CHAPTER III BOOKS AND POETRY It is safe to assert that Shakespeare was a poet before he was a dramatist. Of his first steps in the practice of poetry nothing is known; but the study of his plays and poems has thrown some light on his dealings with literature. Books served him in two ways; as a mine, and as a school: he lifted from them the tales that he rehandled, and he learned from them some part of his poetic and dramatic method. His literary sources have been so carefully identified and so exhaustively studied, that it is possible to make a long catalogue of the books that he read or consulted. The slow-footed and painstaking pursuit of him by the critics through ways that he trod so carelessly and lightly would furnish a happy theme for his own wit and irony. The world lay open to him, and he had small patience with the tedious processes of minute culture. He was a hungry and rapid reader; and has expressed, with something of a witty young man's intolerance, his contempt for more laborious methods: Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks ; Save base authority from others' books. In Stratford he can have had no great choice of books, though we may assume that he read most of those he 63 could lay his hands on. There is extant a private account-book containing an inventory of the furniture and books belonging to Sir William More, of Loseley, in the last year of the reign of Queen Mary, some seven years before Shakespeare was born. This list has nothing to do with Shakespeare, but it serves to show what books were to be found in the library of a country gentleman of literary tastes and easy, though not ample, means. There is a selection of the Latin classics, including works by Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Suetonius, Apuleius, and a volume of extracts from Terence. Cicero's Offices, and Thucydides, occur in the English translations of Whittington and Nicolls. In Italian there are Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavel, and the Book of the Courtier. Medieval literature is represented by the Golden Legend, Vincentius Lirinensis, Albertus De Secretis, and Cato's Precepts; the Revival of Learning by More (the Utopia), Erasmus (the Adages and the Praise of Folly), and Marcellus Palingenius. There is a fair number of Chronicles, including Higden, Fabyan, Harding, and Froissart. The English list includes works by Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, John Heywood, Skelton, Alexander Barclay, and a liberal allowance of books of Songs, Proverbs, Fables, and Ballads. An English Bible, copies of the New Testament in Latin, French, and Italian, Elyot's Latin Dictionary, an Italian Dictionary, some books on law, physic, and land-surveying, "a book of the Turk," and "a treatise of the newe India," make up the list. Last, and never to be forgotten in estimating the poetic influences of the time, in the parlour there was a pair of virginals, a lute, and a gittern. This is a richer collection of books than Shakespeare was likely to find in Stratford, and it is noticeable that, except the Latin poets whom he read at school, none of the authors occurring in the above list influenced him in any marked fashion. He was a child of the English Renaissance, and it was the books of his own age that first caught him in their toils. Even Chaucer, who never lost popularity, lost esteem with the younger generation of Elizabethans, and suffered from the imputation of rusticity. But the translations and imitations of the classics, which poured from the press during the second half of the century, the poems and love-pamphlets and plays of the University wits, the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing Italian taste-all these were the making of the new age and the favourite reading of Shakespeare, who can hardly have become intimate with them until he first set foot in London. No doubt he ranged up and down the bookstalls of Paul's Churchyard, browsing among "the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets" wherewith, according to a contemporary, "this Country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished." Here for a few shillings he may have bought books printed by Caxton and his pupils, and so made acquaintance with Gower, whom he read, and with Malory, some of whose phrases he seems to echo. Here, no doubt, he tore the heart, at a single reading, out of many a pamphlet and many a novel. He was no bibliophile, though he gives utterance, with curious frequency, to the opinion that a good book should have a good binding. He read the works of his contemporaries as they appeared. Marlowe, his master in the drama, he has honoured in the most unusual fashion by direct quotation : Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might; E From Greene's story of Dorastus and Fawnia he took the plot of The Winter's Tale; and it is permissible to think that he commemorated the unhappy life and early death of Greene, who had died reviling him, in those lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream which describe The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death Of Learning late deceas'd in beggary. On Thomas Lodge's novel Rosalynde he based his play of As You Like It. He read Euphues, of course; borrowed from it, and in Henry IV. ridiculed its affectations. He read Sidney's Arcadia, and perhaps took from it the underplot of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear. And apart from these famous instances, there is hardly a pamphlet, in that age of pamphlets, which the student can read in the certainty that Shakespeare has not been before him. The names of the devils in King Lear seem to be borrowed from an obscure Protestant tract, of 1603, called A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures. The arguments of Shylock, in his speeches before the Duke, have been supposed to owe something to Silvayn's Orator, a book of declamations translated in 1596 from the French; while a very close parallel to Portia's reply has been found in the prose of Seneca. These are instances which might be multiplied a hundredfold; and although few are certain cases of debt, their cumulative effect is irresistible. Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of all that brings them new information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles their fancy. Such a reader will perhaps have done with a volume in a few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is a live man; and is sometimes wrongly judged by slower wits to be a learned man. Among the publications of his own age, some few stand out pre-eminent as books that were of more than passing interest to Shakespeare, books that he ransacked from cover to cover for the material of his plays. The books that served him best for his dramatic plots were Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, and the Italian novelists, in many translations, chief among which must be reckoned Painter's Palace of Pleasure, containing a selection of the choicest novels of the great Italian masters. These books, one would say, he must have owned. The novelists supplied him, either directly, or through the medium of some earlier play, with much of the material of his comedy. From Holinshed he took the substance of his English historical plays; and his study of the book acquainted him also with those ancient British legends which he transfigured in King Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. The Italian novels and the English chronicle history cannot compare, in the world's literature, with the thricerenowned Lives of Plutarch; yet all three were worthy to be read and studied by Shakespeare. An examination of the use that he makes of these, his principal sources, shows that he did not pay the same measure of respect to them all. The novels he treats with the utmost freedom, altering them, or adding to them, to suit his fancy. He brings them out of the languid realm of romance by inventing new realistic characters, who give something of the diversity of life to the story, and save it from swooning into sheer convention. Orlando and Rosalind must run the gauntlet of criticism at the hands of |