These are minutiae on which students like Bacon or Ben Jonson might set store, but in regard to which Shakespeare was quite untroubled and careless. Perhaps they deserve notice only because they add one little item to the mass of proof that the plays were written by a man of merely ordinary information, not by a trained scholar. But for themselves they may be disregarded. It is not such trifles that interfere with fidelity to antiquity. But in weightier matters, too, Shakespeare shows an inevitable limitation in reproducing a civilisation that was in some aspects very different from his own, and for which he had no parallel in his own experience. He shows a precisely analogous limitation when he deals with themes from English History that were partly alien to the spirit of the time. Of this King John furnishes the grand example. We all know why that troublesome reign is memorable now, not merely to the constitutional historian, but to the man in the street and the child on the school bench. Yet Shakespeare makes no mention of Runnymede or the Great Charter; and we may assume that he, like most Elizabethans, if interested in such matters at all, would have been unsympathetic to a movement that extorted liberties by civil strife. To him the significant points are the disputed succession, the struggle with the Pope, the initial invasion of France by England when the Kingdom is of one accord, and the subsequent invasion of England by France, when it is divided against itself. So King John, though very true to human nature and even to certain aspects of the period, pays no heed to the aspect which other generations have considered the most important of all, and one which on any estimate is not to be overlooked. But if Shakespeare thus misses a conspicuous feature in a set of occurrences that took place among his own people less than four hundred years before, we need not wonder if he failed to detect the peculiar features of ancient Rome as it existed at a further distance of twelve or sixteen centuries. His approximation to the actual or alleged conditions varies indeed in the different plays. It is closest in Antony and Cleopatra. In that there is hardly a personage or circumstance for which he had not some sort of a clue. He knew about soldiers of fortune like Enobarbus and pirate-adventurers like Menas; a ruler like Henry VII. had in him a touch of Octavius, there were not a few notabilities in Europe who carried a suggestion of Mark Antony, the orgies of Cleopatra’s court in Egypt were analogous to those of many an Italian or French court at the Renaissance. It is all native ground to Shakespeare and he would feel himself at home. On the other hand, he is least capable of seeing eye to eye the primitive republican life which on Plutarch’s evidence he has to depict in Coriolanus. The shrewd, resolute, law-abiding Commons, whom some of the traditions that Plutarch worked up seem meant to exalt; the plebs that might secede to the Holy Mount, but would not rise in armed revolt; that secured the tribunate as its constitutional lever with which it was by and by to shift the political centre of gravity, this was like nothing that he knew or that anybody else knew about till half a century had elapsed. He could only represent it in terms of a contemporary city mob; and the consequence is that though he has given a splendid picture that satisfies the imagination and even realises some of Plutarch’s hints, it is not true to the whole situation as envisaged by Plutarch.[73] Julius Caesar occupies a kind of intermediate position, and for that reason illustrates his method most completely. He could understand a good deal of the political crisis in Rome on which that story turns, from the existing conditions or recent memories of his own country. In both a period of civil turmoil had ended in the establishment of a strong government. In both there were nobles who from principle or interest were opposed to the change, so he could enter into the feelings of the conspirators. In both the centralisation of authority was the urgent need, so he could appreciate the indispensableness of the Empire, the ‘spirit of Caesar.’ But of zeal for the republican theory as such he knows nothing, and therefore his Brutus is only in part the Brutus of Plutarch.
Thus Shakespeare in his picture of Rome and Romans, does not give the notes that mark off Roman from every other civilisation, but rather those that it possessed in common with the rest, and especially with his own. He even puts into it, without any consciousness of the discrepancy, qualities that are characteristic of Elizabethan rather than of Roman life. And the whole result, the quickening of the antique material with modern feeling in so far as that is also antique, and occasionally when it is not quite antique, is due to the thorough realisation of the subject in Shakespeare’s own mind from his own point of view, with all the powers not only of his reason, but of his imagination, emotion, passion, and experience. Hence his delineations are in point of fact more truly antique than those of many much more scholarly poets, who can reproduce the minute peculiarities, but not, what is more central and essential, the living energy and principle of it all. This was felt by contemporaries. We have the express testimony of the erudite Leonard Digges, who after graduating as Bachelor in Oxford, continued his studies for many years in several foreign universities, and consequently was promoted on his return to the honorary degree of Master, a man who, with his academic training and academic status, would not be apt to undervalue literal accuracy. But he writes:
So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius: oh! how the audience
Were ravish’d, with what wonder went they thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-labour’d Catiline,—
Sejanus too was irksome.
Ben Jonson in Sejanus and Catiline tried to restore antiquity in its exclusive and exceptional traits. Shakespeare approached it on its more catholic and human side, interpreted it by those qualities in modern life that face towards the classical ideal, and even went the length of using at unawares some that were more typical of his new world. And Jonson’s Roman plays were felt to be well-laboured and irksome, while his filled the spectators with ravishment and wonder.