Paradin, ed. 1562, p. 12v.
From Paradin we learn that the Order of St. Michael had for its motto Immensi tremor Oceani,—“The trembling of the immeasurable ocean,”—and for its badge the adjoining collar.—
“This order was instituted by Louis XI., King of France, in the year 1469.[123] He directed for its ensign and device a collar of gold, made with shells laced together in a double row, held firm upon little chains or meshes of gold; in the middle of which collar on a rock was a gold-image of Saint Michael, appearing in the front. And this the king did (with respect to the Archangel) in imitation of King Charles VII. his father; who had formerly borne that image as his ensign, even at his entry into Rouen. By reason always (it is said) of the apparition, on the bridge of Orleans, of Saint Michael defending the city against the English in a famous attack. This collar then of the royal order and device of the Knights of the same is the sign or true ensign of their nobleness, virtue, concord, fidelity and friendship; Pledge, reward and remuneration of their valour and prowess. By the richness and purity of the gold are pointed out their high rank and grandeur; by the similarity or likeness of its shells, their equality, or the equal fraternity of the Order (following the Roman senators, who also bore shells on their arms for an ensign and a device); by the double lacing of them together, their invincible and indissoluble union; and by the image of Saint Michael, victory over the most dangerous enemy. A device then instituted for the solace, protection and assurance of this so noble a kingdom; and, on the contrary, for the terror, dread and confusion of the enemies of the same.”
Paradin (f. 25) is also our authority with respect to the Order of the Golden Fleece, its motto and device being thus presented:—
“The order of the Golden Fleece,” says Paradin, “was instituted by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, styled the Good, in the year 1429, for which he named[124] twenty-four Knights without reproach, besides himself, as chief and founder, and gave to each one of them for ensign of the said Order a Collar of gold composed of his device of the Fusil, with the Fleece of gold appearing in front; and this (as people say) was in imitation of that which Jason acquired in Colchis, taken customarily for Virtue, long so much loved by this good Duke, that he merited this surname of Goodness, and other praises contained on his Epitaph, where there is mention made of this Order of the Fleece, in the person of the Duke saying,—
The expedition of the Argonauts, and Jason’s carrying off of the Golden Fleece may here be appropriately mentioned; they are referred to by the Emblem writers, as well as the exploit of Phrixus, the brother of Helle, in swimming across the Hellespont on the golden-fleeced ram. The former Whitney introduces when describing the then new and wonderful circumnavigation of the globe by Sir Francis Drake (p. 203),—
Alciat, 1551.
The latter forms the subject of one of Alciat’s Emblems, edition Antwerp, 1581, Emb. 189, in which, seated on the precious fleece, Phrixus crosses the waters, and fearless in the midst of the sea mounts the tawny sheep, the type of “the rich man unlearned.” Whitney (p. 214) substitutes In diuitem, indoctum,—“To the rich man, unlearned,”—and thus paraphrases the original,—
In a similar emblem, Beza, edition Geneva, 1580, Emb. 3, alludes to the daring deed of Phrixus,—
Thus rendered in the French version,—
The Merchant of Venice (act. i. sc. 1, l. 161, vol. ii. p. 284) presents Shakespeare’s counterpart to the Emblematists; it is in Bassanio’s laudatory description of Portia, as herself the golden fleece,—
To this may be added a line or two by Gratiano, l. 241, p. 332,—
The heraldry of Imaginative Devices in its very nature offers a wide field where the fancy may disport itself. Here things the most incongruous may meet, and the very contrariety only justify their being placed side by side.
Let us begin with the device, as given in the “Tetrastichi Morali,” p. 56, edition Lyons, 1561, by Giovio and Symeoni, used between 1498 and 1515; it is the device
to the motto, “Hand to hand and afar off”—
Cominus & eminus.
A Porcupine is the badge, and the stanza declares,—
Camerarius with the same motto and the like device testifies that this was the badge of Louis XI., king of France, to whose praise he also devotes a stanza,—
It was this Louis who laid claim to Milan, and carried Ludovic Sforza prisoner to France. He defeated the Genoese after their revolt, and by great personal bravery gained the victory of Agnadel over the Venetians in 1509. At the same time he made war on Spain, England, Rome, and Switzerland, and was in very deed the porcupine darting quills on every side.
The well known application in Hamlet (act. i. sc. 5, l. 13, vol. viii. p. 35) of the chief characteristic of this vexing creature is part of the declaration which the Ghost makes to the Prince of Denmark,—
And of “John Cade of Ashford,” in 2 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 1, l. 360, vol. v. p. 162), the Duke of York avers,—
From the same source, Giovio’s and Symeoni’s “Sententiose Imprese,” Lyons, 1561, p. 115, we also derive the cognizance,—
Giovio and Symeoni, 1561.
To this Ostrich, with a large iron nail in its mouth, and with a scroll inscribed, “Courage digests the hardest things,” the stanza is devoted which means,—
Camerarius, to the same motto, Ex Volatilibus (ed. 1595, p. 19), treats us to a similar couplet,—
Shakespeare’s description of the ostrich, as given by Jack Cade, 2 Henry VI. (act iv. sc. 10, l. 23, vol. v. p. 206), is in close agreement with the ostrich device,—
“Here’s the lord of the soil,” he says, “come to seize me for a stray, for entering his fee-simple without leave. Ah, villain, thou wilt betray me, and get a thousand crowns of the king for carrying my head to him; but I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.”
Note the iron pin in the ostrich’s mouth.
“My Lady Bona of Savoy,” as Paradin (ed. 1562, fol. 165) names her, “the mother of Ian Galeaz, Duke of Milan, finding herself a widow, made a device on her small coins of a Phœnix in the midst of a fire, with these words, ‘Being made lonely, I follow God alone.’ Wishing to signify that, as there is in the world but one Phœnix, even so being left by herself, she wished only to love conformably to the only God, in order to live eternally.”[125]
The “Tetrastichi Morali” presents the same Emblem, as indeed do Giovio’s “Dialogo dell’ Imprese,” &c., ed. Lyons, 1574, and “Dialogve des Devises,” &c., ed. Lyons, 1561;
with the same motto, and the invariable Italian Quatrain,—
In English,—
The full description and characteristics of the Phœnix we reserve for the section which treats of Emblems for Poetic Ideas; but the loneliness, or if I may use the term, the oneliness of this fabulous bird Shakespeare occasionally dwells upon.
In the Cymbeline (act i. sc. 6, l. 12, vol. ix. p. 183), Posthumus and Iachimo had made a wager as to the superior qualities and beauties of their respective ladies, and Iachimo takes from Leonatus an introduction to Imogen; the Dialogue thus proceeds,—
Rosalind, in As You Like It (act iv. sc. 3, l. 15, vol. ii. p. 442), thus speaks of the letter which Phebe, the shepherdess, had sent her,—
The oneliness of the bird is, too, well set forth in the Tempest (act iii. sc. 3, l. 22, vol. i. p. 50),—
To the Heraldry of Imaginative Devices might be referred the greater part of the coats of arms, badges and cognizances by which noble and gentle families are distinguished. To conclude this branch of our subject, I will name a woodcut which was probably peculiar to Geffrey Whitney at the time when Shakespeare wrote, though accessible to the dramatist from other sources; it is the fine frontispiece to the Choice of Emblemes, setting forth the heraldic honours and arms of Robert, Earl of Leycester, and in part of his brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Each of these noblemen bore the same crest, and it was, what Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 1, l. 203, vol. v. p. 215), terms “the rampant bear chained to the ragged staff.”
Whitney, 1586.
How long this had been the cognizance of the Earls of Warwick, and whether it was borne by all the various families of the Saxon and Norman races who held the title,—by the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, and the Dudleys, admits of doubt; but it is certain that such was the cognizance in the reign of Henry VI. and in that of Elizabeth.
According to Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, edition 1730, p. 398, the monument of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in Edward III.’s time, has a lion, not a bear; and a lamb for his Countess, the Lady Katherine Mortimer. Also on the monument of another Earl (p. 404), who died in 1401, the bear does not appear; but on the monument of Richard Beauchamp, who died “the last day of Aprill, the year of our lord god 1434,” the inscriptions are crowded with bears, instead of commas and colons; and the recumbent figure of the Earl has a muzzled bear at his feet (p. 410). The Nevilles now succeeded to the title, and a limner’s or designer’s very curious bill, of the fifteenth year of Henry VI., 1438, shows that the bear and ragged staff were then both in use and in honour,—
Among the monuments in the Lady Chapel at Warwick is a full length figure of “Ambrose Duddeley,” who died in 1589, and of a muzzled bear crouching at his feet. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester, his brother, died in 1588; and on his magnificent tomb, in the same chapel, is seen the same cognizance of the bear and ragged staff. The armorial bearings, however, are a little different from those which Whitney figures.
If, according to the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s works, 1863–1866, vol. v. p. vii., “the play upon which the Second part of Henry the Sixth was founded was first printed in quarto, in 1594;” or if, as some with as much reason have supposed,[126] it existed even previous to 1591, it is not likely that these monuments of elaborate design and costly and skilled workmanship could have been completed, so that from them Shakespeare had taken his description of “old Nevil’s crest.” Nathan Drake’s Shakspeare and his Times (vol. i. pp. 410, 416) tells us that he left Stratford for London “about the year 1586, or 1587;” yet “the family residence of Shakspeare was always at Stratford: that he himself originally went alone to London, and that he spent the greater part of every year there alone, annually, however, and probably for some months, returning to the bosom of his family, and that this alternation continued until he finally left the capital.”
Of course, had the monuments in question existed before the composition of the Henry VI., his annual visits to his native Warwickshire would have made them known to him, and he would thus have noted the family cognizance of the brother Earls; but reason favours the conjecture that these monuments in the Lady Chapel were not the sources of his knowledge.
Common rumour, indeed, may have supplied the information; but as Geffrey Whitney’s book appeared in 1586, its first novelty would be around it about the time at which Shakespeare was engaged in producing his Henry VI. That Emblem-book was dedicated to “Robert Earle of Leycester;” and, as we have said, contains a drawing, remarkably graphic, of a bear grasping a ragged staff, having a collar and chain around him, and standing erect on the helmet’s burgonet. There is also a less elaborate sketch of the same badge on the title-page to the second part of Whitney’s Emblemes, p. 105.
Most exactly, most artistically, does the dramatist ascribe the same crest, in the same attitude, and in the same standing place, to Richard Nevil, Earl of Warwick, the king-setter-up and putter-down of History. In the fields between Dartford and Blackheath, in Kent, the two armies of Lancaster and York are encamped; in the Dialogue, there is almost a direct challenge from Lord Clifford to Warwick to meet upon the battle-field. York is charged as a traitor by Clifford (2 Henry VI., act v. sc. 1, l. 143, vol. v. p. 213), but replies,—
The Dialogue continues until just afterwards Warwick makes this taunting remark to Clifford (l. 196),—
A closer correspondence between a picture and a description of it cannot be desired; Shakespeare’s lines and Whitney’s frontispiece exactly coincide;
By Euclid’s axiom, “magnitudes which coincide are equal;” and though the reasonings in geometry and those in heraldry are by no means of forces identical, it may be a just conclusion; therefore, the coincidences and parallelisms of Shakespeare, with respect to Heraldic Emblems, have their original lines and sources in such writers as Giovio, Paradin, and Whitney. It was not he who set up the ancient fortifications, but he has drawn circumvallations around them, and his towers nod over against theirs, though with no hostile rivalry.
Horapollo, ed. 1551.
ECHO has not more voices than Mythology has transmutations, eccentricities, and cunningly devised fancies,—and every one of them has its tale or its narrative—its poetic tissues woven of such an exquisite thinness that they leave no shadows where they pass. The mythologies of Egypt and of Greece, of Etruria and of Rome, in all their varying phases of absolute fiction and substantial truth, perverted by an unguarded imagination, were the richest mines that the Emblem writers attempted to work; they delighted in the freedom with which the fancy seemed invited to rove from gem to gem, and luxuriated in the many forms into which their fables might diverge. Now they touched upon Jove’s thunder, or on the laurel for poets’ brows, which the lightning’s flash could not harm—then on the beauty and gracefulness of Venus, or on the doves that fluttered near her car;—Dian’s severe strictness supplied them with a theme, or Juno with her queenly birds; and they did not disdain to tell of Bacchus and the vine, of Circe, and Ulysses, and the Sirens. The slaying of Niobe’s children, Actæon seized by his hounds, and Prometheus chained to the rock, Arion rescued by the dolphin, and Thetis at the tomb of Achilles,—these and many other myths and tales of antiquity grew up in the minds of Emblematists, self-sown—ornaments, if not utilities.
Though the great epic poems are inwrought throughout with the mosaic work of fables that passed for divine, and of exploits that were almost more than human, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, printed as early as 1471, and of which an early French edition, in 1484, bears the title La Bible des poetes, may be regarded as the chief storehouse of mythological adventure and misadventure. The revival of literature poured forth the work in various forms and languages. Spain had her translation in 1494, and Italy in 1497; and as Brunet informs us (vol. iv. c. 277), to another of Ovid’s books, printed in Piedmont before 1473, there was this singularly incongruous subscription, “Laus Deo et Virgini Mariæ Gloriosissimæ Johannes Glim.” Caxton, in England, led the way by printing Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1480, which Arthur Golding may be said to have completed in 1567 by his English Metrical Version.
Thus everywhere was the storehouse of mythology open; and of the Roman fabulist the Emblem writers, as far as they could, made a Book of Emblems, and often into their own works transported freely what they had found in his.
And for a poet of no great depth of pure learning, but of unsurpassed natural power and genius, like Shakespeare, no class of books would attract his attention and furnish him with ideas and suggestions so readily as the Emblem writers of the Latin and Teutonic races. “The eye,” which he describes, “in a fine phrensy rolling,” would suffice to take in at a single glance many of the pictorial illustrations which others of duller sensibilities would only master by laborious study; and though undoubtedly, from the accuracy with which Shakespeare has depicted ancient ideas and characters, and shown his familiarity with ancient customs, usages, and events, he must have read much and thought much, or else have thought intuitively, it is a most reasonable conjecture that the popular literature of his times—the illustrated Emblem-books, which made their way of welcome among the chief nations of middle, western, and southern Europe—should have been one of the fountains at which he gained knowledge. Nature, indeed, forms the poet, and his storehouses of materials on which to work are the inner and outer worlds, first of his own consciousness, and next of heaven and earth spread before him. But as a portion of this latter world we may name the appliances and results of artistic skill in its delineations of outward forms, and in the fixedness which it gives to many of the conceptions of the mind. To the artist himself, and to the poet not less than to the artist, the pictured shapes and groupings of mythological or fabulous beings are most suggestive, both of thoughts already embodied there, and also of other thoughts to be afterwards combined and expressed.
Hence would the Emblem-books, on some of which the foremost painters and engravers had not disdained to bestow their powers, become to poets especially fruitful in instruction. A proverb, a fable, an old world deity is set forth by the pencil and the graving tool, and the combination supplies additional elements of reflection. Thus, doubtless, did Shakespeare use such works; and not merely are some of his thoughts and expressions in unison with them, but moulded and modified by them.
For much indeed of his mythological lore he was indebted to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or, rather, I should say, to “Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated out of Latin in English metre by Arthur Golding, gent. A worke very pleasaunt and delectable; 4to London 1565.” That he did attend to Golding’s couplet,—
will appear from some few instances; as,—
and,—
Yet from the Emblem writers as well he appears to have derived many of his mythological allusions and expressions; we may trace this generally, and with respect to some of the Heathen Divinities,—to several of the ancient Heroes and Heroines, we may note that they supply him with most beautiful personifications.
Generally, as in Troilus and Cressida (act ii. sc. 3, l. 240), the expression “bull-bearing Milo” finds its device in the Emblemata of Lebeus Batillius, edition Francfort, 1596, where we are told that “Milo by long custom in carrying the calf could also carry it when it had grown to be a bull.” In Romeo and Juliet (act ii. sc. 5, l. 8) the lines,—
We have the scene pictured in Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie, Paris, 1540, leaf 70, with, however, a very grand profession of regard for the public good,—
In Richard II.(act iii. sc. 2, l. 24) Shakespeare seems to have in view the act of Cadmus, when he sowed the serpent’s teeth,—
And the device which emblematizes the fact occurs in Symeoni’s abbreviation of the Metamorphoses into the form of Italian Epigrams (edition Lyons, 1559, device 41, p. 52).
And lastly, in 3 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 1, l. 34), from a few lines of dialogue between Warwick and King Edward, we read,—
But a better comment cannot be than is found in Giovio’s “Dialogve,” edition Lyons, 1561, p. 129, with Atlas carrying the Globe of the Heavens, and with the motto, “Svstinet nec fatiscit,”—He bears nor grows weary.
The story of Jupiter and Io is presented in the Emblem-books by Symeoni, 1561, and by the Plantinian edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Antwerp, 1591, p. 35. From the latter, were it needed, we could easily have added a pictorial illustration to the Taming of the Shrew (Induction, sc. 2, l. 52),—