Shakespeare: A Life (10 page)

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:

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?

-48-

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

-49-

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.

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

-50-

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. 11
d.
'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

-51-

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:

Mr Jenkins for one Chamber o ----- x
^s
of him for an other Chamber o ----- v
^s
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:

-52-

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

-53-