Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan

seat of the town government, and William was schooled within a
few yards of the annexe in which his father met with other aldermen.
Formerly pupils had convened in 'Scholehows' (or
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Pedagogue's House), but after the Gild school was refounded in 1553
there was a slight move. We do not know just why. It may be that
Scholehows was assigned rent-free to John Brownsword, a married
teacher. A new room was set up, and a clerk notes in Brownsword's
tenure (early in the 1560s) that this teacher gives 12 d. 'towarde y e makynge of y e schole' 2 -- a modest gift. (Bretchgirdle, the vicar, did at least as well by
leaving to the new classroom his 'Elyottes lybrarie of Coopers
Castigacion', which was a copy of Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English
dictionary Bibliotheca Eliotae , revised in 1552 by Thomas Cooper, a valuable folio. 3 ) By the 1570s, the boys were climbing stairs to the Gild hall's 'over
hall', which is jettied, ample, and airy with heavy roof braces under a
peaked ceiling of rafters, and two rows of windows, one row looking
onto Church Street. The room was evidently subdivided with partitions;
but in one part about forty-two boys -- with a schoolmaster and his
assistant, or usher -- met six days a week for nearly the whole year.
    The class was a quarter of a mile from the Woolshop, a weary way for Jaques' lad in As You Like It no doubt, though Jaques reduces each age of life to a cynical vignette:
the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face,
creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. ( II. vii. 145-7)
    Of course, somebody made the boy's satchel and one or two greasy
Joans collected ashes and grease all winter to make soap for that
shining face.
    A grammar boy was part
of an élite. Most children hardly finished 'petty' class. Setting out
with his knife, quills, and ink, William would have been very special:
an alderman's son was under pressure to behave well and do credit to
his father. Later William was to mock rhetoric, Latin, and pedants --
but not bitterly -- and alluded often enough to school and its texts
to suggest he had known classes from two viewpoints, the pupil's and
the teacher's. He was impressionable enough to be at one disadvantage
as a schoolboy, in that he might take in too much instruction and so be overly receptive, dutiful, and patient,
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if bored and a little flattened. He had to reach class at about 6 a.m.,
and, after a pause for breakfast, hear lessons till luncheon, and
then from 1 p.m. to about 5.30 p.m.
    Memory-work was endless. At Leicester's Free Grammar School-which
cannot have been much unlike Stratford's -- each morning's lesson was
repeated by pupils next day 'without booke'. On Fridays, the week's
lessons had to be known by heart, 'perfectlie'. From the age of 7
until about 15, William memorized Latin almost daily. Unlike the
meandering, fuzzy, verbose English language -- so unfixed and
variable, so quickly changing that Chaucer was almost unintelligible
after 200 years -- Latin was lucid and precise. For a millennium and a
half it had been the pre-eminent language of Europe, and since the
154Os it had become the vehicle for a fluent and elegant commentary in
all fields of learning at Cambridge and at Oxford. In the 1570s the
literary prestige of Latin was immense. The sound of a language -- far
more than its syntax or vocabulary -- appealed to Elizabethans, and
William's memorizing of Latin would, above all, train his ear. With a
good memory, he would later be able to synthesize in his work a very
great deal of verbal material that he had heard or read. Experience
with the preciseness of Latin would help him to express himself with
point, logic, and lucid continuity, and save him from larding his
English writing with bombast, 'ink-horn' terms, or exotic and
highsounding words adopted simply for show. 4
    On the other hand, a narrow focus upon Latin could be stultifying.
Grammar-school boys were taught nothing about