ay as to imply a
knowledge of their derivation. The discovery of a lost translation may
modify our views as to whether a particular author was used by him in
the original, but the evidence from his use of Romance words gives clear
proof that his schooling was no unimportant element in his mastery of
speech.

[3] See the list in the appendix to Schmidt's _Lexicon_.

Greek was occasionally begun in the Elizabethan grammar school, but we
do not know whether this was the case in Stratford. Certainly we have no
reason to believe that Shakespeare could read Greek, as all his
knowledge of Greek authors could have been obtained from translations,
and only two Greek words, _misanthropos_ and _threnos_, occur in his
writings. Yet no single author was so important in providing material
for the plays as the Greek Plutarch. His _Lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus
Brutus, Marcus Antonius_, and _Caius Martius Coriolanus_, in Sir Thomas
North's translation, are the direct sources of the great Roman
tragedies, and in a less important way the _Lives of Antonius_ and
_Alcibiades_ were used in _Timon of Athens_. Homeric elements are
discoverable in _Troilus and Cressida_, which derives mainly from the
medieval tradition. As the Trojan story was already familiar on the
stage, these need not have come from Chapman's Homer. The knowledge of
Lucian which seems implied in _Timon_ was probably not gained from the
Greek original. The late Greek romances, which were popular in
translation, may have been read by Shakespeare, since the reference to
the "Egyptian thief" in _Twelfth Night_, V. i. 120, is from the
_AEthiopica_ of Heliodorus, translated in 1569. Attempts have been made
by the assembling of parallel passages to prove a knowledge of Greek
tragedy on the part of Shakespeare, but such parallelisms are more
naturally explained as coincidences arising from the treatment of
analogous themes and situations.

Of modern languages, French was the easiest for an Elizabethan
Englishman to acquire, and the French passages and scenes in _Henry V_
make it fairly certain that Shakespeare had a working knowledge of this
tongue. Yet, as in the case of Latin, he seems to have preferred a
translation to an original when he could find it. Montaigne, whose
influence some have found pervasive in Shakespeare, he certainly used in
Gonzalo's account of his ideal commonwealth in _The Tempest_, II. i.
143 ff., but it seems that he employed Florio's translation here.