WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A very Short Introduction.
W. Shakespeare: born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 26th 1546.
Schools provided rigorous education, primarily in oratory, rhetoric, and classical literatures,
comparable in some areas to that of university graduates in Classics of the present day. From an
early age the boys were required both to write and to speak in Latin.
Roman comedies which introduced him to the principles of dramatic craftmanship would have
been on the syllabus: one of them, Menaechmi, by Plautus, was to give him the plot for The
Comedy of Errors. Ovid’s great poem Metamorphoses which tell many myths and legends of
the ancient world, was clearly one of Shakespeare’s favorite books. An episode from its forms
the basis of his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis, of 1593, he alludes to or quits from it in
many plays, bringing it on stage both Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, and in the Tempest, one
of Prospero’s greatest speeches, the one beginning ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, and standing
pools’ (5.1.33 – 57), is virtually a translation of lines from it.
Shakespeare had probably left school when he was about 15, but he didn’t leave Stratford
immediately. We don’t know what he did for a living at first. He may have helped in his father’s
business. He may have helped in his father’s business. He may have been kept on at the school
as an ‘usher’ – an assistant master – to teach the younger boys: late in the 17th century the
gossipy diarist John Aubrey wrote that in his youth Shakespeare had been a ‘schoolmaster in the
country’, where ‘country’ may have referred to Stratford. 5
By this time Shakespeare must have been aware that, however strong the pull of family life, his
future lay away from Stratford in, the literary and theatrical world that centered on London.
Except a passing mention in a law case of 1587, there’s a gap in the record after the birth of the
twins until 1592. This period is often called ‘the lost years. Innumerable guesses have been
made about what he was doing. It has been suggested that he worked in a lawyer’s office, that
he became a soldier or a sailor, and so on. But he must have started his career as a man of the
