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Chapter 1

Good Space and Time: Humanist Pedagogy and the Uses of Estrangement

A rich body of criticism attests to the imprint left on Renaissance writers by their grammar-school education in classical literature,¹ but a basic feature of this pedagogical program has received little attention: in order to promote their vision of Latinity, sixteenth-century humanist pedagogical theorists first had to reinvent English. As Ardis Butterfield points out, the training bestowed on educated Englishmen from the medieval period through the sixteenth century gave them “much greater eloquence and indeed fluency in [Latin] than they possessed in the vernacular”; far from representing a reversion to a more natural voice, writing in English “was thus a source of strain, a sense that there was a gulf to cross between one form of language and the other.”² And yet such men were, of necessity, some of the first to publish in the vernacular, eager to disseminate their methods of study to an audience that had not yet achieved perfect Latinity. In pedagogical treatises such as Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour (1531) and Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), the fashioning of English as a literate tongue thus models, in reverse, the fashioning of English schoolboys as literate classicists: the vernacular is advanced, with self-conscious effort, as a means to its own supersession.

For many critics, this ambivalent stance toward the vernacular constitutes an essential difference between humanist writers of the early and mid-sixteenth century and their late Elizabethan successors. If, as Richard Foster Jones argues, the final decades of the sixteenth century were marked by wholehearted faith in the vernacular’s expressive powers, this is a faith that Elyot and Ascham evidently did not share. The fact that such writers “employed the vernacular is no proof that [they] admired it,” Jones observes: Elyot, though he “did not disdain to use the vernacular in The Governour,” treats eloquence as “a quality beyond the abilities of the vernacular,” while Ascham “gives [in The Scholemaster] unmistakable evidence that the language he is using has no claim to eloquence.”³ In a broader sense, Latin-promoting humanists such as Elyot and Ascham are understood to have chosen the wrong side in an unfolding rivalry between the vernacular and the classical tongues: English “triumphs” at the necessary expense of Latin and Greek.⁴ Or, in Richard Helgerson’s more neutral phrasing, “the sufficiency or insufficiency of the English language … came to matter with a special intensity” only when “other sources of identity and cultural authority mattered less.”⁵

But such formulations cannot account for the pains both Elyot and Ascham took to shape their prose and the cause that justified those pains: these are texts whose innovative and artful English is crafted in the service of Latinity. Indeed, The Governour and The Scholemaster suggest that for early English humanists—who might otherwise, and with greater ease, have written in Latin—the vernacular came to matter precisely because other sources of cultural authority mattered so much more. For the most part, however, the formal achievements of Elyot’s and Ascham’s prose have been read against the grain of their pedagogical commitments: for literary critics, The Governour and The Scholemaster are exemplary of a movement at odds with itself, obtusely blind to the real value of its own investment in the vernacular. Thus C. S. Lewis credits Elyot as a “convinced and conscious neologizer,” the composer of “lucid” and “literary” sentences, and one of the first English writers to be “aware of prose as art,” but he insists that, as a work of pedagogical theory, The Governour has “nothing in it which suggests a mind of the first order.” Ascham he hails as an “irresistible” writer, but only if one pays minimal attention to his educational precepts: “the literary historian can have no opinion on the mischief of ‘making Latines’ or the virtues of the ‘two paper bokes,’ ” he writes, but “once get [Ascham] out of the schoolroom and he pleases us all.”⁶ In more recent criticism, Lewis’s instinctive distaste for humanism’s classicizing ambitions has ramified into a consensus about the adversarial relationship between pedagogy (and, above all, foreign language learning) and literature in the sixteenth century. According to this consensus, humanist pedagogy, with its emphasis on rote learning and unthinking submission to authority, threatened to develop in English schoolboys the very qualities least conducive to linguistic experimentation and literary achievement, and the vernacular Renaissance testifies to the happy failure of its methods.⁷ Classical education is still acknowledged as a shaping influence on Elizabethan writers, but attention has fixed on “the slippage between the august ideals of humanist education and its practical shortcomings, between its ambitions and its unintended consequences.”⁸

In a similar way, by dint of their prowess as writers and their influence as theorists, Elyot and Ascham continue to find their way into studies of sixteenth-century literature, but the lines of formal influence are traced across a more basic plot of departure: prodigality, opposition, rebellion, and critique.⁹ Thomas Greene’s admiration for Elyot and (especially) Ascham as prose stylists prompts him to offer the most generous possible version of this plot. The crucial feature of early English humanism, he writes, is that “it lacked still a sure sense of where it was headed”: what seems like a rigid adherence to antique precepts is simply a not-yet-realized sense of literary and linguistic ambition.¹⁰ But if Jones’s description of Elyot and Ascham exaggerates their disdain for English, Greene’s account understates their confidence in the classical tongues. To say that early English humanism lacked a clear sense of where it was headed dismisses the one thing Elyot and Ascham thought they knew for sure: “[A]ll men couet to haue their children speake Latin: and so do I verie earnestlie too,” Ascham reassures readers of The Scholemaster. “We bothe, haue one purpose: we agree in desire, we wish one end: but we differ somewhat in order and waie, that leadeth rightlie to that end.”¹¹ From Ascham’s perspective, the end of the journey was its only fixed point: well-intentioned humanists might disagree about how to arrive at fluency in the Latin tongue (and, as we shall see, he and Elyot emphatically do), but it never occurs to him that anyone might question the goal itself.

It is precisely the firmness, even the stubbornness, with which The Governour and The Scholemaster cling to this end that draws them closest to the vernacular poets and playwrights of a later generation, with whom they share—to whom they communicate—the notion that eloquence both depends and thrives on estrangement. Indeed it is in the writing of men strenuously committed to a linguistic ideal anchored in classical antiquity, and prone to see England in terms of its remoteness from that ideal, that we find a rationale for the willfully eccentric literary vernaculars of the late sixteenth century: in the context of the humanist schoolroom, English is a language constituted and regenerated by its difference and distance from the classical tongues. We find, moreover, a precedent for the impulse to narrate the experience of linguistic estrangement, projecting one’s own rhetorical maneuvers onto characters whose actions allegorize fraught transactions within and between languages. The self-reflexive stories of errancy, alienation, and trespass in Euphues, The Shepheardes Calender, and Tamburlaine riff on fantasies of estrangement and transport original to scenes of foreign language learning in The Governour and The Scholemaster. In their eloquence and their indelible strangeness Euphues, Colin Clout, and Tamburlaine are kin to a cluster of imaginary figures who preside over the transmission of eloquence in Elyot’s and Ascham’s treatises: classical writers reimagined in the guise of foreign-born nursemaids and native archers, expert sea captains and wayward exiles, figures whose skill resides precisely in their negotiation of estrangement. From our own perspective, the linguistic transactions such figures are asked to mediate can appear, as Richard Halpern writes of humanist education as a whole, like “miracle[s] of impracticality.”¹² That impracticality is, in fact, a central preoccupation for Elyot and Ascham, manifested most clearly in their self-conscious reflections on their own use of the vernacular—a practical necessity that begets a sense of possibility. For both writers, the strain of moving between tongues is initially legible only as an obstacle to their ambitions for England, a country whose historic marginality and insularity seem to condemn it to rusticity, if not outright barbarity. Each ultimately arrives, however, at a more positive sense of what distance and difficulty might mean for English culture and language: the labor of translating their classical ideals into the vernacular subtly refashions their conceptions of eloquence.

Virgil the Nursemaid

When Ascham says that he and his fellow pedagogues “differ somewhat in [the] order and waie” of language study, he points to a debate that swirls around a single, fundamental question: how were sixteenth-century English schoolmasters, self-appointed heirs to classical antiquity, to accommodate the fact of living in sixteenth-century England? As he observes in The Scholemaster, “if ye would speake as the best and wisest do, ye must be conuersant, where the best and wisest are, but if yow be borne or brought vp in a rude contrie, ye shall not chose but speake rudelie: the rudest man of all knoweth this to be trewe.”¹³ For Elyot, this truth is a source of frequent embarrassment, a recurring impediment to his desire to “devulgate or sette fourth” the substance of classical learning.¹⁴ The difficulties arise literally from the start. As he acknowledges in the opening pages of The Governour, classical theories of education have little to say about language instruction for infants: most “olde authors holde oppinion that, before the age of seuen yeres [the moment at which the care of the mother or nursemaid yields to the supervision of the pedagogue] a chylde shulde nat be instructed in letters.” But Elyot insists that it is only by distinguishing itself from the classical example in this one particular that the English can hope to equal Greece and Rome in any other: “[For] those writers were either grekes or latines, amonge whom all doctrine and sciences were in their maternall tonges; by reason wherof they saued all that longe tyme whiche at this dayes is spente in understandyng perfectly the greke or latyne. Wherfore it requireth nowe a longer tyme to the understandynge of bothe. Therfore that infelicitie of our tyme and countray compelleth us to encroche some what upon the yeres of children, and specially of noble men, that they may sooner attayne to wisedome and grauitie” (18_r). This apology reveals the double bind at the heart of Elyot’s approach to foreign language study: for sixteenth-century English schoolboys, the infelicitous circumstances of time and place have made it difficult to access learned speech, and that difficulty compounds the burden of temporal and geographic alienation. The “longer time” that must be devoted to the acquisition of classical tongues—the years spent in grammar school grasping painfully by rote what was once held by birthright—both exposes and exacerbates England’s distance from civilized antiquity.

But Elyot’s perception of the doubling of lost time and wasted space that occurs whenever a seven-year-old English boy opens his Greek or Latin grammar for the first time points him toward a possible solution: a pedagogy that makes the acquisition of foreign learning an experience of immediacy, intimacy, and domesticity—a pedagogy that conceals its own “encroachment” on the infant by masking itself as something like maternal care. “Hit is expedient,” he therefore urges, “that a noble mannes sonne, in his infancie, haue with hym continually onely suche as may accustome hym by litle and litle to speake pure and elegant latin,” and even “the nourises and other women aboute hym, if it be possible, [are] to do the same” (19_v). In this manner, he insists, “nothing can be more conuenient than by litle and litle to trayne and exercise [a child] in spekyng of latyne: infourmyng them to knowe first the names in latine of all thynges that cometh in syghte, and to name all the partes of theyr bodies: and gyuynge them some what that they couete or desyre, in most gentyl maner to teache them to aske it agayne in latine” (18_r). Such convenient and gentle exchanges supply the infant with a foreign speech adapted to his own possessions, his own body, his own desires: what the child acquires almost as a matter of course in Elyot’s imaginary nursery is a fully domesticated Latinity, an ease and comfort with the alien tongue that mimics the always already intimate knowledge of native speech. If Englishmen cannot possess Latin as a “maternall tongue,” they may at least adopt it as a nursemaid tongue: any well-born child might come to “use the latin tonge as a familiar langage,” Elyot promises, provided that his familiars, those “seru[ing] him or kepyng hym company,” are all “suche as can speake latine elegantly” (30_r–v).

There is an obvious flaw in this plan: where, in sixteenth-century England, are such companions to be found? If, as Lynn Enterline urges, it is time to look more skeptically at the promises made by humanist pedagogical theorists, this far-fetched scheme to entrust the basics of classical instruction to nursemaids and playmates (a plan that arouses Lewis’s particular scorn¹⁵) would seem an excellent place to begin.¹⁶ Here Elyot’s logic is conspicuously self-defeating: the effort to imagine a way out of the constraints of time and country merely returns the reader to them. After all, as Elyot laments, English parents who shared his enthusiasm for classical learning were hard-pressed to find qualified tutors or schoolmasters, since even men boasting university training often possessed but a “spone full of latine” (61_r). The idea of a wet nurse who speaks “pure and elegant latin” to the child at her breast may provide an appealing imaginary contrast to the scant intellectual nourishment afforded in actual English schoolrooms, but it is hardly an “expedient” basis for pedagogical practice.¹⁷

The fantasy of the Latin-speaking wet nurse nonetheless proves generative for Elyot, for it supplies him with a conceptual model both for his pedagogical program and for his prose. Both The Governour’s pedagogy and its prose gently enlarge the meaning of supposedly familiar terms, forging increasingly capacious—even far-fetched—boundaries for concepts such as “home,” the “mother tongue,” and “eloquence.” The very absurdity of the idea of a classically fluent wet nurse triggers one such subtle expansion: conscious that no such nurses exist in sixteenth-century England, Elyot quickly amends his suggestion to allow for nurses who, “at the leste way, … speke none englisshe but that which is cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced” (19_v). The Latin-speaking wet nurse figures one strategy by which eloquence might be domesticated—through the adoption of Latin as a familiar tongue—but her English replacement figures another: by differentiating the vernacular from itself, creating an incremental critical distance between English speakers and their native speech.¹⁸ The Latin-speaking nurse shows how learning might be permitted to encroach on an ideal of domesticity; the English-speaking nurse shows how the vernacular might be permitted to encroach on an ideal of eloquence. If “pure” and “elegant” are not exact synonyms for “clean,” “polite,” and “perfectly and articulately pronounced,” the passage from one set of adjectives to another nonetheless begins to effect a transfer of linguistic standards from a purely classical tradition to its no longer homely counterpart.

The two strategies are not identical—Elyot’s “at the leste way” marks a significant capitulation—but that too is the point. The fact that the Latin-speaking wet nurse is so quickly supplanted by a more attainable ideal does not undo the logic of the original proposal so much as intensify it: surrogacy is the name of the game. As Robert Matz observes, the efficacy of Elyot’s Boke depends on the reader’s willingness to assent to a sequence of necessary but potentially unconvincing analogies: virtue is like dancing, reading like eating, study like leisure, and scholarly achievement like aristocratic honor.¹⁹ The same holds true of Elyot’s philosophy of linguistic refinement, which even as it is characterized by its investment in immediacy, intimacy, and ease is distinguished as well by a pragmatic willingness to effect the illusion of those qualities through substitution or approximation. “If not this, then at least that” is the modest mechanism by which one begins to narrow the gap, “by little and little,” as Elyot might say, between eloquence and an infant (which is to say, inarticulate) tongue. Each substitution or similitude repeats the service provided by the imaginary Latin-speaking nursemaid, taking the place of an elusive ideal—approximating but also distancing us from that original fantasy of truly maternal Latinity.

Thus the initial attempt to immerse the infant in Latin from birth yields to an effort to populate his world with companions who speak only pure and elegant Latin, or perhaps clean and polite English, and then to descriptions of exercises and games that provide in a more piecemeal and painstaking way the illusion of familiarity with the classical tongue. Finally the companions fall away, and the conversation becomes purely textual: nursemaids are replaced by books. But here too the pedagogical ideal is an experience of intimacy, familiarity, and proximity—by way of analogy, at least. Virgil’s poetry, Elyot writes, ought to be the first Latin any English child reads because it “so nighe approcheth to the commune daliaunce and maners of children” that nothing “can be more familiar” (32_v). According to Elyot, the bucolic landscape of Virgil’s pastorals evokes the child’s own favored haunts, the husbandry of the georgics appeals to his practical instincts, and Aeneas’s escapades satisfy his longing for adventure. Indeed, Elyot insists, “there is nat that affect or desire, wherto any childes fantasie is disposed, but in some of Virgils warkes may be founden matter therto apte and propise.” Virgil thus presents himself as compensation for the impossible fantasy of the Latin-speaking wet nurse, for he “like to a good norise, giueth to a childe, if he wyll take it, euery thinge apte for his witte and capacitie” (34_r). This nurselike Virgil is not just a surrogate for the unobtainable actual Latin nursemaid; he is also the stand-in for a more arduous and potentially alienating course of study. Elyot’s ideal classical education begins with Homer, “from whom as a fountaine, proceded all eloquence and learning”—“there is no lesson … to be compared with Homer,” he declares (31_v–32_r). But finding a comparable lesson proves necessary: Greek is more difficult than Latin, and Homer’s long epics “require therefore a great time to be all lerned and kanned,” so Virgil presents himself as the next best thing, being “most lyke to Homere, and all moste the same Homere in latine” (32_v).

Elyot’s term for this miraculous aptness of Virgil’s poetry, its dual kinship both to Homer and to the interests and experiences of the English child, is “eloquence.” And although he insists on the necessity of learning Latin in order to access eloquence where it is most readily found, he insists that eloquence transcends disciplinary and linguistic boundaries, enfolding all other intellectual and cultural achievements. “They be moche abused, that suppose eloquence to be only in wordes or coulours of Rhetorike,” he declares, “for … in an oratour is required to be a heape of all maner of lernyng: whiche of some is called the worlde of science, of other the circle of doctrine, whiche is in one worde of greke Encyclopedia” (48_v). Such a vast, indeed global, competence necessarily extends far beyond “the elegant speking of latin”: “latine,” Elyot observes, “is but a naturall speche, and the frute of speche is wyse sentence, whiche is gathered and made of sondry lernynges” (47_v). Precisely because it transcends the boundaries of any particular language, eloquence is—paradoxically—accessible to all, inherent “in euery tonge … whereof sentences be so aptly compact that they by a vertue inexplicable do drawe unto them the mindes and consent of the herers” (47_v–48_r). It is this generous perception of linguistic potential and rhetorical efficacy, of the sameness of eloquence whenever and wherever it is heard—as much as any hopefulness about the hitherto untapped linguistic talents of nursemaids—that sustains Elyot’s vision of an otherwise impossible intimacy with classical antiquity. To read Virgil is to escape the infelicitous constraints of time and country: to traverse a world of learning but to experience it as inexplicably familiar, aptly compact.

However, that is not exactly the lesson one takes away from Virgil’s great poem of civilization building and travel, which takes a rather darker view of the satisfactions afforded by nurses. The Aeneid is all about generative displacements—Troy is rubble and must be rebuilt in Rome—but Aeneas’s encounter with Dido makes clear that the logic of substitution is not infallible: some forms of intimacy only increase the hunger they are meant to satisfy. Indeed, as J. S. C. Eidinow has suggested, book 4 of Virgil’s poem—and in particular Dido’s fantasy of fostering Ascanius as a parvulus Aeneas—can be read as a historically topical meditation on the limits of cross-cultural and extrafamilial intimacy.²⁰ Dido may romanticize herself as the wet nurse of Aeneas’s ambitions, but Virgil ironizes the image, recasting the nurse or foster mother as an emblem of mutually unsatisfactory exchanges and unfulfilled yearning, of losses that cannot be made good.²¹ The Boke named the Governour remains defensive about the implications of this lesson for its own nursemaidlike endeavors: that is, both the substitution of Virgilian nutriments for easier and more natural bodies of knowledge—the exchanges on which Elyot’s pedagogy depends—and the translation of classical learning and culture into English—the exchanges on which Elyot’s prose depends. What must be displaced? What will get left behind? For much of book 1, Elyot’s anxiety is clearly on behalf of the classics. “I am (as god iuge me),” he writes in the opening lines of the dedicatory epistle to King Henry VIII, “violently stered to devulgate or sette fourth some part of my studie, trustynge therby tacquite me of my dueties to god, your hyghnesse, and this my contray” (aii_r). This declaration, David Baker writes, “marks one of the first significant attempts by English humanists to make their learning accessible to a vernacular reading public,” but, as Baker observes, even the violent steering to which Elyot has been subjected persuades him only to publish “some part” of his own wide reading.²² Baker attributes this incompleteness to reticence: wary of the heretical and revolutionary potential of classical learning, Elyot provides only a partial account of his study, insisting on maintaining the boundaries between the learned and the unlearned. But while diplomacy and piety may help to define The Governour’s boundaries, Elyot tends to attribute its defects to the constraints of vernacularity.

Repeatedly throughout book 1 he interrupts the flow of his argument to redirect our attention to his labored, at times frustrated, efforts to put it into English. The very “name” of the Governour, he confesses early in book 1, is not quite apt as a descriptor for the sort of educated nobleman his text is designed to produce, as governance properly speaking belongs to the sovereign alone: “herafter,” he explains, “I intende to call them Magistratis, lackynge a more conuenient worde in englisshe” (14_r). But then, reminding himself that his subject in book 1 is not governance but the education and virtue necessary to produce good government, which learning and virtue noblemen “haue in commune with princes,” Elyot reconsiders, concluding that he might “without anoyance of any man, name them gouernours at this tyme,” trusting readers to maintain the necessary distinction between this general term and the “higher preeminence” reserved to kings and princes. Other lexical impasses prove absolute: Elyot recommends Aristotle’s Ethicae and Cicero’s De Officiis as indispensable sources of moral instruction, revealing the “propre significations of euery vertue,” but insists that the former is “to be lerned in greke; for the translations that we yet haue be but a rude and grosse shadowe of the eloquence and wisedome of Aristotell.” As for the latter, he confesses, even the title must remain obscure to English readers, since there “yet is no propre englisshe worde to be gyuen” for the Latin “officium” (41_r–v).

He writes enthusiastically of the learning to be attained by the reading of classical poetry too, boasting that he “coulde recite a great nombre of semblable good sentences” out of Ovid and other “wantone poets” but then declining to do so, for they “in the latine do expresse them incomparably with more grace and delectation to the reder than our englisshe tonge may yet comprehende” (51_v). Even when he turns from the study of literature to more practical ethical and political matters, Elyot often finds himself thrown back on the classical tongues in order to describe virtues that have no precise vernacular analogue: “constrained to usurpe a latine worde” such as “maturitie” for “the necessary augmentation of our langage” (85_r–v), or to clarify the meaning of a term such as “modestie,” “nat … knowen in the englisshe tonge, ne of al them which under stode latin, except they had radde good authors” (94_r), or to invent words altogether, hoping that they, “being … before this time unknowen in our tonge, may be by the sufferaunce of wise men nowe receiued by custome … [and] made familiare” (94_v).

Elyot’s success in expanding the boundaries of the language is rather remarkable, it must be said,²³ and his strategies can be quite subtle. Philologists have long cited Elyot as a devotee of the “neologistic couplet,” a syntactical unit that pairs a new or strange term with a more familiar vernacular counterpart.²⁴ Thus, in the opening lines of the Governour, the phrase “to devulgate or sette fourth” facilitates the introduction of the Latinate coinage “devulgate” by yoking it to the homely Anglo-Saxon “sette fourth.” Elyot was proud of his couplets: in 1533, in the preface to Of the Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man, he writes that, although in the Governour he “intended to augment our Englyshe tongue,” nonetheless “through out the boke there was no terme newe made by me of a latine or frenche worde, but it is there declared so playnly by one mene or other to a diligent reder that therby no sentence is made derke or harde to be understande.”²⁵ From Elyot’s perspective, then, the phrase “to devulgate or sette fourth” gracefully performs what it promises.²⁶ But as Stephen Merriam Foley points out, the neologistic couplet also highlights the author’s anxiety that he will not be understood: Elyot’s compulsive pairings are, Foley argues, “the traces of a mind insecurely poised between competing discourses of intellectual authority.”²⁷

In this regard the neologistic couplet is yet another rhetorical counterpart for the Latin-speaking nursemaid; it simultaneously exposes and disguises a cultural defect by drawing together two unlike and perhaps incompatible terms. Like any wet nurse, the neologistic couplet risks the charge of redundancy: if the familiar term is adequate to express the meaning of the borrowed or invented term, why borrow or invent? If it is not, how useful is it as a guide to the unfamiliar word? What is forestalled (but also registered) by such a compound is the vexed question of linguistic and cultural parity. That question—as much or more than any political or religious fears—accounts for the violence and the coercion attendant upon Elyot’s admittedly partial devulgation of learning: if the approximations attendant upon the work of translation necessarily entail a loss of meaning or value, how, nonetheless, is meaning or value to be transferred without such fudged equations, such compromised and compromising resemblances? Because he understands eloquence as a quality that speaks across linguistic, cultural, geographic, and temporal divides—as the most mobile of linguistic effects—Elyot can conceive of the study of remote, long-dead tongues as an experience of profound, near-perfect intimacy, and he can write prose that effaces lexical difference even as it testifies to persistent gaps in expressive capability. In addition he can dream of a time when such education and such prose produce an English home, and perhaps even a mother tongue, whose walls enclose the “encyclopedia” of eloquence.

But would such a home, and such a tongue, remain English? In his 1533 preface to Knowledge, Elyot scoffs at the question, berating for their ingratitude those readers who are “offended (as they say) with my strange terms.”²⁸ But in The Governour he seems—briefly and obliquely—to wonder. In the final chapter of book 1, having just urged the Governour’s readers to set themselves vigorously to the work of translating classical wisdom into England, he departs conspicuously from that wisdom. Citing, but then disavowing, Cicero’s injunction against sports and games, he proceeds to make a rather plaintive case for the merits of the dying art of English longbow shooting, a skill that “is, and always hath ben” England’s security “from outwarde hostilitie” and the source of its fame throughout the world, “as ferre as Hierusalem” (99_v–100_r). Elyot attributes the decline of longbow shooting to an encroaching cosmopolitanism, as foreign and new-fangled modes of defense—crossbows and handguns—have eroded a skill that “continuell use” made “so perfecte and exacte amonge englisshe men” (102_r). “O what cause of reproche shall the decaye of archers be to us nowe liuyng?” he demands. “Ye what irrecuperable damage either to us or them in whose time nede of semblable defence shall happen?” (100_r).

This plangent appeal for the preservation of an already (or once) “perfect” native art—an art that has shored up England’s defenses against outsiders and extended its renown to the far corners of the world—makes for an odd conclusion to the litany of not yets that propels the rest of book 1 and justifies its radical conflations of domesticity and estrangement. Indeed, Elyot rather casually observes at one point, midway through his attack on English legal discourse, that eloquence is no different than embroidery, drawing, or sculpture: if Englishmen are not able or willing to cultivate a particular skill at home—if, that is, they are to face the fact that they inhabit a realm where “the langage is barberouse” and “the steering of affections of the mind,” rhetoric itself, “was never used” (56_r)—they must “be constrained … to abandone [their] owne countraymen and resorte unto straungers” (55_r). That matter-of-fact resorting unto strangers exacts an unexpected toll in the final pages of book 1, as Elyot imagines a future England enervated and demoralized by its blind embrace of things novel and strange, its neglect of what it once knew and practiced best.

Cicero the Sea Captain

It is a bit of an interpretive leap to link this elegiac defense of the longbow to a latent concern for the vernacular, but I am nudged to make that leap by the fact that Elyot’s most important sixteenth-century reader—the heir to his zeal both for the English longbow and for foreign-language study—seems to have made it too. In 1545, a year before Elyot’s death, Roger Ascham, the young Cambridge lecturer in Greek, made his debut as an author, publishing a pseudo-Socratic dialogue on the merits of longbow shooting, citing Elyot’s enthusiasm for the sport as inspiration for his own labors on its behalf.²⁹ “[T]o haue written this boke either in latin or Greke … had bene more easier and fit for mi trade in study,” he confesses in the dedicatory epistle to Toxophilus: The Schole of Shotyng, “yet neuerthelesse,” he deems it best to “haue written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue, for Englishe men” (x). The epistle to readers amplifies this claim by way of a fable borrowed from Herodotus:

Bias the wyse man came to Cresus the ryche kyng, on a tyme, when he was makynge newe shyppes, purposyng to haue subdued by water the out yles lying betwixt Grece and Asia minor: What newes now in Grece, saith the king to Bias? None other newes, but these, sayeth Bias: that the yles of Grece haue prepared a wonderful companye of horsemen, to ouerrun Lydia withall. There is nothyng vnder heauen, sayth the kynge, that I woulde so soone wisshe, as that they durst be so bolde, to mete vs on the lande with horse. And thinke you sayeth Bias, that there is anye thyng which they wolde sooner wysshe, then that you shulde be so fonde, to mete them on the water with shyppes? And so Cresus hearyng not the true newes, but perceyuyng the wise mannes mynde and counsell, both gaue then ouer makyng of his shyppes, and left also behynde him a wonderful example for all commune wealthes to folowe: that is euermore to regarde and set most by that thing whervnto nature hath made them moost apt, and vse hath made them moost fitte. (xii)

“By this matter,” Ascham explains, “I mean the shotynge in the long bowe, for English men,” but the fable—like Toxophilus—serves equally well as defense of the practice of writing in the vernacular: English, after all, is the language that nature and use have conspired to make most apt and fit for his own undertaking; to write in Latin or Greek would be to set sail in unseaworthy vessels. Indeed, as Ryan Stark and Thomas Greene have suggested, Ascham’s interest in archery is always also an interest in eloquence: the strengths developed by the former (clarity of vision, precision of aim) are, to his mind, exactly correspondent to the skills requisite for the latter.³⁰ In his epistle to Toxophilus Ascham elucidates the analogy: “Yf any man wyll applye these thynges [that is, writing and shooting] togyther, [he] shal nat se the one farre differ from the other,” he alleges, for “[i]n our tyme nowe, … very many do write, but after suche a fashion, as very many do shoote … , tak[ing] in hande stronger bowes, than they be able to mayntayne” (xiii). For Ascham, his defense of the longbow and his advocacy for the vernacular are interchangeable commitments, and he scoffs at “any man [who] woulde blame me, eyther for takynge such a matter in hande, or els for writing it in the Englyshe tongue” (xiii).

Ascham’s attitude toward his mother tongue is hardly uncritical, but neither does it partake of Elyot’s faith in the enriching effect of intimacy with foreign tongues. Indeed what Ascham seems to have taken from his reading of Elyot—and especially from his reading of the mournful conclusion to book 1—is a keen awareness of the dangers of false intimacy or overeager identification. Like Elyot, he frames his decision to write in English in terms of a desire to improve the tongue and profit his vernacular readership, but he betrays no optimism that such improvement or profit will come easily or without cost. Where Elyot emphasizes likeness, contiguity, and kinship, Ascham insists on a radical and perhaps insuperable estrangement: “as for ye Latin or greke tonge, euery thing is so excellently done in them, that none can do better,” he bluntly declares, but “in the Englysh tonge contrary, euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse” (xiv). Rather than search for terms or syntactical arrangements that might, like Elyot’s neologistic couplets, ease the passage between the learned and the vulgar, Ascham advocates for prose that eschews foreign affectations and neologistic borrowings, arguing that “[h]e that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste … speake as the common people do” and lamenting the fact that “[m]any English writers haue not done so, but vsinge straunge wordes as latin, french and Italian, do make all thinges darke and harde” (xiv).

As for the possibility that the vernacular requires such augmentation, he dismisses it summarily: “Ones I communed with a man whiche reasoned the englyshe tongue to be enryched and encreased therby, sayinge: Who wyll not prayse that feaste, where a man shall drinke at a diner, bothe wyne, ale and beere? Truely quod I, they be all good, euery one taken by hym selfe alone, but if you putte Maluesye and sacke, read wyne and white, ale and beere, and al in one pot, you shall make a drynke, neyther easie to be knowen, nor yet holsom for the bodye” (xiv). Where Elyot sees nurturing and intimacy—the infant at his nurse’s breast—Ascham sees the threat of contamination, an unwholesome and unpalatable brew. This is not to suggest that Ascham believed the vernacular had nothing to learn from the classical tongues, nor English youth from the study of classical literature. His career as a writer and a teacher was founded on the promotion of Greek and Latin literacy, and indeed in the very next lines he hints that not all attempts at linguistic enrichment are doomed to failure, noting that “Cicero in folowyng Isocrates, Plato and Demosthenes, increased the latine tounge after an other sorte” (xiv). Of this “other sorte” or “waye” he will say only that it has fallen into neglect and disrepute—“bycause dyuers men that write, do not know, they can neyther folowe it, bycause of theyr ignorauncie, nor yet will prayse it, for verye arrogauncie”—but it is clear that it must bear little resemblance to Elyot’s own methods.

For Ascham, the infelicities of time and country that have consigned England and English to the cultural and intellectual margins are to be remedied not by a pedagogy that simulates proximity, familiarity, and immediacy but rather by a pedagogy that makes distance, strangeness, and the very passage of time into instruments of instruction. Estrangement may be the root cause of barbarism, but it is also the guarantor of purity: this conviction undergirds The Scholemaster’s fierce objection to the practice of sending English youths to study in Catholic Italy, and it governs the treatise’s pedagogical philosophy no less. The Scholemaster advertises itself as a method of teaching a young boy Latin “with ease and pleasure, and in short time” (1_v). But in truth Ascham has little regard for—or confidence in—ease, pleasure, or quickness. He famously prefers “hard” to “quick” wits on the grounds that the former, however resistant to instruction, are liable to retain what they learn, while the latter “commonlie, be apte to take” but “vnapte to keepe,” “more quicke to enter spedelie, than hable to pearse farre,” and “delit[ing] them selues in easie and pleasant studies, … neuer passe farre forward in hie and hard sciences” (4_v). That eloquence itself is such a high and hard science follows from Ascham’s insistence that, contrary to Elyot’s notion of it as a universal inheritance, proper to any “natural” tongue, true eloquence is to be found only in the remote and rarefied provinces of antiquity: “[I]n the rudest contrie, and most barbarous mother language, many be found [that] can speake verie wiselie,” he observes, “but in the Greeke and Latin tong, the two onelie learned tonges, we finde always wisdome and eloquence, good matter and good vtterance, neuer or seldom asunder” (46_r).

For Ascham, as for Elyot, the rudeness of the English vernacular—its grammatical inconsistency, its inability to replicate the rhythms of classical prose and verse, its impoverished vocabulary and patchwork etymologies—is a natural consequence of England’s own inescapable rusticity, its alienation from Athens and Rome, the wellsprings of learning and eloquence. But in Ascham’s ideal schoolroom the distance between antiquity and modernity, Rome and England, becomes a productive and necessary guard against moral corruption and linguistic vulgarity. To begin with, in direct opposition to Elyot’s promotion of the use of Latin as a familiar tongue—indeed, if possible, as a family tongue—Ascham insists that Latin must not be spoken at all, neither at home nor at school, until students have mastered fully the arts of translation and composition. “In very deede,” he allows, “if children were brought vp, in soch a house, or soch a Schole, where the latin tonge were properlie and perfitlie spoken, as Tib[erius] and Ca[ius] Gracci were brought vp, in their mother Cornelias house, surelie, than the dailie vse of speaking, were the best and readiest waie, to learne the latin tong” (2_v). But such homes and such mothers did not exist in sixteenth-century England, as Ascham’s notorious anecdote of Lady Jane Grey, born to parents whose crudity is matched only by their cruelty, makes plain. Indeed when he reflects on the kind of language learning that might plausibly occur in an English home, it is only to offer a cautionary tale: “This last somer,” he recalls, “I was in a Ientlemans house: where a yong childe, somewhat past fower years olde, cold in no wise frame his tonge, to saie, a little shorte grace: and yet he could roundly rap out so manie vgle othes, and those of the newest facion, and some good man of fourscore yeare olde hath neuer hard named before…. This Childe vsing moche the companie of servinge men, and geuing good eare to their taulke, did easily learne, whiche he shall hardlie forget, all daies of his life hereafter” (16_v). This recollection exactly inverts Elyot’s fantasy of the child nurtured with ease and companionship into pure Latinity, or even clean and polite vernacularity: here easy learning and a good ear are the agents of moral and linguistic corruption. The best parents can hope for, Ascham suggests, is to preserve their children from the “confounding of companies” (16_v): domestic intimacies are imagined strictly in negative terms.

The schoolroom presents a similar challenge, for even in “the best Scholes” the habitual use of poor Latin by masters and schoolboys alike means that “barbariousnesse is bred vp so in yong wittes, as afterward they be, not onelie marde for speaking, but also corrupted in iudgement: as with moch adoe, or neuer at all, they be brought to right frame againe” (2_v). Ascham’s own pedagogical precepts work to provide this “right frame”: a space where children’s instinct for imitation—so often, for him, a source of danger—can be put to safe and profitable use. The basic method is simple: Ascham requires the student to translate a passage from Latin or Greek to English and then back again, using the original classical text to correct his own. Through its carefully regulated employment of classical models, such “double translation” remedies the estrangement of rude English from classical eloquence, facilitating exchanges between the learned and unlearned tongues, but it also guards against the dangers of straying too far from the classical precedent, by imposing a calculated retreat from and return to its bounds.

Much as Elyot’s neologistic couplets modeled for readers the enriching effects of intimacy with foreign tongues, Ascham’s distinctive prose mirrors the controlled comparisons on which his pedagogy depends: ideas are worked out by way of “fit similitude” (19_r), in cautiously elaborated analogies whose resemblances are expressed in neatly balanced parallel clauses. Thus he writes of the distinction between educated and uneducated noblemen:

The greatest shippe in deede commonlie carieth the greatest burden, but yet alwayes with the greatest ieoperdie, not onelie for the persons and goodes committed vnto it, but euen for the shyppe it selfe, except it be gouerned, with the greater wisedome. But Nobilitie, gouerned by learning and wisedome, is in deede, most like a faire shippe, hauyng tide and winde at will, vnder the reule of a skilfull master: whan contrarie wise, a shippe, caried, yea with the hiest tide & greatest winde, lacking a skilfull master, most commonlie, doth either, sinck it selfe vpon sandes, or breake it selfe vpon rockes. And euen so, how manie haue bene, either drowned in vaine pleasure, or ouerwhelmed by stout wilfulnesse, the histories of England be able to affourde ouer many examples vnto vs. (13_v–14_r)

“But yet,” “not onelie,” “but euen,” “except,” “but … in deede,” “whan contrarie wise,” “and euen so”: where Elyot might have compressed the comparison into a single suggestive metaphor, Ascham attenuates it over several sentences, parsing the original commonplace formulation—men are like ships—into an ever more precise diagnosis of the difference between virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. Indeed the similitude, a figure of likeness, becomes in Ascham’s hands an instrument for the expression of otherwise elusive distinctions, and the ideal figure for a pedagogical philosophy founded on mistrust of what is close at hand. For as he explains via another similitude:

[T]here be manie faire examples in this Court, for yong Ientlemen to follow…. But they be, like faire markes in the feild, out of a mans reach, to far of, to shote at well. The best and worthiest men, in deede, be somtimes seen, but seldom taulked withall: A yong Ientleman, may somtime knele to their person, smallie vse their companie, for their better instruction. But yong Ientlemen ar faine commonlie to do in the Court, as yong Archers do in the feild: that is take soch markes, as be nie them, although they be neuer so foule to shote at. I meene, they be driuen to kepe companie with the worste: and what force ill companie hath, to corrupt good wittes, the wisest men know best. (14_r)

Here again the initial comparison between imitation and archery is revised and revised again, yielding a taxonomy of likeness and difference: fair marks versus foul, far off versus nigh, worthy men versus the worst, seeing versus talking, kneeling versus keeping company, instruction versus corruption. In every case virtue is aligned with remoteness: if archery and seamanship are Ascham’s favored analogies for the work of moral and rhetorical education, that is surely because each case skill increases with distance.

So it is with double translation, for the crucial step of the process, what transforms it from a display of rote repetition or memory to an exercise of eloquence in the making, is the gap that Ascham imposes at its center. Once the child has completed his initial translation, from Latin into English, the master is to “take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin againe, in an other paper booke” (1_v, emphasis mine). The hour or more that intervenes between the two Latin versions—Cicero’s original and the child’s imitation—during which the child is left alone with his own English, recapitulates in miniature the infelicitous gap of time, country, and language that divides sixteenth-century England from ancient Rome. What survives that lapse is an inevitably partial reconstruction, akin to “the shadow or figure of the ancient Rhetorique” that Elyot just barely discerns in English legal discourse (56_v). Of course the loss of an original perfection is not the only problem: in the schoolroom as in the course of history, errors and barbarisms accumulate in the interval. The child, as Ascham confesses, is likely to “misse, either in forgetting a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence” (1_v). As Jeff Dolven suggests, this “meantime” between tongues is “a window of necessary risk” since learning “depend[s] … on the hazards of the middle.”³¹

But such language is perhaps unduly monitory, for Ascham is surprisingly sanguine about the likelihood of forgetfulness and confusion, urging the teacher not to “froune, or chide with him, if the childe haue done his diligence, and vsed no trewandship therein” (1_v–2_r). Indeed such errors are what the pause of an hour or more is designed to produce; they are essential to the cultivation of eloquence. “For I know by good experience,” Ascham assures his readers, “that a childe shall take more profit of two fautes, ientlie warned of, then of foure thinges, rightly hitt…. For than, the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him. Tullie would haue vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would haue placed this word here, not there: would haue vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender” (2_r). Lynn Enterline describes this friendly colloquy as “connect[ing] master and student via the student’s likeness to Tullie,”³² but in fact the emphasis falls on difference: it is only when he lays his own Latin next to that of Cicero that the child learns to measure and value the distance between them, only then that he perceives the countless tiny calculations of diction, syntax, arrangement, and style that distinguish eloquence from mere speech. It is this final act of correction that prevents the student from wandering off course, even as he cultivates his own expressive style, but the errors that will so often precede it are no less necessary or productive. Allow the child “good space and time” to complete the exercise, Ascham urges schoolmasters (31_v, emphasis added). Because double translation assumes error as the precondition of learning, it redeems both distance and time, and the waywardness they enable, from their roles as the agents of barbaric decline.

It is not surprising that the “Tullie” who presides over these interlingual exchanges bears no resemblance to Elyot’s nurselike Virgil, who entices the child with sweetly familiar morsels. Instead, Ascham imagines Cicero as an “expert Sea man” who “set[s] vp his saile of eloquence, in some broad deep Argument, [and] caried with full tyde and winde, of his witte and learnyng,” outdistances all rivals, who “may rather stand and looke after him, than hope to ouertake him, what course so euer he hold, either in faire or foule” (63_r). Ascham’s method allows the inexpert schoolboy to accompany Cicero on those perilous rhetorical journeys, with the full expectation that he will run off course in the attempt: translation, which Ascham initially champions as an alternative to travel abroad because “learning teacheth safelie” while the traveler is “made cunning by manie shippewrakes” (18_r–v), in fact mimics the perils of foreign travel, recuperating the shipwreck as the point of the voyage. We might recall here the fable that introduces Toxophilus, in which a barbarian landlubber is persuaded to give up shipbuilding in order to confront his Greek antagonists on (literally) familiar ground. The Scholemaster offers a less stark take on the folly of meeting an ancient civilization (or its most eloquent exponent) at sea: imitation by way of double translation allows rude and hard-witted schoolboys to set themselves up in direct competition with Cicero and recuperates their inevitable losses as gain.

Ultimately, Ascham allows himself to dream of an England so enriched by such exchanges that even Cicero might prefer it to the nurseries of his own eloquence. Recalling that “Master Tully” once declared of England that “[t] here is not one scruple of siluer in that whole Isle, or any one that knoweth either learning or letter,” he imagines making a triumphant rejoinder: “But now master Cicero, … sixteen hundred yeare after you were dead and gone, it may trewly be sayd, that … your excellent eloquence is as well liked and loued, and as trewlie followed in England at this day, as it is now, or euer was, sence your owne tyme, in any place of Italie, either at Arpinum, where ye were borne, or els at Rome where ye were brought vp” (62_r–v). Such a fantasy would seem to answer Elyot’s yearning for perfect intimacy with the past, for an erasure of distance and difference; but, in fact, it is precisely Ascham’s consciousness of his remove from that past, and of England’s inglorious place within it, that gives his fantasy its savor. The sixteen hundred years (and thousands of miles) that separate Ascham’s England from Cicero’s Arpinum or his Rome are here not the source of cultural and linguistic shame but rather evidence of a triumph—the triumph of a pedagogy that turns the “infelicitie of … tyme and countray” into time and space for learning.

Sallust the Exile

In Ascham’s fantasy of an England made eloquent, the natives speak and write in Cicero’s Latin, but he insists that a similar transformation may eventually be effected in the mother tongue. Indeed his first allusion to double translation, Toxophilus’s reference to the “other” method followed by Cicero, comes in a discussion of how best to enrich “the englyshe tongue” (xiv). In addition his gleeful rebuke to Cicero in The Scholemaster is prompted not by the improved Latinity of his countrymen but by their growing skill as vernacular writers. This is as he hopes and expects: the rigorous method of double translation, he writes, is intended “not onelie to serue in the Latin or Greke tong, but also in our own English language. But yet, bicause the prouidence of God hath left vnto vs in no other tong, saue onelie in the Greke and Latin tong, the trew preceptes, and perfite examples of eloquence, therefore must we seeke in the Authors onelie of those two tonges, the trewe Paterne of Eloquence, if in any other mother tongue we looke to attaine, either to perfit vtterance of it our selues, or skilfull iudgement of it in others” (56_v). But when Ascham describes the results of that patterning in England, he has less to say about what vernacular writers do well than about what they now (rightly) perceive themselves to do badly: like the boys in his imaginary schoolroom, English authors are learning to “know the difference” between themselves and antiquity (60_r). He applauds, therefore, the sentiments behind recent efforts to replace “barbarous and rude Ryming” (60_r) with verses modeled on classical quantitative measures, but he is cheered less by results of those experiments than by the knowledge that English writers have, at last and at least, become conscious of their own barbarity: “I rejoice that euen poore England preuented Italie, first in spying out, than in seekying to amend this fault” (62_r). That those amendments so far have yielded verses that “rather trotte and hobble, than runne smoothly in our English tong” (60_v) is, to his way of thinking, further proof of the virtue of the undertaking itself: those who dissent are lazy homebodies who, for “idleness” or for “ignorance,” “neuer went farder than the schole … of Chaucer at home” (61_v)—home, as ever, being the very worst place to take one’s schooling.

Helgerson cites Ascham’s misguided faith in English quantitative measures as an instantiation of a larger truth: “at the historic root of national self-articulation,” he writes, “we find … self-alienation.”³³ It is this self-alienating investment in the authority of classical example, he argues, that later Elizabethan writers must learn to overcome in order to fashion English as a truly national tongue.³⁴ But alienation and eloquence are more complexly entwined, both in the sixteenth century and in Cicero’s Rome, as Ascham is fully aware. On the one hand, as he insists, the greatest classical writers became great because of their willingness to depart from common practice: he cites approvingly Cicero’s dictum that by studying at Rhodes, he exchanged the speech he received at home for a better one (though Ascham adds, characteristically, that he doubts that study abroad helped Cicero as much as “binding himself to translate” the great Attic orators [44_v]). On the other hand, he acknowledges that those who leave home may struggle to find their way back: thus The Scholemaster concludes with an uneasy meditation on the difference between Cicero and Sallust, each living “whan the Latin tong was full ripe” (63_r), each blessed with wisdom and learning, and only one capable of eloquence.

As Ascham recalls, his beloved former tutor John Cheke, whom he credits with the invention of double translation, once cautioned him that it “was not verie fitte for yong men, to learne out of [Sallust], the puritie of the Latin tong,” for “he was not the purest in proprietie of wordes, nor choisest in aptnes of phrases, nor the best in framing of sentences,” and his writing was all too often “neyther plaine for the matter, nor sensible for mens vnderstanding” (64_v). When Ascham asks how a well-educated Roman of Cicero’s time should have succumbed to such awkwardness and bad taste, Cheke confesses that he does not know but adds that he has developed a private “fansie.” Sallust’s youth was, he observes, marked by “ryot and lechery,” and it was only “by long experience of the hurt and shame that commeth of mischief” that he was brought to “the loue of studie and learning.” His reward for this conversion of mind and habits was a post as “Pretor in Numidia,” a North African outpost of the empire, “where he [was] absent from his contrie, and not inured with the common talke of Rome, but shut vp in his studie, and bent wholy to reading” (65_r). This geographic and scholarly isolation was productive insofar as it yielded Sallust’s great Historiae, Cheke observes, but the voice of the work betrays the stress of its author’s alienation: depending on older authors, especially Cato and Thucydides, for his matter, arrangement, and style, Sallust lapses into archaisms and—when he can find no suitable word for his purposes in Cato or Thucydides—invents new terms wholesale. The worst defect of his style, Cheke continues, is “neyther oldnes nor newnesse of wordes” but the “strange phrases” that result when “good Latin wordes” are recast in imitation of Greek, “placed and framed outlandish like” (65_v). It is this outlandish quality that distinguishes Sallust from Cicero: like his model Thucydides, who “wrote his storie, not at home in Grece, but abrode in Italie, and therefore smelleth of a certaine outlandish kinde of talke” (66_r), Sallust loses the ease and familiarity of the native speaker, holding his mother tongue at an awkward and unmistakable remove.

Cheke offers Sallust as proof of the urgency of choosing one’s models wisely: Plato and Isocrates, “the purest and playnest writers, that euer wrote in any tong,” are the “best examples for any man to follow whether he write, Latin, Italian, French, or English” (66_r). But his fanciful vision of Sallust laboring in a North African study with only Cato and Thucydides for company bears a striking resemblance to Ascham’s vision of the ideal English schoolroom, in which scripted interchanges with dead Latin authors take the place of conversation, and the familiar contours of the mother tongue are gradually refashioned to fit the impress of a language now found only in books. The Scholemaster ends shortly after these reflections, with Ascham noting simply that “these … reules, which worthie Master Cheke dyd impart vnto me concernyng Salust,” are to be taken as guides for the “right iudgement of the Latin tong” (67_r). His readers are left with the surmise that, as far as the English tongue is concerned, the pedagogy of Cheke and Ascham seems liable to produce not a nation of Ciceros but an island of Sallusts.

As far as we can tell, few English schoolboys were subjected regularly to the rigors of double translation,³⁵ and even fewer, if any, must have learned Latin at the breast, but the ideals of English humanist pedagogical theory nonetheless threatened to alter the course of vernacular usage.³⁶ So argues Richard Mulcaster, master of London’s Merchant Taylors’ School (where his pupils included a young Edmund Spenser) and outspoken critic of humanist efforts to impose classical standards on the mother tongue. Mulcaster was a humanist by training, steeped in the example of classical authors, but he took from his study of antiquity a very different lesson than Elyot or Ascham did: rhetoric and pedagogy are, he concludes, essentially local arts. As he writes in Positions, his 1581 treatise on the education of children, in seeking to fashion England along the lines of Athens or Rome, a schoolmaster may overlook the fact that “the circunstance of the countrie, will not admit that, which he would perswade.” This inattention to local particularities makes the schoolmaster like the biblical parable’s foolish builder who erects his house on sand: “mistaking his ground, [he] misplaceth his building, and hazardeth his credit.”³⁷ The same care, he points out, is required of the orator: it is only by “mastering of the circunstance”—that is, both the rhetorical circumstances of his case and the actual circumstances of the place in which he speaks—that he may effectively instruct and persuade his fellow citizens. Both travel and an undue regard for alien traditions jeopardize such mastery, since they distance the orator from the ground on which his argument must be built. In the very causes he chooses to espouse, Mulcaster writes, an orator reveals the depth of his loyalty to his native land: “by it each countrie discouereth the travellour, when he seeketh to enforce his forreigne conclusions, and clingeth to that countryman, which hath bettered her still, by biding still at home” (9). Excessive devotion to Greek or Latin, he emphasizes, constitutes just such an enforcement of “forreigne conclusions.” Even the most revered ancient authorities must bow to the imperative of local circumstance, for in rhetorical matters, “where circunstance is prescription, it is no proufe, bycause Plato praiseth it, bycause Aristotle alloweth it, bycause Cicero commendes it, bycause Quintilian is acquainted with it … that therfore it is for vs to vse.” “What if our countrey honour it in them,” Mulcaster asks, “and yet for all that may not vse it her selfe, bycause circunstance is her check” (11)?

On this basis Mulcaster makes his radical case for a pedagogy of the mother tongue: an orthography, grammar, rhetoric, and poetics fashioned specifically for English, according to English models and English habits. He challenges fidelity to Latin exemplars as a servile remainder of England’s colonial past: as he reminds readers of his 1582 treatise on English spelling, The First Part of the Elementarie, “[t]he Romane autoritie first planted the Latin among vs here, by force of their conquest,” and “the vse thereof for matters of learning, doth cause it continew, tho the conquest be expired.”³⁸ He reproaches “the opinion of som such of our peple, as desire rather to please themselues with a foren tung, wherewith theie ar acquainted, then to profit their cuntrie, in hir naturall language, where their acquaintance should be” (255); such misplaced allegiance, he argues, grants the classical tongues and the contemporary continental languages an unjust advantage over the English vernacular. “No one tung is more fine then other naturallie,” Mulcaster argues, “but by industrie of the speaker, … [who] endeuoreth himself to garnish it with eloquence, & to enrich it with learning” (254). To claim that rude countries inevitably breed rude tongues is, he continues, to misunderstand the character of eloquence, which thrives in every place such industry is employed; sounding rather like Elyot, he writes that true eloquence is “neither limited to language, nor restrained to soil, whose measur the hole world is” (258). But where Elyot deplores England’s provinciality, blaming its rusticity for the roughness of its speech, Mulcaster proclaims his pride in all aspects of English identity: “I loue Rome, but London better, I fauor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English” (255). Instead of being “pilgrims to learning by lingring about tungs,” he argues, English authors may find “all that gaietie [to] be had at home, which makes vs gase so much at the fine stranger” (256).

To the charge that English is “vncouth,” Mulcaster responds that it is merely “vnused” and must attain praise “thorough purchace, and planting in our tung, which theie [that is, Greeks and Romans] were so desirous to place in theirs” (256–57). His own treatise, devoted to the establishment of rules for pronunciation and spelling in the vernacular, is meant as a mere pretext to such purchase and planting; ultimately, he writes, the English language must cultivate the whole of the art of rhetoric, becoming “enriched so in euerie kinde of argument, and honored so with euerie ornament of eloquence, as she maie vy with the foren.” In pursuit of that enrichment, he cheerfully advocates the adoption of foreign words and phrases, cautioning only that spelling be anglicized: “For if the word it self be english in dede, then is it best in the natural hew, if it be a stranger, & incorporate among vs, let it wear our colors, sith it wil be one of vs” (227). In Mulcaster’s view, England’s relationship to foreign languages ought not to be construed as a choice between alienation and dependence. Instead, he urges, English may partake freely of all other linguistic models while retaining a strong sense of its own local virtues.

Mulcaster admits that England’s geographic insularity and remoteness have contributed to its lack of rhetorical polish; he acknowledges that the vernacular has been treated as if it were “of no compas for ground & autoritie” because “it is of small reatch” and “stretcheth no further then this Iland of ours, naie not there ouer all.” But concerns about England’s isolation and peripherality miss the mark, he argues. The very geography responsible for the vernacular’s modest reach is also the guarantee of its rhetorical sufficiency: “[t]ho it go not beyond sea, it will serue on this side.” In the same way he admits that England’s place in the world is limited—“our state is no Empire to hope to enlarge it by commanding ouer cuntries,” and “no stranger, nor foren nation, bycause of the bounder & shortnesse of our language, wold deal so with vs, as to transport from vs as we do from other”—but this too he regards as a point in its favor: “tho it be neither large in possession, nor in present hope of great encrease, yet where it rules, it can make good lawes, and as fit for our state, as the biggest can for theirs, and oftimes better to, bycause of confusion in greatest gouernments, as most vnwildinesse in grossest bodies” (257).

He concludes by revising England’s history of foreign conquest and colonial subordination, imagining a newly pacific invasion of its borders by strangers who come not to conquer or pillage but to satiate their desire for learning and eloquence. If Latin is the language of England’s colonial past, English is the tongue of its mercantile future: “Why maie not the English wits … in their own tung be in time as well sought to, by foren students for increase of their knowledge,” he wonders, “as our soil is sought to at this same time, by foren merchants, for encrease of their welth?” As yet, he concedes, wisdom and eloquence are not counted among the island’s domestic riches, but that may change: as England’s “soil is fertile, bycause it is applyed,” he remarks, “so the wits be not barren if theie list to brede” (257). If those fertile wits are cultivated—in the Merchant Taylors’ School and in schoolrooms throughout the nation where Mulcaster’s grammatical precepts are applied—then England need no longer choose between exile from the mother tongue or isolation in a rude vernacular: the homely island tongue may play host to a world of learning.

This vision of an England (and an English) whose relationship to the outside world is one of mutual increase offers those invested in the vernacular—and Mulcaster encourages the mercantile metaphor—an alternative to slavish dependency and close-minded insularity. Destiny, he writes, elects some particular age in the history of each tongue and culture to bless it with perfection: “Such a period in the Greke tung was that time, when Demosthenes liued, and that learned race of the father philosophers: such a period in the Latin tung, was that time, when Tullie liued, and those of that age: Such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”³⁹ “[T]he question,” he concludes, “is wherein finenesse standeth.” When it comes to Latin, he is no different than any other well-read sixteenth-century Englishman, making Cicero his standard and Sallust his cautionary tale: “So was Salust deceiued among the Romans, liuing with eloquent Tullie, and writing like ancient Cato” (160). The consequences of that deceived attachment to a past provide the motive for Mulcaster’s own career and his passionate advocacy for the embrace of English on its own terms and merits. If eloquence is to be found, he argues, it will be found here and now, and if patterns of that eloquence are required, they too must be local ones: “it must nedes be, that our English tung hath matter enough in hir own writing, which maie direct her own right, if it be reduced to certain precept, and rule of Art, tho it haue not as yet bene thoroughlie perceaued” (77).

However, in seeking to avoid the fate of Sallust for a generation of English schoolboys, Mulcaster may well help to bring it about. For a native speaker, after all, nothing is more alienating than the effort of relearning one’s mother tongue in the form of precepts and rules of art; what was easy and instinctive threatens to become, in Mulcaster’s schoolroom, laborious and artificial. As Ascham might point out, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The internalized sense of strangeness for which Mulcaster blames his humanist colleagues is, in some sense, the essential precondition for a full-fledged art of English eloquence. Answering what Mulcaster calls the question of “finenesse”—“thoroughly perceiving” what one has learned at the breast—demands a certain strategic distance. The late sixteenth century bears witness to a revolution on what can seem, at first, like Mulcaster’s terms: in rhetorical handbooks and literary texts alike, the English tongue begins to “direct her own right.” But direction comes, as ever, from afar: within the new vernacular rhetorics and poetics, the distance between English and antiquity becomes, if anything, an even more pressing concern. At the same time strangeness emerges as an essential aspect of eloquence in any tongue, the element that distinguishes artful from ordinary speech and gives rhetoric and poetry their power. Shaped by their long detour in the classical tongues, English writers reconstitute their mother tongue as a second language, self-consciously belated and usefully eccentric. Errancy and exoticism, the instruments of Sallust’s corruption as a writer, are promoted as the master tropes of rhetorical and poetic fineness.