The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia’s speech: 

“Consider this
That in the course of Justice none of us
Should see salvation.”

Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia’s eloquence.

Now take Portia: 

“The quality of Mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath:  it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;”

(Not much Seneca, so far!)

“’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice . . . "

There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already cited, and theological in origin.

Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections, without having read Seneca’s De Clementia, whether, if he could not conceive the ideas “out of his own head,” he might not hear Seneca’s words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for himself.  Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero.

My view of Shakespeare’s Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter Raleigh. {64a} As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach the subject, and who have had a classical education.  An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following chapter.

In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing).  Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.  “His plays,” says Sir Walter Raleigh, “are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris of popular literature,—­scraps and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs.  In this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . .  Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . " {65a} He is rich in rural proverbs not recorded in Bacon’s Promus.

Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, “was making himself all the time.”

The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete rural words.  Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the tags of song, ballad, story, and DICTON.  But so may Shakespeare.