How much did Shakespeare know about language, or languages, in a deliberate sense: about language in general, about the languages of Europe in particular—and about English above all?

That question—or huddle of questions—is still unexplored. It is easy to accept that the great dramatist of England, and of Europe, is the master of his native tongue; but ever since his rival Ben Jonson made his famously slighting remark about "small Latin and less Greek," it has been doubted if he knew much else. Jonson may have been the better classicist, and there is a tradition supported by Milton, Voltaire, and Samuel Johnson that Shakespeare wrote more by nature than by art, "warbling his native woodnotes wild." I want now to propose another, and less familiar, Shakespeare: one who held general views about the nature of language, who was the conscious master of more than one European language: in short, a man learned in tongues. I believe that Shakespeare was a conscious linguist.

The difficulties that lie in the way of proving such a hypothesis are in the first instance practical. The truth is that, much as is known about Renaissance English, that knowledge as a whole is still largely unmarshaled. This is the biggest void there is in English studies. Renaissance English still lacks a dictionary, and it still lacks a grammar. There are both for Old English, or Anglo-Saxon; both for Middle