The fourthe gate | hyghte also Cetheas;
The fyfthe Trojana, | the syxth Anthonydes,
Stronge and myghty | both in werre and pes.—Lond. empr. by R. Pynson, 1513. Fol. B. 2. Ch. 11.
Our excellent friend Mr. Hurd hath born a noble testimony on our side of the question. “Shakespeare,” says this true Critick, “owed the felicity of freedom from the bondage of classical superstition to the want of what is called the advantage of a learned Education.—This, as well as a vast superiority of Genius, hath contributed to lift this astonishing man to the glory of being esteemed the most original thinker and speaker, since the times of Homer.” And hence indisputably the amazing Variety of Style and Manner, unknown to all other Writers: an argument of itself sufficient to emancipate Shakespeare from the supposition of a Classical training. Yet, to be honest, one Imitation is fastened on our Poet: which [pg 188] hath been insisted upon likewise by Mr. Upton and Mr. Whalley. You remember it in the famous Speech of Claudio in Measure for Measure:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where! &c.
Most certainly the Ideas of a “Spirit bathing in fiery floods,” of residing “in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,” or of being “imprisoned in the viewless winds,” are not original in our Author; but I am not sure that they came from the Platonick Hell of Virgil. The Monks also had their hot and their cold Hell, “The fyrste is fyre that ever brenneth, and never gyveth lighte,” says an old Homily:—“The seconde is passyng colde, that yf a grete hylle of fyre were casten therin, it sholde torne to yce.” One of their Legends, well remembered in the time of Shakespeare, gives us a Dialogue between a Bishop and a Soul tormented in a piece of ice, which was brought to cure a grete brenning heate in his foot: take care you do not interpret this the Gout, for I remember M. Menage quotes a Canon upon us,
Si quis dixerit Episcopum podagra laborare, Anathema sit.
Another tells us of the Soul of a Monk fastened to a Rock, which the winds were to blow about for a twelve-month, and purge of it's Enormities. Indeed this doctrine was before now introduced into poetick fiction, as you may see in a Poem, “where the Lover declareth his pains to exceed far the pains of Hell,” among the many miscellaneous ones subjoined to the Works of Surrey. Nay, a very learned and inquisitive Brother-Antiquary, our Greek Professor, hath observed to me on the authority of Blefkenius, that this was the ancient opinion of the inhabitants of Iceland; who were certainly very little read either in the Poet or the Philosopher.
After all, Shakespeare's curiosity might lead him to Translations. Gawin Douglas really changes the Platonick Hell into the “punytion of Saulis in Purgatory”: and it [pg 189] is observable that when the Ghost informs Hamlet of his Doom there,
Till the foul crimes done in his days of nature