—Julius Caesar, Act IT, Scene 1.
Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates (who substituted the liter for the heart), and to have been held also by Rabelais. Neither Galen, Paracelsus, Hippocrates, nor Rabelais was a text-book at Stratford grammar-school during the two terms Mr. De Quincy placed William Shakespeare as a pupil there—but William has them at his fingers' ends. There are said to be no less than seventy-eight passages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to Galen and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or excuse:
"Parolles. So I say; both of Galen and Paracelsus.
Lafeu. Of all the learned and authentic fellows."
—All's Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3.
"Host of the Garter Inn. What says my Æsculapius? my Galen?"
—Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II., Scene 3.
In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the erudite Bardolph and Falstaff's classical page make a learned blunder about Althea, whom the page confounds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage manager has his head so brimming full of his old Greeks and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss their company, and makes his very panders and public-cans prate of them? Even if it were the commonest thing in the world, nowadays, in 1881, for our Mr. Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences of Wallack's or the Union Square), and stuff all the low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion (for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud of the Bankside in London, some three hundred years ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at)—even, we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere among the garrets of Gray's Inn, writing dialogues into which Galen and Paracelsus would intrude unbidden—and a stage manager letting them stay there as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names, of dogs or wenches—at any rate, as good, mouth-filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market price): * than to conceive a twelfth manager and proprietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker of calves, after the day's labor, shunning his cups and the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same Galen and Paracelsus?
* Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why-should
he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or
record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity?
See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1—"O, spite, too
old to be engaged to young!" etc. Again—"Too old, by
Heaven! Let still the woman take an elder than herself."
Again—"Then let thy love be younger than thyself," etc.,
etc. ("Twelfth Night," Act II., Scene 4.)
It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have
wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might
snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his
passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried
perusal in the green-room."—Chambers's Journal, August 7,
1852,p. 89.
Newton, who was only born in 1642—twenty years after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb—surely need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal the immutable truth of gravitation. He had but to take down his copy of "Troilus and Cressida" (printed in 1606) to open to the law itself, as literally stated as he himself could have formulated it: