SHAKESPEARIAN STUDIES.* OF the making of books relating to the
works of Shakespeare there is no end, and much of the learning devoted to this perennial subject is certainly a weariness of the flesh. The two books here noticed are, however, of very considerable value, and in the case of Mr. Churton Collins there is, of course, the literary charm that must attract readers as well as students. His book opens with a lengthy essay on "Shake- speare as a Classical Scholar," the object of which is to prove— "that so far from Shakespeare having no pretensions to classical scholarship he could almost certainly read Latin with as much facility as a cultivated Englishman of our own time reads French; that with some at least of the principal Latin classics he was intimately acquainted; that through the Latin language he had access to the Greek classics, and that of the Greek classics in the Latin versions he had, in all probability, a remarkably extensive knowledge."
The position is a somewhat remarkable one to adopt, and we do not see that the contemporary evidence on the question is disposed of by Mr. Collins. He asserts that when Ben Jonson attributed to Shakespeare "small Latin and less Greek" he was writing as a technical scholar, and would have said, the same of Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning. It is scarcely possible to admit this. The fact that Shakespeare was not a University man was, we are told, the cause of the scorn which was showered on his scholarship by Nash and others. Mr. Collins dismisses with ridicule the attempts made by Upton and Whalley in the eighteenth century to prove that Shakespeare was a profound classical scholar, but he will not admit the contention of Farmer in 1766 that the dramatist's classical learning was derived from "English versions and second-hand information." Farmer's view is the one largely held to-day, and will not easily be dislodged, though it has already been somewhat modified by the con- tributions of Dr. Maginn and Mr. Spencer Baynes to this subject. Mr. Collins takes the curriculum of Ipswich Grammar School drawn up in 1528 "as typical of the instruc- tion provided in the best schools of Shakespeare's time"; and if this was so, we may "with probability assume that, unless the young Shakespeare was either lazy or stupid, he must have left school with a very competent knowledge of Latin, and, it may be, fairly or even well grounded in Greek." The essay goes on to argue in detail from the works that the dramatist must have read various Latin authors in the original, since no English translations were available. He Must have taken The Rape of Lucrece direct from Ovid, and The Comedy of Errors from the .Afenaechmi and Amphitruo of Plautus. It is convincingly urged that Shakespeare read both Seneca and Juvenal in the original, and certainly a very strong case is shown for the assertion that he read Greek daisies in Latin versions (see Troilus and Cressida, Act Scene 3). The careful collation of passages with parallel idioms and peculiarities points to some direct knowledge of Greek, though there is no absolute evidence of this. We note, for example, the statement that "nothing could be more purely Greek than the dialogue in monostichs in Richard III. between Richard and Elizabeth in the fourth scene of the fourth act." The essayist is convinced that Shakespeare had read the Ajax. "Reminiscences of it seem to haunt his dramas." Mr. Collins has presented a powerful and elaborate, though not entirely' convincing, case for his position. It is not for instance, clear that English versions —now perhaps lost, perhaps only manuscript versions—were not available when Mr. Collins says they were not. If * (1) Studies in Shakespeare. By J. Churton Collins. London : A. Constable and Co.. [7s. 6d.]—(2) The Moral System of fi kaki:spawn a Popular Illustration of Fiction as the Reperimentai Side of Philosophy. By Richard G. Moulton, M.A. (Camb.), Ph.D. (Penna.) London : Macmillan and Co. [6s. net.]
Shakespeare had a slight grounding, his own immense recep- tive powers would probably have enabled him to acquire the knowledge he shows from English versions and conversations with men like Joru3on. It is, at any rate, desirable that further efforts should be made to ascertain the actual curriculum in the Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School when the learned Walter Roche was teaching the future dramatist.
We must briefly refer to two other essays in this volume. "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer ? " reopens an interesting problem. The writer is inclined to conclude-
" that in early life he was in an attorney's office ; that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him ; that as a young man in London, he continued to study or dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman, who has indulged in such copious and osten- tatious display of legal technicalities, has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from tripping."
This explanation seems, indeed, the only reasonable solution of a familiarity with law that astounded Lord Campbell ; and the traditions which couple Shakespeare's name with - the Middle Temple—Twelfth. Night was written for performance in the Hall of that Inn—strengthen this position. The essay on "The Text and Prosody of Shakespeare" will be read with real pleasure by all scholars who feel the fascina- tion of the delightful art of text-mending. The settlement of- the true text of the plays is a problem that will vex men till the end of time, but the First Folio is, and must always be, the bed-rock on which to build. The relationship of the Quartos and the First Folio is, as Mr. Collins says, a terrible problem. The only rule of textual criticism that can be safely followed is to regard the Quartos as secondary evidence, to be applied when the primary evidence of the Folio is absent or obviously corrupt.
Dr. Moulton's book is one that we should like to see in the hands of all young Shakespearian students, for though he seems to impose upon the dramatist a moral scheme of which the dramatist was certainly unconscious, yet this analysis brings us face to face with that unconscious moral purpose which undoubtedly underlies all Shakespeare's work, and partly explains the fact that it is endued with aperennial life denied to many authors of splendid imagination and executive power. We may doubt if Shakespeare's immense intellectual and literary gifts, and his unequalled insight into human life, would have sufficed to make him a world-wide household name were it not for other qualities, and chiefly for that quality which recognised the inseparable trinity of Time, Death, and Judgment. Dr. Moulton's root-idea is to treat Shakespeare's world of men and women as analogous to the real world :— -
"For myself, I am content to draw nothing more of system out of the world of Shakespeare's creations than may be drawn from the world of real life. None of us believe the world about us to be a mere chaos. The sifted life that is held up for our observa- tion by Shakespeare will similarly show underlying principles ; every degree of success in discovering and coordinating moral ideas in the Drama may lay claim to the broad sense of the word' system."
We do not wish to quarrel with Dr. Moulton for under- taking the task, which he has carried out with a remarkable and interesting measure of success ; but there is, of course, an underlying fallacy in the idea. The Architect of the Universe must have laid His plans—if one may use the term—on the basis of moral creation. But the great human poet is not first of all a moralist; to be didactic is his last conception. He is not, in the first place, consciously teaching, not con- sciously exhibiting the operation of ultimate laws. The fact is that the highest work in itself must, apart from the will of the poet—the maker—have this result. In so far as art does not teach, it has no permanent place ; and in so far as Shake- speare fails to teach the effects on human life of the ultimate laws of good and evil, he fails as an artist. This is true of all production. If any work is to live, it must be built on a moral system which is, at any rate primarily, unconscious and inspired. Dr. Moulton's book is, however, well worth close study, though it attributes to the dramatist too complete a system for any human mind consciously or unconsciously to have laid down.
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