Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

School
educa¬
tion.
been natives of Stratford or the immediate neighbourhood
And the poets father being, as we have seen, so great a
friend of the players, and during his most prosperous years
inconstant communication with them, his son would have
every facility for studying their art. Curiosity and in¬
terest and the like would prompt him to find out all he
could aboutthe use of the stage “ books,” the distribution of
the parts, the cues and exits, the management of voice and
gesture, the graduated passion and controlled power of
the leading actors m the play, the just subordination of
the less important parts, and the measure and finish of
each on which the success of the whole so largely depended
It is not improbable, too, that in connexion with some of
the companies Shakespeare may have tried his hand both
as poet and actor even before leaving Stratford His
poetical powers could hardly be unknown, and he may
have written scenes and passages to fill out an imperfect or
complete a defective play; and from his known interest
m their work he may have been pressed by the actors to
appear in some secondary part on the stage. In any case
he would be acquainted with some of the leading players
in the best companies, so that when he decided to adopt
their profession he might reasonably hope on going to
London to find occupation amongst them without much
difficulty or delay.
Shakespeare received the technical part or scholastic
elements of his education in the grammar school of his
native town. The school was an old foundation dating
from the second half of the 15th century and connected
with the guild of the Holy Cross. But, having shared the
fate of the guild at the suppression of religious houses it
was restored by Edward VI. in 1553, a few weeks before
ms death. The “King’s Hew School,” as it was now
called, thus represented the fresh impulse given to educa¬
tion throughout the kingdom during the reign of Henry
VIII. s earnest-minded son, and well sustained under the
w!lghtened ride sister, the learned virgin queen.
What the course of instruction was in these country
schools during the second half of the 16th century has
recently been ascertained by special research,1 and may be
stated, at least in outline, with some degree of certainty
and precision.. As might have been expected, Latin was the
chiel scholastic drill, the thorough teaching of the Boman
tongue being, as the name implies, the very purpose for
which the grammar schools were originally founded. The
regular teaching of Greek was indeed hardly introduced
into the country schools until a somewhat later period.
But the knowledge of Latin, as the language of all the
learned professions, still largely used in literature, was
regarded as quite indispensable. Whatever else might
be neglected, the business of “gerund-grinding” was
vigorously carried on, and the methods of teaching, the
expedients and helps devised for enabling the pupils to
read, write, and talk Latin, if rather complex and operose,
were at the same time ingenious and effective. As a rule
t re pupil entered the grammar school at seven years old,
having already acquired either at home or at the petty
school the rudiments of reading and writing. During the
first year the pupils were occupied with the elements of
Latin grammar, the accidence, and lists of common words
which were committed to memory and repeated two or
three times a week, as well as further impressed upon their
minds by varied exercises. In the second year the
grammar was fully mastered, and the boys were drilled in
short phrase-books, such as the Sentential Pueriles, to
increase their familiarity with the structure and idioms of
the language. In the third year the books used were
/Esop’s Fables, Cato’s Maxims, and some good manual of
SHAKESPEARE
751
1 “What Shakespeare learnt at School,’
1879, Jan. and May, 1880.
Fraser’s Magazine, Nov.
school conversation, such as the Confabulationes Pueriles.
he most popular of these manuals in Shakespeare’s day
was that by the eminent scholar and still more eminent
eac ici ore erius. His celebrated Colloquies were prob¬
ably used, in almost every school in the kingdom ; and
Hoole, writing m 1652, says that the worth of the book
had been proved, by scores if not hundreds of impressions
from 'T C0Untrie1s-” Bayle’ indeed> that
m its. universal use m the schools the editions of the
book might be counted by thousands. This helps to
illustrate the colloquial use of Latin, which was so essential
a feature of. grammar school discipline in the 16th and
17th centuries. The evidence of Brinsley, who was
b akespeare s contemporary, conclusively proves that the
constant speaking of Latin by all the boys of the more
advanced forms was indispensable even in the smallest and
poorest of the country grammar schools. The same holds
true of letter-writing in Latin ; and this,* as we know from
the result, was diligently and successfully practised in the
btratford grammar school. During his school days, there¬
fore, bhakespeare would be thoroughly trained in the
conversational and epistolary use of Latin, and several well-
known passages in his dramas show that he did not forget
this early, experience,, but that like everything else he
acquired it. turned to fruitful uses in his hands. The
books read in the more advanced forms of the school were
thz Eclogues ol Mantuanus, the Tristia and Metamorphoses
of Ovid, Cicero’s. Offices, Orations, and Epistles, the
Georgies and JCneid of Virgil, and in the highest form
parts of Juvenal, of . the comedies of Terence and Plautus
and of the tragedies of Seneca. Shakespeare, having
remained at school for at least six years, must have gone
through a greater part of this course, and, being a pupil of
unusual quickness and ability, endowed with rare strength
of mental grip and firmness of moral purpose, he must
during those years have acquired a fair mastery of Latin
both colloquial and classical. After the difficulties of the
grammar had been overcome, his early intellectual cravings
and. poetic sensibilities would be alike quickened and
gratified by. the new world of heroic life and adventure
opened to him in reading such authors as Ovid and Virgil.
Unless the teaching at Stratford was very exceptionally
poor he must have become so far familiar with the favourite
school, authors, such as Ovid, Tully, and Virgil, as to read
them intelligently and with comparative ease.
. An<1 there is no reason whatever for supposing that the instruc¬
tion at the Stratford grammar school was less efficient than in the
grammar schools of other provincial towns of about the same size
there is abundant evidence to show that, with the fresh impulse
given to education under energetic Protestant auspices in the
second half of the 16th century, the teaching even in the country
grammar schools was as a rule painstaking, intelligent, and fruitful.
Brinsley himself was for many years an eminent and successful
teacher m the grammar school of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, a small
town on the borders of Warwickshire, only a few miles indeed from
Coventry; and in Ins Ludus Literarius, referring to a book of
exercises on the Latin accidence and grammar he had prepared he
says that he had chiefly followed the order of the questions of
that ancient schoolmaster Master Brunsword of Maxfield (Maccles¬
field) in Cheshire, so much commended for his order and schollers ;
who, of all other, commeth therein the neerest unto the marke.”’
Another provincial schoolmaster, Mr Robert Doughty, a contem¬
porary of Shakespeare, who was for nearly fifty years at the head of
the Wakefield grammar school, is celebrated by Hoole, not only as
an eminent teacher who had constantly sent out good scholars
but as one who had produced a class of teachers emulating his own
educational zeal and intelligence. The masters of the Stratford
grammar school in Shakespeare’s time seem to have been men of
a similar stamp. One of them, John Brunsword, who held the post
for three years during the poet’s childhood, was almost certainly a
lelative, probably a son, of the eminent Macclesfield master whose
character and work Brinsley praises so highly. At least, Bruns-
word being an uncommon name, when we find it borne by two
grammar-school masters in neighbouring counties who flourished
either together or in close succession to each other, it is natural to
conclude that there must have been some relationship between