A few years ago one bold critic rose in defense of Jaques and protested against “the disturbing intrusion of antiquarian learning” in the interpretation of Shakespeare. Apparently, however, this troublesome academic ghost is still unlaid. Indeed, so much erudite nonsense has been talked about “Elizabethan psychology” in the last quarter of a century that it has come to seem either mortal ignorance or scholarly apostasy to challenge it. We may no longer read the Elizabethans and Jacobeans for their plain poetical meanings: any phrase that speaks however faintly of souls and deeds, or of thoughts and feelings, we must interpret literally in terms of a dutifully mastered sixteenth century jargon. If a plotting villain who sees his intended victim approaching so much as cries “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul!” his words are found heavy with psychological import he little dreamed of: he is using “words which represent the final perversion of the will. In the light of Elizabethan thinking, they probably mean the wilful subjection of intellect to a mode of thought and action guided by the desires of the heart.”