This list, embracing two-thirds of all the plays Shakespeare wrote, and practically all of his dramatic work worth knowing, covers what Field might have seen and, with a few possible exceptions, unquestionably did see, in the way calculated to give him the keenest pleasure and the most lasting impressions.  These plays, during that decade, were presented by such famous actors and actresses as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, Barry Sullivan, George Rignold, E.L.  Davenport, Ristori, Adelaide Neilson, Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Mrs. D.P.  Bowers, and Rose Eytinge in the leading roles.  It is impossible to overestimate the value of listening night after night to the great thoughts and subtle philosophy of the master dramatist from the lips of such interpreters, to say nothing of the daily association with the men and women who lived and moved in the atmosphere of the drama and its traditions.  So, perhaps, it is only fair to include Shakespeare and the contemporaneous drama with the Bible and the New England Primer as the only staple foundations of Field’s literary education when he came to Chicago.  If this could have been analyzed more closely, it would have shown some traces of what was drilled into him by his old preceptor, Dr. Tufts, and many odds and ends of the recitations from the standard speaker of his elocutionary youth, but no solids either of Greek or Latin lore and not a trace of his beloved Horace.

Now it so happened that all I had ever learned in school or college of Greek and Latin had slid from me as easily as running water over a smooth stone, leaving me as innocent of the classics in the original as Field.  But, unlike Field, when our fortunes threw us together, I had kept up a close and continuous reading and study of English language and literature.  The early English period had always interested me, and we had not been together for two months before Field was inoculated with a ravenous taste for the English literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape.  He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and perfect measure of the late English laureate.  For three years Mallory’s “History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table” was the delight of his poetic soul and the text-book for his conversation and letters, and its effect was traceable in almost every line of his newspaper work.  Knights, damosells, paynims, quests, jousts, and tourneys, went “rasing and trasing” through his manuscript, until some people thought he was possessed with an archaic humor from which he would never recover.