“repetitions” only which are to be found in Shakespearian plays of undisputedly later origin and which do not obviously belong to a common stock of Elizabethan play-wrights’ phrases. Now of these there are evidently not many that deserve serious consideration (for a number of them lose their force if the play as I shall try to prove later on—is to be dated after Julius Cæsar and Hamlet). R. W. Chambers has shown some similar expressions, it is true, that occur in Coriolanus. He lays particular stress on the repetition of the idea that civil war would lead to a chaos, in which in the end people “would feed on one another.” But after all, is this idea more than a truism, which may have existed in the thinking of many contemporaries in those unruly times and been usually couched in the same words, although by chance other examples of it are now wanting?[1] I cannot find, furthermore, that the “greyhound” simile offers much better material. Nay, it seems to me that R. W. Chambers misinterprets the passage. Of Titus Lartius (Coriol. I, vi, 37) it is said that he holds—
Corioli in the name of Rome
Even like a fawning greyhound in the leash,
To let him slip at will.
Corioli, the unfortunate conquered town which is at the mercy of the victor, is compared to a “fawning greyhound,” which the owner will let loose from the fettering string just when he likes. But the rebels in Sir Thomas More are said, by assuming the right to punish the strangers, to—
lead the majesty of law in liom
To slip him like a hound;
i.e. they usurp the prerogative of the (law of the) state and employ (its) force as they like. Here the “hound” is the power they use against the strangers. The image then is totally dissimilar. So the picture at the back of the writer’s mind is much more similar to passages like Jul. Cæs. III, i, 273: “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”
Superficial likenesses such as these have little convincing power. The decisive test as to the imagery employed is, whether it bears the particularly Shakespearian mark. Now the characteristic
- ↑ An instructive parallel is offered by the frequency of occurrence of the “hydra-headed multitude,” see Fr. Tupper, junr., The Shakespearean Mob (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am.” xxvii), 495.
