The forecited accounts have an entry, in 1564, of two shillings “paid for defacing image in the chapel.”  Even then the excesses generated out of the Reformation were invading such towns as Stratford, and waging a “crusade against the harmless monuments of the ancient belief; no exercise of taste being suffered to interfere with what was considered a religious duty.”  In these exhibitions of strolling players this spirit found matter, no doubt, more deserving of its hostility.  While the Poet was yet a boy, a bitter war of books and pamphlets had begun against plays and players; and the Stratford records inform us of divers attempts to suppress them in that town; but the issue proves that the Stratfordians were not easily beaten from that sort of entertainment, in which they evidently took great delight.

We have seen that both John and Mary Shakespeare, instead of writing their name, were so far disciples of Jack Cade as to use the more primitive way of making their mark.  It nowise follows from this that they could not read; neither have we any certain evidence that they could.  Be this as it may, there was no good reason why their children should not be able to say, “I thank God, I have been so well brought up, that I can write my name.”  A Free-School had been founded at Stratford by Thomas Jolyffe in the reign of Edward the Fourth.  In 1553, King Edward the Sixth granted a charter, giving it a legal being, with legal rights and duties, under the name of “The King’s New School of Stratford-upon-Avon.”  What particular course or method of instruction was used there, we have no certain knowledge; but it was probably much the same as that used in other like schools of that period; which included the elementary branches of English, and also the rudiments of classical learning.

Here it was, no doubt, that Shakespeare acquired the “small Latin and less Greek” which Ben Jonson accords to him.  What was “small” learning in the eyes of such a scholar as Jonson, may yet have been something handsome in itself; and his remark may fairly imply that the Poet had at least the regular free-school education of the time.  Honourably ambitious, as his father seems to have been, of being somebody, it is not unlikely that he may have prized learning the more for being himself without it.  William was his oldest son; when his tide of fortune began to ebb, the Poet was in his fourteenth year, and, from his native qualities of mind, we cannot doubt that, up to that time at least, “all the learnings that his town could make him the receiver of he took, as we do air, fast as ’twas ministered, and in his Spring became a harvest.”