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 Shakespeare otherwise went any deeper into Bruno's system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare-criticism of the days before Rümelin. It is quite possible that Shakespeare 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, but with more plausibility than he attains to, trace the verses on 1 See Mrs. Frith's Life of Giordano Bruno, 1889, pp. 121-128. 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." 2 But since Shakespeare 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 infer that he had not even heard it more than partially 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 1 "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact," etc. 2 Cited by Noack, Art. "Bruno," in Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon. in Shakespeare which come much nearer their originals than any of these above cited come to Bruno, we are forced to suppose that Shakespeare got his thought at second or third hand. Thus the famous passage in HENRY V1 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 REPUBLICA;2 yet rational criticism must decide with M. Stapfer 3 that Shakespeare knew neither the former treatise nor Augustine's quotation from the latter, but got his suggestion from some English translation or citation. 8 In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge concerning Shakespeare, 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. 1 Act I, Sc. 2. 2 See above, Introd. 3 Work cited, p. 90. VI SHAKESPEARE'S CULTURE-EVOLUTION To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne did or could do for Shakespeare, we must revise our conception of the poet in the light of the positive facts of his life and circumstances -a thing made difficult for us in England through the transcendental direction given to our Shakespeare lore by those who first shaped it sympathetically, to wit, Coleridge and the Germans. An adoring idea of Shakespeare, as a mind of unapproachable superiority, has thus become so habitual with most of us that it is difficult to reduce our notion to terms of normal individuality of character and mind as we know them in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract æsthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakespeare, who became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of playpatching and refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that filled the booth theatre in which his company performed; who sued his debtors rigorously when they did not settle-up; worked up old plays or took a hand in new, according as the needs of his concern and his fellow-actors dictated; and finally went with his carefully collected fortune to spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archæological facts as to theatrical life in Shakespeare's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their æsthetic estimate of his product they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus. Emerson, it is true, 1 It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr. Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakespeare, even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on Shakespeare there is always an effort towards a judicial method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary steps; and that Mr. Fleay and other English critics have by the use of metrical tests made a most important |