Shakespeare: A Life (9 page)

second child Joan Shakespeare on 15 April 1569. She was the only one
of their four daughters to survive childhood. Their last daughter,
Anne, was baptized on 28 September 1571, and buried at the age of 7.
Their son Richard was taken to the baptismal font at Holy Trinity on
11 March 1574, and their last child, Edmund, on 3 May 1580.

These births accentuated an eldest son's pride of place, and, far
from being displaced in the family, William thrived. His well-being
appears in his later dedicatory letters to his patron and also in light
jokes and allusive, affectionate mockery -- all of which seem to point
back to happiness, self-love, and his family pride in the Stratford
years. No deep distaste for Stratford would appear in any of his known
actions, attitudes, or allusions. If he consciously made light of his
sister Joan, in later times, by calling a hawk 'Old Joan' in
2 Henry IV
,
or by playing on a name common for upstarts and servants (as in
'greasy Joan' or 'I can make any Joan a lady'), he kept his sister
close to him in such references; and he was not likely to have
forgotten the constables at Stratford, including his father, when
conjuring up Dull, Elbow, or Dogberry and the watch in
Much Ado
.
He had every reason to be amused and complacent in boyhood as his
father's heir apparent. His ease or boredom in early schooling can
only have left his mind free. In a town various in work, the comic
human spectacle was instructive. But there would also be the profound
enquiring force of his disillusionment --

Othello's occupation's gone!

( 111. iii. 362)

What happens when our preconceived notions of life are abruptly
changed, or when trust in a beloved person is shattered by experience?
His father had risen to a bailiff's robes, and then after being exposed
for usury and illegal dealing, neglected his role as an alderman
until the council would have no more of him. What do the furred
honours or rank, office, and reputation conceal?

Through tattered rags small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hides all.

(
Lear
, 1608 quarto, xx. 158-9)

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In densely peopled Henley Street, an alderman's actions would in any
case be judged by gossip, and his refusal to attend halls would be
known. John Shakespeare had abandoned the 'Brotherhode'. The evidence
would suggest that William was alert to his father's daily work, and
well aware of his brogging. The neighbourhood cannot have been blind
to an alderman's behaviour, and gossip and William's own eyes and ears
would have told him about his father's setback. Yet many an idolized
father has been found to have feet of clay, and for the sensitive
young the act of growing up is perhaps inherently disillusioning.
William is likely to have felt the strongest loyalty, sympathy, and
love for his father, while being aware of depressed circumstances. At
13 he was being changed by one of the great experiences of Tudor life,
inasmuch as he was going to a grammar school, and his education would
have carried his mind away from his family's troubles with debts and
credit. John Shakespeare's downfall is a matter of record
nevertheless, and the household at Henley Street was affected by it.

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Sweet smoke of rhetoric! ( Don Armado,
Love's Labour's Lost
)

John Shakespeare knew his advantages well enough to take large risks
in the early 1570s, and he won local notoriety as an entrepreneur.
Once he was accused of illegally sharing in a joint purchase of 200 tods
(5,600 lb.) of wool. Even before applying for a coat of arms, he must
have looked with immense hope to his son and heir. As a deputy
bailiff, he was unlikely to have sent William to any school but the
borough one, the only grammar school for miles around. This was the
King's New School on Church Street -- scriveners refer to it as the
'free scole' or '
Kynges ffree Schoole'
. Its registers are
missing, but Nicholas Rowe writes in 1709 that 'Mr. John Shakespear'
was a 'considerable Dealer in Wool' who bred William 'for some time at a
FreeSchool' -- and, though he was not always reliable, we have no
reason to discredit Rowe's words in this instance.
¹
Much more direct, certain evidence that William was in grammar school
comes from his plays. The Latin authors he recalls are mainly those
he would have studied in class -- the 'grammar gods' -- and since the
school was open to sons of burgesses, he would have been enrolled in
1571, when he was 7.

Stratford
classes before William's time, and down to the present day, have met
in what borough records call 'the chapel!' -- that is within the
chapel precincts, either inside or close to the Gild hall. That hall
was the seat of the town government, and William was schooled within a
few yards of the annexe in which his father met with other aldermen.
Formerly pupils had convened in 'Scholehows' (or

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Pedagogue's House), but after the Gild school was refounded in 1553
there was a slight move. We do not know just why. It may be that
Scholehows was assigned rent-free to John Brownsword, a married
teacher. A new room was set up, and a clerk notes in Brownsword's
tenure (early in the 1560s) that this teacher gives 12
d.
'towarde y
^e
makynge of y
^e
schole'
²
-- a modest gift. (Bretchgirdle, the vicar, did at least as well by
leaving to the new classroom his 'Elyottes lybrarie of Coopers
Castigacion', which was a copy of Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English
dictionary
Bibliotheca Eliotae
, revised in 1552 by Thomas Cooper, a valuable folio.
³
) By the 1570s, the boys were climbing stairs to the Gild hall's 'over
hall', which is jettied, ample, and airy with heavy roof braces under a
peaked ceiling of rafters, and two rows of windows, one row looking
onto Church Street. The room was evidently subdivided with partitions;
but in one part about forty-two boys -- with a schoolmaster and his
assistant, or usher -- met six days a week for nearly the whole year.

The class was a quarter of a mile from the Woolshop, a weary way for Jaques' lad in
As You Like
It no doubt, though Jaques reduces each age of life to a cynical vignette:

the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face,
creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. ( II. vii. 145-7)

Of course, somebody made the boy's satchel and one or two greasy
Joans collected ashes and grease all winter to make soap for that
shining face.

A grammar boy was part
of an élite. Most children hardly finished 'petty' class. Setting out
with his knife, quills, and ink, William would have been very special:
an alderman's son was under pressure to behave well and do credit to
his father. Later William was to mock rhetoric, Latin, and pedants --
but not bitterly -- and alluded often enough to school and its texts
to suggest he had known classes from two viewpoints, the pupil's and
the teacher's. He was impressionable enough to be at one disadvantage
as a schoolboy, in that he might take in
too much
instruction and so be overly receptive, dutiful, and patient,

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if bored and a little flattened. He had to reach class at about 6 a.m.,
and, after a pause for breakfast, hear lessons till luncheon, and
then from 1 p.m. to about 5.30 p.m.

Memory-work was endless. At Leicester's Free Grammar School-which
cannot have been much unlike Stratford's -- each morning's lesson was
repeated by pupils next day 'without booke'. On Fridays, the week's
lessons had to be known by heart, 'perfectlie'. From the age of 7
until about 15, William memorized Latin almost daily. Unlike the
meandering, fuzzy, verbose English language -- so unfixed and
variable, so quickly changing that Chaucer was almost unintelligible
after 200 years -- Latin was lucid and precise. For a millennium and a
half it had been the pre-eminent language of Europe, and since the
154Os it had become the vehicle for a fluent and elegant commentary in
all fields of learning at Cambridge and at Oxford. In the 1570s the
literary prestige of Latin was immense. The sound of a language -- far
more than its syntax or vocabulary -- appealed to Elizabethans, and
William's memorizing of Latin would, above all, train his ear. With a
good memory, he would later be able to synthesize in his work a very
great deal of verbal material that he had heard or read. Experience
with the preciseness of Latin would help him to express himself with
point, logic, and lucid continuity, and save him from larding his
English writing with bombast, 'ink-horn' terms, or exotic and
highsounding words adopted simply for show.
⁴

On the other hand, a narrow focus upon Latin could be stultifying.
Grammar-school boys were taught nothing about modern history, society,
politics, the life of their town or county or nation, almost nothing
about the crafts, the trades, agriculture, the human body, or any
other topic likely to be useful to them. Discipline was strict, and no
doubt benches were hard -- a clerk notes a new 'plank' for King's New
School. A master arrived at about 7 a.m., when pupils bowed to him.
In a leather jerkin, flat cap, and round cloak, or cassock of silk and
woollen 'mockado', he was usually a lordly presence as he taught the
older boys, who were in Upper School. In the same room the usher
taught children of the Lower School the rudiments of vocabulary,
accidence, and grammar. That training did not help William's spelling,
to judge from 'Hand D' in the
Booke of Sir Thomas More
play

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manuscript, and he perhaps spelled no better than Stratford clerks if
'Hand D' is indeed his own (as we believe it is), since it shows
spellings such as 'ffraunc' ( France), 'Jarman' (German), 'graunt'
(grant), 'scilens' (silence), and 'afoord' (afford). It is not true
that teachers were indifferent to a boy's English, but English
spelling was not regularized and they would have cared a great deal more
for a child's Latin.

Learning by ear
and memory, William would have read very little in the few, costly
schoolbooks. But boys listened, and, since he heard his schoolmates'
jokes, some origins of his puns, bawdry, and burlesque seem traceable
to class. In reaction to endless obedience, town boys almost had to
hear English bawdy humour in the Latin of 'horum, harum, horum' in
William Lily
A Shorte Introduction of Grammar
(a required text), if only to save their sanity.

In
The Merry Wives
,
Mistress Quickly thinks she hears bawdy in those words, and in Act
IV, scene i, the Welsh parson-pedagogue Sir Hugh Evans takes young
William Page through a mock-usher's drill. In the scene's contemporary
spelling we may catch tones of an Elizabethan first-year class,
despite Mistress Quickly's commentary:

EUANS. What is (
Lapis
)
William
? William. A Stone. EUANS. And what is a Stone (
William?
) William. A Peeble. EUANS. No; it is
Lapis
: I pray you remember in your praine . . . What is the
Focatiue case
(
William
?) William. O,
Vocatiuo,
O. EUANS. Remember
William, Focatiue, is caret.
MISTRIS QUICKLY. And that's a good roote. EUANS. O'man, forbeare. MISTRIS PAGE (to
Mistris Quickly
). Peace. EUANS. What is your
Genitiue case plurall
(
William
?) William.
Genitiue case
? EUANS. 1. William.
Genitiuo horum, harum, horum.
MISTRIS QUICKLY. 'Vengeance of Ginyes case; fie on her; neuer name her (childe) if she be a whore. ( IV. i. 28-57;
O-S sc.
xiii)

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Mistress Page is so pleased that she says of William: 'He is a better
scholler then I thought he was', and, in general, Tudor parents
approved of grammar-school training. It made their sons polite and
employable, and we must not assume that Mary Shakespeare -- who had
won Arden's trust for
her
early competence -- would have lessened
urgent pressure upon an alderman's son to succeed in school. And to
succeed too well.

Certainly for many of the boys the slow pace and repetitions were soporific or numbing. They went from the
Grammar
to Lily
Brevissima Institutio
,
which is all in Latin except for an index and a Greek alphabet -- and
William tasted his 'lesse Greeke' (as Jonson termed it) by the age of
9. He did recall the Grammar with a clear, untroubled humour that
contrasts with his paradoxical reactions to Upper School. 'An
Interjection', he learned from Lily, 'betokeneth a sudayne passion' as
of 'Laughing: as
Ha ha he'
.
⁵
So Benedick tells Claudio in
Much Ado
: 'interjections? Why then, some be of laughing, as "ah, ha, he!" ' ( IV. i. 21-2).

Or the
Grammar
could remind boys (who rose before dawn) of the beautiful proverb
'Diluculo surgere . . .' (it is most healthful to get up early in the
morning). 'Approach, Sir Andrew', Sir Toby Belch tells a woebegone
Aguecheek in
Twelfth Night
, 'Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes, and
diluculo surgere,
thou knowest' ( II. iii. 1-3).

Lower School dragged on for three or four years -- and yet earlier
scholars such as Erasmus, Colet, and Grocyn had put into the schools a
potent originating force. Their Christian humanism had in it an
ample, cheerful faith in the possibilities of each individual's capacity
for wise action. They had transformed the old medieval
trivium
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic partly because their humanism was
cosmopolitan, alert, and seeking. Some roots of their thought -- and
thus of Shakespeare's schooling -- were in the writings of
fifteenthcentury Florentines such as Marsilio Ficino or his protégé,
Pico della Mirandola, whose biography Sir Thomas More translated.

Pico held that we are not celestial or earthly, mortal or immortal,
good or bad, but become the product of our choices. If so, young minds
must be trained for ethical choice, and the aim of the British

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