Shakespeare, though cultivating, it may be, little direct acquaintance with the classical writers, followed the general practice. He has built up some of the finest of his Tragedies, if not with chorus, and semi-chorus, strophe, anti-strophe, and epode, like the Athenian models, yet with a wonderfully exact appreciation of the characters of antiquity, and with a delineating power surprisingly true to history and to the leading events and circumstances in the lives of the personages whom he introduces. From possessing full and adequate scholarship, Giovio, Domenichi, Claude Mignault, Whitney, and others of the Emblem schools, went immediately to the original sources of information. Shakespeare, we may admit, could do this only in a limited degree, and generally availed himself of assistance from the learned translators of ancient authors. Most marvellously does he transcend them in the creative attributes of high genius: they supplied the rough marble, blocks of Parian perchance, and a few tools more or less suited to the work; but it was himself, his soul and intellect and good right arm, which have produced almost living and moving forms,—
“See, my lord,
Would you not deem it breath’d? and that those veins
Did verily bear blood?”
Winter’s Tale, act v. sc. 3, l. 63.
For Medeia, one of the heroines of Euripides, and for Æneas and Anchises in their escape from Troy, Alciat (Emblem 54), and his close imitator Whitney (p. 33), give each an emblem.
To the first the motto is,—
“Ei qui semel sua prodegerit, aliena credi non oportere,”—
“To that man who has once squandered his own, another person’s ought not to be entrusted,”—
similar, as a counterpart, to the Saviour’s words (Luke xvi. 12), “If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own.”