SECTION 8 - Stratford fact and fable

Summary

Of Stratford, where Shakespeare is supposed to have passed the first twenty-five years, or so, of his life, something it is unavoidable to say. So much has already been written about it that I shall, as far as possible, avoid repetition.

It was a place of minor consequence, even in Warwickshire. It had no history. As a centre of trade and population it did not compare with Coventry. It had no lordly castle such as that which dignified Warwick. There had never been any important monastic house in or near the town. No magnate or county gentleman had his residence there. No inhabitant had ever distinguished himself in letters or in national affairs. Vervecum patria: it was a pelting place whose wisest talk was of fells and tods of wool and the price of ewes.

It had a school, which was much as other schools in the county, but not as Coventry, where Philemon Holland once taught and where George, Lord Berkeley and probably Marston, the dramatist, were once pupils. How little the leading inhabitants profited by its existence is shown by the fact that of nineteen persons (ten of them aldermen) who signed a paper relating to one of their body, seven only could write their names. John Shakespeare, William's father, was one of the illiterate majority. In the Legend a good deal is made of the maternal influence on the young poet.