In another, better known, report of what it felt like to go to school at St. Paul’s and Eton, Thomas Tusser makes Latin and flogging equivalent:
From Powles I went, to Aeton sent,
To learn straightwayes the Latin phraise,
Where fifty three stripes given to mee
At once I had.
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to passe thus beat I was,
See, Udall, See, the mercy of thee
To mee, poor lad.10
That Tusser’s complaint moves from “Latin phraise” to “fifty three stripes” in epideictic verse (epideixis being the rhetorical term for words spoken in blame as well as praise) reveals how thoroughly the school equated punishment with rhetorical performance.11 Sanctioned forms of verbal facility, even in the guise of an English rather than a Latin complaint against one of its masters, suggests that the author was, in fact, a “poor lad” who tried hard enough to deserve better.
The “Consuetudinarium” also reveals how imitation shaped Westminster’s elaborate, hierarchical organization for supervising and controlling what counted as acceptable speech (e.g., three slips into English would provoke punishment). Older boys were appointed as surrogates for the master to “monitor” and reprimand the younger boys’ linguistic performance in his absence. In addition to imitating the master in front of their peers, these boys appear to have been required to give a weekly, public account of their classmates’ linguistic lapses:
These Monitors kept them strictly to speaking of Latine in theyr several commands; and withall they presented their complaints or accusations (as we called them) everie Friday morn: when the punishments were often redeemed by exercises or favours shewed to Boyes of extraordinarie merite, who had the honor (by the Monitor monitorum) manie times to begge and prevaile for such remissions. And so (at other times) other faultes were often punished by scholastic taskes, as repeating whole orations out of Tullie, Isoc.; Demosth.; or speaches out of Virgil, Thucyd., Xenoph: Eurip &c.12 (Emphasis mine.)
Corporal punishment and imitation (in the narrow linguistic sense) are equivalent: “Punishment” is “redeemed by exercises”; “remission” for whipping is a “scholastic taske,” as in “repeating whole orations out of Tullie.” The chance to perform rhetorically—by “begging and prevailing” for exemption from flogging—is said to be an “honor” for boys of “extraordinarie merit.” And once set in motion, imitation (in the broader sense of one person copying another’s example) proliferated: magister, monitor, Monitor monitorum. All of this hierarchy of discipline was devoted to the hourly and weekly regulation of verbal competence: Latin speaking, translation exercises, cases brought against, pleas advanced (“complaints or accusations” valuing the form, forensic skill, over the actual content of such utterances), and the “repeating of whole orations.”13
The phrase the Westminster student uses to describe the scheduled, weekly event of a master’s surveillance—“By the feare or confidence in their lookes”—does more than reveal the close link, in practice, between imitation and the threat of either public shame or corporal punishment.14 It suggests the young monitor’s identification with his master. “Their lookes” rather than “our” looks: The phrase divides the writer from his (now former) classmates by means of a hierarchy of imitation that moves him up the ranks from the supervised to the supervisor. Psychoanalytically speaking, the phrase reveals the student’s identification with, or desire for, the place from which he is seen—which is also the place from which he is judged and loved—as well as the accompanying internalized divisions that characterize Freud’s topographic description of a composite, fractured psyche.15
Both the unnamed Westminster scholar’s and Tusser’s accounts of a day at school suggest we would do well to reexamine the interweaving of affective and institutional histories implicit in Renaissance rhetorical pyrotechnics—a personal and transpersonal history in which performance, formal technique, socially specific criteria for judgment, and fantasies of mastery and address are intertwined. If nothing else, it might produce intriguing reflection on the period’s fondness for such literary forms as the complaint, the lament, and the satiric “scourge.”16 More particular still for several texts in the next three chapters, literary representations of the “passions” frequently emerge in ekphrastic descriptions or, more generally, passages engaged in what classicists call “programmatic” reflection on the text’s own representational and rhetorical strategies. While there are powerful literary reasons for the “enduring” nature of ekphrastic paragone17 and meta-poetic reflections, the distinct preference for such formal self-display in the epyllia of former schoolboys, as well as Shakespeare’s plays, is suggestive about the school’s hierarchical, disciplinary, and theatrical structures. What better way did a student have to fulfill the charge successfully to imitate classical exemplars before an audience of peers and masters than to point to his own verbal skill (the tendency to programmatic reflection)? What more effective way to persuade an audience to pause for thought, rather than rush to judgment, than to suggest that one’s words can rival other arts? Or to lay claim to the verbal and visual demands of good oratory, the training for which I describe below, than to stage an ekphrastic comparison between the arts of speaking and seeing?
Here we encounter an early modern institutional practice resembling the triangular structure that W. J. T. Mitchell detects in the “social structure of ekphrasis” more generally: “if ekphrasis typically expresses a desire for a visual object (whether to possess or to praise), it is also typically an offering of this expression as a gift to the reader.”18 Or, in this setting, it is a gift to one’s master or peers. Verbal paintings invite an audience to shuttle between aesthetic admiration and interpretive labor, a state of suspended attention a schoolboy could surely turn to his social advantage. And if Mitchell is right to discover in ekphrastic turns qua ekphrasis an unpredictable vacillation between an impossible, utopian desire (for the image to be present to the reader or audience) and a “counter-desire or resistance (the fear of paralysis and muteness in the face of a powerful image),”19 then the affective intensity allied to verbal and visual interplay implicit in ekphrastic display might have been of considerable social value for young orators. For as I describe in the next section, a boy’s success depended on his ability to stir up passions in his audience by means of his acquired set of verbal and visual skills. Ekphrastic turns can and do convey many subtle messages—and often prompt modern audiences to become precisely the careful readers that their authors hoped to create out of contemporary ones.20 Read in light of the institution that taught boys to imitate similar passages in their classical forebears, however, early modern ekphrases preserve something of the external and internal rivalries implicit in the school’s social scene, with its decidedly punitive methods for teaching Latin; its master who sat in judgment; and the divided, self-monitoring schoolboy subjects who strove to find a place in their world by living up to the master’s daily demands and exercises.
Actio, Actio, Actio
The Westminster monitor’s phrase, “by fear or confidence in their lookes,” attests to the school’s still more diffuse, yet for that no less daunting, disciplining of socially acceptable affect. Records from a variety of schools similarly indicate that humanist discipline included lessons in proper intonation as well as physical deportment; masters gave a boy’s voice and gestures strict attention and training. Beyond Westminster’s requirement that boys perform memorized passages publicly “without booke,” one of John Brinsley’s rules for ideal teaching was that the master should pronounce clearly so that his boys might imitate after him: A teacher must