And in the first place it may be taken as extremely probable that he had read them. They were well known to the Elizabethan public, the least famous of them, Kyd’s Cornelia, reaching a second edition within a year of its first issue. They were executed by persons who must have bulked large in Shakespeare’s field of vision. Apart from her general social and literary reputation, the Countess of Pembroke was mother of the two young noblemen to whom the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays was afterwards dedicated on the ground that they had “prosequutted both them and the author living with so much favour.” Some of Daniel’s works Shakespeare certainly knew, for there are convincing parallelisms between the Complaint of Rosamond on the one hand, and the Rape of Lucrece and Romeo and Juliet on the other; nor can there be much question about the indebtedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Daniel’s Delia. Again, with Kyd’s acting dramas Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted. He quotes The Spanish Tragedy in the Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear; and the same play, as well as Solyman and Perseda, if that be Kyd’s, in King John: nor is it to be forgotten that many see Kyd’s hand and few would deny Kyd’s influence in Titus Andronicus, and that some attribute to him the lost Hamlet. All these things considered, Shakespeare’s ignorance of the English Senecans would be much more surprising than his knowledge of them. Further, though his own method was so dissimilar, he would be quite inclined to appreciate them, as may be inferred from the approval he puts in Hamlet’s mouth of Æneas’ tale to Dido, which reads like a heightened version of the narratives that occur so plentifully in their pages. So there is nothing antecedently absurd in the conjecture that they gave him hints when he turned to their authorities on his own behalf.
Nevertheless satisfactory proof is lacking. The analogies with Garnier’s Marc Antoine not accounted for by the obligation of both dramatists to Plutarch are very vague, and oddly enough seem vaguer in the translation than in the original. Of this there is a good example in Antony’s words when he recalls to his shame how his victor
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had
In the brave squares of war.
(A. and C. III. x. 39.)
There is similarity of motif, and even the suggestion of something more, in his outburst in Garnier:
Un homme effeminé de corps et de courage
Qui du mestier de Mars n’apprist oncque l’usage.
But only the motif is left in the Countess of Pembroke’s rendering:
A man, a woman both in might and minde,