"Cressida.... But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very center of the earth,
Drawing all things to it."
—Troilus and Cressida, Act IV., Scene 2.
Are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing them "without blotting out a line," and sending the "copy" to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the stage on the following evening?
What a library it was—that library up among the flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Theater! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have been, to have snatched from his overworked life—from the interval between the night's performance and the morning's routine—the hours to labor over Galen and Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek! It was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge, in the nineteenth century—surrounded with libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing—could have mastered all the known languages. But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms at Stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at Stratford School, or at the University of Oxford—for there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as that he was at Stratford school) without books, since there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!
"He was the prophet of geology," says Fullom, "before it found an exponent in Werner;"
"O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate;
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent