Andrew Lang - Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him “ learned ”? He is “sweet,” “honey-tongued,” “mellifluous,” and so forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with the compliment of “learned.” What Ben Jonson thought of his learning (but Ben’s standard was very high), what Milton and Fuller, boys of eight when he died, thought of his learning, we know. They thought him “Fancy’s child” (Milton) and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with “small Latin and less Greek” (Jonson). They speak of Shakespeare the author and actor; not yet had any man divided the persons.

Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the classics. They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense as our modern scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr. Swinburne among the dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray – if I may be pardoned for mentioning contemporary names. But Elizabethan scholarly poets, and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned. 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 scholarship “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 attitude 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 assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free School is positively amazing.” 52 52 The Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 96. 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. 53 53 See chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare .

Let me take one example 54 54 The Shakespeare Problem Restated , pp. 94–96. 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 gods 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 gods, who, bearing himself like the gods, 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:

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

Now take Portia:

(Not much Seneca, so far!)

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

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E. J. Castle, Shakespeare , Bacon , Jonson , and Greene , pp. 194–195.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 145.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 340.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , pp. 340, 341.

In Re Shakespeare , p. 54.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 341.

Ibid. , p. 470.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 339.

The Vindicators of Shakespeare , pp. 115–116.

Ibid. , p. 49.

The Vindicators of Shakespeare , p. 14.

Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare . By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.

The Shakespere Problem Restated , p. 293.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , pp. 31–37.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , pp. 36–37.

Tue Shakespeare Problem Restated , p. 20.

The Shakespeare Problem Restated , pp. 47–48.

Ibid. , pp. 54–55.

Ibid. , p. 54.

Ibid. , p. 56.