seems pretty certain, that the author of The Taming of the Shrew, had at least read Ovid; from whose Epistles we find these lines:
Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.
And what does Dr. Johnson say on this occasion? Nothing. And what does Mr. Farmer say on this occasion? Nothing.
In Love’s Labour Lost, which, bad as it is, is ascribed by Dr. Johnson himself to Shakespeare, there occurs the word thrasenical; another argument which seems to shew that he was not unacquainted with the comedies of Terence; not to mention, that the character of the schoolmaster in the same play could not possibly be written by a man who had travelled no further in Latin than hic, hæc, hoc.
In Henry the Sixth we meet with a quotation from Virgil,
But this, it seems, proves nothing, any more than the lines from Terence and Ovid, in the Taming of the Shrew; for Mr. Farmer looks on Shakespeare’s property in the comedy to be extremely disputable; and he has no doubt but Henry the Sixth had the same author with Edward the Third, which hath been recovered to the world in Mr. Capell’s Prolusions.
If any play in the collection bears internal evidence of Shakespeare’s hand, we may fairly give him Timon of Athens, In this play we have a familiar quotation from Horace,
I will not maintain but this hemistich may be found in Lilly or Udall; or that it is not in the Palace of Pleasure, or the English Plutarch; or that it was not originally foisted in by the players: It stands, however, in the play of Timon of Athens.
The world in general, and those who purpose to comment on Shakespeare in particular, will owe much to Mr. Farmer, whose researches into our old authors throw a lustre on many passages, the obscurity of which must else have been impenetrable. No future Upton or Gildon will go further than North’s translation for Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Plutarch, or balance between Dares Phrygius, and the Troye
