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perform the customary rhetorical operations on various fables, thus further impressing his mind with the type.
A much more fundamental matter now emerges than the question of whether Shakspere did or did not study Aesop in grammar school. Whether Shakspere studied Aesop or not, it is yet apparent that he looked at nature through Aesop's spectacles, and that his thoughts are cast in the contemporary Aesop mould. It was to bring out this point that I have included all possible allusions known to me. While some of these twenty-three possible allusions may not belong to Shakspere, and others may not be directly to Aesop, yet enough of them are certain to show that Shakspere had been well drilled in the stories and morals of Aesop, and that later he found important use for this training. For, a great deal, if not all, of Shakspere's animal kingdom is seen through the eyes of Aesop. Even when it does not come directly from Aesop, as in the case of Pliny's cuckoo, yet it is viewed and interpreted in the way that current teaching of Aesop dictated. There was no other literary view. Aesop is responsible for the form taken by a great deal of Elizabethan natural history. It all had to be moralized. No wonder Shakspere could find,
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in every thing.m
His schoolmasters had assiduously cultivated that ability in him."6 The role of Aesop and Pliny in Shakspere and in Elizabethan literature would repay intensive study.
As we examine the evidence on our specific problem of whether Shakspere studied Aesop in grammar school, and if so, in what form, some interesting conclusions are evident. In the first place, the Planudes collection in its various forms and the current Caxton translation into English may at once be discarded. If Shakspere had Aesop in grammar school, it was in Latin, not Greek, and it was without the aid of an English translation. In the second place, all of Shakspere's Aesopic fables are in Camerarius, and in the form that Shakspere knew them. That is not the case in Bullokar or in the regular Latin collection which he translates. Of the forms examined, only that of Camerarius meets all the conditions. In some instances, the relationship seems so individual as to make it clear that Camerarius is the true source of Shakspere's Aesop.
Here we have another significant fact. If Shakspere had picked his
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