"THE ILLITERATEPEASANT."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11950, 26 April 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

"THE ILLITERATEPEASANT."

ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW.

Is" last week's supplement we gave an extract from an article by Canon Ainger, in the Pilot, on the " Shakespere-Bacon Controversy." The following letter in the next issue of the Pilot, by Mr. George Stronach, deals with the question from the other point of view: —

There is one curious omission in the two article by Canon Ainger v/itA the title of "The Illiterate Peasant." Although Canon Ainger credits Shakespere at school with having read Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Plan—a stretch of imagination if Shakespere left school at the age of thirteen—he omits to state how or where Shakespere obtained his marvellous knowledge of English. In those days English was not part of the curriculum at the gdaminar or other schools, with the result that the common classes Wuro densely ignorant. They had to pick up their mother tongue as best they could. The first English grammar was not published until 1586, several years after Shakespere left school.

Halliwell-Phillipps wrote : " Removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress, it is difficult to believe that when he left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments." Mr. Sidney Lee acknowledges: "The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature." '

Shakespere left school at thirteen. He was apprenticed to his father's occupation of butcher. Between that date and the ate of his leaving Stratford I have not heard thai - he was addicted to study, but to poaching. In 1586 this butcher's boy and poacher, who had no education in English «t a lime when provincial dialects were strong and persistent, left Stratford, we are told by Goadby, " with a portion of ' Venus and Adonis' in his pocket, and perhaps some sonnets and imperfect plays :" while Collins says : " We feel morally certain that ' Venus and Adonis' was in being anterior to Shakespere's {putting Stratford," and Sir Theodore Martin maintains that "Before Shakespere left Stratford he hail probably written 'Venus and Adonis.'" Mr. Baynes Canon Aiuger's authority— " Venus and Adonis" to Shakespere's "youthful studies at Stratford, and especially to the poets read during his school course." Did Goadby, Collier, Martin, and Baynes ever read "Venus and Adonis, and ask how this poem, written in the purest and most polished classical English, without a trace of Warwickshire patois, could have been written when and how they say it was? Halliwell-Phillipps ascribes Shakespere's capability of accomplishing this feat to 'Lis study 'of the infinite book of Nature," Sir Theodore Martin owes it to " heaven-sent inspiration," another critic to " Nature and his heart," while Canon Ainger tells us ".tor anyone capable of being taught it is through the air he breathes . . that his education comes." And by such means the "lad of Stratford" wrote " Venus and Adonis," which the Cowden Clarkes say " bears palpable tokens of college elegance and predilection, both in story and in treatment. 'Ike air of tliceneas and stiffness, almost peculiar to the schools, invests the effort of the youthful genuis with almost unmistakable signs of having been written by a schoolman." He may have been a "schoolboy ;" he certainly never was a " schoolman." Coleridge writes on this point: "It is not probable that scholastic learning was ever congenial to his tastes." And it is not only the quality but the quantity of Shakespere's English vocabulary that excites astonishment in the minds of those who know the Shakespere of tradition, who in a. few years after he left Stratford blossomed out "into the greatest and most brilliant literary genius of all time. Max Midler in his " Science of Language" writes : " We are told by a country clergyman that some of the labourers in his parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary. A well-educated person in England, who has been at a public school, and at the University, who reads the Bible, the Times, and ill the books of Mudie's Library, seldom uses move than 3000 words in actual conversation Accurate thinkers and close reasoners seldom employ a larger stock, and eloquent speakers may rise to the command of 10,000. Shakespere. who displayed a greater variety ->. l expression than probably any writer in any and all languages, produced all his plays with about 15,000. -Milton's were built up with 8000." In the first 200 pages of Murray's " New Oxford Dictionary" there are 14*6 words, now in common use, which were invented or formed out of the raw material of his own and other languages by the writer of the Shakesperean dramas, and there arc hundreds of words used for the first time with a new signification. Did "genius," not "education," accomplish this, or was Shakespere's English Education completed, after he left Stratford, at an Elizabethan free library or night, school? As Canon Ainger says, "It is ail very wonderful," He is the world's miracle. '