Peter Ackroyd - Shakespeare

It has often been suggested that the scriptural “colouring” of Shakespeare’s language comes from a dedicated reading of the Old and New Testaments; but it is more likely that he adopted them almost instinctively as the most readily available form of sonorous language. He was entranced by the sound and by the cadence. Of course he was not just a purloiner of local effects. The evidence of his drama suggests that he was also impressed by the book of Job and by the parable of the Prodigal Son; in each case the workings of Providence solicited his interest. Phrases and images returned to him when he needed them, so that the Bible became for him an echo-chamber of the imagination. It is perhaps ironical that the Bible was translated into English at the insistence of religious reformers. The reformers, as it were, gave the sacred book to Shakespeare. He returned the compliment with his own plangent and resourceful language.

From the petty school Shakespeare advanced to the King’s New School, where he received a free education by right as the son of a Stratford alderman. Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, states that John Shakespeare “had bred him, ’tis true, for some time at a Free-School, where ’tis probable he acquir’d that little Latin he was Master of …” 1The school assembled in a classroom behind the guild chapel; it was on the floor above the guildhall itself, and was reached by means of a tile-covered staircase of stone. It is in use to this day, a longevity that suggests the prevalence of tradition and continuity in Stratford life. A long and narrow room with a very high oaked-timbered ceiling, strong and many-beamed with bosses in the middle where the beams join, its windows overlook Church Street, which may have afforded a distraction. Certainly the sound of the world could not be kept out.

One engraving illustrating an Elizabethan schoolroom, dating from 1574, shows a master behind a desk, with a book opened in front of him, while the pupils sit on wooden benches in various stages of attention and inattention. On the floor, curiously enough, lies a dog gnawing a bone. There is no sign of the birch or rod that is supposed to have been so prevalent in sixteenth-century school life. The amount of discipline may have been exaggerated by those who like to emphasise the cruelties of Elizabethan life.

Before he entered this new domain the young Shakespeare would have to demonstrate that he could read and write English, that he was “fit” to study the Latin tongue, and that he was “ready to enter into his Accidence and Principles of Grammar.” 2He was about to be introduced to the language of the educated world. He and his father climbed upstairs to the schoolroom where the master read out the statutes of the school, to which the boy agreed to conform; for the sum of 4 pence William Shakespeare was then enrolled in the register. He brought with him candles, fuel, books and writing materials; these would have included a writing book, a glass of ink, an ink horn, and half a quire of paper. He could not have inherited a set of school texts from his father, and so they would also have been purchased. It was an undertaking close to a rite of passage.

The school day was strictly controlled and supervised. It was, after all, the training ground of society itself. The young Shakespeare was present at six or seven in the morning, summer or winter, and replied “adsum” when his name was called. The prayers of the day were then recited, and a psalm sung, succeeded by lessons that continued until nine. There may have been partitions to segregate boys of different ages or different abilities; Shakespeare himself was part of a class of approximately forty-one others at their desks. There was a short space for breakfast of bread and ale, and then more lessons until eleven. Shakespeare then walked home for dinner, and returned on the ringing of the bell at one. During the course of the afternoon fifteen minutes were allotted for game or play, such as wrestling or shooting with a bow and arrow. The school was closed at five. This routine was followed for six days out of seven.

The curriculum of the Stratford school was based upon a thorough grounding in Latin grammar and in rhetoric, inculcated through the arts of reading, memorisation and writing. The first stage of this process consisted in learning simple Latin phrases which could be applied to the ordinary conditions of life and, through an understanding of their construction, in recognising the elementary grammar of the language. To a young child this would be a bewildering and painfully exacting task — to conjugate verbs and to decline nouns, to understand the difference between the accusative and the ablative cases, to alter the normal structure of language so that the verb came at the end of a sentence. How strange, too, that words might have masculine and feminine genders. They became living things, dense or slippery according to taste. Like Milton and Jonson Shakespeare learned, at an early age, that it was possible to change their order for the sake of euphony or emphasis. It is a lesson he did not forget.

In the first months the schoolboy learned the eight parts of Latin speech, before being moved on to a book that Shakespeare invokes on many occasions. William Lilly’s Short Introduction of Grammar is a text on which children have been shipwrecked. Lilly explained the simple grammatical formulations, and then illustrated them with examples from Cato, Cicero or Terence. The children would be expected to imitate these masters by writing very simple Latin sentences. It has been demonstrated that Shakespeare’s punctuation is derived from that of Lilly and that, when he quotes from classical authors, he often uses passages that he read and memorised in Lilly. His spelling of classical names is determined by Lilly. There are many allusions to this process in his drama, not the least being the interrogation in The Merry Wives of Windsor of a pupil named William by a pedagogue of the strictest type. “I pray you haue your remembrance (childe) Accusatiuo hing, hang, hog” (1897-8). This Short Introduction of Grammar was a book that, approached with trepidation as well as concentration, burned itself within his memory.

Shakespeare’s own references to schooldays are not entirely happy. The whining schoolboy creeping like snail unwillingly to school is well enough known, but there are other allusions to the plight of the pupil forced to labour over his texts. In Henry IV, Part Two there is a line concerning “a schoole broke vp,” when each child “hurries towards his home, and sporting place” (2177-8). It is a stray reference but it is, for that reason, even more suggestive. Yet there is a paradox here. Of all the dramatists of the period Shakespeare is the one who most consistently draws on schoolboys, schoolmasters and school curricula as matters for comedy or comment. The notion of schooling was central to him. Perhaps, like most adults, he dreamed of early days.

In the second year the young Shakespeare’s understanding of grammar was put to the test in collections of phrases, aphorisms and commonplaces carefully selected to edify as well as to instruct. These were cast into the memory, also, and it is perhaps worth noting that the child was being continually instructed in the art of remembrance. It was the ground of his education, but of course it proved fruitful in his later career as an actor. The brief sentences were laid out in Sententiae Pueriles , a book to which Shakespeare alludes on more than two hundred occasions. These were dry sayings that, in the alchemy of Shakespeare’s imagination, are sometimes changed into the strangest poetry. “Comparatio omnis odiosa” becomes in the mouth of Dogberry “Comparisons are odorous,” and “ad unguem” turns into Costard’s “ad dunghill.” In this same year of his education he was introduced to selections from the plays of Plautus and of Terence, dramatic episodes that may have quickened his own dramatic spirit. In his account of the proper education for children Erasmus recommends that the master take his pupils through a complete play by Terence, noting the plot and the diction. The master might also explain “the varieties of Comedy.” 3From these authorities, too, Shakespeare gathered some dim intimation of scenes within a five-act structure.