Not only the story, but the proverb, was known to Shakespeare, who makes Launcelot use it in his plain talk with Jessica:—“Truly, then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother: thus, when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother: well, you are gone both ways.”[266] Malone, in his note, written in the last century, says: “Alluding to the well-known line of a modern Latin poet, Philippe Gualtier, in his poem entitled ‘Alexandreïs.’” To this testimony of Malone’s, another editor, George Steevens, whose early bibliographical tastes excited the praise of Dibdin, adds: “Several translations of this adage were obvious to Shakespeare. Among other places, it is found in an ancient poem entitled ‘A Dialogue between Custom and Veritie, concerning the use and abuse of Dauncing and Minstrelsie’:—
“‘While Silla they do seem to shun,
In Charibd they do fall.’”
But this proverb had already passed into tradition and speech. That Shakespeare should seize and use it was natural. He was the universal absorbent.
It did not require a Shakespeare to appropriate it. Brantôme, who wrote rather from hearing than study, so that his style is a record of contemporary language, in describing a great lady who escaped from Turks to fall into the hands of domestic robbers, likens the case to falling from Scylla to Charybdis.[267] A similar illustration drops from La Fontaine:—
“La vieille, au lieu du coq, les fit tomber par là
De Charybde en Scylla.”[268]
Thomson shows that it was a common illustration, when he describes Dunkirk as
“the Scylla since
And fell Charybdis of the British seas.”[269]