He was fortunate in his school. Stratford had once had a College of Priests with its Collegiate Church, an honourable Guild of the Holy Cross, and a notable grammar school; but all had vanished before the exterminating Henry. John Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries had suffered through the suppression, and had grown up weak in English, lacking in Latin, and unable to write, for their sovereign’s sins. But the school had been restored by King Edward VI, and was in good working order by the time John’s eldest son was ready for it. The post of the master of the Stratford Grammar School was one of the plums of the profession, as he had twice the salary of the Master of Eton. We are sure from the Chamberlain’s accounts, that the best men to be had, graduates in a university, were selected by the town councillors. The grammar school was free to all the sons of burgesses, so that no consideration of expense could have kept back William Shakespeare from its advantages, even at the time of his father’s difficulties. He would meet there not only the boys of the town about his own age, but the sons of the neighbouring gentry. We know from several sources the books then in use for each form of a grammar school, and we may reckon what training would be offered young Shakespeare in classic literature to form his English style. A little better than the average, we should presume it to have been. Becon, some years before, had proclaimed Warwickshire to be the most intellectual of the English Counties, and there is some witness to show it still could hold its own.
He was fortunate in his seeming misfortunes. It was all very well to be born in the little town, with its sweet country surroundings, but Shakespeare would never have been the world-poet had he spent his life in Stratford. The place was not big enough for his expansion. But the cloth manufacturers of Stratford suffered heavily from the importation of foreign manufactured goods, and the great farmers and engrossers did what they could to kill its trade in wool. John Shakespeare lost heavily, he sold Snitterfield, probably meant as the portion of his younger children, he mortgaged and lost Asbies, destined by him as the inheritance and future living of his eldest son. And young Shakespeare was thus saved from being a little country farmer, and forced to go to seek his fortunes in London, where he developed into what was in him to be. In London was literary culture from books and men. In London also he was faced with difficulties. He had hoped for so many things; nothing happened to him which he expected or desired; no door was opened to him except that of the stage. Though he pitifully cries:
O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
That doth not better for my life provide
Than public means, which public manners breed;
yet that led him to the very line of life in which he was best fitted to excel, through which he became what he was.
He was fortunate even in his marriage. I know that an opposite view is generally accepted, but I do not believe it. The only reason suggested is that Anne Hathaway was seven years older than himself. Did any one ever meet a bold, masterful, well-grown lad of eighteen whose first love was not a woman older than himself? Many happy marriages have been made with this difference of age, and I do not think Shakespeare’s an exception. I believe she was a timid, delicate, fair-haired girl, type of the submissive wives he paints. There is reason to believe that he took his family with him to London as soon as he found a home. When fortune came he bought them the best house in Stratford, and came to dwell beside them, as soon as he could give up the acting part of his work. There he died among them, away from the world of business, envy, and of strife. There is nothing to warrant the blot on his good name and that of his wife so much insisted on by those who have not studied the question. Mr. J. S. Gray, in “Shakespeare’s Marriage,” is the only writer who has put it straight, and he speaks with authority.
There is nothing derogatory in the legacy of the second-best bed; it was evidently her own last request. She was sure of her widow’s third; she was sure of her daughters’ love and care, but she wanted the bed she had been accustomed to, before the grandeur at New Place came to her.
He was fortunate in the family she brought him, though unfortunately, his only son was a twin, apparently delicate like his mother, and he died young. For his sake Shakespeare called all boys sweet. His daughters lived a longer life, the elder is recorded as “witty above her sex,” because she was like her father, a devoted daughter, a loving wife, a public benefactor. She brought him for his son-in-law the physician Dr. John Hall, great not only in his own county, who first used anti-scorbutics. He must have been a congenial companion to his father-in-law. Then the little granddaughter came, who must have been his joy.
He was fortunate in his friends. London was then but a little city, after all; it could easily be crossed and compassed on foot; its inhabitants did not reach the sum total of 300,000. On arrival he would study London and Westminster, twin-cities, so great and so story-laden, the clear shining Thames, its haunted Bridge, its Tower, its Churches, and the Northern and Southern heights, where he could revel in Nature, as he did at home. He may have gone to London with high hopes, and many introductions. We do not know of those who mocked him, of those who gave him no direct help. We do not know what he aimed at, but we know he failed. Perhaps he hoped to be made a Yeoman of the Privy Chamber, like Roger Shakespeare and Robert Arden, a Royal Messenger like Thomas Shakespeare, a Royal Letter Carrier, like Edmund Spenser. Possibly he meant to volunteer his help against the Spaniard, but they did without him. Possibly his ambitions sank to a share in the grocery business of Sadler and Quiney at Bucklersbury. Long waiting at the doors of negligent patrons seems to have been his share. But through all he had one friend at least, during his period of toil and preparation. We know that he knew his townsman, Richard Field (his senior by three years), who had been at Stratford Grammar School, and entered life on the solid lines of an apprentice to Thomas Vautrollier, the great French printer, and became his son-in-law and successor. Doubtless Shakespeare went at first to reside with him; certainly he was much with him. His shop was the poet’s university, where he read for his degree, by the inclusions and exclusions of the bookshelves. The firm was licensed to keep foreign journeymen printers, and had many monopolies of classical works. From these alone did Shakespeare quote, and Field’s publications account for the most of his learning. There he was inspired by “Plutarch’s Lives Englished by North,” trained by “Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie,” in the canons of literature and a taste for blank verse. There he found books on music, philosophy, science, travels, medicine, language, and literature, which we know he read. It was Richard Field who printed and published Shakespeare’s two poems, the only works which we are sure he published and corrected himself. By this publication, the friend of his everyday life became associated with the friend of his higher dreams, who patronized, criticised, inspired, glorified Shakespeare, and helped to shape his genius. It is something to hear from his contemporary Webster, the praise of Shakespeare’s “right happy and copious industry.” For he must have been hard at work, in his early days in the metropolis to have been able to publish a poem by 1593, which put him at once among the highest group of contemporary poets over which Spenser reigned supreme. That took the sting out of the dying Greene’s scorn the year before concerning the upstart playwright who “thought he could bumbast out a blank verse as well as the best of us.” The young Earl of Southampton had supplied the one thing hitherto wanting in the culture of the Stratford stranger. He was the ideal man of rank, young, learned, refined, untrammelled, wealthy, impulsive, susceptible to genius, critical in judgement. Next year, ere he came of age, Shakespeare had written for him the “Rape of Lucrece,” and dedicated it to him as the “Lord of his Love.” Through the same time he was writing the sonnets, the witnesses of the thoughts, hopes, feelings, fears, joys, he had passed through with his special friend.