From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright’s birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of many of our brains, ready to be summoned when trivia duty calls. But 1576? Not so much. Shakespeare was 12, ink-stained and anonymous at grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Which only goes to show that untrammelled bardolatry isn’t good for theatre history, because even while tweenager William was memorising his Latin vocab a turning point in
