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Shakespeare: The World as StageThe schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week. (The seventh day was probably given over largely to religious instruction.) For much of the year they can hardly have seen daylight. It is easy to understand the line in As You Like It about a boy БЂњcreeping like snail / Unwillingly to school.БЂ« Discipline was probably strict. A standard part of a teacherБЂ™s training, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, was how to give a flogging. Yet compared with many private or boarding schools Stratford БЂ™s grammar provided a cushioned existence. Boys at Westminster School in London had to sleep in a windowless grain storeroom, bereft of heat, and endure icy washes, meager food, and frequent whippings. (But then, these were conditions not unknown to many twentieth-century English schoolboys.) Their school day began at dawn as well but also incorporated an additional hour of lessons in the evening and private studies that kept some boys up late into the night ...» |
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