Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die.
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persèver
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.
Cf. Sophocles’s Œdipus Coloneus, 880: Τοις τοι δικαίοις χα’ βραχυς νικα μέγαν (‘In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,’ Jebb), and 2 Henry VI, iii. 233, ‘Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.’ Shakespeare’s ‘prophetic soul’ in Hamlet (I. v. 40) and the Sonnets (cvii. I) may be matched by the προμαντις θυμος of Euripides’s Andromache, 1075; and Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’ (III. i. 59) by the κακων πέλαγος of Æschylus’s Persæ, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean and Greek drama, Lady Macbeth and Æschylus’s Clytemnestra, who ‘in man’s counsels bore no woman’s heart’ (γυναικος ανδροβουλον ελπίζον κέαρ, Agamemnon, II), most closely resemble each other. But a study of the points of resemblance attests no knowledge of Æschylus on Shakespeare’s part, but merely the close community of tragic genius that subsisted between the two poets.
[15] Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq.
[16] Cf. Spencer Baynes, ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School,’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq.
[17a] Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But the Bishop’s deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare’s piety are strained.
[17b] See p. 161 infra.
[18] Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (published in 1838).
[21] These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of consent on the part of parents to their children’s marriages are also extant there among the sixteenth-century archives.
[23] Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. ll. 160-4:
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings;
And all the ceremony of this compact
Seal’d in my [i.e. the priest’s] function by my testimony.