William grew up in the family home on Henley Street. We do not know the exact details of his schooling, but we can draw some logical conclusions. The town's prominent citizens, including John Shakespeare, financially supported the local guild school, shown here. The sons of the men who paid for the school's operation would undoubtedly attend classes there. In addition, Shakespeare's earliest plays show the influence of works of Latin literature he would have read in school in Stratford.

Boys began their formal schooling at five or six years of age, learning the alphabet from this educational aid called a hornbook. (Girls were educated at home, if at all.) Because education was connected with religion at that time, the young boys were exposed frequently to the Geneva Bible. (The familiar King James Version would not be translated for another 50 years.) They also heard the official Church of England Book of Common Prayer every Sunday in church. (You could be fined if you failed to attend church services.) References to and echoes of Shakespeare's earliest reading can be found in his plays.

As soon as they could read the boys were introduced to the real curriculum of the school, the study of Latin. Like so many other activities in the Renaissance, education was connected to social class. When most people were illiterate, as John Shakespeare apparently was, the ability to read and write was a social advantage. (We'll see this tension between the literate and illiterate in several of the plays we study.) To be truly superior, however, you needed to be fluent in Latin, the language of the Romans who were the object of reverence in the Renaissance. Whether it was history, literature or natural science, students in English schools learned what had been written in Latin by Roman writers. As a consequence they were more likely to know more about Roman history than the history of their own country, to be more familiar with the literature of Rome than the literature of England. You went to school to learn your Latin grammar in order to read and translate works written 1500 years earlier. Boys went to school six days a week and were taught by men from the nearby university at Oxford.

One of the ways in which young boys were taught the basic grammar and vocabulary of Latin was to give them plays written by Roman playwrights such as Seneca and Plautus. Youngsters were then assigned a role, and they had to read their characters' dialogue aloud before translating into English. In the process of learning Latin English schoolboys absorbed the dramatic techniques and themes of the Roman theater. Those so educated became a ready-made audience for the English professional theater, which was just beginning as Shakespeare went to school in Stratford.