As there was a free Grammar School at Stratford, it is natural to suppose that William was educated there from his seventh or eighth to his thirteenth year. If so, he would learn Latin grammar, and read more or less in the popular classics, including, "old Mantuan"—not Virgil, but a writer of the Italian Renaissance. Supposing Shakespeare to have left school at thirteen, he was at the age of Bacon when he went up to Cambridge. Books have been written about the learning or want of learning of Shakespeare. In all probability he could make out most of the meaning of a Roman writer of comedies, like Plautus, or of a philosopher like Seneca. But his use of English translations, whenever he could get them, does not look as if he read Latin with ease: he could ask a friend or pay a poor scholar to help him when he had no translations; and to Ben Jonson his Latin seemed "small," because Ben had so much scholarship, and was so proud of it. All general information Shakespeare acquired as easily as he drew breath. Of schoolmasters, judging from allusions in the plays, he entertained the same opinion as Sir Walter Scott. The classics are most in view in his early plays, in some of which he worked over an earlier manuscript by a more scholarly hand. Moreover classical allusions, mythological and historical, lay loose on the surface of all contemporary literature; and abounded in the conversation of the wits.[4] No man ever cared less for historical accuracy and correct "local colour" than Shakespeare: he piled up anachronisms, making Aristotle live before the Trojan war.
When not yet 19 years of age, at the close of 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who had the same dowry, in money (£6. 13s. 4d.) as his mother. She was seven or eight years older than he: their first child was born at the end of May, 1583, and the circumstances did not promise domestic happiness. Twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith, were born in 1585, and whether Shakespeare did, or did not get into trouble for poaching on the lands of Lucy of Charlecote (against whom his heraldic ridicule, in "Merry Wives," Act I, Scene I, indicates a grudge), it was time for him to seek his fortune. Perhaps he made ventures near home (Aubrey, who knew an old actor that had traditions, says he was a schoolmaster), but by 1587 he was probably "hanging loose on the town" in London. Here he had a fellow townsman, Field, who later printed his "Venus," and his "Lucrece". The story that Shakespeare held the horses of playgoers outside the doors of a theatre comes late into literary anecdote.
By 1594 (perhaps by 1592) Shakespeare was a member of the Company of Actors known successively as "Leicester's," "Derby's" (died 1592) "Hunsdon's" (Carey) and, at the accession of James VI and I (1603) "The King's". With him were the great Richard Burbage, John Heminge, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips. By this Company all his plays were first acted. By 1592 they used the Rose Theatre, and others, and in 1599 the Globe. There is no proof that Shakespeare ever played in Scotland (he could not pronounce Dunsinane, and accentuated the final syllable) or abroad.
From the moment of his departure from Stratford nothing is certainly known of Shakespeare, till the dying Greene apparently alludes to him in "A groat's worth of wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592). Adjuring his comrades (Nash, Peele, and Marlowe?), to forswear sack and the stage, Greene seems to remind them of a hardship in their professional position: the rewriting of plays, once sold, by other hands. A new hand might alter it for the owners, the hand might be that of an actor, one of the "puppets," says Greene, "that speak from our mouths.... There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 'Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute 'Johannes factotum'" (jack-of-all-work) "is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.... It is a pity men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes."
If, as has been suggested (there is no certainty), a piece called "Henry VI" (part I), played by Shakespeare's company in March, 1592, was an older drama "bombasted" by Shakespeare, and if his conduct was one cause of Greene's wrath, we can only regret that Shakespeare set his hand to a work that rejoiced English patriots. The author or authors represent Jeanne d'Arc in two totally different characters, now as a patriot, equally brave, self-sacrificing, and eloquent; now as a loose woman who denies her father, and asserts her pregnancy by one or other of several lovers. History is strangely treated, and the materials must have been taken from Anglo-Burgundian scandals, and from a curious French prose chronicle romance, obviously done into prose out of verse, the "Chronique de Lorraine". This appears to have been the source of the scenes in which Jeanne fights at Rouen, many years after her martyrdom in 1431.
Shakespeare may have "written in" the scenes where Jeanne acts and speaks like herself; the others (let us hope so!) may be by a baser hand. The second and third parts of "Henry VI," were later much altered, probably by Shakespeare; the scenes with Jack Cade are entirely in his manner.
As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable to distinguish, in Shakespeare's earlier works, between what is his own and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a collaborator. The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best passages to Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is not so good.
The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. But we can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love's Labour's Lost" a very early example of the poet's play-writing. He has not mastered blank verse: the sense usually ends with the end of each line; much of the play is written in rhymed verse of various metres: prose is comparatively little used. Some of the personages, as Biron and Longueville, are of the contemporary Court of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to contemplate seclusion from female society! The play, of which the plot seems to be Shakespeare's own,[5] is full of promise of good things to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jaquenetta into Touchstone and Audrey; the ladies are predecessors of the poet's many ladies, as Beatrice and Rosalind, who are merry when in love. We have the stock figure of the pedant schoolmaster in Holofernes, of the fantastic talker in Armado, and the songs, "On a day, Alack the day," and "When daisies pied and violets blue," prelude to all the enchantments of Shakespeare's lyrics. The play was revised and worked over in 1598 (?).
"Titus Andronicus" (certainly extant in 1594) is the play which Burns and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to; it is as full of horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners of war. Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of Elizabeth, and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient Athenian and other Greek legendary histories. But neither these things nor the over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in Shakespeare's mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed at as the work of "Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (published in 1678) says that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long ago Hallam remarked that criticism might come to be as dubious as to Shakespeare's precise share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795) she has been uncertain about Homer's part in his epics. It is clear and certain that plays, when Shakespeare came to the town, were often altered and added to by others than the original authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598, assigned to Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first collected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been the last and, as the most popular, the titular bearbeiter, or worker-over of the drama.
"Richard III" could scarcely be made to feed more full of horrors on the stage than that prince actually did, as reported by Holinshed, and the play, if inflated, is less so than Marlowe's "Tamburlaine". Marlowe's "Edward II," again, had its influence on "Richard II," a perilous play to be concerned with, from the scene of deposing the king, under the irritable Elizabeth. Acted by order of the Essex conspirators, in 1601, it brought Shakespeare's company under the momentary displeasure of the Queen.