Shakespeare's Schoolroom. Lynn Enterline

Given my account of the theatricality of everyday life at school, Bulwer’s immediate association between “schooles,” “rhetorick,” and “theaters” suggests that his metaphor for the human hands as “two Amphitheaters” for “the voluntary motions of the mind” is less an early modern fantasy about the ancient past than a figure attesting to the theatrical practices of the humanist grammar school, the institution in which boys learned eloquence of tongue and body by constantly monitoring their own performances while staging the passions of others before multiple audiences.⁴⁵ In addition, Bulwer’s first triad of institutions includes “the mansions of the muses,” which suggests that we begin to think of the link between actio and the embodied life of the passions not only in relation to staged plays, but also in relation to the literary habits of imitation future poets imbibed as schoolboys.

      In the Latin schoolroom, not just in school plays or the commercial theater, we see a social, rhetorical, and visual staging of affective, embodied subjects. By “staging,” I mean to invoke the internal divisions of the divided, “speaking subject” as well as the constant process of self-dislocation—or better yet, constitutive blindness—outlined in the psychoanalytic theory that the subject is subject for and to an Other. Far from consolidating schoolboy subjects as it claimed to do, early modern pedagogy would tend rather to produce divided, rhetorically capable, yet emotionally labile speakers for whom language learning and self-representation entailed the incessant dislocations of the theater. By “dislocations,” I mean the constant activity of bilingual translation (an early lesson in language’s incessant slippages, about which Shakespeare’s Mechanicals are perhaps most eloquent, running in terror from Bottom’s “translation”), as well as the daily requirement that boys shuttle back and forth from the silent practices of memory and invention to the gestural and vocal techniques required for effective oratory. At the same time, though, I also mean a process quite familiar to Shakespeareans: the constant internal movement in his characters between seeming and being, persona and person, address and self-representation; between assuming, whether successively or simultaneously, the positions of writer, actor, and audience. Iago’s “I am not what I am”—to cite the most famous of many meta-dramatic moments long understood to be an expression of Shakespeare’s experience on the commercial stage—may also stem from the daily theater of his early training in Latin.

Figure 3. Title page to John Bulwer, Chironomia: or, the Art of Manuall Rhetoricke … the chiefest instrument of eloquence (London: Thomas Harper, 1644). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

      Rather than “strengthen the stability of subject positions,” the grammar school’s theatrical demand for mimicry performed in public under threat of punishment would produce rhetorically capable subjects insofar as they found themselves “through displacement.”⁴⁶ Here we might remember Roach’s apt description of the early modern actor, who was admired for producing “the signs” of certain passions “on demand”—in other words, “manifestations of an emotion that he fully embodies, but at the same time is not really his own” (emphasis mine).⁴⁷ The same might be said of an English schoolboy, imitating the passions of a cohort of ancient characters in order to please his audience of master and peers in multiple kinds of Latin performances. Humanist schoolmasters announced themselves to be in the business of “civil prudence” by consolidating rhetorical mastery and thereby producing proper English gentlemen. But it seems to me that their practice pulled against the drive to verbal, gestural, visual, and affective self-mastery because of their profound indebtedness to the theatricality of the very rhetorical tradition they taught.

      A Gentleman Is Being Beaten