As examples of a sentiment directly opposite, we will briefly refer to Coustau’s Pegma (p. 323, edition Lyons, 1555), where to the device of a Camel and his driver, the noble motto is recorded and exemplified from Plutarch, Homo homini Deus,—“Man is a God to man;” the reason being assigned,—
“As the world was created for sake of gods and men, so man was created for man’s sake;” and, “that the grace we receive from the immortal God is to be bestowed on man by man.”
Reusner, too, in his Emblemata (p. 142, Francfort, 1581), though commenting on the contrary saying, Homo homini lupus, declares,—
Was it in reference to these sentiments that Hamlet and Cerimon speak? The one says (Hamlet, act iv. sc. 4, l. 33. vol. viii. p. 127),—
And again (act ii. sc. 2, l. 295, vol. viii. p. 63),—
“What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!”
So in the Pericles (act iii. sc. 2, l. 26, vol. ix. p. 366), the fine thought is uttered,—
The horses and chariot of Phœbus, and the presumptuous charioteer Phaëton, who attempted to drive them, are celebrated with great splendour of description in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (bk. ii. fab. 1), that rich storehouse of Mythology. The palace of the god has lofty columns bright with glittering gold; the roof is covered with pure shining ivory; and the double gates are of silver. Here Phœbus was throned, and clothed in purple;—the days and months and years,—the seasons and the ages were seated around him; Phaëton appears, claims to be his son, and demands for one day to guide the glorious steeds. At this point we take up the narrative which Alciat has written (Emb. 56), and inscribed, “To the rash.”[140]
Shakespeare’s notices of the attempted feat and its failure are frequent. First, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona (act iii. sc. 1, l. 153, vol. i. p. 121), the Duke of Milan discovers the letter addressed to his daughter Silvia, with the promise,—
and with true classic force denounces the folly of the attempt,—
In her impatience for the meeting with Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, act iii. sc. 2, l. 1, vol. vii. p. 72), Juliet exclaims,—
The unfortunate Richard II. (act iii. sc. 3, l. 178, vol. iv. p. 179), when desired by Northumberland to meet Bolingbroke in the courtyard (“may’t please you to come down”), replies,—
And he too, in 3 Henry VI. (act i. sc. 4, l. 16, vol. v. p. 244), Richard, Duke of York, whose son cried,—
when urged by Northumberland (l. 30),—
had this answer given for him by the faithful Clifford,—
That same Clifford (act ii. sc. 6, l. 10, vol. v. p. 271), when wounded and about to die for the Lancastrian cause, makes use of the allusion,—
In the early heroic age, when Minos reigned in Crete and Theseus at Athens, just as Mythology was ripening into history, the most celebrated for mechanical contrivance and for excellence in the arts of sculpture and architecture were Dædalus and his sons Talus and Icarus. To them is attributed the invention of the saw, the axe, the plumb-line, the auger, the gimlet, and glue; they contrived masts and sailyards for ships; and they discovered various methods of giving to statues expression and the appearance of life. Chiefly, however, are Dædalus and Icarus now known for fitting wings to the human arms, and for attempting to fly across the sea from Crete to the shore of Greece. Dædalus, hovering just above the waves, accomplished the aërial voyage in safety; but Icarus, too ambitiously soaring aloft, had his wings injured by the heat of the sun, and fell into the waters, which from his death there were named the Icarian sea.
From the edition of Alciat’s Emblems, 1581, we select a drawing which represents the fall of Icarus; it is dedicated “To Astrologers,” or fortune tellers. The warning in the last two lines is all we need to translate,—
Emblema ciii.
Alciat, 1581.
Whitney, however (p. 28), will supply the whole,—
We use this opportunity to present two consecutive pages of Corrozet’s “Hecatomgraphie” (Emb. 67), that the nature of his
devices, and of their explanations may be seen. There is a motto,—“To take the middle way,”—and these lines follow—
In the page of metrical explanation subjoined, the usual mythic narrative is closely followed.
The full idea is carried out in 3 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 6, l. 18, vol. v. p. 332), Gloucester and King Henry being the speakers,—
In the 1st part also of the same dramatic series (act iv. sc. 6, l. 46, vol. v. p. 78), John Talbot, the son, is hemmed about in the battle near Bourdeaux. Rescued by his father, he is urged to escape, but the young hero replies,—
The tearful tale of Niobe, who that has read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (bk. vi. fab. 5) could not weep over it! Seven stalwart sons and seven fair daughters clustered round the haughty dame, and she gloried in their attendance upon her; but at an evil hour she dared to match herself with Latona, and at a public festival in honour of the goddess to be the only one refusing to offer incense and prayers. The goddess called her own children to avenge the affront and the impiety; and Apollo and Diana, from the clouds, slew the seven sons as they were exercising on the plain near Thebes. Yet the pride of Niobe did not abate, and Diana in like manner slew also the seven daughters. The mother’s heart was utterly broken; she wept herself to death, and was changed to stone. Yet, says the poet, Flet tamen,—“ Yet she weeps,”—
Alciat adopts the tale as a warning; Pride he names his 67th Emblem.
Alciat, 1581
As we look at the device we are sensible to a singular incongruity between the subject and the droll, Punch-like figures, which make up the border. The sentiment, too, is as incongruous, that “Pride is a woman’s vice and argues hardness of look and of feeling such as there is in stone.”
Making a slight change in the motto, Whitney (p. 13) writes. Superbiæ vltio,—“Vengeance upon pride,”—
Shakespeare’s notices of Niobe are little more than allusions; the mode in which Apollo and Diana executed the cruel vengeance may be glanced at in All’s Well (act v. sc. 3, l. 5, vol. iii. p. 201), when the Countess of Rousillon pleads for her son to the King of France,—
Troilus (act v. sc. 10, l. 16, vol. vi. p. 261), anticipating Priam’s and Hecuba’s mighty grief over the slain Hector, speaks thus of the fact,—
Hamlet, too (act i. sc. 2, l. 147, vol. viii. p. 17), in his bitter expressions respecting his mother’s marriage, speaks thus severely of the brevity of her widowhood,—
Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, had foretold that the comely Narcissus would live as long as he could refrain from the sight of his own countenance,—
“But he, ignorant of his destiny,” says Claude Mignault, “grew so desperately in love with his own image seen in a fountain, that he miserably wasted away, and was changed into the flower of his own name, which is called Narce, and means drowsiness or infatuation, because the smell of the Narcissus affects the head.”
However that may be, Alciatus, edition Antwerp, 1581, exhibits the youth surveying his features in a running stream; the flower is behind him, and in the distance is Tiresias pronouncing his doom. “Self love” is the motto.
Alciat, 1581.
Anulus also, in the “Picta Poesis” (p. 48), mentions his foolish and vain passion,—
From Alciat and Anulus, Whitney takes up the fable (p. 149), his printer Rapheleng using the same wood-block as Plantyn did in 1581. Of the three stanzas we subjoin one,—
It is only in one instance, Antony and Cleopatra (act ii. sc. 5, l. 95, vol. ix. p. 48), and very briefly, that Shakespeare names Narcissus; he does this when the Messenger repeats to Cleopatra that Antony is married, and she replies,—
Aneau, 1551.
The most beautiful of the maidens of Thessaly, Daphne, the daughter of the river-god Peneus, was Apollo’s earliest love. He sought her in marriage, and being refused by her, prepared to force consent. The maiden fled, and was pursued, and, at the very moment of her need invoked her father’s aid, and was transformed into a laurel.
At this instant the device of Anulus represents her, in the “Picta Poesis” (P. 47).[141]
The Midsummer Night’s Dream (act ii. sc. 1, l. 227, vol. ii. p. 218) reverses the fable; Demetrius flees and Helena pursues,—
There is, too, the quotation already made for another purpose (p. 115) from the Taming of the Shrew (Introd. sc. 2, l. 55),—
And Troilus (act i. sc. 1, l. 94, vol. vi. p. 130) makes the invocation,—
Among Mythological Characters we may rank Milo, “of force unparalleled;” to whom with crafty words of flattery Ulysses likened Diomed; Troilus and Cressida (act ii. sc. 3, l. 237),—
Milo’s prowess is the subject of a fine device by Gerard de Jode, in the “ΜΙΚΡΟΚΟΣΜΟΣ” (p. 61), first published in 1579, with Latin verses. Respecting Milo the French verses say,—
The famous winged horse, Pegasus, heroic, though not a hero, has a right to close in our array of mythic characters. Sprung from the blood of Medusa when Perseus cut off her head, Pegasus is regarded sometimes as the thundering steed of Jove, at other times as the war-horse of Bellerophon; and in more modern times, under a third aspect, as the horse of the Muses. Already (at p. 142) we have spoken of some of the merits attributed to him, and have presented Emblems in which he is introduced. It will be sufficient now to bring forward the device and stanza of Alciat, in which he shows us how “by prudence and valour to overcome the Chimæra, that is, the stronger and those using stratagems.”
Alciat, 1581.
Shakespeare recognises neither Bellerophon nor the Chimæra, but Pegasus, the wonderful creature, and Perseus its owner.
The dauphin Lewis (see p. 141) likens his own horse to Pegasus, “with nostrils of fire,”—
It is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire ... he is indeed a horse.
In the Grecian camp (see Troilus and Cressida, act i. sc. 3, l. 33, vol. vi. p. 142), Nestor is urging the worth of dauntless valour, and uses the apt comparison,—
The last lines are descriptive of Alciat’s device, on p. 299.
It is the same Nestor (act iv. sc. 5, l. 183), who so freely and generously compliments Hector, though his enemy,—
Young Harry’s praise, too, in 1 Henry IV., act iv. sc. 1. l. 109, vol. iv. p. 318, is thus celebrated by Vernon,—
For nearly all the personages and the tales contained in this section, authority may be found in Ovid, and in the various pictorially illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses or of portions of them, which were numerous during the actively literary life of Shakespeare. It is, I confess, very questionable, whether for his classically mythic tales he was indeed indebted to the Emblematists; yet the many parallels in mythology between him and them justify the pleasant labour of setting both side by side, and, by this means, of facilitating to the reader the forming for himself an independent judgment.
David, ed. 1601.
SIMILITUDES and, in cases not a few, identities have often been detected between the popular tales of widely distant nations, intimating either a common origin, or a common inventive power to work out like results. Fables have ever been a floating literature,—borne hither and thither on the current of Time,—used by any one, and properly belonging to no one. How they have circulated from land to land, and from age to age, we cannot tell; whence they first arose it is impossible to divine. There exist, we are told, fables collected by Bidpai in Sanscrit, by Lokman in Arabic, by Æsop in Greek, and by Phædrus in Latin; and they seem to have been interchanged and borrowed one from the other as if they were the property of the world,—handed down from the ancestorial times of a remote antiquity.
Shakespeare’s general estimation of fables, and of those of Æsop in particular, may be gathered from certain expressions in two of the plays,—in the Midsummer Night’s Dream (act v. sc. 1, l. 1, vol. ii. p. 258) and in 3 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 5, l. 25, vol. v. p. 329). In the former the speakers are Hippolyta and Theseus,—
In the latter Queen Margaret’s son in reproof of Gloucester, declares,—
The year of Shakespeare’s birth, 1564, saw the publication, at Rome, of the Latin Fables of Gabriel Faerni; they had been written at the request of Pope Pius IV., and possess a high degree of excellence, both for their correct Latinity and for the power of invention which they display. Roscoe, in his Life of Leo X. (Bohn’s ed. ii. p. 172), even avers that they “are written with such classical purity, as to have given rise to an opinion that he had discovered and fraudulently availed himself of some of the unpublished works of Phædrus.” This opinion, however, is without any foundation.
The Dialogues of Creatures moralised preceded, however, the Fables of Faerni by above eighty years. “In the Latin and Dutch only there were not less than fifteen known editions before 1511.”[142] An edition in Dutch is named as early as 1480, and one in French in 1482; and the English version appeared, it is likely, at nearly as early a date. These and other books of fables, though by a contested claim, are often regarded as books of Emblems. The best Emblem writers, even the purest, introduce fables and little tales of various kinds; as Alciat, Emb. 7, The Image of Isis, the Ass and the Driver; Emb. 15, The Cock, the Lion, and the Church; Emb. 59, The Blackamoor washed White, &c.: Hadrian Junius, Emb. 4, The caged Cat and the Rats; Emb. 19, The Crocodile and her Eggs: Perriere, Emb. 101, Diligence, Idleness, and the Ants. They all, in fact, adopted without scruple the illustrations which suited their particular purpose; and Whitney, in one part of his Emblemes, uses twelve of Faerni’s fables in succession.
Of the fables to which Shakespeare alludes some have been quoted in the former part of this work;—as The Fly and the Candle; The Sun, the Wind, and the Traveller; The Elephant and the undermined Tree; The Countryman and the Serpent. Of others we now proceed to give examples.
The Hares biting the dead Lion had, perhaps, one of its earliest applications, if not its origin, in the conduct of Achilles and his coward Greeks to the dead body of Hector, which Homer thus records (Iliad, xxii. 37),—