there is nothing to warrant the assumption that what he has in common with Montaigne would not have been equally conspicuous." Does the same formula hold, then, for the alleged saturation of Shakespeare with the classics? How, to come to the point, is a literary influence to be proved or disproved? Mr. Collins, after proffering his classical parallels, candidly indicates a consciousness that he has raised more problems than he claims to have solved: "But, it may be urged, if Shakespeare was acquainted with the Greek dramas he would have left unequivocal indications of that acquaintance with them by reproducing their form, by drawing with unmistakable directness on their dramatis personae for archetypes, by borrowing incidents, situations and scenes from them, or at least by directly and habitually referring to them. The answer to this is obvious. Of all playwrights that have ever lived Shakespeare appears to have been the most practical and the most conventional. The poet of all ages was pre-eminently the child of his own age. He belonged to a guild who spoke a common language, who derived their material from common sources, who cast that material in common moulds, and who appealed to a common audience. The Elizabethan drama was no exotic, but drew its vitality and nutriment from its native soil. The differences which separate Attic tragedy from Elizabethan are radical and essential. Had Shakespeare known the Greek plays by heart he could not have taken them for his models, or transferred, without recasting and reconstructing, a single scene from them. He had also to consider what appealed to his audience. The works of the Attic masters were as yet familiar only to scholars. Allusions to the legends of the houses of Atreus and of Labdacus would not have been popularly intelligible; and it is quite clear that Shakespeare, whatever concessions he may have made to it in his earlier works, abhorred pedantry. That he should, therefore, have given us in HAMLET so close an analogy to the story of the CHOËPHOROE and of the ELECTRA without either recalling or even referring to Orestes; that he should have pictured Lear and Cordelia without any allusion to Oedipus and Antigone, is not at all surprising. There is the same absence of reference to the Attic Tragedies both in Ben Jonson and in Chapman, but of the acquaintance of both these scholars with them there can be no doubt." The infirmity of the argument here is noteworthy. Shakespeare is called "the most conventional" of dramatists inasmuch as he paid no homage to the great source of dramatic convention; and the most practical because, while constantly studying Greek drama, he made no such use of it as he did of Renaissance fiction. Shall we also be told that, being steeped in Greek drama, he took the best course open to him in his presentment of Athenian life in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S Dream, where Theseus is a feudal Duke? All along the line the argument miscarries. Shakespeare, we are told, handled themes which expressly recalled the plots of the Attic tragedies, yet did not mention them; even as the learned Jonson and Chapman abstained from such allusions in their plays. But did Jonson and Chapman, then, handle themes which expressly recalled the Attic tragedies? If they did not, the analogy collapses. Shakespeare, we are further told, abhorred pedantry. But TITUS ANDRONICUS abounds in pedantry; and there we do have references to two Attic tragedies. Mr. Collins, who insists that Shakespeare wrote TITUS, has failed to unify his case. If Shakespeare referred to the AJAX of Sophocles and the HECUBA of Euripides in one early tragedy, why should he not refer to the CHOËРHORI and the ELECTRA in HAMLET, or to the AGAMEMNON in MACBETH, or to the OEDIPUS and the ANTIGONE in Lear, supposing these Attic tragedies to be familiar to him? "In LEAR throughout," says Mr. Collins, Shakespeare seems to be haunted with reminiscences of the ORESTES and PHOENISSAE: how closely, for example, the scene where Cordelia is watching over the sleeping Lear recalls ORESTES 135-240, and both Lear and Gloucester with Edgar and Cordelia, the Oedipus and Antigone of the end of the PHOENISsae. That is to say, a dramatist so steeped in Attic tragedy as to reproduce from it maxims, tags, and idioms, can be seen to be haunted by scenes to which he makes no allusion. "1 Concerning Shakespeare's HAMLET, again, Mr. 1 Studies, p. 75. Collins explains that "He approached his subject from a totally different point of view, proceeding in his treatment of it on diametrically opposite lines, so that in his characters, in his incident, and in his ethical purpose he is never, in any particular, in touch with the Greek."1 Quite so. And when Mr. Collins does seek to show an intellectual influence operating from the Greek tragedies upon Shakespeare, the outcome is decisively inadequate to his thesis: "In passing to Shakespeare's parallels in metaphysical speculation and generalised reflection on life, to use the term in its most comprehensive sense, we may first notice the possible influence exercised on him by Jocasta's magnificent pois in the PHOENISSAE, 582-5. We trace in it Ulysses' great speech in the second scene of the first act of TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, which borrows its sentiments and even its imagery, and catching its very cadence and rhythm, might have been modelled on it; in Henry V's noble soliloquy in the first scene of the fourth act of the play; and though we need not emphasise as significant the parallel between Wolsey's Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition : By that sin fell the angels, etc., and Jocasta's τί τῆς κακίστης δαιμόνων ἐφίεσαι φιλοτιμίας, παῖ; μὴ σύ γ' ἄδικος ἡ θεός· (Why art thou bent on ambition, the worst of deities? I pray thee forbear; a goddess she who knows no justice), it is perhaps worth noticing. Nor would it be any exaggeration to say that every article in Shakespeare's political creed, a creed so elaborately preached and illustrated in his 1 Studies, p. 79. Historical Plays, is summed up in the first speech of Menelaus in the AJAX (1052-90) and Creon's speech to Haemon in the ANTIGONE (665-80). "A sentiment peculiarly characteristic of the Greeks was their superstitious reverence for what was popularly accepted and become custom. This continually finds emphatic expression in the Greek dramas, and is indeed woven into the very fabric of their ethics. We need go no further than a line in Sophocles, as it is typical of innumerable other passages : τό τοι νομισθὲν τῆς ἀληθείας κρατεῖ (what custom establishes outmasters truth), FRAG. 84, and Euripides' BACCHAE, 894, where τὸ ἐν χρόνῳ μακρῷ νόμιμον δαιμόνιον (what has long been custom is divine). This is exactly Shakespeare's philosophy. What custom wills in all things should we do it' (COR. ii, 3). Our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time' (Id. iv, 7). But illustrations would be endless. "And in his general reflections on life and death we see how much he has in common, and very strikingly in common, with the Greek dramatists. Is it too much to say that Hamlet's famous soliloquy and the Duke's speech in MEASURE FOR MEASURE are little more than superbly embellished adaptations of the following lines of Euripides (Fragments of PHOENIX quoted by Stobaeus, cxxi, 12): ὦ φιλόζωοι βροτοί, οἳ τὴν ἐπιστείχουσαν ἡμέραν ἰδεῖν (O life-loving mortals, who yearn to see the approaching day, burdened though ye be with countless ills, so urgent on all is the love of life; for life we know, of death we know nothing, and therefore it is that every one of us is afraid to quit this life of the sun); and of the Chorus (1211-48) in the OEDIPUS COLOneus. "And as is life such is man. To the Greek dramatists, |