I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians
insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was
at a Latin school. I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity,
the prompt acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the
author of the plays must have possessed in youth. "Tradition says
nothing of all that," the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he
likes, turn to my reply in The Traditional Shakespeare. {59a}
Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after
date, in a place where literature was NOT of supreme interest, to
retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did), in
circumstances of privacy? As far as I am able to judge, had I been a
boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing but
Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and
romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I
suppose Shakspere to have possessed. Yet I could scarcely, like him,
have made the second syllable in "Posthumus" long! Sir Walter Scott,
however, was guilty of similar false quantities: he and Shakspere
were about equally scholarly.
I suppose, then, that Shakspere's "small Latin" (as Jonson called it)
enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read
sufficient for his uses. As a fact, he made use of English
translations, and also of Latin texts.
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