r, a man of the sort whose education--even book
education--never ceases. At a later date in London he manifestly
absorbed numerous translations. He knew his way about his Golding's Ovid
and North's Plutarch. Before he attempted those splendid poetical
exercises the _Venus and Adonis_, the _Lucrece_, and the early sonnets,
he had studied, like every one else, the models for sonneteers and
lyrists which came from Italy and France, from Petrarch or Du Bellay. It
is clear that he was familiar with the Essays of Montaigne. Earlier
English literature was no sealed book to him. He also read his own
contemporaries. Hence his _Lucrece_ is part Ovid, part Chaucer, part
Daniel or Watson; his _Venus and Adonis_ is part Ovid, part Lodge.

Better still than reading is conversation, the rubbing of wits and
furbishing of knowledge amid well-informed and bright-minded company.
Tradition tells us that Shakespeare was a member of that brilliant
coterie of the Mermaid Tavern, where rare Ben presided, as glorious John
presided at a later day in his favoured Coffee-house. Fuller describes
the wit-combats between Shakespeare and his learned confrere, and there
is no reason to doubt that the nimble man-of-war and the heavy galleon
fought many a bout. Of that coterie Beaumont writes to Jonson:--

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.

The classical quotation, the apt allusion, would fly freely in that
society. The matter of books new and old would be talked of and
discussed. For the purpose of Shakespeare, here was learning to be
picked up of the most telling sort. For, let us repeat, reading was then
pursued on high levels, and intellectual curiosity was eager. And let
us remember always that Shakespeare must have possessed an astonishing
instinct for seizing the essentials, which he shaped for himself "in the
quick forge and working-house of thought."

Also among the actors into whose company he was perpetually thrown there
were men who had, as we should call it, toured through England and
Scotland, and sometimes abroad to France, Germany, or Denmark. Scores of
his acquaintances must have travelled in Italy, even if they did not
return _diavoli incarnati_. Each man brought back description,
information, story, which the vivid imagination of Shakespeare, as he
list