I realy don't think, I really don't think that references to authors means a writer has read them, in the original, or perhaps at all. And I just don't think that Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists were scholarly.educated men. Unlike the poets they were writing, not for the applause of the few, but the money of the many. And they were writing quickly. Think Scott, Dickens, Balzac. Don't think Walter Pater, Flaubert, Mallarme.
Shakespeare is better than Webster, Kyd, Marlowe, but he is not essentially different. I don't think he cared whether Bohemia had a sea-coast, what kind of a king MacBeth actually was, when the game of Billiards was invented by the Romans, and neither did his audiences. If he was indeed thoroughly fluent in Latin, why did he use translations all the time? He made north better not by referring to Plutarch but simply because he was a better writer.
What Emerson thought is neither here nor there. What Ben Jonson thought is more to the point. He would have to have been privy to a very large-scale deception. He said Shakespeare wrote the plays. He would have to have been lying.
The few poems we have of Edward de Vere are poor stuff. This is not the man who wrote Hamlet.
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