hese parallels is that between 'Will all
great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:

Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
Non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris. (_Hipp._ 715.)

Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
Haerebit altum facinus. (_Herc. Furens_, 1323.)

(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent
pace.') Medea's incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, vii. 197 ff.,
which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, _Tempest_, V. i. 33 ff.,
should be compared with Seneca, _Herc. Oet._, 452 ff., 'Artibus
magicis,' etc. It is of course highly probable that Shakespeare read
some Seneca at school. I may add that in the _Hippolytus_, beside the
passage quoted above, there are others which might have furnished him
with suggestions. Cf. for instance _Hipp._, 30 ff., with the lines about
the Spartan hounds in _Mids. Night's Dream_, IV. i. 117 ff., and
Hippolytus' speech, beginning 483, with the Duke's speech in _As You
Like It_, II. i.]

[Footnote 243: Cf. Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.]

[Footnote 244: It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,

Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls.

There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is
that of leaving his home. And even if it were, it is Macduff that
speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the
preceding sentence,

Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part?

And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words 'the voice of revolt ...
that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of _King Lear_.' It
sounds a good deal earlier too; _e.g._ in _Tit. And._, IV. i. 81, and _2
Henry VI._, II. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan
tragedy.]

[Footnote 245: And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet,
aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more
plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
history