Dear Me,

  So this one will be a longer chapter.  Thus it might be longer to work on.  Ah well, here we go.

Shakespeare: A Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 12:  A Nowne and a Verbe and Such Abhominable Wordes

From the petty school Shakespeare advanced to the King's New School, where he received a free education by right as the son of a Stratford alderman.John Shakespeare :had bred him, 'tis true, for some time at a Free-School, where 'tis probable he acquir'd that little Latin he was Master of..." The school assembled in a classroom behind the guild chapel.  It was on the floor above the guildhall itself, and was reached by means  of a tile-covered staircase of stone.  A long and narrow room with a high oaked-timbered ceiling, strong and many beamed with bosses in the middle where the beams join, overlooking Church Street, which may have provided a distraction. 

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.

Elizabethan School Room

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."  He was about to be introduced to the language of the educated world.  He and his father would gone to the schoolroom where the master read out the statues of the school, to which the boy agreed to conform,  He brought with him candles, fuel, books, and writing materials.  He could not have inherited a set of school text from his father, and so they would have 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.  The prayers of the day were recited, followed by lessons that continued until nine.  Shakespeare himself was part of a class of approximately forty-one others at their desks.  There  was a short space for breakfast, and then more lessons until eleven, where he would walk home for dinner, and returned at the ringing of the bell at one.  During the course of the afternoon was fifteen minute recess and they went home at five.  This routine was done six days of the week.

The curriculum of the Stratford school was based upon a thorough grounding in Latin grammar and rhetoric.  To a young child this would  be a bewildering and painfully exacting task.   To conjugate verbs and to decline nouns, and 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.  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.

Shakespeare's own references to schooldays are not entirely happy. The whining schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school is well known but there are other allusions to the plight of the pupil forced to labour over his text.  In Henry IV, Part Two there is a line concerning "a schoole broke up" when each child "hurries toward his home, and sporting place" (2177-8).  

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.  

In his third year he read the stories of Aesop in the 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 the borrowed feathers and of the ant and the fly.  By this time Shakespeare would have been able to compose English into Latin and to translate Latin into English.  He learned the art of richness and elaboration into the living world.  In Shakespeare, at least, they triumphantly succeeded.

Out of imitation, as he was taught to understand, came invention.  It was possible to take phrases from a variety of sources and in their collocations 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 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..  His mature dramas took plots from a variety of sources and mingled them.  There is an old medieval saying, to the effect that he who learns young never forgets.  In the process he became acquainted with Virgil and with Horace, whose words resurface for his own works.

He began to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid.  At an early age he was introduced to the music of myth.    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 hill and running brooks.  Ovid celebrates transience and desire, the nature of change.  In later life Shakespeare was said to possess the "soul" of Ovid in his own sweet sounding verses.  He was entranced by its fantastic artifice and what can only be described as its pervasive sexuality.  Ovid was also the favourite writer of Christopher Marlow and Thomas Nash.
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 arts, the Elizabethans called rhetoric.  He knew how to invent variations upon theme and to ring changes on the sound as well as the sense of words.  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.  The devices of rhetoric become a form of creation.
He was trained, as part of this act of creation, to take both sides of any question.  Any event or action can be viewed from a variety of different perspectives.  In the process language itself became a form of contest or competition.  But, equally important for the young Shakespeare, the truth of any situation can become malleable and depends on the speaker's eloquence.  What better preparation for a dramatist?

There were specific lessons in action and in delivery.  In one text for used in grammar schools it was ordained that the pupils "be taught to pronounce everything audibly, leisurely, distinctly and naturally,".  It is a good training for the theatre.  It was also a curriculum that encourage  self-assertion.  He may  not have become embroiled in fights 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.  That is why the theatre rapidly became the supreme form art of form of the age.  Shakespeare is most likely to have heard, than to have read, poetry.  An oral culture relies upon the formation of strong memories.  If you can consult a book, you must perforce remember.    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.  In the grammar school of Shrewsbury the pupils were obliged to perform one act of comedy.  It is important to remember that drama was one of the foundations of Elizabethan teaching.   We may believe it was a class that  Shakespeare excelled.