John Hales: Savile’s Scholar and Shakespeare’s Champion

John Hales would find any poetic subject better treated in Shakespeare than in another poet—or so John Dryden reported in 1668. This sweeping judgment came from a Greek scholar whose career Henry Savile had helped to make. Hales collaborated in Savile’s edition of Chrysostom and acquired a formidable reputation for learning. Neville’s tutor and lifelong associate had also trained and promoted a man remembered for placing Shakespeare at the summit of literary judgment.¹²

This chapter follows two histories together: Hales’s place in Savile’s learned world, and the recognition of Shakespeare within that world’s universities, libraries and conversation. Daniel Blank’s substantial 2020 study, “‘Our Fellow Shakespeare’: A Contemporary Classic in the Early Modern University,” makes the second history much richer than a solitary anecdote. William Poole’s investigation of a surviving Eton booklist supplies a complementary view of the books around Hales. Together they allow us to ask what his praise meant, what kind of reader could have made it, and why it belongs among the literary relationships that survived Neville’s death.³⁴

What Dryden actually recorded

The earliest printed account appears in Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie in 1668, twelve years after Hales’s death. On page 48 Dryden writes:

The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eaton say, That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare.¹

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Hales’s claim rests on comparison: select any poetic subject, and he would produce a Shakespearean passage superior to its treatment by other poets.

Its position in Dryden’s argument matters. Immediately before it, Dryden acknowledges Shakespeare’s unevenness: comedy can descend into strained conceits and serious writing into bombast. Yet, he argues, Shakespeare rises to great occasions. Hales’s judgment enters at that point, as evidence of the extraordinary heights available within an uneven body of work. Immediately afterwards Dryden recalls the esteem in which Shakespeare’s contemporaries held him and the preference of Sir John Suckling and other courtiers for Shakespeare over Jonson. The paragraph brings scholarly judgment and courtly taste into the same discussion.

Dryden gives no date for Hales’s remark. He names no occasion, identifies no individual play and supplies no list of classical comparators. The printed statement is Dryden’s report of Hales, rather than a surviving passage in Hales’s own hand. Its value is nevertheless considerable: within living memory of Hales, a major critic invoked his authority to express an exceptionally comprehensive estimate of Shakespeare.⁵

The scholar Savile brought to Merton and Eton

Hales was born at Bath in 1584 and entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1597. His command of Greek and ability in academic disputation drew attention. In 1605 he gained a fellowship at Merton, where Savile was warden. His subsequent work included teaching Greek and assisting the great scholarly enterprise that produced Savile’s edition of John Chrysostom. Savile also secured his election to an Eton fellowship in 1613. These were practical acts of patronage, joining employment, scholarship and access to books.²

For Neville’s history this is a precise institutional connection. Savile had accompanied Neville abroad, helped to shape his education and remained trusted by him until his final illness. Hales belonged to a younger generation of the same scholar’s protégés. The two relationships did not have identical forms: Neville’s was that of pupil, traveller, public man and friend; Hales’s developed through fellowships, Greek scholarship and editorial collaboration. Their common centre was Savile’s conviction that learned work required trained people, reliable texts and the means to bring them together. The sources examined here establish their relationship through Savile; they do not document a personal meeting between Hales and Neville.

Hales’s work on Chrysostom required the comparison of textual witnesses and close attention to Greek. That editorial experience gives weight to his remembered comparison of Shakespeare with other authors. The King Lear and Coriolanus chapters examine a further connection: Debora Shuger’s comparison of those plays’ hungry and exposed poor with Chrysostom’s sermons. That thematic affinity gives the edition a literary relevance beyond Hales’s reputation as a scholar; it does not establish a direct transmission of the sermons to the dramatist.

His connection with Sir Thomas Bodley adds another dimension. Blank describes his work recording accessions and benefactions for the Bodleian and his delivery of one of the funeral orations for Bodley in 1613. Hales helped the university preserve the identities of books and donors as well as interpret texts. He therefore stands unusually close to both the intellectual and the material history of the library.⁶

The man who emerges was sociable as well as learned. The reminiscences assembled by Nancy Scott describe a scholar sought out for conversation and judgment, with interests extending beyond theology into history, mathematics and natural knowledge. His writings were comparatively few; much of his influence operated through teaching, letters, visits and discussion. That matters when considering the survival of the Shakespeare remark. A reputation made partly in conversation will leave a different documentary record from a career built around a succession of printed treatises.⁷

A library in Hales’s hand

Poole’s 2015 study opens a material route into that intellectual life. Eton College Archives 62/55 contains the college’s audit accounts for 1621, followed, after unused leaves, by a list of books. The latest publication identified in it dates from 1624. Poole accordingly places the list around that year. Approximately 750 entries describe a collection substantially larger than 750 individual texts, since some entries cover several volumes or works bound together.⁸

The arrangement is physical: six rows of folios followed by nine rows of smaller books. Space left between the two groups allowed for growth. There are no valuations. These features lead Poole to interpret it as a working shelflist of a living collection, rather than an inventory made to value a dead owner’s possessions. The distinction changes what the document can tell us. It records a particular arrangement at a particular moment; it is not automatically an exhaustive account of a lifetime’s reading.

Poole identifies Hales as the scribe and makes a strong, carefully argued case that the books were his. The additions recording gifts are especially suggestive: the writer could remove books from the collection and give one to his own brother. Poole considers alternatives, including the college library and the collections of Savile and Thomas Murray. The dates, contents and character of the list make those alternatives less persuasive. His conclusion remains an attribution, however, and the manuscript should retain that qualification when used as evidence for Hales’s ownership.⁹

The collection itself is strikingly broad. Classical authors and Church Fathers sit beside medicine, law, geography, travel and current theological controversy. Mathematics and astronomy are conspicuous; Poole identifies nine works by Kepler. Books associated with Savile include his Chrysostom, his edition of English historical writers and his Bradwardine. The picture is of a reader who combined ancient scholarship with active interest in recent European intellectual work. Antiquity did not exhaust his attention.¹⁰

The range of the collection helps explain Dryden’s appeal to Hales’s authority, although the booklist cannot verify the reported judgment.

The missing Shakespeare on the shelves

Shakespeare is not named in the shelflist. Neither are several other authors one might expect in a comprehensive collection of contemporary English literature. Poole notes the absence of Chaucer, Spenser, Daniel, Jonson and Sidney, alongside the presence of Montaigne, Drayton’s Poly-Olbion and the recent English translation of Alemán’s The Rogue. The unexpanded entry “Tragical histories” cannot securely be turned into a Shakespeare volume or even into a collection of plays.¹¹

This is a useful problem rather than an embarrassment to be concealed. We have a scholar remembered as an admirer of Shakespeare and a probable record of his library without an identifiable Shakespeare entry. Several explanations remain possible: literary books might have occupied another location, the list might describe only one portion of his holdings, or reading might have depended on borrowing and access to other collections. Poole specifically raises the possibility of separate shelving for vernacular literature. None of those possibilities licenses inserting a missing book into the surviving list.

The larger lesson applies to Neville’s surviving books too. A collection, its catalogue and its owner’s reading are related but different things. Books can be read without being owned, owned without being listed, and listed without surviving. Hales provides a particularly instructive case because the tension between a documented literary reputation and an incomplete material record is visible. We can recognize that tension without pretending to resolve it.

Blank’s argument: Shakespeare inside learned culture

The Cambridge and Oxford examples that follow supply context for Hales’s judgment. They describe a wider learned culture, rather than events all belonging to his personal biography. Blank’s article asks how Shakespeare acquired standing among university readers when official academic culture gave contemporary vernacular drama so little encouragement. His answer depends on reading institutional restrictions alongside evidence of actual use. University rules, curricula and library policies describe the permitted or preferred culture; student drama, quotation and adaptation show a wider intellectual life. Hales’s reported praise becomes one expression of that larger history.³

The institutional obstacles were real. Ancient Greek and Latin authors supplied the accepted models of style and literary achievement. A scholar could compose on a current event while demonstrating his learning through imitation of Horace. Hales himself did so in a Latin poem associated with Christian IV’s visit in 1606. A living English dramatist did not possess the same formal standing as the classical authors around whom education was organized.¹²

Yet official preference does not describe every book a scholar read. Blank brings together evidence of resistance to professional players with evidence that plays nevertheless reached university audiences. Performance could occur in the town even when the university sought to restrain it. Students might encounter dramatic writing through purchased books, borrowed copies, conversation or local productions. The history cannot be reduced to a closed academic world on one side and an unrelated commercial theatre on the other.

The distinction also appears in library policy. Bodley’s suspicion of vernacular playbooks is well known, but the Bodleian received a First Folio shortly after publication. Blank contrasts that acquisition with the institution’s restrictive statements and its sparse early Shakespeare holdings. A book’s admission to a library, the enthusiasm of individual readers and the official educational status of its author did not advance at the same pace.¹³

Blank documents Shakespeare’s reception independently of the authorship question. Hales’s praise belongs within this learned culture of quotation, adaptation and comparison with antiquity.

Cambridge: Shakespeare under the pillow

The anonymous Parnassus plays, performed at St John’s College, Cambridge, around 1598–1601, are central to Blank’s case. Their comedy follows the frustrations of educated young men seeking a livelihood and brings the worlds of patronage, poetry and professional performance into contact. Shakespeare is sufficiently familiar to provide repeated jokes, quotations and literary points of reference.¹⁴

Gullio advertises his taste with “Ile worshipp sweet Mr Shakspeare.” His enthusiasm is comic, but the joke depends on an audience able to recognize Shakespeare’s language and fashionable reputation.¹⁴

One of Gullio’s boasts places Shakespeare beneath his pillow. Blank relates this to the classical tradition of Alexander keeping Homer near his bed. The comparison is absurd in its immediate dramatic application, but its structure is revealing. Shakespeare can occupy the position held by a classical author in a familiar story about literary devotion. The joke reduces Gullio’s pretensions while simultaneously treating Shakespeare as a recognizable author around whom such pretensions can form.

Elsewhere the plays stage Burbage and Kempe. The character Kempe dismisses academic playwrights:

Few of the university men pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talke too much of Proserpina & Iuppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe.¹⁵

Kempe comically turns Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a second writer. The passage is scripted academic comedy, not a record of the historical actor speaking. University men make the professional actor ridiculous while giving him Shakespeare as his example of theatrical superiority.

Oxford: learning theatrical technique from Shakespeare

Blank’s second extended example is Narcissus, performed at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1602. Its subject comes from Ovid, exactly the kind of classical source an academic audience would recognize. Its theatrical treatment, however, also draws upon Shakespeare. Blank examines verbal correspondences with 1 Henry IV and, more extensively, the relation between its comic performance devices and the Pyramus-and-Thisbe entertainment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.¹⁶

Ovid supplies the myth; in Blank’s reading, Shakespeare supplies a theatrical model: the comic explanation of a stage property recalls the mechanicals’ Wall and Moonshine in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The performer representing the well explains his bucket:

And thus least you should have mistooke it,
The truth of all I to you tell:
Suppose you the well had a buckett,
And so the buckett stands for the well;
And ’tis, least you should counte mee for a sot O,
A very pretty figure cald pars pro toto.¹⁶

The schoolroom term pars pro toto means a part standing for the whole. Here the learned explanation is itself the joke: the actor tells the audience exactly how the inadequate property is to be imagined. Shakespeare’s theatrical method becomes usable material for a new university play.

Hales was at Corpus Christi during this period. The Oxford setting makes Narcissus relevant to the intellectual environment in which he was formed. It does not establish his attendance at that performance. The Cambridge Parnassus plays are more distant still: they offer comparative evidence for university culture, rather than an event in Hales’s documented biography. Kept at those levels, the examples enlarge our understanding without supplying an imaginary itinerary for him.¹⁷

From a reported judgment to an Eton contest

Later writers gave Dryden’s brief report a much more elaborate setting. In 1694 Charles Gildon described a comparison staged in Hales’s Eton chamber, with books assembled and a company including Falkland and Suckling. Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 biography added a conversation involving Jonson, Davenant and Endymion Porter, together with the memorable retort that Shakespeare’s failure to read the ancients had at least prevented him from stealing from them. These versions helped to turn a critical judgment into a dramatic scene.¹⁸

John Freehafer’s 1972 study remains essential here. He follows the growth of the story and separates Dryden’s early testimony from details introduced much later. Gildon himself addresses Dryden and qualifies his recollection. Rowe writes more than half a century after Hales’s death. The late accounts cannot simply be stacked together as independent confirmations of a single event. Their named participants, room, books and dialogue require evidence of their own.

Blank’s recent work and Freehafer’s source criticism answer different questions. Blank shows why an early scholarly enthusiasm for Shakespeare is historically intelligible and more widely evidenced than might be supposed. Freehafer tests the reliability of particular versions of the Hales anecdote. A convincing account of the surrounding culture does not by itself authenticate the later Eton scene. We should retain the cultural history and the early judgment, while identifying the staged contest as a later tradition.

Hales’s place in the Neville case

The most substantial connection returns us to Savile. Hales was his fellow, collaborator and protégé. Neville had been his pupil and travelling companion and remained his close associate. After Neville’s death, the Savile circle continued to contain men who handled books, edited texts, taught younger readers and discussed the achievements of poets. Hales’s Shakespeare judgment belongs within that continuing learned culture.

Hales does not name Neville as Shakespeare. What he contributes is a distinguished and institutionally connected witness to Shakespeare’s intellectual reception. The praise is strongest when read in its earliest form, beside the scholarship and books that made the speaker’s name authoritative. Savile’s scholar was remembered as Shakespeare’s champion, and Blank’s reconstruction of university culture shows that such admiration had roots reaching back into the years when the works were first appearing.