A Life of William Shakespeare | Page 9

the local court that
the debtor had no goods on which distraint could be levied. {12b} On
September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman's gown, on the
ground of his long absence from the council meetings. {12c}

Education.
Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his
four sons. They were entitled to free tuition at the grammar school of
Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediaeval foundation by
Edward VI. The eldest son, William, probably entered the school in
1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something
of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577. The instruction that he
received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature.

From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of
that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the
'Sententiae Pueriles' and Lily's grammar, to the perusal of such authors
as Seneca Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. The
eclogues of the popular renaissance poet, Mantuanus, were often
preferred to Virgil's for beginners. The rudiments of Greek were
occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising
pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between
expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident,
and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian
drama. {13}
Dr. Farmer enunciated in his 'Essay on Shakespeare's Learning' (1767)
the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed
whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and
French literature to English translations. But several of the books in
French and Italian whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his
dramas--Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques,' Ser Giovanni's 'Il Pecorone,'
and Cinthio's 'Hecatommithi,' for example--were not accessible to him
in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his
ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's
exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in
Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all
means of access to the literature of France and Italy.

The poet's classical equipment.
With the Latin and French languages, indeed, and with many Latin
poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his writings openly
acknowledged his acquaintance. In 'Henry V' the dialogue in many
scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate if not
idiomatic. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in 'Love's
Labour's Lost' and Sir Hugh Evans in 'Merry Wives of Windsor,'
Shakespeare placed Latin phrases drawn directly from Lily's grammar,
from the 'Sententiae Pueriles,' and from 'the good old Mantuan.' The
influence of Ovid, especially the 'Metamorphoses,' was apparent

throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic, and is
discernible in the 'Tempest,' his latest play (v. i. 33 seq.) In the
Bodleian Library there is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid's
'Metamorphoses' (1502), and on the title is the signature Wm. She.,
which experts have declared--not quite conclusively--to be a genuine
autograph of the poet. {15} Ovid's Latin text was certainly not
unfamiliar to him, but his closest adaptations of Ovid's
'Metamorphoses' often reflect the phraseology of the popular English
version by Arthur Golding, of which some seven editions were issued
between 1565 and 1597. From Plautus Shakespeare drew the plot of the
'Comedy of Errors,' but it is just possible that Plautus's comedies, too,
were accessible in English. Shakespeare had no title to rank as a
classical scholar, and he did not disdain a liberal use of translations. His
lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the 'small Latin and less
Greek' with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson.
But Aubrey's report that 'he understood Latin pretty well' need not be
contested, and his knowledge of French may be estimated to have
equalled his knowledge of Latin, while he doubtless possessed just
sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of
an Italian poem or novel. {16}

Shakespeare and the Bible.
Of the few English books accessible to him in his schooldays, the chief
was the English Bible, either in the popular Genevan version, first
issued in a complete form in 1560, or in the Bishops' revision of 1568,
which the Authorised Version of 1611 closely followed. References to
scriptural characters and incidents are not conspicuous in Shakespeare's
plays, but, such as they are, they are drawn from all parts of the Bible,
and indicate that general acquaintance with the narrative of both Old
and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire
either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays. Shakespeare quotes
or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes
allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed
proverbial currency, and