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for searching only. Shakspere has no Art, only rude ignorance, but with his patron as muse he has been able to equal learning, even when that learning was itself inspired by the patron.
Shakspere uses this fundamental idea again in the eighty-fifth sonnet, and in sonnet eighty-two is specific that his artistic opponents use "strained touches [of] rhetoric"; that is, that they strain their art to its highest pitch, not, as some have thought, that the results are strained and poor. Again, he begs his patron, in sonnet one-hundred and twenty-five,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free, Which is not mix'd with seconds, knows no art.
We have here, of course, a figurative conceit, which it would be absurd to press too literally. And yet it is probably of some significance that while numerous conventions have been found in Shakspere's sonnets, still this specific conceit is not one of them. It seems to be either fact or Shakspere's own fiction. Nor should we take too liter-ally Shakspere's reference to his "unpolished lines" in the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton in 1593. But we must re-member that a scant seven months before Shakspere was writing these lines Robert Greene had trumpeted to the world these defects of Shakspere's. Greene had in September 1592 pointed out that Shakspere wanted Art. Shakspere thereafter himself claimed consistently, even if conventionally, to rely upon Nature rather than upon Art. We have seen that his friends also took pride in this interpretation of his genius. So Jonson in the First Folio was only giving official phraseology to what had long been the tradition, which both Shakspere and his friends proudly cultivated.
This pride of Shakspere's player friends also found its expression in the Folio of 1623;
Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.
What Jonson thought of this statement by the players we have
already seen. It is clear that the players did not think that Shakspere
lacked sufficient Art, even though they glorified his natural ability.
Nor were Shakspere's own fellows the only ones who before Jon-
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