William Shakespeare

Mr Kung despised fiction and the Sydenstricker library contained only the supposedly factual Plutarch 's Lives and Foxe 's Book of Martyrs, but Pearl read fiction avidly in both Chinese and English, devouring Shakespeare

JM adored drama: by the age of eight she was eagerly reciting Shakespeare . She was taught Latin and the rudiments of Greek by her father . She also attended French classes with Mr Roche .

HP attended Hackney Downs Grammar School , where he excelled at sports, particularly as a runner. Joe Brearley , his teacher of English, was important in nurturing his love of poetry and drama, and casting...

KR wrote that she grew up reading the Bible daily and memorising passages from it. Her mother could recite long passages from Milton and other English poets, besides Scottish poems and ballads. She was glad...

Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare , she wrote later, was my first white love. She also enjoyed and respected...

She chose the medieval option. Her tutor was Rosemary Woolf , and she studied no authors later than Shakespeare . She reports the results of this in two different ways. In one version the course...

Attending a secondary modern school (for those children not selected for grammar school) in Essex, on the north-east borders of London, she hated school and made a habit of sitting at the back...

JJ studied English at Trinity College, Dublin . She had trouble getting in, and once she was there she became disillusioned with what was on offer—just sitting in a class of an enormous size, listening...

It hurt her pride that she made the scholarship list only after someone else had declined. She travelled daily by milk cart and milk train to this old-fashioned, rigorous school where teachers routinely used ridicule...

In India, RG later wrote, it was thought there were five things a girl needed to know if she were to take her place in any sort of society: to dance, to play the...

When at seven she moved from Stamps to St Louis and attended Toussaint L'Ouverture High School, Marguerite found the teachers more formal but the students comparatively backward. In a year there she felt she learned...

She was educated at home by her mother, a tutor, and governesses. Under her mother's instruction, she read Boswell's Life of Johnson, the Mémoires du Cardinal de Retz, Shakespeare , and knew a...

In later years she expanded her reading to include Shakespeare , Southey , Scott , Wordsworth , and Tennyson . She also read Henry Drummond 's Natural Law in the Spiritual World and hisTropical Africa and Charles Lamb 's Letters.

ASS says her first conscious memory was of telling a quite deliberate lie at the age of five, and basely tempt[ing] two infant brothers to share my crime. Her mother took care to cultivate...

ESVM said her mothergave me poetry. In her mother's Shakespeare she encountered the passage in Romeo and Juliet about Death seeking Juliet as his paramour, and she later hyperbolically described the encounter: how...