We can't know what Shakespeare's grammatical issues might have been and how
well he took to his grammar lessons (or how well they took to him) because
we don't have any of Shakespeare's early drafts.  All we have is finished
product that has been filtered through the years by editors and actors,
audiences and textbook publishers.  You cannot know how a writer controls
structures of language until you either look at individual writers'
processes and early drafts or read a given writer's bioethnography.  So any
talk of giftedness, writing, and grammar in the context that we have been
discussing grammar, is fruitless.  What would add to this discussion is some
learning theory about how people acquire literacy, how they struggle with
meaning making through the process of language play, and the role that
grammar in our heads plays in that.

Nancy


At 06:25 PM 2/18/01 -0600, you wrote:
>I think that you are mistaken about Shakespeare.  He and the other
>authors of the English Renaissance benefited from a return
>to basic grammar that had been decreed by Henry VIII. In the fifteenth
>century, grammatical instruction in the schools had suffered because
>scholars were preoccupied with theoretical or speculative grammars that
>raised some of the same philosophical issues as contemporary linguists
>address.
>
>Shakespeare's  basic textbook was Lily's grammar.  It is true that this is
>aimed at Latin but it is based on grammatical concepts that are easily
>transferred to English and have to be if they are to be understood. As a
>Latinist, I can assure you that English speakers do not and cannot learn
>about sentence subjects, prepositional phrases, participles, the passive
>voice, or appositives in Latin without understanding what they they refer
>to in English.  Shakespeare seems to me to be the clearest imaginable
>example of author who benefits from a deep, conscious understanding of
>grammar.  I suppose you could say that you he and the other
>masters of the 17th century show that you don't need to STUDY ENGLISH
>grammar, but that's only if you start Latin in the first grade, approach
>it with a grammatical syllabus, and make it the main subject studied.
>
Nancy G. Patterson
Portland Middle School, English Dept. Chair
Portland, MI  48875

"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centers of
culture."
--Roland Barthes

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