The Universities in Early Modern England The Universities in Early Modern England Author Courtney Follet Author Kate McPherson Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England EncyclopediaEMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Courtney Follet and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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Who Attended University in England

University education was offered to a select number of young men in early modern England. Around the age of 14, schoolboys who had completed grammar school had the option, if their families could afford it and their intellectual gifts were sufficient, to continue their education at the university level. The University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge were the only two universities in England and were also two of the most sought-after universities in Europe at the time. During the reign of Elizabeth I and James I, the middle class began to prosper, causing university attendance to increase significantly as more families coud afford to send bright young men to earn university degrees. Young women were not permitted to receive a university education.

The Curriculum

Universities taught a wide variety of subjects, although not the most modern ones. Young men read and discussed Greek and Latin philosophy, classical history, classical rhetoric, Greek and Latin poetry, Greek and Latin grammar, music, astronomy, arithmetic, theology, and medicine, which included the study of Hippocrates and Galen, along with Arabic and Jewish medical texts. The subjects studied were categorized by a tradition from the medieval period into two disciplines: the first, called the trivium which included grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the second, called the quadrivium, which primarily focused on subjects such as astronomy, geometry and arithmetic. All subject areas were taught using ancient Greek and Roman texts, with minimal use of more modern texts in European languages.

Since their founding in the Middle Ages, universities remained very conservative in nature; therefore, the new interest in Plato and Aristotle, Greek ideals, and new approaches to medicine, which historians now call the Renaissance, were often ignored. Traditional studies that centered on the early theologians of the Church and the Bible were favored in university.

Playwrights in the University

William Shakespeare did not attend university, although some other playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson did. There was a group of playwrights and writers in the late 16th century known as the university wits, who congregated in London in the last quarter of the 16th century. Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele were among these educated men who transformed the literary genres of the period with energetic new kinds of writing, including the widespread use of iambic pentameter, secular and historical subject matter, and richly comic works that featured both bawdy and satiric humor.

University courses did not study Shakespeare’s or these other writers works until the 20th century, although educated people began to read Shakespeare’s works widely in the early years of the 19th century. The general attitude of academics toward Shakespeare was hostility and contempt, even as his popularity grew among the literate public.

Key Print Sources Jewell, Helen M. Education in Early Modern England. Red Globe Press, 1999. Preiss, Richard and Deanne Williams. Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. The universities. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/education/universities.html. Accessed 18 Oct. 2018. Best, Michael. The <term>University Wits</term>. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/contemporaries/greene.html. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023. Gillard, Derek. Education in England: A History. May 2018. https://education-uk.org/history/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023. Wrightson, Keith. Education: Cultural Influences Underlying an Increase in Schooling. Lecture at Yale University. 29 Oct. 2009. Brewminate.com, edited by Matthew MacIntosh. https://brewminate.com/education-and-literacy-in-early-modern-england/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.