Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me

I am swinging through Britland with my daughter, with stops in Stratford and Bath. And I am learning things I never knew.

For instance, I now understand why the ordinary Brit Bill of Stratford could write about Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida. It's because of the school he attended at the Guildhall in Stratford.

See, back in the 1570s, a kid like Bill, son of the local glover, could go to work, at age 8, or he could go to the free school at the Guildhall.

Here's how the school worked. There was a master, paid 20 pounds a year, and about 40 to 60 students. These students sat on forms -- that is boxes that contained the beer they would drink during the day -- by age. The youngest boys sat on the First Form, the next youngest on the Second Form, all the way up to the Sixth Form. British schools are still organized on this model.

Back in those days the instruction was entirely verbal, because paper was so expensive. So students learned their Latin and arithmetic and multiplication tables verbally. Also, the master did not teach them all the time. How could he when there were 60 kids from 8 to 16? So most of the instruction was from the older boys to the younger boys. And if a younger boy didn't know something, he would apply to an older kid for help. Studies show that people remember 90 percent of what they teach.

Since the kids were learning Latin they were also learning Classical history.

So now I know how it was that Shakespeare, a nobody from Stratford-on-Avon, could write plays about Roman history. He had a remarkable education from the local guildhall school, and thus knew about all that stuff.

I asked the chap telling us about all this where he got his information. He said it came from a book, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham. It is available on Google Books and elsewhere. I will be checking it out.

But I want to know: how come I didn't know this? And how come such a system worked, at such a low expense? And how the students learned all this stuff, even though there was no paper and no textbooks?

And how come our present system is a total failure even though it is drenched in money and teachers? How come a schoolmaster paid £20 per year could educate 60 boys without a scrap of paper? And how come the kids could come out with a serious knowledge of the classics? Seriously, how come?

Now, my theory of education is that kids should be chucked out of school at about 11 or 12 and told to get a job, or an apprenticeship. The ones that wanted to continue in school would have to crawl on their knees over broken glass begging to be allowed to stay in school. You can see that the system in Shakespeare's time was not all that different. Only in those days you started work at 8 unless you could get yourself enrolled in school.

The guild school had a punishment day, Friday, on which all defaulters would be "birched" or beaten with a bundle of birch twigs. But here's the thing. You could redeem yourself by good behavior in the interval between your infraction and the Friday birching ceremony. What a concept!

It's interesting that our entire knowledge about early education comes from Dickens and Dotheboys Hall and Mr. Creakle and Dr. Wackford Squeers. What if education in former times was nothing like Dickens' notions? What indeed.

Then we went on to Bath, location of Jane Austen novels like Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane spent several years in Bath, four years in the house of her father who had moved there after retiring as a parish priest, several more years in reducted circumstances after his death in 1805.

Here is what shocked me. The Pump Room is right next to Bath Abbey, quite an imposing church. But I never recall reading about the Abbey. Just a hundred yards away from the Pump Room and the Abbey is the river Avon. How come Jane Austen never mentioned the river? She lived in Sydney Place, just across the river from the Abbey and the Pump Room, so would have frequently crossed the bridge across the river Avon.

But another mystery was solved. Sir Walter Elliott, father of Anne Elliott the heroine of Persuasion, lived in Camden Place. There is no Camden Place in Bath, according to Google Maps. But, on a map of Bath in 1800 there is a Camden Place. It is close to what is now Camden Crescent. So we are to assume that there has been a lot of demolition and building in Bath. Which is odd, because you would think that Bath emerged complete and entire like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus and has remained pure and entire ever since. Apparently not, although the terraced houses of the Circus and the Royal Crescent are still as magnificent and entire as they ever were. Only today they are mostly broken up into flats.

I'd talk about our visit to Stonehenge, only we bailed out after we found that the entrance fee was £34. So we took off for London and took a photo from the road. Back in my day little kids could run in and out of the stones; my dad took movies of me to prove it. But now visitors are kept at a distance. Because preservation.

What a world!