Chapter 4 - Page 2

Stratford history
comes easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-
stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the
surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play:
result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh SUCH a
wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for
all time! It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the
colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and
sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and
admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on
the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of
plaster of paris. We ran short of plaster of paris, or we'd have
built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford
Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or
contained the most plaster.

Shakespeare pronounced Venus and Adonis "the first heir of his
invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at
literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an
embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have
to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and
beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family--
1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the
next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found
time to write another line.

It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and
poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest
likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched
from that school where he 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,