![]() The boy’s education would consist mostly of Latin studies-learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians, moralists, and poets. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster’s salary being paid by the borough. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.) His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough, who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor, before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, shows that he was baptized there on Aphis birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. ![]() Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there.
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