was obviously no scholar, but he was widely read in the literature that was at the disposal of cultivated men of his day. All that he read passed quickly into his mind, but did not long retain there the precise original form. It was at once assimilated, digested, transmuted by his always dominant imagination, and, when it came forth again in a recognisable shape, it bore, except in the rarest instances, the stamp of his great individuality, rather than the stamp of its source.

taneous

power of

Shakespeare's mind may best be likened to a highly sensitised photographic plate, which need only be exposed for the hundredth part of a second to anything in life The instanor literature, in order to receive upon its surface the firm outline of a picture which could be de- perception. veloped and reproduced at will. If Shakespeare's mind for the hundredth part of a second came in contact in an alehouse with a burly good-humoured toper, the conception of a Falstaff found instantaneous admission to his brain. The character had revealed itself to him in most of its involutions, as quickly as his eye caught sight of its external form, and his ear caught the sound of the voice. Books offered Shakespeare the same opportunity of realising human life and experience. A hurried perusal of an Italian story of a Jew in Venice conveyed to him the mental picture of Shylock, with all his racial temperament in energetic action, and all the background of Venetian scenery and society accurately defined. A few hours spent over Plutarch's Lives brought into being in Shakespeare's brain the true aspects of Roman character and Roman aspiration. Whencesoever the external impressions came, whether from the world of books or the world of living men, the same mental process was at work, the same visualising instinct which made the thing, which he saw or read of, a living and a lasting reality.

IV

In any estimate of the extent of foreign influence on Shakespeare's work, it is well at the outset to realise the opportunities of acquaintance with foreign literatures that were opened to him in early life. A great man's education or mental training is not a process that stops with his school or his college days; it is in progress throughout his life. But youthful education usually suggests the lines along which future intellectual development may proceed.

Early instruction in Latin.

At the grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare may be reasonably presumed to have spent seven years of boyhood, a sound training in the elements of classical learning was at the disposal of all comers. The general instruction was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through Latan conversation books, books of Latin phrases to be used in conversation, like the Sententiæ Pueriles and Lily's Grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. Nor was modern Latin literature altogether overlooked. The Latin eclogues of a popular Renaissance poet of Italy, Baptista Mantuanus-'the good old Mantuan' Shakespeare familiarly calls him—were often preferred to Virgil's for youthful students. Latin was the warp and woof of every Elizabethan grammar school curriculum.

The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but it is doubtful if Greek were accessible to Stratford schoolboys. It is unlikely that Shakespeare knew anything of Greek at first hand. Curious verbal coincidences have been detected

between sentences in the great Greek plays and in Shakespearian drama. Striking these often are. In the Electra of Sophocles, which is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes with the same expressions of sympathy as those with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him on the loss of his father:

Apparent ignorance of Greek language.

'Remember Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal, wherefore grieve not much, for by all of us has this debt of suffering to be paid.'

In Hamlet are the familiar sentences

"Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die;

But, you must know, your father lost a father;
but to persever

That father lost, lost his

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness.'

Accidental

Shakespeare's 'prophetic soul,' which is found both in Hamlet and in the Sonnets, is matched by the póμavтis Oupòs of Euripides's Andromache (1075). Hamlet's 'sea of troubles' exactly translates the kakŵv wéλayos of Æschylus's Persae (442). Such parallels could be easily extended. But none compels us to admit textual coinciknowledge of Eschylus or Sophocles or Euripides on Shakespeare's part. They barely do more than suggest the community of sentiment that binds all great thinkers together.

dences.

Something of the Greek spirit lived in Latin, French, Italian, and English translations and adaptations of the masterpieces of Greek literature. Shakespeare gained some conception of the main features of Greek literature through those conduits. At least one epigram of the Greek anthology he turned through a Latin version into a sonnet. But there was no likelihood that he sought at first hand in Greek poetry for gnomic reflections on the commonest vicissitudes of human

life. Poets who write quite independently of one another often clothe such reflections in almost identical phrase. When we find a universal sentiment common to Shakespeare and a foreign author, it is illogical to infer that the sentiment has come to Shakespeare from that foreign author, unless we can establish two most important propositions. First, external fact must render such a transference probable or possible. There must be reasonable ground for the belief that the alleged borrower had direct access to the work from which he is supposed to borrow. Secondly, either the verbal similarity or the peculiar distinctiveness of the sentiment must be such as to render it easier to believe that the utterance has been directly borrowed than that it has arisen independently in two separate minds.

In the case of the Greek parallels of phrase it is easier to believe that the expressions reached Shakespeare independently-by virtue of the independent working of the intuitive faculty-than that he directly borrowed them of their Greek prototypes. Most of the parallelisms of thought and phrase between Shakespearian and the Attic drama are probably fortuitous, are accidental proofs of consanguinity of spirit rather than evidences of Shakespeare's study of Greek.

and

Italian.

But although the Greek language is to be placed outside Shakespeare's scope at school and in later life, we may Knowledge safely defy the opinion of Dr. Farmer, the Camof French bridge scholar of the eighteenth century, who enunciated in his famous Essay on Shakespeare's Learning the theory that Shakespeare knew no tongue but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations. English translations of foreign literature undoubtedly abounded in Elizabethan literature. But Shakespeare was not wholly dependent on them. Several of the books in

French or Italian, whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas, were not in Elizabethan days rendered into English. Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques is the source of Hamlet's history. In Ser Giovanni's Italian collection of stories, called Il Pecorone, alone may be found the full story of the Merchant of Venice. Cinthio's Hecatommithi alone supplies the tale of Othello. None of these foreign books were accessible in English translations when Shakespeare wrote. On more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose school days a training in Latin classics lay within reach, would scarcely lack in future years the means of access to the literatures of France and Italy which were written in cognate languages.

Latin and

French quotations.

With Latin and French and with the Latin poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his early writings openly and unmistakably acknowledged his acquaintance. In Henry V. the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French which is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare placed Latin phrases drawn directly from Lily's popular school grammar, and from the Sententiae Pueriles, the conversation book used by boys at school. The influence of a popular school author, the voluminous Latin poet Ovid, was especially apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic. Ovid's Metamorphoses was peculiarly familiar to him. Hints drawn directly from it are discernible in all his early poems and plays as well as in The Tempest, his latest play (v. i. 33 seq.). Ovid's Latin, which was accessible to Shakespeare since his school days, never faded altogether from his memory.