Ok JoanK - I thought i remembered also he may have attended a Catholic school - however, I have the book that went with that series - I do not have the video for reference - the book indicates that the reason there is no record he attended school is "early records of King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford have not survived, because this is one instance where direct biographical evidence from the plays is indisputable...In these plays, the patterns of his quotation and his remembered reading betray the fact that the author was steeped in the Tudor grammar school curriculum. Although this does not prove that the school was in Stratford, it does offer very strong circumstantial evidence that he went to grammar school; and since..." - the text continues explaining who and how his father was entitled to send his son to the local school...
Then it says - "Education was chiefly in the language of authority, church and the law: Latin. Years later, in a back-handed compliment, Ben Johnson said Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek.' This is often quoted as if to dismiss Shakespeare's education, but Jonson's remark needs to be taken in perspective. Jonson himself was a very good Latin scholar. What would be 'small Latin' in his day as much more than is mastered by many a classics graduate now. Even in country grammar schools from Devon to Cambria, boys were expected to 'speak Latin purely and readily;. The quotes in Shakespeare's plays show that he started with the nationally prescribed text Lily's Latin Grammar (which he sends up in the Merry Wives of Windsor), then books of 'Sentences', before moving on to Dialogues and, at eight or nine, to full texts of writers such as Ovid."
The Catholic education may have been because "four of the six teachers in Shakespeare's time had Catholic leanings, Two of them came from Oxford colleges with especially strong connections: St. John's (the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion's college) and Brasenose (known until recently for its links with Lancashire Catholicism). Of these masters, Simon Hunt would have taught William in his upper school from about 1573. Hunt was a private Catholic, or at least Catholic in sympathies, who in 1575 retired to the seminary at Douai and became a Jesuit."
The text continues to explain how after Shakespeare left school, Elizabeth's Privy Council sent letters to all dioceses concerning the Catholic influences in education corrupting the instructing of youth. The text suggests in light of this evidence the presence of the Old Faith at Stratford grammar in 1570 is interesting and that Simon Hunt was recruited just after the Northern Rebellion where John Shakespeare was deputy bailiff and therefore was the hiring of Hunt a political act...?
