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for searching only. SHAKSPERE'S LATINS 685
for grammar school, published in 158t, but written in the 'seventies just when Shakspere should have been going through this stage of his training. Presumably, therefore, Shakspere acquired his Genesis and Isaiah in grammar school; and Job fits suspiciously well in its nature with some of the other books required. Job may indeed have been Shakspere's undirected choice. I hope it was, since it is also a favorite of mine; but I see no proof for such a conclusion.
It seems best, therefore, to account for Shakspere's knowledge of the Old Testament as predominantly the result of grammar school practice. And this is true whether Shakspere got this knowledge in grammar school, or from the air. The Age had decided to emphasize these parts of the Bible as among the most important, and so drilled them at once into the boys for use in church and in life. They were thus common knowledge for those with a grammar school education. Grammar school and church service together account sufficiently for nearly, if not all, of Shakspere's knowledge of the Bible. While he evidently had been well drilled in youth on the conventional mini-mum materials from the Old Testament, yet there is no evidence that he was later an assiduous reader of these sections. His knowledge is too well confined to grammar school limits to permit much individual and aggressive endeavor at any time on his part. He was no John Milton, as anyone should know who knows his Bible, his Shakspere, and his Milton.
We have some hints also as to how the boys turned the prescribed sections of the Bible from English into Latin. We have seenli that Paul's curriculum as recorded in the latter part of the seventeenth century bases its exercises through the fifth form entirely on the Proverbs and Psalms, even requiring the boys to turn the Psalms into Latin verse for the verse themes of the fifth form when they were beginning the study of versification. Paul's boys ought to have known the Proverbs and Psalms exceedingly well. From the tone of the school, one is safe in assuming that this practice at Paul's was at least as early as the first mention of it in the authorized grammar of 1548, which had been evolved out of Paul's grammar. It should be remembered also that the practice grows out of the recommendation of Erasmus, who had assisted Colet very closely in establishing the curriculum of the school.
But however pious the practice, its lack of linguistic purity would render it anathema to the Ciceronians. So Hoole, being no ardent
U See above, pp. i [9 if.
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