Natural Shakespeare

As early as about 1615, we see Francis Beaumont, in his verse letter to "Mr B:J" (Ben Jonson) refer to Shakespeare as a poet informed by Nature:

Here I would let slip
And from all learning keep these lines as clear
As Shakespeare's best are, which our heirs shall hear
Preachers apt to their auditors to show
How far sometimes a mortal man may go
By the dim light of Nature.

The letter is printed in E. K. Chambers' William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930) in vol. II, p. 224, and has been reprinted several times, most recently in Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare (p. 80).  It begins a traditional view of Shakespeare as the unlearned, non-scholarly poet; a poet born, not made; one who brings forth his verse from his mother wit, as it were, without studied preparation; in short, "by the dim light of Nature."

The perception gets a big boost from Heminge and Condell in their "To the Great Variety of Readers" prefaced to the First Folio when they say, "Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers."  Jonson's own "small Latine, and lesse Greeke" pushes the image along, though, ironically, he labors in his dedicatory poem to show Shakespeare's artistry.  (See Jonathan Bate's argument along these lines in The Genius of Shakespeare, p. 29).

By the time of Milton's L'Allegro (1631) we are asked to envision Shakespeare in opposition to Jonson:

Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild. (131-134)

Shakespeare is pictured as effortlessly warbling, while poor Ben is a "learned" poet.  By 1640 Leonard Digges confirms the image of Shakespeare's natural felicity in the prefatory poem to the Benson edition of Poems : Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.:

Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow
This whole Booke, thou shalt find he doth not borrow,
One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate,
Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate,
Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane,
Nor begges he from each witty friend a Scene
To peece his Acts with, all that he doth write,
Is pure his owne, plot, language exquisite.

It truly makes you wonder what Digges had been reading, but by this time it hardly mattered.  Shakespeare's image as the "natural" artist had been established, contra labored, scholarly artists like Ben Jonson.

By 1662 in Fuller's History of the Worthies of England we see Shakespeare set contra Jonson in the image of the small, maneuverable English man-of-war vs. the sluggish Spanish galleon:

"Many were the wet-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson ; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war : master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow, in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention" (vol. III, p. 284)

It took another three centuries and the efforts of hundreds of scholars to eke out the sources and allusions in his works in order to appreciate the deep art of Shakespeare.  He was able to take great learning, though never learning for learning's sake, and style it so felicitously that it seemed to proceed from Nature itself.  This is art indeed.