Monday, April 18, 2022

Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d.

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.  Chapter 5 page 109.

Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays—unlike, say, those of Ben Jonson, where learning hangs like bunting on every word. Nothing we find in Shakespeare betrays any acquaintance with Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, or others who influenced Jonson and were second nature to Francis Bacon. That is a good thing—a very good thing indeed—for he would almost certainly have been less Shakespeare and more a showoff had he been better read. As John Dryden put it in 1668: “Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn’d.”

No comments:

Post a Comment