.
Tschischwitz credits him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on the
other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and ethically of the serious side of
drunkenness,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence
in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of
drunken practices.[135] Yet again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, "Sol
et homo generant hominem," beside Hamlet's gibe about the sun breeding
maggots in a dead dog--a phrase possible to any euphuist of the period.
That the parallels amount at best to little, Dr. Tschischwitz himself
indirectly admits, though he proceeds to a new extravagance of
affirmation:

"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,
or that Shakspere otherwise went any deeper into Bruno's
system than suited his purpose, but that such passages show
Shakspere, at the time of his writing of HAMLET, to have
already reached the heights of the thought of the age
(Zeitbewusstsein), and to have made himself familiar with
the most abstract of the sciences. Many hitherto almost
unintelligible passages in HAMLET are now cleared up by the
poet's acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the
writings of the Nolan."

All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German
Shakspere-criticism of the days before Ruemelin. It is quite possible
that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his
friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have
profoundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at Oxford on the
immortality of the soul included the matter he published later on the
subject, they may have called English attention to the Pythagorean lore
concerning the fate of the soul after death,[136] above cited from
Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the
verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the
poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in Bruno
as this:--

"The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of the
phantasy; the first and most capital poet is the inspiration
that originally arises with the impulse of deep thought, or
is set up by that, through the divine or akin-to-divine
breath of which they feel themselves moved to the fit
expression of their thoughts. For each it creates the other
principle. Therefore are the philosophers in a certain sense
painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the
painters,