Chapter 3

SHAKESPEARE'S READING

We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than "The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in which Ben Jonson stated that the poet had "small Latin and less Greek," it is evident from the allusions throughout the plays that Shakespeare was a reader rather than a scholar. In other words, he used books for what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemanship, politics, and other fields; but such works are usually the products of enthusiasts in single subjects, who are apt to forget how much a man of acute mind and keen observation can pick up of a technical matter that interests him for the time, and how intelligently he can use it. The cross-examination of an expert witness by an able lawyer is an everyday illustration; and in the literature of our own day this kind of versatility is strikingly exemplified in the work of such a writer as Mr. Kipling.

[Page Heading: School-Books]

How Shakespeare learned to read and write his own tongue we do not know; that he did learn hardly needs to be argued. The free grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, like other schools of its type, was named from its function of teaching Latin grammar; and we may make what is known of the curricula of such schools in the sixteenth century the basis for our inferences as to what Shakespeare learned there.

The accidence, with which the course began, was studied in Lily's Grammar, and clear echoes of this well-known work are heard in the conversation between Sir Hugh Evans and William Page in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, IV. i, in _1 Henry IV_, II. i. 104, in _Much Ado_, IV. i. 22, in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii. 82 (and perhaps, V. i. 10 and 84), in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 2, in _The Taming of the Shrew_, I. i. 167,--a line of Terence altered by Lily,--and in _Titus Andronicus_, IV.