e was supposably storing up Latin for future literary
use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must
have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be
understood in London, and study English very hard. Very hard indeed;
incredibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the
smooth and rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus
and Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn great
and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.

However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and more,
much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the complex procedure of
the law-courts; and all about soldiering, and sailoring, and the manners
and customs and ways of royal courts and aristocratic society; and
likewise accumulated in his one head every kind of knowledge the learned
then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the
lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate
knowledge of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than
was possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to make
brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid
treasures the moment he got to London. And according to the surmisers,
that is what he did. Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to
teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig them
out of. His father could not read, and even the surmisers surmise that
he did not keep a library.

It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his
vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance
with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for
a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT; just as a bright lad like me,
reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become
perfect in knowledge of the Bering Strait whale-fishery and the
shop-talk of the veteran exercises of that adventure-bristling trade
through catching catfish with a "trot-line" Sundays. But the surmise
is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence--and not even
tradition--that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.

It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his
law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through
"amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up
lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering ab