The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,—­and here is a parallel!  Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof.  Greece agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that it is not lucky to be “a corby messenger” of bad news; or that all goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,—­and so on as long as you please.  Of such wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs.  Vestigia nulla retrorsum is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.  Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was saturated in Greek tragedy.  But page on page of such facts as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of “the belly-pinched wolf,” the other of “the empty-bellied wolf,” are apt to impress the reader—­and verily both Shakespeare and AEschylus talk of “the heart dancing for joy.”  Mr. Collins repeats that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up.  It was a theory of Shakespeare’s time that the apparent ghost of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil.  Hamlet knows this —

“The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”

Orestes (Electra, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging daemon (alastor) in the shape of a god, that bids him avenge his father.  Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?

A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in Romeo and Juliet, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her bridegroom.  Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology —

“For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”

One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels.  But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.

To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces:  as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.

The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephorae and Electra, are so close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all:  the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.