There’s long been debate as to whether Shakespeare, a small-town commoner with “small Latin and less Greek” could have had the experience and erudition necessary to write the plays that are attributed to him.
I don’t find the “anti-Stratfordian” arguments terribly persuasive, but I’m not proposing to thrash all that out here. Rather, I was just struck by the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about the king in Shakespeare’s Henry V reads like an anticipatory comment on the authorship controversy:
Hear him but reason in divinity,
and, all-admiring, with an inward wish
you would desire the King were made a prelate;
hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,
you would say it hath been all in all his study;
list his discourse of war, and you shall hear
a fearful battle rend’red you in music;
turn him to any cause of policy,
the Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks,
the air, a charter’d libertine, is still,
and the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears,
to steal his sweet and honey’d sentences;
so that the art and practice’d part of life
must be the mistress to this theoric:
which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,
since his addiction was to courses vain,
his companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,
his hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports,
and never noted in him any study,
any retirement, any sequestration
from open haunts and popularity.
Next July in San Francisco I’m planning to speak at