FullReads

Ay, but to die and go we know not where! etc.

Most certainly the Ideas of a “Spirit bathing in fiery floods,” of residing “in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,” or of being “imprisoned in the viewless winds,” are not original in our Author; but I am not sure that they came from the Platonick Hell of Virgil. The Monks also had their hot and their cold Hell, “The fyrste is fyre that ever brenneth, and never gyveth lighte,” says an old Homily:–“The seconde is passyng colde, that yf a grete hylle of fyre were casten therin, it sholde torne to yce.” One of their Legends, well remembered in the time of Shakespeare, gives us a Dialogue between a Bishop and a Soul tormented in a piece of ice, which was brought to cure a grete brenning heate in his foot: take care you do not interpret this the Gout, for I remember M. Menage quotes a Canon upon us,

Si quis dixerit Episcopum PODAGRA laborare, Anathema sit.

Another tells us of the Soul of a Monk fastened to a Rock, which the winds were to blow about for a twelve-month, and purge of it’s Enormities. Indeed this doctrine was before now introduced into poetick fiction, as you may see in a Poem, “where the Lover declareth his pains to exceed far the pains of Hell,” among the many miscellaneous ones subjoined to the Works of Surrey. Nay, a very learned and inquisitive Brother-Antiquary, our Greek Professor, hath observed to me on the authority of Blefkenius, that this was the ancient opinion of the inhabitants of Iceland; who were certainly very little read either in the Poet or the Philosopher.

After all, Shakespeare’s curiosity might lead him to Translations. Gawin Douglas really changes the Platonick Hell into the “punytion of Saulis in Purgatory”: and it is observable that when the Ghost informs Hamlet of his Doom there,

Till the foul crimes done in his days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away,—-

the Expression is very similar to the Bishop’s: I will give you his Version as concisely as I can; “It is a nedeful thyng to suffer panis and torment–Sum in the wyndis, Sum under the watter, and in the fire uthir Sum:–thus the mony Vices–

Contrakkit in the corpis be done away
And purgit.—- Sixte Booke of Eneados. Fol. p. 191.

It seems, however, “that Shakespeare himself in the Tempest hath translated some expressions of Virgil : witness the O Dea certe.” I presume we are here directed to the passage where Ferdinand says of Miranda, after hearing the Songs of Ariel,

—-Most sure, the Goddess
On whom these airs attend;

and so very small Latin is sufficient for this formidable translation, that if it be thought any honour to our Poet, I am loth to deprive him of it; but his honour is not built on such a sandy foundation. Let us turn to a real Translator, and examine whether the Idea might not be fully comprehended by an English reader; supposing it necessarily borrowed from Virgil. Hexameters in our own language are almost forgotten; we will quote therefore this time from Stanyhurst:

O to thee, fayre Virgin, what terme may rightly be fitted?
Thy tongue, thy visage no mortal frayltie resembleth.
—- No doubt, a Godesse !–Edit. 1583.

Gabriel Harvey desired only to be ” Epitaph’d , the Inventor of the English Hexameter,” and for a while every one would be halting on Roman feet ; but the ridicule of our Fellow-Collegian Hall, in one of his Satires, and the reasoning of Daniel, in his Defence of Rhyme against Campion, presently reduced us to our original Gothic.