But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne influence is unique or exceptional. Of the many literary influences which an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, was Montaigne’s the only one which wrought deeply upon Shakspere’s spirit, apart from those of his contemporary dramatists and the pre-existing plays, which were then models and points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere must have thought much and critically of the methods and the utterance of his co-rivals in literary art, as he did of the methods of his fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players in HAMLET was hardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet which speaks of its author as

“Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,”

is one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto, that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:

“Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?”

has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here concerned with influences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example; and the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact comparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of Montaigne’s Essays?

The matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even the Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As regards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research during two centuries; and of collations of parallel passages, apart from Montaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the dramatist’s mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our own generation. As regards many of the parallel passages, the ground has been pretty well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship brought to bear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean school, as represented by Knight, did much to retard scientific conclusions on this as on other points.

Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all open-minded readers that much of Shakspere’s supposed classical knowledge was derived from translations alone; and further investigation does but establish his general view. Such is the effect of M. Stapfer’s chapter on Shakspere’s Classical Knowledge; and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as against the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W. Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca’s tragedies on Shakspere’s. Unquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe’s valuable research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its technique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we have seen, apparent echoes from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we have seen, Dr. Cunliffe suggests sources for some Shaksperean passages in the Senecan tragedies, he is doubtful as to whether they represent any direct study of Seneca by Shakspere.

“Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to Seneca,” he writes, “is a question as difficult as it is interesting. As English tragedy advances, there grows up an accumulation of Senecan influence within the English drama, in addition to the original source, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the direct and the indirect influence of Seneca. In no case is the difficulty greater than in that of Shakspere. Of Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Massinger, we can say with certainty that they read Seneca, and reproduced their readings in their tragedies; of Middleton and Heywood we can say with almost equal certainty that they give no sign of direct indebtedness to Seneca; and that they probably came only under the indirect influence, through the imitations of their predecessors and contemporaries. In the case of Shakspere we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Professor Baynes thinks it is probable that Shakspere read Seneca at school; and even if he did not, we may be sure that, at some period of his career, he would turn to the generally accepted model of classical tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."

This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between Seneca’s tragedies and Shakspere’s are but cases of citation of sentences likely to have grown proverbial; and the most notable of the others that have been cited by Dr. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes, points to AEschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red:”

certainly corresponds closely with that of Seneca’s Hercules:

“Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica
Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox
Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
Haerebit altum facinus”

and that of Seneca’s Hippolytus:

“Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,
Maeotis undis pontico incumbens mari.
Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris.”

But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from AEschylus, are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediaeval. The phrases used were already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:

“Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys
Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."

In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso; and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere’s English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca’s stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published after, MACBETH:

“Although the waves of all the Northern sea
Should flow for ever through those guilty hands,
Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be”

a sad foil to Shakspere’s

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

It is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe. Shakspere’s

“Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all,"

which he compares with Seneca’s

“Et ferrum et ignis saepe medicinae loco est.
Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"

a passage that may very well be the original for the modern oracle about fire and iron is really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates, that “Extreme remedies are proper for extreme diseases,” and cannot be said to be more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to Shakspere’s hand in Montaigne, as translated by Florio:

“To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies.”

Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth’s

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?”

and the sentence of Hercules:

“Nemo polluto queat
Animo mederi."

Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and in THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN (in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we have the doctor protesting: “I think she has a perturbed mind, which I cannot minister to."

And so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules’ cry:

“Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,
Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,
Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,
Etiam furorem."

and Macbeth’s:

“I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have."

Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the versification in Macbeth’s speech is certainly Shakspere’s, such a lament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct reproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again only perfecting some previous declamation.

There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:

“Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To that they were before;"

and

“We but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor."

which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere’s hand than Seneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above considered, there was really little or nothing in the tragedies of Seneca to catch Shakspere’s eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of reflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding intellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed have drawn from one or two of Seneca’s treatises, which do, in their desperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual ground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests alike of quantity and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere was slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne’s essays. Nor is it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at hand in translation. Despite Montaigne’s own leaning to Seneca, as compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne says of the latter, that “his manner of writing seemeth very tedious.” Over the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does over Cicero, “I understand sufficiently what death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise them.” For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and even to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious examination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman’s lantern, leaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. Under no stress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a man of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages. It is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man of genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in Shakspere’s case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.

Even before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation about dismissing the only other outstanding theory of a special intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere the theory of Dr. Benno Tschischwitz, that he read and was impressed by the Italian writings of Giordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the hypothesis are of the scantiest and the flimsiest. Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586, before Shakspere came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and Leicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings only one passage can be cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakspere; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. In Bruno’s ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, “Che e la materia di vostri versi,” and the pedant replies, “Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae,” on which Octavio again asks: “Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito." So far as it goes this is something of a parallel to Polonius’s question to Hamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet’s answer, “Words, words.” But the scene is obviously a stock situation; and if there are any passages in HAMLET which clearly belong to the pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of Hamlet with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz’s parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno’s comedy recalls anything else in Shakspere; but he goes on to find analogies between other passages in HAMLET and some of Bruno’s philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno’s theorem that all things are made up of indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr. Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!”

It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; and it is quite impossible for anybody out of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who finds that Hamlet’s figure of the melting of flesh into dew is an illustration of Bruno’s “atomic system,” and goes on to find a further Brunonian significance in Hamlet’s jeering answers to the king’s demand for the body of Polonius. Of these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which he translates from Bruno’s CENA DE LE CENERI:

“For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, death and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation of all nature is not possible; but it attains from time to time, by a fixed law, to renew itself and to change all its parts, rearranging and recombining them; all this necessarily taking place in a determinate series, under which everything assumes the place of another."

In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this theorem, which anticipates so remarkably the modern scientific conception of the universe, “elucidates” Hamlet’s talk about worms and bodies, and his further sketch of the progress of Alexander’s dust to the plugging of a beer-barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all this is the idlest supererogation. The passages cited from HAMLET, all of them found in the First Quarto, might have been drafted by a much lesser man than Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case approaching to a reproduction of Bruno’s far-reaching thought; while on the contrary the “leave not a wrack behind,” in the TEMPEST, is an expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an endless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would naturally suggest itself to one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at least exoteric humour, Dr. Tschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of drunkenness, Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of drunken practices. Yet again, he puts Bruno’s large aphorism, “Sol et homo generant hominem,” beside Hamlet’s gibe about the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period. That the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself indirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of affirmation:

“We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes, or that Shakspere otherwise went any deeper into Bruno’s system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show Shakspere, at the time of his writing of HAMLET, to have already reached the heights of the thought of the age (Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost unintelligible passages in HAMLET are now cleared up by the poet’s acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the writings of the Nolan.”

All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German Shakspere-criticism of the days before Ruemelin. It is quite possible that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno’s theories from his friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno’s teaching would have profoundly interested him. If Bruno’s lectures at Oxford on the immortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the subject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore concerning the fate of the soul after death, above cited from Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz’s lines, trace the verses on the “shaping fantasies” of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, to such a passage in Bruno as this:

“The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and philosophers love and reciprocally admire each other. There is no philosopher who does not poetise and paint. Therefore is it said, not without reason: To understand is to perceive the figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or is nothing without it."

But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which he would have been extremely likely to produce in such a context, had he known it, we are bound to decide that he had not even heard it cited, much less read it. And so with any other remote resemblances between his work and that of any author whom he may have read. In regard even to passages in Shakspere which come much nearer their originals than any of these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere got his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous passage in HENRY V., in which the Archbishop figures the State as a divinely framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly traceable to Plato’s REPUBLIC and Cicero’s DE República; yet rational criticism must decide with M. Stapfer that Shakspere knew neither of these treatises, but got his suggestion from some English translation or citation.

In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakspere, as well as by the abstract principles of proof, to regard him in general as a reader of his own language only, albeit not without a smattering of others; and among the books in his own language which we know him to have read in, and can prove him to have been influenced by, we come back to Montaigne’s Essays, as by far the most important and the most potential for suggestion and provocation.