| Shakespeare at School |
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Shakespeare had 'small Latine and lesse Greeke', according to his contemporary, Ben Jonson. This famous judgement can be very misleading to those living more than four centuries later. It must be understood in relative terms: not only was Jonson himself an extremely learned man, but the literary culture of Elizabethan England was saturated in the Roman and Greek classics. What Jonson deems 'small' appears impressively large to those living in the late twentieth century, where classical literature in the original language is an ever receding, increasingly rarefied body of knowledge. Shakespeare's formal education was complete when he left Stratford's grammar school at the age of fifteen or sixteen but he would already have acquired more mastery of Latin than most British graduates in the language today. The Petty SchoolThe town's petty school would have been the starting point for William Shakespeare and the other five-year-olds of Stratford-upon-Avon. Here the children learnt their letters with the help of a hornbook. Sandwiched between a wooden board and a piece of transparent animal horn, a sheet of paper comprised the horn book's basic text of the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer. Simple reading skills were also taught by means of 'abc books' which included the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and the Ten Commandments. In learning to write, the children must have struggled with the skillful management of quill pen and ink. Claude Holyband's school-book, Campo di Fior: or else, The Flourie Field of Foure Languages (London, 1583), written in English, French, Italian and Latin, presents a dialogue on the subject between master and students, (in which it can be seen that, at this period, English spelling was happily inconsistent): Master: .Have you brought your penner [a case for pens] and inke-horne and pennes? We write with goose quilles. Cut of the fethers with a penknife, scrape awaye that which is roughe. The sons of the richer citizens would move on, at the age of seven, to the town's grammar school and among them would certainly have been the young William Shakespeare. As a prosperous craftsman, businessman and leading townsman it would have been extraordinary if John Shakespeare had not ensured that his son take full advantage of the education available in his home town by attending the local schools. The Grammar SchoolThere are no academic records surviving for Stratford's grammar school in the sixteenth century, although there is information available about the schoolmasters at that time, which shows that they included a high proportion of Oxford graduates. It is possible to reconstruct Shakespeare's schooling from our knowledge of other, better-documented schools, elsewhere in the country, since there was virtually a national system of education established by the mid-sixteenth century. A uniform structure of schools, freely available to the male children of the town, covered the country, following the same basic principles and adhering to a common curriculum. Numerous grammar schools had been founded in the mid sixteenth-century, during the reign of the Protestant King Edward VI, in order to produce educated and responsible citizens who could respond to the ideals of the Protestant Reformation by reading and translating, for themselves, the Bible and other religious writings. Schoolboys had to endure a long, unvaried, taxing day, from Monday to Saturday, beginning at 6 or 7 in the morning and continuing until 5 or 6 in the evening. Although there was a break of a couple of hours in the middle of the day, there was no physical exercise or play included in the timetable and no vacations beyond the occasional day's holiday. Discipline was harsh. On the seventh day of the week, the boys were still not at liberty since they were obliged to attend lengthy church services, again under the watchful eye of their schoolmaster. It is easy to sympathise with the picture of the child conjured up in a speech from As You Like It: ...the whining schoolboy, with his satchel The study of Latin lay at the heart of the grammar school curriculum. All Elizabethan schoolboys were taught their lessons in the same, traditional manner, which depended mercilessly on their ability to memorize by rote. The teaching was based on the 'trivium' of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the 'quadrivium' of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. There was no place for the study of modern languages or sciences so familiar in our own contemporary syllabus. Underpinning the Renaissance humanist culture was the conviction that the most valuable knowledge was to be found in the writings of classical times. Access to this treasury of wisdom could only be gained by mastery of Latin. Latin was still the international language of Europe, used throughout the professions, in the law, in medicine and in the Church, and, as explained earlier, a thorough knowledge of Latin was necessary for the proper practice of the Protestant Faith. Latin GrammarThe textbook best known to Shakespeare and his schoolfellows was Lily's Short Introduction of Grammar (first published 1540). This was prescribed for use in all grammar schools across the country and it was to remain in use, with some small changes, until the mid-nineteenth century. The boys were obliged to commit its contents to memory, where, one may assume, it remained for much of their adult lives, as is the way with texts learnt by heart as a child. In The Merry Wives of Windsor the Welsh parson-teacher, Sir Hugh Evans (it is worth noting that one of Shakespeare's teachers, Thomas Jenkins, was Welsh), tests the Latin of young William Page. The scene must have reminded many men in the playhouse audiences of their childhood struggles with the opening section of Lily's text book and its explanation of nouns. Lily begins: 'In nouns be two numbers, the singular and the plural. The singular number speaketh of one: as Lapis, a stone'. Here is Shakespeare's version: Evans: What is 'lapis', William? Logic, Rhetoric and Literary StyleAs the boys progressed through the school their fluency in Latin flourished: in the upper forms Latin was spoken at all times. Having mastered their grammar, they were taught to think and argue logically and to deploy their arguments with all the eloquence and force that their skills in rhetoric could afford. Such skills were acquired through the study and imitation of the ancient masters. The most admired stylists and moralists included Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Seneca, while the histories of Livy, Julius Caesar and Plutarch were also carefully studied. The plays of Terence introduced Shakespeare to the comic types of the braggart soldier and the witty servant or, as in Plautus's Menaechmi, the theme of twins separated at birth. The declamation of Latin speeches from these plays was an important part of the pupils' practice of rhetoric. They were also expected to imitate the styles of the great writers in their own compositions, which they would deliver, first to propose and then to oppose a specific argument. The contrasting styles and effects of the funeral orations of Brutus and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar demonstrate these rhetorical arts, first acquired by Shakespeare at school, twenty years earlier. In addition, the study of poetry such as the Eclogues of Virgil and of the fifteenth-century Italian poet Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus ('Good old Mantuan', as he is called in Love's Labour's Lost) and, above all, the Metamorphoses of Ovid was to have an incalculable influence on Shakespeare's imagination and literary style. The great scholar Erasmus (1466-1539) wrote several educational books to help young students. His anthologies of Latin sayings and proverbs, the Adagia and the Apophthegmata were widely used by schoolboys in their efforts to expand and enrich their Latin vocabulary. On Copiousness in Style and Subject Matter famously showed one hundred and fifty different ways in correct Latin to say 'thank you for the letter'. Likewise, his Colloquies demonstrated the use of rhetorical figures, metaphors, word-play, patterned and balanced sentence structures and so on. We have no evidence to show how Shakespeare benefited from all this in his use of Latin but there is ample proof of his receptivity to such lessons in the extraordinary rhetorical skills he was later to display in his native language. Further ReadingFurther information about education in Shakespeare's time may be found in the following books and articles: Baldwin, T.W., William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944) Briggs, Julia, This Stage-Play World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Curtis, M.H., 'Education and Apprenticeship', in Shakespeare in his Own Age, Shakespeare Survey 17, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 53-72 Fox, Levi, The Early History of King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon (Hertford: Dugdale Society, 1984) Grafton Anthony, 'Education and Apprenticeship', in Shakespeare: his World, his Work, his Influence, ed. John Andrews, 3 vols (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), I, 55-65 |
