SHAKESPEARE’S EDUCATION (COMMENT).

SHAKESPEARE’S EDUCATION (COMMENT). When I questioned the claim that a commoner could not have written Shakespeare’s plays in this post, Nick commented: “I wish I knew more about education that could be available at the time.” Simon Schama, in this critical review of Anonymous (“idiotic misunderstanding of history and the world of the theater”), describes Shakespeare’s education: “By the time he was 13 or so, Shakespeare would have read (in Latin) works by Terence, Plautus, Virgil, Erasmus, Cicero, and probably Plutarch and Livy too.” I quoted Victoria Kahn here on the rhetorical education of the Renaissance grammar school which “produced the great flowering of English literature” that included the works of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Shakespeare would have had a very good education in school.

I also think that the genius who wrote the plays could have picked up the learning he needed on his own.