Marchette Chute's Shakespeare in London (1965) is one of the most engaging of the biographies. Its portrait of the time is vivid and convincing, and it reminds us of how much is actually known about Shakespeare's life: quite a lot, in fact. She also seems quite certain of what was taught to Shakespeare and his classmates at the Stratford grammar school, even though it's my understanding that no one else is entirely sure of the contents of the curriculum. Chute, however, writes the following: "The curriculum of Stratford grammar school, like that of every other grammar school in England was serious, thorough and dull. There was no attempt whatever to fit the boys for the ordinary life they were going to find when they graduated, for all school theory in England was based on the medieval system. The purpose of schools in the Middle Ages was to turn out learned clerks for church positions, and therefore what the little boys of Renaissance England learned was Latin, more Latin, and still more Latin. About a decade after Shakespeare entered the classroom a London teacher urged that English should also be taught in the schools, but no one paid any attention to so radical a suggestion."

If this were the case, it would at least partially explain why the teachers in Shakespeare's plays, particularly Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor (with its hilarious impromptu grammar quiz scene) are made the objects of fun, shall we say. But there may have been an upside to this sort of training, for Shakespeare at least: 1. The disciplined and systematic approach to the nuts and bolts of language may have provided grounding for his unmatched sentence construction. As a great teacher I once had the fortune to study with put it, "It's a paradox, but you have to take root to fly." 2. The freedom that Shakespeare must have felt afterward to be working in English, a language that was relatively young at the time (compared to Latin, it still is), and that, for various reasons (his work being a large one), has always managed to escape rules-based constrictions.