The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty What Shakespeare learnt at Stratford Grammar School

Here's Shakespeare's hornbook. The handle, pierced with a round hole, has lost the piece of string which once attached the little primer to his girdle. A single leaf of yellow parchment is set in the gnawed oak frame, with a slice of transparent horn protecting it. This went with him every day when he went to school.

Here is Shakespeare's alphabet, both large and small, followed by a barbaric regiment of monosyllables: ab eb ib ob ub / ba be bi bo bu. (I read the chant straight across at the second line. See where Holofernes comes from, with his baaing and his bleating?)

Here is Shakespeare's Lord's Prayer, his Paternoster cut out in black-letter, with above it his In nomine, in Gothic script: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, & of the holy Ghost.

This pellucid horn, cool to the touch, was what saved these letters from Shakespeare's inky fingers as he pored over them. I hold in my aged hand what he held once in his young one, reciting in the big schoolroom, at the top of the stone stairs, under beams of chamfered oak, the master enthroned on high at his desk before him, his assistant behind, rod ready for the boys who had not learnt their lesson.

Ben Jonson sneered that the late Mr Shakespeare knew 'small Latin, and less Greek', but I say that the education he received at the King's New School at Stratford was not to be sniffed at. Learning was highly thought of there in Shakespeare's youth, and the magister got PS20 a year (which was more than a master at Eton). The school itself was free to the sons of notable citizens. John Shakespeare was certainly that in the year that William entered it. That was the year the butcher served as bailiff to the town. That year and the next Will was in what they called 'petty school', sitting down with the other boys, but learning the rudiments. In fact he never studied the quadrivium - arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy. His lot was the trivium - the first or 'trivial' part of the medieval curriculum, still then in vogue. In other words, Shakespeare learnt the essentials of all knowledge: grammar itself, and logic, and rhetoric. He left before he got to the second stage.

Why did he leave?

I'll be coming to that, as my grandfather the bishop used to promise his choirboys.

So what did Shakespeare learn from this trivial schooling?

He learnt an educated disbelief. I think he learnt above all how to take what he needed from his studies, how to leave the rest.

And what exactly did he study?

Latin, some Greek, more French than you might think likely in the provinces (in Henry V the dialogue in that language is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic). History. Biblical bits and pieces - I've counted more than two hundred references to things in the Bible in his plays, nearly all of them of an unmystical cast, thank God; for instance, he seems to have been especially impressed by the story of Cain and Abel, the treachery of Judas, and the parable of the Prodigal Son. Then, of course, he studied the major Roman poets and historians and orators. And how to parse a sentence. And how to scan.

Which authors in particular did he read there?

Ovid (I have his copy, with his signature), Virgil, the comedies of Plautus, and the tragedies of Seneca. Prudentius, Boethius, Livy, Sallust. But all such education comes out only in his prentice work. There he can't help letting us know what he knows, like a bright boy forever raising his arm in the classroom. Later, Mr S stopped showing off. He forgot what he had read, and he wrote without reading. But even then the occasional memory from that room at the top of the open stone staircase came in useful. Palingenius, for instance, whose Zodiac of Life, running to 9000 Latin hexameters, he'd had to parse, memorise, and translate at the rate of one hundred lines a week, gave him one remembered line: All the world's a stage. Horace came in handy when he was writing the sonnets, so it seems, and in Titus Andronicus you will find an aphoristic villain who has read him also, 'in the grammar long ago'.

Would you make William Shakespeare a great scholar?

Not at all, sir. Not like John Selden, or Ben Jonson. Not even like William Smith, his exact contemporary, who went on from Stratford school to matriculate at Oxford.

Wasn't he fancy's child?

Madam, I perceive you know your Milton! But Milton never knew our man at all. Leonard Digges, stepson to one of his executors, got it better in another of those prefatory poems in the Folio, where he says, Nature only helped him. By her dim light Mr Shakespeare made his way. No scholar he, yet his scholarship was profound. What he learnt in the King's New School was from the method of what was done there in the name of education, where every side of every question was considered, and different voices encouraged equally to express opposing views. In place of dogmatic definition, versatility of presentation was in favour. No bad training for a future dramatist.

Which book left most mark on him, apart from the Bible?

William Lyly's Grammar. He quotes it in his plays ten times or more.

Does that mean he admired it?

I'd say not. I think it only means he remembered it. I have seen Shakespeare's desk in the Stratford schoolroom. In the lid of it he carved the words Nulla emolumenta laborum ('There is no reward for work'), which is Lyly turned upside-down. In fact, sobersides Lyly is often comical, though of course he didn't mean to be. His Grammar is full of saws that cut no ice for William. For instance, 'homo is a common name to all men.' Mr S has Gadshill, a sententious thief, recite this schoolboy wisdom to impress his partners in crime. They are duly impressed. But the Bailiff's son wasn't. The Grammar also promotes a Calvinistical morality, which Mr Shakespeare always found amusing. For instance, it claims 'it is most healthful to get up at dawn.' This sounds more plausible in Latin, and Sir Toby invokes that Latin in Twelfth Night. A drunkard, in truth he goes to bed with the sunrise, like John Shakespeare.

Do you make Shakespeare out a cynic, like yourself?

Madam, you flatter me. I know nothing of Antisthenes, nor Diogenes neither. As for Mr Shakespeare, what his Stratford education gave him was the start of a way of understanding human nature in all its complexity and contradictoriness. That understanding, though, was never anybody's but his own. Consider: Ben Jonson had much the same sort of schooling, at Westminster, under Camden, and applied himself much more thoroughly to the curriculum. His Catiline is a fair example of the result - a classical construction, good warring against evil, all clear as cold. But if you take Shakespeare's version of the same material in Julius Caesar what you find is a hero who is in part a villain, and a tyrant who is heroic. Which is more true to life, the truer poetry? WS, by the way, never got his due from Jonson, and he knew it. He was responsible for getting Jonson's first plays put on, and his rival resented that. If you look at everything Jonson said about Shakespeare there is always some barb concealed in there amidst the praise. He knew that Shakespeare was the better dramatist, and it choked him. He was always a praiser of himself, and a contemner and scorner of others. As for Mr WS, he never went in much for criticising other writers. But he made one pun sending up Jonson's classical pretensions, when he stood godfather to a son of Ben's, and gave the boy a dozen latin spoons (that is, spoons made of latin, a kind of brass). These, he said, were for Jonson to translate. Shakespeare himself never needs translation, nor does his verse ever sound translated. Ovid I know he loved. But he remembered him mostly from Golding's English version - though he did employ a Latin couplet from the Amores as epigraph to Venus and Adonis. You could say he got his five-Act structure from Terence and Plautus. But what he filled it with is pure impure English hodge-podge.

Who were William Shakespeare's teachers at his school?

First, Simon Hunt. Then, Thomas Jenkins. Last, John Cotton.

Do we know much about them?

Enough, perhaps. Hunt and Cotton were both Catholics. Hunt had to see down a little rebellion among his pupils, following the St Bartholomew Massacre. They smashed some windows and threw a few books about. I can't see Willy having any great stomach for this, even at eight years old. Hunt was a man of parts, evidently. When his religion forced his resignation, he went off abroad, where he became a Jesuit, and died in Rome. Cotton was probably a good teacher, too. He was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford.

What about Thomas Jenkins? Was he a Papist?

No, sir. He was some sect of Puritan. Shakespeare makes fun of him, I believe, in the character of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where there is a schoolroom scene in which he makes fun of himself too, as a recalcitrant pupil called Will. Quite evidently this Welsh Jenkins was far from possessing a powerful brain. What is certain is that right in the middle of one school year, when Shakespeare was fourteen, the governors got rid of the teacher suddenly. He was given PS6 to relinquish his duties and hand the cane over to Cotton, a competent master of the old type, lately down from Oxford.

Do you say Shakespeare was taught well? By two Papists and a Puritan!

I say nothing of the sort. I say he learnt from their extremes a via media, a middle way.

Which master had the greatest influence upon him?

Jenkins, in my opinion. He taught him something about foolishness. And remember that he was a Welshman, and that he seems (judging from his caricature as Hugh Evans) to have abused the English language thoroughly. It is just possible that he was the person who first gave William Shakespeare some notion of the possibilities that lie in stitching Latin and Saxon words together to make new compounds, and of playing off the one strain in our tongue against the other. The portrait of Evans is not without affection. And someone such may well have served to set the boy Shakespeare off on the love-affair with language that lasted all his life, finding new terms for new times, setting fire to English!

How did his school day go? Do we have any details?

He lived close by the school - about a quarter of a mile away. The bell started ringing at a quarter to six every morning in summer, an hour later in winter. On the stroke of six the pupil was supposed to be in class. So Will would rise and say his prayers and wash his morning face until it shone and sometimes comb his hair and greet his parents and always collect his books and then shoulder his satchel before creeping like a snail unwillingly down Henley Street and Chapel Street to the corner of Chapel Lane where the school was situated just behind the Guild Chapel. There were thirty desks in the room beneath the long rafters. Everyone chanted 'Good morning, sir' to the master, then lessons would begin with choral singing. (Will's favourite, as I have reason to know, was the 24th Psalm, especially verses 7 to 10.) This morning session lasted until eleven. Will would then trot home to help his mother with the housework. You can suppose from what he has to say about schools and schoolboys in his plays that he always went out a good bit faster than he came in. If he was lucky then his father might be in a jovial mood and allow him to draw ale from the cask and pour it into a pitcher and say grace for the family before they all sat down to dinner at noon - this was a privilege of being the eldest son. After dinner he would go back to school at one o'clock, and stay there until five, with just fifteen minutes' recreation. Thursdays and Saturdays, he had half-days, school finishing at noon. Sundays there was no school. Then he went to church.

Were the boys flogged?

Soundly, sir, when they were obstinate and ungovernable. Moral advice would also be given to complete their punishment. 'God has sanctified the rod,' as Seager says in his The Schoole of Vertue and the Book of Good Nourture for Children, the last word on the subject, published when William Shakespeare was just thirteen. 'Thus it must be used as the instrument of God.' I knew myself a schoolmaster who in winter would ordinarily on a cold morning whip his boys over, for no other purpose than to get himself a heat.

When are you going to tell us some more about the Misses Muchmore?

Fie, madam! Shame upon you! Do you want your pretty bottom smacked, or what?