Before the next chapters take up schoolroom practices and some of their unintended consequences, a general outline of current approaches to the grammar school’s forms of social reproduction is necessary. As the result of an emerging class of (often lowborn) professional scholars searching for financial and social advancement—and a fortuitous battle between Henry VIII and canon lawyers—command of Latin became a significant form of cultural capital in early modern England.18 In the words of Lisa Jardine and Antony Grafton, humanist schooling “stamped the more prominent members of the new elite with an indelible cultural seal of superiority.”19 Funding for new and reestablished grammar schools in England came largely from merchant capital; and the majority of students were drawn from landed or merchant classes. And yet even the largest, most prestigious schools ensured support for at least a handful of “poor students” every year.20 The grammar school’s curriculum and training, as well as the new, public mix of boys from different stations therefore did more than “signif[y] an already existing class system.” Rather, as Richard Halpern points out, schools “intervened in the system itself, transforming both the ruling groups and the very nature of class distinction.”21 The humanist desideratum of rhetorical copia became a distinctive way of marking significant social differences, differences that their training was designed both to produce and to police.22
As an all-male institution that separated young boys from their families to bring them up as Latin-speaking gentlemen, moreover, the Tudor grammar school institutionalized a historically distinctive, hierarchical division between “mother” and “father” tongues. Establishing a socially significant opposition between English and Latin, maternal and paternal spheres of language and influence, schools self-consciously sought to intervene, materially and discursively, in the reproduction of normative gender categories.23 And indeed, a crude misogyny does inform many school textbooks, which often distinguish a boy’s coddling mother from the bracing discipline of his Latin schoolmaster. But whether all boys who read and translated such passages from and into Latin felt the way the authors presumed they would about leaving their mother’s care for the schoolmaster’s discipline is far from obvious (here we might remember one Shakespearean schoolboy, “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”).24 Of course, it does not take exhaustive research to show how profoundly the linguistic and rhetorical basis of the school’s curriculum influenced commonplace, dismissive views about female inferiority. For example, a former schoolboy published the following comment in 1577 about his own attempt at versification and wives:
Take in good parte these triflyng toyes,
good Reader which I write:
When I was a boye with boyes,
these toyes I did indite.
Tushe, tushe, thei foolishe are thou saiest:
I graunt, thei are in deede:
But where are thy wifes wondrous workes,
now where are thei to reede?25
For this former grammar school student, “boyes” are the gender privileged to “indite” poetic “workes,” women the gender to bear the burden of mute anonymity. Boys, moreover, learn their craft among a community of “boyes” presumed to persist beyond school—to constitute the future “readers” to whom a man will address himself as the writer does here. Such attitudes will not surprise readers familiar with early modern England’s gender norms. And yet I have found that a careful look at the grammar school’s texts and material, discursive practices undermines the simple gender dichotomy on which such standard sentiments rest. In the chapters that follow, I hope to make a well-known literary history a little less familiar. That is, if we read Shakespeare’s texts from the perspective of school language training, the socially sanctioned community and prima facie meaning of “a boye with boyes” sometimes took turns the boys’ teachers did not seem to expect.
Halpern observes that measuring the school’s relationship to social reproduction means stepping outside a literary perspective on the “Renaissance” long enough to question the social illogic of an educational institution devoted so narrowly to linguistic arts—first to grammar, then to techniques of rhetoric and style.26 Departing from an earlier, untroubled appreciation among twentieth-century literary historians for the rise and dominance of an educational institution dedicated to inculcating skills amenable to playwrights and poets, recent critics draw attention to the social function of the humanist school and its legacy. And some have begun to point to a few significant contradictions between the school’s announced mission and its actual practice. Grammar schools trained boys in the arts best suited for statesmanship, the clergy, the law, and international trade; but masters rarely, if ever, seemed concerned about the fact that many of their students would never pursue such careers. As an important survey of provincial grammar schools attests, fathers from a far greater array of professions than those for which rhetorical training was truly practical enrolled their sons in these new schools: At Hull, for example, the fathers’ professions ranged from clergy, counselors-at-law, merchants, and traders to a mix of “tailors, cordwainers, butchers, clerks, surgeons, innkeepers, master mariners, tobacco cutters, milliners, grocers, customs officers.”27 And so for Halpern, it is “no longer obvious why Tudor society would allocate a substantial part of its resources” to an institution whose investment in rhetoric made it a “miracle of impracticality” when viewed in light of the kind of training many of these vocations actually required. Though humanist teachers often objected in print to severe corporal punishment, publicly advocating gentler forms of training and persuasion, a host of evidence suggests that corporal punishment hardly vanished from the schools—and that flogging (or the threat of it) was used right alongside the gentler art of inculcating respect for authority by training a boy to imitate or “follow” an exemplary model. Pursuing such evidence in his sociologically oriented study of contemporary objections from families to harsh corporal discipline at school, Alan Stewart observes that “the value of the educational experience of a young man as a rite of passage” in early modern England was “threatened by that experience itself.”28
To this recent critique of the distance between humantist theory and practice, I would add that a relatively untroubled twentieth-century consensus that the school succeeded in consolidating normative gender categories stems largely from Walter Ong’s influential observation that Latin training was a kind of “male puberty rite.”29 Yet it is only in recent years that feminist and queer theorists have questioned the way assessments like Ong’s rely on the terms male and female without fully interrogating their historically and culturally variable significance. As will become clear from my analysis in the next chapter, the same might be said of puberty. While feminist and queer critique have changed the kinds of questions we bring to bear on Shakespeare’s plays, they have only begun to alter our