When We Relate To Shakespearean Times

When we relate to Shakespearean times, we actually refer to Elizabethan times, where Queen Elizabeth I was in rule. Elizabethan Education was generally for boys of the Upper and Middle Classes. However, Upper Class girls, often members of the Nobility were also given and education. The basic principles of childhood and education would be started in the home. English Protestants believed that it was important for lay believers to read the Bible, and endowing schools with money was considered a moral duty. Many schools were founded between the reign of Elizabeth I's brother, Edward VI, and the end of the 16th century. These were mainly grammar schools (the sort of school attended by Shakespeare), and there were two types: public grammar schools, which were given money by a wealthy or even noble patron to teach both rich and poor boys (not girls); and private grammar schools, which charged the boys' parents a fee for education. All grammar schools taught Latin and sometimes Greek. Elizabeth's religious policy shaped the future of the Anglican Church as a blend of Roman Catholicism and Genevan Protestantism (Calvinism), a compromise that enabled England to avoid religious wars like those elsewhere in Western Europe. o Catholics believed that Churches celebrate God and elaborately decorated with statues and shrines o Protestants believed that Churches should be plain allowing the people to concentrate on the sermons At the beginning of the sixteenth century ideals, methods and customs, which had existed for centuries, were being challenged. The old feudal ways of life had largely disappeared and a new aristocracy drawn from the ranks of the growing middle classes had begun to emerge. The triumph of the Crown over the Church during the 1530s marked the close of the Middle Ages in more spheres of life than the ecclesiastical. A concept of humanism began to emerge which saw civilized man as an educated person concerned with the common weal and his civic duties, and one who had freedom of choice and the power to change his own and society’s destiny. The sixteenth century was a period of exploration, and of expansion in overseas trade which provided a new source of wealth. The Tudors united Wales with England so that one set of laws and rights applied to both countries; Scotland continued to be independent.