The Facts About Shakespeare

by William Allan Neilson; Ashley Horace Thorndike

The impression which the evidence from the textbooks as a whole leaves on one is that Shakespeare took from school enough Latin to handle an occasional quotation[3] and to extract the plot of a play, but that he probably preferred to use a translation when one was to be had. The slight acquaintance shown with authors not always read at school, Caesar, Livy, Lucan, and Pliny, does not materially alter this impression. Much more conclusive as to the effect of his Latin training than the literary allusions are the numerous words of Latin origin either coined by Shakespeare, or used in such a way as to imply a knowledge of their derivation. The discovery of a lost translation may modify our views as to whether a particular author was used by him in the original, but the evidence from his use of Romance words gives clear proof that his schooling was no unimportant element in his mastery of speech.

Greek was occasionally begun in the Elizabethan grammar school, but we do not know whether this was the case in Stratford. Certainly we have no reason to believe that Shakespeare could read Greek, as all his knowledge of Greek authors could have been obtained from translations, and only two Greek words, misanthropos and threnos, occur in his writings. Yet no single author was so important in providing material for the plays as the Greek Plutarch. His Lives of Julius Cæsar, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and Caius Martius Coriolanus, in Sir Thomas North's translation, are the direct sources of the great Roman tragedies, and in a less important way the Lives of Antonius and Alcibiades were used in Timon of Athens. Homeric elements are discoverable in Troilus and Cressida, which derives mainly from the medieval tradition. As the Trojan story was already familiar on the stage, these need not have come from Chapman's Homer. The knowledge of Lucian which seems implied in Timon was probably not gained from the Greek original. The late Greek romances, which were popular in translation, may have been read by Shakespeare, since the reference to the "Egyptian thief" in Twelfth Night, V. i. 120, is from the Æthiopica of Heliodorus, translated in 1569. Attempts have been made by the assembling of parallel passages to prove a knowledge of Greek tragedy on the part of Shakespeare, but such parallelisms are more naturally explained as coincidences arising from the treatment of analogous themes and situations.

Of modern languages, French was the easiest for an Elizabethan Englishman to acquire, and the French passages and scenes in Henry V make it fairly certain that Shakespeare had a working knowledge of this tongue. Yet, as in the case of Latin, he seems to have preferred a translation to an original when he could find it. Montaigne, whose influence some have found pervasive in Shakespeare, he certainly used in Gonzalo's account of his ideal commonwealth in The Tempest,French and Italian II. i. 143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here. Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in As You Like It, III, ii. 238, and the great humorist is possibly the inspirer of some of Sir Andrew's nonsense in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century, and it is thought that in some cases Shakespeare shows direct acquaintance with Ronsard. He was thus acquainted with the three greatest French writers of his century, and French may well have been the medium through which he reached authors in other languages.

The class of Italian literature with which Shakespeare shows most acquaintance is that of the novelle, though there is no proof that he could read the language. The Decameron of Boccaccio contains the love-story of Cymbeline, though there may have been an intermediary; the plot of All's Well came from the same collection, but had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure; and the story of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice is found in a form closer to Shakespeare's in the English translation of the Gesta Romanorum than in the Decameron. Thus we cannot conclude that the poet knew this work as a whole. Similarly with Bandello and Cinthio. The plot of Much Ado is found in the former, and is translated by Belleforest into French, but at least one detail seems to come from Ariosto, and here again an intermediary is commonly conjectured. The novel from Cinthio's Hecatommithi which formed the basis of Othello existed in a French translation; and his form of the plot of Measure for Measure came to Shakespeare through the English dramatic version of George Whetstone. The version of the bond story in The Merchant of Venice closest to the play is in Il Pecorone of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, but the tale is widespread. Incidents in The Merry Wives have sources or parallels in the same work, in Straparola's Piacevoli Notti, and in Bandello, but in both cases English versions were available. A mass of Italian and French prototypes lies behind the plot of Twelfth Night, but most of the details are to be found in the English Apolonius and Silla of Barnabe Riche, and there is reason to conjecture a lost English play on the subject. The Taming of the Shrew, based on an extant older play, draws also on Gascoigne's version of Ariosto's I Suppositi; and the echoes of Petrarch in the Sonnets may well have come through French and English imitators. The introduction of stock types from the Italian drama, such as the pedant and the braggart-soldier, can be accounted for by the previous knowledge of these in England, and does not imply a first-hand reading of Italian literature. The negative position is still stronger in the case of Spanish, where the use of episodes from George of Montemayor's Diana in The Two Gentlemen, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer-Night's Dream, can be supposed to be due to the author's having access to Yonge's translation in Early Englishmanuscript, especially since there is no other trace of Spanish influence.

The conclusion with regard to Italian and Spanish, then, seems to be that Shakespeare in his search for plots was aware of the riches of the novelle, but that he found what he wanted as a rule in English or French versions; and that we have no evidence of his knowledge of anything but fiction from these literatures.

Turning now to English, we find Shakespeare's knowledge of books in his own tongue beginning after the Conquest. The romances of the Middle Ages were in the Elizabethan time rapidly undergoing the process of degradation that was soon to end in the chap-books, but the material was still widely known. The particular versions read by the dramatist can rarely be determined on account of the slight nature of most of the references, but we find allusions to the Arthurian romances, to Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, The Squire of Low Degree, Roland and Oliver, and to Huon of Bordeaux, from which last came the name of Oberon as king of the fairies. Among popular ballads, those of Robin Hood are frequently alluded to; the story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid appears in no fewer than five plays; Hamlet knew a ballad on Jephtha's daughter, and Sir Toby one on the chaste Susanna. A large number of popular songs appear in fragments; and rimes and spells, current jests and anecdotes, combine with the fairy-lore of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merry Wives to assure us that Shakespeare was thoroughly versed in the literature and traditions of the people.

His acquaintance with more formal letters begins with Chaucer, whose Knight's Tale contributed some details to A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and the main plot of The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which Shakespeare is now usually supposed to have had a hand. This story had, however, been already dramatized by Richard Edwardes. More certainly direct is his knowledge of Chaucer's Troilus, which, with Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, is the main source of Troilus and Cressida. The references to the leprosy of Cressida are due to Henryson's Testament of Creseide, a Scots sequel to Chaucer's poem, printed in the sixteenth century editions of the older poet's works. In the Legend of Good Women he may have found the story of Pyramus, and a version of the tragedy of Lucrece, to supplement his main sources in Livy and Ovid. Chaucer's contemporary Gower contributed to his stock the story of Florent (Taming of the Shrew, I. ii. 69) from the Confessio Amantis, and from the same collection a version of the tale of Apollonius of Tyre, dramatized by Shakespeare and another in Pericles.

With the non-dramatic literature produced by Shakespeare's contemporaries, we naturally find most evidence of his acquaintance in the case of those books which provided material for his plays. Thus the otherwise obscure Arthur Brooke, whose poem Romeus and Juliet Contemporary Literatureis the chief source of the tragedy, is much more prominent in such an enumeration as the present than he probably was in Shakespeare's view of the literature of the day. Painter, whose version of the same story in his Palace of Pleasure cannot be shown to have been used much, if at all, by the dramatist, seems nevertheless to have been known to him; and we hardly need evidence that Shakespeare must have kept a watchful eye on similar collections of stories, such as Whetstone's, Riche's, and Pettie's. Of the greater writers of imaginative literature there is none missing from the list of those he knew, though, as has been implied, the evidence is not always proportionate to the greatness; and some prominent figures in other fields, such as Hooker and Bacon, do not appear. Spenser, who is supposed to have alluded to Shakespeare in Colin Clout's come home again and, less probably, in The Teares of the Muses, is in turn alluded to in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, V. i. 52; and his version of the story of Lear in The Faerie Queene, II. x, is believed to have given Shakespeare his form of the name Cordelia. Evidence is more abundant in the case of Sir Philip Sidney. The under-plot of King Lear is based on the story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in the Arcadia, and Sidney's sonnets, along with those of Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Watson, and Barnes, formed the main channel through which the French and Italian influences reached Shakespeare's. However we may estimate the original element in his sonnets, and in our opinion it is very great, there is no question of the author's having had a thorough familiarity with contemporary sonnetteers.

Similarly we can be certain that he had read many of the elaborate narrative poems then in vogue, a class to which he contributed Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and A Lover's Complaint. Daniel's Rosamond and Marlowe's Hero and Leander especially have left many traces, and Daniel's Barons' Wars is intimately related to Richard II and Henry IV. The longer prose fictions of the time he also watched, and Lyly's Euphues contributed the germ of a number of passages, as Lodge's Rosalynde and Greene's Pandosto supplied the plots of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale respectively.

Reference has already been made to his knowledge of folk beliefs about fairies. To this should be added other supernatural beliefs, especially as to ghosts, devils, and witches, evidence of his familiarity with which will occur to every one. Matters of this sort were much discussed in his time, the frequency of ghosts in Senecan plays having made them conspicuous in Elizabethan imitations, and religious controversy having stimulated interest in demonology. Several important books appeared on the subject, and one of these at least Shakespeare read, Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, for from it Edgar, as Poor Tom in King Lear, derived many of the names and phrases which occur in his pretended ravings.