Shakespeare and the Primer

Abstract

IT is widely assumed that Shakespeare received part of his early education from one of the Primers authorized for use in the petty schools of his day. This text was different in some content from that used by Chaucer’s ‘litel clergeoun’, who ‘sat in the scole at his primere’, but not so different in character: both little books were meant to teach reading and to inculcate piety.1 Shakespeare learned his ‘catechisme … with many godly prayers’. In a tradition also extending from the Middle Ages, adults in Tudor England had ‘Primers’ of their own, the most popular of which were of the ‘Sarum [i.e. Salisbury] use’. These were devotional manuals containing a liturgical calendar, prayers, and passages from Scripture organized partly around the Canonical Hours. For young and old, the Reformation over time worked changes in the Primers, which came to feature Protestant translations of the Bible into English and to remove some conspicuously Catholic material, including much that involved devotion to the Virgin Mary.2 There was a considerable demand for the older content, however, among English Catholics or the Catholic-minded, who had access to it in copies long preserved, or in works published on the Continent from the sixteenth century into the seventeenth and beyond.3 Shakespeare seems to have known this Catholic literature, for he recalled portions of it in writing some of his plays.