Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/14

12 five years, and that some money matters brought him to Stratford in 1587. Halliwell’s Shakespeare may have slipped home from London, on hearing the jingling of the guineas, but my Shakespeare never once, for seven years, emerged from Cimmerian darkness). As you all know, such is Shakespeare’s proficiency in all the vocations of life that there is not a calling, trade, or profession that has not claimed him as a fellow. Consequently, what a priceless boon to humanity these seven years of obscurity have proved! What a chance is here, in this long passage of time, to account for the acquisition of that universal knowledge which is attributed to him. Accordingly, if we are to believe his editors, commentators, and critics, it was during these seven, silent years, while holding horses betimes, pray observe, at the doors of theatres for his daily bread, that Shakespeare made himself a thorough master of Law and Practice; Medicine (with treatment of the Insane); Veterinary Medicine, Farriery, Music, Military Science, Seamanship, Botany, Horticulture, Archery, Hawking, Fishing, Fencing, Astronomy, Astrology, Ornithology, Hunting, Printing; he was a strolling actor in Germany, traveled in Italy, read every translation of French and of classic authors, and every original then printed, and finished up with reading the whole of English literature from Chaucer to his own time, and as he read he took voluminous notes of every word and phrase so as to pass them off afterward as his own!

It would betoken a strangely superficial reading of Shakespeare’s plays not to perceive defects therein. But they are very largely due to youth, inexperience, and to carelessness, and the carelessness was due, I believe, to the pressure of time. His metaphors are sometimes mixed, such as “taking arms against a sea of troubles.” There are expressions which are too elliptical, such as “I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong”; or “And bid me, when my fate would have me wive, To give it her.” And then there are obscure allusions, such as “run-aways eyes,” and “a fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife,” and “most busy lest, when I do it,” and many, many more, which are held very often to be misprints. But I am inclined to set them down quite as often to careless, hasty writing; and of all these defects Shakespeare must have been quite as conscious as we can be. Are we arrogant enough to suppose that we can