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Chapter 2

Imitate and Punish

The Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Schoolrooms

All that was to me a pleasure when I was a childe while I was undre my father and mothers kepyng, be tornyde now to tormentes and payn. For than I was wont to lye stylle abedde…. What sport it was to take my lusty pleasur betwixte the shetes, to behold the rofe, the beamys…. But nowe the worlde rennyth upon another whele. For nowe at fyve of the clocke by the monelyght I most go to my booke and lete sleepe and slouthe alon. And yff oure maister hape to awake us, he bryngeth a rode stede of a candle. Here is nought els preferryde but monyshynge and strypys…

—Grammar school lesson for translation into Latin, Ms. Arundel 249

Imitate and Punish

“Imitation is a principle that animates not only humanist stylistics but also humanist pedagogy.”¹ Richard Halpern’s formulation succinctly captures two important strands of early modern thinking about the grammar school. First, as we began to see in the passage from Ascham’s Scholemaster, imitation structured the humanist approach to teaching both grammar and rhetoric. Perhaps contemporary satire best captures the ongoing tension, as well as the uneven development, that characterized “the grammarians’ war” over the benefits of teaching Latin through imitation as opposed to memorizing rules and precepts. As late a play as Cupid’s Whirligig (1616), performed “sundrie times” by the Children of the Revels, depicts pedagogy as rote learning when four boys recite grammatical rules and examples from memory.² But the earlier Parnassus trilogy (1598–1601) satirizes contemporary pedagogy in its distinctly humanist guise: A teacher is one who “interprets” a common schooltext, Pueriles confabulationes, “to a companie of seven-yeare-olde apes.”³ Along these lines, Skelton is more succinct: “Speak, Parrot!” Second, grammar school ordinances consistently demand that the headmaster himself model exemplary behavior for his students: The humanist idea of authoritative model and imitation, in other words, also structured the school’s hierarchy of personal relations. As Thomas Elyot puts it, a teacher should be “such a one as the child by imitation following may grow excellent.”⁴ School ordinances usually put their expectation for a master’s exemplarity in a rather more pragmatic, cautionary light: “The masters shall not be common gamesters, nor common haunters of tavernes or alehouses or other susspect houses or places of evell rule or of other knowne vice at the tyme they be elected.”⁵ At Oundle, these ordinances extend to boarding houses, where those running them should “give example to the scholars not to follow gaming or other vain pastimes not meet for students.”⁶ The Renaissance discourse of exemplarity pervades school ordinances about personnel. But it is important to remember that because its “new” pedagogy turned on imitation, the Latin grammar school gave exemplarity—and its related habits of mind and conduct—considerable institutional and material support.⁷

Imitation could intervene in the school’s daily routine in yet another, more theatrical and disciplinary way. Public exercises in grammar, translation, and speechmaking revolved around a master who was the final judge of a boy’s worth. A scholar from the seventh form at the Westminster School wrote a detailed “Consuetudinarium” (ca. 1610)—an account of daily life—one of the few extant accounts of its kind written by a student rather than a school authority. It gives a pupil’s perspective on how imitation operated in the school’s daily economy of reward and punishment. The young scholar’s pronouns vacillate between “them” and “us,” revealing someone poised between ranks—being a student and a master in the making:

… they were all of them (or such as were picked out, of whom the Mr made choice by the feare or confidence in their lookes) to repeat and pronounce distinctlie without booke some piece of an author that had been learnt the day before. Betwixt 9 and 11 those exercises were reade which had been enjoyned us overnight (one day in prose, the next day in verse); which were selected by the Mr; some to be examined and punished, others to be commended and proposed to imitation.⁸ (Emphasis mine.)

In such a setting, a boy’s choice is stark: imitate “some piece of an author” well or be beaten. Verbal skill is the medium through which one proves oneself worthy of esteem (“commended”) or unworthy, which means facing the threat of being “punished.” A student could, in fact, look forward to the exact hour of potential punishment on a daily basis. The “Consuetudinarium” is as precise as a book of hours: “Betwixt 9 and 11.… Betwixt one to 3.… Betwixt 3 and 4 they had a little respite.” The Bailiff’s ordinances at Shrewsbury establish a similarly predictable schedule. The tolling of “the schollers’ bell” signaled that the master would arrive within the hour to punish students “for negligence accordinge to his discression and their deserts.”⁹

In another, better known, report of what it felt like to go to school at St. Paul’s and Eton, Thomas Tusser makes Latin and flogging equivalent:

From Powles I went, to Aeton sent,

To learn straightwayes the Latin phraise,

Where fifty three stripes given to mee

At once I had.

For fault but small, or none at all,

It came to passe thus beat I was,

See, Udall, See, the mercy of thee

To mee, poor lad.¹⁰

That Tusser’s complaint moves from “Latin phraise” to “fifty three stripes” in epideictic verse (epideixis being the rhetorical term for words spoken in blame as well as praise) reveals how thoroughly the school equated punishment with rhetorical performance.¹¹ Sanctioned forms of verbal facility, even in the guise of an English rather than a Latin complaint against one of its masters, suggests that the author was, in fact, a “poor lad” who tried hard enough to deserve better.

The “Consuetudinarium” also reveals how imitation shaped Westminster’s elaborate, hierarchical organization for supervising and controlling what counted as acceptable speech (e.g., three slips into English would provoke punishment). Older boys were appointed as surrogates for the master to “monitor” and reprimand the younger boys’ linguistic performance in his absence. In addition to imitating the master in front of their peers, these boys appear to have been required to give a weekly, public account of their classmates’ linguistic lapses:

These Monitors kept them strictly to speaking of Latine in theyr several commands; and withall they presented their complaints or accusations (as we called them) everie Friday morn: when the punishments were often redeemed by exercises or favours shewed to Boyes of extraordinarie merite, who had the honor (by the Monitor monitorum) manie times to begge and prevaile for such remissions. And so (at other times) other faultes were often punished by scholastic taskes, as repeating whole orations out of Tullie, Isoc.; Demosth.; or speaches out of Virgil, Thucyd., Xenoph: Eurip &c.¹² (Emphasis mine.)

Corporal punishment and imitation (in the narrow linguistic sense) are equivalent: “Punishment” is “redeemed by exercises”; “remission” for whipping is a “scholastic taske,” as in “repeating whole orations out of Tullie.” The chance to perform rhetorically—by “begging and prevailing” for exemption from flogging—is said to be an “honor” for boys of “extraordinarie merit.” And once set in motion, imitation (in the broader sense of one person copying another’s example) proliferated: magister, monitor, Monitor monitorum. All of this hierarchy of discipline was devoted to the hourly and weekly regulation of verbal competence: Latin speaking, translation exercises, cases brought against, pleas advanced (“complaints or accusations” valuing the form, forensic skill, over the actual content of such utterances), and the “repeating of whole orations.”¹³

The phrase the Westminster student uses to describe the scheduled, weekly event of a master’s surveillance—“By the feare or confidence in their lookes”—does more than reveal the close link, in practice, between imitation and the threat of either public shame or corporal punishment.¹⁴ It suggests the young monitor’s identification with his master. “Their lookes” rather than “our” looks: The phrase divides the writer from his (now former) classmates by means of a hierarchy of imitation that moves him up the ranks from the supervised to the supervisor. Psychoanalytically speaking, the phrase reveals the student’s identification with, or desire for, the place from which he is seen—which is also the place from which he is judged and loved—as well as the accompanying internalized divisions that characterize Freud’s topographic description of a composite, fractured psyche.¹⁵

Both the unnamed Westminster scholar’s and Tusser’s accounts of a day at school suggest we would do well to reexamine the interweaving of affective and institutional histories implicit in Renaissance rhetorical pyrotechnics—a personal and transpersonal history in which performance, formal technique, socially specific criteria for judgment, and fantasies of mastery and address are intertwined. If nothing else, it might produce intriguing reflection on the period’s fondness for such literary forms as the complaint, the lament, and the satiric “scourge.”¹⁶ More particular still for several texts in the next three chapters, literary representations of the “passions” frequently emerge in ekphrastic descriptions or, more generally, passages engaged in what classicists call “programmatic” reflection on the text’s own representational and rhetorical strategies. While there are powerful literary reasons for the “enduring” nature of ekphrastic paragone¹⁷ and meta-poetic reflections, the distinct preference for such formal self-display in the epyllia of former schoolboys, as well as Shakespeare’s plays, is suggestive about the school’s hierarchical, disciplinary, and theatrical structures. What better way did a student have to fulfill the charge successfully to imitate classical exemplars before an audience of peers and masters than to point to his own verbal skill (the tendency to programmatic reflection)? What more effective way to persuade an audience to pause for thought, rather than rush to judgment, than to suggest that one’s words can rival other arts? Or to lay claim to the verbal and visual demands of good oratory, the training for which I describe below, than to stage an ekphrastic comparison between the arts of speaking and seeing?

Here we encounter an early modern institutional practice resembling the triangular structure that W. J. T. Mitchell detects in the “social structure of ekphrasis” more generally: “if ekphrasis typically expresses a desire for a visual object (whether to possess or to praise), it is also typically an offering of this expression as a gift to the reader.”¹⁸ Or, in this setting, it is a gift to one’s master or peers. Verbal paintings invite an audience to shuttle between aesthetic admiration and interpretive labor, a state of suspended attention a schoolboy could surely turn to his social advantage. And if Mitchell is right to discover in ekphrastic turns qua ekphrasis an unpredictable vacillation between an impossible, utopian desire (for the image to be present to the reader or audience) and a “counter-desire or resistance (the fear of paralysis and muteness in the face of a powerful image),”¹⁹ then the affective intensity allied to verbal and visual interplay implicit in ekphrastic display might have been of considerable social value for young orators. For as I describe in the next section, a boy’s success depended on his ability to stir up passions in his audience by means of his acquired set of verbal and visual skills. Ekphrastic turns can and do convey many subtle messages—and often prompt modern audiences to become precisely the careful readers that their authors hoped to create out of contemporary ones.²⁰ Read in light of the institution that taught boys to imitate similar passages in their classical forebears, however, early modern ekphrases preserve something of the external and internal rivalries implicit in the school’s social scene, with its decidedly punitive methods for teaching Latin; its master who sat in judgment; and the divided, self-monitoring schoolboy subjects who strove to find a place in their world by living up to the master’s daily demands and exercises.

Actio, Actio, Actio

The Westminster monitor’s phrase, “by fear or confidence in their lookes,” attests to the school’s still more diffuse, yet for that no less daunting, disciplining of socially acceptable affect. Records from a variety of schools similarly indicate that humanist discipline included lessons in proper intonation as well as physical deportment; masters gave a boy’s voice and gestures strict attention and training. Beyond Westminster’s requirement that boys perform memorized passages publicly “without booke,” one of John Brinsley’s rules for ideal teaching was that the master should pronounce clearly so that his boys might imitate after him: A teacher must “utter before them what they cannot.” A commonplace book from the 1630s suggests the extent to which humanist training made the vocal techniques of rhetorical training routine: As the student dutifully records, “Rhetorick consists in adorning speech with tropes and figures and pronouncing it according as the differing nature of those tropes and figures require” (my emphasis).²¹ Verbal skill, in the eyes of humanist masters, had as much to do with the bodily mechanics of pronuntiatio and actio as with memory.²² Indeed, training in how to move one’s body often coincided with training in the physical motions of tongue and throat. Among Richard Mulcaster’s recommended daily exercises in running and wrestling and dancing is the practice of “loud speaking”—an exercise in vocal modulation (“first begin lowe, and moderately, then went on to further strayning, of their speeche: sometimes drawing it out … sometimes bringing it backe, to the sharpest and shrillest …”) derived from the ancient oratorical practice called “vociferation.” In Lily’s Grammar, which outlines and gives specific names to common, “ugly” faults of pronunciation, the boys found in a section called “Orthoepia” a specific exercise for refining the motions of their “chattering” tongues (balbutiens … ora): Errors of pronunciation “may bee amended by quickly pattering over som ribble rabble made hard to pronounce on purpose, as, arx, tridens, rostris, sphinx, praester, torrida, seps, strix.”²³ I quote from Charles Hoole’s English rendering here, because he thought highly enough of what was originally Lily’s exercise in tongue-tripping to recommend it to other schoolmasters (Grammatica Latina in usum scholarum adornata [London, 1651]).

School records, moreover, indicate that humanist masters often moved beyond trying to discipline a boy’s memory, voice, and tongue to giving more general instruction in the art of socially acceptable gesture and physical demeanor. Indeed, the Westminster student’s comments about his fellows’ “looks” suggest that discipline extended even to the performance of certain kinds of facial expression. In classical rhetorical theory, the nuances of physical deportment are called actio and thought crucial to persuasive oratory. And so in John Stanbridge’s Vulgaria (a text designed to teach students Latin by means of double translation), boys were to translate from one language to another and also to imbibe a lesson in bodily demeanor: “Also see yt the gesture be comely with semely and sobre movyng : sometyme of the heed / sometyme of the hande / and fote: and as the cause requyreth with all the body.”²⁴ Richard Sherry, the headmaster of the Magdalen School from 1534 to 1540, compares rhetorical skill to bodily demeanor by means of one word: “Scheme,” Sherry writes, is a “Greke worde” that signifies first “the maner of gesture that daunsers use to make” and second “the fourme, fashion, and shape of anye thynge expressed in wrytynge or payntinge … a word, sayynge, or sentence, otherwyse wrytten or spoken then after the vulgar and comen usage.”²⁵ Dancing, in his view, becomes a communicative activity in which the body’s “gestures” signify just as much as spoken words or written sentences; it is therefore one of many physical activities recommended for the training of effective orators. In a commonplace book from the 1590s, begun while the writer was still at school, a collection of phrases gathered under the heading “actio” begins with Demosthenes’s often quoted maxim: “the principall part of an oration was actio, the second the same, the third noe other.” The writer then records that persuasion stems from the emotions conveyed by a speaker’s facial and bodily movements: “the passion wherewith the Orator is affected passeth by the eyes, for in his face we discover it & in other gestures” (emphasis mine). More evocatively still for the school’s impact on drama, he translates actio as “action” and calls it “eloquence of the bodye, or a shadowe of affect” (emphasis mine). Rhetorical technique, in such a translation, exercises a precedent and determining force on human passions and actions. Finally, this young writer records that rhetorical excellence arises from “three springes which flowe from one fountayne”: “vox, vultus, vita. Voyce, countenance, life.”²⁶ Faces, as much as voices, required proper training.

The Westminster student’s account of daily life indicates how far the school’s highly articulated hierarchy governed the repeated exercises that were to establish, within each boy, a set of approved gestures, tones, and facial expressions. And it was based on a stark distinction: One is either the monitor or the monitored—watching and judging or speaking and performing. Acquiring socially sanctioned habits of speech, movement, and affect in such a disciplinary setting means that a scholar learned to adopt the verbal and corporal behavior of others and also learned to monitor his own performance while imitating those examples. Or indeed, as in the case of the young writer from Westminster, he learned to supervise the social and rhetorical performance of others while in the middle of monitoring his own. Such daily practices, it seems to me, might instill within schoolboy subjects a self-reflexive division reminiscent of what Harry Berger identifies in many of Shakespeare’s plays as a character’s “internal auditor.”²⁷ “Monitor monitorum” (“the monitor of monitors”): The school’s regulatory version of self-reflection in the daily performance of Latin eloquence suggests that Berger’s meta-theatrical definition of Shakespearean subjectivity—the constant activity of an internal auditor whose imagined overhearing turns dramatic monologues into attempts at self-persuasion—may derive from an earlier institutional scene of affective discipline. “Past experiences” of judgment, emulation, and admonition at school remain internally active in adult life, continuing to define what it means to be a social subject from within. From monitor monitorum to internal audition—such a trajectory from one institutional scene of performance and judgment (the schoolroom) to another (the commercial theater) resembles the divisions central to psychoanalytic theory’s model of the self-censoring subject. I am proposing that such a division—an intrapsychic scene folded inward as a persistent interpsychic system—was an important consequence of the grammar school’s methods for training in Latin eloquence. And that it was realized not only in depictions of characters on the commercial stage, but also in the everyday lives of Renaissance schoolboys.²⁸

What I call the theatricality of everyday life in the sixteenth-century grammar schools does not derive solely from the Westminster student’s account. Other kinds of training in rhetoric are similarly suggestive. For example, the ordinances at Shrewsbury required frequent public performances from the boys. On the occasion of a master’s election, the ordinances join rhetorical skill directly to the public performance of submission: In the presence of school bailiffs, “the master elected and admitted shall … make a Latin oration; one of the best scholars shall welcome him with a congratulatory Latin oration, promising obedience on behalf of the school” (emphasis mine).²⁹ The frontispiece to Alexander Nowell’s Catechismus paruus (London, 1573) shows a scholar gesturing and declaiming some memorized text before the schoolmaster and an audience of his classmates (Figure 2). A birch sits prominently at the master’s side while fellow students are seated around the orator, reading along as he performs his speech without aid of his book.³⁰ The woodcut captures the school’s strict disciplinary hierarchy, as well: The boys are arranged in ascending sizes up through the speaker, and all of them gather before the largest figure of all—the master, who sits at the head of the room, resembling nothing so much as a judge in court.³¹ Much like the “Consuetudinarium,” this woodcut attests to how far humanism’s disciplinary training in imitation relied on the memorial, verbal, bodily, and affective techniques of public performance.

The theater’s ubiquitous presence in schoolroom practice may have gone relatively unexamined in part because of a long-standing, anachronistic distinction between rhetoric and drama. Critics have not attended as thoroughly as they might to the school’s intimate, habitual association between rhetoric and play acting.³² Schoolmasters thought both acting and declamation were good training in eloquence and the art of gentlemanly behavior. In several ordinances, “declame” and “play” are virtual synonyms. The Shrewsbury ordinances declare that “Everie thursdaie” scholars “shall for exercise declame and plaie one acte of a comedie,” while St. Saviour’s Grammar School in Southward required, in 1614, that “on play days the highest Form shall declaim and some of the inferior Forms act a scene of Terence or some dialogue” (emphasis mine).³³ A student at Merchant Taylors’ described the stage as a “means” to teach “good behaviour and audacitye,” while John Bale praised the headmaster of the grammar school in Hitchin for building a large, permanent stage because it allowed him “to train the young and babbling mouths of his students” and “to teach” these future orators “to speak clearly and elegantly.”³⁴ Eton’s headmaster from 1560–63, William Malim, admits that theatricals may be a “frivolous art” only to argue that they are essential to the development of actio: Nothing is “more conducive to fluency of expression and graceful deportment” than the theater (ad actionem tamen oratorum, et gestum motumve corporis decentem). Christopher Johnson, headmaster of Winchester in the 1560s, is more expansive still. As recorded in one of his students’ notebooks, he reminded his boys what they should learn “from those stage plays which we have lately exhibited to the view”:

Figure 2. Title page to Catechismus paruus pueris primum Latine … proponendus in scholis (London: John Day, 1573). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

I think you have derived this benefit besides others, that what must be pronounced with what expression, with what gestures not only you yourselves learned, but are able also to teach others (if need were). For there should be in the voice a certain amount of elevation, depression, and modulation, in the body decorous movement without prancing around, sometimes more quiet, at others more vehement, with the supplosion of the feel accommodated to the subject.³⁵

Some twenty-five years later, Charles Hoole is similarly enthusiastic. Acting prepares boys “to pronounce orations” and thereby to “expel that subrustic bashfulness and unresistible timorousness which some children are naturally possessed withal, and which is apt in riper years to drown many good parts in men of singular endowments.”³⁶ Given the proximity between Latin oratory and dramatic performance in such accounts, the number of schoolboys “impressed” (i.e., kidnapped) into service at Blackfriars theater cannot surprise. Who better to take to the stage than “seven-yeare-olde apes”? The most minutely recorded case is a complaint brought by Thomas Clifton’s father against those from the Chapel Royal theater who “carried off” his son on his way to school and, like their humanist predecessors, required him to learn their “sayd playes or enterludes … by harte.”³⁷

Since T. W. Baldwin’s study, however, secondary accounts often describe school training in Latin as a solitary, scholarly activity: “read, read, read; and write, write, write.”³⁸ Mary Crane pursued the written side of school training in careful detail, tracing the “notebook method” of schoolwork that required students to pursue “the twin discursive practices” of “gathering” important “textual fragments and ‘framing’ or forming, arranging, and assimilating them.” In such a practice—a “central mode of transaction with classical antiquity”—Crane detects “an influential model for authorial practice and for authoritative self-fashioning.”³⁹ So, too, does Peter Mack focus primarily on the activities of reading and writing in his account of school rhetorical training.⁴⁰ My aim here is to build on this work, to add to the solitary and scribal model (the textual habits associated with inventio and copia) the corporal and vocal aspects of Latin performance that were necessary for actio. I add this dimension to my discussion of school habitus, however, while keeping in mind Mitchell’s point that when considered as modes of signification, “there is no essential difference” between visual and verbal texts, that speech acts “are not medium-specific.”⁴¹ And it is in rhetoric’s intertwined verbal and visual practice—the embodied, performative aspect of training in Latin grammar and rhetoric (crucial to the development of London’s commercial theaters and resistant to our own text- and performance-based dichotomy)—that I find most reason to question how successful schoolmasters might have been in their announced goal of teaching students to occupy seamless, “authoritative” subject positions by means of rhetorical facility.

Understood alongside the way schoolmasters habitually compared acting to declaiming as an important means for disciplining the young bodies and “babbling mouths” of students, the Westminster “Consuetudinarium” indicates how deeply the theater informed school training in Latin grammar and rhetoric. In other words, the many ways boys were required to demonstrate several skills in speaking “withoute booke” tell us that the presence of an actual stage was hardly necessary. The Westminster student’s account of carefully supervised speech—of begging, prevailing, and speaking whole orations out of “Tullie and Demosthenes” as punishment—indicates that a theatrical habitus shaped the school’s disciplinary practices; its real and phantasmatic hierarchies; and its drilling in socially acceptable forms of eloquence, movement, and affect (e.g., “good behavior and audacitie” rather than “subrustic bashfulness,” “fear,” or “prancing around”). While ensuing chapters explore specific questions of genre, trope, linguistic form, and imitation in relation to this habitus, my point here is not simply that humanist schools made language training an increasingly public activity. Rather, the form this increasingly public education took became, thanks to its indebtedness to ancient rhetorical theory, a process of moving from stage to page and back again—a process that turned England’s schoolrooms into a kind of daily theater for Latin learning. And it turned early modern schoolboys into self-monitoring, rhetorically facile subjects who modulated their performances of acceptable speech, bodily deportment, facial movement, vocal modulation, and affective expression by taking the institutional scene of judgment inside, as their own. Another way to put this observation: One might describe a student’s sense of inwardness as a phantasmatic, retrospective engagement with the school’s theatrical social relations. His emotional life became part of an ongoing “internal audition” derived from early experiences in an institution where one’s voice, body, gestures, and emotions came to make sense—became socially legible to oneself and to others—in relation to a hierarchical distinction between audience and actor, judge and speaker, master and student.

In an exceptional study that explores the deep links between “acting, rhetorical gesture, and ancient physiological theory,” Joseph Roach traces the influence of Quintilian’s conception of the “bodily incarnation of the inward mind” onto the seventeenth-century stage as well as in John Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia. He aims to put to rest “the tiresome debate over the relative formalism or naturalism in seventeenth-century acting style,” a debate that “can be traced to the disinclination on both sides to understand the historic links between acting, rhetoric, and ancient physiological doctrines.”⁴² One of the chief instruments for preserving those links as embodied experience rather than as intellectual history, I would argue, is the grammar school—understood as the place where specific exercises inculcated on a daily basis brought ancient ideas about rhetoric and the passions into practice. Roach draws out the impact of Bulwer’s medical background since Galen’s view of expressive gesture founds his treatises, but it is important to notice, too, that Chironomia (“the art of manuall rhetoric”) prominently evidences its institutional origins and aspirations. Like any good former schoolboy, Bulwer derives his invention from classical authority. He says he has added something that was missing from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, while also stressing, like most schoolmasters, how important eloquence is to the good of the commonwealth: “the Gestures of the Body, which are no lesse comprehensible by Art, and of great use and advantage, as being no small part of civill prudence.” He observes that the institutions forming the basis of such prudence are many, but his list begins with “the school”:

Prevalent Gestures accomodated to perswade, have ever been in the Hand; both the Ancient Worthies, as also Use and daily Experience make good, it being a thing of greater moment than the vulgar thinke, or are able to judge of: which is not onely confined to Schooles, Theaters, and the Mansions of the Muses; but doe appertaine to Churches, courts of Commonpleas, and the Councell-Table. (Emphasis mine.)

Perhaps it is worth remembering in conjunction with Bulwer’s fascination with hand gestures that early school vocabularies frequently begin with bilingual lists of body parts as an easy way for boys to learn Latin nouns. At least one, John Holt’s Lac puerorum (1507), included a picture of the hand as a kind of chart by which to organize the parts of speech.⁴³ Chironomia’s opening illustration presents four figures associated with “Grandiloquentia” (see Figure 3). Three watch, while one of them, the orator Demosthenes, rehearses. With his back to us in the foreground, Demosthenes observes his own gestures in a mirror held up before him by Andronicus (the Byzantine emperor associated as much with rhetoric as with terror). On the other side of the mirror stand Roscio, the Roman actor against whose theatrical performances Cicero’s speeches were famously judged, and Cicero.⁴⁴ On the mirror’s frame appears the inscription, “Actio—Actio—Actio.” Given my account of the theatricality of everyday life at school, Bulwer’s immediate association between “schooles,” “rhetorick,” and “theaters” suggests that his metaphor for the human hands as “two Amphitheaters” for “the voluntary motions of the mind” is less an early modern fantasy about the ancient past than a figure attesting to the theatrical practices of the humanist grammar school, the institution in which boys learned eloquence of tongue and body by constantly monitoring their own performances while staging the passions of others before multiple audiences.⁴⁵ In addition, Bulwer’s first triad of institutions includes “the mansions of the muses,” which suggests that we begin to think of the link between actio and the embodied life of the passions not only in relation to staged plays, but also in relation to the literary habits of imitation future poets imbibed as schoolboys.

In the Latin schoolroom, not just in school plays or the commercial theater, we see a social, rhetorical, and visual staging of affective, embodied subjects. By “staging,” I mean to invoke the internal divisions of the divided, “speaking subject” as well as the constant process of self-dislocation—or better yet, constitutive blindness—outlined in the psychoanalytic theory that the subject is subject for and to an Other. Far from consolidating schoolboy subjects as it claimed to do, early modern pedagogy would tend rather to produce divided, rhetorically capable, yet emotionally labile speakers for whom language learning and self-representation entailed the incessant dislocations of the theater. By “dislocations,” I mean the constant activity of bilingual translation (an early lesson in language’s incessant slippages, about which Shakespeare’s Mechanicals are perhaps most eloquent, running in terror from Bottom’s “translation”), as well as the daily requirement that boys shuttle back and forth from the silent practices of memory and invention to the gestural and vocal techniques required for effective oratory. At the same time, though, I also mean a process quite familiar to Shakespeareans: the constant internal movement in his characters between seeming and being, persona and person, address and self-representation; between assuming, whether successively or simultaneously, the positions of writer, actor, and audience. Iago’s “I am not what I am”—to cite the most famous of many meta-dramatic moments long understood to be an expression of Shakespeare’s experience on the commercial stage—may also stem from the daily theater of his early training in Latin.

Figure 3. Title page to John Bulwer, Chironomia: or, the Art of Manuall Rhetoricke … the chiefest instrument of eloquence (London: Thomas Harper, 1644). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Rather than “strengthen the stability of subject positions,” the grammar school’s theatrical demand for mimicry performed in public under threat of punishment would produce rhetorically capable subjects insofar as they found themselves “through displacement.”⁴⁶ Here we might remember Roach’s apt description of the early modern actor, who was admired for producing “the signs” of certain passions “on demand”—in other words, “manifestations of an emotion that he fully embodies, but at the same time is not really his own” (emphasis mine).⁴⁷ The same might be said of an English schoolboy, imitating the passions of a cohort of ancient characters in order to please his audience of master and peers in multiple kinds of Latin performances. Humanist schoolmasters announced themselves to be in the business of “civil prudence” by consolidating rhetorical mastery and thereby producing proper English gentlemen. But it seems to me that their practice pulled against the drive to verbal, gestural, visual, and affective self-mastery because of their profound indebtedness to the theatricality of the very rhetorical tradition they taught.

A Gentleman Is Being Beaten