In the Earl of Lincoln's household such amusements would be
common, and it was not till many years later, that a narrowing
faith made Anne write them down as "the follyes of youth." Through
that youth, she had part in every opportunity that the increased
respect for women afforded.

Many a Puritan matron shared her husband's studies, or followed
her boys in their preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, and Anne
Bradstreet's poems and the few prose memorials she left, give full
evidence of an unusually broad training, her delicacy of health
making her more ready for absorption in study. Shakespeare and
Cervantes were still alive at her birth, and she was old enough,
with the precocious development of the time, to have known the
sense of loss and the general mourning at their death in 1616. It
is doubtful if the plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her,
though there are hints in her poems of some knowledge of
Shakespeare, but by the time girlhood was reached, the feeling
against them had increased to a degree hardly comprehensible save
in the light of contemporaneous history. The worst spirit of the
time was incorporated in the later plays, and the Puritans made no
discrimination. The players in turn hated them, and Mrs.
Hutchinson wrote: "Every stage and every table, and every puppet-
play, belched forth profane scoffs upon them, the drunkards made
them their songs, and all fiddlers and mimics learned to abuse
them, as finding it the most gameful way of fooling."

If, however, the dramatists were forbidden, there were new and
inexhaustible sources of inspiration and enjoyment, in the throng
of new books, which the quiet of the reign of James allowed to