I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin school.  I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of the plays must have possessed in youth.  “Tradition says nothing of all that,” the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he likes, turn to my reply in The Traditional Shakespeare. {59a} Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after date, in a place where literature was not of supreme interest, to retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did), in circumstances of privacy?  As far as I am able to judge, had I been a boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing but Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I suppose Shakspere to have possessed.  Yet I could scarcely, like him, have made the second syllable in “Posthumus” long!  Sir Walter Scott, however, was guilty of similar false quantities:  he and Shakspere were about equally scholarly.

I suppose, then, that Shakspere’s “small Latin” (as Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read sufficient for his uses.  As a fact, he made use of English translations, and also of Latin texts.  Scholars like Bacon do not use bad translations of easy Latin authors.  If Bacon wanted Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation of a French translation of a Latin translation.

Some works of Shakespeare, the Lucrece, for example, and The Comedy of Errors (if he were not working over an earlier canvas from a more learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge of Latin texts which in his day had not appeared in published translations, or had not been translated at all as far as we know.  In my opinion Will had Latin enough to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult, for himself.  He could also “get a construe,” when in London, or help in reading, from a more academic acquaintance:  or buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor scholar.  No contemporary calls him scholarly; the generation of men who were small boys when he died held him for no scholar.  The current English literature of his day was saturated with every kind of classical information; its readers, even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world of lore with which the modern man is seldom acquainted.  The ignorant Baconian marvels:  the classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with Elizabethan literature is amazed.  Really there is nothing worthy of their wonder.

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.