Inspired by an image on r/funny, I became curious, as he is a major part of our education for literature, just what would Shakespeare's educational studies look like? Would he be reading classic Greek and Latin texts such as Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses or something more English like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?
Stand back, finally an r/askhistorians question I am qualified to answer!
Shakespeare is often depicted as uneducated, but we have to understand what that means in context. Many literary figures of the day were Oxford or Cambridge graduates or drop-outs, and so it is tempting to depict Shakespeare as a simple country rube by comparison. Some of his fellow writers actually did so. The first mention of Shakespeare in print as a playwright is from Robert Greene (MA from Oxford and Cambridge), who wrote of Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow" who thinks he can compete with properly (by Greene's standard) educated writers. Perhaps from these attitudes grew the popular image that persisted for many years of Shakespeare as an "untutored genius". Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories take this further and insist that someone of his education could not have written the Shakespeare plays, which is certainly inaccurate.
The problem is when we hear "grammar school" and try to compare Shakespeare's education with the grammar schools of today. We don't know anything about Shakespeare's specific education, but we know quite a bit about the school he, as a child of his social rank, certainly attended, and the schools in England of the time. The curriculum was far more rigorous than today's grammar schools. We know the names of the headmasters at the King's New School when Shakespeare would have attended, and we know they were both Oxford graduates. His education would have included reading, grammar, and writing in English and Latin, including exposure to Cicero, Ovid, and other classical authors. Shakespeare scholar James Shaprio writes: "Scholars have exhaustively reconstructed the curriculum in Elizabethan grammar schools and have shown that what Shakespeare...would have learned there...was roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical classics major." (p. 276)
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