ABSTRACT
As far as I have been able to ascertain, no critic with my level of familiarity of Shakespeare’s plays has read all of Desiderius Erasmus’ Colloquia familiaria and noted the echoes that appear in his mature work. Because most of Erasmus’ colloquies were not published in English in Shakespeare’s youth but were present in virtually all Latin grammar schools, it is likely that Shakespeare encountered them first as a schoolboy, as part of his instruction in conversational Latin. This realization set me off on a journey of discovery, connecting dots from research and gathering evidence that the performing arts were absolutely central to his education and the education of his entire generation.
Because imitation and collaboration were constants in Shakespeare’s classroom, it is not a far stretch to imagine that the earliest version of The Taming of the Shrew was a group effort by schoolboys imitating Erasmus’ hilarious Latin colloquy Coniugium (marriage), in which the main character is Xanthippe, the name of Socrates’ shrewish wife and a taunt that Petruchio uses to refer to Kate. All the accumulated evidence that Shakespeare and his classmates performed and relished the Colloquia familiaria lights up our perspective on his school experience and clearly shows that the writing, acting, and physical rhetoric he engaged in as a student prepared him for his career in the theatre.
