The first bolded section aligns well with Milch's ideas of writing which emphasizes rhetorical language as a bridge from the cold logic of the ego to the poetic imagination of "faith" (which is not exactly the same as mere religious faith).Venus and Adonis is used to show that Shakespeare could write elegant poetry in imitation of the ancients despite having no more than a basic grammar school education. His proficiency in Latin emerges from Bate’s reinvestigation of the syllabus he followed at school: after practising double-translation from Latin to English and back without a crib, students were trained in the art of rhetoric; they learned to mould language like wax, to argue in utramque partem (ie “for” and “against”) and to “move” audiences by their silver tongues. As Quintilian, the prince of orators, had explained, rhetoric “is an art which relies on moving the emotions by saying that which is false”. Or as Touchstone puts it in As You Like It, “The truest poetry is the most feigning”. The kinsman of the persuasive orator, Bate observes, is the convincing actor, and this gives fresh meaning to Shakespeare’s decision to embark on a stage career.
Once Shakespeare advances from acting in plays and doctoring scripts to writing them, the rich variety of his sources becomes clear. Bate reveals how, for all his subject’s much-vaunted reliance on translations of Plutarch, Ovid and Virgil, he was able to base his Rape of Lucrece on a story in Ovid’s Fasti that had not been translated into English. His Latin was better than that of most modern classics graduates in Britain, and his rhetorical training taught him to pose problems and dramatize conflicting viewpoints in a non-partisan way. Bate sees this as the foundation of what he calls Shakespeare’s “theatrical magnanimity”.
(Emphases mine)
I also like the second passage because it summarizes the basic assumptions of Dramatica theory: Poetry as problem-solving.
