CHAPTER VI.
CLASSIFICATION OF THE CORRESPONDENCIES AND PARALLELISMS OF SHAKESPEARE WITH EMBLEM WRITERS.
HAVING established the facts that Shakespeare
invented and described Emblems of his own,
and that he plainly and palpably adopted
several which had been designed by earlier
authors, we may now, with more consistency, enter on the
further labour of endeavouring to trace to their original
sources the various hints and allusions, be they more or less
express, which his sonnets and dramas contain in reference
to Emblem literature. And we may bear in mind that we
are not now proceeding on mere conjecture; we have dug
into the virgin soil and have found gold that can bear
every test, and may reasonably expect, as we continue our
industry, to find a nugget here and a nugget there to reward
our toil.
But the correspondencies and parallelisms existing in
Shakespeare between himself and the earlier Emblematists
are so numerous, that it becomes requisite to adopt some
system of arrangement, or of classification, lest a mere chaos
of confusion and not the symmetry of order should reign
over our enterprise. And as “all Emblemes for the most
part,” says Whitney to his readers, “maie be reduced into
these three kindes, which is Historicall, Naturall, & Morall,”
we shall make that division of his our foundation, and considering
the various instances of imitation or of adaptation
to be met with in Shakespeare, shall arrange them under the
eight heads of—1, Historical Emblems; 2, Heraldic Emblems;
3, Emblems of Mythological Characters; 4, Emblems illustrative
of Fables; 5, Emblems in connexion with Proverbs;
6, Emblems from Facts in Nature, and from the Properties of
Animals; 7, Emblems for Poetic Ideas; and 8, Moral and
Æsthetic, and Miscellaneous Emblems.
Section I.
HISTORICAL EMBLEMS.
AS soon as learning revived in Europe, the great
models of ancient times were again set up on
their pedestals for admiration and for guidance.
Nearly all the Elizabethan authors,
certainly those of highest fame, very frequently introduce, or
expatiate upon, the worthies of Greece and Rome,—both
those which are named in the epic poems of Homer and
Virgil, and those which are within the limits of authentic
history. It seemed enough to awaken interest, “to point
a moral, or adorn a tale,” that there existed a record
of old.
Shakespeare, though cultivating, it may be, little direct
acquaintance with the classical writers, followed the general
practice. He has built up some of the finest of his Tragedies,
if not with chorus, and semi-chorus, strophe, anti-strophe,
and epode, like the Athenian models, yet with a
wonderfully exact appreciation of the characters of antiquity,
and with a delineating power surprisingly true to history and
to the leading events and circumstances in the lives of the
personages whom he introduces. From possessing full and
adequate scholarship, Giovio, Domenichi, Claude Mignault,
Whitney, and others of the Emblem schools, went immediately
to the original sources of information. Shakespeare,
we may admit, could do this only in a limited degree, and
generally availed himself of assistance from the learned translators
of ancient authors. Most marvellously does he transcend
them in the creative attributes of high genius: they supplied
the rough marble, blocks of Parian perchance, and a few
tools more or less suited to the work; but it was himself,
his soul and intellect and good right arm, which have produced
almost living and moving forms,—
“See, my lord,
Would you not deem it breath’d? and that those veins
Did verily bear blood?”
Winter’s Tale, act v. sc. 3, l. 63.
For Medeia, one of the heroines of Euripides, and for
Æneas and Anchises in their escape from Troy, Alciat
(Emblem 54), and his close imitator Whitney (p. 33), give each
an emblem.
To the first the motto is,—
“Ei qui semel sua prodegerit, aliena credi non oportere,”—
“To that man who has once squandered his own, another person’s ought not to be entrusted,”—
similar, as a counterpart, to the Saviour’s words (Luke xvi. 12),
“If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s,
who shall give you that which is your own.”
The device is,—
with the following Latin elegiacs,—
Colchidos in gremio nidum quid congeris? eheu
Neſcia cur pullos tam malè credis auis?
Dira parens Medea ſuos ſæuiſſima natos
Perdidit; & ſperas parcat vt illa tuis?
Which Whitney (p. 33) considerably amplifies,—
“Medea loe with infante in her arme,
Whoe kil’de her babes, shee shoulde haue loued beste:
The swallowe yet, whoe did suspect no harme,
Hir Image likes, and hatch’d vppon her breste:
[108]And lifte her younge, vnto this tirauntes guide,
Whoe, peecemeale did her proper fruicte deuide.
Oh foolishe birde, think’ste thow, shee will haue care,
Vppon thy yonge? Whoe hathe her owne destroy’de,
And maie it bee, that shee thie birdes should spare?
Whoe slue her owne, in whome shee shoulde haue ioy’d.
Thow arte deceau’de, and arte a warninge good,
To put no truste, in them that hate theire blood.”
And to the same purport, from Alciat’s 193rd Emblem, are
Whitney’s lines (p. 29),—
“Medea nowe, and Progne, blusshe for shame:
By whome, are ment yow dames of cruell kinde
Whose infantes yonge, vnto your endlesse blame,
For mothers deare, do tyrauntes of yow finde:
Oh serpentes seede, each birde, and sauage brute,
Will those condempne, that tender not theire frute.”
The stanza of his 194th Emblem is adapted by Alciat, and
by Whitney after him (p. 163), to the motto,—
Pietas filiorum in parentes,—
“The reverence of sons towards their parents.”
Per medios hoſteis patriæ cùm ferret ab igne
Aeneas humeris dulce parentis onus:
Parcite, dicebat: vobis ſene adorea rapto
Nulla erit, erepto ſed patre ſumma mihi.
“Aeneas beares his father, out of Troye,
When that the Greekes, the same did spoile, and sacke:
His father might of suche a sonne haue ioye,
Who throughe his foes, did beare him on his backe:
No fier, nor sworde, his valiaunt harte coulde feare,
To flee awaye, without his father deare.
Which showes, that sonnes must carefull bee, and kinde,
For to releeue their parentes in distresse:
And duringe life, that dutie shoulde them binde,
To reuerence them, that God their daies maie blesse:
And reprehendes tenne thowsande to their shame,
Who ofte dispise the stocke whereof they came.”
The two emblems of Medeia and of Æneas and Anchises,
Shakespeare, in 2 Henry VI. (act. v. sc. 2, l. 45, vol. v. p. 218),
brings into close juxta-position, and unites by a single description;
it is, when young Clifford comes upon the dead body of
his valiant father, stretched on the field of St. Albans, and bears
it lovingly on his shoulders. With strong filial affection he
addresses the mangled corpse,—
“Wast thou ordain’d, dear father,
To lose thy youth in peace, and to atchieve
The silver livery of advised age;
And, in thy reverence, and thy chair-days, thus
To die in ruffian battle?”
On the instant the purpose of vengeance enters his mind, and
fiercely he declares,—
“Even at this sight,
My heart is turn’d to stone; and, while ’tis mine,
It shall be stony. York not our old men spares;
No more will I their babes: tears virginal
Shall be to me even as the dew to fire;
And beauty, that the tyrant oft reclaims,
Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.
Henceforth I will not have to do with pity:
Meet I an infant of the house of York,
Into as many gobbets will I cut it,
As wild Medea young Absyrtus did:
In cruelty will I seek out my fame.”
Then suddenly there comes a gush of feeling, and with most
exquisite tenderness he adds,—
“Come, thou new ruin of old Clifford’s house:
As did Æneas old Anchises bear,
So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders:
But then Æneas bare a living load,
Nothing so heavy as these woes of mine.”
The same allusion, in Julius Cæsar (act. i. sc. 2, l. 107, vol.
vii. p. 326), is also made by Cassius, when he compares his own
natural powers with those of Cæsar, and describes their stout
contest in stemming “the troubled Tyber,”—
“The torrent roar’d, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere he could arrive the point proposed,
Cæsar cried, ‘Help me, Cassius, or I sink!’
I, as Æneas our great ancestor
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Cæsar: and this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature, and must bend his body
If Cæsar carelessly but nod on him.”
Progne, or Procne, Medeia’s counterpart for cruelty, who
placed the flesh of her own son Itys before his father Tereus,
is represented in Aneau’s
“Picta Poesis,” ed. 1552,
p. 73, with a Latin stanza
of ten lines, and the motto,
“Impotentis Vindictæ
Foemina,”—The Woman of
furious Vengeance. In the
Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc.
2, l. 192, vol. vi. p. 522) the
fearful tale of Progne enters
into the plot, and a similar revenge is repeated. The two sons
of the empress, Chiron and Demetrius, who had committed
atrocious crimes against Lavinia the daughter of Titus, are
bound, and preparations are made to inflict such punishment
as the world’s history had but once before heard of. Titus
declares he will bid their empress mother, “like to the earth
swallow her own increase.”
“This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this the banquet she shall surfeit on;
For worse than Philomel you used my daughter,
And worse than Progne I will be revenged.”
’Tis a fearful scene, and the father calls,—
“And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,
[He cuts their throats.
Receive the blood: and when that they are dead,
Let me go grind their bones to powder small,
And with this hateful liquor temper it;
And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.
Come, come, be every one officious
To make this banquet; which I wish may prove
More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast.”
A character from Virgil’s Æneid (bk. ii. lines 79–80; 195–8;
257–9),[109] frequently introduced both by Whitney and Shakespeare,
is that of the traitor Sinon, who, with his false tears and
lying words, obtained for the wooden horse and its armed men
admission through the walls and within the city of Troy. Asia,
he averred, would thus secure supremacy over Greece, and
Troy find a perfect deliverance. It is from the “Picta Poesis”
of Anulus (p. 18), that Whitney (p. 141) on one occasion
adopts the Emblem of treachery, the untrustworthy shield of
Brasidas,—
Perfidvs familiaris,—
“The faithless friend.”
Per medium Brasidas clypeum traiectus ab hoſte:
Quóque foret læſus ciue rogante modum.
Cui fidebam (inquit) penetrabilis vmbo fefellit.
Sic cvi ſæpe fides credita: proditor eſt.
Thus rendered in the Choice of Emblemes,—
“While throughe his foes, did boulde Brasidas thruste,
And thought with force, their courage to confounde:
Throughe targat faire, wherein he put his truste,
His manlie corpes receau’d a mortall wounde.
Beinge ask’d the cause, before he yeelded ghoste:
Quoth hee, my shielde, wherein I trusted moste.
Euen so it happes, wee ofte our bayne doe brue,
When ere wee trie, wee trust the gallante showe:
When frendes suppoas’d, do prooue them selues vntrue.
When Sinon false, in Damons shape dothe goe:
Then gulfes of griefe, doe swallowe vp our mirthe,
And thoughtes ofte times, doe shrow’d vs in the earthe.
But, if thou doe inioye a faithfull frende,
See that with care, thou keepe him as thy life:
And if perhappes he doe, that may offende,
Yet waye thy frende: and shunne the cause of strife,
Remembringe still, there is no greater crosse;
Then of a frende, for, to sustaine the losse.
Yet, if this knotte of frendship be to knitte,
And Scipio yet, his Lelivs can not finde?
Content thy selfe, till some occasion fitte,
Allot thee one, according to thy minde:
Then trie, and truste: so maiste thou liue in rest,
But chieflie see, thou truste thy selfe the beste?”
And again, adopting
the Emblem of John
Sambucus, edition Antwerp,
1564, p. 184,[110] and
the motto,
Nusquam tuta fides,—
“Trustfulness is never sure,”
with the exemplification
of the Elephant
and the undermined tree,
Whitney writes (p. 150),—
“No state so sure, no seate within this life
But that maie fall, thoughe longe the same haue stoode:
Here fauninge foes, here fained frendes are rife.
With pickthankes, blabbes, and subtill Sinons broode,
Who when wee truste, they worke our ouerthrowe,
And vndermine the grounde, wheron wee goe.
The Olephant so huge, and stronge to see,
No perill fear’d: but thought a sleepe to gaine
But foes before had vndermin’de the tree,
And downe he falles, and so by them was slaine:
First trye, then truste: like goulde, the copper showes:
And Nero ofte, in Nvmas clothinge goes.”
Freitag’s “Mythologia ethica,” pp. 176, 177, sets forth
the well-known fable of the Countryman and the Viper, which
after receiving warmth and nourishment attempted to wound
its benefactor. The motto is,—
Maleficio beneficium compensatum,—
“A good deed recompensed by maliciousness.”
“Qui reddit mala pro bonis, non recedet malum de domo eius.”—Prouerb, 17, 13.
“Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house.”
Nicolas Reusner, also, edition Francfort, 1581, bk. ii. p. 81,
has an Emblem on this subject, and narrates the whole fable,—
Merces anguina,—“Reward from a serpent.”
“Frigore confectum quem rusticus inuenit anguem
Imprudens fotum recreat ecce sinu.
Immemor hic miserum lethale sauciat ictu:
Reddidit hìc vitam; reddidit ille necem.
Si benefacta locis malè, simplex mente, bonusq.:
Non benefacta quidem, sed malefacta puta.
Ingratis seruire nefas, gratisq. nocere:
Quod benè fit gratis, hoc solet esse lucro.”[111]
In several instances in his historical plays, Shakespeare very
expressly refers to this fable. On hearing that some of his
nobles had made peace with Bolingbroke, in Richard II. (act. iii.
sc. 2, l. 129, vol. iv. p. 168), the king exclaims,—
“O villains, vipers, damn’d without redemption!
Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
Snakes, in my heart blood warm’d that sting my heart!”
In the same drama (act. v. sc. 3, l. 57, vol. iv. p. 210) York urges
Bolingbroke,—
“Forget to pity him, lest thy pity prove,
A serpent that will sting thee to the heart.”
And another, bearing the name of York, in 2 Henry VI. (act.
iii. sc. 1, l. 343, vol. v. p. 162), declares to the nobles,—
“I fear me, you but warm the starved snake,
Who, cherish’d in your breasts, will sting your hearts.”
Also Hermia, Midsummer Night’s Dream (act. ii. sc. 2, l. 145,
vol. ii. p. 225), when awakened from her trance-like sleep, calls
on her beloved,—
“Help me, Lysander, help me! do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast.”
Whitney combines Freitag’s and Reusner’s Emblems under
one motto (p. 189), In sinu alere serpentem,—“To nourish a
serpent in the bosom,”—but applies them to the siege of
Antwerp in 1585 in a way which Schiller’s famous history
fully confirms:[112]—“The government of the citizens was
shared among too many hands, and too strongly influenced
by a disorderly populace to allow any one to consider with
calmness, to decide with judgment, or to execute with firmness.”
The typical Sinon is here introduced by Whitney,—
“Thovghe, cittie stronge the cannons shotte dispise,
And deadlie foes, beseege the same in vaine:
Yet, in the walles if pining famine rise,
Or else some impe of Sinon, there remaine.
What can preuaile your bulwarkes? and your towers,
When, all your force, your inwarde foe deuoures.”
In fact, Sinon seems to have been the accepted representative
of treachery in every form; for when Camillus,
at the siege of Faleria, rewarded the Schoolmaster as he
deserved for attempting to give up his scholars into captivity,
the occurence is thus described in the Choice of Emblemes,
p. 113,—
“With that, hee caus’de this Sinon to bee stripte,
And whippes, and roddes, vnto the schollers gaue:
Whome, backe againe, into the toune they whipte.”
Shakespeare is even more frequent in his allusions to this
same Sinon. The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, speaks of
him as “the perjured Sinon,” “the false Sinon,” “the subtle
Sinon,” and avers (vol. ix. p. 537, l. 1513),—
“Like a constant and confirmed devil,
He entertain’d a show so seeming just,
And therein so ensconc’d his secret evil,—
That jealousy itself could not mistrust,
False creeping craft and perjury should thrust
Into so bright a day such black-faced storms,
Or blot with hell-born sin such saint-like forms.”
Also in 3 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 188, vol. v. p. 285), and in
Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc. 3, l. 85, vol. vi. p. 527), we read,—
“I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And like a Sinon, take another Troy;”
and,—
“Tell us what Sinon hath bewitch’d our ears,
Or who hath brought the fatal engine in
That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound.”
But in Cymbeline (act. iii. sc. 4, l. 57, vol. ix. p. 226), Æneas is
joined in almost the same condemnation with Sinon. Pisano
expostulates with Imogen,—
“Pis.Good madam, hear me.
Imo. True honest men being heard, like false Æneas,
Were in his time thought false; and Sinon’s weeping
Did scandal many a holy tear, took pity
From most true wretchedness: so thou, Posthumus,
Wilt lay the leaven on all proper men;
Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjured
From thy great fail.”
Doubtless it will be said that such allusions to the characters
in classical history are the common property of the whole
modern race of literary men, and that to make them implies no
actual copying by later writers of those who preceded them in
point of time; still in the examples just given there are such
coincidences of expression, not merely of idea, as justify the
opinion that Shakespeare both availed himself of the usual
sources of information, and had read and taken into his mind
the very colour of thought which Whitney had lately spread
over the same subject.
The great Roman names, Curtius, Cocles, Manlius and
Fabius gave Whitney the opportunity for saying (p. 109),—
“With these, by righte comes Coriolanus in,
Whose cruell minde did make his countrie smarte;
Till mothers teares, and wiues, did pittie winne.”
And these few lines, in fact, are a summary of the plot and chief
incidents of Shakespeare’s play of Coriolanus, so that it is far
from being unlikely that they may have been the germ, the very
seed-bed of that vigorous offset of his genius. Almost the exact
blame which Whitney imputes is also attributed to Coriolanus
by his mother Volumnia (act. v. sc. 3, l. 101, vol. vi. p. 407), who
charges him with,—
“Making the mother, wife and child, to see
The son, the husband and the father, tearing
His country’s bowels out.”
And when wife and mother have conquered his strong hatred
against his native land (act. v. sc. 3, l. 206, vol. vi. p. 411),
Coriolanus observes to them,—
“Ladies, you deserve
To have a temple built you: all the swords
In Italy, and her confederate arms,
Could not have made this peace.”
The subject of Alciat’s 119th Emblem, edition 1581, p. 430,
is the Death of Brutus, with the motto,—
Fortuna virtutem superans,—
“Fortune overcoming valour.”
Cæsareo poſtquàm ſuperatus milite, vidit
Ciuili vndantem ſanguine Pharſaliam;
Jam iam ſtricturus moribunda in pectora ferrum,
Audaci hos Brutus protulit ore ſonos:
Infelix virtus; & ſolis prouida verbis,
Fortunam in rebus cur ſequeris dominam?
On the ideas here suggested Whitney enlarges, p. 70, and
writes,—
“When Brvtvs knewe, Avgvstvs parte preuail’de,
And sawe his frendes, lie bleedinge on the grounde,
Such deadlie griefe, his noble harte assail’de,
That with his sworde, hee did him selfe confounde:
But firste, his frendes perswaded him to flee,
Whoe aunswer’d thus, my flighte with handes shalbee.
And bending then to blade, his bared breste,
Hee did pronounce, theise wordes with courage great:
Oh Prowes vaine, I longe did loue thee beste,
But nowe I see, thou doest on fortune waite.
Wherefore with paine, I nowe doe prouue it true,
That fortunes force, maie valiant hartes subdue.”
So, in the Julius Cæsar (act. v. sc. 5, l. 25, vol. vii. p. 413),
the battle of Philippi being irretrievably lost to the party of the
Republic, and Marcus Cato slain, Brutus, meditating self-destruction,
desires aid from one of his friends that he may
accomplish his purpose,—
“Good Volumnius,
Thou know’st that we two went to school together:
Even for that our love of old, I prithee,
Hold thou my sword-hilts, whilst I run on it.
Vol. That’s not an office for a friend, my lord.”
The alarum continues,—the friends of Brutus again remonstrate,
and Clitus urges him to escape (l. 30),—
“Cli. Fly, fly, my lord; there is no tarrying here.
Bru. Farewell to you; and you; and you, Volumnius.
Strato, thou hast been all this while asleep;
Farewell to thee, too, Strato. Countrymen,
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
I shall have glory by this losing day,
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile contest shall attain unto.
So, fare you well at once; for Brutus’ tongue
Hath almost ended his life’s history:
Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest,
That have but labour’d to attain this hour.”
Once more is the alarum raised,—“Fly, fly, fly.” “Hence, I
will follow thee,” is the hero’s answer; but when friends are gone,
he turns to one of his few attendants, and entreats (l. 44),—
“I prithee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord:
Thou art a fellow of a good respect;
Thy life hath had some smatch of honour in it:
Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face,
While I do run upon it. Wilt thou, Strato?
Stra. Give me your hand first: fare you well, my lord.
Bru. Farewell, good Strato. [Runs on his sword.] Cæsar, now be still:
I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.[Dies.]”
In the presence of the conquerors Strato then declares,—
“The conquerors can but make a fire of him;
For Brutus only overcame himself,
And no man else hath honour by his death.
Lucil. So Brutus should be found. I thank thee, Brutus,
That thou hast proved Lucilius’ saying true.”
And we must mark how finely the dramatist represents the
victors at Philippi testifying to the virtues of their foe (l. 68),—
“Antony. This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
* * * * * *
Octavius.[113] According to his virtue let us use him,
With all respect and rites of burial.
Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie,
Most like a soldier, order’d honourably.”
The mode of the catastrophe differs slightly in the two
writers; and undoubtedly, in this as in most other instances,
there is a very wide difference between the life and spiritedness
of the dramatist, and the comparative lameness of the Emblem
writers,—the former instinct with the fire of genius, the latter
seldom rising above an earth-bound mediocrity; yet the
references or allusions by the later poet to the earlier can
scarcely be questioned; they are too decided to be the results
of pure accident.
In one instance Whitney (p. 110, l. 32) hits off the characteristics
of Brutus and Cassius in a single line,—
“With Brutus boulde, and Cassius, pale and wan.”
It is remarkable how Shakespeare amplifies these two epithets,
“pale and wan” into a full description of the personal manner
and appearance of Cassius. Cæsar and his train have re-entered
upon the scene, and (act. i. sc. 2, l. 192, vol. vii. p. 329) the
dictator haughtily and satirically gives order,—
“Cæs. Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Ant. Fear him not, Cæsar; he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
Cæs. Would he were fatter! but I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.”
“Pale and wan,”—two most fruitful words, certainly, to bring
forth so graphic a description of men that are “very dangerous.”
Of names historic the Emblem writers give a great many
examples, but only a few, within the prescribed boundaries of
our subject, that are at the same time historic and Shakespearean.
Vel post mortem formidolosi,—“Even after death to be
dreaded,”—is the sentiment with which Alciatus (Emblem 170),
and Whitney after him (p. 194), associate the noisy drum and
the shrill-sounding horn; and thus the Emblem-classic illustrates
his device,—
“Cætera mutescent, coriumq. silebit ouillum,
Si confecta lupi tympana pelle sonent.
Hanc membrana ouium sic exhorrescit, vt hostem
Exanimis quamuis non ferat exanimem.
Sic cute detracta Ziscas, in tympana versus,
Boëmos potuit vincere Pontifices.”
Literally rendered the Latin elegiacs declare,—
“Other things will grow dumb, and the sheep-skin be silent,
If drums made from the hide of a wolf should sound.
Of this so sore afraid is the membrane of sheep,
That though dead it could not bear its dead foe.
So Zisca’s skin torn off, he, changed to a drum,
The Bohemian chief priests was able to conquer.”
These curious ideas Whitney adopts, and most lovingly enlarges,—
“A Secret cause, that none can comprehende,
In natures workes is often to bee seene;
As, deathe can not the ancient discorde ende,
That raigneth still, the wolfe and sheepe betweene;
The like, beside in many thinges are knowne,
The cause reueal’d, to none, but God alone.
For, as the wolfe, the sillye sheepe did feare,
And make him still to tremble, at his barke:
So beinge dead, which is most straunge to heare,
This feare remaynes, as learned men did marke;
For with their skinnes, if that two drommes bee bounde,
That, clad with sheepe, doth iarre; and hathe no sounde.
And, if that stringes bee of their intrailes wroughte,
And ioyned both, to make a siluer sounde:
No cunninge care can tune them as they oughte,
But one is harde, the other still is droun’de:
Or discordes foule, the harmonie doe marre;
And nothinge can appease this inward warre.
So, Zisca thoughte when deathe did shorte his daies,
As with his voice, hee erste did daunte his foes;
That after deathe hee shoulde new terror raise,
And make them flee, as when they felte his bloes.
Wherefore, hee charg’d that they his skinne shoulde frame,
To fitte a dromme, and marche forth with the same.
So, Hectors sighte greate feare in Greekes did worke,
When hee was showed on horsebacke, beeinge dead:
Hvniades, the terrour of the Turke,
Thoughe layed in graue, yet at his name they fled:
And cryinge babes, they ceased with the same,
The like in France, sometime did Talbots name.”
The cry[114] “A Talbot! a Talbot!” is represented by Shakespeare
as sufficient in itself to make the French soldiers flee and
leave their clothes behind; 1 Henry VI. (act ii. sc. 1, l. 78, vol. v.
p. 29),—