debtor's friend. The management of the plot in the Italian novel is indeed more closely followed by Shakespeare than was his ordinary habit. Shake speare's radical methods of alteration. The Italian fable, it is to be admitted, merely formed as a rule the basis of his structure. Having surveyed all its possibilities, he altered and transmuted the story with the utmost freedom as his artistic spirit moved him. His changes bear weighty testimony to the greatness of his conceptions of both life and literature. In Measure for Measure, by diverting the course of an Italian novel at a critical point he not merely showed his artistic ingenuity but gave dramatic dignity and unusual elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. Again, in Othello, the tragic purpose is planned by him anew. The scales never fall from Othello's eyes in the Italian novel. He dies in the belief that his wife is guilty. Shakespeare's catastrophe is invested with new and fearful intensity by making Iago's cruel treachery known to Othello at the last, after Iago's perfidy has compelled the noble-hearted Moor in his groundless jealousy to murder his gentle and innocent wife Desdemona. Too late Othello sees in Shakespeare's tragedy that he is the dupe of Iago and that his wife is guiltless. But, despite the magnificent freedom with which Shakespeare often handled the Italian novel, it is to the suggestion of that form of Italian literary art that his dramatic achievements owe a profound and extended debt. Petrarch. Not that in the field of Italian literature Shakespeare's debt was wholly confined to the novel: Italian lyric poetry left its impress on the most inspiring of Shakespeare's lyric flights. Every sonneteer of Western Europe acknowledged Petrarch (of the fourteenth century) to be his master, and from Petrarchan inspiration came the form and much of the spirit of Shakespeare's sonnets. Petrarch's ambition to exalt in the sonnet the ideal type of beauty, and to glorify ethereal sentiment, is the final cause of Shakespeare's contributions to sonnet-literature. At first hand Shakespeare may have known little or even nothing of the Italian's poetry which he once described with a touch of scorn as the numbers that Petrarch flowed in.' But English, French, and contemporary adaptations of Petrarch's ideas and phrases were abundant enough to relieve Shakespeare of the necessity of personal recourse to the original text while the Petrarchan influence was ensnaring him. The cultured air of Elizabethan England was charged with Petrarchan conceits and imagery. Critics may differ as to the precise texture or dimensions of the bonds which unite the two poets, but they cannot question their existence. Italian art. Nor was Shakespeare wholly ignorant of another mode in which Italian imaginative power manifested itself. He was not wholly ignorant of Italian art. In The Winter's Tale he speaks of a contemporary Italian artist, Giulio Romano, with singular enthusiasm. He describes the supposed statue of Hermione as 'performed by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.' No loftier praise could be bestowed on a worker in the plastic arts. Giulio Romano is better known as a painter than a sculptor, but sculpture occupied him as well as painting in early life, and although Michael Angelo's name might perhaps have been more appropriate and obvious, Shakespeare was guilty of no inaccuracy in associating with Romano's name the surpassing qualities of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Poetry of VII Of the great foreign authors who outside Italy were more or less contemporary with the Elizabethans, those of France loom large in the Shakespearian arena. No Elizabethan disdained the close study of sixteenth-century literature of France. Elizabethan poetry finally ripened in the light of the lyric effort of Ronsard and his fellowmasters of the Pléiade School. Ronsard and his friends, Du Bellay and De Baif, had shortly before Shakespeare's birth deliberately set themselves the task of refining their country's poetry by imitating in French the classical form and spirit. Their design met with rare success. They brought into being a mass of French verse which is comparable by virtue of its delicate imagery and simple harmonies with the best specimens of the Greek anthology. It was under the banner of the Pléiade chieftains and as translators of poems by one or other of their retainers, that Spenser and Daniel, Lodge and Chapman, set forth on their literary careers. Shakespeare could not escape altogether from the toils of this active influence. It was Ronsard's example which introduced into Elizabethan poetry the classical conceit, which Shakespeare turned to magnificent advantage in his sonnets, that the poet's verses are immortal and can alone give immortality to those whom he commemorates. Insistence on the futility of loveless beauty which lives for itself alone, adulation of a patron in terms of affection which are borrowed from the vocabulary of love, expressions of fear that a patron's favour may be alienated by rival interests, were characteristic motives of the odes and sonnets of the Pléiade, and, though they came to France from Italy, they seem to have first caught Shakespeare's ear in their French guise. When Shakespeare in his Sonnets (No. xliv.) reflects with vivid precision on the nimbleness of thought which 'can jump both sea and land As soon as think the place where he would be,' he seems to repeat a note that the French sonneteers constantly sounded without much individual variation. It is difficult to believe that Shakespeare's description of Thought's triumphs over space, and its power of leaping 'large lengths of miles,' did not directly echo Du Bellay's apostrophe to 'Penser volage,' or the address of Du Bellay's disciple Amadis Jamyn to 'Penser, qui peux en un moment grand erre Toute la terre, et les flots spacieux, Qui peux aussi penetrer sous la terre.' 1 1 Sonnets to Thought are especially abundant in the poetry of sixteenthcentury France, though they are met with in Italy. The reader may be interested in comparing in detail Shakespeare's Sonnet xliv. with the two French sonnets to which reference is made in the text. The first sonnet runs: 'Penser volage, et leger comme vent, Qui or' au ciel, or' en mer, or' en terre En quelque part que voises t'eslevant Ou rabaissant, celle qui me fait guerre, The second sonnet runs: (DU BELLAY, Olive xliii.) 'Penser, qui peux en vn moment grand erre But Shakespeare's interest in French literature was not confined to the pleasant and placid art or the light ethereal philosophy of Ronsard's school. The burly hu Rabelais and Montaigne. morist Rabelais, who was older than Ronsard by a generation, and proved the strongest personality in the whole era of the French Renaissance, clearly came within the limits of Shakespeare's cognisance. The younger French writer, Montaigne, who was living during Shakespeare's first thirty-eight years of life, was no less familiar to the English dramatist as author of the least embarrassed and most suggestive reflections on human life which any autobiographical essayist has produced. From Montaigne, the typical child of the mature Renaissance in France, Shakespeare borrowed almost verbatim Gonzalo's description in The Tempest of an ideal socialistic commonwealth. VIII This brief survey justifies the conclusion that an almost limitless tract of foreign literature lent light and heat to Shakespeare's intellect and imagination. He may in acquiring not have come to close quarters with much of it. foreign knowledge. Little of it did he investigate minutely. But he Alertness Par toy souvent celle-là qui m'enferre De mille traits cuisans et furieux, Se represente au devant de mes yeux, (AMADIS JAMYN, Sonnet xxi.) Tasso's sonnet (Venice 1583, i. p. 33) beginning: 'Come s'human pensier di giunger tenta Al luogo,' and Ronsard's sonnet (Amours, 1. clxviii.) beginning: 'Ce fol penser, pour s'envoler trop haut,' should also be studied in this connection. |