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is commanded by most college graduates today.” The “intense concentration on language” meant that “boys from the age of eight onwards spent around nine hours a day, six days a week, in all but seven weeks a year on literary exercises such as learning by rote, writing according to formulae, reproducing sententiae, imitating classical authors, and constructing arguments for and against set propositions” (Van Es 2013, p. 4). A boy could not fail to become good at the construction of arguments and have an armory of literary tropes and figures to draw upon when instructed to create compositions of their own. This emphasis on eloquence and rhetorical skills would stand many other playwrights in good stead. George Chapman, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson all relied on their “schoolboy training” and no wonder.

      William’s education was strikingly different to that of his parents. Neither John nor Mary could write, although both clearly functioned successfully in daily life and business, whether in the home or workshop. And yet, William’s parentage was not unusual for a professional playwright, indeed it was “entirely typical” (Van Es 2013, p. 2). The list of Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ fathers’ occupations provides a roster of artisan trades: Christopher Marlowe (shoemaker); Anthony Munday (stationer); John Webster (cartwright); Henry Chettle (dyer); Thomas Kyd (scrivener); Robert Greene (cordwainer or saddlemaker).

His schooling may have exposed a young Shakespeare to classical literature, but everyday Stratford town life exposed him to popular drama. Robust traditions of playing in provincial England ranged from the acting companies who performed under the protection of a member of the nobility, and took his name, through to informal local groups of actors, neighbors, or guilds gathering to make theater in domestic or communal spaces.² Much of this playing went on under the radar since the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds (and an even more draconian measure passed in 1598) stipulated that all traveling players had to be attached to a “baron of the realm or any other honourable person of greater degree.”³ The Queen’s Men, formed as the result of a Privy Council directive designed to take back control of the anarchic world of playing, were expected to entertain their patron, the queen, of course, but also spent much of the year touring. It was a relentless life on the road, with limited runs in each town: only three shows for the Queen’s Men, even less for other companies.⁴ But stars were born and occasionally fortunes made: the renowned comedian dancer Richard Tarlton left the magnificent sum of £700 at his death and had Sir Philip Sidney as godfather to his son. And when the players did come to town, civic leaders would get the best seats in the house, good news if you were the High Bailiff’s son, as William was.

      Until the late 1570s that is, when John Shakespeare stopped attending council meetings. William was in his early teens and would have lost his privileged entrance to the Guild Hall, although he, like everyone else, could still have joined the paying customers for the players’ shows in the town. John’s fortunes determined William’s and those fortunes were becoming dangerously troubled according to some. The crisis was precipitated for a whole range of reasons depending on which biographer you consult: “rash business practices, a general economic downturn in the Midlands, changes in the licensing and practice of wool merchants, an obdurate commitment to Catholicism that led to fines and harassment, and perhaps a drinking problem for good measure” (Tromly 2010, p. 246).

      However, the family’s financial crisis has been downgraded recently. Examining the year 1586, when John was expelled as alderman, Potter notes that most men did not really want to serve their community because corporation business was “expensive and time-consuming,” pointing out that none of John’s sons would contribute to local government (Potter 2012, pp. 46–47). Moreover, 1586 was not a good year for anyone, with “dearth” in Stratford and beyond bringing to an end a 20-year period of relative prosperity and, more problematically for John Shakespeare, the calling in of debts. John mortgaged his wife Mary’s inheritance to meet the short-term financial challenge, but this was standard practice in a volatile, debt-heavy system. It may well be that John Shakespeare’s financial problems have been exaggerated by posterity and, in the first instance, by the man himself in order to avoid his debtors (Fallow 2015).

It is a biographical stretch, therefore, to argue that young William was motivated by the desire to reverse his father’s and his family’s decline, but it is certain that John, as father, would have determined the course of his son’s life as a teenager. More than that, “in Elizabethan families the eldest son stands in a special relationship to the father as the primary inheritor of property and as the transmitter of patrilineal values,” the father’s “legal successor and metaphysical continuation” (Tromly 2010, p. 248). Simply by virtue of the patriarchal control invested in him by church and state, John had almost total sway over his son’s future (Fallow 2015, p. 38). And that future did not include university.

      Biographer Jonathan Bate (2008, p. 75) views this as significant, contrasting Shakespeare with his almost exact contemporary Christopher Marlowe. As a student at Cambridge University, Marlowe was drawn into a dangerous intellectual world of philosophy, Machiavellian thinking, even atheism and, for Bate, this was a natural route to the edgy life of poet and playwright. Bart van Es (2013, p. 14) sees things differently. “A playwright’s literary accomplishment was in practice little affected by attendance at university: Oxford and Cambridge specialized in the teaching of theology, philosophy, history, and similar branches of exact learning, and not in literature of a kind that a poet might readily apply.”

      So, no university for William – but how did he spend his youth? Some suggest he was informally apprenticed to the family business. Both John and Mary “were capable and tough-minded business people” (Edmondson and Wells 2015a, p. 330), unlikely to employ other people when there was a healthy eldest son to be trained up: there’s a “logical possibility” therefore that William was apprenticed to “the unregulated family business” (Fallow 2015, p. 38). This apprenticeship would not necessarily preclude an engagement with the acting world, whether in Stratford, its surroundings, or even in faraway London, the business capital. Indeed, as Bart van Es (2013, pp. 9–10) points out, we don’t need to make a choice between William the apprentice and William the actor, because so many actors had their “roots in practical professions,” the theater industry itself having its foundations in medieval guilds and corporations.

      The truth is, we just don’t know whether Shakespeare was apprenticed to the family business. Nor do we know much about his or his family’s religious practices, let alone beliefs, but there is nevertheless a noisy debate as to whether the Shakespeares were closet Catholics in a Protestant England.⁵ Hard evidence is elusive, although one can argue that it would be. The religious changes over the course of John Shakespeare’s life did not help the quest of future generations seeking insight into any individual’s belief. The Reformation made it easier to be labeled a heretic, as there was no longer a unified church to guide the faithful, and, especially in countries such as England, the authorities who determined religious policy changed at an alarming rate.

Those with Catholic sympathies were wise to conform outwardly in an era where opposition to the established Protestant Church of England was punishable by, at best, fines, and at worst – at least for those who actively supported the pope’s command to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I in the name of the Catholic religion - torture and execution. In the 15 years or so prior to William’s birth, England had gone from a country in the grip of a zealous Protestant Reformation under the young king Edward VI to an equally zealous return to Roman Catholicism under his sister Mary, only to be returned to Protestantism with the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. Put another way, it became ever more important to think about individual salvation but equally dangerous to declare one’s confessional allegiance (Hadfield 2019, p. 18). In an era of traumatic religious change, caution was wise.

      We do know that when William was 19, two Catholic members of his mother’s Arden family, Mary and Edward, were arrested for conspiring to kill the queen. Mary was pardoned. Edward was executed, his head displayed on London Bridge as was the custom of the time. There are, furthermore, two pieces of evidence to suggest that William’s father, John, was Catholic. A “Testament of Faith” with his name written on it was found hidden in the rafters of the Henley Street house in 1757. Crypto-Catholics kept these documents, a profession of their faith,

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