LITMIR.BIZ

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of an already (or once) “perfect” native art—an art that has shored up England’s defenses against outsiders and extended its renown to the far corners of the world—makes for an odd conclusion to the litany of not yets that propels the rest of book 1 and justifies its radical conflations of domesticity and estrangement. Indeed, Elyot rather casually observes at one point, midway through his attack on English legal discourse, that eloquence is no different than embroidery, drawing, or sculpture: if Englishmen are not able or willing to cultivate a particular skill at home—if, that is, they are to face the fact that they inhabit a realm where “the langage is barberouse” and “the steering of affections of the mind,” rhetoric itself, “was never used” (56_r)—they must “be constrained … to abandone [their] owne countraymen and resorte unto straungers” (55_r). That matter-of-fact resorting unto strangers exacts an unexpected toll in the final pages of book 1, as Elyot imagines a future England enervated and demoralized by its blind embrace of things novel and strange, its neglect of what it once knew and practiced best.

      Cicero the Sea Captain

      It is a bit of an interpretive leap to link this elegiac defense of the longbow to a latent concern for the vernacular, but I am nudged to make that leap by the fact that Elyot’s most important sixteenth-century reader—the heir to his zeal both for the English longbow and for foreign-language study—seems to have made it too. In 1545, a year before Elyot’s death, Roger Ascham, the young Cambridge lecturer in Greek, made his debut as an author, publishing a pseudo-Socratic dialogue on the merits of longbow shooting, citing Elyot’s enthusiasm for the sport as inspiration for his own labors on its behalf.²⁹ “[T]o haue written this boke either in latin or Greke … had bene more easier and fit for mi trade in study,” he confesses in the dedicatory epistle to Toxophilus: The Schole of Shotyng, “yet neuerthelesse,” he deems it best to “haue written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue, for Englishe men” (x). The epistle to readers amplifies this claim by way of a fable borrowed from Herodotus:

      Bias the wyse man came to Cresus the ryche kyng, on a tyme, when he was makynge newe shyppes, purposyng to haue subdued by water the out yles lying betwixt Grece and Asia minor: What newes now in Grece, saith the king to Bias? None other newes, but these, sayeth Bias: that the yles of Grece haue prepared a wonderful companye of horsemen, to ouerrun Lydia withall. There is nothyng vnder heauen, sayth the kynge, that I woulde so soone wisshe, as that they durst be so bolde, to mete vs on the lande with horse. And thinke you sayeth Bias, that there is anye thyng which they wolde sooner wysshe, then that you shulde be so fonde, to mete them on the water with shyppes? And so Cresus hearyng not the true newes, but perceyuyng the wise mannes mynde and counsell, both gaue then ouer makyng of his shyppes, and left also behynde him a wonderful example for all commune wealthes to folowe: that is euermore to regarde and set most by that thing whervnto nature hath made them moost apt, and vse hath made them moost fitte. (xii)

      “By this matter,” Ascham explains, “I mean the shotynge in the long bowe, for English men,” but the fable—like Toxophilus—serves equally well as defense of the practice of writing in the vernacular: English, after all, is the language that nature and use have conspired to make most apt and fit for his own undertaking; to write in Latin or Greek would be to set sail in unseaworthy vessels. Indeed, as Ryan Stark and Thomas Greene have suggested, Ascham’s interest in archery is always also an interest in eloquence: the strengths developed by the former (clarity of vision, precision of aim) are, to his mind, exactly correspondent to the skills requisite for the latter.³⁰ In his epistle to Toxophilus Ascham elucidates the analogy: “Yf any man wyll applye these thynges [that is, writing and shooting] togyther, [he] shal nat se the one farre differ from the other,” he alleges, for “[i]n our tyme nowe, … very many do write, but after suche a fashion, as very many do shoote … , tak[ing] in hande stronger bowes, than they be able to mayntayne” (xiii). For Ascham, his defense of the longbow and his advocacy for the vernacular are interchangeable commitments, and he scoffs at “any man [who] woulde blame me, eyther for takynge such a matter in hande, or els for writing it in the Englyshe tongue” (xiii).

      Ascham’s attitude toward his mother tongue is hardly uncritical, but neither does it partake of Elyot’s faith in the enriching effect of intimacy with foreign tongues. Indeed what Ascham seems to have taken from his reading of Elyot—and especially from his reading of the mournful conclusion to book 1—is a keen awareness of the dangers of false intimacy or overeager identification. Like Elyot, he frames his decision to write in English in terms of a desire to improve the tongue and profit his vernacular readership, but he betrays no optimism that such improvement or profit will come easily or without cost. Where Elyot emphasizes likeness, contiguity, and kinship, Ascham insists on a radical and perhaps insuperable estrangement: “as for ye Latin or greke tonge, euery thing is so excellently done in them, that none can do better,” he bluntly declares, but “in the Englysh tonge contrary, euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse” (xiv). Rather than search for terms or syntactical arrangements that might, like Elyot’s neologistic couplets, ease the passage between the learned and the vulgar, Ascham advocates for prose that eschews foreign affectations and neologistic borrowings, arguing that “[h]e that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste … speake as the common people do” and lamenting the fact that “[m]any English writers haue not done so, but vsinge straunge wordes as latin, french and Italian, do make all thinges darke and harde” (xiv).

      As for the possibility that the vernacular requires such augmentation, he dismisses it summarily: “Ones I communed with a man whiche reasoned the englyshe tongue to be enryched and encreased therby, sayinge: Who wyll not prayse that feaste, where a man shall drinke at a diner, bothe wyne, ale and beere? Truely quod I, they be all good, euery one taken by hym selfe alone, but if you putte Maluesye and sacke, read wyne and white, ale and beere, and al in one pot, you shall make a drynke, neyther easie to be knowen, nor yet holsom for the bodye” (xiv). Where Elyot sees nurturing and intimacy—the infant at his nurse’s breast—Ascham sees the threat of contamination, an unwholesome and unpalatable brew. This is not to suggest that Ascham believed the vernacular had nothing to learn from the classical tongues, nor English youth from the study of classical literature. His career as a writer and a teacher was founded on the promotion of Greek and Latin literacy, and indeed in the very next lines he hints that not all attempts at linguistic enrichment are doomed to failure, noting that “Cicero in folowyng Isocrates, Plato and Demosthenes, increased the latine tounge after an other sorte” (xiv). Of this “other sorte” or “waye” he will say only that it has fallen into neglect and disrepute—“bycause dyuers men that write, do not know, they can neyther folowe it, bycause of theyr ignorauncie, nor yet will prayse it, for verye arrogauncie”—but it is clear that it must bear little resemblance to Elyot’s own methods.

      For Ascham, the infelicities of time and country that have consigned England and English to the cultural and intellectual margins are to be remedied not by a pedagogy that simulates proximity, familiarity, and immediacy but rather by a pedagogy that makes distance, strangeness, and the very passage of time into instruments of instruction. Estrangement may be the root cause of barbarism, but it is also the guarantor of purity: this conviction undergirds The Scholemaster’s fierce objection to the practice of sending English youths to study in Catholic Italy, and it governs the treatise’s pedagogical philosophy no less. The Scholemaster advertises itself as a method of teaching a young boy Latin “with ease and pleasure, and in short time” (1_v). But in truth Ascham has little regard for—or confidence in—ease, pleasure, or quickness. He famously prefers “hard” to “quick” wits on the grounds that the former, however resistant to instruction, are liable to retain what they learn, while the latter “commonlie, be apte to take” but “vnapte to keepe,” “more quicke to enter spedelie, than hable to pearse farre,” and “delit[ing] them selues in easie and pleasant studies, … neuer passe farre forward in hie and hard sciences” (4_v). That eloquence itself is such a high and hard science follows from Ascham’s insistence that, contrary to Elyot’s notion of it as a universal inheritance, proper to any “natural” tongue, true eloquence is to be found only in the remote and rarefied provinces of antiquity: “[I]n the rudest contrie, and most barbarous mother language, many be found [that] can speake verie wiselie,” he observes,

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