But, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin aside, was English taught at Stratford school? If it were, it would have been the most wonderful of all, for, as a matter of fact in those days, and for many long years thereafter, English was a much snubbed acquirement. The idea of education was to read, talk, and quote Latin, Greek, and the dead languages, the child was put to his "accidence." instead of his horn-book, and scholars scorned to spend much time on their own vernacular. But even should we concede that it was genius that made the village boy master of a diction the grandest of which his mother tongue was capable, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which the concession will not lift us. This difficulty has been so succinctly stated by Mr. Grant White, in his "Essay Toward the Expression of Shakespeare's Genius," that we can not do better than quote his words. "It was only in London that those plays could have been written. London had but just before Shakespeare's day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as well as acknowledged throughout England. As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue..... Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear, the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern English ears." * As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not occur to him that, by his own chronology, ** this Warwickshire rustic came to London with "Venus and Adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dialect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but in a diction that needs no translating "to be understood by modern English ears?"
* Shakespeare's Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi.
** Id., p. cxxi.
Robert Burns became great in the dialect of his home, which he made into music through the alembic of his genius. When, later in life, he essayed to write in metropolitan English, says Principal Shairp, "he was seldom more than a third-rate—a common clever versifier." * But this uncouth Warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in English composition, the most elegant verses the age produced, and which for polish and care surpass his very latest works! Every step in the received Shakespeare's life appears to have been a miracle: for, according to them, the boy Shakespeare needed to be taught nothing, but was born versed in every art, tongue, knowledge, and talent, and did every thing without tuition or preparation.
And in the long vacation of this precious school how much our worthy pupil—whose paternal parent was in hiding from his creditors so that he dare not be seen at church—supplemented its curriculum by feasts of foreign travel! For it is only the careful student of these plays who knows or conceives either their wealth of exact reference to the minutest features of the lands or the localities in which their actions lie, or the conclusions to be drawn therefrom. There were no guide-books or itineraries of Venice published until after William Shakespeare had ceased writing for the stage: and yet, while schoolboy facts—such as that Venice is built in the sea, or that gondolas take the place of wheeled vehicles, or that there is a leaning tower at Pisa, or a coliseum at Verona or Rome—are not referred to (the out-door action in "Othello" or the "Merchant of Venice" is *
* "English Men of Letters. Robert Burns.
always in a street or open place in that city, canals and gondolas being never mentioned), the most casual, inadvertant, and trivial details of Italian matters (such as a mere tourist, however he might have observed, would scarcely have found of enough interest to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phenomena of all this familiarity with Italy quite too prominent to be overlooked. A poet like Samuel Rogers writes a poem on Italy. All that is massive, venerable, and sublime; all that touches his heart as pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensuous and romantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Rogers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cultivated tourist to-day—the past of history that must stir the soul to enthusiasm. But here are plays, written before the days of guide-books (and if there had been any such things, they would have enlarged upon the same features that Mr. Rogers did), which are at home in the unobserved details which the fullest Murray or Baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. Portia sends her servant Balthazar to fetch "notes and garments" of her learned cousin, Bellario, and to meet her at the "common ferry which trades to Venice." There are two characters named "Gobbo" in the play—a frequent Venetian name in a certain obscure walk, and one which a mere tourist would be most unlikely to meet with. Othello brings Desdemona from her father's house to his residence in the "Sagittary." In "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Valentine is made to embark at Verona for Milan, and in "Hamlet," Baptista is used as the name of a woman. Both of these latter were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, until one learned German discovers that Baptista is not uncommonly used as a woman's name in Italy, * and another learned German that, in the sixteenth century, Milan and Verona were actually connected by canals, ** with which the surface of Italy was intersected! etc., etc. Dr. Elze was made a careful collation of these instances (which need not detain us here except by way of reference), in an essay on the supposed travels of Shakespeare, wherein he, from the same internal evidence, regards it certain that the writer (William Shakespeare he calls him), not only visited Italy, but Scotland, absorbing all he saw with the same microscopical exactness.
And were the modern languages also taught by this myriad-minded Jenkins? Mr. Grant White says emphatically, No! "Italian and French, we may be sure, were not taught at Stratford school." *** And yet William Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, Cinthio, and Belleforest.
Ulrici **** says (quoting Klein) that the author of "Romeo and Juliet" must have read "Hadriana," a tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr. Grant White points out that Iago's speech, "Who steals my purse, steals trash," etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a stanza in Berni's "Orlando Innamorato," of which poem, says Mr. White, to this day (1864) there is no English version.
* A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870.
** Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan &
Co. 1874.
*** Memoir. Works, p. xxi.
**** Vol. I, p. 253.
Mr. White furnishes a translation of the stanza of Berni, which is certainly startingly like.1 And yet Mr. White clings to his Stratford school, where "Beeston" told Aubrey that William Shakespeare was once a school-master. Perhaps Mr. White refuses to be converted because he has discovered that Dr. Farmer discovered that, when, in the "Taming of the Shrew," Tranio quotes Terence, "he is inaccurate, and gives the passage, not as it appears in the text of the Latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the Latin grammar of William Lily; a school-book in common use among our forefathers when William Shakespeare was a boy." ** But (though somebody has suggested that William might have risen to be "head boy" at Stratford grammar school; and been, in that capacity, intrusted with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, whence the school-master story may have arisen), the Beestou story has been rejected by all the commentators with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the only instance, in case of a Shakespearean detail. So far as we know, there has been but one effort to prove that William Shakespeare was a university man. ***