An Analysis of Shakespeare's Indebtedness to North's Plutarch

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Shakespeare, the first poet of all time, borrowed three plays almost wholly from North. I do not speak of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen, for each of which a little has been gleaned from North's Theseus; nor of the Timon of Athens, although here the debt is larger.2 The wit of Apemantus, the Apologue of the Fig-tree, and the two variants of Timon's epitaph, are all in North. Indeed, it was the 'rich conceit' of Timon's tomb by the sea-shore which touched Shakespeare's imagination, as it had touched Antony's; so that, some of the restricted passion of North's Antonius, which bursts into showers of meteoric splendour in the Fourth and Fifth Acts of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, beats too, in the last lines of his Timon, with a rhythm as of billows: 'yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.' But in Antony and Cleopatra, as in Coriolanus and in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's obligation is apparent in almost all he has written. To measure it you must quote the bulk of the three plays. 'Of the incident,' Trench has said, ' there is almost nothing which he does not owe to Plutarch, even as continually he owes the very wording to Sir Thomas North;3 and he follows up this judgment with so detailed an analysis of the Julius Caesar that I shall not attempt to labour the same ground. As regards Coriolanus, it was noted, even by Pope, 'that the whole history is exactly followed, and many of the principal speeches exactly copied, from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch.' This exactitude, apart from its intrinsic interest, may sometimes assist in restoring a defective passage. One such piece there is in II. iii. 231 of the Cambridge Shakespeare, 1865: 'The noble house o' the Marcians, from whence came That Ancus Marcius, Numa's daughter's son, Who, after great Hostilius, here was king;

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