Shakespeare's Schoolroom. Lynn Enterline
power to Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic’s shaping force is promising for a study of early modern masculinity, but it is only a beginning. As numerous psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorists writing in light of Lacan have suggested in a variety of ways, he left much unanswered about the body’s complex embedding in language—particularly with regard to the way specific institutions and the habits they inculcate through repetitive practice grant individuals their social existence and induct them into a given culture’s norms about which bodies, actions, thoughts, and emotions “matter”; which do not; and in what ways.39 It will also become clear that I draw, as have others, on Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as an “acquired system of generative schemes,” a “product of history” that “produces individual and collective practices.”40 Each chapter detects, and asks how one might interpret in the Shakespearean text in question, the “active presence of past experiences … deposited” in schoolboys “in the form of schemes of perception, thought, and action.”41 But habitus, like “the Symbolic,” works at a level of abstraction that begs historical specificity. In particular, the exclusively rhetorical heart of the Latin schoolroom requires a precise formal account of a schoolboy’s formative “schemes of perception, thought, and action.” I therefore focus in each chapter on the particular tropological and generic questions each text raises with regard to the “active presence” of early school experience in the future writer’s habits of invention and impersonations of feeling.
In the readings that follow, a number of important discursive techniques and figures allow me to bring the schoolroom into texts and literary texts back into the schoolroom. In addition to the ubiquitous technique of in utramque partem argument so effectively brought to bear already on Renaissance drama, I follow two particular figures in Shakespeare’s poetry that are tropologically as well as transactionally revealing about grammar school training, gender, and the passions: prosopopoeia (and its early modern umbrella term, ethopoeia) and ekphrasis (“description”). As the following chapters detail, the art of impersonation and description—judged by ένάργεια, or “liveliness,” in which a speaker “does not narrate so much as depict, the reader does not read so much as see”—were standard lessons in advanced oratorical exercise.42 The confusions of ear and eye, the ability to impersonate characters on demand, were crucial components of school exercises in oratory. It hardly takes a professional Shakespearean to see how important such training in impersonation and “liveliness” might be—for both the dramatist and the narrative poet. I maintain this tropological and transactional focus not simply because rhetoric is one of the period’s distinctive and pervasive institutional practices, a peculiar form of early experience to which many texts indebted to school training attest. I do so because Latin rhetorical training—as an elaborately defined set of discursive, corporal, and affective exercises—allows us to reconsider early modern classicism in its literary and social aspect, and therefore to understand the material role ancient texts played in the history of subjectivity, gender, and sexuality in late sixteenth-century England.
An exploration of rhetorical form allows us, in short, to ask what the particular details of literary and school texts, taken together, reveal about the way early modern schoolboys internalized (indeed, embodied) grammar school training. As the next chapter clarifies, the disciplinary program within which boys were educated, from early grammar lessons to advanced training in oratory, makes it impossible to separate language lessons from embodiment; matter rendered significant through time and practice from thought and perception; or affect from the “generative” social “schemes” to which schoolboys were subject during their years under the eye, and birch, of a humanist rhetorical master. The following chapters are designed to show that accounting for symbolic determination, both historically and psychoanalytically, means acknowledging the school’s extraordinary cultural reach while at the same time keeping an eye out for its immanent contradictions. As I hope to show, the literary and school texts adduced here reveal a deep, unstable conflict at the heart of the very regime of identity and difference (between girls and boys, mother and father tongues, vulgar and learned) that its avatars worked so hard to install.
Pedagogy, Erotics, Alterity
My opening question—how did grammar school training influence what counted as genteel masculinity in the period?—raises another: How did early modern pedagogy affect experiences of sexuality and desire? Such a question bears directly on a variety of school texts, as we shall see. But it becomes more urgent still in Shakespeare’s many dramatic renditions of schoolroom dynamics, as well as in less explicit reflections on rhetorical practice that draw, nonetheless, on early Latin training. Indeed, the more I explored the school’s forms of instruction—ranging from lessons in translation to guidance in acceptable gesture, intonation, and affect for convincing oratorical performance—the more frequently I found myself asking, why is Shakespeare so fond of turning contemporary pedagogy and its classical curriculum into a matter of sex? Why is love the word he links most frequently to master or mastery? The affective resonance in the following (by no means exhaustive) list of scenes ranges widely, but each dramatizes the school, its Latin curriculum, and its devotion to language training in a distinctly sexual context.43 In Titus Andronicus, teaching based on Roman poetry leads only to rape and dismemberment: “Indeed I was their tutor to instruct them,” boasts Aaron about his lesson in Ovidian imitation that leads Chiron and Demetrius to turn Lavinia into another Philomel (5.1.98). In The Tempest, pedagogy leads to near rape: Prospero, erstwhile master and language tutor to Caliban, rebukes his former student for trying “to violate/The honor of my child” (1.2.347–8). Lucrece reacts to Tarquin’s threat of rape by asking if he would make himself a “school” for “Lust” (617). In The Taming of the Shrew, translating Latin allows Lucentio, disguised as a schoolmaster, to woo Bianca over a line from the Heroides and to style himself as a “master” in the “art of love.” In Henry V, Shakespeare expands The Taming of the Shrew’s connection between pedagogy, translation, and seduction beyond Latin to French. When Katherine becomes a beginning language student, her first lesson, like any English schoolboy using a bilingual Latin-English vocabulary, is to learn the names for parts of the body. In at least one school, masters were required by statute to conduct the nightly exercise of having the boys rehearse the Latin names for all parts of the body: “the schoolmaster shall every night teach their scholars their Latin words with the English signification … begin[ning] with words that concern the head reciting orderly as nigh as they can every part and number of the body and every particular of the same.”44 Here one sees that the penchant for anatomizing in the period may have more than a literary (Petrarchan) heritage. And the sexual edge surrounding persuasion and deferral in the scene where the king proposes marriage derives largely from jokes about their respective “tongues” and, more generally, problems in bilingual translation. In Venus and Adonis, a “lesson” based on “old treatises” from Rome—in this case, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria—takes a turn toward sexual harassment when Venus plays the role of an Ovidian magister amoris to a pupil who “hates” her lesson and describes himself as an “orator too green” to imitate the ancient examples she offers. And in the “Induction” to The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, impromptu exercises based on Roman poetry gesture toward provocatively undefined and therefore potentially expansive pleasures. Sly learns a lesson in lordly behavior when he hears about pictures of amor drawn from the first and tenth books of the Metamorphoses. Perhaps it is Mistress Quickly who best cuts to the chase: Hearing young William decline “the genitive case,” “horum, harum, horum,” Quickly mishears, transforming Latin lessons into a decidedly disreputable erotic encounter. “Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore” (4.1.52–57).
Two acute readers of Titus Andronicus point out that Shakespeare can be savagely critical of humanist claims for the civic and moral benefits of the school’s classical curriculum. In that play, imitating Ovid leads only to cultural, familial, and sexual mayhem.45 Chiron and Demetrius may show themselves to be poor Latin scholars, but their stupidity hardly excuses their teachers or their texts. Caliban’s “profit” from his teacher’s lessons suggests a similarly bitter assessment of language