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words, a man familiar with these two authors, and with no others, would be able to make all the mythological allusions contained in the undisputed works of Shakespeare, barring some few exceptions to be considered later. Throughout, the influence of Ovid is at least four times as great as that of Vergil; the whole character of Shakespeare's mythology is essentially Ovidian.
Of the particular poems of Ovid, it is but natural that the Metamorphoses should furnish Shakespeare with the bulk of his mythology. With nearly all of the important episodes of the poem, with each of the fifteen books, save perhaps the twelfth and fifteenth, his familiarity is clearly demonstrable. The highly dramatic quality of the Heroides must surely have made them congenial reading, and allusions to the myth of Ariadne, to Leda, and to the dream of Hecuba that she had brought forth a firebrand, indicate that the work was not unfamiliar. In the Taming of the Shrew there is even a direct Latin quotation from the first epistle; but the uncertain extent of Shakespeare's authorship in this play makes the bit of evidence less conclusive. From the Fasti Shakespeare certainly drew much of his Rape of Lucrece, and to the same work is probably to be referred an allusion to Arion on the dolphin's back in Twelfth Night. From the //mores is taken the Latin motto pre-fixed to Venus and sldonis; while the rlrs Amatoria may explain Shakespeare's acquaintance with the intrigue of Mars and Venus, and Juliet's statement: `At lovers' perjuries, they say, Jove laughs.' The only positive evidence of indebtedness to the Tristia is found in a mention of Medea and Absyrtus in the doubtfully authentic II Henry VI.
Sharply contrasted with the frequency and variety of Shakespeare's references to Ovid is the comparative paucity and narrow scope of his Vergilian allusion . . . Only three episodes of the Aeneid seem to have made a deep impression on Shakespeare-the account of the fall of Troy with the stratagem of Sinon and the death of Priam, the grief of the forsaken Dido, and the infernal machinery of Vergil's Hades-episodes all of them which savor more or less of the sensational, and thus approach the prevailing taste of Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare is not content, however, with merely selecting sensational episodes; he sets to work deliberately to heighten the sensationalism. The truth of this statement is at once apparent if one corn-pares the account of Priam's death in the player's speech in Hamlet with the lines of the second book of the 4eneid on which it is founded; but since Shakespeare's authorship of these lines has been disputed, it may be proved by an equally characteristic example from the Merchant of Venice. Lorenzo says:
The croon shines bright .. .
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.
Vergil's Dido is left disconsolate at Carthage; but for this particular scene the Reneid may be searched in vain. So essentially un-Vergilian is it, that Matthew Arnold quotes the lines in his Essay on Celtic Literature as an
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