1 40 Shakspeare 



his deathbed, might — one would fain think it — 

 have rued and retracted his angry censure. 



From the beginning of his connection with the 

 theatre he not only attended sedulously to its 

 business but was diligently occupied with the 

 cultivation and improvement of his mind by the 

 serious study of great writers. As Prospero says 

 of himself — if not he of himself in the person 

 of Prospero — he " was living in closeness and 

 occupied with the bettering of his mind." He 

 read and no doubt re-read Montaigne, Rabelais, 

 Plutarch, Seneca, Horace, and Ovid, and most 

 likely made notes of the thoughts which they ex- 

 pressed and suggested. It has been a question 

 whether he read Latin authors in the original or 

 only in translation, but it is a question hardly 

 worth asking ; for it is certain that a person of 

 his capacity and industry might easily so improve 

 his knowledge of the little Latin learnt at school 

 as to be able to read it fairly well. If Titus 

 Andronicus with its gross blood-and-horror scenes 

 be one of his immature products (supposing, that 

 is, that he wrote much of it), it might perhaps 

 yield a significant hint that he was then applying 

 himself to better his reading of Latin ; for the 

 quotation of a whole verse from Horace, if it does 

 not show a pride of knowledge, is hardly what 

 he would have introduced into the best work of 

 his riper season.* That he made systematic notes 



* In other plays, however, scraps of Latin are rather gratui- 

 tously if not incongruously introduced ; whatever their purpose, 



