“The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.”
How unwillingly we do not fully comprehend until we look more closely into the schooling of those days. It was a twelve-hour day, begun extremely early in the morning, and continued through the weary hours with some exercise of the rod.
We know exactly who were the masters of the Grammar School in the years 1571 to 1580, when Shakespeare received his education here, in common with the other children of the town. They were Walter Roche, who was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and afterwards rector of Clifford Chambers; succeeded in 1572 by Thomas Hunt, afterwards curate-in-charge at Luddington; and in 1577 by Thomas Jenkins, of St. John’s College, Oxford. These may have been pedants, but they were scholars, and qualified to impart an excellent education. They were in fact men distinctly above the average of the schoolmasters of that age, and live for all time in the characters of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives of Windsor; the title “Sir,” being one, not of knighthood, but of courtesy, given to a clergyman. Shakespeare’s allusions to schools, masters and scholars, and his Latin conversations in the plays, modelled on the school methods then in vogue, are much more numerous and illuminative than generally supposed. We find, indeed, an especially intimate touch with Shakespeare’s schooldays in the description of Malvolio in Twelfth Night as “like a pedant that keeps school i’ the church”; a remark whose significance is not evident until we read that during Shakespeare’s own schooldays the buildings were extensively repaired and that for a time the master and pupils were housed in the Guild Chapel.
The Latin Schoolroom has an outside staircase built in recent years to replace the original, abolished in 1841. The half-timbered house standing in the courtyard was formerly the schoolmaster’s residence; it is now, with the need for accommodating the natural increase of scholars, used for additional class-rooms.
Shakespeare, retiring early from his interests in London and the playhouses, and coming home to Stratford a wealthy man, hoping to live many years in the enjoyment of his fortune, settled in the old mansion he had bought, adjoining the scene of his own schooldays. He must have looked with a kindly eye and with much satisfaction from the windows of New Place, upon the schoolboys coming and going along the street, as he himself had done. Not every one can be so fortunate. Perhaps the reigning schoolmaster of the time even held up the shining example of Mr. William Shakespeare, “who was a schoolboy here, like you, my boys,” to his classes, and carefully omitting the factors of chance and opportunity, promised them as great success if they did but mind their books. Perhaps, on the other hand—for these were already puritan times—their distinguished neighbour was an awful example: author of those shocking exhibitions called stage-plays, at this time forbidden in the town, under penalties, and an actor, “such as those rogues whom we but the other day sent packing from our streets. Beware, my lads, lest you become wealthy after the fashion of Mr. Shakespeare. ‘What profiteth it a man, if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”
Shakespeare, although he had become a personage of great consideration, with a fine residence, many times removed from his father’s humble house in Henley Street, had not changed into a more salubrious neighbourhood. The Stratford of his day and for long after was a dirty and insanitary place, according to our notions, but the townsfolk did not seem to be troubled by these conditions, and it never occurred to them that the plagues and fevers that carried off many of their fellows to Heaven—or whatever their destination—untimely were caused by the dirt and the vile odours of the place. Stratford of course, was not singular in this, and had its counterpart in most other towns and villages of that age. The town council, however, drew the line at the burgesses keeping pigs in part of the houses, or allowing them to wander in the streets; and enacted a fine of fourpence for every strayed porker. But the townsfolk regarded the authority’s dislike of pigs as a curious eccentricity, and the swine had their styes and roamed the streets exactly as before. The biggest of the six municipal muckhills that raised their majestic crests in the streets all the year round was situated in Chapel Lane, opposite Shakespeare’s door, but there is no record of his having objected to it. It was this, however, and the deplorable condition of Chapel Lane in general, then notoriously the dirtiest thoroughfare in the town, which probably caused the poet’s death; for the opinion now generally held is that he died of typhoid fever.
Down Chapel Lane then ran an open gutter: a wide and dirty ditch some four or five feet across, choked with mud. All the filth of this part of the town ran into it and discharged into the river.