"That loss is common to the race,
And common is the common-place."

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."