SHAKESPEARE’S name, in three quarto editions, published during his lifetime, appears as author of the play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and if a decision be made that the authorship belongs to him, and that in the main the work was his composition, then our previous conjectures are changed into certainties, and we can confidently declare who were the Emblem writers he refers to, and can exhibit the very passages from their books which he has copied and adopted.

The early folio editions of the plays, those of 1623 and 1632, omit the Pericles altogether, but later editions restore it to a place among the works of Shakespeare. Dr. Farmer contends that the hand of the great dramatist is visible only in the last act; but others controvert this opinion, and maintain, though he was not the fabricator of the plot, nor the author of every dialogue and chorus, that his genius is evident in several passages.

In Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere, supplemental volume, p. 13, we are informed: “The first edition of Pericles appeared in 1609,”—several years before the dramatist’s death,—“under the following title,—‘The late and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, &c. By William Shakespeare: London, Glosson, 1609.’”

According to the Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. i, Preface, “another edition was issued in the same year.” The publication was repeated in 1611, 1619, 1630 and 1635, so that at the very time when Shakespeare was living, his authorship was set forth; and after his death, while his friends and contemporaries were alive, the opinion still prevailed.

The conclusion at which Knight arrives, sup. vol. pp. 118, 119, is thus stated by him: “We advocate the belief that Pyrocles, or Pericles was a very early work of Shakspere in some form, however different from that which we possess.” And again, “We think that the Pericles of the beginning of the seventeenth century was the revival of a play written by Shakspere some twenty years earlier.... Let us accept Dryden’s opinion, that

The Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. 10, ed. 1866, gave a firmer judgment:—“There can be no doubt that the hand of Shakespeare is traceable in many of the scenes, and that throughout the play he largely retouched, and even rewrote, the work of some inferior dramatist. But the text has come down to us in so maimed and imperfect a state that we can no more judge of what the play was when it left the master’s hand than we should have been able to judge of Romeo and Juliet, if we had only had the first quarto as authority for the text.”

Our own Hallam tells us,—“Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part, the work of Shakespeare:” but with great confidence the critic Schlegel declares,—“This piece was acknowledged to be a work, but a youthful work of Shakespeare’s. It is most undoubtedly his, and it has been admitted into several later editions of his works. The supposed imperfections originate in the circumstance that Shakespeare here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its proper sphere. Hence he even introduces Gower himself, and makes him deliver a prologue in his own antiquated language and versification. This power of assuming so foreign a manner is at least no proof of helplessness.”

There are, then, strong probabilities that in the main the Pericles was Shakespeare’s own composition, or at least was adopted by him; it belongs to his early dramatic life, and at any rate it may be taken as evidence to show that the Emblem writers were known and made use of between 1589 and 1609 by the dramatists of England.

Books of Emblems are not indeed mentioned by their titles, nor so quoted in the Pericles as we are accustomed to do, by making direct references; they were a kind of common property, on which everyone might pasture his Pegasus or his Mule without any obligation to tell where his charger had been grazing. The allusions, however, are so plain, the words so exactly alike, that they cannot be misunderstood. The author was of a certainty acquainted with more than one Emblem writer, in more than one language, and Paradin, Symeoni, and our own Whitney may be recognised in his pages. We conclude that he had them before him, and copied from them when he penned the second scene of the Second Act of Pericles.

The Dialogue is between Simonides, king of Pentapolis, and his daughter, Thaisa, on occasion of the “triumph,” or festive pageantry, which was held in honour of her birthday. (Pericles, act. ii. sc. 2, lines 17–47, vol. ix. pp. 343, 344.)

As with the ornaments “in silk and gold,” which Mary Queen of Scotland worked on the bed of her son James, or with those in “the lady’s closet” at Hawsted, we trace them up to their originals, and pronounce them, however modified, to be derived from the Emblem-books of their age; so, with respect to the devices which the six knights bore on their shields, we conclude that these have their sources in books of the same character, or in the genius of the author who knew so well how to contrive and how to execute. Emblems beyond a doubt they are, though not engraved on our author’s page, as they were on the escutcheons of the knightly company. Take the device and motto of the gnats or butterflies and the candle; we trace them from Vænius, Camerarius, and Whitney, to Paradin, from Paradin to Symeoni, and from Symeoni to Giles Corrozet,—at every step we pronounce them Emblems,—and should pass the same judgment, though we could not trace them at all. It is the same with these devices in the Triumph Scene of Pericles; we discover the origin of some of them in Emblem works of, or before Shakespeare’s era,—and where we fail to discover, there we attribute invention, invention guided and perfected by masters in the art of fashioning pictures to portray thoughts by means of things. We will, however, in due order consider the devices and mottoes of these six knights who came to honour the king’s daughter.

The first knight is the Knight of Sparta,—

A motto almost identical belongs to an old family of Worcestershire, the Blounts, of Soddington, of which Sir Edward Blount, Bart., is, or was the representative; their motto is, Lux tua vita mea,—“Thy light, my life;”—but their crest is an armed foot in the sun, not a black Ethiop reaching towards him. There was a Sir Walter Blount slain on the king’s side at the battle of Shrewsbury, and whom, previous to the battle, Shakespeare represents as sent by Henry IV. with offers of pardon to Percy. (Henry IV. Pt. 1. act. iv. sc. 3, l. 30, vol. iv. p. 323.) A Sir James Blount is also briefly introduced in Richard III. act. v. sc. 2, l. 615. The name being familiar to Shakespeare, the motto also might be;—and by a very slight alteration he has ascribed it to the Knight of Sparta.

I have consulted a considerable number of books of Emblems published before the Pericles was written, but have not discovered either the device or “the word” exactly in the form given in the play. There is a near approach to the device in Reusner’s Emblems, printed at Francfort in 1581 (Emb. 7, lib. i. p. 9). A man is represented stretching forth his hand towards the meridian sun, and the device is surmounted by the motto, Sol animi virtus,—“Virtue the sun of the soul.” The elegiac verses which follow carry out the thought with considerable clearness,—

Among these lines is one to illustrate the first knight’s motto;

But Plautus, the celebrated comic poet of Rome, gives in his Asinaria, 3. 3. 24, almost the very words of the Spartan knight: Certe tu vita es mihi,—“Of a truth thou art life to me.”

The introduction of an Ethiop was not unusual with Shakespeare. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona (act. ii. sc. 6. l. 25, vol. i. p. 112), Proteus avers,—

and in Love’s Labour’s Lost (act. iv. sc. 3, l. 111, vol. ii. p. 144), Dumain reads these verses,—

A genius so versatile as that of Shakespeare, and capable of creating almost a whole world of imagination out of a single hint, might very easily accommodate to his own idea Reusner’s suggestive motto, and make it yield the light of love to the lover rather than to the reverend sage. Failing in identifying the exact source of the “black Ethiope reaching at the sun,” we may then not unreasonably suppose that Shakespeare himself formed the device, and fitted the Latin to it.

In the Emblem-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Latin mottoes very greatly preponderated over those of other languages; and had Shakespeare confined himself to Latin, it might remain doubtful whether he knew anything of Emblem works beyond those of our own countrymen—Barclay and Whitney—and of the two or three translations into English from Latin, French, and Italian. But the quotation of a purely Spanish motto, that on the second knight’s device, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza,—“More by gentleness than by force” (act ii. sc. 2, l. 27),—shows that his reading and observation extended beyond mere English sources, and that with other literary men of his day he had looked into, if he had not studied, the widely-known and very popular writings of Alciatus and Sambucus among Latinists, of Francisco Guzman and Hernando Soto among Spaniards, of Gabriel Faerni and Paolo Giovio among Italians, and of Bartholomew Aneau and Claude Paradin among the French.

Shakespeare gives several snatches of French, as in Twelfth Night, act iii. sc. 1, l. 68, vol. iii. p. 265,—

and in Henry V. act iii. sc. 4; act iv. sc. 4 and 5; act v. sc. 2, vol. iv. pp. 538–540, 574–577, and 598–603: in the scenes between Katharine and Alice; Pistol and the French soldier taken prisoner; and Katharine and King Henry. Take the last instance,—

Appropriately also to the locality of the Taming of the Shrew (act i. sc. 2, l. 24, vol. iii. p. 23), Hortensio’s house in Padua, is the Italian quotation.

We find only two Spanish sentences, those already quoted,—one being Pistol’s motto on his sword, Si fortuna me tormenta sperato me contenta; the other, that of the Prince of Macedon, on his shield, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza.

Similar proverbs and sayings abound both in Cervantes, who died in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, and in the Spanish Emblem-books of an earlier date. I have very carefully examined the Emblems of Alciatus, translated into Spanish in 1549, but the nearest approach to the motto of the Prince of Macedon is, Que mas puede la eloquençia que la fortaliza (p. 124),—“Eloquence rather than force prevails,”—which may be taken from Alciat’s 180th Emblem, Eloquentia fortitudine præstantior.

Other Spanish Emblem-books of that day are the Moral Emblems of Hernando de Soto, published at Madrid in 1599, and Emblems Moralized, of Don Sebastian Orozco, published in the year 1610, also at Madrid; but neither of these gives the words of the second knight’s device. Nor are they contained in the Moral Triumphs, as they are entitled, of Francisco Guzman, published in 1587, the year after Whitney’s work appeared. The Moral Emblems, too, of Juan de Horozco, are without them,—an octavo, published at Segovia in 1589.

But, although there has been no discovery of this Spanish motto in a Spanish Emblem-book, the exact literal expression of it is found in a French work of extreme rarity—Corrozet’s “Hecatomgraphie,” Paris, 1540. There, at Emblem 28, Plus par doulceur que par force,^[94]—“More by gentleness than by force,”—is the saying which introduces the old fable of the Sun and the Wind, and of their contest with the travellers. Appended are a symbolical woodcut and a French stanza,

which may be pretty accurately rendered by the English quatrain,—

This comment in verse follows Corrozet’s Emblem,—

There is a brief allusion to this fable in King John (act iv. sc. 3, l. 155, vol. iv. p. 76), in the words of Philip, the half-brother of Faulconbridge,—

The same fable is given in Freitag’s “Mythologia Ethica,” Antwerp, 1579, p. 27. It is to a very similar motto,—

“Moderate force more powerful than impotent violence,”—to which are added, below the woodcut, two quotations from the Holy Scriptures,—

implying that not by the rigid exercise of authority, but by a sympathising spirit, the true faith will be carried onward unto victory.

Now, as the motto of the second knight existed in French, and, as we have seen, Emblem-books were translated into Spanish, the supposition is justifiable, though we have failed to trace out the very fact, that the author of the Pericles—Shakespeare, if you will—copied the words of the motto from some Spanish Emblem-book, or book of proverbs, that had come within his observation, and which applied the saying to woman’s gentleness subduing man’s harsher nature. Future inquirers will, perhaps, clear up this little mystery, and trace the very work in which the Spanish saying is original, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza.

We pass to the third, the fourth, and the fifth knights, with their “devices” and “words;” and to illustrate these we have almost a superabundant wealth of emblem-lore, from any portion of which Shakespeare may have made his choice. His materials may have come from some one of the various editions of Claude Paradin’s, or of Gabriel Symeoni’s “Devises Heroiqves,” which appeared at Lyons and Antwerp, in French and Italian, between the years 1557 and 1590; or, as the learned Francis Douce supposes, in his Illustrations of Shakspere, pp. 302, 393, the dramatist may have seen the English translation of these authors, which was published in London in 1591, or, with greater probability, as some are inclined to say, he may have used the emblems of our countryman, Geffrey Whitney. Were it not that Daniell’s translation, in 1585, of The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius is without plates, we should include this in the number.

Of the devices in question, Whitney’s volume contains two, and the other works the three; but between certain expressions of Whitney’s and those of the Pericles, the similarity is so great, that the evidence of circumstance inclines, I may say decidedly inclines, to the conclusion that for two out of the three emblems referred to, Shakespeare was indebted to his fellow Elizabethan poet, and not to a foreign source.

From his use of Spanish and French mottoes, as well as Latin, it is evident that Shakespeare, no more than Spenser, needed the aid of translations to render the emblem treasures available to himself; and if, as some maintain,^[95] the Pericles was in existence previous to the year 1591, it could not have been that use was made of the English translation of that date of the “Devises Heroiqves,” by P. S.; it remains, therefore, that for two out of the three emblems he must either have employed one of the original editions of Lyons and of Antwerp, or have been acquainted with our Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes, and have obtained help from them; and for the third emblem he must have gone to the French or Italian originals.

The third knight, named of Antioch, has for his device “a wreath of chivalry,”—

i. e., “The crown at the triumphal procession has carried me onward.” On the 146th leaf of Paradin’s “Devises Heroiqves,” edition Antwerp, 1562, the wreath and the motto are exactly as Shakespeare describes them. But Paradin gives a long and interesting account of the laurel-wreath, and of the high value accorded to it in Roman estimation. “It was,” as that author remarks, “the grandest recompense, or the grandest reward which the ancient Romans could think of to offer to the Chieftains over armies, to Emperors, Captains, and victorious Knights.”

“La plus grande recompense, ou plus grãd loyer que les antiques Rommains estimassent faire aus Chefz d’armee, Empereurs, Capitaines, et Cheualiers victorieux, c’estoit de les gratifier & honnorer (selon toutefois leurs merites, estats, charges, & degrez) de certaines belles Couronnes: qui generalemẽt (à cette cause) furent apellees Militaires. Desquelles (pour auoir estées indice & enseignes de prouesse & vertu) les figures des principales & plus nobles, sont ci tirees en deuises: tant a la louange & memoire de l’antique noblesse, que pareillement à la recreation, consolation, & esperance de la moderne, aspirãt & desirãt aussi de paruenir aus gages & loyers apartenãs & dediez aus defenseurs de la recommendable Republique. La premiere donques mise en reng, representera la Trionfale: laquelle estant tissue du verd Laurier, auec ses bacques, estoit donnée au Trionfateur, auquel par decret du Senat, estoit licite de trionfer parmi la vile de Romme, sur chariot, comme victorieus de ses ennemis. Desquels neantmoins lui conuenoit deuant la pompe, faire aparoir de la deffaite, du nombre parfait de cinq mile, en vne seule bataille. La susdite Couronne trionfale, apres long trait de temps (declinant l’Empire) fut commẽcee à estre meslee, & variée de Perles & pierrerie, & puis entierement changée de Laurier naturel en Laurier buriné, & enleué, sus vn cercle d’or: comme se void par les Medailles, de plusieurs monnoyes antiques.”^[96]

Shakespeare does not add a single word of explanation, or of amplification, which he might be expected to have done, had he used an English translation; but simply, and without remark, he adopts the emblem and its motto, as is natural to anyone who, though not unskilled in the language by which they are expressed, is not perfectly at home in it.

Of chivalry, however, he often speaks,—“of chivalrous design of knightly trial.” To Bolingbroke and Mowbray wager of battle is appointed to decide their differences (Richard II. act i. sc. 1, l. 202, vol. iv. p. 116), and the king says,—

And (vol. iv. p. 137) John of Gaunt declares of England’s kings; they were,—

But in the case of the fourth and fifth knights, it is not the simple adoption of a device which we have to consider; the very ideas, almost the very phrases in which those ideas were clothed, have also been given, pointing out that the Dramatist had before him something more than explanations in an unfamiliar tongue.

The device of the fourth knight is both described and interpreted,—

Thus presented in Symeoni’s “Tetrastichi Morali,” edition Lyons, 1561, p. 35,—

“In the battle of the Swiss, routed near Milan by King Francis, M. de Saint Valier, the old man, father of Madame the Duchess de Valentinois,^[97] and captain of a hundred gentlemen of the king’s house, bore a standard, whereon was painted a lighted torch with the head downward, on which flowed so much wax as would extinguish it, with this motto ‘Qvi me alit, me extingvit,’ imitating the emblem of the king his master; that is, ‘Nvtrisco et extingvo.’ It is the nature of the wax, which is the cause of the torch burning when held upright, that with the head downward it should be extinguished. Thus he wished to signify, that as the beauty of a lady whom he loved nourished all his thoughts, so she put him in peril of his life. See still this standard in the church of the Celestins at Lyons.”^[98]

Paradin, who confessedly copies from Symeoni, agrees very nearly with this account, but gives the name of the Duchess “Diane de Poitiers,” and omits mentioning “the emblem of the king.”

The “Amorvm Emblemata,”—Emblemes of Loue,—with verses in Latin, English, and Italian: 4to, Antverpiæ, M.DC.IIX., gives the same variation in the reading of the motto as Shakespeare does, namely, “Quod” for “Qui;” and as Daniell had done in The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jouius, in 1585, by substituting “Quod me alit” for “Qui me alit.”^[99] The latter is the reading in Paulus Jovius himself,—and is also found in some of the early editions of this play. (See Cambridge Shakespeare, vol. ix. p. 343.) The Amorum Emblemata, by Otho Vænius, named above, and dated 1608—one year before “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” was first published, in quarto—has the Latin motto, “Qvod nvtrit, extingvit,” Englished and Italianised as follows:

At a much earlier date, 1540, Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie gives the inverted torch as a device, with the motto, “Mauluaise nourriture,”—