* Poems, 1651, p. 273.
One Leonard Ditrges—who, Farmer says (in his essay on "The Learning of Shakespeare"), was "a wit of the town" in the days of Shakespeare—wrote some verses laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer says again) "were printed along with a spurious edition of Shakespeare" in 1640. In this copy of verses occur such lines as—
"Nature only led him, for look thorough
This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow
One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate,
Nor once from vulgar languages translate."
A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, concerning compositions which Judge Holmes has demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, imitations drawn from works untranslated from their originals at the date when quoted; so that it would be impossible to say that the quoter found them in English works and took them with no knowledge of their original source! * "Nature itself was all his art," says Fuller, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakespeare] has was from old mother witt." ** And Dominie Ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, "I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt, without any art at all;" *** though, of course, this was, and could have been, nothing more than matter of report.
* See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition,
p. 5.
** Farmer, p. 13.
*** "Diary of Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extending
from 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30.
Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's
"Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent.
It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 'William Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to compose "without blotting out a line" himself. That he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscionably from Robert Greene and others (so much so that Greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have Greene's book itself to testify. From its almost unintelligible pages we can glean some idea of the turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in the composition of this popular English that Shakespeare, by surpassing Greene, awakened the latter's jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no superiority in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into Greene's profits wherein Greene could have found cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to earn money indifferently to whether Shakespeare carried on his trade or not, he would not have been "jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would easily have made himself invaluable to his management by dashing off scores of such local sketches as "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," suggested by the current events of the day.
But, even if "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth," and "Julius Cæsar" could have been produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, (so that the author's first draft should be the acting copy for the players), they could have hardly been composed, nowadays, without a library. And even had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia (such as were first invented two hundred years or so after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. They can not be studied as they are capable of being studied—as they were found capable of being studied by Coleridge and Gervinus—without a library. And yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed without one?—in the days when such a thing as a dictionary even was unknown! Who ever heard of William Shakespeare in his library, pulling down volumes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the expense of Greece and Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern romance—for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in blankets?