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in adorning speech with tropes and figures and pronouncing it according as the differing nature of those tropes and figures require” (my emphasis).²¹ Verbal skill, in the eyes of humanist masters, had as much to do with the bodily mechanics of pronuntiatio and actio as with memory.²² Indeed, training in how to move one’s body often coincided with training in the physical motions of tongue and throat. Among Richard Mulcaster’s recommended daily exercises in running and wrestling and dancing is the practice of “loud speaking”—an exercise in vocal modulation (“first begin lowe, and moderately, then went on to further strayning, of their speeche: sometimes drawing it out … sometimes bringing it backe, to the sharpest and shrillest …”) derived from the ancient oratorical practice called “vociferation.” In Lily’s Grammar, which outlines and gives specific names to common, “ugly” faults of pronunciation, the boys found in a section called “Orthoepia” a specific exercise for refining the motions of their “chattering” tongues (balbutiens … ora): Errors of pronunciation “may bee amended by quickly pattering over som ribble rabble made hard to pronounce on purpose, as, arx, tridens, rostris, sphinx, praester, torrida, seps, strix.”²³ I quote from Charles Hoole’s English rendering here, because he thought highly enough of what was originally Lily’s exercise in tongue-tripping to recommend it to other schoolmasters (Grammatica Latina in usum scholarum adornata [London, 1651]).

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

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

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

      The theater’s ubiquitous presence in schoolroom practice may have gone relatively unexamined in part because of a long-standing, anachronistic distinction between rhetoric and drama. Critics have not attended as thoroughly as they might to the school’s intimate, habitual association between rhetoric and play acting.³² Schoolmasters thought both acting and declamation were good training in eloquence and the art of gentlemanly behavior. In several ordinances, “declame” and “play” are virtual synonyms. The Shrewsbury ordinances declare that “Everie thursdaie” scholars “shall for exercise declame and plaie one acte of a comedie,” while St. Saviour’s Grammar School in Southward required, in 1614, that “on play days the highest Form shall declaim and some of the inferior Forms act a scene of Terence or some dialogue” (emphasis mine).³³ A student at Merchant Taylors’ described the stage as a “means” to teach “good behaviour and audacitye,” while John Bale praised the headmaster of the grammar school in Hitchin

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