There can be no doubt that he learned easily all
he was taught, and still less doubt that he was not taught much. He
mastered Lyly's "Latin Grammar," and was taken through some conversation
books like the "Sententiae Pueriles," and not much further, for he puts
Latin phrases in the mouth of the schoolmasters, Holofernes in "Love's
Labour's Lost," and Hugh Evans in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and all
these phrases are taken word for word either from Lyly's Grammar or from
the "Sententiae Pueriles." In "Titus Andronicus," too, one of Tamora's
sons, on reading a Latin couplet, says it is a verse of Horace, but he
"read it in the grammar," which was probably the author's case. Ben
Jonson's sneer was well-founded, Shakespeare had "little Latine and
lesse Greeke." His French, as shown in his "Henry V.," was anything but
good, and his Italian was probably still slighter.
It was lucky for Shakespeare that his father's increasing poverty
withdrew him from school early, and forced him into contact with life.
Aubrey says that "when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade [of
butcher]; but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in high style and
make a speech.
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