For its historical associations Warwickshire was no less the fitting region for the education of a great national poet. From the time of the Roman occupation it had played an important part in the national history. Several Roman roads traversed the district, and Stratford got its name from the ford where one of these streets (as they were called) crossed the Avon. The sites of several Roman camps, o• fortified sta tions, were in the neighborhood, one of these, Alcester, being only five miles from Stratford. In Anglo-Saxon times Warwickshire formed part of the Kingdom of Alereia, which was for a while the dominant power of the country. Later, from its central position, it was traversed and occu pied by the rival armies in the civil wars. The decisive battles that ended the Barons' War in the thirteenth century and the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth were fought on the bor ders of Warwickshire, at Evesham and Bosworth Field. The castles of Kenilworth and Warwick, both in the same county and within fifteen miles of Stratford, were. during these wars, the main centres of military and political interest in England. Queen Elizabeth's famous visit to Robert Dudley at Kenilworth in 1575• and the holiday pageant in her honor, which lasted from July 9th to the 27th, occurred when Shakespeare was eleven years old. His father. as a well-to-do citizen and prominent magistrate of Stratford, probably saw something of the stately show, and may have taken William with him. Certain passages in the Midsummer Night's Dream (ii. ) appear to lie reminiscences of the Kenilworth festival, of which the boy must have heard much, even if lie saw nothing of it.
The legendary lore of the district was equally stimulating and inspiring to a poet. Warwick shire was eminently a field of romance and old heroic story and the scene of many an ancient ballad. Guy of 'Warwick was a foremost hero in this popular poetry, and his gigantic spectre still haunts the scenery of his traditional exploits. Shakespeare in his boyhood was familiar with the stories about this half-mythical personage, and lie recalled them in later life when he put allusions to Colbrand, the big Saracen whom Guy conquered and slew, into the mouths of certain characters in his plays. Warwickshire was also prominent in the history of the English drama. Coventry was renowned for the religious plays performed by the Grey Friars of its great monastery, and kept up, though with less pomp, even after the dissolution of their establish ment. It was not until 1589 that these pageants were entirely suppressed; and Shakespeare, who was then eleven years old, may have been an eye witness of the latest of them. his allusions to characters in these old plays (as, for instance, to Herod in Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Wind sor, and to the 'lost souls' in Henry prove that he knew them by report, even if he had not seen them. Historical plays, not biblical in sub
ject, were also common in Coventry before the dramatist was born. The Nine Worthies, which he burlesques in Love's Labour's Lost, was acted there before Henry Vl. in 1455. The original text of the play has been preserved, and por tions of Shakespeare's travesty seem almost like a parody of it. The play performed at Strat ford in 1569, which must have been of this re ligious or historical type, was the beginning, so far as the town records show, of theatrical per formances in Stratford, but in succeeding years they were frequent. Of course the young Shake speare witnessed them; and we can surmise how they fired his imagination and fostered his in born taste for the drama.
Wo see, then, that all outward conditions in Stratford and its neighborhood were peculiarly favorable to the awakening, stimulating, and de veloping of Shakespeare's genius; and in his second home, where he spent more than twenty five years, including his entire career as an actor and author, be was equally fortunate. London was then, as now, the metropolis of the kingdom, the capital of arts and letters, no less than of the National Government. It was the centre of the literary activity and brilliancy that made the spacious times of great Elizabeth' forever mem orable. What stimulus, what inspiration must Shakespeare have found in its life and society! We see then that, though so far as schooling properly so called was concerned Shakespeare's education was inferior to what a boy of thirteen or fourteen would get nowadays, it was in the broader sense far from inadequate as a prepara tion for the work he was to do as a poet and dramatist.
For some time after leaving school the boy may have helped his father in his trade. In 1577 John Shakespeare was beginning to have bad luck in his business, and William, then thirteen years old, may have been taken from school for work of some kind. The tradition that he was bound apprentice to a butcher and later ran away to London is improbable, Another tradi tion makes him an attorney's clerk for a time, and the many references in his works to the technicalities of the law have led Lord Campbell and other specialists to believe that he must have studied law somewhat thoroughly. But Judge Allen, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in his Notes on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question (1900), has shown that such legal allusions are equally common in contemporary dramatists, and that Shakespeare, instead of being uniformly accurate in these matters. as Lord Campbell and others have assumed, is often guilty of mistakes which a lawyer or student of law would never make. This may be regarded as the final word on the question of the supposed legal attain ments of the dramatist.