Perhaps it does not go without saying that these three categories emanate from the school and are not the imposition of modern concerns. The grammar school was the exclusive domain of men and boys, but Shakespeare frequently dramatizes aspects of contemporary pedagogy through the voices of passionate—and often troublesome—women. And these female characters are not exclusively relegated to the role of docile student or comical ignorans.47 Chapter 3 examines the scandalous erotics of Venus and Adonis in light of two observations: Venus represents herself as trying to teach Adonis a “lesson” in love reminiscent of the very first lesson in Lily’s ubiquitous A Short Introduction of Grammar: “amo magistrum” (“I love the master”). “Barbarism” was a school commonplace for translating your Latin badly: As Lily’s Grammar declares, for instance, “All barbary, all corruption, all Latin adulteration which ignorant, blind fools brought into the world … and poisoned the old Latin speech of the early Roman tongue will not be allowed entrance to the school.”48 But Shakespeare is quite capable of inventing “barbarians” like Aaron or Othello who know their classical tradition very well indeed. Where Aaron plays Ovidian “tutor” in Titus, Othello’s far from “rude” speech wins Desdemona’s “love” and “pity”: Othello thus imitates Aeneas, whose tale of travel and peril so beguiled Dido in Aeneid 2, and whose story stood above almost any other in humanist writing as essential to a boy’s education.49 Caliban’s protest about the benefits of Prospero’s “language” training, moreover, has long struck readers and audiences as one of The Tempest’s most memorable lines. Finally, the school’s classical curriculum was shaped by humanist disdain for popular and folk culture. But as I have already suggested, Shakespeare gives an exquisite pleasure in Latin textuality to the likes of Sly and Bottom—and at times seems to cling, like Mamillius, to precisely the “old wives’ fairy rubbish” their classical curriculum was designed to supplant.
I discuss some of these characters; I might have chosen others. Their ubiquity suggests how frequently Shakespeare is inclined to provide a classical frame for characters and passions at some considerable distance from the socially normative position—never mind bodily and vocal deportment—for which schoolboys were actually being trained. It is therefore crucial to think beyond the school’s explicit categories and social distinctions. The next chapters demonstrate that school training in Latin rhetoric inculcated something one could call a habit of alterity, even though its teachers probably did not anticipate some of the directions in which a talent for impersonating other voices would lead. Characters like those enumerated above indicate how much Shakespeare benefited from this habit. But I believe that his penchant for using school techniques against the institution’s explicit representations of a properly functioning social body is a distinctive touch.
By habit of alterity, I mean not only that school training encouraged a general disposition toward impersonation, and hence a propensity for drama. I also mean that if read back into the schoolroom that made them possible, Shakespeare’s representations of the passions indicate that early school training encouraged in pupils a highly mediated relation to emotion, a tendency to experience what passes for deep personal feeling precisely by taking a detour through the passions of others (particularly those classical figures offered as examples for imitation). To do justice to this habit of alterity, I analyze the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century pedagogy according to historically specific reprereniaiions of social “others” while also keeping in mind psychoanalytic speculation about the effects of the “other” in speaking subjects. Unexpected characters like Venus, Adonis, Bianca, Kate, Aaron, Othello, Caliban, Sly, Bottom, and Mistress Quickly—caught up in the language and dynamics of the schoolroom while acting within sexual fantasies that range from the appallingly violent to the obscene, the bawdy, and the evanescently erotic—tell us that Shakespeare’s engagement with the humanist grammar school goes well beyond explicit political and moral critique.50 In the pages the follow, I show that it is especially in Shakespeare’s depictions of character, feeling, and desire that we detect traces of his ambivalent indebtedness to the institution that gave him the classically inflected rhetorical facility of an early modern gentleman.
Emotion and Character
I have been arguing that early modern classicism testifies to a deeply fraught social and transpersonal struggle for verbal, social, and erotic power. Shakespeare and others often call this a struggle for “mastery.” What might appear to us to be merely formal decisions in the texts of the period were, rather, embedded in a complex institutional history with immense influence on gender, sexuality, and the passions. Recent cultural and literary critics working on the history of emotion call attention to language’s “constitutive role in any culture’s emotional universe,” an idea captured in Katherine Rowe’s apt phrase, “emotion scripts.”51 Among other things, this insight means that before assuming we know what a particular feeling means or how it signifies in a given text, we first require a careful philological account of the changing significance of words used to designate and assign values to emotions across cultures and time periods. The pages that follow understand grammar school training to have provided a fountain of influential emotion scripts. Before turning to the relationship between school practices and Shakespeare’s representation of “the passions,” however, I must briefly distinguish between it and two other more modern words for the inner life of feeling: emotion and affect. The medical strain of early modern discourses about the passions derives emotional life from bodily disposition: In humoral theory, one’s corporal existence has a determining effect on states of feeling. As much recent scholarly work suggests, Shakespeare’s representations of the passions are indebted to the Galenic medical tradition. But we have not yet investigated fully enough why his reflections on the passions involve meta-theatrical or meta-rhetorical reflections on classical figures, texts, and traditions: Hecuba, Niobe, Philomela, Lucrece, Venus, Adonis, Actaeon, Apollo, Daphne, Narcissus, Dido, Aeneas, Sinon, and Medea (among others) provide the Latin mythographic template from which his scenes of overpowering feeling derive their force.52 In Chapter 3, for instance, I ask two related questions of Venus and Adonis: Why is the narrator’s exercise in prosopopoeia (understood as giving a voice to mythological characters) deliberately framed as a lesson in “love”? And what does the rhetorical contest between the two main characters have to tell us about the affective and erotic contours of the poem? Chapter 4 analyzes an example of ekphrastic description—“wanton pictures” of Venus, Apollo, and Io offered to Sly—in light of Shakespeare’s critique of “mastery” and the schoolroom in The Taming of the Shrew. And in Chapter 5 I examine the crucial role that Hecuba plays in school rhetorical training and thus in Shakespeare’s reflections on imitatio and “woe” in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare’s hands, the passions have a distinctly classical cast; part of the project of this book is to demonstrate why.
With respect to the difference between the modern terms emotion and affect, I try to use our own modern and familiar term,