Shakespeare's Schoolroom. Lynn Enterline
habits of past practice, but also attends carefully to future retrospection—to the links between the conditions of cultural intelligibility, the odd temporality of puberty, the vicissitudes of memory, and the enigmatic effects of punishment and cultural taboo.
Finally, thinking through Shakespeare’s school for the passions leads to what I have found to be one of the more complex after-effects of rhetorical training, by which I mean “character,” whether personal or literary. Shaping a boy’s character along socially useful lines lay at the heart of humanist pedagogy; virtually every schoolmaster who commented on the social utility of a classical curriculum insisted, after Cicero, that eloquence and wisdom were the same thing and therefore useful to the commonwealth. I use the word character advisedly throughout—not entirely in the sense of twentieth-century “character criticism” (reading literary texts according to a sense of “individuality impressed by nature and habit; mental or moral constitution”). Nor do I use it entirely in its dominant sixteenth-century association with external signs: a “distinctive mark impressed or engraved; a brand, stamp, graphic sign, or style of writing.”61 Instead, I use it in the sense fostered in school texts and practice because it is in the schools that future poets and dramatists first became acquainted with the rhetorical notion of ethos (a term originating with Aristotle and with a long life in rhetorical theory). As a technical term widely circulated in the schools by way of a chapter in Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata on “character making” (“etho-poeia”), ἒθος was not merely a matter of intellectual history but also became a category important to schoolboy practice.62 In Aphthonius’s scheme, which was partially preserved in the schoolmaster Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ethopoeia (impersonating historical and mythological characters) is closely allied to two other kinds of speech making: prosopopoeia (impersonating abstractions or “things unknown”) and idolopoeia (impersonating dead people).63
As we will see in Chapter 5, Aphthonius’s lesson in character-making is very likely the route by which Hecuba and Niobe became such a compelling figures of grief for Shakespeare. Furthermore, in its “emotional” form, ethopoeia designates a speech that follows “the motion of the mind in every respect” (“quae prorsus animi significant motum”)—for example, “words such as Hecuba would say at the fall of Troy.”64 As deployed in early modern education as a lesson in imitation, character therefore designates a revealing historical switch point where Latin rhetorical training contributes to the word’s bifurcation in two directions. First, it moves inward, swerving away from the external signs of writing to the sense of interiority that has dominated since the mid-eighteenth century: “personality; the moral or mental qualities” of an individual. Second, it moves classical ethos into English fiction, signifying “the personality or ‘part’ assumed by an actor on the stage” and, eventually, literary character tout court.65 Many of the poetic and dramatic moments this book surveys participate in that historical shift, revealing how tightly rhetorical training in the Latin schoolroom tied rhetorical effects of “character” to the life of “the passions,” and at the same time, how profound the confusion between texts and persons became. But before I can comment further about this switch point in its social, personal, and literary aspects, I must first take a closer look at daily life in the Tudor grammar school—particularly the disciplinary practices surrounding early lessons in imitation and impersonation. At this point in my analysis, however, I hope it is clear that following “the motion of the mind in every respect” was one lesson in imitation that Shakespeare learned well. Perhaps instead of seeing a single-handed “invention of the human,”66 we might see in Shakespeare’s convincing subjectivity-effects an eloquent, “gentlemanly” index of the Latin schoolroom’s material, discursive, and disciplinary interventions in early modern culture.
Chapter 2
Imitate and Punish
The Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Schoolrooms
All that was to me a pleasure when I was a childe while I was undre my father and mothers kepyng, be tornyde now to tormentes and payn. For than I was wont to lye stylle abedde…. What sport it was to take my lusty pleasur betwixte the shetes, to behold the rofe, the beamys…. But nowe the worlde rennyth upon another whele. For nowe at fyve of the clocke by the monelyght I most go to my booke and lete sleepe and slouthe alon. And yff oure maister hape to awake us, he bryngeth a rode stede of a candle. Here is nought els preferryde but monyshynge and strypys…
—Grammar school lesson for translation into Latin, Ms. Arundel 249
Imitate and Punish
“Imitation is a principle that animates not only humanist stylistics but also humanist pedagogy.”1 Richard Halpern’s formulation succinctly captures two important strands of early modern thinking about the grammar school. First, as we began to see in the passage from Ascham’s Scholemaster, imitation structured the humanist approach to teaching both grammar and rhetoric. Perhaps contemporary satire best captures the ongoing tension, as well as the uneven development, that characterized “the grammarians’ war” over the benefits of teaching Latin through imitation as opposed to memorizing rules and precepts. As late a play as Cupid’s Whirligig (1616), performed “sundrie times” by the Children of the Revels, depicts pedagogy as rote learning when four boys recite grammatical rules and examples from memory.2 But the earlier Parnassus trilogy (1598–1601) satirizes contemporary pedagogy in its distinctly humanist guise: A teacher is one who “interprets” a common schooltext, Pueriles confabulationes, “to a companie of seven-yeare-olde apes.”3 Along these lines, Skelton is more succinct: “Speak, Parrot!” Second, grammar school ordinances consistently demand that the headmaster himself model exemplary behavior for his students: The humanist idea of authoritative model and imitation, in other words, also structured the school’s hierarchy of personal relations. As Thomas Elyot puts it, a teacher should be “such a one as the child by imitation following may grow excellent.”4 School ordinances usually put their expectation for a master’s exemplarity in a rather more pragmatic, cautionary light: “The masters shall not be common gamesters, nor common haunters of tavernes or alehouses or other susspect houses or places of evell rule or of other knowne vice at the tyme they be elected.”5 At Oundle, these ordinances extend to boarding houses, where those running them should “give example to the scholars not to follow gaming or other vain pastimes not meet for students.”6 The Renaissance discourse of exemplarity pervades school ordinances about personnel. But it is important to remember that because its “new” pedagogy turned on imitation, the Latin grammar school gave exemplarity—and its related habits of mind and conduct—considerable institutional and material support.7
Imitation could intervene in the school’s daily routine in yet another, more theatrical and disciplinary way. Public exercises in grammar, translation, and speechmaking revolved around a master who was the final judge of a boy’s worth. A scholar from the seventh form at the Westminster School wrote a detailed “Consuetudinarium” (ca. 1610)—an account of daily life—one of the few extant accounts of its kind written by a student rather than a school authority. It gives a pupil’s perspective on how imitation operated in the school’s daily economy of reward and punishment. The young scholar’s pronouns vacillate between “them” and “us,” revealing someone poised between ranks—being a student and a master in the making:
… they were all of them (or such as were picked out, of whom the Mr made choice by the feare or confidence in their lookes) to repeat and pronounce distinctlie without booke some piece of an author that had been learnt the day before. Betwixt 9 and 11 those exercises were reade which had been enjoyned us overnight (one day in prose, the next day in verse); which were selected by the Mr; some to be examined and punished, others to be commended and proposed to imitation.8 (Emphasis mine.)
In such a setting, a boy’s choice is stark: imitate “some piece of an author” well or be beaten. Verbal skill is the medium through which one proves