Shakespeare (11 page)

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 & 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 & 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 able 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.

Simon Hunt was succeeded by Thomas Jenkins, a Londoner and son of a “poor man” and “old servant” of Sir Thomas White; he had been a student of Latin and Greek at St. John’s College, Oxford, which had been established by the very same Sir Thomas White. White was a Roman Catholic, and St. John’s College was known to be sympathetic to Catholic undergraduates. Edmund Campion, Catholic saint and martyr, was attached to St. John’s College, and taught Thomas Jenkins there. Jenkins can therefore be considered to be indulgent, at the very least, to the Catholic cause. He can also be considered an expert classicist, and it was he who first introduced Shakespeare to the work of Ovid. He was in every sense a dedicated teacher; he had requested two years’ absence from his Oxford college “that he may give himself to teach children.”
¹¹

When Jenkins resigned in 1579 he found his own replacement in John Cottam, a fellow scholar from Merchant Taylors’ and Oxford University. Cottam’s younger brother, Thomas Cottam, was a Jesuit priest and missionary who resided at Douai with Simon Hunt. There they were joined by a fellow pupil of Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, the son of a Catholic farmer from Shottery. The associations with Shakespeare are close, therefore, and almost pressing. Thomas Cottam returned to England with a letter from Robert Debdale to his father. Both Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale were later arrested, for their proselytising activities in England, and executed. From allusions in his plays it is clear that Shakespeare followed the career of his erstwhile schoolfellow with some interest. He was, you might say, one of the fraternity.

John Cottam left the King’s New School in the year of his brother’s execution. The last connection with Shakespeare’s schooldays was another master, Alexander Aspinall, popularly supposed to be the model for the pedantic dunce Holofernes. And so the unfortunate man entered the creative imagination of the English. But since he did not enter the school until Shakespeare was eighteen, the connection may not be a close one. The young man no longer attended the New School; but he did know Aspinall, and may have observed his pedagoguery with an eye more objective than that of a school-boy.
He is even believed to have written a set of verses, to accompany Aspinall’s present of gloves (bought from John Shakespeare) to an intended bride:

Funnily enough, the little poem sounds like Shakespeare, and may count as some amends for Holofernes.

I
n the early years
of Shakespeare’s schooling his father persevered in illegal dealings in wool and in money-lending. They were in a sense conventional offences, and not likely to injure John Shakespeare’s reputation in any significant way. They were noted in the public records but he continued with his normal civic duties, and at the beginning of 1572 he and Adrian Quiney travelled to London in order to represent their town at the lawcourts in Westminster. There was a dispute with the lord of the manor, the Earl of Warwick. A few months later John Shakespeare was in Warwick to attend a post-mortem on a local miller. Throughout this period he attended the requisite “halls” when the council met for business.