4 ms·
The argument about the poem is quite right. I’m actually taken aback that it has been read in any other way, as the English seems straightforward to me. ‘And t
by rodric 4y ago
The argument about the poem is quite right. I’m actually taken aback that it has been read in any other way, as the English seems straightforward to me.
‘And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek’ = ‘even if you had little knowledge of Latin and less of Greek’
The whole argument is just saying that Jonson is using the subjunctive mood, which seems obvious. If he had wanted to use the indicative, he would have written ‘thou hast’ rather than ‘thou hadst’.
- jfengel 4y agoShakespeare was dead by that point, so Jonson could have used "hadst" for the past tense. Which in English is often identical to the subjunctive mood. If only Jonson had written it in Latin or Greek.
- rodric 4y agoIf only he had! I suppose it could be as you suggest, but the context does not seem to me to fit a past tense indicative. Just a few lines earlier he even writes ‘Thou … art alive still, while thy book doth live,’ and the previous sentence matches the subjunctive + conditional structure (‘if I thought … I should commit’) that I think he is using in the disputed sentence (‘though thou hadst … I would not seek’).