by Park Honan
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 12d. 'towarde ye makynge of ye 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 cos
mopolitan, 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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grammar school should not be to purify souls but to prepare the intellect for proper service in God's world. Since the ancients had refined the mind -- or brought it to its highest attainments -- Latin and Greek filled the Tudor curriculum, and indeed in 1571 the bishops asked every British schoolmaster to teach books 'whereby the fulnes and finenes of the Latine & Greeke toung may be learned'. 6
The system -- with its element of promise -- at least ensured that Elizabethan playwrights would write for audiences reared in a literary culture. In practice, the system of course depended on many a Sir Hugh Evans -- but William learned from his next classroom text. This was Leonard Cullmann Sententiae Pueriles, with its lists of Latin adages for 'conversing', such as these:
Deferto neminem Accuse no man
Multitudini place Please the multitude
Pecuniae obediunt omnia All things obey money
Felicitas incitat inimicitias Felicity cloth raise up enemies
Sommis mortis imago Sleep is the image of death
Tempus edax rerum Time is a devourer
Tempus dolorem lenit Time doth assuage grief
Animus cujusque sermone revelatur Each person's mind is discovered by
his speech
If Polonius is here in bud, so is much more. Pupils used these and other adages -- such as those in Erasmus Cato -- for 'amplifying' in themes. William learned to think in sententiae. As he looked for the best, he was to bring pithy commonplaces along with much of the subtle mind of the Renaissance into his work, and some 209 echoes of the Pueriles itself have been found in his poems and plays. 7
Pupils had to think beyond the life of the classroom, now and then, for how else could they show that 'time doth assuage grief'? They imagined ancient Romans (they heard almost nothing about England since the time of Julius Caesar), and they met a few Romans in Terence's comedies, as in the delicate Eunuchus with its funny, greasy parasite Gnatho:
GNATHO. plurima salute Parmenonem summum suom inpertit Gnatho. quid agitur?
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PARMENO. statur. GNATHO. video. num quidnam hic quod nolis vides? PARMENO, te. [GNATHO. Gnatho wishes a very good morning to his great friend Parmeno. What are you on? PARMENO. My legs. GNATHO. So I see. You don't see anything here, do you, that you'd rather not? PARMENO. YOU.] 8
If the usher ever went beyond a few scenes, the children became aware of the five-act play structure, but Terence was admired chiefly for fine Latin. William was to take much more from Plautus, whose comedies were too coarse for most schools. When did he first read Plautus? That is uncertain, but the classroom introduced him tantalizingly to Roman comedy; and it is probable that from his father's friends, if not from the schoolmaster, he could have borrowed, at last, as much of Terence or Plautus as he wished to read.
He recalled the modern Latin moral poets well. Children memorized from Palingenius' Zodiacus Vitae, which has a brief defence of comedy, and from a bucolic eclogue or two by the Carmelite poet, Mantuanus ( Baptista Spagnuoli), dear to the heart of the pedant Holofernes in Love's' Labour's Lost. In their third year, they began to compose their own Latin with help of Withals's short dictionary, or the Elyot-Cooper one left by the vicar. For more conversing, they jotted lines from Corderius, Gallus, or Vives, or from the dialogues of Castalio and Erasmus. 9
In a sense, classes lasted seven days a week, since the children had to account for themes they heard in Sunday sermons and briefer homilies. In school they translated back and forth, English to Latin and Latin to English, from the Geneva Bible -- and William's teacher most probably favoured the Proverbs and Psalms as well as Genesis, Job, and Ecclesiasticus. 10 His knowledge of the Bible was improved in church by Henry Heicroft, a fellow of St John's at Cambridge, who had an MA in 1570, and who earned extra pay for Lenten sermons and who was among the best-prepared vicars the town had known. In tenure from 1569 to 1584 (when he left for the richer benefice of
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Rowington), Heicroft at least helped to impart that profound religious and moral sense that underlies Shakespeare's urbanity.
Schooldays began and ended in devotions, and the boys would have trudged into the Gild chapel to sing from the Psalter. A psalm was a dramatic, collective act, requiring pupils as they sang to assume in unison the 'I' of David, Christ, and the Church. They were saved, too, from literalness by Alexander Nowell great Catechisme, which, after ABC with the Catechism, most grammar-school pupils knew by the mid-1570s. Nowell taught the mystery of God, 'which is a spirit, eternall, unmeasurable, infinite, incomprehensible', severed from every 'vaine shape', and he pointed to an evil so dark, foul, and dreadful (and full of emotion and drama) that it was nameless. Boys may have whispered 'regicide' as they memorized his warning: 'Yea surely', says the Catechisme. For if it is terrible to offend one's parents, 'and parricide to kill them . . . what shall we say of them that haue conspired and borne wicked armour, against the common weale, against their countrey, the most auncient, sacred, and common mother?' 11
That was about as close as schoolchildren came to hearing of English 'bearers of wicked armour', although a new mood stirred outside schools in the 1570S with an implicit question. If teachers taught Latin, what of English? New books praised the nation's past as well as her tongue: William Lambarde Perambulation of Kent -- the first county history -- argued in 1576 for the supreme value of the 'Hystorie of England'. 12 Raphael Holinshed massive Chroniclesa year later exalted the British Isles. One of its excellent woodcuts shows 'Makbeth', as he rides along with 'Banquho' under a crow-filled sky to meet three 'weird sisters or feiries', who scowl at him and his companion on horseback. 13 If the British past was important one might argue for the fineness of the native tongue -- at least in the patriotic climate when William left Lower School. Up until then, his training was routine, but it would have prepared him for the arrival of Master Thomas Jenkins.
Rhetoric at dawn
On dark days in Church Street's over-hall, the living world faded and it was the ancients that mattered. Sallust or Caesar came to life in the
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accents of young boys -- or miracles of animation were supposed to occur. Boys were told to recite 'pathetically', with feeling, and the bishops' canons asked them to stand up straight and speak 'openly, plainly, and distinctly'. 14 In Upper School, such recitals -- of benefit to future actors perhaps -- had to appeal to a university-trained master.
From 1571 Simon Hunt had taught the upper benches; he was fresh from Oxford with a BA. He may have been volatile, but his payment of 7s. 11d. 'towardes the repayringe of the schole wyndowes' (in his early tenure) probably means that he was a victim of 'barring out' when, on set days, pupils barred the door against the master and became rowdy. Windows were smashed and boys -- such as William-might pay for 'a wyndowe broken at the shuttinge of [their] Master forthe'. 15 William knew a festive, topsy-turvy world of inverted authority in school and his comedies were to explore the more subtle and complex inversions -- and deep releases -- of antic mishap.
Hunt's troubles with the broken window-glass preceded his exit in 1575. He left Church Street either to become a Jesuit -- if he is the Simon Hunt who matriculated at the University of Douai in the summer of 1575 -- or else to pursue a local career, if he is the Simon Hunt of Stratford who left an estate worth £100 in 1598.
The next two schoolmasters were Thomas Jenkins and John Cottom, both Oxford men. The master's pay of. £20 per annum was reasonable, but not generous, and since the incumbent teacher had to pay the usher's salary, some masters left for more lucrative posts in the 1560s
and 1570s. The departing teacher or the vicar usually recruited a replacement. So John Brownsword had been brought in by the vicar Bretchgirdle, his former teacher at Witton. Three years later in 1568 the new schoolmaster became John Acton, a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford; he was replaced by Walter Roche, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, who after resigning from the King's New School practised law on Chapel Street and twice witnessed deeds with John Shakespeare.
Jenkins and Cottom had strong Catholic connections, but no doubt so did many other masters at a time when the English Reformation was still within living memory. A Londoner, Jenkins was the son of an 'old servant' of Sir Thomas White, founder of St John's College, Oxford. White was a pious Catholic who conformed, and
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in fact St John's welcomed men who preferred the Catholic faith but who wished to reconcile it with loyalty to the Queen. It was to this college that White's servant's son was sent. Jenkins took his BA in 1566 and MA in 1570; he was also a fellow of St John's from 1566 to 1572, when his college granted him the lease of 'Chawsers Howse' at Woodstock, probably for teaching. 16 Sir Thomas had favoured him with a letter of support, and so if Jenkins was not in fact a Catholic he had friends and well-wishers who were. Cottom -- who succeeded him-had a younger Catholic brother who was martyred. It is sometimes confidently said that Jenkins was fetched over from Warwick in 1575, but the master from Warwick is not named in Stratford's records, and Jenkins does figure as renting rooms from the council in a rent-roll dated 10 March 1574, though these entries could have been added some time after that March:
