantial favours, almost immediately named him Grand Almoner of France.

Amyot was an indefatigable but deliberate worker. Fifteen years had elapsed between his first appearance as translator and the issue of his masterpiece. Thirteen more were to elapse before he had new material ready for the press. The interval in both cases was filled up with preparation, with learned labour, with the leisurely prosecution of his plan. A revised edition of the Lives appeared in 1565 and a third in 1567, and all the time he was pushing on a version of Plutarch’s Moralia. Meanwhile in 1570 Charles gave him the bishopric of Auxerre; and without being required to disown the two literary daughters of his vivacious prime, “somewhat curiously and voluptuously frounced and of too amorous fashion” though they might be, he had yet to devote himself rather more seriously to his profession than he hitherto seems to have done. He set about it in his usual steady circumspect way. He composed sermons, first, it is said, writing them in Latin and then turning them into French; he attended faithfully to the administration of his diocese; he applied himself to the study of theological doctrine, and is said to have learned the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas by heart.[97] These occupations have left their trace on his next work, which was ready by 1572. Not only are Plutarch’s moral treatises perfectly consonant in tone with Amyot’s episcopal office, but the preface is touched with a breath of religious unction, of which his previous performances show no trace. Perhaps the flavour is a little too pronounced when in his grateful dedication to his royal master he declares: “The Lord has lodged in you singular goodness of nature.” The substantive needs all the help that can be wrung from the adjective, when used of Charles IX. in the year of St. Bartholomew. But Amyot, though the exhibiter of “Plutarch’s men,” was essentially a private student, and was besides bound by ties of intimacy and obligation to his former pupil, who had certainly done well by him. Nor was the younger brother behindhand in his acknowledgments. Charles died before two years were out (for Amyot had a way of dedicating books to kings who deceased soon after), and was lamented by Amyot in a simple and heartfelt Latin elegy. But his regrets were quite disinterested, for when Henry III. succeeded in 1574, he showed himself as kind a master, and in 1578 decreed that the Grand Almoner should also be Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost without being required to give proofs of nobility.

Invested with ample revenues and manifold dignities, Amyot for the next eleven years lived a busy and simple life, varying the routine of his administrative duties with music, of which he was a lover and a practitioner; with translations, never published and now lost, from the Greek tragedians, who had attracted him as professor, and from St. Athanasius, who appealed to him as bishop; above all, with the revision of his Plutarch, for which he never ceased to collect new readings. Then came disasters, largely owing to his reputation for partiality and complaisance. When the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise were assassinated in 1589, he was accused by the Leaguers of having approved the crime and of having granted absolution to the King. This he denied; but his Chapter and diocesans rose against him, the populace sacked his residence, and he had to fly from Auxerre. Nor were his woes merely personal. On August 3rd the House of Valois, to which he was so much beholden, became extinct with the murder of Henry III.; and however worthless the victim may have been, Amyot cannot have been unaffected by old associations of familiarity and gratitude. Six days later he writes that he is “the most afflicted, desolate and destitute poor priest I suppose, in France.” His private distress was not of long duration. He made peace with the Leaguers, denounced the “politicians” for supporting Henry IV., returned to his see, resumed his episcopal duties, though he was divested of his Grand Almonership, and was able to leave the large fortune of two hundred thousand crowns. But he did not survive to see the establishment of the new dynasty or the triumph of Catholicism, for he died almost eighty years old in February, 1593, and only in the following June was Henry IV. reconciled to the Church. Perhaps had he foreseen this consummation Amyot would have found some comfort in the thought that a third pupil, a truer and greater one than those who were no more, would reign in their stead, and repair the damage their vice and folly had caused. “Glory to God!” writes Henry of Navarre to his wife, “you could have sent me no more pleasant message than the news of the zest for reading which has taken you. Plutarch always attracts me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me, for he was for long the instructor of my early years. My good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who had so great a desire to watch over my right attitude and was wont to say that she did not wish to see in her son a distinguished dunce, put this book in my hands when I was all but an infant at the breast. It has been, as it were, my conscience, and has prescribed in my ear many fair virtues and excellent maxims for my behaviour and for the management of my affairs.”[98]

Amyot has exerted a far-reaching influence on the literature of his own country and of Europe. Though as a translator he might seem to have no more than a secondary claim, French historians of letters have dwelt on his work at a length and with a care that are usually conceded only to the achievements of creative imagination or intellectual discovery. And the reason is that his aptitude for his task amounts to real genius, which he has improved by assiduous research, so that in his treatment, the ancillary craft, as it is usually considered, rises to the rank of a free liberal art. He has the insight to divine what stimulus and information the age requires; the knowledge to command the sources that will supply them; the skill to manipulate his native idiom for the new demands, and suit his expression, so far as may be, both to his subject and to his audience. Among the great masters of translation he occupies a foremost place.

Of spontaneous and initiative power he had but little. He cannot stand alone. For Henry II. he wrote a Projet de l’Eloquence Royal, but it was not printed till long after his death; and of this and his other original prose his biographer, Roulliard, avows that the style is strangely cumbersome and laggard (estrangement pesant et traisnassier). Even in his prefaces to Plutarch he is only good when he catches fire from his enthusiasm for his author. Just as his misgivings at the Council of Trent, his commendations of his royal patrons, his concessions to his enemies of the League, suggest a defect in independent force of character, so the writings in which he must rely on himself show a defect in independent force of intellect.

Nor is he a specialist in scholarship. Already in 1635, when he had been less than a century in his grave, Bachet de Méziriac, expert in all departments of learning, exposed his shortcomings in a Discourse on Translation, which was delivered before the Academy. His critic describes him as “a promising pupil in rhetoric with a mediocre knowledge of Greek, and some slight tincture of Polite Letters”; and asserts that there are more than two thousand passages in which he has perverted the sense of his author. Even in 1580-81, during Amyot’s lifetime, Montaigne was forced to admit in discussion with certain learned men at Rome that he was less accurate than his admirers had imagined. He was certainly as far as possible from being a Zunftgelehrter. His peculiar attitude is exactly indicated by his treatment of the missing books of Diodorus which it was his good fortune to light upon. He is not specially interested in his discovery, and has no thought of giving the original documents to the world. At the same time he has such a reverence for antiquity that he must do something about them. So with an eye to his chosen constituency, his own countrymen, he executes his vernacular version.

For of his own countrymen he always thought first. They are his audience, and he has their needs in his mind. And that is why he made Plutarch the study of his life. His romances are mere experiments for his pastime and equipment:[99] his Diodorus is a task prescribed by accident and vocation: but his Plutarch is a labour of love and of patriotism. It was knowledge of antiquity for which the age clamoured and of which it stood in need; and who else could give such a summary and encyclopaedia of Classical Life as the polyhistor of Chaeronea, who interested himself in everything, from details of household management to the government of states, from ancestral superstitions to the speculations of philosophers, from after-dinner conversation to the direction of campaigns; but brought them all into vital relation with human nature and human conduct? Plutarch appealed to the popular instinct of the time and to the popular instinct in Amyot’s own breast. It is his large applicability “distill’d through all the needful uses of our lives” and “fit for any conference one can use” that, for example, arouses the enthusiasm of Montaigne. After mentioning that when he writes he willingly dispenses with the companionship or recollection of books, he adds:

But it is with more difficulty that I can get rid of Plutarch: he is so universal and so full that on all occasions and whatever out-of-the-way subject you have taken up, he thrusts himself into your business, and holds out to you a hand lavish and inexhaustible in treasures and ornaments. I am vexed at his being so much exposed to the plunder of those who resort to him. I can’t have the slightest dealings with him myself, but I snatch a leg or a wing.[100]

And again:

I am above all grateful to [Amyot] for having had the insight to pick out and choose a book so worthy and so seasonable, to make a present of it to his country. We dunces should have been lost, if this book had not raised us out of the mire. Thanks to it we now dare to speak and write. With it the ladies can lecture the school-masters. It is our breviary.[101]

“In all kinds Plutarch is my man,” he says elsewhere. And indeed it is obvious, even though he had not told us, that Plutarch with Seneca supplies his favourite reading, to which he perpetually recurs. “I have not,” he writes, “systematically acquainted myself with any solid books except Plutarch and Seneca, from whom I draw like the Danaides, filling and pouring out continually.”[102] To the latter he could go for himself; for the Greek he had to depend on Amyot. For combined profit and pleasure, he says, “the books that serve me are Plutarch, since he is French, and Seneca.”[103] But it is to the former that he seems to give the palm.

Seneca is full of smart and witty sayings, Plutarch of things: the former kindles you more and excites you, the latter satisfies you more and requites you better; he guides us while the other drives us.[104]

It is indeed impossible to imagine Montaigne without Plutarch, to whom he has a striking resemblance both in his free-and-easy homilies and in his pregnant touches. It is these things on which he dwells.

There are in Plutarch many dissertations at full length well worth knowing, for in my opinion he is the master-craftsman in that trade; but there are a thousand that he has merely indicated; he only points out the track we are to take if we like, and confines himself sometimes to touching the quick of a subject. We must drag (the expositions) thence and put them in the market place.... It is a dissertation in itself to see him select a trivial act in the life of a man, or a word that does not seem to have such import.[105]

But Montaigne did not stand alone in his admiration. He himself, as we have seen, bears witness to the widespread popularity of Amyot’s Plutarch and the general practice of rifling its treasures. Indeed, Plutarch was seen to be so congenial to the age, that frequent attempts had been made before Amyot to place him within the reach of a larger circle than the little band of Greek scholars. In 1470, e.g. a number of Italians had co-operated in a Latin version of the Lives, published at Rome by Campani, and this was followed by several partial translations in French.[106] But the latter were immediately superseded, and even the former had its authority shaken, by Amyot’s achievement.

This was due partly to its greater intelligence and faithfulness, partly to its excellent style.

In regard to the first, it should be remembered that the criticism of Amyot’s learning must be very carefully qualified. Scholarship is a progressive science, and it is always easy for the successor to point out errors in the precursor, as Méziriac did in Amyot. Of course, however, the popular expositor was not a Budaeus or Scaliger, and the savants whom Montaigne met in Rome were doubtless justified in their strictures. Still the zeal that he showed and the trouble that he took in searching for good texts, in conferring them with the printed books and in consulting learned men about his conjectural emendations,[107] would suggest that he had the root of the matter in him, and there is evidence that expert opinion in his own days was favourable to his claims.[108]

At the time when he was translating the Lives into French two scholars of high reputation were, independently of each other, translating them into Latin. Xylander’s versions appeared in 1560, those of Cruserius were ready in the same year, but were not published till 1564. They still hold their place and enjoy consideration. Now, they both make their compliments to Amyot. Xylander, indeed, has only a second-hand acquaintance with his publication, but even that he has found valuable:

After I had already finished the greater part of the work, the Lives of Plutarch written by Amyot in the French language made their appearance. And since I heard from those who are skilled in that tongue, a privilege which I do not possess, that he had devoted remarkable pains to the book and used many good MSS., assisted by the courtesy of friends, I corrected several passages about which I was in doubt, and in not a few my conjecture was established by the concurrence of that translator.[109]

Cruserius, again, in his prefatory Epistle to the Reader, warmly commends the merits of Xylander and Amyot, but refers with scarcely veiled disparagement to the older Latin rendering, which nevertheless enjoyed general acceptance as the number of editions proves, and was considered the standard authority.

If indeed (he writes) I must not here say that I by myself have both more faithfully and more elegantly interpreted Plutarch’s Lives, the translation of which into Latin a great number of Italians formerly undertook without much success; this at least I may say positively and justly that I think I have done this.[110]

On the other hand “Amiotus” has been a help to him. When he had already polished and corrected his own version, he came across this very tasteful rendering in Brussels six months after it had appeared. “This man’s scholarship and industry gave me some light on several passages.”[111] It is well then to bear in mind, when Amyot’s competency is questioned, that by their own statement he cleared up things for specialists like Xylander and Cruserius. And this is all the more striking, that Cruserius, whom his preface shows to be very generous in his acknowledgments, has no word of recognition for his Italian predecessors even though Filelfo was among their number.[112] But his Epistle proceeds: “To whom (i.e. to Amyot) I will give this testimony that nowadays it is impossible that anyone should render Plutarch so elegantly in the Latin tongue, as he renders him in his own.”[113] And this praise of Amyot’s style leads us to the next point.

If Amyot claims the thanks of Western Europe for giving it with adequate faithfulness a typical miscellany of ancient life and thought, his services to his country in developing the native language are hardly less important. Before him Rabelais and Calvin were the only writers of first-rate ability in modern French. But Rabelais’ prose was too exuberant, heterogeneous and eccentric to supply a model; and Calvin, besides being suspect on account of his theology, was of necessity as a theologian abstract and restricted in his range. The new candidate had something of the wealth and universal appeal of the one, something of the correctness and purity of the other.

Since Plutarch deals with almost all departments of life, Amyot had need of the amplest vocabulary, and a supply of the most diverse locutions. Indeed, sometimes the copious resources of his vernacular, with which he had doubtless begun to familiarise himself among the simple folk of Melun, leave him in the lurch, and he has to make loans from Latin or Greek. But he does this sparingly, and only when no other course is open to him. Generally his thorough mastery of the dialect of the Île de France, the standard language of the kingdom, helps him out.

Yet he is far from adopting the popular speech without consciously manipulating it. He expressly states that he selects the fittest, sweetest, and most euphonious words, and such as are in the mouths of those who are accustomed to speak well. The ingenuousness of his utterance, which is in great measure due to his position of pioneer in a new period, should not mislead us into thinking him a careless writer. His habit of first composing his sermons in Latin and then translating them into French tells its own story. He evidently realised the superiority in precision and orderly arrangement of the speech of Rome, and felt it a benefit to submit to such discipline the artless bonhomie of his mother tongue. But since he is the born interpreter, whose very business it was to mediate between the exotic and the indigenous, and assimilate the former to the latter, he never forgets the claims of his fellow Frenchmen and his native French. He does not force his idiom to imitate a foreign model, but only learns to develop its own possibilities of greater clearness, exactitude, and regularity.

It is for these excellencies among others, “pour la naifeté et purété du language en quoi il surpasse touts aultres,”[114] that Montaigne gives him the palm, and this purity served him in good stead during the classical period of French literature, which was so unjust to most writers of the sixteenth century, and found fault with Montaigne himself for his “Gasconisms.” Racine thought that Amyot’s “old style” had a grace which could not be equalled in our modern language. Fénelon regretfully looks back to him for beauties that are fallen into disuse. Nor was it only men of delicate and poetic genius who appreciated his merits. Vaugelas, the somewhat illiberal grammarian and purist, is the most enthusiastic of the worshippers.

What obligation (he exclaims) does our language not owe to him, there never having been anyone who knew its genius and character better than he, or who used words and phrases so genuinely French without admixture of the provincial expressions which daily corrupt the purity of the true French tongue. All stores and treasures are in the works of this great man. And even to-day we have hardly any noble and splendid modes of speech that he has not left us; and though we have cut out a half of his words and phrases, we do not fail to find in the other half almost all the riches of which we boast.

It will be seen, however, that in such tributes from the seventeenth century (and the same thing is true of others left unquoted), it is implied that Amyot is already somewhat antiquated and out of fashion. He is honoured as ancestor in the right line of classical French, but he is its ancestor and not a living representative. Vaugelas admits that half his vocabulary is obsolete, Fénelon regrets his charms just because their date is past, Racine wonders that such grace should have been attained in what is not the modern language.

And this may remind us of the very important fact, that Amyot could not on account of his position deliver a facsimile of the Greek. Plutarch lived at the close of an epoch, he at the beginning. The one employed a language full of reminiscences and past its prime; the other, a language that was just reaching self-consciousness and that had the future before it. Both in a way were artists, but Plutarch shows his art in setting his stones already cut, while Amyot provides moulds for the liquid metal. At their worst Plutarch’s style becomes mannered and Amyot’s infantile. By no sleight of hand would it have been possible to give in the French of the sixteenth century an exact reproduction of the Greek of the second. Grey-haired antiquity had to learn the accents of stammering childhood.

Sometimes Amyot hardly makes an attempt at literal fidelity. The style of his original he describes as “plein, serré et philosophistorique.” With him it retains the fulness, but the condensation, or rather what a modern scholar describes as “the crowding of the sentence,”[115] often gives place to periphrasis, and of the “philosophistorique” small trace remains. Montaigne praises him because he has contrived “to expound so thorny and crabbed[116] an author with such fidelity.” What is most crabbed and thorny in Plutarch he passes over or replaces with a loose equivalent; single words he expands to phrases; difficulties he explains with a gloss or illustration that he does not hesitate to insert in the text; and he is anxious to bring out the sense by adding more emphatic and often familiar touches.

The result of it all undoubtedly is to lend Plutarch a more popular and less academic bearing than he really has. Some of Amyot’s most attractive effects either do not exist or are inconspicuous in his original. The tendency to artifice and rhetoric in the pupil of Ammonius disappears, and he is apt to get the credit for an innocence and freshness that are more characteristic of his translator. M. Faguet justly points out that Amyot in his version makes Plutarch “a simple writer, while he was elegant, fastidious, and even affected in his style.” ... He “emerges from Amyot’s hands as le bon Plutarque of the French people, whereas he was certainly not that.” Thus it is beyond dispute that the impression produced is in some respects misleading.

But there is another side to this. Plutarch in his tastes and ideals did belong to an older, less sophisticated age, though he was born out of due time and had to adapt his speech to his hyper-civilised environment. Ampère has called attention to the picture, suggested by the facts at our disposal, of Plutarch living in his little Boeotian town, obtaining his initiation into the mysteries, punctually fulfilling the functions of priest, making antiquities and traditions his hobby. “There was this man under the rhetorician,” he adds, “and we must not forget it. For if the rhetorician wrote, it was the other Plutarch who often dictated.” Of course in a way the antithesis is an unreal one. Plutarch was after all, as every one must be, the child of his own generation, and his aspirations were not confined to himself. The Sophistes is, on the one hand, what the man who makes antiquity and traditions his hobby, is on the other. Still it remains certain that his love was set on things which pertained to an earlier and less elaborate phase of society, to “the good old days” when they found spontaneous acceptance and expression. On him the ends of the world are come, and he seeks by all the resources of his art and learning to revive what he regards as its glorious prime. His heart is with the men “of heart, head, hand,” but when he seeks to reveal them, he must do so in the chequered light of a vari-coloured culture.

Hence there was a kind of discrepancy between his spirit and his utterance; and Amyot, removing the discrepancy, brings them into a natural harmony. There is truth in the paradox that the form which the good bishop supplies is the one that was meant for the matter. “Amyot,” says Demogeot, summing up his discussion of this aspect of the question, “has in some sort created Plutarch, and made him truer and more complete than nature made him.”

But though Plutarch’s ideas seem from one point of view to enter into their predestined habitation, this does not alter the fact that they lose something of their distinctive character in accommodating themselves to their new surroundings. It is easy to exaggerate their affinity with the vernacular words, as it is easy to exaggerate the correspondence between author and translator. Thus Ampère, half in jest, pleases himself with drawing on behalf of the two men a parallel such as is appended to each particular brace of Lives. Both of them lovers of virtue, he points out, for example, that both had a veneration for the past, of which the one strove to preserve the memories even then beginning to fade, and the other to rediscover and gather up the shattered fragments. Both experienced sad and troublous times without having their tranquillity disturbed, the one by the crimes of Domitian or the other by the furies of St. Bartholomew’s. Both belonged to the hierarchy, the one as priest of Apollo, the other as Bishop of Auxerre.

But it is not hard to turn such parallels into so many contrasts. The past with which Plutarch was busy was in a manner the familiar past of his native country or at least of his own civilisation; but Amyot loved the past of that remote and alien world in which for ages men had neglected their heritage and taken small concern. The sequestered life of the provincial under the Roman Empire, a privacy whence he emerges to whatever civil offices were within his reach, is very different from the dislike and refusal of public activity that characterises the Frenchman in his own land at a time when learning was recognised as passport to high position in the State. The priest of a heathen cult which he could accept only when explained away by a rationalistic idealism, and which was by no means incompatible with his family instincts, was very different from the celibate churchman who ended by submitting to the terms imposed by the intolerance of the Holy League. The analogies are there, and imply perhaps a strain of intellectual kinship, but the contrasts are not less obvious, and refute the idea of a perfect unison.

Now, it is much the same if we turn from the writers to their writings. All translation is a compromise between the foreign material and the native intelligence, but in Amyot the latter factor counts most. Classical life is very completely assimilated to the contemporary life that he knew, but such contemporary life was in some ways quite unlike that which he was reproducing. There is an illusory sameness in the effects produced as there is an illusion of coincidence in the characters and careers of the men who produce them, and this may have its cause in real contact at certain points. But the gaps that separate them are also real, though at the time they were seldom detected. “Both by the details and the general tone of his version,” says M. Lanson, “[Amyot] modernises the Graeco-Roman world, and by this involuntary travesty he tends to check the awakening of the sense for the differences, that is, the historic sense. As he invites Shakespeare to recognise the English Mob in the Plebs Romana, so he authorises Corneille and Racine and even Mademoiselle Scudéry to portray under ancient names the human nature they saw in France.”

And this tendency was carried further in Amyot’s English translator.

3. NORTH

Of Sir Thomas North, the most recent and direct of the authorities who transmitted to Shakespeare his classical material, much less is known than of either of his predecessors. Plutarch, partly because as original author he has the opportunity of expressing his own personality, partly because he uses this opportunity to the full in frank advocacy of his views and gossip about himself, may be pictured with fair vividness and in some detail. Such information fails in regard to Amyot, since he was above all the mouthpiece for other men; but his high dignities placed him in the gaze of contemporaries, and his reputation as pioneer in classical translation and nursing-father of modern French ensured a certain interest in his career. But North, like him a translator, had not equal prominence either from his position or from his achievement. Such honours and appointments as he obtained were not of the kind to attract regard. He was a mere unit in the Elizabethan crowd of literary importers, and belonged to the lower class who never steered their course “to the classic coast.” He had no such share as Amyot in shaping the traditions of the language, but was one writer in an age that produced many others, some of them greater masters than he. Yet to us, as the immediate interpreter of Plutarch to Shakespeare, he is the most important of the three, the most famous and the most alive. Sainte Beuve, talking of Amyot, quotes a phrase from Leopardi in reference to the Italians who have associated themselves forever with the Classics they unveiled: “Oh, how fair a fate! to be exempt from death except in company with an Immortal!” This fair fate is North’s in double portion. He is linked with a great Immortal by descent, and with a greater by ancestry.

Thomas North, second son of the first Baron North of Kirtling, was born about 1535, to live his life, as it would seem, in straitened circumstances and unassuming work. Yet we might have anticipated for him a prosperous and eminent career. He had high connections and powerful patrons; his father made provision for him, his brother helped him once and again, a royal favourite interested himself on his behalf. His ability and industry are evident from his works; his honesty and courage are vouched for by those in a position to know; the efficiency of his public services received recognition from his fellow-citizens and his sovereign. But with all these advantages and qualifications he was even in middle age hampered by lack of means, and he never had much share in the pelf and pomp of life. Perhaps his occupation with larger concerns than personal aggrandisement may have interfered with his material success. At any rate, in his narrower sphere he showed himself a man of public interest and public spirit, and the authors with whom he busies himself are all such as commend ideal rather than tangible possessions as the real objects of desire. And we know besides that he was an unaggressive man, inclined to claim less than his due; for in one of his books he professes to get the material only from a French translation, when it is proved that he must have had recourse to the Spanish original as well.

This was his maiden effort, The Diall of Princes, published in 1557, when North was barely of age and had just been entered a student of Lincoln’s Inn; and with this year the vague and scanty data for his history really begin. He dedicates his book to Queen Mary, who had shown favour to his father, pardoning him for his support of Lady Jane Grey, raising him to the peerage, and distinguishing him in other ways. But on the death of Mary, Lord North retained the goodwill of Elizabeth, who twice kept her court at his mansion, and appointed him Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. The family had thus considerable local influence, and it was not diminished when, on the old man’s death in 1564, Roger, the first son, succeeded to the title. Before long the new Lord North was made successively an alderman of Cambridge, Lord Lieutenant of the County, and High Steward; while Thomas, who had benefited under his father’s will, was presented to the freedom of the town. All through, the career of the junior appears as a sort of humble pendant to that of the senior, and he picks up his dole of the largesses that Fortune showers on the head of the house. What he had been doing in the intervening years we do not know, but he cannot have abandoned his literary pursuits, for in 1568, when he received this civic courtesy, he issued a new edition of the Diall, corrected and enlarged; and he followed it up in 1570 with a version of Doni’s Morale Filosofia.

Meanwhile the elder brother was advancing on his brilliant course. He had been sent to Vienna to invest the Emperor Maximilian with the Order of the Garter; he had been commissioned to present the Queen on his return with the portrait of her suitor, the Archduke Charles; he had held various offices at home, and in 1574 he was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to congratulate Henry III. of France on his accession, and to procure if possible toleration for the Huguenots and a renewal of the Treaty of Blois. On this important legation he was accompanied by Thomas, who would thus have an opportunity of seeing or hearing something of Amyot, the great Bishop and Grand Almoner who was soon to be recipient of new honours from his royal pupil and patron, and who had recently been drawing new attention on himself by his third edition of the Lives and his first edition of the Morals.[117] It may well be that this visit suggested to Thomas North his own masterpiece, which he seems to have set about soon after he came home in the end of November. At least it was to appear in January, 1579, before another lustre was out; and a translation even from French of the entire Lives, not only unabridged but augmented (for biographies of Hannibal and Scipio are added from the versions of Charles de l’Escluse),[118] is a task of years rather than of months.

The embassage, despite many difficulties to be overcome, had been a success, and Lord North returned to receive the thanks and favours he deserved. He stood high in the Queen’s regard, and in 1578 she honoured him with a visit for a night. He was lavish in his welcome, building, we are told, new kitchens for the occasion; filling them with provisions of all kinds, the oysters alone amounting to one cart load and two horse loads; rifling the cellars of their stores, seventy-four hogsheads of beer being reinforced with corresponding supplies of ale, claret, white wine, sack, and hippocras; presenting her at her departure with a jewel worth £120 in the money of the time. In such magnificent doings he was by no means unmindful of his brother, to whom shortly before he had made over the lease of a house and household stuff. Yet precisely at this date, when Thomas North was completing or had completed his first edition of the Lives, his circumstances seem to have been specially embarrassed. Soon after the book appeared Leicester writes on his behalf to Burleigh, stating that he “is a very honest gentleman and hath many good parts in him which are drowned only by poverty.” There is perhaps a certain incongruity between these words and the accounts of the profusion at Kirtling in the preceding year.

Meanwhile Lord North, to his reputation as diplomatist and courtier sought to add that of a soldier. In the Low Countries he greatly distinguished himself by his capacity and courage; but he was called home to look after the defences of the eastern coast in view of the expected Spanish invasion, and this was not the only time that the Government resorted to him for military advice.

No such important charge was entrusted to Thomas, but he too was ready to do his duty by his country in her hour of need, and in 1588 had command of three hundred men of Ely. In the interval between this and the distressful time of 1579 his position must have improved; for in 1591, in reward it may be for his patriotic activity, the Queen conferred on him the honour of knighthood, which in those days implied as necessary qualification the possession of land to the minimum value of £40 a year. This was followed by other acknowledgments and dignities of moderate worth. In 1592 and again in 1597 he sat on the Commission of Peace for Cambridgeshire. In 1598 he received a grant of £20 from the town of Cambridge, and in 1601 a pension of £40 a year from the Queen. These amounts are not munificent, even if we take them at the outside figure suggested as the equivalent in modern money.[119] They give the impression that North was not very well off, that in his circumstances some assistance was desirable, and a little assistance would go a long way. At the same time they show that his conduct deserved and obtained appreciation. Indeed, the pension from the Queen is granted expressly “in consideration of the good and faithful service done unto us.”

He also benefited by a substantial bequest from Lord North, who had died in 1600, but he was now an old man of at least sixty-six, and probably he did not live long to enjoy his new resources. Of the brother Lloyd records: “There was none better to represent our State than my Lord North, who had been two years in Walsingham’s house, four in Leicester’s service, had seen six courts, twenty battles, nine treaties, and four solemn jousts, whereof he was no mean part.” In regard to the younger son, even the year of whose death we do not know, the parallel summary would run: “He served a few months in an ambassador’s suite; he commanded a local force, he was a knight, and sat on the Commission of Peace; he made three translations, one of which rendered possible Shakespeare’s Roman Plays.”[120]

This is his “good and faithful service” unto us, not that he fulfilled duties in which he might have been rivalled by any country justice or militia captain. And, “a good and faithful servant,” he had qualified himself for his grand performance by a long apprenticeship in the craft. Like Amyot, he devotes himself to translation from first to last, but unlike Amyot he knows from the outset the kind of book that it is given him to interpret. He is not drawn by the fervour of youth to “vain and amatorious romance,” nor by conventional considerations to the bric-a-brac of antiquarianism. From the time that he has attained the years of discretion and comes within our knowledge, he applies his heart to study and supply works of solid instruction.

Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

It is characteristic, too, both of his equipment and his style, that though he may have known a little Greek and certainly knew some Latin, as is shown by a few trifling instances in which he gives Amyot’s expressions a more learned turn, he never used an ancient writer as his main authority, but confined himself to the adaptations and translations that were current in modern vernaculars.

Thus his earliest work is the rendering, mainly from the French, of the notable and curious forgery of the Spanish Bishop, Antonio de Guevara, alleged by its author to have been derived from an ancient manuscript which he had discovered in Florence. It was originally entitled El Libro Aureo de Marco Aurelio, Emperador y eloquentissimo Orator, but afterwards, when issued in an expanded form, was rechristened, Marco Aurelio con el Relox de Principes. It has however little to do with the real Marcus Aurelius, and the famous Meditations furnish only a small ingredient to the work. It is in some ways an imitation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, that is, it is a didactic romance which aims at giving in narrative form true principles of education, morals, and politics. But the narrative is very slight, and most of the book is made up of discussions, discourses, and epistles, the substance of which is in many cases taken with a difference from Plutarch’s Moralia. These give the author scope to endite “in high style”; and in his balanced and erudite way of writing, which with all its tastelessness and excess has a far-off resemblance to Plutarch’s more rhetorical effects, as well as in his craze for allusions and similes, he anticipates the mannerisms of the later Euphuists. But despite the moralisings and affectations (or rather, perhaps, on account of them, for the first fell in with the ethical needs of the time, and the second with its attempts to organise its prose), the book was a great favourite for over a hundred years, and Casaubon says that except the Bible, hardly any other has been so frequently translated or printed. Lord Berners had already made his countrymen acquainted with it in shorter form, but North renders the Diall of Princes in full, and even adds another treatise of Guevara’s, The Favored Courtier, as fourth book to his second edition.

It is both the contents and the form that attract him. In the title page he describes it as “right necessarie and pleasaunt to all gentylmen and others which are louers of vertue”; and in his preface he says that it is “so full of high doctrine, so adourned with auncient histories, so authorised with grave sentences, and so beautified with apte similitudes, that I knowe not whose eies in reding it can be weried, nor whose eares in hearing it not satisfied.”

That North’s contemporaries agreed with him in liking such fare is shown by the publication of the new edition eleven years after the first, and even more strikingly by the publication of John Lily’s imitation eleven years after the second. For Dr. Landmann has proved beyond dispute that the paedagogic romance of Euphues, in purpose, in plan, in its letters and disquisitions, its episodes and persons, is largely based on the Diall. He has not been quite so successful in tracing the distinctive tricks of the Euphuistic style through North to Guevara. It has to be remembered that North’s main authority was not the Spanish Relox de Principes, but the French Orloge des princes; and at the double remove a good many of the peculiarities of Guevarism were bound to become obliterated: as in point of fact has occurred. It would be a mistake to call North a Euphuistic writer, though in the Diall, and even in the Lives, there are Euphuistic passages. Still, Guevara did no doubt affect him, for Guevara’s was the only elaborate and architectural prose with which he was on intimate terms. He had not the advantage of Amyot’s daily commerce with the Classics, and constant practice in the equating of Latin and French. In the circumstances a dash of diluted Guevarism was not a bad thing for him, and at any rate was the only substitute at his disposal. To the end he sometimes uses it when he has to write in a more complex or heightened style.

But if the Spanish Bishop were not in all respects a salutary model, North was soon to correct this influence by working under the guidance of a very different man, the graceless Italian miscellanist, Antonio Francesco Doni. That copious and audacious conversationalist could write as he talked, on all sorts of themes, including even those in which there was no offence, and seldom failed to be entertaining. He is never more so than in his Morale Filosofia, a delightful book to which and to himself North did honour by his delightful rendering. The descriptive title runs: “The Morall Philosophie of Doni: drawne out of the auncient writers. A worke first compiled in the Indian tongue, and afterwards reduced into diuers other languages: and now lastly Englished out of Italian by Thomas North.” This formidable announcement is a little misleading, for the book proves to be a collection of the so-called Fables of Bidpai, and though the lessons are not lacking, the main value as well as the main charm lies in the vigour and picturesqueness of the little stories.[121]

Thus in both his prentice works North betrays the same general bias. They are both concerned with the practical and applied philosophy of life, and both convey it through the medium of fiction: in so far they are alike. But they are unlike, in so far as the relative interest of the two factors is reversed, and the accent is shifted from the one to the other. In the Diall the narrative is almost in abeyance, and the pages are filled with long-drawn arguments and admonitions. In the Fables the sententious purpose is rather implied than obtruded, and in no way interferes with the piquant adventures; which are recounted in a very easy and lively style.

North was thus a practised writer and translator, with a good knowledge of the modern tongues, when he accompanied his brother to France in 1574. In his two previous attempts he had shown his bent towards improving story and the manly wisdom of the elder world; and in the second, had advanced in appreciation of the concrete example and the racy presentment. If he now came across Amyot’s Plutarch, we can see how well qualified he was for the task of giving it an English shape, and how congenial the task would be. Of the Moral Treatises he already knew something, if only in the adulterated concoctions of Guevara, but the Lives would be quite new to him, and would exactly tally with his tastes in their blend of ethical reflection and impressive narrative. There is a hint of this double attraction in the opening phrase of the title page: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans compared by that grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarch of Chaeronea.” The philosophy and the history are alike signalised as forming the equipment of the author, and certainly the admixture was such as would appeal to the public as well as to the translator.

The first edition of 1579, imprinted by Thomas Vautrouillier and John Wight, was followed by a second in 1595, imprinted by Richard Field for Bonham Norton. Field, who was a native of Stratford-on-Avon, and had been apprenticed to Vautrouillier before setting up for himself, had dealings with Shakespeare, and issued his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. But whether or no his fellow townsman put him in the way of it, it is certain that Shakespeare was not long in discovering the new treasure. It seems to leave traces in so early a work as the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, which probably borrowed from the life of Theseus, as well as in the Merchant of Venice, with its reference to “Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia”; though it did not inspire a complete play till Julius Caesar. In 1603 appeared the third edition of North’s Plutarch, enlarged with new Lives which had been incorporated in Amyot’s collection in 1583: and this some think to have been the particular authority for Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.[122] And again a fourth edition, with a separate supplement bearing the date of 1610, was published in 1612; and of this the famous copy in the Greenock Library has been claimed as the dramatist’s own book. If by any chance this should be the case, then Shakespeare must have got it for his private delectation, for by this time he had finished his plays on ancient history and almost ceased to write for the stage. But apart from that improbable and crowning honour, there is no doubt about the value of North’s version to Shakespeare as dramatist, and the four editions in Shakespeare’s lifetime sufficiently attest its popularity with the general reader.

This popularity is well deserved. Its permanent excellences were sure of wide appreciation, and the less essential qualities that fitted Plutarch to meet the needs of the hour in France, were not less opportune in England. North’s prefatory “Address to the Reader” describes not only his own attitude but that of his countrymen in general.

There is no prophane studye better than Plutarke. All other learning is private, fitter for Universities then cities, fuller of contemplacion than experience, more commendable in the students them selves, than profitable unto others. Whereas stories, (i.e. histories) are fit for every place, reache to all persons, serve for all tymes, teache the living, revive the dead, so farre excelling all other bookes as it is better to see learning in noble mens lives than to reade it in Philosophers writings. Nowe, for the Author, I will not denye but love may deceive me, for I must needes love him with whome I have taken so much payne, but I bileve I might be bold to affirme that he hath written the profitablest story of all Authors. For all other were fayne to take their matter, as the fortune of the contries where they wrote fell out; But this man, being excellent in wit, in learning, and experience, hath chosen the speciall actes, of the best persons, of the famosest nations of the world.... And so I wishe you all the profit of the booke.

This passage really sums up one half the secret of Plutarch’s fascination for the Renaissance world. The aim is profit, and profit not merely of a private kind. The profit is better secured by history than by precept, just as the living example is more effectual than the philosophic treatise. And there is more profit in Plutarch than in any other historian, not only on account of his personal qualifications, his wit, learning, and experience, but on account of his subject-matter, because he had the opportunity and insight to choose the prerogative instances in the annals of mankind. Only it should be noted that the profit is conceived in the most liberal and ideal sense. It is the profit that comes from contact with great souls in great surroundings, not the profit of the trite and unmistakable moral. This Amyot had already clearly perceived and set forth in a fine passage of which North gives a fine translation. The dignity of the historian’s office is very high:

Forasmuch as his chiefe drift ought to be to serve the common weale, and that he is but as a register to set downe the judgements and definitive sentences of God’s Court, whereof some are geven according to the ordinarie course and capacitie of our weake naturall reason, and other some goe according to God’s infinite power and incomprehensible wisedom, above and against all discourse of man’s understanding.

In other words history is not profitable as always illustrating a simple retributive justice. It may do that, but it may also do otherwise. Some of its awards are mysterious or even inscrutable. The profit it yields is disinterested and spiritual, and does not lie in the encouragement of optimistic virtue. And this indicates how it may be turned to account. The stuff it contains is the true stuff for Tragedy.

The remaining half of Plutarch’s secret depends on the treatment, which loses nothing in the hands of those who now must manage it; of whom the one, in Montaigne’s phrase, showed “the constancy of so long a labour,” and the other, in his own phrase, “took so much pain,” to adapt it aright. But just as the charm of style, though undiminished, is changed when it passes from Plutarch to Amyot, so too this takes place to some degree when it passes from Amyot to North. North was translating from a modern language, without the fear of the ancients before his eyes. Amyot had translated from Greek, and was familiar with classical models. Not merely does this affect the comparative fidelity of their versions, as it was bound to do, for North, with two intervals between, and without the instincts of an accurate scholar, could not keep so close as even Amyot had done to the first original. Indeed he sometimes, though not often, violates the meaning of the French, occasionally misinterpreting a word, as when he translates Coriolanus’ final words to his mother: “Je m’en revois (i.e. revais, retourne) vaincu par toy seule,” by “I see myself vanquished by you alone”; more frequently misconstruing an idiom, as when he goes wrong with the negative in passages like the following: “Ces paroles feirent incontinent penser à Eurybides et craindre que les Atheniens ne s’en voulussent aller et les abandonner”; which he renders: “These wordes made Eurybides presently thinke and feare that the Athenians would not goe, and that they would forsake them.”[123]

But the same circumstance affects North’s mode of utterance as well. It is far from attaining to Amyot’s habitual clearness, coherence, and correctness. His words are often clumsily placed, his constructions are sometimes broken and more frequently charged with repetitions, he does not always find his way out of a complicated sentence with his grammar unscathed or his meaning unobscured. One of the few Frenchmen who take exception to Amyot’s prose says that “it trails like the ivy creeping at random, instead of flying like the arrow to its mark.” This is unfair in regard to Amyot; it would be fairer, though still unfair, in regard to North. Compare the French and English versions of the passage that deals with Mark Antony’s “piscatory eclogue.” Nothing could be more lucid or elegant than the French.

Il se meit quelquefois à pescher à la ligne, et voyant qu’il ne pouvoit rien prendre, si en estoit fort despit et marry à cause que Cléopatra estoit présente. Si commanda secrettement à quelques pescheurs, quand il auroit jeté sa ligne, qu’ilz se plongeassent soudain en l’eau, et qu’ilz allassent accrocher à son hameçon quelques poissons de ceulx qu’ilz auroyent eu peschés auparavent; et puis retira aussi deux or trois fois sa ligne avec prise. Cleopatra s’en aperceut incontinent, toutes fois elle feit semblant de n’en rien sçavoir, et de s’esmerveiller comme il peschoit si bien; mais apart, elle compta le tout à ses familiers, et leur dit que le lendemain ilz se trouvassent sur l’eau pour voir l’esbatement. Ilz y vindrent sur le port en grand nombre, et se meirent dedans des bateaux de pescheurs, et Antonius aussi lascha sa ligne, et lors Cleopatra commanda à lun de ses serviteurs qu’il se hastast de plonger devant ceulx d’Antonius, et qu’il allast attacher a l’hameçon de sa ligne quelque vieux poisson sallé comme ceulx que lon apporte du païs de Pont. Cela fait, Antonius qui cuida qu’il y eust un poisson pris, tira incontinent sa ligne, et adonc comme lon peult penser, tous les assistans se prirent bien fort à rire, et Cleopatra, en riant, lui dit: “Laisse-nous, seigneur, à nous autres Ægyptiens, habitans[124] de Pharus et de Canobus, laisse-nous la ligne; ce n’est pas ton mestier. Ta chasse est de prendre et conquerer villes et citez, païs et royaumes.”

The flow of the English is not so easy and transparent.

On a time he went to angle for fish, and when he could take none, he was as angrie as could be, bicause Cleopatra stoode by. Wherefore he secretly commaunded the fisher men, that when he cast in his line, they should straight dive under the water, and put a fishe on his hooke which they had taken before: and so snatched up his angling rodde and brought up a fish twise or thrise. Cleopatra found it straight, yet she seemed not to see it, but wondred at his excellent fishing: but when she was alone by her self among her owne people, she told them howe it was, and bad them the next morning to be on the water to see the fishing. A number of people came to the haven, and got into the fisher boates to see this fishing. Antonius then threw in his line, and Cleopatra straight commaunded one of her men to dive under water before Antonius men and to put some old salte fish upon his baite, like unto those that are brought out of the contrie of Pont. When he had hong the fish on his hooke, Antonius, thinking he had taken a fishe in deede, snatched up his line presently. Then they all fell a-laughing. Cleopatra laughing also, said unto him: “Leave us, (my lord), Ægyptians (which dwell in the contry of Pharus and Canobus) your angling rodde: this is not thy profession; thou must hunt after conquering realmes and contries.”

This specimen is in so far a favourable one for North, that in simple narrative he is little exposed to his besetting faults, but even here the superior deftness of the Frenchman is obvious. We leave out of account little mistranslations, like on a time for quelquefois,[125] or the fishermen for quelques pescheurs,[126] or alone by herself for apart. We even pass over the lack of connectedness when they (i.e. the persons informed) in great number[127] becomes the quite indefinite a number of people, and the omission of the friendly nudge, so to speak, as you can imagine, comme lon peult penser. But to miss the point of the phrase pour voir l’esbatement, to see the sport, and translate it see the fishing, and then clumsily insert the same phrase immediately afterwards where it is not wanted and does not occur; to change the order of the fishe and the hooke and entangle the connection where it was quite clear, to change s’esmerveiller to wondred, the infinitive to the indicative past, and thus cloud the sense; to substitute the ambiguous and prolix When he had hong the fish on his hooke, for the concise and sufficient cela fait—to do all this and much more of the same kind elsewhere was possible only because North was far inferior to Amyot in literary tact. In the English version we have often to interpret the words by the sense and not the sense by the words; and this is a demand which is seldom made by the French.

But there are compensations. All modern languages have in their analytic methods and common stock of ideas a certain family resemblance, in which those of antiquity do not share; and in particular French is far closer akin to English than Greek to French. Since North had specialised in the continental literature of his day and was now dispensing the bounty of France, his allegiance to the national idiom was virtually undisturbed, even when he made least change in his original. He may be more licentious than Amyot in his treatment of grammar, and less perspicuous in the ordering of his clauses, but he is equal to him or superior in word music, after the English mode; and he is even richer in full-blooded words and in phrases racy of the soil. Not that he ever rejects the guidance of his master, but it leads him to the high places and the secret places of his own language. So while he is quick to detect the rhythm of the French and makes it his pattern, he sometimes goes beyond it; though he can catch and reproduce the cadences of the music-loving Amyot, it is sometimes on a sweeter or a graver key. Take, for instance, that scene, the favourite with Chateaubriand, where Philip, the freedman of Pompey, stands watching by the headless body of his murdered master till the Egyptians are sated with gazing on it, till they have “seen it their bellies full” in North’s words. Amyot proceeds:

Puis l’ayant layé de l’eau de la mer, et enveloppé d’une sienne pauvre chemise, pour ce qu’il n’avoit autre chose, il chercha au long de la greve ou il trouva quelque demourant d’un vieil bateau de pescheur, dont les pieces estoyent bien vieilles, mais suffisantes pour brusler un pauvre corps nud, et encore non tout entier. Ainsi comme il les amassoit et assembloit, il survint un Romain homme d’aage, qui en ses jeunes ans avoit esté à la guerre soubs Pompeius: si luy demanda: “Qui est tu, mon amy, qui fais cest apprest pour les funerailles du grand Pompeius?” Philippus luy respondit qu’il estoit un sien affranchy. “Ha,” dit le Romain, “tu n’auras pas tout seul cest honneur, et te prie vueille moy recevoir pour compagnon en une si saincte et si devote rencontre, à fin que je n’aye point occasion de me plaindre en tout et partout de m’estre habitué en païs estranger, ayant en recompense de plusieurs maulx que j’y ay endurez, rencontré au moins ceste bonne adventure de pouvoir toucher avec mes mains, et aider a ensepvelir le plus grand Capitaine des Romains.”

This is very beautiful, but to English ears, at least, there is something in North’s version, copy though it be, that is at once more stately and more moving.

Then having washed his body with salt water, and wrapped it up in an old shirt of his, because he had no other shift to lay it in,[128] he sought upon the sands and found at the length a peece of an old fishers bote, enough to serve to burne his naked bodie with, but not all fully out.[129] As he was busie gathering the broken peeces of this bote together, thither came unto him an old Romane, who in his youth had served under Pompey, and sayd unto him: “O friend, what art thou that preparest the funeralls of Pompey the Great.” Philip answered that he was a bondman of his infranchised. “Well,” said he, “thou shalt not have all this honor alone, I pray thee yet let me accompany thee in so devout a deede, that I may not altogether repent me to have dwelt so long in a straunge contrie where I have abidden such miserie and trouble; but that to recompence me withall, I may have this good happe, with mine owne hands to touche Pompey’s bodie, and to helpe to bury the only and most famous Captaine of the Romanes.”[130]

On the other hand, while anything but a purist in the diction he employs, North’s foreign loans lose their foreign look, and become merely the fitting ornament for his native homespun. It is chiefly on the extraordinary wealth of his vocabulary, his inexhaustible supply of expressions, vulgar and dignified, picturesque and penetrating, colloquial and literary, but all of them, as he uses them, of indisputable Anglicity—it is chiefly on this that his excellence as stylist is based, an excellence that makes his version of Plutarch by far the most attractive that we possess. It is above all through these resources and the use he makes of them that his book distinguishes itself from the French; for North treats Amyot very much as Amyot treats Plutarch; heightening and amplifying; inserting here an emphatic epithet and there a homely proverb; now substituting a vivid for a colourless term, now pursuing the idea into pleasant side tracks. Thus Amyot describes the distress of the animals that were left behind when the Athenians set out for Salamis, with his average faithfulness.

Et si y avoit ne sçay quoi de pitoyable qui attendrissoit les cueurs, quand on voyoit les bestes domestiques et privées, qui couroient ça et là avec hurlemens et signifiance de regret après leurs maistres et ceulx qui les avoient nourries, ainsi comme ilz s’embarquoient: entre lesquelles bestes on compte du chien de Xantippus, père de Pericles, que ne pouvant supporter le regret d’estre laissé de son maistre, il se jeta dedans la mer après luy, et nageant au long de la galère où il estoit, passa jusques en l’isle de Salamine, là où si tost qu’il fust arrivé, l’aleine luy faillit, et mourut soudainement.

But this account stirs North’s sympathy, and he puts in little touches that show his interest and compassion.

There was besides, a certain pittie that made mens harts to yerne, when they saw the poore doggs, beasts and cattell ronne up and doune, bleating, mowing, and howling out aloude after their masters in token of sorowe, whan they did imbarke. Amongst them there goeth a straunge tale of Xanthippus dogge, who was Pericles father; which, for sorowe his master had left him behind him, dyd caste him self after into the sea, and swimming still by the galley’s side wherein his master was, he held on to the Ile of Salamina, where so sone as this poor curre landed, his breath fayled him, and dyed instantly.[131]

Similarly, when he recounts the story how the Gauls entered Rome, North cannot restrain his reverence for Papirius or his delight in his blow, or his indignation at its requital. Amyot had told of the Gaul:

qui prit la hardiesse de s’approcher de Marcus Papyrius, et luy passa tout doulcement[132] la main par dessus sa barbe qui estoit longue. Papyrius luy donna de son baston si grand coup sur la teste, qu’il la luy blecea; dequoy le barbare estant irrité, desguaina son espée, et l’occit.

North is not content with such reserve.

One of them went boldely unto M. Papyrius and layed his hand fayer and softely upon his long beard. But Papyrius gave him such a rappe on his pate with his staffe, that the bloude ran about his eares. This barbarous beaste was in such a rage with the blowe that he drue out his sworde and slewe him.[133]

Or sometimes the picture suggested is so pleasant to North that he partly recomposes it and adds some gracious touch to enhance its charm. Thus he found this vignette of the peaceful period that followed Numa:

Les peuples hantoient et trafiquoient les uns avec les autres sans crainte ni danger, et s’entrevisitoient en toute cordiale hospitalité, comme si la sapience de Numa eut été une vive source de toutes bonnes et honnestes choses, de laquelle plusieurs fleuves se fussent derivés pour arroser toute l’Italie.

This is how North recasts and embellishes the last sentence:

The people did trafficke and frequent together, without feare or daunger, and visited one another, making great cheere: as if out of the springing fountain of Numa’s wisdom many pretie brookes and streames of good and honest life had ronne over all Italie and had watered it.[134]

But illustrations might be multiplied through pages. Enough have been given to show North’s debts to the French and their limits. With a few unimportant errors, his rendering is in general wonderfully faithful and close, so that he copies even the sequence of thought and modulation of rhythm. He sometimes falls short of his authority in simplicity, neatness, and precision of structure. On the other hand he sometimes excels it in animation and force, in volume and inwardness. But, and this is the last word on his style, even when he follows Amyot’s French most scrupulously, he always contrives to write in his own and his native idiom. And hence it came that he once for all naturalised Plutarch among us. His was the epoch-making deed. His successors, who were never his supersessors, merely entered into his labours and adapted Plutarch to the requirements of the Restoration, or of the eighteenth or of the nineteenth century. But they were adapting an author whom North had made a national classic.

Plutarch was a Greek, to be sure, and a Greek no doubt he is still. But as when we think of a Devereux ... we call him an Englishman and not a Norman, so who among the reading public troubles himself to reflect that Plutarch wrote Attic prose of such and such a quality? Scholars know all about it to be sure, as they know that the turkeys of our farm-yards come originally from Mexico. Plutarch however is not a scholar’s author, but is popular everywhere as if he were a native.[135]

But one aspect of this is that North carries further the process which Amyot had begun of accommodating antiquity to current conceptions. The atmosphere of North’s diction is so genuinely national that objects discerned through it take on its hue. Under his strenuous welcome the noble Grecian and Roman immigrants from France are forced to make themselves at home, but in learning the ways of the English market-place they forget something of the Agora and the Forum. Perhaps this was inevitable, since they were come to stay.

And the consequence of North’s method is that he meets Shakespeare half way. His copy may blur some of the lines in the original picture, but they are lines that Shakespeare would not have perceived. He may present Antiquity in disguise, but it was in this disguise alone that Shakespeare was able to recognise it. He has in short supplied Shakespeare with the only Plutarch that Shakespeare could understand. The highest compliment we can pay his style is, that it had a special relish for Shakespeare, who retained many of North’s expressions with little or no alteration. The highest compliment we can pay the contents is, that, only a little more modernised, they furnished Shakespeare with his whole conception of antique history.

The influence of North’s Plutarch on Shakespeare is thus of a two-fold kind. There is the influence of the diction, there is the influence of the subject-matter; and in the first instance it is more specifically the influence of North, while in the second it is more specifically the influence of Plutarch.

It would be as absurd as unfair to deny Shakespeare’s indebtedness to North not only in individual turns and phrases, but in continuous discourse. Often the borrower does little more than change the prose to poetry. But at the lowest he always does that; and there is perhaps in some quarters a tendency to minimise the marvel of the feat, and so, if not to exaggerate the obligation, at least to set it in a false light. He has nowhere followed North so closely through so many lines as in Volumnia’s great speech to her son before Rome; and, next to that, in Coriolanus’ great speech to Aufidius in Antium. In these passages the ideas, the arrangement of the ideas, the presentation of the ideas are practically the same in the translator and in the dramatist: yet, with a few almost imperceptible touches, a few changes in the order of construction, a few substitutions in the wording, the language of North, without losing any directness or force, gains a majestic volume and vibration that are only possible in the cadences of the most perfect verse. These are the cases in which Shakespeare shows most verbal dependence on his author, but his originality asserts itself even in them. North’s admirable appeal is not Shakespeare’s, Shakespeare’s more admirable appeal is not North’s.[136]

Similarly there has been a tendency to overestimate the loans of the Roman Plays from Plutarch. From this danger even Archbishop Trench has not altogether escaped in an eloquent and well-known passage which in many ways comes very near to the truth. After dwelling on the freedom with which Shakespeare generally treats his sources, for instance the novels of Bandello or Cinthio, deriving from them at most a hint or two, cutting and carving, rejecting or expanding their statements at will, he concludes:

But his relations with Plutarch are very different—different enough to justify or almost to justify the words of Jean Paul when in his Titan he calls Plutarch “der biographische Shakespeare der Weltgeschichte.” What a testimony we have here to the true artistic sense and skill which, with all his occasional childish simplicity[137] the old biographer possesses, in the fact that the mightiest and completest artist of all times, should be content to resign himself into his hands and simply to follow where the other leads.

To this it might be answered in the first place that Shakespeare shows the same sort of fidelity in kind, though not in degree, to the comparatively inartistic chronicles of his mother country. That is, it is in part, as we have seen, his tribute not to the historical author but to the historical subject. Granting, however, the superior claims of Plutarch, it is yet an overstatement to say that Shakespeare is content to resign himself into his hands, and simply to follow where the other leads. Delius, after an elaborate comparison of biography and drama, sums up his results in the protest that “Shakespeare has much less to thank Plutarch for than one is generally inclined to suppose.”

Indeed, however much Plutarch would appeal to Shakespeare in virtue both of his subjects and his methods, it is easy to see that even as a “grave learned philosopher and historiographer” he is on the hither side of perfection. He interrupts the story with moral disquisitions, and is a little apt to preach, and often, through such intrusions and irrelevancies, or the adherence of the commonplace, his most impressive touches fail of their utmost possible effect: at least he does not always seem aware of the full value of his details, of their depth and suggestiveness when they are set aright. Yet he is more excellent in details than in the whole: he has little arrangement or artistic construction; he is not free from contradictions and discrepancies; he gives the bricks and mortar but not the building, and occasionally some of the bricks are flawed or the mortar is forgotten. And his stories have this inorganic character, because he is seldom concerned to pierce to the meaning that would give them unity and coherence. He moralises, and only too sententiously, whenever an opportunity offers; but of the principles that underlie the conflicts and catastrophes which in his free-and-easy way he describes, he has at best but fragmentary glimpses.

And in all this the difference between the genial moralist and the inspired tragedian is a vast one—so vast that when once we perceive it, it is hard to retain a fitting sense of the points of contact. In Shakespeare, Plutarch’s weaknesses disappear, or rather are replaced by excellences of precisely the opposite kind. He rejects all that is otiose or discordant in speech or situation, and adds from other passages in his author or from his own imagination, the circumstances that are needed to bring out its full poetic significance. He always looks to the whole, removes discrepancies, establishes the inner connection; and at his touch the loose parts take their places as members of one living organism. And in a sense, “he knows what it is all about.” In a sense he is more of a philosophic historian than his teacher. At any rate, while Plutarch takes his responsibilities lightly in regard both to facts and conclusions, Shakespeare, in so far as that was possible for an Elizabethan, has a sort of intuition of the principles that Plutarch’s narrative involves; and while adding some pigment from his own thought and feeling to give them colour and visible shape, accepts them as his presuppositions which interpret the story and which it interprets.

Thus the influences of North’s Plutarch, whether of North’s style or of Plutarch’s matter, though no doubt very great, are in the last resort more in the way of suggestion than of control. But they do not invariably act with equal potency or in the same proportion. Thus Antony and Cleopatra adheres most closely to the narrative of the biographer, which is altered mainly by the omission of details unsuitable for the purpose of the dramatist; but the words, phrases, constructions, are for the most part conspicuously Shakespeare’s own. Here there is a maximum of Plutarch and a minimum of North. In Coriolanus, on the other hand, apart from the unconscious modifications that we have noticed, Shakespeare allows himself more liberty than elsewhere in chopping and changing the substance; but lengthy passages and some of the most impressive ones are incorporated in the drama without further alteration than is implied in the transfiguration of prose to verse. Here there is the maximum of North with the minimum of Plutarch. Julius Caesar, as in the matter of the inevitable and unintentional misunderstandings, so again here, occupies a middle place. Many phrases, and not a few decisive suggestions for the most important speeches, have passed from the Lives into the play: one sentence at least it is hard to interpret without reference to the context; but here as a rule, even when he borrows most, Shakespeare treats his loans very independently. So, too, though he seldom wittingly departs from Plutarch, he elaborates the new material throughout, amplifying and abridging, selecting and rejecting, taking to pieces and recombining, not from one Life but from three. Here we have the mean influence both of Plutarch and of North.

In so far therefore Julius Caesar gives the norm of Shakespeare’s procedure; and with it, for this as well as on chronological grounds, we begin.

JULIUS CAESAR