I more voluminous should grow—
(Chiefly if I like them should tell
All change of weathers that befell)
Than Holinshed and Stowe.
Their intention is good, and they often realise it so as to interest and impress, but the introduction of such-like trifles as Cowley mentions, without much relevance or significance, may give us the measure of their technical skill. Again, though in the second and third part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was dealing with the work of Marlowe, we have to remember, first, that his originals were composite pieces not by Marlowe alone, and, further, that even Marlowe could not altogether escape the disabilities of a pioneer.
In Plutarch, however, Shakespeare levied toll on no petty vassal like the compilers of the Chronicles, or innovating conqueror like the author of Tamburlaine, but on the king by right divine of a long-established realm. And the result is that he appropriates more, and that more of greater value, than from any other tributary.
CHAPTER III
ANCESTRY OF SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS
1. PLUTARCH[75]
Plutarch, born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, about 45 or 50 a.d., flourished in the last quarter of the first and the earliest quarter of the second century. He came of good stock, which he is not reluctant to talk about. Indeed, his habit of introducing or quoting his father, his grandfather, and even his great grandfather, gives us glimpses of a home in which the prescribed pieties of family life were warmly cherished; and some of the references imply an atmosphere of simplicity, urbanity, and culture.
The lad was sent to Athens to complete his education under Ammonius, an eminent philosopher of that generation, though in Carlyle’s phrase, ‘now dim to us,’ who also took part in what little administrative work was still intrusted to provincials, and more than once held the distinguished position of strategos. Thus, as in childhood Plutarch was trained in the best domestic traditions of elder Greece, so now he had before his eyes an example of such active citizenship as survived in the changed condition of things.