- Shakespeare's Funeral Meats
- Portia's Quality of Mercy
- A Model for Lady Macbeth
Shakespeare scholars have been aware for centuries now that the ghost in Hamlet was probably borrowed from Seneca’s play Agamemnon. It hasn’t ruffled too many feathers, anyway, as John Studley’s English translations of the Roman stoic’s Medea and Agamemnon were published in 1566. The earliest of those scholars who have left us a record is Thomas Nashe. In his introduction to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589) we learn some venal newcomers:
leaue the trade of Nouerint whereto they were borne, and busie themselues with the indeuors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should haue neede; yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth : and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches.[1]
Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not. No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.
Those who were willing to push the play back and to find a way, nonetheless, to have a 25 year old Stratford man write it, latched onto the “noverint” description. Shakespeare had shown considerable legal knowledge in his plays. Just how that could be was a matter of some consternation. Nash, however, could be interpreted to have said that he was a legal secretary, a noverint. Problem solved! The “whole Hamlets,” then, must mean that Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, clearly closely related to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was the Seneca-inspired play from which “whole Hamlets” were being stolen.
Of course, this is precisely the opposite of what is being said. While Kyd had attended the excellent Merchant Taylors' School, in London, the Latin he picked up there does not seem to have impressed the highly fluent Nashe. The Merchant Taylors was more-or-less the equivalent of a high-end modern high school. Kyd did not go on to University.
The reason he attended the school was that his father ranked high enough in the Scriveners' Company to be regularly elected warden of his parish church. To be a senior member of a major guild was no small matter. The best school might be available to one’s sons. Moreover, another name for a scrivener (if one copied legal documents) was a noverint. If Thomas Kyd did not become a noverint for a time, he was certainly “born into” the trade. Likely he tried it for a time.
Therefore, Nashe says that Kyd tried to compete with a highly successful play entitled Hamlet by stealing phrases out of an English Seneca. Somehow, Hamlet is intimately connected to Seneca in Nashe’s mind.
The only “English Seneca” at the time was the 1581 volume of his tragedies translated by Studley and others for the stage and collected under the title The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca. Numerous clues show that Kyd drew upon the volume. Nevertheless, he does not draw actual text from it.
His ghost in The Spanish Tragedie is clearly drawn from the ghost of Tantalus in the play Thyestes. The character Revenge is drawn from Tantalus’s foil, the fury Megaera. Their conversations are completely inspired in subject and tone by Seneca’s play.
As for the play Hamlet, as we have it from Shakespeare, the ghost is just as clearly drawn from Seneca’s Agamemnon. He is Thyestes, now dead. A major difference, however, is that Shakespeare’s play frequently quotes the Latin original when it diverges from the translation in the Tenne Tragedies.
While the plot of Shakespeare’s play is drawn from Belleforest’s Ameleth, much of the tone and many of the additional scenes not in Belleforest are adapted from the Agamemnon. The translation of the play glosses over the sense of irony the ghost expresses that a banquet is laid out in the midst of such a bloody time. The king is about to be murdered.
Now, now shall this house swim in blood other than mine; swords, axes, spears, a king's head cleft with the axe's heavy stroke, I see; now crimes are near, now treachery, slaughter, gore—feasts are being spread.[2]
In Seneca, the feast is to celebrate the birthday of Thyestes’ son Aegisthus. But the guest of honor has arrived (if only in spirit): his mother Pelopia. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, arrives as the guest of honor, the bride.
Not only is the irony present in Shakespeare while it is missing the 1566 translation, the prince’s mother is present as guest of honor only in the former. Something else rather stunning is present. Seneca’s “parantur epulae” is translated literally into Hamlet as “baked-meats / Did coldly furnish forth”.
Hor. My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
Ham. I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student ;
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
Hor. Indeed, my lord, it follow'd hard upon.
Ham. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.[3]
The sole addition in Hamlet is the adverb coldly. Shakespeare’s translation is far superior to Studley’s who doesn’t even mention the meats.
This example is only one of dozens of such instances when Shakespeare can absolutely be shown to have been steeped in original Latin texts from Seneca. Such knowledge makes clear that he had much more than a Stratford Free School education of Latin squibs. I will show many of those dozens scattered throughout numerous plays in this series of posts.
[1] Greene, Robert. Menaphon: Camila's alarm to slumbering Euphues in his melancholy cell at Silexedra (1589). Arber ed. (1895). 9.
[2] Seneca in Nine Volumes: IX Tragedies II, (Harvard Loeb, 1968). Agamemnon, 7. This is Frank Justice Miller’s solid translation of
iam iam natabit sanguine alterno domus:
enses secures tela, divisum gravi
ictu bipennis regium video caput;
iam scelera prope sunt, iam dolus, caedes, cruor —
parantur epulae.
[3] Furness, Horace Howard. A New Variorum Edition Of Shakespeare. Hamlet I (1918). I.ii.176-81.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Plague Dogs in 16th Century London. April 7, 2020. "In his account of the sources and effects of pestilences, from his enormously popular poem De Rerum Natura, the Roman author Titus Lucretius Carus noted that dogs caught pestilences as well."
- What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01? January 28, 2020. “Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.”
- Who Saved Southampton from the Ax? September 2, 2019. “One of the popular mysteries of the final years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I is why the Queen executed her favorite, the Earl of Essex, for treason, and left his accomplice, the Earl of Southampton, to languish as a prisoner in The Tower until King James I ascended the throne.”
- A Most Curious Account of the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I: April 28, 1603. April 28, 2019. “Once it was clear that James I would face no serious challenges, Cecil and the others could begin to give attention to the matter of the Queen’s funeral.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
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