Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters, Volume I. | Page 6

in which they
evidently took great delight.
We have seen that both John and Mary Shakespeare, instead of writing
their name, were so far disciples of Jack Cade as to use the more
primitive way of making their mark. It nowise follows from this that
they could not read; neither have we any certain evidence that they
could. Be this as it may, there was no good reason why their children
should not be able to say, "I thank God, I have been so well brought up,
that I can write my name." A Free-School had been founded at
Stratford by Thomas Jolyffe in the reign of Edward the Fourth. In 1553,
King Edward the Sixth granted a charter, giving it a legal being, with
legal rights and duties, under the name of "The King's New School of
Stratford-upon-Avon." What particular course or method of instruction
was used there, we have no certain knowledge; but it was probably
much the same as that used in other like schools of that period; which
included the elementary branches of English, and also the rudiments of
classical learning.
Here it was, no doubt, that Shakespeare acquired the "small Latin and
less Greek" which Ben Jonson accords to him. What was "small"

learning in the eyes of such a scholar as Jonson, may yet have been
something handsome in itself; and his remark may fairly imply that the
Poet had at least the regular free-school education of the time.
Honourably ambitious, as his father seems to have been, of being
somebody, it is not unlikely that he may have prized learning the more
for being himself without it. William was his oldest son; when his tide
of fortune began to ebb, the Poet was in his fourteenth year, and, from
his native qualities of mind, we cannot doubt that, up to that time at
least, "all the learnings that his town could make him the receiver of he
took, as we do air, fast as 'twas ministered, and in his Spring became a
harvest."
The honest but credulous gossip Aubrey, who died about 1700, states,
on the authority of one Beeston, that "Shakespeare understood Latin
pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the
country." The statement may fairly challenge some respect, inasmuch
as persons of the name of Beeston were connected with the stage before
Shakespeare's death and long afterwards. And it is not unlikely that the
Poet may, at some time, have been an assistant teacher in the
free-school at Stratford. Nor does this conflict with Rowe's account,
which states that John Shakespeare kept William at the free-school for
some time; but that straitness of circumstances and need of help forced
him to withdraw his son from the school. Though writing from tradition,
Rowe was evidently careful, and what he says agrees perfectly with
what later researches have established respecting John Shakespeare's
course of fortune. He also tells us that the Poet's father "could give him
no better education than his own employment." John Shakespeare, as
we have seen, was so far occupied with agriculture as to be legally
styled a "yeoman." Nor am I sure but the ancient functions of an
English yeoman's oldest son might be a better education for what the
Poet afterwards accomplished than was to be had at any free-school or
university in England. His large and apt use of legal terms and phrases
has induced many good Shakespearians learned in the law to believe
that he must have been for some time a student of that noble science. It
is indeed difficult to understand how he could have spoken as he often
does, without some study in the law; but, as he seems thoroughly at
home in the specialties of many callings, it is possible his knowledge in
the law may have grown from the large part his father had, either as

magistrate or as litigant, in legal transactions. I am sure he either
studied divinity or else had a strange gift of knowing it without
studying it; and his ripeness in the knowledge of disease and of the
healing art is a standing marvel to the medical faculty.
Knight has speculated rather copiously and romantically upon the idea
of Shakespeare's having been a spectator of the more-than-royal pomp
and pageantry with which the Queen was entertained by Leicester at
Kenilworth in 1575. Stratford was fourteen miles from Kenilworth, and
the Poet was then eleven years old. That his ears were assailed and his
imagination excited by the fame of that magnificent display cannot be
doubted, for all that part of the kingdom was laid under contribution to
supply it, and was resounding with the noise of it; but his father was
not of a rank to be summoned or invited thither, nor