Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide reading, the choice of name might have been judicious.  A “concealed poet” of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting the plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, through that knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will Shakspere.  He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as it was his whim to do.  The actor might make fair copies in his own hand, give them to his company, and say that the improved works were from his own pen and genius.  The lie might pass, but only if the actor, in his life and witty talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended to have done.  But if the actor, according to some Baconians, could not write even his own name, he was impossible as a mask for the poet.  He was also impossible, I think, if he were what Mr. Greenwood describes him to be.

Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to London, does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name.  But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is no documentary record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps “he was removed from school long before the usual age,” “in all probability” when “he was about thirteen” (an age at which some boys, later well known, went up to their universities).  If we send him to school at seven or so, “it appears that he could only have enjoyed such advantages as it may be supposed to have provided for a period of five or six years at the outside.  He was then withdrawn, and, as it seems, put to calf-slaughtering.” {16a}

What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.

Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will “could have learned but little there.  No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar schools, if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin driven into them.  Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was taught; and an industrious boy who had gone through the course and attained to the higher classes would generally be able to write fair Latin prose.  But he would learn very little else” (except to write fair Latin prose?).  “What we now call ‘culture’ certainly did not enter into the ‘curriculum,’ nor ‘English,’ nor modern languages, nor ‘literature.’” {17a} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that “removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—­it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments.” {17b} Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a butcher or draper, but doubts the poaching, and the frequent whippings and imprisonments, as in the story told by the Rev. R. Davies in 1708. {17c}