in literary art, as he did of the methods of his
fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the players in HAMLET was
hardly less a critic than a poet; and the sonnet[109] which speaks of
its author as

"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"

is one of the least uncertain revelations that these enigmatic poems
yield us. We may confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110]
that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:

"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"

has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his
most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here concerned with
influences of thought, as distinct from influences of artistic example;
and the question is: Do the plays show any other culture-contact
comparable to that which we have been led to recognise in the case of
Montaigne's Essays?

The matter cannot be said to have been very fully investigated when even
the Montaigne influence has been thus far left so much in the vague. As
regards the plots, there has been exhaustive and instructive research
during two centuries; and of collations of parallel passages, apart from
Montaigne, there has been no lack; but the deeper problem of the
dramatist's mental history can hardly be said to have arisen till our
own generation. As regards many of the parallel passages, the ground
has been pretty well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship brought to
bear on them from Farmer onwards; though the idolatry of the Coleridgean
school, as represented by Knight, did much to retard scientific
conclusions on this as on other points.

Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all
open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical
knowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further
investigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the
effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;[113]
and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as
against the view suggested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John W.
Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's tragedies on Shakspere's.
Unquestionably the body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valuable
research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the
Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its
technique. But it is noteworthy that while there are in the plays, as we
have seen, apparent echoes fro