This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions.  Phillips, a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682; he is “the chronicle of the stage.”  Through him Davenant gets the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and had been a rural dominie.  Mr. Greenwood {57a} devotes much space to disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority, moult s’en faut), but Mr. Greenwood here says not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition.  He frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration than I like.  He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p. 105, but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say that “Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his authority.”  On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does not suit his book) as “a mere myth.”  “He knows, he knows” which traditions are mythical, and which possess a certain historical value.

My own opinion is that Shakspere did “know Latin pretty well,” and was no scholar, as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship.  He left school, if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age, twelve, when Bacon went to Cambridge.  Will, a clever kind of lad (on my theory), left school at an age when some other clever lads became freshmen.  Why not?  Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have heard as Bishop of Salisbury under William iii) took his degree at the age of fourteen.

Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I conceive him to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be found the most wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which could not but please his “green unknowing youth.”  In the years before he left Stratford, and after he left school (1577-87?), I can easily suppose that he was not always butchering calves, poaching, and making love; and that, if he could get books in no other way, this graceless fellow might be detected on a summer evening, knitting his brows over the stories and jests of the chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom desk.  Moi qui parle, I am no genius; but stories, romance, and humour would certainly have dragged me back to the old desks—­if better might not be, and why not Shakspere?  Put yourself in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad, you liked to steal away into the world of romance, into fairyland.

If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was a marvel of genius.  But I am not here claiming for him genius, but merely stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and romance, had no English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired as much power of reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily gain in four years of exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies as he pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.