Charles Brown was one of the first to demonstrate, if only by implication, John Keats's affinity with Shakespeare. Keats passed the relevant examination at Apothecaries’ Hall and was listed as ‘certificated apothecary’ in the London Medical Repository, and his social standing, like that of anyone else in English society, was echoed in that of his friends. In fact, Keats went to John Clarke's Enfield Academy, which Nicholas Roe has described as ‘the most extraordinary school in the country’. It was a dissenting institution at the forefront of educational theory and practice. Instead of the floggings suffered by pupils elsewhere, boys kept records of their behaviour, and made ‘voluntary’ translations from Latin and French texts. It gave Keats an excellent education and the mentorship of Charles Cowden Clarke, who nurtured his literary talent up to the moment at which he began to write his greatest work.