cess, as others had, to the open storehouse of known truth. Shakespeare's learning was acquired by ordinary process. He may have had, as Jonson tells us, "small Latin and less Greek," but he utilized in phenomenal ways that which he had. A comparison here between Shakespeare and Burns, each a genius and each without liberal training, will reveal the immense superiority of the former both as to the acquisition and use of literary material. This difficulty of accounting for such learning has given some basis to the Baconian theory of the plays, with regard to which it may be said that if by this we escape one difficulty we invite another equally serious, in that it is as difficult to account for the possession of Shakespearean genius by Bacon as it is to account for the possession of Baconian learning by Shakespeare. Moreover, scholars are slowly conceding that liberally educated men have no monopoly of truth, and that often, as they sit dreaming over their books in fancied possession of special privilege, these untutored minds - so called are looking at the world of life and fact with their eyes wide open and taking in all they see and hear. 2. A second question pertains to Shakespeare's religious beliefs and life. Here again there are extreme views. That he was an essentially godly man, after the type of Knox and Fox and the English reformers is the view of some. Hence we are told that his plays are a kind of second Bible, as Mr. Rees, in his "Shakespeare, and the Bible," sets forth. Hence his allusions to Christ, the Deity, and the atonement, as set forth by Bishop Wordsworth, are magnified by critics in support of this view. "The Tempest," we are told, is the dramatist's account of Paul's voyage and shipwreck. In fact, in these biblical references there is nothing conclusive, since Shakespeare used them, as he used the facts of history, as purely literary material. As he himself tells us, even the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." The Bible and theological teaching took their place, in his view, with all other sources from which he drew at pleasure. A more dangerous extreme asserts. that Shakespeare was a wild and reckless youth, defying all human and divine law, dissipating at Stratford and in the clubs of London. His death. it is said, was due to a fever contracted at a "merry meeting" with Jonson and Drayton; a native wit," says Taine with irony, "not shackled by morality." Most of this gratuitous criticism is based on pure conjecture, and should receive no in 66 66 dorsement at the hands of the careful student of English letters. The modified and more charitable view is that Shakespeare had a creditable knowledge of the Bible, that he had been Christianly instructed and trained in the Protestant faith, and, at the close of his life at least, appears as a thoroughly upright citizen and a worthy man of the world. Not a Christian by open profession, he looked at truth and duty in his own way, maintained an honorable attitude toward the church and the prevailing faith, and aimed in what he wrote to elevate the moral standards of the time. As Chaucer before him, he never posed as a reformer, announced no creed, and championed no special moral movement, and yet, as Guizot writes, "was the most profound and dramatic of moralists." Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, he stood on the safe ground of meliorism, believing that all was working steadily for the better. Despite the fact that his pages must be at times expurgated to meet the somewhat fastidious taste of modern times, no one can rationally accuse him of a willful purpose to corrupt the conscience or shock the most delicate sensibilities of his readers. Here, as elsewhere, he was immeasurably above the standard of his fellow-dramatists. Such a play as "Macbeth" is a study in moral science quite impossible to an author who was not well versed in ethical distinctions and anxious to throw the weight of his influence on the side of truth and right. As to Shakespeare's religious beliefs and life, however, this is to be said as a final wordthat they lie properly outside the sphere of the literary student as such. It is questionable whether, if asked to do so, he could have formulated his own doctrinal creed, while he lived his private life in accordance with what he conceived to be the essential principles of Christian morality. His religious personality is as much concealed in his plays as his mental and social and civic or, indeed, his literary personality. He writes as an interpreter of general truth to men and not as a revealer of his own states of mind or ethical conditions. 3. A further topic of interest included under our caption is the English of Shakespeare - as an example of sixteenth-century or Elizabethan English, or of that "New English" of which Oliphant speaks as representing the opening of the Modern English era as distinct from the Old and Middle English of Alfred and Chaucer. It is to this that Meres, in his "Palladis Tamia," refers when he says that "the Muses would speak with Shake speare's fine-filed phrase if they would speak English," or, as Wordsworth expresses it, "We must be free or die who speak the tongue Including in his vocabulary about fifteen thousand |