By Euclid’s axiom, “magnitudes which coincide are equal;” and though the reasonings in geometry and those in heraldry are by no means of forces identical, it may be a just conclusion; therefore, the coincidences and parallelisms of Shakespeare, with respect to Heraldic Emblems, have their original lines and sources in such writers as Giovio, Paradin, and Whitney. It was not he who set up the ancient fortifications, but he has drawn circumvallations around them, and his towers nod over against theirs, though with no hostile rivalry.

ECHO has not more voices than Mythology has transmutations, eccentricities, and cunningly devised fancies,—and every one of them has its tale or its narrative—its poetic tissues woven of such an exquisite thinness that they leave no shadows where they pass. The mythologies of Egypt and of Greece, of Etruria and of Rome, in all their varying phases of absolute fiction and substantial truth, perverted by an unguarded imagination, were the richest mines that the Emblem writers attempted to work; they delighted in the freedom with which the fancy seemed invited to rove from gem to gem, and luxuriated in the many forms into which their fables might diverge. Now they touched upon Jove’s thunder, or on the laurel for poets’ brows, which the lightning’s flash could not harm—then on the beauty and gracefulness of Venus, or on the doves that fluttered near her car;—Dian’s severe strictness supplied them with a theme, or Juno with her queenly birds; and they did not disdain to tell of Bacchus and the vine, of Circe, and Ulysses, and the Sirens. The slaying of Niobe’s children, Actæon seized by his hounds, and Prometheus chained to the rock, Arion rescued by the dolphin, and Thetis at the tomb of Achilles,—these and many other myths and tales of antiquity grew up in the minds of Emblematists, self-sown—ornaments, if not utilities.

Though the great epic poems are inwrought throughout with the mosaic work of fables that passed for divine, and of exploits that were almost more than human, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, printed as early as 1471, and of which an early French edition, in 1484, bears the title La Bible des poetes, may be regarded as the chief storehouse of mythological adventure and misadventure. The revival of literature poured forth the work in various forms and languages. Spain had her translation in 1494, and Italy in 1497; and as Brunet informs us (vol. iv. c. 277), to another of Ovid’s books, printed in Piedmont before 1473, there was this singularly incongruous subscription, “Laus Deo et Virgini Mariæ Gloriosissimæ Johannes Glim.” Caxton, in England, led the way by printing Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1480, which Arthur Golding may be said to have completed in 1567 by his English Metrical Version.

Thus everywhere was the storehouse of mythology open; and of the Roman fabulist the Emblem writers, as far as they could, made a Book of Emblems, and often into their own works transported freely what they had found in his.

And for a poet of no great depth of pure learning, but of unsurpassed natural power and genius, like Shakespeare, no class of books would attract his attention and furnish him with ideas and suggestions so readily as the Emblem writers of the Latin and Teutonic races. “The eye,” which he describes, “in a fine phrensy rolling,” would suffice to take in at a single glance many of the pictorial illustrations which others of duller sensibilities would only master by laborious study; and though undoubtedly, from the accuracy with which Shakespeare has depicted ancient ideas and characters, and shown his familiarity with ancient customs, usages, and events, he must have read much and thought much, or else have thought intuitively, it is a most reasonable conjecture that the popular literature of his times—the illustrated Emblem-books, which made their way of welcome among the chief nations of middle, western, and southern Europe—should have been one of the fountains at which he gained knowledge. Nature, indeed, forms the poet, and his storehouses of materials on which to work are the inner and outer worlds, first of his own consciousness, and next of heaven and earth spread before him. But as a portion of this latter world we may name the appliances and results of artistic skill in its delineations of outward forms, and in the fixedness which it gives to many of the conceptions of the mind. To the artist himself, and to the poet not less than to the artist, the pictured shapes and groupings of mythological or fabulous beings are most suggestive, both of thoughts already embodied there, and also of other thoughts to be afterwards combined and expressed.

Hence would the Emblem-books, on some of which the foremost painters and engravers had not disdained to bestow their powers, become to poets especially fruitful in instruction. A proverb, a fable, an old world deity is set forth by the pencil and the graving tool, and the combination supplies additional elements of reflection. Thus, doubtless, did Shakespeare use such works; and not merely are some of his thoughts and expressions in unison with them, but moulded and modified by them.

For much indeed of his mythological lore he was indebted to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or, rather, I should say, to “Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated out of Latin in English metre by Arthur Golding, gent. A worke very pleasaunt and delectable; 4to London 1565.” That he did attend to Golding’s couplet,—

will appear from some few instances; as,—

and,—

Yet from the Emblem writers as well he appears to have derived many of his mythological allusions and expressions; we may trace this generally, and with respect to some of the Heathen Divinities,—to several of the ancient Heroes and Heroines, we may note that they supply him with most beautiful personifications.

Generally, as in Troilus and Cressida (act ii. sc. 3, l. 240), the expression “bull-bearing Milo” finds its device in the Emblemata of Lebeus Batillius, edition Francfort, 1596, where we are told that “Milo by long custom in carrying the calf could also carry it when it had grown to be a bull.” In Romeo and Juliet (act ii. sc. 5, l. 8) the lines,—

We have the scene pictured in Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie, Paris, 1540, leaf 70, with, however, a very grand profession of regard for the public good,—

In Richard II.(act iii. sc. 2, l. 24) Shakespeare seems to have in view the act of Cadmus, when he sowed the serpent’s teeth,—

And the device which emblematizes the fact occurs in Symeoni’s abbreviation of the Metamorphoses into the form of Italian Epigrams (edition Lyons, 1559, device 41, p. 52).

And lastly, in 3 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 1, l. 34), from a few lines of dialogue between Warwick and King Edward, we read,—

But a better comment cannot be than is found in Giovio’s “Dialogve,” edition Lyons, 1561, p. 129, with Atlas carrying the Globe of the Heavens, and with the motto, “Svstinet nec fatiscit,”—He bears nor grows weary.

The story of Jupiter and Io is presented in the Emblem-books by Symeoni, 1561, and by the Plantinian edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Antwerp, 1591, p. 35. From the latter, were it needed, we could easily have added a pictorial illustration to the Taming of the Shrew (Induction, sc. 2, l. 52),—

The Antony and Cleopatra (act ii. sc. 7, l. 101, vol. ix. p. 60), in one part, presents the banquet, or, rather, the drinking bout, between Cæsar, Antony, Pompey, and Lepidus, “the third part of the world.” Enobarbus addresses Antony,—

Now, the figures in Alciat, in Whitney, in the Microcosmos,^[127] and especially in Boissard’s “Theatrvm Vitæ Humanæ,” ed. Metz, 1596, p. 213, of a certainty suggest the epithets “plumpy Bacchus” “with pink eyne,” a very chieftain of “Egyptian Bacchanals.” This last depicts the “monarch of the vine” approaching to mellowness.

The Latin stanzas subjoined would, however, not have suited Enobarbus and the roistering triumvirs of the world,—

The phrase, “rempli de vin dont son visage est teint,” in “Le Microcosme,” Lyons, 1562, suggests the placing the stanzas in which it occurs, in illustration of Shakespeare’s song; they are,—

On the same subject we may refer to Love’s Labour’s Lost (act iv. sc. 3, l. 308, vol. ii. p. 151), to the long discourse or argument by Biron, in which he asks,—

The offensiveness of excess in wine is then well set forth (l. 333),—

On these words the best comment are two couplets from Whitney (p. 133), to the sentiment, Prudentes vino abstinent,—“The wise abstain from wine.”

Not less degrading and brutalising than the goblets of Bacchus are the poisoned cups of the goddess Circe. Her fearful power and enchantments form episodes in the 10th book of the Odyssey, in the 7th of the Æneid, and in the 14th of the Metamorphoses. So suitable a theme for their art is not neglected by the Emblem writers. Alciat adopts it as a warning against meretricious allurements (edition 1581, p. 184),—

To recommend the sentiment that “Art is a help to nature,” Alciatus (edition 1551, p. 107) introduces the god Mercury and the goddess Fortune,—