may be a terse reminiscence of Plautus's-it may be given in English-"If you lend a person any money it becomes lost, so far as you are concerned. When you ask for it back again you may find a friend made an enemy by your kindness. Should you press still further, either you must part with that which you have lent, or else you must lose that friend" (Trinumus, iv. 3). It has been conjectured that the famous speech of Jacques in As You Like It, "All the world's a stage," etc., was suggested to Shakespeare by the phrase from Petronius, which was inscribed on the portico of the Globe Theatre, Totus mundus agit histrionem.1 Is it not possible that he found the germ of the noble passage about the poet in the Midsummer Night's Dream (v. 1) in Plautus's Pseudolus (Act i. sc. 4, 7-10): Sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi, Quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, reperit tamen : (But just as the poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere fiction.) In any case, of Shakespeare's familiarity with Plautus there can be no doubt-I have only given a few typical illustrations; the subject, if quod fere totus Petronius, ed. Burmann, 1Adapted from The Fragments mundus exerceat histrionem. p. 873. treated in detail, would require a monograph1and that he read him in the Latin is all but certain. If it be argued that he had access to manuscript translations, we can only reply that the balance of probability is very much more in favour of arguments based on facts than of arguments based on unsupported hypothesis, for of such translations there is no record. Of Terence," whom he frequently recalls (see Colman's notes in his translation), I say nothing, because he had access to Nicolas Udall's Floures for Latin Speakyng, containing an English version of a large portion of three of the Comedies, published in 1560, to the second edition containing versions 1 I would venture to suggest that it would form an appropriate subject for a thesis at the Universities. 2 In the manuscripts in the British Museum there are only two versions from classical dramatists which can be assigned to the sixteenth century—an anonymous version of Seneca's Medea, circa 1600 (Sloane, 911 f.b. 100-15 b.), and a version of the greater part of the Iphigenia in Aulis, by Lady Lumley (Roy. 15, a. ix. f. 63). In the Bodleian there are none at all. This seems proof positive that classical translations could not have circulated on a large scale, or more examples could scarcely have failed to make their way into these collections. 3 The parallels as collected by Colman are certainly remarkable, and in many of them Shakespeare might just as likely have gone to the original as to the English version. The line in the Taming of the Shrew, "redime te captum quam queas minimo," wrongly quoted or adapted from the Eunuchus, i. i. 29, on which Colman relied as a proof that Shakespeare was recollecting the original, occurs, as Farmer triumphantly pointed out, in Lily's Grammar. from the remaining Comedies, published in 1575, and later to Richard Bernard's literal translation of the whole of the Comedies, published in 1598. Next, we come to the tragedies of Seneca. It would not be too much to say that Titus Andronicus and the three parts of Henry VI. are saturated with the influence of these tragedies, that that influence is as obviously apparent in Richard III., and that it is to be traced in King John, and even in Hamlet, and in Macbeth. This has been so fully illustrated by Mr. J. W. Cunliffe, in his excellent monograph, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (pp. 6688), that it is unnecessary for me to go over the ground again. But what I wish to insist on is that Shakespeare read Seneca in the Latin original, not in the lumbering English version of Studley, Nevile, Newton, Nuce, and Jasper Heywood, published by Newton in 1581. This must be obvious to any one who compares his reminiscences and imitations with the English version and the Latin original, though, necessarily in most cases, it is not possible to decide which he may have followed. As an illustration of a reminiscence which must almost certainly have been from the Latin, take these lines from King John (iii. 4) compared by Mr. Cunliffe : A sceptre, snatch'd with an unruly hand, a passage recalling generally Hercules Furens, 341-5 Rapta sed trepida manu Sceptra obtinentur: omnis in ferro est salus. Haud stabile regnum est. Now the English translation not only mistranslates "obtinentur," but gives, as Mr. Cunliffe points out, an entirely different turn to the whole passage, as may be seen by comparing it : But got with fearful hand : My scepters are obtaynd: in surrd doth all my safety stand, What thee then wotst agaynst the will of cytesyns to get The bright drawn surrd must it defend: in forrayne country set No stable kingdome is. To paraphrase "alienus" as "slippery," deducing that meaning from what "does not belong to one," and so uncertain, is just what might be expected from an inexact scholar. In Titus Andronicus Seneca is twice quoted from memory in the Latin : Sit fas aut nefas Per styga per manes vehor. (ii. 1.) Cf. Hippolytus, 1180:— Tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides? the original being "Magne regnator Deûm," etc. (Hippolytus, 671-2). The English version bears no resemblance to the style of Seneca, and, indeed, stands in pretty much the same relation to it as Hobbes' semi-doggrel version of the Iliad stands to the Greek original. But in his earlier plays, where the influence of Seneca is most perceptible, Shakespeare's style is often as near a counterpart in English of Seneca's style in Latin as can well be. Mr. Cunliffe, who has carefully compared Shakespeare's many indisputable reminiscences and imitations of Seneca both with the Latin and with the English version, is of opinion that the question as to which he followed is so nicely balanced that if the authorship of Titus Andronicus could be established it would turn the scale. But it seems to me that the scale is turned by evidence to which for some reason Mr. Cunliffe appears to attach no importance, the evidence to which I have just referred, the evidence of style and tone. What could be less like the style of Seneca than that of the English version? What more like it than the style of the passages in Shakespeare which recall him more closely in other respects? In Shakespeare's Next, let us take Horace. time there was no translation of the Odes, and yet his plays abound in what certainly appear to be reminiscences of them. Take a very few from very many. Thus in Richard III. the lines (iii. 5): Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks |