That
between his own knowledge, and construes given to him, he might
easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which
he certainly knew, I believe.
Mr. Greenwood says "the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere
must have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free
School is positively amazing." {62a} But I have shown how an
imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and
romances, might continue to read Latin "for human pleasure" after he
left school. As a professional writer, in a London where Latinists
were as common as now they are rare in literary society, he might
read more, and be helped in his reading. Any clever man might do as
much, not to speak of a man of genius. "And yet, alas, there is no
record or tradition of all this prodigious industry. . . . " I am
not speaking of "prodigious industry," and of that--at school. In a
region so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr.
Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will's early reading
(even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to exist,
from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the memories of
the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none of these
things. The thing is not reasonable. {62b}
Let me take one example {62c} of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is
quoted as saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare's debt to Seneca's
then untranslated paper De Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I).
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