OCRed data provided
for searching only. WHAT OF IT? 665
Less still of the soul which once was all in all and all in every part. Yet it does throw some fight upon the soul itself of the man Shakspere. We of the present peer into the glass darkly in the hope and belief that the future may see somewhat more nearly face to face.
But our facts will not yet permit sweeping generalizations about influences. Here we can at most establish tendencies. We can see the tendencies of the system as a whole. We can see Shakspere reacting with and against some of those tendencies. But most other institutions of the time were shaped in accordance with the same social view and so would reinforce the tendencies of the grammar school program. It is thus frequently, if not usually, impossible to know how to apportion the praise or blame to each of these institutions. In this study, we have placed Shakspere against the background of grammar school teaching. In some instances, it is certain that Shakspere had his information or his point of view from grammar school. In the vast majority of cases, we know only that he was sup-posed to get it there. This is true even of the tangible facts and methods. Even less certain can we be of the intangibles, which are really the important things. But from the tangible fossils we can get a fair idea of the tangible skeleton, less indeed of the flesh and blood, yet even sorne insight of the soul itself. And whether we like it or not, we have not yet devised any other method of approach-for intuition, whatever its form and whatever its efficacy, is not a method.
Our tangible question thus becomes, "What did Shakspere find useful in grammar school knowledge, whether he acquired that knowledge in grammar school or out?" But before we begin to answer that question one fallacy of the ages should be cleared away at once. It is really pathetic to see how the Pseudo-Classic apologists for lack-Latin Shakspere in the eighteenth century assumed that Shakspere could not possibly have had any less abject regard for the so-called classical rules than they, had he only known them. Ignorance was the only tolerable excuse of which they could conceive. But such an excuse cannot possibly be accepted, for Shakspere certainly knew many of these dicta and wilfully refused to observe them save when it pleased him so to do. The freshly canonized unities of Shakspere's day will serve as well for illustration as anything else, since they came to be worshipped almost, if not quite, as the supreme deity in the dramatic heaven. As early as The Comedy of Errors Shakspere observes these unities consciously.6 He was adapting Latin plays, and
I See my edition among others.
[ Volume
One ] 
