LITMIR.BIZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Perhaps it is worth remembering in conjunction with Bulwer’s fascination with hand gestures that early school vocabularies frequently begin with bilingual lists of body parts as an easy way for boys to learn Latin nouns. At least one, John Holt’s Lac puerorum (1507), included a picture of the hand as a kind of chart by which to organize the parts of speech.⁴³ Chironomia’s opening illustration presents four figures associated with “Grandiloquentia” (see Figure 3). Three watch, while one of them, the orator Demosthenes, rehearses. With his back to us

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