Shakespeare

In succeeding years, in the classroom above the guildhall, he studied Sallust and Caesar, Seneca and Juvenal. Hamlet is found reading from the tenth satire of Juvenal, which he dismisses as “Words, words, words.” It was a basic grammar-school text. Shakespeare may even have had a slight brush with the Greek authors, although any evidence for this is marginal at best. What is not in doubt, however, is his Latinity. He uses a Latinate vocabulary with consummate ease and proficiency; he writes of “intermissive miseries” and “loathsome sequestration.” He can use the language of the scholar and the pedagogue. It could be claimed that he simply had a good ear, and a poet’s instinct for the succinct and shaping word, but it seems unlikely that this “too ceremonious and traditional” language (to use his own phrase in King Richard III) came to him by nature. Samuel Johnson, who was learned enough to recognise learning in others, remarked that “I always said that Shakespeare had Latin enough to grammaticise his English.” We may see the young Shakespeare, therefore, spending thirty or forty hours of each week in memorising, construing, parsing and repeating prose and verse in Latin. We may hear him talking the language, to his schoolmaster and to his fellow pupils. It may seem an odd perspective in which to place him – especially to anyone accustomed to him warbling “native wood-notes wild”-but Shakespeare is as much part of the revival of Latin culture in the Renaissance as Francis Bacon or Philip Sidney. One formidable scholar of Shakespeare has even suggested that “if letters written by Shakespeare ever turn up, they will be in Latin.”⁴

On the question of Shakespeare’s education, Ben Jonson was decidedly superior. He was “frequently reproaching him with the want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Ancients,”⁵ by which he meant that Shakespeare chose not to follow classical models. Jonson was confusing negligence with ignorance. And when he declared that Shakespeare had “small Latine and lesse Greeke” he was overstating the case for the sake of a phrase. Shakespeare’s Latin was as good as that of any other grammar-school boy, and would rival the knowledge shown by any undergraduate of classics in a modern university. Jonson may also have been implicitly comparing the curriculum of the King’s New School with that of his own Westminster School; but, to judge by the educated and professional schoolmasters of Stratford, the comparison may not all be in Jonson’s favour.

The final stages of Shakespeare’s education were perhaps the formative ones. He moved from grammar to oratory, and learned the arts of elocution. What we call creative writing, the Elizabethans called rhetoric. In the schoolroom Shakespeare was obliged to learn the elementary laws and rules of this now arcane subject. He read a smattering of Cicero and Quintilian. He learned the importance of inventio and dispositio, elocutio and memoria, pronunciatio or action and delivery; he remembered these principles for the rest of his life. He knew how to invent variations upon a theme, and how to ring changes on the sound as well as the sense of words; he knew how to compose themes and to write out formal orations. He also learned how to avoid hyperbole and false rhetoric; in his plays, he gave them to his comic characters. For the alert child it becomes a wonderful means of composition itself. Rhetoric, and the devices of rhetoric, then become a form of creation.

He was trained, as part of this act of creation, to take both sides of any question. The ancient habit of the philosophers and rhetoricians was to argue in utramque partem-on either side of the argument. Any event or action can thus be viewed from a variety of different perspectives. The artist must, like Janus, look in two directions at once. In the process language itself became a form of contest or competition. But, equally importantly for the young Shakespeare, the truth of any situation becomes infinitely malleable and wholly dependent upon the speaker’s eloquence. What better preparation for a dramatist? And what better training could there have been for the making of Mark Antony’s oration in Julius Caesar or the pleading of Portia in The Merchant of Venice?