Rules of Use: Language and Instruction in Early Modern England 9780567238191, 9781472593696, 9781472534552

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Rules of Use

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Also available from Bloomsbury Applying Wittgenstein, Rupert Read, edited by Laura Cook The Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics, edited by Silvia Luraghi and Vit Bubenik The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Max Kolbel Corpus Linguistics and 17th Century Prostitution, Anthony McEnery and Helen Baker Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, edited by Jack Lynch Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’: A Reader’s Guide, Arif Ahmed

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Rules of Use Language and Instruction in Early Modern England Julian Lamb

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Julian Lamb, 2014 Julian Lamb has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5672-3819-1 PB: 978-1-4742-7546-0 ePDF: 978-1-4725-3455-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-3177-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamb, Julian. Rules of use : language and instruction in early modern England / Julian Lamb. pages cm ISBN 978-0-567-23819-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3177-3 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3455-2 (epdf) 1. English language–Study and teaching–England– History–Early modern, 1500–1700. 2. English language–Usage–Early modern, 1500–1700–Case studies. 3. English language–Usage–England–Case studies. 4. English language–Study and teaching–England–History–Early modern, 1500–1700. 5. English language–History–Early modern, 1500–1700–Case studies. 6. English language–Social aspects–England–Case studies. I. Title. PE1103.L26 2014 428.0071’042–dc23 2014009528 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Augustine, Confessions, quoted by Wittgenstein at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations)

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

2

3

4

Towards a Grammar of Use Pedagogy and scepticism The Augustinian picture of language Context Use, usual, useful Using Perfection: Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus and The Scholemaster Taking aim: Toxophilus Ascham’s scepticism: The Scholemaster, Book 1 ‘The daily use of writing’: The Scholemaster, Book 2 Decorous Abuse: George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy Decorum and the critics The art of ambiguity Usual speech: The eye and the ear Solace Usual Spelling: Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie Jonathan Goldberg’s reading of Mulcaster’s Elementarie Grounds Sound Training Sound, reason, custom Rules and use

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31 31 41 50 59 59 65 74 80

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Contents

Arts of Use: Early English Dictionaries, 1604–58 Context Johnson’s Dictionary: Aspiration and resignation ‘Hard usuall English wordes’ An unused siding

Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for giving me a short-term fellowship in 2011 without which this book would have taken even longer to write. A version of Chapter 3 entitled ‘A Defence of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie’ appeared in English Literary Renaissance 39.1 (2009), 24–46. Chapter 5 has been adapted by permission of the publishers from ‘Wittgenstein and Early English Dictionaries, 1604–1658’ in Word and Self Estranged. Ed. Philippa Kelly and L. E. Semler. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 15–32. Copyright © 2010. It is unlikely that I would have written a book about pedagogy had I not received more than my fair share of wonderful teaching. Though it is doubtful that they will read any more of this book than its acknowledgements, the group of teachers known affectionately as the ‘Bruces’ and ‘Brices’ continue to remind me that pedagogy transforms lives, not only students’ lives but teachers’ as well. I thank them and others for helping me discover my vocation. Many years ago now I wrote a PhD under the supervision of Juliet Fleming. She remains my ideal reader. Others whose counsel and conversation have been invaluable include Simon Haines, David Parker, Jason Gleckman, David Schalkwyk, Judith Anderson, Philippa Kelly and Liam Semler. Louisa Searle, Jenny Kwok, Sally Jin and Kirsten Lamb performed some invaluable last-minute editing. Georgie was especially severe on my split infinitives. Jan Lloyd-Jones spent more time over some of these pages than they probably deserved. I cannot bear to think what they would have been like had she not done so. My biggest thanks go to John and Winifred Lamb for having graciously played host to a grumpy and dour son whenever he needed a break from work. They are no longer banned from asking me how the book is going for I can tell them that it is finished. Wittgenstein ends the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations with words which, when quoted by me here, sadly do not contain any of their original irony: ‘I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.’

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Introduction

Let us imagine this scene of instruction. A teacher and a child are seated at a table. The teacher is attempting to instruct the child on how to perform the calculation ‘+2’. The teacher takes the child through the following series of numbers: ‘2, 4, 6, 8, 10’. The teacher tries to explain the calculations he has made based on the child’s existing knowledge of how to count from 1 to 10. The teacher is gentle in his explanations and earnest in his encouragements. But the child is stroppy and in no mood for learning. And he soon discovers a game which undermines the teacher’s best efforts: after everything the teacher says, the student asks, ‘But why?’ The teacher initially answers sincerely: let’s say he slides his finger along a series of numbers written down on a page, and as it lingers on each even number he says, ‘+2’. However clear this instruction may seem to us, it fails to have an effect upon the unwilling child: ‘But why?’ With suppressed frustration, the teacher embarks on a new explanation: ‘In order to +2, you only count every second number, like this.’ He returns to the written series, and says the even numbers as he points to them: ‘2, 4, 6, 8, 10’. And then: ‘This is how you +2.’ But not even this can appease the relentless child: ‘But why?’ The teacher sighs deeply, his frustration no longer suppressed. He reaches into his bag, and pulls out a handful of marbles. He counts out ten, and puts them in a group on the table. He says: ‘When we +2, we add two each time like this.’ He takes two marbles, puts them in a separate group, and counts how many there are: ‘One, two’, pointing at each one. He then places another two alongside those ones, and counts again: ‘One, two, three, four’. He continues this until he reaches ten at which point he concludes emphatically, ‘This is how we +2.’ ‘But why?’ The teacher bangs his fists on the table: ‘Because that’s just how it is!’ The teacher’s head collapses into his arms, his arms collapse onto the table. The impact is enough to send the marbles rolling towards the edge.

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The teacher’s soft voice is barely audible over the sound of them hitting the floor: ‘That’s just how it is.’ The child is momentarily solemn, but soon recognizes that the time is propitious to land the killer blow. He whispers: ‘But why?’ The teacher does not move. What exactly has happened here? Without necessarily claiming that any child is as cruel as this one, nor that every teacher is as easily frustrated, I do claim that the situation exposes something unavoidably true about the scene of instruction. The chapters which follow give an account of a number of different ways this truth can be articulated or enacted, and will go some way to arguing that such ways are as varied as there are scenes of instruction. At this stage, in lieu of an extended explication of this truth, it will suffice to proffer the commonplace view that it is impossible to make someone understand something. No matter how clearly a teacher explains the calculation ‘+2’, there is no absolute guarantee that his explanation will be understood by the student. The student may be decidedly unwilling, as he is in the example above, or he simply might not understand despite his best efforts. We may want to draw a distinction between a scenario in which a child is unwilling to understand and one who is unable to understand. In the first of these, though the child does not understand, the failure can hardly be attributed to him since he has achieved his desired outcome. (In fact, the child can be said to have succeeded in doing what he had intended.) In the second scenario, the child makes an earnest attempt at understanding, but does not achieve it. This is clearly not a triumph of his will, but a failure of his cognitive faculties. Though for different reasons, both scenarios affirm what I take to be a commonplace view: that one cannot make another understand something. When we consider these two scenarios from the point of view of the teacher, they coalesce further into a single conclusion: the teacher cannot deploy his instruction with the absolute assurance that he will be understood. Though the child may be said to have failed in one scenario but not in the other, the teacher can be said to have failed in both. There is no higher order of instruction which the teacher can utilize – something that would make the child willing, or make him perform a calculation correctly – that completely ensures that his words will be received in the way he wants. Nor is there any justification that would finally and absolutely silence ‘But why?’ Of course, teachers are frequently and justifiably called upon to further explain what they have said or done.

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A student might sincerely ask, ‘Why is it that 4 + 2 = 6?’ But after several kinds of explanation – perhaps involving marbles, or sliding his finger along a series of numbers – the child might remain, for whatever reason, unenlightened: ‘But why?’ The question constitutes a request for a more foundational explanation, one which would ensure that the student understands. And when the child asks ‘But why?’ insistently, he demands from the teacher an absolute justification for why he thinks that something is true. The teacher in my example is not simply annoyed at having been outwitted by a child, nor that his authority has so effortlessly been undermined. He is frustrated because the child has, merely by repeating two simple words, brought him to the very bedrock of his convictions, and made it appear arbitrary. ‘That’s just how it is’ is no answer to ‘But why?’ and is powerless to prevent an infinite number of further ‘But whys’ from being asked. These two simple words expose the teacher as lacking justification for performing these most simple of tasks, and holding these most basic of truths. Perhaps, in so doing, the teacher feels that they mark him out as a charlatan. ‘But why?’ is so threatening because it seems quite innocent to ask for that which pedagogy claims to be able to offer: understanding, enlightenment, certainty. The child stands in need of such things. But when pressed to provide them, pedagogy is found wanting.1 By highlighting the fact that a teacher cannot make a student understand something, I am trying to draw attention to a pedagogical gap between teacher and student which cannot absolutely be bridged. In my opening example, as well as my albeit flippant analysis of it, I am attempting to draw out the teacher’s powerlessness in the face of such a gap. The presence of this gap is the ‘unavoidable truth’ to which I earlier referred. I freely concede that the scenarios I have offered are a little far-fetched; and I sympathize with anyone who would question the legitimacy of a truth which can only be arrived at by pursuing a line of thought ad absurdum. Certainly, it is unlikely that any child will be so wilful as to resist understanding forever: the teacher, or a series of teachers, or angry parents, or peer pressure, or a system of punishment and reward, or most probably a mixture of all of these will likely wear the child down, and he will eventually come to understand how to ‘+2’. It seems even less likely that a child would continually fail to understand such a simple calculation if he made an earnest attempt to understand it, especially if he already knew how to count from 1 to 10. However, what might be an

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empirical improbability nevertheless remains a logical possibility. No form of explanation or pedagogical technique can inoculate against the possibility that the child might never understand. All the explanations the teacher offers the child are fallible, and are vulnerable to misunderstanding, or misuse, or of simply being ignored. Understanding may continue to elude their best efforts. In this case, perhaps the teacher will determine that the child has severe learning difficulties. Or perhaps, unable to understand what other students seem almost instinctively to have understood, the student’s education will be abandoned, and he will be isolated from his peers, and considered mad. Or perhaps it is our teacher who cannot make himself understood either to this or any other student. Maybe it is he who is mad. But, again, I have pursued this thought ad absurdum – or rather ad insaniam. However, in my defence, it is a pursuit very difficult to resist. There is no obvious point at which the sequence of thought can end, and there is no clear moment when it becomes absurd. As soon as ‘But why?’ has been asked once, it is difficult to know when to stop asking it. The first ‘But why?’ seems to justify infinite iterations, or at least as many as it takes to come to that point when doubt has been satisfied, and asking ‘But why?’ no longer makes sense. The chapters which follow consider early modern pedagogical texts which tarry in some way with this relentless sequence of thought: either they fall into it, or resist it or more often do both. In so doing, each of these texts deals in some way with the insoluble possibility that understanding might never happen. Each text acknowledges that a gap exists between teacher and student, and that this gap cannot absolutely be bridged. I do not claim that effective pedagogy, whether now or in the early modern period, requires that this gap be absolutely bridged, only that then as now pedagogy frequently has to confront the fact that it cannot be. Nor do I claim that this is always a problem. In fact, the indeterminacy of an instruction is what allows for a student to respond to the teacher in creative, innovative and unexpected ways. The pedagogical gap may, in this sense, be a requirement of effective education much more than it is a threat to it. Moreover, in day-to-day classroom practice, we may hardly be conscious of any gap. Teacher and student may be so well attuned that the former has no reason to think that his words are not being understood, and the latter has no reason to ask, ‘But why?’ And if that is the case then it would seem that this study brings into being a problem which can

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Introduction

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hardly be said to be problematic; a problem which baffles the theorist, but goes largely unnoticed by the practitioner. One of the abiding aims of this book is to understand how this problem asserts itself and becomes threatening: in what scenes of instruction does the pedagogical gap demand to be filled? Under what assumptions does the absence of absolute certainty enforce itself upon teacher and student as a manifest lack? When does the indeterminacy of instruction stop being regarded by teacher and student as the freedom necessary for original thought, and begin to expose their anxieties and frustrations, their fears of never understanding, and of never being understood? The answers I provide to these questions have germinated from my reading of a selection of early modern pedagogical texts: Toxophilus and The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham, The Art of English Poesy by George Puttenham, The First Part of the Elementarie by Richard Mulcaster, and the first monolingual English dictionaries. Though I consider several other texts in relation to these, this remains a surprisingly short list for a book-length study. This may seem yet more surprising given that the term ‘pedagogical text’ is infuriatingly broad, especially when applied to a period which knew that all texts offered forms of epistemological and moral instruction. Nor does one need to have lived in the early modern period to conjecture that every text comprises a scene of instruction of sorts. And from there it might be difficult to resist the conclusion that all acts of communication, whether written or spoken, are essentially scenes of instruction in various disguises. The term ‘pedagogical text’ would thus very quickly collapse in upon its own weight; though it might have power to attract examples to it, it will only be to enclose those examples in perpetual obscurity. We would appear to be in need of a working answer to the question: what makes a text pedagogical? My first response to this question is to reverse the trajectory of the reasoning by which I arrived at it: instead of concluding that all acts of communication can be scenes of instruction, let us hypothesize that the scene of instruction is in some sense paradigmatic of all communication. I have some confidence in this hypothesis because it is not entirely my own. In his seminal reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Stanley Cavell often returns to the scenes of instruction Wittgenstein describes. These scenes are very much like the one with which I began: a teacher is attempting to explain a calculation, or the meaning of a word to a student who sometimes understands, sometimes

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does not. Wittgenstein uses these scenes of instruction in order to clarify those criteria by which we determine whether someone has understood something: how do we know if a student has understood the calculation ‘+2’? In this case, the teacher may perform the calculation up to 10, then ask the student to continue the series. The student will be said to understand ‘+2’ if he can continue thus: ‘12, 14, 16, 18, 20’ and so on. (For how long he must continue the series in order for him to have satisfied the teacher is an ambiguity that interests Wittgenstein, but which I will have to pass by.) According to Cavell, knowing how to continue a series, which is elsewhere described as an ability to ‘go on’, is a figure for the acquisition of language. To learn the meaning of a word is to learn how to use it in new contexts – contexts which are different (even if only subtly) from all other contexts which have ever occurred. The teacher might put in place explicit rules for the use of a word. But rules can neither determine the uses to which they are put, nor provide the student with absolute certainty that he is speaking meaningfully and appropriately in infinitely variable contexts. The student cannot simply follow a rule blindly because every rule must be applied to a particular context. No rule, no matter how determinate, can provide (to use Wittgenstein’s image) a ‘visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity’.2 Cavell highlights that moment when the rules and the teacher’s power to instruct come to an end, and the child must go on alone. Most immediately for us, the examples of ‘knowing how to continue’ give . . . a simple or magnified view of teaching and learning, of the transmission of language and hence of culture . . . It isolates or dramatizes the inevitable moment of teaching and learning, and hence of communication, in which my power comes to an end in the face of the other’s separateness from me.3

The scene of instruction may thus be seen as paradigmatic of all interpersonal communication insofar as it intensifies, and thus draws to light, the gap between teacher and student, and thus between any two interlocutors. The scene of instruction intensifies this gap because it builds inevitably to the moment at which an interlocutor will be called upon to show if he has understood. The texts that I have selected for this study are pedagogical in so far as they respond to this ‘inevitable moment’. Their responses occur within the context of language instruction, and more particularly as part of an attempt to teach the proper use of words. Generally

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Introduction

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speaking, their responses fluctuate between two approaches to teaching. On one hand, a teacher might seek to establish a rule of proper use, one which applies to all contexts, and that the student can obey with certainty and assurance. On the other hand, a teacher might feel that ‘properness’ is too changeable to be defined by any rule. He might then be able to offer only examples of proper use, perhaps in the hope that the student will develop from them a sense for what is proper. The first approach is motivated by certain assumptions: that a rule tacitly guides every instance of proper use; and that, once in possession of such a rule, the student need only follow it. Since there is no new context that rule has not foreseen, there is no need for him ever to use his judgement. In a sense, the rule perpetually defers the moment when the student goes on alone. The second approach recognizes that no such rule can be formulated that could prescribe a definitively proper use in every context. Though this recognition might make the assumptions of the first approach look naive and idealistic, the examples of proper use offered in the second approach lack the certainty of a clear rule. More worryingly, perhaps, their infinite variety threatens to dissolve the principle of properness into something arbitrary and unteachable, if not also unknowable. The second approach leaves us vulnerable to the question, ‘But why is that use proper?’ If we deem it naive to think that a rule of proper use can be formulated, then we ought to be prepared to accept that we can ultimately give no more authoritative answer to this question than, ‘Because that’s just how it is.’ Each of these chapters is a case study of a particular response, or a series of responses to the fact that one cannot make another understand how to use language properly – whether as a word, or a poetic figure or even a single letter. Not only can any instruction be misinterpreted, or even abused, but no rule is so clear as to be able to dictate its own uses. Even the most unambiguous rule needs to be used properly. The pedagogical gap cannot be closed. In one way or another, the texts I consider acknowledge this unavoidable truth. However, though some early modern pedagogues are not so naive as to think they can prescribe an unambiguous rule of proper use, they continue to be tempted by the kind of certainty offered by such a rule. That is, they are unwilling to concede that proper use is not underpinned by a rule, or guiding principle of some kind even though they cannot say what it is. The consequence is that they formulate what I am calling rules of use: rules which can guide a student’s

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practice, but which cannot be so abstracted from instances of use that they can offer clear prescriptions. Perhaps the most effective way of conveying what I mean here is simply to say that the most ubiquitous rule of use in early modern texts is the rule of decorum. To approach early modern pedagogy in this way is to buck a strong trend in current scholarship. Where I am interested in the way the pedagogy of the period is often anxiously aware of its impotence to include – that it might be misunderstood, or misused, or fail to attract followers – recent approaches to early modern pedagogy stress its tendencies to exclude, often for sociopolitical reasons. Many of the texts I consider have been perceived as attempts either to exclude from the company of a learned elite those readers to whom they are addressed, or to instantiate the writer himself as an indubitable member of that elite. In Chapter 1, I offer reasons for why we ought to consider alternative approaches to those which see early modern pedagogy as sociopolitically motivated. To that end, I attempt to define a form of motivation which has largely been elided in current scholarship. The kind of motivation that interests me is perhaps more analytical and conceptual than the desire for social or political advancement, but is no less powerful in prompting and conditioning what these writers say about language and its teaching. St Augustine’s seemingly unremarkable description in the Confessions of how he was taught the meaning of words is an excellent example of this motivation in action. I have used the passage as the epigraph to this book. Wittgenstein too thought that it exposed some of our most deeply held assumptions about the nature of language, so much so that he quotes this passage at the very beginning of the Investigations. I discuss this passage at greater length in Chapter 1. For now, I would like simply to intimate the difference between the serenely confident way in which Augustine’s elders teach the meaning of words by pointing at objects, and the altogether more fraught, haphazard and fallible way in which early modern pedagogues taught the meanings of words, or their decorous use, or their correct spelling. The confidence of the elders is based not on empirical or biographical fact, but is the consequence of an assumption that Augustine is making: that the meaning of a word is the object for which it stands. This assumption can be said to be motivating insofar as it prompts Augustine into providing the description he does, and tacitly justifies its claims to being accurate. Assuming that the meaning of a word is the object for which it stands, it seems perfectly reasonable that a teacher need only gesture

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to the relevant objects in order to teach his student language. The gesturing seems impeccably simple and could hardly be cause for confusion. One could hardly imagine the young Augustine sincerely asking, ‘But why?’ While the writers of these early modern texts are often motivated by an aspiration to speak with the same effortless authority as Augustine’s elders, they are also overwhelmed by the recognition that such authority is perpetually elusive, and is grounded upon erroneous assumptions about the nature of language. When the aspiration confronts the recognition certain problems inevitably arise. These problems are the principle interest of Rules of Use.

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Towards a Grammar of Use

Pedagogy and scepticism Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe changed how we viewed humanist education. No longer could we uncritically accept humanism’s rhetoric about its own ‘intrinsic worth or practical utility’, and the ‘rise of the classical curriculum and the downfall of scholasticism as the natural triumph of virtue over vice’.1 Instead, we were persuaded that humanism succeeded largely due to a ‘consonance between the practical activities of the humanists and the practical needs of their patrons . . . Scholasticism bred too independent an attitude to survive. In the Renaissance as in other periods, in sum, the price of collaboration in the renewal of art and literature was collaboration in the construction of society and polity’.2 From this vantage point, we could now see that humanist pedagogy promoted statesanctioned ideologies, re-articulated socio-political divisions, and imposed upon the populace systems of discipline and punishment which turned it into a pliable workforce.3 It became apparent that, most hypocritically of all, humanism excluded from the company of a learned elite precisely those people to whom its education programme was addressed. Although it may be a generalization to suggest that this has become our default position on early modern pedagogy, this position has legitimated what, to my mind, have become our presiding critical intentions: to situate pedagogy within networks of power relations, and to give an account of its submission and resistance to socio-political, economic and ideological pressures. More recently, for instance,

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Richard Halpern has attempted to ‘inscribe the English literary Renaissance within the prehistory of capital’, and has urged us to see Tudor education as instilling a ‘new disciplinary economy in their subjects’, thus enacting what Michel Foucault (with a nod to Marx) has called the ‘accumulation of men’: ‘The ideological function of Tudor schooling must, then, be understood to include not only the transmission of doctrines or governing representations but also the imposition of certain productive and disciplinary practices. The schools hammered in ideological content and also laid down economies of recreation and labor, punishment and reward.’4 Even as Halpern recognizes the ambivalences and tensions of the way ‘humanist rhetorical education tried to evolve a mode of indoctrination based on hegemony and consent rather than force and coercion’, he nevertheless continues to see education in terms of the strategies of power by which it asserts its own worth, the worth of its proponents and the worth of a ruling ideology. With the possible exception of Roger Ascham’s, all of the texts I consider in the following chapters have attracted readings which adopt this approach and arrive at similar conclusions: that pedagogy replicates political power, or constitutes an attempt by educators to secure a place within an existing sociopolitical hierarchy, or redraws social divisions by excluding the reader from the prestige language it seeks to define.5 Since I consider these readings in depth in the appropriate chapters, I will not go into any of them in detail here. Generally speaking, my response to them will not be of straight disagreement, so much as of departure. I cannot disagree, for instance, that acts of pedagogy are ideologically motivated to include the teacher within an elite class and to define the student as an aspirant to (and thus not a full member of) that class. The occasion for my reading of early-modern pedagogical texts is the conjecture that this politics of inclusion and exclusion is worth reconsidering. My starting point will be to argue that we are confronted in these texts not just with a political motivation to exclude, but also with a hermeneutical condition that makes inclusion problematic. I would like to show that early modern pedagogy poses important questions about the nature of teaching and learning which expose an awareness of its impotence to include. How might a teacher ensure that his instructions have been understood, and how might a student ensure that he has understood them? What rules are sufficiently determining to guide the student into the correct way of speaking, or writing

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or behaving? How might one define a word so that the student can use it properly in any context? These questions are all embedded in the broader question of what can and cannot be taught, and the broader question still of how we can communicate anything with absolute certainty. They also begin to expose aspects of a hermeneutical condition which makes it possible for pedagogy to exclude even as it sometimes also makes it difficult for pedagogy to include. In the Introduction, I discussed one consequence of this condition: that it is impossible to make someone understand something. What makes it impossible to absolutely ensure a student understands is also what makes it possible for that student to be prevented from understanding. The chapters which follow analyse how early modern pedagogical texts responded to the hermeneutical condition out of which both these possibilities arise. Though all scenes of instruction are susceptible to this kind of analysis, early modern pedagogical texts seem to call for it most vociferously. This is because they often define the parameters and aims of their instruction by concepts which resist definition and which are notoriously unteachable. Such concepts are often referred to in terms which delineate a certain desirable quality of language use: propriety, correctness, appropriateness, eloquence (to mention but four). Predictably enough, such qualities cannot often be defined any more precisely than the words we use to name them. We may know what the use of words is, but can we say what proper, or correct, or appropriate or eloquent use is? And if a teacher cannot say what these things are, how can he teach them? Although these and other concepts cannot be subsumed under a single term, their anomalous function in early modern pedagogy finds fullest and most frequent expression in the concept of decorum. Decorum is the rule according to which all language should be used, but none can say exactly what it is since it is different in every context. A pedagogical programme which claims to produce decorous students will likely have to confront the fact that it cannot absolutely define decorum, nor give any definitive instruction on how to achieve it. Any rule that the teacher gives for decorum must itself be used decorously; and every example he offers must be received correctly in order for the decorousness within it to be observed, absorbed and applied to future cases. Both alternatives give rise to the troubling conclusion that the student needs to have a sense of the decorous in order to learn what decorum is. In this situation the teacher seems to lack a grounding rule, or foundational

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instruction or definitive example that would ensure the student understands what decorum is without assuming he already does. All instructions, even in the form of apparently clear rules, are contingent; nothing the teacher says seems capable of absolutely grounding his programme of pedagogy. I do not take this to be a failure of pedagogy, but an inevitable condition of it. As a consequence of this condition, pedagogy can, if it wishes, exclude: since the decorous use of words cannot be reduced to an exact and prescriptive formula, pedagogy can believably obfuscate and equivocate, and eventually blame the student for misunderstanding its instructions. However, by virtue of the same condition, pedagogy will also sometimes struggle to include: how can decorum effectively be taught if none can say exactly what it is? Strategies of exclusion have frequently been the focus of recent studies of early modern pedagogy, and there has been significantly less attention paid to attempts to communicate knowledge or skills which are by nature elusive. Early modern pedagogical texts bear the marks of the perplexity, tension and ambivalence which one would expect go with the teaching of such things. Where my readings of early modern pedagogy depart from many more political readings is in their treatment of those moments when a pedagogical text might seem to fail. It is tempting to take what one might perceive to be the insufficiency of a text’s instruction, or its apparent unwillingness to impart knowledge or skill as evidence of its desire to do things other than teach. So, for instance, George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy has been said to fail pedagogically because its examples of decorous behaviour fail to define what decorum is, and thus keep decorum in the safe possession of a learned elite.6 The pedagogical programme Richard Mulcaster outlines in The First Part of the Elementarie has been said to lack a founding justification for why its proposed orthography is right, and so fails to embody what it claims to be: the origin of literacy.7 The earliest monolingual English dictionaries have been said to fail (not least of all by Dr Johnson) to delineate the proper use of hard words, and instead merely redraw socio-political hierarchies by defining an elite language which only the decorous can use.8 To argue that a text is insincere about teaching what it claims to teach based on the fact that its instruction is insufficient, is necessarily to make a judgement about what constitutes sufficiently assured and assuring pedagogy. To argue that a text does not provide a rule for decorum, or cannot justify the correctness of its spelling, or cannot

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ensure the proper use of the words it defines is inevitably to demand from the text a level of certainty which it fails to fulfil. I am interested in the nature of this demand, especially given that (as I shall try to show) it is a demand the texts often make of themselves. I want to show the ways in which these texts, as well as our judgements of them, are conditioned by what Stanley Cavell, in his seminal reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, has called the ‘threat of scepticism’. The efficacy of the arguments offered in the following chapters relies heavily on the fact that the problems which arise from this threat are real and insoluble. I will consequently spend the remainder of this chapter attempting to determine their force and parameters. Victoria Kahn’s Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance remains the seminal study of scepticism in the period. Kahn considers the ways in which humanist writers used Academic scepticism to make room for what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom, ‘a faculty of judgement which provides an internal rule of decorum or authoritative standard of interpretation’.9 By denying that either the aesthetics of decorous language or the ethics of virtuous behaviour can be taught by general precepts, humanists were able to highlight the judgement which uses these precepts in ways that are contextually appropriate: ‘The relevant distinction here is between the determinant (logical and necessary) judgement of the theoretical sciences, for which objective or mathematic certainty is the criterion of truth, and the reflective judgement of practical wisdom, which is concerned with action.’10 Although Kahn’s account and my own have several points of contact, this passage exposes the fundamental point of departure. Where Kahn proceeds to consider the ways in which the possibility of prudence itself was eventually brought into question by Pyrrhonist scepticism, I consider the kind of scepticism which is brought into being when Aristotle’s distinction between determinant judgement and practical wisdom cannot be maintained. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy brings to light our stubborn tendencies to see a form of logical or mathematical certainty as the sure underpinning of all language use. For this reason, the Philosophical Investigations dramatizes and describes the problems which arise when logic assumes the status of a ‘normative science’: ‘we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using a language must be playing such a game. – But if you say that our languages

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only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding.’11 The misunderstanding is that we too easily see these ‘calculi with fixed rules’ as an ideal towards which language aspires, but can only ‘approximate’. The threat of scepticism emerges when language appears lacking certainty in its rules as a consequence of a comparison with logic.12 I am concerned to locate an impulsion in early modern pedagogy to see verbal phenomena, including decorum, as operating according to an undisclosed but absolute rule – a rule which can provide the kind of certainty that we would expect of a mathematical formula. The scepticism that interests me (and which is fundamentally different to that which interests Kahn) is the condition of disappointment and dissatisfaction that follows upon the realization that such a rule is perpetually elusive. To approach this from a different angle: what Cavell calls the threat of scepticism arises when we attempt to ascertain what is certain by doubting until no doubt is possible. This distinctly Cartesian procedure is used by the sceptic to arrive at a distinctly un-Cartesian conclusion: that there are no absolute grounds for certainty in our knowledge of the external world, or in our interactions with other minds. This state of affairs becomes threatening when the absence of such certainty forces itself upon us as a deficiency. For instance, when at a scene of instruction we seek absolute assurance that we have been understood, or that we have ourselves understood, we discover that all the contingent means by which understanding occurs cannot inoculate against the possibility of misunderstanding, misinterpretation or misuse. To conclude from this that our contingent, fallible means of understanding is uncertain requires a tacit comparison with a condition of indubitable certainty, one that we may feel we were being denied. Cavell sees pedagogy as the paradigm context for the threat of scepticism because here the absence of ideal certainty is often experienced by the teacher as a practical lack: ‘The [student’s] mind cannot be led at every point; teaching (reasons; my control) comes to an end; then the other takes over. And the object of my instruction (my assertions, questions, remarks, encouragements, rebukes) is exactly that the other shall take over, that he or she shall be able to go on (alone).’13 The idea of ‘going on’ marks that ‘inevitable moment of teaching and learning’ in which the teacher exhausts his explanations and justifications, when he has no further rules or examples to offer, and when he (figuratively and literally) stops talking in order to see if the student can continue by himself. For instance, having been taught

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to perform the calculation ‘+2’ up to 10, a child must at some moment go on by himself with numbers beyond 10. Alternatively, we can imagine a scene of instruction in which a teacher explains the meaning of a word to a student: his rules and examples will eventually come to an end, and it will be up to the student to use the word correctly in new and unforeseen contexts. It is at this moment of ‘going on’ that the teacher, or student, or both might feel the lack of an ideal rule, in obedience to which the student could proceed correctly with certainty. This lack will likely become more pronounced if the teacher’s instructions repeatedly fail to show the student how to go on correctly. The mutual isolation – the incapacity to understand, and the inability to be understood – is an ever-present possibility because no such rules exist that would give the student absolute assurance. The threat of scepticism emerges when we experience this as a deficiency. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, scenes in which a child is taught the meaning of a word, or how to read, or how to continue a numerical series are used not only to show the absence of an indubitable rule, but also to call attention to our anxiety at being without such a rule when attempting to make our most ordinary of practices understood. A child who is learning to count might well misunderstand the most basic of arithmetical commands. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a student who has learned the series of cardinal numbers is given the instruction, ‘+2’. The student follows this command to his teacher’s satisfaction until he moves beyond 1000 when he writes, ‘1000, 1004, 1008, 1012’. The teacher stops him, and says, ‘Look what you’ve done? You should have added two.’ What if the student is unable to see his error? It would now be no use to say, ‘But can’t you see . . . ?’ – and go over the old explanations and examples for him again. In such a case, we might perhaps say: this person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order as we would understand the order ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on.’ This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally to a person to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction from fingertip to wrist, rather than from wrist to fingertip. (§185)

Such a scenario might seem to us utterly improbable. However, Wittgenstein is not appealing to our sense of what is empirically likely so much as drawing our attention to a logical possibility.14 He wants us to acknowledge a certain

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contingency in the power of the rule to determine the student’s behaviour.15 Since no rule can govern its own use, it cannot guard against its own misuse. (A student might write down incorrect numbers, and yet still feel as if his actions were determined by the rule he was given.) The rule ‘+2’ is alone insufficient either to provide absolute assurance to the student as to how to proceed, or to explain what has taken place if the student does proceed correctly. Wittgenstein’s example is designed to show the extent to which even the most mathematically determined of instructions depends on what Cavell calls our ‘mutual attunement in judgements’: any rule requires an understanding of the conventions of its application. (These attunements more particularly include the nature of affirmation and correction, the meaning of gestures and vocal inflections, the status of a rule whose use far exceeds the finite examples that can be covered at a scene of instruction. For Wittgenstein, these attunements are analogous to the pointing finger. In order for pointing to be pedagogically meaningful, the child must be attuned to its use: he must know to look in the direction of the finger, not of the wrist.) That Wittgenstein’s scenes of instruction so frequently show dissonance in attunements exposes, for Cavell, an abiding anxiety: ‘We know that he [the student] is not completely unintelligible to us; we feel he must be able to follow our directions. And we know we are impotent in this moment to get him to. The cause of our anxiety is that we cannot make ourselves intelligible (to him).’16 Where the teacher’s sense that the student ought to be able to follow his directions confronts the recognition that it is impossible to make the student do so, the teacher will likely become aware of a gap between him and his student. Any instruction can be misinterpreted, and will be insufficient to provide absolute assurance; every rule – even the most mathematically precise – is contingent. Wittgenstein’s examples bring us to the very edge of what I call a pedagogical gap between teacher and student in order for us to acknowledge that there is no absolute rule to close that gap. The threat of scepticism is charged by the aspiration to find such a rule. In fact, the concluding truth of scepticism, that there is no rule, has no power without an aspiration to grasp such a rule. Cavell takes Wittgenstein as showing us that scepticism becomes an insoluble problem only insofar as we would seek to solve it. And he reads the Investigations as dramatizing, and thereby bringing to light the assumptions that motivate this seeking.

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From this vantage point, a reading which says that a text fails to teach decorum because it can neither define it nor reduce it to a rule risks demanding from a teacher a level of certainty which is perpetually elusive, if not illusory. When a teacher is deemed to fall short of these standards of certainty, then he may be adjudged to be motivated by things other than the desire to teach. I do not mean to say that such judgements will necessarily be wrong, only that – given the ubiquitous and insoluble nature of the sceptical problem – they cannot merely be right. An approach which is sensitive to the sceptical problematic, and which consequently sees the hermeneutics of inclusion and exclusion not just as politically adventitious, but pedagogically unavoidable will likely conceive of an author’s motivation in very different terms. Instead of explaining the anomalies and apparent insufficiencies of early modern texts by exposing the socio-political ambitions which motivate their pedagogy, I take the scepticism itself as containing, or articulating a motivating force. This approach asks us to take seriously an entirely different order of motivatedness.

The Augustinian picture of language The Philosophical Investigations famously begins with a passage from the Confessions in which St Augustine describes how he learned the meaning of words. (The passage appears as the epigraph to this book.) In his detailed explication of this opening, Cavell observes that Wittgenstein is led to philosophical reflection on ‘being accosted’ by the voice of another.17 However, Cavell observes that although ‘the accosting is done by someone Wittgenstein cares about and has to take seriously’, these ‘assertions of Augustine’s memories are not rhetorically accosting, or insisting’.18 They seem, we may add, curiously unprepossessing, and say more about the mind which has paused upon them than their own power to have given it pause. Cavell continues: I note that I had read Augustine’s Confessions before reading Philosophical Investigations, and I remember wondering, philosophically as it were, over his passages concerning time, but not over his passages concerning the acquisition of language. So if there is something disturbing or remarkable about those words, then I am prepared to find that that is itself a remarkable fact about them. As if to suggest: one does not know, in advance, where philosophy might begin, when one’s mind may be stopped, to think.19

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There is, in other words, something remarkably unremarkable about this passage from Augustine. It does not contain lofty philosophical deductions, or systematic thinking. Rather, as a place ‘where philosophy may begin’, the passage is (or contains) a kind of proto-philosophy, the groundwork for a philosophical model. What, paradoxically, is remarkable about this passage is that we let it pass by unremarked. As Cavell argues, ‘its remarkableness, its motivatedness, has been disguised’.20 Wittgenstein has seen through the disguise due to his profound attentiveness to the proto-philosophical underpinning of apparently ordinary utterances. One of the most instructive aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy generally (and his attention to this quotation from Augustine specifically) is the way it reveals the philosophical ‘motivatedness’ of non-philosophical texts in ways which do not mistake them for systematic philosophy. None of the early modern texts I consider are works of philosophy. Not only are they philosophically unprepossessing, but, if anything, they express outright suspicion of theoretical speculation. My argument is that their remarkableness, their motivatedness has been disguised. The scenes of instruction they envisage and enact are motivated by assumptions about what language is, and what it ought to be. These assumptions do not comprise a systematic theory as such, but form the groundwork from which a theory might arise; they provide the founding conditions which determine what can and cannot be said about language. Of what exactly does the proto-philosophy underpinning Augustine’s remarks comprise? Augustine’s description of how we are trained into an understanding of words relies on certain assumptions which together form what Wittgenstein calls a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the words in a language name objects – sentences are combinations of such names. – In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. (§1)

Wittgenstein glosses the passage from Augustine in this way not simply to show that Augustine’s understanding of the essence of language is erroneous or incomplete, but to question the picture of language which holds us in its thrall: the assumption that language has an essence which determines its uses. This assumption can be said to be motivating insofar as it tempts us into a

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certain form of analysis. Let us expand Augustine’s description, and imagine that his elders were trying to teach him the meaning of the word ‘table’. His elders point to different kinds of table. The young Augustine soon realizes that tables come in an almost unlimited number of sizes, shapes, and colours, and are made of a wide variety of materials. Though a majority of these tables have four legs, there are some with only three, others with as many as six or more and some which only have one leg with a wide base. There are also some tables which have no legs at all. (With a small stretch of the historical imagination we may envision Augustine’s elders pointing to airplane tray-tables which have only a hinge, and a small support.) With so many objects all answering to the name ‘table’, the young Augustine is confused: which one of these tables is the object which the word ‘table’ stands for? Motivated by the assumption that language has an essence, he determines that the meaning of ‘table’ is not a single one of these objects, but a set of characteristics common to all the objects it names. The young Augustine will now be compelled to search for them. This search will take him beneath the surface uses of language to those definitive underlying criteria which an object must fulfil if it is meaningfully to be called ‘table’. Under the motivating power of the Augustinian picture, meaning becomes (in Wittgenstein’s words) ‘Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which analysis digs out’ (§92). The metaphor of digging represents in Wittgenstein the aspiration to uncover an essence within language that is presumed to lie hidden from us. But when the young Augustine considers the dazzling variety of ways in which the word ‘table’ can be used, no common unifying characteristic emerges.21 It is as if, having tried to dig beneath his uses to the essence which underpins them, Augustine has been refused the greater depth that he sought, and he finds himself back on the level at which he began, perhaps staring quizzically at the uses themselves. Wittgenstein says that when the most ordinary words resist our attempts to find an essence in them, we are likely to conclude that they lack such essence. That is, our preconceived aspiration to grasp an essence means that when we analyse language, and do not find that essence, we experience its absence as a deficiency, or even as groundlessness. (Replace ‘table’ with ‘decorum’, and the anxieties of early modern language education are intimated, if not foretold.) This is the motivatedness of the Augustinian picture.

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A search for essences of the kind I have just rehearsed makes us forget what Wittgenstein is always reminding us of: that we use such words as ‘table’ meaningfully, without thinking, nearly every day, in contexts that are never the same; and very rarely are we not understood. We know what ‘table’ means. Our search for an essence makes us disown the knowledge we already have. Wittgenstein encourages us to understand what we are persistently inclined to forget: that our uses of language do not require the ideal grounds which philosophy seeks to uncover. And when we try to affix our uses onto this ideal, it is as if they can get no traction upon it: ‘We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’ (§107). The Investigations attempts to release us from a compulsion to ground language upon a flawless, ice-like essence. Wittgenstein’s call for us to return from its slippery surfaces to the rough ground of our actual uses is one we must strive to hear against a tendency to be deaf to it. We so easily and forgetfully slip into a search for essences. Our relationship to language is characterized by this drama. But what solace does the rough ground offer us? Throughout the Investigations, Wittgenstein attempts to teach his reader a form of analysis which does not require digging. If we begin on the understanding that what we seek ‘already lies open to view and . . . becomes surveyable by a rearrangement’ (§92), then our task should not be to explain phenomena, but simply to describe them. For Wittgenstein, explanation attempts to analyse linguistic phenomena in terms of an underlying structure, or essence, or reality; for instance, we can explain, or ostensively define the word ‘table’ by trying to point either to the object for which it stands, or to those ideal criteria common to all the objects it names. By contrast, description does not try to penetrate phenomena, but simply arranges them so that clarifying relationships and resemblances emerge. 122. A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of words. – Our grammar is lacking in just this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions.’ [. . .] 124. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

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For it cannot give it a foundation either. [. . .] 126. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.

The aim of a perspicuous representation is to make sense of an array of language activities: this is done not by trying to submit them to a common essence, but by arranging them in ways that make clear the different sorts of resemblances between and within them. Wittgenstein called these ‘family-resemblances’: ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ (§66). The notion that family resemblances pertain between individual cases, as HansJohann Glock explains, is crucial to Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, ‘the view that there must be something common to all instances of a concept that explains why they fall under it, and that the only adequate or legitimate explanation of a word is one which lays down the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application.’22 A clear view of the family resemblances between words defuses the need for this sort of essentialist, analytic explanation; with our language uses laid perspicuously before us, we no longer feel the compulsion to dig.

Context Some readers might feel concerned that I have so far made only token reference to the time and place with which this study is concerned, and will wonder what on earth Wittgenstein has to do with early modern England. It might seem to some that I have failed to carefully and diligently make a case for the pertinence to the period of the theoretical machinery that (they envisage) I will anachronistically impose upon it. Such concerns are important. Ultimately, the most persuasive assuagement I can offer is contained in the chapters themselves, and the localized readings of early modern texts that Wittgensteinian thinking makes available. And, in that sense, the value of Wittgenstein to early modern scholarship is not an assumption of the following chapters, but one of the central contestable issues with which they engage. However, I would nevertheless like to show that my use of Wittgenstein is neither ignorant of these concerns, and to clarify just how I will use his work.

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Richard Waswo’s Language and Meaning in the Renaissance is the only booklength study to have engaged the philosophy of Wittgenstein to analyse how Renaissance thinkers understood the nature and function of language. Waswo argues that the Renaissance enacted a ‘semantic shift’ from the referential semantics of the medieval period to its own relational, use-based semantics. However, according to Waswo, this shift was never fully realized because Renaissance thinkers and writers lacked the theoretical vocabulary to affect a full-blown semantic revolution.23 Waswo uses Wittgenstein not merely to account for this emergent, constitutive semantics, but also to show that we are always lacking in the theoretical vocabulary to articulate it. The consequence in the Renaissance was a disparity between theory and practice. When language is talked about, it is consciously regarded as the clothing of pre-existent meanings; but when language is employed to reflect on its various functions – to recommend a style, to praise a vernacular, to teach the figures of speech, to urge a method of interpreting Scripture, or to compose literature – it is often implicitly regarded as constitutive of meaning.24

We can apply to this the terms in which I am formulating my own argument. Though language was presumed to have an essence (i.e. the meaning of a word is an object either in the world, or the mind), a divergent view was trying to express itself: that the meaning of a word must be sought in the uses to which it can be put. According to this second view, language constituted a reality rather than merely represented one. Central to Waswo’s case is that key Renaissance thinkers had some understanding of what Wittgenstein was later to call, ‘ordinary language’, and his star witness here is the Italian rhetorician and theologian, Lorenzo Valla. With support from several articles by Salvatore Camporeale, Waswo postulates that Valla’s appeal to customary usage is ‘neither a belletristic fetish nor a canon of oratorical good taste . . . [but] a way of asking how language in fact works and of specifying what kind of distinctions are made in the ordinary use of words’.25 Quoting HannaBarbara Gerl’s Rhetorick als Philosophie: Lorenzo Valla, Waswo describes Valla’s revolutionary reorientation of semantics: ‘Being and meaning, the thing and the word, are in the world of human beings not to be separated.’ What the thing is is what the word means. This equation is Valla’s most profound critique of all the assumptions about the relation of word / object / meaning contained in the traditional process of

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signification or representation. It denies both the correspondence theory of truth and the referential theory of meaning, which is no longer to be sought in objects but rather in the words that name and categorize them. That is, language and the people who use it do not ‘represent’ a reality but constitute one.26

Valla appears to be engaged in the recognizably Wittgensteinian activity of wresting words from the essences they putatively represent, and attaching them back to the activities of their use. Notwithstanding some reservations, I have found Waswo’s account compelling, if not convincing. However, not everyone has had the same reaction. John Monfasani has voiced aggressive disagreement, in particular with the comparison Waswo draws between Valla and Wittgenstein.27 Monfasani attempts to show that ‘ordinary language’, or rather consuetudo, ‘was not an absolute philosophical standard for Valla’.28 Although, he concedes, Valla ‘frequently appealed to linguistic consuetudo in criticizing philosophical opinions’, Valla nevertheless ‘openly disregarded it or even corrected it when it contradicted what he felt to be the truth’.29 Moreover, the notion of ordinary language that Valla seems to be working with is not sufficiently ordinary to warrant comparison with Wittgenstein: ‘the only truly authoritative consuetudo for Valla was the literary practice of the best authors, not ordinary language in the modern sense. Valla’s linguistic standard was thoroughly and self-consciously belletristic.’30 In both these ways, Waswo has appropriated Valla’s ideas to accord with what Monfasani calls ‘the winds of fashion’. Monfasani dismisses Waswo’s use of Wittgenstein as an illness of scholarship in which ‘scholars suddenly discover in texts ideas which happen to be fashionable today. Such discoveries are essentially humorous’.31 Moreover, ‘a heavy dose of the latest social, scientific, literary, linguistic, or philosophical theories to explain what is under, between, around, and behind the lines of a text is prima facie evidence for suspecting that a piece of writing has more to do with present vogue than past fact.’32 I am not especially concerned to defend Waswo’s use of Wittgenstein against Monfasani. (Waswo has been quite capable of defending himself.)33 But I am aware that Monfasani is not alone in having these views, and if Waswo can be accused of holding too fast to fashionable ideas, I ought to defend myself in advance of this charge. If classifying Valla as an ‘ordinary language philosopher’ is seen as being the most objectionable of Waswo’s crimes, then

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I should state clearly that I have no intention whatever of attaching that title to any early modern thinker. In fact, my use of Wittgenstein is not grounded in a perceived similarity between views held by Wittgenstein and early modern thinkers. Rather, it is occasioned by the problems which arise when language is assumed to contain an essence. This assumption can be said to be ‘Wittgensteinian’ only insofar as it was Wittgenstein who made us aware of its ubiquity. It should be made clear, however, that Wittgenstein does not provide historical proofs for its ubiquity. Indeed, by the standards of historically directed scholarship, Wittgenstein’s passing reflections on its influence upon Western thought are careless at best. Let us be clear: Wittgenstein uses a medieval autobiographical text from which he derives a so-called picture of language which he later discovers underpinning both logical positivism and its forebears (including Frege), and which (he infers in passing) tacitly informs Platonic theories of language.34 Though historical claims can be entertained on the basis of these observations, to say that Wittgenstein is making an historical claim is to misconstrue his emphasis. Wittgenstein is not so much interested in how language has and has not been thought about, but the consequences of a particular set of assumptions on how language can and cannot be thought about. He is not interested in documenting historical fact, but in exposing the problems to which an erroneous set of assumptions will logically predispose us. He does this by dramatizing their motivating force: if we assume that language has an essence hidden beneath its uses, then we will be compelled to dig for it. Though I find Waswo’s account of a semantic shift plausible, this study has no investment in the claim that early modern approaches to language instruction were significantly different from those of the medieval period. My interest lies more in the consequences of their figuring themselves as such. I argue that a reaction against what was perceived to be the emphasis on rules in scholastic teaching (and elsewhere) did not lead to an unproblematic renunciation of the certainty such rules offered, but, at times, a renewed desire to grasp them, and, at other times, a cautious acceptance that they could never be grasped. For instance, George Puttenham derided rules as being ‘scholasticall’, and he lauds courtly examples as the only way to teach aspiring poets. But Puttenham, who also wants to prove that there can be an art of English poetry to rival that of Greek and Latin, rejects rules in favour of exemplary use only then to instantiate

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a further rule for that use: decorum. Whether Puttenham’s stance against scholasticism is based on historical fact or mere conjectural bias is beside the point. The stance itself is powerfully conditioning, and leads him to invoke a rule which can never fully express itself as a rule. As with the concepts named by its synonyms (correctness, propriety, aptness), decorum may justifiably be termed a ‘rule of use’ – with the ambiguities of the genitive case very much in play. Decorum is a rule of use in the sense that it is offered to the student as a precept to guide his practice. But decorum is also a rule of use in that it can never be so abstracted from the instances of its practical application as to offer incontestable prescriptions. In the scenes of instruction they envision and enact, early modern pedagogical texts inherit the ambivalence of this ambiguity and dramatize it. The preceding paragraphs (and indeed the whole chapter) have cautiously been edging towards formulating a method of contextualization whose primary frame of reference is not a historical period, or a geographical location. Of course, I do not jettison these categories; it would be plainly perverse, if not impossible, for a book subtitled ‘Language and Instruction in Early Modern England’ to do so. But they are not the principal criteria by which I am trying to define what a context is. The context within which I will read these texts is the interconnected arrangement of assumptions, aspirations, and logical necessities which, when they converge upon a scene of instruction, give rise to a sceptical problem. I call this a ‘context’ because it does not constitute the direct object of a writer’s thinking, but forms the circumstances within which that thinking is done. To situate a text within these circumstances is to provide an account of how it engendered the problem, or succumbed to it, or attempted to solve it, or resisted the temptation to solve it, or was by turns satisfied and dissatisfied, comfortable and perplexed by its insolubility. I claim that this problem is trans-historical only insofar as it does not have a solution, and that it cannot be foreclosed. (In Chapter 5, I give an account of how Dr Johnson could not avoid it when writing his dictionary in the mideighteenth century.) Broadly speaking, Rules of Use attempts to give an account of what was historically particular about early modern English pedagogy in terms of its response to this insoluble, ongoing problem. Taking heed of Monfasani’s criticisms of Waswo, I have resisted using the category of ‘ordinary language’ to analyse how the texts of the period

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understood decorum. I have preferred instead to employ the investigative procedure suggested by that category: to analyse the ordinary language which was used to define and justify the decorous. Far from being anachronistic, such a method is attentive to the situatedness of all language use. Though I neither have the scope nor the intention of providing a taxonomy of key early modern words, there is one word whose cognates have occupied my interest, and these have often been the coordinates by which I have navigated my investigation. I highlight them on the assumption that those words which we use without thinking are oftentimes those words which do a significant amount of tacit thinking for us. This assumption is no mere castle in the air, but extends from what I take to be the logic of doubt: one can only perform an act of doubt upon grounds which are unquestioned. Such grounds are not ontologically indubitable, and they cannot be offered as a decisive refutation of the sceptic’s doubt. To invoke them is to show the sceptic that the expression of even the most radical doubt relies, at the very least, on uses of language which cannot at that moment be subjected to questioning. In order to challenge and contest fundamental aspects of the nature of language – the rule of decorum, or the meanings of words, or a standardized spelling, or how best to teach all of these things – one requires a mastery of a language which itself remains unchallenged and uncontested. To speak particularly: I have argued that, in its attempts to find the essence of decorum by digging beneath the surface operations of language, early modern pedagogy was continually drawn back to the surface itself. I want to suggest that this surface is evoked by a family of words which was too unremarkable to be questionable, which provided a sure basis from which to dispute, question and contest, and through whose categories these writers came to understand what decorous use was.

Use, usual, useful The word ‘use’ is an unusually useful one, and although its usability can leave it open to abuse (if not overuse), it was regularly utilized by a number of early modern pedagogues in their attempts to understand the project of language teaching. ‘Use’ and its cognates perform an impressive range of functions in

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this period, five of which I would like briefly to mention. First, ‘use’ refers to the purposive and circumstantial deployment of a linguistic object – a word, a rhetorical figure, a poetic form, a genre. Writers of rhetoric or poetry manuals are keenly sensitive to the momentary and occasional context of all language activity, and regularly remind us that what constitutes decorous use in one instance might very well constitute misuse in another. They were consequently also aware that the rule of decorum can only be observed in use, which is as much as to say that decorum can only rule through its uses. (And this meant that the faculty of judgement by which a great writer produces decorous acts could only be imitated by imitating its uses.) However – and here is my second meaning of ‘use’ – in some vernacular contexts verbal fashions were changing so quickly during this period that what was decorously usual one month might very well have become indecorously unusual in another. ‘Use’ here is synonymous with ‘custom’, as in its adjectival form, ‘usual’. Derided by many as a whimsical and unruly force antithetical to and destructive of good judgement, custom (or use) was viewed by others as an unavoidable inconvenience which even Latin had to endure (Horace’s famous lines comparing words falling from favour as leaves from a tree are frequently cited in support).35 However, lexicographers and rhetoricians in the later decades of the sixteenth century display an increasing faith that custom was not whimsical: words and expressions came in and out of use according to necessity, or – and this is my third meaning of ‘use’ – usefulness. In the word lists I shall consider, ‘usefulness’ refers to the degree to which a particular word performs a unique and necessary function in a certain context. Dr Johnson was suspicious of the sort of loan words compiled in seventeenth century word lists, but nevertheless condescended to consider including some on the basis of their utility.36 Fourthly (and less importantly), ‘usable’ appears rarely in early modern texts partly because its meaning is subsumed under their uses of ‘useful’. But the category designated by ‘usable’ is sometimes in play: word lists, for instance, were often said to be useful insofar as they made words available for use. Finally, ‘use’ can refer to that highly individual process by which the student comes to learn through practice what teaching cannot instil within him. For instance, Roger Ascham talks about the ‘daily use of writing’ as the only thing by which the student will acquire sound judgement.37 In this context, ‘use’ (usus) forms one-third of that classical triumvirate which also included natural aptitude (natura)

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and knowledge (doctrina). Only with these three things will a student achieve perfection. Fittingly, Wittgenstein’s paradigm-shifting assertion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in a language’ finds a dynamic exemplar in the word ‘use’ itself: the variety of its applications is decisive evidence that its meaning is not a preexistent object in either the mind or the world, but its various functions in a language (§43). The totality of these functions is what Wittgenstein would call the ‘grammar’ of a word. I have chosen not to try to manipulate the grammar of ‘use’ into a definition which will accommodate all its functions. To do so (in Wittgenstein’s words) would be to try to mend a spider’s web with my own fingers. Instead, I will conspicuously observe the deployment of ‘use’ and its cognates in early modern texts in the hope that their grammar may become apparent. What this grammar will reveal is that ‘use’, ‘usual’ and ‘useful’ signified grounds that early modern pedagogues could not dig beneath. In their attempts to teach Latin eloquence, or the art of English poetry, or correct spelling, or the meanings of hard words early modern pedagogues recognized that rules could not absolutely prescribe use, and instead offered these uses as the rules, or at least the grounds of them. To have done so is not merely to have recognized that language use inevitably happens in a world of variable and unrepeatable contexts, but that our capacity to live meaningfully in this contingent world can only be acquired through contingent means.

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2

Using Perfection: Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus and The Scholemaster

Taking aim: Toxophilus Few would disagree with the assessment of Roger Ascham’s place in early modern humanism implied in this remark from Laurence V. Ryan: ‘As a lifelong popularizer of traditional ideas rather than a creative thinker, Ascham carefully acknowledged his role as transmitter and his almost total dependence upon the prior wisdom of others.’1 Ascham openly declares the influence of contemporaries such as John Cheke and Johan Sturm throughout his work; he announces his debt to Cicero so frequently that it verges upon idolatry. It is perhaps because of his perceived lack of creativity that Ascham is not a popular topic of study these days. When he is considered at all it is often on the understanding that his views were standard for his time, and that his contribution to humanism was to consolidate its tenets, rather than to redefine them.2 Ascham is of value to this investigation not for the originality of his thinking, but for the clarity with which he evoked scenes of instruction. To the extent that Ascham’s mind was more lucid than it was original, the pedagogical problems which arise when his assumptions about language meet the brute facts of pedagogical use may be said to be of greater consequence than the solutions he offers to them. I begin with a work which in many ways can be said to present Ascham’s ideal scene of instruction. But problems arise even here. Toxophilus, The Schole of Shoting is a dialogue in which Toxophilus, lover of archery, inspires Philologus, lover of study, to take up the sport. Toxophilus is an important companion to Ascham’s later and better known work,

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The Scholemaster, not just because archery is offered as a healthy accompaniment to study, but because the metaphorical conceit of linking archery and eloquence underpins so much of Ascham’s later pedagogical thinking and tacitly shapes his understanding of the nature of decorum. Through the metaphor, eloquence becomes an act of precision and exactitude – the sole aim of which is to hit the mark.3 One of the entailments of this metaphor is that the mark is characterized as clear and singular, as something which lies in full view, and upon which all eloquent speakers are agreed. However, though such a mark is intrinsic to the sport of archery, Ascham never tells us what, in eloquence, this mark actually is. Of course, it is impossible for him to do so because in eloquence, the mark changes according to the context and it can vary infinitely. In Ascham’s texts, the mark is a symbol of clarity and singularity; but this sits awkwardly with the glaring fact that, in practice, the mark can be almost anything. This tension which arises from the metaphor is caused by an important difference between the arts of archery and eloquence. In archery, though one may require judgement to hit the mark, one does not require judgement to perceive it. The target is pre-given; it is that towards which the shooter directs his judgement, but it is not itself a product of that judgement.4 By contrast, decorum can only be apprehended by one’s judgement. Decorum is not pre-given; apprehension of decorum – the mark – is the quintessential skill of the eloquent speaker. My argument is that the metaphor brings with it two contrary motivations which come into conflict at a scene of instruction. The first is the aspiration to isolate an ideal standard or essential characteristic of decorum – one which can stand as the unambiguous, self-evident, fixed mark at which all eloquence must aim. The other comes with the recognition that decorum is not produced other than in the judgement of the eloquent, nor exists anywhere other than in their contextual uses, and encourages us to see decorum as a spatio-temporal phenomenon. One way in which Ascham works through this tension is to allow archery itself to attain the status of the mark: the student of eloquence aspires to have a view of decorum which is as clear as that which the archer has of the target. Teaching archery, with its clear, pre-given mark, becomes the paradigm instance of teaching for Ascham. And the scene of instruction dramatized in Toxophilus becomes, in turn, an ideal which Ascham will aspire to realize in his teaching of language – a mark at which to take aim.5

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I do not mean by this to imply that an aspiration to hit a target ought to be viewed with suspicion per se. What is at issue is the status of Ascham’s targets, and how they are offered to the student. Ascham says that one must always aim at perfection. But just what perfection is, and how it can be used to guide a student’s use are two of the ongoing questions that Ascham’s pedagogy must confront. In Toxophilus, perfection in archery is a rhetorical creation designed to allure the student into diligent practice. In the Preface, Ascham defends himself against the criticism that he is unqualified to write about the perfect archer because he himself is so imperfect: ‘Than seing that saying is one steppe nerer perfectnesse than doyng, let every man leve marvaylyng why my woorde shall rather expresse, than my dede shall perfourme perfecte shootinge’ (xvi). Verbal art can evoke a mental picture of perfection which actions can never themselves reach. And only with such an image of perfection in mind can an individual desire to improve. As K. J. Wilson has written, Between the action of shooting and the mind’s imagining of perfect shooting is saying, i.e., utterance or speech. Ascham emphasizes in this preface that he offers not a deed, perfectly performed or even thought, but an ‘expressive word.’ We see that the dialogue aims in two directions – toward the doing or performance of shooting, on the one hand, and toward conceiving a mental image of perfect shooting, on the other. It is clear that, in order to achieve both aims, the perfect performance of the perfect image, the dialogue must accurately ‘express’ or mean what it says. To say what one means, we conclude, is the perfect end of eloquence and the aesthetic purpose of Ascham’s dialogue. As Toxophilus puts it, ‘hyttynge of the marke, the ende both of shootyng and also of thys our communication.’6

Insofar as all scenes of instruction require the teacher to say what he means, all teachers require eloquence if they are to hit the mark. However, the phrase ‘to say what one means’, like ‘to hit the mark’, is a highly contracted way of expressing a highly ambiguous and elusive act – an act which Toxophilus can, as a whole, be read as attempting to expound. How does one say what one means? As Wilson says, ‘When the orator has perfectly coordinated his speech with the soul of his listener, he may be said, to borrow Ascham’s term, to have hit the mark.’7 Though Wilson is quite right to emphasize the importance of the mental image, Ascham is painfully aware that mental images mean nothing without the ability to express them with due sensitivity to the contingencies of

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person, place and time. Meaning what one says is just as much a product of context as it is of the mind. Far from being an objective, pre-given entity, the mental image only exists because of the teacher’s ability to evoke it in language. That is to say, the idea of perfection can only be communicated through the imperfect medium of words. A crucial aspect of Toxophilus’ attempts to rhetorically evoke the mental image of the perfect shooter is to offer detailed practical instruction for how to hit the mark.8 Toxophilus is provoked into this task by Philologus, who at one point suggests that during times of peace hitting the target need not be so important, since the principal purpose of peace-time archery is to maintain strength. Philologus therefore recommends that archers discard targets altogether and simply shoot their arrows randomly (56–7). ‘The trouthe is’, says Toxophilus, that fashion muche used, woulde do muche goode, but this is to be feared, least that waye shulde be lytle pleasure in it. And that in shoting is beste, yt provoketh a man to use shotinge moste: For muche use maketh men shoote, bothe strong & well, whiche two thinges in shootinge, everye man doeth desyre. And the chyefe mayntayner of use, in any thing, is comparyson, and honeste contention. (57)

Toxophilus argues here that the use of shooting is maintained by healthy competition, which cannot exist without a target. The target itself is meaningless without that which ‘everye man doeth desire’: to shoot ‘bothe stronge & well’. ‘Use’, which connotes ongoing, goal-directed practice, appears to be deployed thoughtlessly by Toxophilus. But Ascham deploys it with the intention of considering it in greater depth. He has Philologus suggest that use alone is insufficient; also required are natural aptitude and knowledge.9 The classical triad natura, ars and exercitatio/usus (to which Plato alludes in Phaedrus and Cicero in De oratore) is here offered as a more complete model for how a student can be brought to perfection.10 Without a natural aptitude for shooting (and knowledge to enhance that aptitude), use is useless. Toxophilus largely agrees, but stresses the unity of all three. Aptnesse, Knowledge, and Use, even as you saye, make all thinges perfecte. Aptnesse is the fyrst and chyefest thinge, without whiche the other two do no good at all. Knowledge doeth increase al maner of Aptnesse, bothe lesse and more. Use sayth Cicero, is farre above all teachinge. And thus they all

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three muste be had, to do any thinge very well, and yf anye one be awaye, what so ever is done, is done verye meanly. Aptnesse is ye gyfte of nature, Knowledge is gotten by ye helpe of other: Use lyeth in our owne diligence & labour. So that Aptnesse & use be ours and wtin us, through nature & labour: Knowledge not ours, but commynge by other: and therefore moost dilligently, of all men to be sought for. (58)

‘Use’, which is ‘farre above all teachinge’. refers to those exercises in which the student learns by his ‘owne diligence & labour’.11 However, infused into his diligence must be knowledge of the art of archery, and this ‘is gotten by ye helpe of other’. Individual use uninformed by knowledge and teaching will leave the student striving towards nothing, merely firing shots into thin air. Knowledge not only contributes practical instruction, but also helps evoke the image of the perfect shooter, whose example every shooter aspires to emulate. When the shooter takes aim at the mark, they are also inevitably taking aim at this idea.12 Initially, Philologus is sceptical as to whether an art of archery can exist, arguing that archery as it is presently practised is only learned by use (60). This prompts Toxophilus to extract the knowledge inherent in use.13 Surprisingly, it is only with significant reservations that he agrees to do this. In fact, it is Philologus who insists that an art would offer such an alluring image of perfect shooting that the student could not help but try to emulate it. By contrast, Toxophilus is afraid to present this art ‘lest this perfitness wich you speke on will discourage men to take any thynge in hande’ (66). Although Toxphilus does eventually acquiesce, the disagreement is significant of itself: even the most perfect of images and comprehensive of arts can be wrongly received; what might be offered with the intention of inspiring practice could have the effect of discouraging it. Immediately after agreeing to present the art, Toxophilus both disclaims his own ability to convey this art and deflects responsibility by saying that Philologus compelled him to do it. Knowledge by itself cannot plant the image of perfection in the student’s mind. Even the most detailed of arts and unambiguous of rules can be received by the student in unwanted and unexpected ways. Toxophilus eventually agrees to present the art of shooting to Philologus, and most of the second book is devoted to these techniques. The instructions are comprehensive, to say the least, and, according to Lawrence V. Ryan,

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Toxophilus is still ‘honoured by archers as the seminal treatise on their sport’.14 Toxophilus begins with instruction concerning the correct equipment, including advice on the best wood for the bow and on whether a shooter should wear gloves. (As it turns out, the goose feather is fittest both for an arrow and a quill.) Toxophilus then considers the handling of that equipment – how one should stand, how one should draw back the string, how one should aim. Philologus is clearly enraptured by the description. He announces that he ‘wyll forsake no labour’ in the practice of archery, and implores Toxophilus to make him ‘as fayre an Archer as you can’ (99). Philologus reflects upon the aesthetic appeal of Toxophilus’ practical instructions, and concludes that usefulness and beauty are two aspects of the same action or object. For thys I am sure in learnynge all other matters, nothynge is broughte to the moost profytable use, which is not handled after the moost cumlye fasion. As masters of fence have no stroke fit ether to hit an other or els to defende hym selfe, whyche is not joyned wyth a wonderfull cumliness . . . Nature it selfe taught men to joyne alwayes welfavourednesse wt profytablenesse. As in man, that joynt or pece which is by anye chaunce deprived of hys cumlynesse the same is also debarred of hys use and profytablenesse. (99)

When a shooter gathers his knowledge, uses it according to correct judgement, and hits the mark, the inevitable result is a profound beauty. ‘Cumlyenesse’ is a ‘decent, sober, or quiet beauty’ (OED 1a) which is ‘pleasing or agreeable to the moral sense, to notions of propriety, or aesthetic taste; becoming, decent, proper, seemly, decorous’ (OED 3). However, as soon as ‘cumlyenesse’ is commended as the aim of all teaching and learning, we are told that ‘cumlynesse onlye, can never be taught by any Arte or craft. But may be perceyved well when it is done, not described wel how it should be done’ (100). In other words, one cannot teach comeliness because it can only be described in use. Since ‘perfite cumlyenesse can not be expressed wyth any precepte of teaching’ (103), Ascham makes an important distinction: ‘Everye hand craft man that workes best for hys owne profyte, workes most semelye to other mens sight’ (99). If one works for one’s own profit, one will be comely to others; the former is a characteristic of the making, the latter a quality perceptible only in the viewing. After meticulously gathering the elements of the art, Toxophilus reminds Philologus once again that art cannot bring him all the way to perfection. The climax of Toxophilus is a description of the effects upon a shot of the

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‘wynde and wether’, without which, ‘men by teaching might be brought to a wonderful neare shootynge’ (106). The wind and weather are great mysteries that cannot be known by rule or precept, but ‘a good archer wyl fyrste wyth diligent use and markynge the wether, learne to knowe the nature of the wynde, and with wysedom, wyll measure in hys mynde, howe muche it wyll alter his shoote’ (107). Though by experience and use a shooter will acquire partial understanding of the nature of the wind, it will ultimately remain mysterious. To se the wynde, with a man his eyes, it is unpossible, the nature of it is so fyne, and subtile, yet this experience of the wynde had I ones my selfe, and that was in the great snowe that fell .iiii. yeares agoo: I rode in the hye waye betwixt Topcliffe upon Swale, and Borowe bridge, the waye beyng sumwhat trodden afore by waye farynge men. The feeldes on bothe sides were playne and laye almost yearde depe with snowe, the nyght afore had ben a litle froste, so yt the snowe was hard and crusted above. That morning the sun shone bright and clere, the winde was whistlelinge a lofte, and sharpe accordynge to the tyme of the yeare. The snowe in the hye waye laye lowse and troden wyth horse feete: so as the wynde blewe, it toke the lowse snow with it, and made it so slide upon the snowe in the felde wyche was harde and crusted by reason of the frost over nyght, that therby I myght se verye wel, the hole nature of the wynde as it blewe yt daye. And I had a great delyte & pleasure to marke it, whyche maketh me now far better to remember it. Sometyme the wynd would be not past .ii. yeardes brode, and so it would carie the snowe as far as I could se. An other tyme the snow woulde tomble softly, by and by it would flye wonderfull fast. And thys I perceyved also that ye wind goeth by streames & not hole togither. For I should se one streame wyth in a Score on me, than the space of .ii. score no snow would stirre, but after so muche quantitie of grounde, an other streame of snow at the same very tyme should be caryed lykewyse, but not equally. For the one would stande styll when the other flew a pace, and so contynewe somtyme swiftlyer sometime slowlyer, sometime broder, sometime narrower, as far as I could se. Nor it flewe not streight, but sometyme it crooked thys waye sometyme that waye, and somtyme it ran round aboute in a compase. And somtymes the snowe wold be lyft clene from the ground up in to the ayre, and by & by it would be al clapt to the grounde as though there had bene no winde at all, streightway it would rise and flye agayne. (112–13)

Thomas Greene called this ‘the most beautiful page Ascham ever wrote’.15 The purpose of the account is not to lay bare the secrets of the wind, but to

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situate art and instruction within its mystery and uncertainty.16 Simply put, the wind brings context to bear on art. Every shot is different; the conditions of shooting (as with language use) are never the same. No instruction can militate against the infinite guiles of the wind. However, the sense of wonder expressed in this passage gives the impression that the wind ought to be taken as an allurement to learning, and not a discouragement. Something of this is apparent in Toxophilus’ own reaction: ‘this experience made me more mervaile at ye nature of the wynde, than it made me conning in ye knowledge of ye wynd’ (113). This force of uncertainty, ‘so variable in hys owne nature, so unsensyble to oure nature’ (113), is a source of great wonder and amazement, functioning not simply to qualify the rule of art or the role of teaching, but to motivate diligent use. Though ‘the marke is ever under the rule of the wether’ (69), the accomplished archer ‘wyll so handle wt discretion hys shoote, that he shall seeme rather to have the wether under hys rule’ (108). Greene has rightly observed that ‘there is never any thought, here or elsewhere in Ascham, that the guiles of a windy nature are beyond the wisdom of the artist’.17 What Greene characterizes as a ‘species of Humanist optimism’ has a broad relevance to my reading of Toxophilus.18 Given that this description of the wind is set against the undeniable fact that the mark is frequently intentionally hit, Ascham wants to draw to prominence that faculty – call it judgement – which can take heed of the wind, and account for its effect upon the shot. But this faculty by which we come to know the wind is as unknowable as the wind itself; we cannot account for how judgement can account for the wind. If the wind is unknowable, then equally unknowable is our capacity to judge its influence upon our shot. Ascham’s optimism, which is at once triumphant and modest, is the condition of bearing witness to an act which is wonderfully inexplicable. It is only after reading this passage that one realizes the extent to which the dialogue had always been building towards it. When in the opening pages Ascham presents us with a character who doubts the benefits of archery, he is tacitly setting up a scene of instruction in which the character becomes a willing student of the sport. The wind is emblematic not only of the student’s attempts at perfection in infinitely variable contextual circumstances, but reminds us also that all instruction is finite. The wind qualifies the teacher’s guidance and brings it to an end. The student must use his own judgement, and go on by himself. The wind also represents the schoolmaster’s own

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uncertainties over whether his words have been correctly understood, and whether his art will be properly used. These uncertainties build towards that moment in which the student takes aim, draws back the string, takes heed of the wind and weather and fires his own arrow towards the mark. Toxophilus builds towards what Stanley Cavell calls ‘the inevitable moment of teaching and learning’: ‘The [student’s] mind cannot be led at every point; teaching (reasons; my control) comes to an end; then the other takes over. And the object of my instruction (my assertions, questions, remarks, encouragements, rebukes) is exactly that the other shall take over, that he or she shall be able to go on (alone).’19 Ascham’s description of the wind is a lucid figuration of the moment when, not knowing whether he has been understood, a teacher waits to see if his instruction has hit the target. And how will he know? By seeing whether the student hits the mark. In the meantime, all Toxophilus can do is to implore the student to take heed: ‘The more uncertaine and diseyvable the wynd is, the more hede must a wyse Archer gyve to know the gyles of it’ (113); ‘take hede yf you se anye cloude apere’ (113); ‘You must take hede also yf ever you shote where one of the markes or both stondes a lytle short of a hye wall’ (113–14); ‘And thus of ye nature of windes & wether according to my marking you have hearde Philologe: & hereafter you shal marke farre mo your selfe, if you take hede’ (114). Heed promotes an openness to the wisdom that can only be acquired through use, it makes the student open to learning what the teacher cannot teach him. However, Toxophilus does not end there, but with a beautiful description of how to take aim at the mark: Some men wonder why in casting a mans eye at ye marke, the hand should go streyght. Surely yf he consydereth the nature of mans eye, he wolde not wonder at it: For this I am certayne of, that no servaunt to hys master, no chylde to hys father is so obedient, as everye joynte and pece of the body is to do what soever the eye bides. The eye is the guide, the ruler & the succourer of al the other partes. (117)

Hitting the mark requires the unification of the whole body, which happens when the eye stares directly at its target. The ensuing metaphor is of particular relevance to The Scholemaster: ‘The eye is the very tonge wherwt wyt & reason doth speke to every parte of the body, & the wyt doth not so sone signifye a thynge by the eye, as every parte is redye to folow, or rather prevent the

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bydding of the eye’ (117). Just as the eye’s focus on the target concentrates all aspects of the individual in purposive and comely activity, so the tongue’s perception of its target, decorum, will allure all other aspects of the individual into willing and virtuous service. According to Ascham, the moral disorder into which many young men in his country fell could be avoided if they set their sights on comely marks and imitated the eloquence of worthy models.20 The persistent use of the shooting metaphor throughout The Scholemaster – Greene calls it ‘obsessive’ – draws its pedagogical programme towards a singular and clearly perceptible mark.21 Those counted ‘perfite Maisters of eloquence’ have learned to understand, what in everie matter, to be spoken or written on, is, in verie deede, Nimium, Satis, Parum, that is for to say, to all considerations, Decorum, which, as it is the hardest point, in all learning, so is it the fairest and onelie marke, that scholars, in all their studie, must alwayes shote at, if they purpose an other day to be, either sounde in Religion, or wise and discrete in any vocation of the common wealth. (249)

The singularity of the target, as well as its immanence in the mind of the young scholar keeps him in purposive and diligent attempts to hit it. It is easy to see why the archery metaphor so appealed to Ascham. It reassured him in his belief that eloquence is an act in which a clear target is precisely hit. But with its reassurance, the metaphor also brings problems. A teacher finds himself in an awkward position if he instructs a student to hit a mark precisely without ever being able to show precisely what that mark is. Further to this, the archery-eloquence metaphor indulged Ascham’s obsession with perfection by providing a readily conceivable model of perfection: perfection in archery means hitting the mark every time. But the mere idea that there is such a thing as perfect eloquence has troubling pedagogical consequences. At a scene of instruction, an example offered to the student of supposed perfect eloquence very easily crystallizes into an absolute and predetermined target which he can only hit through slavish copying. Such a scenario is unthinkable to Ascham. But its alternative is no less troubling: if the student requires judgement in order to know what is decorous about a particular example, then how can he be sure that he is imitating rightly? This question would seem to draw us to the edge of an abyss: how does the student acquire the judgement that he would appear to need in order to apprehend his target? How can judgement be the

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end of pedagogy when it is, in fact, its founding requirement? These questions are not intended to expose a perceived flaw in Ascham’s pedagogy, but to bring to light what I take to be his central motivations: to ascertain which elements of eloquence can be taught, to determine what can be known about decorum and to provide the student with assurance when the time comes for him to go on alone. The answers to these questions reveal what I am calling Ascham’s scepticism.

Ascham’s scepticism: The Scholemaster, Book 1 Ascham would never have called it scepticism. The word ‘scepticism’ and its cognates do not appear in either of his pedagogical treatises. Instead, what I am characterizing as his scepticism was manifest as a practical pedagogical problem, one which occasioned his most famous work. The Scholemaster opens on a dinner conversation at Windsor Castle about classroom discipline, the news having recently come to hand that ‘diverse Scholers of Eaton, be runne awaie from the Schole, for feare of beating’ (175). Amidst the gathering of dignitaries, Ascham states his view humbly, but unequivocally: ‘yong children were soner allured by love, than driven by beating, to atteyne good learning’ (176). The idea of The Scholemaster began to germinate in Ascham’s mind as a consequence of a discussion he subsequently had with Richard Sackville, also present at the dinner, who told him of the way his own maltreatment when at school drove him away from learning. The Scholemaster thus begins by denouncing the over-bearing disciplinarian, and advocates the use of praise as more humane and effective than the whip. It argues that young scholars ought not to be driven to learning for fear of punishment, but made willing to learn by experiencing its pleasures. However, Book 1 does not continue as it began. Around halfway through, Ascham unexpectedly changes tack: he moves, by degrees of vehemence, from voicing concerns over the excess of liberty English schoolmasters allow their students, to the ethical shortcomings of gentlemen and courtiers. He then engages in an impassioned description of that epitome of moral misorder, the ‘Italianated Englishman’, a figure who affords himself an excess of freedom, and who flouts all sense of good judgement: ‘The marke they shote at, the ende they looke for, the heaven they desire, is onelie, their own present pleasure, and private proffit’ (233). According to Ascham, the

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reluctance of teachers to define the mark at which to aim had resulted in students feeling free to determine the mark for themselves. So Book 1 of The Scholemaster on the one hand castigates schoolmasters for their excessive use of corporal punishment, but on the other shows the consequences of young scholars having been granted an excess of liberty. This is more than a mere shift in emphasis. In the following passage from the middle of Book 1, Ascham seems keen to present it as a genuine incongruity. There is an other discommoditie, besides crueltie in scholemasters in beating away the love of learning from children, which hindreth learning and virtue, and good bringing up of youth, and namelie yong jentlemen, verie moch in England. This fault is cleane contrary to the first. I wished before, to have love of learning bred up in children: I wishe as moch now, to have yong men brought up in good order of living, and in some more severe discipline, then commonlie they be. (203)

Ascham can clearly see that the fault he is about to identify (schoolmasters failing to exert enough discipline) is ‘cleane contrary to the first’, and he is unconcerned to hide the fact that Book 1 of The Scholemaster is pulled in two directions simultaneously: it advocates both less and more discipline. This does not merely expose a contradiction between humanist practice and humanism’s rhetoric about itself. Rather, it is an aspect of what I am calling Ascham’s scepticism. Advocacy of less discipline is grounded in the quintessentially early modern recognition that no rule, no matter how forcefully it is asserted, can teach students the judgement they require in order to be decorous in all contexts. But the calls for greater discipline come from the determination that a clear standard must be taught lest the student simply do as he wishes. The two halves of Book I of The Scholemaster thus comprise the two movements of the sceptical problem which, I am arguing, characterizes early modern pedagogy. Characteristic of this scepticism are convergences of opposing forces which variously express themselves as paradoxes, or anomalies or ongoing qualifications. These will be my principal focus in this section. Such varieties of contradiction are also Rebecca Bushnell’s focus in A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Bushnell explains the early modern ambivalence towards corporal punishment in the classroom (including Ascham’s ambivalence) by showing that the early

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modern scene of instruction inculcated the very forms of political and familial authority which it frequently defined itself against. We thus see two divided, if connected, impulses in humanist pedagogy’s opposition to corporal punishment in schools. Humanism offers to form a free citizen, who learns in a free space of love, pleasure, and play, marked off from the political sphere and even from the family. At the same time, since humanist thinking defines freedom in familial and political terms, and especially in terms of self-rule, the schoolroom is inevitably structured in analogy to the family and state. The teacher becomes the father and the monarch – or the tyrant . . . The humanist teacher is thus caught in a web of contradictions: like a father and opposed to the father’s rule, a monarch in the classroom yet feared as a tyrant, a lover who holds the instrument of pain, a master who is also, in many cases, a servant of the family and state.22

Bushnell interprets these contradictions as a ‘functional ambivalence’, and defines her project as an attempt to give an account of it: ‘to see where one tendency of early modern humanist pedagogy always allowed for the realization of an opposite one, without undermining or effacing itself in turn’.23 Ultimately, for Bushnell, this ambivalence was functional insofar as it constituted a response to the ‘heterogeneity of early modern society and politics. Its own ambivalence was a symptom of a world of uncertain hierarchies, shifting relations, conflicting authorities, and contradictory values’.24 Bushnell’s attentiveness to ambivalence shares resemblances with my own efforts to characterize Ascham’s pedagogy as wrestling with – resisting and succumbing to – a kind of scepticism. Both seek out contradiction, and characterize that contradiction in temporal terms, as ‘a fluctuation between opposites’.25 However, where Bushnell sees these opposites as emerging from the ambivalent relationship between the school and the world beyond its walls, I would like to outline the ways they emerge from the scene of instruction itself. This is not to remove pedagogy from its socio-political context, but simply to acknowledge that the act of teaching is a particular form of communication which engenders its own complications. As regards The Scholemaster, these complications arise from Ascham’s involved consideration of the extent to which eloquence is governed by the rule of decorum, and the question of whether a curriculum of study can justifiably claim to teach it. As with so many early modern pedagogical texts, The Scholemaster struggles against the tendency of decorum to assume greater

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determinacy and prescriptive power than it can bear. Decorum is that category against which all verbal and non-verbal actions must be measured. But what is decorum? Nobody can say, because decorum is context dependent. And yet it remains that singular mark at which a curriculum of learning must aim. The schoolmaster’s authority is ambivalent because it is grounded in his teaching of a rule he can never state absolutely, but towards which his curriculum must be shown absolutely to move. Ascham’s text is thus caught between its refusal to abandon young charges to their own uses, and its unwillingness to punish them for breaking a rule which it cannot explicitly formulate. What I would now like to show is that this ambivalence in the text manifests itself as a paradox in which the power of decorum to assert itself over the student is dependent upon the student’s willingness to be ruled by it. ‘There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good witte and encourage a will to learninge, as is praise’ (183). Praise is the schoolmaster’s way of nurturing the student’s will into active being. When excessive punishment is used, students will learn for their schoolmasters, not themselves: ‘there is no one thing, that hath more, ever dulled the wittes, or taken awaye the will of children from learning, then the care they have, to satisfie their masters’ (182). In order for a student to willingly exercise their judgement, they must be given the freedom to choose, even if incorrectly. Over-assertive teaching techniques combined with prescriptive rules will define eloquence too narrowly and severely limit that freedom. This is why Ascham advocates the technique of double translation, an exercise in which a child is presented with a passage from, say, Cicero and asked to translate it into English then back again into Latin from their own English translation. But even double translation carries a risk: because this technique relies so heavily on the Ciceronian model, the student might come to believe that eloquence can be achieved merely by slavish copying. It is the teacher’s gentle manner which softens the prescriptiveness of the model. Upon completion of the exercise, ‘the master must compare it with Tullies booke, and laie them both togither: and where the childe doth well, either in chosing, or true placing of Tullies wordes, let the master praise him, and saie here ye do well’ (183). If the child makes mistakes, the teacher kindly instructs, ‘N. Tullie would have used such a worde, not this: Tullie would have placed this worde here, not there: would have used this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender’ (184), and so on. It is hoped that the student will not fixate

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upon the words as such, but see beneath them, as it were, to Cicero’s judgement. It is in the presence of such judgement that ‘will in children, wiselie wrought withal, maie easelie be won to be verie well willing to learne’ (200).26 But what if the teacher is confronted with a student who is unwilling to learn – or who is, to use Ascham’s word, wilfull? Wilfulness is an obstinacy which renders the student unaffected by the teacher’s encouragements, and cold to the allurements of the text. In the presence of wilfulness, the teacher is virtually powerless. [I]f will, and witte, by farder age, be once allured from innocencie, delited in vaine sightes, filed with foull taulke, crooked with wilfulnesse, hardned with stubburnesse, and let louse to disobedience, surelie it is hard with jentlenesse, but unpossible with severe crueltie, to call them backe to good frame againe. For, where the one, perchance maie bend it, the other shall surelie breake it. (200–1)

When confronted with a wilful student, the teacher must not succumb to the temptation of being more forceful in his instruction. This is not just because such force will harden the student’s wilfulness yet further, but also because Ascham’s schoolmaster ultimately has no explicit rule to enforce. There is no higher order of precept to which the teacher can appeal, nor an assuredly inspiring model that would secure the student’s willingness. And if the teacher is more insistent in an exercise of double translation, then the model text will assert itself as an example to be copied, rather than the product of a judgement to be imitated. Instead, the schoolmaster can merely repeat the same exercises, kindly showing where the student has gone wrong, how he can improve and so on. And these exercises may continue to have no effect whatever on the student. There is no absolute reassurance against the unnerving possibility that every instruction can be misunderstood, or forgotten or simply ignored. Ascham’s scepticism is the shadow cast by the aspiration that there should be. The states of willingness and wilfulness do not merely comprise different ways of behaving in the world, but predispose the mind to different modes of apprehending it: ‘there be in man two speciall thinges: Mans will, mans mynde. Where will inclineth to goodnes, the mynde is bent to troth: Where will is carried from goodnes to vanitie, the mynde is sone drawne from troth to false opinion’ (230). Although wilfulness is a form of ‘vanitie’ in which the individual asserts his own right to self-assertion, and to that extent is

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insular and solipsistic, it dangerously exposes him to the inconstancy and waywardness of ‘false opinion’. In Toxophilus, Ascham inveighs against ‘the mayneteners of uses wtoute knowledge havying no other worde in theyr mouthe but thys use, use, custome, custome. Suche men [who are] more wylful than wyse, beside other discommo[di]ties, take all place and occasion from al amendment’ (101).27 A student must be willing in order to imbibe through pedagogy the good order which should guide his every action. For Ascham, to justify one’s actions merely by appealing to ‘custom, custom, use, use’ is not only thoughtlessly self-validating, but subjugates an ‘ought’ to an ‘is’. When confronting the rampant disorder of custom, the order to which Ascham often only vaguely refers solidifies into something apparently clear-cut, and we sometimes seem on the verge of being offered a substantive definition of the ‘ought’ that exists independently of the ‘is’. But I mervell the lesse, that thies misoders be emonges som in the Court, for commonlie in the contrie also everie where, innocencie is gone: Bashfulness is banished: moch presumption in yougthe: small authoritie in aige: Reverence is neglected: dewties be confounded: and to be shorte, disobedience doth overflowe the bankes of good order, almoste in everie place, almoste in everie degree of man. (209)

Throughout The Scholemaster, Ascham employs Gorgian rhetorical figures – isocolon, parison, paramoion – to evoke a clear sense of order in his prose, which contrasts with the misorders of the world.28 Indeed, the work itself can be read as an act of ordering, of making clear distinctions between custom and learning, wilfulness and willingness, disobedience and diligence. But what exactly is this good order? Ascham’s rhetoric gives the impression that it is self-evident. Of course, such order can never be known absolutely, but only observed through examples which the student (like the reader) must willingly accept as worthy of imitation. And these examples must, in turn, be observed rightly, the good order seen in them. But in order to perform the function that Ascham requires of these examples, the student needs to know what to look for in them, and this assumes some knowledge of good order, and this was the very thing the examples were deployed to teach. Once again, I do not mean here to expose a flaw in Ascham’s thinking, so much as reveal an epistemological honesty which his pedagogy brings to bear on his conception of language. I am trying to show that Ascham’s frequent references to the order that resides

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in use seem to gesture to a depth that his pedagogy cannot reach. Decorum, good order, judgement – these entities are presumed to be the marks at which use must aim; they are the rules which underpin all eloquence. But pedagogy remains unable to grasp them. It can merely grasp the uses themselves. Unwanted influences seemed to Ascham so rampant that the successful rearing of youth lay ‘not so moch, in teaching them what is good, as in keeping them from that, that is ill’ (209–10). The great disorder Ascham saw in the court – ‘error and phantasie, do commonlie occupie, the place of troth and judgement’ (206) – he believed had filtered down to the whole country. One of the great threats to good order was the influence of Italy. Ascham spends many pages advising his reader to discourage young scholars from travelling there. However, should discouragement fail, and the young scholar insist on going, he shall do well to look on the life, of the wisest traveler, that ever traveled thether, set out by the wisest writer, that ever spake with tong, Gods doctrine onelie excepted: and that is Ulysses in Homere. Ulysses, and his travell, I wishe our travelers to looke upon, not so much to feare them, with the great daungers, that he many tymes suffered, as to instruct them, with his excellent wisdome, which he alwaies and everywhere used. Yea even those, that be learned and wittie travelers, when they be disposed to prayse traveling, as a great commendacion, and the best Scripture they have for it, they gladlie recite the third verse of Homere, in his first booke of Odyssea, conteyning a great prayse of Ulysses, for the witte he gathered, & wisedome he used in his traveling. (224)

The implication is that the student abroad will use the wisdom of the Odyssey in the same way that Ulysses used his own wisdom when travelling. The moral sustenance presumed to be contained in the text will be recognized and accessed by the student, and thus it will exert a positive influence upon him. Robert M. Strozier has emphasized the historical and cultural specificity of this kind of interpretation, characterizing it as ‘a temporary use of the work to resolve a problem about a cultural habit; when there is no longer a problem there is no longer any need for the interpretation’.29 According to Strozier, the validity of interpretation for Ascham ‘is usefulness, and usefulness depends upon the problem at hand’; The Scholemaster thus presents itself as ‘a series of solutions to particular problems that arise within the general problem of educating English youth’.30 In another context, when characterizing the utility of this form of interpretation, Strozier echoes Wittgenstein: ‘the current

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problem is the determinant of the imitator’s point of view, and even controls what the model expression “means,” for meaning is indeed the use to which the expression is put.’31 The meaning of the Odyssey is the use to which it is put. And its use is determined by a present problem. However, even if one were to accept, as Ascham and many of his contemporaries did, that literature can impart wisdom, the role Ascham recommends for the Odyssey raises difficult questions. According to what principle or rule should one use literature? How do we know if we are using Homer or Odysseus in the right way? Can we be sure that our use is solving the problem, rather than merely leading us astray? The dangerous influence of Italy was only a specific aspect of the more general challenge of educating the young, especially the nobility. For Ascham, the greater purpose of education was to produce individuals capable of providing the nation with useful, diligent service. In this too he recommends the use of literature. Ascham hopes that the yougthe in England, speciallie Jentlemen, and namelie nobilitie, shold be by good bringing up, so grounded in judgement of learninge, so founded in love of honestie, as, whan they shold be called forthe to the execution of great affaires, in service of their Prince and contrie, they might be hable, to use and to order, all experiences, were they good were they bad, and that, according to the square, rule, and line, of wisdom learning and vertue. (216)

There is desire here for an almost mathematically precise measurement of what is wise, a kind of universal standard against which the infinite variations of ‘all experience’ may be judged. But how is such a standard acquired? Further on, intimating what will be the focus of Book 2, Ascham criticizes grammar schools for lacking ‘the daily use of writing, which is the onely thing that breedeth deepe roote, both in ye witte, for good understanding, and in ye memorie, for sure keeping of all that is learned’ (243). Ascham is here talking about double translation, a very methodical process of using a text. It is difficult to overestimate the singular importance of double translation to Ascham’s pedagogy. All other exercises are measured against it and found wanting. The daily use of double translation is singled out as the most effective way of inculcating sound judgement. Something of this is indicated by Victoria Kahn when she observes, ‘to read these texts, as Ascham argues, is to use them. Only through use do they give rise to “right and deep judgement in all kinds

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of learning”.’32 To ‘use’ a text in the sense indicated by Ascham and Kahn is to engage it in a practice or exercise through which the student absorbs the wisdom of the author. All well and good – or so it would seem. Despite the enormous faith The Scholemaster puts in double translation, the questions with which I ended the section on Toxophilus continue to nag away. The teacher makes texts available for use in the faith that they will be used correctly; but such faith rests on the rather questionable assumption that the student can judge what constitutes correct use. Judgement was the very thing that was presumed to be lacking, and which the ‘dailie use of writing’ was designed to impart. Once again, we are confronted with that same sequence of infinite regression: how do we acquire the judgement that we would appear to need in order to acquire judgement? The ordinariness of the word ‘use’ and its cognates obscures the extraordinary amount of work they are called upon to do. In Ascham, just as much as in Strozier and Kahn, these words are deployed to account for a family of related phenomena which, when seen together, allow us to assess Ascham’s pedagogy more clearly. This family can roughly be described as follows. As we have just seen, ‘use’ can refer to an act of interpretation through which a student receives the wisdom and good judgement which is somehow bound up in a text. (The schoolmaster might equally be said to use a text if they work to engage the student in this way.) Closely related is that meaning of ‘use’ developed in Toxophilus: an individual practice of learning by which the student brings himself to perfection. But ‘use’ also has a pejorative sense in Ascham: it can refer to those customary practices that Ascham derides as lacking in judgement and as based only on fleeting fashion. Finally, ‘use’ can refer to the momentary, contextual and unrepeatable act of deployment of a word or a shot. (This is the sense vividly figured in those passages in Toxophilus on the wind and weather.) Of course, there are nuances between these meanings which blur into one another. And ‘use’ is a notoriously difficult word to pin down precisely because it is so usable. My reason for setting these uses of ‘use’ before us in this crude way is to show that Ascham is at least partially aware that there are no more foundational grounds to inculcate judgement, or to expose good order, or to define the decorous than those evoked by ‘use’ and its cognates. There is an anxiety in The Scholemaster which is absent in Toxophilus, a restless urge to define an object of pedagogy as residing outside

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of use, or beneath it, either as its perennial target, or its sure underpinning. This restlessness is born of a confrontation with an undeniable fact of human contingency – one which is frightening and yet which gives pedagogy its place: the faculty that enables us to live meaningfully and effectively in a contingent world can only be acquired through contingent means.

‘The daily use of writing’: The Scholemaster, Book 2 The first striking thing about Book 2 of The Scholemaster is that it does not begin where Book 1 left off, but where Book 1 began: with a description of a scene of instruction in which a teacher gently guides the student through an exercise of double translation.33 Once again, Ascham tells us that double translation not only teaches grammar and syntax ‘but that which is greater also, in marking Autors, like invention of Argumentes, like order in disposition, like utterance in Elocution, is easilie gathered up: whereby also, to all trewe understanding and right judgement, both for writing and speaking’ (244–5). One might understandably feel disappointed that The Scholemaster seems to have made no advance upon the advice it offers in its opening pages. Book 2 is also of itself quite repetitive. It extols the virtues of double translation in comparison to other popular rhetorical exercises – paraphrasis, metaphrasis, epitome – and the methods of imitation offered by various writers. Ascham brings the same complaint against all of these approaches: they lack detail in showing how exactly a great writer imitated his model, and they fail to uncover the order according to which a writer used his material. What is required is an exercise which reveals the specific choices an author made. It is not from a lack of imagination that Ascham has ongoing recourse to double translation. Nor is it merely reflective of his genuine belief that the method works. Rather, it connotes his recognition that there are no deeper, more foundational grounds than the ‘dailie use of writing’ to inculcate sound judgement. Though he often speaks of order as if it existed apart from language use, he knows that such order can only be taught through methods which bring use to light. The teacher cannot invoke any rarefied class of rule that would impart the correct use of words. If the student does not grasp correct use, the schoolmaster is forced to backtrack, and cover the same ground. The teacher must be patient: ‘tyme shall breed skill, and use shall bring perfection’ (240).

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As Ascham saw it, the schoolmaster must aim to make the scholar an unflagging judge of what good order was. He thought that the methods of many reputable teachers, both ancient and contemporary, flew wide of this mark. His criticism of Erasmus may be taken as a representative. Erasmus, the ornament of learnyng in our tyme doth wish that som man of learning and diligence, would take the like paines in Demosthenes and Tullie, that Macrobius hath done in Homer and Virgill, that is, to write out and joyne together, where one doth imitate the other. Erasmus wishe is good, but surelie, it is not good enough: for Macrobius gatherings for the Ænidos out of Homer, and Eobanus Hessus more diligent gatherings for the Bucolikes out of Theocritus, as they be not fullie taken out of the whole heape, as they should be, but even as though they had not sought for them of purpose, but fowned them scatered here and there by chance in their way, even so, onelie to point out, and nekedlie to joyne togither their sentences, with no farder declaring the maner and way, how the one doth folow the other, were but a colde helpe, to the encrease of learning. (267) 34

Ascham refers to a letter of Erasmus’ which commends Demosthenes to a young student. In the letter, Erasmus calls for someone to do for Demosthenes and Cicero what the ancients had done for Homer and Virgil, ‘so that he might grasp from the placing together of the passages, how this one was changed from that, and where ours is equal to the Greek, where better, and where the imitation loses nothing from the model. Scarcely anything else leads to preparing judgement as well’.35 However, for Ascham, Erasmus’ recommendation is not enough: a manual on imitation cannot simply cite examples ‘with no farder declaring the maner and way, how the one doth folow the other’; use needs an ordering principle.36 Simply to draw examples ‘out of the whole heape’ without regard for the earlier author’s purpose is to draw the examples ‘not fullie’, as if one ‘had not sought for them of purpose’.37 This method ignores the fact that each example is already a discerning usage determined by the presiding judgement unique to the writer. In contrast, Ascham’s schoolmaster would take this paine also, whan he hath layd two places, of Homer and Virgill, or of Demosthenes and Tullie togither, to teache plainlie withal, after this sort.

1. Tullie reteyneth thus moch of the matter, thies sentences, thies wordes. 2. This and that he leaveth out, which he doth wittelie to this end and purpose.

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This he addeth here. This he diminisheth there. This he ordereth thus, with placing that here, not there. This he altereth and changeth, either, in propertie of wordes, in forme of sentence, in substance of the matter, or in one, or other convenient circumstance of the authors present purpose. (267–8)

Nurtured by diligent reading and an intimate knowledge of the ‘end and purpose’ for which each writer writes, the student, Ascham hopes, will develop the judgement to ‘joyne togither’ his gatherings from antiquity and maintain his own sense of order in the world.38 In some sense, double translation makes the student aware of the need to express himself appropriately by showing him the variety of ways in which the same idea can be expressed. Although double translation has many classical precedents, Ascham’s more immediate debt was to German pedagogue and Protestant reformer, Johan Sturm. Marion Trousdale has provided an illuminating account of the role of double translation in Sturm’s conception of imitation, and its influence on Ascham:39 [A]s in Ascham’s insistence on the need for right understanding and true judgement, it requires an act of mind. But only in Sturm, I think, do the exigencies of that act become clear. It is not that without it one understands poorly the art or the skill of the writer. It is rather that without it the art of the writer cannot be known at all, because it cannot be seen.40

For Sturm and Ascham, what deserved imitation was not use per se, but that which use made perceivable; it was the faculty to choose correctly, rather than the correct choices themselves that had somehow to be accessed.41 In Sturm’s theory of imitation, the art, which brings the judgement to articulation, is imitated as an (albeit indirect) imitation of the otherwise imperceptible judgement. Trousdale emphasizes that to perceive the judgement through the use requires ‘an act of mind’. Without this act of mind, imitation is mere slavish copying. With this act of mind, however, the scene of instruction becomes (once again) unnervingly contingent, and (once again) we are compelled to wonder whether this act of mind requires the very thing it aims to teach: good judgement.42 The exigencies of this act of mind become clear when we reflect upon the ambiguous status of the model in double translation. The most crucial part of

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the exercise – and the one which Ascham describes in such detail, cautioning the teacher to be gentle in admonishment and generous in praise – is when the student’s Latin translation is set next to the original. Against the multitude of ways in which a passage of Cicero can be translated into English and then back into Latin, there is that single Ciceronian text against which all variations will be judged. In its very attempts to expose the genesis of eloquence rather than its consummation, double translation unavoidably also reasserts the singularity of the original Latin text. In a section in which he shows the shortcomings of paraphrasis, Ascham advocates double translation in exactly these terms: in double translating a perfite peece of Tullie or Caesar, neyther the scholer in learning, nor ye Master in teaching can erre. A true tochstone, a sure metwand lieth before both their eyes. For, all right congruitie: propertie of wordes: order in sentences: the right imitation, to invent good matter, to dispose it in good order, to confirme it with good reason, to expresse any purpose fitlie and orderlie, is learned thus, both easilie & perfitlie: Yea, to misse somtyme in this kind of translation, bringeth more proffet, than to hit right, either in Paraphrasis or making Latins. (251)

The benefit of double translation is that both the student and teacher have the ‘true tochstone’ before them against which they judge the student’s translation. The original text is established as that mark which requires judgement to hit, but does not require judgement to perceive. To miss the mark is sometimes of greater profit because the perfections of the original text become more apparent. However, double translation is meant to put the student in contact with the writer’s judgement, not its specific use. The question here is not whether Cicero’s judgement is observable in his use; it is whether use can be rendered translucent enough for the student to see the judgement operating beneath it. The point is that double translation (at least as Ascham uses it) can make judgement more observable only by making use more opaque. The effort to dig beneath use merely re-establishes use as impenetrable grounds. The previous paragraph might, once again, give the impression that I am picking faults in Ascham’s pedagogy. In showing that judgement – or good order, or decorum – cannot be observed as such, I am not exposing a pedagogical failure, but bringing to light what I take to be an inevitable truth regarding the pedagogy in which Ascham is engaged. I am also attempting to account for his response to this truth, which is, broadly speaking, by turns satisfaction and

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dissatisfaction. As to the latter, the spirited optimism of Toxophilus is heavily qualified throughout The Scholemaster by thoughts of social misorder, the unrelenting influence of custom, the excess of liberty granted to the young and the impotence of the teacher who has no absolute rule to assert. But The Scholemaster also recognizes that use in its various forms provides grounds for sufficiently prescriptive pedagogy. Examples of this can be found in Ascham’s attempts to reveal the discerning judgements of various writers by comparing the different genres they used. In speaking of the different kinds of writing – poetry, history, philosophy, oratory – and the different genres within those kinds, Ascham writes that ‘the trew difference of Authors is best knowne, per diuersa genera dicendi, that everie one used’ (283). The aim is to show the genesis of diversity in Latin writers so that the student will sense the method and judgement employed in each. And here, who soever hath bene diligent to read advisedlie over, Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, or els Aristophanes, Sophocles, Homer, and Pindar, and shall diligently marke the difference they use, in propertie of wordes, in forme of sentence, in handlyng of their matter, he shall easelie perceive, what is fitte and decorum in everie one, to the trew use of perfite Imitation. (284)

Decorum is determined by its generic context; what is decorous in comedy may be indecorous in tragedy. Ascham here uses genre as a way of determining and characterizing context. By knowing the differences between genres the student will know the different standards of decorum that exist in each one. There is no hint that the varieties of decorum will confuse the student. Instead, a knowledge of generic use, acquired through comparison and contrast, is regarded as a pedagogically effective way of instilling within the student a sense of the decorous. At certain moments in Book 2, the order to which Ascham mostly only alludes in general terms is expressed more prescriptively. Ascham was an avid supporter of quantitative verse, and at one point, his invectives against custom become an attack on rhyme. In their passive acceptance of a trend for which they had neither reason ‘why to like it, nor can shew learning to defend it’ (291), ignorant rhymers were exponents of a poetry which, according to Ascham, offered no technical challenge, based as it was on mere fleeting fashions. Although Ascham concedes that English, with its high number of monosyllables, is unsuitable for quantitative verse, he argues that the work and

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effort required for English to ‘receive carmen Iambicum as naturallie, as either Greke or Latin’ (290) indicate the superiority of quantity. The quantitative poet comes ‘with the like learnyng, and also did use like diligence, in searchyng out, not onelie just measure in everie meter, as everie ignorant person may easely do, but also trew quantitie in every foote and sillable, as onlie the learned shalbe able to do’ (290). The challenge of quantitative verse keeps the individual in a state of ‘forward diligence’ (289), never passively surrendering to the whims of the day, but maintaining his freedom to choose wisdom over wilfulness. One reason that Ascham advocates quantitative verse is that its rules are not easily obeyed. After all, like the bull’s eye on a target, ‘the hardest point’ is sometimes the only mark worth hitting. Only by taking aim at this target can a poet strive diligently to attain perfection. But once again Ascham seems to imply an underlying justification for why a particular use of language is to be preferred, one by which it exerts authority over custom. Well may we wonder what this authority is. As Richard Helgerson has written, ‘Knowledge of historical difference is what, for Ascham, distinguished his moment from all previous moments in English history. And such knowledge brings with it the possibility of choice.’43 And yet, as Helgerson shows, choice requires responsible choosing: history had to be used with knowledge of what constituted difference, how each historical period came to be and which deserved imitation. From his privileged historical position, Ascham can show that ‘our rude beggerly ryming’ was ‘brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, whan all good verses and all good learning to, were destroyed by them: and after caryed into France and Germanie: and at last receyved into England by men of excellent wit in deede, but of small learning, and lesse judgement in that behalfe’ (289). With knowledge of the history of rhyme, poets could hardly choose it over quantity: ‘now, when men know the difference, and have the examples, both of the best, and of the worst, surelie, to follow rather the Gothes in Ryming, than the Greekes in trew versifying, were even to eate ackornes with swine, when we may freely eate wheate bread emonges men’ (289).44 Once again, Ascham’s rhetoric gives the impression that the distinction is clear-cut; as clear-cut, in fact, as the distinction between barbarous and civilized. Of course, the very occasion for the discussion shows that the categories are easily confused. Though history offers every age a plethora of models to imitate, it falls to every age to judge which models deserve

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imitation. But Ascham believes that if each age knows its history, then the choice between rhyme and quantity is clear. Ascham’s preference for quantity is not just a preference for order over misorder, but a preference for that which the best writers in history have ordained as worthy. Of course, Ascham does not countenance the possibility that advocates of rhyme could themselves create history by using the form in ways which are both civilized and novel. That such forms come already blessed or tarnished by history, which contemporary practice cannot efface, signals that the disagreement as Ascham sees it is not between rules and use, but ultimately between two different increments of use: history and custom. The former provides a clarifying view of use from which we can determine what is to be imitated. The latter merely does as it pleases by wilfully defining its own ends. In the final pages of The Scholemaster, Ascham presents a selection of writers whom he especially admires and deems particularly apt for imitation. He says that he will name four, but in the end names only three: Varro, Sallust and Caesar. Each writer is given his own section, and is discussed individually. Given that Ascham makes the reader aware of the significant faults each writer has, his discussions seem palpably to build to a final expression of perfection, that mark at which they aim, and against which they are judged. It is an expectation that the whole of The Scholemaster engenders, with its talk of perfection, its reference to an abiding order, its archery metaphor. Clearly, it is Cicero – ‘whom, above all other, I like and love the best’ (293) – who is the exemplary instance of eloquence. Though Cicero is not given his own section as the other three writers are, his opinion of Varro, Sallust, and Caesar, as well as his example are used to assess them. That he is not named may merely be the mark of an incomplete text. The Scholemaster was, after all, published posthumously. The temptations to instantiate Cicero as that perfect mark at which to aim are great: an unequivocal, predetermined target would seem to solve the problem of scepticism; the schoolmaster can invoke a higher order of precept, a model to be followed in all cases; the student has something definite at which to aim, and the pedagogical gap would thus appear to be bridged. But the way in which Cicero is offered in these closing pages is more in keeping with Ascham’s tendency through The Scholemaster to resist such temptations. Cicero is not used as a definitive and singular target to aim at, but as a paradigm instance by which to judge and be judged. Against the archery metaphor, which figures perfection as a mark at which to aim, there is

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a subtler metaphor of measurement which posits perfection as a standard rule which can be used to judge. When advocating the benefits of double translation, Ascham calls the model text a ‘metwand’: a measuring rod, or an acknowledged standard length. Here, at the end of The Scholemaster, perfection does not exist outside judgement, but is that standard length according to which the student can measure his own creations, and work to improve them. We may conclude from this that the perfect end of eloquence lies in the ability to use perfection in this way. The final sentence of The Scholemaster makes it clear that the absence of definitively perfect eloquence does not constitute a lack, so much as a spur to the student’s own powers of judgement. Yet nevertheless, for all this perfite excellencie in him [Caesar], yet it is but one member of eloquence, and that but of one side neither, whan we must looke for that example to follow, which hath a perfite head, a whole bodie, forward and backward, armes and legges and all. (302)

All examples of perfect eloquence will be but perspectives on different aspects of eloquence. Maintaining the state of what Ascham had referred to earlier as ‘forward diligence’ means always looking to those examples to come, being attentive, taking heed, never settling on a single, absolute target. Where, at the end of Toxophilus, Ascham left his reader with an image of an archer taking aim at the mark – all parts of his body unified in purpose, a purpose defined by its target – here, at the end of The Scholemaster, he leaves us aiming at examples that are not offered. And here the body is not unified; in fact, it stands in need of continual unification.

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3

Decorous Abuse: George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy

Decorum and the critics Readers of the The Art of English Poesy have long since regarded its instruction as insufficient and contradictory, if not entirely counterproductive. In his preface to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, John Harrington sneered that Puttenham’s use of examples of his own to prove that poetry was an art had backfired: ‘he doth prove nothing more plainly than that which Master Sidney and all the learneder sort that have written on it do pronounce, that it is a gift and not an art.’1 A critical tone of apology, bemusement, or thinly veiled cynicism has prevailed into the present day, and in his collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetic treatises, Gavin Alexander, who chooses to abridge Puttenham’s work, describes it in comparison to those of Sidney and Samuel Daniel as ‘guileless’, ‘rustical’, and important only as a ‘repository of normative views’.2 Alexander adds, in passing, ‘Puttenham is no Aristotle, and the affection in which he is held by students of the English Renaissance can appear like a very English love of the quaint and unintentionally comical.’3 The Art has not been compared favourably to some of its contemporaries partly because critics often fail to see that it is a different sort of text. Although its writer seems at times to value his work as if it displayed the dazzling eloquence of the Sidney or Daniel, it can (and should) be distinguished from either of these treatises in being a manual offering practical instruction on how to compose poetry. Approaches to the Art which highlight the anomalies in Puttenham’s thinking seem unable to regard it as a successful or especially sincere attempt at pedagogy. Instead, the Art is

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seen either as the work of a hack, capable only of offering normative views, or as the machinations of a courtly aspirant who gives deliberately misleading instruction. No critic to my mind has adequately explored the possibility that what makes the Art philosophically anomalous, even dissatisfying, is precisely its fidelity to its pedagogical form and intentions. In the scene of instruction recreated by his text, Puttenham’s insistence that decorum is a rule must confront the undeniable fact that decorum cannot be taught by precept, only learned through examples. The pedagogical form of Puttenham’s reflections on the art of poetry reminds him of the futility of grasping such a precept, and brings him back to a consideration of spatio-temporal occurrences of the decorous. Before proceeding with my own analysis, I would like to consider the extent to which the tendency to disregard the pedagogical nature of the Art is often itself invested in a sceptical position: in order to assess the text in the ways they have, critics have often had to make their own judgements as to what forms of instruction count as sufficiently assured and certain.4 Unsurprisingly, critical accounts of Puttenham’s work have tended to focus on the political nature of its poetics, and in many of these readings Puttenham’s own poetics of dissembling and duplicity obscures his pedagogical purpose.5 So Daniel Javitch has argued that the court was a greater influence on English poetry than the grammar school, and, specifically, that ‘it was the effectiveness and appeal of duplicity in court conduct that allowed [Puttenham] to insist so confidently on the rhetorical means of achieving ambiguity.’6 As Javitch argues, duplicity and display were at once symbols of entitlement to courtly status and the means of courtly communication. More than any of his contemporaries, Puttenham utilized the obfuscatory power of figurative language, a trait that Javitch aligns with the traditional courtly aim ‘to conceal truths from the base and profane multitude’.7 Javitch’s seminal study does not so much engage with the sceptical problem faced by Puttenham, but shows why the Art is so entangled in it. Composing a manual which instructs prospective poetcourtiers on the art of wresting words from plain signification to ‘a certain doubleness’ will always be a precarious enterprise for if ambiguity were reducible to a method, it would be available to all to reduplicate it, and soon become excessively obvious. The inevitable question arises: what ought we to count as sufficiently clear instruction for an activity which adamantly resists clear instruction?

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Puttenham accounts for this resistance by characterizing poetry as a form of abuse: of ordinary speech, of the rules of rhetoric, of the ‘scholasticall’ teachings of the schoolhouse. In so doing, he not only draws attention to the logical fact that no precept, or figure – no linguistic determinant whatever – can govern the use to which it is put, but defines the poet’s skill as the ability to use established forms in unexpected ways. The fact that no rule can govern these abuses demands that the poet use his ‘discretion’. According to David Hillman, by the end of the sixteenth century the word ‘discretion’ began to mean ‘separation’, and Puttenham’s use of it to describe the faculty by which the poet must use his figures is an attempt to ‘ground a hierarchical ideology’ by which the courtier distinguishes himself from all others.8 This is why Puttenham is unwilling to outline the principles of ‘perfit discretion’. [U]nable to escape the circularity of his own argument, Puttenham in the end falls exhausted into the arms of the particular ‘cases whereof no generall rule can be given, but are best knowen by example’ . . . The ‘solace’ Puttenham offers in these examples is thus a very limited one, one that attempts to finesse the awkward fact that any stability his standard of a ‘perfit discretion’ might have comes from social class rather than any remotely transcendent or natural frame of reference.9

Setting aside whether this is actually an ‘awkward fact’ for Puttenham, I do want to underscore the way this argument is only made available on the presumption that examples, compared to the principles of ‘perfit discretion’, will be pedagogically insufficient. If, for instance, one was to argue that these examples are pedagogically meaningful, or that they were to Puttenham, and that a teacher can do little more than facilitate the learning through examples of what cannot be taught by principles, then a reading which says the Art is bent on reasserting class divisions by refusing to provide such principles begins to lose traction. Hillman’s reading takes support from Derek Attridge’s now seminal essay, which locates the productive tension in Puttenham’s treatise in the dichotomy between art and nature which it both relies upon and disturbs.10 Attridge argues that the Art is premised on the assumption that poetry is teachable. However, we are increasingly made aware of an unteachable aspect of poetry which, according to Attridge, must be natural. But decorum ‘is what comes “naturally” not to all humanity but to an elite, and members of that elite can

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be identified by their “natural” sense of decorum’.11 Decorum, the rule that governs the many rules presented in the Art, is thus a mechanism designed to keep poetry safe from the indecorous; for if art – whether the art of poetry or the art of courtly conduct – were reconcilable to a rule, it would be available to all who were willing to make the effort. As the existence of poetry, like the power of the court, is predicated upon exclusiveness, such a conclusion is unthinkable. Puttenham must therefore produce a manual designed to fail.12

The elite minority are thus protected from the incursions of the rabble by the invocation of a rule which cannot even be uttered; a rule, that is, which is not just absent, but which the text manifestly lacks. Attridge’s reading, which seems to be vindicated by Puttenham’s poetics of duplicity, is predicated on the ghostly presence in Puttenham’s treatise of a rule that cannot be taught, and can therefore be used to exclude.13 Attridge makes much of what he perceives to be Puttenham’s reluctance to reconcile poetry to a teachable rule. Without this teachable rule the Art cannot deliver on its founding promise: to teach the reader how to write poetry. Puttenham’s failure to provide such a rule is thus aligned with a pedagogical failure which is then interpreted as a deliberate strategy of exclusion. The origin of what I take to be this mischaracterization of Puttenham’s scene of instruction can be traced to a conceptual leap Attridge makes which, I think, requires reconsideration: ‘decorum is precisely that aspect of the poet’s art which is not reducible to a rule. And human activity that is not reducible to a rule is usually called “natural”.’14 Usually, perhaps; but not in the Art. What is not reducible to a rule is here not natural impulse, but individual learning. It may be clarifying to recall Ascham’s reapplication of the classical triad: aptness (natura), knowledge (ars), use (usus/exercitatio). Art is not absolute, and cannot of itself instil within the student a sense for what is decorous. My suggestion is that the absence of an absolute art ought not be seen as a pedagogical lack, but an inevitability. Consequently, I regard Puttenham’s switch into examples as marking a moment when rules, explanations, prescriptions have come to an end, and the student must learn by themselves what cannot be taught by their teacher. Victoria Kahn has offered a very different perspective upon Puttenham’s attempts to teach decorum: his ambivalence to rules is symptomatic of

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a ‘resistance to theory’ which lies at the heart of Renaissance humanism as it seeks the ‘practical knowledge of human affairs’. Kahn explains, ‘this kind of knowledge the humanists call phronesis, or prudence’, which has a ‘rhetorical equivalent in the rule of decorum. This rule does not function as a philosophical axiom or as the major premise of a syllogism; it does not subsume particulars or logically entail a necessary and universal conclusion. The rule of decorum cannot be theorized because it is always already the application of a rule’.15 Since rules can only be implemented through prudential choice, the reader must learn from examples what cannot be taught through precepts. Even as it claims authority and efficacy for its teaching, the pedagogical text must invite the learning of that which it concedes is unteachable. Kahn is thus able to understand Puttenham as few others have done. Puttenham’s reflection on the resistance of decorum to theorizing, and the consequent necessity of examples, thus leads us to the center of the humanist pedagogical program: the humanist resistance to scholastic theory . . . takes the form of a practice of examples or of an exemplary practice, on the assumption that such examples will involve the reader in a practice of interpretation which is essential for active life.16

Kahn’s formulation allows us to reassess the role of the court in the Art as neither a socially divisive force, nor simply an appropriate context for poetry. Rather, the court brings contextuality itself to bear on rhetoric, allowing Puttenham to picture particular kinds of human activity that will not submit to rules: duplicity, subterfuge, ambiguity – and, indeed, decorum. However – and here is where Hillman and Attridge’s readings are of importance – Puttenham himself is clearly aware that a rule would teach absolutely what his examples can only communicate in fallible ways. Consequently, he offers these examples as ‘solace’ for that fact that no prescriptive rule of decorum can be formulated. (The nature of this solace will be the focus of the final section in this chapter.) In fact, throughout the Art, conscientious rule-following is regarded as an important source of poetic beauty. In every long verse the caesura ought to be kept precisely, if it were but to serve as a law to correct the licentiousness of rhymers, besides that it pleaseth the ear better, and showeth more cunning in the maker by following

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the rule of his restraint. For a rhymer that will be tied to no rules at all, but range as he list, may easily utter what he will. But such manner of poesy is called in our vulgar, rhyme doggerel, with which rebuke we will in no case our maker should be touched. (165)

Precise rule-following is not only pleasurable to an audience, but must be observed lest all English poetry become doggerel. Though Puttenham is sensitive to the demands of custom and context, the efficacy and importance of precepts are what provides his manual with its occasion and founding purpose: to show that ‘Poesy [can] be a vulgar Art with us as well as with the Greeks and Latins’ (95).17 However, since Puttenham maintains that an art is the fruit of practice, and must be ‘found out’ (95), he is at pains to resist imposing the rules of Greek and Latin poetry onto the vernacular. After all, English poetry must be allowed to express itself in its own unique way. The Art is thus poised between asserting the rule’s power to rule, as it does in the passage on caesuras, and maintaining that rules can only be discovered within the practices of English poets. In order, then, to show that there can be an art of English poetry, Puttenham must show both the vernacular’s capacity to accrue rules in its use as well as its willingness to be ruled by precepts external to it, especially those derived from Greek and Latin. Puttenham therefore requires an account of the relationship between precept and circumstance which is both descriptive and rule-governed: while the principles of poetry can be prescribed only insofar as actual usage developed them first, actual usage must bear the imprint of precise rule-following. The Art can profitably be read as a drama in which the aspiration for an art of English poetry is played off against the poet-courtier’s unruly abuses, a drama in which Puttenham’s instruction appears by turns sufficient and lacking. It is a drama, too, into which we can cast the critics: where Hillman and Attridge see a lack (one from which Puttenham attempts to profit politically), Kahn regards the examples, in the context of Renaissance humanism, as sufficient. In the two sections which immediately follow, I offer two different perspectives on this drama. In the first, I give an account of Puttenham’s aspiration and reluctance to reduce ambiguity to a rule, and in the second I explore the ways in which custom – the usual – must both submit to rules and use them. In neither case does the drama achieve resolution, either through the formulation of an unequivocal rule, or by renouncing the aspiration to formulate one.

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My analysis will attempt to expose the scepticism itself, and the hold it has on Puttenham’s thinking.

The art of ambiguity The implications of what I have so far argued may roughly be summarized in this way: Puttenham’s apparent theoretical deficiencies should be seen in the light of practical pedagogical aims. If the Art constitutes a genuine attempt to make ‘this [Greek and Latin] art vulgar for all Englishmen’s use’ (114), then it must present its instruction so as to admit a user: ‘So as in keeping measure, and not exceeding nor showing any defect in the use of his figures, he cannot lightly do amiss, if he have besides (as must needs be) a special regard to all circumstances of the person, place, time, cause and purpose he hath in hand’ (239–40). Neither the figures nor the Art itself can govern the contextual usage for which they have been written, but give rise to the need for ‘discreet using’ (222). The recourse to discretion cannot simply be written off as a ploy aimed at obstructing social mobility. The move is perhaps more pronounced in the Art because by it Puttenham attempts to formulate a poetics which can accommodate the poet’s purpose and intent. According to Puttenham, poetry is a fusion of beauty with ‘discreet and wholesome lessons’ (96), and throughout history has been deployed for certain ends: to build cities, to make and establish laws, or to reveal the mysteries of the Gods. Puttenham sees poetic beauty as always working towards a specific end, for ‘the more pleasing [speech] is, the more it prevaileth to such purpose as it is intended for’ (98). For this reason, poetry is never unmotivated, but is the inherence of motivation in language. By emphasizing the indeterminacy of figures and the need for ‘discreet using’, Puttenham methodologically accommodates the contextual use of poetry for certain ends within his instruction. My suggestion, therefore, is that we see figures less as formal strictures to be obeyed, and more (so to speak) as finger holds upon language: without those holds, a speaker will be unable to grasp language with the firmness required to do things with it; but with those holds he can impart his intent upon every word, spinning it this way or that. Rules are thus not designed to restrict intention, but to give rise to it.

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However, the significance of intention in poetry is not limited to its ability to carry out tasks, for it also draws language into the semantic mode of ambiguity, the figurative communication of meanings which Puttenham calls ‘intendments’. As that which accommodates the intent, figures in this context are described as a form of deception; they are trespasses, in speech, because they pass the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the ear and also the mind, drawing it from plainness and simplicity to a certain doubleness, whereby our talk is the more guileful and abusing. For what else is your metaphor but an inversion of sense by transport; your allegory by a duplicity of meaning or dissimulation under covert and dark intendments. (238)

Throughout the Art, Puttenham refers to ‘intendment’ as a ‘larger meaning’ three times (192, 315, 316), three times as an altered or duplicitous sense (227, 238, 262), and once as an alteration not in sense per se, but interpretation (265). Dissimulation and duplicity occur when the word is implicated in larger, figurative meanings which have the seductive, haunting efficacy described by Puttenham as a ‘stir to the mind’ (227). With etymological links to double entendre, ‘intendment’ was sometimes used pejoratively. In A Display of Heraldry (1611), John Guillim advised the herald to ensure that ‘Words of large Intendment and Signification, are reduced to the definite and determinate Sense and Meaning’.18 And Edward Hall, in his Chronicle (1548), describes a procession at St Paul’s in which ‘the duke of Yorke ledde the Quene, with great familieritie to all mens sightes: but wo worth dissimulation, and false flatteryng countenance: fye on double entendement, and cloked adulacion’.19 The fundamental difference between the duke’s ‘double entendement’ and Puttenham’s is that, for Puttenham, the doubleness must be shown. Dissimulation is not hidden, rather poetry is dependant upon the disclosure of these larger meanings.20 Intendments are ‘dark’ and ‘covert’ by nature because they cannot be represented, but must be made perceptible through the circumstances of figurative use. It ought thus to be emphasized that intendments for Puttenham are not internal processes, but verbal effects. His use of the language of intention characterizes these effects as evoking a cognitive depth, and they leave one with the impression that one has gleaned something more directly in the mind of the speaker. But they are explicitly verbal rather than cognitive acts. The language of intention is entirely

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consistent with Puttenham’s ongoing view that these figurative meanings are only perceptible through contextual use. Figures give rise to the intention insofar as they are the perceptible objects with which the intention works. Marion Trousdale has attempted to remove her work on Puttenham’s Art from what she regards as a lingering Romantic paradigm which saw poetic language as being constitutive of an intuitive knowledge, a view which, she claims, cannot be sustained with a consciousness of art’s artefice.21 Since in Puttenham ‘what can be said by figures . . . theoretically can be said without figures’, they ‘do not provide the means by which meaning is discovered or altered’, rather they are ‘the poetic means of variation, a technical means by which the language of the philosopher can be transformed so as to bring forth a golden world’.22 This decorative poetics can be squared with Puttenham’s stated view that poetry is language which discloses larger, figurative meanings in the following way. Puttenham is interested not in a uniquely poetic meaning as such, but the uniquely poetic capacity for language to accommodate more than one meaning: while the meanings are translatable, the simultaneity is not. Poetry, therefore, does not offer meanings which only it can utter, but a way of meaning which only it can enact. The perception of intendment only occurs when one is aware of the deliberate deployment of a figure, and this can only take place if the art is known and recognized. In other words, an intendment becomes visible when figurative use carries a semantic power. The ‘courtly figure of allegoria’, or the ‘Figure of False Semblant’ – the use of which is ‘so large, and his virtue of so great efficacy, as it is supposed no man can pleasantly utter and persuade without it’ (270) – characterizes all poetic language, and is when ‘we speak one thing and think another, and that our words and our meanings meet not’ (270). The implied equivalence between what one thinks and what one means obscures that fact that what Puttenham refers to as thinking is, once again, a verbal effect. Intendments are neither grounded in internal states, nor require the operation of internal states in order for them to be perceptible. They are effects of use, and are produced within the infinitely variable contexts of language activity.23 This is why Puttenham regularly reveals intended meaning by describing the wider context of figurative deployment; so, when in the Eclogues Virgil writes, ‘Stop up your streams (my lads); the meads have drunk their fill’, we know he means, ‘leave off now, ye have talked of the matter enough’ because ‘the shepherd’s

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guise in many places is by opening certain sluices to water their pastures, so as when they are wet enough, they shut them again’ (272). One must observe use in order to perceive intended meaning since ‘every speech wrested from his own natural signification to another not altogether so natural is a kind of dissimulation, because the words bear contrary countenance to the intent’ (271). ‘Wrest[ing]’ divides and joins ‘words’ and ‘the intent’; ‘joins’ because the unique characteristics of a particular ‘wrest[ing]’, or use, make ‘the intent’ perceptible in the word. The transmission of intendment requires the reader to recognize the intentional deployment of art; we could not, for instance, perceive Virgil’s intended meaning without also perceiving his deliberate use of allegoria. Puttenham’s tendency to focus on the ornamental nature of poetry must thus be understood as an attempt not only to beautify language, but also to release the semantic force of use. While it is easy to regard Puttenham’s courtier as secretive and calculating, he uses language less as a guise, than as a way of being present in the world. Thus, in a passage on style less frequently quoted than those on dissembling and duplicity, Puttenham reasons that since this continual course and manner of writing or speech showeth the matter and disposition of the writer’s mind more than one or few words or sentences can show, therefore there be that have called style the image of man (mentis character), for man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered and qualified, so are his speeches and language at large, and his inward conceits be the mettle of his mind, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woof of his conceits, more plain, or busy and intricate, or otherwise affected after the rate. Most men say that not any one point in all physiognomy is so certain as to judge a man’s manners by his eye, but more assuredly, in mine opinion, by his daily manner of speech and ordinary writing. (233)

This passage is in no respects at odds with those on dissembling: Puttenham’s abiding interest is in a poetics of disclosure in which language produces the impression that we are seeing into a speaker’s inner thoughts. That the disposition of a speaker’s mind is discernable in his style was, of course, a rhetorical commonplace, but throughout the Art Puttenham is actually putting it to use by showing the hermeneutical work the poet does. The ‘mind’ is discovered not simply by an interpretative act of the viewer, but by a deliberate act of the maker: ‘Style is a constant and continuall phrase or tenour

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of speaking and writing . . . a certaine contrived forme and qualitie, many times naturall to the writer, many times his peculier by election and arte.’ (233)24 Style is instinctive, but also contrived and intentional. The combined energies of nature, art and the agentive individual who uses art figure forth the mind in order for its ‘matter and disposition’ to be seen. Taken in the context of the Art as a whole, this passage does not say that any use of language can disclose the speaker’s mind. Rather, only a figurative use of language can achieve such disclosure because only figures will allow a speaker to impart their own intent upon language. What other writers regard as a hermeneutical fact, made true by the interpretive skill of the reader, Puttenham takes to be an achievement of the poet. At the end of his extensive lists of figures, Puttenham discusses the ‘last and principal figure of our poetical ornament’ (333), the ‘Gorgeous’, which polishes ‘our speech and as it were attire[s] it with copious and pleasant amplifications and much variety of sentences all running upon one point and to one intent’ (333). Here the intent orders and inflects figures for its own disclosure. The best English example Puttenham can find is a poem by Elizabeth I about the various ‘secret factions’ assembled against her by Mary Queen of Scots. Though she had ‘with great wisdom and patience dissembled it’ (334), Elizabeth knew of these plots, and reveals as much in her poem. The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb, Which would not be, if reason rul’d or wisdom weav’d the web. But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turn to reign of late repent by course of changed winds. The top of hope supposed, the root of ruth will be, And fruitless all their grafted guiles, as shortly ye shall see. Then dazzld eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, Shall be unseeled by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds. The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow, Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow. No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port: Our realm it brooks no strangers’ force; let them elsewhere resort.

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Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops that seek such change and gape for joy. (334–5)

We may scoff that Puttenham’s choice of this unprepossessing poem to instance the principal figure of poetic ornament is merely an unsubtle exercise in flattery. The poem itself seems to commit the fault of insinuating so forcefully as to be completely unambiguous. Although I do not doubt that the hope of preferment may have motivated Puttenham’s choice, this does not mean that the poem fails to illustrate the gorgeous. Puttenham is caught in the precarious position of having to choose an example in which the intent is clearly perceptible in order for the figure to be visible to his reader. The poem’s persistent unwillingness to express anything plainly makes it a clear example of the oblique, and its inclusion allows us to reflect further upon the paradoxical nature of an art of ambiguity.25 In order for them to have the desired pedagogical effect, the examples used to teach this art need to be relatively unambiguous about their own duplicity. In this poem one can thus infer that the ‘foreign banished wight’ is Mary, that her plots, like the uprooted plant, will bear no fruit, and those ‘that seek such change and gape for joy’ will have their heads cut off. What is not said is revealed through the deliberate ordering of what is said. Like Elizabeth in this poem, the courtier is the implicit subject of all his poetry for his figures lead back to the intent that orders them. The gorgeous, which Puttenham describes as imparting a polish or lustre upon figures, therefore also has a cognitive value, comprising a convenient proportion between words and intent by which the mind is revealed without being represented. All of what I have said, or recognized Puttenham to have said, about rules, use, and ambiguity stands in need of a further precept or principle: how is a poet to use these figures in such a way that his mind is disclosed, or his intendments are made visible? If these non-referential meanings are disclosed too forcefully, they cease to be ambiguous; if not forcefully enough, they will be imperceptible. The rule that putatively governs their operation must inevitably take on this ambivalence, and it too must be disclosed tactfully: clear enough to be perceptible, but imprecise enough to leave room for ambiguity. We are now in a position to understand decorum as something other than the socially divisive device that it has often been judged to be. Preparing his reader by admitting that this ‘good grace’ is ‘easier to conceive than to express’, Puttenham begins a definition of decorum that will continue for several pages, and which

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will approach it in different ways: ‘We will therefore examine it to the bottom and say that everything which pleaseth the mind or the senses, and the mind by the senses as by means instrumental, doth it for some amiable point or quality that is in it, which draweth them to a good liking and contentment with their proper objects’ (347). Attempting to examine decorum ‘to the bottom’, Puttenham here treats it as axiomatic that decorum is an ‘amiable point, or quality’ within the decorous object. However, not long after, he tells us that decorum is a ‘lovely conformity, or proportion, or convenience between the sense and the sensible’ (348) – a certain proportionate relationship, that is, between sensory perception and the objects of its apprehension. Puttenham is equivocal about whether decorum is a proportion which inheres in the object, or one which underpins the context of its perception. The fact that he is led into this equivocation at all has to do with the unequivocal assumption that decorum can be analysed, as it were, ‘at the bottom’, as a simple, though inexplicable, rule underpinning all uses. It is easy to overlook the persuasive influence upon Puttenham’s thinking of the very word itself, ‘decorum’, a noun, which leaves him unwittingly transfixed by the idea that the word names a single thing, or an essence common to a number of different things. As critics, we are perhaps more at liberty than Puttenham to acknowledge the word’s performative force: it orients the reader in a particular way towards the ensuing examples – in fact, towards every instance of use – and calls them to determine the ‘amiable point’ in all of them. Since decorum is quite radically different in different situations, the word cannot be said to refer to a particular thing. This is why decorum is ‘easier to conceive than to express’ (347): it cannot easily be defined because its use involves an explicit act of definition. Puttenham must therefore insist that decorum can only ever be registered or learnt as a quality of viewing: ‘the election is the writer’s, the judgement is the world’s, as theirs to whom the reading appertaineth’ (348). As a result, the courtier can only come to a knowledge of decorum through observation: ‘We will therefore set you down some few examples of every circumstance how it alters the decency of speech or action. And by these few shall ye be able to gather a number more to confirm and establish your judgement by a perfect discretion’ (349). What follows is over 30 pages of examples of decorous and indecorous usage, with Puttenham commenting on each. Few critics have taken these examples as

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a serious attempt at pedagogy, even though, for Puttenham, they mark the climax of his work. The examples I will give you be worthy of remembrance. And though they brought with them no doctrine or institution at all, yet for the solace they may give the readers, after such a rabble of scholastical precepts, which be tedious, these reports being of the nature of matters historical, they are to be embraced. But old memories are very profitable to the mind, and serve as a glass to look upon and behold the events of time, and more exactly to scan the truth of every case that shall happen in the affairs of man. (349)

Puttenham refers to these examples as ‘solace’, by which he means the pleasure evoked by observation. This pleasure, or solace can be understood as decorum in its affective form. Grounded in particular cases, solace nevertheless carries a pedagogical force which extends to all future action, kindling remembrance in the reader so that they may acquire the ability to accurately judge for themselves. However, ‘solace’ retains also that sense of consolation, since it is deployed here in the absence of a precise formulation of the rule of decorum. Indeed, the imperatives of the treatise as a whole culminate at this point in which the delight effected by poetic discourse is figured as a consolation for the fact that decorum can neither be prescribed pedagogically, nor described theoretically. So while solace refers to the pleasures that derive from the use of rules, solace also defines the limits of art and teaching. Puttenham’s insistence that ‘decorum’ names a particular thing sets in motion a mode of examination which aims to locate that thing in an infinitely variable number of uses. My feeling is that Puttenham’s treatment of decorum does not simply define, but enacts what he sees as an innate human desire for a definition of decorum, an aspiration to know what exactly makes something decorous. It is in the context of the solace offered by these examples that Puttenham defines decorum a further way: not as a rule which circumscribes action, but an imperative, or an impulsion which motivates action. When Puttenham associates decorum with nature it is less to show that the poet-courtier draws ultimately from a natural sense of decorum, as Attridge suggests, than to show the universal appetite for decorum: ‘This lovely conformity . . . hath nature herself first most carefully observed in all her own works, then also by kind grafted it in the appetites of every creature working by intelligence to covet and

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desire and in their actions to imitate and perform’ (348). The natural principle that underpins decorum is the desire to learn how to be decorous. All your figures poetical or rhetorical are but observations of strange speeches and such as without any art at all we should use, and commonly do, even by very nature without discipline. But more or less aptly and decently, or scarcely, or abundantly, or of this or that kind of figure, and one of us more than another, according to the disposition of our nature, constitution of the heart, and facility of each man’s utterance. So as we may conclude that nature herself suggesteth the figure in this or that form, but art aideth the judgement of his use and application. (377–8)

It is in our common nature to use figures, whereas our individual natures determine their choice. Nature is animative, initiating the learning of discretion rather than demanding conformity to abstract strictures. By identifying art as the expression of a natural impulse on the one hand, and the tool of the intent on the other, Puttenham attempts to register both the spontaneous and deliberative aspects of the individual, neither of which can be methodized. This conceptual framework, moreover, is the inevitable outcome of a treatise which configures poetic language around a user, the very thing that no poetry manual or courtesy book could formalize. The frequently discussed final chapter of the Art advises the poet to dissemble his art, and ‘when he is most artificial, so to disguise and cloak it as it may not appear, nor seem to proceed from him by any study or trade of rules, but to be his natural’ (382). Nevertheless, art must still be perceptible enough for its dissembling to be appreciated: it is not ‘so evidently to be descried, as every lad that reads him shall say he is a good scholar, but will rather have him to know his art well and little to use it’ (382). Again, the effect of dissimulation depends upon its disclosure. Yet art must be disclosed in such a way as to reveal that it is also being held back, as if the deployment of art itself had to be duplicitous.26 Paradoxically, the observer must be made aware not simply of the speaker’s use, but also of his un-use. The deft un-use of the poet is a quintessentially courtly trait, and is here implicitly set against the crudely undissembled art of the ‘good scholar’, a distinction that recurs throughout Puttenham’s text. As Robert Matz has observed, ‘the courtly poetry of the Art needs to be seen not in isolation, as an internal and organic development; rather, Puttenham’s desire to create an “arte . . . fitter to please the court then

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the schoole” suggests specific opposition to the latter.’27 For Puttenham, who often inveighs against rules in their ‘scholastical’ form, poetic use is always an abuse of the schoolmaster’s rhetoric. In some sense, the un-use of the courtier is imitated by Puttenham in his deliberate un-use of technical terms. In the most impassioned passage in the treatise, Puttenham intimates the criticism he may receive from ‘busy carpers’ at his use of the terms ‘auricular’ and ‘sensible’ instead of ‘orthographical’ and ‘syntactical’ which ‘the learned grammarians left ready made to our hands’ (244): ‘I trust they will bear with me writing in the vulgar speech and seeking by my novelties to satisfy not the school but the court, whereas, they know very well, all old things soon wax stale and loathsome, and the new devices are ever dainty and delicate; the vulgar instruction requiring also vulgar and communicable terms’ (244). Puttenham’s vulgar poetics must discretely dissemble the rules of Latin and Greek poetry because it must be seen not merely to impose these rules upon English, but to allow their use to produce something new. However, novel use is not the only way the rules of rhetoric can be dissembled by courtliness. Though Puttenham derides ‘scholasticall’ words, he nevertheless praises the court as a place where even they can be rendered customary: the ‘clerkly or uncouth’ terms of Greek and Latin poetry favoured by such critics would be ‘primitively received, unless they be qualified or by much use and custom allowed and our ears made acquainted with them’ (244). Unlike the school, which cherished antiquity, the court, I should now like to argue, is seen as the appropriate context for a vulgar poetics since it recognized the formative powers of use and custom not only to produce novelty, but to temper strangeness and to foster familiarity with new terms. The Art’s ambivalence towards figures as devices to be both used and un-used, shown and hidden is further conditioned by Puttenham’s attempt to negotiate a relationship between rules and the customary uses which both keep them new and render them familiar.

Usual speech: The eye and the ear In his chapter entitled ‘Of Language’ Puttenham outlines the best language for the poet to use: it must not be ‘of poor, rustical, or uncivil people’ but ‘shall follow generally the better-brought-up sort, such as the Greeks call charientes: men civil and graciously behaviored and bred’ (229); it should also be ‘the

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most usual of all his country; and for the same purpose rather that which is spoken in the kings court’ (228). On what grounds, one feels tempted to ask, is the ‘English spoken at the kings court’ ‘the most usual’ in the country? Since, Puttenham explains, no English is ‘so courtly nor so current as our southern English is . . . Ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the court and that of London and the shires lying about London within sixty miles, and not much above’ (229). The justification given here that courtly English should be used on account of its being the most usual has often been taken as another strategy of social exclusion.28 But there is more to it than that. For Puttenham, the English spoken at court is the most usual not because it is the most widely used, but because it is the most current. Although we may complain that currency is so contestable, and thus an impossibly ambiguous category, Puttenham is attracted to its very contestability: language which is continuously changing, absorbing and transforming new forms is capable of being simultaneously novel and familiar. This reading is supported by Puttenham’s frequent descriptions of a particular type of poetic novelty which is ‘nothing the more unseemly or misbecoming, but rather decenter and more agreeable to any civil ear and understanding’ (221). For Puttenham, the usual (like poetry itself) is a category that can accommodate both the strange and accustomed. However, what makes the usual dynamically contestable also makes it impossible to define with any certainty. We are inevitably forced to ask: how does one know what usual English is? What principle or rule does Puttenham offer his reader as a way of identifying the usual? Courtly English was notoriously changeable, and Puttenham warns that ‘great heed must be taken by our maker in this point, that his choice be good’ (230). Nor can the courtier simply rely on what he sees others using: even though ‘they be daily spoken in court’, ‘many dark words’ should be avoided because they are ‘not usual nor well-sounding’ (230). Puttenham seems to hint at the possibility for judgement which transcends daily usage for, further on, after listing a few words which should especially be avoided, he adds parenthetically, ‘and I could bring a reason for it’ (232). However, the chapter ends with the famous lines from Horace’s Ars Poetica, the reason apparently unstated: ‘Many a word yfall’n shall eft arise / And such as now been held in highest prise / Will fall as fast, when use and custom will, / Only umpires of speech, for force and skill’ (232).29 There is nothing here to regulate speech

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but use and custom, and seemingly no principles of order can be grounded in them. Puttenham has forgotten to bring his reason. Or has he? The phrase ‘not usual nor well-sounding’ contains a vital equivalence, for throughout the Art the ear is isolated as the faculty which identifies what is usual. In the space of under a page the following advice is given: the poet should avoid Cornish or Welsh ‘as they be now spoken and pronounced’ (228); the languages of the craftsman and carter ‘do abuse good speeches by strange accents or illshaped sounds and false orthography’ (229); the poet should be wary of ‘many strange terms of other languages by secretaries and merchants and travelers, and many dark words and not usual nor well-sounding’ (230). Consider also Puttenham’s defence of his own use of neologisms: ‘I pray that the learned will bear with me and to think the strangeness thereof proceeds but of novelty and disaquaintance with our ears, which in process of time and by custom will frame very well’ (242). Words must have an aural currency for them to be usable; simply, they have to sound English. When Puttenham says a word sounds strange, he is not being metaphorical: the usual is determined aurally. Whether in writing or speech, linguistic misconduct is persistently seen as an offence against the ear. The foulest and most intolerable vice in speech and writing is barbarousness, which the Greeks and Romans understood as ‘when any of their own natural words were sounded and pronounced with strange and ill-shaped accents, or written by wrong orthography’ (336–7). In the 1580s, the importance of orthography to poetic experimentation cannot easily be overstated.30 In a famous letter to Spenser, Gabriel Harvey wrote that there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, eyther for the assured and infallible Certaintie of our English Artificiall Prosodye particularly, or generally to bring our Language into Arte and to frame a Grammer or Rhetorike therof, than first of all universally to agree upon ONE AND THE SAME ORTOGRAPHIE, in all pointes conformable and proportionate to our COMMON NATURAL PROSODYE.31

Experiments in quantitative verse were virtually impossible without orthographical agreement. The same was true of rhyme. In fact, ‘there cannot be in a maker a fouler fault than to falsify his accent to serve his cadence, or by untrue orthography to wrench his words to help his rhyme’ (170). Rhythm and rhyme have to be discovered in ‘common natural prosodye’, not imprinted upon it. There are times in which a poet can alter a word ‘to give a better

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sound’, or to ‘make up the rhyme’, but he ‘must take heed that he be not to bold, especially in exchange of one letter for another, for unless usual speech and custom allow it, it is a fault and no figure’ (246). Unusual pronunciation can never please, only incur derision. Without either standardized spelling or a stable vocabulary, Puttenham relies heavily upon the ear as the principal receptor of familiar English. The privileged position of speech in humanist thought has been seen to reflect the underlying view that language was governed not by rules, but consensus. As Martin Elsky has written, ‘however deep [the humanists’] concern with print and written performance, they return to speech as the originator of writing, not just out of nostalgia for classical authority, but because speech inhabits society, and social consensus gives speech its authority.’32 In A Defense of Rhyme (1603), for instance, Samuel Daniel advocates the use of rhyme on the basis of the ear’s authority as the receptor of those rules which are or can be made customary: ‘Every language hath her proper number or measure fitted to use and delight, which custom, entertaining by allowance of the ear, doth idenize and make natural.’33 However, in their desire for novelty, not least in their ongoing attempts to reform the vernacular, poets and pedagogues often found themselves at odds with custom. Puttenham’s occasional concessions that, though risky, the poet can alter the sound of a word to fit a line reminds us how fluid and changeable consensus was, and that it often ruled with imprecision and tolerance. Indeed, although advocating rhyme on the basis of consensus, Daniel also tells us that I have assayed in some of my epistles to alter the usual place of meeting, and to set it further off by one verse, to try how I could disuse my own ear and ease it of this continual burden which indeed seems to surcharge it a little too much; but as yet I cannot come to please myself therein, this alternate or cross-rhyme holding still the best place in my affection.34

So the ear at certain points can be ‘disused’, not ignored but un-applied, for to truly achieve novelty, poetry must sometimes be wrested from the usual. When the ear is ‘disused’, the familiarity of the usual gives way to the novelties of momentary, occasional use; the ear is disengaged in order to produce something new.35 From what we gather in the Defense, the epistle in which Daniel disused his ear was to him neither pleasant nor barbarous, usual nor unusual; something of a literary non-event. Yet his conclusion – ‘as yet I cannot

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come to please myself therein’ – reveals an intention to accustom himself to a new usual by disusing the old. And this may be seen in terms of a broader effort to keep custom current by attending to the momentary. But, we might ask, by what authority can a poet disuse his ear? If (as I have argued) the usual is a category that accommodates both novelty and familiarity, and the ear seems only to register the latter, by what rule can something be allowably novel? Puttenham’s emphasis on the ‘auricular’ aspects of poetry would seem to privilege the spoken over the written word, and has led Linda Galyon to conclude that ‘Puttenham appears to conceive of an oral component to all written language’ which constitutes ‘an independent element having its own power, its own reality’.36 Book 2 of the Art, ‘Of Proportion Poetical’, contains its most frequently overlooked passages, and offers a very different understanding of language than Galyon would intimate here. Puttenham’s interest in the shapes poetry can assume, together with his inclusion of diagrams of poetic lines, should not be passed off as esoteric novelties, but is intrinsic to his attempt to observe the momentary, occasional operation of the rule in customary speech. For in order to depict use in its immediately contextual application, Puttenham has recourse to an alternative receptor for it: the eye.37 When describing Oriental shape poems, which yield ‘an ocular representation’ (179), Puttenham says that ‘at the beginning [they] will seem nothing pleasant to an English ear, but time and usage will make them acceptable enough’ (180). Although the ear will recognize their beauty only in time, these exotic poems are visually pleasing seemingly without having to become customary. In much the same way that ‘our maker may fashion his meter’ (187) into a certain desired shape, so the usual must in part be fashioned by the visual imperatives of momentary use. Juliet Fleming, who is one of the few critics to have taken Book 2 seriously, has argued that, ‘for Puttenham and his contemporaries, the poetic line was a visual as well as an aural unit, which is to say that all poems were, at least potentially, “ocular representations”.’38 Fleming highlights ‘posies’, portable epigrams or inscriptions, as particularly cogent examples of the efficacy of the material in Puttenham’s poetics. Such poetry, says Puttenham, is ‘made for the nonce’ – that is, it is designed to mark a specific occasion or to serve a particular purpose. The posy is the form that poetry takes in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, at a particular site . . . Puttenham’s statement that posies are

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‘made for the nonce’ underlies their status as things purpose-made: they are material because occasional.39

For Puttenham, the visual has a force registered in and for a specific moment. By regarding the ear and the eye as different receptors of poetry, Puttenham is understanding use as operating in two quite distinct temporal increments: the customary and the momentary. The efficacy of poetic language (and the usual) lies in its capacity to accommodate both. When considering ‘proportion by situation’ – that is, the ways in which rhyme and line length can be manipulated ‘as may best serve the ear for delight’ (174) – Puttenham utilizes ‘ocular example[s]’ to reveal the nature of the ear’s pleasure. These examples are made up of horizontal lines of differing length to represent measure, and curved lines connecting them to represent a rhyme scheme. And I set you down an ocular example, because ye may the better conceive it. Likewise, it so falleth out most times, your ocular proportion doth declare the nature of the audible, for if it please the ear well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e conuerso. And this is by a natural sympathy between the ear and the eye, and between tunes and colours, even as there is the like between the other senses and their objects, of which it appertaineth not here to speak. (174–5)

The shape poems (which immediately follow) are the natural extension of these diagrams, and Puttenham’s faith that the ear will soon enjoy what the eye already enjoys is grounded in this sensory ‘sympathy’, which itself is grounded in a general metaphysics of proportion: ‘all things stand by proportion, and that without it nothing could stand to be good or beautiful. The doctors of our theology to the same effect, but in other terms, say that God made the world by number, measure and weight’ (153). Since poetry is the ‘skill to speak and write harmonically’, it partakes of musical proportion which is ‘audible by stirs, times and accents’ (154). The length of a stanza or line, the pattern of concords, the physical shape of a poem are representations of ‘motion’ which exist in time, and this motion should move to the measures that move the heavens. But the ear is too powerful a receptor of the customary to perceive proportion by itself. The eye rules with an authority based not on consensus which develops only over time, but on a metaphysics of proportion which is disclosed in the moment; only with its help will the poet know what novelties and disuses are acceptable. These ocular representations are maps of

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particular poetic moments, the incarnation of measure in time. Accordingly, they are not merely representations of what the ear already hears, they declare what the ear should be hearing. The demands of proportion cut across those of usual speech in the eye and ear’s disagreement over shape poems. Puttenham’s faith in the ear’s eventual acquiescence is not merely a faith in the efficacy of a detached metaphysics, but a faith that custom will eventually become accustomed to proportion.40 Poetic proportion has a specific name and function. Decorum is a ‘lovely conformity, or proportion, or convenience between the sense and the sensible’ (348), our sensory apprehension and the physical utterance: ‘measures and concords . . . breedeth a variable and strange harmony not only in the ear, but also in the conceit of them that hear it’ (174).41 After all, humans use their senses in the exchange of thought: ‘the mind is not assailable unless it be by sensible approaches, whereof the audible is of greatest force for instruction or discipline, the visible for apprehension of exterior knowledges as the Philosopher saith’ (281). The aural is of greatest force in human interaction (‘the ear is properly but an instrument of conveyance for the mind, to apprehend the sense by the sound’), and the visual in the perception of knowledges exterior to human activity. Puttenham’s own pedagogical method is consistent with the relative strengths of eye and ear. Deliberately placed in the first third of the treatise, Puttenham’s visual forms appeal to that faculty most able to perceive proportion. Immediately following, Puttenham considers ‘the grammatical versifying of the Greeks and Latins [to] see whether it might be reduced into our English art or no’ (200), and from here, the ear and custom assume authority: ‘it were no hard matter to induce all their ancient feet into use with us, and that it should prove very agreeable to the ear and well according with our ordinary times and pronunciation’ (201). Through the eye’s ability to perceive and the ear’s ability to practice, proportion must be willingly received into use. Proportion in poetry must therefore appear not as a cosmic law, but a human act, an ongoing poetic practice in which a decorous custom dissembles the rules of proportion to which it adheres.

Solace In the previous chapter, I argued that the description of the wind and weather in Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus comprises and emblematizes the teacher’s

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instruction coming to an end, and the student being called upon to ‘go on’ by himself. In this moment, Ascham, through Toxophilus, acknowledges that the deployment of shots, like the deployment of words, occur in infinitely variable contexts which will not submit to a teachable rule. But the great uncertainty of the wind is set against the undeniable fact that shooters can, through practice, acquire the judgement which can account for the wind’s influence. What Ascham finds difficult to account for is not the wind as such, but how judgement comes to know it in the way it does. To say that it is by ‘practice’, or ‘use’ that judgement does this might very well be true, and may describe the grounds of a shooter’s understanding. But against the certainty offered by a rule, ‘practice’ and ‘use’ are quintessentially dissatisfying. The wind is just as unknowable as that faculty which can come to knowledge of it. Ascham’s question is not simply, ‘How can we come to know the wind?’ but ‘How can I account for the fact that we do come to know the wind?’ I would like to suggest that Puttenham confronts a similar difficulty when he arrives at this same inevitable moment of teaching. Unable to express decorum as a precept, Puttenham presents his examples as proof that decorous acts are nevertheless performed regularly and intentionally. Given that he presents these examples to show the radical alterability of decorum, they are ample demonstration of the very resistance to the kind of rule which he has nevertheless insisted underpins them. Indeed, they comprise a departure from rules altogether: ‘And though they brought with them no doctrine or institution at all, yet for the solace they may give the readers, after such a rabble of scholastical precepts, which be tedious, these reports being of the nature of matters historical, they are to be embraced’ (349). ‘Solace’ means consolation, but also pleasure and delight, and I would argue that both meanings are in play here. The consolation to be derived from the unfulfilled expectation that decorum can be formulated as a precept is the joy that is derived from bearing witness to acts which we know to be decorous, but whose decorousness we cannot absolutely account for. The absence of such a precept, and the consequent acknowledgement that no rule can govern the boundlessness of context, are in fact the enabling preconditions of decorum. Decorum would cease to be a wonder if we had a rule that could explain it. The Art recognizes this in its pedagogical practice, even despite Puttenham’s insistence that all decorous acts obey an almost mathematically precise rule. His copious examples picture

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a world in which decorous acts have become usual. And this, for Puttenham, is the world of the court: that context within which decorum has become so usual that it has become an institution. The examples of decorum in Book III are not excerpts of poetry, but supposedly historically accurate descriptions of decorous behaviour. If, in his poetry, Puttenham commits all the faults of a rule-obsessed pedant, then those faults are nowhere present in these examples which demand faithful representation not ornament. Their desired effect is not to teach the operation of a rule, but to give ‘solace . . . after such a rabble of scholastical precepts’. In them, the rules of poetry are pleasurably dissembled; by them, the Art casts its art away. In arguing that Puttenham’s discussion of decorum comprises an inevitable moment, one which ought not to come as a surprise to the reader, I find myself (once again) at odds with both Attridge and Hillman who argue that Puttenham inverts the customary order of rhetorical instruction by placing decorum after the lists of figures. Here is Hillman paraphrasing Attridge: as Puttenham undoubtedly knew, normative rhetorical theory dictated that in the organization of discourse the ‘generall,’ the ‘source of ordered and reasoned argument,’ was to be placed first in the disposition of discourse, the order then ‘descending’ to the particular or ‘special.’ Puttenham reverses the trajectory, ‘preposterously’ putting the rule of ‘generalitie’ (269) after the plethora of examples that make up the main text of The Arte of English Poesie.42

I do not think one can unambiguously say that decorum is a rule of ‘generalitie’. In fact, the difficulty of saying whether decorum is general or specific is exactly the problem that Puttenham finds himself in. Puttenham struggles to articulate it adequately as a general rule, and instead uses it to introduce examples whose unruly contextual specificity cannot be reduced to any generalization. Given that decorum is different in every circumstance, one may even argue that, far from being general, ‘decorum’ names something which is different in every case, and is thus radically particular. However, if we consider the discussion of decorum as comprising a movement from teaching to learning – or a moment in which a scene of instruction comes to an end, and the student must ‘go on’ alone – then it becomes obvious why it must be placed at the end. As with Toxophilus’ description of the wind and weather, Puttenham’s examples of decorous courtly behaviour are a moment, as it were, in which the student is

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discharged, sent out into the world. It would be plainly ludicrous to discharge the student at the beginning of a programme of pedagogy. The practical pedagogical effect of the Art is easily lost on the contemporary critic: we read the text as an historical artefact, an ‘important repository of normative views’, a cogent example of Renaissance self-fashioning, and an act of courtly duplicity, not because we think it will turn us into good poets. ‘Puttenham is no Aristotle’ – quite right! The discords and contradictions we may observe in the Art emanate, at least in part, from the theoretical expectations of our own critical method – one which the Art is at pains to resist. As members of the academy, we must register a presiding sense that the Art (‘fitter to please the Court than the school’) was not written for us; and perhaps our insistence that its inconsistencies compromise its aims merely reveals that it is us who are ‘scholasticall’ and ‘clerky’. And so, to summarize: on the one hand, decorum functions as a hard and fast rule to be obeyed – ‘the line and level for all good makers to do their business by’ (347) – but on the other hand, it functions as a point of departure from rules altogether, and the reassertion of context and contingency. Puttenham is forced into this position because decorum cannot abide the indecorousness either of unregulated use, or of unusual rules. Puttenham is wedged between an assumption that decorous acts can be explained with reference to a rule which exists independently of use, and a recognition that this rule can only be communicated through descriptions of usual practice. These positions are mutually exclusive; they open up a rift which cannot be closed. Puttenham, so to speak, loads this rift with the ore of a golden world.

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4

Usual Spelling: Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie

Jonathan Goldberg’s reading of Mulcaster’s Elementarie This chapter will give an account of the sixteenth-century English spelling controversy in terms of two contrary responses to the usual: what exactly is ‘the usual’, by what criteria can it be defined and what role might it play in determining how we ought to use language? Though these questions are best addressed in and through an account of the controversy itself, ‘the usual’ may benefit from some very basic definition. Usual language is that which is customarily used. Intrinsic to the idea of custom is that there exists a ‘we’ who practises it, and some regularity can be discerned in its practices. The role of the usual in determining correct use is partly dependent on the extent to which communal practice can be accepted as justifiable grounds for correctness. The sceptical drama which I am arguing characterizes early modern pedagogy appears in this spelling controversy as the disagreement between reformers over the status of the usual in determining orthographical correctness. Their animosity dramatizes the irreconcilability of the two orientations towards the usual: an aspiration to grasp a principle of correctness beyond the usual, and satisfaction with the usual as forming or containing that principle of correctness. Moreover, this was a controversy fought out within scenes of instruction. Since spelling reform sought to establish a universal standard of correctness, its success would inevitably be measured by how effectively it could be taught to the multitude.1 Rules which purported to be rational (and even userfriendly) risked being marginalized as eccentric and affected if they did not

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attract followers. As M. C. Bradbrook has written, ‘Although among the earliest attempts at a scientific analysis of speech to be evolved by scholars, reformed spelling never succeeded, since, as the more perceptive quickly saw, the uses of language are too varied to be controlled by fiat; so that science degenerated into affectation on the one hand and eccentric pedantry on the other.’2 Bradbrook cites Holofernes as a cogent reminder of what happens when a desire for extreme orthographical precision inhabits a sensibility prone to asserting its own singularity. It is with moral outrage that Holofernes complains of the pronunciations of the Spaniard, don Armado. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and pointdevise companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’, when he should say ‘doubt’; ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’; d, e, b, t, not d, e, t. He clepeth a calf, ‘cauf ’; ‘half ’, ‘hauf ’; neighbour vocator ‘nebour’; ‘neigh’ abbreviated ‘ne’. This is abhominable, which he would call ‘abominable’. It insinuateth me of insanie. Ne intelligis, domine? To make frantic, lunatic. (V.1; 14–22)3

Though Shakespeare playfully suggests that Holofernes’ slavish adherence to the rule of phonetic pronunciation is akin to madness – ‘It insinuateth me of insanie’ – it cannot merely be discounted as such. This madness is grounded in and is the inevitable result of Holofernes’ unrelenting fidelity to a rule. And perhaps that is the source of the humour: we understand and oddly empathize with the impeccable reasoning that legitimates absurd pronunciations. We laugh because Holofernes has submitted himself to a rule for which he becomes emblematic: it is rigid and uncompromising, and stands resistant to the softening influence of custom. His madness is that he has become oddly dehumanized, mechanistic. Of course, Holofernes is not literally mad. But madness is a powerful metaphor for a language user who is, as it were, marooned upon self-invented rules, having unwittingly banished himself from the language over which he had hoped to assert his influence. Holofernes is often taken to be a parody of Richard Mulcaster, first headmaster of Merchant Taylor’s School (1561–86), high master of St Paul’s School (1596–1608) after John Colet, and author of two significant pedagogical works: Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581) and The First Part of the Elementarie (1582).4 Ironically, however, the parody echoes

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Mulcaster’s criticism of his orthographical predecessors, Sir Thomas Smith and John Hart, and is only applicable to proponents of slavishly phonetic orthographies.5 Smith and Hart recognized only too late that in order to learn their new systems, the literate – authors, publishers, and, most significantly, the teachers that would be relied upon to disseminate their reformed spelling – would have to unlearn the old. Though apparently returning spelling to its simplest and most essential of rules, their orthographies, like Holofernes’ pronunciations, remained impervious to customary practice, and had thus to suffer the imperviousness of custom to them.6 In short, they failed to attract any significant following. It was at the scene of their failure that Mulcaster recognized that a reformed orthography had to receive within its rules the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of the very thing it was attempting to reform: usual practice. The rightness of Mulcaster’s orthography lay not in its rigid adherence to the rule of phoneticism, nor any single rule at all, but in its capacity to reconstitute customary use into a teachable form. In Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg offers ‘a representative example of a deconstructive reading of a pedagogic text and of the site of writing within a programmatic, regularizing pedagogy’.7 That text is The First Part of the Elementarie, and that ‘programmatic, regularizing pedagogy’ is the curriculum it outlines. Although, for Goldberg, the Elementarie is ‘remarkable’ (and the pun is no doubt intended), it is nevertheless presented as ‘a pedagogic text’, one out of many, and used as a vehicle for a ‘representative reading’.8 This form of deconstructive reading aims to expose that class whose ideologies command the practices of writing, and that sustain the state apparatuses which, in turn, give that class its authority.9 Goldberg tells us that this approach exists in Derrida as ‘the possibility of other ways of telling history, ones that could be as attentive to oppression and closures, to institutional determinations and acts of violence, but that would also see these as never entirely closing off the structures that exceed them’.10 A deconstructive reading (of which Goldberg’s is representative) would thus expose pedagogy for making use of structures which escape, and thus unfound, the ideological apparatuses it attempts to institute. Mulcaster’s elementary school would attempt to instil minimal literacy as a preparation for either the grammar school, or the workforce. Goldberg has suggested that the Elementarie therefore ‘faces a question of origin – of

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the instituted origin of literacy – and would mark that determinate point and place of origin as entirely differentiated from a prior (non)place of illiteracy’.11 However, according to Goldberg, the attempt to install ‘right writing’ at the origin turns out to be futile because Mulcaster, in attempting to ‘found’ literacy upon its differentiation with non-literacy, attempts to efface, while relying upon, the a priori writtenness of the pedagogical subject. [T]here can be no ‘right’ nature for Mulcaster except that which is written. He provides terms for this duplicity in the distinction between ‘mere being onelie’ and ‘well being’ (30). Only the latter is genuine human being, a secondary institution that re-marks ‘mere being’ as human through a retrodetermination (returning the elementary to the elements). That is, as Mulcaster writes, it is only by ‘wiselie marking, whereunto natur is either evidentlie given, or secretlie affectionat’ (28) that nature is realized and brought ‘to artificiall perfection.’ Mulcaster’s elementary is grounded in this re-marked nature: ‘I ground my argument that this must nedes be a verie good Elementarie’ (29), grounded, that is, in the re-marking, perfecting, and making-artificial of nature, reading it as already written towards the rewriting of the initial human stamp and impression.12

Attempting to institute the origin of literacy, Mulcaster refuses to acknowledge what Derrida calls arche-writing. In order for the subject to be a writing being, he must first have been written. Nature itself cannot be understood apart from its capacity to be artificially perfectible, and thus cannot be seen to be originary. The re-marked structure of Mulcaster’s elementary is not just a condition of the institution as such, but produces anomalies in its curriculum. Although writing is set forth as the origin of literacy it is preceded in the curriculum by learning to read. That is, since writing constitutes a scheme of re-marking a pre-existent literacy, it can hardly be said to be originary. For these reasons, according to Goldberg, the book is prevented from beginning ‘within the terms of its own founding intention’. The Elementarie consequently remains ‘forestalled at instituting its elementary (and elemental, originary) institution’.13 Mulcaster’s text fails because it cannot institutionalize the supplementary, or re-marked nature of the pedagogical scheme it utilizes: art perfects nature only insofar as nature is already written; and if nature is already written, then Mulcaster’s institution cannot claim to be the origin of literacy. However, that it nevertheless makes the claim to be an origin comprises (and here Goldberg is paraphrasing Antony Grafton and Lisa Jardine) ‘the ideological functions of

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an educational apparatus bent on the formation of a class of intellectuals with power (in the court or in the schools), thereby also depriving women and the lower classes such access in the name of “humanity”’.14 Pedagogy replicates and reproduces the state, and becomes, once more, a strategy of social exclusion. Against a reading (especially as sophisticated as this one) which seeks to expose the underlying political motivations of a text, my own reading, which takes the text more or less at its word, may appear not only to be gullibly hoodwinked by it, but also unable to get (as it were) to the heart of the matter. Motivations which are unspoken, or elided, or unconscious have a certain seductive explanatory power, but are not necessarily more true than those which are stated quite openly. Let me emphasize at the outset that my response to Goldberg’s analysis (as with my response to Derek Attridge’s reading of George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy) will not be one of straight disagreement. I cannot disagree, for instance, that the Elementarie is an exercise in self-fashioning which is imbricated in strategies of political preferment. (I would suggest, however, that such a conclusion has become so frequently reached in criticism of early modern pedagogy that it has become difficult to assess the value and efficacy of arguments which continue to arrive at it.) I agree, furthermore, that the Elementarie does not institute an origin. However, I contest the assumption that this constitutes a failure on Mulcaster’s part. Just why I am resisting a straight disagreement with Goldberg will become clearer in the pages which follow. For now it will suffice to say that I am wary of playing the idealist to Goldberg’s sceptic; wary, that is, of making the assumption – all too easily made – that a sufficient response to his argument requires me to see the absence of an absolute origin as a gap that must be absolutely filled. The crucial step in Goldberg’s reading – and the one from which all the others naturally follow – is taken at the beginning: ‘To assume that there is a place in which literacy is offered, however, and that there is such a minimal requirement [for literacy], entails other and opposing assumptions: that no other place could install literacy, and that nothing before or outside of such an institution could count as literacy.’15 To argue that the institutionalization of literacy entails these two assumptions is, at best, misleading, and relies upon its own erroneous assumption: that the institution in question is at liberty to define – and is bent on establishing – what counts as literacy without reference to what is ‘before or

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outside’ of it. Quite simply, what counts as literacy for Mulcaster is the ability to read existing writing, and the capacity to write in a way that will be understood by those who are already literate.16 In other words, Mulcaster’s institution requires precisely that integration with that which is ‘before and outside’, the effacement of which Goldberg would claim to be its founding gesture. In taking ‘writing’ in both the narrow sense of a material act of inscription or marking, and the broad Derridean sense of arche-writing (with its attendant strategies of supplementarity and différance), Goldberg pays little attention to the orthographically correct writing that is Mulcaster’s principal concern. (Goldberg leaves his discussion of Mulcaster’s orthography to a much later section of his book.) The Elementarie is startlingly original, paradoxically, because it does not conceive of its orthography as the origin of rightness in writing, but as a response to the rightness emergent in existing practices. This is why learning to read precedes learning to write in Mulcaster’s curriculum: writing is a responsiveness to the uses which pre-exist the elementary institution. In an analysis which problematizes the relationship between the artificial and the natural, and which removes a discussion of orthography to a completely different part of the book, Goldberg tends to ignore that process – neither artificial, nor natural – which, for Mulcaster, are the grounds of rightness: custom. Mulcaster derided Smith and Hart for assuming that they could simply originate an orthography ex nihilo, and expect custom to willingly consent to it. As I shall attempt to show, the Elementarie interrogates the presumption that it too attempts to instantiate the origin of orthographical correctness. In this way, it is always already responding to a reading such as Goldberg’s, and providing an alternative to it. The idea of an origin of literacy is also very difficult to square with what David Cressy has argued was the historical reality in early modern England: Literacy contains many levels and gradations. It may be imagined as a spectrum or curve, in which even the narrow definition of ‘reading and writing’ shades into an extensive range of competencies. Literacy, in early modern England, involved an ascending order of accomplishments, from the simple ability to recognize the letters of the alphabet to full fluency in handling the most sophisticated texts.17

The fluid criteria by which we determine what counts as literacy are also reflected in Mulcaster’s curriculum in which a child becomes literate through

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a process of gradual familiarization with the various uses of letters. Familiarity, which is neither natural nor artificial, is fundamentally non-originary: not only does it require, a priori, that to which one becomes familiar, but, phenomenologically and conceptually, it is impossible to establish where exactly it begins. When we try to pinpoint the precise instant of familiarization, we see only what appears to be a series of transitional moments.18 I have taken time to outline Goldberg’s reading not simply because its complexity demands time, but to register its own investment in a sceptical position. I question Goldberg’s readiness to equate absence with deficiency: simply because Mulcaster’s text does not instantiate a determinate origin (whether in nature or the art which re-marks it) does not mean that it lacks one. I do not disagree with Goldberg’s reading so much as deny that its reading amounts to a thesis about either the nature of language, or the scene of instruction as Mulcaster envisages them. My task is to show the ways in which Mulcaster’s text attempts to expose the groundlessness of the kind of demand that Goldberg’s reading makes upon it. Mulcaster’s arguments against phoneticism ought to be understood as strategies designed to release us both from the compulsion to see current orthography as disordered, and from an aspiration to grasp an illusory form of certainty. In each of the sections which follow, I analyse the Elementarie as a set of attempts to defuse this aspiration. These attempts do not negate the founding claim of the phonetic reformers: that English spelling lacks absolute orthographical rules. Rather, they render that conclusion an undeniable condition of language, and, in so doing, release the reformer from the aspiration to originate such rules. If, as I would like to argue, Mulcaster’s text anticipates and deconstructs the expectation that it seeks to establish an origin, then the critic who claims that it fails to do so may be compared to one who, having peeled away all the leaves of an artichoke, thinks of himself as being in possession of a powerful truth when he discovers that there is nothing there.19

Grounds But what is the status and function of a reform which diligently responds to that which is already practised? Mulcaster’s reform is one which does not seek radical change. Rather, it seeks a radical reconsideration of what already

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pertains. In order to establish firm grounds for the rightness of writing, Mulcaster must persuade his reader that such firm grounds already exist in customary practice. This involves him in an extended consideration of the nature of groundedness in which he seeks to redefine the grounds of linguistic certainty by redefining what counts as grounding. This should not be confused for an attempt to locate, or instantiate an origin, or a source. Rather, it answers a desire to justify how it is one can spell and read with certainty, as a matter of course, even with an orthography teaming with apparent uncertainty. It not only counters an urge to see our uses as lacking in such certainty, but it satisfies a need to make the most basic of verbal practices intelligible to someone who does not share them. Far from being a mere theoretical curiosity, the satisfaction of this need is for Mulcaster a pedagogical requirement. Orthographers such as Smith and Hart attempted to dig beneath the mere customary uses of language, to unearth grounds which were yet more foundational – more certain, more exact, more consistent. In so doing, they invalidated what, according to Mulcaster, were the only legitimate grounds of orthographic certainty. Criticizing their attempts to enforce their own invented rules upon language, Mulcaster derides them for failing to understand that their ‘allwaie so’ is an imposition of ungrounded correctness upon the ordinary ‘commonlie so’: ‘upon this right most commonlie so, where choice hath found reason to joyn withal in companie, must both speche be grounded, and their interest examined, which will overrule speche by their to much privat reason’ (102). ‘Allwaie so’ and ‘commonlie so’ make contrasting and incompatible claims to correctness. ‘Commonlie so’ is grounded upon those rules which have been discovered by collective choice, and rules with the persuasive familiarity generated by ongoing use. ‘Allwaie so’ enforces its rules under the license of ‘privat reason’, an authority outside communal and conventional language activity, and which excludes exceptions to its rules as barbarisms. More dangerously still, ‘he that pretendeth a falt against anie tung & amendeth not that falt, but deviseth a new right, of his own conceiving, helpeth not the old falt, but by tendering a new mean, offereth more matter to the finding of new falts’ (102). The ‘allwaie so’ operates under the allurement of perfect order, an ideal that charges the aspiration to arrest all exceptions, to make language more precise, more obedient, and thus reads into language the faults it means to reform. Mulcaster would like us to recognize that this preconceived notion

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of perfect order is itself groundless and illusory. And not just an imposition upon language of an order to which it would never submit, but an illusion of absolute order which makes language as it is appear disordered, chaotic and incomprehensible. In short, the aspiration for the ‘allwaie so’ draws forth the threat of scepticism. And yet, the ‘allwaie so’ has deep attractions: we wish for there to be a rule to which we can defer as to a mathematical formula which performs its calculations seemingly without our intervention. The temptation of the ‘allwaie so’ is that it places the responsibility of rightness on the rule, and thus leaves humans out, both their judgement and uses. The ‘commonlie so’ rather unnervingly puts humans at the centre – their practices, their habits, their institutions, their scenes of instruction Mulcaster strives to show that the certainty we are all too easily tempted to ascribe to an ideal rule is in fact grounded in us. But what does it mean for the ‘commonlie so’ to be ‘grounded in us’? The Elementarie conceives of itself as a search for orthographical certainty, and in so doing redefines certainty as something that must be sought, rather than invented. Mulcaster articulates his dedication to this search in images of plant uprooting, and these become emblems of an investigative procedure which attempts to ascertain what roots a language to the ground. For instance, he tells his reader that he will not enumerate any precepts before he ‘thoroughlie rip up the hole certaintie of our English writing’ (53). In order to aid him in establishing the groundedness of English, Mulcaster will analyse the ways in which ancient tongues were grounded, and this requires him to ‘rip up, even from the verie root, how and by what degrees, the very first tung, doth seme to com by that her perfection in writing’ (63). Unsurprisingly, then, Mulcaster’s assurances as to the certainty of his orthography frequently appear as metaphors which assert its groundedness in custom. In the dedicatory epistle, Mulcaster claims that he ‘write[s] nothing without cause why, and most certain ground. For I have sounded the thing by the depth of our tung, and planted my rules upon our ordinarie custom’ (¶r). ‘Ordinarie custom’, use, language practice – these are the grounds of orthographic certainty. Custom is, indeed, ‘Lord of the soil’ (79). Only in this soil will reforms take root. These acts of uprooting serve (ironically perhaps) to ground the Elementarie in one of its motivating questions: given that the literate spell and read with assurance even with an orthography which is often inconsistent, what are the

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grounds of their assurance? Mulcaster’s answer deploys a familiar metaphor: ‘Wherefor considering the learned tungs do require a fundation, and carefull teachers som help of foretrain, I undertook to rip up all those things which concern the Elementarie, a degre in teaching before the grammar train, by mine own travel to ease a multitude of maisters’ (234).20 Such uprooting would presumably reveal the primary functions an elementary must fulfil in order to achieve its groundedness; in order, that is, to fulfil with certainty that which it is designed to do.21 Having inspected the elementary at its roots, Mulcaster announces that its primary aim is to teach reading and writing, and these will act as the grounds of a child’s future learning: ‘As in this course of mine, the Elementarie principles maie resemble the first groundwork: the teachings of tungs the second stories: the after learning the upper bildings’ (232). Elsewhere, the elementary is compared to a ‘plat’, a plot of arable land, or a nursery, one out of which the student grows like a plant. The student as plant metaphor is pervasive throughout early modern education, and its use in the Elementarie is so widespread that examples are hardly required.22 Though botanical metaphors such as these are generally taken to express the relationship between nature and nurture, they are part of a system of metaphorical entailments in the Elementarie which reveal Mulcaster’s concerns with the nature of groundedness. Seen in this way, they develop a rather paradoxical character which has emblematic significance for the whole work. On the one hand, the Elementarie profits from an ambiguity in which child and vernacular language become allegories of each other, each like plants growing towards literacy and assurance. And on the other hand, custom and the elementary school, both grounds, become mutually grounding: the grounds of our orthographic assurance is pedagogy, our elementary training into literacy; and what grounds that training is a system of orthographic rules which depict ‘ordinarie custom’. Pedagogy creates what is customary; custom determines what pedagogy teaches.

Sound The first significant attempt to reform English spelling in the sixteenth century came out of an attempt to reform the pronunciation of ancient Greek. At Cambridge, in around 1534, Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith began

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teaching the reformed pronunciation of ancient Greek developed by Erasmus in De recta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528) which questioned the practice of modern Byzantine scholars, and argued that ancient Greek was pronounced significantly differently to modern Greek. In 1540, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, became Chancellor of Cambridge, and in 1542 issued a ban on the teaching of Erasmus’ pronunciation. There followed an exchange of letters between Cheke and Smith, on the one hand, and Gardiner on the other, although only those between Cheke and Gardiner are published in De pronuntiatione Graecae linguae (1555). Where Gardiner ascribed authority to current use, and argued that correct pronunciation, being a fluid, historical concept, now lay with modern Byzantine pronunciation, Cheke argued that, since Greek (as all languages) experienced periods of rise and fall, the pronunciation of the language at its height ought to be chosen. John F. McDiarmid’s attentive account makes apparent a fundamental consonance between Gardiner’s defence of non-reformed Greek pronunciation, and Smith’s English orthography.23 McDiarmid observes Gardiner’s use of chapter 2 of Aristotle’s Organon, commonly called De interpretatione, to support the view that there is no natural connection between a word and its referent; language is the product of convention, and is governed by the arbitrary decisions of men.24 It was on this basis that Gardiner could argue that ancient Greek pronunciation ought to follow modern Greek pronunciation. In De recta et emendata linguae anglicanae scriptione, dialogus (1568), Smith appears to call this earlier controversy to mind by citing those same passages from De interpretatione in which Aristotle distinguishes language from those entities which have their ‘own eternal, and unchangeable nature’.25 (Such things include ‘man, horse, bird, fish, grass, trees, and minerals’.) Smith thus asserts that language is based on convention, ‘a sort of mutual covenant and consent among men’, and for this reason, the meanings of words (like their spelling) ‘have their source in the common consent of many in nation-wide agreement’.26 In responding to Gardiner’s argument, Smith uses Aristotle for his own purposes. The idea that language is conventional carries, for Smith, the powerful implication that it is within human power to reform it.27 However, where, for Gardiner, convention comprises the grounds of correctness, for Smith, the conventional nature of language merely makes reform possible, and says nothing about the correctness of a reform.28 Correctness must therefore be grounded in something extrinsic to convention.

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Smith saw the projects of the reform of Greek pronunciation and the reform of English spelling as directed if not towards a similar goal, then certainly against a common foe: ‘In both cases, however, it has been and will be a dispute directed to such an extent against the old errors and misuses of writing and against what is ugly, absurd, doubtful and incoherent that nothing can be more uncertain and foolish.’29 Aspiring to rid English spelling of its incoherence and uncertainties, Smith offered an orthography based on the principle that ‘in writing, the uttered words, speech syllables and letters are recognized . . . so that writing may be truly described as a picture of speech.’30 Thus in possession of the rule of writing, Smith then sought to apply it with precision. And, according to Smith, such precision was possible because writing, being artificial, exists within the influence of human agency: ‘if there is an art of writing, as there is of speaking and painting, and art imitates nature, what follows should be certain and settled, and cannot be doubted. Otherwise it would not be art, but a confused licence to misuse in ignorance any one thing for any other.’31 Art imitates the permanence and surety of nature, and instantiates orthographic rules that ‘cannot be doubted’. The aspiration to indubitable order inevitably leads Smith to conceive of any spelling which will admit the possibility of doubt as one which harbours a confusion. For Smith, current spelling teemed with such confusion, and required immediate reform at its most basic level. Taking his cue from Latin and Greek grammarians, as well as the etymology of the word ‘grammar’ (γράμμα, meaning letter), Smith begins with ‘the smallest part into which sounds and words can be resolved’, and intones that ‘Whoever does not know their force and nature, like a man unacquainted with the first outlines and sketches in painting, cannot aspire to greater things.’32 Only by analysing language at the level of the letter, at its putative ‘beginning and foundation’, can we see what orthography ought to aspire to. However, we should be mindful of the degree to which the aspiration is a consequence of the mode of analysis Smith uses to derive it. To understand writing at the level of its apparently most basic constituents, individual letters, which each have their own ‘force and nature’, is already to have drawn the conclusion that orthography ought to be perfectly phonetic. What Smith perceives to be the essence of writing thus legitimates an aspiration to reform it according to the rule that one letter represents one sound. That Smith here commits a variation of the naturalistic fallacy – defining writing according to that which it ought to

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be; reforming writing according to that which it essentially is – is an inevitable consequence of his methodology. But writing as it essentially is – the perfect phonetic picture of speech – and writing as it is actually practised – chaotic, disordered, manifestly unphonetic – were two very different things for Smith. Despite the fact that he emphasizes that language is a consensual activity, Smith never considers that users of English had already legitimately consented to a non-phonetic orthography. Phonetic correspondence seems for him to have been a fact beyond consent. And although he explicitly maintains that ‘speech and writing are both conventional’, he would seem to make special provision for writing as something which takes its nature ‘by a postulate’: For if it is sound reasoning to say: ‘He is a man and therefore he is an animal’; it is equally sound to say, ‘If a, b, make ab and b, a, ba, put together they make abba. And if a by itself is a and b, b; taken together they make ab . . .’ For, granted the postulate, the rest follows naturally. But the primary agreement that sounds may be represented by letters is a postulate, from the granting of which the rest is a conclusion; and if you depart from it you seem to depart from nature; as though you were able to saddle an ox, and use it for riding, to which it is not adapted by nature.33

This unstated postulate – either that writing must represent the sounds of speech, or that letters must represent only one sound each – is not itself conventional, but a piece of artificial logic which, in this passage, comes to possess an authority resembling that of ‘eternal and unchanging nature’. But this postulate gives rise to an art which has no grounds in convention. The ideality of art is thus not a practical reality, but a logical necessity which nevertheless eludes language as it is. Art thus comes to exist as a future possibility, an aspiration, a condition of language as it ought to be. Although, for Smith, consent must be sought from the nation as a whole, he assumes that it could be won by the rationally based systems of a small circle of educated men.34 The De recta et emendata takes the form of a Latin dialogue in which a character called Smith gradually persuades a character called Quintus to consent to a reformed orthography. Indeed, the dialogical form of the orthography is designed to assure the reader that these rules are not an imposition, but encouragements to willingly follow the example set by reason and good sense. And yet, despite being confident that his orthography would

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find a nation willing to consent to it, Smith recognized that consent would be hard won. Quintus tells Smith of a recent encounter he had with Stubborn, a figure who, according to Bror Danielsson, was widely recognized to represent Mulcaster.35 In fact, it is Stubborn’s resistance to reform that induces Quintus to ask Smith how to counteract him, and which provides the occasion for Smith’s orthography. Stubborn’s defence of custom becomes emblematic of the obstinate refusal of current practice to submit to what is reasonable and civilized: ‘Whatever has been usual and generally approved, however absurd, unfit, or stupid it may be, and blamed by the truthful, good, wise, and learned, is to him true and right. He cannot accept that anyone points out his inveterate errors and tells him to correct them.’36 Even when bombarded with arguments about the disorder of current spelling, and the need for new letters to represent all sounds, Stubborn defends current practice: ‘ “What difference”, said he, “does it make how a word is written, so long as it can be read and is now the received form?” ’ adding: ‘ “My case was won long ago’ ”.37 Scoffing at Quintus’ proposals for a phonetic spelling, Stubborn refuses to see the need for reform. Smith’s reaction to Quintus’ description of the encounter is to claim that Stubborn is uncivilized in supporting spelling practices which are inherently indecorous. To use letters without regard for their sound is akin to making a robe from ‘a ready-made sleeve, boots, shoes, a hat, breeches, a belt, and a shirt, and without taking them to pieces, but sewing them together as they were’.38 Current spelling is thus figured as a barbaric caricature of what spelling ought to be; Stubborn will continue to eat acorns, when corn is plentiful. That Smith’s orthography is articulated at a scene of instruction is designed to showcase the manifest teachability of a perfectly phonetic script.39 Nevertheless, there is a moment in the dialogue in which Smith (the writer, not the character) appears to recognize the strangeness of his reformed script. After outlining the many disorders attending upon the letter ‘C’, and explaining that its functions can be performed by other letters, Smith proposes to remove it from English altogether. He then asks Quintus if he consents to this reform. Quintus replies: ‘Though I am alive, I don’t know where I am; it upsets me so. As I look at what you write, it seems strange and unknown: as I listen to you, I perceive that I must agree.’40 This response is perhaps more honest than it ought to be. Quintus has been presented with a vision of ideal order, and the effect of it has been the experience of confusion. Faced with changes which,

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on the one hand, would render his language no longer the one he has known, but, on the other, are so stridently reasonable that they cannot be rationally refuted, Quintus finds himself without grounds to resist reforms which make his language unusual to him. At the very moment at which these rules call stridently for Quintus’ consent, they announce themselves as things born of private reason. John Hart addresses his treatise ‘To the doubtfull of the English Orthographie’.41 Like Smith, he set out to present ‘the due order and reason, how to write or paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to life or nature’.42 Hart insists that the many ‘disorders and confusions’ caused and perpetuated by custom could be resolved if we used ‘as many letters in our writing, as we doe voyces or breaths in speaking, and no more: and never to abuse one for another, and so write as we speake: which we must needes doe if we will ever have our writing perfite’.43 Phonetic perfection is once more invoked not only as the ultimate goal of reform, but also as the intrinsic condition of writing. Hart is less concerned than Smith to highlight the consensual, conventional basis of language, and instead extols the virtues of a certain order of true writing ‘founded upon Reason mother of all sciences’.44 More than Smith, Hart emphasizes that a perfectly phonetic orthography is the fitting expression of a species imbued with God-given reason.45 And so, while not denying that language is consensual, he is able to ground his unconventional orthography in the view that God, through our reason, had willed it to succeed. Reason finds such a central place in Hart’s conception of orthographical correctness by virtue of the way he analyses language at its smallest ‘elementes’, the manifold sounds we make with our tongues, lips and voices: ‘so ought the law of Reason which is in us, to turn our handes to order justly, those figures and letters which we shal make, to represent the voyces of our pronounciation wherefore we write them: & not to usurpe others powers, or be ydle in their owne: or for want of better example of our predecessors, to portraict a monstrous figure, wanting such members as are manifest in the voice’.46 Wrested from the contexts of actual words, and analysed in isolation, letters appear desperately to require an immutable connection to the elements they represent. In place of current spelling, in which letters ‘usurpe others powers, or be ydle in their owne’, Hart offers a rational system which he advocates as the most user-friendly: ‘in what lesse, and how much more easie and

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readie, it will be for the writer or Printer, Reader or hearer, I will not write, but leave it to the judgement of the Reader, of the sayd following treatise, and to the experience it selfe as occassion shall serve.’47 Hart’s rational rules were thus not merely born of a pedantic desire to see consistency triumph, but a belief that they would be the easiest to use, and whose claims to correctness would be evidently justified by experience. (After all, language often changes for completely irrational reasons; all the more likely that it will consent to reasonable alterations.)48 But Hart appeals not to actual experience, but a vision of what experience will be, or ought to be. The force of his appeal presupposes – or is motivated by a confidence in – the prescriptive power of the rule at the scene of instruction.49 And yet, though Hart is confident that his system would be widely and easily accepted among educated society, he nevertheless arms himself with patience ‘to beare the anger of such as are obstinately bent to maintaine their custome and use’.50 In fact, the apparent intractability of custom is not a dissuasion, but energizes his insistence that his reforms are right. He relates that many friends of his had tried to discourage him from his project, warning that common use will reject any attempts at reform, especially those reforms that propose the inclusion of new letters: ‘[use] will be ten folde more stiffenecked to receyve any newe letters, than a teame of wilde Steeres would be at first to receyve the bearing of their yokes. Though the experience should prove it to be verye beneficiall to their posteritie, so much they are offended at all innovations.’51 Hart thus uses the pig-headedness of custom to ennoble his own orthography as a gallant struggle against unreason and barbarism. As a consequence, however, he finds himself awkwardly placed in relation to custom: although reform could only be achieved with the final consent of custom, it was the very thing whose judgement could never be trusted. And custom refused to be changed. When this becomes clear to Hart a year after the publication of An Orthographie, he published a short instruction manual on how to teach his reformed script. In A Method or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned (1570), Hart seems to have come to the conclusion that the difficulties with reforming orthography were not in learning a new, rationally based, easy-to-use system, but un-learning the old confused and disordered one. Clearly frustrated, Hart characterizes those who cling to current spelling as being ‘bewitched by Circes inchauntments’, and ‘trained

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in abuse, wher with their senses are so imbued and intoxicate, as they will allow none other maner (be never so reasonable, profitable and certain) than that they have ben traded in’.52 So, in A Method, Hart aims his reforms at the illiterate: ‘And if a certaintie, order, and reason may by experience be found to be profitable for the unlearned sort, it may in short time prevaile generally.’53 But, of course, he cannot address the illiterate directly because they cannot read his book. In this way A Method is oddly placed as an argument addressed to the literate on behalf of the illiterate, advocating orthographical reforms which the literate, being accustomed to current spelling, are likely to find strange, but which the illiterate are likely to find easier to learn. And so he conceives of reform as beginning with the unlearned, and only gradually spreading to the learned. And therefore, when the learned sort of all professions shall see the experience, how easily, and in what short time their unlearned parentes, friendes, and other acquaintance which they have occasion to trafick and deale with, have learned to reade, and some peradventure to write, after the following maner, they know they may turne their penne to use it, or leave it when they list.54

Hart’s unconventional orthography makes it impossible for him to advocate it by appealing to existing communal practice, and he must argue for its capacity to create a new communal practice from the ground up. Yet, in order for this to happen, Hart recognizes that his orthography requires teachers; and these teachers must be literate in order to read An Orthographie and A Method. The success of his orthography is in the hands of the very people most likely to reject it.55 Mulcaster subjects these proposals for reform to extensive criticism. The general trajectory of his criticism is that these reformers invented the ills that they sought to reform, and consequently saw difficulty and confusion when really they were not there. Motivated by ‘despare’ that English was ‘uncapable of anie direction’ (78), they ‘came of a wrong cause, the falt rising in dede not of the thing, which theie did condemn, as altogether rude and unrulie, but of the parties them selves, who mistook their waie’ (78). Ironically, their railing against custom itself became a ‘customarie argument’ (79), but one which had currency only among an isolated few. Smith and Hart made an enemy of custom by proceeding in the excessive hope that it could come under the

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influence of a ‘privat conceit’ (79).56 And it was from what they regarded as the unwillingness of custom to submit to their rule that they came to regard it as ‘a common corrupter of all good things’ (84). Smith and Hart misconstrued the occasion for reform, and thus misconceived of the kind of reform that was required. Captive to an impression of disorder which was of their own invention, they sought to innovate order, and to gradually persuade users to consent to it. Mulcaster suggests a different way: find the order emergent in consensual use itself: ‘For the thing itself will soon be ordered (our custom is grown so orderable) tho it require som diligence, and good consideration, in him that must find it out’ (78). Mulcaster reserves for special treatment that which is arguably the most unusual aspect of Smith and Hart’s reforms: their use of invented letters. Mulcaster argued that, although it is in our power as humans to do so, we need not introduce new characters.57 Where, in Smith and Hart’s phonetic orthographies, language is considered at the level of the letter, Mulcaster offers an orthography which recognizes that letters perform different functions depending on their contextual placement with other letters: letters stand not alouf, but allow of the service, whereunto you allot them, be it never so manifold, seing without either confusion or darknesse, customarie acquaintance will work the distinction in them, & their manifoldnesse: as a beaten disputer will sift out the difference of manifold words, that the varietie of their sense, make no quarell in the question. (93)

Letters do not dictate their own uses, but ‘allow of the service’ their users ask them to perform in given contexts. Doubt and confusion dissipate when the child, through ‘customarie acquaintance’, learns the range of distinct uses to which the letters may be put.58 To demand that individual letters represent single sounds is to invoke an external measurement of certainty when, in matters of language, the only measure is human practice: ‘For it is most certain, that we maie use our letters so, as we maie all other things else, whose end is in use, and man is the measur. Neither is it anie abuse, when theie which use, can give a reason why, sufficient to the wise, and not contrarie to good custome’ (93). To ascribe certainty to a rule imposed upon language is to remove language from the realm of use; it is to make language no longer human. This leads Mulcaster to conclude that ‘our usage [of letters] is certain in their most uncertaintie’ (93); that is, despite

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the uncertainty by which the letters designate sounds, our use of them is certain. The difference between Mulcaster and his predecessors is stark. For the latter, certainty is the function of a stringent rule, one which determines use, and thus exists outside of use; the phonetic rule, like a mathematical formula, appears as a universal principle which has all possible spelling bound up within it; it bears the responsibility of certainty. For Mulcaster, certainty is a condition of our ability to know how a letter should be used in a given context; this is a consequence of our having successfully been trained into these uses; humans, in their uses, bear the responsibility of certainty. In my analysis of Smith and Hart, I have made use of the conjunction ‘possible doubt’. Mulcaster’s critique of their proposals gives this term some substance. As we have seen, Mulcaster argues that simply because there might be the possibility for phonetic uncertainty in the way a word is spelled, does not mean that users of this spelling actually experience doubt whenever they spell. Mulcaster’s catchphrase, ‘right writing’, is, as Paula Blank points out, scandalously un-phonetic, and, in this sense, it is redolent with possible doubt.59 Mulcaster’s point in highlighting this term is to show that his own readers would spell or pronounce such words correctly as a matter of course, without the slightest inclination of doubt. Of course, one may quite rightly object by arguing that doubt never arises for such readers because they have been taught how to spell. That is exactly Mulcaster’s point: teaching students to spell is the function of the pedagogical institution upon which he founds his orthography. In saying this I do not mean to deny that English spelling lacked consistency, or even that its users often proceeded with uncertainty. My suggestion, which merely reapplies Mulcaster’s criticism, is that the uncertainty against which Smith and Hart do battle is of a different order. What appears to be an analytically rigorous method of arriving at certainty by denying its contingent, pedagogical, and human basis actually produces an unattainable ideal against which language appears confused. Mulcaster’s criticisms do not deny the motivating assumption of this method: that spelling is not determined by absolute rules. Rather, for him, this assumption exposes an undeniable condition of language, and from there he denies that the absence of absolute rules constitutes a lack, or a deficiency. In so doing, Mulcaster makes room for pedagogy, and defines its role as that process by

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which the subject comes to bear the responsibility of orthographic certainty themselves.

Training The first third of the Elementarie continually makes reference to the work which Mulcaster published a year earlier, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, and the pedagogical system Mulcaster envisions there is part of the context for the orthographical rules he was later to formulate. The pedagogical reforms proposed in Positions are put into the service of a general argument for a uniform public education which would include a rigorous elementary curriculum open to all classes.60 Although he does recognize that not all students were to progress from the elementary to the grammar school (fewer still would, from the grammar school, further their studies at university), Mulcaster explicitly states that talent, not class or wealth, was to be the criterion of preferment.61 The student who entered the grammar school merely on the basis of their nobility was a ‘usurper’.62 However, we should heed William Barker’s warning against reading Mulcaster’s proposals as being motivated by ideals of class equality; they are first and foremost designed to utilize the available talent in order to ensure the best result for the nation.63 David Cressy has yet more powerfully shown the ways Mulcaster, throughout Positions, ‘seems to be poised on the brink of a meritocratic argument, but quickly backs away to safety. Whatever the theory might wish, the practical educator was faced with the reality of a strictly hierarchical social structure and a severely unequal distribution of wealth’.64 Even when public or private funds were made available expressly to finance the education of the disadvantaged, in reality the deployment of these funds was not always easy to monitor, and it was difficult to ensure that they would be deployed effectively.65 Cressy has also shown that the presence in the same school of students with different fee-paying arrangements meant that schoolmasters always risked favouring wealthier, full fee-paying students.66 All these factors give the lie to any claim that Mulcaster’s educational system was based solely on merit. However, we ought to remember that the tensions and inconsistencies which compromise these meritocratic ideals only arise as a result of a proposal for an

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elementary system which brought students from all social strata together in the same classroom. We ought therefore to examine what motivated Mulcaster to champion a public schooling which (he hoped) would eventually assimilate the private education of the nobility. Given that education ought to prepare the individual for a life in society, Mulcaster thought that private education was a contradiction in terms: Education is the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but among others, (bycause companie is our naturall cognisaunce) whereby he shall be best able to execute those doings in life, which the state of his calling shall employ him unto . . . [A]nd yet we restraine education to private, all those circumstances which be singular to one. As if he that were brought up alone, should also ever live alone, as if one whould say, I will have you to deale with all, but never to see all: your end shalbe publike your meane shalbe private.67

Mulcaster’s advocacy of public schooling not only brought him into conflict with the expectations of the nobility, but questioned the enterprises of humanist educationalists such as Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham who had only ever written about the private education of the aristocracy. Mulcaster is especially critical of ‘the courteouse maister Askam’ who, he argues, ought not to have entitled his book ‘The Schoolmaster’ ‘bycause myselfe dealing in that argument must needes sometime dissent to farre from him, with some hasard of myne owne credit, seeing his is hallowed’.68 Ascham’s pedagogy sought the formation of the student’s inward discretion, that faculty of practical judgement that Aristotle called phronesis, which allowed the individual to assimilate the unique aspects of any given situation into a decorous course of action.69 This faculty would also allow him to maintain his individual integrity against the influence of those ‘mayneteners of uses wtoute knowledge havying no other worde in theyr mouthe but thys use, use, custome, custome’.70 For Ascham, custom is a heedless force, impervious to good judgement, and against which the student must stand strong.71 What, in comparison, is strikingly absent in Mulcaster’s pedagogy is a concerted effort to instil such judgement in the student.72 What predominates in Positions and the Elementarie is a concerted effort to show that custom is itself imbued with the collective judgement of language users. Turning its back on this communally wrought judgement, private education ‘corrupteth

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by planting a to privat habit’, and produces students characterized by their ‘odnesse’.73 If the private pupill chaunce to come to speake, it falleth out mostwhat dreamingly, bycause privitie in traine is a punishment to the tongue: and in teaching of a language to exclude companions of speeche, is to seeke to quenche thrist, and yet to close the mouth so, as no moysture can get in. If he come to write, it is leane, and nothing but skinne, and commonly bewrayes great paines in the maister, which brought forth even so much, being quite reft of all helping circumstance, to ease his great labour, by his pupilles conference, with more companie. Which is of small benefit to a child, that might have had much more if his course had bene chaunged . . . If he travelled to utter, and one of judgement should stand behind a covert to heare him, methinke he should heare a straunge orator straining his pipes, to perswade straunge people.74

The child of private education develops language practices which are idiosyncratic and ‘straunge’, as if they could only develop their individual sense of discretion by asserting it against the perceived indiscretions of common use. As a consequence, private education produces students who ‘be somwhat to childish bold, by noting nothing, but that which he breedes of himself in his own solitarie traine, where he is best himself, and hath none to controwle him’.75 Without a classroom of peers, the private student develops a wilfulness that makes him unwilling to give up those mistakes he develops in solitude. The boldness and isolation of the privately educated scholar are analogous to those orthographers who, from the solitude of their own reason, impose a private conception of correctness upon a public language. Mulcaster’s vision of a uniform national elementary is the context for an orthography which recognizes that orthographic certainty is grounded in collective use, and will never submit to even to the most discerning individual judgement. Although his orthography does not appear to be fired by the same reformative fervour as Smith and Hart’s, Mulcaster does appear as an impassioned, even pugnacious reformer when insisting upon the pedagogical worth of the vernacular.76 His reformation of English orthography is inextricable from his reformation of a pedagogical system which deemed the vernacular unworthy of study. By learning the vernacular at the elementary before learning Latin at the grammar school, the student could acquire literacy in English, as it were,

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on its own terms. Mulcaster also insisted that English ought to be taught in its own terms, and warns against using Latin phrases in teaching English: Though the Latin tongue be already discharged of all superfluities, exempt from custome, to chaunge it, and laid up for knowledge, to cherish it: and of long time hath bene smoothed both to the eye, and to the eare: yet in course of teaching it doth not naturally draw out the English, which yet remaineth in her lees unrackt and not fined, though it grow on verie faire.77

English remains in the ‘lees’ of Latin, and does not receive the fining that Latin has enjoyed for centuries. In that time, Latin has been purged of many of its inconsistencies, and now exists as a body of rules removed from the influence of custom. Mulcaster is concerned that English will inevitably appear inferior against this example of immutable, atemporal order. The implicit function of an elementary grounded in learning the vernacular is that it familiarizes students to the nature of a customary language – with all its inconsistencies and changes – in such a way that they do not see it as lacking certainty and regulation. In addition, the elementary was designed to prepare students to learn Latin at the grammar school. To this end, the learning of the vernacular in Mulcaster’s elementary would comprise an ‘entrance into language’ (79), and one which would be made through practice, not rules: ‘For children as theie be still in doing, so theie know not what theie do, much lesse wherefor theie do, till reason do grow unto som ripenesse in them. And therefore the master of their train is such, as theie profit more by practis, then by knowing why, till theie fele the use of reason, which teacheth them to know considerations and causes’ (38–9).78 The elementary thus offers a ‘foretrain’ which facilitates ease of learning in the future. The relationship between the elementary and grammar school is clarified when Mulcaster, calling Plato to mind, argues that ‘all our learning is but a calling to remembrance of foreacquainted skill’ (40); so, ‘when difficultie is past in the first planting, which is rightlie termed the better half of the hole, facilitie must nedes follow in all the residew, which seme to the principles, as of their acquaintance, theie follow so frindlie’ (41). The student does not, as such, learn anything new about English at the grammar school; rather, they are furnished with rules which, with the force of a recollection, give them a new perspective upon what they already know.79 By drawing attention to the recollective nature of education, Mulcaster reminds

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us that the pedagogical efficacy of a rule is not pre-given, but comes of an attunement with previously acquired practices. A pedagogical programme in which the grammar school draws on the elementary (‘like still draweth on like’) rather audaciously grounds the sublimity of Latin rules on the apparent groundlessness of customary vernacular practice. However, it is not easy to grasp, except in the most general terms, how proficiency in reading and writing the vernacular would help a student learn the grammatical precepts of Latin. Although confidently advertising the strength of his elementary in bringing students to grammar, Mulcaster is sometimes oddly unwilling to speak about the grammar school. For this time this maie suffise, that this our Elementarie is verie beneficiall unto us, by the mean of grammer also, which is the honour and perfection of the Elementarie in both hir nature, but chefelie in the course of our learning now, whereby we are entred into language, and withall into knowledge, while our own tung remaineth but poor, and is kept verie low thorough some reasonable superstition, not to have learning in it. (52)

The oxymoronic ‘reasonable superstition’ is charged with cynicism levelled against those who would blindly venerate the rational rules of Latin at the expense of investing in the vernacular. English is thus kept poor by a pedagogical system which neither sees learning within it, nor invests learning in it by training children in its proper use. Here, the limits of Mulcaster’s pedagogical scheme intersect with the limits of the condition of English at the time. Mulcaster’s plan for an elementary envisions a formalized English grammar through which grammar school students could study the vernacular by its own precepts, and without recourse to Latin. Mulcaster is confined to speaking about the elementary school because English grammar only existed as unformalized conventions, and remained (as it were) at the elementary stage of its development, not yet capable of expressing its rules in art. But by training children in a uniform, nation-wide elementary curriculum, the language itself would be trained. And, like a child, it would eventually achieve the regularity in its practices that will see it advance to the grammar school. Only here can we recognize the full significance of an orthographical reform articulated as a plan for an elementary school. In practical pedagogical terms, Mulcaster recognizes the crucial importance of preparatory training for a rule to work the right effect upon a student, or even to be sensical to them. But in

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historical linguistic terms, he recognizes that custom realizes rules, rather than is underpinned, or determined by them. In both pedagogical and historical terms, the Elementarie locates certainty in use, and acts as a corrective to a presumed urge to see rational rules as being the grounds of linguistic certainty. Of course, this ‘corrective’ does not satisfy the demand for an absolute rule. Rather, by showing that demand to be groundless, it refuses to see the absence of an absolute rule as a deficiency that must absolutely be filled.

Sound, reason, custom Where Smith and Hart had justified the need for reform because of the disorders inherent in practice, Mulcaster advocated the timeliness of reform because English had attained unprecedented order in its practice.80 For Mulcaster, custom was not the heedless, irrational force that his predecessors had made out, for it ‘is grounded at the first, upon the best and fittest reason, and is therefor to be used, bycause it is the fittest’ (72). Statements such as this are potentially misleading for in them Mulcaster would appear to defend custom only by invoking a principle of correctness which determines it from within. To do so would risk seeing custom as merely the surface operation of a reason which tacitly grounds it. The orthographer’s task would then become one of restlessly digging beneath custom to unearth that ‘best and fittest reason’ which is the source of certainty. This eventuality is unthinkable to Mulcaster, not least because reason, unconstrained by custom, produces the rational excesses of Smith and Hart, but also because reason, uncontextualized by custom, has no grounds for correctness. Mulcaster therefore shows that reason and custom are mutually grounding. Perhaps the most explicit way in which he does this is through an allegorical retelling of the development of the first tongue whose progress towards perfection is seen as an inexorable movement away from phonetic spelling. Hart had explicitly refused to present such a history since, he claimed, it would implicate him in the uncertainty and conjecture of other writers.81 Mulcaster’s account does not pose as an accurate representation of historical fact, but functions as an artful attempt to release the reader from the assumption that orthographic certainty requires absolute and rational grounds.82 Within the context of an irresistible process of linguistic fining, which comprises a

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movement away from pure phoneticism, orthographical certainty is itself construed as a renunciation of ideal certainty. Mulcaster is in substantial agreement with Smith and Hart over the fact that writing was, at its origin, phonetic, and he refers to this first stage in the development of the first tongue as the ‘monarchie of sound alone’ (71). But this is a monarchy which we would never want to recover. Although the unequivocal prescriptiveness of sound gives the appearance of certainty, it is actually the basis of chaos because it grants orthographical authority to ‘whoesover were able but even to make a sound’ (66).83 Ironically, this disorder is the effect of sound’s tyrannical demand for perfect order: For great inconveniences following, and the writing it self proving more false than trew, while the pen set down that form, which the ear did assure, to answer such a sound, & the sound it self being to imperious, without anie either mercie or pitie, but death for disobedience, no pardon, no forgivenesse, no misericordia, what equitie soever the contrarie side had. (66)

Because sound was too powerful, and exercised its power too severely, the users of this first tongue had no choice but precisely to obey his dictates even at the expense of consistency and order. Sound was therefore encouraged to modify his power: men of good wit, & great understanding, who perceaved & misliked this imperiousnesse of sound, which yet was maintained, with great uncertaintie, naie rather with confusion, than anie assurance of right, assembled them selves together to common upon so common a good, and in the end after resolut and ripe deliberation theie presented them selves before sound, using these, rather persuasions, then compulsions, to qualify his humor. (66–7)

That this assembly of representatives of the ‘common’ should use ‘persuasions’ rather than ‘compulsions’ is not just a sign of anxiety in the presence of a hottempered monarch, but is characteristic of the kind of certainty they offer. Orthography is not to be founded upon the stringencies of private reason which refuses ever to be crossed, but is to be determined by a plurality of factors in suasive consultation with each other. However, this apparently seamless development away from sound’s absolute rule belies a fundamental difficulty with it. Although these ‘men of good wit, & great understanding’ assemble ‘upon so common a good’, in orthographical terms there is no ‘common’ at this stage of fining, since spelling is ruled by the

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idiosyncrasies of individual speech. The monarchy of sound had unwittingly made every user a monarch of their own language, and made it impossible to form a genuine language community with other users. Mulcaster deftly avoids anachronistically supplying a notion of linguistic community by showing that it emerges as a response to the over-prescriptiveness of the singular rule. The common good under which these men assemble is their mutual dislike of the imperiousness of sound. Linguistic history is propelled forward through its renunciation of the absolute rule of phoneticism. Ironically, the tyranny of phoneticism is thus seen as responsible for bringing into being standards of customary correctness that Smith and Hart were later to deride as irrational. These ‘men of good wit, & great understanding’ sought to remedy the unchecked ‘monarchie of sound alone’ not by deposing him, but by qualifying ‘his government, and to use the assistence of a further councell which they ment to joyn with him’ (67). So begins the second stage of orthographical development, one ruled by a triumvirate of sound, reason, and custom, and is characterized by continuous consultation between them: ‘Reason, to consider what wilbe most agreable upon cause, and Custom to confirm that by experience and prouf, which reason should like best, and yet neither to do anie thing, without conference with sound’ (68).84 With an eye to what is the most usual and the easiest to use, reason coheres a confused orthography into something that begins to resemble a single and communal language. Properly understood, reason does not attempt to rule custom, but enables its emergence.85 For its own part, custom confirms and adapts the stipulations of reason by putting them into use. Custom . . . made verie much of both sound and reasons retinew, as his verie good frinds, whereby he was commended to generall practis, of himself & for himself, he entertained warinesse, to be still like himself, and tho he altered upon cause, as reason should enform him, yet to behave himself so, as he may easilie be discerned from corruption in use, which was his natural enemie, and was alwaie bakt by the ignorant multitude, as custom it self was by those, that were of skill, both at his first planting, and throughout his performance. (73)

Reason and sound only achieve influence through custom, while custom itself can only be distinguished from ‘corruption in use’ by reason. Though Mulcaster would appear to locate the authority of custom in the consensus of

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language users, this passage sets up a potentially troubling dichotomy between the ‘ignorant multitude’, who back ‘corruption in use’, and that minority ‘of skill’ who support custom. Is not custom losing its grounding in consensus by becoming the possession of an elite minority? And what is custom’s claim to correctness if not communal use? Once again, Mulcaster would seem to have to invoke a principle of correctness outside language use in order to account for how a language community first emerges. It should be remembered that the ignorant multitude comprise an incoherent heterogeneity of individuals, not a collective. In their forced recourse to ‘privat reason’ in the spelling of words, they shun the very possibility of the communal orthography made available by reason and custom. Where Smith and Hart had invoked reason as a timeless principle, or postulate, which formulates its principles before applying them to custom, for Mulcaster reason is a temporally based entity which exists within the movement of customary language. Thus aligned, reason and custom, in consonance with sound, set language on a course of growth towards certainty: ‘During this compound government of these thre, the matter of all our precepts, that belong to writing, did first grow to strength, then were rules grounded, then were exceptions laid, when reason and custom perceived cause why’ (73). The triumvirate of sound, reason and custom formulate in practice the unformalized precepts of spelling. The third stage in the history of the first tongue is when practice attains a regularity and consistency whereby the rules of writing can themselves be written down.86 This ‘Art’ of English cannot simply be prescribed to a disordered practice; it is only possible when a tongue reaches the very apex of its development: ‘Art took hirself to som one period in the tung, of most and best account, and therefor fittest to be made a pattern for others to follow, and pleasant for hir self to travell and toill in’ (74–5). In arguing that a language must make itself available for orthographical formalization, Mulcaster reassesses the occasion of reform. Smith and Hart had assumed that language was theirs to change: absolute agency was not just an assumption, it was a requirement of their reforms. For Mulcaster, both the capacity for the reformer to reform, and the content of that reformation must be made available by language. Art neither produces any new substance, nor unearths structures otherwise hidden within language. Rather, it comprises a clarifying representation of our own uses of language. Its function is analogous to that

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of the grammar school: it is a series of formal reminders of that which we already know in practice. A ‘reasonable custom and an artificiall method’ thus provide mutual assurance: ‘that the first doeth the thing for the second to assure, and the second assureth, by observing the first’ (74). The certainty towards which language aspires is not the result of a single principle, but exists as the mutual grounding of practice and the formalized rule. The Elementarie is heavily conditioned by the stage at which English was in its development towards art. Mulcaster formulates his rules in the knowledge that they pre-empt an art of English, but do not themselves comprise it. This art is not created through innovation, but discovered through investigation so that ‘the thing it self, shall com furth in hir own naturall hew, tho in artificiall habit’ (74). The Elementarie locates itself just before the appearance of art, and ‘presenteth itself first, as a leader to the residew’ (¶1r). The growth of the child from elementary to grammar school is synecdochic of the development of the language from practice to art, and Mulcaster’s writing about the elementary, the preparatory stage for the teaching of rules at the grammar school, reflects the state of the English language itself, as it remains on the cusp of art, still at the elementary stage of its fining. Mulcaster’s Elementarie occupies a formative and highly ambiguous place in the history of English in which it can only instil the right sort of practice if it anticipates a future stage in the language that is emergent and ‘foresene’, though unrealized. Although Mulcaster believed that English was ready for formalization, he reflects that ‘if our custom be not yet ripe to be reduced into a rule, then that perfit period in our tung is not yet com, & I have set upon this argument, while it is yet to grene’ (76–7). Mulcaster thus places himself in the position of the conscientious rule-follower, allowing an emergent art to mark his text and institution in the same way that the elementary would mark a child. Though Mulcaster is writing before the full realization of art, he is supremely confident that history is irresistible, that it would actualize in practice what he could not foresee in theory.

Rules and use The most extensive account of Mulcaster’s orthographical rules is also the most chastising of them. E. J. Dobson scoffs that ‘Mulcaster’s arguments

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against the thorough reform of English spelling cannot be said to show any real understanding of the matter’; ‘He has not the scientific conception of the development of pronunciation and spelling which Hart and Smith had’; ‘Mulcaster had no understanding of phonetics’; ‘Mulcaster’s work is on the whole disappointing.’87 It should be remembered that Dobson is writing a history of English pronunciation in the service of which Smith and Hart’s phonetic orthographies are very useful, and it seems to be on this basis that he has little patience with Mulcaster’s.88 Dobson is critical of Mulcaster’s inconsistencies when categorizing vowel and consonant sounds, as well as Mulcaster’s occasional reliance on his own Northern pronunciations when determining the spelling of some words.89 However, Dobson does make important concessions. For instance, he concedes that Mulcaster’s spelling – both as expressed in his rules, and practised in his writing – more closely resembles modern spelling than either Hart’s unreformed spelling (in the first half of An Orthographie), or any sixteenth-century proposal for phonetic spelling.90 Perhaps most revealing of all, Dobson writes that ‘The case of the reformers [i.e. Smith and Hart] really stands, at any rate in academic logic; but Mulcaster’s countrymen have been content, as he was, to retain a “known confusion” in preference to an “unknown reformation”.’91 To concede this is to expose Smith and Hart’s reforms to Mulcaster’s severe criticism: to ‘really stand’ in ‘academic logic’ is not to stand at all; what academic logic shows to be right, or certain is no basis for what is, or ought to be right in language. The seven rules of Mulcaster’s orthography are not so much principles of prescription, but techniques of examination through which a student may be brought to familiarity with present spelling. Their function is to reconstitute customary use into pedagogical content. That there are seven rules indicates that right writing is the product of multiple forces operating in ongoing consultation and qualification. These rules are: generall rule which comprises a detailed description of each letter, and the several functions they perform; proportion which concerns the logical consistency between like sounding, or like written words; the rule of enfranchisement has jurisdiction over foreign words which have been received into English; composition refers to the spelling of compound words; derivation rules words which include a suffix; distinction is the use of punctuation, and other accentual marks; and, prerogative is a force that creates exceptions to all rules. Mulcaster attends separately to each

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of these rules to show their overall combined influence on the spelling of hundreds of individual words. For instance, in this passage, he explains the rule of proportion: I call that proportion, when a number of words of like sound ar writen with like letters, or if the like sound have not the like letters, the cause why is shewed, as in hear, fear, dear, gear, wear, the like proportion is kept: in where, here, there it faileth by prerogative, bycause our custom, hath won that writing in such adverbs of place: in mere it faileth by enfranchisement, bycause it commeth of the latin merus, ra, rum. And therefore proportion, as all other rules, consisteth on generall precept and private exception. (124)

Correctness is seen to be the work of a variety of influences, none of them correct in itself, but all contributing to what spelling actually is. There is no over-arching principle to which the seven rules collectively submit. Instead, they criss-cross, overlap, intersect and continually qualify each other. To borrow a Wittgensteinian image: they are wound around each other like the fibres of a rope.92 And they show language itself to operate without a single fibre – without an essence, or super-order, or single determining rule – running through from beginning to end, but to be composed of smaller, contingent fibres wrapped tightly around each other. What these rules are manifestly not designed to do is to establish orthographical certainty by removing the possibility for doubt. Although they may be seen to lack the precision of Smith and Hart’s phoneticism, to see them in terms of this lack is judge them against the standards of the very ideal they are working to free the teacher and student from. Here is Mulcaster’s description of the use of the letter ‘O’: O is a letter of as great uncertaintie in our tung, as e . . . The cause is, for that in vowel it soundeth as much upon the u, which is his cosin, as upon the ó, which is naturall, as in còsen, dòsen, mòther, which o, is still naturallie short, and hósen, frózen, móther, which o, is naturallie long. In the diphthong it soundeth more upon the, u, then upon the, o, as in sound, wound, cow, sow, bow, how, now, and bow, sow, wrought, ought, mow, trough. Notwithstanding this varietie, yet our custom is so acquainted with the use therof, as it wilbe more difficultie to alter a known confusion, then profitable to bring in an unknown reformation, in such an argument, where acquaintance makes justice, and use do no man wrong . . . [S]o must our acquaintance be the mean to discern the duble force of this letter, where we finde it, and he that

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will learn our tung, must learn the writing of it to, being no more strange then other tungs be even in the writing. (115–16)

Acknowledging the great uncertainty in the diverse uses of the letter ‘O’, Mulcaster does not attempt to remove that uncertainty by reducing these uses to a single use. Instead, he shows as clearly as possible the different functions the letter performs, and the various relationships it has with other letters. The letter is not considered in isolation, as in Smith and Hart, but within contexts of use. From this basis, words begin to form families of like usage (còsen, dòsen, mòther), and it is of these contingent, inessential family resemblances that orthographical correctness is comprised. It is the task of pedagogy to familiarize the student to the varieties of use to which a letter can be put until these uses cease to appear strange, and can be written and read as a matter of course. Orthographic certainty becomes a responsibility the teacher must bear in their attempts to familiarize the student to what might initially seem strange. It is a responsibility the student must also bear. In fact, we may be struck by how dissatisfyingly little the rule does, and how much it leaves the student to do: how much it leaves to the student’s competency to respond to repetition, his capacity to recognize and perceive the significance of resemblance, his willingness to follow a rule beyond the examples set by the teacher. These abilities (and no doubt more) are required in order for ‘acquaintance [to] be the mean to discern’ the use of any letter. In this light, Mulcaster’s rules leave a pedagogical gap between teacher and student manifestly gaping, and seem hardly to have addressed what we might perceive to be the heart of the issue: how can we get the student to spell correctly? Mulcaster’s scene of instruction takes that gap to be undeniable: understanding, teaching, learning occur – do actually occur – on grounds no more certain than those drawn by the student’s capacity to familiarize himself, and the teacher’s efforts to facilitate that familiarization. The Elementarie as a whole interrogates our tendency to see these grounds as deficient. Mulcaster anticipates this tendency in eight orthographical principles which he presents before his analysis of individual letters. Crucial in this regard is the way the principles outline how the rules will deal with what Mulcaster calls ‘particulars’, or ‘particularities’: those occasional inconsistencies in spelling that do not follow any rule at all. Such particulars are not seen as rogue elements

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that must be brought into line, but customary uses that define the limits of art: ‘That no rule of Art can deall so, but it must leave manie particularities to dailie practis, to be learned by oft using, and such like observations, which be common staies both for Art to direct by, and the pen to write by’ (109).93 In circumscribing the power of art to account for language use, Mulcaster also acknowledges that no rule can provide absolute assurance as to how the student is to spell the way they do. (These ‘manie particularities’ must be learned through ‘oft using’, not art.) But having renounced the aspiration to attain such a rule – in taking the sceptic’s conclusion to be undeniable – the Elementarie does not experience its absence as a lack. Rather, it maps out a method by which a pedagogical subject will learn to spell correctly until they do so as a matter of course, habitually, and without a thought to there being no absolute grounds for why they spell as they do. The particulars of a tongue determine the status of art in another way. Though art lives on eternally unchanged, history does not. Mulcaster argues that an art remains specific to the particular period of its formulation, after which the language departs from its precepts, descends into confusion and then must begin the process of fining once more (157). There will always be some ‘particulars’ which ‘will be still unrulie’, and these particulars will ‘make fresh matter for an other period in speche’ (75). Mulcaster called this perpetual change prerogative, ‘that secret misterie, or rather quikning spirit in everie spoken tung’ (158). Prerogative animates custom, creates exceptions and seems ‘to disorder som well ordered rule’ (159). And it were to much almost to require that of anie wise and learned man, so to arrest exceptions, chefelie in such a thing, as will not proue a standard, tho he that wisheth this, seme to conceiue such a thing, which tho it were granted, yet wold it break out again furthwith som other waie, and cause a greater gap. Bycause no banks can kepe it in so strait, bycause no strength can withstand such a stream, bycause no vessell can hold such a liquor, but onelie those banks which in flowing ar content to be somtimes ouerrun, onelie those staies which in furie of water will bend like a bulrush, onelie that vessell which in holding of the humor, will receiue som it self, as allowing of the relice. (161)

To amend all exceptions is to attempt to stem the inevitable tide of history. Prerogative is the rule that is not a rule, an animating principle which invokes

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a mutable and unstable context for art. Clearly revelling in the rhetorical force of his description, Mulcaster strategically places it after the other rules have been described in order (once again) to subvert a presumed urge in the reader to see either the preceding rules, or the unrealized art of English as absolute. The status of the teacher at Mulcaster’s scene of instruction is very different to those in Smith and Hart’s. In their phonetic orthographies, the teacher defers to a justifying rule, the efficacy of which resides in its power to remove him – as an exemplary inhabitant of a language community – from that justification. This is perhaps most apparent in the way Hart’s treatise is compelled to use the conventional orthography it derides in order to explain a reformed orthography. Hart effectively disowns the ordinary spelling on which his treatise relies in order to act out an aspiration to attain indubitable certainty. These acts of disowning and aspiration are part of the same sceptical gesture. At Mulcaster’s scene of instruction, there is no pre-given principle to which the teacher can appeal. Even art, the crowning achievement of language, is finite, both in its pedagogical effectiveness, and its historical relevance. The teacher can justify his practice merely by declaring himself as being part of an existing communal practice. If a student was to ask, ‘But why do you spell a word that way?’ Mulcaster’s teacher can only reply: ‘Because that is how we spell it.’ This justification is likely to strike us as shallow. Surely there are deeper grounds to which we can dig down. Both Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Mulcaster’s orthography are sensitive to how distressingly quickly we arrive at the bedrock of our convictions. Stanley Cavell continually reminds us of our unwillingness to recognize ourselves as that bedrock.94 Unwilling, that is, to accept that the teacher’s justification is comprised of his own manifest living in community – speaking, writing, listening, spelling in a way that is understood, that responds and is responsive to others in meaningful ways. As with Wittgenstein and Cavell’s scenes of instruction, Mulcaster’s is motivated by an effort to make such community intelligible to an individual who is not yet part of it. However, as Espen Hammer reminds us, ‘the teacher can never relieve himself of the anxiety that their mutual incomprehension might continue. All he can do is be patient, allowing the other the difficult task of finding, if possible, his own way out of his isolation.’95 There are no definitive means by which the student may be led out of his isolation; rules must wait to be received, understood, inhabited and lived out. The consequences for

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the student if they fail to find their way into community are depicted in an unnerving moment from Wittgenstein’s Brown Book. We are asked to imagine a tribe who teach their children how to count by initially teaching them the first 20 numbers. When they have mastered these, the teacher will make a suggestive gesture after they say ‘20’ which intimates, ‘Go on.’ We are told that the vast majority of students continue by saying, ‘21, 22, 23’. But Wittgenstein ends the remark with this frightening detail: ‘If the child does not respond to the suggestive gesture, it is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic.’96 The severity of the tribe’s treatment of this child draws out the distressingly uncertain, contingent, and seemingly arbitrary means by which we are to work our way into community, and out of madness. If this causes us anxiety it is because, according to Cavell, we wish for there to be ‘some assurance that I will not become deviant, go out of control, an assurance against a certain fear of going mad, or being defenseless against the charge of madness. It may seem a fear for the human race’.97 But this wish for absolute assurance can produce another kind of madness. Holofernes’ madness (‘It insinuateth me of insanie’) is that he succumbs to the wish, and consequently removes himself from the customary, the conventional, the ordinary; in short, he renounces use. The ferocious aspiration for absolute assurance is its own madness. The capacity to live, to reflect meaningfully upon what is usual in language – and to reform English orthography – without such assurance is the founding condition of sanity.

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5

Arts of Use: Early English Dictionaries, 1604–58

Context I would like to begin this final chapter by re-articulating my indebtedness to Language and Meaning in the Renaissance by Richard Waswo, the only book-length study to have engaged the philosophy of Wittgenstein to analyse how Renaissance humanists came to understand the nature and function of language. Waswo argues that ‘The “rebirth” of the classical past through the acutely self-conscious midwifery of Renaissance humanists created an awareness of the historical context of usage in language that gradually came to be treated as semantically constitutive.’1 One of the crucial challenges in putting forth this view is explaining exactly what it means for usage to become ‘semantically constitutive’. This is no easy task. That a referential semantics is much easier to define, and thus more easily described theoretically, is the cause of what Waswo sees as an ambiguity within Renaissance humanism. What he calls the ‘Renaissance semantic shift’ (from the referential semantics of the medieval period) was never fully realized since Renaissance writers lacked the theoretical vocabulary to fully account for the constitutive semantics into which their thinking was shifting. Waswo follows Wittgenstein in arguing that we always lack this theoretical vocabulary. Waswo argues that the effect of this upon Renaissance humanism was ‘a considerable discrepancy between theory and practice’: When language is talked about, it is consciously regarded as the clothing of pre-existent meanings; but when language is employed to reflect on its

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various functions – to recommend a style, to praise a vernacular, to teach the figures of speech, to urge a method of interpreting Scripture, or to compose literature – it is often implicitly regarded as constitutive of meaning.2

That is, in Renaissance texts, language is theoretically regarded as referential: the meaning of a word is the object for which it stands. But when writers reflect on the actual operation of language, they implicitly see language in terms of contexts and effects: meaning is inseparable from the moment of use. These two incompatible ways of understanding language articulate two equally incompatible modes of analysis which Wittgenstein calls explanation and description. On the one hand, explanation attempts to understand language phenomena in terms of a structure which tacitly underpins it, or a set of objects (either in the world or the mind) to which it refers. Explanation will have us seeking out the essence of words, and harbouring dreams that one day they will be ordered by immutable rules; it sees perfect stability as a condition towards which all languages should aspire. On the other hand, description attends to words in their actual contextual use, and attempts to arrange them according to patterns and family resemblances; it does not try to see through language to an essence, but rather reflects upon the actual operation of words as spatio-temporal activities. Where my argument crucially differs from Waswo’s is that it has no significant investment in the view that Renaissance humanism constituted a shift away from the referential semantics of medieval scholasticism. In fact, I am more persuaded by the hypothesis that evidence of such a shift can be found in any period. One of the conjectures of this chapter is that, to some extent at least, we are always shifting, unable to come to complete rest. (And perhaps we should be tentative about distinguishing a period by a shift it could never fully realize.) It may be helpful to abandon the metaphor of the shift altogether, and utilize this more explicitly Wittgensteinian formulation: the notion that language is constitutive (and not merely representative) of meaning is something that we are persistently inclined to forget and need continually to remind ourselves of. The principal reason that I remain agnostic about Waswo’s historical claim is that I have been interested in observing this drama of forgetfulness and reminder at a far more localized level. Since in previous chapters I have shown these dramas performed upon the pages of individual texts, I have needed a frame of contextual reference which is not as such a period in history, nor

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any specific or easily identifiable moment in time or space. What I hope has become clear is that the context which draws out and intensifies this drama, which is at once more notional, but no less real than any specific historical moment, is the scene of instruction. The ways in which Roger Ascham, George Puttenham and Richard Mulcaster think about the nature and function of language is heavily conditioned by the scenes of instruction they envisage, and the scenes of instruction in which their texts, as acts of pedagogy themselves, are involved. This context may be seen as notional insofar as I am not concerned, say, in Ascham or Mulcaster’s actual classroom practice, or in how, say, The Art of English Poesy was actually received by those it aimed to teach. However, I would argue that this context is no less real in that the pedagogical sensitivities of these texts, if not also their form, establishes the conditions for what their authors can and cannot say about language. When enacted or envisaged, the scene of instruction has the power to remind us that rules will only take us so far when teaching our language practices to someone who does not share them; the student will eventually have to go on alone. To enter a scene of language instruction with the assumption that language operates according to system of clear rules, or even to decide that language lacks such rules is to risk bringing into being a sceptical problem. This problem, and the circumstances which give rise to it, comprise the context within which I have tried to understand a selection of early modern texts. My immediate reason for re-articulating these thoughts is that, in this chapter, I would like not merely to show how early modern dictionary writers were embroiled in this problem, but to show that the same problem confronted a dictionary writer who blamed them for some of the disorder his own dictionary sought to address. Samuel Johnson’s aims were clearly very different to those of his predecessors, so much so that it may be misleading to call them his predecessors. He sought to bring clarity and precision where these earlier compilers, he thought, had merely caused unruliness. My purpose for including Johnson in this analysis of early modern dictionaries is to expose neither an historical continuity, nor a discontinuity. I want to show the way in which our thinking about language is always susceptible to scepticism, despite the fact that this thinking may be performed in different historical contexts, or motivated by different objectives. Without denying the historicity of writers and their texts, I do want to emphasize that the crucial conditioning factors of this

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problem are not history, if by ‘history’ we mean the epistemic, socio-political, or material circumstances of a particular moment in time. Rather, context, as I am understanding it, takes as its touchstone the convergence of particular aspirations and assumptions at a scene of instruction. To this end, I will broadly and uncontroversially characterize Johnson as one who analysed the meanings and uses of words, was disappointed with the lack of order he discovered there, and became frustrated when he found himself unable to communicate clearer, more precise definitions to his reader. I will attempt to understand Johnson’s frustrations in the light of Wittgenstein’s ongoing reminders that the search for an order within language, one which exists unaffected by the use of words, will inevitably result in disappointment: ‘When we believe that we have to find that order, the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called “sentences,” “words,” “signs”.’3 Against this order, language appears to us as a ‘broken spider’s web’: we feel that we must repair it, but every attempt to do so makes us realize that our fingers are too unwieldy to reconstruct such subtle and extreme intricacies.4

Johnson’s Dictionary: Aspiration and resignation Johnson could not help but see language as if it were a broken spider’s web, and yet he remains, in word if not in deed, firmly resistant to the urge of mending it.5 In The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), Johnson finds himself in the awkward position of having to show the ambitious scope of his work to its would-be patron while maintaining that, in the field of dictionary writing, ambition very easily outstrips what can reasonably be achieved. This is not merely a general concern that ‘by raising the reputation of the attempt’ the author ‘obstructs the reception of the work’.6 Rather, there is a fantasy intrinsic to lexicography itself that must at least be made known, if not stoutly resisted. Thus, my Lord, will our language be laid down, distinct in its minutest subdivisions, and resolved into its elemental principles. And who upon this survey can forbear to wish, that these fundamental atoms of our speech might obtain the firmess and immutability of the primogenial and constituent particles of matter, that they might retain their substance while they alter their appearance, and be varied and compounded, yet not destroyed.

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But this is a privilege which words are scarcely to expect; for, like their author, when they are not gaining strength, they are generally losing it. Though art may sometimes prolong their duration, it will rarely give them perpetuity, and their changes will almost always be informing us, that language is a work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.7

The first of these paragraphs articulates a longing for an essence of language, one by which the almost infinite variety of uses to which a word can be put can be reconciled into a single unchangeable atom of meaning. Johnson figures this as not merely the motivating aspiration of the lexicographer, but the expectation of anyone who would so much as conceive of such a thing as a dictionary. But the second paragraph dramatizes the grim recognition that such an aspiration is a fantasy: words will never attain permanence, and the lexicographer, in recording the language, must be satisfied with recording what is transient. Even when asking for patronage, the lexicographer must concede that language will not allow him to achieve the perfection in his work that he would so desire. However, though such aspirations can never fully be realized, they nevertheless retain their power to motivate; and though a dictionary can only prolong the duration of certain meanings, it can nevertheless do that. So, in the Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson often grumbles with a tone of noble defeat, regretting that he cannot but deride the lexicographer who ‘shall imagine this dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay’.8 Meanwhile, his tirelessly surging sentences lend such gallantry to his struggle that the hopelessness of the task is rendered heroic. If the changes we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately be defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degradation; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.9

Though there is significant rhetorical power to be generated from fighting for a lost, though worthy cause, Johnson is dealing not merely in rhetoric.

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What I am trying to ascertain are those motivations and assumptions which oblige Johnson to embrace a cause he knows to be unwinnable. Specifically, if lexical change is inevitable, according to what standards can we assert that it is necessarily an evil? By what standards of perfection will Johnson always be lamenting the imperfection of language and his attempts to define it? Wittgenstein would want us to acknowledge that the resistance of words to clear, precise and durable definitions comes not from an inherent fault in language or its users, but the erroneous assumption that to understand the meaning of a word requires one to have grasped its flawless and timeless essence. Of course, our use of words must have attained a level of durability and precision in order to be meaningful. And to that extent, language can be said to operate according to established and communally accepted rules. Wittgenstein’s point is that these rules are not an external imposition, but a consequence of use; they do not provide certainty, so much as articulate a certainty inherent in our practices. His injunction, ‘Don’t think, but look!’ is only the most explicit instruction the Philosophical Investigations provides of what it is always attempting to do: to bring our expectations into alignment with our realities.10 By looking without thinking, we are more likely to see that the rules by which language operates are contingent rather than absolute, to accept that the certainty by which we use language is not immune to doubt, and to describe language without succumbing to the nagging compulsion of explaining it. I do not mean at this point to draw Johnson and Wittgenstein into a battle whose result has been predetermined, and then to laud it over the vanquished lexicographer. (We must at the very least be cautious about pitting Wittgenstein’s philosophy against any competing thesis since Wittgenstein tells us that his philosophy contains no theses.)11 Certainly, Wittgenstein, does provide an extended critique of a proto-theoretical picture of language which (in the opening of the Philosophical Investigations) he associates with Augustine, but which goes back at least as far as Socrates, and which underpinned the theory of language of that philosopher who exerted the greatest influence on Johnson’s lexicography: John Locke.12 However, to crudely argue that the Philosophical Investigations does battle against this enduring philosophical assumption is to ignore its principal philosophical interest in the nature of the battle per se, and its ongoing attempts to dramatize it. In fact, Wittgenstein’s point is that a struggle exists within all of us. We misunderstand the function

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of Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, an unnamed presence in the Investigations who so often gives voice to an aspiration to grasp the ideal in language, if we merely view him as ‘Wittgenstein’s interlocutor’; the aspiration he articulates is as much Wittgenstein’s as it is ours, and as it is, say, Johnson’s. Wittgenstein dramatizes the motivations and assumptions that lead us into the kind of dissatisfactions and frustrations which Johnson articulates. His philosophy is critical only insofar as it is empathizes with the struggle. Returning to the Preface, we see signs of this struggle in Johnson’s ambivalent views on radical proposals to reform English orthography, some of which I considered in Chapter 3. Though he chastises orthographical reformers who chose singularity, he does so only gently, concluding that ‘for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right’.13 In The Plan, Johnson had been yet gentler, even affording these orthographers what he perceived to be the honour due to them.14 Johnson may have afforded greater honour still to their reformative ambitions had he acknowledged that they were grounded upon the assumption that what was orthographically ‘right’ was precisely what could be perfectly, easily and universally ‘known’. Custom was unruly, disordered, and therefore unknowable, whereas a purely phonetic system (they thought) was not only knowable, but easily teachable. Johnson has to strike an awkward balance between mild chastisement of a reformative agenda he knows would never come to fruition, and his recognition that only those less transient forms of language can be known with any assurance. In the very next paragraph, he anticipates criticism, and defends himself against it: This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.15

Accepting that words are perennially susceptible to decay, Johnson’s assumption that words are meaningful insofar as they represent permanent ideas nevertheless entertains a fantasy for linguistic permanence. Though the fantasy is expressed only inasmuch as it is resisted, it does orient Johnson towards language in a way

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that engenders a sceptical problem. How does an impermanent system of signs represent a permanent reality of ideas? How can a lexicographer communicate to his reader meanings which are mutable? The answer is, only imperfectly. Words are not merely transient; they are manifestly lacking in the permanence of ‘the things which they denote’. The meanings of words can thus only approximate their referents, and this necessarily means that Johnson’s definitions do not achieve the clarity and permanence that he desires of them. For Johnson, clarity and permanence comprise what it means for a word’s meaning to be knowable. His attempts to communicate the meanings of words continually remind him of what, by these standards, is their startling unknowability. What I am not doing here is criticizing Johnson for being a prescriptivist.16 Rather, I am trying to draw to light those moments when Johnson’s almost instinctive aspirations to prescriptivism are short-circuited by the recognition that the grounds for his certainty are more difficult to uncover than he would want. Having said that, I must hasten to add that Johnson was no shrinking violet when it came to telling people how to use language. Despite what the Preface says about faithfully describing the language, one rarely feels, when reading the definitions, that Johnson was hesitant in branding certain words for being barbarous, and stoutly recommending more civilized alternatives.17 I am neither questioning Johnson’s feel for what is civilized, nor am I saying that such recommendations are inappropriate to the task of dictionary writing. What I am trying to isolate is something quite different. It may be described as a certain disappointment, subtly articulated in the Preface, that language does not allow the lexicographer to be as effortlessly clear, or precise or even prescriptive as he would aspire to be. Lexicography is such drudgery because it must work through the infinite and ever-changing mess of language in order to unearth an order which is only partial and imperfect. The moments when Johnson’s disappointment is most apparent are those when he most lucidly envisages his dictionary as a scene of instruction, one in which the meaning of a word must be clearly explained to a reader who (it is presumed) stands in need of certainty. When Johnson bewails the inexactness of language use, and asks his reader not to attribute the uncertainty to him, he is envisaging a reader who craves the kind of indubitable definition which language will not afford even the lexicographer.18 Nor can this craving be satisfied by examples: ‘The imperfect sense of some examples I lamented, but could not remedy, and hope

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they will be compensated by innumerable passages selected with propriety, and preserved with exactness; some shining with sparks of imagination, and some replete with treasures of wisdom.’19 The imaginative power of these examples, as well as the wisdom they contain, are presented as solace for their inability to communicate the sense of a word exactly.20 In fact, the examples run away with the perfect sense of a word; context would seem to expose the troubling fact that all meanings are imperfect. In a manner reminiscent of Puttenham’s use of examples to instance the rule of decorum, Johnson’s examples bring a type of consolation for the fact that they cannot fulfil the task their compiler desires of them.21 The uncertainties caused by linguistic transience and inexactness are not the only things which make dictionary writing such drudgery. Ironically, a lexicographer is also prevented from defining a word with certainty by an excess of certainty. To define a language with its own words is not easy when it comes to words which have no simpler explanation than themselves. And such is the fate of hapless lexicography, that not only darkness, but light, impedes and distresses it; things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily illustrated. To explain, requires the use of terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always be found; for as nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of words too plain to admit a definition.22

Johnson struggles not merely against the darkness of inexactness and doubt, but also the blinding light of words known too well. Under the compulsion of his task Johnson must not only dig down to the very bedrock of language, to this ‘something intuitively known’, but when there is nothing more intuitively knowable than the word he is explaining, he must show what fastens the bedrock itself to the ground; his task is no less than to unearth the earth. It is impossible not to empathize with Johnson at this point because it is difficult to imagine how a monolingual dictionary writer can either avoid or solve this problem. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that the problem is exacerbated by an unwillingness to see language itself as a kind of foundation, and its use as that which engenders, rather than merely expresses, meaning. This is not to say that Johnson’s dictionary would have been much different had he come to this realization. But had he been more satisfied with the forms of certainty

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language offers the lexicographer, he would have been less likely to see meaning as elusive, and his definitions as imperfect as he does. As it is, for him, to define the meaning of a word is necessarily to struggle against the word’s tendency to obscure its meaning. When there is either an excess or insufficiency of obscurity, meaning becomes almost irretrievable. Johnson struggles, on the one hand, against the apparent lack of a bedrock, and, on the other, against the curiously dissatisfying way in which that bedrock is uncovered too easily – in fact, hardly requires the lexicographer to discover it. Both scenarios give rise to the same unthinkable situation: that the Dictionary has nothing to teach. However, having put his hand to the plough, Johnson does not plead weakness, and affords himself few liberties in his drudgery. But there is one strategy that he utilizes to ease his stoic battle against lexical change: excluding from his dictionary those words which were most susceptible to change. Nor are all words which are not found in the vocabulary, to be lamented as omissions. Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people, the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, are in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation.23

The two groups of words which were especially resistant to preservation were ‘terms of art’ (terms specific to certain professions) and foreign loanwords. As it happens, these exclusions were the principal inclusions of seventeenthcentury dictionaries. Johnson later sneered that his predecessors had spread such words ‘with a kind of pompous luxuriance over their productions’, and compiled his own dictionary as an attempt to clear up the mess they had made.24 Unlike Johnson, the compilers of these lists made no attempt at defining the whole language. Purporting to satisfy the growing need to explicate the thousands of new words which were rapidly entering into use, they defined hard and unfamiliar words which, they claimed, had attained a certain currency in English. Where Johnson compiled the history of written words in order to minimize the effects of change, these earlier lexicographers situated themselves at the very forefront of change by making unusual words usable. Simply, dictionary writers of the seventeenth century utilized the arts

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of lexicography – principally, definition and formal arrangement – in order to encourage and enact elaboration and copiousness, the very things which Johnson was later to point to as the source of unruliness in English. Confining themselves to the definition of only difficult words, they were never stuck for ‘less abstruse terms’ with which to explain their meanings. In fact, these explanations often contained little more than a single, simpler synonym. The purpose of such definitions, which read much like thesaurus entries, was not merely to allow the reader to understand what they heard and read, but to encourage them to abandon the simpler word for its more sophisticated, exotic and current alternative. In the knowledge that they could not make their sun stand still, seventeenth-century compilers did not – as Johnson famously characterized his task – attempt to chase it; they made it run. However, if it looks like I am trying here to draw a neat, paradigmatic distinction between the early modern period and the eighteenth century, I would like now to complicate it. For what has not been adequately noted in criticism on seventeenth-century dictionaries is that they functioned in a way that was in stark contrast to the function that sixteenth-century orthographers had envisaged for them.25 As we saw in the previous chapter, John Hart was one of the first English orthographers to have proposed a purely phonetic system of spelling which, however, proved too unusual to be usable, and which failed to attract many adherents. Underpinning Hart’s reforms was his veneration for rational rules, and it was in this context that, in 1569, he lamented that with so many ‘disorders and confusions [in the language], there can be made no perfite Dictionarie nor Grammar, which are very commodious for any stranger that desireth to learn our tongue by Arte’.26 The dictionary, we are to assume, would constitute the written rules, the ‘Arte’, of an ordered language. Hart’s claim that such a dictionary would be especially ‘commodious’ to a non-native speaker of English, not only reminds us that such texts are imbricated in a politics of nationhood, but that the dictionary would supply native speakers with a ‘perfite’ – that is, an objective and dispassionate – foreigner’s eye-view of their own language. This desire for a ‘perfite’ dictionary was insistently echoed by another orthographer, William Bullokar, in prefatory stanzas to Booke at Large (1580): For ever (henceforth) time to come, and now in present use, which in time past, hath bene pacht up, no man can it excuse. A like consent in Dictionary, (to Grammer joined hereto,)

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will cause that English speech shall be, the perfectest I knowe: For perfect letter, perfect word, and perfect sentence too, through perfect art, and perfect use, great gaine for high and lowe.27

Although the dictionary would comprise the formalization of the ordered consent of language users, it would not remain passively descriptive. Rather, existing outside of use in the form of perfect and immutable rules, the dictionary would guide use (of which it is a description) to perfection of its own. Amidst what they perceived to be worrying disorder, Hart and Bullokar envisage for the dictionary the role Johnson was later to claim for it: the dictionary would stay the chaotic course of lexical change. Like Johnson after them, Hart and Bullokar felt the allure of the absolute rule precisely because they were not in possession of it, and in an age before lexical standardization, they could only understand the general trend towards formalization in terms of a definitive future period of complete and perfect stability. But what they confidently foresaw was what Johnson later realized he could not deliver: a language that would remain impervious to historical and contextual mutability. Their hope is his resignation. The most significant description of the benefits a dictionary would bring appears towards the end of Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (1580). Mulcaster saw the dictionary in the context of an emergent golden age in the history of the language in which customary use would finally express itself as an art of English. It were a thing verie praiseworthie in my opinion, and no lesse profitable then praise worthie, if som one well learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the words which we use in our English tung, whether naturall or incorporate, out of all professions, as well learned as not, into one dictionarie, and besides the right writing, which is incident to the Alphabete, wold open unto us therein, both their naturall force, and their proper use: that by his honest travell we might be as able to judge of our own tung, which we have by rote, as we ar of others, which we learn by rule.28

Conferred into artificial principles, customary English would become something like a foreign language even to its own users, and such a dictionary as Mulcaster calls for would offer a written, formalized description of use against which use could be clarified, judged and corrected. But the functions the hard words lists assumed for themselves were very different. Instead of defining

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familiar words as if they were foreign, they defined mainly foreign words in response to the complaint that English speakers were becoming strangers within their own language. The definitions these word lists provided were not designed to clarify or correct pre-existing uses, as Johnson’s definitions were designed to do, so much as to facilitate new uses. Nevertheless, their attempts to define drew them inevitably to the edge of that same pedagogical gap which Johnson later recognized he could not bridge. To use Mulcaster’s phrase, how can a definition communicate to its reader the ‘proper use’ of a word?

‘Hard usuall English wordes’ The work now regarded as the first English dictionary was written by Robert Cawdrey and published in 1604. Its full title reads: A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes. These words had an ambiguous status: ‘hard’ and obscure enough to require definition, they nevertheless had to be ‘usuall’ enough not to seem like fleeting affectations. Also on the title page are the stated aims of the work: ‘Whereby [the reader] may more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.’29 The definitions operate both as explicators of words and to facilitate the reader’s own apt use of them. For instance, Abandon, Abash, Aberration,

cast away, or yeelde by, to leave, or forsake. blush. a going astray, or wandering.

These definitions list words or phrases which have the same semantic content, and read much like what we would recognize as thesaurus entries. So with the synonymy observed, the words become interchangeable. The brief definitions thus elegantly fulfil the work’s aims.30 Those aims themselves are driven by the belief that hard words carry a certain rhetorical force which is intrinsic to their status as strange, new and foreign. Though these word lists might appear to answer the call for a dictionary to stabilize the language, they really have much more in common with the rhetoric and poetry manuals of the fifteenth

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century. And though they seem in form to resemble Johnson’s dictionary, their purpose was quite different: they defined strange words in order to make available their rhetorical power. Nevertheless, despite this crucial difference, they had to negotiate the same sceptical problem as Johnson, even if from a different perspective. Where Johnson struggled to find a clear and permanent principle determining the use of words, these hard words compilers similarly struggled to formulate definitions which would clearly show the apt use of a word. In the Preface to A Table Alphabeticall, Cawdrey surprisingly indulges in a fiery tirade against ‘over-sea language’, ‘far-fetched words’, ‘outlandish English’ in favour of ‘such words as are commonlie received’.31 It is not easy to square this animosity towards hard words with the dictionary’s advertised aim of making the reader ‘able to use [the words] aptly themselves’. The operative word is ‘aptly’. Now such are thought apt words, that properly agree unto that thing, which they signifie, and plainly expresse the nature of the same. Therefore, they that have regard of their estimation and credite, do warily speake, & with choise, utter words most apt for their purpose. In waightie causes, grave wordes are thought most needfull, that the greatnes of the matter, may the rather appeare, in the vehemencie of theyr talke. So likewise of other, like order must be taken. Albeit some, not onely doe not observe this kind of aptnesse, but also they fall into much fondnes, by using words out of place, and applying them to divers matters, without all discretion.32

The dictionary itself is configured around the envisaged use of its reader; Cawdrey’s thesaurus-like definitions make hard words usable. But the Preface warns that this does not make them indiscriminately interchangeable with their commoner, more familiar synonyms, and implores the reader to observe what the definitions cannot teach: the rule of decorum. Cawdrey is rightly concerned that his dictionary gives rise to a user who is free to misuse it, and is caught in the precarious position of advancing the usefulness and the usualness of words whose use he must in some way constrain. Of course, no definition can be so clear as to ensure that the word it defines will not be misused. Cawdrey’s anxiety is that his definitions can neither depict decorum, nor teach how to ‘use aptly’. What is at issue here is not simply that a definition cannot determine all the uses to which a word can be put, but that they quintessentially lack such determinacy. The expectations of a semantics in which words ‘plainly expresse’

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the nature of things are left unsatisfied by Cawdrey’s own lexicographical practice in which a variety of synonyms is provided in order to show that the same thing can be expressed in a number of ways. The very premise of the dictionary is that expression is not at all plain. At exactly that moment when he feels that his reader is most in need of a rule which would make the use of hard words a plain, unambiguous operation, Cawdrey concedes that it cannot be articulated. His anxiety is the measure of the rule’s elusiveness. Anxiety is also a sentiment he hopes his reader will inherit as a precondition for their careful and discrete use. Something should here be said about the envisaged users of these lists, and in this context Juliet Fleming’s powerful reading of A Table Alphabeticall should be given the attention due to it. Fleming has observed that these lists invariably advertise the fact that they would be of great benefit to women, ‘people who are not, and may never be, full members of the language community’, but who fulfil a specific function: ‘it is precisely at the scene of their instruction that the “rules” of English may be articulated.’33 Furthermore, ‘the adequately “ruled” English turns out to be the exclusive possession of men. The early English dictionary is thus marked by an irony that is characteristic of conduct literature, in that it functions to exclude from a general franchise precisely those people to whom it is addressed.’34 In defining a prestige language, Cawdrey in his Preface flatly denies his user entry into it. Fleming’s forceful argument is drawn in part from studies of early modern courtesy literature and rhetoric, many of which I have already referred to.35 In this context, however, it requires a small caveat: in Cawdrey’s dictionary the rules of English are left only ambiguously articulated for it is at the scene of instruction that Cawdrey realizes the severe limitations of his power to instruct. Since his definitions require the reader to use words aptly, then the rule which should ultimately govern the dictionary is the very one it is unable to formulate. So if Cawdrey does seek to exclude those people to whom his dictionary is specifically addressed, it is because their very exclusion stands in place of a rule which cannot be plainly expressed, but which nevertheless shadows his thinking as something which should be plainly expressible. A few years before the publication of A Table Alphabeticall, Cawdrey had published A Treasury or Store-house of Similes (1600) to which he had hoped to append a ‘Treatise of Definitions’, a list of hard words most commonly

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used by preachers. But the list grew so large that he decided to publish it separately. It seems likely that the Table is this treatise. It is consequently worth noting Cawdrey’s reasons for compiling the Treasury: ‘For many times that thing, which cannot bee perceived or understood of Readers of Books, and hearers of Sermons, by a simple precept, may yet by a Similitude or plaine example bee attained unto.’36 The Preface to the Table seems to have inherited the desire for elucidation, clarity and plainness which characterizes Cawdrey’s understanding of the function of simile. The ambivalence in the Preface to A Table Alphabeticall can thus partially be explained by Cawdrey’s realization that his work, which was initially designed to render abstruse preachers more plain speaking, may in fact have the effect of rendering its plain-speaking users more abstruse.37 He is consequently concerned that he may be blamed for encouraging affectation as well as confusing learning for mere pretension. Though hard words lists such as Cawdrey’s can easily be read as attempting to re-inscribe socio-political divisions between the educated and the ‘plaine’, they are also consciously aware of the dangers of appearing affected both to such people who are not in possession of learning, or to those who perceive themselves as better judges of it. The consequence was that compilers had increasingly to formulate definitions which defended the status of their words against the presumed criticism that such words were merely fustian pretensions to learning. And this in turn led them to provide some indication of a word’s provenance, and the circumstances in which it would aptly be used.38 In the Preface to An English Expositor (1616), the second English dictionary, John Bullokar claims that he had originally compiled the dictionary for ‘private use’, and for many years kept it from publication for fear of ‘over hard usage’ at the hands of a public readership. His anxiety comes from the ambiguous status of the words themselves: eloquent or fustian, learned or affected? In order to defend the status of his words, Bullokar claims to have taken them out of ‘divers termes of art, proper to the learned in Logicke, Philosophy, Law, Physicke, Astronomie, &c.’, and his definitions often provide information on the profession in which they are used. Antiperistasis. A terme used in Philosophy, when heat being kept in by cold, waxeth the stronger in it selfe, or cold kept in by heate, groweth more vehement.

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Apogeon. A terme in Astronomy, signifying the farthest distance of a Planet from the earth. Appropriation. A terme used when any body corporate, or private man, hath the right unto a personage in themselves, and may receive the profit thereof, by maintaining a Vicar to serve in the place. Bullokar’s entries establish a word’s credentials by defining its use in particular contexts; these contexts make the words ‘proper’. Such words, he goes on to argue, perform necessary functions in certain professions, and therefore deserve inclusion in usual English: ‘it is familiar among best writers to usurpe strange words, (and sometime necessary by reason our speech is not sufficiently furnished with apt termes to express all meanings).’39 An ‘apt term’ for Bullokar was one which had a use within an existing context, and which might not have a synonym. To deny the use of words which were needed to perform certain tasks was ostensibly to deny a part of life. As the definitions became more extensive, they began to describe in greater detail the contexts within which each of their hard words were commonly used. Johnson refused to visit ‘caverns to learn the miner’s language, nor take a voyage to perfect my skill in the dialect of navigation, nor visit the warehouses of merchants, and shops of artificers, to gain the name of wares, tools and operations’.40 These are precisely the places where these hard words lists take us. However, like Cawdrey, Bullokar knew that his dictionary could not prevent the misuse of the words it defined. In the dedication, he implores the work’s devotee, Jane Viscountess Montague, to keep it ‘protected from injuries’.41 At times Bullokar’s comments read more like an argument against perceived future criticism than a dedication: ‘The glorious sun loseth not the least point of his heighth by liberall leanding downe his light, and quickening with his influence the lowest creatures; neither is any eminency disgraced, that easily condescendeth to others desired good.’42 The metaphor is striking not merely for its grandiosity, but its duality: in denying so forcefully that ‘any eminence [will be] disgraced’ in teaching scholarly words to the unscholarly, the implication is made that some readers believe it will be. However, by defending himself against the charge that he lends out learning foolishly, Bullokar cunningly deflects the more severe criticism that what he lends out is not learning, but only its pretentious appearance. In so doing, he infers that the unlearned reader ought to be held responsible for any improper use

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of the words contained in the dictionary. Of course, this strategy is double edged because it exposes a potential failure of the dictionary to define the proper use of its words. A more devious strategy can be found in a section of Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623) entitled ‘The English Translator’ where common words are listed with more eloquent alternatives appended to them.43 However, Cockeram also includes ‘the mocke-words which are ridiculously used in our language, that those who desire generality of knowledge may not bee ignorant of the sense, even of the fustian termes, used by too many who study rather to bee heard speake, than to understand themselves.’44 While the meaning should be learnt, the word should remain unused. But Cockeram gives no indication as to which words fall into this category, and they are left indecipherable from the words that can apparently be used freely. Included in the section of the dictionary specifically designed for the user to translate common speech into eloquence, it is tempting to think that the inclusion of these ‘fustian termes’ is a reminder to the reader to use their own discretion and judgement. The admission that no definition can absolutely communicate the apt use of a word exposes a vulnerability that leaves these lists open to criticism, but which also provides the first line of defence against that same criticism. Thomas Blount’s Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words (1656), which advertised on its title page, ‘Very useful for all such as desire to understand what they read’, was far more extensive than its predecessors.45 As each subsequent list grew in size, compilers were having to look further afield for their words, and Blount’s dictionary signifies an increasing need to show the credentials of each word to meet what must have been an increasing suspicion as to their status and validity. In the Preface, he supplies the following curious disclaimer: ‘Nor is it my purpose to become an Advocate for the use of such Words; let everyones Genius and the quality of the Subject they treat of be their own Dictator.’46 Throughout the Preface Blount employs many hard words contained in his dictionary, and these words are left unitalicized so that the reader may look them up. So in the passage above, to reveal what acts as the user’s ‘dictator’ – which Blount defines as, ‘he that indites a thing to be written’ – the user looks up ‘genius’: ‘a good or evil Angel, the spirit of man, nature it self, natural inclination’. With its own definitions, the dictionary defines its user as potentially good or bad. At the very moment

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the dictionary induces the reader into its pages and proves its usefulness, it reminds him or her of the ever-present possibility for misuse, and partially divests itself of responsibility. Without exception, these lists assumed a pivotal point between the receiving of language and its active deployment, between turning what was heard and read into something that could be used.47 In this context, we ought not to underestimate the novelty of the alphabetical arrangement all of these lists utlized. The title of Cawdrey’s list, A Table Alphabeticall, and the fact that he provides instructions for how words can be accessed reveals the degree to which its form was one of its features.48 In the Preface to his The English Dictionarie, Cockeram wrote that ‘the method is plaine and easie, being alphabeticall, by which the capacity of the meanest may soone be inlightened’.49 Alphabetical arrangement comprised an artificial ordering by which usual speech became usable. However, there are signs that Blount understood that the meaning of a word is heavily influenced by the company it keeps, and one of the features of his list attempts to return words to their defining contexts. Blount’s method in the Preface of using words which the reader must look up is also a feature of the definitions themselves in which he includes other hard words. These are italicized, and the reader is invited to leap from one entry to another. Paralels or Parallels (Gr. παράλληλο, i. equaliter distance) lines running of an equal distance from each other, which can never meet, though they be drawn infinitely in length thus ════ In Astronomy there are five such imagined lines, running circlewise about the round compass of the Heavens. The first is the Æquinoctical Line, just in the middle of the world, between the two Poles. The second northward of the Æquinoctical, is the Tropick of Cancer, to which sign the Sun comes about the eleventh day of June. The third (yet more northward) is the northern Circle, within twenty-three degrees and fifty minutes of the North Pole. The fourth Line is the Tropick of Capricorn, declining southward from the Equinoctical, as much as the Tropick of Cancer doth northward, and to this line the Sun comes about the twelfth of December. The fifth and last Line, is the Southern Circle, being as near the South Pole, as the Northern Circle (before spoken of) is to the North Pole. These Parallels are also called Æquidistants. There is another sort of Parallels (two of which goe to a Clime) called Artificial Parallels, because they shew the differences of artificial days, &c. Heil.

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This definition of ‘Parallels’, for instance, draws into it the definitions of Equator, Tropic, Capricorn, Cancer, Hemisphere, Equinoctical and Equidistants – many of them containing further links to each other – and establishes the context within which these words are apt and meaningful. Their status is justified by their interrelationship. And the Glossographia enacts this interrelationship by encouraging the user to turn from one entry to another, until what emerges is a clarifying view of a context of use. ‘Glossographia’ – literally, a map of words – provides the salient (and beautiful) metaphor for its own method. It is also emblematic of a lexicographical practice which is largely unconstrained by obligations to a world of signifieds: the meaning of a word is not the thing for which it stands, but the contexts within which it is used. Beyond these specific contexts of use, Glossographia and the other words lists attempted to define the broader context of usual English: ‘Something might also be said of the choice of Words, in our refined English tongue; which are to be liked and approved according to their tone, and the sweetness of their cadence, that is, as they run musically in the Ear.’50 As it is in so many early modern texts, here in the Glossographia the ear becomes the receptor and judge of the usual, and Blount assumes, for his own ear, the role of determining what English is.51 This may seem incidental to the properly semantic function of a dictionary. But if, in defining a word, Blount was implicitly establishing its legitimacy, then these concerns about a word’s sounding English are intrinsic to his aims. Blount is aware that the meaning of a word is dependent upon its use in a context, and that it is only by oral or written means that a word can be used. A word which offends the ear with its strangeness, or which looks unusual on the page will likely call undue attention to its sound or its spelling, and be unable to transmit its meaning effectively. In a work heavily indebted to the Glossographia entitled The New World of English Words (1658), Edward Phillips suggests that many borrowed words required ‘sweetening and smoothing’ to accord with the English ear, and recommends that their inclusion not be ‘disputed by arguments’, but evaluated by ‘sense and fancy’.52 Accordingly, the New World claims to be superior to its predecessors by virtue of a method which, as it turns out, is concerned solely with orthographically representing the aural adaptation of foreign (principally Latin) words into English: Thus I have, in as brief a Method as I could devise, run through the whole Oeconomy of our foreign words, and have ranged them all into their several

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orders and distinctions; so that there is scarce any word, but may be reduced to one, or other of them, for I thought it in vain to publish to the world a Dictionary of hard Terms, if I did not withall lead men the way to the right use of it, that they might inform themselves distinctly, and not sit down contented with a confused notion of things.53

By this method, no word stands orthographically alone, but leads readers to the ‘right use’ of words by producing a system of orthographic resemblance. Phillips does not seek a spelling which will homogenize borrowed words under a general and standard ‘English’, but one which works to accustom the reader to the copious unusualness of a language replete with words from such a wide variety of worlds. To have done so, he announces in the prefatory epistle, is to have rendered the language ‘admirably useful for all persons on all occasions’. Phillips is extremely sensitive to the ways in which a word’s orthographical or aural unusualness can obscure its meaning, sour its rhetorical effect and render it unusable. But these sensitivities must be seen in the context of the view that words are merely referential. The Preface to The New World of English Words begins with a fascinating passage in which, as in Cawdrey’s Preface, the strategies of explanation and description are thrust together. The very Summe and Comprehension of all Learning in General, is chiefly reducible into these two grand Heads, Words and Things; and though the latter of these two be, by all men, not without just cause, acknowledged the more solid and substantial part of Learning; yet since, on the other side, it cannot be denyed but that without Language (which is as it were the vehiculum or conveyance of all good Arts) things cannot well be expressed or published to the World, it must be necessarily granted, that the one is little lesse necessary, and an inseparable concomitant of the other.54

While language is simply the vehicle or ‘conveyance’ of knowledge, and is only of scholarly import because it is a ‘concomitant’ of things, when Phillips goes on to describe the actual contextual operation of those words, he cannot help but see knowledge as the effect of their proper use: for let a Subject be never so grave, never so useful, carrying in it never so clear and perfect a demonstration, yet if it be not pertinently worded, and urged with a certain power and efficacy to the understanding, but in a forced, tumultuous, or disjoynted phrase, it will either not be understood,

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or so slightly and with such indifference regarded, that it will come short of working that effect which it promised to itself.55

That Philips should characterize a subject, when ‘pertinently worded’, as that which works an ‘effect’ on those who hear or read is evidence of a view that is at odds with the idea that words are the mere vehicles of knowledge. Words are not merely containers of knowledge, their proper use is productive of it. It need be said that Phillips is never fazed by the discrepency. His example offers the important lesson that conceptual confusion does not always manifest as intellectual perplexity. And though explanation and description are mutually exclusive, they can nevertheless coexist on the pages of a text more inclined to confidently assert its worth than to concede its limitations. Phillips is less anxious than, say, Cawdrey about being accused of facilitating the misuse of unusual words precisely because, by 1658, hard words lists had sold well, and all had been reprinted several times. Under the aegis of his predecessors, especially Blount (from whose Glossographia he drew over half of his entries), Phillips could confidently justify his dictionary in two incompatible ways without bringing into being the fraught side-effects of their conflict. Phillips might also be said to lack perplexity because, in the first passage, he is making a concession to a commonplace, rather than articulating a deeply held view. As a dictionary writer, he feels his emphasis lies in how knowledge is ‘expressed or published to the World’, in how it is deployed by language in specific contexts. However, though knowledge might be ‘solid and substantial’, it cannot be communicated but through the contingencies of verbal use. In fact, each of the hard words compilers I have considered are acutely aware that knowledge is embedded in active and embodied verbal contexts, and that these contexts need somehow to be depicted. Although these writers clearly draw many of their lemmas and their practices from a rich Renaissance lexicographical tradition, their ongoing recourse to ‘proper use’ as the ultimate arbiter of the efficacy of a word strongly places them in an equally rich rhetorical tradition which includes texts such as Erasmus’ De copia, Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric, Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster and George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy. This is why we should not see these dictionaries as the unsurprising appearance of what earlier lexicographers foresaw. Hard words lists are lexicographical works which nevertheless have a rhetorical use; compilers arranged and ordered words not to stabilize the language, nor to

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purge it of barbarisms, but to release the rhetorical power of its newest and strangest additions. In a broader sense, these dictionaries constitute an effort to acclimatize English language users to a language replete with words from such a wide variety of foreign worlds. They are thus unavoidably concerned with the nature familiarity, and the process of familiarization, both their basis, and their objects. Hard words lists were written not just to explicate, but to justify the inclusion within English of some of its strangest words. As in the preceding three chapters, I have been sensitive to the crucial role ‘use’ and its cognates played in the process of justification. I would now like to consider in more detail the nature of the justification that ‘use’ provides. The following may be taken as concluding the whole book.

An unused siding Augustine’s account of how he was taught the meaning of words (which appears as this book’s epigraph) is a description of an ideal scene of language instruction. Since the meaning of a word is assumed to be the object for which it stands, the elders need only gesture to the object when they say the word in order for the young Augustine to learn the word’s sense. Though operating within what Wittgenstein would call the same picture of language, Johnson was nevertheless brought to the uncomfortable realization that such objects were more difficult to gesture to than he wanted. Either the sense of a word changes over time, or we lack a clear enough vocabulary by which to define a word with certainty, or the meaning of a word is perpetually obscured by contextual usage. Because Johnson operates under the same grounding assumptions as Augustine, the scene of instruction enacted by his Dictionary cannot but aspire to the ideal and clear instruction offered by Augustine’s elders.56 Defining a word ought to be a simple task of gesturing to the essence common to all its uses. When Johnson finds that such essences cannot be articulated, he is forced to offer definitions which expose the variable and mutable uses to which a word can be put. That he should see his definitions as lacking certainty and precision exposes a tacit comparison with a scene of instruction in which defining a word is as easy as pointing and saying. Of course, this is not to say that Johnson was only ever disappointed with his Dictionary and its definitions. By figuring

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his struggle as a worthy one, Johnson does fashion a kind of victory out of the inevitability of defeat. After all, Johnson was nothing if not conscious that his Dictionary was a significant event in the history of English, and which the language had needed for some time. He often expresses pride in the Dictionary in terms of its power to address what he found dissatisfying about English: its fugitive change, its imprecision, its susceptibility to abuse. But these are, of course, the very things which caused him to lament the futility of defining the language with certainty. Though a dictionary can retard the evils of linguistic change and decay, it cannot repel them; it can palliate, but not cure. Johnson’s assumptions about the nature of language impose upon him the awkward paradox in which the sources of his pride are also the causes of his discontent. They also involve him in a drama of aspiration, dissatisfaction and begrudging acceptance which Cavell, following Wittgenstein, identifies as an ongoing condition of our life with language. The aims of seventeenth-century hard words compilers were very different to those of Johnson. They did not see a disordered language in need of stability, but new and strange regions of language that needed explanation, and to which English speakers required access. However, despite the differences, the imperatives of lexicography forced them to answer a similar question, and to face a familiar problem: what is meaning, and how can a definition communicate the proper use of a word? Though frequently articulating the view that words must ‘plainly expresse’ the nature of things, or that language is a mere ‘conveyance’, or vehicle of knowledge, hard words compilers were compelled to entertain another view: that of itself a word does not contain, or express knowledge; it is only in its apt use that it can do these things. I have argued that early-modern English dictionaries attempted to depict the apt use of words by observing various types of resemblance between them. By identifying the different subjects or professions in which hard words are used, by drawing orthographic similarities between words of similar origin, and even by imploring the reader to judge the aptness of a word according to its relationship with other words in a context of interlocution these dictionaries attempted to draw to light the contingent resemblances between words, rather than absolute connections between words and objects. The definitions do not so much point to things, but to other words. Though aptness, like decorum, is often understood as an

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aesthetic and ethical category, these hard words lists provoke us to conceive of it as a semantic category too: a word must be used aptly in order for it to be meaningful. But how might a dictionary teach the apt use of a word? When the hard words compilers remind their readers that words must be used aptly it is only because they themselves were reminded that a word has no definable essence which can absolutely determine its use. To invoke the principle of apt use is to accept the limitations of instruction, and to acknowledge that the reader will eventually have to go on by themselves. All of the teacher’s instructions, even if they are clear definitions of words, need to be used aptly. I have attempted to give an account of just what ‘apt use’ was by observing the way ‘use’ and its cognates ‘useful’ and ‘usual’ were used to justify it. My conclusion is just as much a remark on this investigative method as it is on the dictionaries themselves: to observe the resemblances between ‘use’, ‘useful’ and ‘usual’ is to begin to observe the types of resemblances according to which these dictionary writers arranged their strange words and made sense of them. ‘Use’, ‘usual’, ‘useful’ are words which, after all, would never have been included in a seventeenth-century hard words list. Indispensably useful and unquestionably usual, these words were used by dictionary writers with unthinking confidence, and they relied upon them to define what it meant to define words. In order to justify and dispute the inclusion of hard words, hard words compilers had to be masters of a language which itself stood outside the fray. This language of ordinary and unquestioned words functioned as part of what Wittgenstein would have called certainty. Much seems to be fixed, and it is removed from the traffic. It is so to speak shunted into an unused siding. 211. Now it gives our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts.57

This certainty is not absolute; it remains vulnerable to the sceptic. And to that extent, it may seem insufficient. However, though it is not immune to doubt, it is the certainty that is required in order for doubt to be expressible. Like the hinge upon a door, it is the fixed point around which uncertainty can swing. Or, to use a more apt metaphor, ‘use’ and its cognates were those coordinates which enabled dictionary writers to map this new world of English words. ‘Use’,

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‘usual’ and ‘useful’ – ‘shunted into an unused siding’ – functioned like compass points drawn at the side of a vast map. And so too for Ascham, Puttenham and Mulcaster: ‘use’ and its cognates were deployed to justify and understand what they perceived to be the proper use of language. These coordinates gave them their bearings; these unremarkable words told them which way was up.

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Notes Introduction 1 I could have told a similar story from the child’s point of view. In this case, I would have stressed the child’s increasing frustration and anxiety as he tries but fails to understand the simplest of instructions and explanations. For the same reasons that the teacher has no absolute assurance that he will be understood, the student has no absolute assurance that he will understand. He might ask ‘But why?’ with sincerity, as if he genuinely required clarification. The teacher will eventually run out of explanations, and when he arrives at the bedrock of his convictions, he will merely be able to say, ‘Because that’s just how it is.’ If the student does not understand, even after the teacher has exhausted all explanations, this final pronouncement is unlikely to give him much peace. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), §218. 3 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122.

Chapter 1 1 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xii. Although Grafton and Jardine’s has been the most influential, it was not the first study to make these claims about humanist education. See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 20–1; and Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968). The strategies adopted by educators to define an elite educated class have also been thoroughly analysed in accounts of early modern courtesy literature too numerous to mention here, but many of which I consider in Chapter 2 on George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy. 2 Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities, xiv.

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3 ‘It stamped the more prominent members of the new élite with an indelible cultural seal of superiority, it equipped lesser members with fluency and the learned habit of attention to textual detail and it offered everyone a model of true culture as something given, absolute, to be mastered, not questioned – and thus fostered in all its initiates a properly docile attitude toward authority.’ Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities, xiv. 4 Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1; 26. 5 An exception to this trend is Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Recognizing that humanism ‘was never a coherent ideology’ either as a ‘value system’, or ‘an intellectual and pedagogical practice’, Bushnell reads for ‘functional ambivalence: to see where one tendency of early modern humanist pedagogy always allowed for the realization of an opposite one, without undermining or effacing itself in turn’ (19). I consider Bushnell’s reading at greater length in Chapter 1. Rules of Use also has affinities with the focused attention Jeff Dolven gives to pedagogy in Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Dolven aims to show the differences between the forms of instruction practised on the pages of poetic romance, and those practised in the classroom (which, he argues, Renaissance romance calls into question). He broadly characterizes these differences as appeals to two kinds of understanding: ‘Paradigmatic understanding abstracts its objects from time; it is the text as already read, understood according to its topoi, its laws . . . Narrative understanding refuses both paradigmatic abstractions and their institutional origins in favour of a kind of explanation that insists on time and circumstance. The difference between them is the difference between stating a maxim and telling a story.’ Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 58–9. In using pedagogy as a foil for romance, Dolven plays down the ambivalent status of abstractions (rules, topoi, exempla, maxims) in pedagogical texts – texts which display a presiding awareness that any abstraction can be misused, misunderstood or used to justify deviance. If the pedagogy of the period is concerned to offer these paradigms of understanding then it is equally often aware that their value is in their proper use, and that proper use will not submit to any abstraction. 6 Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 1988); David Hillman, ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, Studies in English Literature 36.1 (1995), 73–90. 7 See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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8 See Allon White, ‘The Dismal Sacred Word: Academic Language and the Social Reproduction of Seriousness’, Journal of Literature, Teaching, Politics 2 (1983), 4–15; Juliet Fleming, ‘Dictionary English and the Female Tongue’ in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 290–325. 9 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 9. 10 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 31. 11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §81. All future references will be cited in the text. 12 Wittgenstein frequently uses scenes of failed mathematical instruction to counter our tendency to reify the mathematical rule as absolutely determining, as formulae to which we can benignly submit. 13 Stanley Cavell, Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 112. 14 This is essentially how G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker characterize an earlier section, §144, which §185 revisits. Cf. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein, Rules, Grammar and Necessity: Volume 1 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations: Part II – Exegesis of §§1–184 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 314. 15 Richard Eldridge has considered the ways this scene of instruction interrogates and undermines our desire for absolute rule-governed assurance: ‘[§185] shows that no knowledge of anything that is simply given – in or to the mind, in or to the order of nature, in the ways of a community, or anywhere – can provide immunity against all divergences, control the ways of one’s own rule-following or that of a community, or secure perfect expressiveness. Dramas of resistance and accommodation in rule-following cannot be prescinded from through the acquisition of knowledge of things. There is no legislative directive written into the ordering of the intellect, of nature, or of community habits that secures the perfect information of Willkür [arbitrariness] and Wille [will].’ Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 232. 16 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 115. 17 Stanley Cavell, ‘Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 261–95 (263). 18 Cavell, ‘Notes and Afterthoughts’, 263; 264. 19 Cavell, ‘Notes and Afterthoughts’, 264. 20 Cavell, ‘Notes and Afterthoughts’, 269.

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21 We might observe that all tables have flat, horizontal surfaces. But to conclude from this that ‘flat, horizontal surface’ is the meaning of the word ‘table’ is patently ridiculous. Shelves, desks and floors all have horizontal surfaces too, and they are clearly not tables. 22 Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 120. 23 Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 80. 24 Waswo, Language and Meaning, 80. 25 Richard Waswo, ‘The “Ordinary Language Philosophy” of Lorenzo Valla’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 41 (1979), 255–79 (260). As an example of Valla’s recourse to ordinary usage, Waswo presents his reduction, in the Dialecticae disputationes, of Aristotle’s logical categories from ten to three, and the various scholastic transcendent terms to one: ‘The reductions are made, and the whole critique offered, on the grounds that such terms violate the “common custom of speaking” (“comunem loquendi consuetudinem,” I. xvi; 678) and should be replaced by those that adhere “more simply and more suitably to the natural sense and common use” (“simplicitus et ad naturalem sensum usumque communem accommodatius,” I. xvi; 679) of words’ (257). Salvatore Camporeale has emphasized Valla’s Quintilianism as the source of his opposition to the Aristotelian taint in the scholastic tradition, and his use of the Institutio Oratoria as ‘a science of language . . . through which an epistemological foundation for the culture of the humanae litterae could be established’. Salvatore I. Camporeale, ‘Lorenzo Valla: The Transcending of Philosophy Through Rhetoric’, Romance Notes 50.3 (1990), 269–84 (274). According to Valla, ‘philosophers have “ontologized” common language (the sermo communis, in Valla’s terminology) in that they have assumed words and modes of speaking (verba and modus dicendi) as experiences whose referents were substances and modes of being (substantiae and modus essendi). By reducing technical philosophical terms (like “substance,” “essence,” and “being”) to the semantical “ordinary usage” (usus verborum) of those same words, and by showing through linguistic analysis that words and modes of speaking are only verbalizations of events or sequences of events and modes of contingency, Valla dismantles the traditional ontological conception of language.’ Salvatore I. Camporeale, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology’ in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, ed. John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki and Gerald Christianson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 101–24 (110–11). The task of the theologian thus shifts from metaphysical speculation ‘to a strictly philological study of the scriptures, engaging himself as a grammaticus of the Word; his theological enquiry must be transformed into the activity that had been specific to the “grammarian,” the ennaratio of the sacred text’ (118). 26 Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance, 109–10.

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27 See Waswo, ‘The “Ordinary Language Philosophy” of Lorenzo Valla’, 264. 28 Monfasani, ‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’ Journal of the History of Ideas 50.2 (1989), 309–23 (322). 29 Monfasani, ‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’ 322. 30 Monfasani, ‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’ 323. 31 Monfasani, ‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’ 309. 32 Monfasani, ‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’ 309. 33 Richard Waswo, ‘Motives of Misreading’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50.2 (1989), 324–32. 34 See Philosophical Investigations, §46. 35 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Wigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 232. 36 ‘It seems necessary to the completion of a dictionary designed not merely for critics but for popular use, that it should comprise, in some degree, the peculiar words of every profession; that the terms of war and navigation should be inferred so far as they can be required by readers of travels, and of history; and those of law, merchandise and mechanical trades, so far as they can be supposed useful in the occurrences of common life.’ Samuel Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1747), 7. 37 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 243.

Chapter 2 1 Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 260. 2 Thomas Greene has argued that Ascham tended to regard language as a ‘denotative and stylistic instrument’ which sets him apart from the symbolically heavy language of Spenser’s dark conceits, or Sidney’s golden world: ‘His role was to delay the full openness to symbolism for a generation, until the maturity of Spenser and his contemporaries. His approach to language was nothing if not “clean”.’ Thomas Greene, ‘Roger Ascham: The Perfect End of Shooting’, English Literary History 36.4 (1969), 609–25 (623–4). 3 According to Thomas Greene, Ascham’s three books – Report on the Affaires and State of Germany, Toxophilus and The Scholemaster – are ‘about the same thing, which they jointly define. There is a faculty, a skill, common to these activities and to all the other arts, which remains in fact Ascham’s profound and perennial subject. Since all three activities involve a morality – shooting quite as much as the others – so this skill possesses a moral dimension as well. But the skill is discerned in operation, not in merely potentiality; it is demonstrated in hitting the mark’. Greene, ‘Roger Ascham’, 620.

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4 In fact, Ascham frequently advocates archery on the basis of its honesty, and this characteristic he attributes to the sport’s open and clear objective: ‘it is in everye man his sight, it seketh no corners, it hydeth it not: if there be never so litle fault in it, everye man seeth it, it accuseth itself ’; ‘shooting hath two Tutors to looke upon it, out of whose companie, shooting never stirreth, the one called Daye light, ye other Open place, wyche .ii. keepe shooting from evyl companye, and suffers it not to have to much swinge, but evermore keeps it under awe, that it darre do nothyng in the open face of the worlde, but that which is good and honest’. Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 22; 23. All future references to Ascham’s work will be from this edition and will be noted in the text. 5 Ascham’s dialogue opens on Toxophilus reading a dialogue, Phaedrus. Ascham’s dialogue responds to Plato’s in complex ways, and though their relationship is not my immediate concern here, the following does have some bearing on my analysis. Toxophilus says that he was so absorbed by the descriptions of souls in Phaedrus and that his mind ran away with him. In particular: ‘I was reding howe some soules being well fethered, flewe alwayes about heaven and heavenlie matters, other some havinge their fetheres mowted awaye, and droupinge, sanke downe into earthlie thinges’ (1). Philologus is initially sceptical about the pleasures and benefits of archery, and says somewhat dismissively: ‘And I suppose it be a great dele more pleasure also, to se a soule flye in Plato, than a shafte flye at the prickes’ (2). The parallel is thus established between Socrates’ description of the flight of feathered souls to heaven, and Toxophilus’ ensuing description of feathered arrows flying towards their marks. And Toxophilus’ utter absorption in the former intimates what Ascham hopes will be his own reader’s experience of the latter. Philologus’ dismissive remark sets up the challenge: use eloquence not only to persuade Philologus that archery is a worthy pastime, but also to allure him into the practice of it. However (and this is where the presence of Phaedrus in Toxophilus becomes ambivalent), Socrates’ description is dripping with irony – or, at least, with eironeia – and he attempts many times to disown the words he has uttered. Before he embarks upon the first of his speeches, he very dramatically invokes the muses (237a), and later holds them responsible for what he has said. And when beginning his longer speech about the soul, he attributes its authorship to the poet Stesichorus (243e–244a). Socrates’ disowning of his words comes from his suspicion of the rhetorician’s ability to move people with words he neither believes nor has knowledge to verify. The problem of eloquence as he perceives it is that it poses as knowledge and often stands in its place. By contrast, Toxophilus’ words are entirely sincere, based as they are on a mental image of the perfect archer. His description of arrows flying at targets is not empty rhetoric, but grounded upon a detailed art of archery, which he

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does provide. Ascham seems not to be disagreeing with Socrates, so much as refracting his suspicions: eloquence is to be prized above all because it requires knowledge if it is to hit the mark. In this way, Toxophilus is engaged in a complex renegotiation of the terms upon which Socrates expresses his misgivings. K. J. Wilson’s fine reading of Toxophilus (which I refer to in the following paragraph) is the most detailed exposition available of Ascham’s indebtedness to the Phaedrus. However, because Wilson plays down Socrates’ eironeia, he tends also to see Toxophilus as an act of reverential imitatio rather than of aemulatio. K. J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 125–6. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions, 117. Toxophilus complains that no such practical instruction currently exists: ‘onely howe it is to be learned and brought to a perfectnesse amonges men, is not toulde’ (6). ‘Of Use you speake very much Toxophile, but I am sure in al other matters, Use can do nothing, wythoute two other thinges be joyned wyth it, one is natural Aptnesse to a thinge, the other is a true waye or Knowledge, how to do the thing, to which ii. yf Use be joyned, as thirde felowe, of them three, procedeth perfectnesse and excellencie: If a manne lacke the first two, Aptnesse and Cunnyng, Use can do lytle good, at all’ (58). See Plato, Phaedrus, 269d. More pertinent to Ascham are the two lengthy passages in De oratore (I.113–59 and II.74–98) which discuss the relationship between natura, ars and exercitatio/usus. The first of these passages in particular, which involves Crassus extrapolating on the relationship between these parts, was quite possibly in Ascham’s mind when he composed these sections of Toxophilus. On the relationship between natural ability and art see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, II.19. Aptness is least considered, and is treated more as a given since ‘all Englishe men generally, be apte for shotyng’ (58). It is difficult to resist seeing the intrinsic place granted to knowledge in this scene of instruction as a response to Plato’s Gorgias, and Socrates’ rejection of oratory as a mere knack (emperia) acquired through use, rather than an art (techne). Where an art can provide a rational account of its procedures, and can thus be taught, a knack can only be acquired through routine practice (Gorgias, 462b–466a). Toxophilus’ insistence that archery is an art – and Ascham’s parallel insistence that oratory is too – thus requires a rational description of how excellence in it can be achieved. This will prove to be difficult. Toxophilus says that ‘there lieth hyd in the nature of Shootynge, an Arte, whiche by notynge, and observynge of him, that is exercised in it, yf he be any thyng learned at al, maye be taught, to the great forderaunce of Artillarie through out

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Notes al this Realme’ (60–1). This process of deriving an art from use is intimated by Crassus in De oratore: ‘For if art is defined in the way that Antonius described a little while ago, as consisting of matters that are thoroughly scrutinized and clearly known, and that are beyond the control of mere opinion, but grasped by exact knowledge, then it seems to me that an art of oratory does not exist. After all, every aspect of our judicial and political speaking is variable and adapted to an ordinary and popular way of thinking. If, however, the procedures that have been followed in the actual practice of speaking have been observed and recorded by skilled and experienced people, and described through definitions, and clarified by division into classes and subclasses – and all this has obviously been possible – I don’t see why this shouldn’t be an art, if not according to that precise definition, then at least in the ordinary sense in which we use the word’ (I.108–9). Cicero, Cicero: On the Ideal Orator, ed. and trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Crassus’ distinction between an art which exists outside of practice and an art derived from practice is crucial to Toxophilus in which, as we shall see, art does not (and cannot) remove uncertainty, but must exist in relation to it. Ryan, Roger Ascham, 50. Greene, ‘Perfect End of Shooting’, 622. Wilson has emphasized the figurative significance of the wind, describing it as ‘a perfect metaphor for uncertainty. Of course, it is a real hindrance to shooting straight and “keeping a length,” but the nature of the wind is uncertainty itself . . . And a good man will learn to know the nature of uncertainty and with wisdom will measure in his mind how much it will alter his acts’. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions, 133–4. Greene, ‘Perfect End of Shooting’, 622. Greene, ‘Perfect End of Shooting’, 622. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 112. Clearly, for Ascham, decorum had a moral as well as an aesthetic dimension. Greene reconsiders Ascham’s treatment of style in terms of its inherent ethical imperatives, arguing that ‘the line between the morality of proper conduct and the aesthetics of verbal composition was not, for him, very well-defined. Barbarous writing involved something like a moral failure, just as barbarous conduct offended the sense of decorum’. Greene, ‘Roger Ascham’, 614. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics will receive no special treatment here. I take their interdependence more as a given. Greene, ‘Roger Ascham’, 618. Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44.

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Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 19. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 19–20. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching, 18. Toxophilus’ final advice to Philologus is that his instruction be ‘diligently marked’ (118), and that Toxophilus will think his labour ‘better bestowed’ (119) if they meet once more to consider the question ‘De origine anime’ (119). That they should meet again to discuss the origin of the spirit or mind is highly appropriate. At the beginning of the dialogue, Philologus was idle – neither shooting nor reading – and his first line had been, ‘You study to sore Toxophile’ (1). Closing with Philologus’ eagerness to ‘mete here agayne’, the whole dialogue becomes a picture of how a student has been made willing. According to Toxophilus, knowledge of archery will also prevent the young archer falling into bad habits or falling prey to the influence of customary practices. Alvin Vos has taken note of ‘the isocolon, parison, and antithesis which Ascham relies on strengthen his periods. They organize his prose, disposing the details, outlining his essentials.’ Alvin Vos, ‘Form and Function in Roger Ascham’s Prose’, Philological Quarterly 55 (1976), 305–22 (317). Other studies of Ascham’s prose style include Philip Krapp George, The Rise of English Literary Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), 292–9; George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 74–5; Alvin Vos, ‘ “Good Matter and Good Utterance”: The Character of English Ciceronianism’, Studies in English Literature 19 (1979), 3–18. Robert M. Strozier, ‘Roger Ascham and Cleanth Brooks: Renaissance and Modern Critical Thought’, Essays in Criticism 22 (1972), 396–407 (400). Strozier, ‘Roger Ascham’, 405. Robert M. Strozier, ‘Theory and Structure in Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973), 144–62 (153). Victoria Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’ in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 379. ‘[L]ay them together: compare the one with the other: commend his good choice, & right placing of wordes: Shew his faultes jently, but blame them not over sharply: for, of such missings, jentlie admonished of, proceedeth glad & good heed taking: of good heed taking, springeth chiefly knowledge, which after, groweth to perfiteness, if this order be diligentlie used by the scholer & jently handled by the master’ (239). The passages from Macrobius to which Ascham refers are from The Saturnalia (III.2–16 and V.2–16) in which excerpts from Homer and Virgil are gathered and their similarities noted. But, according to Ascham, this is pedagogically

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Notes incomplete. It simply shows Homer’s original alongside Virgil’s imitation of it without showing ‘how the one doth follow the other’. ‘Elegans interim fuerit exercitatio, quod a veteribus nonnullis factum est in Homero ac Vergilio, si quis idem faciat in Demosthene et M. Tullio, vt ex collatione locorum deprehendat, quid hic ab illo sit mutuatus, et vbi noster sit Graeco par, vbi superior, vbi ab exemplari nonnihil degeneret imitatio. Vix alia res aeque conducit ad parandum iudicum.’ Erasmus to John Paungartner, 2 August 1532 in Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen and H. W. Garrod, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), X, 73–5 (74). Erasmus had reluctantly published this letter as the preface to Herwagen’s Demosthenes. Toxophilus employs this procedure in his treatment of classical sources. Towards the beginning of the dialogue, Philologus presents several examples from Euripides, Sophocles, Xenophon, Homer and others to show that such authors did not consider archery an honourable activity. Toxophilus considers each separately, showing that Philologus had misinterpreted his source material, and that really each writer was writing in support of archery (36–9). Toxophilus insists that correct use of a text must involve an awareness of the original author’s purpose. This image of a heap of usable material is also used pejoratively by Erasmus himself in his highly influential textbook, De copia (1512): ‘We find that a good many mortal men who make great efforts to achieve this godlike power of speech fall instead into mere glibness, which is both silly and offensive. They pile up a meaningless heap of words and expressions without any discrimination, and thus obscure the subject they are talking about, as well as belabouring the ears of their unfortunate audience.’ Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, trans. Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, London and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 295. When crudely heaped together, usable material lacks order. Though it may give the impression of copiousness, such a heap actually encourages indiscrete use. This is fundamentally Ascham’s complaint against Erasmus. Both Erasmus and Ascham advocate the keeping of a notebook in which the student can collect usable material, and from which they can draw if occasion should serve. However, there are revealing differences in their application of this method. When commenting on collecting synonyms in De copia, Erasmus instructs the student to ‘collect a vast supply of words like this from all sides out of good authors, provide oneself with a varied equipment, and, as Quintillian remarks, heap up riches so that we find we have a wealth of words to hand whenever we require it’. Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, 307. The efficacy and applicability of this list lie in the student’s ability to see the infinitely

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variable usages of its contents. But Ascham is more vigilant, and perhaps more wary: some usages, he implies, are better than others. He requires the student to have three notebooks: two for double translation, and a third ‘in the whiche, after he has done his double translations, let him write, after this sort foure [examples] of these fournamed sixe, diligentlie marked out of everie lesson. Propria. Translata. Synonyma. Diversa. Contraria. Phrases’ (187). It is in the context of correct usage as derived from double translation that the student should begin his list of usable material, ensuring that his list will grow only in relation to his ability to use it correctly. The acquirement of judgement thus precedes, and never lags behind the collection of usable forms. In his assessment of the various techniques of imitation available, Ascham says that ‘Sturmius onelie hath most learnedlie declared, who is to be followed, what is to be followed, and the best point of all, by what way & order trew Imitation is rightlie to be exercised’ (271). Marion Trousdale, ‘Recurrence and Renaissance: Rhetorical Imitation in Ascham and Sturm’, English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976), 156–79 (169). In a thought-provoking article, Anthony LaBranche provides a way of thinking about imitation which illuminates the role of double translation in Ascham. Arguing that ‘among modern critics it has been traditional to focus on the finished product and to search there for formal traits strictly identifiable with the model’s’, LaBranche suggests that we should ‘break our fixation on imitation as a formal exercise within a genre, concerned with “closensess” to a model, and talk about it as a poetic activity.’ Anthony LaBranche, ‘Imitation: Getting in Touch’, Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970), 308–29 (308–9). For LaBranche, imitation should be seen as an active process of relating to the past, rather than an attempt to produce approximations of it. The effort to imitate a writer’s judgement rather than their use inflects Ascham’s Ciceronianism, something he also inherited from Strum. Although Ascham frequently invokes Cicero as the mark at which the student must aim, his Ciceronianism is not of the slavishly mechanical kind satirized by Erasmus in the Ciceronianus where one uses only words and phrases contained in Cicero’s extant works. As Alvin Vos has put it, ‘The challenge . . . is not to parrot Cicero’s speech, but to recover the process by which Cicero imitated others, most notably the Greeks . . . [Ascham] is more interested in the genesis of Cicero’s eloquence than in its consummation.’ Vos, ‘ “Good Matter and Good Utterance” ’, 15. Double translation re-enacts the genesis of eloquence by making clear the choices available to the writer, and which ones he chose, thereby allowing the student to see Cicero’s judgement in action, which is the only way it can be seen. Richard Helgerson, ‘Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England’ in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and

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Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 273–92 (279). 44 The fact that important poets such as Chaucer, Surrey and Wyatt all favoured rhyme does not, for Ascham, reveal the acceptability of rhyme, but is cause to lament a lost opportunity: ‘[I]f soch good wittes, and forward diligence, had been directed to follow the best examples, and not have been caryed by tyme and custome, to content themselves with that barbarous and rude rhyming, emonges their other worthy praises, which they have justly deserved, this had not bene the least, to be counted emonges men of learning and skill, more like unto the Grecians, than unto the Gothians, in handling of their verse’ (289).

Chapter 3 1 Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), 263. 2 Alexander, ed., Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, lxiii–lxv. 3 Alexander, ed., Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, lxiii. 4 Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn’s edition of the Art goes some way to counteracting the critical trend I outline in the paragraphs which follow. In their introduction, Whigham and Rebhorn attempt to show the ways in which the Art embodies those poetic techniques it claims to teach. Thus, with analysis which is more rigorously substantiated than many earlier critics, they nevertheless persist in seeing the Art less as a pedagogical treatise, and more as a strenuous exercise in self-fashioning: ‘[Puttenham] struggles to shape and control the particular and strong view of himself – both ours and his own – as a designer of courtly promotion. Such emotional density now seems the most distinctive feature of the Art.’ George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 5. (All further references to the Art will be cited in the text.) My argument is that an equally distinctive feature of the Art is its ongoing attempt to accommodate within its instruction the self-fashioning potential of its individual users. That is, if Puttenham shows awareness of the power of words to fashion his own subjectivity, his manual is also at pains to receive the indeterminate demands of each unique user in their own attempts to do so. Although, in its instruction, the text seems to provide us with tantalizing clues for its interpretation, we risk misunderstanding key concepts in the text if we fail to read it as an attempt not merely to practice them, but to teach them also. 5 Whigham and Rebhorn frequently interpret the Art’s ambivalent attitude towards dissembling as itself an act of dissembling. Although, as Puttenham advises,

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‘the good poet or maker ought to dissemble his art’, Whigham and Rebhorn are quick to observe: ‘like Castiglione, Puttenham seems to worry that the art of his courtier-poet may appear morally suspect, and he goes to great lengths in defending its legitimacy, insisting that it not be confused with the dissimulation practised by hypocrites and “based-minded men” (382) – though he himself has just produced, with a grim smile, perhaps, exactly that confusion, by so richly detailing so many uncomfortable simulations of conduct, as we have seen. This manoeuvre, so typically oblique, may well seem a Machiavellian presentation of the complexities of Castiglione, designed to critique and enable effective princepleasing at one on the same time’ (34). By contrast, I attempt to give an account of Puttenham’s techniques of dissembling (as well as his ambivalence towards them) in the context not of his own performance of them, but his paradoxical instruction on how to perform them. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 66. Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, 83. David Hillman, ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, Studies in English Literature 36.1 (1995), 73–90 (73; 75). Hillman, ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, 78–9. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 1988). ‘Art, it seems, must in some way agree with nature, even though it is defined against nature . . . Poetry is modelled on nature, yet somehow perfects nature . . . The concept of nature is self divided (and is therefore not strictly a concept): it stands both for that which is itself, in total selfsufficiency, and that which is necessarily incomplete and in need of repair’ (28). Attridge, Peculiar Language, 33. Attridge, Peculiar Language, 35–6. See also Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 18; Jonathan V. Crewe, ‘The Hegemonic Theater of George Puttenham’, English Literary Renaissance 16.1 (1986), 71–85; Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, English Literary History 50.3 (1983), 415–59. Attridge, Peculiar Language, 30. Victoria Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’ in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 373–96 (376; 377). Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’, 377–8. In the second chapter of Book 1, Puttenham considers that if ‘art be but a certain order of rules prescribed by reason and gathered by experience, why should not

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Notes poesy be a vulgar art with us as well as with the Greeks and Latins, our language admitting no fewer rules and nice diversities than theirs’ (95). Rule-following was exactly what Greek and Latin poets practised, and which English poets ought to be called upon to do. John Guillim, A Display of Heraldry (London, 1724), 1. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London, 1548), 172. Shakespeare uses ‘intendment’ four times in his whole oeuvre, and always to refer to that which is intended: ‘We do not mean the coursing snatchers only, / But fear the main intendment of the Scot, / Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us’ (Henry V, I.2; ll.143–5); ‘I came hither to acquaint you withal, that either you might stay him from his intendment or brook such disgrace well as he shall run into’ (As You Like It, I.1); ‘Ay, and said nothing but what I protest intendment of doing’ (Othello, IV.2; ll.204–5); ‘And now she weeps, and now she fain would speak, / And now her sobs do her intendments break’ (Venus and Adonis, ll.221–2). ‘Within the art form itself such awareness suggests contrivance on the part of its maker, or intercession, and creates as consequence an impure art. Within the reader, we are apt to assume, such consciousness intercedes temporarily at least between the apprehending mind and the luminous object. It may only momentarily shadow the poem’s total effect. But it can occasion the distortion that comes from paraphrase and a resulting loss of poetic truth.’ Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 81. Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians, 83. I realize that I am skirting an important and ongoing debate in early modern studies about inwardness, interiority and subjectivity. I would like to continue skirting it. My argument has no investment whatever in whether the early modern period oversaw the emergence of quintessentially modern notions of selfhood, or whether its poets discovered a new way of evoking interiority. Instead, I am merely applying this Wittgensteinian observation: ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §580). In the present instance, this amounts to little more than the hum-drum observation that intention (an ‘inner process’) requires figurative use in order for it to be perceptible. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.1. For two early modern articulations of this view see Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622), 42; and Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), VIII, 625.

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25 For anything that they may lack in quality, Puttenham’s poetic selections as a whole rarely fail in their immediate aim which is to show how a figure operates in verse. Indeed, in those examples of his own, Puttenham is often too keen to show his mastery of figures to ever consider dissembling his art, and his poetry suffers from too conscious a knowledge of poetic form: what makes good teachers sometimes makes bad practitioners. And what make useful examples at a scene of instruction are not always instances of exemplary practice. 26 Puttenham’s argument in this final chapter is not easy to decipher and is susceptible to misreading because the word ‘natural’ is used in two different ways: as a specific style in which art is dissembled, and as that aspect of poetic creation which is neither artificial nor, as I have defined it, intentional. The chapter begins with Puttenham advocating the dissembling of art – and yet, he considers, ‘our maker may not be in all cases restrained, but that he may both use and also manifest his art to his great praise, and need no more be ashamed thereof than a shoemaker to have made a cleanly shoe, or a carpenter to have built a fair house’ (382). In order to ‘make this point somewhat clearer’, Puttenham considers ‘where art ought to appear, and where not – and when the natural is more commendable than the artificial in any human action or workmanship’ (382). He then describes the ways in which various arts relate to nature: gardening sometimes aids, sometimes surmounts nature; carpentry puts nature to use in entirely unnatural ways; painting imitates nature. Poetry is different from all these arts insofar as it flows ultimately from a natural desire for decorous language: ‘But for that in our maker or poet, which rests only in device and issues from an excellent, sharp, and quick invention, helped by a clear and bright fantasy and imagination, he is not as the painter to counterfeit the natural by the like effects and not the same, nor as the gardener aiding nature to work both the same and the like, nor as the carpenter to work effects utterly unlike, but even as nature herself, working by her own peculiar virtue and proper instinct and not by example or mediation or exercise as all other artificers do, is then most admired when he is most natural and least artificial. And in the feats of his language and utterance, because they hold as well of nature to be suggested and uttered as by art to be polished and reformed’ (385–6). Puttenham does not say that poetry is ultimately or even largely a natural ability. There is a natural component, and this is what Puttenham is talking about, but there are other components too. Puttenham therefore restates his earlier argument: we use figures by natural impulse, while our individual natures incline us to some figures over others. It is because poetry makes use of these natural tendencies that a natural style, in which art is discretely dissembled, is to be sought, and praised above all. 27 Robert Matz, ‘Poetry, Politics and Discursive Forms: The Case of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie’, Genre 30.3 (1997), 195–213 (207).

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28 This passage has attracted political readings from both Matz and Attridge. ‘What is at stake here is not just status hierarchy, but the reorientation of the English polity under the absolutist monarchy that would disempower the Northern feudal lord along with the rustic servant.’ Matz, ‘Poetry, Politics and Discursive Forms’, 201. ‘ “Usual”. which is clearly nonsense in statistical terms, suggests that Puttenham is able to assimilate the notion of universality to a politically less troublesome notion of cultural superiority.’ Attridge, Peculiar Language, 34. 29 Cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, ll.70–2. 30 As R. F. Jones has written, ‘to those who wished to introduce the principles of classical prosody into English verse orthographic reform meant much, since the quantity of syllables was frequently determined by spelling.’ Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 152. 31 Letter from Gabriel Harvey to Edmund Spenser, April 1580 in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), I, 102. In the same letter, Harvey says he shall never ‘consent’ to make ‘your Carpēnter our Carpĕnter, an inch longer or bigger, than God and his Englishe people have made him. Is there no other Pollicie to pull downe Ryming, and set uppe Versifying . . . and againste all order of Lawe, and in despite of Custome, forcibly usurpe, and tyrannize uppon a quiet companye of wordes, that so farre beyonde the memorie of man, have so peacably enjoyed their several Priviledges and Liberties, without any disturbance, or the leaste controlement?’ Letter from Gabriel Harvey to Edmund Spenser in Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Almiron Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, Alexander Corbin Judson and Ray Heffner, 11 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), X, 474. The language of power is most striking: the rules of quantity threaten to ‘usurpe’ and ‘tyrannize’ the ‘Priviledges’ and ‘Liberties’ established by custom. Despite his fervent desire to establish ‘reformed versifying’, Harvey recognized that any imposed rule had to submit to the rules already operative in use. 32 Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 133. 33 Samuel Daniel, Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, ed. Geoffrey G. Hillier and Peter L. Groves (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 200–1. 34 Daniel, Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, 224. 35 The epistle to which Daniel refers is the one to Anne Clifford which follows an abcabc rhyme scheme. Unto the tender youth of those fair eyes The light of judgement can arise but new,

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39 40

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And young the world appears t’ a young conceit, Whilst through the unacquainted faculties The late invested soul doth rawly view Those objects which on that discretion wait. (ll.1–6) Linda Galyon, ‘Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia: New Twists for Old Terms’, Philological Quarterly 60.1 (1981), 29–40 (32–3). Whigham and Rebhorn note Puttenham’s occasional ‘slippage from the sense of sight to that of hearing’ (44) which they see as ‘deeply revelatory of Puttenham’s conception of the sensual nature of poetry: although he speaks of it as being “decked and set out” with figures of speech, the visual conception of poetry implied here leads him to talk of its appeal not to the eye, as one might expect, but rather to the ear, which is imagined as moving the heart by means of the emotions (“affectively”)’ (44). Although I do not consider the passages which most interest Whigham and Rebhorn, I hope to show that Puttenham is more systematic in his thinking about the visual and aural properties of words than they suggest. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 18. It may be useful to remember here that when Puttenham describes decorum he presents us with a variety of words which evoke the visual: ‘τσ πρεπσυ’ was originally used to refer to the beautiful visual aspect of a thing; ‘seemliness’ is that which describes a ‘good shape and utter appearance well pleasing to the eye’; and, ‘comeliness’: the kind of beauty ‘which our eye only for his prerogative over all the rest of the senses doth usurp’ (348). Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, 20–1. The argument with which the Art begins – that ‘Poesy [can] be a vulgar Art with us as well as with the Greeks and Latins’ – is actually proxy to the argument that proportion can be usual to English: on the one hand, Puttenham uses Greek and Latin poetry as a way of divining the rules of proportion, but on the other, he must allow English to embody these forms in its own unique way. Seen in this light, a passage at the end of Book I which, according to Alexander, begs the question would seem to do nothing of the sort. (See Alexander, ed., Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, lxiii.) After describing various ancient forms of poetry which have passed into use in English, Puttenham claims to have ‘taken from the best [ancient] clerks writing in the same art’ (146). By contrast, ‘the part that next followeth, to wit, of proportion, because the Greeks nor Latines never had it in use, nor made any observation, no more than we do of their feet, we may truly affirm to have been the first devisers thereof ourselves, as άυτοδιδακτοι, and not to have borrowed it of any other by learning or imitation’ (146–7). Puttenham has presented a history of ancient poetic forms which is based on reliable classical sources; he will now go on

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to describe the particular way in which English poetry has taught itself the rules of proportion; ancient examples are about as applicable to this exercise as classical quantity is to English. 41 As Galyon has observed, ‘at the cognitive level, when language has passed the ear and reached the mind, res and verba are inextricably woven together.’ Galyon, ‘Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia’, 37. 42 Hillman, ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, 76.

Chapter 4 1 Despite its unusualness, John Hart’s orthography unequivocally aimed at universal acceptance: ‘To which ende is this treatise, for the profite of the multitude, and that by opening the windowe whereby is light given to discern betwixt perfection and barbarousnesse, so as every reasonable creature universally (of what nation soever understanding it) may be a perfite judge howe every language ought to bee written.’ John Hart, An Orthographie (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1968), 2r. Thomas Smith does not state his intentions quite as openly as this, but the universal applicability of his orthography is implied in his view that language depends upon ‘the common consent of many in nation-wide agreement’. Thomas Smith, De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicanae Scriptione, Dialogus (1568) in Sir Thomas Smith: Literary and Linguistic Works, 3 vols, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1963), III, 41. 2 M. C. Bradbrook, ‘St George for Spelling Reform: Social Implications of Orthography – Cheke to Wythorn; Mulcaster to Shakespeare’s Holofernes’, Shakespeare Quarterly 15.3 (1964), 129–41 (130). 3 Ed. William C. Carroll, Love’s Labor’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4 Richard DeMolen provides the most extensive account of the reasons for and against the identification. See Richard DeMolen, Richard Mulcaster (c.1531–1611) and Educational Reform in the English Renaissance (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1991), 158–71. See also Foster Watson, Richard Mulcaster and His Elementarie (London: C.F. Hodgson and Son, 1893), 3; Richard Mulcaster, Positions, ed. Robert Herbert Quick (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 304; E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation, 1500–1700, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), I, 128. 5 Of course, Holofernes reverses Smith and Hart’s phoneticism: where they had sought a spelling which would represent speech exactly, Holofernes pronounces every letter in a word on the assumption that language is in fact phonetically spelt. 6 Although Smith and Hart were not the only orthographers to propose strictly phonemic systems, they can justifiably be considered together since Hart appears

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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not only deeply familiar with Smith’s work, but declares that in both treatises, the ‘summe, effect, and ende is one. Which is, to use as many letters in our writing, as we doe voyces or breathes in speaking, and no more: and never to abuse one for another, and to write as we speake’. Hart, Orthographie, 6r. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 27. Goldberg describes this kind of reading succinctly: ‘to read deconstructively/ historically on the line can be to practice an ideological reading, for the possibility of linearization (read, within literacy studies as the telos of script, the realization of rationality, the apex of civilization, and so on) “has been structurally bound up with that of economy, of technics, and of ideology. This solidarity appears in the process of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierachization, of the formation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes” (Gram, 86). That statement (perhaps one of those that Derrida claims have not been read) provides the program for Writing Matter.’ Goldberg, Writing Matter, 25–6. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 26. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 26. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 28. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 32. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 29. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 45. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 28. E. J. Dobson reminds us that Mulcaster’s orthography is ‘chiefly intended as a preliminary to the discussion of reading, an important fact to remember, for a schoolmaster must of necessity teach the established spelling and is therefore more likely to concern himself with and defend its principles than to attempt to discover and propagate those which ought theoretically to apply in a reformed spelling’. Dobson, English Pronunciation 1500–1700, I, 18. Mulcaster foresaw that a radically new orthography would either constitute a radical break from all that had previously been written in English, or require the translation of all existing material into the new system. David Cressy, ‘Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early Modern England’ in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 305–19 (311). I take this formulation from Wittgenstein’s attempts to determine criteria for what counts as reading. He describes various students being taught the sounds of words, initially only pronouncing a few sounds correctly, making frequent mistakes, gradually making fewer mistakes and slowly achieving fluency. When we come to analyse these cases, we find it impossible to determine where the

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22

23

24 25 26 27

28

Notes student first began reading, and instead we merely see a ‘continuous series of transitional cases’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), §161. I take the image of the artichoke from Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §164. The image of uprooting is echoed when Mulcaster claims to have found ‘a great blemish in the hole bodie of learning, as Plato, no doubt, in the ripping up, of right did find to be in government’ (233). The Elementarie itself serves a similar function in Mulcaster’s oeuvre – or, at least his conception of it – as ‘a leader to the residue’, one which begins ‘to teach this low, bycause I wold not leap, but rise by degrees entending to mount higher, as my argument growes higher’ (¶r). Rebecca Bushnell’s extensive analysis of such metaphors is perhaps the best recent account of their use in early modern pedagogical manuals. See Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chs 3 and 4. John F. McDiarmid, ‘Recovering Republican Eloquence: John Cheke v. Stephen Gardiner on the Pronunciation of Greek’, Journal of the History of European Ideas 38.3 (2012), 338–51. McDiarmid, whose article I am deeply indebted to, casts this disagreement as one between the latent scholastic, who defers to Aristotle’s Organon (Boethius’ translation) which affirmed that language was conventional, and the humanist, who stands with Cicero and Quintilian in asserting that only the best deserved imitation. Aristotle, De interpretatione, II. Smith, De recta, 39. Smith, De recta, 41. Smith observes that the meanings of words can be ‘temporarily changed at will’, which unfortunately means that their meanings are always available for users to distort and abuse: ‘The same can be said about written language, if anyone wants to misuse one letter for another.’ Smith, De recta, 41–3. ‘Consent’ is a watchword in a slightly later orthography, William Bullokar’s Booke at Large (1580), which does not propose a completely new orthography, but an ‘amendment’ to the current system. William Bullokar, Booke at Large, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1970), B1v. In his prefatory poem, Bullokar attempts to use ‘consent’ as a principle of correctness, and not just the means by which custom received reform: And as consent in speech was cause, to make a perfect sound, in voice, wherby meanings are known, wherof letters take ground, The like consent, must be in these, to make a picture plaine, for everie voice, which joined with mo, all words true may remaine:

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For ever (henceforth) time to come, and now in present use, which in time past, hath bene pacht up, no man can it excuse. (Bullokar, Booke at Large, C1v) In one sense, consent is the agreement existing in a community of language users which allows for verbal exchange. However, in this prefatory poem, and in the dedication, Bullokar argues ‘that in true Ortography, both the eye, the voyce, and the eare consent most perfectly, without any let, doubt, or maze’ (Bullokar, Booke at Large, B1r). Consent is thus also a sensory coherence in which a word is spelt according to how it sounds, and pronounced according to how it is spelt. For Bullokar, an orthography imbued with this sensory consent would quickly enter ‘a generall use, for the easie, speedie, and perfect reading and writing of English’ (Bullokar, Booke at Large, A1r). Smith, De recta, 39. Smith, De recta, 31. Smith, De recta, 35. ‘Now writing is an imitation of speech, as painting is of a person. For as we sometimes see a man’s face so well painted that a man who had never seen him can recognize by means of the lifeless picture the form of the living person the artist has chosen to paint: so in writing, the uttered words, speech, syllables and letters are recognized, and suddenly writing takes the place of a picture, so that writing may be truly described as a picture of speech.’ Smith, De recta, 31. Smith, De recta, 37. In fact, for Smith, the very fact that human language can be expressed in written letters is what differentiates human speech from the sounds animals make. See Smith, De recta, 29. Smith, De recta, 41; 43. ‘For writing, like speech, indicates what it presents to the understanding, not by nature, but by consent and agreement of its users.’ Smith, De recta, 33. Smith, De recta, 41. ‘Now that writing presents speech to us as obviously and clearly as a picture represents bodies and their shadows, which the most ignorant of men recognizes at first sight; but because by agreement and consent between educated people, a particular sign corresponds with a particular sound. Among those skilled in this art, a sound is recognized by its sign as well as a body by its picture.’ Smith, De recta, 31–3. Smith, De recta, 13 Smith, De recta, 15. Smith, De recta, 17; 19. Smith, De recta, 21. Against the thoughtlessness of Stubborn, Smith’s orthography, when it appears in the dialogue, bears the marks of intense ongoing revision. A boy is called to fetch it. When the manuscript materializes it seems still to be materializing.

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55

Notes Smith confesses that, since he has been working on it for such a long time, its pages are full of rewritings and crossings out, and exist as ‘a few sheets of paper sewed together’. Since these pages would hardly be legible to anyone other than its author, Smith decides: ‘I shall have to read it to you, for as you can see, it is so spoiled by deletions and interlineations that I am not sure whether I can guess what I have written in a good many places’ (Smith, De recta, 27). The rules of the orthography are not written, but articulated from loose pages of barely legible script. Smith’s orthography as it is present in the dialogue thus exists as speech, the very ideal towards which a phonetic orthography aspires. Smith, De recta, 105. John Hart, An Orthographie (1569) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), ¶2r. Hart, Orthographie, title page. Hart, Orthographie, 6r. Hart, Orthographie, ¶4r. Hart, Orthographie, 11v–12r. Hart, Orthographie, 12r. Hart, Orthographie, 4r–4v. Hart makes this point explicitly: ‘Tongues have often chaunged (as it is sayd in the Preface) then if occasion in the fancies of men, have had power to chaunge tongues, much more Reason should correct the vicious writing of the speach, wherein (as in all things) use shoulde none otherwise take place, than experience proveth it to be reasonable and profitable, and the contrarie to be taken for abuse or misuse’ (13r). It ought to be remembered that the accuracy of a phonetic orthography would be largely meaningless to the great majority of users unable to distinguish precisely between the different kinds of speech sound. Hart, Orthographie, 3v. Hart, Orthographie, 11r–11v. John Hart, A Method or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned (London: Henrie Denham, 1570), *1r. John Hart, A Method, A2v. Hart, A Method, A2vA3r. Hart composed the final quarter of An Orthographie in his reformed script. These pages set out instructions for the pronunciation of consonants that have not yet been discussed. So, a complete understanding of Hart’s orthography is open only to that reader who will take the trouble to decipher it themselves. The reader is forced into this catch-22 by virtue of the profound difficulties of establishing such an unusual orthography: familiarization is something that even the most rational of orthographies cannot teach; it must be willingly acquired by the reader.

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56 ‘In their desire of redresse, theie appeall to sound, as the onelie soverain, the surest leader in the government of writing: & fly to innovation, as the onelie mean, to reform all errors, that be in our writing’ (84). 57 It ought to be noted in passing that Mulcaster never names Smith and Hart. However, since they were the most prominent of the orthographers calling for reform on strictly phonetic lines, they are clearly the main target of his attacks. 58 Hart laments that the current orthography is in ‘such confusion and disorder, as it may be accounted rather a kind of ciphring, or such a darke kinde of writing, as the best and readiest wit that ever hath bene, could, or that is or shalbe, can or may, by the only gift or reason, attaine to ready and perfite reading thereof, without a long and tedious labour, for that it is unfit and wrong shapen for the proportion of the voice’ (2r). This was a common charge levelled against customary spelling. In presenting his orthography in the context of a proposal for a pedagogical institution, Mulcaster argues that the ‘labour’ required to attain literacy would not be as much as Hart had thought. 59 Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996), 25. 60 ‘For my ende is, to shew mine opinion how the great varietie in teaching, which is now generally used, maye be reduced to some uniformnesse.’ Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581), ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 286–7. According to Richard DeMolen, Mulcaster advocated ‘an educational philosophy which would benefit all citizens. It is to Mulcaster, no doubt influenced by Vives, that we owe the idea of a public elementary – an institution which would bring the various classes of English society together, expose them to a common learning, and in the process select the best for positions of responsibility and service. Merit rather than birth was to be the criterion of admission’. Richard DeMolen, ‘Richard Mulcaster’s Philosophy of Education’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972), 69–91 (74). 61 Mulcaster foresaw the danger of producing more educated men than there were positions in the country to be filled by them, and directly addresses those parents who thoughtlessly envision for their child a life of learning. Mulcaster encourages them to consider their child’s natural aptitude, and, especially, the needs of the nation. See Mulcaster, Positions, 146–7. 62 Mulcaster, Positions, 151. Where a talented student lacked the finances to fund their attendance at the grammar school, Mulcaster recommended that the government make them available: ‘the value of wittes must be heled of most worth, which hath her haven already appointed, where to harbor her selfe, in maintenaunce to studie, either by private helpe, if the parents be wealthy, or publike ayde, if povertie praie for it.’ Positions, 150–1.

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63 See Barker’s Introduction in Mulcaster, Positions, xxx. 64 David Cressy, ‘Educational Opportunity in Tudor and Stuart England’, History of Education Quarterly 16 (Fall, 1976), 301–20 (305). 65 Cressy, ‘Educational Opportunity’, 306–7. 66 Cressy, ‘Educational Opportunity’, 308. 67 Mulcaster, Positions, 186. 68 Mulcaster, Positions, 238–9. In a very practical way, Ascham was beyond reproach. Richard DeMolen has made note of an entry in the Stationer’s Register, dated 6 March 1581 warning that Positions would not be printed ‘yf the booke conteine any thinge prejudiciall or hurtfull to the booke of maister Askham’. Quoted in de Molen, Richard Mulcaster, 53. 69 For instance, double translation aimed to recover for the student the active choices made by an author in order for the student to assimilate the author’s judgement. See Chapter 2. 70 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 101. 71 It ought to be remembered, of course, that Ascham’s pedagogy is one geared to teach Latin, and Mulcaster’s to teach English, and the differences between them are, in part, reflective of the differences between teaching dead and living languages. But these differences alone cannot account for the disagreement. Their respective views of custom are expressed in general and far-reaching terms which exceed the specific contexts of English and Latin instruction. 72 Reflecting upon the unenthusiastic reception of Positions and Elementarie, Barker has remarked that neither appealed ‘to the notion of an individuality of the learner, to the private self, which became the focus of much educational theory during the great epistemological shift in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mulcaster’s notion of education is deeply public’, Mulcaster, Positions, xxxvii–xxxviii. 73 Mulcaster, Positions, 186; 189. 74 Mulcaster, Positions, 189. 75 Mulcaster, Positions, 188. 76 For instance: ‘For who am I to persuade the liking of so full an Elementarie, not allowed of the most, neither tried of the best? A simple teacher. And yet that teaching name is not plane nothing, in a matter of a school. A mean companion. That is a great something, where the persuaders countenance is to carrie awaie the thing. Nay a newfangle. That is very odious, where the old currant will not lightlie be changed, and the opinion of right hath both the countenance of best, and contentment of the most, whereupon to make staie’ (6). 77 Mulcaster, Positions, 42–3. 78 Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-maister (1596) is a textbook on correct pronunciation and spelling. It contains several instructions and explanations to the teacher in the form of chapter headings and marginal notes. On first taking

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the course the student is prohibited from reading these passages, but in a short dialogue between two students with which Coote ends his instruction, one of the students says, ‘by your leave we shall first reade over againe all that we have learned, with the preface, titles of the chapters, and notes in the margent of our bookes, which we omitted before, because they were too hard: for we shall go no further before we be perfect in this’. Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-maister (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), 36. Although Coote never explains why this might be pedagogically worthwhile, it is similar to the progression of Mulcaster’s student from practice to a rational analysis of that practice. Here, Mulcaster translates passages from Aristotle’s Politics: ‘the beginning of everie thing is of most moment, cheflie to him, that is yong and tender, bycause the stamp is best fashioned, and entereth deapest, wherewith ye mean to mark him, and the sequele will be such, as the foretrain shall lead, whether soever you march, bycause naturallie the like still draweth on like’ (23). This view is supported by R. F. Jones who confirms that ‘Mulcaster’s attitude toward the current orthography is the antithesis of his predecessors. To them custom was the blind following of crooked paths, but to him it represented unwritten and unmethodized rational principles.’ R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 160. Without disputing such histories, Hart allows himself to assume, with certainty, that ‘the inventors of letters whatsoever they were, had a regard to man’s voice’. Hart, Orthographie, 8v. Hart is thus able to characterize his phonetic orthography as faithfulness to the origin of writing; an origin, moreover, that has subsequently become sullied by the corrupting influence of custom, and lost in conjecture through the retellings of history. Hart does provide a very brief excursus into the history of changes wrought on Hebrew and Latin which, according to him, shows ‘that every nation doth frame hir tung to hir speech the best she may, according to the right use of letters’. An Orthographie, 7v. Though apparently reasserting the authority of phonetic spelling, Hart unwittingly provides a rationalization of orthographic change which closely resembles a defence of use. Mulcaster explains that, not only are there stages in the fining of tongues, but there are also degrees in the kind of fining available to them. The first degree of fining is the method the first tongue used to achieve perfection, before which, ‘no tung at all had anie bewtie in the pen’ (63). The development of later tongues constitute a second degree of fining, for they ‘proined and pikt themselves, by following that method, which the primitive did use’ (63). Mulcaster’s allegory embodies a third degree of fining since it follows the first through the ‘translations’ (64) of the second.

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83 The political nature of Mulcaster’s allegory has been analysed by Maria O’Neill. See ‘Richard Mulcaster’s Allegory: A Humanist View of Language and State’, Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies 18 (1997), 242–52. 84 According to Maria O’Neill, Mulcaster’s orthographical triumvirate has a precedent in contemporary monarchical politics: ‘just as Art rested on the pillars of Reason, Custom and Sound, so too the monarch in theory was advised by the members of the Privy council. They represented, like their counterparts in language, the forces of tradition and common sense whose roots stretched downward and backwards to embrace and strengthen its authority.’ Maria O’Neill, ‘Richard Mulcaster’s Allegory’, 249. 85 Reason demands attentiveness to language as practised: it is comprised of observation, ‘to mark what were fairest in sense, what were readiest in pen, what were currantest in use’ (72), and comparison, ‘to confer that, which he allowed in one, with the proportion, which he found in another, that the hole might be sutable’ (72–3). 86 Mulcaster makes it clear that at this time, art is also needed to quell the momentary resurgence of ‘sounds malcontented frinds’ who ‘did never rest but alwaie sought means to supplant the two other’ (73). The failures of Smith and Hart are, ironically, signs of the emergence of the art that would vanquish them once and for all. 87 Dobson, English Pronunciation, 1500–1700, I, 122; 122; 123; 127. 88 Dobson remarks that Mulcaster’s ‘spellings are of practically no value as indications of pronunciation’ (Dobson, English Pronunciation, I, 122). 89 See Dobson, English Pronunciation, I, 123–7. 90 Dobson, English Pronunciation, I, 122. 91 Dobson, English Pronunciation, I, 122. 92 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67. 93 Coote used a similar justification for rules. Having taught that a syllable must start with a consonant, he intimates the possible objection, ‘But Sir, some men spell derivative wordes thus, speak-eth. strength-en-ing. otherwise than you have taught.’ The master replies: ‘I know it well, yet because if such like words should be spelled, we must for them frame new rules (which were to bring a needlesse oppression upon childrens memory.) And that the former rules can bring no inconvenience in any word: therfore follow them without feare or doubt. And thus may you by this that you have learned, spell truly, certainly, and with judgement, any English word that can be laid before you.’ Coote, The English Schoole-maister, 20. That is, rules are certain if they have a pedagogical use. Exceptions must be learned as exceptions, not as following some hidden rule. 94 Cavell has in mind remarks from Wittgenstein such as this one: ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.

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Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §217). Cavell’s gloss on this is helpful: ‘What justifies what I do and say is, I feel like saying, me – the fact that I can respond to an indefinite range of responses of the other, and that the other, for my spade not to be stopped, must respond to me, in which case my justification may be furthered by keeping still.’ Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 77. 95 Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), 27. For consistency’s sake, I have changed the gender of Hammer’s student and teacher to male. 96 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 93. 97 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 86.

Chapter 5 1 Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 79. 2 Waswo, Language and Meaning, 80. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §105. 4 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §106. 5 Robert DeMaria, Jr has written that ‘One of the most common and durable questions about Johnson’s Dictionary is whether Johnson was concerned faithfully to record English or in some way or other to fix it, adjust it, or reform it’ (Robert DeMaria, Jr, ‘The Theory of Language in Johnson’s Dictionary’ in Johnson after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 159–74 (159)). Instead of coming down on either side of this question, I am arguing for its being a moot issue. Johnson openly concedes that no dictionary can reform the use of words into a fixed and perfect state. My point is that such a concession only has significance in the context of an aspiration to reform, and that, in this tension between aspiration and concession, the question of reformation and description remains unresolved for Johnson. 6 Samuel Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London: 1747), 3. 7 Johnson, Plan of a Dictionary, 10. 8 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: 1755), 10. 9 Johnson, A Dictionary, 11. 10 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66.

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11 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §128. 12 See James McLaverty, ‘From Definition to Explanation: Locke’s Influence on Johnson’s Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas 47.2 (1986), 377–94; Elizabeth Hendrik, ‘Locke’s Theory of Language and Johnson’s Dictionary’, Eighteenth Century Studies 20.4 (1987), 422–44. In Brendan Wilson’s excellent commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the Lockean conception of language is continually put forward as a catch-all term for the kind of thinking that Wittgenstein was trying to critique. See Brendan Wilson, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 12. 13 Johnson, A Dictionary, 3. 14 ‘There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniences of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake, and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.’ Johnson, Plan of a Dictionary, 10. 15 Johnson, A Dictionary, 3. 16 I would argue that any characterization of his dictionary as prescriptive must come with significant caveats such as those highlighted in Geoff Barnbrook, ‘Johnson the Prescriptivist?: The Case for the Prosecution’ in Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s Dictionary, ed. Jack Lynch and Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92–112; and Anne McDermott, ‘Johnson the Prescriptivist?: The Case for the Defense’ in Anniversary Essays, 113–28. 17 Of the hundreds of examples, these three may suffice. In the third sense listed for ‘privacy’, meaning ‘Privity; joint knowledge; great familiarity’, Johnson is quick to add: ‘Privacy in this sense is improper.’ For the entry, ‘to proselyte’, Johnson warns, ‘A bad word.’ And for ‘wondrous’, he asserts, ‘Wondrous is barbarously used for an adverb.’ Moreover, the metaphor of branding used to describe the marking of such improper words is, of course, Johnson’s own, and comes from The Plan: ‘Barbarous or impure words and expressions, may be branded with some note of infamy, as they are carefully to be eradicated wherever they are found; and they occur too frequently in the best writers.’ Johnson, The Plan, 29. 18 This passage is characteristic: ‘Some senses however there are, which, though not the same, are yet so nearly allied, that they are often confounded. Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness; and consequently some examples might be indifferently put to either signification: this uncertainty is not to be imputed to me, who do not form, but register the language; who do not teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts.’ Johnson, A Dictionary, 9.

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19 Johnson, A Dictionary, 9. 20 In The Plan, Johnson had envisaged a role for the quotations very different to that of clarifying a word’s meaning: ‘By this method every word will have its history, and the reader will be informed of the gradual changes of the language, and have before his eyes the rise of some words, and the fall of others’ (Johnson, The Plan, 32). Far from isolating a stable and exact meaning, the quotations would actually show just how susceptible to change language is. 21 Although I am simplifying Johnson’s position here I hope I do not do so to the point of misrepresentation and condescension. I should acknowledge that Johnson’s copious use of examples to depict lexical change – which is the defining feature of his art of definition – is powerfully at odds with the Augustinian picture of language which of itself can provide no account of lexical change. Of course, this raises its own question of whether Johnson’s practice can be reconciled to the assumptions which underpin his ideal. This I will have to pass by, but not without speculating that Johnson shows a conscious ambition to explain, but a willing predisposition to describe. 22 Johnson, A Dictionary, 6. 23 Johnson, A Dictionary, 9. 24 Johnson, Plan of a Dictionary, 5. Ian Lancashire has argued that ‘Johnson showed little admiration for most of these, the English lexicographers who preceded him. Of the 342 lexicons Johnson catalogued in the Harley Library, not one English monolingual dictionary received an annotation . . . Johnson’s own library, when catalogued after his death, had no general monolingual English lexicon, as far as we can tell.’ Ian Lancashire, ‘Dictionaries and Power from Palsgrave to Johnson’, in Anniversary Essays, 24–41 (28). 25 The most important study of the early modern English dictionary remains DeWitt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604–1755. This detailed historical analysis shows the large extent to which earlier word lists were absorbed into later ones, and deals less with the lexical methodology their writers utilize. Starnes and Noyes tend also to treat the hard word lists as largely continuous with the earlier calls for a dictionary made by William Bullokar and Richard Mulcaster. See DeWitt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604–1755 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991), 9–12. See also, R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 157. 26 John Hart, An Orthographie (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), 5r. 27 William Bullokar, Booke at Large, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1970), C1v.

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28 Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 166. 29 Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), title page. 30 Tetsuro Hayashi has noted a correlation in earlier bilingual and polyglot dictionaries between the practice of gathering synonymous expressions and the principle of copiousness. See Tetsuro Hayashi, The Theory of English Lexicography, 1530–1791 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1978), 29. This correlation seems also to be present in the aims and methods of Cawdrey’s lexicography. 31 Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, A3r–A3v. 32 Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, A4r–A4v. 33 Juliet Fleming, ‘Dictionary English and the Female Tongue’ in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 290–325 (299). 34 Fleming, ‘Dictionary English and the Female Tongue’, 299. 35 See, for instance, Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). More immediately relevant to the hard words lists is the argument put forward by Allon White. Extracted from the flux of history and put into writing, the usual would assume the tone of what White has called ‘seriousness’: ‘even in a word list the word is given a style, imbued with a specific profile under the lexicographer’s hand. This stylistic profile is inseparable from ideological context. The dictionary embodies an implicit hierarchy of language and produces a linguistic environment which, taken together, powerfully establish the “high” language over against all other registers, dialects and sociolects.’ Allon White, ‘The Dismal Sacred Word: Academic Language and the Social Reproduction of Seriousness’, Journal of Literature, Teaching, Politics 2 (1983), 4–15 (6). The dictionary ratifies its seriousness under the aegis of pedagogy, effectively designating ignorance by ‘formalizing the prestige language and making entry into that formalisation a condition of social advancement.’ White, ‘Dismal Sacred Word’, 8. By assuming the ignorance of their user, the early English dictionaries would thus exclude them from the linguistic community which had produced the list. 36 Robert Cawdrey, A Treasury or Store-house of Similes (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), A2v. 37 Cawdrey attempts to remind his readers that in some situations plain expressions are the most appropriate: ‘Such as by their place and calling, (but especially Preachers) as have ocassion to speak publiquely before the ignorant people, are to bee admonished, that they never affect any strange ynckhorne termes, but labour to speake so as is commonly received, and so as the most ignorant may well understand them: neyther seeking to be over fine or curious, nor yet living

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39 40 41 42 43

44 45

177

over carelesse, using their speech, as most men do, & ordering their wits, as the fewest have done . . . Those therefore that will avoyde this follie, and acquaint themselves with the plainest & best kind of speech, must seeke from time to time such words as are commonlie received, and such as properly may expresse in plaine manner, the whole conceit of their minde.’ Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, A3r–A3v. Developments in dictionary writing from Cawdrey on show that these lists drew heavily from each other. Cawdrey himself drew from the list at the end of Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-maister (1596) which is comprised of hard English words derived from Greek, Latin and French. DeWitt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes have calculated that ‘Cawdrey absorbs 87 per cent of Coote’s word list and that this amount from Coote constitutes 40 per cent of the total of Cawdrey’s Table.’ Starnes and Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 18. John Bullokar, in turn, drew heavily on Cawdrey for An English Expositor, and on the title page to Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie the debt to his predecessors is stated unequivocally: ‘Being a collection of the choisest words contained in the Table Alphabeticall and English Expositor.’ Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968). DeWitt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes have systematically traced these extensive borrowings, and I defer to their findings to save repeating them here. It is worth remarking though that this constant borrowing was not just a lexicographical shortcut in what must have been a big labour, but a form of lexical exchange by which these words were rendered usual. Although significant sources would often be left unacknowledged, similarity in definitions ensured, even created, currency. The ‘dictionary’ therefore becomes itself a site of use, simultaneously forging and validating a ‘dictionary English’ through extended and repeated borrowing; in a sense, these words become terms usual to the art of dictionary writing. John Bullokar, An English Expositor (Menston: Scolar Press, 1967), A3v. Johnson, A Dictionary, 9. Bullokar, An English Expositor, A2r–A2v. Bullokar, An English Expositor, A2v–A3r. Jürgen Schäfer has argued that Part II of Cockeram’s list ‘is often taken to constitute an independent section which contains additional neologisms . . . An analysis of the entries quickly shows that Part II is nothing but a reversal of Part I’. Jürgen Schäfer, ‘The Hard Word Dictionaries: A Re-Assessment’, Leeds Studies in English 4 (1970), 31–48 (39–40). Of course, my point is that the reversal is salient and revealing per se in that it provides another use for the same material. Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, A4v. Thomas Blount, Glossographia (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), A1r. When quoting from Blount I have retained the italics and emboldening of the original.

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46 Blount, Glossographia, A4v. 47 Cawdrey inherited this aim, even its exact wording, from Coote’s Schoole-maister which taught ‘any unskilful person’ the understanding of ‘hard english words, which they shall in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere heare or reade: and also bee made able to use the same aptly themselves’. Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-maister (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), A1r. 48 See Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, A3v. 49 Cockeram, English Dictionarie, A4v. 50 Blount, Glossographia, A6r. 51 As I argued in Chapter 2, the ear fulfils a similar function in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy. 52 Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London: Scolar Press, 1974), C1r. 53 Phillips, The New World of English Words, C4r. 54 Phillips, The New World of English Words, B3r. 55 Phillips, The New World of English Words, B3r. 56 Johnson, Dictionary, 6. Certainly, the objects at which Augustine’s elders point are things in the world, whereas Johnson’s are Lockean ideas, both simple and complex. But the point remains: whether existing in the mind or the world, such objects cannot be said to be the meanings of the words which they represent. 57 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §210–11.

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Index Alexander, Gavin 59 archery 31–6, 38, 40, 56 Ariosto 59 Aristophanes 54 Aristotle 15, 59, 83, 95, 105 De interpretatione 95 Ars Poetica 75 art of English 76, 96, 97, 112, 117, 131, 141 Ascham, Roger 5, 12, 29, 31–57, 62, 80, 81, 105, 123, 142, 146 cumlyenesse 36 double translation 44, 45, 48–50, 52, 53, 57 good order 42, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53 Scholemaster, The 31, 32, 39, 40, 41–57, 142 Toxophilus, The Schole of Shoting 5, 31–57, 80, 81 Ulysses 47 wilfulness 45, 46 Attridge, Derek 61–4, 72, 82, 89 Barker, William 104 Blank, Paula 103 Blount, Thomas 138, 140, 142 Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words 138–40, 142 Bradbrook, M.C. 86 Bullokar, John 136, 137 An English Expositor 136 Bullokar, William 131, 132 Booke at Large 131 Bushnell, Rebecca 42, 43 A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice 42 Caesar 53, 56, 57 Cambridge 94, 95 Camporeale, Salvatore 24 Cavell, Stanley 5, 6, 15–20, 39, 118, 119, 144

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Cawdrey, Robert 133–42 A Table Alphabeticall 133–6, 139 A Treasury or Storehouse of Similies 135, 136 charientes 74 Cheke, John 31, 94, 95 De pronuntiatione Graecae linguae 95 Cicero 31, 34, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 53, 56 De oratore 34 Cockeram, Henry 138 English Dictionarie, The 138, 139 Colet, John 86 Confessions 8, 19 consuetudo 25 Cornish language 76 corporal punishment 42, 43 court, the 46, 47, 60–3, 70, 71, 73–5, 82, 83, 89 courtly English 75 courtly figure of allegoria 67–8 Cressy, David 90, 104 custom 29, 46, 49, 54–6, 64, 74–80, 85–7, 90, 92–119, 127, 132 Daniel, Samuel 59, 77 A Defense of Rhyme 77 Danielsson, Bror 98 decorum 8, 13–16, 19, 21, 27–9, 32, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 59–63, 70, 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 83, 129, 134, 144 Demosthenes 51 Derrida, Jacques 87, 88, 90 dictionaries 5, 14, 27, 121–45 discretion 48, 61, 65, 71, 73, 105, 106, 134, 138 Dobson, E.J. 113, 114 don Armado (Love’s Labour’s Lost) 86 doubt 4, 16, 28, 96, 103, 129 Eaton (Eton) 41 Elizabeth I, 69, 70

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188 eloquence 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 53, 56, 57, 59, 138 Elsky, Martin 77 Elyot, Thomas 105 England 23, 27, 42, 48, 55, 90 epitome 50 Erasmus 51, 95, 142 De copia 142 De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione 95 essence 20–6, 115, 122, 125, 126, 143, 145 Fleming, Juliet 78, 135 Foucault, Michel 12 Frege, Gottlob 26 From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe 11 Galyon, Linda 78 Gardiner, Stephen 95 Gerl, Hanna-Barbara 24 Glock, Hans-Johann 23 Goldberg, Jonathan 85 Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance 87–91 Grafton, Anthony 11, 88 grammar 11, 22, 30, 48, 50, 108, 131 grammar schools 48, 60, 87, 104, 106–8, 113 Greene, Thomas 37, 38, 40 Guillim, John 66 A Display of Heraldry 66 Hall, Edward 66 Chronicle 66 Halpern, Richard 12 Hammer, Espen 118 Harrington, John 59 Hart, John 87, 90, 92, 99–106, 109, 112, 114, 116, 118, 131, 132 An Orthographie 99–100, 101 A Method or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned 100, 101 Harvey, Gabriel 76 Helgerson, Richard 55 Hessus, Eobanus Helius 51 Hillman, David 61, 63, 64, 82

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Index Holofernes (Love’s Labour’s Lost) 86, 87, 119 Homer 47, 48, 51, 54 Horace 29, 54, 75 intendment 66–8, 70 Italianated Englishman 41 Italy 47, 48 Jardine, Lisa 11, 88 Javitch, Daniel 60 Johnson, Samuel 14, 27, 29, 123–34, 137, 143, 144 A Dictionary of the English Language 125, 143, 144 Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, The 124, 127 judgement 7, 14, 15, 18, 19, 29, 32, 36, 38, 40–57, 60, 71, 73, 75, 81, 93, 100, 105, 106, 138 Kahn, Victoria 15, 16, 48, 49, 62–4 Pyrrhonist scepticism 15 Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance 15 lexicography 124, 126–9, 141, 144 Locke, John 126 Macrobius 51 Marx, Karl 12 Mary Queen of Scots 69, 70 Matz, Robert 73 McDiarmid, John F. 95 Merchant Taylor’s School 86 metaphrasis 50 metwand 53, 57 Monfasani, John 25, 27 Montague, Jane 137 motivatedness 19–21 Mulcaster, Richard 5, 14, 85–94, 98, 101–18, 123, 132, 133, 146 “allwaie so” 92, 93 “commonlie so” 92, 93 First Part of the Elementarie, The 5, 14, 85–94, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 132 grounding 92–4

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Index Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children 86, 104 reasonable superstition 108 right writing 88, 92, 103, 114, 132 Odysseus 48 Odyssey 47, 48 Orlando Furioso 59 orthography 14, 76, 86, 87, 90–103, 106, 110–12, 114, 118, 119, 127 paraphrasis 50, 53 particulars, particularities 61, 116, 117 pedagogical gap 3–7, 18, 56, 89, 116, 133 Phaedrus 34 Phillips, Edward 140–2 New World of English Words, The 140, 141 phronesis 15, 63, 105 Pindar 54 Plato 26, 34, 107 poetry 26, 29, 30, 54, 55, 59–83, 133 posies 78 praise 41, 44, 53 Puttenham, George 5, 14, 26, 27, 59–83, 89, 123, 129, 142, 146 Art of English Poesy, The 5, 14, 59–69, 73, 76, 78, 82, 83, 89, 123, 142 Renaissance 11, 12, 15, 24, 59, 63, 64, 83, 87, 121, 122, 142 rhyme 54–6, 64, 76–9 rhythm 76 Ryan, Laurence V. 31, 35 Sackville, Richard 41 Sallust 56 scepticism 15–19, 41–5, 56, 65, 93, 123 Seneca 54 shape poems 78–80 Sidney, Phillip 59 Smith, Thomas 87, 90, 92, 94–106, 109–18 De recta et emendata linguae Anglicanae scriptione, dialogus 95, 97 Socrates 126

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solace 61, 63, 72, 80–2, 129 Sophocles 54 sound 76, 77, 80, 93, 94, 96–9, 102, 103, 109–15, 140 spelling 8, 14, 28, 30, 77, 85–119, 127, 131, 140, 141 Spenser, Edmund 76 St Augustine 8, 9, 19, 20, 21, 126, 143 St Paul’s Cathedral 66 St Paul’s School 86 Strozier, Robert M. 47, 49 Sturm, Johan 31, 52 Terence 54 Theocritus 51 threat of scepticism 15–18, 93 Trousdale, Marion 52, 67 use 28–30, 34, 35, 49, 81, 143, 145, 146 useful 28–30, 145, 146 usual 28–30, 133, 145 usual language 85 Valla, Lorenzo 24, 25 Virgil 51, 54, 67, 68 Aeneid 51 Eclogues 51, 67 Waswo, Richard 24–7, 121, 122 Language and Meaning in the Renaissance 24, 121 Welsh language 76 Wilson, K.J. 33 Wilson, Thomas 142 Art of Rhetoric, The 142 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 6, 8, 15, 17–26, 30, 47, 115–27, 143–5 Brown Book 119 On Certainty 145 Philosophical Investigations 5, 8, 15, 17, 19, 22, 126, 127 writing 12, 29, 48–50, 54, 68–9, 77, 87, 88, 90, 92–7, 99, 103, 110, 112, 114–16, 118, 132, 133

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