Is it Shakespeare Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V WAS THE AUTHOR OF THE SHAKESPEARE POEMS AND SONNETS A SCHOLAR ? BUT let us turn to a more pleasant subject. I have already expressed my opinion t... more »hat the author of the Sonnets was an aristocrat by birth and feeling, and it can be shown, and has been often shown by numerous extracts from the Plays, that their author had in special a dislike to low, common people, and to vulgar tastes and habits. I do not think there is need to press this point. But there is another point much disputed, which requires to be settled definitely if possible, and that is : Was the author of the Plays and Poems a scholar ? Much depends on this, and I, for one, am much surprised that it has been so long in dispute; it seems such a clear and certain matter. But we must hear both sides. First take the Shakespearians : they are not all agreed among themselves on this matter, but the majority of them assert that the author of the Plays was not a scholar, and was not well read in languages ancient or modern, but that he was a born genius and picked up sufficient general and special knowledge to be able to write the Plays, even such masterpieces as Hamlet and King Lear, and The Tempest, by the force of his natural genius. His mind was a remarkably receptive one, they say; he would easily get his law from his Stratford experience and his father's conversation, for the old gentleman was obstinately litigious. He would get his Spanish and Italian and French from the natives of those countries whom he chanced to meet at the inns and taverns and other public places of the metropolis. He would get his knowledge of Venice or of Denmark from sailors or travellers who had been there, and so on. He was no SCHOLAR OR GENIUS? 67 erudite scholar or linguist, but he had been to an excellent country...« less