Life of William Shakespeare less than a quarter of a mile from Shakespeare’s home and within a few yards from where his father sat on the town council. It was free to all male children and the evidence indicates that John Shakespeare sent his sons there for a grammar school education, though no attendance records survive. Shakespeare would have been enrolled when he was 7, in 1571. Classes met every day except Sunday, with a half day off on Thursdays, year-round. The school day typically ran from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a two-hour break for lunch, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Reputation of William Shakespeare William Hazlitt raised admiration for Shakespeare to worship or even "bardolatry" (a sarcastic coinage from bard + idolatry by George Bernard Shaw in 1901, meaning excessive or religious worship of Shakespeare). To compare him to other Renaissance playwrights at all, even for the purpose of finding him superior, began to seem irreverent. Shakespeare was rather to be studied without any involvement of the critical faculty, to be addressed or apostrophised—almost prayed to—by his worshippers, as in Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth"" (1823): "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of