The homestead of John Shakespeare, in which he lived and carried on his business, still stands on Henley Street, in Stratford, much the same as it was four hundred and fifty years ago. It is a paltry hovel of two low stories, half timbered, with meagre windows, and must have been a squalid abode even in its prime. It is built flush with the sidewalk, having neither vestibule nor entry, and the rough broken pavement of the kitchen is sunken a step lower than the street. A huge open fireplace of unhewn gray stones yawns rudely in the wall to the right, and a narrow door leads to a smaller apartment in the rear. Immediately above, reached by a precipitous stairway, is the bleak and barren chamber, dimly lighted, the legendary birthplace of the poet. The dwelling is more like the cavern of a savage than the residence of civilized man. Making due allowance for the conditions of domestic life and architecture in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, it is difficult to imagine a home more rude and primitive, more destitute of comfort and convenience, more indicative of poverty and social inferiority. The rough-hewn oak of the frames and timbers and the coarse mortar of the plastered spaces show no more decoration or ornament than the frontier dug-out on the plains of Dakota or the miner's cabin in the gulches of Montana.
In this environment William Shakespeare, the third child and eldest son of eight children, was born and lived till the age of eighteen years. Of his companions, his studies, his pleasures nothing is known.
A few doors from his father's house still stands a group of gray buildings, worn, bleached, and washed like skeletons by the storms and suns of eight centuries: a chapel with pointed windows and low square tower, a hall and the alms-houses of the ancient guild. In the second story of the hall was the endowed grammar school of Stratford, restored by Edward VI. in 1553, and the uncouth, venerable desk at which Shakespeare is said to have studied is included among the few unauthenticated relics in the museum at the homestead. It is a reasonable inference that whatever education he received was obtained here, but this fact, as well as the character and amount of his early training, is wholly conjectural. The first formal separate biography of Shakespeare was published in 1743, one hundred and twenty-seven years after his death, by Rowe, who says that the boy was withdrawn from school in 1578 to assist his father in the drudgery of the shop and farm. Other mouldy gossip makes him a butcher's apprentice, a country pedagogue, and a lawyer's clerk, arrested for poaching, addicted to carousing and the boorish pleasures of the country-side.