Latin for future literary use–he had his youthful hands full,
and much more than full. He must have had to put aside his
Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn’t be understood in London, and
study English very hard. Very hard indeed; incredibly hard,
almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and
rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the “Venus and
Adonis” in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn
great and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.
However, it is “conjectured” that he accomplished all this
and more, much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the
complex procedure of the law-courts; and all about soldiering,
and sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal
courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his
one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and
every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the
ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge
of the world’s great literatures, ancient and modern, than was
possessed by any other man of his time–for he was going to make
brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these
splendid treasures the moment he got to London. And according to
the surmisers, that is what he did. Yes, although there was no
one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in
the little village to dig them out of. His father could not read,
and even the surmisers surmise that he did not keep a library.
It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare
got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate
acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of
lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT;
just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of
the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Bering
Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercises
of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a
“trot-line” Sundays. But the surmise is damaged by the fact that
there is no evidence–and not even tradition–that the young
Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.
It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare
accumulated his law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn
in London, through “amusing himself” by learning book-law in his
garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through
loitering about the law-courts and listening. But it is only
surmise; there is no EVIDENCE that he ever did either of those
things. They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of Paris.
There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by
holding horses in front of the London theaters, mornings and
afternoons. Maybe he did. If he did, it seriously shortened his
law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts. In those
very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he
could get. The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it
too formidably increases the historian’s difficulty in accounting
for the young Shakespeare’s erudition–an erudition which he was
acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those
strenuous times, and emptying each day’s catch into next day’s
imperishable drama.
He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a
knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and
talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages:
for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges,
too, into his dramas. How did he acquire these rich assets?
In the usual way: by surmise. It is SURMISED that he
traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself
to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he
perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road;
that he went in Leicester’s expedition to the Low Countries, as
soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years–or
whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business–and
thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and
soldier-talk and generalship and general-ways and general-talk,
and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.