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As an undergraduate I thought that I knew something about Shakespeare, and no doubt I saw myself a partner in that licensed company of scholars and schoolmasters who had acquired the monopoly to purvey him retail to the nation. My education took a new turn, however, when I met a manual worker who could quote copiously from all the plays, including those I had never read. While I was poring over footnotes, he had taken Shakespeare into the fields with him during long spells of unemployment, until now he knew whole plays almost by heart.