Shakespeare’s Reading

Summary

John Selden is reported to have said: “No man is the wiser for his learning: it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon, but wit and wisdom are born with a man.” For two and a half centuries we have been asking how far learning administered matter for Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom to work in or objects for them to work upon. If a friend had put to Shakespeare the Second Outlaw’s question “Have you the tongues?”, would he have answered, with Valentine, “My youthful travail therein made me happy”?

Soon after his death two poets wrote about Shakespeare in terms that suggest that his learning, that is, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, was scanty. One of them said that he had "small Latin, and less Greek": the other praised him as Fancy's child, warbling "his native wood-notes wild". But Jonson and Milton are among the most learned scholar-poets this country has produced; and if we test Shakespeare, as perhaps they were testing him, by their own severe standards of scholarship, then indeed we must say he had not even the "edging or trimming of a scholar".