earlier dramas, though he certainly boasts of them as meritorious
works. As Shakespeare, on his retiring from the theatre, left his
manuscripts behind with his fellow-managers, he may have relied on
theatrical tradition for handing them down to posterity, which would
indeed have been sufficient for that purpose if the closing of the
theatres, under the tyrannical intolerance of the Puritans, had not
interrupted the natural order of things. We know, besides, that the
poets used then to sell the exclusive copyright of their pieces to the
theatre:[20] it is therefore not improbable that the right of property
in his unprinted pieces was no longer vested in Shakespeare, or had
not, at least, yet reverted to him. His fellow-managers entered on the
publication seven years after his death (which probably cut short his
own intention), as it would appear on their own account and for their
own advantage.

LECTURE XXIII

Ignorance or Learning of Shakespeare--Costume as observed by Shakespeare,
and how far necessary, or may be dispensed with in the Drama--Shakespeare
the greatest drawer of Character--Vindication of the genuineness of his
pathos--Play on words--Moral delicacy--Irony--Mixture of the Tragic and
Comic--The part of the Fool or Clown--Shakespeare's Language and
Versification.

Our poet's want of scholarship has been the subject of endless
controversy, and yet it is surely a very easy matter to decide.
Shakespeare was poor in dead school-cram, but he possessed a rich
treasury of living and intuitive knowledge. He knew a little Latin,
and even something of Greek, though it may be not enough to read with
ease the writers in the original. With modern languages also, the
French and Italian, he had, perhaps, but a superficial acquaintance.
The general direction of his mind was not to the collection of words
but of facts. With English books, whether original or translated, he
was extensively acquainted: we may safely affirm that he had read all
that his native language and literature then contained that could be
of any use to him in his poetical avocations. He was sufficiently
intimate with mythology to employ it, in the only manner he could
wish, in the way of symbolical ornament. He had formed a correct
notion of the spirit of Ancient History, and more particularly of that
of the Romans; and the history of his own country was familiar to him
even in detail. Fortunately for him it had not as yet been treated in
a diplomati