How did his school day go? Do we have any details?
He lived close by the school - about a quarter of a mile away. The bell started ringing at a quarter to six every morning in summer, an hour later in winter. On the stroke of six the pupil was supposed to be in class. So Will would rise and say his prayers and wash his morning face until it shone and sometimes comb his hair and greet his parents and always collect his books and then shoulder his satchel before creeping like a snail unwillingly down Henley Street and Chapel Street to the corner of Chapel Lane where the school was situated just behind the Guild Chapel. There were thirty desks in the room beneath the long rafters. Everyone chanted 'Good morning, sir' to the master, then lessons would begin with choral singing. (Will's favourite, as I have reason to know, was the 24th Psalm, especially verses 7 to 10.) This morning session lasted until eleven. Will would then trot home to help his mother with the housework. You can suppose from what he has to say about schools and schoolboys in his plays that he always went out a good bit faster than he came in. If he was lucky then his father might be in a jovial mood and allow him to draw ale from the cask and pour it into a pitcher and say grace for the family before they all sat down to dinner at noon - this was a privilege of being the eldest son. After dinner he would go back to school at one o'clock, and stay there until five, with just fifteen minutes' recreation. Thursdays and Saturdays, he had half-days, school finishing at noon. Sundays there was no school. Then he went to church.
Were the boys flogged?
Soundly, sir, when they were obstinate and ungovernable. Moral advice would also be given to complete their punishment. 'God has sanctified the rod,' as Seager says in his The Schoole of Vertue and the Book of Good Nourture for Children, the last word on the subject, published when William Shakespeare was just thirteen. 'Thus it must be used as the instrument of God.' I knew myself a schoolmaster who in winter would ordinarily on a cold morning whip his boys over, for no other purpose than to get himself a heat.
When are you going to tell us some more about the Misses Muchmore?
Fie, madam! Shame upon you! Do you want your pretty bottom smacked, or what?
Chapter Thirty-One About Pompey Bum + Pickleherring's Shakespeare Test
I have this garret above a whorehouse which I rent. My landlord is the pie-maker, Pompey Bum. Some of his pies - the sweetest, of course - are tarts. I like cold custard ones, myself, with nutmeg sprinkled on them.
I have this bed, which is not entirely straw. I have this to sit in that was once a chair. I have this worn-out body, and this crust to eat, of which the rats have eaten only part.
Last week, as I recall, one of the girls from below gave me a fresh-laid speckled hen's egg to boil. Such treasures in heaven! No rage, no remorse, no despair. I have this soul in pawn, and this delirious heart.
Now, not for the first time, the plague has passed me by. Pickleherring has been spared to complete his great work. I live on just to write my Life of Shakespeare.
It is a lack of teeth compels me to eat only eggs, fish, hash, and other spoon-meats. I eat when I am hungry, at any hour of the day or night. I drink when I am thirsty, but only water. And I go to bed or arise just as I feel inclined, without any reference to a clock.
It is years now since I gathered my precious data. I drank too much and I slept too little in those days. Then I would rather have broken my neck rashing downstairs than miss getting a story about Mr Shakespeare from a departing guest. The rush remains - but only in my pen. Now I commit my stories all helter-skelter to the page. Haste and muddle were always my middle names. I write, madam, tumultuarily, as these things come into my head, or as I go fishing memories out of one of my boxes. All may easily be reduced into order at your leisure, sir, by numbering my subjects with red ink, according to time and place, et cetera. Your cochineal paste is to be recommended for the office.
I write to prove that I am still alive, and that so is Mr Shakespeare. It is much to be deplored that people nowadays find it convenient to look down their enlightened noses at him. I know the modern taste calls him vulgar and crabbed, an uncouth spirit. I say his day was good, and that it will surely come again when the French fashions that swept into England with King Charles II have gone out again.
I predict that one day Mr William Shakespeare and his works will be so popular and so revered that children will be required to study the subject in schools and universities. You find the notion crazy, sir? Preposterous, madam? Well, it is not important. Humour an old man's whim; his maggot, even. I cannot imagine, for the life of me, that Mr Shakespeare himself would ever have wanted any such fate. But certainly one day his plays will all be staged again, properly, in their entirety, and not in tidied-up and 'corrected' versions to suit a newfangled classicalism. And when they are it won't be with women in the cast!
Meanwhile, here, gentle reader, just for fun, and to eke out a box with nothing in it, is an Examination Paper which I have prepared for your testing:
PICKLEHERRING'S SHAKESPEARE TEST
(Advanced Students Only)
1. What happens in Hamlet? And why?
2. How many children had Lady Macbeth?
3. Who and/or what is Silvia? (Give examples.)
4. Are people murdered in tragedies or aren't they?
5. What was Puck's average speed when flying? And Ariel's? How do we know that Puck was probably the better flyer of the two?
6. Whose bawdy hand was on whose prick in Romeo and Juliet? (Discuss.)
7. In which play does William Shakespeare name me, and wish a plague upon me? In which other play does he also name me (twice) in the first three lines of Act II (well, almost), and then go on to prescribe the exact procedure that I am employing in the writing of this book?
8. What is the effect of the word DUCDAME?
9. Is this a duck or a rabbit?
10. Where is fancy bred?
Chapter Thirty-Two Did Shakespeare go to school at Polesworth?
I had a friend among the younger players who could never believe that Shakespeare was taught in Stratford. He insisted that the poet went as a boy to the old school attached to Polesworth Abbey, deep in the Forest of Arden.
I have found no actual evidence that would support this. All that is certain is that in 1571, John Shakespeare, as bailiff, entertained Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth at the Bear Inn in Bridge Street. Sir Henry was in Stratford to give judgement in an arbitration case. I have consulted the Corporation accounts, and they twice mention payments for his horse-hire.
A year later, according to my friend, John Shakespeare somehow persuaded Sir Henry to take Will into his household. There, in the rambling manor house at Polesworth, the lad served as a page. The place was quite a nest of singing birds. The poet Michael Drayton, one year older, was already a page there. Thomas Lodge (whose story Rosalynde provided Mr S with the plot for As You Like It) seems to have kept popping in and out. Ralph Holinshed lived in the parish, and might even have taught history at the school.
If you ask me, it is all just a bit too convenient. Especially when you add the detail that this Goodere was also friends with the father of Shakespeare's future patron, the Earl of Southampton. Of whom more anon, as my grandfather the bishop used to say.