Each chapter takes up scenes in which Shakespeare draws on schoolroom texts and practices to personify passions at some considerable distance from the socially normative position—never mind bodily and vocal deportment—for which English schoolboys were actually being “trained up.” In the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare marshals not only translation, but also the tropes and transactions of school training in oratory, to portray the Mechanicals: In so doing, Wall’s author doubly proves himself capable of the verbal “wit” that could get a schoolboy out of trouble. First, “Wall” is “the wittiest partition” that Demetrius “ever … heard discourse” (5.1.167–8) precisely because he personifies the idea of “partition,” a rhetorical term for a section of an oration (partitio).4 Second, and consonant with school training in prosopopoeia, he picks up and expands the apostrophe to the wall in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“‘invide’ dicebant ‘paries,’” “they said, ‘envious wall’” 4.73) into a dramatic personification (“That I am that same Wall; the truth is so” 5.1.162).5 As I show throughout this book, habits of personification—from advanced lessons in the techniques of prosopopoeia to other exercises in grammar and translation—permeated school training in rhetorical skill at every level of instruction. But in contrast to humanist claims that their program in imitation conferred gentlemanly identity and mastery on its initiates, this method of reading the texts of former schoolboys back into the educational institution that made them possible indicates that the cumulative effect of grammar school instruction in socially sanctioned language, expression, and bodily movement was to establish in students a significant detour between event and feeling, orator and the passions he imitated for the sake of persuading and pleasing others. Indeed, school training engrained what I have come to call “habits of alterity” at the heart of schoolboy “identity.” Even early lessons in translation, conducted in the silence of written exercise, gave boys a proto-dramatic part to play in dialogues with peers, parents, or masters: Latin textbooks called vulgaria offered boys a Latin ego in sentences for translation that put that “ego” in quotation marks from the beginning. And more advanced training in the art of declamation, as well as the habit for school theatricals thought useful for training young orators, required students to mimic—indeed, to embody—a host of passions that were not their own. From first to last, the humanist disciplinary regime pulled against the drive to verbal, corporal, and affective self-mastery schoolmasters advocated. Their debt to the theatrical nature of the very rhetorical tradition they taught means that rather than strengthen the stability of masculine identity, the grammar school’s daily demand for verbal and bodily mimicry performed in public under the threat of punishment would produce rhetorically capable “gentlemen” only by keeping such identity at a distance.6 To put this problem in Bottom’s memorable summary of his translation, “it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom in it.” My aim throughout Shakespeare’s Schoolroom is to take the Latin linguistic turn, as well as the social goals, of sixteenth-century pedagogy literally and seriously. By contrast to the current tendency to accept humanist claims about their success in cultivating obedience and respect for authority and hierarchy, I show that when Shakespeare’s representations of character and emotion most profit from school training, they also warn us, as does “Bottom’s Dream,” to be cautious about taking schoolmasters entirely at their word.
Chapter 1
Rhetoric and the Passions in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom
“Do you love me, master? no?”
—Ariel to Prospero
Of Questions and Methods
A brief catalogue of lines will evoke a sense of this book’s topic—Shakespeare’s career-long fascination with the idea, practices, and effects of contemporary pedagogy: “Schoolmasters will I keep within my house” and “I am no breeching scholar in the schools” (Taming of the Shrew); “I read it in the grammar long ago” and “I was their tutor to instruct them” (Titus Andronicus); “O learn to love, the lesson is but plain” (Venus and Adonis); “Wilt thou be the school where Lust shall learn?” (The Rape of Lucrece). And one final retort to one of Shakespeare’s most bookish teachers: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (The Tempest). Sixteenth-century humanist schoolmasters claimed that their methods of teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric would turn boys into gentlemen, that the eloquence and wisdom garnered at school would directly benefit the English commonwealth. In the chapters that follow, I explore what Shakespearean poetry and drama tell us about such claims while asking, at the same time, how the all-male grammar school affected the emotional registers of early modern masculinity. I began my research for this book by asking what the nuances of Shakespearean emotion reveal about the grammar schools’ curriculum, methods of instruction, and forms of discipline. But it was not long before another, related question emerged: When read from the vantage of archival evidence about the Latin schoolroom that made them possible, what do the texts of schoolboys and former schoolboys tell us about the experience of being “trained up” as a “gentleman” in the period? We have long accepted the word of humanist teachers and theorists about the effects of their pedagogy. It is time to listen to the testimony of grammar school students.1
The chapters that follow bring evidence about the minutiae of daily life in sixteenth-century schoolrooms to bear on Shakespeare’s representation of character and emotion and investigate, in turn, what his rhetorical and meta-rhetorical portraits of the passions reveal about the institutional curriculum and pedagogical practices that made them possible. More specifically, these chapters challenge three influential assumptions in English studies: first, that London’s new, commercial stage was more indebted to popular morality drama than to the “elite” Latin culture of humanism;2 second, that the grammar school “fostered in its initiates a properly docile attitude toward authority” and effectively produced, as the masters said they would, subjects who believed unreservedly in upholding England’s existing social hierarchies;3 and third, that the school’s training in Latin grammar and rhetoric successfully instituted a rigid distinction between male and female language, behavior, and feeling.4 By contrast, I found that when Shakespeare creates convincing effects of character and emotion, he signals his debt to the institution that granted him the “cultural capital” of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as the goal of their new form of pedagogy.5
A lengthy tradition of historical, philological, and literary inquiry documents the distinctive shifts in theory, method, and imagined outcome that shaped sixteenth-century teaching practices.6 Humanist schoolmasters replaced the method they claimed to have inherited from medieval precursors—Latin training by rule or “precept”—with lessons in imitation. And they vigorously pronounced that their new method and curriculum would train young gentlemen for the good of Britain. In the text that by 1534 had become the standard school grammar in most English schools, Dean John Colet gives the most concise version of this new pedagogical platform: “[L]atyn speche was before the rules, not the rules before the latyn speche. Besy imitacyon with tongue and penne, more auayleth shortly to get the true eloquent speche, than all the tradicions, rules, and precepts of maysters.”7 Usually described as the product of a “war between grammarians” and strongly associated with the Magdalen School (whose members “monopolized the production of textbooks for school use” throughout England), as well as with Colet and the St. Paul’s School (whose statutes were widely emulated in provincial schools), humanism’s emergent program for teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric reformed the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century education.8 As we know well, this new approach to Latin pedagogy changed the course of English literary history. But in addition it meant that as drilling in imitatio began to alter literary taste and technique, it began to govern pedagogical and