First, there is the striking coincidence of the word "consummation" (which appears only in the Second Quarto), with Florio's translation of anéantissement in the essay Of Physiognomy, as above noted. Secondly, there is a curious resemblance between the phrase "take arms against a sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's version of the same essay, which has somehow been overlooked in the disputes over Shakspere's line. It runs:
"I sometimes suffer myself by starts to be surprised with the pinchings of these unpleasant conceits, which, whilst I arm myself to expel or wrestle against them, assail and beat me. Lo here another huddle or tide of mischief, that on the neck of the former came rushing upon me."
There arises here the difficulty that Shakspere's line had been satisfactorily traced to Ælian's[65] story of the Celtic practice of rushing into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons; and the matter must, I think, be left open until it can he ascertained whether the statement concerning the Celts was available to Shakspere in any translation or citation.[66]
Again, the phrase "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" is very like the echo of two passages in the essay[67] Of Conscience: "Of such marvellous working power is the sting of conscience: which often induceth us to bewray, to accuse, and to combat ourselves"; "which as it doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it store us with assurance and trust;" and the lines about "the dread of something after death" might point to the passage in the Fortieth Essay, in which Montaigne cites the saying of Augustine that "Nothing but what follows death, makes death to be evil" (malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem) cited by Montaigne in order to dispute it. The same thought, too, is dealt with in the essay[68] on A Custom of the Isle of Cea, which contains a passage suggestive of Hamlet's earlier soliloquy on self-slaughter. But, for one thing, Hamlet's soliloquies are contrary in drift to Montaigne's argument; and, for another, the phrase "Conscience makes cowards of us all" existed in the soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while the gist of the idea is actually found twice in a previous play, where it has a proverbial ring.[69] And "the hope of something after death" figures in the First Quarto also.
Finally, there are other sources than Montaigne for parts of the soliloquy, sources nearer, too, than those which have been pointed to in the Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. Cunliffe has pointed out,[70] a broad correspondence between the whole soliloquy and the chorus of women at the end of the second Act of the Troades, where the question of a life beyond is pointedly put:
"Verum est? an timidos fabula decepit, Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?"
It is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce definitely against the future life:
"Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.... Rumores vacui verbaque inania, Et par sollicito fabula somnio."
But wherever in Christendom the pagan's words were discussed, the Christian hypothesis would be pitted against his unbelief, with the effect of making one thought overlay the other; and in this fused form the discussion may easily have reached Shakspere's eye and ear. So it would be with the echo of two Senecan passages noted by Mr. Munro in the verses on "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." In the Hercules Furens[71] we have:
"Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam Quum semel venit potuit reverti;"