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Classical Allusions in Shakespeare's Henry V with Special Reference To Virgil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

John H. Betts
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Extract

To assess the influence of one author on another and the extent of one's use of another is always difficult. When the authors assessed are poets who each give a highly individual stamp to material, it is doubly difficult. When they are separated by one and a half millennia and by a language difference, the assessment is open to pitfalls almost too enormous to bear contemplation. What follows, therefore, does not attempt to be a categorical statement that Shakespeare used Virgil solely or in part in any one particular instance or in any one particular way; it rather offers a juxtaposition of lines, images, or ideas which appear to be similar in both authors, in the hope that the comparisons may prove interesting in themselves and that the sum total of them may lead at least to some guarded and cautious conclusions about the use of classical authors and in particular of Virgil's poetry and thought by Shakespeare in Henry V.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , October 1968 , pp. 147 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1968

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References

page 147 note 1 Baldwin, T. W., William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greek (Urbana, 1944), 2 vols.Google Scholar

page 147 note 2 Spencer, T. J. B., ed. Shakespeare's Plutarch (London, 1964), 201 f.Google Scholar

page 147 note 3 Rouse, W. H. D., ed. Shakespeare's Ovid (London, 1961), 142Google Scholar; Baldwin, , op. cit. ii. 443 ff.Google Scholar

page 148 note 1 Prickard, A. O., ed. The Persae of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1885), xxix ff.Google Scholar

page 148 note 2 Norwood, G., Greek Tragedy (London, 1920), 88.Google Scholar

page 149 note 1 Warmington, E. H., ed. Remains of Old Latin (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1936) ii. 318Google Scholar, unassigned fragment of Pacuvius 37–42; Baldwin, , op. cit. ii. 72.Google Scholar

page 149 note 2 Baldwin, , op. cit. ii. 190 and 336 ff.Google Scholar

page 149 note 3 Ibid. ii. 212 f.

page 150 note 1 Baldwin, , op, cit. ii. 197 f.Google Scholar

page 150 note 2 Ibid. i. 629 f.

page 152 note 1 Cf. Wilson, J. D., ed. Henry V (1947), 128Google Scholar, Starnes, D. T., University of Texas Studies in English, 7, 116 ff.Google Scholar, who suggest Elyot as Shakespeare's source, Bullough, G., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1962), iv. 356Google Scholar, who says the bee comparison was ‘taken from Lyly's Euphues’, and Thomson, J. A. K., Shakespeare and the Classics (London, 1952), 104 f.Google Scholar, who denies any direct influence from Virgil, with Baldwin, , op. cit. ii. 472 ff.Google Scholar, and Walter, J. H., ed. Henry V (1954), 22.Google Scholar

page 154 note 1 Walter, , op. cit. 21.Google Scholar

page 155 note 1 Bullough, , op. cit. iv. 370.Google Scholar

page 155 note 2 Spurgeon, C. F. E., Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge, 1952), 219 ff.Google Scholar

page 156 note 1 Spurgeon, , op. cit. 167.Google Scholar

page 157 note 1 The names of plants in this and subsequent translations are taken from Abbe, E., The Plants of Virgil's Georgics (1965).Google Scholar

page 158 note 1 Baldwin, , op. cit. ii. 467.Google Scholar

page 159 note 1 Otis, B., Virgil, A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford, 1963), 216.Google Scholar The dominant storm imagery in King Lear, the storm that rages within Lear himself, ‘mad as the vex'd sea’, reflected by the actual violence of the elements around him, may even bear comparison with the Aeneid, where the internal conflicts of Aeneas are symbolically expressed in the storm which besets him in Book i and perhaps also the further storm in Book iv; cf. Clemen, W., The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951), 146 ff.Google Scholar, especially with Pöschl, V., The Art of Vergil, Image and Symbol in the Aeneid (Michigan, 1962), 13 ff.Google Scholar

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page 163 note 1 Quoted by Nitchie, E., ‘Longinus and the Theory of Poetic Imitation in 17th and 18th Century England’ in Studies in Philology 32 (1935), 588.Google Scholar