Страница 8 из 39
Discipline was probably strict. A standard part of a teacher’s training, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, was how to give a flogging. Yet compared with many private or boarding schools Stratford ’s grammar provided a cushioned existence. Boys at Westminster School in London had to sleep in a windowless grain storeroom, bereft of heat, and endure icy washes, meager food, and frequent whippings. (But then, these were conditions not unknown to many twentieth-century English schoolboys.) Their school day began at dawn as well but also incorporated an additional hour of lessons in the evening and private studies that kept some boys up late into the night.
Far from having “small Latin and less Greek,” as Ben Jonson famously charged, Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar-school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing, and reciting Latin, often in the most mind-numbingly repetitious ma
Formal education stopped for Shakespeare probably when he was about fifteen. What became of him immediately after that is unknown-though many legends have rushed in to fill the vacuum. A particularly durable one is that he was caught poaching deer from the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and prudently elected to leave town in a hurry. The story and its attendant details are often repeated as fact even now. Roy Strong, in the scholarly Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, states that Shakespeare left Stratford in 1585 “to avoid prosecution for poaching at Charlecote” and that he was to be found in London the following year. In fact, we don’t know when he left Stratford or arrived in London or whether he ever poached so much as an egg. It is, in any case, unlikely that he poached deer from Charlecote, as it didn’t have a deer park until the following century.
The only certainty we possess for this early period of Shakespeare’s adulthood is that in late November 1582, a clerk at Worcester recorded that William Shakespeare had applied for a license to marry. The bride, according to the ledger, was not A
In fact A
The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it A
What makes this slightly puzzling is that it was not unusual for a bride to be pregnant on her wedding day. Up to 40 percent of brides were in that state, according to one calculation, so why the extravagant haste here is a matter that can only be guessed at. It was unusual, however, for a young man to be married at eighteen, as Shakespeare was. Men tended to marry in their mid-to late twenties, women a little sooner. But these figures were extremely variable. Christopher Marlowe had a sister who married at twelve (and died at thirteen in childbirth). Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.
We know precious little about Shakespeare’s wife and nothing at all about her temperament, intelligence, religious views, or other personal qualities. We are not even sure that A
We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare-Susa
So, in any case, we have the position of a William Shakespeare who was poor, at the head of a growing family, and not yet twenty-one-not the most promising of situations for a young man with ambitions. Yet somehow from these most unpropitious circumstances he became a notable success in a competitive and challenging profession in a distant city in seemingly no time at all. How he did it is a pere