and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]
"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris, Mæotis undis pontico incumbens mari. Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater Tantum expiarit sceleris."
But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from Æschylus,[117] are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediæval. The phrases used were already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:
"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."[118]
In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published after, Macbeth[120]:—
"Although the waves of all the Northern sea Should flow for ever through those guilty hands, Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"
—a sad foil to Shakspere's
"The multitudinous seas incarnadine."
It is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe. Shakspere's
"Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all,"[121]