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Chapter 1

Rhetoric and the Passions in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom

“Do you love me, master? no?”

—Ariel to Prospero

Of Questions and Methods

A brief catalogue of lines will evoke a sense of this book’s topic—Shakespeare’s career-long fascination with the idea, practices, and effects of contemporary pedagogy: “Schoolmasters will I keep within my house” and “I am no breeching scholar in the schools” (Taming of the Shrew); “I read it in the grammar long ago” and “I was their tutor to instruct them” (Titus Andronicus); “O learn to love, the lesson is but plain” (Venus and Adonis); “Wilt thou be the school where Lust shall learn?” (The Rape of Lucrece). And one final retort to one of Shakespeare’s most bookish teachers: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (The Tempest). Sixteenth-century humanist schoolmasters claimed that their methods of teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric would turn boys into gentlemen, that the eloquence and wisdom garnered at school would directly benefit the English commonwealth. In the chapters that follow, I explore what Shakespearean poetry and drama tell us about such claims while asking, at the same time, how the all-male grammar school affected the emotional registers of early modern masculinity. I began my research for this book by asking what the nuances of Shakespearean emotion reveal about the grammar schools’ curriculum, methods of instruction, and forms of discipline. But it was not long before another, related question emerged: When read from the vantage of archival evidence about the Latin schoolroom that made them possible, what do the texts of schoolboys and former schoolboys tell us about the experience of being “trained up” as a “gentleman” in the period? We have long accepted the word of humanist teachers and theorists about the effects of their pedagogy. It is time to listen to the testimony of grammar school students.¹

The chapters that follow bring evidence about the minutiae of daily life in sixteenth-century schoolrooms to bear on Shakespeare’s representation of character and emotion and investigate, in turn, what his rhetorical and meta-rhetorical portraits of the passions reveal about the institutional curriculum and pedagogical practices that made them possible. More specifically, these chapters challenge three influential assumptions in English studies: first, that London’s new, commercial stage was more indebted to popular morality drama than to the “elite” Latin culture of humanism;² second, that the grammar school “fostered in its initiates a properly docile attitude toward authority” and effectively produced, as the masters said they would, subjects who believed unreservedly in upholding England’s existing social hierarchies;³ and third, that the school’s training in Latin grammar and rhetoric successfully instituted a rigid distinction between male and female language, behavior, and feeling.⁴ By contrast, I found that when Shakespeare creates convincing effects of character and emotion, he signals his debt to the institution that granted him the “cultural capital” of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as the goal of their new form of pedagogy.⁵

A lengthy tradition of historical, philological, and literary inquiry documents the distinctive shifts in theory, method, and imagined outcome that shaped sixteenth-century teaching practices.⁶ Humanist schoolmasters replaced the method they claimed to have inherited from medieval precursors—Latin training by rule or “precept”—with lessons in imitation. And they vigorously pronounced that their new method and curriculum would train young gentlemen for the good of Britain. In the text that by 1534 had become the standard school grammar in most English schools, Dean John Colet gives the most concise version of this new pedagogical platform: “[L]atyn speche was before the rules, not the rules before the latyn speche. Besy imitacyon with tongue and penne, more auayleth shortly to get the true eloquent speche, than all the tradicions, rules, and precepts of maysters.”⁷ Usually described as the product of a “war between grammarians” and strongly associated with the Magdalen School (whose members “monopolized the production of textbooks for school use” throughout England), as well as with Colet and the St. Paul’s School (whose statutes were widely emulated in provincial schools), humanism’s emergent program for teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric reformed the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century education.⁸ As we know well, this new approach to Latin pedagogy changed the course of English literary history. But in addition it meant that as drilling in imitatio began to alter literary taste and technique, it began to govern pedagogical and interpersonal relationships.⁹

Throughout Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, I compare school training to literary invention, institutional practice to theatrical performance, in order to explore the kind of impact the classical rhetorical tradition had on character and emotion in the sixteenth century. Famous and lesser-known records from the schools themselves appear alongside an array of Shakespearean characters and emotions that either directly allude to, or more generally draw upon, various forms of grammar school training in Latin eloquence. The argument proceeds dialectically: I read literary texts in light of common school books, procedures, and exercises; and I reinterpret those texts and procedures in light of the poetry and drama its former students went on to compose. Such a method reveals a crucial, yet unpredictable, connection between humanist rhetorical training and early modern experiences of subjectivity, sexuality, gender, and the inner life of personal feeling. When I first began to work this way, asking what we could tell about early Latin training from the poems and exercises boys read and wrote at school, as well as the vernacular poetry and drama written later in life by former students, I realized that the grammar school’s impact on sexuality, affect, and gender was far more ambivalent and contradictory than schoolmasters asserted—or than we, in turn, have yet acknowledged. Indeed, I demonstrate that when read alongside a variety of school materials, the poetic and dramatic production of at least one former schoolboy reveals considerable resistance to the school’s regime precisely when most profiting from its training. There are times when questions of genre and larger trends in literary production (particularly epyllia in the 1590s) require me to examine Shakespeare’s texts in relation to those of other contemporary authors. But Shakespeare’s work remains my primary focus for two reasons: It constitutes one of the largest bodies of evidence by a former grammar schoolboy about rhetoric and the passions; and Shakespeare is one of the few among the era’s most successful and prolific writers whose formal education did not extend beyond grammar school. There is not room enough in one study to examine university practices as well, a job I leave to others.

A famous passage from Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster will help ground the following discussion. Bristling with associations between school training, hierarchy, and classical imitatio, the passage sketches Ascham’s ideal version of how a master should teach grammar and translation. With respect to grammar, Ascham writes that a master must “construe” Latin “into Englishe,” for his student so often that “the childe may easilie carie awaie the vnderstanding of it.” He must then “parse” the Latin “ouer perfitlie.” More important, the “childe” is to follow his teacher’s footsteps exactly: first construe, then parse (“[L]et the childe, by and by, both construe and parse it ouer againe”). Even the act of rote memory at the basis of a grammar lesson requires a relationship of imitation, both textual and personal. The next step—often quoted with respect to “double translation” and the purported humanist preference for gentleness over corporal punishment—also turns on imitation. But now a third party is involved in the transaction. The “childe” is to translate into English from Latin; an hour later, he translates back into Latin; after that, his master points out how far his words deviate from what “Tullie” would have said:

the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him: N. Tullie would have vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would have placed this word here, not there: would haue vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender: he would have vsed this moode, this tense, this simple, rather than this compound …

The scene connects master and student via the student’s likeness to Tullie and his particular habits of speech. The preeminent personification of a rhetorical master in many texts written in, for, and about the school, Cicero triangulates the pedagogical encounter through Rome as Ascham’s final authority for a boy’s edification. His recommended technique for good language teaching moves literally and imaginatively between text and persons—or rather, to anticipate the theatrical aspect of this argument, personae. It gives the student a precise role in a complex social relation of performance, judgment, and address founded on acknowledging hierarchy and honoring the authority of historical precedent. In a popular dictionary, An English Expositor (1616), we get a concise indication of how easily imitation’s formal and social senses might collide:

Imitate. To follow.

Imitation. A following.

Imitator. A follower of another.¹⁰

In Ascham’s ideal humanist lesson, a student follows first his schoolmaster and then a personified classical authority. In the process, the “childe” imbibes the art of mimicry in a way that turns on both a real and an imaginary social hierarchy.¹¹ He earns his master’s approval by perpetuating the confusion between text and human, past and present, the linguistic and the personal—a hierarchy and a confusion that become the royal road to learning proper Latin grammar and, eventually, rhetorical eloquence. We will see this confusion again—in more advanced lessons in oratory but also in Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic poetry.

The influential humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives claimed that Latin training would turn a “beast” into a “man.” And in the view of virtually every humanist educational theorist who commented on the matter, instruction in classical grammar and rhetoric would substantively benefit the English commonwealth.¹² In the 1940s and 1950s, critics like T. W. Baldwin, Donald Clark, and R. R. Bolgar demonstrated this educational program’s profound impact on England’s literary Renaissance.¹³ In the 1970s, Joel Altman and Emrys Jones expanded this work by drawing attention to important habits of mind—particularly the school’s fondness for arguments “on either side of the question” (in utramque partem)—that shaped Tudor writing in general and Shakespearean drama in particular.¹⁴ In the last twenty years, however, historians and literary critics have turned their attention to the school’s active participation in the ongoing process of social reproduction.¹⁵ This book is deeply indebted to both critical approaches. But I expand the first by taking archival evidence about the school’s material practices into account when analyzing subsequent literary history; by pressing further the theoretical as well as the practical alliance between rhetoric and drama in the eyes of schoolmasters; and by specifying a few pervasive, classically derived tropes that, much like imitatio, produced long-standing literary as well as social and personal effects. And I expand the second critical approach—humanism’s intervention in social reproduction—by bringing psychoanalytic questions about subjectivity, language, gender, and sexuality to bear on the texts its schoolboy subjects produced. In other words, by taking the schoolmasters’ emphasis on Latin grammar and rhetoric literally and seriously, I explore the significant overlap between literary history and the widespread institutional effort to teach Latin as a means to uphold—indeed, inculcate—the categories most important to the period’s explicit formulations about a properly functioning social order. These readings therefore put considerable interrogative pressure on the normative distinctions between genders, erotic practices, and social classes that authors in the period presume when representing to themselves, and to each other, what counts as a functioning, healthy “body politic.”

These chapters move beyond humanist theoretical treatises to consider schoolroom dynamics as revealed in texts used in schools or written by students, placing what we can gather about daily pedagogical routines alongside Shakespeare’s numerous experiments with—or better yet, meta-critical meditations upon—the ancient art of imitatio. My aim is to rethink the school’s literary and social effects, some of them intended and some of them probably not, while developing two related arguments: First, the way Shakespeare represents character and emotion (in drama and in verse) reveals as much about his resistance as his indebtedness to the theatricality of the Latin institution in which he learned the art of rhetorical facility. Second, close attention to matters usually deemed strictly literary—specific rhetorical tropes, choices of genre and precedent topic, techniques of imitation and translation, habits of allusion, revisions of and choices between classical exemplars—affords a properly historical understanding of this institution’s impact on early modern English masculinity. A theoretical foray into a huge archive, this book aims to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. I move between a variety of important tropes, characters, and emotions in these texts in order to open up new ways of understanding the myriad connections among humanism’s institutional practices, the classical past, and what we have come to call Shakespeare’s characteristic “subjectivity effects.”¹⁶

I advance both these arguments—the pertinence of rhetoric to a historical account of masculinity and the crucial difference that the Latin grammar school’s daily practices made to Shakespeare’s representations of character and emotion—to extend Kent Cartwright’s observation that our critical consensus about the commercial theater’s indebtedness to popular morality drama has prevented us from fully appreciating humanism’s impact on that theater’s productions. Cartwright’s project is to reassess humanist drama beyond the Aristotelian strictures through which it has long been understood and beyond the either/or choice of “popular” versus “elite,” since this crude distinction fails to do justice to the capacity of early modern drama to “absorb and refashion a range of influences”¹⁷—or, I might add, to the range of literary and social gradations lying between the ends of this stark opposition. I hope to move his renewed attention to early modern classicism further into the domain of humanism’s social transactions, asking how its pedagogical program, as theorized and practiced by England’s emerging class of professional scholars, influenced the students who became poets as well as playwrights for the commercial stage. When I read Shakespeare’s convincing effects of character and emotion in light of school training, it is to offer a psychologically and rhetorically nuanced account of the social and personal consequences that attended the humanists’ attempt to produce their distinctive version of what counted in sixteenth-century Britain as the difference between “popular” and “elite.”

Before the next chapters take up schoolroom practices and some of their unintended consequences, a general outline of current approaches to the grammar school’s forms of social reproduction is necessary. As the result of an emerging class of (often lowborn) professional scholars searching for financial and social advancement—and a fortuitous battle between Henry VIII and canon lawyers—command of Latin became a significant form of cultural capital in early modern England.¹⁸ In the words of Lisa Jardine and Antony Grafton, humanist schooling “stamped the more prominent members of the new elite with an indelible cultural seal of superiority.”¹⁹ Funding for new and reestablished grammar schools in England came largely from merchant capital; and the majority of students were drawn from landed or merchant classes. And yet even the largest, most prestigious schools ensured support for at least a handful of “poor students” every year.²⁰ The grammar school’s curriculum and training, as well as the new, public mix of boys from different stations therefore did more than “signif[y] an already existing class system.” Rather, as Richard Halpern points out, schools “intervened in the system itself, transforming both the ruling groups and the very nature of class distinction.”²¹ The humanist desideratum of rhetorical copia became a distinctive way of marking significant social differences, differences that their training was designed both to produce and to police.²²

As an all-male institution that separated young boys from their families to bring them up as Latin-speaking gentlemen, moreover, the Tudor grammar school institutionalized a historically distinctive, hierarchical division between “mother” and “father” tongues. Establishing a socially significant opposition between English and Latin, maternal and paternal spheres of language and influence, schools self-consciously sought to intervene, materially and discursively, in the reproduction of normative gender categories.²³ And indeed, a crude misogyny does inform many school textbooks, which often distinguish a boy’s coddling mother from the bracing discipline of his Latin schoolmaster. But whether all boys who read and translated such passages from and into Latin felt the way the authors presumed they would about leaving their mother’s care for the schoolmaster’s discipline is far from obvious (here we might remember one Shakespearean schoolboy, “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”).²⁴ Of course, it does not take exhaustive research to show how profoundly the linguistic and rhetorical basis of the school’s curriculum influenced commonplace, dismissive views about female inferiority. For example, a former schoolboy published the following comment in 1577 about his own attempt at versification and wives:

Take in good parte these triflyng toyes,

good Reader which I write:

When I was a boye with boyes,

these toyes I did indite.

Tushe, tushe, thei foolishe are thou saiest:

I graunt, thei are in deede:

But where are thy wifes wondrous workes,

now where are thei to reede?²⁵

For this former grammar school student, “boyes” are the gender privileged to “indite” poetic “workes,” women the gender to bear the burden of mute anonymity. Boys, moreover, learn their craft among a community of “boyes” presumed to persist beyond school—to constitute the future “readers” to whom a man will address himself as the writer does here. Such attitudes will not surprise readers familiar with early modern England’s gender norms. And yet I have found that a careful look at the grammar school’s texts and material, discursive practices undermines the simple gender dichotomy on which such standard sentiments rest. In the chapters that follow, I hope to make a well-known literary history a little less familiar. That is, if we read Shakespeare’s texts from the perspective of school language training, the socially sanctioned community and prima facie meaning of “a boye with boyes” sometimes took turns the boys’ teachers did not seem to expect.

Halpern observes that measuring the school’s relationship to social reproduction means stepping outside a literary perspective on the “Renaissance” long enough to question the social illogic of an educational institution devoted so narrowly to linguistic arts—first to grammar, then to techniques of rhetoric and style.²⁶ Departing from an earlier, untroubled appreciation among twentieth-century literary historians for the rise and dominance of an educational institution dedicated to inculcating skills amenable to playwrights and poets, recent critics draw attention to the social function of the humanist school and its legacy. And some have begun to point to a few significant contradictions between the school’s announced mission and its actual practice. Grammar schools trained boys in the arts best suited for statesmanship, the clergy, the law, and international trade; but masters rarely, if ever, seemed concerned about the fact that many of their students would never pursue such careers. As an important survey of provincial grammar schools attests, fathers from a far greater array of professions than those for which rhetorical training was truly practical enrolled their sons in these new schools: At Hull, for example, the fathers’ professions ranged from clergy, counselors-at-law, merchants, and traders to a mix of “tailors, cordwainers, butchers, clerks, surgeons, innkeepers, master mariners, tobacco cutters, milliners, grocers, customs officers.”²⁷ And so for Halpern, it is “no longer obvious why Tudor society would allocate a substantial part of its resources” to an institution whose investment in rhetoric made it a “miracle of impracticality” when viewed in light of the kind of training many of these vocations actually required. Though humanist teachers often objected in print to severe corporal punishment, publicly advocating gentler forms of training and persuasion, a host of evidence suggests that corporal punishment hardly vanished from the schools—and that flogging (or the threat of it) was used right alongside the gentler art of inculcating respect for authority by training a boy to imitate or “follow” an exemplary model. Pursuing such evidence in his sociologically oriented study of contemporary objections from families to harsh corporal discipline at school, Alan Stewart observes that “the value of the educational experience of a young man as a rite of passage” in early modern England was “threatened by that experience itself.”²⁸

To this recent critique of the distance between humantist theory and practice, I would add that a relatively untroubled twentieth-century consensus that the school succeeded in consolidating normative gender categories stems largely from Walter Ong’s influential observation that Latin training was a kind of “male puberty rite.”²⁹ Yet it is only in recent years that feminist and queer theorists have questioned the way assessments like Ong’s rely on the terms male and female without fully interrogating their historically and culturally variable significance. As will become clear from my analysis in the next chapter, the same might be said of puberty. While feminist and queer critique have changed the kinds of questions we bring to bear on Shakespeare’s plays, they have only begun to alter our account of early modern pedagogy. Far less widely remembered, moreover, is Harold Newcomb Hillebrand’s 1929 account of school theatricals in The Child Actors. From his extensive documentation we learn that 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 4, especially, “loving”—his master.

In my view, comparing the grammar school’s belief in rhetoric’s formative 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 training’s effect on its students. But two of Shakespeare’s more diffuse (though under-examined) habits confront us with less overtly political, but nonetheless intractable, questions about the after-effects of school training. Why does he so often turn pedagogical scenes and the Latin curriculum behind them into erotic (sometimes violently erotic) encounters? In addition, when literary and rhetorical concerns about classical imitation arise, why does he so often engage at the same time in dense, meta-rhetorical reflections on character, voice, and emotion? Perhaps the most concise way to evoke both the breadth and the obliquity of Shakespeare’s engagement with contemporary pedagogy and its cherished Latin texts is to recall that he has a pronounced tendency to interrogate the grammar school’s language, curriculum, and disciplinary methods for achieving eloquence by giving a voice to the emotions of precisely those whom its rhetorical training was designed to exclude: women (Venus, Lucrece, Katherine, Bianca, Kate, Lavinia); “barbarians” (Aaron, Tamora, Othello, Caliban, Ariel, Cleopatra); and characters who could never aspire to gentility (Sly, Bottom, Mistress Quickly).⁴⁶ If this book does the work I hope it will do, other readers will find more characters to add to such lists.

Perhaps it does not go without saying that these three categories emanate from the school and are not the imposition of modern concerns. The grammar school was the exclusive domain of men and boys, but Shakespeare frequently dramatizes aspects of contemporary pedagogy through the voices of passionate—and often troublesome—women. And these female characters are not exclusively relegated to the role of docile student or comical ignorans.⁴⁷ Chapter 3 examines the scandalous erotics of Venus and Adonis in light of two observations: Venus represents herself as trying to teach Adonis a “lesson” in love reminiscent of the very first lesson in Lily’s ubiquitous A Short Introduction of Grammar: “amo magistrum” (“I love the master”). “Barbarism” was a school commonplace for translating your Latin badly: As Lily’s Grammar declares, for instance, “All barbary, all corruption, all Latin adulteration which ignorant, blind fools brought into the world … and poisoned the old Latin speech of the early Roman tongue will not be allowed entrance to the school.”⁴⁸ But Shakespeare is quite capable of inventing “barbarians” like Aaron or Othello who know their classical tradition very well indeed. Where Aaron plays Ovidian “tutor” in Titus, Othello’s far from “rude” speech wins Desdemona’s “love” and “pity”: Othello thus imitates Aeneas, whose tale of travel and peril so beguiled Dido in Aeneid 2, and whose story stood above almost any other in humanist writing as essential to a boy’s education.⁴⁹ Caliban’s protest about the benefits of Prospero’s “language” training, moreover, has long struck readers and audiences as one of The Tempest’s most memorable lines. Finally, the school’s classical curriculum was shaped by humanist disdain for popular and folk culture. But as I have already suggested, Shakespeare gives an exquisite pleasure in Latin textuality to the likes of Sly and Bottom—and at times seems to cling, like Mamillius, to precisely the “old wives’ fairy rubbish” their classical curriculum was designed to supplant.

I discuss some of these characters; I might have chosen others. Their ubiquity suggests how frequently Shakespeare is inclined to provide a classical frame for characters and passions at some considerable distance from the socially normative position—never mind bodily and vocal deportment—for which schoolboys were actually being trained. It is therefore crucial to think beyond the school’s explicit categories and social distinctions. The next chapters demonstrate that school training in Latin rhetoric inculcated something one could call a habit of alterity, even though its teachers probably did not anticipate some of the directions in which a talent for impersonating other voices would lead. Characters like those enumerated above indicate how much Shakespeare benefited from this habit. But I believe that his penchant for using school techniques against the institution’s explicit representations of a properly functioning social body is a distinctive touch.

By habit of alterity, I mean not only that school training encouraged a general disposition toward impersonation, and hence a propensity for drama. I also mean that if read back into the schoolroom that made them possible, Shakespeare’s representations of the passions indicate that early school training encouraged in pupils a highly mediated relation to emotion, a tendency to experience what passes for deep personal feeling precisely by taking a detour through the passions of others (particularly those classical figures offered as examples for imitation). To do justice to this habit of alterity, I analyze the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century pedagogy according to historically specific reprereniaiions of social “others” while also keeping in mind psychoanalytic speculation about the effects of the “other” in speaking subjects. Unexpected characters like Venus, Adonis, Bianca, Kate, Aaron, Othello, Caliban, Sly, Bottom, and Mistress Quickly—caught up in the language and dynamics of the schoolroom while acting within sexual fantasies that range from the appallingly violent to the obscene, the bawdy, and the evanescently erotic—tell us that Shakespeare’s engagement with the humanist grammar school goes well beyond explicit political and moral critique.⁵⁰ In the pages the follow, I show that it is especially in Shakespeare’s depictions of character, feeling, and desire that we detect traces of his ambivalent indebtedness to the institution that gave him the classically inflected rhetorical facility of an early modern gentleman.

Emotion and Character

I have been arguing that early modern classicism testifies to a deeply fraught social and transpersonal struggle for verbal, social, and erotic power. Shakespeare and others often call this a struggle for “mastery.” What might appear to us to be merely formal decisions in the texts of the period were, rather, embedded in a complex institutional history with immense influence on gender, sexuality, and the passions. Recent cultural and literary critics working on the history of emotion call attention to language’s “constitutive role in any culture’s emotional universe,” an idea captured in Katherine Rowe’s apt phrase, “emotion scripts.”⁵¹ Among other things, this insight means that before assuming we know what a particular feeling means or how it signifies in a given text, we first require a careful philological account of the changing significance of words used to designate and assign values to emotions across cultures and time periods. The pages that follow understand grammar school training to have provided a fountain of influential emotion scripts. Before turning to the relationship between school practices and Shakespeare’s representation of “the passions,” however, I must briefly distinguish between it and two other more modern words for the inner life of feeling: emotion and affect. The medical strain of early modern discourses about the passions derives emotional life from bodily disposition: In humoral theory, one’s corporal existence has a determining effect on states of feeling. As much recent scholarly work suggests, Shakespeare’s representations of the passions are indebted to the Galenic medical tradition. But we have not yet investigated fully enough why his reflections on the passions involve meta-theatrical or meta-rhetorical reflections on classical figures, texts, and traditions: Hecuba, Niobe, Philomela, Lucrece, Venus, Adonis, Actaeon, Apollo, Daphne, Narcissus, Dido, Aeneas, Sinon, and Medea (among others) provide the Latin mythographic template from which his scenes of overpowering feeling derive their force.⁵² In Chapter 3, for instance, I ask two related questions of Venus and Adonis: Why is the narrator’s exercise in prosopopoeia (understood as giving a voice to mythological characters) deliberately framed as a lesson in “love”? And what does the rhetorical contest between the two main characters have to tell us about the affective and erotic contours of the poem? Chapter 4 analyzes an example of ekphrastic description—“wanton pictures” of Venus, Apollo, and Io offered to Sly—in light of Shakespeare’s critique of “mastery” and the schoolroom in The Taming of the Shrew. And in Chapter 5 I examine the crucial role that Hecuba plays in school rhetorical training and thus in Shakespeare’s reflections on imitatio and “woe” in The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare’s hands, the passions have a distinctly classical cast; part of the project of this book is to demonstrate why.

With respect to the difference between the modern terms emotion and affect, I try to use our own modern and familiar term, emotion, to designate a commonsense understanding of personal feeling, one that often presumes emotions to be (relatively) transparent indicators for interior states. Deriving from the Latin emotus, a “moving out” or “perturbation” (and used in several Latin school texts in ways close to our own modern sense), emotion still did not emerge as an English word in its own right until the late seventeenth century. Eventually bifurcating from passion, whose significance slowly narrowed from its early modern provenance to signify only intense, overpowering, and amorous feelings, emotion supplanted the earlier term and served to distinguish certain feelings “from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness.”⁵³ After the late seventeenth century, passion was no longer used, as it was from the fourteenth century until roughly 1680, to designate corporal sensations as much as states of mind: For example, the OED cites “a bely ache or passion” (1547). The early range and subsequent narrowing of passion is a telling index of how important it is to remember that school discipline was a corporal as well as verbal affair.

When I use affect, by contrast, I aim at a range of related meanings that derive from both early modern and psychoanalytic discourse. The earliest English meanings for affect, relatively faithful to the Latin afficio from which it derives (especially with the ablative, “to cause a person to be affected by an emotion … to stir, to be strongly moved”), were “a mental state brought about by influence; the action or result of affecting the mind in some way; an emotion, feeling.”⁵⁴ Perhaps transmitting the Latin sense of an individual being acted upon in some forceful way, Richard Hooker links “affection” to appetite rather than reason, describing such strong feeling as a mystery “not altogether in our power,” at times a desire for something even if it “be … never so impossible.”⁵⁵ In the rest of this book, I therefore use affect in one of two ways. First, I draw on its early modern sense of an intense, sometimes mysterious state of feeling (for example, Leontes’s famously enigmatic declaration that “affection” is a force that “stabs the center” and “communicates” with dreams). Indeed, a number of the classically inflected passions analyzed here, however powerful, seem “not altogether in the power” of those who experience them and run counter to commonsense or intuitive assessments of inner life.

Second, I am also drawing on a modern psychoanalytic understanding of affect (also with a Latinate origin) to signify moments of opacity in emotions. Psychoanalytic theory detects a distance between putative cause and (emotional) effect that stems from our blindness, as speaking subjects, to the most significant events of our own history.⁵⁶ Several of Freud’s important theories turn on affect’s enigmatic quality: He generally uses “affect” to distinguish an event, idea, or sign from the quantity of psychological energy “bound” to it. Indeed, his insight into the “separation” of affect from idea, or idea from affect, was that “they were sure to follow different paths.”⁵⁷ For example, Freud’s quantitative analysis of the dream work theorizes a transfer of affective energy from one (forbidden) sign to another (permissible) one; his analysis of the death drive studies repetition’s deeply compelling yet impenetrable significance for the subjects of trauma. His early encounter with hysterics led him to distinguish between traumatic event and the “proportionate discharge of affect” that is nonetheless disassociated from it. Perhaps most important for my question about what pressure a schoolboy’s past might exert on his literary production as an adult—an issue that exceeds the scope of habitus—is that Freud’s investigations into hysteria led him to posit a notion of “psychical reality” in which a memory might produce a “more powerful release” of affective energy “than that produced by the corresponding experience itself.”⁵⁸ Such an insight is suggestive about the retrospective force that literary representations of the passions might have had on audiences and authors “trained up” by the humanist grammar school. In each of his analyses of “affect,” Freud found nuances to emotional life that evade conscious understanding, require significant semiotic analysis, and defy the linear narratives of developmental models. Based on such an understanding of emotion’s mobility, obliquity, and resistance to seriatim explanation, I use the word affect to indicate that the “passion” I am considering—especially when indebted to the Latin schoolroom—may well be less transparent than it seems.⁵⁹

Throughout this book, then, I use affect rather than emotion to point toward a coincidence between the school’s theatrical training and psychoanalytic theory: Repeatedly imitating others’ words and emotions in public, under the scrutiny of many monitoring eyes and the threat of possible punishment, would be an efficient way to blur the seemingly obvious line between the intensity of an actor/orator’s expressions from the actual speaker’s feelings. I will suggest that the inventive fantasies of writers who were engaging their past school training (whether consciously or not) could take surprising turns—detours that are nonetheless affectively moving and intense. To put the matter another way, acts of poetic ventriloquism, in this period, could be at once profoundly moving and deeply enigmatic; and they therefore testify to the heuristic pallor of the term persona. The cumulative effect of school training in proper language, behavior, and affect was to institutionalize numerous kinds of detours and transfers between event and feeling, speaker and audience, orator and the passions he imitated. It is these detours and transfers—the domain of the theater, the school, the poetry of former schoolboys, but also the unconscious—that prompt me to distinguish between emotion and affect when reading early modern representations of character and the “passions.” One of the stranger aspects of grammar school practice is that the humanist effort to discipline language and affect produced rhetorically skilled subjects whose technical proficiency in evoking assigned passions, from themselves and from an audience, meant that a boy’s connection to his own feelings might become tenuous at best. And prone, moreover, to preposterous reversals of cause and effect. From the perspective of the school, scholars achieved their place in their social world by being drilled in the art of feeling and conveying passions that came from somewhere else and someone else. From a psychoanalytic perspective, early modern schoolboys were trained in techniques that distanced them from their own experience in both language and time; the substitution of a new, “father” tongue for an earlier, “mother” tongue only exacerbated the retrospective work of puberty’s displacements. To preserve my double focus on school practice and psychoanalytic theory, I maintain this mutually informing pair of terms—emotion and affect—to convey both the intensity and the opacity of early modern “passions.”

Earlier, I invoked Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, or “structuring dispositions,” to suggest that the school’s theatrical forms of corporal and verbal discipline might incline its students toward emotionally charged practices of imitation, personification, and multiple identifications in adult life. As I’ll explore in the next chapter, the school’s structuring dispositions might further incline a former schoolboy to experience poetic or rhetorical invention as an adult as if he were still performing for an audience or judge. Bourdieu’s theory gives “disproportionate weight to early experiences,” arguing for “the active presence” of a past that “tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices.”⁶⁰ At least three pasts are important in this book: the classical past activated in schoolroom exercises in imitation; the student’s individual, familial past as it intersects with the disciplinary and discursive methods of the school; and the transpersonal, collective past “reactivated” in the literary inventions of an adult schoolboy. The result, as Bourdieu observes, is not a “mechanical determinism” but rather a historical, identifiable set of constraints that put limits on the field of possible inventions, emotions, and subject positions available to the boys who earned their place as “gentleman” by means of facility in Latin.

Though I find Bourdieu’s ideas about the continuing after-effects of institutional practices extremely helpful for thinking about the texts of former schoolboys, there are times when habitus is not capacious, or perhaps nuanced, enough for my topic. The passions represented in the literary texts of former schoolboys—classically inflected representations of grief, love, rage, disgust, wonder, and fear in which normative categories of gender and desire vanish—suggest the kinds of affective excess, opacity, and displacement traced in psychoanalytic theory. As the next chapters illustrate, moreover, normative boundaries between genders and erotic practices often turn to shifting sand in these texts. And at the same time, the ostensibly clear distinction between pain and pleasure tends to disappear when Shakespeare’s eroticized versions of imitatio take a turn toward violence. These ambivalent associations require a theoretical position that not only accounts for the structuring 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.