"How well he's read, to reason against reading!"
About this Quote
A delicious little jab: the mind trained by books using its polish to argue that books are useless. Shakespeare snaps the hypocrisy into focus with a single twist of phrasing. "How well he's read" is admiration with bared teeth; it grants the opponent competence only to make the next clause sting. The line weaponizes a paradox: anti-intellectualism often arrives dressed in the borrowed clothes of intellect.
Shakespeare is also playing theatergoer psychology. The audience recognizes the type instantly: the rhetorician who can quote, spar, and persuade, yet aims that skill at closing the very door that made him. It's not just contradiction; it's a performance of status. To "reason against reading" is to convert learning into a social cudgel, implying that one's own mind is so naturally sufficient it doesn't need the slow, democratic labor of study.
Context matters because Elizabethan England was anxious about what reading could do: spread heresy, seed sedition, scramble class boundaries. Books were power, and "reading" wasn't an innocent hobby; it was a technology of self-making. The subtext is that arguments against reading are rarely about reading. They're about control: who gets access to knowledge, who gets to interpret the world, who gets to speak with authority.
The wit lands because Shakespeare doesn't moralize. He simply spots the tell: if someone is eloquent in condemning books, books already won.
Shakespeare is also playing theatergoer psychology. The audience recognizes the type instantly: the rhetorician who can quote, spar, and persuade, yet aims that skill at closing the very door that made him. It's not just contradiction; it's a performance of status. To "reason against reading" is to convert learning into a social cudgel, implying that one's own mind is so naturally sufficient it doesn't need the slow, democratic labor of study.
Context matters because Elizabethan England was anxious about what reading could do: spread heresy, seed sedition, scramble class boundaries. Books were power, and "reading" wasn't an innocent hobby; it was a technology of self-making. The subtext is that arguments against reading are rarely about reading. They're about control: who gets access to knowledge, who gets to interpret the world, who gets to speak with authority.
The wit lands because Shakespeare doesn't moralize. He simply spots the tell: if someone is eloquent in condemning books, books already won.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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