ABSTRACT
The “hook” at the beginning of the book is an invitation to my readers to perform aloud short excerpts from two of Desiderius Erasmus’ Colloquia familiaria, which the young Will Shakespeare would have performed, in Latin, in his grammar school, at approximately the age of 10. There are multiple resonances in both of them that appear in The Taming of the Shrew, one of the earliest of the adult Shakespeare’s comedies, first performed about seventy years after Erasmus’ colloquies were written. This is one glimpse of the enormous amount of evidence I have gathered proving that the colorful and comical characters that populate Erasmus’ colloquies stayed in the imagination of the young Shakespeare and were reborn, in full freshness, in the colloquial characters in his plays. This, and my research into their education in physical rhetoric, persuaded me beyond a doubt that Elizabethan schoolboys were on their feet at some point every day of their schooling, performing in role, and receiving the training to do so convincingly.
