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 on which distraint could be levied (ib. ii. 238). On 6 Sept. 1586 John was deprived of his alderman's gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings.

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons. They were entitled to free tuition at the free grammar school of Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI. The eldest son, William, probably entered the school in 1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577. The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature. From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles’ and Lily's grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. The eclogues of the popular mediæval poet, Mantuanus, were often preferred to Virgil's for beginners. The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and those in Shakespeare's plays seem due to accident, and not to any study by Shakespeare while at school or elsewhere of the Athenian drama. With the Latin language and with many Latin poets of the school curriculum, on the other hand, Shakespeare openly acknowledged his acquaintance. In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ and Sir Hugh Evans in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ he placed phrases drawn directly from Lily's grammar, from the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles,’ and from ‘the good old Mantuan;’ Plautus was the source of his ‘Comedy of Errors,’ and the influence of Ovid, especially the ‘Metamorphoses,’ was apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic. In the Bodleian Library is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses’ (1502), and on the title is the signature ‘Wm. She.,’ which experts have declared—not quite conclusively—to be a genuine autograph of the poet (, Annals of the Bodleian, 1890, pp. 379 seq.). Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ‘Essay on Shakespeare's Learning’ (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations. But by no means all the books in French and Italian whence Shakespeare is positively known to have derived the plots of his dramas—Belleforest's ‘Histoires Tragiques’ and Cinthio's ‘Hecatommithi,’ for example—were accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in the Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature of Rome, France, and modern Italy. He had no title to rank as a classical scholar, and his lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the ‘small Latin and less Greek’ with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson. But Aubrey's report that ‘he understood Latin pretty well’ cannot be reasonably contested (cf., ‘What Shakespeare learnt at School’ in Shakespeare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq.).

His father's financial difficulties doubtless caused Shakespeare's removal from school at an unusually early age. Probably in 1577, when he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes. ‘I have been told heretofore,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade,’ which, according to the writer, was that of a butcher. It is possible that John's ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business. His son may have been formally apprenticed to him. An early Stratford tradition describes him as ‘a butcher's apprentice’. ‘When he kill'd a calf,’ Aubrey proceeds less convincingly, ‘he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father's anxieties. He married. His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years. Rowe states that she ‘was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.’

On 1 Sept. 1581 Richard Hathaway, ‘husbandman’ of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Stratford, made his will, which was proved on 9 July 1582, and is preserved in the prerogative court of Canterbury. His house and land, ‘two and a half virgates,’ had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous