Shakespeare Classical Scholar - Poets as Statesmen

 The writer was a classical scholar. Rowe found traces in him of the Electra of Sophocles; Colman, of Ovid; Pope, of Dares Phrygius, and other Greek authors; Farmer, of Horace and Virgil; Malone, of Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Seneca, Sophocles, and Euripides; Steves, of Plautus; Knight of the Antigone of Sophocles; and White, of the Alcestis of Euripedes.

 - Nathaniel Holmes

It may be asked why he should conceal his authorship of such writings. There is considerable proof from contemporary sources that to be known as a poet obstructed a man’s prospects as lawyer, statesman or other public servant. In the MS. play of Sir Thomas More (circa 1600), the Earl of Surrey says: “Poets were ever thought unfit for state.”

 “The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum, to call up all that are against them.” 

- Francis Bacon

When the Dean of Ely delivered the Shakespeare sermon in 1897, he made this very true and memorable statement: "There were some things in Shakespeare that the author might have been burnt for had he been a theologian, just as certainly as there were things about politics, about civil liberty, which had he been a politician or a statesman, would have brought him to the block."