"Shakespeare's Latin Sources for 1000, Alex": Maximianus.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. '"Shakespeare's Latin Sources for 100 Alex": Maximianus.'  Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2018/11/shakespeares-latin-sources-for-100-alex.html [state date accessed].

While reading Robinson Ellis’s article “On the Elegies of Maximianus”[1], for background toward a review of A. M. Juster’s recent translation of the Elegies[2], I came across the following:

The 19^th Sonnet of Shakespere begins with these verses :

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws.

which are, to say the least, very like Maxim. I 271, 2,

Fracta diu rabidi conpescitur ira leonis

Lentaque per senium Caspia tigris erit.

[Long broken down, the angry lion’s rage is checked;

A Caspian tiger will be slow in dotage.[3]]

It is the kind of Shakespeare reference scattered everywhere in our literature.  To wander at large through literary scholarly texts day after day is to come upon such dim, lonely stars, from time to time, far from the central constellations of Shakespeare scholarship.

Often they are suggestions that The Bard might have known one or another Latin text.  In the above instance, the similarity is clear enough but but not necessarily close enough.  Maximilianus was quite popular during the Middle Ages, and, during the 16^th century, Schweiger’s Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie lists editions published in 1501 (Venice), 1503 (Paris), 1509 (Strasburg), 1518 (Lyon)[4], and 1588 (Florence).  Our poet could easily have read the elegies.  But it lacks blunted claws or toothless jaws.  For me, it is too general to be advanced as a certainty.

Of course, most investigations of Shakespeare’s debt to Latin works are not obiter dicta.  Nor are all commentators sure they enjoy the task.

‘Any learned scholar who took a delight in what I confess seems to me the barren and ungrateful task of pointing out all the passages in Shakespeare capable of serving as a text, or pretext, for classical quotations,’ Paul Stapfer complains, ‘would have to distinguish three separate classes: first, the passages borrowed directly from ancient authors; second, those borrowed indirectly; third, mere coincidences.

The distinction is not always easy to make; as, for instance, when Ophelia is buried, Laertes takes last leave of her in the touching and poetic words:—

"Lay her i' the earth ;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring! " (Act V., Sc. 1.)

And in Persius we find—

"Non nunc e manibus istis,

Non nunc e tumulo fortunataque favilla

Nascentur violae?"

[Is not now his departing spirit,

Not now the grave that holds his fair ashes

Sprung up with violets?]

Did Shakespeare borrow this, or is it a mere coincidence?’[5]

Here, I suggest, the exact match of small details tells us that the two passages are indeed related.  Both sets of remains are of fair (fortunataque) persons.  Both graves specifically sprout violets.  Shakespeare seems clearly to have read from the Satires of Persius.

What seems not to be related is the tone and context.  Persius cannot give himself momentary permission to compose a genuinely beautiful lyrical swatch without it being also a sneer. There is no sign that such is the case in Hamlet’s elegiac moment on the death of Ophelia.

Among the many points half made in Stapfer’s book is the fact that ‘…it was not on account of an insufficient knowledge of Latin that he preferred to use the English translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" rather than the original, but because he read English more quickly, and less time was lost.’[6]  There are plenty of signs that he was widely read in the Latin classics.  But as he moved away from plays for Court audiences, toward plays for London audiences, there were fewer references drawn directly from Latin sources. 

What sources Shakespeare went to in each play are amongst the best evidence of when and in what order the plays were written.  As a general rule, plays written to be acted before the Royal Court tended to display their authors’ classical learning.  Plays with Latin quotes are almost certain to have been written for either the Court or the Universities.  If the quotes throughout were short, the stuff of school lessons, and/or generally epigrammatic, the play was written to be performed by a boys’ company probably in Blackfriars.  If the quotes were longer and integrated more into the play it was written to be performed at a university or an Inn of Court.  Shakespeare displays these same stylistic markers.

When Shakespeare switched from writing plays for the Court to plays for a general audience, Latin rarely appeared in the text.  Displays of education were neither detected nor appreciated by such audiences.  He also goes to translations more because he is writing more, with more complex delineation of character, and, thus, at a more demanding pace.  In the words of Stapfer “he read English more quickly, and less time was lost.”  Also, as a result, he began plagiarizing whole speeches from works the style of which he greatly admired.  Whether as an effect or a parallel development, his plays were becoming more complex literary works needing new strategies in order to get them ready for performance in the limited time at hand.

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[1] Ellis, Robinson.  “On the Elegies of Maximianus I”. The American Journal of Philology,   Vol. V, No. 17, 1.  New York: MacMillan and Co., 1884.

[2] Juster, A. M. The Elegies of Maximianus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, no date [2018].

[3] Juster, 37.

[4] Published together with selections from Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius as was often the case.

[5] Stapfer, Paul.  Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 95.

[6] Stapfer, 102.

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• Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.