Peter Ackroyd - Shakespeare

In his third year he read the stories of Aesop in simple Latin translation. He must have memorised these because, in later life, he was able to repeat the story of the lion and the mouse, of the crow with borrowed feathers, of the ant and the fly. There are altogether some twenty-three allusions to these classical fables in his drama. By this time Shakespeare would have been able to compose English into Latin and to translate Latin into English. He scanned the colloquies of Erasmus and Vives in search of what Erasmus called “copia” or plenty. He learned how to pile phrase upon phrase, to use metaphor to decorate an argument or simile to point a moral. He rang changes upon chosen words, and variations upon selected themes. He learnt the art of richness and elaboration from these scholars, whose purpose was to bring classical education into the living world. In Shakespeare, at least, they triumphantly succeeded.

For out of imitation, as he was taught to understand, came invention. It was possible, in the course of a school exercise, to take phrases from a variety of sources and in their collocation to create a new piece of work. It was possible to write a letter, or compose a speech, from a wholly imagined point of view. The imitation of great originals was an essential requirement for any composition; it was not considered to be theft or plagiarism, but an inspired act of adaptation and assimilation. In later life Shakespeare rarely invented any of his plots, and often lifted passages verbatim from other books. In his mature drama he took plots from a variety of sources and mingled them, creating out of different elements a new compound. There is an old medieval saying, to the effect that he who learns young never forgets. Shakespeare was introduced to this method in the fourth year of his schooling, when he was given a selection from the Latin poets, Flores Poetarum; from the study of these flowers of the poets he was supposed to compose his own verses. In the process he became acquainted with Virgil and with Horace, whose words resurface in his own works.

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,” 5by 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.” 6It 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.” 7It 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.