Thou for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiope were.”
A genius so versatile as that of Shakespeare, and capable of creating almost a whole world of imagination out of a single hint, might very easily accommodate to his own idea Reusner’s suggestive motto, and make it yield the light of love to the lover rather than to the reverend sage. Failing in identifying the exact source of the “black Ethiope reaching at the sun,” we may then not unreasonably suppose that Shakespeare himself formed the device, and fitted the Latin to it.
In the Emblem-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Latin mottoes very greatly preponderated over those of other languages; and had Shakespeare confined himself to Latin, it might remain doubtful whether he knew anything of Emblem works beyond those of our own countrymen—Barclay and Whitney—and of the two or three translations into English from Latin, French, and Italian. But the quotation of a purely Spanish motto, that on the second knight’s device, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza,—“More by gentleness than by force” (act ii. sc. 2, l. 27),—shows that his reading and observation extended beyond mere English sources, and that with other literary men of his day he had looked into, if he had not studied, the widely-known and very popular writings of Alciatus and Sambucus among Latinists, of Francisco Guzman and Hernando Soto among Spaniards, of Gabriel Faerni and Paolo Giovio among Italians, and of Bartholomew Aneau and Claude Paradin among the French.
Shakespeare gives several snatches of French, as in Twelfth Night, act iii. sc. 1, l. 68, vol. iii. p. 265,—
“Sir Andrew. Dieu vous garde, monsieur,
Viola. Et vous aussi; votre serviteur;”
and in Henry V. act iii. sc. 4; act iv. sc. 4 and 5; act v. sc. 2, vol. iv. pp. 538–540, 574–577, and 598–603: in the scenes between Katharine and Alice; Pistol and the French soldier taken prisoner; and Katharine and King Henry. Take the last instance,—
“K. Hen. Fair Katharine, and most fair,
Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms