We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than "The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in which Ben Jonson stated that the poet had "small Latin and less Greek," it is evident from the allusions throughout the plays that Shakespeare was a reader rather than a scholar. In other words, he used books for what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemanship, politics, and other fields; but such works are usually the products of enthusiasts in single subjects, who are apt to forget how much a man of acute mind and keen observation can pick up of a technical matter that interests him for the time, and how intelligently he can use it. The cross-examination of an expert witness by an able lawyer is an everyday illustration; and in the literature School-Booksof our own day this kind of versatility is strikingly exemplified in the work of such a writer as Mr. Kipling.

How Shakespeare learned to read and write his own tongue we do not know; that he did learn hardly needs to be argued. The free grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, like other schools of its type, was named from its function of teaching Latin grammar; and we may make what is known of the curricula of such schools in the sixteenth century the basis for our inferences as to what Shakespeare learned there.

The accidence, with which the course began, was studied in Lily's Grammar, and clear echoes of this well-known work are heard in the conversation between Sir Hugh Evans and William Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, IV. i, in 1 Henry IV, II. i. 104, in Much Ado, IV. i. 22, in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 82 (and perhaps, V. i. 10 and 84), in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 2, in The Taming of the Shrew, I. i. 167,—a line of Terence altered by Lily,—and in Titus Andronicus, IV. ii. 20-23, where Demetrius reads two lines from Horace, and Chiron says,

O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes and Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably due to some elementary phrase-book no longer to be identified. It is to be noted how prominently this early comedy figures in the list of evidences of his school-day memories.

Among the first pieces of connected Latin prose read in the Elizabethan schools was Æsop's Fables, a collection which, after centuries of rewriting and re-compiling for adults, had come in the sixteenth century to be regarded chiefly as a school-book, but allusions to which are everywhere to be found in the literature of the day. In 2 Henry VI, III. i. 343, and Richard II, III. ii. 129, we find references to the fable of "The Countryman and a Snake"; in 2 Henry VI, III. i. 69, and Timon of Athens, II. i. 28, to "The Crow in Borrowed Feathers"; in 2 Henry VI, III. i. 77, to "The Wolf in the Sheep's Skin"; in King John, II. i. 139, to "The Ass in the Lion's Skin"; in Henry V, IV. iii. 91, to "The Hunter and the Bear"; in As You Like It, I. i. 87, to "The Dog that Lost his Teeth"; in All's Well, II. i. 71, to "The Fox and the Grapes"; besides a number of slighter and less definite allusions. The most detailed fable in Shakespeare, that of "The Belly and the Members," in Coriolanus, I. i. 99, is derived, not from Æsop, but from Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus.

The traces of the well-known collection of sayings from various writers called Sententiæ Pueriles, and of the so-called Distichs of Cato, both of which were commonly read in the second and third years, are only slight. Battista Spagnuoli Mantuanus, whose Eclogues, written about 1500, had become a text-book, is honored with explicit mention as well as quotation in Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii. 95. Cicero, who was read from Ovidthe fourth year, has left his mark on only a phrase or two, in spite of his importance in Renaissance culture; but Ovid is much more important. The motto on the title-page of Venus and Adonis is from the Amores, and the matter of the poem is from Metamorphoses, X. 519 ff., with features from the stories of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (Meta. IV. 285 ff.), and the hunting in Calydon (Meta. VIII. 270 ff.). Ovid is quoted in Latin in three early plays; and even where a translation was available, the phrasing of Shakespeare's allusions sometimes shows knowledge of the original. Most of Ovid had been translated into English before Shakespeare began to write, and Golding's version of the Metamorphoses (1567) was used for the references to the Actæon myth in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, IV. i. 107 ff., and for a famous passage in The Tempest, V. i. 33. Livy, who had been translated in 1545 according to Malone, seems to have been the chief source of Lucrece, with some aid from Ovid's Fasti, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in Titus Andronicus; to the Medea myth in four or five passages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of classical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in A Midsummer-Night's Dream gives but a slight basis for proving literary relations.

Virgil followed Ovid in the fifth year, and with Virgil, Terence. Of direct knowledge of the latter the plays bear no trace, but of the former there seems to be an influence in the description of the painting of Troy in Lucrece, 1366 ff., and in two short Latin sentences in 2 Henry VI, II. i. 24, and IV. i. 117. Horace, Plautus, Juvenal, Persius, and Seneca were the new authors taken up in the last years in school. All the Horace in the plays may have been taken from other works, like the passage already quoted from Lily's Grammar. Juvenal and Persius have left no mark. The Menæchmi and Amphitruo of Plautus furnish the basis for The Comedy of Errors, and no English translation of either of these is known before that of the Menæchmi in 1595, which some critics think Shakespeare may have seen in manuscript. But no verbal similarities confirm this conjecture, and there is no reason why the dramatist should not have known both plays at first hand.

The influence of Seneca is dramatically the most important among the classical authors. All the plays that go by his name had been translated into English in the first part of Elizabeth's reign; he was the main channel through which the forms of classical tragedy reached the Renaissance; and when Shakespeare began to write he was the dominant force in the field of tragedy. This makes it hard to say whether the Senecan features in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and even Hamlet, are due to Seneca directly, or to the tradition already well established among Shakespeare's earlier contemporaries.

Results of Schooling