At the school, according to its ordinances, as quoted in T. W. Baldwin's
William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), the boys studied "for prose in latten Tullie [Cicero], Caesar his Comentaries, Salust and Livie, also two litle books of Dialogues, drawen out of Tulleys Offices and Lodovicus Vives by Mr Thomas Ashton sometyme cheife schoolemaster of the said schoole: for verse, Virgill, Horace, Ovid and Terence: for greke the greke grammer of Cleonarde, the greke testament, Isocrates ad Demonicum or Xenophon his Cyrus . . ."--in other words, a fairly standard but demanding humanist curriculum introducing the boys to some basic texts in Latin and Greek. In addition to the regular classroom curriculum, both masters trained the boys to present plays and public orations, apparently of high quality. Shrewsbury was an exceptionally good school, good enough for Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, who attended just a few years before Fraunce. That such a well-placed young man as Sidney went to the school would have been unusual; at that time the well-to-do gentry and the nobility usually did not send their boys to public schools. Perhaps Fraunce met Sidney at Shrewsbury; certainly he knew him and his family well in later years.
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