Poetry, plays, and Protestantism characterized the literature of the period. But familiar to us by name as are his contemporaries, it will be as easy to find one educated person who has read the whole of their works, as it would be to find one educated person who has not read Shakspeare.
There were travels and histories written, the great maritime discoveries of the age giving birth to this new class of literature. Hakluyt’s voyages were printed when Shakspeare was only twenty-five years of age, and even if he read them he would not have learned much about serpents there. Nor in Sir Walter Raleigh’s histories either, which were written chiefly during his prison life, he being liberated the same year that saw the death of Shakspeare, 1616.
Many other well-known authors will occur to the reader, to say nothing of the writers of the previous eras, the great divines and scholars who wrote in Latin, and the many English ballad-writers more likely to be perused by ‘the Bard.’
As for natural history, it found no place on those shelves, for as a science it did not as yet exist in England. Lord Bacon, Shakspeare’s celebrated contemporary, did make some pretensions to be a naturalist; but his Novum Organum was written in Latin, and we are not led to believe that the poet enjoyed any very great educational and classical advantages, having had
‘Small Latin and less Greek,’
according to his friend and eulogist, Ben Jonson.
And even if Shakspeare did read what was then the Book of the period, Lord Bacon unfortunately fell into some of the popular errors, or made very hazardous conjectures, so far as natural history was understood; and of him Dr. Carpenter says, ‘So far from contributing to our knowledge of natural history, he often gave additional force to error by the weight of his authority.’
In recalling some lines from Shakspeare, the reader will find how very familiar to the mind are the serpent similes. Some of them prove that the poet was cognizant of a tooth being also a source of evil; but it is evident that he thought the tongue was so also, especially the tongue of the ‘blindworm.’
For a few out of the many in which Shakspeare’s plays abound, vide Timon of Athens, Act iv. Scene 3: ‘The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm.’
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act iii. Scene 2. When Hermia thinks that Demetrius has killed Lysander while sleeping, she scathingly ejaculates: ‘O brave touch! Could not a worm, an adder do so much? An adder did it; for with deadlier tongue than thine, thou serpent, never adder stung!’