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LUCRECE
He with the Romans was esteemed so
As silly-jeering idiots are with kings,
For sportive words and uttering foolish things.
(ll. 1811–13.)
Bandello in his novel describes Brutus’s conduct thus:—
‘E fingendo esser pazzo, e cotali sciocchezze mille volte il dì facendo, come fanno i buffoni, divenne in modo in opinione di matto, che appo i figliuoli del Re, più per dar loro con le sue pazzie trastullo che per altro, era tenuto caro’.¹ Shakespeare’s attribution to Brutus of idiocy characteristic of a ‘fool’ in a king’s household seems coloured by Bandello’s phraseology.
In the rhetorical digressions which distinguish Shakespeare’s poem he had every opportunity of pursuing his own bent, but even in these digressive passages there emerge bold traces of his reading, not merely in the classics, but in contemporary English poetry. The 217 lines (1366–582), which describe with exceptional vividness a skilful painting of the destruction of Troy, betray a close intimacy with more than one book of Vergil’s *Aeneid*. The episode in its main outline is a free development of Vergil’s dramatic account (Bk. i. 456–655) of a picture of the identical scene which arrests Aeneas’ attention in Dido’s palace at Carthage. The energetic portrait of the wily Sinon which fills a large space in Shakespeare’s canvas is drawn from Vergil’s second book (ll. 76 seq.).²
¹ In English the words run:—‘And pretending to be mad, and doing such foolish things a thousand times a day as fools are wont to do, Brutus came to be looked upon as an idiot, who was held dear by the king’s sons, more for making them sport with his foolish tricks than for any other cause.’
² References to more or less crude pictorial representations of the siege of Troy are common in classical authors, notably in Ovid. Ovid in his *Heroides*, i. 33 seq., causes the Greek soldier to paint on a table with wine the disposition of the opposing armies at Troy. The first lines of this passage are very deliberately quoted in *The Taming of the Shrew*, iii. 1. 18, 29:—
Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigela tellus;
Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.
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