Shakespeare

There were specific lessons in action and in delivery. In one text for use in grammar schools it was ordained that the pupils “be taught to pronounce every thing audibly, leisurely, distinctly amp; naturally; sounding out especially the last syllable, that each word may be fully understood.”⁶ It was important to cultivate “sweete pronunciation.” In the same book it is demanded that the pupils “utter every dialogue lively, as if they themselves were the persons which did speake in that dialogue.”⁷ It is a good training for the theatre. It was also a curriculum that encouraged self-assertion. In his later life Shakespeare was not averse to staking his claim to dramatic pre-eminence, and we may imagine him to have been a singularly competitive small boy. He may not have become embroiled in fights, like the juvenile Keats, but he was fast and full of furious energy. He was, we surmise, easily bored.

It was not necessarily a print culture. It was also a culture of the voice, its exponents being primarily preachers, divines and actors. That is why the theatre rapidly became the supreme art form of the age. This oral culture was of necessity deeply connected with the old medieval culture of England, encompassing storytellers, poetical reciters, ballad singers and minstrels. Shakespeare is much more likely to have heard, than to have read, poetry. An oral culture relies, also, upon the formation of strong memories. If you cannot consult a book, you must perforce remember. Schoolboys were trained in systems of memory or “mnemonics.” Ben Jonson declared that “I can repeate whole books that I have read,”⁸ and this was not a singular accomplishment. It is the context for the feats of memory exemplified in the ability of Elizabethan actors to perform several plays in one week.

Plays were regularly performed in the grammar schools of England, with Plautus and Terence as the staple of the juvenile repertoire. In the grammar school of Shrewsbury the pupils were obliged, each Thursday morning, to perform one act of a comedy. The boys of King’s School, Canterbury – among them Christopher Marlowe – put on plays each Christmas in a tradition that must have reached many other grammar schools. It is important to remember that drama was one of the foundations of Elizabethan teaching. From the smallest grammar school to the “moots” in the Inns of Court, debate and dialogue were the staple of learning. It is no accident that much of the earliest English drama derives from the Inns, where the legal training of “putting the case” developed into sheer theatre. In the school of Stratford speeches were learned and delivered, and conversations were often treated as contests of wit. “A delivery amp; sweet action,” it was written, “is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler.”⁹ We may believe that it was one in which Shakespeare excelled. It is unlikely that the man who was known for his grace and fluency did not demonstrate those virtues at an early age. We do not know whether plays were performed at the King’s New School, but there is evidence in Shakespeare’s drama of a favourite school play entitled Acolastus. Children have a natural gift for dramatisation, and they are fully able to imagine scenes and characters taken from their reading; Shakespeare was exceptional only in preserving these abilities to the end of his life. It suggests some profound irritation, or dissatisfaction, with the limitations of the adult world.

There is further evidence of his dramatic education in the careers of the schoolmasters of Stratford. Two of them, Thomas Jenkins and John Cot-tam, had been educated at Merchant Taylors’ School under the tutelage of Richard Mulcaster; Mulcaster’s pedagogic system “advocated teaching through drama, more specifically through acting.”¹⁰ What more natural than that they should continue the theatrical tradition created by their famous teacher?

The first of the school masters, Walter Roche, is the one about whom least is known. He resigned his post in the year that Shakespeare joined the school, but lived in Stratford for the rest of his life. He has the distinction in any case of formally introducing the young boy to the schoolroom. The career of the next master of the Stratford school is of more interest. Simon Hunt was schoolmaster for the first four years of Shakespeare’s education and, although much of that schooling was no doubt undertaken by his assistant, he remained a powerful presence in Shakespeare’s young life. It is significant, then, that he reverted to his old Catholic faith; he left Stratford in order to train at the seminary in Douai as a Jesuit priest and missionary to England. Whether his Catholic sympathies had any material effect upon the young boy is another matter; but it would surely have compounded the family’s own piety and bolstered what seems to have been the Catholic environment of his growing-up.