BIOGRAPHY (PART 2- EDUCATION & MARRIAGE)

SHAKESPEARE'S SCHOOL NOW
(KING EDWARD VI GRAMMAR SCHOOL, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON)


Shakespeare attended(probably) to King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford from the age of 7. Edward VI - the King's name, in which its honoured in the school name - had diverted money from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to endow a network of grammar schools to "propagate good literature throughout the kingdom" during the mid 16th Century. However, the school had been set up by the GUILD OF THE HOLY CROSS - a church institution in the town, early in the 15th Century. It is presumed that this is the school that W.Shakespeare attended, albeit this cannot be confirmed due to the fact that the school's records have not survived. While the element of Elizabethan era Grammar Schools was uneven, the school probably would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature reinforced with frequent use of corporal punishment. As a part of this education, the students would have likely have been exposed to Latin plays, in which students performed to better understand the language. One of Shakespeare's earliest plays - THE COMEDY OF ERRORS -  bears similarity to Plautus' "Menaechmi", which could've been performed at the school.

No evidence have been found that shows/proves that Shakespeare was University educated.  

On 29 November 1582 at Temple Grafton near Stratford, 18-year-old Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was 26. Two neighbours of Hathaway, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson, posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage.Hathaway gave birth six months later.

On 26 May 1583 Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. A pair of Twins - a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith - were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died in 1596, Susanna in 1649 and Judith in 1662.

After his marriage, Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. Indeed, the period from 1585 (when his twin children were born) until 1592 (when Robert Greene called him an "upstart crow") is known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. A number of stories are given to account for his life during this time, including that Shakespeare fled Stratford after he got in trouble for poaching deer from local squire Thomas Lucy, or that he wrote a scurrilous ballad about him. Shakespeare's first biographer Nicholas Rowe recorded both these tales, stating that he wrote the ballad after being prosecuted for poaching by Lucy. John Aubrey says that he worked as a country school teacher, and Rowe that he minded the horses of theatre patrons in London. There is no documentary evidence to support any of these stories and they all were recorded only after Shakespeare's death