Hyperion's curls: the front of Jove himself:
An eye like Mars to threaten and command:
A station like the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.—Hamlet.”
Illiterate is an ambiguous term: the question is, whether Poetick History could be only known by an Adept in Languages. It is no reflection on this ingenious Gentleman, when I say that I use on this occasion the words of a better Critick, who yet was not willing to carry the illiteracy of our Poet too far:—“They who are in such astonishment at the learning of Shakespeare, forget that the Pagan Imagery was familiar to all the Poets of his time; and that abundance of this sort of learning was to be picked up from almost every English book that he could take into his hands.” For not to insist upon Stephen Bateman's Golden booke of the leaden Goddes, 1577, and several other laborious compilations on the subject, [pg 186] all this and much more Mythology might as perfectly have been learned from the Testament of Creseide, and the Fairy Queen, as from a regular Pantheon, or Polymetis himself.
Mr. Upton, not contented with Heathen learning, when he finds it in the text, must necessarily superadd it, when it appears to be wanting; because Shakespeare most certainly hath lost it by accident!
In Much ado about Nothing, Don Pedro says of the insensible Benedict, “He hath twice or thrice cut Cupid's bow-string, and the little Hangman dare not shoot at him.”
This mythology is not recollected in the Ancients, and therefore the critick hath no doubt but his Author wrote “Henchman,—a Page, Pusio: and this word seeming too hard for the Printer, he translated the little Urchin into a Hangman, a character no way belonging to him.”
But this character was not borrowed from the Ancients;—it came from the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney:
Millions of yeares this old drivell Cupid lives;