4 gives ample evidence that the dark years intervening
between his departure from Stratford and the autumn of 1591 had not been
idly spent. Such mastery of his art as he displays even at this early
period was not attained without an active and interested novitiate in
his profession. It is evident that the appellation _Johannes factotum_,
which Greene in 1592 slurringly bestows upon him, had been well earned
in the six or seven preceding years of his London life for which we
possess no records.

Whatever misgivings their staid and thrifty Stratford neighbours may
have had as to the wisdom of the youthful Shakespeare's London
adventure, we may well believe that Mary Arden, knowing her son's fibre,
felt fair assurance that his success there would come near to matching
her desires, and that of the several spurs to his industry and pride of
achievement the smile of her approval was not the least. There is
possibly a backward glance to his mother's faith in him in the spirit of
Volumnia's hopes for the fame of her son:

"When yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when
youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way; when for a day of
Kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her
beholding; I--considering how honour would become such a person; that
it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown
made it not stir,--was pleased to let him seek danger where he was
like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him; from whence he
returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter--I sprang
not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in
first seeing he had proved himself a man."

Mary Arden died in 1608, at about the time the passage quoted above was
written, having lived long enough to see the fortunes of the family
restored through her son's efforts, and also to see him become one of
the most noted men in England, and returning to Stratford with his brows
crowned, if not with martial oak, with more enduring laurels.

We have no record of Shakespeare's schooldays. We know that a free
grammar school of good standard existed in Stratford during his boyhood,
and later. It is usually assumed that it was here that Shakespeare got
the elements of his education. Though he was in no sense a classical
scholar, he undoubtedly had an elementary knowledge of Latin, and may
possibly, in later years, have acquired a smattering of Greek.