Book Excerpt for the Day

    Far from having “small Latin and less Greek,” as Ben Jonson famously charged, Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar-school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing, and reciting Latin, often in the most mind-numbingly repetitious manner.  One of the principal texts of the day taught pupils 150 different ways of saying, “Thank you for your letter” in Latin.  Through such exercises Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis, and others equally arcane and taxing to memorize..

    (from Shakespeare: The World As Stage by Bill Bryson)

  9½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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