WILLIAM SHAKSPERE'S SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE

First edition. A facsimile of the 1944 first edition, published by University of Illinois Press. Two volumes. Publisher's original green cloth with titles and borders in gilt to the spine. Volume I features a black and white facsimile of the title page of William Lily's Latin Grammar of 1599. A very near fine set, the bindings for, the cloth bright and fresh. The contents, with a small mark to the bottom edge of the text block, are otherwise clean throughout, and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps.

Professor T. W. Baldwin offers a detailed survey of what is known, or can reasonably be deduced, about Shakespeare's secondary education. He reconstructs the curriculum of the Elizabethan grammar school and carefully traces its influence in Shakespeare's works. Baldwin's contribution was succinctly summarised by the critic F. P. Wilson, who observed that few readers of 'William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke' could deny that Shakespeare received the standard grammar-school training of his day in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; that he could and did read authors such as Terence, Plautus, Ovid, and Virgil in the original Latin; that his reading knowledge of Latin gave him access to the shortcuts to learning found in florilegia and compendia; and that he read Latin not as a scholar, but as a poet. Similarly, David Bevington, in 'Shakespeare and Biography', notes that Baldwin's massive 1944 study tells us virtually everything we could hope to know about the curriculum of the Stratford free grammar school that the young Shakespeare almost certainly attended, even though records of his enrolment have not survived.