Intellectual virtue

Whatever his other virtues, Shakespeare was not conspicuously worldly. Anachronisms likewise abound in his plays. He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to CaesarБЂ™s Rome 1,400 years before the first mechanical tick was heard there. Whether by design or from ignorance, he could be breathtakingly casual with facts when it suited his purposes to be so. In Henry VI, Part 1, for example, he dispatches Lord Talbot twenty-two years early, conveniently allowing him to predecease Joan of Arc. In Coriolanus he has Lartius refer to Cato three hundred years before Cato was born. ShakespeareБЂ™s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering-things that arenБЂ™t taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays-unlike, say, those of Ben Jonson, where learning hangs like bunting on every word ...»