Shakespeare's Influence | Shakespearean Scholarship: From Rowe to the Present
Shakespearean scholarship has for over 300 years endeavored to recover and to describe Shakespeare's scholarship. Its history may appropriately begin and end, therefore, with Love's Labor's Lost, in which the King of Navarre tells Berowne that "study's godlike recompense" is "that to know which else we should not know," and Berowne retorts, "Things hid and barred, you mean, from common sense?" (I. i. 55-58). The young men of Navarre hope to become "heirs of all eternity" (I. i. 7), and through them Shakespeare expresses both the poignancy and the absurdity of Renaissance academic...
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