Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia [1st ed.] 9783030431488, 9783030431495

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Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia Judith Owens

Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture

Judith Owens

Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia

Judith Owens Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-43148-8 ISBN 978-3-030-43149-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

for Elowyn and James

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many debts, academic and familial, in writing this book. It is a pleasure to acknowledge them here, however much my thanks must fall short of repayment. I would never have been able to embark on this project without financial support from the University of Manitoba and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Research and travel grants made it possible for me to visit archives, and to attend conferences where I presented papers that eventually grew into portions of this book. I am grateful for the feedback I received from fellow-panelists and participants at meetings of PNRC, RSA, SAA, SCSC, and Spenser at Kalamazoo. My research for this project received an early boost from Natalie Johnson, who not only shared with me a wealth of knowledge, and a cache of documents, pertaining to the Merchant Taylors’ School, but also tutored me in Elizabethan handwriting. I would never have completed the book without the support of my department colleague Glenn Clark, whose unwavering enthusiasm for the project buoyed me over the years of its writing and whose intellectual generosity—and critical acumen—in reading drafts and in conversation helped me time and again to clarify my ideas. Judith Weil, from whose teaching and scholarship I have learned so much for so long and who is always one of the readers I keep in mind, commented on chapter drafts, with enthusiasm tempered, as needed, with reservations. Lesley Peterson added substantially to the pleasure of writing with her keen editor’s eye and deep

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knowledge of Shakespeare. Paul Dyck helped me to sharpen ideas, often at the Original Pancake House, where Paul, Glenn, and I hold the occasional leisurely breakfast meeting to talk about all things early modern. George Toles, whose passion for film usually precludes things early modern, generously read drafts of some portions. Faye McIntyre, whose research interests are similarly centuries ahead of mine, offered steady warm encouragement, in friendship and in collegiality. I am also grateful to Cameron Burt, Karalyn Dokurno, and Jeremy Strong, whose work as research assistants at various stages saved me time and legwork. I have benefitted from the advice and encouragement of colleagues further from home, too. Fred Tromly, whose own work on sons and fathers has influenced my thinking, has been a wonderfully supportive correspondent over the years that this project has taken shape; I’m just sorry that Ralegh, in whom we share a particular interest, did not make the final cut. I owe debts to many others as well. I am grateful to Heather Dubrow, for encouragement at a very early stage about the tack I was following; to David Lee Miller, for advice at the outset to pursue the topics I do (and to not fret about the ones that I don’t pursue); to Bill Oram, for comments on an initial scheme for this book that spurred me to think about it in a different way; to Esther Gilman Richey, for illuminating conversations about Hamlet; and to Elizabeth Hanson, Virginia Strain, Nathan Szymanski, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, for generously reading and commenting on chapters. I wish also to thank the anonymous readers for the press, whose work made the book stronger, and the editors for the press, especially Eileen Srebernik and Jack Heeney, who steered the project so deftly in the final stages. I am grateful for the expert technical, and unfailingly courteous, assistance provided by staff at libraries, most recently the Folger Shakespeare Library. I have been sustained in ways that cannot be measured by my family. My daughters, Adriana Chartrand and Madeleine Chartrand, never doubted that I would finish—or at least never let on that they did, which was just as important; they listened thoughtfully to my ruminations, and posed just the right questions; and, more than once, Madeleine offered welcome advice about phrasing. My son-in-law, Dagomar Degroot, followed the book’s progress with warm interest, his inquiries informed by academic perspectives as well as by familial concerns. My husband, Gilbert Chartrand, supported the writing of this book by refraining, tactfully, from asking about its progress. Given the book’s focus, it is especially

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apt for me to note that the emotional community of my family has expanded over the course of its writing, in the most joyful of ways, with the arrivals of Elowyn and James, to whom I dedicate the book—with love from Nana.

Contents

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Introduction: Emotional Settings in Pedagogical Culture

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2

Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional Possibilities

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Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations

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Sidney and Heroic Paideia

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Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

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Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet

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Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Emotional Settings in Pedagogical Culture

A sixteenth-century English woodcut included in John Day’s 1563 Whole Book of Psalms depicts a scene that played out daily in countless sixteenthcentury English households: familial instruction in moral and spiritual matters.1 On one side of the room is a father, portrayed in what Lena Cowen Orlin has described as “commanding solitude”; on the other side are a visibly expectant mother and several children, grouped together.2 At first glance, we might be inclined to see, with Orlin, a clear-cut picture of patriarchy in action. The father has an imposing, weighty presence: he is well-dressed and self-assured in bearing; angled slightly forwards and towards the viewer, he sits securely on a high-backed, cushioned chair; his right leg, draped with his cloak, is bent at an acute angle, the heel of the right foot raised and pressing against the leg of the chair or perhaps hooked under a rung; his left leg, clad in hose that shows off a wellformed calf muscle, is thrust forwards at an angle of about 120 degrees, the left foot planted firmly on the floor. Instructing without the aid of any book, he touches the thumb of his right hand with his left index finger as he enumerates the points of the lesson. (Today, someone might reproach him with mansplaining and manspreading.) His wife and children are grouped opposite him—“clustered together,” to use Orlin’s apt term—and, as a group, pushed just perceptibly back from the foreground. The mother and two of the children appear to be seated on a bench, with the rest of the children standing behind. One child has reached up to tuck his hand into the crook of his mother’s arm; all the children are close to

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_1

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her, within easy touching distance. Although the children must be of varying ages, they are positioned in such a way, some seated, some standing, that the tops of all their heads are just a few inches below the mother’s shoulders. The wife and children—as a unit—have gathered together in front of the head of the household for the daily lesson, demonstrating the deference that was due to the father in this highly patriarchal century, and exuding the cheerful quietness that moralists of domestic life said, time and again, should characterize a family ruled properly by a husband and father.3 The scene nevertheless manages to convey a degree of familial affection and informality that at least qualifies if it does not override the deference that strikes the keynote for some viewers—and supports for them the assumption (long entrenched) that patriarchal structures of authority in early modern England were fixed and firm. Of the two children flanking the mother, one carries a toy, a hobby-horse; another, the one holding a book (of psalms?) and looking to the side, past his mother, to the younger boy, seems to be more interested in his sibling than in his father’s enumeration of points. And while the father just might be frowning ever so slightly in the direction of the wayward child, his reprimand seems quite muted—and, more to the point, unheeded, by the child and by the mother, who does not seem anxious in the least about the conduct of her children in the presence of the patriarch. Of the children—two, just possibly three—who are standing behind the mother, at least one of them is not attending very closely to the father’s instruction. The mother herself does seem to be attuned dutifully to what her husband is saying (or, more likely, reiterating, since such instruction was so often part of the familial routine); but she also appears to be a little preoccupied with her pregnancy. Her hands, crossed in front of her, rest on the noticeable curve of her abdomen; the fingers of her right hand are plucking at the fabric of her skirt. She is seated in the midst of her children and her billowing skirts almost seem to form a nest. While the occasion is one of patriarchal instruction, we thus sense considerable warmth and ease of feeling. There is no question about the father’s holding a position of authority in this instructional setting, but that authority is contextualized, not as sternly remote and unilateral, but as tempered by emotional dynamics, as well as directed towards occasionally inattentive individuals who are distracted from the lesson—and with impunity—by their own interests and preoccupations. To attend to the nuances of emotion and mood depicted in this illustration is to see that patriarchal authority could be experienced as flexible.

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My reading of this illustration reflects the primary questions underlying Emotional Settings: How does the picture we might have formed from preconceptions—of an institution, a social practice, a pedagogical regimen, a set of relationships, or a familiar, even canonical, work of literature—change when we focus our attention on emotional dynamics? What comes newly or more sharply into view? What recedes? As the sheer volume of recent scholarship on affect and emotions attests, these questions are hardly new. My book breaks new ground, however, in terms of the works, literary and non-literary, that I bring together for the first time; in terms of how I construe the pedagogical context within which I then study seminal works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney; in terms of new readings, literary and non-literary; and in terms of my methodology. In chapters on the humanist schoolroom, filial relationships, The New Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy, The Faerie Queene, and Hamlet, I aim to furnish new ways to think about two closely interrelated concerns: shaping boys into civil subjects of the commonwealth and fashioning heroic agency and selfhood in literature. In these aims, I am guided by a host of questions in addition to the ones just posed (not all of them pertinent to each and every chapter). When is it as important to think about what instruction and learning feel like in early modern pedagogical settings, actual or literary, as it is to think about what pupils learn in those settings? What role does emotion play in shaping the moral learning so fundamental both to early-modern instructional regimens and to literature with civic aims? What happens when the emotional and moral imperatives of humanist grammar-school education conflict with those of families? How does literature register such affective tremors? In what ways do the technologies of learning employed in the home or the classroom shape affective and moral responses? How does literature engage with the habits of mind and feeling cultivated by such technologies as the commonplace book or the formation of maxims? Does the affective charge of an instructional setting—a schoolroom, a family—reinforce or undermine structures of authority? How can an emotional response challenge the patriarchal authority on which both households and schools rested? How does literature record the emotional fallout from such a challenge? What kind of mediating role do mothers play within a pedagogical culture built on patriarchal authority? How can we gauge affective charge and emotional responses in documents related to the pedagogies of earlymodern schoolrooms and families? How do we even measure emotional dynamics in the texts by Spenser or Sidney or Shakespeare? My answer

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to the last two questions is that we can do so most effectively by paying close attention to language: syntax, sentence structure, turns of phrase, and metaphors are exceptionally responsive to affective pressures. ∗ ∗ ∗ These interrelated questions and aims are at the heart of Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia. They are not quite the questions that I set out to address with this book. My initial interest was sparked by Hamlet’s vow to obey his dead father’s command to avenge his death, especially by Hamlet’s assuming immediately that he would have to wipe from his memory all that he’d been taught in his humanist schooling in order to execute his father’s will.4 When I found a comparable knot of conflicting imperatives in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in the Ruddymane episode of Book II, where the “vertuous lore” foundational in humanist education aligns imperfectly with the “gentle noriture” of home in the promotion of filial revenge, I was struck by the fact that two such vastly different works (and writers) identified a potential for conflict between familial imperatives and humanist pedagogy.5 This tension seemed worth investigating since not only are household and school two of the most important instructional settings of the sixteenth century in England but the instructional regimens proper to each are often regarded as dovetailing seamlessly. Vocabulary points to the shared pedagogical aims of families and schoolrooms. Spenser’s phrase, “vertuous lore,” directs us towards what is arguably the most significant aim of the humanist educational programme: the inculcation of virtue, especially civic virtue.6 Both the curricula and the instructional practices of grammar schools were geared towards turning boys into the men who would serve the commonwealth in the capacities needed to promote the emerging socio-economic, political, and religious agendas that superseded what Mervyn James identified as “lineage society.”7 From domestic conduct books, sermons, homilies, and family correspondence, we know that parents, too, at all levels of society, were enjoined to instil virtue, including civic virtue, in children (especially sons), a mandate that grew more urgent through the course of the sixteenth century.8 Moreover, both household and school, at least in theory, operate under the banner of patriarchal authority, a model of governance generating the frequently-invoked analogy between fathers and schoolmasters.9

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With the fraught moments from Hamlet and The Faerie Queene in mind, I planned to explore further the ways in which early modern literature used the deeply-felt analogies that linked family and school (and often the state) in shared aims and structures of authority as sixteenthcentury civic society emerged from old feudal orders. To what extent, I wondered, were these analogies able to foreground complementarity among configurations of authority only by masking contradictions, contradictions that surface in imaginative literature? To what extent did these analogies reflect lived experience? I wondered how secure these analogies could be when two works as different as Hamlet and The Faerie Queene highlighted a familial moral imperative—revenge—that contrasts starkly with the Christian ethos at the heart of humanist pedagogy. I am still interested in literary moments and themes that gain their power by highlighting tensions between the respective imperatives of home and school. In the book I have written, the chapters on Hamlet examine directly the particular tensions generated when a ghostly feudal father commands his humanist scholar of a son to exact revenge and the chapter on The Faerie Queene measures the affective costs of humanist education when home is left behind. But these chapters, along with the rest of the book, range beyond this specific focus to consider a broader range of affective ties and emotional effects. The historical context for my study, developed in this Chapter and Chapter 2, remains pedagogical culture. I define pedagogical culture to include both humanist schooling and familial—especially paternal—wisdom, advice, and admonishment, and I delimit it to the training up of boys and young men. The latter limit on the scope of my book reflects not just the fact that grammar schools were for boys only, but also the fact that the literary side of my research focusses mainly on the heroic agency of male characters.10 But while this general pedagogical context has been in place since I first conceived of Emotional Settings, my particular interest shifted over time (as the questions posed at the outset indicate) to the emotional dynamics that shape, even define to some extent, the instructional regimens of home and school. Several lines of analysis gradually emerged as important: first, it is possible to track in emotional responses (and not just acts) a son’s or pupil’s resistance to the authority of fathers and schoolmasters; second, the instructional regimens of home and school, respectively, elicit—indeed, summon—different emotional responses; third, specific technologies of learning—the forming of maxims, the composing of commonplace books, the reading and writing

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of letters—organize emotional responses in particular ways; and, fourth, differing emotional responses can inflect in varying ways moral imperatives shared by home and school, especially when maternal figures mediate. The word “Settings” in my title thus registers my sense that we need to attend to the emotional temperature, as it were, of both home and school when we think about how these two instructional settings and their respective regimens set boys and young men on the path to citizenship in a monarchical commonwealth.11 My focus on emotional dynamics in pedagogical culture aligns Emotional Settings with an explosion of studies that in the last twenty-five or so years have broadened scholarship of early modern literature and society by participating in the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences.12 Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt, each employing thoroughly historicized terms of analysis, encouraged us to read early-modern expressions of emotion (or passion, to use the sixteenth-century word) as embodied in ways now lost to us, however different Paster’s and Schoenfeldt’s respective “bodies” and experiences of subjectivity proved to be.13 Anyone working on emotions in early-modern literature is indebted to them and to other scholars who have similarly anatomized for us the humoral body and who have contributed to the history of emotion by studying emotion in the context of early modern systems of physiology, philosophy, and epistemology. Occasionally, I develop points that draw on this seminal knowledge, but my approach is more sociological and my methodology more rhetorical in its reliance on the close reading of texts, both literary and non-literary. It is no less historicized, however, in its attention to the expression of emotion. Although I am not interested in defining what makes early-modern emotions early modern (or in distinguishing them from the emotions of other historical periods), I am deeply interested in how certain sixteenth-century English institutions and practices shape—and are shaped by—emotions. It is my hope that my study furnishes a compelling example of what Susan Broomhall has described recently as the “potential for historical analyses [done] through the lens of emotions to change how the early modern period is considered.”14 In this regard, Emotional Settings has much in common with a spate of studies from literary scholars that have newly historicized emotion by bringing into focus various terrains of social interaction or cultural negotiation. In the last couple of decades, we have been invited to explore

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the intimacies cultivated in epistolary exchanges; the links between classical rhetoric and affective experience; religious feeling; the emotional fallout from the Reformation; the gendered (and newly re-gendered) values assigned to emotions; the emotional expressiveness permitted by the waning of feudalism; the transactional emotional work of rhetorical disciplines, including the disciplines of the schoolroom; and the large-scale sociopolitical role of emotion.15 Emotional Settings began independently of these directions in criticism, my own turn to questions of emotion occurring—very gradually and even imperceptibly to me—when I was already engaged in writing about and teaching certain works. I have since benefitted, in large measures, from the insights of this scholarship and many specific debts will be tallied up in the chapters (and footnotes) to come. Here, though, I would like to sketch in very broad terms what sets my study apart and what it can contribute to a still-burgeoning field. To begin with, my bringing together home and school to form the historical context of my book distinguishes my research from other studies in the field. Family life and schooling have both drawn sustained attention in recent years, from social historians and literary critics alike, but the two topics are not often interlinked. By examining these settings together rather than in isolation, we can understand more completely the deep social need in sixteenth-century England to experience patriarchal authority as natural.16 As civic society emerges from the feudal structures that had organized socio-economic and ideological life for so long, there is enormous pressure on both household, including the non-aristocratic household, and school to be places of order that offer fulfilment—emotional, material, and ideological—because they are founded on patriarchal authority. Examining home and school together brings into sharper focus the emotional dynamics of each instructional regimen to the extent that each setting serves as a foil to the other. This twofold perspective permits us to qualify (and sometimes disqualify) critical assumptions about the exercise of authority in two social institutions so fundamental to earlymodern English statehood. Even more crucially, the twofold perspective lets us bring mothers into the picture. With respect to humanist pedagogical practices, one of the most important developments in recent years, one that owes much to the affective turn in criticism, has been a revised understanding of the dynamics of the classroom as literary critics, especially, have sought to explain the formative influence of grammar-school education on the towering literary figures of the period. The thesis, expounded compellingly by Lisa Jardine,

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Antony Grafton, Richard Halpern, and others, that the curricular and corporal disciplines of the classroom were invariably or merely coercive has lost purchase recently.17 Several book-length studies have returned us to the humanist schoolroom to discover other, equally definitive, dynamics. Rebecca Bushnell has stressed the instability of authority; Andrew Wallace has described the intellectual intimacy of exchanges between pupil and master or pupil and text; Lynn Enterline has drawn out the liberating and transgressive possibilities in schoolroom exercises; Jeff Dolven has demonstrated the insufficiency of punishment as an instrument of instruction.18 My study expands, in directions other than these, the capacity of the humanist classroom. In Chapter 2, I draw on well-known educational treatises by Roger Ascham and Richard Mulcaster as well as on a lesser-known tract by Edmund Coote to describe a schoolroom—whether the grammar-school classroom or the private tutorial space—that accommodates a wide range of emotional responses, responses available to all the pupils in the classroom (not just the ones who became famous writers). I delineate emotional dynamics that render unpredictable the imposition of authority in the classroom, making the schoolroom not just a place of subjection but also an instructional setting that can accommodate, in Mulcaster’s memorable phrase, “deep insolencie.”19 I discover in Ascham’s depictions of the relationship between master and pupil a pedagogical space that offers equanimity and that anticipates ideals of the humanist programme that would underwrite education in later generations. I conclude with a discussion of laughing and tickling—little-remarked schoolroom exercises recommended by Mulcaster—to reinforce my claim that focussing on the emotional community of the humanist schoolroom uncovers more than coercion. In recent decades, the early modern family has undergone even more renovation than the humanist schoolroom. Historians and other scholars have widened appreciably our sense of early-modern family life, being apt to find emotional richness where an earlier generation of scholars found aridness. Social historians such as Linda Pollock, for example, turning assiduously and widely to letters, commonplace books, diaries, and account books, have demolished the long-accepted assumptions, advanced most influentially by Lawrence Stone, that parents were indifferent towards their children, and that families were unflinchingly patriarchal in form and function. Pollock and others in her wake cut a wide swath in sources neglected by Stone. In doing so, historians have not only accumulated ample evidence of parental care but also produced a

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more nuanced understanding of patriarchal authority. As Pollock puts it in a 2017 essay, recent research “reconceptualises the family as a unit of dynamic, shifting relations and investigates how ideals, values, and norms [including patriarchal ones] played out in real life.” Focussing in particular on how space shapes emotions (and, in turn, emotions define space), Katie Barclay observes that the “emotional bonds” fostered by living in close physical proximity “could destabilize traditional power hierarchies,” not simply “soften” them.20 While the emotional terrain of families—and households—has been mapped in increasingly detailed contours, scholars of family life typically do not build their cases from close, extended rhetorical analysis, even when they mine wills, diaries, letters, and poems or provide a case study. My study proceeds precisely on the level of language, sentence structure, style, and tone; I read non-literary documents very closely, in the same way I read literary works.21 We need to be alert to primary, immediate, meanings that have become obscured through time and the changing conventions of language and discourse, or that emerge only through careful attention to rhetorical, social, and generic contexts.22 We need also to remain ready to plumb the seemingly merely conventional. We can, for instance, discover profound feeling in a remark that earlier generations of scholars find “laconic.” Rather than seizing on the terseness of Daniel Fleming’s noting that he “Paid for my loving and lovely son John’s coffin: 2s.6d.” to conclude that this father passed lightly over the death of his son, we might observe that the quiet rhetorical flourish of “loving and lovely” marks this entry as particularly charged—the more so because this notation appears in an account book of household expenses.23 Not only do these epithets, yoked by alliteration, assonance, and consonance into a lilting syndeton, register emotion, they describe the ties of affection that bound father and son when the boy was alive: this child was both “loving” towards his father and loved (“lovely,” i.e. loveable, deserving of admiration) by him. We should not be fooled by the economy of expression into thinking this father indifferent. Reading documents of family history with an eye (and ear) for what remains unspoken or muted, elided or compressed can lead to an understanding of familial emotions that moves beyond the valuable groundwork of recent years in showing that patriarchy could be experienced as flexible and negotiable—as contestable— however much paternal authority structured family life in theory and officialdom.

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In Chapter 3, after showing how much letter-writing manuals of the day promote the letter’s capacity for conveying emotion, I explore the emotional contours of family life by offering two case studies of family correspondence involving a son away at school. In both cases, the letters I study are known to scholars, but they have not yet been considered in the terms that I develop. In my analysis of letters written home to his father and mother by Philip Gawdy, I pay close attention to the affective charge of language—to syntax, sentence structure, turns of phrase—to show just how provisional could be the experience of paternal authority. In my reading of Henry Sidney’s first-ever letter of advice to his young son, Philip, I furnish a context that lets us gauge the ways that the emotional dynamics of family life shape the moral learning so central to humanist pedagogy and invites us to speculate about the ways that technologies of learning condition that learning. As my citations above to literary scholars indicate, pedagogy has proved an exceptionally fruitful context to adduce in the study of early-modern literature, whether the critic is discovering how Shakespeare adapted the creative possibilities in imitation that the humanist schoolroom afforded or tracing how Spenser and Sidney exploited the possibilities of genre to critique the schoolroom or showing how Spenser engaged with the pedagogical lessons and legacy of Virgil in the classroom.24 I am grateful to Enterline, Dolven, Wallace, and others for their innovative takes on the importance of pedagogical culture in the work of the three authors who make up the literary focus of Emotional Settings. As different as these critics are in their approaches, from each other and from me, they are uniformly inspiring in their commitment to discovering in early-modern literature deep affinities with (or antipathies to) the humanist schoolroom. While I am pursuing lines of analysis that are independent of their particular insights, we occasionally cover the same ground. With Dolven, I am interested in how Spenser and Sidney (I add Shakespeare to the roster) use maxims and exempla, ubiquitous intellectual tools of the humanist classroom; I am interested, however, not in what “learning looks like,” to use Dolven’s nicely pointed phrase, but in what learning feels like.25 With Enterline, I am interested in Shakespeare’s reliance on imitatio and rhetorical practices (and we both have a good deal to say about Hecuba in Hamlet ), but we apply these legacies of the schoolroom in very divergent ways. My interests do not overlap with her aims to show what Shakespeare the dramatist learned about personation, gendered roles, and inhabiting sympathetically the subject positions of others. My focus, more

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narrowly concentrated, remains on Hamlet’s recursion to techniques of the classroom that prove inadequate to the roiling emotional needs and moral imperatives stirred up by familial circumstances. With Wallace, I am interested, but to a lesser degree and without a centring focus on Virgil’s reflections on pedagogy, in how the schoolroom structures affective relationships between pupils and masters. By staying attuned throughout the book to the imperatives, often conflicting, of school and home; and by attending to the thematic or characterological import of emotions, I introduce a perspective that to date has been undeveloped in studies of early modern literature’s engagement with pedagogical culture. It is a perspective that finds new meanings in very familiar works. Chapter 4 concentrates on a few select episodes in Sidney’s New Arcadia and on key passages in The Defence of Poesy to claim that part of Sidney’s aim in revising his prose romance is to seed quietly radical ideas on heroic paideia by reconceiving its affective dimensions. I suggest that Sidney recasts heroism as it is conventionally understood, undermining the ideal of filial piety upon which Renaissance conceptions of heroism typically rest by substituting for the emblematic portrait of Aeneas’ carrying of his father to safety on his back a surprisingly intimate picture of the infant Aeneas nursing at his mother’s breast. Sidney’s dazzling, deeplylayered reflections on Aeneas in The Defence of Poesy, which are replete with conventional praise of this exemplary hero and his much-celebrated rescuing of his father, include also the startling realization that virtue and filial piety are not necessarily synonymous, and that Aeneas’ epic career might have followed a different trajectory. The revised Arcadia gestures towards that path to heroism. More broadly, in the Arcadian conversations between Musidorus and Pyrocles, Sidney challenges the conviction that heroism emerges from such “civic” places as the schoolroom or the topoi of the commonplace book. For these places of “profit” and “delight,” twinned fruits of humanist instruction, Sidney substitutes spaces of emotion and delight: gardens, private retreats, and fellowship. In Chapter 5, I focus on Spenser’s presentation in The Faerie Queene of Arthur’s upbringing and tutelage to highlight Spenser’s deep concern with how familial feeling might be transferred to the work of building a commonwealth, the professed overarching aim of humanist schooling in sixteenth-century England, and how heroes can be fashioned. Taken from home at birth and educated in wardship, Arthur becomes a figure through whom Spenser can weigh both the benefits and costs that accrue in humanist education when the space of instruction is separate from

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home. Throughout, Spenser remains concerned with the emotional conditions of learning, conceiving of Arthur as an embodied individual whose affective ties contribute to his meanings in the poem as much as does his allegorical status. Spenser is clear that humanist pedagogy succeeds only when it is layered with emotional attachments, to the teacher and to the place of instruction; in ministering to Una and Redcrosse in Book I, Arthur capitalizes on the “vertuous lore” of Timon’s affectionate tutelage. Spenser is equally clear about the affective toll of humanist education. Arthur remains haunted by his removal from family, his excision from familial lineage; this is registered with particular poignancy in Book II when Arthur discovers his place in the historical roll and feels himself both “ravished” and at long last inscribed as a son. Chapters 6 and 7, both on Hamlet, show the extent to which Prince Hamlet is trapped, tragically, between schooling and family. Neither his humanist education, for all its promise, nor his wish to “remember” his father, for all its culturally and ideologically sanctioned force, can furnish him with agency or direction. Hamlet can never quite eradicate the humanist habits of intellection and feeling that he has learned, despite their being wholly inadequate to the emotional turmoil occasioned by his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. In Chapter 6, I chart the incommensurability between schooling and family by focussing intensely on Hamlet’s first soliloquy and on the contrasts between Horatio and Hamlet in their respective encounters with the Ghost. Many critics have observed that Hamlet’s opening soliloquy, “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,” is layered with indices to his pressure points. I argue that the greatest pressure builds up because the humanist rhetorical and intellectual practices that condition his thinking (and, to a degree, his emotions) and that structure his moral perspective cannot accommodate the familial feelings that overwhelm him. The extent to which he is moved by strong filial feeling emerges even more sharply when we compare his initial address to the Ghost with Horatio’s (a comparison that Shakespeare compels us to make by staging, in the space of a couple of scenes, two addresses to the Ghost, by two Wittenberg scholars). In the first section of Chapter 7, I focus on Hamlet’s initial exchange with his father’s ghost and his second soliloquy, in which he absorbs his father’s command to “remember him.” I explore this intense dramatic sequence in terms of the competing instructional regimens of the humanist school and the family, highlighting the crisis of agency that Hamlet experiences under the pressure of the patriarchal familial imperative for

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sons to become like their fathers—which, in Hamlet’s case, would mean acceding to an outmoded and destructive ethos. In the second section of the chapter, I suggest that Shakespeare imagines Hamlet as someone deeply, if mutely, attuned to the possibilities of the classroom—and fitfully enabled and enlarged by them—even as he rejects his schooling to comply with patriarchal familial demands. I focus on the language of the classroom that Hamlet employs in his second soliloquy and on Hamlet’s reactions to the Player’s speech on Pyrrhus—and especially Hamlet’s imagining of Hecuba—to argue that Hamlet himself senses that the humanist practices of intellection he spurns could have furnished him with a model of selfhood less tragically limited than the one forced upon him by his ghostly father.

Notes 1. Tenor of the whole psalmes in foure partes. Imprinted by John Day, 1563. STC 2431. In his tremendously popular devotional handbook (34 editions between 1611 and 1643 alone); Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety, advises the man who is “called to the government of a family” thus: “thou must not hold it sufficient to serve God and live uprightly in thy own person, unless thou cause all under thy charge to do the same with thee.…if thou desirest to have the blessing of God upon thyself and upon thy family, either before or after thy own private devotions, call every morning all the family to some convenient room; and first either read to them thyself a chapter in the word of God, or cause it to be read distinctly by some other. If leisure serve, thou mayst admonish them of some remarkable notes” (143, 145). 2. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 43. 3. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, observes that “Church, State, and family…were patriarchal groups where unity based on obedience and acceptance of authority was the essential prerequisite” (200). Secondary sources on the patriarchal structure of the early-modern English family are far too numerous to canvas. For a recent discussion of patriarchal structures from the perspective of women’s agency within those constraints, see Jessica Murphy, Virtuous Necessity. 4. Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.99–104. All citations to the play are from Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006, 2016).

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5. Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book II, Canto iii, stanza 1. All citations from Spenser are to The Faerie Queene, 2nd edition, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007). 6. The importance of instilling virtue is almost universally emphasized in educational treatises. See, for example, tracts by two of the most eminent educators of the sixteenth century: Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster […] (London: John Daye, 1571 [STC 834]); Richard Mulcaster, Positions Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training Up of Children, Either for Skill in Their Booke, or Health in Their Bodie (London: by Thomas Vautrollier for Thomas Chare, 1581 [STC 1825]). 7. Mervyn James, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society. In his definitive study of Durham’s transition from a medieval to an early-modern society, James, 177–78, described “lineage society” as one in which the kinship networks of aristocratic families formed the political, economic, and social bedrock, and in which families turned resolutely inward—sometimes in order to confront external threats, including armed aggression. In such a society, revenge against those who injure the family could have a part (even if revenge took the less blatant form of social, political, or economic sanctions). By the end of the sixteenth century, lineage society had given way to “civil society,” in which a “changing pattern of gentry life [which involved] entrepreneurial, professional and administrative preoccupations, with a strongly Protestant religious commitment, increasingly blurred the traditional chivalric image.” Lineage society lived on in the literary imagination, however, as Spenser’s chivalric allegory and Shakespeare’s tale of a murdered king with a penchant for wagering his kingdom in one-on-one armed combat show. 8. See, for instance, Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman […] (London: Printed by E. Tyler, for Richard Thrase, at the signe of the CrossKeys at St Pauls Gate, 1661 [Wing P943]), 30–37; Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Gouernement (London: Printed by Felix Kingston, for Thomas Man, 1598), 246–341; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, 62–65, observes that the Reformation “riveted home patriarchy,” and “[t]he general moralisation of political obligations was mirrored in the family, where duties were no longer simply contractual but owed in conscience to God who had established the ground-rules of domestic relations.” Simultaneously, Protestantism “deepened the emotional quality of family life, enriching relations between spouses, parents and children.” 9. This is not to suggest that fathers and schoolmasters were always taken to be fully in accord. As Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching observes,

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11. 12.

13.

14.

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40–41, the schoolmaster often “competed” with the father for authority even though “in pedagogic theory, the ideal teacher’s authority was often compared to the father’s.” Schoolmasters often felt, too, that their job was to correct the mistakes of parents. For example, Robert Ainsworth, The Most Natural and Easie Way, argued that a schoolmaster’s “chief business ought to be to … weed out the Tares which perhaps were sown when the Parents slept, before they are grown so high, as to choak the Culture of an Ingenuous and Liberal Education, [etc.] (A4v).” Much of the most exciting work on early-modern pedagogy as it pertains to girls and women focusses on theatre as an instructional setting. See, for example, Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson, eds., Performing Pedagogy. I am using the term “citizen” loosely and anachronistically, to denote what we today define as citizenship. The “affective turn” has cut such wide swaths in so many disciplines that an endnote cannot possibly provide a comprehensive overview. For a useful, recent summary of the state of research as it pertains to the earlymodern period, see Susan Broomhall, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, xxxvi–xxxviii. The individual entries in the book cover a lot of ground, equally succinctly. See also Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), posits a porous body, prone to leakages and unruliness, and a self subject to shame; Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, posits a body that is more contained and a self that is more controlled and autonomous. Broomhall, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Emotions, xxxviii. See also Broomhall, “Emotions in Household,” in Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, traces in epistolary theory and practice, from the classical period to the Renaissance, the rhetoric of intimacy that laid the foundation for modern literature’s understanding of subjectivity. Wendy Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend, examines the interrelatedness of emotion, rhetoric, and friendship to describe cognitive and social dimensions of affective experience. Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England, focussing on language of mourning, examines affective dimensions of faith. Steven Mullaney, The

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16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare focussing on theatre, looks at what happened to social “feelings” in the wake of a Reformation that buried them. Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation, focusses on the reconfiguration of masculine affective experience in post-Reformation England, arguing that feeling pain (and empathy) comes to supplant martial valour. Jennifer Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature, examines the range of emotional expressiveness permitted to men in varying social positions. Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 18, shows how pedagogic theory and practice accommodated “play, pleasure, and kindness,” affective conditions that counterbalance disciplinary regimes. Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, charts in Shakespeare’s representation of big emotional moments the affective dimensions—and possibilities—of the rhetorical practices of his schooling. Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, explores the shifting, intense affective dimensions of the relationship between the pupil and the schoolmaster. Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England, argues that new, politically efficacious, forms of emotional expression developed from Renaissance adaptations of emotionally-charged Ovidian tales. Bradley Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court, uses states of emotion as a lens through which to view important historical personages and the literary works that engaged with those subjects. Ian Green, Humanism and Protestant in Early Modern Education, examines the impact of classical texts as school books in Protestant England, highlighting the effects on the religious understanding of boys and so emphasizing a spiritual rather than social, cultural, or psychological need to experience patriarchy as natural. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities. Virtually every discussion of grammar schools, whether from the period or from our day, speaks of the harshness of schoolroom discipline. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, establishes the tone and tenor of much recent discussion in emphasizing the ideological underpinnings of coercive corporeal and intellectual discipline. Green, however, speculates that “[r]ather than being the norm, beating may have been associated with certain teachers at certain schools” (94). Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. See Note 15 above for Bushnell, Wallace, and Enterline. Mulcaster, Positions, 271. Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800; Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children and “Little Commonwealths I: The Household and Family Relationships,” in A Social History of England, 1500– 1750, ed. Keith Wrightson, 60–83; Katie Barclay, “Family and Household,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall, 245.

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21. Eden considers the connections between style and an ethos of intimacy, but in the context of epistolary and rhetorical theory. 22. Although her focus is specifically on the rhetoric of social interaction and speech acts, not affective dynamics, Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, 1, draws welcome attention to the social, ideological, and psychological dimensions of language. She argues, with respect specifically to Shakespeare, that critics must “develop a better understanding of social invention in language--and of the richly complex rhetoric of social exchange in early modern England,” stressing the need to examine “how language is organized as interaction, how dialogue and other verbal exchanges can be shaped by the social scene or context as much as the individual speakers, how ‘the word in living conversation’--in Bakhtin’s intriguing formulation--‘is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word.’” 23. The descriptor “laconic” is Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, 105–6; he uses it to describe Daniel Fleming’s account book entry, which he quotes on the death of his son. As further evidence of parental indifference to children, Stone points out that there is little indication from the period “of the purchase of mourning--not even an armband--on the death of very small children […] nor of parental attendance at the funeral.” Viviana A. Zelizer, 24, has a position similar to Stone’s thesis of parental indifference: “[u]ntil the eighteenth century in England and in Europe, the death of an infant or a young child was a minor event.” 24. Recent studies such as these acknowledge and expand upon the work of earlier critics who examined the effects upon Tudor literature of the training in grammar and rhetoric that lay at the heart of grammar school education. Joel Altman’s capacious The Tudor Play of Mind is exemplary in tracing the interplay between rhetorical training and drama. In asking how “minds…fashioned” by rhetoric—itself an “art of inquiry” encouraging students to shift perspectives, to see things in many ways, to adopt by turn contrary positions—would construct drama, Altman concludes that a dramatist trained in rhetoric would fashion an aesthetic of wonder and questioning, writing plays that eschewed didacticism in favour of a broad range of responses and moral ambivalence (3, 6). My emphasis on the emotional possibilities of the schoolroom echoes Altman’s emphasis on the creative and liberating aesthetic possibilities afforded by rhetorical training. 25. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 140.

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References Ainsworth, Robert. The Most Natural and Easie Way of Institution Containing Proposals […]. London: Printed for Christopher Hussey, 1699. Web. Altman, Joel. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978. Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster […]. 3rd edition. London: John Daye, 1571. Web. Barclay, Katie. “Family and Household.” In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction. Ed. Susan Broomhall. New York: Routledge, 2017. Bayly, Lewis. The Practice of Piety. Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1842/1997, 1611 Broomhall, Susan. “Introduction.” In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction. Ed. Susan Broomhall. New York: Routledge, 2017. Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996. Print. Campana, Joseph. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012. Print. Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London; Toronto: Routledge and K. Paul, Univ. of Toronto, 1965. Print. Cleaver, Robert, and Deacon, John. A Godly Forme of Household Government for the Ordering of Priuate Families. London: Printed by Thomas Creede, for Thomas Man, 1603. Print. Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Third Anstey Memorial Lectures in the University of Kent at Canterbury, 12–15 May 1986. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Print. Coote, Edmund. The English School-Master. London: Printed by R. & W. Leybourn, for the of Stationers, 1656. Print. Day, John, and Sternhold, Thomas. Imprint of John Day Possibly from the Colophon to Thomas Sternhold’s Whole Book of Psalms. London: Printed by Iohn Daye, Dwelling Ouer Aldersgate, 1579. Print. Dolven, Jeffrey Andrew. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2007. Print. Eden, Kathy. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2012. Print. Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Print. Fox, Cora. Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Gawdy, Philip. Letters of Philip Gawdy. 1579–1616. Ed. I.H. Jeayes. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1909. Facsimile Edition.

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Grafton, Anthony, and Jardine, Lisa. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. Print. Green, Ian. Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Print. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991. Print. Irish, Bradley. Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018. James, Mervyn. Family, Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Print. Kuchar, Gary. The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. Print. Magnusson, Lynne. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Print. Moncrief, Kathryn, and McPherson, Kathryn. Ed. Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance. London: Ashgate, 2011. Print. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children. Ed. William Barker. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994. Mullaney, Stephen. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015. Murphy, Jessica. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England. The Univ. of Michigan Press, 2015. Print. Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008. Print. Orlin, Lena Cowen. Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Print. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993. Paster, Gail Kern, Rowe, Katherine, and Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2004. Print. Peacham, Henry. The Compleat Gentleman […]. London: E. Tyler, for Richard Thrase, at the signe of the Cross-Keys at St Paul’s Gate, 1661. Web. Pollock, Linda. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. Print.

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———. “Little Commonwealths I: The Household and Family Relationships.” In A Social History of England, 1500–1750. Ed. Keith Wrightson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017. 60–83. Schoenfeldt, Michael Carl. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Print. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Revised edition. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016. Sidney, Henry. “Letter to Philip.” In The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney. 2 volumes. Ed. Roger Kuin. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Prembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1977. Print. ———. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 2nd edition. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Print. Vaught, Jennifer. Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature. London: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Wallace, Andrew. Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England. Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. Print. Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic, 1985. Print.

CHAPTER 2

Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional Possibilities

In the final eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, the shepherd-singer Colin famously hangs up his pipe. Long preoccupied with the significance of this action for our understanding of Spenser’s (and Colin’s) literary careers, commentators have paid less attention to a brief reference earlier in the eclogue to the schoolmaster under whose tutelage Spenser’s native talent was fostered. “A good olde shephearde, Wrenock was his name, / Made me [Colin] by arte more cunning in the same.”1 Richard Mulcaster served as the headmaster in two of the preeminent grammar schools in London, Merchant Taylors’ School, which Spenser attended from 1561 to 1569, and later St. Paul’s. A teacher of repute and theorist of education as well as a gifted scholar and classicist, Mulcaster was both an enthusiastic supporter of dramatic performances by his pupils and a staunch champion of the English language.2 Spenser’s abiding affection for the schoolmaster whose methods promoted creativity can be intuited from this brief “December” reference as well as, perhaps, from the fact that in later years Spenser would name his son “Sylvan,” the name of one of Mulcaster’s own sons.3 As represented in “December,” however fleetingly, Spenser’s schooldays seem also to have been characterized by sustaining fellowship. Colin recalls that his peers encouraged his inclination to “song and musicks mirth,” to the extent that Colin was emboldened “Fro thence … in derring doe compare / With shepheardes swayne” and to believe that “To Pan his owne selfe pype [he] neede not yield” (“December,” 39–40, 43–44). While these passing references

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to Spenser’s years at Merchant Taylors’ School might seem inconsequential, in fact they furnish tantalizing evidence about the “emotional community” of at least this pupil at this sixteenth-century English grammar school.4 The resurgence of interest in assessing humanism has occasioned reevaluation of the pedagogical enterprise of English Renaissance humanism, particularly from the perspectives of social historians and literary critics.5 Although Spenser’s fond recollection of his schoolboy years and his “good old” schoolmaster is far from an isolated case, such amiable features of school life are not typically highlighted in these reassessments.6 Critics have tended to stress the harshly coercive and punitive aspects of grammar-school life (for which there is of course ample evidence, some of it, indeed, pertaining to Mulcaster), choosing to focus on the ways in which grammar-school practices fashioned pliable subjects whose emotional states were defined narrowly by fear of the rod and submission to authority.7 Detecting in humanism a gap between lofty ideals of education and the actual work accomplished in the schoolroom, Antony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, for example, have undertaken excavations in documentary evidence that threaten to undermine the whole (in their estimation, shaky) edifice of humanist pedagogy. Along with furnishing valuable scholarship by presenting case studies in humanist education, they contend that, with a few exceptions, humanist educators did not produce what their self-promoting tracts claimed they did—rhetors equipped in both morals and eloquence to be leaders of nations. What they did turn out, as a useful by-product of the mental and physical disciplines employed in teaching grammar, were “initiates [with] a properly docile attitude toward authority.”8 In a similar vein, for Richard Halpern, the content of grammar-school curricula assumes less importance than do the disciplinary regimens, including the corporeal ones, whose strictures were internalized by pupils to produce self-subjection.9 Such views and assumptions have been profitably challenged of late. Counterbalancing emphases on coercive measures, Rebecca Bushnell describes a more expansive emotional life by finding room for “love, pleasure, and play” in the Renaissance humanist school; challenging expressly the claim that grammar schools produced pupils with a “properly docile attitude toward authority,” Lynn Enterline locates in schoolroom texts and practices the means for liberating acts of personation.10

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These studies have been useful in directing attention to the emotional life of the schoolroom. The recent surge of academic interest in such interrelated topics as the “affective turn,” emotional cognition, emotion and ethics, and histories of feeling predicts that the “emotional community” of the humanist schoolroom can furnish a still richer vein of inquiry. As Barbara Rosenwein insists in her study of emotional communities of the early Middle Ages, “emotions” need to be taken “as seriously…as other ‘invisible’ topics, such as ecology and gender” (2). My aim is to advance serious consideration of the kinds of emotional responses that are possible, even probable, in the schoolroom. As my use of the term “community” suggests, my interest extends to the fellowship of scholars, although I am emphatically not interested in identifying student “subcultures,” if by subculture is meant a group whose shared interests and aims separate it from mainstream designs.11 Far from being isolated from the pedagogical concerns of the schoolroom, the emotional community is integral in defining that classroom. It emerges not as an alternative to the regimen of instruction but as its affective charge. Arguably, the emotional dynamics of the classroom structure the school-day every bit as much as does the curriculum. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I will turn to educational texts and treatises, some of them thumbed well by critics in recent years, to look for evidence of emotional dynamics that are more varied, versatile, productive, and, occasionally at least, liberating and sustaining than has been customarily assumed. The same sources also register emotional dynamics that are counterproductive to the ideals of the humanist pedagogical project, but in ways not fully accounted for in studies that emphasize coercion.

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I

As even a brief review of criticism intimates, one feature of English school life with a starkly obvious bearing on the emotional experience of pupils has received substantial attention. It is almost axiomatic to equate humanist schools with beating—with good reason. Dozens of illustrations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries place a switch or rod in the hand of the master.12 Virtually every contemporary treatise or schoolmaster’s manual at least mentions beating, sometimes in so off-handed a manner as to reinforce our impression that corporal punishment was the unquestioned order of the day. The leading theorists and educators of the day engage explicitly with the issue. In the preface to his treatise

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“The Schoolmaster,” for instance, Roger Ascham indicates that the dinner table conversation that led to his writing of the tract was sparked by Lord Burghley’s passing along the “strange News” that “divers Scholars of Eaton be run away from the school for fear of beating” (Preface 6). In his “On Education,” Erasmus not only speaks in general of the “torturechamber” where “you hear nothing but the thudding of the stick [and] the swishing of the rod,” but also recalls vividly a beating he received, providing us with valuable means for estimating the kind of damage done by such harsh disciplinary measures (CWE 26.325). Before focussing on influential treatises on education, however, I would like to turn to a short poem, tucked away in a schoolroom text, that points to ways in which we need to qualify our assumptions about the violence conditioning the emotional life of the English schoolroom. Edmund Coote’s 1596 treatise, The English School-master, provides a useful start.13 Its status as a widely used instructional text composed by a schoolmaster near the end of the sixteenth century lets us assume that it is both descriptive and prescriptive with respect to accepted practices. The “Short Catechism” included in Coote’s text closes with admonitory verses to scholars that promise liberal—and intensifying—application of the rod for breaches of piety, decorum, and conduct. Only nine quatrains in length, “The School-master to his Scholar” nevertheless furnishes considerable insight into the ethos of punishment in the late-sixteenthcentury English school, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the pedestrian quality of its verse (School-master 50). While the matter-of-factness of the poem’s tone confirms that we are correct in assuming that beating was widely accepted as run-of-the-mill, our quickness to draw exactly that conclusion can obscure other qualities of the emotional community of the school life imagined in the vignettes depicted in its stanzas. The first stanza sets the scene: My child and scholar take good heed Unto the words that here are set; And see thou do accordingly, Or else be sure thou shalt be beat.

Following this general admonishment, in which the threat of punishment hangs impersonally over the scholar, the schoolmaster details a myriad of possible infractions, becoming the active agent of punishment as he does so.14 Enumerating a list of increasingly serious classes of misbehaviour,

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the master warns the slovenly scholar that “you and I must have a Fray” and cautions the unruly scholar that “you and I must be at strife.” The most grievous misconduct warrants the harshest punishment, beating on bare legs or buttocks: If that you Curse, Mis call or Swear, If that you Pick File, Steal, or Lye, If you forget a Scholar’s p[]rt, Then must you sure your pointes untie.

This is brutal punishment, perhaps even recognized as such by the writer of the verses, who could just as easily have chosen to rhyme “swear” with, say, “buttocks bare,” but who chose instead to remain indirect, or decorous, by referring to the untying of the fasteners on hose or breeches, the action that would expose the boy’s bare skin. Whether or not the writer of these lines retreats, in the way I have just suggested, from the full force of the punishment to be meted out in these cases, he does draw back from his role as the active agent in the administering of beatings. The use of parison, particularly insistent in this stanza in presenting the scholar as an offender (“If that you … If that you … If you”), also positions the scholar, not just as the object of punishment, but as its agent: “Then must you your pointes untie” (my emphasis). At the very least, it is the scholar himself, rather than the master, who facilitates this especially humiliating correction. While “The School-master to his Scholar” might not be remarkable as an enlightened critique of corporal punishment, it does thus posit thresholds for violence and limits to the master’s instrumentality in the purposeful application of force. Following the lead of a critic such as Halpern, one might argue that the abatement of the master’s active agency is counterbalanced by—indeed, only made possible by—the pupil’s internalization of disciplinary codes. But such a line of argument, however persuasive on the face of it, takes insufficient account of some signal features of the humanist schoolroom, where not only is learning measured by the scholar’s progress in rhetorical arts but knowledge includes knowing oneself, a desideratum of Renaissance thought and education with a long genealogy and shifting valences.15 To the extent that “to know thyself”—nosce te ipsum, as the familiar Latin phrase puts it—involves knowing oneself to be shaped by accepted moral, spiritual, and social codes, these verses do indeed point towards

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both self-subjection and self-abasement. There is ample evidence that for many writers and thinkers of the period self-knowledge meant knowing oneself to be so flawed or imperfect as to need desperately the correction that could only come from submitting oneself whole to governing strictures. In his frequently-printed 1599 philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum, for example, Sir John Davies “knows himself” to be not only “frail” in body but “corrupted in wit and will” and enthralled “to the least and vilest things,” summing up his survey of himself in these words: “And to conclude, I know myself a MAN, / Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing” (“Of Humane Knowledge” ll.169–72, 179–80). The “Short Catechism,” which precedes the “The School-master to his Scholar” in Coote’s text and which every pupil would have to learn by heart, would remind the catechumen, almost daily, that he should know himself to be a sinner by “the Testimony of [his] owne Conscience, and by the Law of God,” that he must “prove and examine himself” with respect to the “Knowledge he hath in the Principles of Religion” in order to “come worthily to the Lord’s Supper,” and that Christians must “keep a narrow watch over [their] Hearts, Words, and Deeds, continually” (39, 43, 44). These lessons in mortifying self-scrutiny were underscored, in vivid language and imagery, by the accompanying prayers and psalms.16 As ingrained as was this understanding of the dictum “know thyself,” however, most grammar-school boys would also encounter Cicero’s insistence that nosce te ipsum not only signifies “the abatement of arrogance,” but “also means that we should recognize our own gifts.”17 Cicero’s nonChristian frame of reference is no barrier to the enthusiastic embrace by Christian humanists of his conviction that knowing oneself can include celebrating one’s capacities.18 In his influential On Humanistic Education, for instance, Vico declares it impossible that this precept was formulated only “to subdue pride of spirit and cast down human arrogance,” happily summoning Cicero to confirm that “know thyself” means to “know your own spirit” (38–39). For Vico, this means to know oneself amply capable, by virtue of one’s “divine mind,” of “great and sublime endeavours” (38). Francis Bacon’s rendering of nosce te ipsum, while less jubilant, goes even further than Vico’s in freeing the dictum from associations with mortifying self-awareness, by positing altogether more practical, even politic, ends: not knowledge of a soul in need of redemption, but knowledge of the “natures” of men, of “their desires and ends, customs and fashions, their helps and advantages … their weaknesses and disadvantages” (Advancement 155).19 Moving from the essentialist bent

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of both the pessimism that weighs down Davies’ poem and the optimism that buoys Vico’s oration, Bacon reasons that “it is not enough for a man only to know himself; for he should also consider the best way to present himself to advantage … to shape himself according to the occasion … to cover artificially his weaknesses, defects, misfortunes” (De Augmentis VIII, ch. 2).20 Attuned in this way to audience and purpose, Bacon’s interpretation of the dictum is fundamentally social and rhetorical. For him, nosce te ipsum offers means and motive for action in the world rather than self-assessment, whether debasing or uplifting. “Know thyself” thus yields a range of meanings, all of which would have been available in the Renaissance classroom and some of which allow considerable agency to the knowing subject. It would be a mistake, then, to assume that disciplinary measures would produce always or only a thoroughly disciplined subject. Even if, rhetorically, the verses cited above invite us to conclude that the master withdraws from active punishment because the pupil has internalized the rules of conduct—because the pupil knows himself to deserve the punishment—it is reasonable to assume that the offending pupil might equally know himself to be mistreated or might present himself as properly chastened to avoid harsher measures, merely shaping himself outwardly to the occasion. There is more reason for us to be cautious in linking disciplinary measures too immediately to self-subjection. Each of the ways of knowing oneself that I have described involves emotion, each seeming to call for a particular response to a given situation: whether mortification or jubilation or smugness, whether aimed inwardly or outwardly. Psychologists, philosophers—and experience—tell us that emotions cannot be slotted neatly into pigeon holes, however.21 A schoolboy who is being flogged might feel duly ashamed of his misconduct, but he might not—or he might feel at once, or by turns, ashamed, defiant, angry, fearful, brave, and so on. Only some of these responses would have self-subjection as a corollary. Further, if we accept the argument of Martha Nussbaum that emotions “are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” that they are more than just an “adjunct” to thought,” that they are “parts, highly complex and messy parts” of “reasoning,” then it follows that emotions play a vital role in our perception, understanding, and valuation of whatever holds meaning for us.22 In this view, they form an integral part of our system of cognition and our judgements: of situations, of others, and of ourselves. Accordingly, when emotional responses are mixed, as might well be the case with a flogging,

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judgements will be qualified rather than categorical; the beaten schoolboy might judge himself more sinned against than sinning—a state of mind or, rather, emotion—not easily reconciled with complete self-subjection.23 “The School-master to his Scholar” offers more evidence to suggest that the emotional community of the Renaissance schoolroom is too complex to sustain the conclusion that disciplinary measures produce only duly disciplined pupils. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom, as a student or a teacher, can attest to the fact that (most) students want to please the person who is in charge of them for so much of the day and who wields such shaping power in their formative years. However selfevidently or intuitively, true, such an observation remains an important one to make in this context because it underlines not only the prominence of emotions in the schoolroom, but their utility. To regulate the bodily comportment and hygiene of his scholars, for example, the master threatens, not physical punishment, but the withholding of attention: Your Cloaths unb[u]tton’[e]d do not use, Let not your Hose ungarter’d be, Have Handkerchief in readiness, Wash Hands and Face, or see not me. (my emphasis)

While it might be straining it too far to say that the master is using affection to control his scholars—granting it to those who are neat and clean, withdrawing it from those who are not—it is fair to say that he is exploiting the pupil’s desire to be noticed by his teacher and, accordingly, tapping an emotional response in the pupil. A further, and more suggestive, indication of the pupil’s emotional need for the regard of his master emerges towards the end of the poem when the schoolmaster warns the scholar to “look for blame” if he is late for school and, conversely, to expect “praise” if he behaves himself. As bland as is this vocabulary, it lets us imagine the intensity of emotional dependence that might characterize a schoolboy’s relationship with the master. Just as instructively, for my purposes, by assigning blame or praise—the rhetorical practice known as epideixis —the master draws the attention of fellow students to the offending or excelling scholar since, by definition, epideixis involves public censure or applause.24 “The School-master to his Scholar” thus includes the salient reminder that the emotional experience of any given pupil is not defined exclusively by his interactions with the schoolmaster, as large as those must loom. It includes the reactions of his

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fellows to his accomplishments and failings, which we can safely imagine would run the gamut of cheers and jeers.25 Because epideixis is one of the branches of classical rhetoric included in grammar-school curricula, the schoolmaster’s reliance on the vocabulary of praise and blame also introduces, rather cleverly, an object-lesson for the pupils who form the ostensible audience for these verses. By employing blame and praise as a figurative rod of correction, the schoolmaster demonstrates to his pupils the usefulness of the rhetoric they are studying, showing them (as he supposes) epideixis at work, fashioning through praise the model student they should emulate, and depicting through blame the delinquent student they should avoid becoming. As with the unfastening of points, the punishment discussed above, such rhetorical fashioning could be construed as yet another instance of how grammar schools produce self-subjection in their pupils. But to do so would be to reduce complex—and so not always predictable—emotional dynamics to an overly simplified mechanism. When the setting is a humanist classroom, with its emphasis on rhetorical arts, which themselves are rooted profitably in emotion and which bind together in a dynamic relationship rhetor and audience, it becomes difficult to claim, in general, that rhetorical fashioning results simply in the self-subjection of pupils. In the instance under discussion, it is virtually impossible to do so. Epideixis implicates a wide audience, as I have noted. The individual responses of pupils to the assigning of blame or praise to a classmate cannot be predicted with certainty, determined as those reactions must be by a multitude of factors extraneous to the moment, including the friendships and enmities that have formed in the classroom. The admonitory poem under discussion here hints at qualifying factors in its listing of infractions. At least some of the misbehaviours that earn reprimands—swearing and stealing, say—are more likely to have been directed by the offending pupil towards his classmates than towards the schoolmaster. These classmates might well relish the laying of blame on the offender, but still not appreciate the epideictic point. And one can easily imagine instances in which the guilty—and apprehended—pupil was encouraged in his delinquency by his classmates, even aided and abetted by them. In those cases, public censure would surely miss the mark entirely, amounting instead to a badge of honour for the culprit and cause for (secret) admiration on the part of his cohort.26 There can be no denying that the schoolroom imagined in “The School-master to his Scholar” houses violence, with its master prepared to apply the rod or switch to enforce social, moral, and scholarly codes

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of conduct. But attunement to the emotional community of the classroom should prepare us to find in pupils something other than, or at least more than, unqualified fear of the rod and unreflective submission to authority. The late-sixteenth-century schoolroom accommodates a range of emotional responses to disciplinary measures, some of them unpredictable, none of them simply automatic, and most of them probably untidy. Importantly, too, the fellowship of scholars is likely to figure prominently in the meting out and experiencing of corporal punishment. A French medieval sculpture depicting a grammar lesson helps to underline the latter point—and to anticipate parts of my argument. On the south portal of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral, a sculpture from early in the twelfth century depicts Grammar as a teacher with two young children at her knees, one of whom seems to have nodded off mid-lesson and the other of whom is extending his arm, protectively, over the head of the sleeping scholar. Holding an open book, as does each child, Grammar also holds a switch. While the scene clearly countenances physical punishment, it also hints that the fellowship of the classroom can buffer the severity of grammar teachers: since Grammar does not seem about to employ her switch, the pupil who is still awake seems to have succeeded in pleading for leniency towards his inattentive fellow pupil. In the medieval classroom represented on the Cathedral façade, it is enough, it seems, that the switch be in evidence. Mulcaster reaches a similar conclusion in considering the punishment that he deems appropriate in the sixteenth-century schoolroom. Prefacing his discussion with the stipulation that “the rod may no more be spared in schooles, then the sword in the Princes hand”—an assertion perfectly in keeping with his frequent drawing of analogies between school and state—he admits subsequently to thinking “gentleness and courtesy towarde children” to be “more needefull then beating” (Positions 270, 274). The rod remains useful, however, as a salutary reminder of the force the master could wield: My self have had thousandes under my hand, whom I never bet, neither they ever much needed: but if the rod had not bene in sight, and assured them of punishment if they had swarved to much, they would have deserved. (275)

Where there are many students (“in any multitude”), “the rod must needes rule: and in the least paucitie it must be seene, how soever it sound” (275). Mulcaster’s strenuous claim that the rod should not be

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spared thus warrants a closer look, particularly when it is coupled with the clarification that follows in which he suggests that it is sufficient for pupils to know that infractions will occasion punishment because that knowledge—reinforced by the rod’s “being in sight”—can be enough to prevent misbehaviour (275). Mulcaster’s recommendation interests me, not so much for its assumption that the mere threat of punishment can be as effective as its actual execution, as for its related convictions that not only do pupils need to be kept fearful but the actual instrument of punishment has to be visible to instil the requisite fear. He cannot, it seems, trust that his scholars have internalized codes of conduct to the point that the rod can be laid away to be brought out as needed. Nor can it be simply for the sake of the expedient administering of stripes that the rod should remain close to hand—at least not in Mulcaster’s classroom. It has evidently been his experience that a master should not, in fact, cannot, punish students summarily. In punishing a pupil for any of the “faultes” named on the list that he should have already compiled and made known to all parties, including parents, the schoolmaster “must be very circumspecte, and leave no shew, or countenaunce of impunitie deserved, where desert biddes” and must “set downe the number of stripes [to be administered], immutable though not many” (Positions 271). He should also “take good heed, that the faulte may be confessed, if it may be, without force, and the boye convicted by the verdict of his fellowes” (271). Otherwise, “children will wrangle amain,” especially since “affection at home hath credulitie beyond crye, which makes the boye dare, what reason dare not” (271). Schoolboys will resort, Mulcaster observes, “to many prety stratagemes and devises … to save themselves” (271). When Mulcaster observes that it “were some losse of time for learning, to spend any of in beating” if there were no “amendments” to be gained, he is not counting up the minutes lost to the act of punishment so much as the time spent in justifying the penalty (271). Like the classroom imagined in “The Schoolmaster to his Scholar,” then, Mulcaster’s schoolroom includes beating. But, again like the one in Coote’s admonitory verses, Mulcaster’s school is a complex emotional community which cannot be reduced to the mere fact of flogging, and which cannot be supposed to produce—at least not readily—selfsubjection in pupils. Informed as it is by two decades’ worth of teaching at Merchant Taylors’ School, Mulcaster’s treatise affords us even firmer grounds than does the poem for supposing that, with respect to punishment, the day-to-day life of the sixteenth-century schoolboy was

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characterized by wrangling, debate, and resistance as much as it was by unquestioning compliance—even with the rod in full sight. That Mulcaster explicitly weighs the costs, in time and in the likelihood of future success, of what he memorably terms “deepe insolencie” and, with it, “long impunity” (271) permits the reasonably safe surmise that resistance and defiance, from parents and pupils, often carried the day.27 The implications of this surmise are considerable, especially when we remember that, for many English writers on education, schooling was intended primarily to equip boys with the learning and virtues they would need to become men serviceable to the state.28 Mulcaster in particular never loses sight of this goal, even advising that parent whose child is unlikely to advance in school to seek another course for the boy, apprenticeship perhaps; for the parent with unrealistic expectations about his child’s chances of flourishing in school “must bear in memorie that he is more bound to his country, then to his child” (Positions 146). Mulcaster is firm in believing that the educated individual “oweth his whole service” to the “countrie whereunto he is born” (186). He is equally certain that the interests of a state ruled by a monarch are best served by individuals who are compliant and uncomplaining: That child therefore is like to prove in further yeares, the fittest subject … which in his tender age sheweth himself obedient to scholeorders, and eitheir will not lightly offend, or if he do, will take his punishment gently: without either much repyning, or great stomaking. (154)

As I indicated at the outset of my discussion of disciplinary measures, commentators on humanist schooling have often been inclined to stress its coercive aspects and its efficiency in turning out docile subjects. A statement such as this one by Mulcaster furnishes solid support for the view that humanist education, once stripped of its professed and lofty ideals, really just functions as a particularly well-oiled cog in the wheel of state or bureaucratic control. But the deeply insolent, wrangling, strategizing, boy doing what he can to avoid punishment whom we have just glimpsed in Mulcaster’s schoolroom is a far cry from the “fit” subject of Mulcaster’s pronouncement. Attention to the emotional dynamics of the sixteenth-century humanist classroom thus licenses assumptions that are vastly different from the ones underpinning the coercive school of thought. As critics such as Green, Kent Cartwright, and Richard Strier each reminds us from his distinct perspective, Renaissance humanists of

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varying stripes leavened ideals and fleshed out abstractions, by engaging the world with wit, irony, and humour; and by celebrating human potential while recognizing human foibles. Deriving from the same impulses that informed humanist contributions in general, the humanist pedagogical project might well be supposed to have swerved often from rules, justifying us in speculating that the humanist schoolroom more often turned out, not boys made docile, but boys who were, if not unflinchingly insolent, then at least not easily subordinated.

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II

It is almost as axiomatic to associate the humanist schoolroom with the bond between master and pupil as it is to link it with flogging—again with justification. Spenser’s recollection of his “good old” schoolmaster, in which fondness is steeped in gratitude for how Mulcaster promoted his growth as a poet, tells us that the emotional bonds linking pupil to master could also be generative—even when they formed around correction of the pupil. Spenser is thankful that Mulcaster made him “more cunning” by his “arte,” by which term Spenser surely means his master’s teaching methods (“December,” 41–42). From Mulcaster’s own writings, as well as from dozens of other sources, we know that these methods included constant practice (in writing, speaking, construing, translating, composing, and so on) and, correspondingly, continual correction. In his campaign to urge schoolmasters to use love rather than fear to instruct their pupils, Ascham recommends that teachers refrain even from frowning when they are correcting the work of their pupils: “If the child miss … I would not have the Master either frown or chide with him” (The Scholemaster 15). Schoolmasters should be approachable: “Let your scholar be never afraid to ask you any doubt, but use discreetly the best allurements you can to encourage him to the same” (16). Ascham’s cautions point to both an ideal of pedagogical intimacy between master and pupil, and the degree to which sixteenth-century schoolboys remained attuned to their masters’ moods. A contemporary woodcut showing a lesson in progress captures a moment of just such attentiveness. One of the six pupils is looking up from his book at the schoolmaster who stands directly in front of him, one hand holding a birch switch and the other extended towards the boy, making a point. The switch notwithstanding, this particular moment poses no immediate threat: the master’s expression is mild, the boy’s face and demeanour unguarded, even eager in anticipation of the point or

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comment to come.29 Even allowing for idealization (or propagandizing), we can suppose that the illustration reflects some measure of truth, that pupils did warm to their masters, and that, while severe punishment devastates the scholar, mild correction can invigorate and sustain the pupil. Ascham is one of the staunchest proponents of the idea that the schoolroom should be a “sanctuary against fear” and the relationship between master and scholar pleasant rather than painful to the child (The Scholemaster 38). He counts himself among those progressive thinkers who are “laugh[ed] at” by men “wise indeed” when “we thus wish and reason, that young children should rather be allured to learning by gentleness and love, than compelled to Learning by beating and fear” (31). Perhaps it is for this reason that he labels as “strange” the news that scholars have run away from Eton to escape beating (Preface 6). It is not that Ascham is opposed, tout court, to strong disciplinary measures. Indeed, he regrets the fact that the youth of England, the seventeen- to twentyseven-year-olds, traipse about undisciplined. It is rather that he shifts the responsibility for harsh punishment from schoolmasters to fathers: The godly Counsels of Solomon and Jesus son of Sirach, for sharp keeping in and bridling of Youth, are meant rather for fatherly correction, than masterly beating; rather for Manners, than for Learning; for other Places, than for Schools. (37; my emphasis)

Scholars at Eton should have no reason to fear the rod, although presumably they should still count on the “sharp chastisement” that Ascham recommends for “all evil touches, wantonness, lying, picking, sloth, will, stubbornness, and disobedience” (37). These offences might seem to us to belong in the category of “manners,” whose correction Ascham reserves for fathers. For Ascham, however, “manners” do not have to do with specific behaviours (or misbehaviours) but with social distinctions. The fathers to whom he delegates the responsibility for bridling youth are the noblemen whose sons will inherit positions of power and influence in the commonwealth. Writing at a point in sixteenth-century England when long-established ideals of aristocratic education were just beginning to be jostled by the ideas of new humanist programmes, Ascham draws an occasionally unsteady line between the new learning, with its investment in moral virtues, that is the province of teachers and the “bringing up of children” in the virtues, many of them indistinguishable from social graces, that fit them for service to Queen and country. He can be vague,

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for instance, on the division of labour with respect to the instilling of “honesty” and the correction of “every vice” (20); and he cannot affirm as unequivocally as will Mulcaster a couple of decades later that humanist schooling is both necessary and sufficient to produce men fit to serve the commonwealth. But what he does seize upon eagerly as something that sets the schoolroom apart from virtually all other realms of experience is the equanimity characterizing the relationship between master and pupil. In doing so, as we shall see, he adumbrates what will come to be large claims about the value of humanist education. We catch glimpses of this equanimity in Ascham’s comments about frowning and approachability, but it is his often-cited anecdote about an encounter with Lady Jane Grey that provides the fullest picture of a schoolroom defined by the absence of perturbation (35–36). Surprised to find Lady Jane “in her Chamber, reading Phaedo Platonis in Greek” while her parents and the rest of the household were engaged in that most quintessential of aristocratic pleasures, hunting, Ascham asks her “why she would lose such Pastime in the Park.” Replying that such “Sport in the Park is but a Shadow to the Pleasure that I find in Plato,” Lady Jane seems merely to be confirming one of the lessons of Phaedo: that the life of the mind “gathered into itself” is far superior the corporeal life. When asked to explain “what did chiefly allure [her] unto” her pleasure in study, however, she cites factors with much wider implications. “One of the greatest Benefits that ever God gave me,” says a remarkably composed Lady Jane, is, that he sent me so sharp and severe parents, and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother; whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing any Thing else; I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways which I will not name for the honour I bear them, so without measure misorder’d, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Aylmer; who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all time nothing, while I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do else, but learning, is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. (36)

In his relaying of Lady Jane’s explanation, Ascham takes (rhetorical) pains to draw as telling a contrast as possible between her unhappy home-life

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and the schoolroom that is her “sanctuary against fear” as well from other kinds of turmoil (38). Extended—haphazardly, it seems—through both polysyndeton and asyndeton, Lady Jane’s enumeration of the activities and actions that earn reprimands, and worse, from her parents paints a vivid picture of the inward perturbations that make her home-life hellish. This rhetorical effect is heightened by the staccato-like accumulation of verbs, the concreteness of the diction, and the shift to gerunds. The classroom, on the other hand, is rendered by calmly measured relative clauses sustained by the lilt of anaphora and parison and the comfort of abstractions. What is more, the peacefulness of the classroom enables Lady Jane to develop (under Ascham’s hand), if not a critique of her parents’ systematic abuse, then at least a perspective on it that reflects a considerable degree of self-possession. The equanimity afforded by the classroom takes on added, almost incalculable, value when we register the implications of Lady Jane’s feeling that “all time [is] nothing” while she studies with her tutor, and take note of Ascham’s allusion to the fate that would befall Lady Jane. “I remember this talk gladly,” muses Ascham, “both because it is so worthy of memory, and because also it was the last talk that ever I had, and the last time that ever I saw that noble and worthy Lady” (The Scholemaster 36). More than a refuge from verbal and physical assaults, Lady Jane’s classroom is a space in which the flux of history and circumstance can seemingly be transcended. The lessons and exercises of the classroom, unlike the activities that mark the round of daily life at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, transport Lady Jane, not simply to the ancient past, but to a timeless realm of settled ideals, values, and virtues. Compared to the hurly-burly of the historical moment that would soon catch Lady Jane in its deadly controversies, politics, and plots, the calm of the classroom would be heavenly indeed.30 Although offered simply as evidence that “love [rather than] fear works more in a child for virtue and learning,” Ascham’s anecdote, then, anticipates the grand claims that would undergird the humanist programme for several generations to come—namely, that the learning possessed and purveyed by humanist teachers is the key to good kingdoms on earth (The Scholemaster 35). When so much is at stake, the relationship between master and pupil must be carefully tended to ensure the child will grow into the necessary virtues and habits. For Ascham, it is not quite enough that the master uses gentle rather than severe means of instruction, thus making the classroom an emotional haven for the pupil. The master must also encourage his pupils

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to turn to him for help with lessons, to the exclusion of everyone or anything else. Ascham’s recommendation, to which I have referred already, that schoolmasters be approachable continues with a warning about what might happen if pupils do not want to take their problems to their teacher: Let your scholar be never afraid to ask you any doubt, but use discreetly the best allurements you can to encourage him to the same, least his overmuch fearing of you, drive him to seek some misorderly shift; as to seek to be helped by some other book, or to be prompted by some other scholar; and so go about to beguile you much, and himself more. (16)

What might strike us as an incidental piece of advice in fact addresses several matters relevant to our understanding of the emotional dynamics of Ascham’s classrooms, those he experienced and those he envisioned. The meanings that cluster around “discreetly,” in particular, make the relationship between schoolmaster and pupil one that is deeply personalized, individualized, and exclusive. The master must use his discretion, that is, his judgement, in determining how best to allure any given scholar, discovering what will work with that individual. Each relationship of master and pupil is thus discrete, in the sense of separate and distinct from every other such bonding. Our sense of the distinctness of each relationship is heightened by yet another meaning of discreet—“circumspect.” The bond that forms assumes almost occult dimensions, offering, if not a secret space for pedagogical exchange, then at least a space set apart from the scrutiny, and more importantly, the influence, of others. The schoolmaster whose severity precludes the creation of such a privileged and protected emotional space puts at risk himself, the pupil, and ultimately, the country. Both teacher and scholar will be “beguiled,” the master cheated into thinking he is teaching the boy (and cheated further in the sense that the boy’s shiftily-acquired learning will likely redound to the master’s discredit), and the pupil deluded into thinking he is acquiring the education that will fit him to the role of noble leadership. The shifts on which the disaffected pupil will rely are “misorderly” not only because such stratagems disrupt the day-to-day order of the classroom but also because the effects of the compromised education that is the result of the boy’s evasions will eventually be writ large in the commonwealth. Ascham frequently laments the lack of order and discipline in the youth, and future leaders, of his day, seeing moral danger and political discord follow from their mis-ordered lives. With so much at stake, it is little wonder that

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Ascham presses upon his audience the importance of securing the pupil through love and gentleness, of presenting for imitation a face that does not frown and a manner that invites confidences. It might be objected that the kind of bond between master and pupil envisioned by Ascham, a private tutor, could never or very seldom be formed in public grammar schools, some of which might have over two hundred students.31 While it is true that the master or ushers in a crowded school might be hard-pressed to find the time or means to cultivate the trust that Ascham regards as essential, it is also the case that theorists of public school education, parents of grammar-school boys, and school benefactors (the people holding the purse strings) all place singular importance on the schoolmaster’s qualifications and, implicitly, on his relationship with his scholars.32 Mulcaster, as I indicated above, emphasizes the need for the schoolmaster to feel fatherly affection, even for the most unsatisfactory student. At the same time, though, Mulcaster draws distinctions between the offices of teacher and parents (along with others interested in the training up of children), observing that the “mannering” of children, by which he means primarily the inculcating of sound moral and ethical principles, is “not for teachers alone” but also (even more so) for “naturall parents…and all honest persons, which seeing a child doing evill, are bid in conscience, to terrify and check him” (Positions 40). In considering the matter of whether the pupil should live at home, board with neighbours, or board with the master, Mulcaster is careful to observe that “[t]hey be distinct offices, to be a parent and a maister” (225). And even when Mulcaster talks explicitly about the affection the schoolmaster should have for his pupils, his tone remains impersonal, his vocabulary less emotionallyladen than what we find in Ascham or Erasmus. To judge from Mulcaster’s criticism of overly-partial parents who regularly—foolishly, in his estimation—side with their children in the matter of punishment, his idea of “fatherly affection” on the part of the schoolmaster includes a sizeable dose of sternness, a supposition confirmed when in the same breath Mulcaster says that “ever the master must…thinke the schoole to be a place of amendment” (275). We could hardly be further removed from Ascham’s classroom, it seems, where love and gentleness are the order of the day, every day, and where the emphasis falls not on faults to be amended but on allurements to learning.

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We shall see shortly that the emotional community of Mulcaster’s ideal school could be more convivial—and in ways that might surprise us— than his stern assessment of fatherly affection might lead us to believe. In the meantime, I shall conclude this section by noting that Mulcaster’s practical and material remedies for what he sees as a school system badly in need of repair do acknowledge, implicitly, the importance of the bond between schoolmaster and pupils. In extolling the benefits of physical education, Mulcaster says he would assign “both the framing of the minde, and the training of the bodie to one mans charge,” asking “how can that man judge wel of the soule, whose travell consisteth in the bodie alone? or how shall he perceive what is the bodies best, which having the soule onely committed to his care, posteth the bodie as to an other mans reckening?” (Positions 129). Whatever other benefits follow from this scheme, and Mulcaster identifies several that I shall consider later, it is reasonable to suppose that the pupils’ attachment to their teacher would only be made stronger by virtue of spending almost the entire day under his supervision, while the master would (theoretically) gain a fuller understanding of his charges. Mulcaster also favours, very strongly, the long “continuance” of boys at the same school, under the same master, bemoaning, for instance, the fact that in “some places multitude of schooles marres the whole market: where store is the sore, and opportunitie to alter an allurement to the worse” (255).33 While he frames this complaint in the context of those factors that disrupt the academic progress of scholars (leaving them ill-prepared for university)—and no doubt also in the interests of steady income for schoolmasters—it is no less the case that continued enrolment in one school under one master would allow for stronger emotional attachment. Similarly, while his wish that grammar schools, where “pupils are most subject to the maisters direction,” could be “planted in the skirtes and suburbes of townes, neare to the fieldes” addresses the need for space to accommodate physical exercise, a school removed from the “disturbance” of towns would also accommodate a more tightly-knit community, one presided over by the master who should live on the premises (223, 225, 228).

2.3

III

In his December eclogue, Spenser recalls warmly the company of fellow students. The fifteenth-century artist Benozzo Gozzoli offers an equally charming and more vivid picture of the fellowship of scholars in his

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St. Augustine: The School at Tagaste, which depicts the moment when the young Augustine is first taken to school by his parents. The sombre staidness of the family grouping contrasts markedly with the high spirits of the other pupils, suggesting that the emotional attachments the boy Augustine will form at school are of a very different order from those which tie him to his family. Until now sheltered and, one senses, indulged by loving and protective parents and (presumably) nurses, the young boy is about to have his emotional world radically reconfigured. There are far more and far more various groupings possible in the emotional community of the school. The painting shows us friendship between boys of the same age, companionship between older and younger pupils, and good-humoured rivalry for the attention of a teacher. In passing from his father’s hands, just now lifted from his shoulders, to the schoolmaster’s hands, which are extended towards him, the young Augustine is entering a world whose emotional values strike the viewer as more dispersed, varied, and animating than anything the boy has yet known. The eagerness with which some of his fellow pupils anticipate his arrival into their midst—coming up behind the schoolmaster to get a closer look at the new boy—promises considerable warmth of fellowship. Gozzoli’s picture of school life makes it easier to suppose that Spenser is not exaggerating or idealizing overly much when he implies that he was sustained, and encouraged in his writing, by his fellow scholars at Merchant Taylors’ School. The educational treatises of Spenser’s headmaster can help us to piece together a suggestive view of school camaraderie—even while we recognize that Mulcaster himself has very specific ideas about what that camaraderie should accomplish. Arguing strenuously for the value of public over private schooling, Mulcaster declares that “Education is the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but amongest others, (bycause companie is our naturall cognisaunce)” (Positions 186). His accompanying indictment of private tuition is vehement: private “traine [i.e. training]…soweth the corne of dissension by difference,” infecting the “common-[wealth]” with the “poyson of a creeping spite” (188). Private education becomes the puffer up to pride in the recluse, and the direction to disdaine, by dreaming still of bettership: the enemie to unitie, betwene the unequall: the overwayning of ones selfe, not compared with others, the disjointing of agreement, where the higher contemneth his inferiour with skorne, and

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the lower doth stomacke his superior with spite: the one gathering snuffe, the other grudge. (187–88)

Public education, on the other hand, benefits the commonwealth. Mulcaster waxes unusually metaphorical on this point, saying that education in public schools produces a “harvest of consent,” a “harbour of common love,” and an “indissoluble chaine of countriemens comfort” (188). He does not mean by this, or at least not intentionally, that public schooling results in warm, undefined, feelings of belonging to a group whose members remain uncritically loyal to one another. His advocacy of common upbringing springs from his conviction that the purpose of education is to “sendeth abroade sufficient men for the service of their countrie” (19), a belief that he reiterates often and that underlies his insistence that not everyone should attend grammar school: universal education would deprive the commonwealth of men more suited to artisanship or manual labour. Drawing on the ubiquitous analogy between the “naturall bodie” and the “bodie politike,” he observes that just as disproportion in the body produces “distemperature” (and is an “eye sore”), so too, in a bodie politike if the like proportion be not kept in all partes, the like disturbance will crepe through all partes. Some by to[o] much will seeke to bite to[o] sore, some by to[o] litle will be trod on to[o] much: as both will distemper: …to[o] many learned be to[o] burdenous, …to[o] few be to[o] bare…wittes well sorted be most civill, …the same misplaced be most unquiet and seditious. (139)

When he talks about social bonds, then, Mulcaster primarily has in mind a community held together by the fact that everyone knows his place. Whereas the privately tutored boy “not[es] nothing, but that which he breedes of himselfe in his solitarie traine, where he is best himselfe, and hath none to controwle him” (188), his schooling serving only his interests, the publically schooled boy, ever in the eye of teachers and schoolmates and constantly held, along with them, to community standards, always knows where he stands in relation to others. In elaborating on this aspect of school life, however, and the related fact that grammar schools generate competition, circumstances that seemingly have little to do with the sustaining effects of fellowship, Mulcaster inadvertently alerts us to benefits of common schooling beyond those that he extols. Schooling in “common” is “best,” for

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Comparisons inspire vertues, hearing spreads learning: one is none and if he do something at home, what would he do with company? It is never settled, that wanteth an adversarie, to quicken the spirites, to stirre courage, to finde out affections. (191)

When schooling is in “common,” even if the establishment is a private household drawing in several pupils, the student shall have “one companie before him to follow and learne of, an other beneath to teach and vaunt over, the third of his owne standing, with whom to strive for praise of fowardness” (192). The boy who learns from and teaches his classmates (even if he does the latter in a vaunting spirit) is not, strictly speaking, in competition with his classmates. He is advancing both himself and them; he is knit together with them into scholarly fellowship. Even when he is competing for praise, the boy is doing so on what we today might call a level playing field. In considering the matter of who should go to school and who should be steered towards all those other occupations that are necessary for the commonwealth—for the creating and sustaining of social bonds—Mulcaster establishes so many provisos that the school cohort turns out to be a relatively homogenous group, at least in terms of intellectual aptitude.34 It is not difficult to imagine that bonds formed in such a setting would result in camaraderie of the kind glimpsed in Spenser’s fond remembrance of his school fellows—or of the kind that characterizes for a while Hamlet’s friendship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and subsequently his attachment to Horatio. I suggested above that the distance between Ascham’s classroom and Mulcaster’s school is not as great as their respective emphases on allurements and faults might lead us to think. Whereas Ascham would build “a house of play and pleasure, and not of fear and bondage” (Preface 4), Mulcaster’s school is filled with “song and musicks mirth,” if what Spenser writes in “December” is a reliable indication. While Spenser likely intends for his readers to understand that he is using “song and music” to mean primarily poetic and dramatic arts, it is nevertheless true that Mulcaster was a strong advocate for music education, the most enthusiastic of his period, according to Foster Watson.35 In writing about music as a school subject, Mulcaster declares himself likely to get carried away once he starts to sing its praises. Indeed, he is uncharacteristically effusive in extolling the benefits of education in music:

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[Music] is such a pacifier in passion, such a maistres to the minde, so excellent in so many, so esteemed by so many, as even multitude makes me wonder, and with all to staie my hand, for feare that I shall not easely get thence, if I enter once in.…this shalbe enough for me to say at this tim, that our countrey doth allow it: that it is verie comfortable to the wearyed minde: a preparative to perswaision: that he must needes have a head out of proportion, which cannot perceive: or doth not delite in the proportions of number, which speake him so faire: …that if the constitution of man both for bodie and soule, had not some naturall, and nighe affinitie with the concordances of Musick, the force of the one, would not so soone stirre up, the cosen motion in the other….[occaionally, wonderfully] for the remedying of some desperate diseases”. (Positions 48)

From the memoirs of James Whitelock, who enrolled in Merchant Taylors’ School not long after Spenser’s time there, we learn that, for this student at least, the school-day included “dayly exercise … in singing and playing upon instruments” and that it was Mulcaster himself who took “care” for his “skill in musique” (Liber 12). From what little we know about the physical layout of MTS in the sixteenth century, we can be fairly certain that music instruction would have taken place in groups in a large room.36 Even if its “proportions” did not calm disruptive “passion” while stirring salutary emotion to quite the degree Mulcaster forecasts, music would have provided a welcome and convivial—“mirthful,” to adapt Spenser’s term—interlude in a routine that would surely be tedious when it was not gruelling. It could accordingly have proved “comfortable to the wearyed minde” of the scholar.

2.4

IV

Whatever inspired Mulcaster’s love of music, his enthusiasm for it as a subject of instruction might well spring from his trust in its holistic effects: body, mind, passions, emotions, and soul—all alike come under its “wonderful” influences. More than any other of the educators I have been discussing, Mulcaster pays attention to the physical conditions and capacities of pupils, linking the strength, health, and accommodations of the body directly to fitness for learning. Whereas Erasmus, for example, dismisses out of hand the belief of “silly women … or … men very much like women” that young children are “too weak to bear the rigours of studying” (CWE 26.299), Mulcaster insists that a child must have “a body able to bear the travell [travail] of learning,” noting, for instance, that the

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decision about “setting [a] child to schoole” depends upon both “the strength of his bodie” and the “quicknesse of his witte” (Positions 31, 34). Parents and teachers both should take such a waie, even from the beginning, as the childes diet, neither stuffe the bodye, nor choke the conceit.…[and take care that] garmentes [,] which oftimes burden the bodie, sometimes weaken it with warmeth, neither faint it with heat, nor freese it with cold. (34)

Once enrolled in school, students need adequate space, for outdoor physical exercise and games (Mulcaster is a booster of football and archery, in particular), and indoor activities such as drawing, writing, and music, activities that, unlike reading, do require “elbow room” and “may not be straited” (229). Mulcaster devotes considerable space to describing the physiological effects of exercises, drawing on the humoral theories of his day and, as a consequence, designating as exercise activities that we would not likely place in that category today. Several of the exercises, if practised as diligently and as frequently as Mulcaster seems to recommend, would make the schoolroom a noisy and boisterous place indeed. Loud speaking, loud singing, and loud reading are all touted as healthful—the last, for example, because it “scoureth all the veines, stirreth the spirites through out all the entraulles, encreaeth heat, suttileth the blood, openeth the arteries, and suffereth not superfluous humours to grow grosse and thicke” (59). Among the more curious exercises are two that are especially germane to a discussion of emotional dynamics and that return us in unexpected ways to the questions of corporal discipline, the bond between master and pupil, and fellowship. Chapter 14 of Mulcaster’s Positions, part of a lengthy, seldom-reprinted, section on the humoral effects of exercise, is entitled “Of laughing and weeping. And whether children be to be forced toward vertue and learning.” Both laughing and weeping can be considered under the rubric of healthful exercise, “as they be passions, that tende in some pointes, to the purging of some partes” (72). But they are not equally beneficial since laughing clears out the humoral sludge “more and better: weeping less and worse” (72). The purgative benefits to be gained from weeping, “wherby the head, and other partes are rid of some needlesse humour,” are not only minimal, but also offset: “the disquieting do much more harme, then the purging can do good” (74). While, by “disquieting” effects, Mulcaster seems to mean, primarily, the “crying,

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sobbing, groning, and teares” with which weeping is “accompanied,” the tautology of this definition invites us to consider more closely the harm of weeping as an exercise in the classroom. Mulcaster’s discrediting of weeping, a position that challenges the authority of Aristotle, arises from several interrelated considerations, all tending to confirm—perhaps contrary to Mulcaster’s own intention—that forcing schoolboys to weep is not “the beast meane, to bring boyes, neither to learning, nor to vertue” (75). Most importantly, weeping is not voluntary (unless you are one of “those wailing women” who weep for money at funerals): “weepe none can, but against their wil” (72). And “free will is the principall standard to know vertue by” (75). In pursuing this line of reasoning, however, Mulcaster begins to equivocate. He staunchly opposes the argument of a “soure Centurion in Xenophon” who commended weeping over laughing on the grounds that “awe, feare, correction, punishements, which commonly have weeping, either companion, or consequent, be used in pollicy, to kepe good orders in state,” aligning himself rather with “Socrates in Plato” who holds “that an absolute witte … in civill societie, ought not to be forced” (74–75). But, he continues, “we neither have such common weales, as Socrates sets forth, nor such people to plant in them, as Socrates had, which he made with a wishe.” Mulcaster is more jaundiced in his view of human nature: And therefor we must content our selves with that which we have, and in our countrey, which is not so absolute, in our children which be no Socraticall saintes, in our learning which will not prove voluntarie. (75)

Some children will require “correction and awe,” even beating, it seems, to be persuaded to virtue, unless “we meete with one, that will runne as swifte uphill against nature, to do that which is good, as we all runne downe bancke, with the swinge of nature, to do that which is ill” (76). Mulcaster thus sidesteps the question of the efficacy of beating in driving pupils towards learning. Elsewhere he insists that beating should only be for ill-behaviour—“lewdnesse”—not for failure in learning when the boy is “willing” but his “witte will not serve” (270). Here, his equivocations about the usefulness of corporal discipline—and the effects of weeping— gravitate towards the issue of the master’s authority. In pursuing what becomes a decidedly convoluted line of thought, Mulcaster presents two scenarios that, similarly to the vignettes in “The Schoolmaster to his Scholar,” allow for emotional reactions that quite

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defeat any pedagogical purpose that might be assigned to a beating. In the second of these scenarios, Mulcaster describes that pupil who, “when he deserves stripes,” does not “shew one trikle” of tears, noting that some people take such self-control as “a signe of a verie shrewd boye,” with “shrewd” seeming to carry not only the sense of “cunning,” but also of “maliciously willed” (74). Mulcaster takes it as that, too, but also as a sign of considerable insouciance, observing wryly that if a few trickling tears ease an anguished mind, then children “might be lesse grieved if they would shedde none” at all (74). Reversing cause and effect, Mulcaster surmises that the stoical boy who sheds no tears when whipped does not feel sufficiently anguished and so certainly has not been pierced by the corrective point of the rod. Nor, one supposes, would the boy’s schoolfellows take away the edifying lesson intended by the master. The first of the scenarios that Mulcaster envisions raises even more doubts about what exactly is accomplished by beatings, especially ones administered specifically to provoke the weeping that will purge a boy of ill humours: If the master should beate his boye, and bring no cause why, but that he sought to have him weepe, so to exercise him to health, and to ridde him of some humours, which made him to[o] moist, the boye would beshrew him, and thinke his maister beate him so, to exercise himselfe, though at the verie co[n]ceit of his maisters mad reason, he might burst out in laughing straight after his stripes. (72)

Proving even less daunted than the “shrewd” boy, this pupil not only refuses the self-subjection so often presumed to result from corporal punishment in the humanist schoolroom, but, taking the measure of a “mad” master, scorns to be subdued. Mulcaster’s scenarios thus suggest that what is “disquieting” about weeping, more precisely, about attempting to provoke weeping for reasons of health or instruction, is that such disciplinary practices unsettle the authority of the schoolmaster. Mulcaster has no doubts about the value of laughing, however, perhaps because laughing seems not to involve the pupil in contests of wills. Moreover, there is no question that laughing promotes health. Mulcaster finds firm physiological grounds to support “laughing in the nature of an exercise and that healthful,” although he cautions that “to[o] much

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laughter is dangerous,” as is evidenced by the fact that some “have dyed laughing ” (73). Even outside of school, amidst the affairs of state, laughing for exercise may be for a good objecte, and occasion to make laughter, may well deserve praise, when the minde being wearied either about great affaires that are alreadie past, or about preventing of some anguish which is to ensue, doth call laughing to helpe, to ease the one, and to avert the other. (75)

Part of what makes laughing so salutary and so preferable to weeping is that, unlike weeping, it is voluntary: “laugh one may, with an hartie good will” (72). This, along with its greater efficacy in purging the body of ill humours, makes laughter more “gracious” and “desirable” than weeping—so much so that Mulcaster actually recommends tickling as an activity (72). He is even precise about where to tickle. As a remedy for such ailments as headaches, agues, cold heads, and melancholy, laughing wil be of much more efficacie, if the parties which desire it, can suffer themselves to be tickled under the armepittes, for in those partes there is a great store of small veines, and little arteries, which being tickled so, become warme themselves, and from thence disperse heat thorough out the whole bodie. (73)

Whether or not the schoolmaster himself is presumed to be the one who tickles the pupils, this exercise takes place under his auspices, as do all the exercises on Mulcaster’s roster. But regardless of who is tickling whom, such a scene is so far removed from the classrooms imagined by critics who stress the harshly coercive aspects of humanist schooling that we should register carefully its implications. I suggested above that if all of Mulcaster’s indoor exercises were practised on a regular basis, his schoolroom would be a noisy, boisterous, place indeed. If laughter is routinely a part of this soundscape, we can imagine an emotional community that could well warrant Spenser’s description of his experiences at school as mirthful. More significantly still, in the light of the themes I have been developing in this chapter, tickling offers us a way to think in more expansive ways about schoolroom discipline, in its widest sense, and about corporal regimens in particular. While tickling leaves the child helpless, he is as Adam Phillips observes, “helpless with pleasure” and, what is more, “usually invit[es] this helplessness.”37 Mulcaster, too, recognizes that tickling requires willing subjects, noting that

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participants in the exercise must “desire it” and must be able to “suffer themselves to be tickled” (Positions 73). As both Phillips and Mulcaster observe, there is a limit to the pleasurable experience of being caught helplessly in the throes of the laughter that accompanies tickling, a point after which “pleasure becomes pain” (On Kissing 9), in Phillips’s words, a point at which “the vitall force faileth,” in Mulcaster’s more dramatic prediction (Positions 73). But as long as this line is not crossed, and Mulcaster seems adequately prepared to halt the exercise before it reaches that line, children can experience repeatedly a state of helplessness that is pleasurable, not only (and only) because it is willed, but because it is temporary and provisional. Phillips sees in this dynamic a psychoanalytical fantasy of perpetual “frustration,” “delightful” precisely because it keeps in balance “irresistible attraction” and “inevitable repulsion” (On Kissing 11). We might describe it as an emotional dynamic that keeps the humanist schoolroom from becoming a place of total subjection.

Notes 1. “December,” 41–42. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, and Ronald Bond (Yale Univ. Press, 1989). Subsequent references to the Shepheardes Calender are to this edition and will be indicated within the body of the chapter. 2. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, remarks that Mulcaster’s “Elementarie (1582) which starts as a treatise on the teaching of reading and writing, becomes a detailed defense of the English language and an analysis of its basic characteristics and possibilities” (p. 102). Informative discussions of Mulcaster include those by J. Oliphant, Richard L. DeMolen, and William Parker. 3. “Sylvan” seems to have been an unusual given name in the late sixteenth century. A study compiled from information on testators in the years does not cite even one occurrence of this name for boys (“Late Sixteenth Century Given Names” by Talan Gwynek [Brian M. Scott]; 1994; revised 1999). 4. I am indebted to Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, for the phrase “emotional community.” My application of the phrase differs from hers, not only in that my period of study is early modern, but also in that I am not constructing taxonomies of distinct communities by counting and analysing the uses of specific emotive terms as she does in her illuminating study. 5. Recent reassessments of English humanism include Jonathan Woolfson, Reassessing Tudor Humanism; Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism

2

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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in Early Modern English Education, whose approach is informed particularly by his interest in how Protestantism and Humanism intersect in influencing educational theory and practice; Green’s Chapter One provides a useful review of historiography. For a valuable analysis of the humanist education and distributive justice, see Elizabeth Hanson, “Education and Distributive Justice in Early Modern England,” in Taking Exception to the Law, ed. Don Beecher, et al. Green, Humanism, reminds us of “the considerable number of teachers of whom former students clearly retained very fond memories” (96), citing several instances of students who expressed affection of their schoolmasters, among them Lancelot Andrewes’ commemorating of Mulcaster (97). Virtually every discussion of grammar schools, whether from the period or from our day, speaks of the harshness of schoolroom discipline. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, establishes the tone and tenor of much recent discussion in emphasizing the ideological underpinnings of coercive corporeal and intellectual discipline. Green, however, speculates that “[r]ather than being the norm, beating may have been associated with certain teachers at certain schools” (Humanism 94). Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities, 141–42. Critics who stress the disciplining of pupils into proper submission have ample warrant. In his own notes on his 1646 treatise on schooling, for instance, John Dury observes that “scholars should be fitted for their schoolmasters care before they come to school”: “parents and nurses” are “to be directed how to make them docile” while they are still at home. Cited in Charles Hoole and Henry Thiselton Mark, eds., A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School, p. x. For a more extensive annotation on critics who stress that humanist education aimed to produce docile citizens, see my Introduction, n. 15. In his seminal “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Walter Ong, associating the use of the rod in the teaching of Latin with puberty rites of initiation, stresses the separation between school and home that such rites entailed, separation that strengthened the authority of the schoolmaster. However, division between home and school in sixteenthcentury England is not quite as categorical as Ong’s argument implies. We know from Mulcaster, as well as from school statutes, that parents, including mothers, wielded considerable influence in some aspects of schooling; we know as well, as Rebecca Bushnell and others have shown, that differences in social status between schoolmasters and the parents of some pupils meant that the master’s authority was not quite as firmly established as Ong posits. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, distinguishes her approach from that of critics such as Grafton, Jardine, and Halpern by noting that her study of humanist schooling “intervenes against the tendency to read early modern

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

humanist—and all successive—pedagogies in terms of a Foucauldian saturation of disciplinary power” (16–17). My own study aims to intervene in a similar way while covering quite different ground. Enterline’s focus in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom on the emotional riches to be mined in the humanist classroom through acts of translation leads to brilliant insights, grounded especially in psychoanalytical theory. My own focus on the emotional community of the classroom, which is grounded more rhetorically, leads in altogether different directions. For an instructive discussion of subculture theory as it pertains to the early-modern period, see Isaac Land, “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory,” in City Limits: Historical Perspectives on the European City, ed. Glenn Clark, Judith Owens, and Greg Smith (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2010). Illustrations are widely available; Ellwood P. Cubberley collects several of them, spanning centuries and countries, in Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education. I cite the 1656 edition published in London, Wing 2nd ed./C6067D, available on EEBO; “The School-master to his Scholar” appears on p. 50. For an excellent electronic edition, see University of Toronto, Renaissance Electronic Texts. Subsequent references are indicated within the body of the chapter. Mulcaster, Positions, 178, emphasizes the importance of publishing a list of school faults and the number of stripes appropriate to each offence. The aphorism “know thyself,” familiar to Renaissance thinkers from classical authors, was applied across a range of intellectual and spiritual pursuits, from anatomies to poetry to philosophical tracts. Erasmus entitles Chapter III of his Manual of the Christian Knight thus: “The first point of wisdom is to know thyself,” and applies the adage throughout his rules. In “A prayer framed for this catechism,” the language of self-abjection is even stronger: “For we (Lorde) are most vain and vile creatures…willingly serving diverse lusts, and committing innumeralbe sins…whereby we deserve most justly to endure all miseries in this life, and to be tormented in Hell forever” (Coote 46). Cicero, To Quintus, His Brother III.5.7. I cite this remark from Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education, trans. Giorgio Pinton and Arthur Shippe, intro. Donald Phillip Verene, p. 38, n. 5. Green remarks on how easily humanistic education melded non-Christian and Christian strains of thought, passim. For a discussion of Renaissance treatments of the dictum “know thyself,” see Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge, chapters one and two.

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20. As Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of EarlyModern Philosophy, observes in citing this passage, Bacon “turns the Socratic dictum ‘know thyself’ into a question of behaviour” (48). 21. In correspondence with me on this topic, Jason Leboe-McGowan, Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, notes that the prominent view in studies of affect and emotion emphasizes the non-specificity of the physiological response to stimuli and the flexibility in labelling a physiological response as a particular emotion. This “cognitive appraisal or two-factor theory of emotion” was first proposed by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer, “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State.” 22. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, 3. The view that emotions are cognitive/evaluative is a matter of lively debate among philosophers and psychologists who investigate the relationship between affect and cognition. For a recent review of the topic that summarizes the debate among social psychologists and neuroscientists, identifying the two main positions—interdependence of affect and cognition vs independence of affect and cognition—and arguing for the “interrelatedness of cognitive and affective processes,” see Justin Storbeck and Gerald Clore, “On the Interdependence of Cognition and Emotion.” For a critique of Nussbaum on philosophical grounds, see Gustavo Ortiz Millan, “Nussbaum on the Cognitive Nature of Emotions.” 23. Mulcaster, Positions, 114–15, notes that “the child will always make the best of his own case” and that there are “many petty stratagems and devices that boys will use to save themselves.” 24. Erasmus, On Education, says that “by alternating praise and blame, the instructor will awaken in his pupils a useful spirit of rivalry” (CWE 26.340). 25. On the face of it, this statement applies only to grammar or public schools, but we will see below, in Ascham’s an anecdote about Lady Jane Grey, that even private tutoring implies a wider emotional community. 26. In his Positions, 254–55, Mulcaster refers to pupils’ telling on each other; on p. 271, he observes that the master should try to ensure that “the boy [is] clearly convicted by the verdict of his schoolfellows,” a remark that implicates the entire classroom in the meting out of punishment. Juan Luis Vives, De tradendis disciplinis, bk. 2, chap. 1, observes that that students can become innured to corporal punishment and/or can be urged to disobey by classmates. Bushnell notes in this connection that “Vives acutely observes two points about corporal punishment.…schoolchildren resist as a community and will push a companion to disobey rather than obey” (31–32). 27. His references at the outset of his treatise to the many “inconveniences” that beset the school system of his day glance pointedly at interference from parents. Since he also defends writing in English on the grounds that

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28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

the parents who form much of readership are “no Latinists,” it is not likely that parents are weighing in on matters of curriculum. Mulcaster’s scattered references elsewhere to the “fondness” and “coddling” of parents leave us with the distinct impression that parents rather routinely intervened in matters of punishment. A critic such as Bushnell might attribute a master’s failure or inability to punish to his ambiguous social position and lack of authority; my analysis suggests that arguments from social status are insufficient to explain absence of beating. Mulcaster’s phrase, “deepe insolencie,” is rendered as “sturdy insolence” by James Oliphant who set out in his 1903 edition to improve on what he considered to be Mulcaster’s difficult style (115). While “sturdy” may well catch at a late-Victorian’s celebration of rugged defiance of authority, Mulcaster’s “deepe” suggests that the insolence is too deeply ingrained in the student to be beaten out of him—a more characteristically sixteenth-century view, as well as a more complex view of human nature. In the first sentence of the preface to his 1660 New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School, Charles Hoole phrases it succinctly when he says “There is no calling more serviceable to Church and Common-welthe.” This illustration can be seen at: http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/ aschquot.htm. Ascham visited Lady Jane Grey in 1550; his account of the visit appeared when The Schoolmaster was published in 1570. Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen, was executed in 1554. Merchant Taylors’ School, attended by Spenser, had around 250 pupils at any given time in the 1560s; Shrewsbury School, attended by Philip Sidney, had 350 pupils enrolled in 1581. See Green, Humanism,who provides some statistics for several schools, noting that for many schools “the norm may have been about 50–100” (60). The examinations that were regular events at grammar schools were as much about testing the credentials of the schoolmaster as about examining how much the pupils were learning. School statutes routinely prescribe the qualifications for the master and ushers, almost always focussing not only on academic or intellectual credentials but also on the moral character of the teachers. The Merchant Taylors’ Company kept records of “continuance.” Mulcaster, Positions, Chap. 37, discusses at length the need to restrain the number of pupils, noting that some boys must pursue trades (for the efficient functioning of the commonwealth), that some boys do not have the capacity to learn, and noting, too, that boys who accept authority are the best-suited for grammar-school education. Such restraints and provisos would make for a relatively homogenous student body. Elizabeth Hanson, “No Boy Left Behind: Education and Distributive Justice,” observes that, in theory, entrance to and success at school was merit-based.

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35. According to Watson, The English Grammar Schools, 210, Mulcaster was “the boldest educational advocate for Music.” 36. John Charles Robinson, “Historical Sketch,” ix, cites the Order for the School’s Probation in 1607, which notes that “for the number of schollers,” MTS is “the greatest schoole included under one roof,” adding that “we may perhaps infer from this expression that the boys were all taught in one large room.” In describing his ideal school building, Mulcaster says that he would “have a faire schoole house above with aire for the tounges, and an other beneth for other pointes of learning” (Positions 225). One imagines that music, too, could be practiced in this airy room. John Wesley, “Rhetorical Delivery for Renaissance English,” 1267, observes that “it is easy to forget that [Renaissance schools] were also full of stirring sounds and sights,” noting that schoolrooms were configured, not for writing, but for oral performances. 37. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, 9. Erica Fudge, “Learning to Laugh,” discusses briefly Mulcaster’s prescriptions in the course of a thoughtful philosophical argument on the role of laughter in defining the “human.”

References Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster […]. 3rd edition. London: John Daye, 1571. Web. Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning: The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. J.M. Robertson. London: Cassell, 1905. Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996. Print. Cartwright, Kent. Theatre and Humanism English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Print. Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London and Toronto: Routledge & K. Paul, Univ. of Toronto, 1965. Print. Coote, Edmund. The English School-Master. London: Printed by R. & W. Leybourn, for the of Stationers, 1656. Print. Cubberley, Ellwood Patterson. Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education: With Selected Bibliographies. Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010. Print. Davies, John. Nosce Teipsum. Newly Corrected and Amended. ed. London: Printed by Richard Field for John Standish, 1602. Print. DeMolen, Richard. Ed. Richard Mulcaster’s Positions. New York: Columbia Univ. Teachers College Press, 1971. Print. Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Print.

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Erasmus. A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children: Collected Works of Erasmus. Volume 26. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1985. Fudge, Erica. “Learning to Laugh.” In Childhood and Children’s Literature. Ed. Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore. London: Routledge, 2005. 19–40. Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. Print. Grafton, Anthony, and Jardine, Lisa. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. Print. Green, Ian. Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Print. Gwynek, Talan. “Late Sixteenth Century Given Names”. Brian M. Scott, 1994. Revised Web. http://heraldry.sca.org/names/eng16/eng16freq.html. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991. Print. Hanson, Elizabeth. “No Boy Left Behind: Education and Distributive Justice.” In Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015. 179–203. Print. Hoole, Charles, and Mark, Henry Thiselton, eds. A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School. Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1912. Land, Isaac. “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory.” In City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City. Montreal, Kingston, London, and Ithaca: McGill–Queen’s Univ. Press, 2010. Print. Millan, Gustavo Ortiz. “Nussbaum on the Cognitive Nature of Emotions.” Manuscrito 39.2 (April–June 2016). Mulcaster, Richard. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children. Ed. William Barker. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994. Print. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. Print. Oliphant, James, ed. The Educational Writings of Richard Mulcaster. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1903. Ong, Walter. “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.” Studies in Philology 56.2 (April 1959): 103–24. Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998. Print. Robinson, John Charles. “Historical Sketch.” In A Register of the Scholars Admitted into Merchant Taylors’ School: from A.D. 1562 to 1874. Lewes: Farncombe and Company, 1882.

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Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2006. Print. Schacter, Stanley, and Singer, Jerome. “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State.” Psychological Review 69.5 (1962): 379–99. Soellner, Rolph. Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge. Columbus, OH: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972. Print. Spenser, Edmund. Shepheardes Calender: The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William Oram, et al. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989. Storbeck, Justin, and Clore, Gerald. “On the Interdependence of Cognition and Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 21.6 (2007): 1212–37. Strier, Richard. The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago, 2011. Print. Vico, Giambattista. On Humanistic Education. Trans. Giorgio Pinton and Arthur Shippe. Intro. Donald Phillip Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993. Print. Vives, Juan Luis, and Watson, Foster. Vives: On Education; a Translation of the De Tradendis Disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971. Print. Watson, Foster. The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1908. Wesley, John. “Rhetorical Delivery for Renaissance English: Voice, Gesture, Emotion, and the Sixteenth-Century Vernacular Turn.” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (Winter 2015): 1265–96. Whitelock, James. Liber Famelicus. Ed. J. Bruce. Printed for the Camden Society. Westminster: J. B. Nichols & Sons, 1858. Woolfson, Jonathan. Reassessing Tudor Humanism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

CHAPTER 3

Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations

My description in Chapter 2 of Gozzoli’s painting of Augustine’s removal from family to school highlighted the greater variety of emotional attachments that await the schoolboy when he leaves what in the painter’s rendering is the relatively static emotional community of the family. Representations of domesticity that circulated widely in treatises, sermons, and homilies likewise create an impression of the emotional life of the early modern English family as similarly static, ideally. In many of these textual depictions, emotional dynamics remain stable, beneficently so, as long as—and this is key—the lines of patriarchal authority are followed. Moralists of household life draw heavily on doctrines of obedience with broad application across English experience to define the spiritual and civil purposes of family life, stressing in particular that good patriarchal order is essential to the fulfilment of those purposes.1 While the emotional dynamics of the family are seldom the explicit focus of the moral philosophers and ministers whose primary concern is to prescribe to family members their respective roles and responsibilities, the prescriptions assume that the emotional temper of the family both derives from, and sustains, patriarchal structure. Even if incidentally, these writers often promote the notion that it is the careful observance of patriarchal order that fosters peace and harmony, cheer and good humour—emotional conditions that in turn (re)enable patriarchy by forestalling rebellion or resistance.2 Such is the ideal, the official view. Recent scholars of early modern family and household life, drawing on a variety of documents, have furnished us with more than ample evidence for supposing that familial peace and © The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_3

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harmony were sometimes in short supply and that patriarchal authority was often contested.3 Perhaps more than any other kind of documentary evidence, family letters have the potential to bring us close to the lived experience and feelings of family members.4 New assessments of Renaissance epistolary theory have stressed in particular the affective dynamics of letter-writing. Kathy Eden has demonstrated that for theorists such as Cicero, Petrarch, and Erasmus, the letter’s capacity for creating intimacy figures as importantly as do the more commonly remarked rhetorical and business aims of letter-writing. Alan Stewart has observed that in Shakespeare’s day Erasmian epistolary theory virtually guaranteed that the letter’s greatest value was assumed to lie in its capacity for conveying emotion at a distance.5 By registering explicitly and implicitly the emotion-bearing capacity of letters, manuals of the period invite us to consider how amply the structures of family feeling could accommodate resistance, protest, and defiance as well as obedience on the part of children; and anxiety, self-reflection, and moral reckoning as well as the exercise of authority on the part of parents. Even when the manual is a translation, we can find reliable signposts to English life. Although William Fulwood’s popular 1568 manual comprises a translation with only “minor changes” from a 1566 French treatise, his prefatory material reveals his own biases and assumptions, as Lynne Magnusson has observed.6 In his dedications, Fulwood capitalizes particularly on the epistle’s capacity to convey feeling and create intimacy. He begins his dedicatory verse-epistle by acknowledging, briefly, what Angel Day in a later treatise will call the “nunciatorie” function of one type of familiar letter: epistles are “needful,” Fulwood asserts, when “urgent matters of our owne, / or frends to write us move,” when it is necessary to give news “of warres, of peace, / or strange newes or else” to distant friends.7 But Fulwood is especially keen to show how “by loving letter” the “mynde shal be discust” and how “by letter well we may / communicate our heart / Unto our frende, though distance farre / have us remou’d apart,” extolling at some length these particular virtues: By Letter we may absence make even presence for to be, And talke with him as face to face together we did see. By letter we may tell our joy, By letter shew our griefe: By letter from our frende thereof,

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we may receive reliefe. By letter what so heart can think, or what can head devise, To frende, or foe, the same we may present before his eyes. (sig. A2v–A3r)

For Fulwood, the intimacy created by letters is all the more valuable because a letter furnishes a protected space for the full, trusting, disclosure of one’s innermost thoughts (“what can head devise”) and feelings (“what so heart can think”)—and without the expense of travel. “Our steede at home in stable standes, / our purse also we spare,” he notes approvingly, “When loving letter trots between, / and mynde to mynde declares” (sig. A3r). Unlike a messenger, moreover, who might either “tell to[o] much” or “leave some untold,” a letter can be trusted to convey exactly what its writer wants to be known: a letter, observes Fulwood, blabbeth not abrode the hid and secrete of our mynde, To any one, save unto him to whome we have assigned. And looke what so we charge it tell, it misseth not a jote: When messenger by word of mouth might hap forget his note, And either tell to much, or else leave some untold: Therefore the little Letter well to trust we may be bolde. (sig. A3r–A3v)

Material factors, such as delay, misdirection, mishap, misappropriation, could—and frequently did—impede the safe and timely delivery of letters. By neglecting to mention these factors, Fulwood idealizes the letter’s capacity to convey securely its writer’s innermost, secret, self.8 His doing so highlights his conviction that what the students of his manual want and need above all is a means of self-expression. The “use” of letters “so nedefull is, / in uttering of our mynde,” he affirms, “That no wise we may want the same, / as dayly proofe doth finde” (sig. A2v). There is, indeed, little need for him to “prove in praise” the “might” of the “little Letter” for “very need it selfe the profe, / in every brayne now bredeth” (sig. A3v). If there remained any doubt that for Fulwood the “might” of the

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letter lies especially in its being a vehicle for emotion, verses entitled “The bokes verdict” confirm that this is the preeminent virtue of the letter. It is true that “Marchants” and “Lawyer” recognize the value of letters, and “Both rich and poore, both high and low, / Sometimes tell me [i.e. the letter] their myndes content.” But it is the “Lover chiefe of all” who can be attest to the power of the letter, since it can “release [him] from [the] carefull thrall” of “hevy heart, and pinching payne” (sig. A5r). The brief prose epistle “To the Reader” predicts, moreover, that the affective work of letters can be more generally therapeutic. Explaining that the “idleness” of his manual’s title—The Enimie of Idleness —is the “capital enimie to all exercise and vertue” Fulwood advises the student of his manual that he or she mayest occupie and practice thy selfe therin, taking pen in hand, and gratifying thy frende with some conceite or other: whereby thou shalt both purchase friendship, increase in knowledge and also drive away drowsy lumps and fond fantasies from thy heavy head. (sig. A5v–A6r; my emphasis)

In alleviating symptoms associated with melancholy—perhaps the most prominent of mood and emotional disorders in the period—the “littel Letter” proves its might indeed. While the therapeutic efficacy of letters is not an explicit concern of either Abraham Fleming or Angel Day in their respective treatises, their instructions in letter-writing pre-suppose that almost any epistolary occasion must be carefully calibrated in terms of the moods, emotions, and passions—present, predicted, and hoped-for—of both recipient and writer. For Fleming, the disposition of the writer of a letter is the prime mover of virtually all epistles. He sums up his prefatory address to the “learned and unlearned reader” by affirming that his treatise provides guidance for “whatsoever thou [the reader of his treatise] art disposed to do by letter.” In touting his manual, he asks: wilt thou write gravely, wilt thou write wisely, wilt thou write sweetly, wilt thou write smoothly, wilt thou write harshly, wilt thou write darkly, wilt thou write gladly, wilt thou write sadly, wilt thou write largely, wilt thou write briefly, wilt thou write lovingly, wilt thou write angerly, wilt thou complaine, wilt thou accuse, wilt thou rebuke, wilt thou commend, wilt thou threaten, wilt thou pardon, wilt thou displease, wilt thou reconcile, wilt thou command, wilt thou intreate?9

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Rather than cataloguing the kinds of letters it is possible to write, Fleming thus surveys possible emotional postures and reactions, implicitly positing little scenarios rich in (and rife with) emotional fallout. More focussed on the resources of language than is Fleming, Day nevertheless also gauges emotional conditions, although for Day it is the disposition of the letter’s recipient that is the primary consideration. In maintaining decorum, the sine qua non of letter-writing for Day, the writer must “measure” such factors as the dignity and age of the letter’s auditor, but also his (or, presumably, her) “humour” and “disposition” (sig. B2v). Day’s rhetorical bent reflects his conviction that words in an epistle can be arranged to convey—or, more accurately, simulate—an attitude, emotion, or mood on the part of the writer and to elicit specific affective responses in the recipient, as his discussion of figures and tropes indicates.10 With respect to extant family correspondence, when letter after letter is addressed to a “dear” or “honoured” parent and subscribed by a “humble, loving, and obedient” son or daughter, we might be lured into the complacency of supposing that offspring never chafed under the constraints of the filial duty to love and obey unquestioningly their parents. But protocols of correspondence, drilled in schools and disseminated widely through letter-writing manuals, determined the conventions of address and signature—even down to the spacing between the end of the letter and the subscription.11 From their varying perspectives, Fulwood, Day, and Fleming all imply that close reading of family letters, the kind of close reading one might undertake with a literary text, can get us past what is merely conventional and sharpen into view the complexities and nuances of familial feeling. In the remainder of this chapter, I undertake exactly that kind of analysis with two case studies of family correspondence. In the first case, I pay minute attention to syntax, sentence structure, and turns of phrase in letters written home to his father and mother by one Philip Gawdy, a young man away at school. Rhetorical analysis in this case shows just how provisional the workings of paternal authority can be, and how troubled, even tenuous, the emotional bonds between a father and son can be. Any number of letters from the period could be read in these terms, leading to a similar conclusion. Young Philip Gawdy’s letters, in addition to offering the convenience of accessibility, the legibility of printed transcriptions, coherent sequencing, and address to both parents separately, are particularly clear in their implications because Philip writes well. In the second case, I focus on Henry Sidney’s widely-known first letter of

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paternal advice to his young son, also named Philip and also away at school to suggest that how the recipient of paternal advice is expected to commit to memory preceptial wisdom is as important as the (moral) wisdom contained in the prescriptions. Not just any letter could have served in this case. The addition of a postscript by Mary, Philip’s mother, and the much later publication of the letter turn what is a fairly typical, if charming, letter of fatherly advice into a document that lets us gauge how emotional dynamics within families shape in ways exclusive to the family the moral wisdom so foundational in humanist education and that invites us to consider how technologies of learning condition the absorption of moral wisdom.

3.1

I

Letters written by Philip Gawdy (b.1562), a younger son away at school, furnish evidence of the complexity that could characterize the emotional dynamics linking fathers and sons, evidence that is all the more telling because drawn from a medium that hewed closely to cultural norms.12 Philip Gawdy is well versed in the doctrines of familial bonds, even at the age of 17, when he writes to his father from school. Having been enjoined, it seems, to write home often, Philip sends his “wrytynges” since “it hath chaunced” that there is “good conveighing” available. In this letter of 19 October 1579, Philip reports no news of any kind, about himself, school, London, or the Court; he makes no request for money or goods from home. But he does rehearse his understanding of his duty, acknowledge his (moral) indebtedness to his parents and to God’s grace, and express his hope of making amends to his father for having “hetherto…been cause of some of youre great care.” Such exercises in filial self-scrutiny, common in letters of the period, attest to how thoroughly sons were instructed in filial piety and in how to express it. Philip’s letter is interesting especially for the initial convolutedness of his self-positioning—syntactical tangling and grammatical enervation that are not attributable to youth or inexperience in writing, as Philip’s writing in other letters, as well as elsewhere in this one, proves. This son has difficulty writing clearly about the emotional dimensions of his relationship with his father, partly because he seems uncertain about his father’s affection for him. The easy assurance of his conventional salutation, “Most loving and gentle ffather,” dissolves into doubt with the opening sentence, which Philip begins with the tellingly provisional “Yf.”

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Yf I cold to your so great joye as to myne owne lyking write of any thing, the only duty that I owe wold worke the care of doing, so oft as by any meanes it might be especyally upon so good conveighing of my wrytynges as (it hath chaunced) now with great gladnes. (October 19, 1579)

Philip’s hesitation in imagining—hoping, predicting—that his letters bring as much “joye” to his father as the penning of them brings to himself signals more than just (proper) filial deference in making presumptive claims upon a father’s affection. Through syntactical evasion, that initial deference is transformed into emotional brokering. The modifier that closes the sentence, “with great gladnes,” is significantly misplaced: it is dislocated from its logical position following the clause “[my] duty wold worke the care of [writing as often as possible],” where it would intensify Philip’s declaration of pleasure in writing, and attached instead to the clause “conveighing of my wrytynges…hath chaunced now,” where it acts, illogically, to qualify a statement about postal delivery. The modifying phrase “with great gladnes” thus only seems to measure Philip’s present joy in writing to his father. Rhetorically, it is as if Philip holds in reserve his love for his father because he cannot be certain of his father’s affection for him, despite his having saluted his father as “Most loving.” Pushing this rhetorical, syntactical, effect just a little further, we can surmise that Philip is striking an emotional deal: “if you, father, will feel ‘great joye’ when I write, then I will write with ‘great gladnes.’” The formal symmetry that balances the sentence by pairing “great joye” (near the start) with “great gladnes” (at the end) and, accordingly, implies emotional equilibrium between father and son, thus masks a dynamic that is in fact provisional and precarious. In this particular case, the precariousness of the emotional situation appears to derive from Philip’s having offended his father in some unspecified way in the past. First acknowledging his enduring indebtedness to his mother’s “exhortations and loving persuasions to avoyde the worst and use the best sortes of company,” Philip announces confidently his intention to redeem himself in his father’s eyes: “And I pray god that as hetherto I have bene cause of some of youre great care so by countervalling of the same I may hearafter bring agayne some cause and hope of youre good lyking in me.” Philip’s confidence about regaining his father’s affection—assurance registered in grammatical and syntactical control—verges on bravado. Immediately after making this bold statement, Philip rushes

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to end the letter, blaming the vagaries of the post: “I am driven to shortnes by reason of the uncerteyne haste of the bearer herof.” This is the same post that Philip welcomes at the start of the letter for offering such “good conveighing of [his] wrytynges,” implying that among the conveniences of the present conveyance he counts the time and opportunity it affords him to wrestle with the terms of his filial self-scrutiny. Even if we allow for the fact that a relatively short letter such as this one would take much longer to write, physically, in the 1580s than one of similar length takes today—when keyboards have replaced quills, inkhorns, sharpening knives, and blotters—even allowing for that and for the related supposition that the letter-carrier grows impatient as his wait-time increases, Philip seems to be seizing now upon the haphazardness of the carrier’s schedule, his “uncerteyne haste,” as an excuse for cutting short his letter.13 It is as if the boldness with which he asserts that he will rise again in his father’s estimation suddenly deserts him. It is worth reiterating that the rhetorical convolution and equivocation in the letter of 19 October 1579 characterize those moments when Philip is addressing directly his relationship with his father. When he turns from parsing personal, reciprocal, emotional obligations to rehearse widely-held strictures regarding filial love, duty, and obedience, his sentences glide more effortlessly—an effect conveyed by greater syntactical directness and control, as well as by his use of a co-ordinating conjunction at the start of successive (or nearly successive) sentences. He begins four of his eight sentences with “And,” linking together smoothly, and in line with the wisdom of his day, the following conventional elements of filial self-scrutiny: acknowledgement that what is good in him he owes to god; admission that by nature he is inclined to evil; determination to amend himself; and desire for parental blessing. Such a marked contrast between what is rehearsed by rote and what is felt by Philip highlights the need to attend closely to emotional dynamics in considering how patriarchal order actually functioned in early-modern families—however much it was the dogma of the day. Others of Philip’s extant letters confirm that he often felt uneasy in negotiating emotional bonds with his father, more so than he did in covering the same ground with his mother. In a letter of 1580 to his father, Philip once again focusses on the letter-carrier, this time latching on to the messenger as someone who provides more than just a convenient means of delivering the expected letter home. Expedience certainly factors into

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Philip’s present writing: “Thoughe the care of our dutyes at all tymes sufficiently requires letters to you our parentes,” he begins, “yet this cause of wrytyng is the rather furthered by meane of our messinger.” But Philip goes on to dissociate himself, grammatically, from the letter he is writing; the sentence just quoted continues with an ambiguous relative clause: “by meane of our messinger, whose message shall manyfest and as it were laye open that hydden good will in some measure on my behalf which all Sonnes do owe, and ought to gyve to their fathers.” Fulwood exalts the letter as more trustworthy than a messenger in conveying what “head [can] devise” or “heart can think,” observing, to the detriment of messengers, that they say either too much or too little (sig.A2v-A3r). Philip, on the other hand, does not quite spell out what he thinks in his heart about his father, anticipating that the carrier will “laye open [Philip’s] hydden good will in some measure” and trusting in the fact that, whether the messenger proves voluble or taciturn, his father can attribute only proper sentiments to his son (my emphasis). If the messenger’s added measures are large, his father must take this as added confirmation of the ampleness of his son’s love; if the messenger’s measures are stingy, his father can only conclude they do not take the full measure of his son’s “good will” towards him. No such equivocation qualifies Philip Gawdy’s expressions of love and duty towards his mother. More steeped in emotive language than are the comparably dutiful utterances in letters to his father, Philip’s expressions of regard for his mother also register filial self-scrutiny more searching than that which is prompted by writing to his father. Like the first of the letters to his father discussed above, a letter to his mother around this time offers no news and makes no requests, being, like the one to his father, wholly given over to “confess[ing]” filial “duty.” And like the parallel letter to his father, this one to his mother begins with the evocatively provisional “if.” We have seen that, addressed to his father, “if” signals Philip’s uncertainty about his father’s affection for him, arms him with emotional reserve, and precipitates emotional bargaining. Addressed to his mother, Philip’s “if” begins a meditation on how best to reciprocate maternal love: If I shold (most loving and deare Mother) consider and wey the depthe of your loving carefulnes, how often might I have occasion to be sorry that suche a mother as you ar shold be dryven to regard your sonne his well doing with suche extremyty both of the inward mind carefully occupyed, as allso of your bodily health. Therefore trobled with greife of yowrs I

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see not els to be remedied or eased but only this way, that you may see my mynd addicted to vanquishe all kynde of Vanytyes and earnestly follow after all godly exercises and studies. (ca. October 1579)

Both letters engage in balancing the emotional obligations of parent and son. But whereas the letter to the father creates emotional equilibrium that is merely rhetorical, the letter to the mother weighs reciprocal emotional experiences that are deeply commensurate: maternal “loving carefulnes” and “extremyty…of inward mind” are matched by filial troubledness and a “mynd addicted to vanquishe[ing]” vain pursuits. More crucially, the carefully balanced emotional responses of mother and son promise remediation for maternal suffering through continuing filial reformation, through this son’s remaining “addicted” to the vanquishing of empty pursuits. The strength of Philip’s ties to his mother is a key aspect of the emotional community within which he composes his letters of self-scrutiny. In several of his letters, Philip expresses, in remarkably emotive language, his indebtedness to his mother. In one, describing his longing to hear from his mother, he compares himself to the “greatest lovers [who] do feede on the leaste favors”; he is sorry that, on this occasion, his mother has not written to him but instead sent family news “by word of mouthe,” saying “myself am contented with the leaste remembrance of you any waye, thoughe every waye desiring to heaere dayly nowe from you.” As if careful to avoid putting words into his mother’s mouth, he is scrupulous in reporting to her the exact means by which her maternal concerns for him were relayed: Kirke delivered by a means from you, though not directly from your owne mouthe, that I shold take heade how to lyve in this daungerous world, and especially what company I sholde keepe. I do assure yow I do desier to satisfy you thus muche. That I do every morning use the bricke, and wormewood as a remedy against all pestilence and infection that may happen to the body, and I have long synce layde uppe your motherly good counsayle, that I do every daye meditate uppon as a medicine agaynst all bad company all all other badd actions whatsoever. (February 8, 1587)

There follows a list of actions to avoid and courses to pursue that could have—and possibly did—come right out of works of published advice like those studied in school. Philip has “learned…of late by the advise of them

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that ar very wel able to instructe” such things as avoiding both overfamiliarity and servility in friendships as well as acting courteously to all and according to conscience. We know from Philip’s letter of October 19 that his mother sent him off to school in London with “exhortacions and loving persuasions to avoyde the worst and use the best sortes of company”; the particular precepts he enumerates now are certainly of a piece with his mother’s earlier admonitions. Thus, although these precepts for conduct are drawn from other, very possibly academic, sources, Philip melds them seamlessly with his mother’s “good counsayle,” which he has “long synce layde uppe.” He is eager, evidently, to grant to his mother a continuing role in guiding his moral and social life. His reluctance to sever these particular ties to his mother is suggested as well by his likening of her moral advice to “medicine.” It is a conventional enough metaphor, but, coming as it does immediately after Philip assures his mother that he is following her regimen of bricks and wormwood to ward off physical infections, it suggests that Philip still conflates two kinds of maternal caretaking, moral and physical, despite the fact that he has entered a stage in life when maternal influences on character were supposed—by many writers on education and domestic economy—to have weakened. While retaining always their roles in tending to physical health and while encouraged, certainly, to help the father with the moral education of children, mothers were expected to cede to fathers and schoolmasters pride of place in moulding the moral characters of young men.14 Philip’s continuing to accord his mother a role in shaping his moral life testifies not only to the strength of his emotional bond with his mother, but perhaps also to a larger, cultural, recognition of the need to root virtuous conduct in strong feeling—a supposition to which I will return in subsequent chapters. But Philip’s meticulous parsing of the instruction he has received, from his mother and from others, hints as well that he is ready to assert independence of judgement, as we might expect of a young man who has recently left home. His dilemma about demonstrating proper respect for his mother while also cutting some ties emerges also in his curious waffling about what his mother has labelled the “dangerous world” of London. He declares that he hopes to live up to her standards of conduct—“I praye God gyve me his grace to do the best”—while claiming that “the tyme be nothing so daungerous as yow [Mother] take it for.” As if reluctant to discredit entirely her admonitions, however, he adds quickly that

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the time is “yet daungerous enough to have much warning given, and neede enough to be very diligently observed” (February 8, 1587). A subsequent letter from Philip to his mother suggests that she has in fact taken umbrage at his equivocal stance, or at least that Philip suspects that she has. Self-defensive, he is careful, at first, in resuming a position of filial deference. He leads into the heart of the matter with measured steps, saying first: “Yow writ to me of the receipte of a letter by Kirke. I would have bene glad to have heard whether you have receyved the thinges I sent downe bothe for yowr selfe and my brother.” Having alluded to her silence on this score, he broaches the topic of another, more troubling, silence: “I have sent letters to you every weeke since my comming upp, howsoever you have receyved them. I would be glad to understand whether yow have receyved my good meaning or no.” He fears she has not. “You seamed to write in your lettres that I shold be more carelesse of dangers then you would have me to be,” he ventures, before showing just how well he has absorbed her cautions: He that saythe the water is not deepe wold be lothe to be wette, and though the dangers be nothing so great as yow tooke them for yet I wold be lothe to fall into the leaste of them. The chiefe occasion of all myscheif being taken awaye, the danger ceasethe withall. (February 24 [1587])

Even while insisting that he has listened to his mother’s counsel, however, Philip moves towards independence of judgement, encapsulating his mother’s advice in the impersonality of an adage. It is a rhetorical move that suggests he is staking out his moral ground independently of his emotional ties to his mother. He is not breaking those ties—there is no dramatic rupture here—but he is distancing himself from his mother. Our sense that he is positioning himself securely in London, at some remove from home and his mother’s influence, is confirmed by his turning immediately to the news of the day: “Ther was a great marriage in the towne this weeke”; “Ther was yesterday the gunpowder house betwixt Grenwich and London blowne uppe by myshappe.” With the latter headline hardly likely to allay his mother’s fears about the dangers of London since in this explosion “seven or eight men myscarryed withall,” Philip’s reporting on his life in London seems a rather sly gambit, one calculated to flag his independence. Such a supposition is strengthened when in the very next sentence Philip appears nonchalant about his mother’s (apparent) promise to send some money: “You writ somthing about some order

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for the receipt of mony, when it shall please yow it can not but be wellcome to us that tast the cold weather, and ar now entring into Lent to do peanaunce.” The almost breezy self-assurance with which Philip faces the coming season of deprivations and concludes his letter—“I desire to be remembered to my good father, etc.”—is in decided contrast to the circumspection with which, earlier in the letter, he sounded out the possibility that his mother was dissatisfied with him. Philip’s closing gesture of respect towards his father could hardly seem more formulaic. But when we look beyond conventional expressions of love and respect and past culturally-scripted salutations and subscriptions, to specific rhetorical effects, we can surmise that the patriarchal authority espoused so widely in the period—and regarded so often by students of the period as deeply rooted in early-modern culture and lives, and as fully predictable in its effects—could be experienced as provisional and negotiable.

3.2

II

In 1566, Sir Henry Sidney wrote a letter to his young son Philip, who was away at school, a letter to which Philip’s mother, Mary, appended a postscript.15 What might strike us today as a fairly inconsequential document is in fact far from trifling. Sir Henry’s letter, written, we are told by Mary, with “paynes,” and then printed 25 years later for the edification of young gentlemen, furnishes a unique means of distinguishing between moral instruction within a family setting and similar instruction purveyed to a wider audience. When the mother’s postscript and the printer’s title for the 1591 publication of Henry Sidney’s missive are brought into view, this letter of paternal advice highlights in particular two aspects of the moral instruction that was integral to both home and school, and so to the fashioning of citizen-subjects in sixteenth-century England. In its double incarnation as family correspondence and as printed text, the letter shows that emotional dynamics within families shape moral life in ways exclusive to home, and it suggests that technologies of advice intersect with memory to distinguish the moral imperatives of family from those of humanist education more broadly disseminated: that is, how the recipient of advice is expected to remember is as significant as what the recipient is expected to remember. The advice that Sir Henry gives to the 12-year-old Philip draws, as Richard Helgerson has observed, on “common stock available to any Elizabethan” from numerous sources, ancient and contemporary—the same

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inventory of advice from which Polonius draws when counselling his son Laertes in Hamlet.16 Study hard, Sir Henry advises, obey your teacher; be humble; be courteous; be moderate in food and drink and exercise; be modest; think before you speak. But while Sir Henry’s wisdom might be widely disseminated—equally likely to be proffered by father or schoolmaster, ancient rhetorician or early-modern writer of prose romance—the manuscript letter (and its postscript) carry an affective charge that surely distinguishes this serving of advice from the moral nuggets offered up elsewhere to a schoolboy or young man—and not just because parental affection for Philip is so abundantly evident in the letter. We can begin gauging that affective charge by considering the differences in how the three individuals whose words are recorded in the published volume containing the letter conceive the role of memory in the inculcation of virtue. From the full title of the published letter, we learn that the printer, T. Dawson, who extols the advice as “most necessarie for all yoong gentlemen,” understands it as something “to bee carried in memorie”—as something, that is, to be committed to memory (my emphasis). Printed in 1591 as a small octavo volume, the letter was unlikely to have been published with an eye to durability or portability. There is only one known surviving copy of the publication, currently held at Shrewsbury school; that copy was already “very rare” by 1819, and its leather binding has been described to me in private correspondence as likely “no earlier” than the eighteenth century. These bibliographical facts together suggest that this was not a publication designed to last, at least not as a stand-alone volume.17 Once purchased, the volume could have been bound in with other works, something that would have lent it durability, but not necessarily portability. In either case, it seems fair to assume that Dawson expects the “yoong gentlemen” who purchase and read “A very godly letter” to gather, probably quickly, and to retain in memory, its gist rather than to memorize verbatim its precepts; accordingly, he does not conceive any need for purchasers to maintain a particularly close physical connection to the volume. Given the familiarity of the precepts recycled by Sir Henry, they could easily enough be “carried in memorie.” I speculate about Dawson’s intentions, and the ephemerality of the published volume, in order to contrast the printer’s understanding of how memory functions in the absorption of moral wisdom conveyed textually with the conception implied in Mary Sidney’s postscript to her husband’s letter of advice to young Philip. Whereas Dawson does not envision any need for the printed volume to become well thumbed, Mary Sidney urges

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upon her son Philip a close and continually renewed physical connection to the document itself—implying, as she does so, that Philip’s ability to remember and follow his father’s advice depends upon such material intimacy.18 Mary Sidney begins her postscript by telling Philip that his “Noble and carefull Father hath taken paynes with his owne hand … to give precepts for you to follow” (my emphasis). It is evidently important to her that Philip appreciates the effort his father put into the letter in writing it himself rather than leaving the task to a secretary.19 And she considers it vital, too, for Philip to read carefully, closely, without distractions. It is not enough for him to “follow, with a diligent and humble thankefull minde,” the precepts penned by his father, although that is, of course, paramount. He must, in the first instance, fasten his eyes on the letter: she will not write a letter herself at this time “as [she] will not withdrawe [his] eies from beholding and reverent honoring” of Sir Henry’s precepts. Thereafter, Philip must “fayle not continually once in foure or five daies to reade them over.” It is only through regular re-reading of his father’s “excellent counsailes” with his bodily eyes, she implies, that young Philip can keep those counsels “always before the eyes of [his] mind” (my emphases). For his part, Sir Henry leaves it largely to time to strengthen his son’s moral capacity. He concludes his litany of precepts with affectionate acknowledgement of his son’s tender age: Well my little Phillip this is enough for me and I feare to much for you, but yet if I finde that this light meat of digestion, do nourish any thing the weake stomack of your yoong capacitie, I will as I finde the same grow stronger, feede it with tougher food.

Sir Henry counts, in particular, on daily routines to “put [his son] in remembrance” of his moral obligations to pray and to study; he calls on Philip to “Remember” his “noble blood…on his mother’s side,” and to frame his life accordingly. Sir Henry expresses hope that remembrances such as these will cultivate in Philip a “habite of well doing.” In stressing the need for Philip to return often to the letter itself in order to absorb his father’s precepts, Mary Sidney is not simply reframing her husband’s concern that the advice he offers might be as yet beyond Philip’s capacity to take in fully; nor is she pinpointing the cultivation of good habits as the means to remembering the preceptial wisdom of

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his father. In urging upon Philip repeated readings of his father’s letter, she is recommending a specific, pragmatic means for remembering— absorbing—paternal advice. But she is also, and more significantly, registering her understanding of how emotional ties function to reinforce moral lessons—and of how the material object that is the letter generates an affective response. To describe this dynamic, we can note, first, Sir Henry’s use of the term “documentes.” When he calls the “advices” he offers to his son “documentes,” Henry’s use of the plural indicates that he intends the now-defunct sense of “document” as “teaching, instruction, warning, lesson, admonition” and not the now-usual sense of a “written or printed record.”20 Mary, however, while not using the term “document,” clearly understands her husband’s letter of advice as a document in the latter sense as well as in the former. She focusses intently on the letter, the physical object containing Henry’s fatherly admonitions, conceiving it as something to be read and re-read by her son. She draws attention, as I have noted, to her husband’s “paynes” in writing the letter “with his owne hand” and she returns to this motif in closing, deepening as she does so the connections between the letter as produced by her husband’s labouring hand and the efficacy of the advice it contains. She urges her young son to apply himself diligently to his studies especially so that he may “deserve at [his father’s] handes the continuance of his great joy, to have him often witnesse with his own hande the hope he hath in your well doing ” (my emphasis). Philip’s moral growth—his “well doing”—will be nourished, not only by his studies and by the particular precepts set forth by his father, in this and in future letters, but also by the incontrovertible material evidence of his father’s emotional investment in his son’s education, that is, by his father’s continuing to take “paynes” to write in his own hand in witness of his “joy” and “hope.” The emotional dynamics imagined here are generative and re-generative: Philip’s recognition that his father took pains will pay off in his father’s taking them again and again. Mary’s repeated assurance to Philip that his father took “paynes” in writing this letter in his own hand would likely have been enough to prompt young Philip to appreciate his father’s physical efforts in writing, even if there were no material traces on the page. And, without the evidence that might have been supplied by the now-lost manuscript letter, we can only surmise about the extent to which Sir Henry’s letter would have reflected the “paynes” it took him to write it. There can be

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little doubt that Sir Henry would have possessed a good hand: raised as a companion to Prince Edward, Henry would have shared in the future king’s education, which included instruction in writing. Nevertheless, his letter would still bear witness to the exertion involved in setting pen to paper. As someone whose own penmanship was developing, the young Philip away at school would be familiar with specific “paynes” involved in writing, such as those described in a popular school text of the day, a set of dialogues on schoolboy life written by Vives. With its pointers on how to ensure that ink flows uniformly and on how to avoid blotting and its comments on the “hindrances” in writing caused by rough paper, Vives’ dialogue suggests that almost any letter would have material traces of the pains involved in writing, no matter how practised and polished the hand. Covering also such topics as how to make a pen from a goose (or hen) quill to how hard to press on the paper when forming letters, Vives’ dialogue, an exchange between a writing-master and two schoolboys, represents writing not only as time-consuming but also as taxing in its demands on fine motor skills—the latter demand something that those of us today who occasionally turn from our keyboards to write longhand can appreciate. If Sir Henry followed Vives’ advice to “[a]s much as possible, keep your head erect in writing,” he might well have felt physical strain on larger muscle groups, too, after writing as much as he did (Dialogues X, Writing). Thus, when Sir Henry says in closing “this is enough for me,” we can suppose that he has exhausted not only his store of precepts but his stamina for writing as well—especially if, as a man who employed secretaries to handle his voluminous correspondence, he did not have many occasions to write out entire letters. I have been arguing that Mary’s directive to her son to read the letter routinely conveys her conviction that emotional ties are fostered by means of the materiality of the letter—and that these bonds of affection will help in shaping Philip’s moral life. I would like now to think about the implications of Mary’s very particular instruction that Philip should “fayle not continually once in foure or five daies to reade” over his father’s precepts (my emphasis). If “continually” is taken to modify the method of reading, rather than to mean that Philip should continue for some indefinite period to read the letter every four or five days, the implications are significant indeed. If Mary is insisting that Philip read the letter from start to finish at each reading, as I believe she is, we can draw some important distinctions between moral instruction in the family and moral instruction

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in the school and in print—and speculate further about the role of affect in the inculcation of virtue. I have noted already that the familiarity of the precepts contained in the letter would have factored into the printer Dawson’s ready assurance that the contents of the letter could be carried easily in the memories of young gentlemen readers—not verbatim, but in terms of the general drift of the advice. As young as he is at this time, Philip would almost certainly have been able to absorb the gist of his father’s very commonplace advice, as easily as Dawson’s hypothetical young gentlemen, Henry’s comment about the “weak stomacke of [his son’s] young capacity” notwithstanding.21 And Mary would surely have credited her son’s memory with at least enough power to retain the general drift of his father’s very first letter to him.22 Her insisting to Philip—“fayle not,” she says—that he reread his father’s letter, from start to finish, every four or five days must, therefore, reflect other concerns on her part. There is a touch of anxiety in her exhortations to Philip, some suspicion, perhaps, that her young son might indeed fail to rise to what she describes as “reverent honouring” of Sir Henry’s precepts. Sounding more admonitory than Henry, she anticipates—and aims to forestall—inattention on Philip’s part. In addition to insisting that Philip “fayle not” to re-read the letter every few days, she “warn[s]” her son to focus on his father’s precepts. Mary’s diction—she won’t write herself at this time, we recall, as she will not withdraw her son’s eyes from “beholding and reverent honoring of [his father’s] precepts”—seems designed to instil in her son pious regard for the advice penned by his father, for the actual wording and ordering of the precepts, as if the precepts form a textual talisman. Just as the letter-as-object, with its material proof of Henry’s emotional investment in his son’s education, is a vital instrument in Philip’s moral growth, so, too, it seems does the letter’s rhetoric bear witness to the affective charge necessary to the shaping of a moral life within a family setting. For all the commonplaceness of the precepts he offers, Henry does mould them to Philip’s particular situation in life, conveying rhetorically in this way his deep emotional investment in Philip’s “well doing.”23 He has taken “paynes,” not just in penning the letter, but in composing it, taking care to balance, for example, his son’s prospects against his obligations, attending equally to what the future holds for a young man born into a well-placed family and what Philip must do to become a man who is virtuous as well as fortunate. Each time he holds out the prospect of the life of privilege (and greatness) that awaits his son, he counterbalances it

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with measured advice on how to stay on the path to that greatness. And throughout his tone is one of solicitude for young Philip, fatherly feeling evidenced most strongly by the fact that Henry never sounds the least bit overbearing. The letter bears rhetorical witness to the importance of emotions— and the inward life—in the shaping of a moral life in another way, too: in Henry’s speaking to his son not just of things that he must do—practice what he learns in school, pray daily, obey his schoolmaster, study diligently—but also of what he should feel within himself as he goes about doing these things. Henry is keen to have his son frame within himself those structures of feeling that will support a virtuous life, as his diction and implied metaphors reveal. Philip must “lift” his mind to god in daily prayer; he must “frame” himself to “obey” his teacher and to “feel” within himself “what obedience is” (otherwise he cannot hope to teach others how to obey him later in life). A moral life is not just a matter of conduct, but also of the inner richness of “wit and judgement” that comes from marking the sense and not just the sound of word. Henry’s metaphors of meat and stomach are of a piece with his conviction that inward readiness and state of feeling are as important as outward action. The longest period in the letter, a sentence of seven main clauses, each modified by prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses, furnishes particularly compelling evidence that Sir Henry imagines virtuous conduct, measured socially and relationally, to be intimately connected with inward and even somatic states of feeling. The sentence begins with the simple directive “Be courteous of gesture, and affable unto all men” and concludes with the Polonius-like reminder to be rather a “hearer” of other men’s speech than a talker; in between the sentence ranges widely, giving advice on diet and drink and exercise and cleanliness. It’s a sentence suggesting that the inner equilibrium that results from practising moderation and good hygiene in satisfying bodily needs translates into social harmony—an important measure of the moral life in sixteenth-century England. One of the most charmingly personal bits of advice that Sir Henry gives to his young son speaks intriguingly to the link between emotion and virtuous conduct. Right after observing that cleanliness will make Philip “gratefull” in company, Sir Henry urges his son to “give [him]selfe to be merie,” for, he continues: “you degenerate from your father if you find not your selfe most able in wit and bodie, to do anything when you be most merie.” Much of what I am aiming to suggest coalesces in this

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particular bit of advice. Most immediately, the link between emotions—in this case, merriment—and virtuous conduct—here described as the ableness in wit and body that makes one good company—that link is explicit. What’s especially telling for my purposes, though, is Henry’s expectation that his son will grow to be like him, that he will not “degenerate” from his father. The hope that sons will become their fathers is expressed frequently in early modern representations of filial relations: in portraits, for example, where the costumes and postures of boys mirror those of their fathers; or, sometimes less benignly, in literature—in Hamlet, for example, where old Hamlet, the prince’s ghostly father, expects his son to “remember” him by becoming as vengeful, and as doomed, as he. The hope that sons will turn into their fathers is a staple motif in letters of advice from fathers to sons.24 In this cultural desideratum, we can find another reason for Mary Sidney’s insistence that Philip re-read his father’s letter “continually,” from start to finish, every four or five days, and can define another basis on which to distinguish moral instruction within a family setting from similar, or, in this case, identical moral instruction purveyed publically to a wider audience. I noted above that the printer Dawson does not expect the young gentlemen who buy and read his little book to become particularly attached to the actual words on the page: for them, it is enough to catch the drift of the advice and to carry that in memory, mentally storing—and conflating—Sir Henry’s precepts with countless other similar ones they would have come across in their reading and schooling, perhaps jotting down particular ones in a notebook. Dawson expects, that is, that they will apply to their reading of Sir Henry Sidney’s letter of advice the commonplace method of learning that they would have practised for years in school, a technique that involved culling bits of wisdom and fine phrases from the works of the writers they studied and copying them out, under appropriate headings, in a commonplace book. In her groundbreaking study of the commonplace technique, Mary Thomas Crane has shown just how much room for self-fashioning—self-authorizing—there can be in such a method of learning and remembering. Indeed, selffashioning or self-revision is often at the heart of the treatises on rhetoric that underpinned much of the humanist school system. Quintilian, for example, advocated the paraphrasing of others and of one’s own words as a practice that encouraged a supple mind and self-revision.25 Mary Sidney’s postscript, with its insistence that Philip “fayle not” to re-read Sir

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Henry’s letter continually, every few days, tends in the opposite direction: not towards encouraging self-authorization in her young son away at school, but towards encouraging submission to the shaping influence of the loving father who has taken such “paynes” to write in his own hand. The contradictions just barely felt here, between home and school, between becoming like one’s father and retaining one’s autonomy, tighten unbearably in Hamlet, as Chapters 6 and 7 will show.

Notes 1. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, observes that “Church, State, and family…were patriarchal groups where unity based on obedience and acceptance of authority was the essential prerequisite” (200). Secondary sources on the patriarchal structure of the early-modern English family are far too numerous to canvas. For a recent discussion of patriarchal structures from the perspective of women’s agency within those constraints, see Jessica Murphy, Virtuous Necessity. 2. Fathers are frequently reminded of their obligations to preserve household harmony, often in terms that envision cooperation between fathers and mothers rather than paternal edict. In an extended discussion of breastfeeding—the single most extensively covered topic in his treatise on parental duties—William Gouge, in his influential 1622 handbook Of Domestical Duties, advocates strongly for maternal, rather than hired-out, nursing (VI. Chaps. 11–16), an advocacy that relies for its force upon arguments from affection. He asks rhetorically, for example: “How can a mother better expresse her love to her young babe, then by letting it sucke of her own breasts?” (509). Gouge urges fathers not to “complain” about any “trouble, disquiet [or] expense” occasioned by maternal breastfeeding, citing the example of Elijah who gave his nursing wife “all the ease and content he could” (518). One social instrument of the period that frequently makes explicit the connection between patriarchal authority and familial peace is the last will and testament. In his extraordinarily popular devotional handbook The Sycke Mans Salve, for instance, Reformer Thomas Becon emphasizes that the last will and testament should foster the moral and spiritual health of the family by promoting peace among the bereaved. Since most testators were men, often fathers, the peace that obtains is conceived fundamentally as a function of patriarchy. The Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for the Visitation of the Sick,” reminds the minister that it is his duty to advise the sick man that the will and testament is a means for the “discharging of his conscience and quietnesse of hys executours.” Gouge remarks that the will “is an especial means to

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settle peace among children after [the father’s] death” (571). In his pamphlet on the art of dying well, James Cole observes that “touching our household and heires, we are not onely bound in duty to keep them in good order, and peace while we live, but likewise so to forecast all things, that we may leave peace with them after our departure” (89). Testators who were fathers often assume the task of promoting peace and harmony. One John Pounte (d.1584) desires that there be “perfecte continuance of love amitye and friendship to and among my saide children” and makes specific provisions for this outcome in his will, declaring that “if any of saide three sonnes my executours…be contentious…then the portion…bequeathed to him…shall be utterly voyd and of none effect.” John Blincoe gives “unto [his children] half crownes a piece as a final legacie desireing them to be therewith contented untill [his] wife’s death,” urging them further to “make no disturbance or in any wise trouble [her] during her life.” His evocative phrasing—“as a final legacie desireing them to be… contented”—not only reinforces the point that testators looked upon wills as a means to foster harmony within the family, but suggests too, in its tone of pleading, that testators hoped for familial peace more often than they expected it to materialize. It is tempting in this context to recall the predicament Hamlet finds himself in when he is urged by a father speaking from beyond the grave (from whence these, and all, testators speak) to set things right—to restore harmony—but to do so without “contriving” against his mother. My discussion of Hamlet in Chapters 6 and 7 will engage closely with the emotional havoc that can follow from the kinds of family dynamics glimpsed in countless wills of the period. 3. See Susan Broomhall, ed., Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900, for wide-ranging essays that ask, among other things, how “power dynamics or strategies of resistance within households were demonstrated through emotions” (1). 4. Such a statement might seem to fly in the face of much recent scholarship on early modern letters and epistolary culture, which demonstrates that even a seemingly personal letter from one individual to another could easily become embedded in wider scribal practices, copied into manuscripts, archived in family collections, shared aloud. On epistolary culture of the period, and the need to move beyond a “dyadic model of single sender and single recipient,” see Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England, 23. Nevertheless, in theory and practice, letters had emotion-bearing capacities. In his analysis of “the emotional-expressive capacity of letters,” Schneider, noting the “difficulty [that] accompanies the representation of emotion in letters, reliant as emotions are on bodily cues,” argues that the “reliability, validity, and authenticity” of “affect and emotion” were conveyed

3

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

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by the “imaginative recreation of orality…and bodily presence” (110–12). My own analysis of emotions in letters does not focus on imagined bodily presence or tropes of embodiment. Eden, Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy; Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, 115. William Fulwood, The Enemy of Idelnes (1568), sig. A2v. Subsequent references are to this text and indicated parenthetically. Angel Day, “The Second Part of the English Secretorie,” The English Secretary (1586), Chapter 8, describes letters “Narratory and Nunciatorie” as “consisting onlie in advertisements of affaires.” Recent studies of early modern letters and delivery systems that discuss the material conditions of letter-writing include James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England and Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters. Abraham Fleming, A Panoply of Epistles (1576), vi. Subsequent references will be indicated parenthetically. In “A Declaration of…Tropes, Figures, or Schemes” Day collects, defines, and illustrates the rhetorical devices that he previously recommended for use in epistles, to “grace” the epistles; many of his illustrative examples either focus directly on emotional states and moods or include highly connotative language. Fulwood, for example, observes that the placement of the superscription on the outside of the letter depends upon the social status of the addressee: “to our superiors we must writeat the right side in the nether end of the paper… And to our equalles we maywrite towards the midst of the paper… To our inferiors we may write on highat the left hand” (1578, A8r). John Massinger, The Secretary in Fashion (1654), B5r, notes that the further the distance between the first and second lines of the superscription, the greater the respect shown. As James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, the editors of Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, note, “Whether it be a petition, a suitor’s letter, a letter to a kinsman or kinswoman, all such works needed to negotiate the relative social degree of each party, and in doing so they deployed strategies” that included “forms of address” (8). For a helpful recent overview of such epistolary conventions, see Kerry Gilbert-Cooke, “Addressing the Addressee: Shakespeare and Early Modern Epistolary Theory.” The Letters of Philip Gawdy of West Harling, Norfolk, and of London to Various Members of His Family, 1579–1616 (J. B. Nichols, 1906). Mark Brayshay, “Conveying Correspondence,” Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed. James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, notes

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

that, even as a modern postal system began to develop in England, correspondence was often delivered by “relatives, acquaintances, servants, or others acting in impromptu fashion as letter bearers” and that “despite being improvised, unsystematic, and, in some instances, potentially dangerous and unreliable, personal letter conveyance of this kind continued to be undertaken throughout the early modern period” (50). Published Letters of Advice from the period, such as Lord Burghley’s Certain Precepts, make it clear, implicitly or explicitly, that as sons mature their moral education falls increasingly under the purview of fathers. Countless letters from parents to sons away at school urge those sons to be guided by their schoolmasters and tutors. The mother’s purview, on the other hand, took in medical matters. Andrea Brady, “Death in the Early Modern English Household,” Emotions in the Household, ed. Susan Broomhall, 189–90, notes that “in most households women provided medical care” and that “[k]nowing how to deal with illness was women’s responsibility.” For a critical edition of Sir Henry’s letter, see the Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Roger Kuin, vol. 1, 5–6. The text of the letter, information about its original publication and title page, and about subsequent editions can be found on the website Sidneiana, curated by Gavin Alexander. Richard Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, 17. On pages 17–18, Helgerson surveys widely-available precepts and their sources. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Morragh, Historian and Archivist, Shrewsbury school, for sharing with me via email information about the surviving volume. Scholars are paying increasing attention to the material conditions of letter-writing. See, for example, James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England. Recently appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, Henry Sidney seemed to have little time to devote to his personal domestic affairs, making his penning this letter himself the more noteworthy. A Miscellany belonging to one Brian Cave uses “moral precepts” and “documentes” synonymously. Folger V.a.402 (fol.21r). For a discussion of the digestion metaphor that was widely used by earlymodern educational theorists, including Erasmus and Vives, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England, 63–66. The emphasis on arts of memory in school curricula as well as more widely in Renaissance culture assures us that young Philip would have the capacity to “carry in his memory” his father’s precepts. For a recent critical

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anthology on early-modern memory arts, see William Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams, eds., The Memory Arts in Renaissance England. 23. Fred Tromly, “Masks of Impersonality in Burghley’s ‘Ten Precepts’ and Raleigh’s Instructions to His Son,” shows that even the most impersonalseeming of published letters of advice, such as those by Burghley and by Raleigh, mask deeply personal situations and feelings. 24. On the often deeply fraught relationships between fathers and sons, from two widely-divergent perspectives, see Fred Tromly, Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised, and David Lee Miller, Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness. 25. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book10, Sect. 5. I am grateful to Jeff Espie for drawing my attention, initially in private correspondence, to Quintilian’s recommendation. See Jeff Espie, “Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale.”

References Becon, Thomas. The Sicke Mans Salve. At London: Printed by Iohn Daye, Dvvelling Ouer Aldersgate beneath S. Martins, 1574. Print. Blincoe, John. Last Will and Testament. Undated, 16th C. Brady, Andrea. “Death in the Early Modern Household.” In Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900. Ed. Susan Broomhall. London: Palgrave, 2007. Brayshay, Mark. “Conveying Correspondence: Early Modern Letters Bearers, Carriers, and Posts.” In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Ed. James Daybell and Andrew Gordon. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016: 48–65. Broomhall, Susan. “Introduction.” In Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900. London: Palgrave, 2007. Burghley, Lord (William Cecil). Certaine Precepts: Advice to a Son. Ed. Louis B. Wright. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962. Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London; Toronto: Routledge and K. Paul, Univ. of Toronto, 1965. Print. Cole, James. Of Death a True Description. London, 1629. Crane, Mary Thomas. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993. Print. Day, Angel. The English Secretary. 1599. EEBO: Proquest Editions, 2010. Daybell, James. The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Daybell, James and Andrew Gordon. Eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Print.

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Eden, Kathy. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2012. Print. Engel, William, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams. Eds. The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016. Print. Espie, Jeff. “Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale.” Spenser Studies 33 (2019): 133–60. Fleming, Abraham. A Panoplie of Epistles. 1576. EEBO: Proquest Editions, 2010. Fulwood, William. The Enimie of Idlenesse. 1568. EEBO: Proquest Editions, 2010. Gawdy. Letters of Philip Gawdy. 1579–1616. Ed. I.H. Jeayes, 1909. Facsimile Edition. Gilbert-Cooke, Kerry. “Addressing the Addressee: Shakespeare and EarlyModern Epistolary Theory.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 3 (2014): 243– 63. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises. 3rd edition. London: Printed by George Miller, for Edward Brewster, and Are to Be Sold at the Signe of the Bible, Neere the North Doore of Saint Pauls Church, 1634. Early English Books Online. Web. Helgerson, Richard. Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976. Print. Magnusson, Lynne. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Massinger, John. The Secretary in Fashion (1640). STC (2nd edition) 20491. Miller, David Lee. Dreams of the Burning Child. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. of Press, 2003. Print. Miscellany of Brian Cave. Folger MS V.a.402. Murphy, Jessica. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Print. Pounte, John. Last Will and Testament. 1584. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Ed. and Trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Schneider, Gary. The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and LetterWriting in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005. Sidney, Henry. Letter to Philip. The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney. 2 volumes. Ed. Roger Kuin. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012. Stewart, Alan. Shakespeare’s Letters. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. Print.

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Tromly, Fred. Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2010. Print. ————. “Masks of Impersonality in Burghley’s ‘Ten Precepts’ and Ralegh’s Instructions to His Son.” Review of English Studies 66.275 (June 2015), 480– 500. Vives, Juan Luis. “Writing.” In Dialogues: Tudor School-Boy Life. Ed. Foster Watson. London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1908.

CHAPTER 4

Sidney and Heroic Paideia

Nothing indicates the particular complexity—and richness—of Sir Philip Sidney’s revised Arcadia more than the fact that it lends itself readily to schematic analyses that refuse to remain schematic. As Nancy Lindheim observes in her still-essential 1982 study, a “sense of scheme which is neither overly neat nor pedantic is…thoroughly characteristic” of the Arcadia.1 Michael McCanless analyses in close, illuminating detail how descriptions in the new Arcadia “exploit the resources of antithetical figuration,” observing that “[e]verything that is to appear in a description is verbalized and schematized.”2 In his recent study, Jeff Dolven highlights brilliantly the ways in which Arcadia pressures maxims into yielding more expansive codes for conduct.3 Sidney everywhere invites us to draw up initial schemes because his work is thoroughly informed with the rhetorical topoi embedded in the writing and speaking culture of humanist schooling and civic life, as both Lindheim and others, notably Wendy Olmsted recently, have demonstrated so insightfully. Sidney also everywhere tests those schemes and topoi. Although Blair Worden concentrates his study on the Old Arcadia, his observation that “Sidney’s mind is restless. …[h]e commits himself to literary conventions, only to mock them when they rein him in” fits with what others have to say about Sidney’s mercurial touch with rhetoric, if we leave aside Worden’s stress on mockery.4 Lindheim, for instance, focusses in particular on two antithetical pairs—Reason and Love, Knowledge and Virtue—finding in Sidney’s treatment of these commonplace topics his characteristic deftness in breaking down antitheses in order to explore alignments that are © The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_4

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more than usually nuanced, philosophically, psychologically, and morally, and whose distinctions often disappear into a “vanishing” point (Structures 39). She links his subtle analysis of these specific topics to his “deepening awareness of the moral and dramatic potentialities to be found in the education of princes” (58), noting that, generally, one of the features of the revised Arcadia that distinguishes it from the original version is its far more fully developed interest in heroic paideia (51). Lindheim remains interested, primarily, in the content and consequences of the princes’ education—in how what the princes learn about the world, themselves, and others shape their careers in, and the narrative structures of, the revised Arcadia while illuminating Sidney’s philosophical and intellectual leanings and defining his ethical positions. I am interested less in what the princes learn than in what Sidney shows about mechanisms and settings of instruction and in how he tests cultural and, especially, school-curricular assumptions about instruction in heroic virtue—specifically, the emphasis on filial piety as the primary path to virtue. Musidorus’ sojourn at the home of Kalander furnishes the material for my analysis in this chapter; but I draw also from other episodes in Arcadia, as well as extensively from Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, to argue that Sidney’s romance-epic seeds quietly radical ideas on heroic paideia, reconceiving its affective dimensions.

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I

Lindheim, Olmsted, McCanless, and others have mined much of the thematic, rhetorical, and philosophical richness of Sidney’s treatment of Kalander’s home and Musidorus’ stay there, alerting us to the importance of hospitality topoi as an index to what Olmsted defines as a moral centre in Arcadia.5 Drawing on Lindheim and McCanless, Olmsted analyses Sidney’s rhetorical reliance on “contrasting topoi,” arguing that the balancing of opposites in both the architectural features and the domestic economy of Kalander’s house registers his “moral balance” and attunes readers to a “rhetoric [that] exhibits the prudent adjustment of opposite categories”—a balancing act that for humanists such as Sidney promotes ethical choices. She extends her analysis of Kalander’s hospitality to account for the ways in which the destructive emotions churned up by civil war prevent Kalander from “completing his task” as host; when news of his son’s imprisonment reaches him, he “withdraws from his guest, creating an imbalance in the host-guest relationship” (Imperfect Friend 81).

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Olmsted and others focus on Kalander’s house and household economy to delineate the “moral force” of hospitality (as exercised by Kalander, but also as extolled in humanist thought in general) and its importance in good government more widely conceived. I wish to take us out Kalander’s back door to the garden, the “well-arrayed ground he [has] behind his house…the place himself more than in any other delighted” (Arcadia 73). There, I argue, Sidney unravels the conventional wisdom that paternalistic love unilaterally produces filial virtue and thus the heroic endeavour that, together with the socio-economic and moral values of hospitality weighed by Olmsted and others, helps to constitute a good commonwealth. Kalander’s house and domestic economy are able to figure moral balance and force as clearly as they do because Sidney’s rhetoric of opposition produces stable and predictable meanings. Once a reader registers a pattern of contrasting topoi, she can predict what the next term in a pair of opposites will be and recognize that the ideal lies between or mediates those opposites. In turn, it is easy to extrapolate from this rhetorical strategy and register the implication that moral action, whether on the part of readers or on the part of characters in Arcadia, should likewise strike a balance between extremes or opposites. Kalander’s grounds and garden present quite different cognitive and epistemological experiences, for Arcadia’s readers and characters alike, gesturing towards ideals of moral action and ethical positioning that differ from those implied by the architectural and economic features of his house. As other commentators have observed, Sidney’s rhetorical strategy in picturing the grounds is to destabilize categories by blurring distinctions and blending together disparate features of landscape: “The backside of the house was neither field, garden, nor orchard, or rather it was both field, garden, and orchard.” And the effect is to put—and keep—observers off balance: for as soon as the descending of the stairs had delivered them down, they came into a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits; but scarcely had they taken that into their consideration [my emphasis] but that they were suddenly stept into a delicate green; of each side of the greene a thicket, and behind the thickets again new beds of flowers, which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion and they to the trees a mosaical floor, so that it seemed that Art therein would needs be delightful by counterfeiting his enemy Error and making order in confusion. (Arcadia 73)

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At least some of the “delight” experienced here surely has to do with the relaxing of judgement, even, perhaps, with the temporary dissolution of a need for judgement. The plenitude and new growth here, and, especially, the presence of “taste-pleasing fruits”—significantly left untasted, like forbidden fruit—evoke prelapsarian Eden where, there being no sin, there is no call for moral judgement. It is not the case here, as it is with the contrasting topoi discussed by Olmsted, that observers must be constantly adjudicating; for one thing, there is no time in the garden to adjust views, “scarcely” any time to take things into “consideration.” Indeed, the suddenness with which Musidorus and Kalander are “stept into a delicate green” hints at submersion in an altered, almost dreamlike, state of consciousness, particularly if one hears in “stept” the aurally-close “steeped.” This is not quite Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade,” but Sidney’s description carries something of the same impression of descent (“descending…the stairs… deliver[s]” Kalander and Musidorus into the garden) into a world beneath rational consciousness, where perceiving subjects and objects of perception are indistinguishable one from another.6 The subjectivity figured in both green spaces, conceived fully in Marvell’s “The Garden,” imagined partially in Arcadia, remains amorphous, undefined. Even when we hear “stept” as “stepped” and not “steeped,” the curiously passive, and curiously awkward, construction—Musidorus and Kalander do not step into the greenness, they “are stept” into it—suggests the suspension at least of willed action. It is also the case, however, that the walkers through this garden are perpetually in “Error,” or at least made to think they are by “Art,” an experiential and design feature of the garden implying that there will be a need for judgement. A short detour to Spenser’s Bower of Bliss in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene indicates by comparison the kind of error Sidney has in mind. Spenser’s Bower of Bliss is likewise made by Art, “pickt out by choice of best alyve, / That natures worke by art can imitate” (II.xii.42.3–4). But in Spenser’s garden “art” and “nature,” not “art” and “error,” are paired: “One would have thought (so cunningly the rude / And scorned partes were mingled with the fine, / That nature had for wantonesse ensude / Art, and that Art at nature did repine; / So striving each th’other to undermine, /Each did the others worke more beautify” (II.xii.59.1–6). What is at stake in this contest, what can be undermined by Art, Spenser suggests, is heroic moral action. Made Eden-like by Art, the Bower of Bliss is a perilous place because it creates belief that the world is not

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fallen, that is it not a place of “error,” and that heroic action is therefore not necessary. The artfulness of Kalander’s Edenic garden poses a different moral predicament. “Error,” with all its implications of moral waywardness, is pervasive and visible in Kalander’s garden, not erased artfully from view as it is in Spenser’s Bower. In Sidney, “Error” is part of the “Art” of the garden. At stake in Kalander’s garden, we can surmise, is not whether moral action is necessary or possible—it will be—but rather how to pursue ethical action, how to chart a path through “confusion” and “Error.” It is as if, in descending to the garden, Kalander and Musidorus go back to a starting point. In this regard, we can also read Musidorus’ descent into Kalander’s garden as Sidney’s glance, oblique and faint, to be sure, at Aeneas’ sojourn in the grove of the blessed—an allusion to the Aeneid with signal implications for our understanding of Sidney’s revision of heroic paideia, particularly the inception of heroic endeavour. It is in this suggestive context, too, that the description of Kalander’s home as a place much “haunted” for its hospitality resonates with surprising depth to distinguish this Aenean moment from the Aeneid (Arcadia 68). Within the shade of Kalander’s groves, Musidorus will not meet with patrilineal prophecy pointing the way forwards to heroic and imperial destiny as is Aeneas’ fortune. Our impression that the movement into Kalander’s garden is regressive, a movement back to a point of origin, is strengthened by Sidney’s description of the water feature that, in keeping with the design of many Renaissance gardens, lies “in the midst of all the place” (73). The narrator describes a “fair pond whose shaking crystal was a perfect mirror to all the other beauties, so that it bare show of two gardens; one in deed, the other in shadows” (73). I stress that it is the narrator who supplies the description; we do not share the points of view of either Kalander or Musidorus at this point and will not be made aware of them again until the following paragraph—yet another way in which Sidney suggests the temporary dissolution of agency in the garden. The pond itself presents us with epistemological and ontological puzzles, beginning with the riddle of how a “shaking” pond can be a “perfect” mirror. In Elizabethan usage, “perfect” almost always carries the idea of completeness in action or form, but a rippling, shimmering surface cannot reflect a stable, defined image: the “gardens” reflected in this pond, one in “deed,” one in “shadows”— each of them a “show”—seem both to exist in potentia. Sidney’s “shaking crystal” functions, in effect, as a crystal ball, as a “perfect mirror” of what could be.

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That Sidney has in mind the heroic world that could be becomes more fully evident in what follows immediately upon the description of the crystal pond: a depiction of fountain statuary, nestled “in one of the thickets” nearby, figuring Venus and Aeneas. Even this detail, that the thicket is just one of a few or several, increases the overall impression that the garden registers possibilities rather than fixed, pre-determined categories of being or action. More tellingly, the statuary depicts Aeneas, Renaissance model hero non pareil, at a moment long before he assumed that mantle, commemorating him as a nursing infant: And in one of the thickets was a fine fountain made thus: a naked Venus of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning, that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body. At her breast she had her babe Aeneas, who seemed, having begun to suck, to leave that to look upon her fair eyes which smiled at the babe’s folly, meanwhile the breast running. (Arcadia 73–74)

As brief as it is, Sidney’s description, with its unusual, possibly unique, depiction of Aeneas as an infant, overflows with implications for our understanding of the heroic paideia that is so central to the revised Arcadia. Before tracing these implications, however, I wish to turn to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, the writing of which between the two versions of Arcadia helped to shape Sidney’s conception of heroic endeavour in his expanded romance-epic. In the Defence, as we shall see, Sidney introduces into the portrait of Aeneas affective dynamics that transfigure conventional (and school-curricular) understandings of Aenean piety.

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II

In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney returns repeatedly to the figure of Aeneas as an “excellent man in every way,” a “virtuous man in all fortunes.”7 When he defends and extols “heroical” poetry, Sidney compiles a catalogue of Aeneas’ virtuous and worthy acts, advising his audience that, should they need a reminder of how “the lofty image of …worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy,” they need Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of [their] memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country, in the preserving of his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies, in obeying gods’ commandment to

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leave Dido, though not only all passionate kindness but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness would have craved other of him; how in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious, how besieged, how besieging, how to strangers, how to allies, how to enemies, how to his own, (lastly) how in his inward self and how in his outward government. (Defence 131)

I have quoted at length, not only to indicate the rhetorical and intellectual exuberance with which Sidney handles the figure of Aeneas in the Defence (enthusiasm that I will parse in detail shortly), but also to underscore the obvious difference between this Aeneas and the nursing infant at the centre of Kalander’s garden: in the Defence’s exhaustive list of Aeneas’ exemplary actions, Aeneas is always already an adult, perfected in his heroic role. In the Defence, Sidney is especially keen to praise the adult Aeneas’ worthiness as a son who acts heroically in “preserving” his “old father.” This action is singled out for commendation earlier in the treatise, too, when Sidney is proving that poetry is superior to philosophy because it moves the reader. With warm enthusiasm, showing himself engaged by the example that springs most compellingly to his mind, Sidney asks: “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?” (124) Sidney is far from alone in his attraction to this particular Virgilian episode. Shakespeare, to cite just one example close to home, exploits the tradition of “filial rescue” in several of his plays.8 In As You Like It , he draws on its potency to convey the weight and inherent value of heroic ideals when, staging his hero’s escape from the home his brother threatened to burn, he juxtaposes Orlando’s entering with the fatherly old Adam on his back to Jacques’ cynically reductive extemporizing on the seven ages of man. But in Hamlet, Shakespeare calls into question the whole cultural machinery of filial rescue by dramatizing Hamlet’s delay in acceding to his father’s command that he avenge his murder (a kind of rescue) and by representing sons who do act with alacrity on behalf of fathers as hellish (Pyrrhus) or lacking in honour (Laertes). Aeneas’ rescue of his father is a favourite theme for painters and sculptors across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as for poets and dramatists. In tracing historical shifts in the cultural reception of the escape episode, Winifried Schleiner demonstrates that virtually without exception Renaissance commentators understood and praised the episode as exemplifying

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filial piety in particular, whereas later centuries fastened on other aspects as the important ones, on the pathos of Aeneas’ leaving behind or losing his wife, for example. Sidney could have encountered the Renaissance interpretive tradition in many places, but he almost certainly encountered it in the schoolroom—a setting that he invokes more than once in the Defence. The passage that I quoted at length above begins with an allusion to the schoolroom practice of writing down in tablets the commonplace topics that underwrite both instruction in language and instruction in morals. It is certainly not surprising that a tract so deeply indebted to the arts that formed much of the curriculum of humanist schooling should bear traces of that training in incidental references to material practices of the classroom. But Sidney’s allusion to technologies of instruction invites us to look beyond seemingly incidental (and inconsequential) vestiges of the schooling he received to recognize the general, diffuse affinity between the structural ethos of the humanist classroom and the predominant Renaissance interpretation of the escape episode from the Aeneid. Both the classroom and the interpretation of Aeneas’ carrying of his father privilege patriarchal values—not surprisingly, since this is a period in which pious regard for fathers (and father-figures) anchors multiple socio-political institutions. Sidney’s invoking of schoolroom technology just when he begins to enumerate Aeneas’ heroic qualities, the first of which itemized is his filial piety, reminds us, too, that, in specific ways, sixteenth-century school curricula and exercises would have reinforced the reading of the adult Aeneas as loving, dutiful son. This reading of Aeneas would have been reiterated many times in the course of grammar-school education—“worn” into, to use Sidney’s word, the classroom tablets and into pupils’ memories and, accordingly, forming what Sidney calls here a “mind most prejudiced with a prejudicating humour,” a pupil primed to be himself “in excellency most fruitfull” (Defence 131). Repeatedly inscribed, this interpretation of Aeneas would amount to what Sidney elsewhere in the Defence calls a foreconceit, one that would encourage schoolboys to reproduce, if only in imagination, this model of heroic, redemptive filial piety. We can gauge how profoundly affected schoolboys might have been by repeated exposure to the Aenean ideal of filial piety when we sound the depths of Sidney’s rhetorical question, “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform

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so excellent an act?” (124). The question conveys a young adolescent’s yearning: in the subtle internal rhymes, sustained by assonance and sibilance, and in the mellifluous prose rhythm that crests on the multisyllabic “excellent”—a word that sits brightly on the tip of the tongue. And the question gestures towards schoolboy fantasies. Sidney’s formulation is almost—but not quite—a maxim in its brevity, its memorableness, and its interest in “instruction for living.”9 I say not quite because, as Dolven observes in his compelling analysis of the “thousand ways” that Arcadia “brood[s]” upon maxims, sententia is the “trope of ethical constancy and autonomy,” that is, of an ethical posture already established. The maxim, Dolven contends, is “a compressed countergenre to romance” in being “perfectly antagonistic to narrative discovery” (Scenes 101). What Sidney’s question imagines, however, is precisely a narrative of discovery, specifically, self-discovery (of oneself as capable of heroic acts)— and through the most extreme conditions imaginable. The immediate context in the Defence for Sidney’s question about Aeneas—his discussion of poetry’s preeminence as an art that can move readers towards virtue—insists that the way to virtue is so hard and uninviting that few would take it if poetry did not “giveth so sweet a prospect unto the way” (Defence 123). Just a moment before he poses his rhetorical question Sidney speaks of poetry’s power to make “delightful” such “things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles”; among these horrible, cruel things, Sidney would surely count the war-ravaged, burning Troy from which Aeneas flees with his father. Yet Sidney cannot imagine anyone who would not wish for such a “fortune,” such a stage on which to “perform” as “excellent an act” as that which Aeneas undertook in exemplary fashion. More precisely, Sidney cannot imagine any schoolboy who, encountering Aeneas’ act of filial piety, would not long for the chance to prove himself, and in the most catastrophic of circumstances. While adolescent dreams of selfhood have surely always been made of extravagant stuff, the sixteenth-century schoolboy’s dreams might have tended especially towards scenarios that played out in extremis. Ann Moss, along with others, has demonstrated that the Erasmian principles that defined so many instructional settings and technologies—particularly the reliance on the commonplace book—encouraged the practice of arranging notebook headings “by opposites.” Moss observes that “[s]tudents collecting material for [notebooks] undoubtedly developed a fascination with the extraordinary and the extreme.”10 Schoolboys would thus be primed to respond fervently to the specific heroic pitch of the escape episode.

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Adolescent fantasies of selfhood have surely always been filled also with impatient longing to know what the future—“fortune,” to use Sidney’s word—holds. Sidney’s syntax catches at this restiveness, too. Reading about Aeneas’ rescue of his father, “old Anchises,” creates instantly in the schoolboy the desire to possess the future now: “who readeth…that wisheth not.” In that word “old,” we can sense, in particular, impatience to supplant fathers (and other elders—schoolmasters, for example), to take over centre-stage, and to enact autonomy, supplanting that might be hastened were the father “not” to rescued. The maxim, to cite Dolven again, is the trope of autonomy. Sidney’s question, which is not precisely a maxim, limns instead—I’m tempted in this context to say “limbs”— the adolescent dream of autonomy to come. Most pertinently for my purposes here, it is autonomy that will be won through adherence to the patriarchal ideals that scaffold the schoolboy’s encounters with the classical models of heroism and selfhood that filled school curricula. As Craig Kallendorf observes, when “Virgil” was purveyed to schoolboys in humanist classrooms, teachers consistently and repeatedly parsed and glossed—and schoolboys uniformly and repeatedly excerpted and copied out into commonplace books—the same memorable passages. These passages, along with other excerpts from classical literature, “spoke with one voice in the schools, urging the student to respect authority, to work for the good within existing institutions, and to adhere to the conservative values of discipline, fortitude and hard work.”11 Such values, as Kallendorf notes, align neatly with Rome-inspired imperial values, values that we can also, of course, label patriarchal. To cite one among countless measures of the extent to which patriarchal imperatives shape school curricula and exercises—well beyond the provision and parsing of explicit models of virtuous or heroic conduct— I turn to William Kempe, whose very off-handedness in furnishing the following example of how schooling should proceed indicates just how deeply rooted is the assumption that learning is patriarchal. In an incidental observation about instruction in languages, Kempe observes that “by a naturall use we learn the inflexion of words together, with the variety of their accidentall significations: as father, fathers, fatherhod, fatherles, fatherlie, fatherlines.” 12 That this example comes right away to Kempe’s hand, and that it is offered as an example of “naturall” use, underscores both the patriarchal bias in education and the artificialness of such a bias: theorists of the day routinely note that children first learn language—their mother tongue—from women, whether birth mothers or

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nurses or, occasionally, petty-school teachers. But patrilineage lies at the heart of Kempe’s programme: in a preamble to his treatise, in which he surveys the long history of schooling and schoolmasters to bolster his claims about the importance of education in his day (when it is often, he laments, undervalued), Kempe traces a direct line from God through “the Patriarkes” and Moses and priests and prophets to contemporary “parents and householders.” Sidney’s re-imagining of instructional settings as less patriarchal—the line of analysis this chapter traces—is all the more radical given how pervasive and ingrained are biases such as those articulated by Kempe. To refine my claim that Sidney’s figuring of Aeneas in the Defence accords with widespread Renaissance interpretations, especially those promoted in the classroom, but contrasts radically with the figuration of Aeneas at the centre of Kalander’s garden in Arcadia, I will return to the passage from the Defence that I quoted at the outset of this section, in order to read it now as a passage that both rehearses enthusiastically the conventional Renaissance humanist views of Aenean heroism that I have been sketching and structures scepticism into that re-affirmation. Since I will be referring to it in detail, I quote it again here for ease of reference: Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of [their] memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country, in the preserving of his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies, in obeying gods’ commandment to leave Dido, though not only all passionate kindness but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness would have craved other of him; how in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious, how besieged, how besieging, how to strangers, how to allies, how to enemies, how to his own, (lastly) how in his inward self and how in his outward government. (Defence 131)

Forming the crowning period in a paragraph of heightened rhetoric, Sidney’s praise of Aeneas amounts to a compendium of heroic virtues—or, rather, not quite. It is in fact a compendium of circumstances and occasions that could conceivably call for heroic or virtuous conduct. To persuade his readers that the “lofty image” of “such worthies” as are found in “heroical” poetry leads from “knowing well” to “doing well,” Sidney turns to Aeneas. In order to be “inflam[ed] with the desire to be worthy” and “inform[ed] with counsel how to be worthy,” one need only, says Sidney, “let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of [one’s] memory” (131).

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There follows, not analysis or even description of Aeneas’ actions, however, but a series of injunctions simply to remember Aeneas’ conduct in various situations. The memory of anyone who aspires to “do well” is stocked, it seems, with the “images” of Aeneas’ virtuous heroic actions, images compiled, presumably, from reading the Aeneid or, what’s more likely, from the classroom encounters with Virgil’s epic that would have stocked the schoolboy’s curriculum and commonplace book. What Sidney’s reference to Aeneas offers is thus less an anatomy of a particular hero than a reminder of how to read the Aeneid (or of how it has been read by schoolboys) in order to find in it those virtues comprising the Renaissance ideal of heroism—interpretive circularity that not only ensures the coincidence of Virgilian and sixteenth-century ideas of heroic and virtuous conduct but that also conserves the predominant patriarchal culture of the period. The importance of patrilineal imperatives in the formation of heroic characters and careers is underscored at the start of this rhetorically deft passage: Aeneas’ “preserving [of] his old father” is the first of the actions to be itemized in the lengthy outline of episodes in which Aeneas’ conduct proved exemplary. But more than the exercise of private virtue is at stake. The first of Aeneas’ exemplary actions, his demonstration of filial piety, is paired as object of the preposition “in,” in the same noun clause (“how he governeth himself…”), with an act of religious piety, with “carrying away his religious ceremonies.” Sidney highlights the close interrelatedness of these two forms of piety, suggesting, indeed, that they are essentially indistinguishable one from the other, not only in his use of nicely balanced phrasing but also in his use of hypallage, a rhetorical device which transposes the relations of words. We would expect Aeneas’ father to be carried (in keeping with literary and graphic representations of the escape episode) and ceremonies to be preserved, but Sidney’s Aeneas carries ceremonies and preserves his father. These two closely-entwined kinds of piety gesture in turn towards civic or state piety, given that family, religion, and state are so often conceived in the sixteenth century as thoroughly analogous and mutually constitutive within patriarchal structures. In Sidney, as in so much Renaissance thought, ethical and political ethoi overlap. The two expressly paired (and, it is implied, virtuously equivalent) actions together form the first example of “how [Aeneas] governeth himself in the ruin of his country,” in, that is, the collapse of the state. Each item in the list that follows is controlled grammatically by the same noun clause: “how he governeth himself.” The list itself rehearses,

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roughly, the plot of the Aeneid, the legendary story about the founding of what would become the “new Troy”: Rome. Thus, the same patrilineal imperatives that give rise to Aeneas’ career as a hero give rise, the implication runs, to a new state. When the long, richly elliptical period draws to a close, Sidney returns explicitly to the vocabulary of government, noting “(lastly) how [Aeneas ‘governeth himself’] in his inward self and how in his outward government.” By this point in the passage, we sense that Aeneas’ well-governed selfhood is commensurate with the new state founded by his actions, and that both are grounded in the patriarchal value-system that exalts filial piety. The passage thus foregrounds notions of government, order, control—in personhood and in statehood; and, even though the list of the epic’s episodes alludes to events (wars, sieges, enemies) that threaten the imperial project of the “westering of Troy,” we do not perceive these, at least not immediately, as significant threats. I claimed above, however, that Sidney structures into this passage scepticism about, as well as affirmation of, the conventional view of Aenean heroism as generated and sustained by patriarchal values. Before turning to trace the major fault-line in Sidney’s otherwise staunch validation of the widely-accepted cultural view, I would like to consider the effects of two specific stylistic features of the passage: its reliance on elliptical syntactical structures and its tendency to schematize as binary possibilities Aeneas’ epic choices. With these stylistic features as backdrop, we will hear more clearly Sidney’s note of scepticism. As I observed a moment ago, the noun clause, “how he governth himself,” controls syntactically the long series of prepositional phrases beginning with “in” (or with “how in”) that follows. The phrases (within explicit or implied clauses) that start and conclude the series (“in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies” / “how in his inward self and how in his outward government”) are—with one notable exception to which I will return—the most descriptive of the series. The prepositional phrases and implied noun clauses strung together between these bracketing declarations about Aeneas elide virtually all descriptive information, abbreviating the syntactical units to the bare minimum (e.g. “how in storms,” “how in sports,” “how in war,” “how in peace”), even the barest minimum of “how” plus adjective (e.g. “how victorious,” “how besieged”). Such marked syntactical abridgement does not simply lend flourish to the passage; it also leaves many blanks in ideation, and we might well wonder what is to be gained, besides rhetorical forcefulness, by eliding graphic

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details of Aeneas’ conduct, especially when we know how important Sidney considers visual detail and specific example to be in moving readers to “do well.” A clue can be found at the start of the paragraph containing this paean to Aeneas; there, as Sidney begins his defence of “heroical” poetry, he silences would-be detractors by daunting them with the names of such “champions” as “Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tydeus, [and] Rinaldo” (Defence 131). This is a very mixed bag of heroes, however, some of them (e.g. Cyrus) consistently held in high regard in the Renaissance—and by Sidney, as Robert Stillman has shown; others (e.g. Achilles) subject to varying interpretations and occasionally even anathematized. These are heroes, in other words, who embody sometimes competing traditions of heroism or traditions of heroism that can intersect in conflicting ways in a particular figure. The inclusion in this list of Turnus, whom Aeneas defeats in the culminating battle of the Aeneid, alerts us in particular to a minority Renaissance view of Aeneas that faults him in his treatment of Turnus. In this context, Sidney’s subsequent reliance on elliptical syntax in the praising of Aeneas seems canny: the sparseness of detail spares from too-close scrutiny a figure whom Sidney wishes to praise. No doubt, Sidney learned well his grammar-school lessons in epideictic rhetoric.13 The second of the stylistic features that I would like to consider is what we might describe as the plotting of Aeneas’ career across sets of binary possibilities. On the one hand, the anatomizing of his epic career seems comprehensive: no fewer than 14 kinds of circumstances or occasions are canvassed, each of them calling for a particular heroic posture or response. On the other hand, Aeneas’ choices in any one situation seem limited: he is either at “war” or at “peace,” “fugitive” or “victorious,” “besieged” or “besieging,” surrounded by “allies” or “enemies,” and so on. Unsurprisingly, there is little room for nuance or negotiation within the parameters of epic choices. Such starkness seems of a piece with the minimalism registered in the elliptical syntax that I discussed a moment ago. The Aeneas outlined in such spare, stark fashion is a figure unencumbered by the weight of difficult ethical choices, his way forwards from Troy clearcut—with the exception of his sojourn with Dido. Sidney’s glance at that interlude in the middle of the passage under discussion brings into view a different Aeneas and lets us guess the costs of his epic choices—and, when placed alongside the figuration of Aeneas in Kalander’s garden in Arcadia, lets us imagine alternative epic trajectories, as we shall see. Rhetorically, the portion of the passage devoted to Aeneas’ leaving of Dido stands apart from the rest of Sidney’s long, forceful period: its syntax

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is more complex, both in itself and in how it relates to the rest of the long sentence; its phrasing is fuller; its diction more connotative. Having located the grounds of Aeneas’ heroism in his filial and religious piety, in his “preserving his old father and carrying away his religious ceremonies,” Sidney amplifies our sense of Aeneas’ religious (and always patriarchal) piety with a second instance, reminding readers of Aeneas’ exemplariness in obeying gods’ commandment to leave Dido, though not only all passionate kindness but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness would have craved other of him. (Defence 131)

Despite its being linked through anaphora to the prepositional phrase that precedes it (and to the “in” phrases that follow it), however, the syntactical unit alluding to Aeneas’ affair with Dido sketches a vastly different profile of Aeneas’ heroic career, including his practices of piety. Although the “carrying away” of “religious ceremonies” and of his father requires heroic strength, courage, and determination in the face of physical, militaristic threat, it remains an act of piety that does not demand more of Aeneas than he is willing to give. On the other hand, Sidney invites us to surmise that Aeneas’ obeying his gods’ commandment to leave Dido is piety practised under duress. Aeneas’ very nature rebels at the command: the innate, unreflective, empathy that links together (human)kind—“passionate kindness”—urges a course of action different from that prescribed by the gods. More, Sidney implies that reasoned, measured ethical choice—“human consideration of virtuous gratefulness”—“would” have led Aeneas on a different course had he not resolved to remain pious. The latter surmise is almost startling in its implication that “virtue” and “piety” are not always perfectly coincident. Syntactically, Sidney hints at such a failure in alignment by furnishing surmises about Aeneas’ inner struggle in a subordinate clause (“though… him”) that not only qualifies Aeneas’ obedience to the gods in the ways I’ve suggested but that outweighs, rhetorically, the prepositional phrase describing that obedience— outweighs, in spite of the fact that the prepositional phrase in which it is embedded is in keeping with the main syntactical style of the whole passage. In a sentence that to this point has been moved along briskly by the abbreviated syntactical units that I discussed above, the correlative structure of the clause, “not only…but even,” invites us to pause and reflect. And what we are asked to reflect upon is Aeneas’ presumed inward life at the time he was compelled to obey the gods’ commandment to leave

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Dido, his states of mind and emotion. Elsewhere in the sentence, we are asked to think simply about Aeneas’ actions (which are not, we recall, even described). As conceived here by Sidney, Aeneas’ inward states are deeply layered, complex, and weighty—qualities registered in several ways. The subordinate clause is distinguished, for one thing, by the accumulation of adjective-noun pairings. There are three such pairings in the clause: “passionate kindness,” “human consideration,” and “virtuous gratefulness.” (No other syntactical unit in the entire sentence has as many; most of the others have none.) That each of the six words is multisyllabic lends more weight, especially when this diction—multisyllabic, abstract, sophisticated—is balanced against the string of simple, monosyllabic nouns in the next four elliptical clauses. Grammar and diction alone do not make Aeneas’ inward states of mind and emotion stand apart from the epic actions surveyed in the rest of the sentence. Each of these adjective-noun pairings gestures towards complex—and complexly interrelated—processes: of affect, of thought, of emotion, of ethical choice. Together, the three adjective-noun pairings suggest that in all ways of being Aeneas is drawn to Dido. Individually, each pairing evokes multiple motivations for, and consequences of, actions. “Passionate kindness” draws on ambivalent Renaissance attitudes towards the passions: as irrational and ungovernable and, so, in need of discipline; but also as allied to energeia, that “being-at-work” that is necessary motion towards an end. “Kindness” can mean both what we commonly mean by the word— an act of generosity, tenderness, sympathy, and so on—and an act performed “according to kind.” The latter meaning can easily shade into something opprobrious, if Renaissance Christian ideas of fallen human nature come into play. We are surely not meant to parse the phrase into one set or the other of meanings, but rather to register the complexity inherent in acts of kindness and in strong feelings, the impossibility of separating out what betokens our fallen nature from what points to our human potential. Sidney’s finely calibrated correlative structure, his writing “not only…but even” rather than “not only…but also,” insists that we recognize the impossibility of categorically separating bad from good. Were a reader inclined to assign only negative values to “passions” and to the “kindness” that is acting according to kind (i.e. fallen human nature) and in this way relegate to the promptings of rebellious flesh Aeneas’ desire to stay with Dido against the express commandment of the gods, Sidney’s correlative construction would not allow such glib separation of

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base motivations from higher ones. The two adjective-noun pairings that follow, “human consideration” and “virtuous gratefulness,” do point to human traits that are altogether praiseworthy; “but even” these unequivocally blameless capacities of thought and emotion would have prompted Aeneas to stay with Dido in contravention of divine decree. If we suppose that Sidney’s ordering of the three adjective-noun pairings is deliberate rather than haphazard, then we should understand further that “human consideration,” the pairing that comes second in the list, involves the whole range of values implied in “passionate kindness”: for Sidney, to consider, to judge, to assess, to think as a human is to be influenced by passions and by kindness in all the senses I have canvassed. We might suppose further that “human” consideration, for Sidney, is to be distinguished in exactly this way from both divine and bestial consideration. When we get to the third pairing, “virtuous gratefulness,” we thus have available a wide and nuanced range of ways to understand how “gratefulness” can be “virtuous.” We might note, first, the implied reciprocity between “gratefulness” and acts of “kindness,” and suppose that Sidney imagines just such a reciprocal relationship to have held between Aeneas and Dido, who extended welcome and refuge to the shipwrecked Aeneas; when “kindness” includes the idea of “according to kind,” we can suppose further that the bond that Sidney imagines to have been forged between Aeneas and Dido is as strong as that which Milton’s Adam feels for fallen Eve when he affirms that “the link of nature draw[s] him” to her and away from the properly pious and filial response that should compel him to reject Eve (Paradise Lost 9.914). By explicitly labelling such “gratefulness” as “virtuous,” Sidney once again invites us to imagine that virtue does not only, or does not always have to, align with filial, patriarchal piety. He alerts us also to the place of emotion in virtuous conduct, to the powerful pull of strong feeling. Three more rhetorical features warrant attention in this regard: rhythm, sound patterns, and the strategic use of connotation. For ease of reference, I will quote the clause again: “though not only all passionate kindness but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness would have craved other of him.” Rhythmically, only this clause gathers momentum; the spare, elliptical syntactical units that comprise most of the lengthy period create a cumulative impact, of course, but they do not individually carry the reader very far. The rhythmic effect of the subordinate clause results partly from muted assonance and light sibilance (“passionate,” “gratefulness,” “craved”; “pass ionate,” “kindness,” “cons ideration,” “virtuous,” “gratefulness ”) and partly from

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the measured placement of multisyllabic words (“human consideration of virtuous gratefulness,” for example, almost begins to scan as dactylic— the metre, significantly, of Virgil’s Aeneid). The momentum generated by these means leads to signal emphasis on the word “craved,” a word that stands out in sound—with its long, resonant “a” echoing “gratefulness” and, more faintly, “passionate”—but even more so in sense. “Crave” carried a wider range of meanings and associations in Sidney’s day than it does in ours. For Sidney and his readers, as for us, “craving” implies longing or yearning as well as (for us, the preeminent meaning) overwhelming appetite for or need for something. These connotations alone urge us to recognize that Sidney’s treatment of Dido’s claims on Aeneas admits the strength of those claims. But for Sidney and his readers, unlike for us, “craving” conveys also the ideas of earnest petitioning and, even more tellingly, legal petitioning. And these senses invite us to suppose that Sidney imagines, if only fleetingly, Dido’s claims to have not only authority but the right to authority over Aeneas’ heroic career and choices. To entertain that perspective on Aeneas’ epic choices, however briefly, is to view Aeneas’ “obeying [of his] gods’ commandment to leave Dido,” that much-lauded act of filial, patriarchal piety, as having been only one possible form for his heroic career to have taken. In analysing so closely the subordinate clause that posits choices that Aeneas might have made (but did not), I have been tracing the major fault-line in Sidney’s otherwise staunch affirmation in the Defence of the popular—and school-curricular—view of Aeneas’ heroism. The latter is the view, we recall, that his heroism is nowhere emblematized as fully as in his preservation of his father, the view that his heroism and the founding of empire are both rooted in filial piety and patrilineal imperatives. I will conclude my analysis of the densely-packed, if subordinate, clause by acknowledging, first, that what I am calling a fault-line remains submerged in the passage, at a significant distance from the polished and pointed rhetorical surface of familiar praise. But, while Sidney’s brief entertaining of a different trajectory for Aeneas’ heroic career does not pose a significant challenge to the main cultural story rehearsed in the sentence, it does register with the reader. I have identified already reasons for this—the variety of features that make this clause stand out in style and substance. One last, possibly unintended but provocative nonetheless, effect of Sidney’s rhetorical choices in his overt praising of Aeneas in the bulk of the passage underscores what my analysis has been designed to suggest. When the passage is read aloud, the word “how,” occurring

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fifteen times in total, fourteen of those times in close succession following the Dido clause, can start to sound like an interrogative adverb calling into question Aeneas’ epic trajectory.

4.3

III

To return to Arcadia and to Kalander’s garden statuary with Sidney’s subversive, if but submerged, reservations about Aenean filial piety in mind is to see at a glance that in his romance-epic Sidney is not at all interested in rehearsing customary or school-curricular understandings of Aeneas’ heroic career. I have drawn attention already to what distinguishes most saliently the Aeneas of the statuary from the Aeneas of the Defence— his infancy—and suggested that, generally, Kalander’s garden impresses us as a place of possibilities, of choices yet to be made. I use the word “place” here deliberately because I will explore shortly more of what distinguishes places that generate imaginative possibilities from the commonplace topics, so familiar to schoolboys, that hold in place or in memory collected and authoritative wisdom. Fulke Greville, whose assessments of his friend and colleague cannot always be trusted, is surely right in observing that (in the New Arcadia) Sidney’s “knowledge [was not] moulded for tables [i.e. commonplace books] or schools” but rather for “life and action.”14 In pointing to this rift between schooling and the practising of civic ideals, Greville’s comment taps provocatively into my argument that Sidney’s thinking about heroic paideia undermines, albeit without overturning completely, fundamental values and assumptions informing early modern pedagogy. To expand upon Greville’s insight—and, crucially, re-direct its force to open up a different rift in Sidney’s thought—I must first describe more features of Arcadia’s Venus and Aeneas. The statuary in the heart of Kalander’s garden presents a tableau that, as I noted above, seems to be wholly Sidney’s invention. For ease of reference, I will quote again the relevant passage: And in one of the thickets was a fine fountain made thus: a naked Venus of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning, that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body. At her breast she had her babe Aeneas, who seemed, having begun to suck, to leave that to look upon her fair eyes which smiled at the babe’s folly, meanwhile the breast running. (Arcadia 73–74)

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I have called this a tableau. We cannot call it an emblem, in the way that we can speak of Aeneas’ carrying of Anchises on his back as an emblem (although Sidney in the Defence does not speak of Aeneas as “carrying” his father). In Sidney’s day, any reference, graphic or verbal, to Aeneas’ saving of his father would be understood immediately as exemplifying filial piety. The statuary of Venus and Aeneas is opaque in meaning, less immediately legible—at least, certain aspects of the statuary are not immediately readable. In drawing out its meanings, we might notice first that Sidney chooses to stress somatic features of the figure of Venus—her veins, breast, and eyes. But he does so in a context removed from both eroticism and intimations of divinity, the two most common ways to apprehend the figure of Venus in Renaissance traditions. Neither sexualized nor etherealized, Sidney’s figure is wholly maternalized, as the concentrated focus on “veins” and “breast” makes evident. As contemporary readers would surely know implicitly, physiologists and other humoral theorists believed breast milk to be blood, left over from gestation, whitened and purified for continuing post-partum nourishment and carried by veins to the breasts. Sidney’s nursing scene thus removes Aeneas from the usual interpretive contexts and traditions: from emblematic contexts of piety as I’ve indicated, certainly, but also from tendencies, prevalent in the period and purveyed in the classroom, to assign allegorical or neo-Platonic meanings to episodes and characters in Virgil’s epic. The Venus and Aeneas of the statuary remain immovably materialist, not easily translated to ideals. Having extracted Aeneas from the usual contexts, Sidney does not furnish alternative lines of interpretation. If anything, the unreadability of the scene increases the longer we look at it. When the narrator describes the workmanship of the artificer and the surface features of the figure of Venus—the aspects that he or any observer can see—he sounds confident in his declarations: the fountain was “made thus”; the “graver had used such cunning”; “the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body.” When he describes the interaction between Venus and Aeneas, however, he becomes tentative: it “seemed” that Aeneas had stopped nursing to gaze into his mother’s eyes. We are well accustomed to tropes of “seeming” in Renaissance literature, the gap between appearance and reality being a prominent theme of writers and the evidence of the senses being frequently mistrusted. But “seemed” here is not functioning to highlight that gap or to indict the senses. Rather, it expresses the narrator’s uncertainty about why the infant

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Aeneas has stopped nursing and about what exactly Venus might be feeling. Patently, the infant is not nursing—so “seemed” does not lead us (or the narrator) to wonder if he has stopped nursing; we are led to wonder if he has stopped in order to gaze upon his mother’s eyes and, if that is the case, why and with what consequences. The narrator’s tentativeness regarding this moment of physical and emotional intimacy between mother and infant is underlined by the contrasting assurance with which he declares the meanings of an encounter depicted in the first of the “delightful pictures” that fill Kalander’s “house of pleasure,” the garden-pavilion to which Kalander leads Musidorus after they pass by the fountain (74). The painting represents Diana (so often paired in contrast with Venus in Renaissance traditions), naked and bathing after the hunt, and seen in this state by Acteon. Thus, it represents a scene that is both similar to the exchange captured in the statuary, in terms of sheer intimacy, and far different from that exchange, in terms of subject matter. The narrator does not hesitate to identify the states of emotion expressed by the painting ’s figures, however, observing that in Diana’s “cheeks the painter had set such a colour as was mixed between shame and disdain” and noting that, in the “weeping” and “louring” of one of Diana’s “foolish nymphs,” “one might see the workman meant to set forth tears of anger” (74). His confidence regarding the emotional states of Diana and her nymph highlights in particular the indeterminacy in his depiction of Venus’ emotional response. If the infant Aeneas’ motivations are opaque, the mother Venus’ reaction is even more enigmatic: why does she “smile” at his “folly”? Wherein lies the “folly”? And what do we make of the peculiar mix of intimacy and distance that seems to characterize Venus’ attitude towards her infant son? This curious mix is conveyed to us rhetorically in a just-perceptible slackening of the maternal bond, registered in the dropping of the possessive adjective in the references to Venus’ “breast” and “babe” in the closing sentence of the passage quoted above: “her breast” and “her babe Aeneas” become “the babe’s folly” and “the breast running” by the end of the sentence (my emphasis). I have identified this shift from possessive adjective to definite article as an indication of maternal detachment. But it is equally accurate, and more to the point here, to say that the narrator disengages from the scene of maternal intimacy. Unable to decipher clearly this scene, not quite able to interpret the emotional dynamics of this maternal bond, he turns to the

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painting of Diana and Acteon, defining its emotional contours with confidence. It is the subject matter of the painting, I contend, that makes it so easy for the narrator to read its emotional values—a contention with significant implications for our understanding of Sidney’s civic vision. Like the preservation of Anchises, the story of Acteon’s seeing of Diana furnishes a touchstone in the period, although its application is more narrowly focussed than is the case for the former, Virgilian scene. Commentators frequently interpret Acteon’s seeing of Diana as an allegory warning against prying unlawfully into state secrets or government. As such, the painting’s subject thus prepares for, in a general way, what will be the burden of Kalander’s conversation with Musidorus in the pleasure house: King Basilius’ ill-advised retreat to a country cottage and his relinquishing of sovereign power—and Kalander’s own knowledge of what motivated Basilius, knowledge conveyed to him by his son’s surreptitious copying of a private letter sent to Basilius. The letter-copying is represented, to us and to Musidorus, as a flagrant act of prying into the sovereign’s affairs; indeed, Kalandar at the time “blamed [his son Clitophon] for the curiosity which made him break his duty in such a kind, whereby kings’ secrets are subject to be revealed” (Arcadia 79). But, having raised by means of the painting the ethical matter of unlawful looking into a king’s affairs, the narrator’s attitude towards the breaches at Basilius’ court remains urbane: Clitophon’s spying, initially labelled blameworthy, is simultaneously represented as a civic solecism that does not seriously impair the commonwealth; in fact, it is essential, not only in laying the scene for readers but also in furnishing Musidorus—although he does not yet know it or know that he will want to know it—with the means to get close to Pamela and to help repair, through his heroism, the damage caused by Basilius. The ease with which the narrator glosses the painting of Diana and Acteon, noting its emotional charge, and the related coherence with which he plots the fallout from Basilius’ rash and foolish decisions, reflect his (and, ultimately, Sidney’s) fluency in matters of civic import. More importantly for my purposes here, his assured reading of the painting gauges his fluency in charting the emotional dynamics of public, civic life—fluency that in this episode, at least, slips into near-glibness or conventionality (of course the spied-upon Diana is “angry” and “disdainful”). The contrast between this fluency and the reticence, uncertainty, even, with which the narrator approaches the intimacies captured in the statuary of Venus and Aeneas goes to the heart of what I am arguing about Sidney’s re-imagining of heroic paideia. On firm and familiar ground

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when contemplating the public, and publicly performed, emotions that are generated by or that fuel affairs of state, the narrator hesitates when confronted with private scenes of emotional depth. Nevertheless, it is in the private, partially unfathomable scene depicted in the fountain statuary of Kalander’s garden that Sidney locates heroic impetus, casting a new emblem of Aeneas’ heroism to counter the old one: an infant nursing at his mother’s breast in place of an adult son carrying his father on his back. The latter emblem circulates widely as cultural and pedagogical currency in Sidney’s day; the former is newly minted by Sidney to counterbalance patrilineal imperatives. By relocating heroic beginnings, by reimagining Aeneas in the new Arcadia in a posture that does not fit the mould fashioned by cultural and school-curricular commonplace readings, Sidney suggests further that heroism does not emerge from such “civic” places as the schoolroom and the commonplace topic, but from maternal love, from gardens and private retreats behind great houses, from fellowship—from places of emotion and delight, rather than from places of profit and delight.

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These are admittedly large claims to make on the basis of a brief paragraph describing garden statuary. To ground these claims more securely, I will consider two additional episodes, where action (in the form of conversations), along with ornaments of style, generates the salient points for my discussion. First, in an exchange that also takes place on the grounds of Kalander’s home, this time in the woods adjacent to the garden, we see a widening gap between civic (and civilizing) lessons of the kind learned in school and the fortunes and agency of an individual in the world—precisely the gap that Greville identifies as characteristic of the new Arcadia. Like the statuary discussed in the previous section, this conversation registers the importance of affect in heroic paideia, but it does so with more direct application to the young princes. Musidorus, pressing the newly love-lorn Pyrocles on the reasons for his altered mood and his reluctance to return home from Arcadia (Musidorus himself having “grown weary of his abode” there [109]), is baffled by Pryocles’ preference for solitude over company, for contemplation over action. Sidney presents their conversation as if it were an exchange between two schoolboys, or a schoolmaster and pupil: one, dutifully, properly, and fluently rehearsing arguments gleaned from years of gathering material for the topics that

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filled commonplace books and structured debates; the other, a truant. While Musidorus speaks eloquently, working deftly—in balanced phrases and parallel structures, in anadiplosis, aporia, and antitheses—to frame arguments that will return Pyrocles to his customarily virtuous “course” and “career,” Pyrocles “no more attentively mark[s] his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson” and he responds less than coherently, with “store of thoughts rather stirred than digested” (Arcadia 110–13). Olmsted has analysed with insight the Arcadian conversations between Musidorus and Pyrocles, tracing in the princes’ dialogue a revisioning of humanist ideas of counsel (from “harsh” to “gentle”), a softening in Musidorus’ “rigid patriarchal rhetoric” (which privileges reason over emotion and demeans love as feminizing), an ameliorating relaxation in the “rigour of [his] humanism,” and, ultimately, a triumph of “friendship” over “commitment to virtuous action” as Musidorus decides to support Pyrocles-in-love, even as it means accepting his less than virtuously-heroic disguise as an Amazon.15 Olmsted, finally, identifies the “solitude of Arcadia, detached as it is from public and courtly functions,” as a quality of Arcadian life that “creates a space for friendship that interrogates cultural commonplaces and affirms alternative identities” (Imperfect Friend 43). I am indebted to Olmsted’s reading, particularly her sense of how the exchanges between the young princes call cultural commonplaces into question and her emphasis on the values of friendship. My reading identifies dynamics that complement those observed by Olmsted, but my interest in pedagogical settings, practices, and values generates a very specific set of concerns about commonplaces and about affect. Threading through the princes’ first exchange is a tacit debate about the value of places and about how places confer value. It is a debate that opposes the topic or commonplace so integral to humanist schooling to places in the world that mediate affect and an expanding (rather than categorizing) consciousness. Musidorus admonishes his friend and former schoolmate, noting the ways in which Pyrocles seems to have “slacken[ed]” in a “career…notably begun and almost performed.” “You were wont,” he laments, in all places you came to give yourself vehemently to the knowledge of those things which might better your mind, to seek the familiarity of excellent men in learning and soldiery, and lastly, to put all these things in practice, both by continual wise proceeding and worthy enterprises as occasion

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fell for them; you now leave all these things undone: you let your mind fall asleep: beside your countenance troubled, which surely comes not of virtue, for virtue, like the clear heaven, is without clouds: and lastly, you subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing. (Arcadia 110)

By “places,” Musidorus ostensibly means the real-world places—kingdoms, courts, cities—through which Pyrocles has been travelling, honing virtuous habits of mind and action as he goes. But Musidorus could just as easily be referring to the commonplaces of countless humanist school lessons. When Musidorus speaks about “seek[ing] the familiarity of excellent men,” for instance, his words can just as aptly describe the schoolroom practice of acquainting oneself with the best classical (and other) authors. In both of these “places,” after all, real-world and school-curricular, the apt pupil should find the means for improving self and commonwealth (for “better[ing] his mind” and undertaking “worthy enterprises”); in both places, his “mind” should be engaged. For Musidorus (at this point in his adventures) travel in other lands offers the opportunity to apply to the places one visits the same habits of thought and ways of organizing knowledge that pupils bring to their school studies. I noted above Musidorus’ weariness with Arcadia; it is the weariness of a pupil who has nothing more to learn from the ground he has covered: [B]eing now grown weary of his abode in Arcadia, having informed himself fully of the strength and riches of the country, of the nature of the people and manner of their laws; and, seeing the court could not be visited, prohibited to all men but to certain shepherdish people, [Musidorus] greatly desired a speedy return to his own country after the many mazes of fortune he had trodden. (109–110)

In the light of Greville’s comment, cited earlier, that Sidney’s “knowledge was not moulded for tables or schools” but rather for “life and action,” we might detect sly Sidneian irony in the reference here to the “many mazes of fortune” that have wearied Musidorus. According to Musidorus’ own argument in the passage cited earlier, their education has prepared Musidorus and Pyrocles to proceed deliberately and “wise[ly]” and to turn to their advantage, to make “worthy,” whatever “occasion [or fortune]” dropped in their way: in this pedagogy, pupils are not stymied and “fortune” does not throw “mazes” in their way. But the world does not always go by the book, of course, as Greville’s comment implies: Musidorus has

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been wearied by the incidents that have befallen him, and, moreover, having had his travel lessons cut short by the impossibility of visiting the court, has been stymied by the unaccountable conduct of the king. As noted above, Pyrocles no more attends to Musidorus’ excellentlyconned arguments than a pupil granted permission to play hears the tailend of a lesson. This analogy, marking Pyrocles as truant (and, so, untutored), sits oddly with the second analogy used to describe Pyrocles’ inattention to the well-composed commonplace arguments aimed at returning him to the safety of grammar-school precepts. In this analogy, Sidney compares Pyrocles to “the diligent pilot in a dangerous tempest” who does not “attend the unskilful words of a passenger” (111). Not only is Pyrocles now expertly informed, capable of navigating through treacherous ways, but Musidorus now appears “unskilful,” as someone very likely to founder were he to be piloting the ship. To apply the implications of the analogy to Mudisorus’ wish to leave Arcadia because he has grown weary of the “mazes of fortune” is to infer that Musidorus’ adherence to the “knowledge of tables or school” does not equip him for “life and action,” to cite Greville again, but rather leaves him lost and subject to fortune. On the other hand, Pyrocles’ delinquency, his deafness to the preceptial wisdom rehearsed by his friend, predicts a successful career. The pilot analogy also predicts agency, to a degree that Musidorus’ reliance on the commonplaces of schooling does not. Musidorus’ choice of words when he is urging Pyrocles to recall his former pedagogical diligence is telling. “You were wont,” he reminds his cousin and schoolmate, “in all places you came to give yourself to the knowledge of…things”; but now “you subject yourself to solitariness” (Arcadia 110; my emphasis). Olmsted persuasively identifies Arcadia as place amenable to the ameliorating and salutary influences of friendship; but it is also a place amenable to the fashioning of selfhood, as the distinctions between “giving” oneself over to something (here, the authority of school-based knowledge) and “subjecting oneself”—being subject to oneself—indicate. We might recall in this context the pious Aeneas of the Defence, who gives himself over almost entirely to the “commandment of the gods,” but who retains within himself, and in relation to Dido, resistance to the piety that defines him. Pyrocles resists Musidorus’ efforts to confine him to the authority of commonplaces. We can discern the selfhood and agency intimated by the piloting analogy by focussing on Pyrocles’ responses to Musidorus. As Olmsted observes, “Sidney represents Pyrocles as vigorously asserting his beliefs rather than passively assenting to advice” (Imperfect Friend 40). It’s the

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rhetorical style in which Pyrocles asserts his beliefs—in the value of solitude, of contemplative withdrawal from company, of the beauty of the natural world, and of love—that interests me here. Pyrocles’ language is frequently self-reflexive, but not in a way that suggests solipsism. Rather, his self-reflective language points to knowledge of self, which is always a desideratum of Renaissance ideals of education, and a sense of himself, not as the measure of all things, but as the starting point for measuring. Whereas Musidorus proceeds deductively, beginning his intervention in Pyrocles’ recent conduct with gnomic statements about “a mind well trained and long exercised in virtue” and implicitly aligning his cousin’s former habits of mind with this general paradigm, Pyrocles reasons inductively, asking defiantly and defensively, “[w]ho knowes whether I feed not my mind with higher thoughts?” He counters Musidorus’ complaint that he used to pursue “vehemently” the “knowledge of those things” that “better the mind” with the extravagant claim that he “see[s] the bounds of all these knowledges” and accordingly “find[s] the workings of [his] mind…much more infinite” (Arcadia 111). If one were to single out a governing grammar for each of the speakers in this exchange, Musidorus’ would be “I know” and Pyrocles’ would be “I find”: Musidorus speaks from a place of certain knowledge, already-assimilated (from a commonplace topic); Pyrocles speaks from a place of wonder and discovery. Musidorus has in store, and knows that he has, “many other arguments which the plentifulness of the matter [here, specifically, idleness versus action] yielded to the sharpness of his wit” (113). The implied metaphor here is telling, and it draws on very conventional ideas associating education with agricultural cultivation: like a scythe, Musidorus’ sharp wit garners a large yield. Pyrocles, on the other hand, “feed[s] his mind” and has “in him a store of thoughts rather stirred than digested” (113; my emphasis). The implied metaphor here, of learning as nourishment or as meat (to use word that Sidney’s own father used in the letter to him discussed in a previous chapter) is equally conventional in the period, but its logic points to inwardness and to the absorbing of knowledge, as the metaphor of garnering does not. We might recall again, in this context, the resistant Aeneas of the Defence; it is only in the clause alluding to Aeneas’ sojourn with Dido that we sense inwardness or interiority in the hero. Sidney creates an impression of Pyrocles’ possessing interiority by making his body speak and his words fail him. In comparison with Musidorus, whose physical state or appearance is never depicted and whose fluent arguments remain disembodied, Pyrocles is pictured vividly. Before the

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princes even begin to converse, we are cued to attend to Pyrocles’ physical state. Seeking out Pyrocles to sound out his “great alteration,” Musidorus “one day take[s] him alone with certain graces and countenances, as if he were disputing with the trees” (110; my emphasis). In recording the ensuing conversation, the narrator refers to Pyrocles’ “heart” (as “pierced”), to his “look” (as “shamefast”), to his “countenance” (as mixing reticence with a wish to have his feelings known), to his wish to “breathe out” his feelings, and to the “new blood” that rushes to his face. Musidorus, more accustomed to disputations that proceed by the book, is unsettled by the variety and number of physical cues to which he must attend as he listens to Pyrocles’ praising of the solitary life: “his look fixed upon Pyrocles’ countenance,” Musidorus “marked how [Pyrocles’] words proceeded from him; but in both these he perceived such strange diversities that they rather increased new doubts than gave him ground to settle any judgement.” Little wonder that Musidorus is thrown off course: “For besides [Pyrocles’] eyes sometimes even great with tears, the oft changing of his colour, with a kind of shaking unstaidness over all his body, he might see in his countenance some great determination mixed with fear, and might perceive in him store of thoughts rather stirred than digested” (112–13). Before deciding on a tack to take, Musidorus waits to determine which of Pryocles’ “humour[s]” should reveal “his secret.” In keeping with the humoral theories of the mind current in his day, according to which the mind and its contents had materialist attributes, Musidorus silently assesses Pryocles’ thoughts and arguments as half-baked, as not yet fully concocted, as not yet fully formed (“stirred,” but not “digested”). Sidney clearly does not share Musidorus’ dismissal of Pyrocles’ intellection: Pyrocles does, after all, ultimately win over Musidorus, as Olmsted shows so well. Indeed, the stress on Pyrocles’ thoughts and words as embodied lends substance to Pyrocles. It is not simply that Pyrocles counters Musidorus’ ideas with his own ideas and beliefs—“vigorously” asserted, as Olmsted has it—but rather that Pyrocles’ being resists and counterbalances (even outweighs) Musidorus’ precept-heavy arguments. With the figure of Pyrocles, Sidney thus gestures towards an integrated personhood, in which the operations of body, passions, and mind are interrelated. Like the Hamlet who has “that within that passeth show” (and speech, I would add) and who, largely on that basis, has become the model of developing early modern ideas of interiority and selfhood, Pyrocles warrants our attention on similar grounds. Later, we shall see

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how Shakespeare’s invoking of pedagogical values inflects his treatment of Hamlet. With Sidney, we can account for the impression of interiority in Pyrocles by once again attending to rhetorical effects. In the conversation between the two cousins and former schoolmates, Musidorus’ words, the precepts so familiar from humanist schooling, take his full measure, defining him clearly and coherently. Pyrocles’ words, in contrast, do not: “his words [are] interrupted continually with sighs”; “the tenor of his speech [is] not knit together”; his speech is “dissolved into itself as the vehemency of [his] inward passion prevail[s].” He leaves off talking; he switches topics, moved to do so by some inward prompt. We might note here Sidney’s precision in pinpointing part of what separates Musidorus from his younger cousin: Musidorus recalls approvingly, and with a wish to return Pyrocles to his former condition, that his cousin used to “give [himself] vehemently to the knowledge of things which might better [his] mind”; but here and now, it is the “vehemency of [Pyrocles’] inward passion” that prevails. For Musidorus, vehemence is instrumental merely, a quality of intellectual pursuit; for Pyrocles, it is itself of the essence. We can remark here, too, that the characteristic precision and wit of Sidney’s diction betrays his bias towards Pyrocles’ new course and condition: although Musidorus would have his cousin’s vehemence be wholly an attribute and action of his intellect, usages of “vehemence” in Sidney’s day tend to incorporate the sense of physical or materialist force. The feature of Pyrocles’ discourse that most clearly, and charmingly, gestures towards his possessing inwardness that is not fully articulable is the same quality that distinguishes his experience of Arcadia from Musidorus’ experience. This feature is the fancifulness with which he describes his Arcadian retreat. Relationship to place thus functions in Sidney as a marker of personhood—and as a placeholder for emotion, as we shall see in both this episode and the final one I will consider. We know, and Musidorus will soon know, that love for Philoclea lies at the heart of Pyrocles’ “great alteration.” In the context of this exchange between the young princes, however, the immediate “secret” that Musidorus ferrets out of Pyrocles is his fondness for “this country”: having waited and listened to determine which “humour” would “soonest put out the secrect,” Musidorus identifies it as Pyrocles’ “affected” and “excessive” praise of “this country.” Musidorus himself, we recall, has “grown weary of his abode in Arcadia” with its “many mazes of fortune”; his weariness stems also, we should observe, from his “having informed himself fully of the strengths and riches of the country, of the nature of the people and the manner

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of their laws” (109). Having garnered all he can, having gathered sufficient information for the kinds of topics or headings according to which a humanist scholar-traveller would organize his knowledge of a foreign country, Musidorus is ready to return home. Pyrocles, in his affected (perhaps “cathected”) state, is not. In labelling his cousin’s praise of Arcadia as “affected,” Musidorus implies, with slight disparagement, that this praise is influenced by emotion (“humour,” “passion”) as opposed to being reasonable; Musidorus points out to Pyrocles that, objectively considered, there are many places as beautiful, including the princes’ homeland. In calling Pyrocles’ paean “affected,” he also suggests that Pyrocles’ praise might be artificial, put on, assumed by Pyrocles to “make [Musidorus] see the vigour of [his] wit.” Neither of these meanings of “affected”—and, therefore, neither of Musidorus’ suppositions about Pyrocles’ relationship to place—conveys adequately Pyrocles’ experience of Arcadia, or what Sidney is proposing about the relative value of humanist commonplaces. Pyrocles’ attachment to Arcadia is not a posture—there is nothing insincere here—and, while his praise is “affected” in the sense of emotionally charged, the affective dynamics of Pyrocles’ attachment to place enlarge, rather than diminish (as Musidorus’ mild disparagement insinuates) both the perceiving subject and the object of perception. I remarked above that the signature grammar of Pyrocles’ experience of Arcadia—his understanding of “place”—is “I find,” with all its implications of wonder, discovery, and delight. These are the acts of intellection that strike the keynote in Pyrocles’ description of Arcadia, where “the pleasantness of [the] place carr[ies] in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it.” Each blade of grass, each flower “require[s] a man’s wit to know and his life to express.” The “stately trees” are “clothed with a continual spring”; the “air breathe[s] health”; “the birds, delightful both to ear and eye, do daily solemnize” the setting; the “fresh and delightful brooks…slowly…slide away, as loth to leave the company of so many things united in perfection.” The harmony expressed here is both aesthetic and ethical. We are very accustomed to the idealizing bent in Renaissance pastoral traditions. But to say simply that Pyrocles idealizes naively (or feignedly, in the manner of some pastoral poets) misses the point. To observe that his pastoral praise implicitly counters Musidorus’ very civic-minded apprehension of Arcadia—which catalogues its natural resources, its people, and its laws—is more to the point. In juxtaposing these two very different experiences of Arcadia, Sidney shows how much more is to be gained from an

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“affected” response to place: affect transforms both perceiving subject and object of perception. The new Arcadia, expanded so exuberantly in revision to accommodate an increased interest in heroic paideia, shows us how needful is the capacity to transform. ∗ ∗ ∗ As a brief coda to this discussion of the places of emotion, I would like to turn to the very first scene of the revised Arcadia, in which the shepherds Claius and Strephon recount their encounter with Urania—describing as they do so how they and their world have been changed. Critics have rightly taken the scene’s position at the start as an invitation to explore some of the themes and ideas that will structure the expanded romanceepic. Many commentators focus on the scene’s neo-Platonic elements, and, so, Sidney’s philosophical leanings. Grant Williams takes up more of the emotional valences; focussing in particular on the dynamics of the blazon embedded in this scene, he illuminates the importance of wonder in fostering a transformative “ethics of sexual difference” that accommodates “feminine alterity.”16 My own interest in the scene, and in its staging of transformation, lies in what I regard as a pedagogical encounter between Urania and the shepherds and attends, once again, to the resonance of “place.” The moment is one recounted by Strephon as he recalls Urania’s departure: At that turning she spake to us all, opening the cherry of her lips, and Lord, how greedily mine ears did feed upon the sweet words she uttered! And here she laid her hand over thine [i.e.Claius’] eyes, when she saw the tears springing in them, as if she would conceal them from other and yet herself feel some of thy sorrow. (Arcadia 62)

Urania’s touching of the tear-filled eyes of Claius is a remembered moment of astonishing emotional connection between teacher and pupil. This gesture, both intimate and opaque, predicts that in revising his romance-epic Sidney will be keen not only to deepen the “lesson in ethics” (Dolven, Scenes 101) that subtended the first version of Arcadia, but to do so by exploring emotional dynamics and the instructive spaces in which emotional charges develop. Strephon and Claius speak fervently of the signal importance of place—as both this place, where they now stand, called here by remembrance of Urania’s influence, and as places in the sense of the topics or commonplaces in which knowledge is to

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be stored and they do so in a way that virtually conflates the two kinds of places: “this place served us to think of those things [Urania’s presence and actions in the world] so those things serve as places to call to memory more excellent matters” (Arcadia 63). Love for Urania, sorrow at her leaving: the charge of strong emotion is what amalgamates these places. Both their world and the shepherds are totally transformed—transfigured is a more apt term—by such a pedagogy: intimations of divinity now inform the familiar particularities of their environment because their “poor eyes” have been “so enriched”; their “rais[ed] up thoughts” make them equal to “great” scholars. This is an ideal of pedagogy—places in the world commensurate with the commonplaces of humanist learning, all of them offering understanding “grounded upon feeling”—that the rest of Arcadia shows to be impossible to sustain, although greatly to be desired.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s “Arcadia”, 62. McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World, 12, 19. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance, 99–133. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics, 18. Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and their Contexts, 80. Marvell, “The Garden,” line 48. Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 108, 117. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be indicated in the body of the chapter. See Fred Tromly, Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised, passim. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 102. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, 110. Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the “Aeneid” in Early Modern Culture, 10. Kempe, The Education of Children in Learning (London, 1588). Early English Books Online. See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, Chapter 6, for a detailed analysis of Renaissance attitudes towards Aeneas, Turnus, and Aenean pietas. Wilson-Okamura, 212, concludes that one way “commentaries and classroom lectures on the Aeneid were organized” rather

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than scattershot was by “the concept of praise: Aeneas is the pagan ideal of the perfect man.” 14. Quoted in Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 18. 15. Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend, 39–41. 16. Grant Williams, “Early Modern Blazons and the Rhetoric of Wonder: Turning Toward and Ethics of Sexual Difference,” 126–37.

References Dolven, Jeffrey Andrew. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2007. Print. Kallendorf, Craig. The Other Virgil: “Pessimistic” Readings of the “Aeneid” in Early Modern Culture. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. Kempe, William. The Education of Children in Learning: Declared by the Dignitie, Vtilitie, and Method Thereof. Meete to be Knowne, and Practised Aswell of Parents as Schoolmaisters. London: Thomas Orwin, for Iohn Porter and Thomas Gubbin, 1588. Web. Lindheim, Nancy. The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia. Toronto: U of Toronto, 1982. Print. Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Story and Jonathan Bate. London: Penguin, 2005. Print. McCanles, Michael. The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. Print. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. Print. Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Print. Schleiner, Winifried. “Aeneas’ Flight from Troy.” Comparative Literature 27 (1975): 91–112. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Prembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1977. Print. ———. The Defence of Poesy. Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 2nd Editon. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Stillman, Robert. Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmoplitanism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Williams, Grant. “Early Modern Blazons and the Rhetoric of Wonder: Turning Towards an Ethics of Sexual Difference.” Irigaray and Premodern Culture. Ed. Theresa Krier and Elizabeth Harvey. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 126–37.

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Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. Virgil in the Renaissance. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Worden, Blair. The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.

CHAPTER 5

Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

To focus on instruction in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is to risk being rewarded with the plenty that makes one poor. Commentators have long thought about specific instructional aims and effects in this most didactic of poems, and resurgent critical attention to Spenser’s pedagogical project has opened rich new veins of sustained analysis. Jane Grogan devotes a book-length study to the “theory of pedagogy” at work in Spenser’s poem, isolating in particular Spenser’s critical engagement with the “visual episteme that figures so many epistemological, pedagogic and even moral concepts in visual terms.”1 Andrew Wallace explores the poem’s engagement with the “placement and proximity” of schoolmasters in the context of Spenser’s meditation on the Aeneid’ s investment in instruction and related ideas of mastery.2 Jeff Dolven focusses two substantial book-chapters on Spenser’s epic-romance, observing that, of the poets he studies in the context of pedagogy, “none was as profoundly and variously interested in teaching and learning as was Edmund Spenser.”3 He demonstrates that The Faerie Queene engages broadly and insistently with pedagogy throughout its length, even if “pedagogical inquiries are translated…into the language of romance,” and he stresses as particularly important the need to think about what learning “look[s] like” in the poem (140). I would add that it is equally essential to think about what learning feels like in the world of Spenser’s poem. It is especially vital to do so, as Wallace’s study predicts, with respect to the affective relationships—between pupil and schoolmaster, pupil and place, pupil and lesson-object—that structure Spenser’s settings of instruction. As Wallace © The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_5

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has remarked, it is no accident that the paradigm for the first conjugation of Latin verbs encountered by schoolboys in Lily’s ubiquitous Grammar was amo-amare.4 It is equally vital to attend to Spenser’s deep concern with how familial feeling might be transferred to the work of building a commonwealth, the professed overarching aim of humanist schooling in sixteenth-century England. I begin by returning briefly to the passages from the eclogue for December in The Shepheardes Calender that I cited at the start of Chapter 2 to introduce discussion of the emotional community of the schoolroom. I suggested there that Spenser’s references to his schooldays highlight two signal features of the humanist schoolroom that he experienced: the supportive affection between pupil and schoolmaster (the “good olde shephearde, Wrenock”), and the sustaining fellowship of the schoolboys who encouraged Colin’s inclination to “song and musicks mirth” to such an extent that Colin was emboldened to “compare” himself with other poets in the pastoral tradition and even with Pan himself (“Dec.,” 39–40; 43–44). I cite these passages again to anticipate my claim in this chapter that Spenser will inflect the bond between schoolmaster and pupil with particular tensions, and to observe that these passages from the eclogue gesture towards a connection that was already in Spenser’s mind in 1579 when he contemplated schooling: the link between affect and aspiration, between structures of feeling and careers. In the context of Spenser’s epic poem, this link becomes one between structures of feeling and the quests of knights, and it encourages us to re-examine Spenser’s conception of heroic agency in The Faerie Queene in the light of his pedagogical concerns. I shall do so in this chapter and my example will be Arthur, the primary hero of the poem, as Spenser represents him in a few key instructional settings.

5.1

I

If “December” anticipates Spenser’s abiding interest in the emotional conditions of learning, the Letter to Raleigh includes signposts to specific emotional dynamics that for Spenser propel the movement from “knowing well” to “doing well,” to the kinds of affective charges that shape agency—and direct heroic quests.5 These signposts are especially legible in Spenser’s discussion of what Dolven calls that “workaday piece of pedagogical furniture”: example (Scenes 136). In the Letter, Spenser’s preferred methodology of “doctrine by ensample” (rather than by rule or

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precept) is described in words that accommodate emotional resonances by evoking depth and layers and varying perspectives: his virtuous doctrine is “clowdily enwrapped”; his conceits are “dark”; his history is “coloured”; and his chief exemplar of virtue comes to us most vividly as a character with a backstory. The extent to which Spenser eschews delivering precepts “at large,” as they might be in a sermon, or axiomatically, as they might be in school, is indicated by those same features. In a sermon, preceptial wisdom is unfolded: meanings and applications are expounded; nothing is left unexplicated; all becomes clear. In school, precepts are honed to pithy point. (And in neither of those instructional regimens, which seem to be in the back of Spenser’s mind in the Letter, is emotion implicated in learning in quite the way it is in Spenser’s “doctrine by ensample.”6 ) In The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, virtuous doctrine is enfolded: wrapped up in “allegorical devices,” limned in a portrait, absorbed into plots, implicated in storylines—plots and storylines, moreover, into which the poet-narrator, at key junctures and in all the proems, interjects himself as mediator and also, frequently, solicits openly an emotional response from readers, directing them to attend to the emotional lives of his characters.7 When Spenser elaborates on his choice of Arthur as his prime “ensample,” he thematizes affective pedagogy in ways that resonate throughout The Faerie Queene. He also indicates that the most compelling example is one that foregrounds relational and emotional dynamics.8 Having rehearsed the specific ways in which Xenophon, who works with example, differs from Plato, who offers rule, and summed up his preference for the former by declaring “[s]o much more profitable and gracious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule,” Spenser signals that his is an even more expansive conception of “doctrine by ensample” than is Xenophon’s, on several counts. By declaring doctrine by example “gracious,” Spenser invokes the whole register of Christian feeling that accumulates around God’s act of grace, his giving of his son as an example for fallen humans to follow and to love—a fitting extension, in this staunchly Protestant poem, of Xenophon’s method.9 By figuring Arthur’s quest as a love-quest, as he will do shortly, Spenser brings Plato in again, through the back door, as it were, by invoking something akin to Plato’s stress on the role of eros in the construction of knowledge—a similarly fitting expansion, in this case, of philosophical bounds, by a poet well-versed in neo-Platonism.10 What I wish to focus on in detail, however, is Spenser’s interest in overgoing Xenophon by expanding the affective possibilities that surround

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Arthur, his chief “ensample.” Whereas Xenophon treats of “Cyrus and the Persians” in general, Spenser represents Arthur in densely particularized relationships with his guardian, Merlin, and his tutor, Timon: So have I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure: whome I conceive after his long education by Timon, to whom he was by Merlin delivered to be brought up, so soone as he was borne of the Lady Igrayne, to have seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen, with whose excellent beauty ravished, he awaking resolved to seeke her out, and so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon throughly instructed, he went to seek her forth in Faery land. (Hamilton, 737; my emphasis)

We can begin to think about the significance of such particularity in the defining of Arthur’s relationships by focussing on Spenser’s word “person.” It is the term that he uses in the Letter in reference to Arthur, with the exception of an earlier passage where he calls Arthur an “image” of “perfected moral virtues” and so alludes to a narrowly defined allegorical function of Arthur. The available contemporary meanings of “person” all point us away from seeing Arthur as emblematic or static, directing us, rather, to understand Arthur as a character in a story, as an individual acting in a particular capacity, as a physical presence, as a living body.11 In its occurrences in The Faerie Queene, “person” typically implies physical, bodily presence. Given the immediate context in the Letter—Spenser’s analysis of the storylines, including backstories, of his narrative poem— we can suppose that he has in mind the several meanings I have listed. It is a range of meanings that allows us to think of Arthur as both as a factor in Spenser’s allegory and as an embodied individual about whose subjectivity and agency we can speculate, an individual whose affective ties therefore contribute to his meaning in the poem as much as does his allegorical status.12 With the shift from “image” to “person,” Spenser moves from consideration of what Arthur represents to how he becomes inspired to undertake his virtuous, heroic quest.13 His heroic agency here in the Letter remains incipient, and construed (“conceive[d]” is Spenser’s word) in terms of its facilitating conditions, which Spenser represents as both internal and external. Spenser’s attention to the circumstances of Arthur’s upbringing and tutelage, to his formative—and informing—relations with Merlin and Timon, invites us to understand Arthur’s heroic agency not only as motivated inwardly, by his dream of the Faery Queen, but also

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as enabled by Merlin and Timon. “[L]ong education” prepares Arthur for his ravishing dream by “instruct[ing]” him “throughly,” by framing within him the very structures—of virtue and affect—that can support a dream of such overwhelming force. Without long and thorough instruction in “morall vertues,” Arthur, we can surmise, would collapse into powerlessness, unable to wield the sword with which Merlin arms him. Rhetorically as well as conceptually, tutelage emerges as foundational to Arthur’s quest. As the highlighted phrases in the passage quoted above indicate, Spenser’s description of the visionary inception of Arthur’s quest is bracketed by his emphasis on the care of guardian and tutor, whose solicitous efforts are intertwined and underlined by chiasmus: “by Timon…by Merlin”; “by Merlin…by Timon.” The shared solicitude of Merlin and Timon constructs a space within which Arthur can move from “knowing well” to “doing well,” from resolution to action. Spenser registers this point rhetorically by his placement of the second set of prepositional phrases that refer to Merlin and Timon: these phrases are between the clauses announcing Arthur’s intention to find the Faery Queen (he “resolved to seeke her out”) and his setting forth to do so (“he went to seek her forth in Faery Land”). Spenser’s use of the verb “seek” to describe both Arthur’s state of mind and his course of action stresses not only the directness of the connection between “knowing well” and “doing well” but also, again, the importance of tutelage: it is education that leads Arthur to form his intention and that, on the level of allegory, arms him for his quest. What I am especially keen to observe is that it is not tutelage alone that makes possible Arthur’s dream and subsequent heroic quest, but rather the fact that his instruction in virtue is shaped and layered with emotions. The circumstances of Arthur’s upbringing (and fashioning) carry a strong affective charge. Details of the passage quoted above combine to suggest that Arthur’s caretakers, among whom I count the poet, are guided by love and solicitude. In addition to the chiastic structuring of the mentorship of Merlin and Timon upon which I have just remarked, the vigilance of Merlin, ready to deliver Arthur into care “so soone as he was borne,” and the patience of Timon, whose tutelage of Arthur is both “long” and thorough, reflect depth and strength of affection. Spenser’s own emotional investment in his exemplary figure surfaces in diction, in the intellectual intimacy conveyed by the verbs “laboured” and “conceive,” whose linked use in the sentence heightens the affective connotations of each. His attachment to Arthur expresses itself also in a shift in verb tense, from

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present perfect to simple present: “So have I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure: whome I conceive…to have seene in a dream” (my emphasis). Spenser’s conception of Arthur grows from long and continuous brooding—still ongoing—upon this exemplary figure. That Spenser lingers in solicitude over the figure of Arthur is evidenced as well by rhetorical delay and by retrospection. Having said that he “conceive[s]” Arthur, Spenser, by means of an adverbial phrase and two relative clauses, delays telling us that what he conceives is the idea that Arthur’s “dream or vision” of the Faery Queen inaugurates his quest. Instead, the grammatical interruption tracks the narrative of Arthur’s upbringing back to the moment of his birth, implying that for Spenser, for a moment in the Letter at least, the circumstances that shape and direct Arthur’s heroic career assume precedence over his inward envisioning. A significant part of what gives Spenser’s backstory of Arthur its emotional resonance is the implied tension between familial and pedagogical imperatives and bonds. Spenser adumbrates this tension with characteristically deft strokes. With the single exception of the word “borne,” the language of childbirth—“laboured,” “conceive,” and “delivered”—attaches, not to Lady Igrayne, Arthur’s mother, but to Arthur’s male mentors, Merlin, Timon, and the poet. We should not mistake economy of signification for lack of depth, however. In imagining his story of Merlin’s giving of Arthur to Timon to be raised—Timon is entirely Spenser’s invention— Spenser invokes instructional regimens that operate in complex, sometimes oppositional, relationship to family. To begin with, and not surprisingly in a chivalric epic poem, Spenser draws on the late feudal institution of wardship, the practices of which included handing over (noble) male children whose fathers had died to the guardianship of another nobleman to be trained up in knight-service, a practice that removed the boy from the care and influence of his mother.14 By Spenser’s day, wardship no longer involved military training, but it still remained incumbent on the guardian to provide education for his ward, in principle if not in practice; and it still involved removing the ward from the direct care and supervision of the mother. There can be little doubt that Spenser would have been aware of how wardship worked. Several of the individuals in his literary network were involved with the institution: Lord Burghley, the earls of Oxford, Essex, and Leicester, and Sir Walter Raleigh all participated, as guardians or as wards; Burghley served as Master of the Court of Wards for an astonishing thirty-seven years and was succeeded in that post by his son. Even without these quasi-personal connections, Spenser could

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hardly have escaped knowing something about the business of wardship. According to Joel Hurstfield, the foremost historian of the subject, the mastership of the Court of Wards was well on its way by 1540 to becoming “one of the most influential offices of Tudor England,” while the “fiscal feudalism” of the Court became a significant source of revenue as the sixteenth century unfolded.15 Spenser’s few deft strokes thus conjure up a scenario that must frequently have been freighted with strong, and mixed, emotions. The subtle appropriation of the mother’s role here in the Letter gestures, albeit faintly, towards maternal unfitness. Although directed towards Lady Igrayne, such an aspersion underpins implicitly the very institution of wardship, whether feudal or latter-day, with its strongly masculinist ethos. Sixteenth-century wardship arrangements could be protracted and messy, with multiple suitors petitioning to purchase a wardship (in the expectation of considerable return on their investment); in the process, as Hurstfield remarks, “a mother’s claim…might easily be trampled upon” (80) and familial wishes generally shunted aside. Accordingly, the practical and financial benefits of the arrangement notwithstanding, we might suppose that there would remain for the mother—and child— residual feelings of loss, regret, resentment, even anger. Spenser, it seems, admits the possibility of such discordant feelings. When the question of the “fittingness” of Arthur’s upbringing comes up again, in the ninth canto of Book 1, it is the removal of the infant Arthur from his mother that appears as “unfit,” on emotional grounds. I shall discuss this particular discrepancy between the Letter and the poem shortly. Considered in the light of practices of wardship, then, Spenser’s lightly-sketched backstory of Arthur’s upbringing and tutelage draws into play—and into his poem—complex emotional dynamics. These dynamics register tension between familial bonds and guardianship, whether the feudal version of wardship, still operative as a literary trope if no longer as a viable social mechanism, or the contemporary version, with its professed investment in educating young noblemen. It is a further sign of Spenser’s economy and depth of signification that in the Letter’s brief recounting of Arthur’s tutelage he adumbrates also tensions between familial bonds and the humanist schooling that started to become the norm in the sixteenth century. Spenser writes of Arthur’s being “delivered” by Merlin into the care of his tutor, using a word whose obstetrical meaning usually applies to the mother, and whose connotations in the sixteenth century resonated more widely than

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they do today, encompassing several notions of freedom from bondage. As used in the Letter, “delivered” thus intimates that Arthur has been freed from detrimental ties. Such a liberation accords with the Erasmian advice, much-repeated, that pupils need to be cut from their mothers’ apron-strings. Although educational treatises and theory in the sixteenth century exploit the analogy linking fathers and schoolmasters in order to reinforce structures of authority, in other ways humanist education often pursued actively a separation of home and school. Part of the deftness in Spenser’s handling of the story of Arthur’s upbringing lies in his constructing, rhetorically, the space of instruction as a place distinct from home, in the ways that I have examined with respect to the Letter and in ways that I shall delineate with respect to the poem. His deftness lies also in his conveying both the advantage and the loss that attends such separation.

5.2

II

It could be objected that in the foregoing paragraphs I place too heavy a burden of meaning on Spenser’s few comments in the Letter about Arthur’s upbringing—were it not that the issues I highlight carry over into key episodes of the poem. Indeed, Spenser’s representation in Book I of Arthur’s upbringing registers still more fully the tensions between familial and humanist nurturance, and between family and wardship. When, in canto 9 of Book 1, Una asks for Arthur’s “name and nation” so that the “great good” he has done in freeing Redcrosse from Orgoglio’s dungeon and in exposing Duessa might not be “buried…in thanklesse thought,” Arthur cannot oblige (I.ix.2.6–9). He admits to having no inkling of his “lignage” or “certein Sire” (I.ix.3.3) and recounts instead details of his upbringing by guardian and tutor that echo those in the Letter, right down to his using also the word “delivered”—with its suggestion of emancipation from constraining conditions—to describe Merlin’s giving of him to Timon. At first, Arthur identifies his tutor simply and generically as “a Faery knight,” summarizing his tutelage in phrasing that recalls the raison d’etre and practices of the late feudal institution of wardship: he remarks that he was “streight delivered…[t]o be upbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might” (ix.3.8–9). Almost immediately, however, Arthur begins to thicken his history with lovingly-shaped memories, both of his tutor, whom he now names, twice, and of the place of instruction:

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“Unto old Timon he [i.e.Merlin] me brought bylive, Old Timon, who in youthly yeares hath beene In warlike feates th’expertest man alive, And is the wisest now on earth I weene; His dwelling is low in a valley greene, Under the foot of Rauran mossy hore, From whence the river Dee as silver cleene His tombling billowes rolls with gentle rore: There all my dayes he trained me up in vertuous lore.” (I.ix.4)

The repetition of Timon’s name, with epithet, not only conveys Arthur’s depth of affection for his tutor, but also triggers recollection that seems to transport Arthur back to the setting of his instruction—imaginative indwelling that is signalled by the temporary shift to the present tense in lines 4–8, as well as by the sustained, almost Wordsworthian attention to landscape in these lines, and that is rendered as comforting by the lulling effects of the consonance and assonance linking lines 5 and 8 in sonorous rhythms. Dolven, following William Empson, has reminded us to attend closely to the medial couplet in the Spenserian stanza, noting the frequency with which “unstable relations [are] generated by the couplet at the center of the stanza.”16 In this stanza, the instability has to do with the dislocation of “old Timon,” with the separation of his “youthly yeares,” when he “hath beene / In warlike feates th’expertest man alive,” from his present years, when he “is the wisest now” and his “dwelling is low in a valley greene” (my emphasis). The shift in tense suggests that the wisdom Timon “now” possesses, “there” in his green valley dwelling, is disconnected from the battlefield and the “warlike feates” he performed in the past. Despite being himself a Faery knight, Timon, in his “low” dwelling, is removed as well as from the pride that, conventionally and, in Spenser’s view, damagingly, forms so instrumental a part of chivalric life (as Redcrosse in this very book of The Faerie Queene has learned at such painful cost). Timon’s repudiation of chivalric pride is underscored with typical Spenserian wit, by the fact that, although his name means “honour,” he lives quite apart from the usual trappings of chivalric honour. There being no court, lists, or battlefield in this valley in the remote western reaches of Wales, where even the river’s “rore” is “gentle,” Arthur’s curriculum under Timon’s tutelage, which he sums up as “vertuous lore” in his second, more considered and heart-felt, reference to his education, cannot be identical with the “gentle thewes and martiall might” he mentions

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nine lines earlier. In the space of a stanza, that is, Arthur’s own understanding of his pupillage has deepened to accommodate fundamental and dearly-cherished ideals of humanist education: instruction in virtue, civic and personal, and loving bonds between pupil and teacher. That Arthur’s instructional setting is seemingly rural reflects another standard of humanist schooling that theorists, including Spenser’s schoolmaster, frequently espoused—physical separation of home and school. Mulcaster’s ideal school, had he established one, would have been “planted in the [out]skirtes…neare to the fieldes” (Positions, chap. 40). Such a prospect would provide ample room for the considerable amount of physical exercise that Mulcaster championed; many chapters in his Positions focus on exercising, physical training being viewed by him as integral to strengthening the bond between master and pupils. Mulcaster does seem to suggest that, if the parents are responsible people, then the child is better off living at home and walking daily to school. Close attention to his reasoning indicates, however, that he recommends this primarily as a way to avoid overburdening an already-underpaid schoolmaster with additional responsibilities and expenses: ideally, pupils would be housed by neighbours living close by the suburban school, a situation that would, perforce, weaken the pupil’s ties to his family. Mulcaster’s strong preference for semi-rural schools rests upon other grounds, too: he remarks with exasperation that “it is halfe a wonder ever to bring forth a good scholler in the hart of a great town.” In town, there are too many schools from which to choose, and too often parents will move their child from school to school “as it shall please the child,” a state of affairs bound to weaken the pupil’s bond with any one master. In this vein, we might recall that Timon’s tutelage of Arthur is “long.” The stanza that traces so affectingly such a deepening of understanding ends on a note of rupture, however. Arthur’s drifting, nostalgic recollection of the Welsh landscape terminates in the emphatically placed “There” of the final line of the stanza.17 In his stimulating analysis of Spenser’s capacious, sturdy hexameter, Dolven observes that the ninth line often “proposes itself as a moment of provisional rest” and contains “something that is reflective, summary, or even epigrammatic” (“Method,” 21–22). In the stanza that I am discussing, the hexameter registers those qualities but also something more affectively-charged—and less morally-organized, even though Arthur is summing up his education in virtue. With the abrupt, deictic “There” that begins the line, Arthur distances himself, spatially, temporally, and emotionally, from the setting of his instruction, as if

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positioning himself to weigh the affective claims of his humanist schooling. I shall suggest later that Arthur weighs those claims against familial ones, and I shall consider in detail the implications of the need to balance in this way sometimes conflicting emotional demands.

5.3

III

But I turn first to Una, to demonstrate that her response to Arthur’s rehearsal of his upbringing registers a deepening of understanding similar to Arthur’s own. Una, we recall, prompts Arthur’s recounting of his education by asking him to tell her “his name and nation” so that the “great good” he has done should not “die unknown, and buried be in thanklesse thought” (ix.2.6–9). Before hearing his story, Una, it seems, cannot conceive of any social mechanism other than lineage or dynasty for the fostering of praiseworthy deeds—for the fitting of knights to heroic action and the blazoning abroad of those actions so that praise redounds to, and continues to inspire, the heroic knight. With her interest in “name” and “nation,” Una’s assumptions about the value of fellow-praise in sustaining a beneficent commonwealth are very much of a piece with the vision of social cohesion and shared enterprise featured in the first stanza of the ninth canto, where the poet extols the “Goodly golden chain, wherewith yfere / The vertues linked are in lovely wize” (ix.1.1–2). In articulating this vision, the poet highlights the role of “praise” in producing such a “golden” state: And noble mindes of yore allyed were, In brave poursuit of chevalrous emprize, That none did others safety despize, Nor aid envy to him, in need that stands, But friendly each did others prayse devize How to advaunce with favourable hands, As this good Prince redeemd the Redcrosse knight from bands. (ix.3–9)

The vocabulary of unalloyed accomplishment—of endeavours that are both praiseworthy and praise-redounding—situates this stanza uneasily, however, between the event that has just transpired at the end of Canto viii, the stripping and banishing of Duessa, and the event that is soon to follow in Canto ix, Redcrosse’s descent into the abode of Despair. Although justified allegorically, the treatment of Duessa seems an action very far removed from the “chevalrous emprize” limned in the stanza

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quoted above, and Redcrosse’s despair, along with his consequent need to be healed in the House of Holiness, qualifies (at the very least) Prince Arthur’s “redeem[ing]” of him “from bands,” rendering Arthur’s action necessary but far from sufficient in securing Redcrosse’s release from spiritual bondage. We might notice, too, that, following Arthur’s rescue of him from Orgoglio’s prison, Redcrosse remains virtually silent in Arthur’s presence, leaving it to Una to “devize” “prayse” of the Prince. By these means, Spenser indicates that beneficent social cohesion sustained by resounding and reciprocal praise—the “chevalrous emprize” celebrated in the opening stanza of Canto ix—characterizes an era that, even in the fictional present of Arthur, Una, and Redcrosse, is a bygone one, if ever it existed. In Spenser’s day as well as in the fictional past of his poem, such socially-generative mechanisms remain imagined rather than something realized. Accordingly, Spenser has Una revise her assumptions. Upon hearing Arthur’s account of his upbringing by guardian and tutor, Una, having earlier supposed that only worthy lineage could have produced so praiseworthy a knight, now commends the instruction in “vertous lore” that produced such a “[w]ell worthy impe” and “Pupil fit for such a Tutours hand” (ix.6.1–2). Spenserian wit helps us to gauge the full force of Una’s revised view. For Spenser’s readers, “impe” could mean both offspring of a noble family and a plant-cut for grafting. In calling Arthur an “impe,” Una both acknowledges his presumed nobility and, since she uses “impe” and “pupil” interchangeably here, accepts that it was his being grafted, so to speak, into Timon’s home and humanist tutelage that made him “worthy,” that made him “fit” to accomplish “great good.” Along with Arthur’s deepened understanding of his pupillage, Una’s revised understanding of what fits Arthur to his achievements and quest reflects Spenser’s conviction that it is humanist education in virtue, rather than “chevalrous emprize,” that is positioned to accomplish “great good” (although familial feeling remains absolutely essential to Arthur’s quest, in ways that I shall discuss shortly).

5.4

IV

In these crucial central cantos of Book I, Spenser furnishes in small compass demonstrations of the efficacy of humanist education in promoting “great good,” underlining as he does so the importance of emotion in instructional settings. For Spenser it is not enough to “know well”: How

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the wisdom of the schoolroom is applied is equally, if not more, important. Just as Spenser finds the most compelling example to be one that foregrounds relational and emotional dynamics (as I argued above), so too does he understand that the preceptial wisdom at the core of the humanist curriculum must be applied in ways attuned to specific situations—and individuals—to be fruitful and that it must be applied with feeling. Both Una and Redcrosse are afflicted in these cantos, emotionally and spiritually, respectively, and Arthur brings to bear on their crises much “vertuous lore.” We shall see that in adducing the preceptial moral wisdom of the humanist curriculum, Arthur remains circumstantially flexible, rather than prescriptive, proceeding quite differently in each case, but acting with empathy in both. When Una meets Arthur “by good hap” (vii.29.1), she is suffering unbearably with the news of Redcrosse’s spiritual failings and current state of captivity; yet she presses forth, “resolving him to find”: And evermore in constant carefull mind She fedd her wound with fresh renewed bale; Long tost with stormes, and bet with bitter wind, High over hills, and lowe adowne the dale, She wandred many a wood, and measured many a vale. (vii.28.2, 5–9)

Through several stanzas’ worth of description before this, Spenser’s imagery has figured Una’s emotional distress—over having been separated from Redcrosse, over fearing that he is dead, over learning that he is being held captive—in ways that represent her sorrow as something that both afflicts her inwardly and buffets her from without, and that thus renders errant both her travels over the landscape and her travails on behalf of her knight. Una remains trapped in a loop of sorrow, her constantly renewed “bale” experienced by her as a “storm” that effectively prevents her from moving or acting in ways beneficial to Redcrosse. Notably, she moves “as the Dwarfe to her the way assigned” (vii.28.4), guided now by the character who entered the poem lagging far behind her, carrying her “needments” (I.i.6.1–4). Although his solicitude for Una is sincere, as his busy care in reviving her when she swoons indicates (vii.21.4–8), the Dwarfe can neither lead her to Redcrosse (in spite of his not having “travailled long” after Orgoglio captured Redcrosse [20.1]) nor direct her way. Unlike the Dwarfe, Arthur can restore Una to herself, which is to say, to her allegorical role, purposes, and aims. He can do so in part because

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he draws “nigh” (vii.38.1) and in part because he engages her, precept by precept, in gentle stichomythic dialogue, carefully attuning his responses to her qualms and reservations (vii.41). Both of these actions—drawing close and remaining attentive—spring from empathy of a kind that the Dwarfe, for all his sympathy for Una, cannot experience. Whereas the Dwarfe, in order to revive Una from her swoon, “does begin / To rubb her temples, and to chaufe her chin, / And everie tender part does tosse and turne” (vii.21.5–7), Arthur ministers to Una with words: when he heard her aunswers loth, he knew Some secret sorrow did her heart distraine: Which to allay and calme her storming paine, Faire feeling words he wisely gan display And for her humor fetting purpose faine, To tempt the cause it selfe for to bewray. (vii.38.3–8)

While the Dwarfe, by means of his anxious ministerings, “hardly…[Una’s] flitted life does win,” it is only to “retourne” that life “[u]nto her native prison,” from where “gins [Una’s] grieved ghost …to lament and mourne” (vii.21.7–9; my emphasis). Arthur’s gentle verbal probing, however, leaves Una “enmoved,” ready to pour out the “bleeding words” that will lead to fuller recovery and release her from “bale” (vii.38.9; 28.6). That Spenser takes pains to stress the gentle empathy of Arthur’s approach to Una is evidenced not only by this contrast between the ministrations of the Dwarfe and Arthur but also, and even more pointedly, by the striking contrast between Arthur’s method of treating Una and Arthur’s powers, as represented by his armour. An elaborate description of Arthur’s armour, helmet, and shield occupies fully eight of the nine stanzas that stand between the moment Una first catches sight of Arthur, a “goodly knight, faire marching by the way” (vii.29.2), and the moment Arthur first draws “nigh” to her (vii.38.1). It is not surprising that Arthur’s initial appearance in the poem (Una’s first sight of him is also ours) should be accompanied with such extravagant fanfare; he is, after all, the overarching hero of the entire poem, not just of this book. It is surprising that in aiding Una he draws on virtually none of the powers and strengths emblematized in his armour. Arthur’s magnificent accoutrements herald invulnerability and the related powers to breed “great terrour,” to “dismay, “affray,” “appall,” “subdew,” and to turn “men into stones,” “stones to dust,” and “dust to nought at all” (stanzas 31–36). Arthur’s

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approach to Una registers tenderness and access of emotion—“wondrous great griefe groneth in [Arthur’s] spright” (40.3). In drawing upon fellow-feeling and his store of “advice” in ministering to Una (vii.40.7), Arthur thus capitalizes on his humanist education, on the “vertuous lore” of Timon’s affectionate tutelage. In the delicate exchange of maxims in Arthur’s counselling—his instructing—of Una, we glimpse Spenser’s conviction that the precepts that underpin training in both language and morals in the humanist schoolroom must with “feeling” (38.6) be sifted through, weighed, turned over in the mind, considered in terms of the specific situation in order to be commensurate to the needs of the moment. Arthur’s wisdom in this moment lies in contriving (“fain[ing]”) words adapted to Una’s circumstances, to “her humor” (38.7). Their exchange warrants quotation in full: “Ah Lady deare,” quoth then the gentle knight, “Well may I ween, your grief is wondrous great; For wondrous great griefe groneth in my spright, Whiles thus I heare you of your sorrowes treat. But woefull Lady, let me you intrete For to unfold the anguish of your hart: Mishaps are maistred by advice discrete, And counsell mitigates the greatest smart; Found never help, who never would his hurts impart.” “O but” (quoth she) “great griefe will not be tould, And can more easily be thought, then said.” “Right so” (quoth he) “but he, that never would, Could never: will to might gives greatest aid.” “But griefe” (quoth she) “does greater grow displaid, If then it finds not helpe, and breeds despaire.” “Despaire breeds not” (quoth he) “where faith is staid.” “No faith so fast” (quoth she) “but flesh does paire.” “Flesh may empaire” (quoth he) “but reason can repaire.” (vii.40–41)

It is beyond the scope of my argument to tease out fully the subtle ways in which these stanzas enact the repair-work of Arthur’s words, but I will direct attention to some salient aspects of his ministrations. Arthur’s grief not only mirrors Una’s—both of them experience “great grief” (40.2– 3)—but also grows, empathetically, in direct response and proportion to Una’s expression of her sorrow: Arthur’s grief “grone[s] in [his] spright” as he listens to Una “of [her] sorrowes treat” (40.3–4). In offering to her

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“advice discrete” to help her master misfortune and mitigate pain, Arthur promises counsel that is both discrete and discreet. He will single out from the huge humanist inventory of adages those that he believes are appropriate to her situation, and he will offer them with circumspection, remaining alert to Una’s feelings. In his tenderly proffered advice, Arthur addresses Una’s hesitations in ways that slowly engage Una’s will to be led by reason, and so to be moved from grief to solace: “His goodly reason and well guided speech /…deepe did settle in her gracious thought” (42.1–2). Thus guided, she is “perswaded to disclose the breach, / Which love and fortune in her heart had wrought” (42.3–4; my emphasis). As is so often the case in Spenser, one word encapsulates the import of a scene: here, Una’s “disclosing ” of the sorrow that has broken her heart will help to “close” the “breach.” Una is soon healed sufficiently to recruit Arthur’s help in freeing Redcrosse from Orgoglio’s prison. Arthur’s “repair[ing]” of Una’s “faith” through the application of carefully weighed preceptial wisdom thus helps her to reconnect “knowing well” and “doing well,” an express aim of humanist education. Thus restored, and following Arthur’s rescue of Redcrosse, Una is eager to part company with Arthur: “Als Una earned her traveill to renew” (ix.18.5). Although she refrains temporarily “her forward course [to] pursew,” knowing that Redcrosse remains yet in “decayed plight,” she is no longer trapped in a loop of sorrow and no longer guided by the Dwarfe—the two conditions that made necessary Arthur’s intervention. That Arthur fulfills Spenser’s ideal of someone (counsellor, teacher, pupil) who remains circumstantially flexible, rather than prescriptive or rote-minded, in adducing the lessons and adages of humanist education is demonstrated not only in the discretion he shows in treating of Una’s grief but also in his changing course when it comes to treating of Redcrosse’s spiritual affliction. Having freed Redcrosse from Orgoglio’s dungeon, Arthur remains, initially, unexpectedly reticent in ministering to the desperately-suffering knight whose long captivity has left him “a pined corse,” a “ruefull spectacle of death and ghastly drere” (viii.40.8– 9). Spenser heightens our sense that Arthur’s tack has changed from the one he pursued with Una (when immediately—and “wisely”—he began to “display” “[f]aire feeling words” [vii.38.6]) by having Una be the one to rush to speech intended to heal. Seeing Redcrosse “clene consum’d and all his vitall powres / Decayd, and al his flesh shronk up like withered flowres,” Una runs to him with “hasty joy” and a fervent invitation for

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him to say “what evill starre” has “berobbed” him of himself (viii.41.8– 9; 42.2, 6–8). Fresh from her own salutary exchanges with Arthur, Una proceeds to adduce a maxim that could have been culled freshly from a commonplace book, urging Redcrosse to speak, by saying “good growes of evils priefe” (viii.43.6). But “hasty joy,” Spenser suggests, can be overbearing: “The cheareless man, whom sorow did dismay, / Had no delight to treaten of his griefe; / His long endured famine needed more reliefe” (viii.43.7–9). Arthur intervenes tactfully, preventing further probing from Una, and seeming now to dismiss as unhelpful the very course of healing conversation that he had pursued with Una by countering her adage with one of his own that recommends silence: “Faire Lady, then said that victorious knight, / The things, that grievous were to doe, or beare, / Them to renew, I wote breeds no delight” (viii.44.1–3). Having deflected from Redcrosse Una’s loving but, as endured by the afflicted knight, uncomfortable, attention, Arthur in turn offers his own words of counsel. But he does so in a flurry of adages that seem only tenuously connected to Redcrosse’s particular crisis: “Best musicke breeds delight in loathing eare”; “[T]h’only good, that growes of passed feare, / Is to be wise, and ware of like agein”; “[B]lisse may not abide in state of mortall men.” (viii.44.4, 5–6, 9)

Dolven reads stanza 44, and Arthur’s general attempt to take stock of what has befallen Redcrosse, as a “study in lesson-making” (Scenes 3). He observes that the victory of turning painful experience into something pedagogically useful for Spenser’s characters and readers alike, a lesson “[d]eepe written in [the] heart with yron pen” (viii.44.8), is a hard-won and uncertain triumph.18 But he misses, I think, much of the import of this scene by not addressing the pronounced impertinence of the lesson that Arthur draws. The precepts Arthur adduced in Una’s case were attuned with exquisite precision to her suffering in that moment; the preceptial wisdom that he applies in Redcrosse’s case is not particularly well calibrated to address his present situation (although Arthur is responsive to Redcrosses’s deeper needs, as I shall suggest). The authoritative moral that Arthur draws, “blisse may not abide in state of mortall men,” verges on triteness; it is, in Dolven’s own pointed phrasing, a “maxim…ripe for the commonplace book” (“Method,” 21). Upon closer reflection—reflection of the kind that its formulation here as a maxim is designed exactly to

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deflect—it also seems, as I have said, a little off the mark, not quite immediately relevant to the sufferings that Redcrosse has just endured. To this point in Book 1, we have not witnessed in Redcrosse a fall from bliss. Up to now, the trajectory of his career has been from “clownish” young knight yearning to “prove his puissance” and “winne [himself] worship” to victim of his own chivalric pride (Letter; I.i.3). Arthur draws the moral for “this day’s lesson,” not from Redcrosse’s specific circumstances and failings, that is, but from the large inventory of adages that formed the bulk of the grammar schoolboy’s instruction in virtue and that therefore constituted the shared “vertuous lore” of humanist pedagogical culture. It is not so much that Arthur’s maxim is “ripe for” the commonplace book, but, rather, that it has been plucked from the commonplace book, as a moral more or less suitable to the occasion. A. C. Hamilton, annotator par excellence of the moral allegory of Spenser’s poem, identifies no fewer than seven echoes in the poem of this specific maxim, a gloss that underlines the element of universality in Arthur’s counsel. While wide applicability does not, in itself, disqualify Arthur’s maxim as counsel or instruction, it should caution us to reconsider his intentions. As I remarked above, Arthur is responsive to Redcrosse’s deep need in this moment: that need is to shrink from view, and from direct attention to his situation, as from scrutiny too painful to bear. Arthur’s broadlyapplicable sententiae, “be wary of making the same mistake twice,” “bliss cannot last,” protect Redcrosse from too-searching an inquiry into the specifics his misfortunes, the very universality of the adages making them seem so authoritative as to settle the matter and render further inquiry pointless. Arthur deflects attention from Redcrosse’s current state and agony so well that we, the readers, might not even notice that Redcrosse does not speak at all during the punishment of Duessa or during Arthur’s story of his upbringing—silence extending over 26 stanzas. This is not to say that Spenser forgets about Redcrosse for more than two dozen stanzas. When Redcrosse does finally speak, it becomes clear that Arthur’s tact— and that is the best word for how he handles Redcrosse’s crisis—that tact has furnished Redcrosse with the time and space that he needs to confront his own painful sense of shame about the “pricking” chivalric pride that led directly to his defeat and imprisonment by Orgoglio. Spenser knows that readers will recall how Redcrosse entered the poem: “pricking on the plaine,” “crav[ing]” “worshippe” and the “grace” of “Glorianna” above “all earthly thinges,” yearning to “prove his puissance,”

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and, we are invited to surmise, “disdayning” to “curb his steed” sufficiently to keep pace with the slower, more modest Una (I.1–4). Arthur’s tactful deflection of pressing attention to Redcrosse’s grievous state gives Una’s champion the chance to revise his formerly prideful ambitions and actions—now the source of deep shame—and to understand his quest in new terms. When, following Arthur’s recounting of his ravishing dream of the Faery Queen, Una hints obliquely to Redcrosse that glory is what awaits Arthur, not him (ix.16.5–8), Redcrosse’s reply (his first words since calling for death in Orgoglio’s dungeon) reflects his new understanding: “Thine [Una’s], O then,” said the gentle Redcrosse knight, “Next to that Ladies [Glorianna’s] love, shalbe the place, O fayrest virgin, full of heavenly light, Whose wondrous faith, exceeding earthly race Was firmest fixt in myne extremest case. And you, my Lord, the Patrone of my life, Of that great Queene may well gaine worthie grace: For only worthie you through prowes priefe Yf living man mote worthie be, to be her liefe.” (ix.17)

Una’s champion has now, correctly, placed Una above Glorianna— although in the hearing of Arthur, he says, tactfully, “next to”—from whence her “heavenly light” can guide him on his “earthly race.” Redcrosse has not returned fully to his former strengths. As Una recognizes he is “yet weake and wearie” and she knows that he cannot confront the dragon in “dreadfull fight” until he has “recovered” his “former hew” (ix.20.7–9). In fact, he must first sink to despair, a more spiritually profound and perilous state of emotion than the shame he has just worked through, and then be repaired, restored, and instructed in the House of Holiness (a sojourn that offers evocative points of contrast with Arthur’s tutelage, as I will suggest at the end of the next section). But partial victories are the norm in Spenser’s poem and we are certainly meant to acknowledge what Arthur has accomplished in bringing to bear the wisdom of the humanist schoolroom. Spenser represents the parting of the two knights in terms that recall, even as they reconfigure, the vision of social cohesion expressed in the stanza that opens canto ix and that I discussed in detail earlier as an unrealizable ideal. As Redcrosse and Arthur bid each other farewell, they secure lasting bonds:

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Then those two knights, fast frendship for to bynd, And love establish each to other trew, Gave goodly gifts, the signs of gratefull mynd, And eke as pledges firme, right hands together joynd. (ix.18.7–9)

Here, the dream of unity and beneficence is of an altogether different order than the one delineated in the opening stanzas of the canto: it is less ambitious, “fast frendship” rather than “chevalrous emprize”; it is founded on shared gratitude rather than mutual praise; it is more intimate, grounded in privately exchanged assurances of friendship rather than in blazoned-abroad reputations; it is more affectively and affectingly charged. Notably, too, it is not unalloyed like the golden state envisioned in the canto’s opening stanza. Having spent the night “diversly discoursing of their loves,” the trio part at sunrise when the “golden Sunne his glistering head gan shew,” a parting that brings “sad remembraunce” to Arthur and “traveill…renew[ed]” to Una, reminders to them and to us that much remains to be done in the shared enterprise of establishing the ideal commonwealth. Arthur feels “fresh desire his voyage to pursew” and Una “[y]earn[s] her traveill to renew” (ix.18.2–5). If the idealized, but unrealizable, social cohesion represented in the opening stanza is founded on “vertues linked” and “noble minds…allyed” (ix.1.2–3), the community shadowed here is bound together in love, loss, and yearning.

5.5

V

In Arthur’s instructing of Una and Redcrosse, and in the outcomes of that instruction, we thus see demonstrated on a small, but resonant, scale my claim that Spenser attends always and with delicacy to the parts that emotions play in scenes of instruction and counsel that draw on humanist education in virtue—which is almost always education aimed ultimately at civic virtue. In these crucial central cantos, we see, too, that Spenser remains attuned always to how structures of feeling support the dream of a commonwealth, the visionary goal of the entire poem and of all its questing knights. I suggested at the conclusion of Sect. 5.2 that Arthur himself balances the conflicting emotional demands of humanist schooling and familial feeling in the fostering of his “dream or vision of the Faery Queen” (Letter). There we saw that, in responding to Una’s request that he tell of his “name and nation,” Arthur offered instead an affectively-charged—and affecting—description of his humanist tutelage, saying that what she

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asked for was beyond “the compas of [his] witt” since Merlin had never revealed to him his lineage (ix.3.2). Una, accordingly, revised her assumptions about what fits a knight to accomplish “great good” (ix.2.8). Yet Arthur’s response to Una’s asking about his “name and nation” circles back to the familial (and, consequently, noble chivalric enterprise) in a way that underscores just how much instruction in virtue can also feel like loss in Spenser rather than, or in addition to, the accomplishment that Una praises and that Spenser affirms as socially beneficent. Her acknowledgement that it is Timon’s commendable instruction in “vertuous lore” that has fitted Arthur for his worthy actions returns us to Arthur’s own words on the course of his life, to the answer he gave to Una when she asked about his “name and nation”: both the lignage and the certain Sire, From which I sprong, from me are hidden yit. For all so soone as life did me admit Into this world, and shewed heavens light, From mothers pap I taken was unfit. (I.ix.3.3–7; my emphasis)

Arthur’s stress on the speed and abruptness with which he was removed from his mother’s nurturance, and the note of recrimination in his word “unfit,” catch at something that Una’s commendation does not register: the emotional cost to Arthur of an education in virtue that required the severing of familial ties. We have seen already that Arthur feels fondness for his tutor—in line with the best pedagogical theory of the day—and, although deprived of his “mothers pap,” he enjoyed, and throve under, his “Tutours noriture” (I.ix.5.4). We are given to understand, however, that the very question that Una asked him at the outset regarding his name and lineage haunted him throughout his pupillage. Describing for her Merlin’s part in his upbringing, he recalls the great Magicien Merlin came, As was his use, ofttimes to visit me: For he had charge my discipline to frame, And Tutours noriture to oversee. Him oft and oft I asked in privite, Of what loines and what lignage I did spring: Whose aunswere bad me still assured bee: That I was sonne and heire unto a king, As time in her just terme the truth to light should bring. (I.ix.5)

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Arthur’s asking Merlin “in privitie,” out of hearing of Timon—his recognizing that it would be a breach of decorum to ask in the presence of the tutor who has shown such solicitude for him—implies that he understands that in his instructional setting Timon’s “noriture” takes the place of familial nurturance (“mothers pap”). That awareness does not cancel out longing, however; Arthur’s asking “oft and oft” gestures towards his feeling that something is missing. We can press the medial couplet and the diction a little more, to yield a fuller measure of the gap between pupillage and filial feeling. The suggestion in the word “oversee” (line 4) that Merlin remains aloof, like one of the examiners who routinely visited grammar schools to evaluate the progress of students and the competence of schoolmasters, is countered by line five’s “privitie,” with its insistence on the intimacy needed to broach the topic of the painful longing that Arthur feels. Similarly, “frame” and “spring,” the words that Arthur associates with the respective ways in which school and family shape subject-hood—Merlin “frame[s]” his school “discipline”; Arthur feels himself to have “sprung” from “loines and lignage”—these words with their very different connotations gesture to a whole range of ways in which the “discipline” of schooling can feel like unnatural constraint of natural filial feelings. Indeed, with their widely differing connotations and imagistic associations, “frame” and “spring” positioned opposite to each other on either side of the medial couplet, bring school and home into contention with each other. Along with the measures yielded in this stanza, we might note further that what Arthur experiences as deprivation—his being “taken unfit” from “mother’s pap”—is registered in the Letter to Raleigh as vigilance and care on the part of Merlin, whose overseeing of Arthur’s “discipline” began with his “deliver[ing]” of Arthur to Timon’s tutelage “so soone as he was borne.” The Letter is famous for its inconsistencies, some of them minor, with the poem proper. This discrepancy between Letter and poem regarding the emotional values attendant upon Arthur’s removal from his mother, far from incidental, registers something very fundamental about Spenser’s sense of how familial imperatives and humanist education align—or, rather, fail to align: the respective emotional communities of home and school, Spenser suggests, remain incommensurate with one another. We might begin to think further about what it means, for Arthur in particular and The Faerie Queene in general, for learning to feel like loss by remembering that Arthur’s entire quest is in search of something he

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has lost, and by remarking that the same canto in which Arthur expresses his longing for familial context is the very canto in which he describes his ravishing dream of the vanished Faery Queen. Arthur’s double recitation in this canto—of his pupillage, including his longing to know his lineage, and of his dream—marks the second time when references to Arthur’s birth, tutelage, and quest-vision cluster together in suggestive ways, the first being in the passage from the Letter that I cited at the outset of my discussion. There, we recall, Spenser recounts what he has “laboured to doe in the person of Arthure,” saying that he has conceived Arthur, after his long education by Timon, to whom he was by Merlin delivered to be brought up, so soone as he was borne of the Lady Igrayne, to have seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen. (Letter)

What we might call Spenser’s grammar of heroic agency is subtle indeed. The adverbial clause “so soone as he was borne” can look ahead, syntactically if not logically, to modify Arthur’s envisioning of the Faery Queen and to suggest thereby that the vision was awaiting Arthur’s birth, as it were. When we consider what Spenser’s narrative here elides—Merlin’s delivering of Arthur to Timon glosses over the fact of Arthur’s having been taken from his mother—it is as if the dream of the Faery Queen takes shape in compensation for the loss of the mother. This certainly seems to be the belief—or intention—of Spenser’s Merlin, to judge from Canto ix once again and Arthur’s recalling for Una Merlin’s answer to his question about family and lineage: when pressed by Arthur about his “name and nation,” Merlin’s “aunswere,” we recall, “bad [Arthur] still assured bee, / That [he]was sonne and heire unto a king, / As time in her just term the truth to light should bring ” (I.ix.5.7– 9; my emphasis). Merlin’s veiled hints about Arthur’s identity map onto Arthur’s own account of himself in telling ways. Merlin’s word “term,” the usual word in Spenser’s day for a completed pregnancy, looks back to Arthur’s recounting, a mere two stanzas earlier, of the moment of his birth. There, in speaking of his birth, Arthur describes himself as having been “shewed heavens light,” anticipating with his wording Merlin’s prediction (“truth to light”) of the revelation that awaits Prince Arthur. Merlin thus offers to Arthur a birth-narrative that competes with Arthur’s own maternally-centred one, deferring indefinitely Arthur’s inscription into a familial context as a son and heir, predicting instead inscription

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into something larger and more abstract than mere family. In place of lineage, family, mother, Merlin offers prophesied political history, and in so doing looks ahead to Arthur’s second “ravishing” experience: his reading of Briton moniments (II.ix.59.6).19 Before turning to Arthur’s experience in Alma’s Castle, I would like to touch on Redcrosse’s sojourn in the House of Holiness, where Book I’s titular knight not only undergoes instruction on how to follow the path to heaven but also finds a spiritual home, one that is deeply, securely maternal. When Redcrosse has been “cure[d]” in “conscience” by “wise Patience” and “trew Repentaunce,” Una entrusts him to the care of Charissa, wishing her to “be so good, / As in her vertuous rules to schoole her knight” (I.x.32.6–9). But Charissa is first described several stanzas earlier, when Una, asking after her, learns that “forth she may not [yet] come: / For she of late is lightened or her wombe / And hath increast the world with one sonne more” and it would “trouble” her to be disturbed (x.16). The emphasis on the protected space of the childbirth bed, which does not add perceptibly to our understanding of Charissa’s allegorical function, is repeated when Una does hand Redcrosse into her care: we’re reminded that Charissa was “late in child-bed brought” but has now “woxen strong, and left her fruitful nest” (x.29.7–8). Charissa’s capacity to nurture is similarly stressed, vivid depictions of breastfeeding spanning two consecutive stanzas: baring “neck and brests” so that “her babes might sucke their fill,” Charissa has “multitudes of babes” hanging upon her “[W]hom still she fed” (x.30.7–8; 31.1–3). We are certainly meant to remember the serpent-woman Error, with her “thousand young ones that she dayly fed, / Sucking upon her poisonous dugs,” and to contemplate the ways in which Charity corrects and transfigures Error (I.i.15.5–6). But we are also meant, I think, to recall that Arthur was “delivered” from his mother by Merlin at the moment of birth, taken “unfit” from his mother’s breast. Surely, we are also meant to feel, keenly, that Arthur’s being taken into wardship deprived him of maternal affection: the keynote in Spenser’s portrayal of Charissa’s home is the abundance of joy and good cheer: Charissa joys in watching her babes at play (x.31.2); she is wished “joy” of her “happy brood” by Una and her knight (x.32.2); she entertains her guests with “chearfull mood” (x.32.4); and she is “joyous” in response to Una’s requesting help in schooling Redcrosse (x.33.1). The “vertuous rules” of her “school” have to do with emotions as much as they are strictures about virtuous conduct: taking Redcrosse “by the hand,” she “instruct[s] him in everie good behest,

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/ Of love, and righteousness” (x.32.6; 33.2–4). If a sense of loss shadows Arthur’s understanding of his pupillage in the ways I have suggested, Charissa’s schooling of Redcrosse gauges for us the depth of that loss.

5.6

VI

The full significance of Merlin’s offering a prophecy of commonwealth, as well as a fuller answer to what it means for learning to feel like loss in The Faerie Queene, emerges in Book II, when Arthur sojourns at Alma’s castle. The castle, including the turret that houses Briton moniments, has been much surveyed for its allegorical import. But remarkably little attention has been paid to the specific ways in which the castle’s upper chambers constitute an instructional setting. Even less attention has been paid to the affective responses of the visiting knights, Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon, to the chambers, and their presiding “sages” (II.ix.47.8). Their reactions highlight Spenser’s conviction that the discipline, in the sense of the intellectual programme, of the humanist schoolroom cannot be separated from its affective charge. On their tour of the upper chambers, the two knights evince little interest in the first chamber and even some antipathy towards its resident genius. The chamber is “dispainted” with “sondry colours” depicting “infinite shapes” of the kind that “flit” in “idle fantasies”: “Infernall Hags, Centaurs, feendes, Hippodames, / Apes, Lyons, Aegles, Owles, fooles, lovers, children, Dames” (II.ix.50). It is inhabited by Phantastes and “buzz[ing]” with “idle thoughtes and fantasies, / Devices, dreames, opinions unsound, / Shewes, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies; / And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies” (II.ix.51.6–9). The first chamber is remarkable for its lack of order—things are jumbled together without coherence—and for its drawing on the kind of “lore” that the humanist schoolroom worked actively to discourage: fairy lore, old wives’ tales, superstitions, beliefs and wonders that belong to childhood and that are learned at the knee of mother or nurse. Neither the narrator nor Alma disparages either the chamber or its sage, however. The chamber is counted among the “three” rooms in the castle that are “chiefest, and of greatest powre”; Phantastes is counted among the “three honorable sages” who are the “wisest men…that lived in their ages” (II.ix.47.7–9). Yet Arthur and Guyon react to Phantastes with aversion, as is suggested in these lines, which reflect indirectly their viewpoint:

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A man of yeares yet fresh, as mote appere, Of swarth complexion, and of crabbed hew, That him full of melancholy did shew; Bent hollow beetle browes, sharp staring eyes, That mad or foolish seemd: one by his vew Mote deeme him borne with ill disposed skyes, When oblique Saturne sat in the house of agonyes. (II.ix.52.3–9)

Nor do the knights seem inclined to linger in the chamber, offering no objection when Alma hustles them out in short order to bring them to the next room (53.1–2). Our impression that they feel aversion towards Phantastes arises, not only from the unpleasantness of Phantastes—his ill-humoured and unbalanced demeanour—and the willingness of the knights to move on to the next room, but also from the fact that, grammatically, the verse does not connect the knights to Phantastes in any way; as I observed above, we surmise that we are seeing Phantastes through their eyes. That will not be the case in the second and third rooms, where the knights’ reactions will be pointed clearly and registered explicitly in the grammar and syntax. The second chamber offers to the knights an altogether different affective experience and a much different kind of lore. The pleasure they take in this room is reflected rhythmically in the verse, in the balanced phrases and doubled modifiers that replace the tumbling asyndeton that characterizes several of the lines devoted to the first chamber. Their pleasure is reflected also in the greater conceptual tidiness of the lists that inventory what the second chamber offers. Whereas the asyndeton used in describing the contents of the first room strings together, haphazardly, unrelated concepts or realms of experience or things (owls, children, centaurs, Dames all indiscriminately thrown together, for example), the lists that describe the second chamber are orderly and conceptually clear in their principles of organization, with related concepts and arenas of endeavour clustering together within individual lines. In this chamber, the walls are “painted faire with memorable gestes / Of famous Wisards, and with picturals,” depictions Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals, Of commen wealthes, of states, of pollicy, Of lawes, of judgementes, of decretals; All artes, all science, all Philosophy, And all that in the world was ay thought wittily. (II.ix.53.2–9)

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This chamber reflects the organized and structured thought of the humanist schoolroom, instead of the wildly associative or elliptical logic of a tale or superstition; this chamber reflects the large-scale social institutions and civic abstractions that preoccupy humanists and underwrite humanist enterprises, including education, instead of the idiosyncrasies and self-interestedness of “sooth-sayes,” “leasings,” or “tales.” The business of the second chamber is weighty, unlike the flitting, “thin,” “idle” fantasies that fill the first chamber: the asyndeton in the lines describing the second chamber deepens into anaphora, the addition of “of” and “all” to each and every noun listed creating gravitas. This chamber offers “vertuous lore.” Unlike the presiding genius of the first chamber who is, paradoxically, a “man of yeares yet fresh”—that is, a man who is intellectually immature although old—the figure who presides over the second chamber is a man “of ripe and perfect age” (II.ix.54.2). Unlike Phantastes, whose busily working wit quickly pre-judges the infinite ideas and fantasies that materialize and then evaporate (49.7–9), this figure has “meditate[d] all his life long” and has through “continuall practice and usage” of his intellect “growne right wise and wondrous sage” (54.3–5). Balanced phrases register rhetorically the feelings of deep satisfaction that settle in the knights when they enter the second chamber and see its presiding figure. The poet is explicit about the strength of the attraction that the knights experience. Whereas they felt aversion towards Phantastes and had no desire to stay in his company, they do wish to remain in the presence of this figure: “Great plesure had those straunger knightes, to see / His goodly reason, and grave personage, / That his disciples both desyred to bee” (ix. 54.6–8). An ideal schoolroom, the second chamber, with its exemplary master, makes of its visiting knights willing pupils and subjects. In large measure, their willingness to become “disciples” is a function of the stability and balance and the discipline—conceptual, intellectual, and scholarly—that pervade this chamber. The humanist educational project, Spenser suggests, rests upon structures of strong, positive feeling every bit as much as upon curricula, exercises, or coercion. Although reluctant to leave the second chamber and its master, “his disciples both desyrd to bee; / But Alma thence led to th’hindmost rowme of three” (54.8–9), the knights enter the last room and approach its genius, Eumnestes, with “reverence dew,” “wonder[ing] at his endless exercise” (II.ix.59.1–2). Drawn by their reverence to inspect the old

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man’s (he’s older than either Nestor or Mathusalem [57.1–2]) extensive library, the knights chance upon the chronicles of their respective nations—for Arthur, this is Briton moniments (ix.59.6). Not that chance has anything to do with it. Arthur happens upon this book because he is ready for it, emotionally as well as cognitively. Everything in his tutelage—and his tour of the chambers repeats, in a different register, the trajectory of his upbringing and humanist education, right down to the drawing away from the nursery to the schoolroom that we have traced in the Letter and in Book 1—everything has prepared Arthur for this defining moment in which he feels himself at long last inscribed as a son. Having read voraciously through the chronicle to the point at which it breaks off “There abruptly” with the death of his (to him) unknown father (II.x.68.1–2), Arthur feels that the breach “him self halfe seemed to offend” (68.6–7; my emphasis). But the wound of repeated loss—once again, as when he pleaded with Merlin to tell him his lineage, Arthur is cut off from knowledge of his father—is almost immediately assuaged by “secret pleasure” and the gap filled (68.8). The following stanza, which warrants quotation in full, offers an answer that brings to a profoundly affecting resolution Arthur’s experience of learning as loss, as well as the central themes of this chapter. Prince Arthur, At last quite ravisht with delight, to heare The royall Ofspring of his native land, Cryde out, “Deare countrey, O how dearly deare Ought thy remembraunce, and perpetual band Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand Did commun breath and nouriture receave? How brutish is it not to understand, How much to her we owe, that all us gave, That gave unto us all, what ever good we have.” (II.x.69)

In describing Arthur as “ravisht with delight” by his reading of British chronicles—the exact phrase that he uses to describe Arthur’s reaction to his dream of Glorianna (I.ix.14.6) and the very word that he uses in the Letter to describe Arthur’s “dream or vision of the Faery Queen” when he is “ravished” by her beauty—Spenser aligns Arthur’s quest with the British history hoped for and prophesied in The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s ideal (and idealized) Protestant commonwealth will come into being when Arthur is wed to Glorianna, magnificence to glory. To put it this way is to view Arthur’s epiphany and the prophecy of commonwealth

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from the outside, however. Spenser’s touch in this stanza is to make us understand Arthur’s ravishment as he experiences it: as a healing of the breach between familial feeling and humanist education that opened upon Merlin’s delivering of him to Timon to be raised. Timon’s tutelage, we recall, instilled in Arthur the personal—and above all, civic—virtue that is the sine qua non of humanist education in this period, but at the cost of familial bonds. Arthur’s ecstatic apostrophe to the “Deare countrey” who has fostered him and from whom he now believes himself to have drawn “breath” and “nouriture” in common with his countrymen reveals how completely Arthur feels himself to have been incorporated into the body politic—and how fulfilling he believes that incorporation to be. Merlin’s plans and Timon’s tutelage have borne perfect fruit, it seems. But Spenser’s word, “ravished,” always a particularly charged word in his poetry and placed so precisely in the instructional settings that I have been tracing, might make us pause before assuming that Spenser shares the belief (the hope) that overwhelms Arthur in this moment. Even in its most positive and joyful connotations, “ravish” is a word that almost always denotes violent loss.

Notes 1. Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in “The Faerie Queene,” 45, 5. 2. Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, 216. 3. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 136. 4. This remark was made in private correspondence. I am grateful to Andrew Wallace for his comments and suggestions on this chapter. 5. Spenser shares with many others of his period, teachers, writers, philosophers, the conviction that the aim of knowledge is virtuous action. In the Letter, he speaks of the “ethicke” and “politicke” ends of The Faerie Queene; the phrases “knowing well” and “doing well” are most familiar to students of the period from Philip Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy,” where Sidney writes that “the highest end of the mistress knowledge…stands…in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only” (113). 6. The sentence in which Spenser refers to other methods of delivering the discipline that shapes a virtuous person reads thus: “To some I know [my] Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises” (737). The latter method

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7.

8.

9. 10.

alludes clearly to sermons; the former, I suggest, to schoolroom practices. Kempe notes that “first the scholar shall learn the precepts, secondly he shall learn to note the examples of the precepts in unfolding other men’s works” (Education Sig. F2; cited in Charlton 106). The Preface to Lily’s Latin Grammar is just as clear about the plain delivery of education, touting this Grammar as “plainly to be compiled and set forth” to lead “scholars to learning and godly education” (cited in Charlton 108). Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh, appended to the 1590 instalment of The Faerie Queene but not included in the 1596 instalment, has occasioned considerable debate. As a guide to the poem, it has perplexed readers as much as it has enlightened them. While it has been adduced uncritically as a statement that illuminates the poem, exactly as it purports to do, it has also been dismissed summarily as irrelevant to our understanding of the poem, especially in its completed version as we have it. Bibliographically, it poses a crux, as Gordon Teskey and others have observed, because the question of where, exactly, to position it within a given edition cannot be answered once and for all—as the extent to which early printers moved it around attests. For Teskey, in “Positioning Spenser’s ‘Letter to Raleigh,’” the difficulty in pinning down its physical location in The Faerie Queene is fitting, given the Letter’s waffling between the intention to explain the genesis of the poem and the desire to be “an act of criticism” (44). The Letter has been read as canny in its presentation of the poet (Wayne Erickson, “Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene’s 1590 Publication”) as well as politically radical—in the fashioning of its readership (Grogan, Exemplary Spenser). I share with Grogan the conviction that the Letter retains significant heuristic value, but on quite different grounds. Fundamentally interested in Spenser’s critique and revision of humanist epistemology, Grogan follows what she identifies as signposts to Spenser’s didactic poetics and “radical pedagogical ideals,” ideals that include “individual hermeneutic freedom and ethical selfdetermination outside the de facto categories” defined in and by humanist educational theory (44–45). I am interested in the Letter’s signposts to the emotional dynamics that propel the movement from “knowing well” to “doing well” and the affective charges that shape agency. For discussions of “example” in Spenser, see especially Dolven, Scenes, and Grogan; for a discussion of exemplarity in the broader context of the Renaissance use of historical models as exemplars of moral action, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History. I would like to thank Glenn Clark for encouraging me to think about the implications of the word “grace” in this context. I would like to thank Andrew Wallace for suggesting, in private correspondence, an elided connection between Arthur’s attachment to Gloriana and Plato’s account of the role of eros in the construction of knowledge. As

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this chapter aims to show, the emotional dynamic linking Arthur to Gloriana is complexly generated through love for his mentor and his tutor, which relates it to Plato’s account with its emphasis on love for Socrates, but that operates in tension with his love for family, which alters the Platonic dynamic. For a wide-ranging discussion of the role of eros in learning that takes as its starting point Plato’s account, see Kathleen Hull, “Eros and Education.” I draw these meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary. On the allegorical status of Spenser’s characters and the question of how they experience themselves in the poem, see Susanne Wofford, Choice of Achilles; for engagement with Wofford, see Dolven, Scenes, Chapter 4. Other important studies of Spenser’s allegory include Angus Fletcher, Allegory, and Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence. Although I will conclude my argument in this chapter by noting the violent loss at the heart of Arthur’s pedagogy, I am not concerned in this chapter with either the allegorical meanings of Spenser’s poem and characters or the interplay between allegorical mode and narrative. Jeffrey Fruen, “The Faery Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana,” 53–88, links Gloriana to the figure of wisdom in the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, a connection that invites us, indirectly, to link Arthur’s quest with his tutelage. Fruen himself does not pursue such a line of analysis, however. Generally, commentators who discuss Arthur’s dream of the Faery Queen do not link it to education in the way that my argument does. My discussion of wardship draws on Judith Owens, “Warding off Injustice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene.” Taking Exception to the Law, ed. Don Beecher, et al. (Toronto Univ. Press, 2015): 202–24. Joel Hurstfield, The Queen’s Wards: Wardship and Marriage Under Elizabeth I, 243. Jeff Dolven, “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” 20. See Heather Dubrow, Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric, for a stimulating analysis of the relational, especially, spatial situations created by “pointing” words. Dolven’s analysis of this stanza contributes to his larger project of describing the “growing crisis of confidence in the humanist program” whose pedagogy relied heavily on the drawing of maxims (Scenes 8). Andrew Escobedo, in Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England, develops a dense, cogent, and persuasive argument about the “loss” represented by Arthur’s reading of the British chronicle. He focusses, however, on what “Arthur” means for national history and Spenser’s sense of historiography; I focus on what national history means for Arthur.

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References Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London and Toronto: Routledge and K. Paul, Univ. of Toronto, 1965. Print. Dolven, Jeffrey. “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 19 (2004): 17–25. Web. ——–. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2007. Print. Dubrow, Heather. Deixis in the Early Modern Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print. Erickson, Wayne. “Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of the Faerie Queene’s 1590 Publication.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 10 (1992): 139–74. Web. Escobedo, Andrew. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England. Cornell Univ. Press, 2004. Print. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory, the Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964. Print. Fruen, Jeffrey. “The Faery Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana.” Spenser Studies 11 (1990): 53–88. Grogan, Jane. Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990. Print. Hull, Kathleen. “Eros and the Role of Desire in Teaching and Learning.” The NEA Higher Education Journal 18(1–2) (2002): 19–32. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children. Ed. William Barker. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994. Print. Owens, Judith. “Warding off Injustice in Book V of The Faerie Queene.” In Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern England. Ed. Don Beecher, Travis DeCook, Grant Williams, Andrew Wallace. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2015: 201–24. Print. Sidney, Philip. The Defence of Poesy. Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print. Spenser, Edmund. Shepheardes Calender. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William Oram, et al. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989. Print. Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Cornell Univ. Press, 1996. Print. ———. “Positioning in Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh”, in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett. Univ. of Calgary Press, Calgary, 1990. Print. Wallace, Andrew. Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. Print. Wofford, Susanne. The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic. Stanford Univ. Press, 1994. Print.

CHAPTER 6

Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet

In the previous chapter, I argued in part that Prince Arthur’s education in The Faerie Queene registers the slow, often painful process by which familial feeling can be transferred to the commonwealth. Hamlet’s dilemma— how or when or if to avenge his father’s murder—tracks a different course: the difficulties of carrying into an aristocratic familial setting the practices, and pieties, learned in school. Hamlet’s initial encounter with the Ghost who enjoins upon him revenge and remembrance famously turns on his vehement promise, first to “sweep to [his] revenge” and then to “wipe away” from the “table of his memory” all that his youthful education has taught him in order to remember his father’s command only.1 Just as famously, Hamlet proceeds to delay, occasioning thereby both the longest of Shakespeare’s plays and one of the most enduring critical debates in Shakespeare studies.2 To take up the question of Hamlet’s delay is to cover ground that has been worked thoroughly and fruitfully, of course. My attention to the structures of thought and feeling that scaffold Hamlet’s actions (and inaction) proceeds from a perspective not yet developed in criticism, however; my argument, accordingly, yields new insights and furnishes further lines of inquiry. Many of the most influential readings of Hamlet’s delay have been psychoanalytical in focus, unsurprisingly, given Hamlet’s modern status as the play that first articulated compellingly, if it did not actually invent, inwardness and that afforded Freud salient points of analysis.3 I share this widespread and enduring critical interest in Hamlet’s emotional, psychological, and ethical motivations, but I locate these motivations in the © The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_6

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contradictions between humanist pedagogy and the imperatives of families. It is commonplace to observe that Hamlet is a play filled with sons, avenging sons; it is almost as customary to observe that it is a play that foregrounds scholars from Wittenberg. But these two observations are not often joined in one analysis or argument. In the next two chapters, I look at this paired emphasis on sons and scholars, very closely, and from angles that reveal Hamlet’s tragic dilemma to be an inevitable result of his being a son and scholar. To follow rhetorically, and minutely, Hamlet’s turns of thought and emotion in crucial scenes and speeches is to see that he is trapped between his schooling and his family. It is to see that neither his humanist education, for all its promise, nor his wish to “remember” his father, for all its culturally and ideologically sanctioned force, can furnish him with agency or direction. His repeated recourse to deeply ingrained practices of humanist schooling, even in speeches that we expect to be grounded entirely in sentiments that are inward, personal, and private—such as his first soliloquy, delivered before he learns of the Ghost—indicates the impossibility of his ever “wiping away” all traces of his education. At the same time, though, in key moments (such as the first soliloquy), there is overwhelming evidence that the humanist habits of intellection that he can never quite eradicate are totally inadequate for dealing with the emotional turmoil occasioned by his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. Charting the incommensurability between schooling and family feeling will be the work of this chapter. With the appearance of the Ghost, Shakespeare tightens even more the painful contradictions between Hamlet’s humanist schooling and his deeply felt filial obligations. Gauging that will be the work of the following chapter. There, we shall see that Hamlet’s willing—and willed—subjection to his Ghost father’s “commandment” denies him agency and forecloses, tragically, what now emerges (although just) as the liberating potential of humanist schooling.4

6.1

I

I begin with a reading of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,” a speech that, as countless others have noted, is layered with indices to Hamlet’s pressure points and habits of mind (1.2.129–59).5 The greatest pressure builds up, I contend, because the humanist rhetorical and intellectual practices that condition Hamlet’s thought (and, to a degree, his emotions) and that structure his moral

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perspective cannot accommodate the feelings that overwhelm him in the wake of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. The opening lines cast Hamlet in a deep funk. Hamlet broods, his thoughts scarcely move forward, his language and imagery circle around themselves. “Oh that this too too sallied flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,” Hamlet begins, using three verbs instead of one, drawing on the rhetorical device of variatio (1.2.129–30). “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world,” he continues, with four adjectives instead of one (1.2.133–34). It is not quite right to say there is no movement of the mind in these lines: “resolve” is different from melt; “unprofitable” hints at dissatisfactions of a kind unlike those associated with staleness or weariness. But there is not sufficient distinction to say that the proliferation of words reflects a mind engaged in subtle analysis. The accumulations of words mire the thought rather than propel it forward to a new object, serving also to suggest emotional stagnation. The lingering echoes within and between lines contribute to the impression of inertia: “dew” at the end of the soliloquy’s second line hearkens back to the “too too” of the first line, almost eliding as it does so the conceptual distinctions that Hamlet is seeking to establish between the burdensome corporeality of his body, his being, and his longed-for dissolution; the slide from one kind of dental fricative in “this” and “that” to the other kind of dental fricative in “[t]haw” similarly diminishes the conceptual distance between present and desired states of being; the alliterated “w” links “world,” at the end of a line, back to “weary,” near the start of the previous line. With its listings of words, its looping sound patterns, and its repeated interjections—“O god, O god”; “Fie, fie”—the first several lines of the soliloquy trap Hamlet in a quagmire of thought and emotion. Hamlet’s enervation is underscored by the fact that in the opening lines he relies on intransitive verbs, except when he expresses dismay that God forbids suicide. Hamlet’s language here, his wish that the “Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter,” deepens the impression of Hamlet’s utter loss of agency: the staunchness of “fixed” contrasts with the nearly imperceptible, inexorable dissolution implied by “melt, thaw, resolve”; the faint hint of violence in “canon,” whose meaning as instrument of war is hard to suppress since we have just heard talk of a “cannon” (1.2.126), renders Hamlet’s stance more passive. Given such a state of stagnation, it is little wonder that Hamlet compares his world to an “unweeded garden” overrun with “things rank and

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gross.” Elsewhere in Shakespeare, as the editors of the most recent Arden edition of Hamlet note, “neglected gardens” are associated with “social disorder.”6 Unlike the gardens cultivated into metaphorical service in King Richard the Second and Henry V, where industrious labour is imagined, Hamlet’s garden figures absence of human agency: untended, “tis an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.135–37). “Merely” is usually glossed as “completely, entirely,” as in “this garden is entirely overgrown with weeds.” But “merely” can also qualify “possess” more directly—and interestingly: these rank things “merely” possess, rather than husband or cultivate, the garden. The Hamlet who feels all the “uses” of the world, all employments, to be unproductive and without profit finds an apt metaphor in a garden left untouched by human hand, labour, or design. In saying that Hamlet finds an apt metaphor in the image of the garden, I am suggesting that he relies again on the rhetorical training that his humanist education has provided him, seeming to practice here the “invention” that was so necessary in composing an argument or oration, and that should lead onward.7 Hamlet’s invention, serves to stop further reflection, however. The shifting referents of the pronoun “it” are especially telling in this regard. In line 135, “it” (of the contraction “’tis”) refers back to “world” from line 134 and ahead to “unweeded garden,” securing grammatically thereby the comparison of world and garden that lets us know that right now for Hamlet the whole world seems to be overrun by rankness (137). The second use of the impersonal pronoun in line 137, “That it should come thus,” half-predicts continued meditation on the world/garden and continued rhetorical invention in this vein, given that those pronoun antecedents have been established. At the same time, however, because “it” is now part of a noun clause acting as a grammatical subject, we half-expect a change in direction. And that happens abruptly in the next line when Hamlet bursts out, veering away suddenly from his jaundiced reflections on the state of the world in general to hone in on something at once more specific and less manageable rhetorically: “But two months dead—nay not so much, not two.” We know from the larger dramatic context that Hamlet is remembering his late father here. But in the immediate context of this soliloquy the something that is “but two months dead” is not identified right away, a lacuna marking both a syntactical disruption and an emotional upheaval. Eight and a half lines into his soliloquy, Hamlet thus seems dispossessed not only of will but also now, momentarily, of the skill with language furnished him by his

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humanist training in rhetoric. For a few lines (highlighted below), his syntax, until now smoothly controlled, becomes elliptical; his vocabulary, with the exception of the word “excellent,” becomes singularly flat; his grammar, until now fluent, sputters: How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘ tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come thus: But two months dead –nay not so much, not two— So excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth, Must I remember? (1.2.133–42; my emphasis)

The humanist rhetorical strategy of invention has buckled for the moment, under the pressure of Hamlet’s welling emotions. Hamlet regains rhetorical composure when he likens his father to “Hyperion” and his uncle to a “satyr.” Critics have long agreed that Hamlet’s comparison serves to idealize his father, while debasing his uncle. They differ, sometimes widely, about the psychological and emotional weight of the comparison, however, especially with respect to the idealizing metaphor of Hyperion.8 Rhodri Lewis, for example, finds perfunctory Hamlet’s mention of his father. This father, he argues, is a “publicly framed figure; idealized, drained of vitality, and hardly a father at all.”9 For Lewis, the metaphor “does not cost Hamlet very much” (139). For Stephen Greenblatt, to the contrary, the metaphor figures in Hamlet’s deeply personal and tormenting “compulsion” to remember his father.10 For Lewis, the metaphor is pulled from the common stock of public praise and thus describes a figure that is “not…impressed on Hamlet’s memory” (141); for Greenblatt, the metaphor is one indication that Hamlet “cannot get his dead father out of his mind” (213). Contextualizing Hamlet’s praise of his father in humanist pedagogical ideals and techniques, as I shall do, lets us acknowledge the public, seemingly impersonal, dimension of Hamlet’s vocabulary while recognizing how deep-seated is the filial feeling that his comparison conveys. In my analysis in Chapter 4 of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, I called upon Ann Moss’s observation that Erasmian educational principles encouraged

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the arranging of topics in a notebook, or commonplace book, by “opposites” and her related conclusion that such practice led to “fascination with the extraordinary and the extreme.”11 It is precisely such a habit of mind, I suggest, that leads to the extravagance of Hamlet’s comparing his father to Hyperion and coupling that metaphor with the extreme, opposite figure of the satyr. Deriving thus from educational principles that were widely practiced and experienced, Hamlet’s metaphor is in some sense more “public” than private and idiosyncratic, as Lewis contends. Its public aspect does not rule out fervour, though. I would suggest that the habitual practice of pairing opposite extremes intensified affective responses, sharpening contrasting sentiments (admiration and revulsion, say) into their most compelling forms. We might think of this as a grammar of emotional response, in accordance with which emotions gain intensity not just by being pushed to extreme expressions but also by being held in opposition, mutually sustained and magnified by the contrast. (Within a family, one might reasonably suppose, emotional contours would be considerably less sharply defined.) In the present instance, the very specificity of the terms of comparison, “Hyperion” and “satyr,” after the generality of “unweeded garden” and “things rank and gross,” indicates more emotional engagement. More tellingly, Hamlet’s metaphor of Hyperion, yoked as it is with the image of the satyr, carries an affective charge sufficiently strong to jolt Hamlet into the particularity of detail that increasingly fills the rest of this speech, an affective charge that galvanizes Hamlet’s moralizing bent as well.12 I will have more to say in Chapter 7 about the moral thinking that can emerge from humanist rhetorical habits. For now, I’d like to observe that to trace the emotional parameters of Hamlet’s first soliloquy in this way, glimpsing through them the influence of humanist schooling, is almost necessarily to delineate Hamlet’s moral framework, given the thorough interweaving of affect and morality, feeling and virtue, in Renaissance rhetorical theory and practice.13 Accordingly, part of what lets us gauge the emotional charge of Hamlet’s comparison is its efficacy in prompting Hamlet to frame immediately a moral scheme within which to organize the particularizing details that torture him for the remainder of the soliloquy. “Heaven and earth,” exclaims Hamlet, transporting “Hyperion” (a sun-god) and “satyr” (a base creature) into their respective celestial and terrestrial domains—but also transposing these images into terms that are morally evaluative, insofar as they are inflected with the theological (and commonplace) concepts of spirit and matter.14 Contemplated

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within the sharply polarized terms of a moral framework such as this, Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius can appear to Hamlet only as vile and sinfully debased. Hamlet, at least at this point in the play, could no more “leave [his mother] to heaven,” as the Ghost will shortly urge him (however disingenuously) to do, than he could entertain the possibility that his father, despite his being a brother to Claudius, shared anything of Claudius’ corruption. Relying on yet another of the habits of intellection fostered in humanist schooling, the forming or gathering of maxims, Hamlet anchors his polarizing moral scheme with the sententious declamation “Frailty, thy name is woman!” That this maxim concludes a line that begins with “Let me not think on’t” should register with us as deep, destabilizing irony: Hamlet grasps at a pithy moralizing assumption about women in order to avoid thinking specifically about his mother. It’s a strategy of evasion that not only closes Hamlet’s mind to any sympathetic apprehension of his mother, but does so at the very moment in which he desperately needs to feel emotional intimacy with her. Hamlet’s yearning for emotional closeness is signalled in images, by his repeated, and increasingly proximal, imaginings of his mother’s face and, particularly, her eyes (in the same speech in which he does not once visualize his father). When he wants to express the strength of love that his father felt for his mother, Hamlet says that his father prevented the “winds of heaven” from “[v]isit[ing] her face too roughly”; when he calls to mind his mother’s countenance as she followed the funeral bier, he says she was “all tears”; when he recalls her tear-streaked face, he pictures her “galled eyes.” The latter two images especially suggest that, as Hamlet draws nearer to his mother’s face in his imagination, narrowing his focus to her eyes, his emotional devastation—and confusion—at her remarriage intensify, as does his censure of her actions. In being “all tears,” Gertrude seems to Hamlet to be “like Niobe,” a comparison that, as many commentators have noted, is inapt: Niobe weeps for murdered children not for a dead husband. Hamlet’s misapplied metaphor betrays powerful, if unacknowledged, feelings of abandonment by his mother and self-loss. “[G]alled eyes” is even more telling and even more compressed. Most immediately, “gall” here means that Gertrude’s eyes are red and irritated from the salt of her tears. But other meanings of “gall” press into the image in ways that underscore the complexity of Hamlet’s emotions, as well as Hamlet’s confidence that he is gazing through his mother’s eyes into the depths of her perfidy. As another word for “bile,” gall evokes the humoral theory

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that permits Hamlet to condemn his mother as excessively carnal, as a creature of uncontrolled, indiscriminate “appetite” who “posts with dexterity to incestuous sheets.” It is tempting, also, to hear in Hamlet’s turn of phrase the tone we still use today when we take umbrage at someone’s “having the gall” to do or say something that offends us: Hamlet, we might surmise, feels “galled” by his mother’s having chosen—of her own will and without consultation with her son—a course of action that appals him. The humoral link between yellow bile (gall) and quickness to anger cues us to Hamlet’s anger towards his mother. We might speculate further that Hamlet, projecting his own anger and suspecting that his mother finds him worthless (he is no Hercules, in his own estimation), takes his mother’s remarriage as evidence that she feels towards him an anger born of scorn or disdain.15 Gertrude is capable of sudden anger, after all, as her explosive initial reaction when Hamlet first accosts her in her closet will attest. By the end of Hamlet’s baleful ruminations on his mother, we are thus a long way from the stability—and glibness—of maxims: the one with which Hamlet begins, “Frailty, thy name is woman,” is altogether inadequate to the welter of emotions and the churning thoughts compacted into these few lines. Hamlet closes his first soliloquy with a line suggesting that he himself senses some incommensurability between the turbulent emotions evoked by his familial circumstances and the techniques for organizing thoughts and feelings promoted in his humanist schooling: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.159). The still-common use of “tongue” as shorthand for language and speech (especially saucy speech)—respectively, “mother tongue,” “hold your tongue”—makes it easy to overlook the particular associations that Hamlet’s use of the word would evoke for Shakespeare’s audience. It’s worth spelling out, therefore, that “tongue” would bring to mind specifically the humanist stress on teaching languages, especially Latin, and eloquence—with all that that encompassed in terms of imitating endlessly rhetorical devices and habits of thought and expression precisely of the kind that Hamlet turns to in this soliloquy. We can thus conclude that Hamlet’s saying he “must hold [his]tongue” reflects his sense that the humanist rhetorical arts of eloquence at his disposal fall short, that his emotions cannot be expressed by means of these techniques. We have already heard him declare that he has “that within which passeth show” (1.2.85). It might well be, too, that Hamlet’s emotions cannot even be made known to himself by means of the rhetorical arts he has mastered.

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The association of “tongue” with humanist learning remains uppermost in the closing line of Hamlet’s soliloquy. But the metonymic, figurative, and iconographic associations made frequently in this period—and exploited pointedly and tensely in the closet scene—between “tongues” and unruliness or rebellion or slander (to identify just a few of the ways in which “tongues” were imagined to pose threats) mean that we can gloss Hamlet’s line further: as articulating his recognition that to give full expression to his emotions would be a dangerous, or at least, indecorous, action, personally and perhaps politically.16 Later in the play, Ophelia is put quickly under surveillance when, under pressures that resemble those experienced by Hamlet, she voices overwhelming grief, strewing about her bits and pieces of songs and proverbial wisdom along with flowers and tears. The latter reading of the last line of Hamlet’s soliloquy could be reinforced by staging: Hamlet might bid himself to silence when he hears or sees the approach of Horatio and Marcellus, who enter just as his soliloquy ends. In either case, the emotions roiled up by familial matters exceed Hamlet’s learned capacities of expression; they are too turbulent to be moulded easily into humanist rhetorical patterns or maxims and too destabilizing to conform to the ethos promoted by humanist training in tongues—the ethos to which Claudius subscribes glibly when, shortly before Hamlet delivers his first soliloquy, he counsels the prince against excessive mourning, saying that such indulgence shows an “understanding simple and unschooled” (1.2.97; my emphasis). I’ll conclude my analysis of Hamlet’s first soliloquy by reiterating that his determination at its end to remain silent is motivated by his sense that the humanist pedagogical project, in its twofold aim to produce civil (in its broadest meaning) subjects and rhetorically adept citizens, is inadequate to his needs. Furthermore, although other factors will come into play in Hamlet’s second soliloquy, his seeming to sense here the insufficiency of his learned rhetorical techniques in meeting overwhelming emotional pressures helps to explain the alacrity with which, harrowed by his encounter with the Ghost, he will soon vow to “wipe” from the “tables of his memory” everything his humanist education taught him. Hamlet’s continual recourse in this first soliloquy to the practices of humanist learning suggests, however, that habits of thought and intellection drilled repeatedly in school cannot easily be abandoned. His careful inscribing of an adage on the writing-tablets that (oddly, for us) he carries with him to the encounter with the Ghost will provide just one measure of this.

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6.2

II

When he first hears of the apparition, from Horatio and Marcellus, moments after he finishes his first soliloquy, Hamlet’s reaction runs the gamut between rational scholar and impassioned son. He moves from astonished incredulity (Horatio begs him to “Season [his] admiration” [1.2.191]) to probative questioning, applying his powers of reasoning (“But where was this?”; “Armed, say you … From top to toe?”; “What looked he—frowningly?”; “Pale, or red?”; “Stayed it long?”; “His beard was grizzled, no?” [1.2.211–38]) before resolving “I will watch tonight. … / If it assume my noble father’s person / I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape” and subsequently concluding from the evidence presented that “[a]ll is not well” (1.2.240–43, 253).17 Hamlet also reaches other conclusions, though, once Horatio and Marcellus exit, ones that are related to the nearly self-evident “all is not well,” but that are premised on Hamlet’s powerful longing to see his father again. Alone once more on stage, no longer constrained to tamp down his emotions by the presence of Horatio and Marcellus—to whom he has presented himself as a scholar and prince in control of himself—Hamlet makes an emotionally-fuelled leap, from the cautiousness of “If it assume my noble father’s person” to the unequivocal certainty of “My father’s spirit—in arms,” rushing also to surmise that there has been “foul play.” He can barely contain his eagerness to see the spirit of his father: “Would the night were come. / Till then sit still my soul” (1.2.253–55). By the time the watch begins, his anticipation has lost some of its edge. His first words, a comment on the weather, “[t]he air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,” are followed by the seemingly mundane inquiry, “What hour now?” (1.4.1–3). It would be easy to assume that this nonchalance is feigned, donned carefully and guardedly by a nerve-wracked prince anxious to keep his distance from his companions, were it not for the fact that Hamlet does not actually seem to watch very assiduously for the spirit, even though he knows that its customary hour of appearance is near. Instead, to Horatio’s inquiry about the meaning of the cannon-shots, Hamlet begins to censure the carousing encouraged by Claudius. It is a diatribe that indicts the new king and his reign, helping us to keep in mind the sharp contrast that Hamlet has forged between his abominable uncle and his idealized father—whose “like,” we recall, Hamlet never expects to “look upon…again” (but who will appear, in a few moments, clad in his hero’s armour)—while suggesting the prince’s inattention to the reason

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he has joined the watch this night (1.2.185, 187). Hamlet becomes so caught up in his disquisition on the pernicious effects of vices that he has to be cut off mid-sentence by Horatio, who has been watching for the ghost intently enough to break into Hamlet’s speech to exclaim at the moment it enters: “Look, my lord, it comes” (1.4.38). Like the initially sceptical Horatio, who is “harrow[ed]” into “fear and wonder”—and belief—by his first sight of the Ghost, the discoursing Hamlet is profoundly affected by the appearance of the Spirit. He is moved to an altogether new register of thought, emotion, and vocabulary, exclaiming “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” when he sees the apparition. Far more instructive, however, are the differences between Horatio’s and Hamlet’s addresses to the Ghost. While much critical attention on Hamlet has focussed, rightly, on the significance of the play’s being populated with so many avenging sons (and I will have more to say about the damaging effects on Hamlet of filial piety in Chapter 7), it is no less significant that the play gives us so many scholars and that we are directed particularly to compare the two from Wittenberg.18 My argument over the next several paragraphs will examine the differences between Horatio’s address to the Ghost and Hamlet’s appeal to his “father’s spirit,” with a view towards demonstrating that, in the pairing of Horatio and Hamlet, here and throughout the play, we find Shakespeare’s most searching examination of the promises and insufficiencies of humanist education, especially with respect to civic, moral life and its alignment with the affective life.19 To anticipate in part my conclusion, I would like to say here that, in pairing the two Wittenberg scholars, Shakespeare pursues a distinction between morality and ethics, as distinguished by Avishai Margalit, for whom morality is “thin,” a matter of general principles, and ethics are “thick,” particularized and layered by specific relationships, including familial.20 Horatio’s moral compass—admired by Hamlet and critics alike and calibrated through his humanist schooling— works as reliably as it does because its range is limited, its points of reference rational, objective, and to some degree, abstract.21 Hamlet suffers as much as he does, and inflicts as much anguish as he does, because his dilemmas are ethical, in Margalit’s sense; he is enmeshed in relationships, connected inextricably to Elsinore and to family. Horatio is affected more by the idea of the Ghost’s being real than he is by the Spirit itself. As he confesses to Marcellus and Barnardo, the apparition is a “mote to trouble the mind’s eye” (1.1.111; my emphasis). His address to the Ghost thus remains generalized and abstract in its

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assumptions about why the apparition has materialized and, despite his being “harrowed” by the appearance of the Ghost, Horatio does not become personally engaged with the Spirit. Between the Ghost’s two appearances on this night, anxious to have reasons to believe in it, Horatio draws upon his knowledge of Roman history, looking for a precedent to confirm the “sensible and true avouch / Of [his] own eyes” and finding it in the “graves that stood tenantless” and the “sheeted dead [who did] squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” before “the mightiest Julius fell” (1.1.56, 114–15).22 He finds further proof in the similarities between recent astronomical portents and those that filled the Roman sky. Curiously, it is Barnardo and not Horatio who surmises that the Ghost’s appearing now, and in arms, might be linked to the preparations for war currently underway in Denmark—even though it is Horatio who knows why there is such “rummage in the land” and who, moreover, supposes the Ghost “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.105, 68; my italics). Trained in the arts of humanist thought that promoted reasoning from historical examples, Horatio, it seems, cannot jump easily to conclusions about immediate events—something that Hamlet can do all too easily. When the Ghost appears to Horatio a second time, after “it stalks” away in response to Horatio’s first, blunt address—“What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?”—the Wittenberg scholar canvasses the most well-known explanations for ghostly visitations, reasoning deductively rather than inductively (1.1.49, 45). Horatio’s own seemingly high estimation of King Hamlet, whose funeral he has travelled to attend and whom he describes as a “goodly king,” does not factor meaningfully into his suppositions. He asks, in turn, if the Ghost has come to request acts that will “ease” his time in Purgatory; if the Ghost has foreknowledge of the “fate of his country”; and, finally, if the Ghost has hidden away treasures that he “extorted” from the earth (1.1.129–37). The last supposition is both reasonable—ghost sightings were frequently associated with such crimes (as Horatio himself notes at line 138)—and entirely abstract, because implausible in this particular situation.23 While it is easy to conceive of a king who might need the prayers of the living to help expiate his private sins and of a dead king who might still care about his country, it is less easy to imagine a triumphant chivalric king who hides away ill-gotten gains. (And a venially-corrupt king is a figure completely out of keeping with Horatio’s personal assessment of King Hamlet.) Yet this third supposition is the one in which Horatio seems to put most stock: after the

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Ghost’s abrupt departure, just as he seems about to answer Horatio’s last command “to speak,” Horatio describes the Ghost as a “guilty thing surprised” (1.1.46–47). Horatio, however, shaken he is—or rather, because he “tremble[s]” and turns “pale” (1.1.52)—searches for explanations that seem likely, given what he knows of ghost-sightings in general, settling on the one that is the most statistically probable, even if it does not accord with this situation. Horatio feels secure when he is grounded in reason.24 Later, fearing that Hamlet “waxes desperate with imagination,” Horatio will urge Hamlet not to go with the Ghost to other ground, lest he be “deprived” of the “sovereignty of reason” and lose his footing on the precipice that overlooks the sea (1.4.85, 73). With brilliant economy, Shakespeare sets a stage—literally—that reflects Horatio’s wanting to adhere to the tenets of logic and reason, his resistance to being moved by the appearance of the Ghost to abandon his learned habits of thought and supposition, his reluctance to shift his ground. (We might recall in this context that, in his very first words in the play, Horatio identifies himself and Marcellus as “[f]riends to this ground” [1.113]) “Well, sit we down,” says Horatio almost as soon as he arrives for the watch, “let us hear Barnardo speak of this” (1.1.32– 33; my emphasis.) A few minutes later, Marcellus invites “he that knows” to “sit down” and tell him why the land toils nightly in preparation for war (1.1.69; my emphasis). When the Ghost starts to leave, Horatio urges Marcellus to “[s]top it,” ordering him to “strike it” with his weapon “if it will not stand” (1.1.138, 140; my emphasis). One of the dynamics of the entire first scene is that between watchmen who are stationary, who are in place, and a ghost who stalks and marches, who comes and goes. Numerous critics have unfolded convincingly some of the thematic implications of the first words of the play, “Who’s there,” by focussing on “who” and stressing that by this single stroke Shakespeare introduces complex questions of identity. Many critics have also remarked on the implications of Horatio’s replying to Barnardo’s “is Horatio there?” with the terse “a piece of him,” developing from his laconic answer persuasive analyses of Horatio’s brand of stoicism and its salutary effects (1.1.18).25 We should place equally as much importance on the word “there,” which occurs each time a member of the watch approaches, for a total of three times in the first eighteen lines of the play. Once we notice the many references in this scene to being in place and stationary, to being “there,” it is hard not to notice the contrast when Hamlet, two scenes later, encounters the Ghost and will not be barred from following it; in that scene, Horatio, for his

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part, is reluctant to follow Hamlet, even in order to safeguard him, preferring to let “heaven” direct matters and going after the prince only at the prompting of Marcellus (1.4.91). Before turning to Hamlet’s altogether more dynamic encounter with the Ghost, I would like to touch on one more point of contrast between Horatio’s and Hamlet’s appeals. In addition to being generalized and abstract in the ways I have suggested, Horatio’s address to the Ghost reflects his unwillingness to engage closely with the apparition. Not only must Barnardo and Marcellus (the latter, twice) urge Horatio to speak to the Ghost, but when Horatio does so he maintains strenuously both physical distance from the apparition, ordering Marcellus to “strike it with [his] partisan,” and rhetorical distance (1.1.139–40). Although couched in the grammar of conditional petition, “if such and such is the case, then speak,” Horatio’s imperatives, “Speak to me,” “Speak to me,” “O, speak,” “stay and speak,” sound like injunctions rather than invitations (1.1.127–38). Horatio’s conditional “if” clauses, moreover, aim to predetermine the Ghost’s responses; Hamlet, we shall find, poses questions to the Ghost that are far more open-ended. The very formality of Horatio’s address reinforces the impression that he holds himself aloof from the Ghost. Everything about Horatio’s address—the commands to speak, the prescriptive clauses—implies Horatio’s desire to maintain control, to manage this encounter, to contain a Ghost that he fears is an “extravagant and erring spirit” (1.1.153). We can sense the enormous relief in Horatio when he observes that, like all such unrestrained, roaming spirits, this one “hies / To his confine” as the cock’s “trumpet[ing] to the morn /…/ Awake[s] the god of day” and “the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill” (1.1.154, 149, 165–66). The normally terse, and on this night tense, Horatio heralds the dawn in imagery that in its expansiveness summons the reassuring triumph of light and clarity. I observed above that Hamlet is like Horatio in being soul-shakingly affected by the Ghost’s appearance but that the tenor of his subsequent appeal to his “father’s spirit” differs profoundly from that of Horatio’s address. Unlike Horatio, Hamlet brings strong filial feeling along with a scholar’s disposition to his encounter with the Ghost. Whereas Horatio strives to maintain distance—physically, rhetorically, emotionally, and cognitively—Hamlet abandons quickly such scholarly stances, his initial attempts at what the Arden editors call “conscious distancing” yielding almost immediately to deeply felt and deeply personalized engagement as

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his memories of his father’s funeral, still fresh for him two months later, surge up (1.1.n.40). Hamlet begins formally enough. The carefully balanced phrases and measured rhythm of his first words to the Ghost indicate some need to cling to rational, objective grounds of apprehension after the initial shock: Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such questionable shape That I will speak to thee. (1.4.38–43)

Even Hamlet’s formality differs in tenor and tone from Horatio’s, however. As does Horatio, Hamlet canvasses possible reasons for the Ghost’s appearance; but the prince summons a dramatically eschatological backdrop, vividly conceived with the concreteness of “goblin” and “blasts,” in place of Horatio’s scenarios of political intelligence and the hoarding of treasure. Hamlet’s address is more highly charged from the start. Perhaps surprisingly, given such terrifyingly delineated options—“airs from heaven or blasts from hell,” “intents wicked or charitable” (my emphasis)—Hamlet right away moves closer to the Ghost, rhetorically, cognitively, and emotionally, positioning himself to speak with the apparition. His “thou com’st in such questionable shape” supposes the Spirit’s willingness, and capacity, to entertain questions and his “I will speak to thee” declares his own willingness to draw near (1.4.43–44). Horatio, we might recall, wonders if the apparition “hast sound or use of voice” and subsequently commands the Ghost to speak to him (1.1.127). With his next words, Hamlet extends to the Ghost various subject positions from which to answer his questions, in contrast, again, to Horatio, who circumscribes through prescription the positions from which the Ghost might speak: “I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane,” says the prince, binding himself to variable relationships with the apparition (1.4.44–45). Shortly, he will add that he is “bound to hear” what the Ghost has to impart, an ethical obligation that Horatio does not assume (1.5.6). Very quickly, Hamlet’s appeal to the Ghost becomes more particularized, and reflective of Hamlet’s regard for his father. Your “canonized bones,” he says, were “hearsed”; you were “quietly interred” (1.4.47, 49). Although by “canonized” Hamlet means duly consecrated, it is hard

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not to think that he is imagining his father as saintly, as someone whose “bones,” encased in a hearse are like sacred relics, as someone whose “quiet” interment was a sign of his virtuous life. (In this vein, we should recall that Horatio apprehends the Ghost as a “guilty thing” [1.1.147].) We have seen already, in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, that he idealizes his father as Hyperion; we have seen in his first exchange with Horatio that he keeps his father that way in “his mind’s eye” (1.2.184). He recalls the funeral now in a way that confirms his estimation of his father, and he holds that ideal up to his father’s spirit as he describes his father’s funeral to him. At the same time as Hamlet reassures himself of his father’s virtuousness, by recalling the quietness of the interment, however, his confidence in that goodness begins to falter and he grows increasingly frenetic; but he does not waver in his intention to move closer to the Ghost. These “canonized” bones have “burst” their wrappings in decidedly unsaint-like fashion, the force of that bursting forth underlined by the image of the “marble” sepulchre as “ponderous.” Esther Gilman Richey draws particular attention to the Ghost’s being “cast…up again” from the “jaws” of the “sepulchre,” invoking as an analogue Jonah’s being cast up from the jaws of the whale.26 Although certainly treated often as a type of Christ, Jonah is also notoriously reluctant prophet, as well as one who calls for vengeance to fall on his enemies. It is a curious analogy to draw in the interests of idealization. As Hamlet focusses intensely on the material circumstances of his father’s interment and his appearance now before him— “dead corpse,” “complete steel”(1.4.53)—he becomes hyper-attuned to his surroundings, the fitful moonlight, and to his own reactions, the “horrid” shaking that convulses his body and unmoors his mind: What may this mean That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? Say why is this? Wherefore? What should we do? (1.4.51)

Horatio, too, shows sharpened awareness, of his harrowed body, the crowing cock, and the rising sun. But Horatio, we recall, welcomes with relief the Ghost’s abrupt departure and subsequent confinement; he advises reporting to the prince, supposing that the Ghost, silent before him, will speak to “young Hamlet” (1.1.167–70). Hamlet, in spite of

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his fear and before he does know “[w]hat…this [may] mean,” commits himself (and those with him) to immediate action, “What should we do?” (1.4.57). Driven by filial feeling for the father he has lost, Hamlet is motivated by ethical obligations of a kind that his fellow student, Horatio, does not experience. Throughout his initial encounter with the Ghost, Hamlet is moved by powerful familial emotions to break past the limits that Horatio observes. Horatio clings to reason; Hamlet “waxes desperate with imagination” (1.4.87). Horatio stands his ground, literally; Hamlet ranges wildly over the platform. Horatio’s words are terse and pointed; Hamlet’s words are, in Horatio’s estimation, “wild and whirling” (1.5.132). Most importantly, in expressing the pious hope, four separate times, that Hamlet will be guided and protected by heaven, Horatio assumes a conventionally moral stance (1.4.89; 1.5.13, 18, 21, Hamlet, whose ethically-motivated reactions push him “beyond the reaches of [his] soul” (1.4.56), perceives something limiting in his fellow-scholar, telling him “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.165–66).

Notes 1. Hamlet, 1.5.97–104. All citations to the play are from Hamlet, revised edition, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden Shakespeare, 2016) and will be indicated parenthetically in the body of Chapters 6 and 7. 2. Kiernan Ryan, “Hamlet and Revenge,” observes wryly that for “centuries critics have tied themselves in knots trying to solve the baffling problem” of Hamlet’s delay. Ryan himself proceeds on the assumption that Hamlet’s “resistance” to undertaking revenge signals a “justified rejection” of a “whole way of life,” that his is the “only sane response to an insane predicament in a society that no longer makes sense” and that he is therefore a hero ahead of his time. Not only have dozens (and dozens) of established critics taken up the question of Hamlet’s delay, as has every editor of a critical edition of the play, but many, many scholars have no doubt cut their academic teeth on the matter. As recently as 1995 (which is recent, given the long history of commentary on the topic), Martin Cohen completed an MA thesis at Oregon State University entitled, “Hamlet’s Delay: An Attempt at Synthesis.” The word “attempt” in his title should give pause to anyone who sets out to summarize critical approaches to the question. Accordingly, I will not aim for comprehensiveness in this

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

note (and I leave the full citations to the bibliography). Hamlet’s delay, not thought to constitute a problem until the early-eighteenth century, has been attributed to his too-sensitive nature (Goethe); to his being too much of an intellectual (Schlegel, Coleridge); to his strongly ethical nature (Jones); to pathologies of character (Bradley, Adams); to external hindrances (Wilson); to the genre of revenge tragedy (Stoll); to Hamlet’s being caught in a moment of historical transition (Bristol). Most famously, Hamlet has been the subject of psychoanalytic analyses of varying kinds (Jones, Erlich, Adelman, Garber). A decade ago, A.L. Semler, “The Proximate Prince: The Gooey Business of Hamlet Criticism,” 107, observed that “[R]eaders nowadays tend to feel that it goes without saying that Hamlet…is all about subjectivity, that is to say, it is the defining drama of the dawn of modern selfconsciousness.” This claim, as Semler and many others note, has been subject to withering attacks on many sides: from those who observe that many earlier works successfully depict interiority; from those who oppose in ideological terms the idea of a modern, bourgeois self; from those who mount philosophical objections. For a concise review of the debate and its key players, see David Schalkwyk, “‘Unpacking the Heart’: Why It Is Impossible to Say ‘I Love You’ in Hamlet’s Elsinore,” Chapter 7, Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018): 188–221. Although my argument takes up questions of agency and selfhood, I am not entering the lists of the debate about whether or not Shakespeare celebrates “individualism” and understands it in the way that Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism, 46, claims he does: as an authentic, “recessive dimension of the human,” an “inner life…profoundly deep and mysterious.” But in my emphasis on language, on discovering Hamlet’s affect in his words, I am implicitly opposed to Holbrook’s conception of the self in Hamlet as “something inside one that slips out from under the net of language and society” (47). For a critique of Holbrook, see Paul Kottman’s review of Holbrook’s book in Shakespeare Quarterly. Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare, 198–200, for example, discusses Hamlet’s references to Hyperion and Hercules, which she labels “rhetorical flourishes,” as an example of his “dynamic use of comparison and contrast as a vehicle for self-knowledge.” The Arden editors note, 206, the examples of the “neglected garden [as] a metaphor for social disorder” in Richard II, 3.4.29–47 and Henry V, 5.2.31–67. The definition of “invention” in Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Book I, conveys the sense in which inventio presupposes progression of

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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thought: “The finding out of apt matter, called otherwise Invention, is a searching out of things true, or things likely, the which may reasonablie set forth a matter, and make it appeare probable (my emphasis). Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 67, discussing Agricola’s De inventione dialectica, describes “invention” as a process of thinking that helps the person “to think of further objects or qualities related to the first one.” Garber, Coming of Age, 200, cites Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytical Explorations in Art (1952) [17–18], as one of a number of critics who by the midtwentieth century had commented on Hamlet’s idealization of his father. Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 141. Subsequent references to Lewis will be indicated parenthetically in the body of the chapter. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 214. Subsequent references to Greenblatt will be indicated parenthetically in the body of the chapter. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, 110. Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” focusses on how training in epideictic rhetoric encouraged pupils to see both sides of a topic, such that praise would automatically generate blame. I discuss Vickers’ observation more fully in Chapter 7. In Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 6–7, Susan James notes that, while thinkers of the period inherited a long tradition of sometimes competing ways of classifying emotions, the various “typologies” and “maps” of emotion tended to “delineate a central set of oppositions” and to understand “affective life” as characterized by “susceptibility to pairs of positive and negative emotions.” For a highly technical discussion of emotions as evaluative—of “moral emotions”—see William Downes, “The Language of Felt Experience: Emotional, Evaluative, Intuitive.” Quintilian’s dictum that the orator is a “good man, skilled in speaking” (Institutio oratoria, Book XII, Chapter 1, was axiomatic in the period. In his thorough examination of the knowledge and skills acquired by pupils, Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, demonstrates the extent to which training in reading and composition “encouraged pupils to learn and use moral sentences” and to “admire” the “moral exempla” of narratives (32, 35). Commonplace books of the period, repositories of humanist learning, are filled with moral precepts. In an unpublished essay on Hamlet, Esther Gilman Richey notes that “‘Matter’ had become a hot-button issue at the end of the sixteenth century” in theological debates concerning the redemption of the flesh and develops a searching interpretation of Hamlet’s “dark energy” as a “will to eliminate the presence of bodies.”

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15. The Hercules reference is far from straightforward, given the various meanings that accrued around Hercules in the period, with one tradition emphasizing his heroic virtue, the other his madness. But at the very least, as Garber, Coming of Age, 200, suggests, Hamlet’s naming of Hercules is a “deprecatory self-reference.” 16. In the closet scene, Gertrude lambastes her son for “dar[ing] to wag [his] tongue / In noise so rude against [her]” (3.4.37–38), her words “wag,” “rude,” and “noise,” indicating the barbarousness of Hamlet’s speech here, its violation of the values associated with eloquence as a civilizing force. For a recent incisive review of the tradition that linked eloquence to the emergence of civil life, see Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, 1–18. Spenser’s notorious image of Malfont’s tongue nailed to a post (5.9.37) and his allegory of the Blatant Beast with its “thousand [grotesque] tongs,” later sharpened to “one vile tongue” (6.12.27, 38), figure envy, detraction, and slander as monstrous threats to the body politic. Conduct books of the period frequently rail against the “glibbery member,” that is, the tongue, especially when it belongs to a woman (Richard Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman [1631]), 88. While the memorable “glibbery” is Braithwait’s term, the sentiment is widely shared. 17. Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare, 2, notes that composition exercises for schoolchildren routinely included the instruction to “set downe all the circumstances to expresse the nature and manner of [a narrative or description].” The question of proof, not only with respect to Hamlet and the Ghost, but also more widely in Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare, is one that has engaged many critics, especially critics interested in literature and law. See Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama; and see Derek Dunne, Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law: Vindictive Justice, Chapter 5, for a useful overview of critics who have tackled Hamlet and the law. 18. For a recent comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s many fathers and sons, including those in Hamlet, see Fred Tromly, Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised. 19. Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, devotes an entire book, one filled with erudition, to the question of what Shakespeare is doing with humanism in Hamlet. While I contend that Shakespeare explores ways in which Hamlet’s humanist, Wittenberg education fails him, I do not share Lewis’ conviction that Shakespeare depicts the wholesale bankruptcy of humanism. In Lewis’ rendering, humanism, all received wisdom, all moral philosophy—anything to which Hamlet or anyone else in his world might turn to find meaning—all of it is empty, all of it a sham, none of it can speak to the existential darkness of Hamlet’s age.

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In Chapter 7, especially, I will gesture towards ways in which Hamlet’s education might have served him well. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory. Horatio has recently been the subject of renewed critical interest, much of centred on his being a scholar and an outsider, who is therefore trustworthy, for Hamlet and for the audience. Elizabeth Hansen, “Fellow Students: Hamlet, Horatio, and the Early Modern University,” argues that the relationship between the poor scholar and the prince registers the social tensions between the clerical class and the nobility in the sixteenth-century university, the uneasy intermingling of these classes. Lars Engle, “How is Horatio Just? How Just is Horatio?,” suggests that Hamlet values Horatio for his disinterestedness, for his standing apart from the socioeconomic realties of Elsinore and thus offering to Hamlet a secure moral judgement, while Horatio, as his suicide attempt indicates, acts out of love for Hamlet. Christopher Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” argues that Horatio’s presence in Hamlet makes it a play about emerging public sphere in that Horatio is positioned as a just observer who holds no social position. Andrew Hui, “Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet,” similarly stresses Horatio’s role as an interpreter, as someone who “wrest[s] meaning from ambiguous signs” and ultimately articulates the meaning of the play (153). My comparison of Horatio and Hamlet focusses less on Horatio’s role in the whole play than on the ways in which he helps to highlight Hamlet’s the tensions in Hamlet’s rhetoric. Hui, “Horatio’s Philosophy,” 156, notes that “[a]s befitting a scholar, Horatio also acts as the voice of ancient history.” Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story, 50–52, observes that “much of the actual activity of ghosts [in the period] appeared to involve the detecting of crimes and righting of wrongs,” noting, for example, that one particularly persistent ghost was someone who had been consigned to hell for an “alleged petty larceny”—the theft of a buttery plank. In a more serious vein, an Elizabethan statute makes it a felony to practise witchcraft (which can include the summoning of spirits) in order to find out lost or stolen money or treasure (5 Eliz. 1, cap. 12). Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion, observes that rhetorical education included stress on probabilities and inference. Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” 1026, covers some of this ground. Richey, “Hamlet’s Negation of Luther,” unpublished.

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References Adams, Joseph Quincy. Ed. Hamlet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. New York; London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1904. Print. Braithwait, Richard. The English Gentlewoman. London, 1631. Bristol, Michael. “Funeral Baked Meats: Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet.” In Hamlet: Case Studies. Ed. Susanne Wofford. Bedford: St. Martin’s Press, 1993: 348–68. Cohen, Martin. “Hamlet’s Delay: An Attempt at Synthesis.” Master’s Thesis. Oregon State University, 1995. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shakespearean Criticism. 1930. 2 vols. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. Everyman Library Edition. New York: Dutton, 1960. Downes, William. “The Language of Felt Experience.” Language and Literature IX.2 (2000): 99–121. Dunne, Derek. Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Engle, Lars. “How Is Horatio Just? How Just Is Horatio?” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.2 (2011): 256–62. Erlich, Avi. Hamlet’s Absent Father. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977. Print. Garber, Marjorie. Coming of Age in Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1981. Print. ———. “Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost.” In Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Methuen, 1987. Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. Print Hanson, Elizabeth. “Fellow Students: Hamlet, Horatio, and the Early Modern University.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 205–29. Holbrook, Peter. Shakespeare’s Individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010. Print. Hui, Andrew. “Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet.” Renaissance Drama 41.1/2 (Fall 2013): 151–71. Hutson, Lorna. Circumstantial Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. ———. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. Print. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949. Kottman, Paul. “Review of Shakespeare’s Individualism by Peter Holbrook.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64. 1 (2013): 107–10.

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Kris, Ernst. Psychoanalytical Explorations in Art. New York: International Universities Press, 1952. Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017. Print. Mack, Peter. Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Print. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002. Print. Marshall, Peter. Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007. Print. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. Print. Nicholson, Catherine. Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Print. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Ed. and Trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Richey, Esther Gilman. “’Go Not to Wittenberg: Hamlet’s Negation of Luther.” Unpublished paper. Ryan, Kiernan. “Hamlet and Revenge.” British Library: Discovering Literature. 15 March 2016. Online. Schalkwyk, David. “Unpacking the Heart.” In Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018. Schlegel, August. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808). Trans. John Black and A.J.W. Morrison. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1876. Semler, Liam. “A Proximate Prince: The Gooey Business of Hamlet Criticism.” Sydney Studies in English 32 (2006): 97–122. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Revised edition. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016. Print. ———. The Life of King Henry V and The Tragedy of King Richard II: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Revised edition. Ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington. Glenview: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1973. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 2nd edition. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Stoll, Elmer Edgar. Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1919. Tromly, Fred. Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2010. Print. Vickers, Brian. “Epideictic and Epic.” New Literary History 14.3 (1983): 497– 537. Warley, Christopher. “Specters of Horatio.” ELH 75.4 (2008): 1023–1050. Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. London: Macmillan, 1935. Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique (1563). STC (2nd ed.) 25799.

CHAPTER 7

Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet

Initially, but only temporarily, Hamlet feels strengthened to the point of heroic capacity in his determination to act, to do something, once he sees the Ghost on the ramparts of Elsinore. The grieving son who claims earlier that he is no Hercules now finds “each petty artery in [his] body” to be “[a]s hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve” (1.4.82–83). Reinforced thus and prompted by strong filial feeling, Hamlet breaks away violently from Horatio and Marcellus, following the Ghost in spite of the strenuous attempts of his companions to hold him back and demanding that the apparition speak to him. Their private exchange and the soliloquy that ensues, in which Hamlet rehearses his father’s “commandment” to “remember him,” have been mined profitably in criticism, yielding cogent reasons for Hamlet’s struggle to retain the urge to pursue revenge. Many commentators have observed that the Ghost’s chivalric warrior ethos is an outmoded and potentially damaging one, one that his scholar son cannot adopt because it is inimical to an increasingly ascendant humanist, Christian ethos in which blood-revenge has no place.1 Explaining Hamlet’s failure to rush to vengeance exclusively in terms of these contrasting ethoi without examining the mechanisms by which their respective values are transmitted gives us only a partial answer to the question of Hamlet’s dilemma, however. Similarly, explaining Hamlet’s delay or inability to exact swift revenge as a problem with “remembering,” as critics I discuss below have done very compellingly, takes us only partway towards understanding Hamlet’s inaction. Close rhetorical analysis of Hamlet’s exchanges with the Ghost and of the soliloquy in which he vows to © The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_7

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remember his father can anatomize Hamlet’s crisis more fully, if it cannot quite pluck out the heart of his mystery. In delineating the crisis of agency and selfhood that Hamlet experiences when the respective imperatives of home and school mingle in the alembic of his encounter with the Ghost, I shall concentrate first on the tragic effects of Hamlet’s acceding to familial imperatives and then the potentially salutary effects of the humanist schooling that, tragically, Hamlet renounces. From almost the very moment that he engages privately with the Ghost, Hamlet does not really address, at least, not directly and steadily, the matter of revenge, concentrating instead, as others have remarked, on the need to remember his father. Several critics comment insightfully on Hamlet’s apparent inability to remember his father even though the Ghost’s parting words, “remember me,” echo through the prince’s mind and second soliloquy. John Kerrigan was among the first to observe that, strictly speaking, Hamlet “never promises to revenge, only to remember.”2 Hamlet, he continues, can never play the role of avenger, in part because “he cannot change his nature,” can never become “crude and cruel,” and in part because “only memory”—and not revenge—can restore to him the father he loves (“Hieronimo” 119).3 I will argue below that the “nature” that cannot countenance revenge is as much one formed by schooling as it is something inborn in the character of Hamlet. Even though school exercises insisted upon filial piety, as my discussion in Chapter 4 of Aeneas as a cultural and curricular touchstone for filial piety suggests, such piety is not of a kind to countenance the blood-revenge commanded by Hamlet’s dead father. Rhodri Lewis has contended recently that Hamlet cannot undertake revenge, or even contemplate doing so at this point, precisely because he cannot remember his father, and does not really want to, however much customary notions of filial piety insist that he must.4 I will demonstrate, pace Lewis, that Hamlet’s inability to remember his father in the terms dictated by the Ghost stems, not from deficiency of feeling, but from the particular pressures brought to bear upon the prince when familial imperatives collide with the values of humanist schooling. Readings such as those by Kerrigan and Lewis develop their discussions of remembering in ways that invite questions about Hamlet’s agency and interiority. A number of studies have bracketed off such questions. Seminal work by Peter Stallybrass and others has directed particular attention to the “technologies” of remembrance represented by the tables in Hamlet’s soliloquy, technologies that are associated with humanist values and the promises of a newly emergent socio-political ethos, but that can prove

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fragile aids to memory.5 Indeed, for Stallybrass and the co-authors of a groundbreaking 2004 article, the insistent staging of such technologies in Hamlet highlights the play’s obsession with the forgetfulness, as much cultural as personal, that permeates Hamlet’s world.6 Even though they do not frame their observations or apply their findings in such terms, Stallybrass and his co-authors extend their analysis of tables and tablewriting in Hamlet in ways that do have far-reaching implications for our understanding of early-modern constructions of selfhood. They consider how Shakespeare’s play fits into the seventeenth-century theatre’s “critique of the table-book,” noting that (what they call) Hamlet’s “scorn” for the “trivial fond records” of his “youth and observation” (1.5.99, 101)—the kinds of records that Renaissance pedagogues promoted—parallels the scorn with which early-modern dramatists dismissed the “tablebook” as a technology suitable for “schoolchildren and merchants” but inimical to good dramatic writing (“Hamlet’s Tables” 414, 413). This attitude heralds, they continue, what would become most valued in theatre in the centuries to come: originality rather than imitation. In a related discussion, the authors note, but without attempting to resolve, the apparent contradiction of Hamlet’s turning away from, and then immediately back to, practices of notetaking as he first vows to “wipe away” from his memory everything he “copied” there in his youth and then proceeds to write observations in the “tables” he carries with him (1.5.98, 107). For Stallybrass and his co-authors, this contradiction serves primarily as an index to the play’s various perspectives on practices of notetaking and on technologies and tropes of remembrance. In restricting their interest to Hamlet ’s part in developing the seventeenth-century critique of derivative playwrighting and in letting stand as an unexamined contradiction Hamlet’s repeated recourse to the technologies he disavows, the authors miss an opportunity to link the notetaking practices that feature so prominently in Hamlet to the play’s long-asserted association with emerging notions of interiority and what would become the modern, individuated, autonomous self (the kind of “self” who could author an original work). I anticipate parts my analysis by stating here that, when considered specifically as technology of the humanist schoolroom, practices of common-placing point to the ways in which an ideal of autonomy and self-authorization could be realized. This is especially clear in Hamlet when these practices are set against the imperatives of patriarchal familial structures—which, as I will demonstrate, is what happens in Hamlet’s second soliloquy.

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No one has yet contextualized Hamlet’s vocabulary of notetaking specifically in the practices of the schoolroom or explored the intense dramatic sequence featuring Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost expressly in terms of the competing instructional regimens of the humanist school and the family, which together weave the complex web of influences that shape Hamlet’s subject-hood.7 Doing so reveals that Hamlet is caught between the patriarchal familial imperative for sons to become like their fathers—which, in Hamlet’s case, would mean acceding to an outmoded and destructive ethos —and habits of thought and emotion cultivated in the humanist schoolroom that could, ideally, promote a more salutary model of selfhood. This bind makes it impossible for Hamlet to achieve any sense of unified experience or being—or to act. This bind suggests, too, that Hamlet’s failure to become the avenging son that the Ghost desires has less to do with insufficiencies of memory than with Hamlet’s pedagogical culture, broadly construed to mean family and school. To claim that Hamlet’s second soliloquy pits familial imperatives of filial feeling and conduct against techniques of selfhood learned in the humanist classroom is not to repeat observations about Hamlet’s first soliloquy that I made in Chapter 6. Like the second one, the first soliloquy is informed by both humanist habits of intellection and strong familial feeling. There, as we saw, Hamlet’s schooled habits of thought and emotion prove wholly inadequate to the emotional turmoil of his family life. But that misalignment serves as a fairly straightforward indicator of Hamlet’s grief for the death of an idealized father and anger at a mother’s remarriage. There, too, confined physically by the close quarters of the court, Hamlet is likewise constricted in his thoughts, his capacity for reflection circumscribed. In his second soliloquy, Hamlet ranges through a wider mindscape and, consequently, the complexities of his position— ethical, philosophical, relational, rhetorical—multiply. By the time of his second soliloquy, Hamlet’s immediate circumstances have intensified in signal ways. The emergence in Elsinore of the Ghost has roiled even more Hamlet’s state of mind and emotion, introducing a host of other, more profoundly disturbing, matters for Hamlet to process, as the prince himself acknowledges in remarking to Horatio that “[t]here are more things in heaven and earth… / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.165–66). Hamlet’s disparaging measure of his schoolmate’s capacity verges on dramatic disingenuousness, however: the scholar Horatio’s entry into Hamlet’s world is what introduces a wider frame of reference within which the prince might deal with these new considerations were

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he in a state of mind and emotion to recognize that. We shall see also that this enlarged field of reference, one grounded in practices of the humanist schoolroom, brings into focus—for us, although not for Hamlet, tragically—the destructive potential inherent in familial imperatives of the kind that weigh upon Hamlet. Whereas the first soliloquy shows that the habits of mind learned in school cannot accommodate or shape to productive ends Hamlet’s emotional turmoil in the aftermath of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage, the second one, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, reveals that his experiencing what is a primal scene of instruction in the form of a patriarchal command cannot offer a way through his ordeal either. Moreover, even after his agonizing encounter with the Ghost, when Hamlet determines vehemently to obey his Ghost-father’s commandment—vowing extravagantly to do so by erasing all that his humanist education has taught him—he continues to rely on rhetorical techniques of the kind drilled in the classroom. Hamlet’s continued recourse to humanist rhetorical practices does not simply register ingrained habit, however, an assertion that can be made about the first soliloquy. It also intimates that he recognizes, albeit faintly, that patriarchal imperatives of the kind enjoined upon him by the Ghost are not only inimical to his education, which (I will argue later) he cherishes, but also to the moral character formed by his schooling.8 I have introduced my analysis of the Ghost scene by referring to it as the alembic within which the imperatives of home and school mingle to the point of crisis. We shall see that what makes the amalgamating of instructional regimens so destructive for Hamlet is that, in solidifying filial feeling into a desire to obey a paternal edict, it renders insubstantial the salutary effects—and promise—of humanist schooling.

7.1

I

Close attention to the Ghost’s address to his son and Hamlet’s profoundly filial response lets us gauge the debilitating pressures brought to bear on Hamlet by his father’s spirit. Once Hamlet has drawn apart from his friends, including Horatio, and challenged the apparition to speak, the Ghost stokes the strong filial feeling that prompted Hamlet’s violent bursting of restraints. He also appeals to his son on moral grounds, melding ethical imperatives with a more generalized moral appeal. The Ghost’s first few speeches to Hamlet are punctuated insistently with the first-person pronoun in a calculated effort to strengthen affective ties:

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“Mark me”; “My hour is come”; “I …must render up myself”; “I shall unfold [a tale]”; and, most poignantly for Hamlet, “I am thy father’s spirit / Doomed” (1.5.2–10).9 Thus, even though he says does not want Hamlet’s “pity,” the Ghost plies precisely that emotion in his son, personalizing in this way Hamlet’s motivations to act. When the Ghost issues the most direct command for his son to avenge his murder, however, he does so in the third person, abstracting himself from this particular father–son relationship and speaking in terms of what sons universally (in Renaissance thinking, “naturally”) owe to their fathers, while testing whether or not Hamlet meets this bar: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love / …/ Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!” (1.5.23–25; my emphasis). The Ghost now frames filial revenge as a moral obligation arising out of the general nature of father–son relationships rather than, or as well as, what Avishai Margalit might call an “ethical” action, a choice arising out of Hamlet’s personal, private, particular ties to his father. Always canny, the Ghost surmises that his son will not be “apt” to “stir in this” business unless he is moved by both strong familial feeling, in this case pity and love, and a sense of general moral rectitude (1.5.32, 34). After all, Hamlet is the product of humanist schooling, with its investment in moral education directed towards fashioning a subject fit for civil society. The Ghost persuades his son to equate familial and moral imperatives, pressing the connection between filial love and the taking of revenge—“If ever thou didst thy dear father love.…/ Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder”—until he succeeds in prompting Hamlet to conflate filial love, filial piety, and heroic ardour with the act of revenge: “Haste me to know’t that I with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love / May sweep to my revenge,” exclaims the prince (1.5.29–31).10 But Hamlet’s aptness to stir in his father’s cause begins to falter almost as soon as the Ghost exits with his echoing cry, “Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me” (1.5.91). The second soliloquy begins with the kind of grammatical fitfulness that erupts midway through Hamlet’s first soliloquy when familial feeling overwhelms him, that is, with interjections, interruptions, and truncated phrasing. Hamlet’s fractured thoughts are directed inward now, though, rather than towards his mother’s actions. More than simply weakened in resolve, Hamlet is desperate to keep himself together, as we might say today: he wills his “heart” to “hold” and his “sinews” to remain strong enough to keep him from collapsing (1.5.93– 94). Now, too, Hamlet wishes for continued life—to “grow not instant

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old”—as fervently as he wishes for death and dissolution in the first soliloquy (1.5.94; my emphasis). When he vows to “remember” his father “whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe,” Hamlet’s vocabulary indicates that nothing less than his selfhood is at stake (1.5.96–97). In Shakespeare, the word “seat” appears most frequently in contexts of political or judicial authority.11 Its occurrence here, in lines obsessed with an individual’s acts of remembering, thus ascribes to “memory” a large role in self-governance and underlines Hamlet’s mental efforts to hold himself together. Just how strenuous must be these efforts is implied in the phrasing that follows. While “globe” very frequently in this period suggests unity of mass or state, its modifier here, “distracted,” implies quite the opposite in its several related meanings of being “perplexed,” “riven apart,” “driven hither and thither,” “mentally drawn to different objects.”12 It is as if the Ghost’s terrifying prediction that a full recounting of the torments of Purgatory would make his son’s “eyes like stars start from their spheres” and his “knotted and combined locks to part / And each particular hair to stand on end” is coming to pass, as a shattering of Hamlet’s self that is at once emotional, cognitive, and physiological, rather than outwardly visible (1.5.17–19). Initially, Hamlet latches onto the “commandment” to “remember” his father as the key to holding himself together. For ease of initial reference, I quote the relevant passage from Hamlet’s second soliloquy: O all you host of heaven, O earth—what else? And shall I couple hell? O fie! Hold, hold my heart, And you, my sinews, grow not instant old But bear me swiftly up. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven. (92–104)

In Shakespeare, “distracted” can carry the particular sense of being beyond the control of authority or a centralizing power, in addition to the meanings cited above.13 That is certainly the implication when Ophelia,

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craving admittance to the Queen, is described as “distract,” occasioning both Horatio’s advice that she be permitted to enter lest she “strew / Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds” and Claudius’ subsequent command that she be watched (4.5.2, 14–15). This is the sense conveyed also when Claudius realizes that he cannot use Hamlet’s killing of Polonius as an excuse to imprison or execute the prince because he is “lov’d of the distracted multitude” (4.3.3–4). Given these implications in the word “distracted,” we can thus press Hamlet’s phrase “distracted globe” a little further. Verging on loss of self-control, inwardly riven, as I observed above, Hamlet seeks a unifying—or, better, a consolidating—principle in subjecting himself completely to his father’s command. Hamlet’s focus on his father dictates rhetoric that, for the space of a few lines, builds in confidence, resolve, and seeming self-command. The instant that Hamlet echoes his father’s command—“Remember thee?”— he begins to recollect himself, self-composure reflected in the control, polish, and pulse of the verse. The sudden rhyming (or near-rhyming) of four consecutive lines (95–98) after dozens of lines of blank verse not only catches our ear but also suggests the knitting up of Hamlet’s thoughts after the distractedness of the start of the soliloquy. The fluidness of the rhythm in lines 95–104, along with the noticeable enjambment in these lines, contrasts with the disjointedness of the opening lines of the soliloquy to suggest growing equanimity in the prince. Diction, assonance (repeated long “e” sounds), consonance, and strikingly patterned figures of repetition contribute as well to our impression that Hamlet’s thoughts and resolve are consolidating around the Ghost’s edict: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain. (1.5.97–103; my emphasis)

“Remember” and “memory” stand out, and not just because they are three-syllable words, although that in itself is striking (albeit not unique) within this passage: each of these words is drawn out by its repeated internal “m” sounds, while the chiming of “remember thee” and “memory,”

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linked twice in four lines by assonance, consonance, and parallel placement, creates lingering resonance. The keyword, “commandment,” with its three syllables and repeated “m” sounds, settles heavily into the middle of its line, which thereafter dissolves quickly in the liquifying “l” sounds of the next four words. In clinging to the Ghost’s parting words, Hamlet does not just keep himself from falling apart; he also seems to find (for a brief period) his moral bearings. The second soliloquy begins, not only in grammatical fitfulness, but also with a ricocheting moral compass as Hamlet looks frantically to “heaven,” “earth,” and “hell” for the strength to “hold” himself together and to his purpose (1.5.92–93). His plangent desperation in this moment is registered in the assonance of long “o” sounds. In the first soliloquy, we recall, Hamlet erects almost immediately a moral scaffold prefabricated from the practices of humanist schooling. Here in his second soliloquy, after careening from “heaven” to “earth” to “hell” in the opening lines, Hamlet anchors himself firmly in his father’s “commandment” in order to orientate himself towards “heaven”: “thy commandment,” he assures the departed Ghost in apostrophe, “all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven.” We might recall in this context that, along with the ringing phrase “Remember me,” the Ghost’s parting words were “[a]dieu, adieu, adieu,” that is, “to God, to God, to God” (1.5.91). Hamlet, we might therefore suppose, understands these words to be spoken, not in farewell only, but also in benediction, in fatherly blessing.14 We might suppose further, then, that, for Hamlet in this moment, remembering his father seems to be doubly moral, an act of piety that is both filial and Christian, both ethical (in the sense I have been using this term) and generally moral. This is a moral calculation that Hamlet will have trouble sustaining over the course of the play, as we know. In his most recent discussion of the play, Kerrigan contextualizes Hamlet’s vow to adhere to his father’s “word” in a provocative broader discussion of language that binds. He comments suggestively on the “fearful comedy” of the scene to follow, where Hamlet scuttles back and forth on the platform, swearing his companions to secrecy on a sword. Kerrigan links the element of “performativity” in this parody of a swearing ritual to much larger cultural expressions of the “impulse to externalize and take hold of something solid” when swearing an oath.15 I would like to note that Hamlet’s needing to “externalize and take hold of something solid” in swearing an oath

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implies a certain shakiness from the start in the convictions underpinning his oath. Equally to my purpose here is the observation, made by many, that, despite his resounding insistence that his father’s “commandment” will remain “[u]nmixed with baser matter” in the “book and volume of his brain,” Hamlet returns to thoughts of his “pernicious” mother and “villainous” uncle. He reverts to these thoughts instantly, in the space of a line break, with just the slightest catching of the breath after the triumphant asseveration, “Yes, by heaven”: And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven, O most pernicious woman, O villain, villain, smiled damned villain. (1.5.102–6)

Hamlet’s moral thinking once again swings between the contrasting poles of “heaven” and “base matter,” as it did in the first soliloquy. Any moral scaffold erected on grounds of paired extremes—saint or sinner, virtuous or vicious, pure or base—is always in danger of collapsing because human nature and actions can rarely be slotted neatly and categorically into stark either/or options.16 Indeed, Hamlet invites us repeatedly to reflect on the difficulty of making categorical judgements: Hamlet’s “good” father dies “unaneled,” his once “smooth” body in an “instant” “barked” with “loathsome crust” (1.5.71–77); Claudius is both vile and by some measures a better king than Old Hamlet; Polonius is both a foolish man and a loving father; Gertrude is both an adulterer (by the standards of the time) and a dowager queen whose kingdom is being threatened by a foreign power. But Hamlet himself continues to think in categorical terms that allow no middle ground, ground upon which understanding or empathy might grow: when Ophelia is no longer “celestial” in Hamlet’s eyes, she is no better than a whore (2.2.108); when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show divided loyalties (attending on both their school friend and the king and queen), they are disposable. It could be argued that Hamlet’s turning ferociously against individuals he has loved and esteemed is simply a function of his being an idealist—bitter cynicism often enough being the measure of disillusionment. To adduce the specific historical context of humanist schooling is to account more pointedly for Hamlet’s cruelty

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towards these characters, however, as well as for his failing to “sweep to [his] revenge” (1.5.31). To begin this accounting, I focus once more on the pairing of opposite extremes, a habit of intellection cultivated through exercises in rhetoric, debate, and composition, as well as through the making of commonplace books, as Ann Moss has shown. In my analysis in Chapter 6 of the traces of this habit in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, I was particularly interested in demonstrating that this way of organizing ideas and feelings generates a grammar of emotional extremes. Here, I would like to expand on the corollary claim, just touched on in my earlier discussion, that such a habit of intellection generates also a grammar of moral extremes. This claim makes immediate sense when we recall that epideixis , the rhetorical assigning of praise and blame, is fundamental to humanist schooling.17 Brian Vickers has outlined clearly the routes by which demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric came to be intimately connected to, indeed, virtually identified with ethics, with the promotion of virtue through praise and the castigation of vice through blame.18 His interest lies especially in describing the value of epideixis to poets whose didactic aims demanded a moralized framework within which to teach the emulation of virtue and the avoidance of blame. But his observation that school training in the arts of disputation encouraged pupils to argue effectively from both sides of epideictic rhetoric, that is, to learn both to praise highly and to censure vigorously, helps me to account for what I am calling Hamlet’s moral grammar. As Vickers notes, the “ability to argue in utramque partem, to speak for the excellence of night or the superiority of day, is a rhetorical exercise which in effect combines laus and vituperatio, since praise of one will lead to dispraise of the other” (“Epideictic” 505; my emphasis). While Vickers is interested in the value of this training to poets and dramatists, rightly calling the ability to see both sides “a crucial gift in a creative writer,” I am interested in the structural logic implied by the assumption that one rhetorical stance (praising) “will lead to” another (censuring). Linked in this way, praise and blame, along with their respective objects, virtue and vice, cannot stand independently of one another; one calls the other into being. The training in epideictic rhetoric that is so foundational to humanist schooling thus generates moral thinking that does not simply accommodate but that requires diametrically opposed terms. As a humanist scholar trained in epideictic rhetoric, Hamlet is conditioned to censure as vehemently as he praises, to label Ophelia a whore when she

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is no longer (in his view) “divine,” to send schoolmates to whom he formerly “adhered” to their deaths without compunction, to revile in the grossest terms the mother whom he formerly adored. In Hamlet’s particular circumstances, the debilitating, ultimately tragic, effects of such rigidly schematic moral sentiments are magnified by his attachment to a patriarchal command that is equally deleterious because it deprives Hamlet of agency (and, as I shall go on to argue, because it blots from his view humanist techniques of selfhood that could mitigate tragic effects).19 When we consider what Hamlet says in his second soliloquy as well as how he says it, we understand that the corollary of the growing composure, resolution, self-possession, and moral orientation that I have been delineating is self-subjection. Hamlet’s word “commandment,” with its monumental rhetorical weight in the passage analysed above, invokes mosaic law, in all its weight of paternalistic authority. Hamlet’s choice of word suggests how readily he subscribes to the analogy, ubiquitous in the period, that likens the edicts of fathers to the laws of God, positioning fathers as figures who demand obedience and sons as correspondingly and unquestioningly obedient.20 The enthusiasm with which moralists of domestic conduct in this period embraced this analogy can be gauged in any number of ways, including in the popularity of Lord Burghley’s “Precepts for his Son.” Written ca. 1584, and sufficiently known and regarded to be copied into commonplace books, Burghley’s letter of advice sets forth ten precepts for his son to follow; while these precepts do not in themselves mirror the ten commandments (other than in a general air of piety), the fact of there being ten numbered precepts secures the connection, as does Burghley’s alluding to “Moses’ tables.”21 One of the most noteworthy features of Burghley’s tract of advice is the rhetorical rigour with which Burghley chastens his son into a position of complete obeisance, speaking for him, as it were, and denying him agency. In this light, Hamlet’s repeating of his father’s words in his soliloquy seems less an act of self-assertion on Hamlet’s part than an act of ventriloquism by the Ghost. With this context of filial subjection in mind, we can recall the initial, terse exchange that takes place between the Ghost and his son once they have drawn apart from the others. A swift, if subtle, shift in powerdynamics occurs. Hamlet, having broken forcibly away from his companions, opens the new scene with a show of rhetorical strength, ordering the Ghost to stop and to speak, declaring that he will “go no further” (1.5.1). While the apparition does speak in response to Hamlet’s command to do

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so, his answer takes the form of an imperative, “Mark me,” that effectively pre-empts Hamlet’s control of the rhetorical (and dramatic) situation by demanding something from Hamlet—sustained attention, observation, evaluation—that is more complex than the mere act of speaking that Hamlet demanded of it (1.5.2). The Ghost then cuts short Hamlet’s expression of pity for the “poor ghost” who must “render [himself] up” again to “sulphurous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3–4). When Hamlet responds feelingly to his father’s condition—“Alas, poor ghost!”—his father reminds him curtly that filial love should be expressed in obedience, “Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold.” His reminder ties Hamlet’s willingness to obey, “Speak. I am bound to hear,” to damning action, “So art thou [bound] to revenge, when thou shalt hear” (1.5.5–6). The sense of legal obligation that the word “bound” would carry for Shakespeare’s audience underlines the extent to which the Ghost aims to take control in this exchange with his son. Hamlet’s one-word response of “What?” to the Ghost’s blunt contractual language registers, I suggest, a shock of recognition that, as a loving son holding up his end of the bargain, he must accede to a warrior ethos that countenances blood-revenge. His failure to demur openly at this point helps to gauge how much Hamlet the son is willing to yield to paternal authority.22 Hamlet’s second soliloquy contains still more measures of his selfsubjection. The following lines, in particular, supply several indices to the prince’s loss of agency: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixt with baser matter. (98–104)

The fluidity of these lines, which I discussed above as a rhythmical feature that heightens the impact of that keyword “commandment,” almost obscures another signal effect of these lines, this one emerging from sentence structure, specifically the disposition of the two independent clauses in the period. Although the first of the main clauses, the one that grants agency to the prince by beginning “I’ll wipe away” (99), commands fully four of the lines grammatically, it is the second of the main clauses, the

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one beginning in line 102 and controlling not quite three full lines, that resonates more profoundly. The slightly shorter clause, the one in which Hamlet cedes agency to the Ghost, is the one that stands out in this passage. Within this clause, the phrase “book and volume” in line 103 acts as ballast in the entire passage I quoted above, rhetorical weighting achieved by the following several means: within the line, the phrase, with its four solid syllables, is bracketed by three-syllable prepositional phrases, and its strongly stressed words are flanked by weakly stressed ones; the phrase “book and volume” feels—and sounds—more substantial than the closing words of line 102, where, as I observed above, liquid “l” sounds dissolve the line. An example of the hendiadys that appears so frequently in Hamlet, the phrase in its tautness contrasts with the syndeton of line 100, suggesting thereby that the patriarchal edict to be housed in Hamlet’s brain has far more substance than the “saws of books, forms, and pressures past” that Hamlet gleaned from his humanist studies.23 As I mentioned above, I shall argue shortly that the school-wisdom so seemingly overwhelmed by a familial imperative could promote a salutary model of selfhood, were Hamlet able to realize it. But the point to make right now is that in avowing his determination to adhere to the Ghost’s “commandment,” in his willingness to subject himself to paternal authority, Hamlet gives up agency. One other means by which we can measure Hamlet’s willing abasement is by examining the vocabulary of service. Judith Weil has illuminated brilliantly Hamlet’s aversion to service, antipathy registered in his fear of being made into an instrument, his resentment at being used in any way, and in his readiness to send to their deaths Rosencrantz and Guildenstern once they’ve proved themselves (to him) to be tools of the king and queen.24 As Hamlet says dismissively, and arrogantly, to Horatio, who might well be appalled by Hamlet’s actions towards former friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “are not near my conscience. Their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow” (5.2.57–58).25 Part of Horatio’s disquietude at the ease with which Hamlet dispatches his former friends stems, I maintain, from his own position as a “poor servant” to the Prince, to use the terms with which he introduces himself to Hamlet and insists on using despite Hamlet’s gracious protests to the contrary.26 Horatio’s insistence in the matter of his relative status should be coupled with the facts that he has been in Elsinore for two months or more before he speaks to Hamlet and that, when he does first approach, the Prince seems not to recognize him immediately.27 These circumstances imply,

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not simply that Horatio and Hamlet were not close friends at school in Wittenberg, but also, and far more significantly, that Horatio attended Wittenberg as a poor working scholar, a sizar, whose duties would have included performing menial tasks for scholars of higher rank and sufficient wealth to be fellows.28 Thus, when Horatio calls himself Hamlet’s “poor servant,” he means it quite literally. As a sizar, Horatio’s duties would almost certainly have included waiting on the tables of Hamlet and other scholars of social distinction, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This supposition might explain why, in exchanging initial pleasantries with Horatio, Hamlet thinks almost immediately of dining tables. When their exchange of greetings turns to the matter of the death of Old Hamlet and remarriage of Gertrude, and Horatio acknowledges that the latter followed closely upon the former, Hamlet replies sardonically that it was a matter of “thrift”: “the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.179–80). Hamlet’s courteous initial protest that Horatio is his “friend” while he, Hamlet, is Horatio’s “servant” is thus nothing more than that: an expression of courtesy on the part of the Prince of the court. Hamlet’s seemingly reflexive association of Horatio with dining tables puts each of them in their respective social places. More noteworthy for my present purpose than this incidental underlining of Hamlet’s aristocratic status and Horatio’s correspondingly low social status, however, is the transference, via the word “tables,” of ideas of service, even servitude, from the banquet room to the schoolroom. When Hamlet uses the word again it is to refer to his writing-tablet—that appurtenance so vital to scholars. When he speaks of “wiping” the “table of his memory” so soon after his wry witticism about the funeral and wedding “tables,” we can trace in that gesture the kind of menial task performed by poor scholars such as Horatio who wiped dining-hall tables and perhaps even the writing-tablets of socially superior scholars such as Hamlet. Hamlet’s placing himself in this position of service, however unwittingly, forms a marked contrast with the aversion to service that Weil has shown to be his customary attitude. It’s a gesture of willing abasement that aligns perfectly, however, with the prescriptions of patriarchal familial culture. Service can be liberating, as Weil has shown of Shakespeare’s servants, especially when it situates a servant at the moral centre of the play and in opposition to powerful immoral, amoral, or impious characters. But as invoked here by Hamlet’s metaphor of wiping tables, service elides freedom and agency—and undermines the moral high ground. Hamlet’s imagined action of wiping clean his memory is utterly self-effacing, given

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the connection between memory and self-governance that I described above. Moreover, for Hamlet to “wipe clean” his memory is not only to relinquish self-direction, but also to cede control to a powerful figure who countenances the profoundly un-Christian act of revenge. In Hamlet’s very expression of his willing submission, we can discern faintly the stark outline of the tragic costs that his filial obedience would entail. I have analysed at some length already the rhetorical features of the lines wherein Hamlet renounces his humanist schooling to declare adherence to the Ghost’s “commandment.” I would add here that the rhetorical and imagistic qualities that give such weight to the Ghost’s “commandment” and that anchor it in the “book and volume of [Hamlet’s] brain” work also to isolate Hamlet and immobilize his will. Although the sombrely intoned words “all alone” in the lines “thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” describe—and monumentalize—the Ghost’s edict, the mood that they evoke envelops his son. And while Hamlet’s averring that the edict shall “live” within him might not in itself warrant much notice, the setting of this strong verb (made stronger by the pall of death that hangs over Hamlet otherwise) against the industrious mental actions that Hamlet moments before vows to undertake—willing himself to “remember” by “wiping clean” his memory—underscores Hamlet’s ceding of agency to the Ghost: Hamlet predicts a future state in which his actions are willed, not by him, but by his father’s spirit. The juxtaposition of schoolroom tables and patriarchal edict also figures Hamlet’s tragic isolation as a turning inward that disables the powers of his mind.29 The lines in question bear quoting again: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixt with baser matter.

In determining to erase all that his humanist education taught him in order to concentrate on his father’s commandment, Hamlet is not just rejecting—in favour of a solitary edict—wisdom accumulated over the ages, the sententiae (“saws”) that grounded humanist pedagogy. He is also turning away from the world, relinquishing his powers of “observation,” in order to comply with—to observe—the commandment

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“within.” His capitulation seems a fait accompli: Hamlet’s using the deictic “there” in reference to the intellectual practices of his schooling indicates that he believes himself to have already distanced himself from those practices of intellection and from the “youth” in which such habits of mind prevailed.

7.2

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Scholars differ, sometimes sharply, about the effects on pupils of the pedagogy that Hamlet aims expressly to reject. Richard Halpern, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, and others have represented the schoolroom emphasis on imitation as coercively repressive in enforcing conformity to norms of behaviour, thought, and feeling or, at best, calculated to stifle any originality of thought. Greene, for instance, reduces the notebook method to “a work of cataloguing and rote memory” incapable of generating “sensitive understanding and creative imitation.”30 Others, including most notably Mary Thomas Crane, have shown that theorists of education in the sixteenth century distinguished their humanist practices from medieval scholasticism precisely on the grounds that the notebook method encouraged “profound absorption of material,” unlike the “rote memorization” of the earlier period.31 While Crane contends further that the notebook method was conceived as a means of controlling the subject, of indoctrinating the pupil into cultural norms, she concludes also that pedagogues remained concerned that in Thomas Greenethe accruing of knowledge, even via what could be mindless copying, pupils might experience “growth” and in this way elude control.32 As I observed in Chapter 3, Quintilian advocated the rewriting the words of others, as well as one’s own writings, as a means of self-revision—self-authorizing, we might say. Lynn Enterline shows very persuasively that imitating the style, speeches, letters, and sentiments of classical authors could be liberating for pupils insofar as it encouraged heterogeneity rather than homogeneity in the possibilities that pupils imagined for themselves. Building on the many studies that have evaluated Shakespeare’s debt to his schooling, she demonstrates, too, that Shakespeare the dramatist benefited enormously from practices that invited the imaginative inhabiting of various subjectivities. My aim in this section of the closing chapter is not to weigh how the oppressions and coercions of grammar-school techniques stack up against the freedoms these practices enable. (I engaged aspects of that debate in

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Chapter 2 in my examination of the emotional community of the schoolroom.) My purpose here, narrower and more pointed, is to suggest that Shakespeare imagines Hamlet as someone deeply, if mutely, attuned to the possibilities of the classroom—and fitfully enabled and enlarged by them—even as he rejects his schooling to comply with patriarchal familial demands. As I have shown in Sect. 7.1 of this chapter, Hamlet experiences as profoundly oppressive those filial pressures. I indicated at the outset of this chapter that the very practices of intellection that Hamlet spurns in his second soliloquy could furnish him with a model of selfhood and inwardness more salutary—or at least less tragic—than the one forced upon him by the Ghost. In the passage quoted above at the end of Sect. 7.1, we can detect rhetorical hints that Hamlet himself knows this to be so. Hamlet’s summary of his education, “all trivial, fond records / All saws, all forms, all pressures past,” gestures in several ways towards expansiveness rather than constriction, freedom rather than coercion (1.5.99– 100). While the repeated word “all,” considered semantically, conveys the sweep of Hamlet’s intention to erase all that he has learned, the open vowel sound of “all” echoing through the lines invites us to linger in the space created by the technology and practices of humanist education—implying also thereby Hamlet’s own continuing attachment to those modes of instruction. When Hamlet’s several dismissive “all”s are echoed two lines later in his resounding affirmation of adherence to the Ghost’s edict (“all alone”), the sharp division between the now-rejected humanist education and the paternal command seems less clear-cut, which calls just perceptibly into question Hamlet’s willingness to dismiss his learning.33 Similarly, Hamlet’s characterizing as “trivial” and “fond” all that he studied in his youth suggests his ambivalence about discarding his education. Hamlet’s adjective “trivial” surely calls to mind the outmoded trivium of the medieval university and carries also our sense of “trifling” or “paltry,” registering thus his contempt for what his education provided. Further, in Shakespeare’s day “trivial” could be nearly synonymous with “commonplace,” a meaning that reminds us that Hamlet is thinking disparagingly about techniques of his humanist education specifically. In coupling “trivial” with “fond” (yet another instance of the hendiadys that is a signature trope of Hamlet ), Hamlet both reinforces his expression of impatience with (perhaps contempt for) his schooling

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and reveals enduring affection for it: although “fond” could be synonymous with “trivial” and almost always in Shakespeare’s day means “foolish” or “silly,” it’s a word that around this time comes increasingly to signal, without reproach, “tender affection.”34 Moreover, the very means by which Hamlet cuts the wide swath of his intention to “wipe out” all that he has learned—the repetition of “all” (conduplicatio), the pluralizing of nouns—also figures the classroom as richly furnished with an abundance of things to learn.35 Shakespeare does not give us unlimited scope for surmising just how salutary a model of selfhood promoted by schoolroom practices might have been for Hamlet. The play does not offer its protagonist much freedom of any kind. But we can “by indirection find out [some] direction” (without the need for Polonius-like stratagems), as I aim to show below. First, though, and quite directly to my purpose, I would repeat the observation made by many critics, and cited at the start of this chapter, that the blood-revenge enjoined upon Hamlet by the Ghost cannot be aligned with Christian piety. I would add, again, that the latter ethos was fundamental to humanist schooling. As Enterline puts it, “school records reveal how assiduously school authorities worked to inculcate Christian precepts in their students” (Shakespeare’s Schoolroom 122). Founding statutes for English grammar schools virtually always stress the importance of teaching morals and religion to pupils. Those drawn up in 1595 for the hospital and school at Tadcaster, for example, are altogether typical in stipulating that the schoolmaster should have “special regard” for “children’s morals…and [for] religion, which may bring vertue, goodness, civilitie, and moral knowledge.”36 Revenge cannot be accommodated by the civil society or virtuous citizen-subject envisioned in such directives, a truth that must have been impressed deeply upon pupils by their reading and by their commonplacebook exercises. A particularly rich miscellany held in the Folger Library, whose author (or authors) carry into adulthood the culling of wisdom that formed a substantial part of a schoolboy’s education, includes—along with a copy of Burghley’s precepts—several entries cautioning against, or condemning outright, the taking of revenge.37 In one such entry, the writer quotes approvingly Pierre de La Primaudaye’s high praise of the “sentence,” “oft repeated by [Plato],” that “Revenge is not in any sort to be used.” The closely-written manuscript page on which this saying is recorded is filled with similar anti-revenge sententiae. Indeed, the negative assessment of revenge is the single most-elaborated commonplace

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topic in the entire miscellany.38 While standing out in this way, the antirevenge sentiment is also of a piece with the generally moralistic tenor of the volume. In its promotion of piety (in verses on the vanity of the world, for instance), in its encouragement of social virtues (in entries on sobriety, for example), in its extended attention to instructional matter (Burghley’s precepts, for instance), in its repeating of Alexander’s expression of gratitude for his schoolmaster—in all these ways, this miscellany offers us a glimpse of the intellectual moral world of the grammar-school pupil or graduate. Its digest of wisdom (to adapt a metaphor popular with early-modern theorists of pedagogy) prompts moral positions that are out of keeping with the ethical imperatives foisted upon Hamlet by the Ghost. While it would be folly to equate an academic canvassing of moral positions with Hamlet’s agonizing experience of moral dilemmas, it is nevertheless the case that Hamlet suffers in the terms of his day. In addition to its articulating of a moral stance that opposes the revenge urged so forcefully upon Hamlet by the Ghost, the miscellany I’m describing reflects habits of intellection that are decidedly at odds with the mindset that grips Hamlet in his encounter with the Ghost and that cause him to relinquish agency and to shutter up his powers of observation. One supposes that the copying out or noting of commonplaces could often be a mind-numbing activity, but the impression created by this notebook is one of intellectual industry. This is so partly because of the fullness of the notebook; whereas some of the commonplace books that I have seen include many empty pages, or pages that, aside from a dutifully recorded heading, remain blank or only partially filled in with relevant sententiae, this particular one leaves few blanks. There is also an air of intellectual diligence in the manuscript, registered in the detailed notes on “A compendious and profittable way of studying” (six intellectual activities or readings prescribed for the morning, nine for the afternoon) and in the range and idiosyncrasy of topics (e.g. Salique law, Jewish and Egyptian burial customs, origins of surnames) that seem to have caught the compiler’s interest. The intellectual industry and expansiveness of this particular miscellany might well be attributable to its being the work of an adult rather than a reluctant schoolboy compelled to keep a notebook. Nevertheless, the keeping of such a notebook is a practice learned in school. As a pedagogical tool, the practice can thus encourage intellectual endeavour that expands the mind; as a technique of selfhood, it can promote agency in self-fashioning.

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I turn now to the several ways that Hamlet itself furnishes means to imagine a more salutary model of selfhood for the prince, means that can likewise be linked to instructional settings and practices, however much the stakes for Hamlet are not merely commonplace. In an extended discussion of imitatio as fundamental to training up grammar-schoolboys, not simply in eloquence, but also in the experiencing and embodying of passions and feelings, Enterline explores ways in which this schoolroom practice could be liberating despite the designs of pedagogues. She argues that, although intended (like corporal punishment) to ensure “compliance with the school’s linguistic and social regime,” drilling in imitatio could in fact cultivate “deep-rooted forms of opposition” (Shakespeare’s Schoolroom 121).39 Her evidence includes the Player’s rehearsal of Hecuba’s woe—in a speech whose theatrical and emotional tactics she traces to the humanist pedagogical practice of imitation—and, especially, Hamlet’s reactions to the Player’s speech. Hamlet, she concludes, is critical of the skilful Player’s “well-honed [rhetorical] technique” because his speech proves too moving—“for nothing.” For Enterline, Hamlet (and through him, Shakespeare) reacts against the very thing that school “training in classical rhetoric [imitatio] helped institutionalize”: the Aristotelian conviction that “character [can be] produced by rhetorical performance,” that “character is a rhetorical effect rather than prediscursive fact” (132, 134). One implication of Enterline’s argument is that Hamlet’s reaction to the Hecuba episode is in keeping with his overt rejection, earlier in this scene, of what humanist schooling has to offer. Without discounting the value of Enterline’s insights (and while neglecting as not to my purpose her important discussion of the fluidity in gender-positions that characterize the Hecuba passages), I will draw out quite different implications from Hamlet’s reactions to the Player’s speech. I am especially keen to explore the significance of Hamlet’s being arrested by the phrase “mobled queen,” used by the Player to describe the sorrowing Hecuba (2.2.440). In Hamlet’s reactions to this portraiture of grieving, we can discern, even if just faintly and fleetingly, a model of selfhood that includes a capacity for the empathy that might have freed Hamlet from his tragic limitations. But I begin with Hamlet’s reaction to the Player’s portrait of the avenging son, Pyrrhus. Surprisingly, Hamlet barely reacts to the first part of the Player’s speech, where he describes the hellishly violent Pyrrhus, even though he, Hamlet, specifically asked to hear the speech on “the

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rugged Pyrrhus,” even though he starts the recitation himself, and even though the parallels between Hamlet’s being a son who has been asked to exact revenge and Pyrrhus’ being a son who is exacting revenge strike us as hugely significant (2.2.38). It may well be that Hamlet recognizes himself, or what he has committed himself to becoming, so clearly in this mirror that it does not provoke further self-reflection at this point.40 It might well be, too, that Hamlet wields the speech as an indirect threat to Claudius and Gertrude. Shortly before the meeting with the Players, Hamlet had been parrying with Polonius, deflecting with a show of madness Polonius’ best efforts to prove to Claudius and Gertrude that spurned love is “the very cause of [the prince’s] lunacy” (2.2.49). Hamlet’s baiting of Polonius indicates that he is aware of the counsellor’s connivances with the King and Queen. And immediately prior to the entrance of the Players, Hamlet had forced Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into confessing that they were indeed “sent for” (2.2.258). Thus, when he meets the travelling actors, Hamlet is no doubt feeling set upon from all sides.41 From this perspective, the set-piece on “rugged Pyrrhus” might spring to his mind as a useful weapon of retaliation against the forces ranged against him, a reminder to Claudius (an indirect one, but one that Hamlet might suppose would be passed along either with busy and voluble alacrity by Polonius or with some reticence by his tongue-tied friends) that he, the prince, is dangerous. Against this backdrop of an aggressively menacing (rhetorical) posture—one that implicitly at least can be construed as Hamlet’s beginning to fashion himself after the Ghost’s directives—Hamlet’s reaction to the Player’s description of Hecuba as “the mobled queen” stands out as different in kind. The phrase “mobled queen” strikes Polonius, too, who judges this wording “good” after having critiqued the speech itself as “too long,” and “mobled” has long puzzled editors and commentators (2.2.442, 436). I am not interested here in evaluating with Polonius the aesthetic suitability of the phrase or in wondering with editors about its precise derivation. I wish rather to gauge its affective impact on Hamlet. Silent throughout the Player’s description of Pyrrhus’ assault on Priam except to be curtly dismissive of Polonius’ running commentary on the recitation, Hamlet is the one who urges the Player to “Say on, come to Hecuba” (2.2.439). As has happened before in the play when he has been confronted with the killing of a king, Hamlet’s thoughts run to the king’s wife. On its own, Hamlet’s brief, murmured interjection—“The mobled queen!”—gives few clues as to why the phrase arrests his attention. But as

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the Player concludes his recitation, Polonius supplies evidence to suggest that Hamlet has found himself to be deeply and unexpectedly moved by the image of the suffering Hecuba. Editors often suppose that Polonius is speaking about the Player’s emotional state when he exclaims, “Look where he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes” and then begs the Player to stop, “Prithee no more” (2.2.457–58). Such a supposition is supported by the fact that when Hamlet is alone on stage a few minutes later he, too, refers to the Player’s wan, tear-stained “visage” (2.2.489). But it may be that Polonius is describing changes in the prince’s countenance as he listens to the Player’s words. This seems altogether possible, even probable; Polonius, who commented earlier (and obsequiously) on Hamlet’s delivery of the first lines of the Pyrrhus speech, has tasked himself, we recall, to watch Hamlet closely throughout this scene.42 To suppose that Hamlet is moved, powerfully and visibly, by the Player’s portrait of the sorrowful Hecuba is to account for some immediate changes in the prince’s demeanour towards those around him. That these changes are temporary does not take away from their significance at this moment. With the sudden access of emotion in Hamlet comes a softening in his attitude towards both Polonius and his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Having been extraordinarily rude to Polonius prior to—and during—the Player’s speech, Hamlet now accords him respect, acknowledging (sincerely, I am convinced) Polonius’ position of “honour and dignity” and asking his friends not to “mock him,” as Hamlet himself had been doing prior to the entrance of the Players (2.2.480). And having been evasive and antagonist with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern upon their arrival, to the point of making them squirm with discomfort, Hamlet now treats them (again, I would contend sincerely) cordially, as his “good friends” (2.2.481).43 For a brief moment, we can glimpse a Hamlet who fits Ophelia’s description of the man Hamlet used to be: a prince with a “noble mind” who, as “courtier…soldier…scholar,” was the “fair rose and expectation of the state,” who was the kind of man Hamlet’s social position, aristocratic upbringing, and humanist education designed him to be (3.1.145). Since Hamlet is arrested by the particular words used to describe Hecuba’s sorrowing, “mobled queen,” and not just by the fact of her grief, we should ask why this particular image proves so affecting to him and what more it means for him (beyond the softening noted above) to be so affected. While editors vary in their glossing of the word “mobled,” there is widespread consensus that the word means “muffled”

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or “veiled.”44 If this image works to obscure Hecuba from view, to mask her sorrow, the lines of further description that follow seem to make all too visible the extremity of her emotional state. “But who –ah woe—had seen the mobled queen,” laments the Player, “Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames With bisson rheum, a clout upon that head Where late the diadem stood, and for a robe, About her lank and all-o’erteemed loins, A blanket in the alarm of fear caught up. Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped, ‘Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced. But if the gods themselves did see her then, When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport In mincing with his sword her husbands limbs, The instant burst of clamour that she made (Unless things mortal move them not at all) Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven And passion in the gods.” (2.2 443–56)

As soon as we look closely at this subtly layered portrait, however, we can no longer be certain of just what in Hecuba is visible, just what state of inwardness is open to show (We might recollect here Hamlet’s professing to have “that within that passeth show” [1.2.85]). The Player’s reliance on the conditional mood (“who had seen…would;” “but if”; “the burst of clamour…would ”) implies the possibility that no one, mortal or god, has actually, truly, witnessed Hecuba’s state of extreme sorrow. Especially telling is the parsing of her complex emotional reaction. The running, the shedding of tears, the wearing of the headcloth, the threatening, the grabbing of the blanket—these particular indices to her emotional state correspond with very specific aspects of Hecuba, queen and mother, and register feelings commensurate with those roles. She feels anger at the burning of the city-state over which she has ruled as queen, as the word “threatening” suggests; she feels “fear” for her weakened physical being, for a body made thin through childbearing. But exactly what she feels as she sees her husband murdered is less clear. On the one hand, the graphicness in the description of the attack, Pyrrhus’ “mincing” of the king’s “limbs,” makes it almost impossible to suppose that Hecuba’s “burst of clamour” erupts for any other reason than the murder of her beloved husband. On the other hand, “clamour” is less visual than the details

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attached to Hecuba’s reactions as queen or mother. Moreover, it is the last display of emotion—the “burst of clamour”—that is embedded most firmly in the conditional mood: “But if the gods themselves did see her then,” her “clamour… [w]ould” have compelled the pity of the gods. While this grammatical tentativeness does not call into question the fact of Hecuba’s strong emotional response, it does register uncertainty about what Hecuba feels at the moment of her husband’s death: “mobled,” as either veiled or muffled, is a strikingly apt image in this context. Hamlet, we know, is a son intensely interested in his mother’s emotional responses to her husband’s death; it is fitting, then, that of everything in the Player’s speech, it is “mobled” that arrests his attention. I stress Hamlet’s being struck in particular by “mobled,” a descriptor that is at once highly visual and that draws the eye to Hecuba, but that deflects full insight into Hecuba’s emotional state, in order to invite comparison with Hamlet’s recollection of Gertrude’s expressions of mourning. In his first soliloquy, we recall, even in the midst of his turbulent emotions, Hamlet feels confident that he sees into his mother when he recollects in his mind’s eye her tearful countenance and construes her “galled” eyes as signs of perfidy, her tears as false-streaming. Hamlet’s being caught by “mobled” suggests that now, faced with another queen’s mourning, he hesitates to assume full knowledge of her inward state of emotion. Such hesitation, however momentary, is a small measure of increased empathy—perhaps emotional tact would be a better word—in Hamlet, a recognition in him of his own possibly limited insight and willingness on his part to admit that limitation. In the short-lived effects of Hamlet’s brief encounter with the Hecuba brought so vividly before his eyes by the Player’s command of rhetoric and imitatio—techniques of personation that form an integral part of humanist schooling, as Enterline has shown—we thus glimpse a more salutary model of selfhood: one that accommodates empathy and that could mitigate the effects of conforming to patriarchal familial imperatives. But Hamlet cannot sustain such moments of emotional tact, or transfer to his own mother the lesson of Hecuba. It is a large part of Hamlet’s tragedy that he cannot—or will not— see himself, or his own mother, in the Player’s impassioned personation of Hecuba or find in that performance of empathy motives for action that could save him (and others) from the terrible consequences of his taking his sole cue from his father.45 If, as I urged above, Hamlet is visibly moved, in the moment, by the Player’s depiction of the sorrowing

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Hecuba and if the mobled Hecuba makes him falter momentarily in his fervent belief that he has looked into his mother’s eyes and seen her foulness, he refuses to contemplate the meaning of those moments. Instead, alone on stage once more, Hamlet turns back to his father. He marvels at the Player’s performance, at how, having “but a dream of passion”—a “conceit” of Hecuba’s sorrow—the Player could express it so convincingly, “his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit—and all for nothing” (2.2.487–92).46 He weighs the Player’s imagined motivations against his own (in his mind) very real one—“a king / Upon whose property and most dear life / A damned defeat was made”—that yet leads him to “say nothing” (2.2.504–6). Hamlet rejects the lessons might have been taken to heart from the Player’s performance. Instead, feeling himself to be “[P]rompted [only] to revenge,” he chastises himself by trying on, roughly and briefly, various roles—“muddy-headed rascal,” “John-a-dreams,” “coward,” “villain,” “ass,” “drab”—before settling on a scheme that he hopes will determine his “course” of action: the play that will “catch the conscience of a King” (2.2.502–40). Hamlet’s seeming willingness here to at least entertain the possibility that Claudius might prove innocent suggests that he has not quite yet locked himself into the role of avenging son. But by the time Hamlet recruits Horatio as a watcher of Claudius’ reactions to the Mousetrap, he has lost even that limited amount of freedom. When Hamlet enjoins Horatio to “observe my uncle” with me, saying “If [Claudius’] occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech / It is a damned ghost we have seen / And my imaginations are as foul /As Vulcan’s smithy,” he implies strongly that Claudius is guilty, not only by using that spuriously conditional “If,” but also by describing his uncle’s guilt as merely “occulted,” merely, as yet, hidden from view (3.2.76–81). And Hamlet’s likening of his “imaginations” to “Vulcan’s smithy,” where Vulcan forged in anger at Venus’ infidelities, shows Hamlet to be, still, more deeply affected by Gertrude’s sexual betrayal of his father than by his father’s death. When the mousetrap is sprung, Hamlet watches to catch her conscience. Hamlet cannot, finally, escape the model of selfhood pressed upon him by his Ghost-father in the encounter on the ramparts. Hamlet never does become the avenging son that the Ghost pressures him to be: as many others have observed, Hamlet’s eventual killing of Claudius does not quite follow the Ghost’s script or seem directly motivated by the Ghost’s command; indeed, Hamlet seems to forget entirely about his father after

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the closet scene. But if Hamlet never quite conforms to the role of avenging son thrust upon him by the Ghost, he does see through his father’s eyes when it comes to his mother. This the closet scene makes abundantly clear. When Hamlet accosts his mother, violently, saying “You shall not budge. / You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (3.4.17–19) he proceeds to paint the very picture of Gertrude that the Ghost had urged upon him before adding, with palpable disingenuousness, “Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught” (1.5.85–86).47 Hamlet’s mind is tainted by the misogyny that is part and parcel of patriarchal familial imperatives. And in his soul he contrives against not only his mother, but also Ophelia. Hamlet may believe that Ophelia colluded with Polonius and Gertrude and Claudius in their efforts to constrain his actions or he may believe that Ophelia was simply spurning his love when she returned his letters and gifts—those tokens of his esteem for the “celestial” Ophelia—at (as we know) Polonius’ insistence. In either case and regardless, the shockingly cruel jibes about her sexuality that Hamlet directs towards Ophelia at the performance of “The Mousetrap” indicate that he catches her up too in the misogynous net woven from the Ghost-father’s words. When in the closet scene Hamlet rails against his mother, we should suppose that Hamlet conflates his mother and the woman he claimed to have loved, especially since some of the imagery in his indictment seems more applicable to Ophelia than to Gertrude—the “rose” on the “fair forehead,” for example—and since his language is otherwise generalized enough to attach to both women. When Gertrude asks what she has done that Hamlet “dar’st wag [his] tongue / In noise so rude,” Hamlet replies with even more vituperation: Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows As false as dicers’ oaths –O, such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words. Heaven’s face does glow O’er this solidity and compound mass With heated visage as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act. (3.4.38–50)

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Hamlet has forgotten the lesson of “the mobled queen,” remembering only the Ghost’s. The presumption that informed his first soliloquy, when he was certain he could look into his mother’s eyes and see her corruption, directs his thoughts and moral outrage once again. This time, the jaundiced view of his mother that he expressed in his first soliloquy having been reinforced by his encounter with the Ghost, he is more certain than ever that what he decides to read in—and on—faces reflects inward truths. With respect to Hamlet’s emotional life, to the loving relationships that might have been possible—with his mother, with Ophelia, with friends—the familial imperatives imposed by the Ghost upon a loving son have proved tragically limiting for Hamlet.

Notes 1. Hamlet ’s being a play in which realpolitik is superimposed on a revenge story filled with the long-vanished ethos of a world in which individual warriors acted heroically is a critical commonplace. John Kerrigan, “Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Remembrance,” 114, remarks that the play’s action “pauses for Horatio to celebrate Old Hamlet as a representative of that lost and epic age in which political issues were decided by fierce, single combat.” András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 3, includes Hamlet among the plays that “give virtual access to statecraft…the profession of politics.” For Kisery, Hamlet’ s “inward turn is a function of a change in the dominant understanding of the political realm. Hamlet understands politics as a career” (31). Thus, in enjoinng revenge, the Ghost, Old Hamlet, shows himself “oblivious not only of Christian ethics and the proscription of blood vengeance, but also of the argument from state interest” that considers “what effect the regicide might have on the future of Denmark” (83). 2. John Kerrigan, 114, “Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Remembrance”; subsequent references to this essay are indicated parenthetically within the chapter. See also Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 152–54, and passim. 3. Lesley Peterson has reminded me in conversation that Hamlet does indeed become “crude and cruel,” notably in his tirade against his mother and in his abysmal treatment of Ophelia. Later in the chapter, I’ll discuss this vituperative streak as an effect of rhetorical training in epideixis. 4. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 147–54, and passim. 5. Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” 415.

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6. Stallybrass and his co-authors, “Hamlet’s Tables,” 418, note that “Hamlet obsessively stages erasures of memory, from the memory of King Hamlet…to the memory of Polonius…to the memory of Ophelia.” Subsequent references to this article are indicated parenthetically in the chapter. 7. In an important essay that came to my attention after I had completed my chapters on Hamlet, Ross Knecht pursues a line of analysis that complements my own. In “‘Shapes of Grief’: Hamlet’s Grammar School Passions,” Knecht, building partly on Wittgenstein’s claims that the uses of a word give it meaning and provide the conditions for understanding objects, argues that “[G]rammar is no less fundamental to the phenomena of inner life than to any other object” (40). Focussing on Polonius’ “declension” of Hamlet’s state of melancholy, Knecht highlights how the play assumes continuity between inward states of being and outward expression. Focussing on Hamlet’s famous claim to have “that within that passeth show,” Knecht demonstrates that, despite Hamlet’s protestations that his inward state is ineffable, the “very opposition of passion and action that defines this ineffable inwardness is derived from the structure of language, and the terms used to explore it borrowed from the discourse of grammar” (36). Commenting on Hamlet’s determination to forget all the techniques of humanist learning to follow his father’s command to avenge his death, Knecht notes that the very “vow to forswear the practices of Humanism…suggest how deeply the methods and materials of learning are embedded in early modern discourse, providing the vocabulary in which thought and memory are conceptualized” (49). Like Knecht, I connect structures of thought and feeling to the techniques of humanist learning; but my interest lies in the failures of that scaffolding to support emotional turmoil, as well as in comparing the emotional grammar of the schoolroom with the emotional grammar of filial relations. 8. Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 163, contends that “Hamlet first addresses the Ghost’s commandment by expressing his piety in the manner of one who has not outgrown his training in Erasmian copiousness. Orating by numbers, he buys himself the time and space to formulate a more considered response.” As should be apparent by now, I nowhere find that Hamlet orates “by numbers,” even when his particular rhetorical structures prove inadequate to the moment. 9. Richey, “Hamlet’s Negation of Luther,” 11, reading the exchange between the Ghost and Hamlet from a theological perspective, emphasizes the “spiritual control exercised against a son in the darkness of a midnight watch.” 10. As countless critics have noted, these lines underscore the “problem” of Hamlet’s delay. What happens to the alacrity expressed here? Greenblatt, Purgatory, 207–8, suggests that these lines indicate such a strong desire in Hamlet to execute this father’s will that “the desire for haste erases the

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very person who does the desiring; the subject of the wish has literally vanished from the sentence.” Greenblatt’s interpretation seems to rest on misquoting, however; any edition I have seen has “I” as the grammatical subject. Greenblatt also observes that resistance to haste is built into the expression of alacrity, “since meditation and love are experiences that are inward, extended, and prolonged…at a far remove from the sudden, decisive, murderous action that [Hamlet] wishes to invoke” (208). Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 149, also focusses on Hamlet’s using the word “meditation,” suggesting that “perhaps” it indicates that “he has in some sense grasped that his feelings for his father are not those of a typically loving son.” According to the online Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, the word “seat” occurs a total of 60 times in 58 speeches within 25 works; 32 of the 60 uses have to do with the seat of power or majesty or eminence that implies elevation over others. See “globe” and “distracted” in the OED for the definitions available and prominent in Shakespeare’s day. According to the online Concordance to Shakespeare’s Complete Works, “distracted” occurs 15 times in 15 speeches in 11 works, with 4 of the 15 speeches occurring in Hamlet. In 9 of the total occurrences, including 2 from Hamlet, “distracted” is used in contexts of civic disorder or temporarily clouded royal eminence or failed social authority. Two scenes previous to this one, we witness Polonius’ bestowing of a second blessing on Laertes (1.3.52–56). Hamlet is not witness to what Laertes calls a “double blessing,” but in the second scene of the play, Hamlet is present to witness Laertes receive, in a very public way, his father’s permission to leave Elsinore and to have his leave-taking “blessed,” as it were, by both Polonius and King Claudius (1.2.57–63), before Claudius even turns his attention to Hamlet. John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, 37. In Chapter 6, I talked about Hamlet’s curiously inattentive “watching” for the Ghost, noting that he launches into censure of Denmark and its drinking culture (1.4.14–38). Whatever else this speech shows us about Hamlet (and however likely it is that Shakespeare intended to cut these lines—see the Arden editorial note on lines 23–38), the speech reinforces the impression that Hamlet is someone whose moral and philosophical speculations are categorical: one small dram of corruption spoils an otherwise extremely virtuous man. Hamlet’s famous “What a piece of work is a man” speech registers similar extremes: “how infinite in faculties [is man] … how like a God…a quintessence of dust” (2.2.269–74). See my discussion of epideixis in Chapter 2. Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic.” Subsequent references to the article are cited in the body of the chapter.

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19. See Judith Weil’s insightful anatomizing of “Hamlet’s deliberate selfalienation from reciprocal relationships,” in Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays, 31. 20. These words of a wayward son, Lewes Bagot, to his displeased father, Walter, convey something of the strength of this culture of filial obedience: “Sir/ If heretofore I have spent the beginning of my time in that uncivil kind of behaviour that I have been a disparagement to my house and a disgrace to myself yet I hope you will out of your fatherly love be willing to forgive and forget: as I unfaynedly will be most dutiful to you and by gods grace to amend my mispent time and to lead the rest of my live in such a civil manner that shall be both pleasing to god and nothing at all distasteful to you.….” A subsequent letter, from father to son, indicates that Lewes was not restored to his father’s graces. Folger, Bagot Family Papers, L.a.67. 21. Burghley, “Certain Precepts,” prescribes only 10 rules, not just because he would not “confound [his son’s] memory,” but also because, limited to this number, the rules can be aligned with the decalogue. Regarding his precepts, Burghley writes: “next unto Moses’ tables, if thou do imprint them in thy mind, then shalt thou reap the benefit and I the contentment” (9). Burghley’s word “next,” functioning ambiguously as preposition, adjective, or adverb, suggests that he supposes his rules to be either juxtaposable to, or equivalent to, or sequent to, Mosaic law, but not as transcendent of the law. His precepts thus assume legislative rather than emancipatory force, an instructional dynamic aimed at curtailing his son’s agency. In another set of instructions attributed to Burghley, this one directed toward his seemingly more profligate son Thomas, Burghley rhetorically leaves little room for agency on the part of his son. In a passage prescribing morning prayers, for example, the piling up of appositive phrases and relative clauses pulls the son down into virtual abjection. For examples of Miscellanies or Commonplace Books that contain Burghley’s precepts, see Folger V.a.381 and Folger V.a.402. 22. Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, reminds us that we need to attend very closely to the implications of the Ghost’s endeavours to bind his son to him. With respect to this scene in particular, Kerrigan observes that in “an early modern context, the commandment of a king and father should ‘bind’ as does an oath” (139). Kerrigan notes, but without focussing on the moment I have singled out as important—Hamlet’s reply of “What”—that Hamlet evades the command to revenge (because it is contrary to the Decalogue’s injunction against killing) and shifts his energies to the matter of remembrance, a focus which brings moral rather than emotional quandaries to the fore.

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23. See George Wright, “Hamlet and Hendiadys,” notes that hendiadys occurs 66 times in this play, more than in any other single Shakespeare play, and it is closely tied to the play’s most important themes. 24. Weil, Service and Dependency, 23–32. 25. In F., Hamlet’s reply to Horatio begins with, “Why, man, they did make love to this employment,” a line that Harold Jenkins includes in his 1982 Arden edition of Hamlet. 26. See 1.2.162–3. While Hamlet increasingly addresses Horatio in terms of friendship, Horatio almost always addresses Hamlet as his social superior and repeatedly offers him his service, albeit in a way that suggests deepening affection for Hamlet. See 3.2.49–85, the scene in which Hamlet enjoins Horatio as a fellow-watcher of Claudius’ reaction to the Mousetrap. 27. When Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo first approach Hamlet to tell him about the Ghost, Horatio addresses him with “Hail to your lordship” (1.2.160). Hamlet’s immediate response, “I am glad to see you well,” is the reflexively courteous response one might expect from a prince who is, as Ophelia tells us later, “Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (3.1.152–3). It takes a moment for Hamlet to look more closely at the man addressing him and to recognize him: “Horatio, or I do forget myself” (1.2.161). 28. William Howitt’s “Biography of Oliver Goldsmith,” notes that sizars swept the courts, carried dishes to the tables of fellows, and had to wait until the fellows retired to dine themselves. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 55, notes that the term “sizar” derives from the “size,” that is “an allowance of board and lodgings” and is a term used only at Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin (although there were poor scholars at other universities). Sizars shared rooms with the fellows to whom they were assigned, suggesting they likely performed menial tasks there as well. 29. Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, 144, remarks astutely that despite having gathered around himself a “conspiracy” of witnesses to the Ghost and sworn them to secrecy, Hamlet remains “left alone with his burden….The suspicion grows in an audience…that he wants whatever he has taken up to be his task, the better, perhaps, for the task to be lost.” 30. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 318, n.1. 31. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England, 63. 32. Crane, Framing, 54–76, examines the tension between promoting and controlling growth.

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33. My discussion in Chapter 4 of how thoroughly schooling promoted the ideal of Aenean piety gives further reason to suppose that Hamlet will not find it easy to separate out familial imperatives from those of his humanist education. 34. Both the OED and the Shakespeare Concordance furnish ample evidence for this claim. 35. Mulcaster, Positions, 94, compares learning to a “treasure.” Crane, Framing, discusses the “plenitude” of the classroom (54); and cites Vives’ “that ancient books contain ‘the knowledge of antiquity and of all human memory, so many words and deeds’”(60). 36. Folger MS X.d.290. This stipulation forms Item 14 of the document. 37. Commonplace books and miscellanies often show different hands and include notes indicating that the volume has been passed down to another member of a family. 38. Folger V.a.381, p. 56. 39. See my discussion in Chapter 2 of how corporal punishment might also produce resistance, what Mulcaster calls “deep insolencie.” 40. Virtually all commentators on Hamlet note the parallels between Pyrrhus and Hamlet. Jenkins, in his Arden edition, 145, notes that “Pyrrhus, mercifully, is not Hamlet,” but notes as well that Pyrrhus “as in some distorting mirror, presents a monstrous and horrific figure in which the alarming potentialities of both murderer and revenger are contained.” 41. Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, devoting an entire chapter to the imagery of the hunt in the play, shows just how plentiful are traps and snares and references to hunting after quarries. Lewis argues that the imagery “help[s] to fashion a moral economy in which the inhabitants of…Denmark both perpetrate and find themselves unable to elude” ensnarement (44). For Lewis, the fact that every hunted person in the play becomes a hunter proves the moral bankruptcy of all. Without question, Hamlet is often enough on the hunt; but as my ensuing discussion urges, the play holds out possibilities for escaping that role. 42. At 2.2.167, Polonius sends Claudius and Gertrude away, promising “I’ll board him presently. O, give me leave.” 43. Weil, Service and Dependency, 27, suggests imagining that Hamlet’s “farewell to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” has in it “a touch of ruefulness.” 44. See the Arden editors’ note to 2.2.440. 45. My thanks to Judith Weil for prompting me on this point. 46. Claire Kenward, “The Reception of Greek Drama in Early Modern England,” (187), observes that the incantatory effects of the “rhetorical construction of Hamlet’s oft-quoted question [“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba”] radically re-animates Hecuba in the precise moment that the Prince professes to dismiss her.” That he nevertheless does turn from

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sorrowing queens to murdered kings points also to the strength of his compulsion to remember his father. 47. The Ghost urges Hamlet not to taint his mind against his mother only after declaiming that “Lust, though to a radiant angel linked, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage” (1.5.55–57).

References Bagot Family Papers. Folger MS L.a.67. Burghley, Lord (William Cecil). Certaine Precepts: Advice to a Son. Ed. Louis B. Wright. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962. Crane, Mary Thomas. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993. Print. Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Print. Grafton, Anthony, and Jardine, Lisa. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. Print. Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982. Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014. Print. Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991. Print. Howitt, William. “Oliver Goldsmith.” Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847) I: 286–336. Kenward, Claire. “The Reception of Greek Drama in Early Modern England.” In A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama. Ed. Betine Van Zyl Smit. Oxford: Wiley, 2016. 173–98. Kerrigan, John. “Hieronimo, Hamlet, and Remembrance.” Essays in Criticism 31.2 (April 1981): 105–26. ———. Shakespeare’s Binding Language. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Kisery, Andras. Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Knecht, Ross. “‘Shapes of Grief’: Hamlet ’s Grammar School Passions.” ELH 82.1 (Spring 2015): 35–58. Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017. Print.

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Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002. Print. Miscellany. Folger MS V.a.381. Miscellany of Brian Cave. Folger MS V.a.402. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. Print. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children. Ed. William Barker. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994. Print. Richey, Esther Gilman. “Go Not to Wittenberg: Hamlet’s Negation of Luther.” Unpublished Paper. School Statutes. Tadcaster Hospital and School. Folger MS X.d.290. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Revised edition. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016. Print. Stallybrass, Peter, Chartier, Roger, Mowery, John Franklin, and Wolfe, Heather. “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004): 379–419. Web. Vickers, Brian. “Epideictic and Epic.” New Literary History 14.3 (1983): 497– 537. Weil, Judith. Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005. Print. Wright, George. “Hamlet and Hendiadys.” PMLA 96.2 (March 1981): 168–93.

Index

A Adelman, Janet, 168 Aeneas (Aeneas’ heroism). See Arcadia, new; The Defence of Poesy Affection, as a means to control scholars. See The English Schoolmaster (Coote); Mulcaster, Richard Affective turn, 6, 7, 15, 23 Ainsworth, Robert, 15 Altman, Joel, 17 Arcadia, new (Sidney) Aeneas as nursing infant, 90, 91 Claius and Strephon and Urania, 115 commonplaces in, 11, 85, 103, 107, 108, 114, 115 commonplaces vs places in the world, 108, 116 Diana and Acteon (as contrast to Venus and Aeneas), 106 education of princes, 86 filial piety, 11, 86

inwardness (interiority) of Pyrocles, 111, 113 Kalander’s house and garden (and moral action), 86, 87, 95, 98, 103, 107 maternal intimacy (Venus and Aeneas), 105 maxims, 85, 93 Musidorus and Pyrocles (in conversation), 11, 108 places of emotion, 107, 115 Venus, 103, 106 Arthur. See The Faerie Queene Ascham, Roger (The Schoolmaster) on correction, 34 and equanimity, 35, 36 on fear of the rod, 34 and Lady Jane Grey, 35, 36 on love and gentleness in classroom, 34, 38 As You Like It , 91 Authority. See also Patriarchal authority of fathers, 4, 5, 126

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5

211

212

INDEX

of schoolmasters, 4, 5, 46, 126. See also Ascham, Roger; Coote, Edmund; Mulcaster, Richard B Bacon, Francis and “know thyself”, 25–27, 51 Barclay, Katie, 9, 16 Bayly, Lewis, 13 Beating. See Ascham, Roger; Coote, Edmund; Erasmus, and Erasmian ideals Becon, Thomas, 77 Beecher, Donald, 49, 149 Blincoe, John (testator), 78 Bradley, A.C., 168 Braithwait, Richard, 170 Brayshay, Mark, 79 Bristol, Michael, 168 Broomhall, Susan, 6, 15, 16, 78, 80 Burghley, Lord (his Precepts), 186, 193, 194 Bushnell, Rebecca, 8, 14, 16, 22, 49, 51, 52 C Campana, Joseph, 16 Cartwright, Kent, 32 Charlton, Kenneth, 13, 48, 77 Chartier, Roger, 202 Cicero, 26, 50, 58 Classroom, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 23, 27–32, 36–38, 42, 45, 47, 50, 51, 92, 94–96, 104, 178, 179, 192, 193, 207. See also Schoolroom Cleaver, Robert, 14 Clore, Gerald, 51 Coercion (in the schoolroom), 8, 23, 145, 191, 192. See also Ascham, Roger; Mulcaster, Richard

Cohen, Martin, 167 Colin. See The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) Collinson, Patrick, 14 Commonplace books (commonplacing), 3, 5, 8, 76, 93, 94, 96, 135, 136, 156, 169, 185, 186, 194, 205, 207. See also Miscellany Coote, Edmund, 8, 24, 26, 31. See also The English School-master Correction (in the classroom), 25, 26, 29, 33–35. See also Ascham, Roger; Mulcaster, Richard Crane, Mary Thomas, 76, 80, 191, 206, 207 Cubberley, Ellwood Patterson, 50 D Davies, John (“Nosce Teipsum”), 26 Dawson, T. (printer), 70, 74, 76 Day, Angel, 58, 60, 79 Daybell, James, 79, 80 Day, John. See Whole Book of Psalms “December,”. See The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) Defence of Poesy (Sidney) Aeneas, 11, 90 classroom (schoolroom) practices, 92 Dido (and Aeneas), 91 filial piety, 11, 86, 102 patrilineal (patriarchal) imperatives, 97, 102 rescue of fathers, 94 scepticism (about Aenean heroism), 95, 97 DeMolen, Richard, 48 Discipline (corporal) in schools, 8, 16, 44, 45, 49. See also Ascham, Roger; Coote, Edmund; Erasmus, and Erasmian ideals; Mulcaster, Richard

INDEX

Dolven, Jeffrey, 8, 10, 16, 17, 85, 93, 94, 116, 119, 120, 127, 128, 135, 147–149 Downes, William, 169 Dubrow, Heather, 149 Dunne, Derek, 170

E Eden, Kathy, 15, 17, 58, 79, 88 Emotional community, 22, 24, 30, 31, 39, 40, 47, 48, 50, 51, 66 of the family, 57 of the schoolroom, 8, 23, 28, 120, 192 Engel, William, 81 Engle, Lars, 171 The English School-master (Coote) affection as means of control, 38 punishment, 24 rod, 24 “The School-master to his Scholar”, 24 “The Short Catechism”, 24 Enterline, Lynn, 8, 10, 16, 22, 50, 191, 193, 195, 199 Epideixis (epideictic), 28, 29, 98, 185. See also Hamlet Equanimity (in the classroom). See Ascham, Roger Erasmus and Erasmian ideals, 24, 38, 43, 50, 51, 58, 80 Erickson, Wayne, 148 Erlich, Avi, 168 Escobedo, Andrew, 149 Espie, Jeff, 81 Example (exempla), 10

F The Faerie Queene (Spenser) [Characters]

213

Arthur, 11, 120–122, 124–126, 130, 134, 146, 151 Charissa, 142, 143 Lady Igrayne, 122, 124, 125, 141 Merlin, 122, 141, 143 Redcrosse, 12, 127, 130, 136, 138, 143 Ruddymane, 4 Timon, 12, 122, 124, 127 Una, 12, 130, 138, 139 [Episodes] Bower of Bliss, 88 Castle of Alma, 142, 143 [Topic] (Arthur’s) affection (fondness) for tutor, 127, 139 affective pedagogy, 121 (Arthur’s) pupilage, 128, 130, 141, 148, 149, 151 emotions (in instruction), 3, 123, 125, 138 empathy (in counsel), 131, 132 example (ensample), 121, 122. See also Examples filial feeling, 3, 12, 140 heroic agency, 3, 5, 120, 122, 141 humanist education (humanist schoolroom), 3–5, 11, 12, 128, 130, 140, 147 instructional setting, 120, 130 learning as loss, 119, 140, 143 Letter to Ralegh, 120, 140, 148 lineage (vs pupillage), 130, 141 maxim as counsel, 136 “mothers pap”, 139, 140 praise (in promoting chivalric enterprise), 129 precepts (moral wisdom; preceptial wisdom), 121, 131 tutelage (Arthur’s), 11, 21, 122, 123, 125, 137, 141

214

INDEX

wardship (guardianship), 11, 124, 149 Family correspondence, 4, 10, 61, 69. See also Letters Family life, 7–10, 14, 57, 178 Fear of the rod, 22, 30, 34. See also Ascham, Roger; The English School-master Fellowship (in schooling), 11, 21, 23, 30, 39–42, 44, 107, 120 Feudalism, 7 Filial piety. See also Arcadia, new (Sidney); Hamlet in Defence of Poesy (Sidney), 11, 86, 92, 93, 102–104 in family letters, 62 Fleming, Abraham. See Letters Fletcher, Angus, 149 Fox, Cora, 16 Fruen, Jeffrey, 149 Fudge, Erica, 53 Fulwood, William. See Letters

G Garber, Marjorie, 168–170 Gawdy, Philip and filial piety, 62 and self-scrutiny, 62, 64–66 emotional bonds (with father), 61 emotive language (in letters to mother), 65, 66 equivocation in letters to father, 64 Gilbert-Cooke, Kerry, 79 Gordon, Andrew, 79 Gouge, William, 77 Gozzoli, St. Augustine: The School at Tagaste, 40 Grafton, Anthony, 8, 16, 22, 49, 191 Greenblatt, Stephen, 155, 169, 203, 204 Greene, Thomas, 191, 206

Green, Ian, 16, 32, 49, 50, 52 Greville, Fulke, 103, 107, 109, 110 Grogan, Jane, 119, 147, 148 Gwynek, Talan, 48

H Hadfield, Andrew, 206 Halpern, Richard, 8, 16, 22, 25, 49, 191 Hamilton, A.C., 14, 122, 136 Hamlet (Hamlet ) [Characters] Claudius, 157, 159, 160, 182, 184, 196, 200, 201, 204, 206 Gertrude, 157, 158, 170, 184, 189, 196, 199–201 Ghost, 12, 152, 157, 161–166, 170, 175, 176, 178–181, 183, 186–188, 190, 192–194, 196, 200–206, 208 Hecuba, 10, 13, 195–200, 207 Horatio, 12, 42, 159–167, 171, 175, 178, 179, 182, 188, 189, 200, 202, 206 Ophelia, 159, 181, 184, 185, 197, 201, 202, 206 Player, 195–197, 199, 200 Polonius, 70, 182, 184, 196, 197, 201, 203, 204 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 42, 184, 188, 189, 196, 197 [Scenes, speeches] 1.1 (Horatio’s encounter with the Ghost), 164, 167 1.2.28-59 (Hamlet’s first soliloquy), 12, 152, 156, 158–160, 166, 178–181, 183–185, 199, 202

INDEX

1.4 (Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost), 151, 159, 176, 178, 179, 194, 202 1.5.92-112 (second soliloquy), 12, 13, 159, 176–178, 180, 181, 183, 186, 187, 192 2.2 (Hamlet’s reactions to the Player’s speech), 13, 195, 197, 199 3.4 (the closet scene), 159, 201 [Topic] (Hamlet’s) delay, 91, 151, 167, 168, 175, 203 emotional intimacy (desire for), 157 Epideixis , 185 familial imperatives, 12, 176, 178, 179, 188, 199, 201, 202 filial feeling, 164, 167, 175, 178, 179 “Frailty, thy name is woman”, 157, 158 (Hamlet) scholar, 152, 164, 171, 189 (Hamlet) son, 76, 152, 187, 196 Hyperion (metaphor), 155, 156 Inventio (invention), 154, 168, 169 maxims, 157 model of selfhood, 13, 188 notebook (method of learning), 156, 194 obedience, 64, 187, 190 patriarchal imperatives (patriarchal command), 179, 186 Pyrrhus, 13, 195–197, 207 “remember me”, 176, 180, 183 revenge (blood-revenge), 5, 151, 167, 175, 176, 187, 193, 194, 196, 202, 205 self-subjection, 186, 187 tables, “tables of memory”, 159

215

warrior ethos , 175, 187 Hanson, Elizabeth, 49, 52 Helgerson, Richard, 69, 80 Heroic paideia, 11, 86, 89, 90, 103, 106, 107, 115 Historicized emotion, 6 Holbrook, Peter, 168 Hoole, Charles, 49, 52 Howitt, William, 206 Hui, Andrew, 171 Hurstfield, Joel, 125, 149 Hutson, Lorna, 170, 171

I Imitation (imitatio), 10, 195, 199 Instruction (technologies of), 92 Invention (inventio). See Hamlet Irish, Bradley, 16

J James, Mervyn, 4, 14 James, Susan, 169 Jardine, Lisa, 7, 16, 22, 49, 191 Jones, Ernst, 168

K Kallendorf, Craig, 94, 116 Kempe, William, 94, 95, 116, 148 Kenward, Claire, 207 Kerrigan, John, 176, 183, 202, 204–206 Kiséry, András, 202 Knecht, Ross, 203 “Know thyself” (nosce te ipsum). See Bacon, Francis; Davies, John; Vico, Giambattista Kottman, Paul, 168 Kris, Ernst, 169 Kuchar, Gary, 15

216

INDEX

L Land, Isaac, 50 Leboe-Mcgowan, Jason, 51 Letters (and letter-writing theory and manuals). See also Day, Angel; Fleming, Abraham; Fulwood, William; Gawdy, Philip; Sidney, Henry; Sidney, Mary; Sidney (Philip) advice (precepts) in, 10, 62, 69, 70, 72, 76, 81, 186 capacity to convey emotion, 10, 58 pains taken in writing (“paynes”), 73 physical connection to, 70, 71 Lewis, Rhodri, 155, 156, 169, 170, 176, 202–204, 207 Lindheim, Nancy, 85, 86, 116 Loughnane, Rory, 81 M Mack, Peter, 169 Magnusson, Lynne, 17, 58 Margalit, Avishai, 161, 171, 180 Marshall, Peter, 171 Marvell, Andrew, 88, 116 Massinger, John, 79 Maxims. See Arcadia, new (Sidney); The Faerie Queene (Spenser); Hamlet; Sententiae McCanles, Michael, 85, 86, 116 McPherson, Kathryn, 15 Merchant Taylors’ School, 21, 22, 31, 40, 43, 52. See also Mulcaster, Richard Miller, David Lee, 81 Miscellany, 80, 193, 194 Moncrief, Kathryn, 15 Moral instruction (in letters), 69, 73, 76 Moss, Ann, 93, 116, 155, 169, 185 Mowery, John Franklin, 202

Mulcaster, Richard and correction, 45 on beating (use of the rod), 31 on (fatherly) affection for pupils, 38, 39 on laughing and weeping, 44 and Merchant Taylors’ School, 21, 32, 43 on music, 42–44, 53 on parents, 38 on private education vs public, 40 and Spenser, 21, 33, 42 on tickling, 8, 47 Mullaney, Stephen, 15 Murphy, Jessica, 13, 77

N Nicholson, Catherine, 170 Nussbaum, Martha on emotions and cognition, 27, 51

O Oliphant, James, 48, 52 Olmsted, Wendy, 15, 85–88, 108, 110, 112, 116, 117 Ong, Walter, 49 On Humanist Education. See Vico, Giambattista Orlin, Lena Cowen, 1, 13 Owens, Judith, 50, 149

P Paster, Gail Kern, 6, 15 Patriarchal authority, 2–4, 7, 9, 57, 58, 69, 77 Peacham, Henry, 14 Pedagogical culture, 5, 6, 10, 11, 136, 178 Phillips, Adam, 47, 48, 53 Pollock, Linda, 8, 9, 16

INDEX

Polonius (and precepts), 70, 182, 184, 196, 197, 201, 203, 204, 207 Pounte, John (testator), 78 Precepts, 26, 67, 70–74, 76, 80, 110, 113, 121, 132, 133, 135, 147, 148, 169, 186, 193, 194, 205. See also Letters Pupils and masters, 11

Q Quintilian, 76, 81, 169, 191

R Raleigh, Walter, 81, 120, 124, 140, 148 Resistance (to authority) in the family, 57, 58 in the schoolroom, 5, 32 Richey, Esther Gilman, 166, 169, 171, 203 Robinson, John Charles, 53 (The) rod, 23, 24, 29–31, 32, 46, 49. See also Ascham, Roger; Coote, Edmund; Mulcaster, Richard Rosenwein, Barbara, 23, 48 Ryan, Kiernan, 167

S Schalkwyk, David, 168 Schlegel, August, 168 Schleiner, Winifried, 91 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 6, 15 The Schoolmaster. See Ascham, Roger “The School-master to his Scholar” (Coote), 24–26, 28, 29, 50 Schoolroom, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 22–25, 28–36, 44, 46–49, 53, 92, 107, 109, 120, 131, 133, 137, 143, 145, 146, 148, 177–179, 189–193, 195, 203

217

Self-scrutiny, 26, 62, 64–66 Self-subjection, 22, 26–29, 31, 46, 186, 187 Semler, Liam, 168 Sententiae. See Maxims The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) Colin’s schooldays, 21, 120 “December”, 21, 42, 120 emotional community, 22 Wrenock (schoolmaster), 21, 120 Sidney, Henry letter of advice (to son Philip), 10, 69, 76 “paynes” in writing, 69, 72–74, 77 precepts in, 70, 71, 74, 76 Sidney, Mary letter as physical object, 72 postscript (in letter to Philip), 70, 71, 76 on rereading letter, 74 Soellner, Rolf, 50 Spenser, Edmund. See The Faerie Queene; The Shepheardes Calender Stallybrass, Peter, 176, 177, 202, 203 Stewart, Alan, 58, 79 Stillman, Robert, 98 Stoll, Elmer Edgar, 168 Storbeck, Justin, 51 Strier, Richard, 32 (The) switch, 23, 29, 30, 33. See also (The) rod

T Tadcaster Statutes (grammar school statutes), 193 Taylor, Neil, 13, 167 Teskey, Gordon, 148, 149 Thompson, Ann, 13, 167 Topos (topoi), 11, 85–88 Tromly, Fred, 81, 116, 170

218

INDEX

Tutelage, 11, 12, 21, 122, 123, 125–128, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 147, 149 Tutors, 36, 38, 80, 122, 123, 125– 127, 130, 139, 140, 149. See also Timon (The Faerie Queene) V Vaught, Jennifer, 16 Vickers, Brian, 169, 185, 204 Vico, Giambattista (On Humanist Education). See “Know thyself” Violence in the schoolroom, 24, 25, 29. See also Ascham, Roger; Coote, Edmund Virgil, 10, 11, 94, 96, 102, 104. See also Aeneas Vives, Juan Luis, 51, 73, 80, 207 W Warley, Christopher, 171

Watson, Foster, 42 Weil, Judith, 188, 189, 205–207 Wesley, John, 53 Whitelock, James. See Mulcaster, Richard, on music Whole Book of Psalms (John Day) woodcut, 1 Williams, Grant, 81, 115, 117 Wilson-Okamura, David, 116 Wilson, Thomas, 168 Wofford, Susanne, 149 Wolfe, Heather, 202 Woolfson, Jonathan, 48 Worden, Blair, 85, 116, 117 Wrenock. See The Shepheardes Calendar Wright, George, 206

Z Zelizer, Viviana, 17