al mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare
may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's
treatment of this story in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ gives but a
slight basis for proving literary relations.

[Page Heading: Ovid]

Virgil followed Ovid in the fifth year, and with Virgil, Terence. Of
direct knowledge of the latter the plays bear no trace, but of the
former there seems to be an influence in the description of the painting
of Troy in _Lucrece_, 1366 ff., and in two short Latin sentences in _2
Henry VI_, II. i. 24, and IV. i. 117. Horace, Plautus, Juvenal, Persius,
and Seneca were the new authors taken up in the last years in school.
All the Horace in the plays may have been taken from other works, like
the passage already quoted from Lily's Grammar. Juvenal and Persius have
left no mark. The _Menaechmi_ and _Amphitruo_ of Plautus furnish the
basis for _The Comedy of Errors_, and no English translation of either
of these is known before that of the _Menaechmi_ in 1595, which some
critics think Shakespeare may have seen in manuscript. But no verbal
similarities confirm this conjecture, and there is no reason why the
dramatist should not have known both plays at first hand.

The influence of Seneca is dramatically the most important among the
classical authors. All the plays that go by his name had been translated
into English in the first part of Elizabeth's reign; he was the main
channel through which the forms of classical tragedy reached the
Renaissance; and when Shakespeare began to write he was the dominant
force in the field of tragedy. This makes it hard to say whether the
Senecan features in _Titus Andronicus_, _Richard III_, and even
_Hamlet_, are due to Seneca directly, or to the tradition already well
established among Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries.

[Page Heading: Results of Schooling]

The impression which the evidence from the textbooks as a whole leaves
on one is that Shakespeare took from school enough Latin to handle an
occasional quotation[3] and to extract the plot of a play, but that he
probably preferred to use a translation when one was to be had. The
slight acquaintance shown with authors not always read at school,
Caesar, Livy, Lucan, and Pliny, does not materially alter this
impression. Much more conclusive as to the effect of his Latin training
than the literary allusions are the numerous words of Latin origin
either coined by Shakespeare, or used in such a w