Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan Page A

themes exploit it; he was to portray
in Hamlet a kind of ideal grammar-school prince, who can play, duel,
and dream in words while staying in character, bookish and vital.
    In the last stages of Upper School, the children took up Virgil and
Horace, as well as Caesar and Sallust, for glimpses of Rome's history.
If William began his Greek New Testament, it is probable that his
career at Church Street ended before he learned much more to add to
the modest amount of Greek he would already have had.
    The Lord of Misrule
    In recent years, his father's fortunes had changed. A boy who began in
Lower School as a leading townsman's son found himself in a family
short of cash and being treated leniently by indulgent aldermen -- who
did not see John Shakespeare at 'halls'.
    Yet the times abetted a sense of release. There was a new audacity, a
'certaine deformitie and insolencie of minde' (as William Camden put
it) that appeared in a rage for fashionable dress. This phenomenon was
not confined to London but was a symptom of change 'all over England' 21 -- and the flouting of old, sane sumptuary, rules would have been evident at Stratford's Bridge Street inns and beyond.
    Social barriers were eroding. Clothes no longer exactly reflected
rank or degree. On a holiday from Upper School, William would have
seen more than a little of the new anarchy -- which was colourful. Men
of mean rank wore cheap rosettes on their shoes. Embroidered waistcoats
appeared in tuffeted taffeta or branched satin stitched in gold or
silver, as if tradesmen's sons were noblemen, and grander young men
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had enormous padded doublets, effeminate shirts of cambric or lawn,
even steeple-crowned hats of sarsenet 'with hat-bands of black, white,
russet, red, green, or yellow, never the same for two days', hose after
the French or Venetian patterns and slashed and embroidered shoes
with high cork heels. 22
    That social revolution accented the audacity of seasonal rights of
inversion, such as those of the Lord of Misrule in the Christmas feasts
up to Twelfth Night and at harvest-time and Shrovetide. The wildheads
of a parish (says Phillip Stubbes in revulsion in the Anatomie of Abuses )
with jangling bells and in 'liueries of green, yellow, or some other
light wanton colour' either bemuse or deafen the godly, mock the
Sabbath and invade churches, plead for money, dance and riot without
hindrance -- and may lay a cross over their necks, 'borrowed for the
most parte of their pretie Mopsies & loouing Besses, for bussing
them in the dark'. 23
    With the superiority of a grammar-school scholar, William may have
avoided the ruffians of 'Mis-rule' and never figured among 'twentie,
fortie, threescore or a hundred lustie Guttes' who followed their
parish king; but he knew a spirit of inversion and defiance that abets
self-discovery. The bottled-up life of the scholar did not appeal to
him -- and, partly in reaction to the artificiality of school, he seems
(on the evidence of his attentions very soon in or near Shottery) to
have had hunger enough for early experience. Even at 15 or 16 he was
most certainly acquainted with Anne Hathaway, since the Hathaways of
Shottery had had a friendly connection with his family since his
infancy. Already his walks across the fields to the Hathaway cottage
may have added to his parents' worries.
    The restrictions of school and his hunger for experience affected his
behaviour, and we cannot accuse him of incuriosity. As much as he
absorbed in class, we have the evidence of his own writing to show
that he was a close, almost famished, observer of the country -- and the
local Stratford lore of his deer-killing draws one's attention to his
behaviour as he roamed with friends. In an early play he would
celebrate deer-killing and grammar-school pedantry in the same scene ( Love's Labour's Lost , IV. ii).
    In any case, deer-poaching was a sport for the adventurous. The
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Tudor game laws in