I did a posting a day or two ago about the education of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), at my education blog. The point of it was: it was all of it, entirely, in Latin. No "English literature" was involved at all.

So, forty years after William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had been and gone, the people in England with the best educations didn't learn anything at all about the likes of Shakespeare, or not in their school lessons, or anything else merely in English.

What this tells me is that Shakespeare really was the "commercial" entertainment of his day, as opposed to "high" culture. One of the central conceits of the movie Shakespeare in Love – Shakespeare then equals Hollywood now – is right on the money.

By "low" I don't mean the upper classes shunned it. After all Judy Dench (otherwise known as Queen Elizabeth I) used to go. But the upper classes have always liked to let their hair down with lowbrow entertainment, as well as the posh stuff. Desert Island Discs usually has a pop song or two in among the Mozart and the Beethoven, of whatever vintage the celebrity happens to be. Posh people were going to the movies long before the culturally posh finally accepted movies as a bona fide art form.

By the way, Michael Blowhard linked back only yesterday to the piece Friedrich Blowhard wrote in the early days of the 2 Blowhards blog, and which I remember with great pleasure because it finally made me read Peter Hall's Cities in Civilization, about the economics of the theatre in Shakespeare's London. Recommended now as much as when Friedrich B first wrote it.

The big difference between now and then is that whereas in Samuel Pepys' time, high culture was international, and commercial culture was in the local vernacular, now it's the other way around. Now high culture is locally based and locally supported, and locally worried about, in the face of: commercial culture, low culture, which is now international. Pepys learned Latin not just to "train the mind" but to enable him to communicate with the rest of the ruling class of Europe.

I will not expand on this thought. I need more education myself about such things to do that. But I definitely count it as a thought, and I hope you do too.

Busy weekend, starting now, so no more today, and maybe no more until Monday.