In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had been acted by link-light, had led to brawls—either between literary factions or through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost all clue—had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmas gambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale. The point for us is that (in 1597–1601) they abound in topical allusions to the London theatres: that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concern to these young men of Cambridge as Mr. Shaw (say) is to our young men today, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will be aptly taken. For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have some love-verses recited to him “in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer’s, Gower’s and Spenser’s and Mr. Shakespeare’s.” Having listened to Chaucer, he cries, “Tush! Chaucer is a foole”; but coming to some lines of Mr. Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” he cries, “Ey, marry, Sir! these have some life in them! Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, I’le worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay his ‘Venus and Adonis’ under my pillowe.” For another allusion—“Few of the University pen plaies well,” says the actor Kempe in Part II of the Returne; “they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, ay and Ben Jonson, too.” Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh at well-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London. Here you have, to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays all hinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literature for a livelihood. For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you have a statute of Queens’ College (quoted by Mr. Bass Mullinger) which directs that “any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy or tragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance, contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from the Society”—which seems drastic. And on top of all this, you have evidence enough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the “University Wits.” Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to have invented its form—blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St. John’s) to have carried it on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque. Both Universities claim Lyly and Chapman. Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailed from Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge—of St. John’s both, and Day of Caius. They sought to London, and there (for tragic truth underlay that Christmas comedy of The Pilgrimage of Parnassus) many of them came to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid personal ruin—and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered—they built the Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments. We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done. I think it scarcely needs further proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century, was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, English literature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing.
There remains a second question—How happened it that Cambridge, after admitting Greek, took more than three hundred years to establish a Chair of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so to speak, a mushroom (call it not toadstool!) of yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin continued to be the working language of Science. In Latin Bacon naturally composed his Novum Organum and indeed almost all his scientific and philosophical work, although a central figure of his age among English prose-writers. In Latin, in the eighteenth century, Newton wrote his Principia: and I suppose that of no two books written by Englishmen before the close of that century, or indeed before Darwin’s Origin of Species, can it be less extravagantly said than of the Novum Organum and the Principia that they shook the world. Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos (founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great names of Bentley and Porson, we may observe it as generally true, that whenever and wherever large numbers of scientific men use a particular language as their working instrument, they have a disposition to look askance on its refinements; to be jealous of its literary professors; to accuse these of treating as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like the Denver editor I quoted to you in a previous lecture, these scientific workers want to “get there” in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice it is likely to cut. You may observe this disposition—this suspicion of “literature,” this thinly veiled contempt—in many a scientific man today; though because his language has changed from Latin to English, it is English he now chooses to cheapen. Well, we cannot help it, perhaps. Perhaps he cannot help it. It is human nature. We must go on persuading him, not losing our tempers.
None the less we should not shut our eyes to the fact that while a language is the working instrument of scientific men there will always be a number of them to decry any study of it for its beauty, and even any study of it for the sake of accuracy—its beauty and its accuracy being indeed scarcely distinguishable.
I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to the dreadful conclusion that the date 1869, when Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair
