He was lucky, in this view, to have escaped the clutches of the educational system.
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. It also fits the democratic image of a Shakespeare just like the rest of us only more so. The upper chamber was the Town Council meeting room. The original schoolroom was on the ground floor. In the charming words of Milton’s sonnet, 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.’ Stratford Grammar School (re-founded 1553). At one extreme, those who take literally Ben Jonson’s words from his enigmatic eulogy in the First Folio (1623) 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. There is no record of his having attended either school or university. There has been a checkered history of attitudes to William Shakespeare of Stratford’s possible education. Originally published in THE OXFORDIAN, Volume XI 2008, pages 113–136 Brief Chronicles & Other Past Journals Expand.
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