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In the “Twelfth Night” there are many salt-water allusions no less happy, beginning with the bright picture of Antonio presented by the Captain (of a war-ship?) breasting the sea upon a floating mast. Again in Act I., Scene 6, Viola answers Malvolio’s uncalled-for rudeness, “Will you hoist sail, sir?” with the ready idiom, “No, good swabber, I am to hull [to heave-to] here a little longer.” In Act V., Scene 1, the Duke speaks of Antonio as Captain of a “bawbling vessel—for shallow draught, and bulk, unprizable”; in modern terms, a small privateer that played such havoc with the enemy’s fleet that “very envy and the tongue of loss cried fame and honour on him.” Surely Shakespeare must have had Drake in his mind when he wrote this.

Who does not remember Shylock’s contemptuous summing-up of Antonio’s means and their probable loss?—“Ships are but boards, sailors but men, there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves—I mean, pirates; and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks” (Act I., Scene 3). In this same play, too, we have those terrible quicksands, the Goodwins, sketched for us in half-a-dozen lines: “Where the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried” (Act III., Scene 1); and in the last scene of the last act Antonio says his “ships are safely come to road,” an expression briny as the sea itself.