Shakespeare's Schoolroom. Lynn Enterline
training in acceptable gentlemanly behavior at school included the indirections, displacements, and emotional excesses of the theater—for which some students were being paid by members of the public as early as 1518 and for which a number of schools became well known—and that whatever male signifies in this institutional/ritual context, its meaning must be flexible enough to include the widespread practice of cross-dressing. With great frequency over the course of the sixteenth century, schoolboys preserved—indeed, extended—the long-standing medieval custom of playing female parts on holidays. And they did so as part of their induction into the successful performance of genteel masculinity. In the grammar school attached to Magdalen College, Oxford, boys in the choir acted in plays as early as 1509; in 1518, the master of the choir was paid after his boys’ play for providing a costume for Christ and “pro crinibus mulieribus” (“for women’s hair”). On November 10, 1527, boys from the St. Paul’s School, under the direction of their master, John Rightwise, presented a Latin morality play at Greenwich before Henry VIII and several French ambassadors; the dramatis personae include a mix of historical figures (Luther, Luther’s wife, St. Peter, Paul, Wolsey) and several female personifications: Lady Peace, Lady Quietness, Dame Tranquility, Ecclesia, Veritas, and Heresy. As I examine in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4, evidence of cross-dressed playing in the schools increases rapidly after 1525, beginning at Eton.30 In one arresting case that does not entirely comport with Ong’s observation (or received opinions derived from it), the “very loose behaviour” of the schoolmaster’s daughter at the King’s School in Ely drew considerable parental ire in the town. Evidently, this daughter “would not stick to put on boys apparel” in her father’s absence and “lett boyes putt on hers”; she then liked to dance, so dressed, “amongeste the boyes.”31 Whether advanced in the form of a theoretical critique of cross-dressing’s impact on the boys subject to such training in Latin rhetorical facility or a historical investigation into the particular details of school events and customs, current accounts of this institution cannot pass too quickly over the term male puberty rite. It is time to think in further historical and theoretical detail about what, precisely, we might mean by invoking male, puberty, or rite to describe the social and literary impact of a humanist education.
Impractical though it may appear to some now, and provoking as it appeared to some then, the grammar school’s program of inculcating Latin grammar and rhetoric through practices of imitation virtually guaranteed that something we recognize as a literary “Renaissance” occurred as an unintended side effect of its program for the “training up of children” to become “gentlemen” whose “wits” would “aunswereth best the monarchie” and “help” Britain become “the best of common weales.”32 In the following pages, I explore the contradictions between the grammar school’s declared purpose, practices, and effects further still, asking what texts written for and in the schools themselves have to say about this institution’s social and personal effects, as well as what they reveal about the oblique—yet historically significant—associations that schoolmasters forged on a daily, disciplinary basis among language, subjectivity, gender, body, and emotion. With respect to the world of feeling, I discuss the historical and theoretical differences between the terms passion, emotion, and affect in some detail at the end of this chapter in order to explain my reasons for using one term over another at a given moment in my analysis. But perhaps it does not go without saying that I try not to collapse these words or use them simply as synonyms. Rather, I put them in productive tension because they enter the English language at different moments bearing distinctly different meanings and histories. For now, let me observe simply that taking stock of the grammar school’s social, literary, and personal effects requires attention to the intersection between classical rhetoric’s chief aim—to “move” audiences in ways that are not purely cognitive—and sixteenth-century understandings of the body and the passions.
To conduct this investigation, I have developed and maintained a theoretical framework flexible enough to address these (ostensibly) disparate areas of early modern experience: classical rhetorical practice and instruction; masculinity; and the embodied life of the passions. To push our account of the school’s role in social reproduction further, 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).33 Ascham’s personification of Cicero as imagined interlocutor in a scene of grammatical instruction has already suggested as much. Imitation, in Ascham’s hands, is a literary and pedagogical practice deploying the animating fantasy of prosopopoeia (understood in its Roman sense as a speech “impersonating” that of another) in a grammar lesson that has narrow designs on a student’s grammatical abilities and broader aspirations for the formation of his character.34 Guiding his own speech according to “what Tullie would have said” allows a boy to succeed and win his master’s approval. Assessing the grammar school’s impact on its gentlemen in the making therefore means taking formal and tropological analysis very seriously—at least as seriously as humanist schoolmasters did—while expanding historical critiques of gender and sexuality in relation to nuances of literary and rhetorical technique, form, and style. This book assesses the claims schoolmasters made about their new program in relation to several kinds of textual evidence: the various texts the boys read and used in their lessons (i.e., dictionaries, vulgaria, grammars, commonplace books, rhetorical manuals); extant exercises and poems students wrote while attending a school; the kinds of physical and verbal training the records suggest they received in acting and declamation; and, finally, the literary texts such students went on to compose later in life. Grammar schools declared themselves to be in the business of responding to historical social norms with classical literary and rhetorical examples that would mold those norms in light of the past. For example, in a 1592 London edition of the widely disseminated rhetorical manual that introduced boys to a host of ancient figures and formal rhetorical techniques, Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, a student’s dutiful inscription reminds us of the extent to which classical rhetorical facility was directly linked to social and personal ends: “disburst to me by my tutor last term for the mending of my youth.”35 The technical path to such “mending” in the Progymnasmata consisted of a series of general and then practical instruction in how to imitate such techniques as fabula (drawn from Aesop and Hesiod), narratio (stories about “persons, deeds, times, places, causes”) chreia (“anecdote”), sententia (“aphorism”), restructio (“refutation”), confirmatio (“proof”), locus communis (“commonplace”), laus (“praise”), vituperatio (in Shakespeare’s translation, “dispraise”), comparatio (“comparison” of “persons, things, times, places, animals, plants”), ethopoeia (“character making”), descriptio/ekphrasis (“where persons, things, times, places, animals and plants are brought before the eyes”) and thesis (“deliberation of general or abstract questions,” i.e., “whether to marry?”).36 The way schoolboys and former schoolboys deployed the ancient forms they were trained to imitate therefore has a great deal to tell us about their experience of being turned into Latin-speaking gentlemen.
The grammar school’s belief in language’s productive force clearly invites comparison with Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic’s determining effect on sexual difference, but I am not the first to notice the resemblance.37 Schoolmasters and Lacan agree on at least one thing: Language precedes and shapes character rather than the other way around. Since Lacan’s return to Freud, moreover, much contemporary psychoanalytic theory has moved between the tropological and the transactional, between semiotic analysis and transpersonal effects. Such movement attests to its complex indebtedness to the history of rhetoric, and it is primarily in light of psychoanalysis’s leavening proximity to rhetoric that I invoke it here.38 More generally, however, Lacan’s claim that the subject is an effect of signification, as well as his corollary critique of mastery, is particularly apt for an institution devoted to cultivating a boy’s character by means of his submission to—indeed, as we shall see in Chapters 3 and