Ch. 4: Mr. Collins on Shakespeare's Learning - Page 2

University man in London. That is a simple and natural means by which he could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.

Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare's wide and profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: "Nothing which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with certainty that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even that he possessed enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek text." {71a} In that case, how did Shakespeare's English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek idioms, while he only knew the Greek plays through Latin translations?

However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove Shakespeare's close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic literature by a method of which he knows the perils--"it is always perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may be mere coincidences." {72a} Yet this method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for himself.

He thinks it "surely not unlikely" that Polonius's

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend,"

may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (Trinummus, iv. 3). Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of the borrowers and lenders.

Next, take this of Plautus (Pseudolus, I, iv. 7-10), "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." We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus's theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:

"And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."

The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth FORMS, and the poet's pen turns them to SHAPES. But to suppose that Shakespeare here borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.

These are samples of Mr. Collins's methods throughout.

Of Terence there were translations--first in part; later, in 1598, of the whole. Of Seneca there was an English version (1581). Mr. Collins labours to show that one passage "almost certainly" implies Shakespeare's use of the Latin; but it was used "by an inexact scholar,"--a terribly inexact scholar, if he thought that "alienus" ("what belongs to another") meant "slippery"!

Most of the passages are from plays (Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually) to HIS author, the Great Unknown. Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes