Shakespeare: A Life (11 page)

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 was 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.

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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Proud of employment, willingly I go. ( Boyet,
Love's Labour's Lost
)

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 player 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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