THE STRATFORD GRAMMAR SCHOOL
The Stratford Grammar School, as we have already seen (page 38 above), was an ancient institution in Shakespeare's day, having been originally founded in the first half of the 15th century by the Guild, and, after the dissolution of that body, created by royal charter, in June, 1553, "The King's New School of Stratford-upon-Avon." The charter describes it as "a certain free grammar school, to consist of one master and teacher, hereafter for ever to endure." The master was to be appointed by the Earl of Warwick, and was to receive twenty pounds a year from the income of certain lands given by the King for that purpose. A part of the expenses of the school is to this day paid from the same royal endowment.
The school-house stood, as it still does, close beside the Guild Chapel, the school-rooms on the second story being originally reached by an outside staircase, roofed with tile, which was demolished about fifty years ago. The building was old and out of repair in Shakespeare's boyhood. In 1568 it was partially renovated, and while the work was going on the school was transferred to the adjoining chapel, as it may have been under similar circumstances on more than one former occasion. This probably suggested Shakespeare's comparison of Malvolio to "a pedant that keeps a school i' the church" (Twelfth Night, iii. 2. 80). In 1595 the holding of school in church or chapel was forbidden by statute.
THE SCHOOL-ROOM AS IT WAS
The training in an English free day-school in the time of Elizabeth depended much on the attainments of the master, and these varied greatly, bad teachers being the rule and good ones the exception. "It is a general plague and complaint of the whole land," writes Henry Peacham in the 17th century, "for, for one discreet and able teacher, you shall find twenty ignorant and careless; who (among so many fertile and delicate wits as England affordeth), whereas they make one scholar, they mar ten." Roger Ascham, some years earlier, had written in the same strain. In many towns the office of schoolmaster was conferred on "an ancient citizen of no great learning." Sometimes a quack conjuring doctor had the position, like Pinch in the Comedy of Errors (v. 1. 237), whom Antipholus of Ephesus describes thus:—
"Along with them
They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac'd villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A living dead man. This pernicious slave,
Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer;
And, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,
And with no face, as 't were, out-facing me.
Cries out, I was possess'd."
Pinch is not called a schoolmaster in the text of the play, but in the stage-direction of the earliest edition (1623) he is described, on his entrance, as "a schoole-master call'd Pinch."
In old times the village pedagogue often had the reputation of being a conjurer; that is, of one who could exorcise evil spirits—perhaps because he was the one man in the village, except the priest, who could speak Latin, the only language supposed to be "understanded of devils."
A certain master of St. Alban's School in the middle of the 16th century declared that "by no entreaty would he teach any scholar he had, further than his father had learned before them," arguing that, if educated beyond that point, they would "prove saucy rogues and control their fathers."
The masters of the Stratford school at the time when Shakespeare probably attended it were university men of at least fair scholarship and ability, as we infer from the fact that they rapidly gained promotion in the church. Thomas Hunt, who was master during the most important years of William's school course, became vicar of the neighboring village of Luddington. "In the pedantic Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare has carefully portrayed the best type of the rural schoolmaster, as in Pinch he has portrayed the worst, and the freshness and fulness of detail imparted to the former portrait may easily lead to the conclusion that its author was drawing upon his own experience." We need not suppose that Holofernes is the exact counterpart of Master Hunt, but the latter was probably, like the former, a thorough scholar.