Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/277



Vol. 1

PREVAILING misconception of the social condition of the parents of William Shakespeare, the influences of his childhood, his opportunities of education, his youthful environmnt and the surroundings of his manhood are, in a great measure, responsible for the doubts that are so frequently expressed of the possibility of such a man having the ability or knowledge to conceive, develop, and write the plays and poems ascribed to his name. The popular error being that Shakespeare, having been born in such humble circumstances, had little or no education, and was of such a wild and dissipated character that the proposition was absurd and untenable.

John Shakespeare, the father of William, was not a peasant, but a sturdy yeoman, and belonged to that great middle class of England which has always been, and still is, the very backbone of the British Empire, and from whose loins sprang our own great American Republic of today. He was a man of substantial means at the time of the birth of his eldest son (William); one of the chamberlains of the borough of Stratford, 1564, and shortly afterwards was raised to the dignity of an alderman and thereafter was entitled to the honorable prefix of "Mr." Mary, his wife, was the daughter of a wealthy Warwickshire farmer, named Arden, whose family were afterwards ennobled. It was from such sturdy stock that William Shakespeare came.

It is but fair to assume that, under these conditions, the parents of Shakespeare were not without some little education and refinement, and, with the natural maternal pride that a mother takes in her first-born son (William was her third child), that he received his first knowledge at his mother's knee, and from the Holy Scriptures, a copy of which was doubtless to be found in almost every homestead in the country. If we could have looked, therefore, through the diamond-paned windows of the old gabled house in Henley street, Stratford, on some summer evening, after the shadows, had fallen we might have seen a little fellow attired for bed, kneeling at the feet of his gentle mother, with his hands uplifted, repeating after her, with his infant lips, the Lord's Prayer, and imbibing the first knowledge of the divine principles of the Christian faith, which he so frequently and beautifully expresses throughout his plays.

At the age of seven years Shakespeare entered the village grammar school of Stratford, of which Walter Roche, a man of considerable learning, was then master, and attended it for seven years. We have no absolute knowledge of the curriculum of study at that school, but the