Shakespeare’s words will receive a not inapt illustration from the sermon of a contemporary prelate, Dr. Chatterton, Bishop of Chester from 1579 to 1595, and to whom Whitney dedicated the Emblem on p. 120, Vigilantia et custodia,—“Watchfulness and guardianship.”[[118]] He was preaching a wedding sermon in Cambridge, and Ormerod, i. p. 146, quoting King’s Vale Royal, tells us,—
“He used this merry comparison. The choice of a wife is full of hazard, not unlike to a man groping for one fish in a barrel full of serpents: if he escape harm of the snakes, and light on the fish, he may be thought fortunate; yet let him not boast, for perhaps it may be but an eel.”
That “good woman” “to mend the lottery well,” that “one fish in a barrel full of serpents,” came, however, to the chance of one of Cæsar’s friends. Even when Antony (Antony and Cleopatra, act ii. sc. 2, l. 245, vol. ix. p. 40) was under the witchery of the “rare Egyptian queen,” that “did make defect, perfection,” the dramatist says,—
“If beauty, wisdom, modesty, can settle
The heart of Antony, Octavia is
A blessed lottery to him.”
The Emblems applicable to Shakespeare’s historical characters are only a few among the numbers that occur in the Emblem writers, as Alciat, Cousteau, Giovio, Symeoni, &c.: but our choice is limited, and there would be no pertinency in selecting devices to which in the dramas of our author there are no corresponding expressions of thought, though there may be parallelisms of subject.
Alciat’s Arms (Giovio, ed. 1562).