William Shakespeare - 1888 Author:Karl Elze Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter VI. SHAKESPEARE'S INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. MORE than a hundred years have passed since Dr. Farmer' published his famous " Essay on the Learning of Shake... more »speare," an essay which to a certain extent may be said to mark an epoch, and of which Dr. Warton said that it had exhausted the subject once and for ever. But although, in our day, no one becomes so readily famous—every beginner and dilettante in the study of Shakespeare is expected to know Farmer's " Essay "—it is pleasant in this instance to have unquestionable testimony that the uninterrupted work and investigations of a century have not been in vain. Nowadays we no longer inquire into Shakespeare's " learning "—of which there can scarcely be any question—but into his intellectual culture,' and we now possess an incomparably greater amount of material to enable ns to answer the inquiry from a freer and wider range of view, and one which, at the same time, penetrates more deeply into the subject. For Farmer nowhere advances beyond the point of comparing passages and giving quotations. That a hundred years hence the Shakespeareanscholars of the future may regard our present work somewhat in the same way as we do Farmer's is in no way a depressing thought; on the contrary, we consider it encouraging. If Farmer and his contemporaries had not acted as pioneers, we should not have arrived at our better knowledge of the subject, and if we were now to sit with our hands idle, the next century would be no further than the point which Farmer reached. The smallest, as well as the greatest efforts, accordingly, teach us the necessity for, and the blessings of incessant mental work continued on an uninterrupted chain of thought. 1 An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, addrctsed to Joseph Cradoek, Esq., by Richard Farmer, M.A....« less