[In the following essay, Miola explores the ways in which Shakespeare used and adapted the poetry of Vergil throughout his career.]

Surprisingly slight and desultory is the extant criticism on Vergil's presence in Shakespeare's art. Although Plutarch, Ovid, and Seneca have attracted much scholarly attention, no systematic study illuminates the complex and pervasive influence of Vergil on Shakespeare. Few have seriously considered the subject; fewer have navigated safely past the Scylla of broad, interpretive generalization and the Charybdis of narrow-minded quellenforschung. The general neglect derives partly from the obvious differences in genres and subjects of the two artists. It derives as well from the long-standing conception of Vergil as learned and meticulous craftsman and that of Shakespeare as Fancy's child, warbling native woodnotes wild. John Dryden recognized the contrast between the two orders of genius in his celebrated comparison of Shakespeare to Homer and Jonson to Vergil. And Joseph Addison sharpened and canonized the distinction by placing Shakespeare among those writers who possess nobly wild, extravagant, and natural talent, and Vergil among those who form "themselves by rules" and work within the "restraints of art."

The biographical fallacy dividing Vergil from Shakespeare, of course, does justice neither to the Roman's genius nor the Englishman's art. Nor can it diminish or obscure Vergil's ubiquitous influence on the art and culture of the Renaissance. Central to such diverse figures as Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Montaigne, Spenser, and Milton, Vergil clearly transcended the boundaries of artistic temperament and taste. To those in the age of imitation he was the preeminent poetical authority, the noblest and highest fountain of Latin eloquence. Annotated by Servius, Donatus, Ascensius and others, allegorized by men like Fulgentius, Silvestris, and Landino, appropriated by almost all writers of pastoral and epic, the works of Vergil were a centerpiece for European literary and popular traditions. In Shakespeare's day one met Vergil everywhere: in anthologies of sententiae and in florilegio; in rhetorical handbooks and classical dictionaries; in the works of classical and contemporary writers and artists; in editions and translations of the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. As T. W. Baldwin has demonstrated, the works of Vergil, parsed and pored over by countless schoolchildren, were practically unavoidable steps on Shakespeare's road to Parnassus.

Throughout his career Shakespeare shows a working familiarity with Vergil's text and a strong attraction to his art. In early works like Titus Andronicus and Lucrece Shakespeare's allusions to Vergil smell of the lamp: they are labored, ostentatious, and self-congratulatory. Later, by about the turn of the century, the allusions become subtle and sharply controlled. In Julius Caesar and Hamlet smoothly-integrated allusions to Vergil provide point and irony. In Shakespeare's last phase extensive treatment of Vergilian idea and image broadens allusion to eristic imitation. The final mode is radically transformative: in works like Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest the Vergilian sub-text assumes new life and meaning as Shakespeare adapts it to articulate his own visions of love and civilization.

I

Like Ovid, Vergil appears at first in Shakespeare's mannered and self-conscious allusions. Shakespeare's earliest Roman play, Titus Andronicus (1593-94), is a chrestomathy of Latin scraps and fragments boldly pasted together. With partial success, the play attempts to incorporate Vergilian motifs into a dramatic structure. Vergilian and Ovidian allusions to the iron age combine to depict a world wherein pietas, the quintessential Vergilian virtue, lies vanquished. During the course of the action two sets of brothers take arms against each other; one helpless bystander endures his brother's misfortune and madness, his niece's mutilation, his nephews' death or banishment. One mother sells her child for gold while another encourages her sons to acts of rape and murder. A Roman father slays his son and then his daughter. After the Roman royal family dine on a gory Thyestean banquet, the play ends in a spasm of murder and revenge.

Such impious Romans, of course, are not fit inhabitants for the promised city of the Aeneid, that vision of peace and order ruled by Augustus, divi genus, aurea condet / saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva / Saturno quondam (6.792-4 "son of a god, who will renew a Golden Age in Latium, in fields where Saturn once was king"). Shakespeare's portrayal of the decaying Roman Empire in Titus Andronicus provides a rude ending to Vergil's dream. His Lavinia, regrettably coarse in conversation (2.3.66ff.), bathetic in injury, and desperate in revenge, pointedly opposes Vergil's, that silent and shadowy figure who waits for the great forces of history to decide her fate. Although both Lavinias are contested brides who cause strife between rival leaders, the rape and mutilation of the helpless woman in the play grimly parody the marriage of the destined wife in the epic. Whereas the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia begins Roman civilization and Empire, the rape of Shakespeare's Lavinia brutally expresses the savagery that ends Roman civilization and starts a new and barbaric dispensation.

Shakespeare also portrays Titus Andronicus in Vergilian terms, as a type of Aeneas. Like Aeneas, Titus is "Pius" (1.1.23). At the funeral of his sons, it has long been noted, he echoes the conversation of Aeneas and Sibyl in hell (6.318ff.). Later, reminded of his daughter's mutilation, Titus sees himself as Aeneas in Carthage, forced to retell the story of Troy and to relive his anguish:

Ah, wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands,
To bid Aeneas tell the tale twice o'er
How Troy was burnt and he made miserable?
                                   (3.2.26-8)

Of course, the Vergilian allusions here, blended with references to Seneca and Ovid, are merely indecorous shreds from the original robes. Costumed in them, Titus appears ludicrous and artificial rather than tragic and human. Unlike Aeneas, who weeps at suffering, growing wiser and richer in sorrow, Titus tears passion to tatters and goes mad.

Shakespeare invokes Vergil to help shape character and theme in Titus Andronicus. Yet the effort is comparatively clumsy and juvenile: the allusions to Aeneas and Lavinia are crudely and baldly inappropriate rather than ironic. They are stitched on to the play rather than woven into its fabric. Shakespeare is clearly excited by the Aeneid as subtext but he is overwhelmed by it as well, unable to control fully the powerful resources at his disposal. After invoking Hecuba to illustrate Tamora's grief (1.1.135ff.), for example, he indiscriminately invokes her again to illustrate Lavinia's (4.1.20ff.). Dido, for another example, appears incongruously in Tamora's seduction of Aaron the Moor:

And after conflict such as was suppos'd
The wand'ring prince and Dido once enjoyed,
When with a happy storm they were surpris'd,
And curtain'd with a counsel-keeping cave,
We may, each wreathed in the other's arms
(Our pastimes done), possess a golden slumber.
                                       (2.3.21-6)

The absurdity of the parallel here between the illicit lovers (especially that between Aaron and Aeneas) is matched only by the absurdity of Dido's reappearance at the end of the play. A Roman urges Lucius:

Speak, Rome's dear friend, as erst our ancestor,
When with his solemn tongue he did discourse
To love-sick Dido's sad attending ear
The story of that baleful burning night,
When subtile Greeks surpris'd King Priam's
 Troy.
Tell us what Sinon hath bewitch'd our ears,
Or who hath brought the fatal engine in
That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound.
                                     (5.3.80-87)

The general analogy between shattered Troy and Rome can hardly justify the pointless evocations of Dido and Sinon.

Although drawn largely from Ovid and Livy, The Rape of Lucrece (1593-94) provides another illustration of Shakespeare's early engagement with Vergil, an engagement which has all the intensity and rashness of young love. For some two hundred lines in the poem Lucrece muses over an imaginary depiction of Troy. The dramatic situation of this ekphrasis, as well as its substance and effect, owes much to Vergil's model in Aeneid 1. Aeneas weeps at a depiction of Troy in Carthage, but takes comfort in the sympathetic portrayal of his suffering. Similarly alone and estranged from familiar surroundings, Lucrece weeps to look on her present sorrow pictured forth in "Troy's painted woes" (1492). Like Aeneas, she focuses on the human tragedies of the war, the struggles between Greeks and Trojans "from the strond of Dardan, where they fought, / To Simois' reedy banks" (1436-7), and the destruction of the city, bright with fire. Although Shakespeare draws upon the thirteenth Metamorphoses as well as the Aeneid, his ekphrasis expresses a Vergilian sense of Greek perfidy, Trojan helplessness, and pervasive doom. The vicarious experience of Trojan woe brings Lucrece, as it does Aeneas, "from the feeling of her own grief (1578) to comfort and relief. She marvels at the sympathetic imagination of the "well-skill'd workman" (1520) who understands the tears of things and whose heart, like those of the Carthaginians and the Trojans, is touched by mortal sorrows.

Shakespeare's remembrance of Troy in Lucrece draws also upon Vergil's second Aeneid. In the climactic incident of the Iliupersis, Pyrrhus, animated by his father's fury, breaks through various gates and doors to reach the innermost chambers of Priam's house. Priam, horrified, sees Pyrrhus and prepares to defend his home:

urbis uti captae casum convolsaque vidit
limina tectorum et medium in penetralibus
  hostem
arma diu senior desueta trementibus aevo
circumdat nequiquam umeris et inutile ferrum
cingitur, ac densos fertur moriturus in hostis.
                                          (507-11)

When he saw the fall of the captured city, saw
the doors of the house wrenched off, and the foe
in the heart of his home, old as he is, he vainly
throws his long-disused armour about his aged
trembling shoulders, girds on his useless sword,
and rushes to his death among his thronging
  foes.

Arrogantly, Pyrrhus scorns Priam, slaughters one of his sons, Prince Polites, and then kills the aged King on one of his own altars. The invading Pyrrhus, who slays a son and then a father, violates person, household, and family. Profaning the residence of the household gods, his attack on the penetralia is an attack on all the spiritual and physical principles necessary for human life, quae ad vitam sunt necessaria, as Servius put it. No wonder Aeneas comments, ferit aurea sidera clamor (488 "The din strikes the golden stars").

The importance of this incident to Shakespeare's dramatic imagination is clearly evident in Lucrece (and, as we shall see, in Hamlet). The pictorial representation of Priam's death arrests Lucrece's gaze and closely mirrors her own predicament:

Many she sees where cares have carved some,
But none where all distress and dolor dwell'd,
Till she despairing Hecuba beheld,
Staring on Priam's wounds with her old eyes,
Which bleeding under Pyrrhus' proud foot lies.
                                             (1445-9)

Seeing in Hecuba an image of her own grief, Lucrece assumes the identity of an onlooker and achieves some distance from her situation. However momentary and illusory, the identification with Hecuba enables Lucrece to give tongue to unspeakable sorrows. As the imaginary ekphrasis works its magic, she envisions herself as Priam:

To me came Tarquin armed so beguild
With outward honesty, but yet defil'd
With inward vice: as Priam him did cherish,
So did I Tarquin, so my Troy did perish.
                                       (1544-7)

Here Lucrece becomes the central figure in the Trojan tragedy, "slain" by the barbaric invader in the penetralia of her home. Tarquin, like Pyrrhus, is a cruel and bloody usurper armed with a gleaming weapon. Like the Greek, he breaks through locks and doors until he reaches the inmost recesses of his victim's home. Both invaders aim at the very center of civil stability, the mid-point of the concentric circles of social order, and both attack with the fury of their fathers. Their deeds crack the foundations of civilized life and turn the city into wilderness.

Extended allusion to Vergil allows Shakespeare to portray various vignettes from the epic tradition and to present a mythological perspective that expresses the various levels of Lucrece's violation. But the artificial and stylized ekphrasis intrudes upon the narrative of the poem. It is a heavy rhetorical device bolted on rather than fitted in. Moreover, as in Titus Andronicus, the handling of classical allusions in Lucrece shows a lack of firm control. The opening ten stanzas of the ekphrasis labor to provide totally extraneous commentary on the figures of Ajax, Ulysses, Nestor, Achilles, and Hector. This throat-clearing completed, the climactic invasion sequence quickly loses power and focus. Lucrece sees herself as mourning Hecuba and murdered Priam, momentarily as Helen, "the strumpet that began this stir" (1471), and then as Priam again. This last identification is made not with the murdered king but, surprisingly, with the gullible ruler who listened to Sinon's lies. In an equally unchronological and anticlimactic progression, the conceit proceeds to cast Tarquin as terrible Pyrrhus, fond Paris, and finally deceitful Sinon. One cannot help thinking that the ekphrasis is too long and too ingenious, especially as Priam appears one other time in it with no reference to anyone in the poem, as the doting father who should have restrained Paris's lust (1490). The extraneous characters and ever-shifting identifications vitiate the allusions even as they display the poet's youthful ardor and eagerness. Enamored with Vergil and the possibilities of allusion, Shakespeare is unable to subordinate the sub-text to the demands of the text. The poet has yet to discipline his imagination and to master the subtle art of classical allusion.

II

By the turn of the century, with almost a decade's writing experience behind him, Shakespeare becomes more fluent and self-assured in his continuing dialogue with Vergil. The initial infatuation is succeeded by mature understanding. The ingenious conceits and awkward gesturing of the early works now give way to sharply controlled allusion. In Julius Caesar (1599), for example, Cassius evokes a well-known Vergilian scene in order to denigrate Caesar:

I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of
  Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar.
                                   (1.2.112-15)

Shakespeare here alludes to the archetypal scene of pietas, memorialized on Roman coins and celebrated often by ancient writers. In addition to Vergil's account, Ovid's brief sketch of the Trojan war in Metamorphoses 13 includes reference to the episode (624-6) and Propertius alludes to the scene in an elegy (4.1.43-4), as does Seneca in De Beneficiis (3.37.1).

Later generations followed Vergil and the ancients in regarding the carrying of Anchises as a supreme example of pietas, the virtuous respect for gods, country, and family. Commentators on Vergil provided appropriate glosses, ranging from the brief but touching paraphrase of Donatus to the elaborate and learned moral essay of Pontanus, replete with classical, medieval, and Renaissance allusions, as well as various analogues. The lessons of the grammar school on Vergilian pietas were reinforced by various sources: by collectors of proverbs like Erasmus, for example; by compilers of classical lore like Aelianus; by cataloguers of moralized antiquity like Ravisius Textor; and by emblematists like Alciati and Whitney. Interestingly enough, the Vergilian emblem was also recalled on stage by one of the characters in The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey (pub. 1607), a play often cited as a possible source for Julius Caesar. By the time of Cassius' allusion, the original Vergilian passage and its moral significance were commonplaces of Renaissance humanism.

Seen in the Renaissance context, the irony of Cassius' allusion clearly emerges. His appropriation of the famous scene urges not humble filial piety but arrogant self-assertion and murderous betrayal. Cassius' awkward repetition of the first-person singular subject ("I … Did I … ") suggests the fumbling impatience of his self-assertion in the conceit and in the play. Cassius casts himself as a new Aeneas here, one unwilling to shoulder the burden of the past but destined to found a new Rome. He sees Caesar as a new Anchises—weak, old and troublesome—one who should not be carried on the shoulders of true Romans but thrown off. In so doing, Cassius replaces the articulated emblem of pietas with the unarticulated emblem of impietas, the image of the son slaying the father. To be true sons of Rome, Cassius argues, he and Brutus must murder Caesar, the pater patriae. Cassius' allusion to the Aeneid repudiates its most important virtue—pietas, one of the fundamental principles of Roman civilization.

Shortly after, Cassius, recalling his conduct during the storm, again appears in the role of Aeneas:

For my part, I have walk'd about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night;
And thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bar'd my bosom to the thunder-stone;
And when the cross blue lightning seem'd to
 open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even in the aim and very flash of it.
                                     (1.3.46-52)

This bravado has no basis in Plutarch but most probably originates in Shakespeare's remembrance of Aeneid 5.685-95, where Aeneas bares his chest to the gods, invites the thunderbolt to strike, and witnesses as an answer to his prayers a divine tempest. Once again, Cassius envisions himself as Aeneas, just before chiding Casca for not having "those sparks of life / That should be in a Roman" (1.3.57-8). Yet, as before, there is certain irony in Cassius' imitation of Aeneas. Aeneas bares himself as a gesture of piety, as an expression of his humility and his dependence on the gods. The storm is a reward for piety and a sign of divine favor. Cassius' baring of his chest after the storm has begun is an arrogant assertion of self, a gesture which brashly proclaims his own manhood and courage, and assumes rather than petitions the favor of the gods. Unlike the clumsy stitching and patching earlier, Shakespeare here weaves Vergilian images into powerful dramatic symbols.

No less striking and skillful is Shakespeare's use of Vergil in Hamlet (1600-1). Welcoming the players to Elsinore, Hamlet remembers from a recent play Aeneas' tale to Dido concerning Priam's slaughter and Pyrrhus' revenge:

"The rugged Pyrrhus, like th' Hyrcanian beast—"
'Tis not so, it begins with Pyrrhus:
"The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in th' ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion
 smear'd
With heraldy more dismal: head to foot
Now is he total gules, horridly trick'd
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord's murther. Roasted in wrath and
 fire,
And thus o'er-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks."
So proceed you.
                                      (2.2.450-65)

First Hamlet assumes the role of storyteller Aeneas, the exemplar of filial piety. This assumption suggests Hamlet's struggle to act the role of pious son, to render service to his father by killing Claudius. Hamlet then surrenders the speech to the First Player, who proceeds with the narration of Pyrrhus's "roused vengeance." Now a spectator, Hamlet sits rapt with attention as the tale of bloody murder unfolds. He curtly admonishes Polonius for complaining about the length of the speech and urges the actor, "Say on, come to Hecuba" (501). Clearly, Hamlet sees Pyrrhus, the fierce son of Achilles who slays a king to avenge his father, as an idealized image of himself And just as clearly, Hamlet sees Hecuba, stock example of grief and loyal mourning, as an idealized image of his mother, Gertrude. The art of the speech here dramatically and pointedly rebukes life: the heroic images of Troy ironically expose Elsinore's degeneration, Gertrude's inconstancy, and Hamlet's vacillation. After the players leave, Hamlet lacerates himself with self-reproach:

But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should 'a' fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.
                                                           (577-80)

Like the ekphrasis in Lucrece, the allusion to Pyrrhus in Hamlet is stylized and set apart from the surrounding action. It is a rhetorical set piece recited on cue by two actors. Unlike the earlier references to Aeneid 2, however, this one is subtle and complex. The self-conscious artificiality in manner and style reveals Hamlet's preoccupation with art and with the power of playing. In fact, Hamlet is shamed by the Player's shedding of real tears for the fictional characters. So forcing the "soul to his own conceit," the Player weeps, thereby entering the imaginary scene and becoming a participant. The power of art and the artistic imagination transforms reality, creates it anew in the present. Recitation of Pyrrhus's revenge can thus help Hamlet to perform his own. Through the magic of art, the allusion may transform the rapt gazer, Hamlet, into the pitiless avenger, Pyrrhus.

Although the inspiration for the Pyrrhus speech derives ultimately from Aeneid 2, its lurid and melodramatic style are reminiscent as well of Ovid and Lucan. Shakespeare overlays the incident with Marlovian sensationalism, not to parody quaint theatrical styles as has been suggested, but to portray the internal drama of his main character. To Hamlet, fascinated and horrified, the prospective murder of Claudius must seem as bloody, bombastic, and oversized as the narrated murder of Priam. To complicate matters further, there is even a fleeting parallel between Priam and the elder Hamlet, two cruelly murdered kings and fathers. In art's many-faceted mirror the archetypal assassin, Pyrrhus, the royal assassin, Claudius, and the would-be assassin, Hamlet, all appear as images of each other. No wonder Hamlet stares in stupefaction. In order to avenge his father he fears that he must become his enemy Claudius and also another Pyrrhus, roasted in wrath and fire, horridly tricked with blood and gore.

Examination of Shakespeare's Vergilian allusion here leads us through the twisted corridors of the royal palace and through the labyrinth of hope and fear in Hamlet's mind. What is more, the speech and Hamlet's reaction to it resonate throughout the play. When Hamlet stands with drawn sword over the praying Claudius, for example, we recall Pyrrhus over Priam:

                    lo his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverent Priam, seem'd i' th' air to stick.
So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood
[And,] like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
                                         (477-82)

Of course it is the differences between Hamlet and Pyrrhus that obtain here: Pyrrhus's sword comes down like the "Cyclops' hammers" (489), whereas Hamlet walks away and waits for a better time. So too in the rest of the play. Hamlet never becomes the savage Pyrrhus, inhuman avatar of revenge. Instead, he becomes more noble and humane. Unlike the impious violator of all civilized value, Hamlet expresses faith in the Providence that brings all to completion:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.

(5.2.219-22)

Calm, faithful, ready to meet his end, he finally kills Claudius and dies in peace. His final revenge presents to us an unresolved paradox, one central to Shakespearean tragedy: the man of pietas and humanity acts in impious furor. This is, of course, the paradox central to the Aeneid, especially evident in the final books as pius Aeneas ruthlessly slays Magus and Turnus.

In Shakespeare's middle phase, then, allusion to Vergil is complex and controlled. The allusions in Julius Caesar and Hamlet create a standard by which the speakers judge themselves and are judged. In Julius Caesar Shakespeare draws on the literary and emblematic traditions descending from a famous Vergilian scene in order to expose Cassius' pretensions. In Hamlet another Vergilian scene provides richly satisfying ironies and develops themes. The reworking of Aeneid 2 in Hamlet contrasts neatly with Shakespeare's reworking in Lucrece and clearly illustrates artistic development. In the mature work, over-wrought style and attention to detail are not merely clumsy contrivances but purposeful in the revelation of character. Shakespeare here creates a revenger antithetical to Pyrrhus, who represents all that Hamlet can never be. In this play as in the final ones, Shakespeare shows his increasing mastery and maturity. By this time he has learned to subordinate the sub-text to his own text, and to harness the inexhaustible energy of allusion. Such knowledge brings new freedom and power.

III

In Shakespeare's final phase, as in Hamlet, Vergil is a pervasive presence, a deep source that, directly or indirectly, shapes character and action. Yet, at the last, the dramatist shows increasing skill and boldness in allusion. In Antony and Cleopatra (1607-8), Antony's famous comparison of himself and Cleopatra to Aeneas and Dido clearly illustrates the point:

Eros!—I come, my queen!—Eros!—Stay for me!
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in
 hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts
 gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros!
                                   (4.14.50-54)

Antony's vision of Aeneas and Dido reunited in Hades is his own creation. In the sixth Aeneid, of course, Dido's shade coldly and silently turns from Aeneas to rejoin her former husband, Sychaeus. By misconstruing the famous scene, Shakespeare transforms the epical love story into a reflection of Antony's own desires and aspirations. After Antony, unlike Aeneas, decides the archetypal conflict between love and duty in favor of love, he hopes to live forever with Cleopatra in the next life.

Throughout Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare turns to Aeneid 4 and boldly reshapes Vergilian scenes. Antony's first leave-taking of Cleopatra (1.3), for example, follows the scenic rhythms established by Vergil's Aeneas and Dido. Dido, we recall, knows (praesensit, 4.297) that Aeneas is preparing to leave before he breaks the news to her. So Cleopatra divines Antony's intentions before he can reveal them:

Ant. Now my dearest queen—
Cleo. Pray you stand farther from me.
Ant. What's the matter?
Cleo. I know by that same eye there's some
  good news.
What, says the married woman you may go?
Would she had never given you leave to come!
                                    (1.3.17-21)

Before Aeneas has a chance to speak, Dido berates him for betraying her love and breaking his promises:

dissimulare etiam sperasti, perfide, tantum
posse nefas tacitusque mea decedere terra?
nec te noster amor nec te data dextera quondam
nec moritura tenet crudeli funere Dido?
                                         (305-8)

Deceiver, did you even hope to hide
so harsh a crime, to leave this land of mine
without a word? Can nothing hold you back—
neither your love, the hand you pledged, nor
  even
the cruel death that lies in wait for Dido?

Similarly, Cleopatra denies Antony the chance to speak and berates him for his perfidy:

Ant. Cleopatra—
Cleo. Why should I think you can be mine, and
  true
(Though you in swearing shake the throned
  gods),
Who have been false to Fulvia? Riotous
 madness,
To be entangled with those mouth-made vows,
Which break themselves in swearing!
                                       (26-31)

Later, Dido reminds Aeneas that she granted mercy and hospitality to him, a wretched castaway and beggar (eiectum litore, egentem, 373). Angrily, she tells him to leave: i, sequere ltaliam ventis, pete regna per undas (381 "Go then, before the winds to Italy. Seek out your kingdom over seas"). Likewise, Cleopatra reminds Antony of his former suppliance and tells him to leave:

Nay, pray you seek no color for your going,
But bid farewell, and go. When you sued
 staying,
Then was the time for words; no going then.
                                         (32-4)

Aeneas' response is pauca (333), "brief as well as "small," compared with Dido's large passion. He blames fata (340) for shaping his life and tells Dido to cease complaint as he does not search for Rome voluntarily:

desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis.
ltaliam non sponte sequor.
                                             (360-61)

    No longer set yourself and me
afire. Stop your quarrel. It is not
my own free will that leads to Italy.

Antony also lays the blame for his departure on an unapproachable abstraction, the "strong necessity of time" (42), and bids the angry queen, "Quarrel no more" (66). Shakespeare follows Vergil very closely here, even going so far as to transfer Dido's speechlessness—incipit effari mediaque in voce resistit (76 "she starts to speak, then falters / and stops in mid-speech")—to Cleopatra:

   Something it is I would—
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.
                                        (89-91)

The Vergilian undertones that Shakespeare sounds throughout the play enrich Cleopatra's final moments. Cleopatra's death scene incorporates and transforms Dido's. Both women decide to commit suicide because they suffer from broken hearts and because they fear imminent conquest. Dido's companions help prepare a purgation ritual; Cleopatra's handmaids help prepare a sacrificial rite. Dido retreats into the locked penetrale that contains Aeneas's sword, clothing, and the familiar bed, notumque cubile (648); Cleopatra withdraws into the monument, also an epithalamial tomb, a place of marriage and self-immolation. Before dying, both queens recall the first meeting with their lovers, both receive kisses and loving ministrations from their companions, and both give the lie to Mercury's cruel jeer, varium et mutabile semper /femina (569-70 "an ever / uncertain inconstant thing is woman").

And yet, the differences between the fourth Aeneid and Antony and Cleopatra remain fundamental. Vergil's Dido is a tragic figure whose leave-taking expresses broken-hearted pathos and chthonic rage. Shakespeare's Cleopatra is in the parallel scene essentially comic, a consummate actress whose quicksilver shifts of mood bewilder and captivate her Roman lover. So too are their deaths dissimilar. Whereas Dido dies bitterly and tragically, Cleopatra dies triumphantly and joyfully. Her glazed rapture (5.2.76ff.) replaces Dido's grim curse (607ff.); and Antony's transformation from guest to husband ("Husband, I come! / Now to that name my courage prove my title!" 5.2.287-88) neatly reverses Aeneas' degeneration from husband to guest: hospes, / (hoc solum nomen quoniam de coniuge restat) (323-4 "I must say 'guest': this name is all/ I have of one whom once I called my husband").

In this play allusion broadens to eristic imitation as Shakespeare recalls an entire episode—its characters and thematic implications. Lying below the surface of Shakespeare's text, the Aeneas and Dido story deepens and enriches the play. It must be observed, however, that Shakespeare here appropriates Vergilian ideas for most un-Vergilian ends: namely, for the glorification of Antony and Cleopatra. The play rewrites the fourth Aeneid and reverses its values. In this work the playwright molds a Vergilian episode into radically new shape and form. The sub-text provides the material for its own counter-statement, for the articulation of a fundamentally different vision.

Such transformative imitation is also evident in Shakespeare's final masterpiece, The Tempest. The Vergilian presence makes itself felt conspicuously in 3.3, wherein Ariel dressed as a harpy descends to confront Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, and the rest. Obviously, Shakespeare here imitates the harpy episode of Aeneid 3. In both scenes winged harpies shatter an island banquet and astonish shipwrecked voyagers. A struggle ensues but ends quickly as the humans discover that they cannot harm the supernatural creatures. Vergil's sed neque vim plumis ullam nee vulnera tergo / accipiunt (242-3 "No blow can wound their wings or scar their backs") echoes in Ariel's proud notice of his untouched "plume" (65). After both battles one harpy speaks with divine authority. Celaeno, eldest of the Furies (maxima Furiarum, 252), repeats the message of Jupiter and Phoebus Apollo; Ariel, also a minister of "Fate" (61), speaks for omniscient "pow'rs" (73). Both accuse the dazed listeners of wrongdoing and promise grim punishment: Celaeno prophesies that the voyagers will eat their tables from hunger, and Ariel threatens "Ling'ring perdition (worse than any death / Can be at once)" (77-8).

The manifest differences between the two scenes, however, reveal the purpose of Shakespeare's elaborate imitation. Ariel, we observe, differs sharply from Celaeno, that hideous creature of filth and ordure. He merely enacts a charade for Prospero, who greets him warmly after the performance:

Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring.
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say.
                                                (83-6)

As in Lucrece and Hamlet, Shakespeare frames the Vergilian allusion in art and artifice. Much like the Player at Elsinore, Ariel acts out a Vergilian role to instruct his audiences on stage and in the theatre. His dire threat, unlike Celaeno's, points the way to forgiveness and reconciliation. "Heart's sorrows / And a clear life ensuing" (81-2), Ariel promises, will guard the amazed auditors from the wrath of the powers above. Here the curse of the screaming harpy yields to the reassuring admonition of a benevolent spirit; the epic ordeal becomes an internal drama of penitence and salvation.

In his own way, Shakespeare thus follows the well-trodden paths of allegorical humanism. Commentaries on classical texts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance frequently transformed classical characters and incidents in this fashion, to accord with Christian values. Cristoforo Landino's enormously influential Camaldolese Disputations, for example, provides an instructive parallel to Shakespeare's revision of Aeneid 3 in The Tempest. According to Landino, the harpies represent Avarice: their faces are pale and haggard from desire; they have hooked claws for grasping, which drag men down into bestiality; the broken banquet suggests that Avarice is born of stupidity and baseness of spirit and prefers death to the diminishment of treasure. The Trojans strike at the harpies ineffectually but, Landino tells us, the creatures may be easily repelled, si fort generosumque sumamus anim ("if we assume a brave and generous spirit"). Landino's confrontation between Avarice and the brave and generous spirit glosses interestingly Shakespeare's confrontation between those grasping villains—Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio—and the forgiving Prospero.

The Tempest represents the culmination and conclusion of Shakespeare's relationship with Vergil. In it the playwright ponders an essentially Vergilian concern—the cost of civilization in human terms. Unlike the Roman poet, however, Shakespeare does not end his vision in epic action, but in recognition of the human capacity for spiritual growth. "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance" (5.1.27-8); and Prospero, wiser and sadder, learns finally to put furor aside for forgiveness. This option, of course, is not open to Aeneas, who must, to his own sorrow, end in furious and bitter triumph over Turnus. Yet, despite these differences, the two conclusions are similar in spirit: they are in their own ways sad victories, shadowed over by the same exhausted awareness of evil, suffering, and loss. The weary Aeneas finally understands what is needed to build the high walls of Rome, and the weary Prospero returns to Milan, where "Every third thought" is his grave (5.1.312). In such transformative imitation, as in the early and middle allusions, there is meaningful tribute. Shakespeare, even as he adapts Vergil, acknowledges for all time the importance of his work, the keenness of his understanding, and the lasting power of his art.