By the age of four or five, young William Shakespeare was enrolled at the King's New School in Stratford, a grammar school run for the benefit of the sons (tough luck, daughters) of civil servants like John Shakespeare. By today's standards, the education that boys like Will Shakespeare received at these grammar schools was incredibly rigorous. Classes started at dawn and were held six days a week. Boys studied the alphabet, moved on to the Book of Common Prayer, and by the ripe old age of seven began instruction in Latin. "They began with what was considered the relatively easy Latin of Aesop's Fables (translated from Greek), then Caesar, and then moved on to Cicero, Virgil, Ovid (the author that seems to have been Shakespeare's favorite), Horace, Suetonius, Livy, and, notably for a dramatist, Seneca, Terence and (perhaps) Plautus,"3 wrote Shakespeare expert Terry A. Gray. Are you smarter than a Renaissance fifth-grader? Maybe, but it's certainly possible that you're not nearly as well-read!