Mr. Theobald is “very unwilling to allow him so poor a scholar as many have laboured to represent him”; and yet is “cautious of declaring too positively on the other side of the question.”
Dr. Warburton hath exposed the weakness of some arguments from suspected imitations; and yet offers others, which, I doubt not, he could as easily have refuted.
Mr. Upton wonders “with what kind of reasoning any one could be so far imposed upon, as to imagine that Shakespeare had no learning”; and lashes with much zeal and satisfaction “the pride and pertness of dunces, who, under such a name, would gladly shelter their own idleness and ignorance.”
He, like the learned Knight, at every anomaly in grammar or metre,
Hath hard words ready to shew why,
And tell what Rule he did it by.
How would the old Bard have been astonished to have found that he had very skilfully given the trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic, commonly called the ithyphallic measure, to the Witches in Macbeth! and that now and then a halting Verse afforded a most beautiful instance of the Pes proceleusmaticus!
“But,” continues Mr. Upton, “it was a learned age; Roger Ascham assures us that Queen Elizabeth read more Greek every day, than some Dignitaries of the Church did Latin in a whole week.” This appears very probable; and a pleasant proof it is of the general learning of the times, and of Shakespeare in particular. I wonder he did not corroborate it with an extract from her injunctions to her Clergy, that “such as were but mean Readers should peruse over before, once or twice, the Chapters and Homilies, to the intent they might read to the better understanding of the people.”
Dr. Grey declares that Shakespeare's knowledge in the Greek and Latin tongues cannot reasonably be called in question. Dr. Dodd supposes it proved, that he was not such a novice in learning and antiquity as some people would pretend. And to close the whole, for I suspect you to be tired of quotation, Mr. Whalley, the ingenious Editor of Jonson, hath written a piece expressly on this side the question: perhaps from a very excusable partiality, he was willing to draw Shakespeare from the field of Nature to classick ground, where alone, he knew, his Author could possibly cope with him.
These criticks, and many others their coadjutors, have supposed themselves able to trace Shakespeare in the writings of the Ancients; and have sometimes persuaded us of their own learning, whatever became of their Author's. Plagiarisms have been discovered in every natural description and every moral sentiment. Indeed by the kind assistance of the various Excerpta, Sententiæ, and Flores, this business may be effected with very little expense of time or sagacity; as Addison hath demonstrated in his Comment on Chevy-chase, and Wagstaff on Tom Thumb; and I myself will engage to give you quotations from the elder English writers (for, to own the truth, I was once idle enough to collect such) which shall carry with them at least an equal degree of similarity. But there can be no occasion of wasting any future time in this department: the world is now in possession of the Marks of Imitation.