Now, exclaim the men who upho'd the stage manager's ability to read Greek, the idea of this is from Anacreon, and they give the ode in which William Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. He might have taken it from the French of Ronsard, a French poet: because one Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of some one--of a "reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, finding certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated by Ronsard, the French poet--comes a minion and translates the same out of French into English," and "on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anacreon among the rest!" {183}Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims to prove that William Shakespeare could not read Greek by showing that he could reach French--or the observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's arguments (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew no Greek--he knew where every thing contained in Greek was to be obtained in translation: the question for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have recourse to either Anacreon or Ronsard for a meteorological episode? This, and a thousand like passages, are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to do with the action or by-play of the comedy or tragedy in which they occur, and not apposite to anything else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. A scholar might be unable to keep them out; but why should a stage-manager--fitting a spectacle to the acting necessities of his boards or to the humor of his audience--put them in? Whereas, if a scholar did write the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut out the digression or why he left it in, for that was a mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer went just far enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of history wrote the Book, something must be done to account for his access to the material he wrought with. If the Doctor had kept on a little further, the truth would have dawned upon him. But, as it was, he (without looking for them) observed traces of what he believed to be two hands in the Plays, and so followed Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he considered it "extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the {184}last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than the author of the body of the work"--but the hint was altogether lost on him. He looked no further, and so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth--namely, that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was William Shakespeare's. The "without blotting a line" of Ben Jonson--not a mere form of speech, but a fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers"--as we shall see further on, ought to have itself awakened suspicion.