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The Stoic Consolatio and Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Benjamin Boyce
Benjamin Boyce*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska
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Extract

Though Shakespeare's liking for Stoic commonplaces of the sort that one finds in the prose works of Seneca, Plutarch, Cardano, and Justus Lipsius no longer needs to be pointed out and though interesting evidence has recently been assembled1 of Shakespeare's utilizing the forms and principles of traditional Renaissance rhetoric, there is one rhetorical pattern used by Shakespeare, itself a development from Stoic prose models, which seems not to have caught the eye of modern students. This is the consolatio or “Paramythia … a forme of speech which the Orator vseth to take away, or diminish a sorrow conceiued in the minde of his hearer”, as Henry Peacham defined it in 1593.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , September 1949 , pp. 771 - 780
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 Thomas W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine “ Lesse Greeke (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), esp. chs. xxviii, XXXVIII-XLI.

2 The Garden of Eloquence, p. 100.

3 See Constant Martha, “Les Consolations dans l'Antiquité”, Etudes Morales sur l'Antiquité (Paris, 1883).

4 Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, iv, v; v, xvi; Epistulae ad Brutum, i, xvi; Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium; Seneca, Ad Marciam De Consolatione and Ad Polybium and Ad Eehiam Malrem; Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, LXIII, XCVIII, xcix.

5 Epist. Moral., xcix.

6 Epist. ad Famil., v, xvi.

7 ii Corinthians 2: 7.

8 Printed by Harry Sellars in MLR, xi (1916), 29.

9 (1637), p. 5.

10 Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford, 1902), i, 310–316.

11 Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia (Leyden, 1703), i, cols. 426–435.

12 G. H. Mair ed. (Oxford, 1909), pp. 65–66.

13 1595 ed., pp. 112–128 (first pub. 1586).

14 Baldwin, Shakspere's Small Latine, ii, 287.

15 “Death is common to al persons, though to some one waye, and to some another”—attributed to Socrates in William Baldwin's Treatyse of Morall Philosophy [15S7], fol. 90v.

16 Ad Marciam, xi, 1—Seneca Moral Essays, tr. John W. Basore (Loeb Classical Library: London—New York), ii (1932), 33.

17 The English Secreiorie, p. 122. It is at this point in Day's consolatio that a widow is made to imagine a visitation from the disapproving ghost of her husband.

18 iv, v, 65–83. The consolatio and response in Richard II (i, iii, 258–303) on the topic of exile are more poetic but quite conventional, as a comparison with Cicero and Erasmus would show.

19 i, iii, 206–209. Cf. Ad Marciam, v, 6: “Nothing casts so much contempt on Fortune as an unruffled spirit.”

20 Epist. Moral., xxxiii, 7.

21 The English Secrelorie, pp. 127–128. The adage about easily giving counsel to the sick when we are well comes from Erasmus.

22 The idea would not have shocked Seneca. See Epist. Moral., xciv, 9: “Indeed, the persons who take the greatest pains to proffer such advice are themselves unable to put it into practice. It is thus that the pedagogue advises the boy, and the grandmother her grandson; it is the hottest-tempered schoolmaster who contends that one should never lose one's temper”—Seneca Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, tr. Richard M. Gummere (Loeb Classical Library, London—New York), iii (1925), 17.

23 This same unorthodox method of combating grief is used by Malcolm in Macbeth (iv, iii, 207–240).