Shakespeare's Schoolroom. Lynn Enterline

       Introduction

      “Thou art translated”

      This book places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare’s poetry—narrative and dramatic portraits of what his contemporaries called “the passions”—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. The analysis moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to put pressure on institutional goals and effects. And it brings evidence about the theatricality of everyday life in humanist grammar schools to bear on Shakespeare’s representations of character and emotion—particularly expressions of “love” and “woe.” Throughout the book, I rely on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continually interact: tropological (requiring formal, literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Humanist training in rhetorical copia was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to defining and producing proper English “gentlemen.” But the method I adopt in this book brings out a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote their new pedagogical platform and argue for its beneficial effects on the commonwealth. That is, when Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of “modern” subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

      Each chapter traces the classical texts, rhetorical techniques, and school disciplinary practices that enabled Shakespeare to invent characters and emotions so often taken to resemble modern ones, demonstrating in the process that seriatim genealogy cannot possibly account for the startling literary and social effects of sixteenth-century pedagogy. Rather, a more complex temporal perspective is required to explain the evident modern appeal of Shakespeare’s characters—dependent as they were on ancient examples absorbed in an educational institution that, while laying the foundation for what we now call “the humanities,” trained and disciplined its students in ways quite alien to our own practices and expectations. This analysis leans forward and backward in two ways. First and most generally, by highlighting the ancient rhetorical models and texts that made Shakespearean emotions possible, I put the retrospective force of “re-naissance” (a rebirth from the classical past) into productive tension with the prolepsis implicit in the now widely accepted label “early modern studies.” Second, I pay attention to many of the early Latin lessons that helped shape Shakespeare’s portraits of personal character and emotion. But I also read those portraits back into grammar school archives, assessing that institution’s disciplinary and discursive practices by way of Shakespeare’s frequent engagement with early Latin training. Here I take my cue from Freud, whose evolving ideas about “psychical reality” led him to suggest that a memory, as an event arising within the subject, might produce a “more powerful release” of affective energy “than that produced by the corresponding experience itself.”¹ Implicit throughout this book is the idea that Shakespeare’s affectively charged returns to early school training in Latin grammar and rhetoric are so emotionally powerful precisely because these personifications reenact, or reengage, earlier institutional events, scenes, and forms of discipline that were not fully understood or integrated when they occurred.

      One scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play intimately engaged with classical antecedents, will help capture how much school discipline reveals about character and the passions in Shakespeare’s texts and vice versa. “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated” (3.1.118–19): Peter Quince’s frightened outburst still makes audiences laugh—even though “translation” no longer calls up the intense, embodied memories and emotions it must once have done for writers and audiences trained up in Latin grammar and rhetoric at the hands of humanist schoolmasters. Rather than merely act a part in a play based on a Roman poem, as many schoolboys had been required to do before him, Bottom also undergoes a physical, classically derived metamorphosis that his peers understand in terms of translation, a common sixteenth-century lesson in Latin vocabulary and grammar. On a daily basis, schoolboys were set to translate passages from English to Latin and back again; and a master backed up his demand for such linguistic agility by the sting, or the threat, of his birch. Such early lessons in bilingual translation were the basis for more