thought, bound to be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate or
responsive faculty, capable of giving back with peculiar vividness and
spontaneity every sort of impression which may be made on it. The
faculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the
bare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece,
with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's
schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years'
association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was
capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital
culture, into the poet of LEAR and MACBETH. But the vital culture must
come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of
his way to seek the culture. A man so minded, a man who would bear
hardship in order to win knowledge, would not have settled down so
easily into the actor-manager with a good share in the company's
profits. There is almost nothing to show that the young Shakspere read
anything save current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable book as
North's PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his
literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of
JULIUS CAESAR may have been suggested to him by some other play-maker, as
was the case with his chronicle histories. In his contemporary, Ben
Jonson, we do have the type of the young man bent on getting scholarship
as the best thing possible to him. The bricklayer's apprentice,
unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately
all the while to his Horace and his Homer, resolute to keep and to add
to the humanities he had learned in the grammar school, stands out
clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusiastic for knowledge and
letters, but also far more plastically framed, and at the same time far
more clearly alive to the seriousness of the struggle for existence as a
matter of securing the daily bread-and-butter. It may be, indeed--who
knows--that but for that peculiarly early marriage, with its consequent
family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little
more of youthful breathing-time: it may be that it was the existence of
Ann Hathaway and her three children that made him a seeker for pelf
rather than a seeker for knowledge in the years between twenty and
thirty, when the concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual men.
The thesis undertaken in LO