wn.

A few doors from his father's house still stands a group of gray
buildings, worn, bleached, and washed like skeletons by the storms and
suns of eight centuries: a chapel with pointed windows and low square
tower, a hall and the alms-houses of the ancient guild. In the second
story of the hall was the endowed grammar school of Stratford,
restored by Edward VI. in 1553, and the uncouth, venerable desk at
which Shakespeare is said to have studied is included among the few
unauthenticated relics in the museum at the homestead. It is a
reasonable inference that whatever education he received was obtained
here, but this fact, as well as the character and amount of his early
training, is wholly conjectural. The first formal separate biography
of Shakespeare was published in 1743, one hundred and twenty-seven
years after his death, by Rowe, who says that the boy was withdrawn
from school in 1578 to assist his father in the drudgery of the shop
and farm. Other mouldy gossip makes him a butcher's apprentice, a
country pedagogue, and a lawyer's clerk, arrested for poaching,
addicted to carousing and the boorish pleasures of the country-side.

A little distance westward from Stratford by a footpath winding
through pleasant fields lies the hamlet of Shottery, in the edge of
which, with its gable to the highway, stands the cottage of Richard
Hathaway, as humble in its architecture and accessories as the
Shakespeare abode. The entrance is through a rustic garden with pinks
and marigolds bordering the narrow way, and a covered well before the
door. November 28, 1582, the Bishop of Worcester granted a license for
the marriage of "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey" upon once asking
of the banns. The bridegroom was eighteen and the bride twenty-six. By
this act William Shakespeare assumed the paternity of a daughter born
six months afterward, and baptized Susanna, May 26, 1583. The only
other children born of the marriage were twins, Hamnet and Judith,
christened February 2, 1585. The two daughters survived their father,
but Hamnet died at the age of twelve.

Thus two months before he became of age Shakespeare found himself a
cadet of a ruined house, the parent of three children, with no
business, trade, or fortune, and the compulsory husband of a woman old
enough to have been the wife of his father. Where and how they lived
has not been discovered. The mature age and premature maternity of
Mrs. Shakespeare justify inferences whi