His father, who was of yeoman rank, was probably a dealer in wool and leather.

Aubrey, a gossiping chronicler of the next generation, says he was a butcher, and some biographers assert that he was a glover.

He may have exercised all these crafts together, but it is more to our purpose to know that in his best estate he was a property holder and chief burgess of the town.

Shakspeare's mother seems to have been of an older family.
Neither of them could write.

Shakspeare received his education at the free grammar-school, still a well-endowed institution in the town, where he learned the "small Latin and less Greek" accorded to him by Ben Jonson at a later day.
There are guesses, rather than traditions, that he was, after the age of fifteen, a student in a law-office, that he was for a time at one of the universities, and also that he was a teacher in the grammar-school.