by Shakespeare
One engraving illustrating an Elizabethan schoolroom, dating from 1574, shows a master behind a desk, with a book opened in front of him, while the pupils sit on wooden benches in various stages of attention and inattention. On the floor, curiously enough, lies a dog gnawing a bone. There is no sign of the birch or rod that is supposed to have been so prevalent in sixteenth-century school life. The amount of discipline may have been exaggerated by those who like to emphasise the cruelties of Elizabethan life.
Before he entered this new domain the young Shakespeare would have to demonstrate that he could read and write English, that he was “fit” to study the Latin tongue, and that he was “ready to enter into his Accidence and Principles of Grammar.”2 He was about to be introduced to the language of the educated world. He and his father climbed upstairs to the schoolroom where the master read out the statutes of the school, to which the boy agreed to conform; for the sum of 4 pence William Shakespeare was then enrolled in the register. He brought with him candles, fuel, books and writing materials; these would have included a writing book, a glass of ink, an ink horn, and half a quire of paper. He could not have inherited a set of school texts from his father, and so they would also have been purchased. It was an undertaking close to a rite of passage.
The school day was strictly controlled and supervised. It was, after all, the training ground of society itself. The young Shakespeare was present at six or seven in the morning, summer or winter, and replied “adsum” when his name was called. The prayers of the day were then recited, and a psalm sung, succeeded by lessons that continued until nine. There may have been partitions to segregate boys of different ages or different abilities; Shakespeare himself was part of a class of approximately forty-one others at their desks. There was a short space for breakfast of bread and ale, and then more lessons until eleven. Shakespeare then walked home for dinner, and returned on the ringing of the bell at one. During the course of the afternoon fifteen minutes were allotted for game or play, such as wrestling or shooting with a bow and arrow. The school was closed at five. This routine was followed for six days out of seven.
The curriculum of the Stratford school was based upon a thorough grounding in Latin grammar and in rhetoric, inculcated through the arts of reading, memorisation and writing. The first stage of this process consisted in learning simple Latin phrases which could be applied to the ordinary conditions of life and, through an understanding of their construction, in recognising the elementary grammar of the language. To a young child this would be a bewildering and painfully exacting task – to conjugate verbs and to decline nouns, to understand the difference between the accusative and the ablative cases, to alter the normal structure of language so that the verb came at the end of a sentence. How strange, too, that words might have masculine and feminine genders. They became living things, dense or slippery according to taste. Like Milton and Jonson Shakespeare learned, at an early age, that it was possible to change their order for the sake of euphony or emphasis. It is a lesson he did not forget.
In the first months the schoolboy learned the eight parts of Latin speech, before being moved on to a book that Shakespeare invokes on many occasions. William Lilly’s Short Introduction of Grammar is a text on which children have been shipwrecked. Lilly explained the simple grammatical formulations, and then illustrated them with examples from Cato, Cicero or Terence. The children would be expected to imitate these masters by writing very simple Latin sentences. It has been demonstrated that Shakespeare’s punctuation is derived from that of Lilly and that, when he quotes from classical authors, he often uses passages that he read and memorised in Lilly. His spelling of classical names is determined by Lilly. There are many allusions to this process in his drama, not the least being the interrogation in The Merry Wives of Windsor of a pupil named William by a pedagogue of the strictest type. “I pray you haue your remembrance (childe) Accusatiuo hing, hang, hog” (1897-8). This Short Introduction of Grammar was a book that, approached with trepidation as well as concentration, burned itself within his memory.
Shakespeare’s own references to schooldays are not entirely happy. The whining schoolboy creeping like snail unwillingly to school is well enough known, but there are other allusions to the plight of the pupil forced to labour over his texts. In Henry IV, Part Two there is a line concerning “a schoole broke vp,” when each child “hurries towards his home, and sporting place” (2177-8). It is a stray reference but it is, for that reason, even more suggestive. Yet there is a paradox here. Of all the dramatists of the period Shakespeare is the one who most consistently draws on schoolboys, schoolmasters and school curricula as matters for comedy or comment. The notion of schooling was central to him. Perhaps, like most adults, he dreamed of early days.
In the second year the young Shakespeare’s understanding of grammar was put to the test in collections of phrases, aphorisms and commonplaces carefully selected to edify as well as to instruct. These were cast into the memory, also, and it is perhaps worth noting that the child was being continually instructed in the art of remembrance. It was the ground of his education, but of course it proved fruitful in his later career as an actor. The brief sentences were laid out in Sententiae Pueriles, a book to which Shakespeare alludes on more than two hundred occasions. These were dry sayings that, in the alchemy of Shakespeare’s imagination, are sometimes changed into the strangest poetry. “Comparatio omnis odiosa” becomes in the mouth of Dogberry “Comparisons are odorous,” and “ad unguem” turns into Costard’s “ad dunghill.” In this same year of his education he was introduced to selections from the plays of Plautus and of Terence, dramatic episodes that may have quickened his own dramatic spirit. In his account of the proper education for children Erasmus recommends that the master take his pupils through a complete play by Terence, noting the plot and the diction. The master might also explain “the varieties of Comedy.”3 From these authorities, too, Shakespeare gathered some dim intimation of scenes within a five-act structure.
In his third year he read the stories of Aesop in simple Latin translation. He must have memorised these because, in later life, he was able to repeat the story of the lion and the mouse, of the crow with borrowed feathers, of the ant and the fly. There are altogether some twenty-three allusions to these classical fables in his drama. By this time Shakespeare would have been able to compose English into Latin and to translate Latin into English. He scanned the colloquies of Erasmus and Vives in search of what Erasmus called “copia” or plenty. He learned how to pile phrase upon phrase, to use metaphor to decorate an argument or simile to point a moral. He rang changes upon chosen words, and variations upon selected themes. He learnt the art of richness and elaboration from these scholars, whose purpose was to bring classical education into the living world. In Shakespeare, at least, they triumphantly succeeded.
For out of imitation, as he was taught to understand, came invention. It was possible, in the course of a school exercise, to take phrases from a variety of sources and in their collocation to create a new piece of work. It was possible to write a letter, or compose a speech, from a wholly imagined point of view. The imitation of great originals was an essential requirement for any composition; it was not considered to be theft or plagiarism, but an inspired act of adaptation and assimilation. In later life Shakespeare rarely invented any of his plots, and often lifted passages verbatim from other books. In his mature drama he took plots from a variety of sources and mingled them, creating out of different elements a new compound. There is an old medieval saying, to the effect that he who learns young never forgets. Shakespeare was introduced to this method in the fourth year of his schooling, when he was given a selection from the Latin poets, Flores Poetarum; from the study of these flowers of the poets he was supposed to compose his own verses. In the process he became acquainted with Virgil and with Horace, whose words resurface in his own works.
But, more significantly, he began to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid. At an early age he was introduced to the
music of myth. He quotes from Ovid continually. In one of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus, one of the characters brings a copy of the Metamorphoses on to the stage. It is one of the few literary “props” in English drama, but it is a highly appropriate one. Here were Jason and Medea, Ajax and Ulysses, Venus and Adonis, Pyramus and Thisbe. It is a world in which the rocks and trees seem to possess consciousness, and where the outline of the supernatural world is to be seen in hills and running brooks. Ovid celebrates transience and desire, the nature of change in all things. In later life Shakespeare was said to possess the “soul” of Ovid in his own mellifluous and sweetly sounding verses; indeed there is some close affinity. Something in Shakespeare’s nature responded to this swiftly moving landscape. It took him out of the ordinary world. He was entranced by its fantastic artifice, its marvellous theatricality, and what can only be described as its pervasive sexuality. There is little reason to doubt that Shakespeare was a thoroughly sexual being. Ovid was the favourite writer both of Christopher Marlowe and of Thomas Nashe. But Metamorphoses became Shakespeare’s golden book. The words of Ovid entered him and found some capacious residence within him.
In succeeding years, in the classroom above the guildhall, he studied Sallust and Caesar, Seneca and Juvenal. Hamlet is found reading from the tenth satire of Juvenal, which he dismisses as “Words, words, words.” It was a basic grammar-school text. Shakespeare may even have had a slight brush with the Greek authors, although any evidence for this is marginal at best. What is not in doubt, however, is his Latinity. He uses a Latinate vocabulary with consummate ease and proficiency; he writes of “intermissive miseries” and “loathsome sequestration.” He can use the language of the scholar and the pedagogue. It could be claimed that he simply had a good ear, and a poet’s instinct for the succinct and shaping word, but it seems unlikely that this “too ceremonious and traditional” language (to use his own phrase in King Richard III) came to him by nature. Samuel Johnson, who was learned enough to recognise learning in others, remarked that “I always said that Shakespeare had Latin enough to grammaticise his English.” We may see the young Shakespeare, therefore, spending thirty or forty hours of each week in memorising, construing, parsing and repeating prose and verse in Latin. We may hear him talking the language, to his schoolmaster and to his fellow pupils. It may seem an odd perspective in which to place him – especially to anyone accustomed to him warbling “native wood-notes wild”-but Shakespeare is as much part of the revival of Latin culture in the Renaissance as Francis Bacon or Philip Sidney. One formidable scholar of Shakespeare has even suggested that “if letters written by Shakespeare ever turn up, they will be in Latin.”4
On the question of Shakespeare’s education, Ben Jonson was decidedly superior. He was “frequently reproaching him with the want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Ancients,”5 by which he meant that Shakespeare chose not to follow classical models. Jonson was confusing negligence with ignorance. And when he declared that Shakespeare had “small Latine and lesse Greeke” he was overstating the case for the sake of a phrase. Shakespeare’s Latin was as good as that of any other grammar-school boy, and would rival the knowledge shown by any undergraduate of classics in a modern university. Jonson may also have been implicitly comparing the curriculum of the King’s New School with that of his own Westminster School; but, to judge by the educated and professional schoolmasters of Stratford, the comparison may not all be in Jonson’s favour.
The final stages of Shakespeare’s education were perhaps the formative ones. He moved from grammar to oratory, and learned the arts of elocution. What we call creative writing, the Elizabethans called rhetoric. In the schoolroom Shakespeare was obliged to learn the elementary laws and rules of this now arcane subject. He read a smattering of Cicero and Quintilian. He learned the importance of inventio and dispositio, elocutio and memoria, pronunciatio or action and delivery; he remembered these principles for the rest of his life. He knew how to invent variations upon a theme, and how to ring changes on the sound as well as the sense of words; he knew how to compose themes and to write out formal orations. He also learned how to avoid hyperbole and false rhetoric; in his plays, he gave them to his comic characters. For the alert child it becomes a wonderful means of composition itself. Rhetoric, and the devices of rhetoric, then become a form of creation.
He was trained, as part of this act of creation, to take both sides of any question. The ancient habit of the philosophers and rhetoricians was to argue in utramque partem-on either side of the argument. Any event or action can thus be viewed from a variety of different perspectives. The artist must, like Janus, look in two directions at once. In the process language itself became a form of contest or competition. But, equally importantly for the young Shakespeare, the truth of any situation becomes infinitely malleable and wholly dependent upon the speaker’s eloquence. What better preparation for a dramatist? And what better training could there have been for the making of Mark Antony’s oration in Julius Caesar or the pleading of Portia in The Merchant of Venice?
There were specific lessons in action and in delivery. In one text for use in grammar schools it was ordained that the pupils “be taught to pronounce every thing audibly, leisurely, distinctly amp; naturally; sounding out especially the last syllable, that each word may be fully understood.”6 It was important to cultivate “sweete pronunciation.” In the same book it is demanded that the pupils “utter every dialogue lively, as if they themselves were the persons which did speake in that dialogue.”7 It is a good training for the theatre. It was also a curriculum that encouraged self-assertion. In his later life Shakespeare was not averse to staking his claim to dramatic pre-eminence, and we may imagine him to have been a singularly competitive small boy. He may not have become embroiled in fights, like the juvenile Keats, but he was fast and full of furious energy. He was, we surmise, easily bored.
It was not necessarily a print culture. It was also a culture of the voice, its exponents being primarily preachers, divines and actors. That is why the theatre rapidly became the supreme art form of the age. This oral culture was of necessity deeply connected with the old medieval culture of England, encompassing storytellers, poetical reciters, ballad singers and minstrels. Shakespeare is much more likely to have heard, than to have read, poetry. An oral culture relies, also, upon the formation of strong memories. If you cannot consult a book, you must perforce remember. Schoolboys were trained in systems of memory or “mnemonics.” Ben Jonson declared that “I can repeate whole books that I have read,”8 and this was not a singular accomplishment. It is the context for the feats of memory exemplified in the ability of Elizabethan actors to perform several plays in one week.
Plays were regularly performed in the grammar schools of England, with Plautus and Terence as the staple of the juvenile repertoire. In the grammar school of Shrewsbury the pupils were obliged, each Thursday morning, to perform one act of a comedy. The boys of King’s School, Canterbury – among them Christopher Marlowe – put on plays each Christmas in a tradition that must have reached many other grammar schools. It is important to remember that drama was one of the foundations of Elizabethan teaching. From the smallest grammar school to the “moots” in the Inns of Court, debate and dialogue were the staple of learning. It is no accident that much of the earliest English drama derives from the Inns, where the legal training of “putting the case” developed into sheer theatre. In the school of Stratford speeches were learned and delivered, and conversations were often treated as contests of wit. “A delivery amp; sweet action,” it was written, “is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler.”9 We may believe that it was one in which Shakespeare excelled. It is unlikely that the man who was known for his grace and fluency did not demonstrate those virtues at an early age. We do not know whether plays were performed at the King’s New School, but there is evidence in Shakespeare’s drama of a favourite school play entitled Acolastus. Children have a natural gift for dramatisation, and they are fully abl
e to imagine scenes and characters taken from their reading; Shakespeare was exceptional only in preserving these abilities to the end of his life. It suggests some profound irritation, or dissatisfaction, with the limitations of the adult world.
There is further evidence of his dramatic education in the careers of the schoolmasters of Stratford. Two of them, Thomas Jenkins and John Cot-tam, had been educated at Merchant Taylors’ School under the tutelage of Richard Mulcaster; Mulcaster’s pedagogic system “advocated teaching through drama, more specifically through acting.”10 What more natural than that they should continue the theatrical tradition created by their famous teacher?
The first of the school masters, Walter Roche, is the one about whom least is known. He resigned his post in the year that Shakespeare joined the school, but lived in Stratford for the rest of his life. He has the distinction in any case of formally introducing the young boy to the schoolroom. The career of the next master of the Stratford school is of more interest. Simon Hunt was schoolmaster for the first four years of Shakespeare’s education and, although much of that schooling was no doubt undertaken by his assistant, he remained a powerful presence in Shakespeare’s young life. It is significant, then, that he reverted to his old Catholic faith; he left Stratford in order to train at the seminary in Douai as a Jesuit priest and missionary to England. Whether his Catholic sympathies had any material effect upon the young boy is another matter; but it would surely have compounded the family’s own piety and bolstered what seems to have been the Catholic environment of his growing-up.