Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan

sentences.
    The trouble is that Tudor schoolboys knew too little of life to use
such a language system well. They were trained in imitative synthesis,
but the rhetorical system was complex enough to encourage
artificiality, or mere technical facility. Even when writing in London,
William would take a decade to learn to use the full resources of
rhetoric. To judge from the stiffness of style in his early plays, he
was slow to match his use of language to his sense of experience. He
learned (as many did) to attend to manner in composing arguments for
orations, but we must wait at least until The Merchant of Venice or perhaps Troilus and Cressida and the tragic soliloquies to find him fully at ease in the
argumentative speech. He never abandoned the classical system of
rhetoric, and, in time, made more powerful, ranging, and innovative
uses of it than anyone else who has written for the English stage; but
it is another thing to suppose that he quickly assimilated that system.
    -54-

With its arid emphasis on verbal artifice, school evidently came too
early for him, in some ways narrowing his mind and delaying his success;
there are signs, for example, in his mature writing, that he had been
too attracted by ringing changes on words, by varying, amplifying, and
patterning. Even when mocking rhetoric in his apprentice work, he
seems enamoured of the verbal excesses he comically attacks, as in the
word-and sound-play of Speed and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona :
SPEED. The Shepheard seekes the Sheepe, and not the Sheepe the
Shepheard; but I seeke my Master, and my Master seekes not me:
therefore I am no Sheepe.
    PROTEUS.
The Sheepe for fodder follow the Shepheard, the Shepheard for foode
followes not the Sheepe: thou for wages followest thy Master, thy
Master for wages followes not thee: therefore thou art a Sheepe. ( I.
i. 84-90; O-S sc. i)
    He was dazzled by models of verbal patterning he was slow to outgrow,
and one of his handicaps was that he was likely to imitate styles long
out of date, or not to adapt to a later age that might possibly ask
for more matter and less rhetoric. A grandson of Lily the grammarian
was soon to charm him: the family name had changed from Lily to Lyly,
and the patterned smartness of Lyly Euphucs , of 1578, became a fad. But fads do not last. Long after Euphues began to tire people, an ornate euphuistic style lingered in
Shakespeare's writing. He never made his mind up about its excesses;
he sends up euphuistic symmetry in Osric's speeches in Hamlet or Falstaff in 1 Henry IV -- but he uses it in the serious verse, too, of 1 Henry IV , Richard III , or Othello .
    This fault is attributable to schools that were hotbeds of literary
talent, but not always of self-sustaining life. William -- and a few of
his classmates -- must have been agile at Latin, but as the agility
spilled into English it outran the pupil's sense of himself and his
observations. A deeper problem was William's enforced commitment to
what he learned; the narrow channels of school were approved by his
father, or John Shakespeare would not have seen the boy in class. But
how could agility lead to inward development? An implicit protest
against school is voiced in all of his light satire of pedants, but in
the 1570s he prepared
    -55-

himself for no career more likely than the pedant's; if he evaded that,
he still had no obvious way to reconcile his fondness for words and
sounds with the sense of reality. As a schoolboy -- even under an
evidently humane, sensible Jenkins -- he was in danger of being forced
into a bright, shallow artificiality by verbal training, the narrow
classicism of the course, and his imitativeness and receptivity. He did
keep his fondness for rhetorical display in check -- later -- partly
by laughing at its excesses, and indeed his comedians jest at academic
absurdities with almost too much energy. His clowns are victims of
rhetoric, and his most impressive