Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

by Andrew Lang

One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels. But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.

To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.

The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephoræ and Electra, are so close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.

Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and Beowulf and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar. But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s The Heroic Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, “The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.

But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers of his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare. To me, Hamlet’s soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phœnix of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that “of death we know nothing” are bound to do,—though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the richer. For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone. But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet’s lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis—not his own—“that by a certain natural affinity Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy.”

Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of Greek parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.

One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary tenacity of memory.

Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor. The author, on Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its fragments. The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon’s works, that he was such a student.

Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case. If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion—he was, in the opinion of Mr. Collins.

If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with “the poet’s sad lucidity” the same “pageant of men’s miseries.” But how dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels.