William Shakespeare's Religion - Shakespeare's Schooling

Shakespeare's Schooling

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers, and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit priest. Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, travelled to the Catholic seminary at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising, along with Cottam.