one of his most persistent characteristics. The
Elizabethan puritans, too, according to Guillim's _Display of Heraldrie_
(1610), regarded coat-armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with
his son made persistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of
arms. (Cf. _infra_, p. 187 seq.)

{12a} The sum is stated to be 4 pounds in one document
(Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 176) and 40 pounds in another (_ib._ p. 179);
the latter is more likely to be correct.

{12b} _Ib._ ii. 238.

{12c} Efforts recently made to assign the embarrassments of
Shakespeare's father to another John Shakespeare of Stratford deserve
little attention. The second John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name
is usually spelt) came to Stratford as a young man in 1584, and was for
ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of
Master of the Shoemakers' Company in 1592--a certain sign of pecuniary
stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, 137-40).

{13} James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between
expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded
the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in a
_Grace et Latine_ edition. I believe Lowell's parallelisms to be no more
than curious accidents--proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any
indebtedness on Shakespeare's part. In the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which
is akin in its leading motive to _Hamlet_, the Chorus consoles Electra
for the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument as
that with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him. In
_Electra_, are the lines 1171-3:

[Greek text]

(_i.e._ 'Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal.
Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of us
has this debt of suffering to be paid'). In _Hamlet_ (I. ii. 72 sq.) are
the familiar sentences:

Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die.
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness.

Cf. Sophocles's _OEdipus Coloneus_, 880: [Greek text] ('In a just cause
the weak vanquishes the strong,' Jebb), and 2 _Henry VI_, iii. 233,
'Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.' Shakespeare's
'prophetic soul' in _Hamlet_ (I. v. 40) and the _Sonnets_ (cvii. I) may
be matched by the [Gree