Over the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does1 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 Shakespeare. 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 Shakespeare's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal.

1 B. II, Ch. 10.

V

SHAKESPEARE AND BRUNO

EVEN before that is made clear, however, there can be little hesitation about dismissing the only other outstanding theory of theory of a special intellectual influence undergone by Shakespeare -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 Shakespeare came to London. Among his patrons were Sidney and Leicester, but neither Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writings only one passage has been cited which even faintly suggests a coincidence with any in Shakespeare; and in that the suggestion is faint indeed. Bruno's ill-famed comedy IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, "Che è la materia di vostri versi?" and the pedant replies, "Litterae, syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et

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In

remotae," on which Octavio again asks, "Io dico, quale è il suggetto et il proposito? "1 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 episodes in HAMLET which clearly belong to the pre-Shakespearean play, the fooling of Hamlet with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's parallels are quite unconvincing; indeed they promptly put themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in Shakespeare; 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 :

2

"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

1 Tschischwitz, Shakespeare-Forschungen, i, 1868, p. 52.

2 "Es ist übrigens nicht zu bedauern, dass Shakespeare Bruno's Komödie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, denn sie enthält so masslose Obscönitäten, dass Shakespeare an seinen stärksten Stellen daneben fast jungfräulich erscheint " (Work cited, p. 52).

of Germany or the Bacon-Shakespeare 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." 1

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,

1 Work cited, p. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's translation, so far as syntax permits.

might have been drafted by a much lesser man than Shakespeare, 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 farreaching 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

2

1 A little more plausibly, Professor Churton Collins has traced Ariel's "Nothing of him that doth change" to Lucretius; but, as is shown below (Art. on “The Learning of Shakespeare"), several Lucretian passages conveying the idea lay to the poet's hand in Montaigne.

2 Act I, Sc. 4.

3 Tschischwitz, p. 59.