HAVING established the facts that Shakespeare invented and described Emblems of his own, and that he plainly and palpably adopted several which had been designed by earlier authors, we may now, with more consistency, enter on the further labour of endeavouring to trace to their original sources the various hints and allusions, be they more or less express, which his sonnets and dramas contain in reference to Emblem literature. And we may bear in mind that we are not now proceeding on mere conjecture; we have dug into the virgin soil and have found gold that can bear every test, and may reasonably expect, as we continue our industry, to find a nugget here and a nugget there to reward our toil.

But the correspondencies and parallelisms existing in Shakespeare between himself and the earlier Emblematists are so numerous, that it becomes requisite to adopt some system of arrangement, or of classification, lest a mere chaos of confusion and not the symmetry of order should reign over our enterprise. And as “all Emblemes for the most part,” says Whitney to his readers, “maie be reduced into these three kindes, which is Historicall, Naturall, & Morall,” we shall make that division of his our foundation, and considering the various instances of imitation or of adaptation to be met with in Shakespeare, shall arrange them under the eight heads of—1, Historical Emblems; 2, Heraldic Emblems; 3, Emblems of Mythological Characters; 4, Emblems illustrative of Fables; 5, Emblems in connexion with Proverbs; 6, Emblems from Facts in Nature, and from the Properties of Animals; 7, Emblems for Poetic Ideas; and 8, Moral and Æsthetic, and Miscellaneous Emblems.

Section I.
HISTORICAL EMBLEMS.

AS soon as learning revived in Europe, the great models of ancient times were again set up on their pedestals for admiration and for guidance. Nearly all the Elizabethan authors, certainly those of highest fame, very frequently introduce, or expatiate upon, the worthies of Greece and Rome,—both those which are named in the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, and those which are within the limits of authentic history. It seemed enough to awaken interest, “to point a moral, or adorn a tale,” that there existed a record of old.

Shakespeare, though cultivating, it may be, little direct acquaintance with the classical writers, followed the general practice. He has built up some of the finest of his Tragedies, if not with chorus, and semi-chorus, strophe, anti-strophe, and epode, like the Athenian models, yet with a wonderfully exact appreciation of the characters of antiquity, and with a delineating power surprisingly true to history and to the leading events and circumstances in the lives of the personages whom he introduces. From possessing full and adequate scholarship, Giovio, Domenichi, Claude Mignault, Whitney, and others of the Emblem schools, went immediately to the original sources of information. Shakespeare, we may admit, could do this only in a limited degree, and generally availed himself of assistance from the learned translators of ancient authors. Most marvellously does he transcend them in the creative attributes of high genius: they supplied the rough marble, blocks of Parian perchance, and a few tools more or less suited to the work; but it was himself, his soul and intellect and good right arm, which have produced almost living and moving forms,—

For Medeia, one of the heroines of Euripides, and for Æneas and Anchises in their escape from Troy, Alciat (Emblem 54), and his close imitator Whitney (p. 33), give each an emblem.

To the first the motto is,—

similar, as a counterpart, to the Saviour’s words (Luke xvi. 12), “If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own.”

The device is,—

with the following Latin elegiacs,—

Which Whitney (p. 33) considerably amplifies,—

And to the same purport, from Alciat’s 193rd Emblem, are Whitney’s lines (p. 29),—

The stanza of his 194th Emblem is adapted by Alciat, and by Whitney after him (p. 163), to the motto,—

The two emblems of Medeia and of Æneas and Anchises, Shakespeare, in 2 Henry VI. (act. v. sc. 2, l. 45, vol. v. p. 218), brings into close juxta-position, and unites by a single description; it is, when young Clifford comes upon the dead body of his valiant father, stretched on the field of St. Albans, and bears it lovingly on his shoulders. With strong filial affection he addresses the mangled corpse,—

On the instant the purpose of vengeance enters his mind, and fiercely he declares,—

Then suddenly there comes a gush of feeling, and with most exquisite tenderness he adds,—

The same allusion, in Julius Cæsar (act. i. sc. 2, l. 107, vol. vii. p. 326), is also made by Cassius, when he compares his own natural powers with those of Cæsar, and describes their stout contest in stemming “the troubled Tyber,”—

Progne, or Procne, Medeia’s counterpart for cruelty, who placed the flesh of her own son Itys before his father Tereus, is represented in Aneau’s “Picta Poesis,” ed. 1552, p. 73, with a Latin stanza of ten lines, and the motto, “Impotentis Vindictæ Foemina,”—The Woman of furious Vengeance. In the Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc. 2, l. 192, vol. vi. p. 522) the fearful tale of Progne enters into the plot, and a similar revenge is repeated. The two sons of the empress, Chiron and Demetrius, who had committed atrocious crimes against Lavinia the daughter of Titus, are bound, and preparations are made to inflict such punishment as the world’s history had but once before heard of. Titus declares he will bid their empress mother, “like to the earth swallow her own increase.”

’Tis a fearful scene, and the father calls,—

A character from Virgil’s Æneid (bk. ii. lines 79–80; 195–8; 257–9),^[109] frequently introduced both by Whitney and Shakespeare, is that of the traitor Sinon, who, with his false tears and lying words, obtained for the wooden horse and its armed men admission through the walls and within the city of Troy. Asia, he averred, would thus secure supremacy over Greece, and Troy find a perfect deliverance. It is from the “Picta Poesis” of Anulus (p. 18), that Whitney (p. 141) on one occasion adopts the Emblem of treachery, the untrustworthy shield of Brasidas,—

Thus rendered in the Choice of Emblemes,—

And again, adopting the Emblem of John Sambucus, edition Antwerp, 1564, p. 184,^[110] and the motto,

with the exemplification of the Elephant and the undermined tree, Whitney writes (p. 150),—

Freitag’s “Mythologia ethica,” pp. 176, 177, sets forth the well-known fable of the Countryman and the Viper, which after receiving warmth and nourishment attempted to wound its benefactor. The motto is,—

Nicolas Reusner, also, edition Francfort, 1581, bk. ii. p. 81, has an Emblem on this subject, and narrates the whole fable,—

In several instances in his historical plays, Shakespeare very expressly refers to this fable. On hearing that some of his nobles had made peace with Bolingbroke, in Richard II. (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 129, vol. iv. p. 168), the king exclaims,—

In the same drama (act. v. sc. 3, l. 57, vol. iv. p. 210) York urges Bolingbroke,—

And another, bearing the name of York, in 2 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 1, l. 343, vol. v. p. 162), declares to the nobles,—

Also Hermia, Midsummer Night’s Dream (act. ii. sc. 2, l. 145, vol. ii. p. 225), when awakened from her trance-like sleep, calls on her beloved,—

Whitney combines Freitag’s and Reusner’s Emblems under one motto (p. 189), In sinu alere serpentem,—“To nourish a serpent in the bosom,”—but applies them to the siege of Antwerp in 1585 in a way which Schiller’s famous history fully confirms:^[112]—“The government of the citizens was shared among too many hands, and too strongly influenced by a disorderly populace to allow any one to consider with calmness, to decide with judgment, or to execute with firmness.”

The typical Sinon is here introduced by Whitney,—

In fact, Sinon seems to have been the accepted representative of treachery in every form; for when Camillus, at the siege of Faleria, rewarded the Schoolmaster as he deserved for attempting to give up his scholars into captivity, the occurence is thus described in the Choice of Emblemes, p. 113,—

Shakespeare is even more frequent in his allusions to this same Sinon. The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, speaks of him as “the perjured Sinon,” “the false Sinon,” “the subtle Sinon,” and avers (vol. ix. p. 537, l. 1513),—

Also in 3 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 188, vol. v. p. 285), and in Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc. 3, l. 85, vol. vi. p. 527), we read,—

and,—

But in Cymbeline (act. iii. sc. 4, l. 57, vol. ix. p. 226), Æneas is joined in almost the same condemnation with Sinon. Pisano expostulates with Imogen,—

Doubtless it will be said that such allusions to the characters in classical history are the common property of the whole modern race of literary men, and that to make them implies no actual copying by later writers of those who preceded them in point of time; still in the examples just given there are such coincidences of expression, not merely of idea, as justify the opinion that Shakespeare both availed himself of the usual sources of information, and had read and taken into his mind the very colour of thought which Whitney had lately spread over the same subject.

The great Roman names, Curtius, Cocles, Manlius and Fabius gave Whitney the opportunity for saying (p. 109),—

And these few lines, in fact, are a summary of the plot and chief incidents of Shakespeare’s play of Coriolanus, so that it is far from being unlikely that they may have been the germ, the very seed-bed of that vigorous offset of his genius. Almost the exact blame which Whitney imputes is also attributed to Coriolanus by his mother Volumnia (act. v. sc. 3, l. 101, vol. vi. p. 407), who charges him with,—

And when wife and mother have conquered his strong hatred against his native land (act. v. sc. 3, l. 206, vol. vi. p. 411), Coriolanus observes to them,—

The subject of Alciat’s 119th Emblem, edition 1581, p. 430, is the Death of Brutus, with the motto,—

The mode of the catastrophe differs slightly in the two writers; and undoubtedly, in this as in most other instances, there is a very wide difference between the life and spiritedness of the dramatist, and the comparative lameness of the Emblem writers,—the former instinct with the fire of genius, the latter seldom rising above an earth-bound mediocrity; yet the references or allusions by the later poet to the earlier can scarcely be questioned; they are too decided to be the results of pure accident.

In one instance Whitney (p. 110, l. 32) hits off the characteristics of Brutus and Cassius in a single line,—

It is remarkable how Shakespeare amplifies these two epithets, “pale and wan” into a full description of the personal manner and appearance of Cassius. Cæsar and his train have re-entered upon the scene, and (act. i. sc. 2, l. 192, vol. vii. p. 329) the dictator haughtily and satirically gives order,—

“Pale and wan,”—two most fruitful words, certainly, to bring forth so graphic a description of men that are “very dangerous.”

Of names historic the Emblem writers give a great many examples, but only a few, within the prescribed boundaries of our subject, that are at the same time historic and Shakespearean.

Vel post mortem formidolosi,—“Even after death to be dreaded,”—is the sentiment with which Alciatus (Emblem 170), and Whitney after him (p. 194), associate the noisy drum and the shrill-sounding horn; and thus the Emblem-classic illustrates his device,—