Red Booth Notes: Shakespeare’s Plays and the Bible, part 2

How did Shakespeare come to possess such a great familiarity with scripture? In a word, the Christian faith was inextricably woven into the fabric of his life. It marked his times and seasons.

With his father John and his godparents looking on, he was baptized in The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford on April 26, 1564. Tradition fixes the date of his birth as April 23, though it may have been one or two days earlier.[1] What is known is that his baptism took place in within the newly established Church of England, and that during the baptism his godparents were exhorted to make sure that young William heard sermons and learned the Apostle’s Creed as well as The Lord’s Prayer “in the English tongue.”[2] Beyond this, we know that he attended the grammar school of Stratford, whose royal patron Edward VI was by right of succession a defender of this nascent Protestant faith.

Shakespeare was singularly fortunate, for as the son of an alderman, he was “entitled to free tuition at the grammar school of Stratford.”[3] He would never attend university,[4] but he possessed a brilliant mind and retained everything he could glean from the somewhat limited education afforded him. He was, one of his most noted biographers writes, a boy “with exceptional alertness of intellect.”[5]

So what did he retain? A great deal, if the best evidence we have is any indication of what he was taught at grammar school and modeled for him in the church-related experiences of his youth.

One of Shakespeare’s most celebrated biographers, Sidney Lee (editor of the magisterial Dictionary of National Biography), tells us that during the six or seven years education Shakespeare received at the grammar school of Stratford,[6] he was taught Latin and French, knew Ovid’s Metamorphoses in translation, and had a working knowledge of Italian that enabled him to follow the drift of an Italian poem or novel.[7] And of course, reading, writing and arithmetic were part of the curriculum.

The typical course of study for a boy who attended grammar school in Shakespeare’s day has been very helpfully summarized by Thomas Spencer Baynes, the literary scholar who served as editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Children,” he writes,

 were often sent to the petty school, or English side of the grammar school, about the age of five, and after remaining there two years entered the grammar school proper, and began the study of Latin at seven. If they completed the full course of instruction, they remained till their fifteenth or sixteenth year, when they left, prepared for commercial or professional life, or, in special cases, for a course of university study. We know that, in consequence of the altered state of his father’s [financial] circumstances, Shakespeare was withdrawn from school before he had completed the full term, and it is usually assumed on tolerably good grounds that he left in 1578, when he had just completed his fourteenth year.[8]

 But what of Shakespeare’s specific instruction in the tenets of Christianity? From the first, this early training would have been extensive. By the time he entered school his mother Mary (who came from a well-to-do family) may have taught him to read, but if she had not, he would have begun learning his letters through the use of a Horn Book.[9]

Where would his formal education have commenced? We know that the classes for the petty school he attended in Stratford were held in the guild chapel, and Shakespeare later made reference to this in his play Twelfth Night when he wrote of the “Pedant that keepes a Schoole i’ th’ Church.”[10]

But to return to the Horn Book. It was a learning aid, we learn, that most often consisted of a wooden tablet upon which was mounted a sheet of paper protected by a thin, transparent plate of horn—hence the name Horn Book. On this paper were the alphabet, the vowels, various common syllables and the Lord’s Prayer.[11] Roman numerals were also included, and often, the Trinitarian phrase: “in the name of the Father and of the Sonne and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.”[12]

Other elements of the Horn Book’s design also served to reinforce its faith-based origin. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the sheet contained in a Horn Book, first made of vellum and later of paper, contained first a large cross—“the criss-crosse”—from which the horn-book was called the Christ Cross Row, or criss-cross-row.[13]

Most importantly, for our purposes, Shakespeare speaks of the Horn Book in his play Love’s Labour’s Lost—in Act Five, scene one: “Monsieur,” Armado asks Holofernes, “are you not lett’red?” To this, another companion named Moth, replies, “Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook.” So then, from the very earliest days of his lessons, Shakespeare knew what things like the Christ Cross Row were. He learnt his letters in a context steeped in matters of faith.

Aside from this, the best evidence we have indicates that he was taught the Catechism in English, and that among the texts he was required to read were The Psalter and The Book of Common Prayer, as well as the New Testament in English.[14] And we may surmise that he spent hours each week with all three sources. This was crucial, as they would have been part of his everyday experience in boyhood and early adolescence. It bears repeating: these sources would have been part of the fabric of life—second nature to his mind, if not the habits of his heart.

Title Page of Miles Coverdale Bible (from The Printed English Bible 1909)

The Bible he would have read was either “the popular Genevan version, first issued in a complete form in 1560, or in the Bishops’ revision of 1568.”[15] And again, the most reliable evidence we have suggests that it was The Geneva Bible he knew best. The biblical references in his plays are most often closer to it than any other version, and indeed, there is every reason to believe that throughout his life he owned a copy.[16]

What more can we say? Again we turn to Sidney Lee, who tells us that Shakespeare’s allusions to scripture “are drawn from all parts of the Bible, and indicate that general acquaintance with the narrative of both Old and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays.”[17] He frequently quotes or adapts biblical phrases and alludes to episodes in biblical history.[18]

Was Shakespeare a lifelong student of scripture? Since he likely owned a copy of The Geneva Bible, it is reasonable to assume that he consulted it from time to time when seeking to use one of its phrases in a play. However, as Sidney Lee also suggests, Shakespeare’s allusions to scripture may be more suggestive of phrases which “enjoyed proverbial currency” than anything else. And further, “as a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency of the mind in a stage of early development rather than close and continuous study of the Bible in adult life.”[19]

The benefit Shakespeare derived from an early and extensive acquaintance with the Bible has also been cited by Peter Ackroyd, who has commented on how it has “often been suggested that the scriptural ‘colouring’ of Shakespeare’s language comes from a dedicated reading of the Old and New Testaments.” However, Ackroyd suggests, there any be another, perhaps more likely explanation. Shakespeare may well have drawn extensively on the Old and New Testaments not so much from any sense of personal faith, but rather because they were more of a resource. As Ackroyd takes note, the Old and New Testaments were “the most readily available form of sonorous language. [Shakespeare] was entranced by the sound and the cadence….[His early store of religious education was such that] phrases and images returned to him when he needed them, [and] the Bible became for him an echo-chamber of the imagination.[20]

Scholars have and will continue to debate the question of how genuinely pious Shakespeare was. But whether or not faith was for him a matter of deep personal commitment, one thing is clear: he had been reared in the tenets and teachings of the Bible, he was intimately familiar with Catechism in English, as well as The Psalter and Book of Common Prayer. The rites and ceremonies of the Church of England were second nature to him. And though his time at school had been cut short by his father’s financial reverses, he had received a “very fair education” of which Christianity was a central component. All of these things stayed with him the length of his days, and, in time to come, would shape both the content and character of his works for the stage.

In writing of the Bard’s considerable acquaintance with the scriptures, Frederick Furnivall, cited earlier, has perhaps said it best. He states that for dramatic purposes, “Shakspere…takes the Bible’s word as to the beginning, the life, and the end of the heavens, the earth, and man.”[21] And that is saying something.

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