Those who find it impossible to accept that someone they take to be a simple country boy could be the greatest literary genius of the English language often talk of him as being uneducated. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that he didn't go to university. He might have done - probably Oxford - because he came from a prominent Stratford family, descended, on his mother's side, from aristocracy – the Ardens of  Park Hall.

However, just as he was reaching school-leaving age - fourteen, the age at which other boys went to university - his father's business was failing. That was possibly connected with John Shakespeare's unwavering Catholicism, which was a dangerous position to take at that time and subject to discrimination and even persecution. We don't know much about the detail but the fact is that young William had to be withdrawn from school.

So, like other Stratford boys, he attended the King Edward IV Grammar School where he had the standard national curriculum of the time. Taught by Ushers (junior masters) or older pupils, the boys learnt the rudiments of Latin first, using the Tudor text-book known as Lily's Latin Grammar.

This short introduction to grammar, compiled by William Lily, had been authorized by Henry VIII as the sole Latin grammar textbook to be used in schools. The first year of Elizabethan education would have consisted of learning parts of speech together with verbs and nouns; the second year the rules of construction and forming sentences and the third year would have concentrated on English-Latin and Latin-English translations. Shakespeare would have had to be properly versed in Latin!

At the age of 10 the boys would leave the Ushers to be taught by the Masters. They began studying      the works of the great classical authors and dramatists, such as Ovid, Plautus, Horace, Virgil, Cicero and Seneca. They studied the histories of Caesar, Sallust and Livy too, for their moral example was believed relevant to life in Elizabethan England and so included in their education.

Those who complain about Shakespeare's lack of education are ignorant or ill-informed. If there's one thing we can say about William Shakespeare it is that he must certainly have been an intelligent pupil. It is also evident that the King Edward 1V Grammar School in Stratford was a very good school. The salaries were £10 per year for a Master and £40 per year for the Headmaster and these were on par with the most prominent schools in England. The School therefore attracted excellent teachers and two of them rose to great heights by founding colleges. Richard Fox, who was appointed master at King Edward IV Grammar school in 1497,  later became principal minister under Edward VII as Bishop of Winchester and founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Another master, William Smyth, founded Brasenose College. Two Oxford graduates, Ben Hunt and Thomas Jenkins, were employed as Masters of Elizabethan Education at the time William Shakespeare attended the King Edward IV Grammar school and would have taught the young William Shakespeare. It's clear that the  education  he received at the the King Edward IV  Grammar school was of a high quality.

Warren King has studied and taught Shakespeare in Britain for over 30 years. He now writes Shakespeare resources for  No Sweat Shakespeare - a website dedicated to helping students understand Shakespeare's sonnets and plays.