I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current
Elizabethan light literature--Euphues, Lyly's Court comedies, novels
full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney--his Defence
of Poesy, and Arcadia (1590)--with scores of tales translated from
the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign society, and
discourses of knights and ladies. He saw the plays of the day,
perhaps as one of "the groundlings." He often beheld Society, from
without, when acting before the Queen and at great houses. He had
thus, if I am right, sufficient examples of style and manner, and
knowledge of how the great were supposed (in books) to comport and
conduct themselves. The books were cheap, and could be borrowed, and
turned over at the booksellers' stalls. {96a} The Elizabethan style
was omnipresent. Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover
of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily
influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that my
conjectures are not too audacious. Not only "the man in the street,"
but "the reading public" (so loved by Coleridge), have not the
beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man reads. Watch
them poring for hours over a newspaper! Let me quote what Sir Walter
Raleigh says: {97a} "Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly
readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is
dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of
all that brings them new information, or jumps with their thought, or
tickles their fancy. Such a reader will have done with a volume in a
few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is
a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned
man."

I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was