In _Hamlet_, _Othello_,
_The Tempest_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Comedy of Errors_,
_Twelfth Night_, _Winter's Tale_, _Measure for Measure_, and
_Pericles_, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the
plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which
forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes:
however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare
uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.'
In the _Winter's Tale_, we read of--
---- 'the fearful usage
(Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'
In _Henry V._, of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the
inconstant billows dancing;' in _Henry VI._, Queen Margaret finds in
the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo;
in _Richard III._, Clarence's dream figures to us all the horrors of
'the vasty deep;' in _Henry VIII._, Wolsey indeed speaks of 'a sea of
glory,' but also of his shipwreck thereon; in _The Tempest_ we read of
'the never surfeited sea,' and of the 'sea-marge sterile and
rocky-hard;' in the _Midsummer's Night Dream_, 'the sea' is 'rude,'
and from it the winds 'suck up contagious fogs;' _Hamlet_ is as 'mad
as the sea and wind;' the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes
is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, 'overpeering of his list;'
in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, 'a sea of troubles,'
which, in spite of Pope's suggested and tasteless emendation,
commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks,
and more than once by AEschylus and Menander.
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