Teachers in Early Modern English Drama

Pedagogy and Authority

Jean Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367137663
• eBook ISBN: 9780429647673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Starting from the early modern presumption of the incorporation of role with authority, Jean Lambert explores male teachers as representing and engaging with types of authority in English plays and dramatic entertainments by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century.

This book examines these theatricalized portraits in terms of how they inflect aspects of humanist educational culture and analyzes those ideas and practices of humanist pedagogy that carry implications for the traditional foundations of authority.

Teachers in Early Modern English Drama is a fascinating study through two centuries of teaching Shakespeare and his contemporaries and will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, writing, and culture.

1 ‘So many men so many minds’

George Gascoigne’s schoolroom and The Glasse of Government

In performing the triumph of humanist pedagogy over opposing forces as projected through a contest between virtues and vices, George Gascoigne’s ‘tragicall Comedie’ The Glasse of Government, printed in 1575 (STC 11643a), connects schoolroom practice with a wider educational culture while borrowing from earlier didactic drama, particularly versions of the prodigal son motif. Conforming to a theatrical tradition supporting humanist pedagogical ideals as part of a broad, increasingly institutionalized agenda for shaping students, it accords with Christian, in this case Protestant, values. Examples of the genre are two tragicomic interludes, Nice Wanton attributed to Richard Wever and Thomas Ingelend (ca.1553, revived 1560) and Ingelend’s The Disobedient Child (ca.1570). Both are moral narratives implicitly invoking the importance of humanist educators by demonstrating the profits that applied learning confers on individuals and the commonwealth as against the tragic consequences awaiting the wilfully unschooled. Yet, their closures suggest that only a small minority of youths can benefit the state, the rest being superfluous, an outcome indicating an indictment of humanist pedagogy as elitist and its aim to educate all through the same curriculum impractical. The three plays may be glossed by a common saying mirrored in grammar-school vulgars (vernacular sentences) and dialogues, such as Robert Whittinton’s and John Stanbridge’s well-known Vulgaria: ‘it is better a chylde unborne/than untaught’ (109). Nice Wanton and Disobedient Child clearly articulate this dictum; Glasse may be insinuating it. Like its predecessors, however, Glasse evinces ambivalence about humanist values while seeming to be complicit with its ideology as expounded in pedagogical treatises by philosophers and educational practitioners, prescribed in school statutes and official documents, and validated by testimonials from scholars. There is no extant performance record for Gascoigne’s Glasse and, given its dry prose and numerous sober sententious maxims delivered in lengthy monologues, it is unlikely that it was played.

The play’s representation of humanist precepts centres on the character and practice of Gnomaticus, an idealized pedagogue, paragon of virtues, and the embodiment of antique authority. Interactions in his schoolroom highlight the fundamental principles of humanist education and may be designed to invoke contemporary debates about the cultivation of memory and imitation, learning reinforcements, the precedence of rule over understanding – art versus content – and the grounds of humanist authority. This chapter’s main focus is on the schoolmaster’s modes of authority as they are invested in humanist literary culture, conferred by contractual agreement, and set alongside critical responses to what he represents. The model for emulation, Gnomaticus compromises moral authority in connection with his exploitation of the commodity value of teaching and learning and his preoccupation with his own reputation and status, impulses judged by prominent contemporary theorists and commentators as abuses of the gift of learning and its benefits to the commonwealth. Critique also manifests in the performance of pedagogical method and the voice of ‘rashe youth’ in its challenges to traditional patterns of social control and subjection (6).¹ Indeed, as Cressy comments, education was cited by Francis Bacon and others as arousing fears about an overeducated population generating subversive elements primed for unrest in the form, for instance, of undermining religious conformity or the socio-economic order (24). Whilst the play enacts a poetic justice through the idiom of chivalric combat that leaves no doubt about Gascoigne’s moral purpose, its triumphalist ending is clouded by lingering scepticism about the ability of the humanist educational agenda to deliver on its principles and by an inclining towards a loss of faith in its legitimacy as an agency of authority.

‘Studie to profite the common wealth’

In his prologue, Gascoigne emphasizes his serious moral intent by assuring his audience that they will hear ‘true discourse’, speech purged of ‘Terence phrase’, pleasing to ‘godly Preachers’ and ‘compiled upon these sentences’ (6–7). Little wonder the play was not performed. ‘These sentences’, expressly stated dictates, number twenty-four Christian duties underwriting the text, including one endorsing the value of a humanist education: ‘Studie to profite the common wealth, for it is commendable with God and man’ (7). In effect, as T. W. Baldwin noted, the play sermonizes on the system, implicating education among virtues rewarded and the lack of it among vices punished (1: 436). In sum, education, virtue, and serving the commonwealth define the life of the better, that is, Christian, man. Gascoigne draws on Erasmus’s reformulation of a classical liberal education based on ancient pedagogical theories and apophthegms of the biographer and essayist Plutarch, and ideas of the great Roman teacher of rhetoric, Quintilian, and although the drama is set in Antwerp, the ideology and practice represented follow the English system as founded on Erasmian principles and expounded in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), a manual for private tutors of noble and genteel youth.² Accordingly, the language of ‘The Argument’ validates humanist conceptions of the purpose of education as the production of true Christian men fitted for a role in community service:

Two riche Citizens of Andwerpe (being nighe neighboures, & having eche of them two sonnes of like age) do place them togither with one godly teacher. The scholemaster doth briefly instruct them their duetie towardes God, their Prince, their Parents, their cuntrie, and all magistrates in the same. The eldest being young men of quicke capacitie, do (Parrotte like) very quickly learne the rules without booke: the younger being somewhat more dull of understanding, do yet engrave the same within their memories. The elder by allurement of Parasites and lewde company, beginne to incline themselves to concupiscence. The parents (to prevent it) sende them all togither to the University of Dowaye, whereas the yonger in short space be (by painefull studie) preferred, that one to be Secretaries unto the Palsegrave, that other becommeth a famous preacher in Geneva. The eldest (turning to their vomit) take their carriage with them, and travaile the worlde. That one is apprehended and executed for a robbery (even in sight of his brother) in the Palsgraves courte: that other whipped and banished Geneva for fornication: notwithstanding the earnest sute of his brother for his pardon.

The whole Comedie a figure of the rewardes and Punishments of vertues and vices (5).

Gnomaticus, the godly schoolmaster, instructs the four youths in true religion, virtuous conduct, and right learning, three specific characteristics pinpointed by Ascham as the foundation of a humanist curriculum (180). The younger brothers commit these lessons to memory. The older brothers, bored with such commonplaces, fail to do the exercises set by Gnomaticus and seek experiential learning outside the schoolroom through sensual pleasures. Similarly, Lamia, ‘the Harlot’, craves to live at liberty, free from the social conventions restricting gentlewomen’s lives espoused by her mother and church ministers ‘pratling’ against transgressive conduct from the pulpit (23). Having left her mother, she resides with her aunt Pandarina, who, true to her name, encourages Lamia to make the most of her beauty while she has it. Lamia becomes acquainted with Gnomaticus’s older pupils through Eccho, ‘the Parasyte’, for whom she represents the bait for ensnaring them. Knowing that they are sons to ‘two of the welthiest burghers’ in Antwerp, he plots to procure money from one of them in return for uniting him with Lamia (40). He dupes Gnomaticus by informing him that Markgrave Severus requests a visit from his pupils, hence gaining them an afternoon off school. The younger brothers fail to arrive at the Markgrave’s as immersion in their studies causes them to lose their way while the older pair visit Lamia but are seen entering the brothel and are reported to their parents. Gnomaticus recommends sending them to university and placing them under strict supervision to control their conduct. However, regarding university as an opportunity to indulge ‘wădring desires’, the older sons waste their time in taverns and bordellos and are aided in their waywardness by Ambidexter, the double-dealing servant of one of their fathers, who deliberately evades delivering Gnomaticus’s letters to the tutors selected by him as suitable supervisors for his pupils (80). Lamia and her associates are arrested for corrupting the burghers’ sons but Severus is hindered from making a case against them until he learns of Eccho’s deceit involving his name while Dick Drumme, ‘the Royster’ (noisy reveller), escapes to pursue further mischief with the older sons in Douai (4).³ The younger sons progress well, one becoming secretary to the Palsgrave, the other a famous preacher in Geneva. The older boys end badly. Having absconded from university, one older son is executed for robbery in Germany, the other banished from Geneva for sexual offences despite the best efforts of their younger brothers to ameliorate their harsh fates. Lamia, her aunt, and Eccho are publicly punished – Lamia and her aunt on the ducking stool, Eccho at the whipping post. Ambidexter receives punishment for colluding with the reprobates in leading the elder sons astray.

‘Some cause of contestation’

Gasgoigne’s moral purpose, encapsulated in a biblical quotation on the title page, is to enjoin spiritual health: ‘blessed are they that fear the Lorde, their children shalbe as the branches of the Olive trees rounde about their table’.⁴ In the dedicatory address to the print version of the play, however, he informs his kinsman and patron, Sir Owen Hopton, that he will doubtless find therein ‘some cause of contestation’ (3). By this he means a matter that is the subject of contention among his contemporaries and probably intends those reading or hearing his entertainment to understand its dynamic in rhetorical terms, namely, the popular figure of the comparison of contraries. Technically known as antitheton, ‘the Renconter’ or ‘Quarreler’, or contentio, the figure refers to an adversarial struggle or contentious encounter between contraries, which in Glasse informs a major part of the action, as the words appended to ‘The Argument’ suggest: ‘the whole Comedie a figure of the rewardes and punishmentes of vertues and vices’ (5).⁵ Gascoigne’s mirror of government represents a binary view of the world conceived in terms of a mimetic contest between behavioural antinomies associated with virtuous self-government and vicious misgovernment that bears witness to and persuades his audience of the unequivocal superiority of choosing the moral path, or so it seems. In particular, the tragicomic interplay demonstrates the consequences of application versus non-application to ‘painefull studie’ and selfless duty versus self-serving dissipation. Good fortune connects with virtue, ill fortune with vice as complementary attributes on the social ladder:

In true discourse, howe hygh the vertuous clyme,
Howe low they fall which lyve withouten feare
Of God or man, and much mispende theyr tyme (5, 6).

Paul Whitfield White suggests that the tension in Glasse is essentially between the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the reformative value of education (137). Certain lines in ‘The fourth Chorus’ may suggest these opposing discourses as the proponents in ‘some cause of contestation’: ‘the grace of God it is, whereas good gyftes must growe,/And lacke of God his grace it is, which makes them lye full lowe’ (71). Here, the bestowal of God’s grace as the determining factor in human destiny, a possible allusion to Calvin’s theories of divinely appointed eternal salvation as God’s gift to His chosen elect, appears to support this interpretation. Perhaps, Gascoigne was intimating his concern about the growing tendency for the faithful to believe in predestination and regard good works as irrelevant despite the Calvinist doctrine of free will, and hence its link with declining moral standards. However, Gascoigne’s final words in the ‘Epilogus’ reinforce what he, or more accurately his ‘muse’, means to make us know ‘by proofe in acte’: ‘this christsall glasse I polisht fayre and cleene,/For every man, that list his faultes to mend,/This was my mind (90). Rather more akin to the action of a morality play or Roman comedy, what is ‘set in shewe’ is a contention involving simple moral categories, abstractions engaging their representatives in a tussle for dominance that serves as testimony to the hard-won rewards proffered by the humanist manifesto (90).

The fathers of the pupils are Phylopæs, whose sons are Phylautus and Phylomusus, and Philocalus, the father of Phylosarchus and Phylotimus. To avoid confusion between the similarly named father and son characters and their variants in the text, the discussion omits their names and distinguishes between the pupils as older or younger sons or pupils.

Gnomaticus’s status as educational authority is predicated on a number of attributes traditionally recognized by late medieval and early modern society as essential in a schoolmaster, as Gascoigne’s authoritative chorus of ‘four grave burghers’ confirms. It is also conferred by or in association with a variety of sources. As the epitome of the ideal humanist pedagogue, his ‘godly’ nature is his principal attribute and the one most sought by his prospective employers, the Bible is his primary source (5). ‘Godly’ encompasses divinity and notions of coming from God or being god-like, but Gascoigne’s ‘sentences’ and text rather suggest the epithet is used to refer to godliness, the devout observance of God’s laws in conduct and speech (7). Godliness was considered to be the primary requirement for teachers in England by dint of Elizabethan legislation. In Tudor Royal Proclamations, a proclamation for 1559 enjoins teachers to induce all children and scholars to godliness and reverence of God’s true religion, an injunction reinforced simultaneously by the diocesan licensing of private and public teachers by which pedagogical authority was granted by bishops:

No man shall undertake to teach except … allowed by the ordinary and found meet for his learning and dexterity in teaching as for sober and honest conversation, and also for right understanding of God’s true religion (127).

As the ‘godly teacher’, Gnomaticus is qualified to inculcate the moral instruction and excellent knowledge of liberal sciences required to fulfil the approved humanist ambitions of a university education and state service, ambitions increasingly common among the wealthy middle ranks, epitomized by Gascoigne’s ‘two Citizens of Andwerpe’ (5). Anxious not to be categorized as ‘envious’ and unchristian, the two fathers justify their paternal aspirations for their sons’ advancement and reputational elevation in terms of humanist principle: ‘desire of promotion (by vertue) is godly and lawfull’ (9–10). In line with classical ethics, early modern learning construed ambition and reputation as morally good if earned for civic ends not self-aggrandizement, which schoolboys familiar with Cicero’s De Officiis (‘On Duty’) knew and Christian philosophers upheld as godliness (3: 285). Thomas Elyot, for example, condemns ambition grounded in ‘vayne and superfluous appetite’ and gratuitous desires pernicious to the ‘publike weale’, but condones education that prepares the children of gentlemen for positions of authority in the state (Book 3, fol. 212r, 213v, 214r; Book 1, fol. 15v). Hence, the fathers are keen to express conformity to this humanist doctrine by reminding their sons of the function of university study: ‘trusting that you will there use diligence, as may be to the profit of your Countrey and for your own advancements’ (63). Consequently, diligence and studiousness thus applied are the sole m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1  ‘So many men so many minds’: George Gascoigne’s schoolroom and The Glasse of Government
• 2  ‘O tempora, O mores’: Philip Sidney’s maying for Elizabeth I: The Lady of May
• 3  The end of learning in William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost
• 4  ‘Asse in presenti’: The discipline of grammar: John Marston’s What You Will
• 5  Playing the pedagogue with Shroud shrews: William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew
• 6  Prospero’s lessons: Island pedagogies and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
• 7  Pedagogical enormities and the fairing of a wasp and a bee in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair
• Index