A shorter version was published as “Shakespeare, Oxford and the Grammar School Question” in The Oxfordian. Vol 11, 2009.

SHAKESPEARE’S EDUCATION?

The Grammar Schools, The Tudor Miracle, and the Authorship Question


The High Street Stratford-on-Avon

The Grammar School was located in the Guildhall building next to the Guild Church

Contents:

Prologue: Hedonism, the Puritans and Science

Part One: Education and the Tudor Miracle

Why is there no Henry VII?
What Education?
Trashing the Grammar Schools
What were the Grammar Schools?
Defending the Grammar Schools.
The Stratford Grammar School.

Part Two: Schools and Schoolmasters in the Plays.

Grammar Schools in the Plays.
Oxford’s Grammar School.
Schoolmasters in the Plays.
     The Merry Wives of Windsor
     Love’s Labour’s Lost
The Education of Royalty.

Epilogue: On to the Mayflower.

Prologue: Hedonism, The Puritans and Science.

Max Weber was right that for capitalism to flourish, for the Miracle to happen, there had to be an ascetic, puritan, re-investing, work-as-a-vocation middle class. The Protestant Ethic became, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “spirit” of capitalism. But many critics have pointed out that there had to be more than that. For a start there had to be a dependable international banking system with readily available credit. We are learning to our cost today both how necessary and how vulnerable that is. But such a system was started by the Templars, and emerged after the Middle Ages largely in Catholic northern Italy (the genius of Giovanni de Medici) and a lot of it was in the hands of Jews who, as opposed to the Christians, were allowed to charge interest (to non-Jews.) For capital to flow there had to be exchanges, and stocks and shares were invented in Bruges in what is now Belgium.

     Manufacturing in metal, spurred by war, and in glass and ceramics, had to be perfected. Time had to be regularized and made more accurate with ever-better clocks, to organize and discipline the working day. Factories had to be invented from workshops, and armies of workers had to be fed by a surplus produced from an agricultural system more efficient than subsistence-level peasant farming. Ships and land transport had also to be transformed, eventually by steam, to move the goods around. Insurance – a completely new idea, had to be invented and was, in the London coffeehouses. It was not enough, as the example of Spain had shown, to have a massive influx of bullion: that was in fact counter-productive. But industrial capitalism had to have a lot of influences over and above the Protestant spirit and the Protestant mercantile class, however essential these were.

     The catalogue is long, and interested readers should look at the BBC Channel 4 series and its book, The Day the World Took Off (Sally and David Dugan) for one of the best discussions of the “perfect storm” that produced the Industrial Revolution – and how deep its roots were. England and Holland were the epicenter, and while they had the Protestant middle class and while it did indeed make its vital contribution, they had something else: they had an élite of literate, educated, curious, inventive and very non-puritanical scientists and humanists.

     Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and modern sociologists like Robert Merton, have been sure that the same Protestant spirit that produced capitalism also gave birth to modern science: an anti-magical empiricism. But in one of the most effective challenges to what virtually became an orthodoxy, Lewis Feuer in The Scientific Intellectual showed the opposite was true. The spirit that infused early modern science was anti-Puritan, anti-Calvinist. The early scientists were hedonistic, libertarian, individualistic, utilitarian and optimistic. Their philosopher was Spinoza with his unflinching rationalism, their heroes were Galileo, Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno; their principle was the experiment – an anti-dogmatic principle of doubt and intellectual curiosity; their goal, which they shared wholly with the humanists, was a “more pleasant and civilized existence” for the human race.

     This spirit is exemplified in the seventeenth century by the early members of the Royal Society, including Boyle, Wren, Petty, Evelyn, Halley, Hooke, and of course Newton, led by the Merry Monarch Charles II, who exemplified their almost playful curiosity. (He played practical jokes on the learned members.) Although of course they were Protestants, very few of them were Puritans, and they joined the founders of marine insurance in the lively life of the coffeehouses that were despised and condemned, along with the theaters, by the Puritans. Puritanism was as hostile to the scientific spirit as it was to witchcraft: two hundred witches were burned by the Parliamentary regime, the theaters were closed, and the scientists stayed underground until the Restoration.

     But Feuer acknowledges that there was a kind of confluence between the two spirits. The Protestants, like the scientists, were defying authority - the long-standing authority of the Catholic Church, and the Puritans stressed individual responsibility and democratic organization within their own congregations. While their ascetic spirit was indeed hostile to science, their political spirit helped to produce an atmosphere in which the scientific intellectual could arise and flourish, as a kind of unintended consequence. Not all Protestants, as we have seen, were Calvinists, but the core of the new middle-class had subscribed to the Calvinist ethic. The Calvinist doctrine of election (predestination) paradoxically led to an emphasis on material success in this world; it became a sign of election to the next. In accumulating and investing capital rather than dissipating it, they were showing themselves to be the elect of God, and hence destined for heaven.

     Most importantly for our present purposes, Feuer stresses another consequence. Even though the Calvinist spirit was inimical to science as such, it did help in the general diffusion of science by “providing it with a literate, educated citizenry.” This citizenry was crucial to the development of modern capitalism, although Weber only mentions education once in his book, and Feuer does not expand on it. But the Protestant Reformation crossed paths with that other great liberating movement the Renaissance, with its revival of humane learning. The major aim of the Renaissance humanists (exemplified by Desideratus Erasmus) was to replace scholastic medieval education with the New Learning based on a close study of the classical authors, and this humanism, unlike its sad present-day counterpart, was enthusiastic about science, under the marvelous heading of “Cosmography.”

     This became in England (where Erasmus moved from Holland) a crusade to re-make the Protestant citizenry after the destruction of the Catholic medieval institutions by Henry VIII. The Protestant middle class was wholly for this expansion of literacy as a foundation for success in business and the professions, and not least because it thought the bible should be available to all believers. Above all, its Protestant ethic called for discipline, both self-discipline in work and re-investment, and the discipline of others, like women and workers and, of course, children in school. Small boys, for the good of their souls and their success in this life, which indicated their chances in the next, should spend long hours in hard learning with serious moral content: the great classical authors.

     What became a sea change in education – a vital contribution to the Miracle, caught up the author of the Shakespeare plays. As portrayed by tradition and orthodox academic opinion, he was a child of the Grammar School revival that was at the heart of the change in English society sweeping through the second half of the sixteenth century. But was he? In an attempt to answer this question, or at least shed some light on it, we shall look in more detail at the Tudor Grammar Schools and what they achieved. In doing so we shall return to the question of the making of the Miracle by way of an enduring puzzlement over the identity of the man who was its greatest literary figure before the unquestionably Puritan John Milton (a Grammar School product himself.) The place to start is with the reign of England’s first modern monarch, the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the mysterious absence of a “Shakespeare” play about Henry VII.

Part One: Education and the Tudor Miracle

Why is there no Henry VII?

     Shakespeare wrote a play for Henry IV (two parts), Henry V (one part), Henry VI (three parts), and even Henry VIII. Why did he not write one for Henry VII? The man who was to become Henry VII appears at the end of Richard III as Henry Tudor, Duke of Richmond, the Lancastrian candidate for the throne, who beat the evil Yorkist Richard at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. This ended the Wars of the Roses and started the brilliant Tudor dynasty. So why didn’t Henry Tudor merit a play of his own? The author clearly had deep Lancastrian sympathies and his portrayal of Richard III is about as biased as a dramatic portrait can get. It would seem he had an agenda to promote the Lancastrian and Tudor cause. So why not celebrate the glorious reign of the first Tudor with at least a one-part drama? It could be of course that he did and it has been lost. But there may be good reasons to think the omission was deliberate.

     Shakespeare’s source for the history plays, Ralph Holinshed’s Chronicles of the History of England, in the 1587 edition that he used, covers Henry’s reign adequately. Bernard André, the blind tutor of Henry’s son Prince Arthur, had written a life of his master, which started the stream of anti-Yorkist Tudor propaganda. Polydore Vergil in his Anglica Historia in 1534 produced what became the official pro-Tudor history very flattering to Henry. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, in 1622 published the first great biography of an English king, his History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh. The material was there, the public demand for history plays was there, the general urge to write pro-Tudor dramatic propaganda was there, but for some reason the bard skipped this king in the chronological sequence of Henrys.

     We cannot get inside God’s memory so we can only conjecture the reasons for the omission. The writer of the Shakespeare plays was a monarchical romantic with a decidedly feudal view of the divine right of kings, and of the rightfulness of the feudal order of society. His history plays are about kings and nobles and their ladies and their courts, and their dynastic quarrels and personal love affairs. Even in the comedies, the social hierarchy remains intact. The trading or middle classes do not play any part in the affairs of state and, as in The Taming of the Shrew or The Merry Wives of Windsor, they are fit only for comedy. His merchants in Venice are the grandees of the Venetian city-state. Othello is a prince and a general. The Jewish moneylender Shylock may (or may not) be sympathetically portrayed, but he remains an outsider: the Doge and his grandees rule Venice.

     Shakespeare’s is a rigidly hierarchical world where the old aristocracy runs things and plays its games of government and power interspersed with wit and romance. His kings, of whom Henry V is the epitome, should be just and wise and rule fairly, but they also should rule absolutely. The lower orders are universally buffoons and are in there for light relief or downright villainy. They may sometimes be generously portrayed, like the common soldiers in Henry V, but they are never even remotely in command or ever shown to be capable of anything but supporting roles and slapstick. In the comedies, those below stairs can outwit the upstairs characters, as with Maria in Twelfth Night for example, but this does not touch on the ordering of society; Malvolio is nothing more than a steward, and the Duke still rules in Illyria.

     The kings in particular are warriors and power brokers, and it is their exploits in these departments that are his subject matter. Henry V seems to have exhausted, for him, the possibilities of a hero king in England. Henry VI was a pawn and went mad. His play is about the Wars of the Roses, with its cast of power hungry noblemen seeking to control the crown, and the villainous rebels like Jack Cade, who sought to usurp royal power, but even then only by falsely claiming royal descent. Evil rulers can be driven from power, but by the responsible among the nobility and those with legitimate claims, not by upstart commoners trying to pass as royalty. Richard III was a continuation of this theme, and as far as the author was concerned, with Richard’s death the matter ended. Henry Tudor’s victory was hailed as a rightful triumph for the House of Lancaster, and then left to rest.

     Henry Tudor, as king, was not the stuff to excite a playwright like the author of the histories. Henry was so efficient and capable that apart from two minor rebellions he ruled without challenge. He married Elizabeth of York thus uniting the warring houses, and married his daughter to James IV of Scotland setting the scene for the eventual union of the kingdoms. He lives in memory almost wholly for his compassionate treatment of the rebel Lambert Simnel. Henry recognized that the boy was simply a tool, and having defeated the rebellion he pardoned him and put him to work as a spit turner in the royal kitchen.

     He cleverly managed Parliament and taxation and filled the chronically empty royal coffers, which left his surviving son, Henry VIII, a very rich boy indeed. He expanded the system of Justices of the Peace which persists to this day, and which put the administration of justice into the hands of volunteer gentry responsible to the Crown. He reorganized the royal household as the basis of administration, and some of their titles are still used for ministers of the crown. He preferred royal marriages to royal wars and dealt brilliant diplomatic deals with the Pope, the Emperor and the continental powers, which brought peace and prosperity to England after years of failure and devastation. As the common verdict has it, he may not have been a great king, but he was an astonishingly successful one.

     I would even like to claim him as the first truly modern king: a realist and a pragmatist. He had to change a country run by rival mafia families (after the Wars of the Roses and the failure of feudalism had brutalized them) into a country of citizens responsible to a central bureaucracy under the king and his appointed ministers. He preferred that these ministers not be nobles, or only nobles that he created, and drew from the ranks of burghers and lawyers, and churchmen that he favored. The old formula we learned in school was accurate: “King and Town versus Castle.” Tudor towns and their tradesmen expanded round churches and cathedrals with their attached Grammar Schools. Castles fell into disuse and were domesticated into residences or were replaced by country houses. Efficiency, and direct dependence on the monarch, became more important than nobility in the governance of England.

     Bureaucratic efficiency is not, however, the stuff of which great and especially tragic drama is made. Henry had a colorful sex life, and while being a good husband and father (feeling deeply the loss of his eldest son, Arthur, and his wife) he is said to have slept with three hundred women, getting two hundred seventy-three of them pregnant. There is also a tale that during his exile he worked for five years as a male prostitute. These may have been Yorkist slanders, but slander never stopped Shakespeare in the other cases. However, it was not good material for a pro-Tudor propagandist.

     Despite the possibly scandalous tidbits, Henry was a sober, private king, concerned with the details of government. He kept in fact a quite cultivated and lively court as befitted a Renaissance prince, but he was not given to public appearances and pandering to the people. There were no royal “progressions” around the country as with Elizabeth. And in this he pushed further than did any of his predecessors the use of “new men” who were, unlike the old aristocrats, loyal directly to him and owed their livelihoods and advancement to him. Such men included Richard Fox (no known relative) the son of a humble yeoman who rose to be Bishop of Winchester, Lord Privy Seal, founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and godfather to the future Henry VIII. In 1497 he had been master at the school of the Guild of the Holy Cross in Stratford on Avon.

     This I think is the crux of the neglect by Shakespeare. Henry made it his goal to curb and restrict the power of the old nobility and did it supremely well. We had to wait until Louis XIV in France to see such another successful attempt. He pushed laws through Parliament to restrict the use of liveried retainers – in effect abolishing the private armies the nobles had routinely kept in the past. He let them keep their titles and high-sounding offices (“Lord Great Chamberlain” etc) but he hemmed them in with taxes and required of them bonds that ruthlessly penalized disloyalty. A measure of his success is that his son succeeded him without challenge, something unheard of in the past. But in all this he represented the wave of the future, of the dominance of the rule of law and the centrality of trade that spelled the beginning of the end of feudal society with its rigid hierarchies and its familial loyalties.

     The old order lingered, but a new order was taking over that meant the emergence of a new class eager for its share of governance. Sean Cunningham (2007) in his excellent history of Henry VII, shows in detail how this worked. Henry had been isolated from the English aristocracy during his years in exile, and he tended therefore to rely less on the noble courtiers, many of whom were of suspect loyalty, and more and more on the new men. He ruled through the royal council and around it gathered “managing committees” that constituted “a core of executives and common lawyers gathered permanently at Westminster.” He created very few new titles of nobilty, but knighted many commoners like, Empson, Poynings and Bray, who became his closest advisers. These new men foreshadowed Wolsey, Cecil, Cromwell and Walsingham, and Henry made their fortunes entirely dependent on himself in what Cunningham describes as “a purely professional relationship created to streamline policy, and one that made Henry’s new men more accountable and easier to supervise.” He created, in effect, an efficient, central, meritocratic bureaucracy, and in doing so reduced the powers of the aristocracy, which continued to “shine at court” but was less likely to try to usurp royal power.

     The newly authenticated play of Richard II, Part One, formerly known as Thomas of Woodstock, (Egan 2007) is overtly concerned with exactly this issue: the use by the king of the new men of the educated middle class, and the usurpation by them of the power of the old nobility. There is not a shadow of a question where the author’s sympathies lie. Again his portrait of the new men is a caricature of greed and villainy, and is contrasted with the sense of duty and obligation of the old nobility. This theme carries over into Richard II proper with Bagot, Bushy and Green – the “caterpillars of the commonwealth.” Cunningham cites an interesting play promoted by Cardinal John Morton. Morton was Henry VII’s Wolsey, and among other things raised Thomas More whose History of King Richard III (1557) was a deep influence on the Shakespeare play. The play here in question was Henry Medwall’s Fulgus and Lucrece, “performed before courtiers” in 1497. Medwall (another new man) was Morton’s chaplain, and his plot turns on the struggle between a nobleman and a commoner for the hand of an heiress. In the end, says Cunningham, it is the hard-working commoner rather than the shallow and arrogant nobleman who gets the girl. This deserves further study, and I can think of no such conflict or outcome in any Shakespeare play.

     Lawrence Stone (1965) has shown the aristocracy to have been “in crisis” during the Tudor period. Its power was being eroded; its lands were being sold to the tradesmen, and along with the loss of land went the decline in influence. Almost symbolically, the Grammar School patronized by the Earls of Oxford at Earl’s Colne in Essex eventually passed to a family of grocers. Stone uses the 17th Earl, Edward de Vere, as the prime example among the aristocracy of the loss of land to the traders and townsmen. Oxford’s sale of land to the Harlackenden family in East Colne - and the lengthy lawsuits that followed deep into the seventeenth century, is almost a text-book case of the decline of aristocratic landholding and the growing influence of the bourgeoisie (Pearson 2005.) Shakespeare looked eternally backwards to the feudal society that was his ideal of governance; but he saw what was coming. So he just kept silent about the man who more than anyone helped to usher in the new world order: the order of pragmatism, efficiency, bureaucracy, meritocracy and contract: the modern world as we know it. He did not write Henry VII. Yet Shakespeare was caught in a trap here because he was himself an almost prototypical part of that new world.

     If he was indeed the Grammar School boy from Stratford-on-Avon that is claimed, then he was an end product of the process that was geared to the production of the new men he seemed to despise. He was not an aristocrat but a meritocrat; he was one of the new men who made his own way to success. He was a son of the trading classes aspiring to a coat of arms and the ranks of the gentry. He should have reveled in the memory of Henry VII. Above all, he would have been a product of the Grammar School system that was itself a conscious product of the policy of educating these new men. This conscious state policy was a confluence of the twin influence of the Renaissance revival of classical learning, and the Protestant Reformation that brought the bible to all believers and the Calvinist work ethic to life in general. These two powerful forces were crossed with rising nationalism and the desire to have a literate middle class to increase the national wealth and power. How did a child of this surge of modernization come to have the obvious reactionary political and cultural biases we see in the plays?

     The matter is complicated, or perhaps, as is the case with so many authorship puzzles, simplified, by the “mysterious nobleman” theory. This would have Shakespeare as a front man for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who, according to this theory, when he wasn’t selling his land to the traders was writing the poems and plays that appeared under the pen name “Shake-speare.” There is no need to spell out the evidence for Oxford to this audience. One relevant matter for our immediate purposes is that his ancestor, the 13th Earl, was Henry Tudor’s main supporter and appears as such at the end of Richard III. In his campaign against the power of the nobles, Henry VII is said to have turned on his supporter, the 13th Earl, and levied a huge fine against him for having more liveried retainers than the king himself. This, according to the story, started the decline in the fortunes of the Oxford earldom.

     Some observers, like Charlton Ogburn (1984), think this is a very good reason why there is no play of Henry VII. The omission was Oxford’s revenge for the attack on the finances of his lineage! This whole story originated with Francis Bacon, and Cunningham finds no other reference to it and thinks there is no basis for it. Henry needed these loyal noblemen as much as he needed the new men, but the promotion of the latter, and their central part in all future forms of government, certainly dug into the privileges of the former. As Cunningham puts it: “Something deeply important to the long-term development of England’s ruling structures occurred during Henry VII’s reign.” This disruption of the feudal order was obviously something that the author of the plays seemed to feel personally and disliked at some profound level. It could well have been the basis for the Earl of Oxford’s reluctance to grant the first Tudor monarch his own play.

What Education?

     There has been a checkered history of attitudes to Shakespeare’s possible education. There is no record of his having attended either school or university. At one extreme, then, those who take Ben Jonson’s words from his enigmatic eulogy in the First Folio (1623) literally have credited the author with “smalle Latine and lesse Greeke.” In other words they prefer to think that Shakespeare had no education worth considering, and was an untutored natural genius. In the charming words of Milton’s sonnet about him he was “warbling his native woodnotes wild.”

     This fits the picture of the rustic youth leaving his Warwickshire home at about age twenty-two, abandoning his wife and children, and making his way in London in “the university of the world.” It fits the democratic image of Shakespeare as just like the rest of us only more so. He was, in this view, better off without an education given the restrictive quality of what was offered: Grammar School being largely a flogging institution concerned to thrash Latin grammar into the heads of unwilling schoolboys, and the universities (Oxford and Cambridge) being little more than vocational schools for clerics, lawyers and physicians. He was lucky, in this view, to have escaped the clutches of the educational system.

     The other school of thought sees that according to the poems and plays credited to him, he was clearly a man of considerable learning, especially in the Latin classics. He must have been able to read many of the original sources in French, Italian and even Spanish and Greek, translations not being available at the time. A Comedy of Errors, for example, is based on a play by Plautus, as then not translated. This school has then to account for how the boy from Stratford-on-Avon acquired this mastery. The author of the plays also shows evidence of a detailed knowledge of English history, legal and military matters, the sea and sailing, aristocratic sports and pastimes, the geography, art, theater and customs of northern Italy, and courtly life in England and France, and even Denmark. These, it is argued, he could have acquired by acute observation during the six “lost years” (1585-91) for which we have no information at all except that William Shackspere was named in a lawsuit in Stratford. But this theory of learning by osmosis is purely in the realm of speculation, while one fact remains in the realm of distinct possibility: he could have attended the Free Grammar School, “The King’s New School,” at Stratford-on-Avon.

     Those of the “natural genius” school are content to take Jonson at his word and shrug off the poet’s education as something that any boy could have got from a few years at Grammar School. The learning, they say, was slight and lightly borne. There was nothing remarkable about it and the Grammar School with all its limitations could have provided it. There the matter can rest. But for others this is not enough. Shakespeare’s two long poems, the sonnets, and the plays, show far too intimate an acquaintance with the Latin classical authors at least, and demand that he knew more than just a smattering of grammar. He must have had a quite serious and detailed education to provide this background.

     All the natural genius in the world cannot supply knowledge. That has to be acquired. In particular, to know the works in the original language means that the original must itself have been thoroughly learned. The issue then became: could the Stratford Grammar School have provided at least his knowledge of Latin and the classical authors, particularly Ovid and Virgil? There is a secondary question of whether there is anything in the works that might point directly to the knowledge having been gained specifically at a Grammar School. We should note here that “grammar school” means something different to American and English audiences. Boys attended such schools in Tudor England from roughly age seven to fourteen and above, and those who went to university did so at a young age by our standards.

     We might pause on the issue of just what Jonson in fact meant by his line about Shakespeare having “small Latine and lesse Greeke.” Compared to whom? Jonson himself was educated at Westminster School. Again there are no records, but he thanks Camden the famous headmaster there for teaching him all he knew, which would seem to clinch it. Westminster was one of the large “established” Grammar Schools and sent most of its sons on to university. Jonson did not go on from school, but his reading was massive and his erudition legendary. He displays it liberally and ostentatiously in his plays.

     While seeming to praise Shakespeare by saying that the great tragic poets would honor him, when discussing his “art” he compares him to Terence, Plautus and Aristophanes. These were, for Jonson, definitely lesser comedic dramatists: the kind of authors a small-time grammar-school boy might have a smattering of. He does not compare him to Virgil or Ovid. Thus, and T. W. Baldwin was the first to notice this, he might be saying that Shakespeare only had a grammar-school knowledge of Latin and Greek – and perhaps not a complete one at that. Shakespeare’s knowledge then, compared to a true scholar’s, was “small”: a schoolboy’s knowledge.

     Jonson had also, in another curious passage, recollected that “the Players” always said that Shakespeare never “blotted out a line”; that is, presumably, that he never needed to correct his first draft. “Would he had blotted a thousand” was Jonson’s comment, and he continues in that condescending vein with his insistence that Shakespeare “lacked art” – or for that matter even a sense of humor. Jonson is odd. One can never be sure he is serious about anything, and his meaning is often opaque. But it does seem he credited Shakespeare with the ability to read and write something in connection with “the Players,” and with some knowledge of the classics, however “small” from his lofty point of view.

     This question of whether anything in the works specifically indicates Grammar School experience, becomes a real issue because there is a ready solution to the problem that bypasses the Grammar School altogether. This proposes that the author of the works was not the untutored boy from Stratford at all, but a nobleman who indeed was privately tutored in the way that noblemen were, by the very best teachers; a nobleman who went to the university (or even both of them) then to the Inns of Court to study law, traveled in Italy and France, knew the royal courts intimately, served as a soldier and a sailor, spoke French and Italian, wrote a graceful Latin and French, wrote poetry and plays for his fellow aristocrats at court, and was involved with his own companies of players, and with playwrights and authors of whom he was a patron and employer: a known man of letters and the theater.

     As a high aristocrat, however, he would not have been able to publish under his own name plays that were meant for the common playhouses and written for a fee, however small. It is hard for us to understand this now, but in Elizabethan England it was absolutely so. A nobleman would lose caste if seen to be “in trade” – writing for money, for the public stage constituted such. Noblemen could write for the court and the amusement of courtiers, and even for the Inns of Court or the universities: amateur entertainment. But the playhouses were seen as little more than annexes to the brothels and magnets for their trade. A nobleman therefore would have used a pseudonym, or a front man who would produce his plays and take the credit.

     A strange pamphlet by Robert Greene in 1592 (Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit) regarded as crucial by biographers of the bard, described one “Shake-scene” as an “upstart crow” who beautified himself with others’ feathers. This is generally agreed by the biographers to be a reference to William (the first) since it quotes a line from Henry VI. If it is, it is not complimentary since it suggests the use of other’s work passed off as his own, which however does also suggest, however obliquely, that he could read and write. But like all these references it is ambiguous. It says the upstart crow was prone to “bombast out a blank verse” – suggesting he was an actor and that the complaint was about his acting not his writing. At this point there is no record of Shakespeare acting, and Stephanie Hughes thinks it refers to the actor Edward Alleyn.

     I don’t want to spell out the whole authorship issue here; it is too well known. I just want to show how the attribution of the authorship to a nobleman with the experience described solves the irritating issue of whether the Grammar School could have done it. In the case of a privately educated aristocrat it doesn’t need to have done it. But then again, that would leave the question of the direct reporting of Grammar School experience in the plays, if there is any, to be explained in turn.

     But the issue will not rest there because while we have no direct evidence that Shakespeare went to the Stratford Grammar School - the records for those years have disappeared, we have equally no direct evidence that someone else with an appropriate education wrote the works. We have not for that matter any direct evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works either. The plays bore that name, or more likely the name Shake-speare (with a hyphen) but that was not even the name the boy from Stratford went by for at least his early life: he was mostly known as Shaksper or Shakspere with a short “a”. John Michel in Who Wrote Shakespeare? lists some fifty-seven variants; E. K. Chambers lists eighty-three. A number of plays came out under the name “Shake-speare” that orthodox scholars have expelled from the canon, and several others that were originally anonymous are now included in it. This strongly suggests that in this form it was a name of convenience.

     It was not an uncommon name in Warwickshire, and eager biographers have sometimes confused other Shaksperes (or Shaxperes, or even Chagspers) with William. Most remarkably, he was not known in his lifetime as a playwright or poet. There are of course plays published under that name and references to these, but there are absolutely no documents or manuscripts or theater records as there are for other playwrights of the time. There are no diaries, no letters sent or received, no notices in the rich gossip of London, or in the diaries and accounts of theater moguls like Henslowe, or even among his Stratford neighbors, that connect him to the theater other than as a sometime actor and shareholder.

     The extant records show him as a part-time actor frequently moving his lodgings, a petty litigator, a tax dodger, a subject of a restraining order, a dealer in property, a shareholder in two London theaters, a hoarder of grain during shortages, a buyer of tithes, an encloser of common lands. He was a persistent seeker after a coat of arms for his family, an associate of known criminals, and a very successful businessman the source of whose wealth is difficult to trace but cannot have been playwriting, which was poorly paid. His net worth amounted to several million pounds in modern values. He bought property for himself and his relatives and an expensive mansion, New Place, to retire to in Stratford-on-Avon, where no one even noticed his death, where he was buried in an anonymous grave, and where no one mentioned his being a great writer, or a writer at all – not even his son-in-law, the physician John Hall, who wrote extensively about his Stratford patients.

     I mention these “facts” of Shakespeare’s biography because they are all we have. You wouldn’t know this from the reams of legend, supposition and fantasy that appear yearly as “biographies” of the bard. He left no manuscripts or books or any indication that he was England’s leading playwright destined for immortal fame. There were neither eulogies nor a great funeral at his death. There was no burial in Westminster Abbey, as there had been for other, even inferior, writers of his time. The only writings we have from his own hand are six shaky signatures, which has lead skeptics to doubt that he could even read and write. His will – he died in 1616, was not written by him, and the only connection it makes to the theater is an interpolation leaving a small legacy to Burbage, Heminges and Condell, fellow actors in London, to buy mourning rings. His wife, as we know, got the second-best bed. His children were all illiterate, as his parents had been.

     He disappears from sight until the First Folio of 1623 turned up eighteen plays that had not been seen before, and had Ben Jonson’s odd eulogy that we have already noted. Jonson had previously written a wicked satirical portrait of Shakspere the businessman: Sogliardo in Every Man Out Of His Humor (1598.) There he is portrayed as an ignorant nouveau-riche country bumpkin, greedy and unscrupulous, and obsessed with getting a coat of arms and joining the gentry: a portrait that fits better what we actually know of William of Stratford, than the usual contrived suppositions of the biographers. Even orthodox scholars agree that another of Jonson’s verse attacks on a certain “Poet -ape” - who again was a blatant plagiarist, refers to Shakespeare, and was published in the year of his death, 1616. For our immediate purposes however, this attack again suggests that Shakespeare the actor and play broker was literate. He had to be minimally literate to be a successful plagiarist and broker of plagiarized plays.

     Why Jonson should have changed horses for the First Folio, if indeed he really meant to be referring there to Will of Stratford, remains a mystery. Jonson had been closely associated with his sponsor, Mary Countess of Pembroke, a formidable literary lady, who was the mother of the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, to whom the Folio is dedicated. Why should these two earls have been picked? It is possible that they contributed to the considerable expense of the venture (it bankrupted the printers.) One earl had been betrothed to, and the other married to, a daughter of the Earl of Oxford, which may be a clue. The First Folio also had a letter from Hemminges and Condell, praising Shakespeare, which even some orthodox scholars think was in fact written by Jonson himself. The whole thing is very rum indeed, and has all the appearance of a put-up job, but for our purposes it is the starting point of the controversy given that Jonson’s denigrating (apparently) of William’s education, while praising his genius to the heavens, raised the whole question of the bard’s educational background or lack of it.

     The “biographers” of Shakespeare start with an absolute premise: that the boy from Warwickshire wrote the plays and poems. Given that, they can weave a fantasy about his life that connects the few known facts to the works, including their chronology. Thus, you will find a disquisition on his education at the Grammar School that calls on the works as evidence. The writer must have known Ovid’s Metamorphoses in detail; the writer was William; therefore he must have learned his Ovid at the Grammar School. QED. I doubt anyone takes seriously the native genius theory today. It is pretty generally accepted that there must have been some kind of education. The minimalists feel a few years in school, and perhaps some time as a country schoolmaster (conjectural) or a law clerk (also conjectural) will do. To this is added the possibility, explored by Honigman (1998) that he lived in an aristocratic house in Lancashire and toured with Lord Strange’s Men. This depends on the unlikely and very slight fact, that a recorded “William Shakeshaft” was in fact Will of Stratford. To his credit, however, Honigman does some interesting detective work on a schoolmaster in Lancashire, John Cottam, who had been in Stratford. But for the minimalists Stratford schooling and some kind of learning by osmosis in the seven lost years sufficed, and native genius takes it from there. The maximalists attribute massive educational powers to the Grammar School, powers that more than explain all of the writer’s knowledge. Where does the truth lie?

     The matter is complicated, as we have seen by the mysterious nobleman theory. There is one outstanding candidate who fits exactly the profile we have mentioned earlier. This is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, whose in-laws were connected with the First Folio, and whose ancestor, the 13th Earl, was Henry Tudor’s main supporter and appears as such at the end of Richard III as we have seen. I cannot re-hash the whole authorship question here, and certainly not the whole case for Oxford. I am only concerned with the schooling issue. If the author was a well-educated nobleman, then the issue is perhaps moot; but we still have the supposed Grammar School references. How could these derive from a privately tutored nobleman? If the author was indeed the boy from Stratford, then is the education he could have received from the Grammar School enough to explain the learning that shines through the works?



Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School, 1429, re-founded 1553.

This is a reconstruction of the upper floor of the old Guildhall
     that became the school on its re-foundation.

Trashing the Grammar Schools

     Supporters of the case for Edward de Vere as author have always taken the view that there is no direct evidence that William of Stratford did go to the Grammar School there (or anywhere) and in this they are right. But they add that if he had gone it would not have given him anything like the education reflected in the works. They thus interestingly align themselves with the native genius school on the issue: no education to speak of. But since they do this to bolster the case of de Vere; they deny that native genius could make up for the deficiencies of the schooling, and conclude that therefore the mal-educated or un-educated William cannot have written the plays, and that the combination of education and inspiration lies elsewhere: in the Earl of Oxford. To this end they have consistently trashed both the Stratford school and the Grammar Schools generally. I am sympathetic to the Oxfordian case, believing with Orson Welles that there are otherwise “some awfully funny coincidences,” so I want to ask whether the Oxfordian portrayal of the deficiencies of the schools is warranted. What is more, we must ask whether they really need this put-down of the Grammar Schools to make their case.

     It started, as did the Oxfordian movement generally, with the remarkable work of J. T. Looney in his “Shakespeare” Identified of 1920. Quoting Halliwell-Phillips he characterizes life in Stratford as one of “dirt and ignorance” and stresses the illiteracy of Shakespeare’s parents. Like subsequent critics he seems particularly shocked by John Shakespeare’s being fined for keeping a dung heap too long in front of his house: “a quantity of filth” he calls it. I grew up in English farm towns in the 1930s and 40s – service centers for agricultural communities, and dung and dung heaps were a way of life. John was a dealer in wool, and Stratford was a service center for the local wool industry. Sheep would be herded into the town at sale time and kept there in the streets in large sheep pens often for several days. Their dung was a valuable commodity, used as a fertilizer. It would be gathered into heaps, and when the sale was over carted off to the local vegetable gardens. John was lax about moving the heap near his house.

     This evidence of his “dirt and ignorance,” then, is really only the equivalent of any one of us getting a ticket for not promptly removing snow from his sidewalk. It does not mean Stratford was in any way different from any other active and prosperous wool-town in the English midlands. Dirt and illiteracy were not confined to these. All English towns were dirty and smelly, and few people were literate. The London theater districts were filthy areas with open sewers, no toilet facilities, and were rife with prostitution and robbery. The great playwright-to-be Christopher Marlowe (see David Rigg’s recent biography) grew up as a shoemaker’s son among the leather tanning works in Canterbury. The smell and filth of the tannery surpassed anything the dung heaps of Stratford could produce, but neither this, nor parental illiteracy, prevented Marlowe from gaining a scholarship to the King’s School (the cathedral Grammar School at Canterbury) and going on to Cambridge University. (His father could sign his name and, like John Shakespeare took part in numerous lawsuits, but there is no evidence of his literacy.)

     Looney rightly insists that there is no documentary evidence for William’s attendance at the local Free Grammar School. But again he starts the trend of insisting that William’s illiterate home would have meant he could not read and write, to do so being a condition of entry to the school. He scorns Halliwell-Phillips idea that “the poet received his first rudiments of education from older boys.” But the system could have worked this way: it worked for Marlowe for example, and scholars since have written at length about the system of the “petty school” wherein very young boys (five or six) would be taught their basic alphabet and writing. This was a pretty standard method of teaching the basics in preparation for the upper school, as we shall see.

     Charlton Ogburn continues the attacks in his monumental The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984): “The Astonishing Stratford School and the Miracle of ‘Genius’” (Chapter 15.) He paints the picture of Stratford as a narrow, tight medieval community, where the town officers were largely illiterate and served unwillingly, including John Shakespeare as Alderman and High Bailiff (mayor.) He paints William’s life as one of drudgery in a debtor’s home. But during William’s young life John was in fact quite prosperous; the debt and disgrace came later and might well have interfered with William’s completing school.

     Ogburn’s main scorn is reserved for the Grammar School itself. This was a typical one-master school, and between 1565 and 1575 there were five masters he notes, and this does not speak well of the school. It can be counter argued that the masters were so good they were rapidly promoted, or that their Catholic sympathies were the issue at a time of Catholic persecutions. The pay of the masters, twenty pounds annually, he has to admit was good in comparison to other schools; Eton masters only got ten pounds. But he claims this appeared better than it was since the master had to pay four pounds to his usher and pay for repairs to the school. He omits that the master got free lodging, and does not elaborate on the paid “usher” or assistant master. Although the school records are lost, there are plenty of town records with items about the school and the masters.

     We shall look at more of these details later, but in the meantime Ogburn saves his severest blows for the quality of teaching. Despite their decent pay and their M.A. degrees, he insists, the quality of school teaching was abysmal. We do not know this directly for Stratford of course, so he depends on Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), which portrays the general state of teaching in England. Ascham had never been a country schoolmaster. He was himself schooled by a private tutor and became a tutor to the aristocratic rich, including the princess Elizabeth. His knowledge of what happened in schools seems to depend on one anecdote about Eton. One must remember he was part of the humanistic campaign to reform the old medieval schools, many of which lingered. He paints a dismal picture of poorly trained masters drilling boys largely by the use of the rod and basically just putting them through the motions. As a picture of the worst, the unreformed, schools this was probably justified. But it does not tally with any contemporary picture of the better “established” Grammar Schools.

     Certainly there was beating. I went to an English country Grammar School in the 1940s and was beaten quite often and usually with good cause. This may offend our modern tender sensibilities, but it was not necessarily an indication of bad schooling. In any case Ascham’s diatribe against punishment was out of date by the time it was published (posthumously) and his principles of reasoned tuition were strongly advocated by the leading and influential educationalists of his day. Ascham’s picture of the contemporary bad teacher applied largely to the scores of independent teachers who appeared in response to the laudable demand for some kind of education. David Cressy, in the best short survey of Tudor-Stuart education, reports that in the 1580s only 27 per cent of the schoolmasters licensed in the diocese of London were university graduates. By the 1630s it has risen to 59 per cent. Thus there were a lot of poorly qualified teachers out there in what were often fly-by-night operations. This makes Stratford all the more admirable both in its secure foundation and funding and in the high standards required of its teachers.

     Ogburn continues to disparage T. W. Baldwin’s account (in William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 1944) of the elaborate curriculum at English schools, the details of which we will examine. But Ogburn’s disparagement is mostly an expression of simple disbelief. Faced with what was required of a seven-year-old boy (Lily, Aesop, Erasmus, Terence, Plautus, etc.) he comments: “One wonders if the professor had ever met a seven-year old.” Not a seven-year-old Elizabethan schoolboy certainly, but neither had Ogburn. Plenty of boys did go through this system and did end up as fluent Latin speakers and writers; they went on to university and some of them to literary fame like Marlowe and Spenser. Ben Jonson never went to university but his education from Westminster stood him in good stead and he remembered it fondly. Stratford was a small one-master school as were most schools, true, but we have no more reason to assume it was a bad school than we have to know it was a good one. It was probably average.

     The trashing continues in Diana Price’s otherwise remarkable Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (2001), easily the best account of the authorship difficulties. In her chapter on “Shakespeare’s Education” she repeats the Ogburn criticisms but without mention of the dung heap. Interestingly she admits that William might have had some sort of education, and the only reasonable supposition is that he got it in Stratford where it was free and available. He must have had “basic literacy” to have been an actor; he had to learn his lines. If he was the “upstart crow” (“Shake-scene”) in the attack by Robert Greene mentioned earlier, then he was guilty of hiring other playwrights to write for him and taking the credit. This must mean he was capable at least of reading the stuff he was going to plagiarize.

     His numerous legal and business interests also suggest he could read and write at least minimally. We must not forget he made a great deal of money and retired to Stratford a rich man. Technically he could have done this while illiterate, but it is improbable. People record sending letters to him, but no replies survive. Price accepts the minimal literacy, but denies that the Grammar School could have provided the “Renaissance education” displayed in the plays. She repeats the criticisms of Ascham, along with Peacham and Harbage, concerning the low quality of teaching, but she does not quote Kempe, Brinsley, Hoole and Clarke who paint a more positive picture. She thinks the illiteracy and lack of education of William’s daughters (his only son Hamnet died at age 11) tells against his being educated himself. It tells against his qualities as a father perhaps, but is not conclusive about his education.

     In the pro-Oxford compendium from the UK, Great Oxford (2004) there are two chapters that continue the trend. In “Shakespeare’s Education, or the Circular Argument” Christopher Dams makes the unimpeachable point that we have canvassed earlier: that Stratfordians make the initial assumption that William of Stratford wrote the plays, see that he must have had a remarkable education, so insist he must have got it from the Grammar School. If the playwright is William, this is inevitable. But Dams sticks by the fact that we have no evidence he did go, and indeed we don’t. He further shows, with examples, how easily they pass from “must have received” to “definitely received” with too great ease. Given their premise, they are forced into this circularity.

     In “Shakespeare’s Education and the Stratford Grammar School” Phillip Johnson, after again assailing the presumption that William attended, takes up the cudgels against the quality of the school. Even if Will had attended, that is, he would not have benefited because the school was in a “rather insignificant midlands town.” This, he thinks, renders the pages and pages of comparison with the curricula of the “established” Grammar Schools at Ipswich, St. Paul’s, Westminster, Winchester, Merchant Taylors and Eton, unreliable at best. The criticisms Ascham leveled at the country schools, reproduced in Muriel St Clare Byrne’s Elizabethan Life in Town and Country, are repeated: long hours, brutality, monotony, discipline etc., that are “unsuited to holding a boy’s natural interest” and so on.

     No boy probably does go naturally to rote learning of Latin grammar, but many did, and as I can testify, came out the other end competent and largely un-traumatized. Schooling (as I argued with Tiger in The Imperial Animal) is always a struggle to effect a balance between education and initiation; between the instilling of information and the molding of character. Not sparing the rod is part of the endurance of pain that has characterized most systems of initiation. The Elizabethan schools were, as we shall see, on a mission, and perhaps erred on the initiatory side. But the mission was effective.

     Johnson dismisses the evidence that Shakespeare had contemporaries in Stratford from the same background, including Richard Field the printer in London who published Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and who show evidence of a more than competent education. Baldwin records that the editor and biographer Malone in 1821, wrote at length about the letters of the Quiney family, who were Shakespeare’s in-laws, which showed a high level of Latin competence. There is no record of these people being at the school, Johnson insists, and there is not. But they must have got the education somewhere, and as the sons of Stratford burghers there was not much else open to them. It is a reasonable inference that they went to the local Free Grammar School.

I thoroughly agree with these critics that we are not allowed to assert William’s or anyone else’s attendance there as a known fact, given the absence of records for the period. But surely we are allowed reasonable inferences? They are what the case for Oxford is built on after all. Johnson’s final blow to the Grammar School cause is the case for William Smith, another Stratford contemporary who went on to Oxford. This is taken as proof of the excellence of the local schooling, except, Johnson points out, that Smith went to Winchester College before going to Oxford. True, but he would not have been accepted into the upper forms at Winchester unless he had been competent in the work of the lower forms to start with. There was no way a beginner could have made up the ground. I think Smith argues well for Stratford!

What Were the Grammar Schools?

     The Grammar School question has largely been discussed in a historical vacuum. We must ask what the Grammar Schools were, and how confident can we be in extrapolating from those about which a great deal is known to those, like Stratford, where the relevant records are missing. Free Schools that taught mostly Latin grammar and which were open to all boys including those from poor families, had existed in England since Alfred the Great, Augustine and Alcuin in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the Middle Ages, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, many such schools were founded attached to monasteries, abbeys (Westminster), cathedrals (Canterbury and York), collegiate churches (Winchester and Eton), chantries, guilds (Stratford), and hospitals. They were church institutions and were largely concerned with ensuring a supply of clerics literate in Latin, who of course doubled as administrators. This was the only literacy available, and worked for the universal church and for the political arm since Latin was the only universal language in Europe and the language in which international diplomacy was conducted.

     The association of guilds with schools shows that Latin literacy was valued also in the merchant classes, and in the production of clerks and keepers of records. Thus the schools were largely vocational, utilitarian institutions preparing boys mostly for the church, but also for the university and the professions, particularly law and medicine. Of the hospital schools, the most famous is Christ’s Hospital, but this was founded after the Reformation (1563). The guilds (merchant and craft) were lay institutions, but they had their resident priests, chapels, almshouses and hospitals. One of the duties of the priest, and sometimes also a lay “scholemaster,” was to teach the sons of members. One of these schools was founded and maintained by the Guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire in 1427, on the foundations of an older school that had existed since the early thirteenth century.

     The medieval Grammar Schools were just that: they taught Latin grammar in a mechanical and often brutal way. This was a Latin to be used in “disputations” and was taught as part of the trivium: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Literature was definitely not part of the curriculum, and the learning was mostly oral, there being no printed books. Copies of the one grammar used, that of Donatus, were passed down from teacher to teacher – and these were all priests. Education while often serving secular ends was an affair of the Church. Three things happened in the fifteenth century to disturb this tranquility: Gutenburg, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.

Printing changed everything, and helped the spread of the New Learning consequent on the revival of classical literature. Books were produced in quantities and relatively cheaply. The study of literature became possible as never before, and great humanists like Erasmus actively campaigned for the study of the Latin and Greek classics, for their moral as well as literary value, and for the contemporary non-classical authors like himself who wrote in Latin – even about Greek. The Reformation added its own demand for the propagation of the bible in the vernacular – now possible with printing, and the demand of the new Protestant national powers for an educated and intellectually and religiously disciplined middle class.

     Henry VIII added his own violent twist to the history of the Grammar Schools. With the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-9 and the Chantries 1546-8, Henry destroyed the foundations that had been the source of Grammar School education in England: the great abbeys, free chapels, chantries, hospitals and guilds. Henry, and his short-lived son and successor Edward VI, were conscious of the damage done, and made attempts to repair it. Thus many “foundations” attributed to them, especially Edward VI, are in fact re-foundations. Money was set aside from the loot of the dissolved church institutions for this purpose, but as is the way with such earmarked funds, a lot of it found its way elsewhere than education. The body charged with the disposition of the looted wealth was called significantly The Commissioners for the Continuance of Schools.

     In some cases enterprising towns would re-negotiate their status and that of their Grammar Schools with the king. Such was the case with the burghers of Stratford-on-Avon and Edward VI in 1553. As a result of a petition the town became a self-governing borough and the Guild lands and properties were restored to it to provide income for the almshouses and the school. The status of the school between 1547 and 1553 is doubtful. Levi Fox (no relative) records that the Commissioners confirmed a salary of ten pounds for the master, William Dalam, but there were no funds to run the school. However, in 1553 the “King’s New School” (one of the many “Edward VI Grammar Schools”) came into being: essentially a Protestant (however reluctantly) continuation of the old Guild School. It surely says something about Stratford and its worthies that they would take this serious step, and that the school has continued to flourish until today.

     Thus, despite the devastations of the Dissolution, there was a conscious national policy led by Cardinal Wolsey and later Archbishops Cranmer and Parker, to restore the health of national education. Wolsey personally founded and endowed and supervised the curriculum of Ipswich School. The larger schools like Winchester and Eton were not dissolved, but the Commissioners of Edward VI made stringent regulations to expunge Papist tendencies and prescribe the curriculum, including the use of Erasmus’ Catechism. The appointment of schoolmasters was strictly regulated by the new Church of England – the State Church with the king as its head, and the curriculum was determined by the Church to the extent that an approved uniform Latin grammar, that by Dean Colet and William Lily – the Brevissima Institutio, was prescribed for use in all Grammar Schools by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1529, and by Royal proclamation in 1540. Elizabeth followed this up in her Royal Injunctions of 1559, as did subsequent administrations.

     It is hard for us to appreciate now, but the new Protestant establishment in England was very conscious and determined to make a national system of education do its part in producing a new kind of Protestant Englishman out of the ruins of Catholicism. This centralized control was part of the totalitarian nature of Tudor England, which was run like a police state by Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and kept in line by Francis Walsingham’s ruthless spy service: the new men in action. They faced the very real problem of the allegiance of stubborn Catholics to the continental powers, particularly Spain, and the constant risk of rebellion and assassination.

     After the Church and the printers, schools and theaters were two of the most supervised and controlled institutions. The preface to Lily’s authorized grammar states in its 1540 edition: “As his majesty purposeth to establish his people in one consent and harmony of pure and true religion; so his tender goodness toward the youth and childhood of his realm, intendeth to have it brought up under one absolute and uniform sort of learning.” Gutenburg and the printing press was the great facilitator in this campaign for uniformity.



Grantham Grammar School, 1528

Re-founded 1553 as “The King’s School”
     Where Isaac Newton was a pupil

     So the Tudor Grammar Schools, while continuing to be purveyors of Latin grammar, were in effect new foundations with a new mandate from the new Protestant State. The rising Protestant middle-class also had its share in their development. What is outstanding about the Tudor period is the impact of the merchants on the founding of Grammar Schools. In pre-Reformation days, rich men had endowed chantries, or left fortunes to abbeys and hospitals and their associated schools; now they endowed Grammar Schools directly. A mark of man’s success in business was that he should endow a school in his birthplace. Thus we have a list of schools endowed by tailors, brewers, mercers, drapers, skinners and goldsmiths. The grocer Lawrence Sheriff, who made a fortune selling groceries to the royal court, founded Rugby in 1567, while several worthies like John Lyon the founder of Harrow, were described as “yeomen.” One the most famous of these schools bears in its name the nature of its origins: Merchant Taylors (1560).

     The movement for a new kind of Grammar School was also forged in the exile of many Protestant clergy during Mary’s reign. (1553-58). These clerics fled to Europe and absorbed ideas and methods from their Calvinist and humanist colleagues, mostly in Holland, Germany and Geneva. Here they thoroughly assimilated the idea of “the priesthood of all believers” - which meant of necessity, literate believers. They returned with Elizabeth’s accession and threw themselves into the building of a new educational system based on Calvin’s work ethic, the demonstration of election by personal success, and the new learning of the Renaissance.

     The Grammar Schools continued to be important after the accession of James Stuart with added impetus from the much more advanced system in Scotland, driven by the Calvinism of John Knox. Grammar Schools produced people like John Milton and Sir Isaac Newton. After the Revolution and the Restoration, with Samuel Pepys rebuilding the British Navy and requiring basic mathematics of midshipmen, and both competition with, and the example of, the Dutch, Grammar Schools continued to be founded. David Cressy in Literacy and the Social Order, shows how between 1500 and 1540, 36 schools were founded, while from 1540 to 1600 there were 162. This growth continued apace up to the civil war.

     Four local merchants and farmers founded my own small country Grammar School at Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1673. They obtained a charter from Charles II, and a mandate to teach “The English and Latin tongues, Mathematics and Good Manners.” Note the elevation of English and Math to equality with Latin, a sign of the changing times. This was originally a one room, one master school, and grew with the growing population in the nineteenth century. Thornton was the birthplace of the Brontë sisters (and their brother Branwell) and for a while the Rev. Patrick Brontë, as the curate of the parish, would have been responsible for the school.

     Some of the older and larger Grammar Schools eventually morphed into “Public Schools” (so called because they originated as exactly that,) and from being a haven for poor students they became prep schools for the rich, as the upper classes began sending their sons away as boarders. The Grammar Schools languished along with all educational institutions in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth had to adapt their curricula to the needs of an industrializing society, in competition with technical and vocational “modern” schools. They were finally destroyed by successive doctrinaire socialist governments in the late twentieth century in the rush to “comprehensive” education: the worst act of official vandalism since Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries.

Defending the Grammar Schools

     The bête noir of Oxfordians on the Grammar School issue is the massive work (two-volumes, 1525-pages) of dedicated scholarship by T. W. Baldwin, a classicist from the University of Illinois. It takes as its title Jonson’s enigmatic comment from the First Folio: William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944). (The spelling of the name is Baldwin’s.) Baldwin is the stoutest opponent of the natural-genius-does-it-all school. He firmly believes and demonstrates at length and often in the original un-translated Latin, that the Grammar School could have provided all the information Shakespere would have needed to write the plays. His work then is largely about the curriculum of the schools as it has come down to us. To this he adds an assessment of the “Movement to Authorized Uniformity” which we have already noted, and then argues that we can with some certainty extrapolate to the curriculum of the Stratford Grammar School, of which he provides the most detailed account to date.

     Baldwin completely accepts that Shakespere is the author; he never raises the issue. That there is no record of Shakespere at the Stratford school does not bother him. Shakespere must have got the education at some Grammar School and, given the uniformity, we can be confident what it would have been. To Oxfordians this is unacceptable both on the grounds that they do not believe that Will of Stratford had an education, and there is no proof he got it at Stratford, and also that the education Baldwin claims to have been available was ridiculous in its volume and challenge. No schoolboy could have mastered what looks today like a PhD curriculum in the classics, including not only the Roman authors but the many contemporary writers like Erasmus and Mantuanus who wrote in Latin.

     But Baldwin follows closely the syllabus as set out in detail for the established schools. In this he notes the overwhelming importance of the great humanist Desideratus Erasmus, whose immensely popular The Praise of Folly (Laus stultitiae – 1511)) had been among other things an attack on the deficiencies of stultifying medieval education and a plea for the adoption of the new learning of the Renaissance. Erasmus’ influence on the development of Tudor education was profound, particularly in his collaboration with Dean John Colet in the founding of St. Paul’s School (1509), where William Lily, whose streamlined grammar (based on Colet’s) became the authorized text for all England, was the first headmaster. (The name is sometimes spelled “Lyly” and this is the form his descendants preferred.) Colet, Erasmus and Lily, together with Thomas More, were on a crusade, and Paul’s was their instrument. To quote Maurice Adams: “Colet therefore initiated a great reforming movement when he devoted the fortune left to him by his father to the establishment of a school in which children should be treated with kindness, and under able masters with improved schoolbooks should ‘proceed and grow’ as he expressed it, ‘to perfect literature, and come at last to be great clerks.’ ”

     The other great founder was Cardinal Wolsey, whose syllabus for Ipswich (1528) also closely followed the model of St. Paul’s. Equally, the programs at the older schools of Eton and Winchester were revised on the new model and consciously imitated by the burgeoning Tudor Grammar Schools as they were founded and re-founded, particularly the cathedral schools (like Marlowe’s Canterbury and Jonsons’s Westminster) where the national Church had direct influence. Starting from Erasmus’ De Ratione Studii, a program of learning from age seven to fourteen (and perhaps beyond) was laid down. It does indeed look formidable, but the boys worked up to seven hours a day six days a week, with very few holidays for at least seven years: perhaps around 2,000 hours a year in total; that is, more than twice the hours a modern high school student puts in. It was not necessarily great fun by our standards, but they did it, and they went on to successful university careers and even fame as creative artists. Something worked.

     One is impressed by the great care given to the teaching methods and the succession of authors to be tackled in these curricula. What Baldwin quotes at great length are of course the ideal curricula as laid down by the founders. We do not know how closely they were in fact followed. But even if only the outlines of these ambitious schemes were realized the result would still be an impressive “Renaissance education,” with history and geography being absorbed through the Latin of the contemporary writers that were studied along with the classical authors. The principles of Erasmus-Colet-Wolsey stressed the early introduction of Latin authors to be studied as examples of the rules of grammar learned, initially under the ushers, from Lily, by much copying of examples and translation, and speaking only in Latin.

     They would start with Cato, Aesop (in Latin) and Terence, work up through Virgil and Cicero, go on to Sallust, Caesar, Seneca and Plautus, on then in the upper forms (grades) to Horace, Ovid, Quintillian, Susenbrotus and Livy taking in Erasmus’ Colloquies and Copia, and some of Mantuanus (the Eclogues) on the way. It is interesting that advanced syntax was to be learned along the way also, with constant examples from the authors, and by memory, repetition, recitation, reading and writing, translation and re-translation in both prose and poetry. It was a kind of massive immersion technique, carefully thought out and adopted by school after school, and even Baldwin admits that it must have been taxing. “One wonders how a human being, either teacher or boy, endured it.” But they did, and the result was a great surge forward in the level of literacy and learning in Tudor England. Cressy, quoting Lawrence Stone, notes that by the end of the sixteenth century one third of the English male population could read and write; the actual degree of literacy differed according to social status. This was an astonishing result that made England (along with Holland) unique in the world.



St. Paul’s School in 1670

          Founded 1509
As re-built after the Great Fire of London 1666
     Where John Milton was a pupil.

     The small schools in this followed the large ones quite specifically, except that the possibilities of having Greek and Hebrew in the upper forms was low. The bigger schools with more masters, like St. Paul’s, could manage it but, Baldwin agrees, not the smaller ones: therefore, Lesse Greeke. They might in some cases have done some New Testament Greek, but not much of it. How well the small schools succeeded was of course heavily dependent on the quality of the master and his ushers. There must have been brutal and lazy masters then as now, but there were also obviously dedicated and careful ones, as the results prove.

     But we can know this much: if the records from Stratford could be retrieved, they would show much the same syllabus and methods as the small, one-master Grammar Schools at Wimborne, Cuckfield, Saffron Walden, Seven Oaks, Peterborough, Tiverton and others, whose records do survive and which are consciously modeled on Eton, Winchester, St. Paul’s and Ipswich. Erasmus ruled; the Renaissance triumphed; Protestantism was established.

     I am tempted to add a personal note here. I went to the small country Grammar School described earlier at eleven, (1945) and studied Latin for five years (eleven to sixteen) plus a little Greek – enough to be able to read with dictionary help. Latin was only one of ten subjects studied for the school leaving exams, and the time spent in school was significantly less than in Tudor times. Thus I would calculate I had about a tenth (or less) of the Latin (and even less Greek) that Shakespeare would have had if he had gone to Stratford Grammar School. This was “pure” Latin – entirely from the Roman authors.

     By the nineteenth century the Renaissance and medieval Latin authors had been dropped and history, geography and science were taught directly in English, which was itself a major subject, both language and literature, along with French and German. We had only one but very capable classics master, Mr. E. Estyn Evans, M.A. (Sheffield), who taught every form from the beginners to the sixth form – the two years of advanced Latin and Greek for those wanting to pursue it at the university. Latin was still required for entry to arts faculties at English universities in those days, and even for science at Oxbridge; it was very important.

     So this was a one-master classics operation in a small provincial school. Nevertheless, by sixteen I had more than basic Latin grammar, and some familiarity with those Roman authors that Shakespeare must have known as evidenced by the works. We read Caesar and Cicero - I remember very well preferring the legal pleadings (the De Milone stands out) to the rather long-winded moral essays (De Amicitia, De Senectute), because they were like a detective tale. I loved the adventure story of the Aeneid, as well as Horace’s Epistles, which were often truly funny.

     In my limited Greek I cherished the Illiad, and Sophocles, and certainly in Latin appreciated the marvelous mythology of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the acknowledged major source in the Shakespeare plays. On my own I read favorites not in the syllabus like Lucretius and Catullus, whose “Vivamus mea Lesbia” I translated early into English verse. (See The Passionate Mind.) I have written some commentaries on Sir James Frazer’s (mis-)translations of Virgil, on the real meaning of the Greek in Antigone, and have translated Ovid on incest in the Metamorphoses. I cite this record only to stress that with a tenth (or less) of the education in the classical languages that the Stratford Grammar School could provide, I managed to cover this ground and to have this minimal competence.

     Ogburn thinks it ludicrous to suggest, as Oscar J. Campbell did, that the Grammar School could have provided an education in the classics as good as, if not better than, an American university degree course. I have checked with my colleagues in the classics departments at Rutgers and Princeton, and they agree that anyone completing “A Levels” in a traditional English Grammar School would have been, at age eighteen, comparable in achievement to an American university sophomore or even a junior. No, we do not know if William attended the Grammar School, but if he had, some of the variance, as the statisticians say, could be accounted for. It would also leave a lot unaccounted for, to which we shall return.

The Stratford Grammar School

     In the meantime, what do we know of the Stratford school and its masters? Baldwin gives in some detail the dealings between town and gown, but the upshot is that from its re-foundation in 1553, the school had masters and ushers (some of whom became masters) of obviously good quality, all clergymen with master’s degrees some of whom received preferment and even multiple livings while still teaching. If William had gone to the school it would have been between 1571 and 1579. There is something of a mystery about the existence of a petty school for the teaching of letters. The records seem to imply that the usher would start the boys on grammar at seven, assuming them to be able to read and write. They were “obliged to get their necessary preliminary training in English outside of the grammar school.” The critics have not failed to point out that this could not have been from illiterate parents. But even the sons of literate burghers were not educated by their parents; they would have gone to a petty school.

     Although Baldwin wrote a whole, and again learned book, on Shakespere’s Petty School (1943), this was largely inferential. He took the description of petty schools of the time and made the leap to first of all the existence of one at Stratford, and second to the assumption that William went there. There is evidence of a petty-school teacher after 1600 (Thomas Parker) who had been there “for some time” and so Baldwin extrapolates backwards. Unlike the town-run Grammar School, the petty school would have been private and held in a private home, so there would have been no official records. This was so everywhere else, so it can be inferred to have been true of Stratford.

     Once again we must use reasonable inference. The Grammar School was there and was successful. It required its entrants to be competent in English before entrance; therefore they must have been; therefore there must have been a petty school. The appeal can again be made to the plays (Love’s Labor’s Lost e.g.) where the author seems to show evidence of having learned his writing from an ABC – probably a “horn book,” and the Catechism (probably the Calvinist version of Alexander Nowell) that were used in the petty schools.

     But the teachers at the Grammar School continue to impress. We have already met the redoubtable Richard Fox who rose to high office under Henry VII, and there was also William Smyth, who founded Brasenose College, Oxford. There was a hiatus of course after the dissolution of the Guild School in 1547 and the re-foundation in 1553. This might help explain why so many of John Shakespeare’s generation were not educated: there was no education available. Just before William’s time there was the master John Brownsword who became a well-known Latin poet. During William’s possible years there, there were two masters, Simon Hunt and Thomas Jenkins. Hunt, an M.A, from Oxford, converted to Catholicism and left in 1575 to become a Jesuit. Stratford did not have good luck with the Catholic connection. A future master, John Cottam was ousted because of his Catholic sympathies, his brother being executed for involvement with the Campion plot in 1582.

     Jenkins who succeeded Hunt and would have been teaching the upper forms had William been in them, was a Welshman, educated probably at Merchant Taylors, and definitely an M.A. and Senior Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, renowned for its fostering of Greek. That he was Welsh has given rise to a lot of commentary on his being the model for Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. For now let us note in summary that the records show that Stratford had well-qualified masters supported by ushers of good quality, and sent boys on to the universities and the professions. We have no reason to suppose it was not a good school of its kind, as we have no direct evidence William ever went there.



Ipswich School

     Founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1528.
The original burned down. This building is from the nineteenth century.

Part Two: Schools and Schoolmasters in the Plays

Grammar Schools in the Plays

     This leaves the issue of the portrayal of the schoolmaster in the plays, with Sir Hugh Evans as the most prominent. How could the author have painted such accurate pictures without direct knowledge of the Grammar School scene? But first there are some little-quoted specific references to the schools themselves that demand attention, and were briefly mentioned by Foster Watson in The Old Grammar Schools (1916). I went back to the originals. This is from Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene 2, where Griffith is replying to Queen Katherine, who has been rejoicing in the fall of her archenemy Cardinal Wolsey. Griffith asks her to reconsider and praises Wolsey in general (the text used throughout is that of the Folger Shakespeare Library):

He was a scholar and a ripe and good one:
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading:
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not;
But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting,
Which was a sin, yet in bestowing, madam,
He was most princely;

Griffith then proceeds to an interesting specific:

          ever witness for him
Ipswich and Oxford! One of which fell with him,
Unwilling to outlive the good that did it;
The other, though unfinished, yet so famous,
So excellent in art, and yet so rising,
That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue.

     This is a direct reference to Cardinal Wolsey’s founding of Ipswich School and Christ’s Church College (originally Cardinal’s College), Oxford. The original school buildings burned down, but the school, in Wolsey’s home town, and the Oxford college both flourished. Here Wolsey is promised immortality for his educational efforts, including the founding of a Grammar School, and one that was a model for others and was crucial to the surge forward in Tudor education.

     What are we to make of this reference? It could be William reflecting on his good fortune to have been a beneficiary of Wolsey’s legacy in promoting Grammar Schools; but William never went to Oxford. So it could equally be de Vere reflecting on his own connection both as the Earl of Oxford and a graduate of the university – although I suspect his degree there was honoris causa: more for his name and his literary merit than his studies at the university. In the sixteenth century, as opposed to today, an MA required nine terms of study beyond the BA. De Vere was, we know, in residence for some months at Cambridge University when he was eight years old (at his early mentor Sir Thomas Smith’s alma mater Queen’s College) and he later received an MA from that university also, being briefly registered at St. John’s College. He certainly did not complete nine terms, but Miller in his portrait of St. Johns states “one undergraduate in twenty was the son of a nobleman and eligible for the MA degree without examination.” That would seem to cover Oxford’s case. Still, the reference to Wolsey and his Oxford college and Grammar School is remarkable, showing that the author, whoever he was, understood the importance of Wolsey’s educational efforts and singled them out for praise.

     Henry VIII is one of those several plays that appear to have more than one hand in them, so it could have been neither of the candidates. (See Brian Vickers on co-authorship, and note that Swinburne had astutely uncovered all the cases that are now agreed upon as un-Shakespearean.) Some of the play is attributed to John Fletcher, including this scene, largely on the basis of the feminine endings of many of the lines. But some scholars have seen the scene as basically by Shakespeare with “interpolations” by Fletcher, while computer studies attribute it wholly to the author of the cannon. (Vickers sees feminine endings as proof of Shakespeare’s hand in Pericles, but as proof of Fletcher’s hand in Henry VIII. Attribution can be a tricky thing.)

     Griffith’s speech seems to me to be pretty “Shakespearean.” Consider his earlier lines reflecting on Wolsey:

          Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtue
          We write on water.

You don’t get more Shakespearean than that, despite the feminine ending, and Keats echoed it in his verdict on his own legacy. (c.f. Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii: “Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work.”) Fletcher might have inserted the lines, but it is hard to see why. He was the son of a Bishop, and he went to Cambridge when he was eleven. We do not know about his earlier schooling, but why would he have singled out “Ipswich and Oxford” as redeeming virtues in Wolsey?

     Fletcher has no known connection with de Vere (he was thirty years younger), but then he has no documented connection with Shakespeare either during his lifetime. Writing for the King’s Men he could have made additions to the unfinished work of either. Whomever the candidate, the fragment remains intriguing in selecting out the founding of a Grammar School as a virtue to persuade the queen. Griffith was successful in any case, and Katherine changed her mind about Wolsey.

     Another direct and opposite reference is found in 2 Henry VI Act IV Scene 7. The rebel Jack Cade is speaking to one of the nobles, Lord Saye:

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and, whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the King, his crown and his dignity, thou hast built a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian can endure to hear.

We are here in the early fifteenth century when literacy for the lower orders was suspect to the authorities who were trying to put down the Lollards and other levelers. Printing and literacy for the masses, and especially the use of “grammar” were an abomination. But the speech is put into the mouth of the upstart rebel, Jack Cade, who represents the worst kind of lower-class chauvinist. In scene 2 he rails against Lord Saye:

I tell you that Lord Saye hath gelded the commonwealth, and made it an eunuch: and more than that, he can speak French; and therefore he is traitor.

In scene 7 Lord Saye defends himself, in verse as opposed the prose of the rebels:

Large gifts have I bestow’d on learned clerks, Because my book preffer’d me to the King, And seeming ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

     Say has founded Grammar Schools, probably in chantries (with their learned clerks), because his learning has gained him promotion from the king, and he therefore recognizes knowledge as the road to salvation on earth as it is in heaven. Henry VI for all his weakness, promoted education, and is of course revered as the founder of Eton. Saye follows his monarch’s example, but it does him no good with the Yahoo Cade and his yes-man Dick:

Dick: What say you of Kent?

Saye: Nothing but this: ‘tis bona terra, mala gens.

Cade: Away with him! Away with him! He speaks Latin.

     And Saye is murdered. With Henry VI there are also doubts about the complete authorship (at least about part one, not perhaps part two where this scene occurs) but there is a consistency here. Wolsey and Saye are held up as moral examples for founding Grammar Schools. It is something worth picking out as a particular virtue in these men. Although Henry VI is set in the early fifteenth century, its author is thinking of the early sixteenth and the role being played by the newly re-founded Grammar Schools, Wolsey’s Ipswich in particular. The most we can say here is that he thought it worthy of note and regarded it as a virtue. The aristocrats were for it, the ignorant rabble were against it; the author was with the nobility on this yet again.

Oxford’s Grammar School

     Here is the point to introduce the outstanding fact that, like Say and Wolsey, Oxford’s grandfather, the fifteenth earl, was instrumental in founding a Grammar School. In 1520, eight years before Wolsey founded Ipswich in Suffolk, the Rev. Christopher Swallow started a Free Grammar School for thirty boys at Earls Colne, nearby in Essex. As its name suggests the town was named for the Earls of Oxford (on the river Colne) and was originally part of the Oxford estates. Swallow made an agreement that the Earls of Oxford would be perpetual guardians of the school, an agreement that lasted until the last earl, Aubrey de Vere, in 1673, when it was handed over to the Cressener family, a gentleman, a lawyer and a grocer. In 1682 it passed to the sole care of “John Cressener, grocer.” The tradesmen triumphed.

     Alan Nelson in his biography thinks that Edward de Vere, during his tenure as guardian, interfered too much in the running of the school, to its detriment. He appointed as schoolmaster William Adams of St. John’s College Cambridge, who proved dishonest and incompetent and was ousted by a commission of inquiry. Oxford promptly overruled the commission and re-appointed Adams, again with disastrous results. It all sounds very Oxford. He wanted his own way, and Adams was from a Cambridge college where the Earl had been registered as opposed to the alternative, John Stockbridge, who was from Hart Hall, a mere non-collegiate hostel. But despite many vicissitudes, including a period as an agricultural college, the school at Earls Colne survived and expanded until it too was abolished as a Grammar School in 1975, as part of the dissolution of the same already described. Whether or not Oxford was a sensible steward of the school is for our purposes less important than that he was a steward and was involved in its governance.

     The author’s direct concern in two history plays with the founding of Grammar Schools, and his defense of them and respect for their founders, begins to make great sense. Oxford’s grandfather, a contemporary of Wolsey at the court of Henry VIII, was a co-founder of such a school, a mere twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, from Wolsey’s Ipswich. Oxford was himself concerned, however injudiciously, with the affairs of Earls Colne Grammar School, and would have been very aware of the educational activities of the Cardinal a short distance from his home. William Shakespeare of Stratford, with all his fortune, neither in his retirement nor in his will, made any benefactions to, or took any recorded interest in, his local school, to which he is presumed to have owed so much.



Earls Colne Grammar School, founded 1520

These buildings are from the 19th century.

Schoolmasters in the Plays

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

     We cannot avoid the famous scene with Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives, (Act IV, scene 1) even though it has been quoted to death by now. It is regarded as conclusive evidence that Shakespeare, as the author, went to the Grammar School, since he seems to recollect his experience directly. Since my fondly remembered Latin master was also an Evans, I feel a strange spiritual connection with the issue. The scene in question is odd since it has all the appearance of being inserted for its own sake. It has no relation to the plot whatsoever. In this it is like the equally curious scene of the German visitors and the mysterious duke (Act IV, Scene 3).

     But this is a sprawling peculiar play altogether. No one seems to doubt it is part of the canon, but it is more of a knockabout farce than a Shakespearean comedy. W. H. Auden thought the same, and refused to lecture on it, playing instead, for his class at The New School in New York City, an LP of Verdi’s Falstaff. (I hope it was the magnificent 1956 recording with von Karajan, Gobbi and Schwartzkopf.) Other commentators, starting with Bernard Shaw, have found Arrigo Boito’s libretto for the opera a better drama than Merry Wives. So the odd scene was inserted for laughs into the odd play.

     In it Mistress Page has brought her son William (seen by some as a hint that the pupil is indeed Shakespeare himself) for a Latin lesson with Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson. Sir Hugh is not specified as a teacher, just a parson. In attendance is Mistress Quickly, who provides the comic commentary through her complete misunderstanding of the Latin words. Mistress Page asks Sir Hugh to “aske him some questions in his Accidence” that is, his basic Latin grammar. The reference throughout the scene is to William Lily’s own abbreviation of his authorized work published as A Shorte Introduction of Grammar in 1534: there were numerous editions after that.

Evans. William, how many Numbers is in Nownes?

Will. Two.

Quickly. Truly I thought there had bin one number more, because they say “Od’s-Nownes.”

She is probably referring to a popular oath – Swounds! – “God’s wounds.” William was in fact right; the two numbers are singular and plural. They proceed with more examples straight from Lily.

Evans. Peace your tatlings. What is Faire William?

Will. Pulcher.

Quickly. Polecats? There are fairer things than polecats, sure.

That, while being one of the bard’s worst puns, must have got a laugh, but from whom? The groundlings (the “nut cracking groundlings”) standing up in the pit would not have known it. And how many grammar-school educated playgoers were there in the tiers and boxes? We don’t know. If the play were written, as tradition has it, to please the Queen, how many Grammar School boys would there have been at court to see it? (See Richard Whalen on the contentious issue of Shakespeare’s audience.) The lesson continues:

Evans. You are a very simplicity o’man: I pray you peace. What is Lapis William?

Will. A stone.

Evans. And what is “a stone” William?

Will. A pebble.

Evans. No; it is Lapis; I pray you remember in your praine.

Remember Evans is Welsh, hence o’man = woman, praine = brain, (c.f. Fluellen in Henry V.) What William failed to do here was to turn the English back into Latin as required by the system. He gets the point and goes on:

Will. Lapis

Evans: That is good William: what is he William that do’s lend Articles.

Will. Articles are borrowed of the pronoun; and be thus declined.
Singulariter nominativo hic, haec, hoc.

Again William is right with his declension of hic, “this,” but Evans proceeds to mangle the pronunciation.

Evans. Nominativo hig, hag, hog: pray you marke: genitivo huius: Well: what is your Accusativo case?

Will. Accusativo hinc.

Evans: I pray you have your remembrance childe: Accusativo hing, hang, hog.

Quickly: Hang-hog is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.

Evans. Leave your prabbles o’man. What is the Focative case William?

Will. O, vocativo, O.

Evans. Remember William, Focativo is caret.

Quickly: And that’s a good roote.

Evans’ mispronunciation is a set up so that Quickly can make the joke about hang-hog being Bacon, which is capitalized in the original. Baconians have made much of this “clue.” When Evans tells William, correctly, that there is no vocative of hic (it is caret, missing – exactly as in the Lyly text), Quickly hears this as “carrot” – which is a good roote both as a vegetable and as slang for penis. Evans’ Focative is probably meant as yet another bawdy word play. I remember how a classroom of boys inevitably fell into giggles when reciting the principle parts of facio (remember that the “c” is hard and the “a” short): facio, facere, feci, factum. Some laughs are just too easy.



A page from William Lily’s A Shorte Introduction to Grammar, 1534

     William Page and Sir Hugh quote directly from the text.

Apart from getting the accusative wrong (it should have been huc, hanc, hoc), William doesn’t do too badly, and Sir Hugh comes off as an amiably pompous schoolmaster-type. Mistress Quickly ends the show with a mishearing that would have got a laugh even from the groundlings:

Evans: What is your Genitive case plural William?

Will. Genitive case?

Evans: Aye

Will. Genitive: horum, harum, horum.

Quickly. Vengeance of Ginnys case; fie on her; never name her childe if she be a whore.
Evans: For shame o’man.

Quickly: You do ill to teach the child such words: he teaches him to hick and to hack; which they do fast enough for themselves, and to call whorum; fie upon you.

     “Ginny’s (Ginyes) case” probably meant her genitals in the city slang. “Hic” and “hac” were like enough to slang words for sexual activity, and horum was all too obvious. But William got the genitive plural right. He fails in the next passage (which I will not reproduce here) to get his pronouns right (qui, quae, quod) and is threatened with a beating. He is about half right; he gets by with a C+. Evans on the other hand is a caricature of the pompous pedagogue.

     What are we to make of this? Is it a memory of Grammar School? Is it a memory of the Welshman Jenkins? Half the fun of Evans comes from his Welsh pronunciation. Is Shakespeare poking fun at himself here, or is someone poking fun at him and his pretentions, much as Jonson did with him as Sogliardo? (Or as Touchstone does with another William in As You Like It.) Baldwin himself, while seeing the stamp of the Grammar School and Lyly on the scene, is skeptical of the Jenkins-Evans connection. Jenkins was too good a teacher to have been the inspiration for such a lampoon, although Baldwin notes rightly that the portrait is “un-malicious” and good humored.

     William Farina raises an interesting possibility in that Oxford’s associate, employee, and possibly collaborator, the playwright and novelist John Lyly, is thought to have written Endimion, the play which was the basis for the scene with the “fairies” that ends Merry Wives. Oxford and Lyly were very close; the Lyly novel Euphues His England, which defined the “euphuistic” style and is acknowledged to have deeply influenced the plays, was dedicated to Oxford. Lyly and Oxford together obtained the lease of the Blackfriars Theater in the 1580s. During this time, when Lyly was his secretary, Oxford sponsored children’s acting companies – “Oxford’s Boys” - who were managed by one Henry Evans, of course a Welshman. In the bizarre final scene of Merry Wives, Sir Hugh Evans “manages” the children and townsfolk as they, disguised as fairies, “administer pinching punishment” (Baldwin) to the wayward Sir John Falstaff. Here is a direct reference to an actual Evans who seems to fit the bill in many respects.

     If we look again to Arrigo Boito’s libretto for Falstaff we see that he produced a fast paced, coherent, lyrical and funny script out of the rambling Merry Wives, with additions from Henry IV. And one way he did this was to leave out Sir Hugh Evans entirely – Latin lesson and all! It is no loss. The plot benefits from the omission. This raises the question of what Evans was doing there in the first place. He does nothing to move the plot; he even obfuscates it. Is it possible that he was just a caricature of a person well known to the crowd, with his Welsh accent and its confusion of voiced and unvoiced consonants (which Londoners think hugely funny), his pomposity, his pedantry, and his “management” of child players? Oxford could have put his associate in, not for the plot but just as a crowd pleaser: he was in there just for the laughs. Hence the Latin lesson – to show his pompous pedantry and to feed salacious laugh lines to Mistress Quickly. If the play was indeed originally written for the court, could this scene have been inserted for the common-theatre version? This interpretation at least gives the part a raison d’être it does not otherwise have.

     Oxfordians have been quick to note that on the first page of the grammar, William Lily starts with proper names and uses the sentence “Edwardus is my proper name.” Out-of-place scenes like this, and for example in Titus Andronicus IV:ii where Demetrius and Chiron anachronistically chat about a quote from Horace in the grammar, (also in 1 Henry IV, II:1) suggest that the author was deliberately drawing attention to the sentence about Edward being his proper (i.e. real) name. Perhaps. I think they were equally meant to be there for laughs. But perhaps that reinforces the point: we remember what we laughed at.

Love’s Labour’s Lost.

     But the Hugh Evans of the play is also an avatar of “the pedant,” who was in part a schoolmaster but also perhaps a creature derived from elsewhere than the Grammar School. Shakespeare (the author) seems to have coined the very term “pedant” from the Italian pedantaggine (according to the OED.) The prototype of this character is Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. He is stated explicitly to be “The Pedant or schoolmaster.” Baldwin cites him more than any other character in the plays, for the obvious reason that he is the most given to quotations, words and tropes that reflect classical learning, and thus, for Baldwin, reflect the author’s Grammar School education. But while Holofernes lectures everyone in his pedantic style, he does not give lessons as Sir Hugh did. A favorite exchange of those who see the Grammar School writ large in Holofernes is (Act IV, Scene 2):

Holofernes:         Facile precor gelida peccas omnia sub umbra
        Ruminat –
and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan! I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice;
     Venetia, Venetia,
     Chi non ti vede non ti pretia
Old Mantuan, old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not, [loves thee not.] (He sings) Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa. (To Nathaniel) Under pardon, sir, what are the contents? Or rather, as Horace says in his – (Looking at the letter) What my soul, verses?

Nathaniel: Ay sir, and very learned.

Holofernes: Let me hear a staff, a stanza, a verse, Lege, domine.

     The pedant does a garbled misquote from Mantuan. It could mean something like “I pray you are easily doing everything wrong in the cool shade.” Ruminat – “it ruminates,” is left hanging. Some commentators have mistaken this for a reference to Virgil, who was also from Mantua, but it is definitely from Mantuanus (Johannes Baptista Spagnola) whose Eclogues (1498) were part of the standard Grammar School curriculum. This was the first poem in the book so every grammar-school boy would know it. (11.2)



The correct line is:

Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra
Ruminat…

“Faustus, I pray, once all the herd is ruminating in the cool shade…”
(“let us give an account of [our] former loves.”)

     But the Holofernes line makes a kind of weird sense and would have raised a laugh from any ex-schoolboys (or others tutored in Mantuan) in the audience. Most editors since Rowe and Pope have “corrected” the line, including the editor (Dr. Mustard) of the Eclogues when quoting it, thinking the copier or printer made an error, and many errors were indeed made. The Folio printer confused Holofernes and Nathaniel for example, but he is not likely to have mistakenly put Facile for Fauste. (See 11.2) It seems obvious that the author meant it to be a joke, like the schoolboy howler: “All Gauls are divided into three parts.” The Folger editors agree that this and other Latin mis-quotations in the play were intended as jokes.

     Similarly, the Italian of the popular proverb is garbled in the Folio. (“Vemchie, vencha, que non te unde, que non te perreche.”) I have given the “corrected” version here, as do most editors, but I wonder if the author again did not mean it to be a clear signal for the pedant’s pseudo-learning. If so, for what audience was the joke intended: one that knew Italian? Holofernes continues by citing an authority, Horace, for nothing in particular, then does his signature redundant iteration “a staff, a stanza, a verse” and tells Nathaniel, in Latin, to read the letter. His character is summed up in this passage. But it is not really the character of a schoolmaster as such; he is not at all like Sir Hugh Evans for example. It is closer to the character of the pedant or doctor found in the Italian improvisatory theater of the Commedia dell’Arte: Il Dottore.

     The influence of the Commedia on the comedies is well established. An excellent summary of the evidence is contained in Kevin Gilvary’s chapter in Great Oxford. The author must have had a first hand acquaintance with the form since there were no scripts; it was indeed improvised from standard plots – plots that re-appear all the time in the Shakespeare comedies. It is more plausible, say Oxfordians, that the author was someone who saw these masked farces in Italy, since it would be hard to get the point from second-hand descriptions.

     Il Dottore, or Doctor Gratiano, or Baloardo, or Balanzone, is one of the old men of the Commedia who are lusty and foolish and thwart the path of true love of the young lovers, Arlequino and Columbine. Il Dottore is repetitious, talks largely malapropic nonsense with a battery of phony learning, misquotes authorities and mangles his Latin. He is to this kind of comedy what Cliff Claven was to Cheers. The author of Love’s Labour’s Lost may well have used the figure to satirize the self-important English educationalists of his day – although no one has been able to pin down a culprit. (Richard Mulcaster is suggested.) For our purposes it is enough to note that Holofernes does not seem to be a representative English schoolmaster at all, even though his knowledge of the classics would overlap.

     A couple of other “schoolmasters” crop up in the plays. There is one in A Comedy of Errors, one in Julius Caesar (a teacher of rhetoric), and Gerrold in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which play is of doubtful attribution. These are all small parts and figures of fun. In 1 Richard II – the newly authenticated play, there exists a prototype of the pedant in a schoolmaster (he is called no more than this) who starts every remark with “Patientia” writes appalling doggerel political verses, and is duly executed. His being in the play is one of the sure marks of its authenticity. Only Sir Hugh Evans actually tries to teach somebody something, however ineptly.

     The wide knowledge of the classics displayed in the plays could have come from a grammar-school education. Certainly Ogburn’s expressions of disbelief are not justified on this account. In listing the authors Baldwin claims were studied, he mentions Susenbrotus and adds sarcastically: “whoever he was.” Susenbrotus wrote a treatise on rhetoric that was meant to systematize the teachings of Cicero and Erasmus on the subject. It was a kind of school textbook on rhetoric and was widely used. Baldwin in “The Rhetorical Training of Shakspere: Susenbrotus” (Vol. II: Chap.35) shows in almost alarming detail how much of the verbal by-play in the comedies can be disentangled only as witty commentary on the tropes and figures of rhetoric contained in Susenbrotus.

     Such passages are the despair of modern producers and are often simply omitted. Love’s Labour’s Lost in particular has a bewildering cascade of such by-play with Holfernes and Dull, Moth, Armado and Costard disputing on enigmas, allegories, simile, antiphrasis and hyperbole. Armado (cast as the master) engages in a verbal duet with Moth (cast as the pupil) on the stock figure of plumbo stupidior: the slowness of lead. Moth so pleases his master with his ingenuity (“Is that lead slow which is fired from a gun?”) that Armado exclaims in delight: “Sweet smoke of rhetoric!” (Act III: scene 1) Baldwin can only find this figure in the school texts of Erasmus and his conduit Susenbrotus.

     How does this help us with the Grammar School question? Do the portraits of schoolmasters, and the obvious wide knowledge of the classics and rhetoric, demonstrated at length by Baldwin to have been obtainable from a Grammar School education, tell us definitely that the author was a Grammar School alumnus?

The Education of Royalty

     Paradoxically, Baldwin may give us a clue to the opposite conclusion. In the midst of detailing the Grammar School curricula, he inserts four chapters on “The Education of Royalty.” These deal with the tutoring of the Princess Mary, Prince Edward (two chapters) and the Princess Elizabeth. There are generous records on all three, especially the young Edward. The whole point of these chapters is to show that the royals were put through exactly the same paces as any grammar-school boy, with the same curriculum, in the same order, using the same texts and on the same principles. Let me quote Baldwin’s opening words on Prince Edward (Chapter X):

The schoolmasters of King Henry’s younger children, Elizabeth and Edward, agree essentially with Sir Thomas Elyot in their points of view. They, too, were ultra-pious men; but they adapted more fully the grammar school curriculum and methods to attain their ends. For Richard Cox, who was in charge of the rudiments of Prince Edward’s education, was that master of Eton who transcribed the curriculum of about 1530. It was, therefore, only natural that he should retain the Eton mould when he began to shape a scheme of education for Prince Edward. The grammar school curriculum had proved itself so effective that its wind was now tempered to the shorn lambs of royalty.

     He goes on to detail a group of like-minded educationalists from St. John’s College Cambridge, which, like its counterpart at Oxford, was devoted to Greek (and where Oxford was briefly registered.) These men gathered around John Cheke, the first tutor to Prince Edward. They included Roger Ascham, whom we have already encountered and who later became tutor to Elizabeth, William Grindal, Ascham’s student who became her first teacher, and the guiding spirit of the group, Cheke’s brother-in-law, William Cecil, who, as Lord Burghley became her chief minister. Oxfordians do not need to be reminded that Burghley was also the guardian and father-in-law of Edward de Vere, and responsible for his education. That William Adams was from this college must have carried weight in Oxford’s decision to appoint him as schoolmaster at Earls Colne.

     To go through Edward VI’s schooling from his ABC and Catechism, through his Latin exercises to his eventual mastery of Greek, French, Italian and Spanish, would cause doubters in the capacity of Elizabethan schoolboys to wince at the impossible pressure of it. But Baldwin has the details and we have even the little prince’s exercises and letters to check on his progress. And the point is that he followed the grammar-school curriculum to the letter only more so, since he was, as Elizabeth was later, the sole pupil with his tutor’s sole attention.

     He started, like everyone else, with the Lyly-Colet Latin Grammar, now the only official one. A copy of it on vellum was presented to him, and we have it with his signatures. In other words, he would have been drilled through his horum, harum, horum like any Grammar School boy, by his masters Cheke and Cox, whom Edward, writing about himself in the third person, calls “ two learned men, who sought to bring him up in learning of (1) toungues, (2) of the scriptures, (3) of philosophie, and (4) all liberal sciences.”

     By 1547, Baldwin reckons that Edward “completed the work of lower grammar school like any commoner, and in the expected time.” He would, like William Page, have “spent his first quarter… memorizing his accidence” before starting on his Cato and his Aesop. The point here then is that the education of royalty and nobility was not simply modeled on the Grammar School, it was for at least the foundational years the same in all its details. Edward de Vere after his father’s death was under the guardianship of the very William Cecil who was at the heart of the group of St. John’s men who formed the education of Prince Edward. Cox, the prince’s first tutor, had drawn up the Eton curriculum, which he then followed.

     Can it be doubted that Oxford’s education then followed the same pattern? He was raised in the household first of Sir Thomas Smith; he transferred to Cecil’s house in 1562. Smith was a remarkable man of learning and diplomacy, and, among other things, was Provost of Eton. (See Stephanie Hughes on Oxford’s education.) Between Smith and Cecil then, Oxford would have received no less an education than did Prince Edward, and no less on the Grammar School model – particularly that of Eton.

     This would mean that Oxford too would have been drilled in his accidence, and from the authorized grammar of William Lily. We have already met the Lylys/Lilys but let us recapitulate the Lyly connection. (The details can be found in the Dictionary of National Biography.) William Lily was first High Master of St. Paul’s School, the colleague and collaborator of John Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the founder of the school, along with Erasmus. He was a leading humanist in the movement to liberalize the curriculum of the Grammar Schools, and a friend of that other great humanist Sir Thomas More. He died in 1522.

     His son George Lyly, who died in 1559, was an historian and cartographer, and is known for having made the first accurate printed map of Britain. His grandson, John Lyly (1554-1606) is the playwright and novelist we have already encountered who worked for Oxford between 1580 and 1588. He and Oxford advanced the cause of Euphuism and this influence is writ large on the comedies. There is no direct record of John’s schooling. With his lineage he should have gone to St. Paul’s, but he was brought up in Canterbury and may have gone to the King’s School like Marlowe. Thus this close companion of, and collaborator with, Oxford, was the grandson of the writer of the official “accidence.”

Epilogue: On to the Mayflower

     This is all germane to the argument that the author of Merry Wives must have been to a Grammar School, and was reproducing his experience in the Latin lesson, along with his recollections of Jenkins. This ain’t, as the song says, necessarily so.

First: we have seen that Oxford, in the households of Smith and Cecil, would have been drilled in the same manner as a Grammar School boy, from the same texts.

Second: he was a close friend and collaborator of the grandson of the official Latin text’s author, himself a product of the Grammar School system, as was Oxford’s other employee, playwright and poet Antony Munday. Munday is at least partly responsible for the play once attributed to Shakespeare, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, about the proto-type of Falstaff. Munday was a draper’s son, orphaned at eleven, and must have got his basic education at a Grammar School. Oxford surrounded himself with a bohemian circle of grammar-school men like Lyly and Munday in his house “Fisher’s Folly” during the 1580s: they could surely have compared experiences.

Third: the supposed “schoolmasters” in the plays, especially Holofernes, are not primarily modeled on the Grammar School, but are more likely derived from the Commedia dell’Arte, which had to be experienced in Italy. The author could have been poking fun at any pedantic private teachers for that matter: perhaps Oxford’s learned uncle, Arthur Golding, the translator of Ovid, or his tutor Laurence Nowell the founder of Anglo-Saxon studies.

Fourth: the figure of Sir Hugh Evans is more likely to have been based on Oxford’s employee Henry Evans than on Stratford’s Thomas Jenkins.

Fifth: the Earls of Oxford were guardians of a local free Grammar School, and Oxford was familiar with its ways and its schoolmasters, and concerned, however clumsily, with the running of it.

     As to the vast learning displayed in the plays that Baldwin lays out in his two volumes, while this might have been available from the best of the larger schools, it was even more available from the kind of private tuition that was given the little Prince Edward, and his young nobleman namesake, Edward de Vere. Even Baldwin finds it hard to imagine an advanced knowledge of Greek, Italian, French and Spanish being available at Stratford. The fact that we find numerous references in the plays to texts that were taught in the Grammar Schools, as Baldwin indefatigably does, does not tell us that the knowledge was gained there, any more than from the private instruction given to noblemen that mirrored it line for line.

     We know that Oxford was a precocious student. By the age of thirteen Nowell figured he had no more to teach him. He wrote an elegant Latin, and letters in French, and he spoke both French and Italian, could read Spanish, and bought books in foreign languages. We do not need to claim that the author of the plays must have been to a Grammar School. On the other hand, neither do Oxfordians need to trash the Stratford school, and Grammar Schools in general, to make their case. If William Shakespeare did go to school in Stratford, he could have got for himself a good education, depending on the time he spent there. The extent of this will perhaps always be a mystery.

     But whatever he got from Stratford, it is not sufficient to explain the plays and poems, which contain a breadth of knowledge and experience, and an attitude, that go way beyond small-town Warwickshire (or Lancashire for that matter.) This includes the crucial knowledge of then un-translated sources in all the languages that we know Oxford knew, and that were unavailable at Stratford. Also, the author’s reading went way beyond what any Grammar School could have provided or afforded. Books were expensive items. I had the advantage of excellent free libraries and even cheap paperbacks (the first Penguin Books) to continue my reading beyond the basics; there were none of these in Elizabethan times. Libraries were very expensive and you could not carry them around with you while changing lodgings. The author must have had access to large private libraries like those of Smith and Cecil, and even his own.

     A Grammar School education is then not a sufficient explanation of the author’s knowledge and ability. After all, thousands of English boys went to Grammar Schools, yet very few of them became famous and immortal writers. But they did become literate and active citizens. These schools were part of a dramatic phenomenon that was the revolution in education, and the part played by the state in it, during the great transformation of the Tudor-Stuart period. They helped to make the new Protestant-Capitalist England, and hence the modern world of the Miracle.

     They lifted English society from its feudal and medieval condition as part of a conscious plan by the Humanist and Protestant reformers to create a new order of things. These remarkable schools were the confluence of the twin forces of the Reformation and the Renaissance that produced the new bourgeoisie, and these new model citizens and their descendants unseated two kings and were the formative influence on the growth of capitalism and democracy as we know it. Let us not forget that those remarkably literate and determined men on the Mayflower were all Grammar School boys.



Sources To have documented the facts in the essay point by point would have meant a citation every two sentences, and would have ended up sounding like Holofernes. The works I have consulted are listed below, and each contains its own extensive list of sources. On the history of the Grammar Schools and Tudor education, there is again a long list, but I have relied mainly on Watson, Cressy, Brown, and Baldwin. The history of the Stratford school is in Levi Fox (no relative.) All the basic historical material on Earls Colne, including the Essex Record Office documents (# 3201756, # 32300700, # 32800466) on which I have drawn here, can be found in the Earls Colne Database at: www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/earlscolne.html. The Commedia dell’Arte has a library of commentaries, but the article by Kevin Gilvray in Great Oxford lists many of them. I usually consult Salerno’s translation of Flaminio Scala for the plots and characters. Oxford’s education is dealt with in the works mentioned, but Anderson is the most recent. Nelson’s biography of Oxford is the most complete, if unsympathetic, account. See also Pearson on Oxford’s life as a ward, and Stephanie Hopkins Hughes on Oxford’s childhood with Smith. Perhaps the most accessible print edition of Lily’s grammar is the one cited but there are good versions on the web. The pictures of the old Grammar Schools are from Foster Watson.

Acknowledgments

An abbreviated version of this article given as a talk to the Shakespeare-Oxford Society annual conference at White Plains New York in October 2008. Several people offered useful suggestions, corrections and help: Frank Davis, John Hamill, Stephanie Hughes, Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison, Earl Showerman, John Shahan, Richard Whalen, Ramon Jiménez, Charmaine Smiklo and Michael Egan. A shorter version titled “Shakespeare, Oxford and the Grammar School Question” appeared in The Oxfordian vol. 11, 2009.

References

Anderson, Mark, 2005. “Shakespeare” By Another Name. New York: Gotham Books/Penguin USA.

Baldwin, T. W., 1943. William Shakespeare’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. .

___________, 1944. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. .

Brown, J. Howard, 1933. Elizabethan Schooldays: An Account of the English Grammar Schools in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Byrne, Muriel St. Clair, 1950. Elizabethan Life in Town and Country. London: Methuen.

Cressy, David, 1975. Education in Tudor and Stuart England. (Documents of Modern History) London: Edwin Arnold.

____________,1980. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Cunningham, Sean, 2007. Henry VII. New York: Routledge. Dugan, Sally and David, 2000. The Day the World Took Off: The Roots of the Industrial Revolution. London: Channel 4 Books (Macmillan).

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Fox, Robin,1994. “The Golden Bough and the descent into Anthropology.” In The Challenge of Anthropology. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

_________, 2000. The Passionate Mind. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

_________, 2011. “Incest and In-Laws: Tribal Norms and Civilized Narratives.” In The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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______________________, 2006. “Oxford’s Childhood: What we know and what we don’t.” The Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter, Vol. 42: No 1 (Winter) 2006.

______________________, 2006. “Oxford’s Childhood Part II: The first four years with Smith.” The Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter. Vol. 42: No. 3 (Fall)

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Merton, Robert K. 1970 (1938). Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-century England. New York: Howard Fertig.

Nelson, Alan H., 2001. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward De Vere. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Pearson, Daphne, 2005. Edward de Vere: The Crisis and Consequences of Wardship. London: Ashgate.

Price, Diana, 2001. Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. Westport CT: Greenwood Press.

Riggs, David, 2004. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt. .

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Whalen, Richard, 2004. “Shakespeare’s Audience: A reassessment of the Stratfordian View.” The Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter, Vol. 40, No. 3. Fall. .