booke of Lydgate. The Hystorie of Hamblet, in black letter, will for ever supersede Saxo Grammaticus; translated novels and ballads will, perhaps, be allowed the sources of Romeo, Lear, and the Merchant of Venice; and Shakespeare himself, however unlike Bayes in other particulars, will stand convicted of having transversed the prose of Holingshead; and at the same time, to prove “that his studies lay in his own language,” the translations of Ovid are determined to be the production of Heywood.
“That his studies were most demonstratively confined to nature, and his own language,” | readily allow: but does it hence follow that he was so deplorably ignorant of every other tongue, living or dead, that he only “remembered, perhaps, enough of his schoolboy learning to put the hig, hag, hog, into the mouth of Sir H. Evans; and might pick “up in the writers of the time, or the course of his conversation, a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian?” In Shakespeare’s plays both these last languages are plentifully scattered; but then, we are told, they might be impertinent additions of the players. Undoubtedly they might: but there they are, and, perhaps, few of the players had much more learning than Shakespeare.
Mr. Farmer himself will allow that Shakespeare began to learn Latin: I will allow that his studies lay in English: but why insist that he neither made any progress at school; nor improved his acquisitions there? The general encomiums of Suckling, Denham, Milton, &c. on his native genius[1], prove nothing; and Ben Jonson’s celebrated charge of Shakespeare’s small Latin, and less Greek[2], seems absolutely to decide that he
- ↑ Mr. Farmer closes these general testimonies of Shakespeare’s having been only indebted to nature, by saying, “He came out of her hand, as some one else expresses it, like Ballas out of Jove’s head, at full growth and mature.” It is whimsical enough, that this some one else, whose expression is here quoted to countenance the general notion of Shakespeare’s want of literature, should be no other than myself. Mr. Farmer does not chuse to mention where he met with this expression of some one else; and some one else does not chuse to mention where he dropt it.
- ↑ In defence of the various reading of this passage, given in the preface to the last edition of Shakespeare, “small Latin, and no Greek,” Mr. Farmer tells us, that “it was adopted above a century ago by W. Towers, in a panegyrick on Cartwright.”
