Education is no substitute for genius. Consider the following short speech:

Nov. 19, 1863

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.


Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.


It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

The person who wrote The Gettysburg Address had one year of formal education. He ruled a government of intelligent college graduates, many of whom thought, at first, that they should have his job. Most of them eventually realized their error and became his supporters and defenders.

So if a rustic backwoodsman from Illinois can be credited, as he is, with the above and other great writings, surely a superb playwright such as Shakespeare can be thought to have created his great works without the same formal education as the nobs of his era. He wrote almost as well as Lincoln, and probably had more access to the education of his time.