IT CHAPTER II. THE EDUCATION OF WILLIAM SHAKSPERE. Touchstone. Art thou learned? William. No, sir. Touchstone. Then learn this of me: to have is to have. As You Like It, v, i. T must not be forgotten that the world of three hundred years ago was a very different world from that of to-day. A young man, at the present time, can receive in the backwoods of the United States, or Canada, or in the towns of Australia, an education which Cambridge and Oxford could not have afforded to the noblemen of England in the sixteenth century. That tremendous educator, the daily press, had then no existence. Now it comes to almost every door, bringing not only the news of the whole world, but an abstract of the entire literary and scientific knowledge of the age. I. ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Three hundred years ago the English-speaking population of the world was confined almost altogether to the island of Great Britain, and the refinement and culture of the island scarcely extended beyond a few towns and the universities. London was the great center, not only of politics, but of literature and courtly manners. The agricultural population and the yeomanry of the smaller towns were steeped to the lips in ignorance, rude and barbarous in their manners, and brutal in their modes of life. They did not even speak the same language. Goadby tells us that, when the militia met from the different counties to organize resistance to the invasion of the Spaniards, It was hard to catch the words of command, so pronounced were the different dialects.' Simpson says: If cattle-driving was to be interpreted as levying war, all England at harvest tide was in a state of warfare. The disputes about tithes and boundaries were 1 Goadby, England of Shak., p.83. then usually settled by bands of armed men, and the records of the Star-Chamber swarm with such cases. 1 The cots or dwellings of the humble classes in Shakspere's time were, as the haughty Spaniard wrote, in the reign of Elizabeth's sister, built "of sticks and dirt.” "People," says Richard Grant White, "corresponding in position to those whose means and tastes would now insure them as much comfort in their homes as a king has in his palace, and even simple elegance beside, then lived in houses which in their best estate would seem at the present day rude, cheerless and confined, to any man not bred in poverty."' II. STRATFORD IN THE TIME OF SHAKSPERE. The lives of the people were coarse, barren and filthy. In the absence of all winter roots and herbs, beyond a few onions, a diet of salted provisions, extending over so long a period, would be sure to engender disease; . . . and, as a matter of fact, scurvy and leprosy, the invariable results of an unwholesome diet, were endemic, the latter malignant and infectious in medieval England. The virulence of these diseases, due in the first instance to unwholesome food, was aggravated by the inconceivably filthy habits of the people. Richard Grant White says: Stratford then contained about fifteen hundred inhabitants, who dwelt chiefly in thatched cottages, which straggled over the ground, too near together for rural beauty, too far apart to seem snug and neighborly; and scattered through the gardens and orchards around the best of these were neglected stables, cow-yards and sheep-cotes. Many of the meaner houses were without chimneys or glazed windows. The streets were cumbered with logs and blocks, and foul with offal, mud, muck-heaps and reeking stable refuse, the accumulation of which the town ordinances and the infliction of fines could not prevent even before the doors of the better sort of people. The very first we hear of John Shakespeare himself, in 1552, is that he and a certain Humphrey Reynolds and Adrian Quiney "fecerunt sterquinarium," in the quarter called Henley Street, against the order of the court; for which dirty piece of business they were "in_misericordia," as they well deserved. But the next year John Shakespeare and Adrian Quiney repeated the unsavory offense, and this time in company with the bailiff himself. Halliwell-Phillipps says: The sanitary condition of the thoroughfares of Stratford-on-Avon was, to our present notions, simply terrible. Under-surface drainage of every kind was then an unknown art in the district. There was a far greater amount of moisture in the land than would now be thought possible, and streamlets of water-power suffi School of Shak., vol. i, p. 60. Work and Wages, Thorold Rogers, p. 96. • Life and Genius of Shak., p. 21. cient for the operation of corn-mills meandered through the town. This general humidity intensified the evils arising from the want of scavengers, or other effect. ive appliances for the preservation of cleanliness. House-slops were recklessly thrown into ill-kept channels that lined the sides of unmetaled roads; pigs and geese too often reveled in the puddles and ruts, while here and there were small middens, ever in the course of accumulation, the receptacles of offal and of every species of nastiness. A regulation for the removal of these collections to certain specified localities, interspersed through the borough and known as common dung-hills, appears to have been the extent of the interference that the authorities ventured or cared to exercise in such matters. Sometimes when the nuisance was thought to be sufficiently flagrant, they made a raid on those inhabitants who had suffered their refuse to accumulate largely in the highways. On one of these occasions, in April, 1552, John Shakespeare was fined the sum of twelve pence for having amassed what was no doubt a conspicuous sterquinarium before his house in Henley Street, and under these unsavory circumstances does the history of the poet's father commence in the records of England. It is sad to be compelled to admit that there was little excuse for his negligencè, one of the public stores of filth being within a stone's throw of his residence.1 The people of Stratford were densely ignorant. At the time of Shakspere's birth, only six aldermen of the town, out of nineteen, could write their names; and of the thirteen who could not read or write, Shakspere's father, John Shakspere, was one. Knight says: We were reluctant to yield our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name in this document. But subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used two marks-one something like an open pair of compasses, the other the common cross.? III. SHAKSPERE'S FAMILY TOTALLY UNEDUCATED. Shakspere's whole family were illiterate. He was the first of his race we know of who was able to read and write. His father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and cousins-all signed their names, on the few occasions when they were obliged to sign them, with crosses. His daughter Judith could not read or write. The whole population around him were in the same condition. The highest authority upon these questions says: Exclusive of Bibles, church services, psalters and educational manuals, there were certainly not more than two or three dozen books, if so many, in the whole town. The copy of the black-letter English History, so often depicted as well thumbed by Shakespeare, in his father's parlor, never existed out of the imagination.' 1 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 18. * Knight's Shak. Biography, p. 17. 'Halliwell-Phillipps, Life of Shak., p. 42. Goadby says: The common people were densely ignorant. They had to pick up their mother tongue as best they could. The first English grammar was not published until 1586. [This was after Shakspere had finished his education.] It is evident that much schooling was impossible, for the necessary books did not exist. The horn-book for teaching the alphabet would almost exhaust the resources of any common day schools that might exist in the towns and villages. LITTLE IF ANY ENGLISH WAS TAUGHT EVEN IN THE LOWER CLASSES OF THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.' Prof. Thorold Rogers says: Sometimes perhaps, in the days after the Reformation, a more than ordinarily opulent ecclesiastic, having no family ties, would train up some clever rustic child, teach him and help him on to the university. But, as a rule, since that event, there was no educated person in the parish beyond the parson, and he had the anxieties of a narrow fortune and a numerous family." The Rev. John Shaw, who was temporary chaplain in a village in Lancashire in 1644, tells of an old man of sixty years of age, whose whole knowledge of Jesus Christ had been derived from a miracle play. "Oh, sir,' said he, 'I think I heard of that man you speak of once in a play at Kendall called Corpus Christi Play where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.'' IV. THE UNIVERSITIES OF THAT DAY. Even the universities were not such schools as the name would to-day imply. The state of education was almost as unsettled as that of religion. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford were thronged with poor scholars, and eminent professors taught in the schools and colleges. But the Reformation had made sad havoc with their buildings and libraries, and the spirit of amusement had affected their studies.' The students turned much more readily to dissipation than to literature. In the year 1570, the scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge, consumed 2,250 barrels of beer!' The knowledge of Greek had sensibly declined, but Latin was still cultivated with considerable success. The number of scholars of the university fit for schoolmasters was small. "Whereas they make one scholar they marre ten," averred Peacham, who describes one specimen as whipping his boys on a cold morning “for no other purpose than to get himself a heate." The country swarmed to such an extent with scholars of the universities, who made a living as beggars, that Parliament had to interfere against the nuisance. By the act of 14th Elizabeth, "all 1 Goadby, England of Shak., p. 101. Rogers, Work and Wages, p. 85. Goadby, England, p. 97. • Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 97. scholars of the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of said universities," are declared "vagabonds," and punishable as such. V. "A BOOKLESS NEIGHBORHOOD." If this was the condition of the two great "twins of learning," sole centers of light in the darkness of a barbarous age, we can readily conceive what must have been the means of public education in the dirty little hamlet of Stratford, with its fifteen hundred untaught souls, its two hundred and fifty householders, and its illiterate officials. It was, as Halliwell-Phillipps has called it, “a bookless neighborhood." We have the inventory of the personal property of Robert Arden, Shakspere's mother's father, and the inventory of the personal property of Agnes Arden, his widow, and the will of the same Agnes Arden, and any number of other wills, but in them all, in the midst of a plentiful array of "oxenne," "kyne," "sheepe," "pigges," "basons," "chafyng dyches," "toweles and dyepers," "shettes," "frying panes," "gredyerenes," "barrelles," "hansaws," "knedyng troghs," "poringers," "sawcers," "pott-hookes," and "linkes," we do not find reference to a single book, not even to a family Bible or a prayer-book. Everything speaks of a rude, coarse and unintellectual people. Here is an extract from the will of Agnes Arden, Shakspere's grandmother: I geve to the said Jhon Hill my best platter of the best sort, and my best platter of the second sorte, and j poringer, one sawcer and one best candlesticke. And I also give to the said Jhon one paire of sheetes. I give to the said Jhon my second pot, my best pan, and one cow with the white rump. ... "One John Shakspeare, of Budbrook, near Warwick, considered it a sufficient mark of respect to his father-in-law to leave him 'his best boots.'" VI. A GROSS IMPROBABILITY. It would indeed be a miracle if out of this vulgar, dirty, illiterate family came the greatest genius, the profoundest thinker, tbroadest scholar that has adorned the annals of the human race. It is possible. It is scarcely probable. 1 Outlines Life of Shak., p. 183. |