Part 4 (1/2)

Perhaps few modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.

The opinion of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought Shakespeare's scholars.h.i.+p ”inexact,” as we shall see.

I conceive that Shakspere ”knew Latin pretty well,” and, on Ben Jonson's evidence, he knew ”less Greek.” That he knew ANY Greek is surprising. Apparently he did, to judge from Ben's words. My att.i.tude must, to the Baconians, seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive. I cannot pretend to know what was Shakspere's precise amount of proficiency in Latin when he was writing the plays. That between his own knowledge, and construes given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.

Mr. Greenwood says ”the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere must have done, and a.s.similated, during his brief sojourn at the Free School is positively amazing.” {62a} But I have shown how an imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and romances, might continue to read Latin ”for human pleasure” after he left school. As a professional writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they are rare in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in his reading. Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of genius. ”And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this prodigious industry. . . . ” I am not speaking of ”prodigious industry,” and of that--at school. In a region so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr.

Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will's early reading (even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to exist, from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the memories of the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none of these things. The thing is not reasonable. {62b}

Let me take one example {62c} of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare's debt to Seneca's then untranslated paper De Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I). It inspires Portia's speech about Mercy. Here I give a version of the Latin.

”Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief magistrate (principem) . . . No one can think of anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher office . . . But if the placable and just G.o.ds punish not instantly with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power.

What? Holds not he the place nearest to the G.o.ds, who, bearing himself like the G.o.ds, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for the better? . . . Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would absolve.”

The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia's speech:

”Consider this That in the course of Justice none of us Should see salvation.”

Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia's eloquence.

Now take Portia:

”The quality of Mercy is not strain'd; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;”

(Not much Seneca, so far!)

”'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But Mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to G.o.d himself; And earthly power doth then show likest G.o.d's, When mercy seasons justice . . . ”

There follows the pa.s.sage about none of us seeing salvation, already cited, and theological in origin.

Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections, without having read Seneca's De Clementia, whether, if he could not conceive the ideas ”out of his own head,” he might not hear Seneca's words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for himself. Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero.

My view of Shakespeare's Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter Raleigh. {64a} As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach the subject, and who have had a cla.s.sical education. An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following chapter.

In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing). Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.

”His plays,” says Sir Walter Raleigh, ”are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris of popular literature,--sc.r.a.ps and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs. In this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . . Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Bened.i.c.k, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . ” {65a} He is rich in rural proverbs NOT recorded in Bacon's Promus.

Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, ”was making himself all the time.”

The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete rural words. Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the tags of song, ballad, story, and DICTON. But so may Shakespeare.

CHAPTER IV: MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE'S LEARNING

That Shakspere, whether ”scholar” or not, had a very wide and deep knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr.

Greenwood seems to admire in that ”violent Stratfordian,” Mr. Churton Collins. {69a} I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade cla.s.sical scholars who have never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their merits the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide cla.s.sical knowledge? Does he use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?