It's evident that Shakespeare received a very strong early grounding in what used to be known as the trivium: logic, grammar and rhetoric. These disciplines were taught in a style that we would now consider a thing of the past, perhaps even regressive. Exercises, drilling, memorization of terms - these approaches are frowned upon in our more enlightened times. Today, instruction is informed with educational jargon, which if looked at fairly and honestly, says very little, and accomplishes even less. In today's world, we'd be very lucky to find a high school student who could define such rhetorical terms as anaphora (repeating a word or phrase to start of successive clauses or lines), anadiplosis (repeating the final word of a phrase at the beginning of the next), and chiasmus (the repetition of two terms in reverse order), let alone use them. As Woody Allen once wrote (in a different context): This is progress? Here are examples of the figures listed above, all from Richard II, courtesy of the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...

(2.1)

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father . . .

(5.5)

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me...

(5.5)