Shakespeare: A Life
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Mr Jenkins for one Chamber o ----- xs of him for an other Chamber o ----- vs 17
(Schoolmasters had rent-free quarters. Ushers did not.) It is possible, then -- but by no means certain -- that Jenkins began as an usher, and that his teaching would account for William's recalling extremely well the moral poets who came near the end of the Lower School curriculum. However that may be, Jenkins impressed clerks, who called one of his rooms 'Mr ginkins Chamber' or 'mr Jenkins Chamber' six and eight years after he left it; 18 and he was likely to have impressed boys. He seems, to mention one example, to have taught the class Book I of Quintilian, which no mere pedant would teach (a teacher interested only in rhetoric drill would skip it). As he became master in 1575, it was apparently he who introduced William to Ovid Metamorphoses and perhaps to Arthur Golding's famous, 'equivalent' version, homely and useful at once, which schoolmasters often read from. One virtue of Golding's English is that it unfolds and expands the tight richness of Ovid's Latin. Shakespeare's fondness for Golding's version and reliance upon it, of course, cannot be taken to show that he lacked a good, independent sense of Ovid's text; still, he was to use Golding's details, which are compelling in descriptive pictures -- as in that of a mortal Atalanta, beloved of gods:
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The garment she did weare A brayded button fastned at hir gorget. All hir heare Untrimmed in one only knot was trussed. From hir left Side hanging on hir shoulder was an Iuorie quiuer deft: Which being full of arrowes, made a clattring as she went. And in hir right hand she did beare a Bow already bent. Hir furniture was such as this. Her countnance and hir grace Was such as in a Boy might well be cald a Wenches face. 19
Ovid's text was the Elizabethan classroom favourite. But William's fondness for Ovid was complex, lifelong, and, it would seem, always developing so that he found freshnesses in the Metamorphoses as if it were for him a many-levelled source of worldly and metaphysical insights. One of the best things he saw in that inexhaustible poem was a varying, rich image of spiritual and bodily transformation, which informs nature's processes and could inform the spirit of comedy.
A master's chief task was to teach rhetoric, or the devices that enabled a boy to create a voice on paper in his themes, epistles, and orations. Any boy who stayed the course would learn a little -- and clever boys learned how to state an argument with the utmost emotional force in their controversiae, in which they argued now one view of a question, now another. That exercise gave William an early sense of the detached-yet-attached speech-writing needed for plays. They also learned from imitatio -- or the process of assimilating many snippets of Latin to produce a text, like, yet unlike, the one to be imitated. If Ovid captured his fancy at 13 and 14, William was exactly trained in the techniques of assimilation from diverse sources.
To the extent that school influenced him, he was made to be a follower and assimilator -- not a creative man. School probably reinforced his dislike of singularity. He was to take well-tried subjects for his plays and use his power for a fresh reworking of old texts, old themes, old truths, and so write works that seem uneccentric but are deeply original as well as universal. To a degree, any boy on the benches was battered into conformity and taught merely the habits and frames that helped him to be a pale shadow of Latin authors. William's chief guides for rhetoric were the Ad Herennium (then thought to be Cicero's) for general information, Quintilian for
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theory, Erasmus Copia for variety and elegance, and Susenbrotus for tropes and figures of speech. It is not clear that he ever read a work by Cicero other than Tusculan Disputations; his texts at school were few. But the Ad Herennium did teach him that a speech must be written without much labour -- boys tried for smart fluency -- and it implicitly offered the theory that the physical world itself, as well as verbal phrasing and adornment, may be alike ornamental. 20 Possibly his teacher dissented from that classical notion -- and William did not subscribe to it. He respected a distinction between reality and the airy fuss of words, and yet he valued the tropes and schemes. A good teacher would have stressed them. They unlocked language itself, and, in theory, helped the user to express feelings naturally. The trope was, in effect, a 'turn' in a word's meaning from a literal to an imaginative level, as when the word is used in metaphor, simile, or hyperbole, or again in devices such as synecdoche (where the part represents the whole) or metonymy (where the name of an attribute is used for the thing itself). The schemes involved repetitions of words, symmetry or balance in style, visual and aural patterns, as in isocolon and parison (equal length and equal structure in successive clauses) or paromoion (corresponding sounds with matching structures), and a variety of other devices affecting emphasis, tempo, or rhythm in phrases and sentences.
The trouble is that Tudor schoolboys knew too little of life to use such a language system well. They were trained in imitative synthesis, but the rhetorical system was complex enough to encourage artificiality, or mere technical facility. Even when writing in London, William would take a decade to learn to use the full resources of rhetoric. To judge from the stiffness of style in his early plays, he was slow to match his use of language to his sense of experience. He learned (as many did) to attend to manner in composing arguments for orations, but we must wait at least until The Merchant of Venice or perhaps Troilus and Cressida and the tragic soliloquies to find him fully at ease in the argumentative speech. He never abandoned the classical system of rhetoric, and, in time, made more powerful, ranging, and innovative uses of it than anyone else who has written for the English stage; but it is another thing to suppose that he quickly assimilated that system.
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With its arid emphasis on verbal artifice, school evidently came too early for him, in some ways narrowing his mind and delaying his success; there are signs, for example, in his mature writing, that he had been too attracted by ringing changes on words, by varying, amplifying, and patterning. Even when mocking rhetoric in his apprentice work, he seems enamoured of the verbal excesses he comically attacks, as in the word-and sound-play of Speed and Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
SPEED. The Shepheard seekes the Sheepe, and not the Sheepe the Shepheard; but I seeke my Master, and my Master seekes not me: therefore I am no Sheepe.
PROTEUS. The Sheepe for fodder follow the Shepheard, the Shepheard for foode followes not the Sheepe: thou for wages followest thy Master, thy Master for wages followes not thee: therefore thou art a Sheepe. ( I. i. 84-90; O-S sc.i)
He was dazzled by models of verbal patterning he was slow to outgrow, and one of his handicaps was that he was likely to imitate styles long out of date, or not to adapt to a later age that might possibly ask for more matter and less rhetoric. A grandson of Lily the grammarian was soon to charm him: the family name had changed from Lily to Lyly, and the patterned smartness of Lyly Euphucs, of 1578, became a fad. But fads do not last. Long after Euphues began to tire people, an ornate euphuistic style lingered in Shakespeare's writing. He never made his mind up about its excesses; he sends up euphuistic symmetry in Osric's speeches in Hamlet or Falstaff in 1 Henry IV -- but he uses it in the serious verse, too, of 1 Henry IV, Richard III, or Othello.
This fault is attributable to schools that were hotbeds of literary talent, but not always of self-sustaining life. William -- and a few of his classmates -- must have been agile at Latin, but as the agility spilled into English it outran the pupil's sense of himself and his observations. A deeper problem was William's enforced commitment to what he learned; the narrow channels of school were approved by his father, or John Shakespeare would not have seen the boy in class. But how could agility lead to inward development? An implicit protest against school is voiced in all of his light satire of pedants, but in the 1570s he prepared
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himself for no career more likely than the pedant's; if he evaded that, he still had no obvious way to reconcile his fondness for words and sounds with the sense of reality. As a schoolboy -- even under an evidently humane, sensible Jenkins -- he w
as in danger of being forced into a bright, shallow artificiality by verbal training, the narrow classicism of the course, and his imitativeness and receptivity. He did keep his fondness for rhetorical display in check -- later -- partly by laughing at its excesses, and indeed his comedians jest at academic absurdities with almost too much energy. His clowns are victims of rhetoric, and his most impressive themes exploit it; he was to portray in Hamlet a kind of ideal grammar-school prince, who can play, duel, and dream in words while staying in character, bookish and vital.
In the last stages of Upper School, the children took up Virgil and Horace, as well as Caesar and Sallust, for glimpses of Rome's history. If William began his Greek New Testament, it is probable that his career at Church Street ended before he learned much more to add to the modest amount of Greek he would already have had.
The Lord of Misrule
In recent years, his father's fortunes had changed. A boy who began in Lower School as a leading townsman's son found himself in a family short of cash and being treated leniently by indulgent aldermen -- who did not see John Shakespeare at 'halls'.
Yet the times abetted a sense of release. There was a new audacity, a 'certaine deformitie and insolencie of minde' (as William Camden put it) that appeared in a rage for fashionable dress. This phenomenon was not confined to London but was a symptom of change 'all over England' 21 -- and the flouting of old, sane sumptuary, rules would have been evident at Stratford's Bridge Street inns and beyond.
Social barriers were eroding. Clothes no longer exactly reflected rank or degree. On a holiday from Upper School, William would have seen more than a little of the new anarchy -- which was colourful. Men of mean rank wore cheap rosettes on their shoes. Embroidered waistcoats appeared in tuffeted taffeta or branched satin stitched in gold or silver, as if tradesmen's sons were noblemen, and grander young men
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had enormous padded doublets, effeminate shirts of cambric or lawn, even steeple-crowned hats of sarsenet 'with hat-bands of black, white, russet, red, green, or yellow, never the same for two days', hose after the French or Venetian patterns and slashed and embroidered shoes with high cork heels. 22
That social revolution accented the audacity of seasonal rights of inversion, such as those of the Lord of Misrule in the Christmas feasts up to Twelfth Night and at harvest-time and Shrovetide. The wildheads of a parish (says Phillip Stubbes in revulsion in the Anatomie of Abuses) with jangling bells and in 'liueries of green, yellow, or some other light wanton colour' either bemuse or deafen the godly, mock the Sabbath and invade churches, plead for money, dance and riot without hindrance -- and may lay a cross over their necks, 'borrowed for the most parte of their pretie Mopsies & loouing Besses, for bussing them in the dark'. 23
With the superiority of a grammar-school scholar, William may have avoided the ruffians of 'Mis-rule' and never figured among 'twentie, fortie, threescore or a hundred lustie Guttes' who followed their parish king; but he knew a spirit of inversion and defiance that abets self-discovery. The bottled-up life of the scholar did not appeal to him -- and, partly in reaction to the artificiality of school, he seems (on the evidence of his attentions very soon in or near Shottery) to have had hunger enough for early experience. Even at 15 or 16 he was most certainly acquainted with Anne Hathaway, since the Hathaways of Shottery had had a friendly connection with his family since his infancy. Already his walks across the fields to the Hathaway cottage may have added to his parents' worries.
The restrictions of school and his hunger for experience affected his behaviour, and we cannot accuse him of incuriosity. As much as he absorbed in class, we have the evidence of his own writing to show that he was a close, almost famished, observer of the country -- and the local Stratford lore of his deer-killing draws one's attention to his behaviour as he roamed with friends. In an early play he would celebrate deer-killing and grammar-school pedantry in the same scene ( Love's Labour's Lost, IV. ii).
In any case, deer-poaching was a sport for the adventurous. The
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Tudor game laws in application were not severe. In theory (under the law of 5 Eliz., c. 21) an archer caught with a deer faced three months in prison and triple the cost of damages, and would have to provide sureties for abstaining from illegal killing for five years. But punishments seldom matched the statute. 24 Just because it involved outwitting the park-keeper, and a good deal of self-control and silent skill, deer-poaching appealed to the intelligent young. None of the poacher traditions attached to his name proves that William killed deer in these years or later, but so much smoke may suggest a little fire.
Poaching flourished at Oxford, and had had a lively history in Warwickshire. William learned about stalking, brakes, cover, the deerherd, the herd's sensitivity to the slight 'noise of thy cross-bow', 25 and the ways of quiet, strategic poaching; he shows less knowledge of the legitimate chase with the hounds or the sounds of the horn. Even if he had studied the deer's anatomy in a Henley Street whittawer's shed, nevertheless he could not -- one would think -- have gained his fine sense of the herd's ambiance and habits in just that way.
Almost no escapade of his own would have caused his withdrawal from school, but straitened circumstances 'and the want of his assistance at Home, forc'd his Father to withdraw him from thence', says Rowe. 26 We have no evidence that he quit at an unusually early point. It was normal to leave at the age of 15 or 16, and it is probable that he left Church Street within a few months of his fifteenth birthday.
In April 1579 John Shakespeare would have needed 'assistance at home' if he lacked cash to pay helpers; as we have seen, by then the brethren were excusing him from levies he seems to have been unable to pay. The Shakespeares buried their daughter Anne that month. Joan was then 10, Gilbert and Richard 12½ and 5 respectively. Gilbert may have been to petty school, since he later affixed, in an Italian hand, his well-written "Gilbart Shakesper" to a Stratford lease (of 5 March 1610). 27 As spring turned into summer in the parish there was a normal changeover at the King's New School when Master Jenkins was replaced by John Cottom. The two teachers agreed to -- and signed -- an arrangement as regards part-payment of salary, and Jenkins before leaving had one task laid upon him by the full weight of canon law: he had to recommend boys among those whom he had
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taught. He was supposed to send names of his abler pupils to the bishop of Worcester, for the 'Scholemasters' each year, as the canons read, 'shall signifie to the Byshop, what chosen scholers they haue of all their number, which are of that aptnes, and so forward in learning, that there may be a good hope they will become fitte, either for the common wealth, or for the holy ministerie'. 28
William can hardly have spent months in class without revealing some 'aptnes', or a sign that he might 'become fitte'; his later writing does not suggest he had slept through school -- and in the exercise of assimilating for imitatio he can only have shown promise. Yet we do not know that a borough teacher ever sent his name to the Anglican bishop of the diocese, ripe for advancement as he was. The evidence is still uncertain, but, with their known connections, Master Jenkins or Master Cottom may well have proposed for him an alternative way ahead, and a journey that led him to wear at a surprisingly early age 'playe clothes'.
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5
0PP0RTUNITY AND NEED
Proud of employment, willingly I go. ( Boyet, Love's Labour's Lost)
'In the Countrey'
It is reasonable to think that at about the age of 15 or 16 Shakespeare helped his father, and that for an interlude he even found alternative employment. In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey was by no means certain that Ben Jonson's report of the Stratford poet's 'small' Latin could be valid. 'He understood Latine pretty well', Aubrey wrote of Shakespeare, 'for he had been in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey.' 1 This is a fairly well authenticated report. Using living sources of information, Aubrey was told of the schoolmastering by William Beeston, whose father Christopher Beeston the pl
ayer had been a member of Shakespeare's company and had acted with him in Ben Jonson Every Man in his Humour. Memories were long in the profession of the stage, in which recruitment was largely a matter of hereditary castes, and the elder Beeston had been an early member of the Lord Chamberlain's men. The 'Schoolmaster' report is not particularly surprising, unlikely, or merely gossipy.
At 15 or 16 William knew ' Latine pretty well', though with no other qualification he can hardly have begun as a grammar-school master. Unless he taught as an unlicensed teacher for a private employer, he would have needed a licence to be a schoolmaster, and no licence (or record of one) has come to light in his case. Most boys on leaving school either helped their fathers or contracted out, usually after paying a fee to be seven-year apprentices, and there was an exodus from
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Stratford. A few boys, such as Roger Lock in 1577, or Richard Field in 1579, went to serve members of the London Stationers' Company, which controlled aspects of the book trade. As a son of Henry Field the tanner (whose inventory was later appraised by John Shakespeare), Richard Field was apprenticed from 29 September 1579 to the stationer George Bishop, and then agreed to learn printing for the first six years under Thomas Vautrollier, an immigrant from Paris, who brought out Calvin Institutes, a Latin Book of Common Prayer, and Ovid, Cicero, and other schoolbooks.
If William had an explicit contract to teach in the Midlands, we lack it. We do, however, know of a family 'in the Countrey' -- the northern family of Hoghton at Lea and Hoghton Tower in Lancashire -- who have had a long-standing tradition that Shakespeare, as a young man, served two years with them. 2 Lancashire was then a poor county, backward and feudal, and known to be rough and dangerous for travellers. To the extent that they were religious, many of its people were Catholic. If Alexander de Hoghton wanted a 'Schoolmaster' for his retainers' children, he was wealthy enough to hire more than one. Yet among the retinue listed in his will, none is closer in name to Shakespeare than a 'servant', who is listed with a certain Fulke Gillom and is called William Shakeshafte. In the county there were a few families of Shakeshafte, but the name was not common; the name Shakespeare was very rare in Tudor Lancashire. An 'item' in Hoghton's will of 3 August 1581 interestingly associates Gillom and Shakeshafte with players, musical instruments, and 'all maner of playe clothes' or with a stock of players' clothes. In the will, Hoghton leaves his instruments and costumes to his half-brother Thomas, but, if Thomas refuses to keep an acting troupe, it is Hoghton's wish that his friend, Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford,