Shakespeare, poet of nature?

The presumed differences between Shakespeare's work, and the work of the university educated, is a point scholarship is at great pains to address without apparent contradiction.

The work of Shakespeare is full of classical allusions. Yes, we know that large chunks of Ovid and other Roman writers were memorized at the grammar schools. By way of analogy, fourteen year olds today study Shakespeare (let's confine this to the gifted) in and before grade nine. But, it's also studied at the university by twenty year olds. The top students who study Shakespeare in grade nine have a vastly inferior appreciation of the works than the top students who studied the same works at university.

At age fourteen, which was the senior level at the grammar schools, the abstract reasoning centers of the brain have barely switched on, even in the brilliant. It's a question of cognitive maturation, not IQ.

Shakespeare understood Ovid, and the rest of the classical world, at the same depth and breadth as our top university graduates understand Shakespeare, not in the way that our top grade nine graduates understand Shakespeare.

That doesn't mean it's impossible for Shakespeare to have achieved a level of Ovidian scholarship equal to the university elites, it does mean that it is incumbent upon scholars to explain how it "could" have happened, since, we are told, it did.