Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture Hamlet The Faerie Queene and Arcadia 1St Ed Edition Judith Owens Full Chapter

Emotional Settings in Early Modern
Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The

Faerie Queene, and Arcadia 1st ed.
Edition Judith Owens
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Emotional Settings
in Early Modern
Pedagogical Culture
Hamlet, The Faerie Queene,
and Arcadia
Judith Owens
Emotional Settings in Early Modern
Pedagogical Culture
Judith Owens
Emotional Settings
in Early Modern
Pedagogical Culture
Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, and Arcadia
Judith Owens
Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-43148-8 ISBN 978-3-030-43149-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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for Elowyn and James
Acknowledgments
I have incurred many debts, academic and familial, in writing this book.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge them here, however much my thanks must
fall short of repayment.
I would never have been able to embark on this project without finan-
cial support from the University of Manitoba and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Council of Canada. Research and travel grants made it possi-
ble for me to visit archives, and to attend conferences where I presented
papers that eventually grew into portions of this book. I am grateful for
the feedback I received from fellow-panelists and participants at meetings
of PNRC, RSA, SAA, SCSC, and Spenser at Kalamazoo. My research for
this project received an early boost from Natalie Johnson, who not only
shared with me a wealth of knowledge, and a cache of documents, pertain-
ing to the Merchant Taylors’ School, but also tutored me in Elizabethan
handwriting.
I would never have completed the book without the support of my
department colleague Glenn Clark, whose unwavering enthusiasm for the
project buoyed me over the years of its writing and whose intellectual gen-
erosity—and critical acumen—in reading drafts and in conversation helped
me time and again to clarify my ideas. Judith Weil, from whose teaching
and scholarship I have learned so much for so long and who is always
one of the readers I keep in mind, commented on chapter drafts, with en-
thusiasm tempered, as needed, with reservations. Lesley Peterson added
substantially to the pleasure of writing with her keen editor’s eye and deep
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
knowledge of Shakespeare. Paul Dyck helped me to sharpen ideas, often at

the Original Pancake House, where Paul, Glenn, and I hold the occasional
leisurely breakfast meeting to talk about all things early modern. George
Toles, whose passion for film usually precludes things early modern, gen-
erously read drafts of some portions. Faye McIntyre, whose research inter-
ests are similarly centuries ahead of mine, offered steady warm encourage-
ment, in friendship and in collegiality. I am also grateful to Cameron Burt,
Karalyn Dokurno, and Jeremy Strong, whose work as research assistants
at various stages saved me time and legwork.
I have benefitted from the advice and encouragement of colleagues fur-
ther from home, too. Fred Tromly, whose own work on sons and fathers
has influenced my thinking, has been a wonderfully supportive correspon-
dent over the years that this project has taken shape; I’m just sorry that
Ralegh, in whom we share a particular interest, did not make the final cut.
I owe debts to many others as well. I am grateful to Heather Dubrow, for
encouragement at a very early stage about the tack I was following; to
David Lee Miller, for advice at the outset to pursue the topics I do (and
to not fret about the ones that I don’t pursue); to Bill Oram, for com-
ments on an initial scheme for this book that spurred me to think about
it in a different way; to Esther Gilman Richey, for illuminating conver-
sations about Hamlet; and to Elizabeth Hanson, Virginia Strain, Nathan
Szymanski, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, for generously reading
and commenting on chapters. I wish also to thank the anonymous read-
ers for the press, whose work made the book stronger, and the editors for
the press, especially Eileen Srebernik and Jack Heeney, who steered the
project so deftly in the final stages. I am grateful for the expert technical,
and unfailingly courteous, assistance provided by staff at libraries, most
recently the Folger Shakespeare Library.
I have been sustained in ways that cannot be measured by my fam-
ily. My daughters, Adriana Chartrand and Madeleine Chartrand, never
doubted that I would finish—or at least never let on that they did, which
was just as important; they listened thoughtfully to my ruminations, and
posed just the right questions; and, more than once, Madeleine offered
welcome advice about phrasing. My son-in-law, Dagomar Degroot, fol-
lowed the book’s progress with warm interest, his inquiries informed by
academic perspectives as well as by familial concerns. My husband, Gilbert
Chartrand, supported the writing of this book by refraining, tactfully,
from asking about its progress. Given the book’s focus, it is especially
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
apt for me to note that the emotional community of my family has ex-
panded over the course of its writing, in the most joyful of ways, with the
arrivals of Elowyn and James, to whom I dedicate the book—with love
from Nana.
Contents
1 Introduction: Emotional Settings in Pedagogical Culture 1
2 Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional

Possibilities 21
3 Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations 57
4 Sidney and Heroic Paideia 85
5 Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 119
6 Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in

Hamlet 151
7 Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection

in Hamlet 175
Index 211
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Emotional Settings

in Pedagogical Culture
A sixteenth-century English woodcut included in John Day’s 1563 Whole

Book of Psalms depicts a scene that played out daily in countless sixteenth-
century English households: familial instruction in moral and spiritual
matters.1 On one side of the room is a father, portrayed in what Lena
Cowen Orlin has described as “commanding solitude”; on the other side
are a visibly expectant mother and several children, grouped together.2 At
first glance, we might be inclined to see, with Orlin, a clear-cut picture
of patriarchy in action. The father has an imposing, weighty presence: he
is well-dressed and self-assured in bearing; angled slightly forwards and
towards the viewer, he sits securely on a high-backed, cushioned chair;
his right leg, draped with his cloak, is bent at an acute angle, the heel of
the right foot raised and pressing against the leg of the chair or perhaps
hooked under a rung; his left leg, clad in hose that shows off a well-
formed calf muscle, is thrust forwards at an angle of about 120 degrees,
the left foot planted firmly on the floor. Instructing without the aid of
any book, he touches the thumb of his right hand with his left index fin-
ger as he enumerates the points of the lesson. (Today, someone might
reproach him with mansplaining and manspreading.) His wife and chil-
dren are grouped opposite him—“clustered together,” to use Orlin’s apt
term—and, as a group, pushed just perceptibly back from the foreground.
The mother and two of the children appear to be seated on a bench, with
the rest of the children standing behind. One child has reached up to tuck
his hand into the crook of his mother’s arm; all the children are close to
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_1
2 J. OWENS
her, within easy touching distance. Although the children must be of vary-
ing ages, they are positioned in such a way, some seated, some standing,
that the tops of all their heads are just a few inches below the mother’s
shoulders. The wife and children—as a unit—have gathered together in
front of the head of the household for the daily lesson, demonstrating the
deference that was due to the father in this highly patriarchal century, and
exuding the cheerful quietness that moralists of domestic life said, time
and again, should characterize a family ruled properly by a husband and
father.3
The scene nevertheless manages to convey a degree of familial affec-
tion and informality that at least qualifies if it does not override the def-
erence that strikes the keynote for some viewers—and supports for them
the assumption (long entrenched) that patriarchal structures of author-
ity in early modern England were fixed and firm. Of the two children
flanking the mother, one carries a toy, a hobby-horse; another, the one
holding a book (of psalms?) and looking to the side, past his mother, to
the younger boy, seems to be more interested in his sibling than in his
father’s enumeration of points. And while the father just might be frown-
ing ever so slightly in the direction of the wayward child, his reprimand
seems quite muted—and, more to the point, unheeded, by the child and
by the mother, who does not seem anxious in the least about the conduct
of her children in the presence of the patriarch. Of the children—two,
just possibly three—who are standing behind the mother, at least one of
them is not attending very closely to the father’s instruction. The mother
herself does seem to be attuned dutifully to what her husband is saying
(or, more likely, reiterating, since such instruction was so often part of the
familial routine); but she also appears to be a little preoccupied with her
pregnancy. Her hands, crossed in front of her, rest on the noticeable curve
of her abdomen; the fingers of her right hand are plucking at the fabric
of her skirt. She is seated in the midst of her children and her billowing
skirts almost seem to form a nest. While the occasion is one of patriarchal
instruction, we thus sense considerable warmth and ease of feeling. There
is no question about the father’s holding a position of authority in this
instructional setting, but that authority is contextualized, not as sternly
remote and unilateral, but as tempered by emotional dynamics, as well
as directed towards occasionally inattentive individuals who are distracted
from the lesson—and with impunity—by their own interests and preoc-
cupations. To attend to the nuances of emotion and mood depicted in
this illustration is to see that patriarchal authority could be experienced as
flexible.
1 INTRODUCTION: EMOTIONAL SETTINGS IN PEDAGOGICAL CULTURE 3
My reading of this illustration reflects the primary questions under-

lying Emotional Settings: How does the picture we might have formed
from preconceptions—of an institution, a social practice, a pedagogical
regimen, a set of relationships, or a familiar, even canonical, work of lit-
erature—change when we focus our attention on emotional dynamics?
What comes newly or more sharply into view? What recedes? As the sheer
volume of recent scholarship on affect and emotions attests, these ques-
tions are hardly new. My book breaks new ground, however, in terms of
the works, literary and non-literary, that I bring together for the first time;
in terms of how I construe the pedagogical context within which I then
study seminal works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney; in terms of new
readings, literary and non-literary; and in terms of my methodology.
In chapters on the humanist schoolroom, filial relationships, The New
Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy, The Faerie Queene, and Hamlet, I aim
to furnish new ways to think about two closely interrelated concerns:
shaping boys into civil subjects of the commonwealth and fashioning
heroic agency and selfhood in literature. In these aims, I am guided by
a host of questions in addition to the ones just posed (not all of them
pertinent to each and every chapter). When is it as important to think
about what instruction and learning feel like in early modern pedagogi-
cal settings, actual or literary, as it is to think about what pupils learn in
those settings? What role does emotion play in shaping the moral learn-
ing so fundamental both to early-modern instructional regimens and to
literature with civic aims? What happens when the emotional and moral
imperatives of humanist grammar-school education conflict with those of
families? How does literature register such affective tremors? In what ways
do the technologies of learning employed in the home or the classroom
shape affective and moral responses? How does literature engage with the
habits of mind and feeling cultivated by such technologies as the com-
monplace book or the formation of maxims? Does the affective charge
of an instructional setting—a schoolroom, a family—reinforce or under-
mine structures of authority? How can an emotional response challenge
the patriarchal authority on which both households and schools rested?
How does literature record the emotional fallout from such a challenge?
What kind of mediating role do mothers play within a pedagogical cul-
ture built on patriarchal authority? How can we gauge affective charge
and emotional responses in documents related to the pedagogies of early-
modern schoolrooms and families? How do we even measure emotional
dynamics in the texts by Spenser or Sidney or Shakespeare? My answer
4 J. OWENS
to the last two questions is that we can do so most effectively by paying

close attention to language: syntax, sentence structure, turns of phrase,
and metaphors are exceptionally responsive to affective pressures.
∗ ∗ ∗
These interrelated questions and aims are at the heart of Emotional Set-
tings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The Faerie Queene,
and Arcadia. They are not quite the questions that I set out to address
with this book. My initial interest was sparked by Hamlet’s vow to obey
his dead father’s command to avenge his death, especially by Hamlet’s
assuming immediately that he would have to wipe from his memory all
that he’d been taught in his humanist schooling in order to execute his
father’s will.4 When I found a comparable knot of conflicting impera-
tives in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in the Ruddymane episode of Book
II, where the “vertuous lore” foundational in humanist education aligns
imperfectly with the “gentle noriture” of home in the promotion of filial
revenge, I was struck by the fact that two such vastly different works (and
writers) identified a potential for conflict between familial imperatives and
humanist pedagogy.5 This tension seemed worth investigating since not
only are household and school two of the most important instructional
settings of the sixteenth century in England but the instructional regi-
mens proper to each are often regarded as dovetailing seamlessly. Vocab-
ulary points to the shared pedagogical aims of families and schoolrooms.
Spenser’s phrase, “vertuous lore,” directs us towards what is arguably the
most significant aim of the humanist educational programme: the inculca-
tion of virtue, especially civic virtue.6 Both the curricula and the instruc-
tional practices of grammar schools were geared towards turning boys into
the men who would serve the commonwealth in the capacities needed
to promote the emerging socio-economic, political, and religious agen-
das that superseded what Mervyn James identified as “lineage society.”7
From domestic conduct books, sermons, homilies, and family correspon-
dence, we know that parents, too, at all levels of society, were enjoined
to instil virtue, including civic virtue, in children (especially sons), a man-
date that grew more urgent through the course of the sixteenth century.8
Moreover, both household and school, at least in theory, operate under
the banner of patriarchal authority, a model of governance generating the
frequently-invoked analogy between fathers and schoolmasters.9
With the fraught moments from Hamlet and The Faerie Queene in
mind, I planned to explore further the ways in which early modern lit-
erature used the deeply-felt analogies that linked family and school (and
often the state) in shared aims and structures of authority as sixteenth-
century civic society emerged from old feudal orders. To what extent,
I wondered, were these analogies able to foreground complementarity
among configurations of authority only by masking contradictions, con-
tradictions that surface in imaginative literature? To what extent did these
analogies reflect lived experience? I wondered how secure these analogies
could be when two works as different as Hamlet and The Faerie Queene
highlighted a familial moral imperative—revenge—that contrasts starkly
with the Christian ethos at the heart of humanist pedagogy. I am still
interested in literary moments and themes that gain their power by high-
lighting tensions between the respective imperatives of home and school.
In the book I have written, the chapters on Hamlet examine directly the
particular tensions generated when a ghostly feudal father commands his
humanist scholar of a son to exact revenge and the chapter on The Faerie
Queene measures the affective costs of humanist education when home
is left behind. But these chapters, along with the rest of the book, range
beyond this specific focus to consider a broader range of affective ties and
emotional effects.
The historical context for my study, developed in this Chapter and
Chapter 2, remains pedagogical culture. I define pedagogical culture to
include both humanist schooling and familial—especially paternal—wis-
dom, advice, and admonishment, and I delimit it to the training up of
boys and young men. The latter limit on the scope of my book reflects
not just the fact that grammar schools were for boys only, but also the
fact that the literary side of my research focusses mainly on the heroic
agency of male characters.10 But while this general pedagogical context
has been in place since I first conceived of Emotional Settings, my partic-
ular interest shifted over time (as the questions posed at the outset indi-
cate) to the emotional dynamics that shape, even define to some extent,
the instructional regimens of home and school. Several lines of analysis
gradually emerged as important: first, it is possible to track in emotional
responses (and not just acts) a son’s or pupil’s resistance to the author-
ity of fathers and schoolmasters; second, the instructional regimens of
home and school, respectively, elicit—indeed, summon—different emo-
tional responses; third, specific technologies of learning—the forming of
maxims, the composing of commonplace books, the reading and writing
6 J. OWENS
of letters—organize emotional responses in particular ways; and, fourth,

differing emotional responses can inflect in varying ways moral impera-
tives shared by home and school, especially when maternal figures medi-
ate. The word “Settings” in my title thus registers my sense that we need
to attend to the emotional temperature, as it were, of both home and
school when we think about how these two instructional settings and
their respective regimens set boys and young men on the path to citizen-
ship in a monarchical commonwealth.11
My focus on emotional dynamics in pedagogical culture aligns Emo-
tional Settings with an explosion of studies that in the last twenty-five or
so years have broadened scholarship of early modern literature and society
by participating in the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sci-
ences.12 Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt, each employing thor-
oughly historicized terms of analysis, encouraged us to read early-modern
expressions of emotion (or passion, to use the sixteenth-century word) as
embodied in ways now lost to us, however different Paster’s and Schoen-
feldt’s respective “bodies” and experiences of subjectivity proved to be.13
Anyone working on emotions in early-modern literature is indebted to
them and to other scholars who have similarly anatomized for us the
humoral body and who have contributed to the history of emotion by
studying emotion in the context of early modern systems of physiology,
philosophy, and epistemology. Occasionally, I develop points that draw
on this seminal knowledge, but my approach is more sociological and my
methodology more rhetorical in its reliance on the close reading of texts,
both literary and non-literary. It is no less historicized, however, in its
attention to the expression of emotion. Although I am not interested in
defining what makes early-modern emotions early modern (or in distin-
guishing them from the emotions of other historical periods), I am deeply
interested in how certain sixteenth-century English institutions and prac-
tices shape—and are shaped by—emotions. It is my hope that my study
furnishes a compelling example of what Susan Broomhall has described
recently as the “potential for historical analyses [done] through the lens
of emotions to change how the early modern period is considered.”14
In this regard, Emotional Settings has much in common with a spate
of studies from literary scholars that have newly historicized emotion by
bringing into focus various terrains of social interaction or cultural nego-
tiation. In the last couple of decades, we have been invited to explore
the intimacies cultivated in epistolary exchanges; the links between classi-

cal rhetoric and affective experience; religious feeling; the emotional fall-
out from the Reformation; the gendered (and newly re-gendered) val-
ues assigned to emotions; the emotional expressiveness permitted by the
waning of feudalism; the transactional emotional work of rhetorical dis-
ciplines, including the disciplines of the schoolroom; and the large-scale
sociopolitical role of emotion.15 Emotional Settings began independently
of these directions in criticism, my own turn to questions of emotion
occurring—very gradually and even imperceptibly to me—when I was
already engaged in writing about and teaching certain works. I have since
benefitted, in large measures, from the insights of this scholarship and
many specific debts will be tallied up in the chapters (and footnotes) to
come. Here, though, I would like to sketch in very broad terms what sets
my study apart and what it can contribute to a still-burgeoning field.
To begin with, my bringing together home and school to form the his-
torical context of my book distinguishes my research from other studies
in the field. Family life and schooling have both drawn sustained atten-
tion in recent years, from social historians and literary critics alike, but
the two topics are not often interlinked. By examining these settings
together rather than in isolation, we can understand more completely the
deep social need in sixteenth-century England to experience patriarchal
authority as natural.16 As civic society emerges from the feudal structures
that had organized socio-economic and ideological life for so long, there
is enormous pressure on both household, including the non-aristocratic
household, and school to be places of order that offer fulfilment—emo-
tional, material, and ideological—because they are founded on patriarchal
authority. Examining home and school together brings into sharper focus
the emotional dynamics of each instructional regimen to the extent that
each setting serves as a foil to the other. This twofold perspective permits
us to qualify (and sometimes disqualify) critical assumptions about the
exercise of authority in two social institutions so fundamental to early-
modern English statehood. Even more crucially, the twofold perspective
lets us bring mothers into the picture.
With respect to humanist pedagogical practices, one of the most impor-
tant developments in recent years, one that owes much to the affective
turn in criticism, has been a revised understanding of the dynamics of the
classroom as literary critics, especially, have sought to explain the forma-
tive influence of grammar-school education on the towering literary fig-
ures of the period. The thesis, expounded compellingly by Lisa Jardine,
8 J. OWENS
Antony Grafton, Richard Halpern, and others, that the curricular and cor-
poral disciplines of the classroom were invariably or merely coercive has
lost purchase recently.17 Several book-length studies have returned us to
the humanist schoolroom to discover other, equally definitive, dynamics.
Rebecca Bushnell has stressed the instability of authority; Andrew Wal-
lace has described the intellectual intimacy of exchanges between pupil
and master or pupil and text; Lynn Enterline has drawn out the liberat-
ing and transgressive possibilities in schoolroom exercises; Jeff Dolven has
demonstrated the insufficiency of punishment as an instrument of instruc-
tion.18 My study expands, in directions other than these, the capacity of
the humanist classroom.
In Chapter 2, I draw on well-known educational treatises by Roger
Ascham and Richard Mulcaster as well as on a lesser-known tract by
Edmund Coote to describe a schoolroom—whether the grammar-school
classroom or the private tutorial space—that accommodates a wide range
of emotional responses, responses available to all the pupils in the class-
room (not just the ones who became famous writers). I delineate emo-
tional dynamics that render unpredictable the imposition of authority in
the classroom, making the schoolroom not just a place of subjection but
also an instructional setting that can accommodate, in Mulcaster’s mem-
orable phrase, “deep insolencie.”19 I discover in Ascham’s depictions of
the relationship between master and pupil a pedagogical space that offers
equanimity and that anticipates ideals of the humanist programme that
would underwrite education in later generations. I conclude with a discus-
sion of laughing and tickling—little-remarked schoolroom exercises rec-
ommended by Mulcaster—to reinforce my claim that focussing on the
emotional community of the humanist schoolroom uncovers more than
coercion.
In recent decades, the early modern family has undergone even more
renovation than the humanist schoolroom. Historians and other schol-
ars have widened appreciably our sense of early-modern family life, being
apt to find emotional richness where an earlier generation of scholars
found aridness. Social historians such as Linda Pollock, for example,
turning assiduously and widely to letters, commonplace books, diaries,
and account books, have demolished the long-accepted assumptions,
advanced most influentially by Lawrence Stone, that parents were indif-
ferent towards their children, and that families were unflinchingly patri-
archal in form and function. Pollock and others in her wake cut a wide
swath in sources neglected by Stone. In doing so, historians have not
only accumulated ample evidence of parental care but also produced a
more nuanced understanding of patriarchal authority. As Pollock puts it

in a 2017 essay, recent research “reconceptualises the family as a unit of
dynamic, shifting relations and investigates how ideals, values, and norms
[including patriarchal ones] played out in real life.” Focussing in particu-
lar on how space shapes emotions (and, in turn, emotions define space),
Katie Barclay observes that the “emotional bonds” fostered by living in
close physical proximity “could destabilize traditional power hierarchies,”
not simply “soften” them.20
While the emotional terrain of families—and households—has been
mapped in increasingly detailed contours, scholars of family life typically
do not build their cases from close, extended rhetorical analysis, even
when they mine wills, diaries, letters, and poems or provide a case study.
My study proceeds precisely on the level of language, sentence structure,
style, and tone; I read non-literary documents very closely, in the same
way I read literary works.21 We need to be alert to primary, immedi-
ate, meanings that have become obscured through time and the changing
conventions of language and discourse, or that emerge only through care-
ful attention to rhetorical, social, and generic contexts.22 We need also to
remain ready to plumb the seemingly merely conventional. We can, for
instance, discover profound feeling in a remark that earlier generations
of scholars find “laconic.” Rather than seizing on the terseness of Daniel
Fleming’s noting that he “Paid for my loving and lovely son John’s cof-
fin: 2s.6d.” to conclude that this father passed lightly over the death of
his son, we might observe that the quiet rhetorical flourish of “loving and
lovely” marks this entry as particularly charged—the more so because this
notation appears in an account book of household expenses.23 Not only
do these epithets, yoked by alliteration, assonance, and consonance into
a lilting syndeton, register emotion, they describe the ties of affection that
bound father and son when the boy was alive: this child was both “loving”
towards his father and loved (“lovely,” i.e. loveable, deserving of admi-
ration) by him. We should not be fooled by the economy of expression
into thinking this father indifferent. Reading documents of family history
with an eye (and ear) for what remains unspoken or muted, elided or
compressed can lead to an understanding of familial emotions that moves
beyond the valuable groundwork of recent years in showing that patri-
archy could be experienced as flexible and negotiable—as contestable—
however much paternal authority structured family life in theory and offi-
cialdom.
10 J. OWENS
In Chapter 3, after showing how much letter-writing manuals of the

day promote the letter’s capacity for conveying emotion, I explore the
emotional contours of family life by offering two case studies of family
correspondence involving a son away at school. In both cases, the letters I
study are known to scholars, but they have not yet been considered in the
terms that I develop. In my analysis of letters written home to his father
and mother by Philip Gawdy, I pay close attention to the affective charge
of language—to syntax, sentence structure, turns of phrase—to show just
how provisional could be the experience of paternal authority. In my read-
ing of Henry Sidney’s first-ever letter of advice to his young son, Philip, I
furnish a context that lets us gauge the ways that the emotional dynamics
of family life shape the moral learning so central to humanist pedagogy
and invites us to speculate about the ways that technologies of learning
condition that learning.
As my citations above to literary scholars indicate, pedagogy has proved
an exceptionally fruitful context to adduce in the study of early-modern
literature, whether the critic is discovering how Shakespeare adapted the
creative possibilities in imitation that the humanist schoolroom afforded
or tracing how Spenser and Sidney exploited the possibilities of genre to
critique the schoolroom or showing how Spenser engaged with the ped-
agogical lessons and legacy of Virgil in the classroom.24 I am grateful to
Enterline, Dolven, Wallace, and others for their innovative takes on the
importance of pedagogical culture in the work of the three authors who
make up the literary focus of Emotional Settings. As different as these
critics are in their approaches, from each other and from me, they are
uniformly inspiring in their commitment to discovering in early-modern
literature deep affinities with (or antipathies to) the humanist schoolroom.
While I am pursuing lines of analysis that are independent of their partic-
ular insights, we occasionally cover the same ground. With Dolven, I am
interested in how Spenser and Sidney (I add Shakespeare to the roster)
use maxims and exempla, ubiquitous intellectual tools of the humanist
classroom; I am interested, however, not in what “learning looks like,”
to use Dolven’s nicely pointed phrase, but in what learning feels like.25
With Enterline, I am interested in Shakespeare’s reliance on imitatio and
rhetorical practices (and we both have a good deal to say about Hecuba
in Hamlet ), but we apply these legacies of the schoolroom in very diver-
gent ways. My interests do not overlap with her aims to show what
Shakespeare the dramatist learned about personation, gendered roles, and
inhabiting sympathetically the subject positions of others. My focus, more
narrowly concentrated, remains on Hamlet’s recursion to techniques of

the classroom that prove inadequate to the roiling emotional needs and
moral imperatives stirred up by familial circumstances. With Wallace, I
am interested, but to a lesser degree and without a centring focus on Vir-
gil’s reflections on pedagogy, in how the schoolroom structures affective
relationships between pupils and masters. By staying attuned throughout
the book to the imperatives, often conflicting, of school and home; and
by attending to the thematic or characterological import of emotions,
I introduce a perspective that to date has been undeveloped in studies
of early modern literature’s engagement with pedagogical culture. It is a
perspective that finds new meanings in very familiar works.
Chapter 4 concentrates on a few select episodes in Sidney’s New Arca-
dia and on key passages in The Defence of Poesy to claim that part of
Sidney’s aim in revising his prose romance is to seed quietly radical ideas
on heroic paideia by reconceiving its affective dimensions. I suggest that
Sidney recasts heroism as it is conventionally understood, undermining
the ideal of filial piety upon which Renaissance conceptions of heroism
typically rest by substituting for the emblematic portrait of Aeneas’ carry-
ing of his father to safety on his back a surprisingly intimate picture of the
infant Aeneas nursing at his mother’s breast. Sidney’s dazzling, deeply-
layered reflections on Aeneas in The Defence of Poesy, which are replete
with conventional praise of this exemplary hero and his much-celebrated
rescuing of his father, include also the startling realization that virtue and
filial piety are not necessarily synonymous, and that Aeneas’ epic career
might have followed a different trajectory. The revised Arcadia gestures
towards that path to heroism. More broadly, in the Arcadian conversa-
tions between Musidorus and Pyrocles, Sidney challenges the conviction
that heroism emerges from such “civic” places as the schoolroom or the
topoi of the commonplace book. For these places of “profit” and “de-
light,” twinned fruits of humanist instruction, Sidney substitutes spaces
of emotion and delight: gardens, private retreats, and fellowship.
In Chapter 5, I focus on Spenser’s presentation in The Faerie Queene
of Arthur’s upbringing and tutelage to highlight Spenser’s deep concern
with how familial feeling might be transferred to the work of building
a commonwealth, the professed overarching aim of humanist schooling
in sixteenth-century England, and how heroes can be fashioned. Taken
from home at birth and educated in wardship, Arthur becomes a figure
through whom Spenser can weigh both the benefits and costs that accrue
in humanist education when the space of instruction is separate from
12 J. OWENS
home. Throughout, Spenser remains concerned with the emotional con-

ditions of learning, conceiving of Arthur as an embodied individual whose
affective ties contribute to his meanings in the poem as much as does
his allegorical status. Spenser is clear that humanist pedagogy succeeds
only when it is layered with emotional attachments, to the teacher and
to the place of instruction; in ministering to Una and Redcrosse in Book
I, Arthur capitalizes on the “vertuous lore” of Timon’s affectionate tute-
lage. Spenser is equally clear about the affective toll of humanist edu-
cation. Arthur remains haunted by his removal from family, his excision
from familial lineage; this is registered with particular poignancy in Book
II when Arthur discovers his place in the historical roll and feels himself
both “ravished” and at long last inscribed as a son.
Chapters 6 and 7, both on Hamlet, show the extent to which Prince
Hamlet is trapped, tragically, between schooling and family. Neither his
humanist education, for all its promise, nor his wish to “remember” his
father, for all its culturally and ideologically sanctioned force, can fur-
nish him with agency or direction. Hamlet can never quite eradicate the
humanist habits of intellection and feeling that he has learned, despite
their being wholly inadequate to the emotional turmoil occasioned by
his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. In Chapter 6, I chart the
incommensurability between schooling and family by focussing intensely
on Hamlet’s first soliloquy and on the contrasts between Horatio and
Hamlet in their respective encounters with the Ghost. Many critics have
observed that Hamlet’s opening soliloquy, “O that this too too sallied
flesh would melt,” is layered with indices to his pressure points. I argue
that the greatest pressure builds up because the humanist rhetorical and
intellectual practices that condition his thinking (and, to a degree, his
emotions) and that structure his moral perspective cannot accommodate
the familial feelings that overwhelm him. The extent to which he is moved
by strong filial feeling emerges even more sharply when we compare his
initial address to the Ghost with Horatio’s (a comparison that Shakespeare
compels us to make by staging, in the space of a couple of scenes, two
addresses to the Ghost, by two Wittenberg scholars).
In the first section of Chapter 7, I focus on Hamlet’s initial exchange
with his father’s ghost and his second soliloquy, in which he absorbs his
father’s command to “remember him.” I explore this intense dramatic
sequence in terms of the competing instructional regimens of the human-
ist school and the family, highlighting the crisis of agency that Hamlet
experiences under the pressure of the patriarchal familial imperative for
sons to become like their fathers—which, in Hamlet’s case, would mean

acceding to an outmoded and destructive ethos. In the second section
of the chapter, I suggest that Shakespeare imagines Hamlet as someone
deeply, if mutely, attuned to the possibilities of the classroom—and fit-
fully enabled and enlarged by them—even as he rejects his schooling to
comply with patriarchal familial demands. I focus on the language of the
classroom that Hamlet employs in his second soliloquy and on Ham-
let’s reactions to the Player’s speech on Pyrrhus—and especially Ham-
let’s imagining of Hecuba—to argue that Hamlet himself senses that the
humanist practices of intellection he spurns could have furnished him with
a model of selfhood less tragically limited than the one forced upon him
by his ghostly father.
Notes
1. Tenor of the whole psalmes in foure partes. Imprinted by John Day, 1563.
STC 2431. In his tremendously popular devotional handbook (34 editions
between 1611 and 1643 alone); Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety, advises
the man who is “called to the government of a family” thus: “thou must
not hold it sufficient to serve God and live uprightly in thy own person,
unless thou cause all under thy charge to do the same with thee.…if thou
desirest to have the blessing of God upon thyself and upon thy family,
either before or after thy own private devotions, call every morning all
the family to some convenient room; and first either read to them thyself
a chapter in the word of God, or cause it to be read distinctly by some
other. If leisure serve, thou mayst admonish them of some remarkable
notes” (143, 145).
2. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford Univ.
Press, 2008), 43.
3. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, observes that
“Church, State, and family…were patriarchal groups where unity based
on obedience and acceptance of authority was the essential prerequisite”
(200). Secondary sources on the patriarchal structure of the early-modern
English family are far too numerous to canvas. For a recent discussion
of patriarchal structures from the perspective of women’s agency within
those constraints, see Jessica Murphy, Virtuous Necessity.
4. Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.99–104. All citations to the play are from Ham-
let, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare,
2006, 2016).
14 J. OWENS
5. Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book II, Canto iii, stanza 1. All citations
from Spenser are to The Faerie Queene, 2nd edition, ed. A.C. Hamilton
(Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007).
6. The importance of instilling virtue is almost universally emphasized in
educational treatises. See, for example, tracts by two of the most emi-
nent educators of the sixteenth century: Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster
[…] (London: John Daye, 1571 [STC 834]); Richard Mulcaster, Positions
Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie
for the Training Up of Children, Either for Skill in Their Booke, or Health
in Their Bodie (London: by Thomas Vautrollier for Thomas Chare, 1581
[STC 1825]).
7. Mervyn James, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society. In his definitive study
of Durham’s transition from a medieval to an early-modern society, James,
177–78, described “lineage society” as one in which the kinship net-
works of aristocratic families formed the political, economic, and social
bedrock, and in which families turned resolutely inward—sometimes in
order to confront external threats, including armed aggression. In such
a society, revenge against those who injure the family could have a part
(even if revenge took the less blatant form of social, political, or economic
sanctions). By the end of the sixteenth century, lineage society had given
way to “civil society,” in which a “changing pattern of gentry life [which
involved] entrepreneurial, professional and administrative preoccupations,
with a strongly Protestant religious commitment, increasingly blurred the
traditional chivalric image.” Lineage society lived on in the literary imagi-
nation, however, as Spenser’s chivalric allegory and Shakespeare’s tale of a
murdered king with a penchant for wagering his kingdom in one-on-one
armed combat show.
8. See, for instance, Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman […] (Lon-
don: Printed by E. Tyler, for Richard Thrase, at the signe of the Cross-
Keys at St Pauls Gate, 1661 [Wing P943]), 30–37; Robert Cleaver,
A Godly Forme of Household Gouernement (London: Printed by Felix
Kingston, for Thomas Man, 1598), 246–341; Patrick Collinson, The
Birthpangs of Protestant England, 62–65, observes that the Reformation
“riveted home patriarchy,” and “[t]he general moralisation of political
obligations was mirrored in the family, where duties were no longer sim-
ply contractual but owed in conscience to God who had established the
ground-rules of domestic relations.” Simultaneously, Protestantism “deep-
ened the emotional quality of family life, enriching relations between
spouses, parents and children.”
9. This is not to suggest that fathers and schoolmasters were always taken to
be fully in accord. As Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching observes,
40–41, the schoolmaster often “competed” with the father for authority
even though “in pedagogic theory, the ideal teacher’s authority was often
compared to the father’s.” Schoolmasters often felt, too, that their job was
to correct the mistakes of parents. For example, Robert Ainsworth, The
Most Natural and Easie Way, argued that a schoolmaster’s “chief business
ought to be to … weed out the Tares which perhaps were sown when the
Parents slept, before they are grown so high, as to choak the Culture of
an Ingenuous and Liberal Education, [etc.] (A4v).”
10. Much of the most exciting work on early-modern pedagogy as it pertains
to girls and women focusses on theatre as an instructional setting. See,
for example, Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson, eds., Performing
Pedagogy.
11. I am using the term “citizen” loosely and anachronistically, to denote what
we today define as citizenship.
12. The “affective turn” has cut such wide swaths in so many disciplines that
an endnote cannot possibly provide a comprehensive overview. For a use-
ful, recent summary of the state of research as it pertains to the early-
modern period, see Susan Broomhall, “Introduction,” in Early Modern
Emotions: An Introduction, xxxvi–xxxviii. The individual entries in the
book cover a lot of ground, equally succinctly. See also Gail Kern Paster,
Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern
Passions.
13. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of
Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), posits a
porous body, prone to leakages and unruliness, and a self subject to shame;
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, posits
a body that is more contained and a self that is more controlled and
autonomous.
14. Broomhall, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Emotions, xxxviii. See also
Broomhall, “Emotions in Household,” in Emotions in the Household,
1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
15. Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, traces in episto-
lary theory and practice, from the classical period to the Renaissance, the
rhetoric of intimacy that laid the foundation for modern literature’s under-
standing of subjectivity. Wendy Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend, examines
the interrelatedness of emotion, rhetoric, and friendship to describe cogni-
tive and social dimensions of affective experience. Gary Kuchar, The Poetry
of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England, focussing on language of
mourning, examines affective dimensions of faith. Steven Mullaney, The
16 J. OWENS
Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare focussing on theatre,

looks at what happened to social “feelings” in the wake of a Reformation
that buried them. Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation, focusses on
the reconfiguration of masculine affective experience in post-Reformation
England, arguing that feeling pain (and empathy) comes to supplant mar-
tial valour. Jennifer Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern
English Literature, examines the range of emotional expressiveness per-
mitted to men in varying social positions. Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture
of Teaching, 18, shows how pedagogic theory and practice accommo-
dated “play, pleasure, and kindness,” affective conditions that counterbal-
ance disciplinary regimes. Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, charts
in Shakespeare’s representation of big emotional moments the affective
dimensions—and possibilities—of the rhetorical practices of his schooling.
Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, explores the shifting, intense affec-
tive dimensions of the relationship between the pupil and the school-
master. Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan Eng-
land, argues that new, politically efficacious, forms of emotional expression
developed from Renaissance adaptations of emotionally-charged Ovidian
tales. Bradley Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court, uses states of emotion
as a lens through which to view important historical personages and the
literary works that engaged with those subjects.
16. Ian Green, Humanism and Protestant in Early Modern Education, exam-
ines the impact of classical texts as school books in Protestant England,
highlighting the effects on the religious understanding of boys and so
emphasizing a spiritual rather than social, cultural, or psychological need
to experience patriarchy as natural.
17. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities. Vir-
tually every discussion of grammar schools, whether from the period or
from our day, speaks of the harshness of schoolroom discipline. Richard
Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, establishes the tone and
tenor of much recent discussion in emphasizing the ideological under-
pinnings of coercive corporeal and intellectual discipline. Green, however,
speculates that “[r]ather than being the norm, beating may have been
associated with certain teachers at certain schools” (94).
18. Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. See Note 15
above for Bushnell, Wallace, and Enterline.
19. Mulcaster, Positions, 271.
20. Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800; Linda
Pollock, Forgotten Children and “Little Commonwealths I: The House-
hold and Family Relationships,” in A Social History of England, 1500–
1750, ed. Keith Wrightson, 60–83; Katie Barclay, “Family and House-
hold,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall,
245.
21. Eden considers the connections between style and an ethos of intimacy,
but in the context of epistolary and rhetorical theory.
22. Although her focus is specifically on the rhetoric of social interaction and
speech acts, not affective dynamics, Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and
Social Dialogue, 1, draws welcome attention to the social, ideological, and
psychological dimensions of language. She argues, with respect specifi-
cally to Shakespeare, that critics must “develop a better understanding
of social invention in language--and of the richly complex rhetoric of
social exchange in early modern England,” stressing the need to exam-
ine “how language is organized as interaction, how dialogue and other
verbal exchanges can be shaped by the social scene or context as much as
the individual speakers, how ‘the word in living conversation’--in Bakht-
in’s intriguing formulation--‘is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future
answer-word.’”
23. The descriptor “laconic” is Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in Eng-
land 1500–1800, 105–6; he uses it to describe Daniel Fleming’s account
book entry, which he quotes on the death of his son. As further evidence
of parental indifference to children, Stone points out that there is little
indication from the period “of the purchase of mourning--not even an
armband--on the death of very small children […] nor of parental atten-
dance at the funeral.” Viviana A. Zelizer, 24, has a position similar to
Stone’s thesis of parental indifference: “[u]ntil the eighteenth century in
England and in Europe, the death of an infant or a young child was a
minor event.”
24. Recent studies such as these acknowledge and expand upon the work
of earlier critics who examined the effects upon Tudor literature of the
training in grammar and rhetoric that lay at the heart of grammar school
education. Joel Altman’s capacious The Tudor Play of Mind is exemplary in
tracing the interplay between rhetorical training and drama. In asking how
“minds…fashioned” by rhetoric—itself an “art of inquiry” encouraging
students to shift perspectives, to see things in many ways, to adopt by
turn contrary positions—would construct drama, Altman concludes that
a dramatist trained in rhetoric would fashion an aesthetic of wonder and
questioning, writing plays that eschewed didacticism in favour of a broad
range of responses and moral ambivalence (3, 6). My emphasis on the
emotional possibilities of the schoolroom echoes Altman’s emphasis on the
creative and liberating aesthetic possibilities afforded by rhetorical training.
25. Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 140.
18 J. OWENS
References
Ainsworth, Robert. The Most Natural and Easie Way of Institution Containing
Proposals […]. London: Printed for Christopher Hussey, 1699. Web.
Altman, Joel. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development
of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.
Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster […]. 3rd edition. London: John Daye, 1571.
Web.
Barclay, Katie. “Family and Household.” In Early Modern Emotions: An Intro-
duction. Ed. Susan Broomhall. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Bayly, Lewis. The Practice of Piety. Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1842/1997,
1611
Broomhall, Susan. “Introduction.” In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction.
Ed. Susan Broomhall. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Bushnell, Rebecca W. A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory
and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996. Print.
Campana, Joseph. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics
of Masculinity. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012. Print.
Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London; Toronto: Rout-
ledge and K. Paul, Univ. of Toronto, 1965. Print.
Cleaver, Robert, and Deacon, John. A Godly Forme of Household Government
for the Ordering of Priuate Families. London: Printed by Thomas Creede, for
Thomas Man, 1603. Print.
Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural
Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Third Anstey Memorial
Lectures in the University of Kent at Canterbury, 12–15 May 1986. New York:
St. Martin’s, 1988. Print.
Coote, Edmund. The English School-Master. London: Printed by R. & W. Ley-
bourn, for the of Stationers, 1656. Print.
Day, John, and Sternhold, Thomas. Imprint of John Day Possibly from the
Colophon to Thomas Sternhold’s Whole Book of Psalms. London: Printed by
Iohn Daye, Dwelling Ouer Aldersgate, 1579. Print.
Dolven, Jeffrey Andrew. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago, 2007. Print.
Eden, Kathy. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. Chicago: Chicago Univ.
Press, 2012. Print.
Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadel-
phia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Print.
Fox, Cora. Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Gawdy, Philip. Letters of Philip Gawdy. 1579–1616. Ed. I.H. Jeayes. London: J.
B. Nichols and Sons, 1909. Facsimile Edition.
Grafton, Anthony, and Jardine, Lisa. From Humanism to the Humanities: Edu-
cation and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. Print.
Green, Ian. Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Print.
Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance
Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.
Print.
Irish, Bradley. Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern
Feeling. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018.
James, Mervyn. Family, Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics
and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1974. Print.
Kuchar, Gary. The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. Print.
Magnusson, Lynne. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue Dramatic Language and
Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999.
Print.
Moncrief, Kathryn, and McPherson, Kathryn. Ed. Performing Pedagogy in Early
Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance. London: Ashgate,
2011. Print.
Mulcaster, Richard. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children. Ed.
William Barker. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994.
Mullaney, Stephen. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015.
Murphy, Jessica. Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the
Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England. The Univ. of Michigan Press,
2015. Print.
Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton,
and Their Contexts. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008. Print.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2007. Print.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.
Paster, Gail Kern, Rowe, Katherine, and Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Reading the Early
Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: Univ.
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Thrase, at the signe of the Cross-Keys at St Paul’s Gate, 1661. Web.
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———. “Little Commonwealths I: The Household and Family Relationships.”

In A Social History of England, 1500–1750. Ed. Keith Wrightson. Cambridge:
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Schoenfeldt, Michael Carl. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England Physiology
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York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Print.
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Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016.
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volumes. Ed. Roger Kuin. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.
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———. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry.
Ed. Robert Kimbrough. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print.
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CHAPTER 2
Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom:

Emotional Possibilities
In the final eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, the

shepherd-singer Colin famously hangs up his pipe. Long preoccupied with
the significance of this action for our understanding of Spenser’s (and
Colin’s) literary careers, commentators have paid less attention to a brief
reference earlier in the eclogue to the schoolmaster under whose tutelage
Spenser’s native talent was fostered. “A good olde shephearde, Wrenock
was his name, / Made me [Colin] by arte more cunning in the same.”1
Richard Mulcaster served as the headmaster in two of the preeminent
grammar schools in London, Merchant Taylors’ School, which Spenser
attended from 1561 to 1569, and later St. Paul’s. A teacher of repute
and theorist of education as well as a gifted scholar and classicist, Mul-
caster was both an enthusiastic supporter of dramatic performances by his
pupils and a staunch champion of the English language.2 Spenser’s abid-
ing affection for the schoolmaster whose methods promoted creativity
can be intuited from this brief “December” reference as well as, perhaps,
from the fact that in later years Spenser would name his son “Sylvan,” the
name of one of Mulcaster’s own sons.3 As represented in “December,”
however fleetingly, Spenser’s schooldays seem also to have been charac-
terized by sustaining fellowship. Colin recalls that his peers encouraged
his inclination to “song and musicks mirth,” to the extent that Colin was
emboldened “Fro thence … in derring doe compare / With shepheardes
swayne” and to believe that “To Pan his owne selfe pype [he] neede
not yield” (“December,” 39–40, 43–44). While these passing references
© The Author(s) 2020 21

J. Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43149-5_2
22 J. OWENS
to Spenser’s years at Merchant Taylors’ School might seem inconsequen-

tial, in fact they furnish tantalizing evidence about the “emotional com-
munity” of at least this pupil at this sixteenth-century English grammar
school.4
The resurgence of interest in assessing humanism has occasioned re-
evaluation of the pedagogical enterprise of English Renaissance human-
ism, particularly from the perspectives of social historians and literary crit-
ics.5 Although Spenser’s fond recollection of his schoolboy years and his
“good old” schoolmaster is far from an isolated case, such amiable fea-
tures of school life are not typically highlighted in these reassessments.6
Critics have tended to stress the harshly coercive and punitive aspects of
grammar-school life (for which there is of course ample evidence, some
of it, indeed, pertaining to Mulcaster), choosing to focus on the ways
in which grammar-school practices fashioned pliable subjects whose emo-
tional states were defined narrowly by fear of the rod and submission to
authority.7 Detecting in humanism a gap between lofty ideals of edu-
cation and the actual work accomplished in the schoolroom, Antony
Grafton and Lisa Jardine, for example, have undertaken excavations in
documentary evidence that threaten to undermine the whole (in their
estimation, shaky) edifice of humanist pedagogy. Along with furnish-
ing valuable scholarship by presenting case studies in humanist educa-
tion, they contend that, with a few exceptions, humanist educators did
not produce what their self-promoting tracts claimed they did—rhetors
equipped in both morals and eloquence to be leaders of nations. What
they did turn out, as a useful by-product of the mental and physical dis-
ciplines employed in teaching grammar, were “initiates [with] a properly
docile attitude toward authority.”8 In a similar vein, for Richard Halpern,
the content of grammar-school curricula assumes less importance than
do the disciplinary regimens, including the corporeal ones, whose stric-
tures were internalized by pupils to produce self-subjection.9 Such views
and assumptions have been profitably challenged of late. Counterbalanc-
ing emphases on coercive measures, Rebecca Bushnell describes a more
expansive emotional life by finding room for “love, pleasure, and play”
in the Renaissance humanist school; challenging expressly the claim that
grammar schools produced pupils with a “properly docile attitude toward
authority,” Lynn Enterline locates in schoolroom texts and practices the
means for liberating acts of personation.10
2 DISCIPLINE AND RESISTANCE IN THE SCHOOLROOM … 23
These studies have been useful in directing attention to the emotional

life of the schoolroom. The recent surge of academic interest in such
interrelated topics as the “affective turn,” emotional cognition, emotion
and ethics, and histories of feeling predicts that the “emotional commu-
nity” of the humanist schoolroom can furnish a still richer vein of inquiry.
As Barbara Rosenwein insists in her study of emotional communities of
the early Middle Ages, “emotions” need to be taken “as seriously…as
other ‘invisible’ topics, such as ecology and gender” (2). My aim is to
advance serious consideration of the kinds of emotional responses that
are possible, even probable, in the schoolroom. As my use of the term
“community” suggests, my interest extends to the fellowship of scholars,
although I am emphatically not interested in identifying student “sub-
cultures,” if by subculture is meant a group whose shared interests and
aims separate it from mainstream designs.11 Far from being isolated from
the pedagogical concerns of the schoolroom, the emotional community is
integral in defining that classroom. It emerges not as an alternative to the
regimen of instruction but as its affective charge. Arguably, the emotional
dynamics of the classroom structure the school-day every bit as much as
does the curriculum. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I will turn to educa-
tional texts and treatises, some of them thumbed well by critics in recent
years, to look for evidence of emotional dynamics that are more varied,
versatile, productive, and, occasionally at least, liberating and sustaining
than has been customarily assumed. The same sources also register emo-
tional dynamics that are counterproductive to the ideals of the humanist
pedagogical project, but in ways not fully accounted for in studies that
emphasize coercion.
2.1 I
As even a brief review of criticism intimates, one feature of English school
life with a starkly obvious bearing on the emotional experience of pupils
has received substantial attention. It is almost axiomatic to equate human-
ist schools with beating—with good reason. Dozens of illustrations from
the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries place a switch or rod in
the hand of the master.12 Virtually every contemporary treatise or school-
master’s manual at least mentions beating, sometimes in so off-handed
a manner as to reinforce our impression that corporal punishment was
the unquestioned order of the day. The leading theorists and educators
of the day engage explicitly with the issue. In the preface to his treatise
24 J. OWENS
“The Schoolmaster,” for instance, Roger Ascham indicates that the din-
ner table conversation that led to his writing of the tract was sparked by
Lord Burghley’s passing along the “strange News” that “divers Scholars
of Eaton be run away from the school for fear of beating” (Preface 6). In
his “On Education,” Erasmus not only speaks in general of the “torture-
chamber” where “you hear nothing but the thudding of the stick [and]
the swishing of the rod,” but also recalls vividly a beating he received,
providing us with valuable means for estimating the kind of damage done
by such harsh disciplinary measures (CWE 26.325). Before focussing on
influential treatises on education, however, I would like to turn to a short
poem, tucked away in a schoolroom text, that points to ways in which
we need to qualify our assumptions about the violence conditioning the
emotional life of the English schoolroom.
Edmund Coote’s 1596 treatise, The English School-master, provides a
useful start.13 Its status as a widely used instructional text composed by
a schoolmaster near the end of the sixteenth century lets us assume that
it is both descriptive and prescriptive with respect to accepted practices.
The “Short Catechism” included in Coote’s text closes with admonitory
verses to scholars that promise liberal—and intensifying—application of
the rod for breaches of piety, decorum, and conduct. Only nine qua-
trains in length, “The School-master to his Scholar” nevertheless furnishes
considerable insight into the ethos of punishment in the late-sixteenth-
century English school, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the pedestrian
quality of its verse (School-master 50). While the matter-of-factness of the
poem’s tone confirms that we are correct in assuming that beating was
widely accepted as run-of-the-mill, our quickness to draw exactly that
conclusion can obscure other qualities of the emotional community of
the school life imagined in the vignettes depicted in its stanzas.
The first stanza sets the scene:
My child and scholar take good heed

Unto the words that here are set;
And see thou do accordingly,
Or else be sure thou shalt be beat.
Following this general admonishment, in which the threat of punishment

hangs impersonally over the scholar, the schoolmaster details a myriad of
possible infractions, becoming the active agent of punishment as he does
so.14 Enumerating a list of increasingly serious classes of misbehaviour,
the master warns the slovenly scholar that “you and I must have a Fray”
and cautions the unruly scholar that “you and I must be at strife.” The
most grievous misconduct warrants the harshest punishment, beating on
bare legs or buttocks:
If that you Curse, Mis call or Swear,

If that you Pick File, Steal, or Lye,
If you forget a Scholar’s p[]rt,
Then must you sure your pointes untie.
This is brutal punishment, perhaps even recognized as such by the writer

of the verses, who could just as easily have chosen to rhyme “swear” with,
say, “buttocks bare,” but who chose instead to remain indirect, or deco-
rous, by referring to the untying of the fasteners on hose or breeches,
the action that would expose the boy’s bare skin. Whether or not the
writer of these lines retreats, in the way I have just suggested, from the
full force of the punishment to be meted out in these cases, he does draw
back from his role as the active agent in the administering of beatings.
The use of parison, particularly insistent in this stanza in presenting the
scholar as an offender (“If that you … If that you … If you”), also posi-
tions the scholar, not just as the object of punishment, but as its agent:
“Then must you your pointes untie” (my emphasis). At the very least, it is
the scholar himself, rather than the master, who facilitates this especially
humiliating correction.
While “The School-master to his Scholar” might not be remarkable
as an enlightened critique of corporal punishment, it does thus posit
thresholds for violence and limits to the master’s instrumentality in the
purposeful application of force. Following the lead of a critic such as
Halpern, one might argue that the abatement of the master’s active
agency is counterbalanced by—indeed, only made possible by—the
pupil’s internalization of disciplinary codes. But such a line of argument,
however persuasive on the face of it, takes insufficient account of some
signal features of the humanist schoolroom, where not only is learning
measured by the scholar’s progress in rhetorical arts but knowledge
includes knowing oneself, a desideratum of Renaissance thought and
education with a long genealogy and shifting valences.15
To the extent that “to know thyself”—nosce te ipsum, as the familiar
Latin phrase puts it—involves knowing oneself to be shaped by accepted
moral, spiritual, and social codes, these verses do indeed point towards
26 J. OWENS
both self-subjection and self-abasement. There is ample evidence that for

many writers and thinkers of the period self-knowledge meant knowing
oneself to be so flawed or imperfect as to need desperately the correc-
tion that could only come from submitting oneself whole to govern-
ing strictures. In his frequently-printed 1599 philosophical poem Nosce
Teipsum, for example, Sir John Davies “knows himself” to be not only
“frail” in body but “corrupted in wit and will” and enthralled “to the
least and vilest things,” summing up his survey of himself in these words:
“And to conclude, I know myself a MAN, / Which is a proud, and
yet a wretched thing” (“Of Humane Knowledge” ll.169–72, 179–80).
The “Short Catechism,” which precedes the “The School-master to his
Scholar” in Coote’s text and which every pupil would have to learn by
heart, would remind the catechumen, almost daily, that he should know
himself to be a sinner by “the Testimony of [his] owne Conscience, and
by the Law of God,” that he must “prove and examine himself” with
respect to the “Knowledge he hath in the Principles of Religion” in order
to “come worthily to the Lord’s Supper,” and that Christians must “keep
a narrow watch over [their] Hearts, Words, and Deeds, continually” (39,
43, 44). These lessons in mortifying self-scrutiny were underscored, in
vivid language and imagery, by the accompanying prayers and psalms.16
As ingrained as was this understanding of the dictum “know thyself,”
however, most grammar-school boys would also encounter Cicero’s insis-
tence that nosce te ipsum not only signifies “the abatement of arrogance,”
but “also means that we should recognize our own gifts.”17 Cicero’s non-
Christian frame of reference is no barrier to the enthusiastic embrace by
Christian humanists of his conviction that knowing oneself can include
celebrating one’s capacities.18 In his influential On Humanistic Educa-
tion, for instance, Vico declares it impossible that this precept was for-
mulated only “to subdue pride of spirit and cast down human arro-
gance,” happily summoning Cicero to confirm that “know thyself” means
to “know your own spirit” (38–39). For Vico, this means to know one-
self amply capable, by virtue of one’s “divine mind,” of “great and sub-
lime endeavours” (38). Francis Bacon’s rendering of nosce te ipsum, while
less jubilant, goes even further than Vico’s in freeing the dictum from
associations with mortifying self-awareness, by positing altogether more
practical, even politic, ends: not knowledge of a soul in need of redemp-
tion, but knowledge of the “natures” of men, of “their desires and ends,
customs and fashions, their helps and advantages … their weaknesses and
disadvantages” (Advancement 155).19 Moving from the essentialist bent
of both the pessimism that weighs down Davies’ poem and the optimism
that buoys Vico’s oration, Bacon reasons that “it is not enough for a man
only to know himself; for he should also consider the best way to present
himself to advantage … to shape himself according to the occasion …
to cover artificially his weaknesses, defects, misfortunes” (De Augmentis
VIII, ch. 2).20 Attuned in this way to audience and purpose, Bacon’s
interpretation of the dictum is fundamentally social and rhetorical. For
him, nosce te ipsum offers means and motive for action in the world rather
than self-assessment, whether debasing or uplifting.
“Know thyself” thus yields a range of meanings, all of which would
have been available in the Renaissance classroom and some of which allow
considerable agency to the knowing subject. It would be a mistake, then,
to assume that disciplinary measures would produce always or only a thor-
oughly disciplined subject. Even if, rhetorically, the verses cited above
invite us to conclude that the master withdraws from active punishment
because the pupil has internalized the rules of conduct—because the pupil
knows himself to deserve the punishment—it is reasonable to assume that
the offending pupil might equally know himself to be mistreated or might
present himself as properly chastened to avoid harsher measures, merely
shaping himself outwardly to the occasion.
There is more reason for us to be cautious in linking disciplinary mea-
sures too immediately to self-subjection. Each of the ways of knowing
oneself that I have described involves emotion, each seeming to call for
a particular response to a given situation: whether mortification or jubi-
lation or smugness, whether aimed inwardly or outwardly. Psychologists,
philosophers—and experience—tell us that emotions cannot be slotted
neatly into pigeon holes, however.21 A schoolboy who is being flogged
might feel duly ashamed of his misconduct, but he might not—or he
might feel at once, or by turns, ashamed, defiant, angry, fearful, brave,
and so on. Only some of these responses would have self-subjection as a
corollary. Further, if we accept the argument of Martha Nussbaum that
emotions “are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism
of a reasoning creature,” that they are more than just an “adjunct” to
thought,” that they are “parts, highly complex and messy parts” of “rea-
soning,” then it follows that emotions play a vital role in our percep-
tion, understanding, and valuation of whatever holds meaning for us.22
In this view, they form an integral part of our system of cognition and our
judgements: of situations, of others, and of ourselves. Accordingly, when
emotional responses are mixed, as might well be the case with a flogging,
28 J. OWENS
judgements will be qualified rather than categorical; the beaten schoolboy

might judge himself more sinned against than sinning—a state of mind or,
rather, emotion—not easily reconciled with complete self-subjection.23
“The School-master to his Scholar” offers more evidence to suggest
that the emotional community of the Renaissance schoolroom is too com-
plex to sustain the conclusion that disciplinary measures produce only
duly disciplined pupils. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom, as a
student or a teacher, can attest to the fact that (most) students want to
please the person who is in charge of them for so much of the day and
who wields such shaping power in their formative years. However self-
evidently or intuitively, true, such an observation remains an important
one to make in this context because it underlines not only the promi-
nence of emotions in the schoolroom, but their utility. To regulate the
bodily comportment and hygiene of his scholars, for example, the master
threatens, not physical punishment, but the withholding of attention:
Your Cloaths unb[u]tton’[e]d do not use,

Let not your Hose ungarter’d be,
Have Handkerchief in readiness,
Wash Hands and Face, or see not me. (my emphasis)
While it might be straining it too far to say that the master is using affec-
tion to control his scholars—granting it to those who are neat and clean,
withdrawing it from those who are not—it is fair to say that he is exploit-
ing the pupil’s desire to be noticed by his teacher and, accordingly, tap-
ping an emotional response in the pupil. A further, and more sugges-
tive, indication of the pupil’s emotional need for the regard of his master
emerges towards the end of the poem when the schoolmaster warns the
scholar to “look for blame” if he is late for school and, conversely, to
expect “praise” if he behaves himself. As bland as is this vocabulary, it lets
us imagine the intensity of emotional dependence that might characterize
a schoolboy’s relationship with the master.
Just as instructively, for my purposes, by assigning blame or praise—the
rhetorical practice known as epideixis —the master draws the attention of
fellow students to the offending or excelling scholar since, by definition,
epideixis involves public censure or applause.24 “The School-master to his
Scholar” thus includes the salient reminder that the emotional experience
of any given pupil is not defined exclusively by his interactions with the
schoolmaster, as large as those must loom. It includes the reactions of his
fellows to his accomplishments and failings, which we can safely imagine

would run the gamut of cheers and jeers.25 Because epideixis is one of
the branches of classical rhetoric included in grammar-school curricula,
the schoolmaster’s reliance on the vocabulary of praise and blame also
introduces, rather cleverly, an object-lesson for the pupils who form the
ostensible audience for these verses. By employing blame and praise as a
figurative rod of correction, the schoolmaster demonstrates to his pupils
the usefulness of the rhetoric they are studying, showing them (as he
supposes) epideixis at work, fashioning through praise the model student
they should emulate, and depicting through blame the delinquent student
they should avoid becoming. As with the unfastening of points, the pun-
ishment discussed above, such rhetorical fashioning could be construed as
yet another instance of how grammar schools produce self-subjection in
their pupils. But to do so would be to reduce complex—and so not always
predictable—emotional dynamics to an overly simplified mechanism.
When the setting is a humanist classroom, with its emphasis on rhetor-
ical arts, which themselves are rooted profitably in emotion and which
bind together in a dynamic relationship rhetor and audience, it becomes
difficult to claim, in general, that rhetorical fashioning results simply in
the self-subjection of pupils. In the instance under discussion, it is virtually
impossible to do so. Epideixis implicates a wide audience, as I have noted.
The individual responses of pupils to the assigning of blame or praise to
a classmate cannot be predicted with certainty, determined as those reac-
tions must be by a multitude of factors extraneous to the moment, includ-
ing the friendships and enmities that have formed in the classroom. The
admonitory poem under discussion here hints at qualifying factors in its
listing of infractions. At least some of the misbehaviours that earn repri-
mands—swearing and stealing, say—are more likely to have been directed
by the offending pupil towards his classmates than towards the schoolmas-
ter. These classmates might well relish the laying of blame on the offender,
but still not appreciate the epideictic point. And one can easily imagine
instances in which the guilty—and apprehended—pupil was encouraged
in his delinquency by his classmates, even aided and abetted by them. In
those cases, public censure would surely miss the mark entirely, amount-
ing instead to a badge of honour for the culprit and cause for (secret)
admiration on the part of his cohort.26
There can be no denying that the schoolroom imagined in “The
School-master to his Scholar” houses violence, with its master prepared
to apply the rod or switch to enforce social, moral, and scholarly codes
30 J. OWENS
of conduct. But attunement to the emotional community of the class-

room should prepare us to find in pupils something other than, or at
least more than, unqualified fear of the rod and unreflective submis-
sion to authority. The late-sixteenth-century schoolroom accommodates
a range of emotional responses to disciplinary measures, some of them
unpredictable, none of them simply automatic, and most of them proba-
bly untidy. Importantly, too, the fellowship of scholars is likely to figure
prominently in the meting out and experiencing of corporal punishment.
A French medieval sculpture depicting a grammar lesson helps to under-
line the latter point—and to anticipate parts of my argument. On the
south portal of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral, a sculpture from
early in the twelfth century depicts Grammar as a teacher with two young
children at her knees, one of whom seems to have nodded off mid-lesson
and the other of whom is extending his arm, protectively, over the head
of the sleeping scholar. Holding an open book, as does each child, Gram-
mar also holds a switch. While the scene clearly countenances physical
punishment, it also hints that the fellowship of the classroom can buffer
the severity of grammar teachers: since Grammar does not seem about to
employ her switch, the pupil who is still awake seems to have succeeded
in pleading for leniency towards his inattentive fellow pupil.
In the medieval classroom represented on the Cathedral façade, it is
enough, it seems, that the switch be in evidence. Mulcaster reaches a
similar conclusion in considering the punishment that he deems appro-
priate in the sixteenth-century schoolroom. Prefacing his discussion with
the stipulation that “the rod may no more be spared in schooles, then
the sword in the Princes hand”—an assertion perfectly in keeping with
his frequent drawing of analogies between school and state—he admits
subsequently to thinking “gentleness and courtesy towarde children” to
be “more needefull then beating” (Positions 270, 274). The rod remains
useful, however, as a salutary reminder of the force the master could wield:
My self have had thousandes under my hand, whom I never bet, nei-
ther they ever much needed: but if the rod had not bene in sight, and
assured them of punishment if they had swarved to much, they would
have deserved. (275)
Where there are many students (“in any multitude”), “the rod must
needes rule: and in the least paucitie it must be seene, how soever it
sound” (275). Mulcaster’s strenuous claim that the rod should not be
spared thus warrants a closer look, particularly when it is coupled with the
clarification that follows in which he suggests that it is sufficient for pupils
to know that infractions will occasion punishment because that knowl-
edge—reinforced by the rod’s “being in sight”—can be enough to pre-
vent misbehaviour (275). Mulcaster’s recommendation interests me, not
so much for its assumption that the mere threat of punishment can be as
effective as its actual execution, as for its related convictions that not only
do pupils need to be kept fearful but the actual instrument of punishment
has to be visible to instil the requisite fear. He cannot, it seems, trust that
his scholars have internalized codes of conduct to the point that the rod
can be laid away to be brought out as needed.
Nor can it be simply for the sake of the expedient administering of
stripes that the rod should remain close to hand—at least not in Mulcast-
er’s classroom. It has evidently been his experience that a master should
not, in fact, cannot, punish students summarily. In punishing a pupil for
any of the “faultes” named on the list that he should have already com-
piled and made known to all parties, including parents, the schoolmas-
ter “must be very circumspecte, and leave no shew, or countenaunce of
impunitie deserved, where desert biddes” and must “set downe the num-
ber of stripes [to be administered], immutable though not many” (Posi-
tions 271). He should also “take good heed, that the faulte may be con-
fessed, if it may be, without force, and the boye convicted by the verdict
of his fellowes” (271). Otherwise, “children will wrangle amain,” espe-
cially since “affection at home hath credulitie beyond crye, which makes
the boye dare, what reason dare not” (271). Schoolboys will resort, Mul-
caster observes, “to many prety stratagemes and devises … to save them-
selves” (271). When Mulcaster observes that it “were some losse of time
for learning, to spend any of in beating” if there were no “amendments”
to be gained, he is not counting up the minutes lost to the act of punish-
ment so much as the time spent in justifying the penalty (271).
Like the classroom imagined in “The Schoolmaster to his Scholar,”
then, Mulcaster’s schoolroom includes beating. But, again like the one
in Coote’s admonitory verses, Mulcaster’s school is a complex emo-
tional community which cannot be reduced to the mere fact of flogging,
and which cannot be supposed to produce—at least not readily—self-
subjection in pupils. Informed as it is by two decades’ worth of teach-
ing at Merchant Taylors’ School, Mulcaster’s treatise affords us even
firmer grounds than does the poem for supposing that, with respect to
punishment, the day-to-day life of the sixteenth-century schoolboy was
32 J. OWENS
characterized by wrangling, debate, and resistance as much as it was by

unquestioning compliance—even with the rod in full sight. That Mul-
caster explicitly weighs the costs, in time and in the likelihood of future
success, of what he memorably terms “deepe insolencie” and, with it,
“long impunity” (271) permits the reasonably safe surmise that resistance
and defiance, from parents and pupils, often carried the day.27
The implications of this surmise are considerable, especially when we
remember that, for many English writers on education, schooling was
intended primarily to equip boys with the learning and virtues they would
need to become men serviceable to the state.28 Mulcaster in particular
never loses sight of this goal, even advising that parent whose child is
unlikely to advance in school to seek another course for the boy, appren-
ticeship perhaps; for the parent with unrealistic expectations about his
child’s chances of flourishing in school “must bear in memorie that he is
more bound to his country, then to his child” (Positions 146). Mulcaster
is firm in believing that the educated individual “oweth his whole service”
to the “countrie whereunto he is born” (186). He is equally certain that
the interests of a state ruled by a monarch are best served by individuals
who are compliant and uncomplaining:
That child therefore is like to prove in further yeares, the fittest subject
… which in his tender age sheweth himself obedient to scholeorders, and
eitheir will not lightly offend, or if he do, will take his punishment gently:
without either much repyning, or great stomaking. (154)
As I indicated at the outset of my discussion of disciplinary measures,

commentators on humanist schooling have often been inclined to stress
its coercive aspects and its efficiency in turning out docile subjects. A
statement such as this one by Mulcaster furnishes solid support for the
view that humanist education, once stripped of its professed and lofty
ideals, really just functions as a particularly well-oiled cog in the wheel of
state or bureaucratic control. But the deeply insolent, wrangling, strate-
gizing, boy doing what he can to avoid punishment whom we have just
glimpsed in Mulcaster’s schoolroom is a far cry from the “fit” subject
of Mulcaster’s pronouncement. Attention to the emotional dynamics of
the sixteenth-century humanist classroom thus licenses assumptions that
are vastly different from the ones underpinning the coercive school of
thought. As critics such as Green, Kent Cartwright, and Richard Strier
each reminds us from his distinct perspective, Renaissance humanists of
varying stripes leavened ideals and fleshed out abstractions, by engaging

the world with wit, irony, and humour; and by celebrating human poten-
tial while recognizing human foibles. Deriving from the same impulses
that informed humanist contributions in general, the humanist pedagogi-
cal project might well be supposed to have swerved often from rules, jus-
tifying us in speculating that the humanist schoolroom more often turned
out, not boys made docile, but boys who were, if not unflinchingly inso-
lent, then at least not easily subordinated.
2.2 II
It is almost as axiomatic to associate the humanist schoolroom with the
bond between master and pupil as it is to link it with flogging—again
with justification. Spenser’s recollection of his “good old” schoolmaster,
in which fondness is steeped in gratitude for how Mulcaster promoted
his growth as a poet, tells us that the emotional bonds linking pupil to
master could also be generative—even when they formed around correc-
tion of the pupil. Spenser is thankful that Mulcaster made him “more
cunning” by his “arte,” by which term Spenser surely means his master’s
teaching methods (“December,” 41–42). From Mulcaster’s own writings,
as well as from dozens of other sources, we know that these methods
included constant practice (in writing, speaking, construing, translating,
composing, and so on) and, correspondingly, continual correction. In his
campaign to urge schoolmasters to use love rather than fear to instruct
their pupils, Ascham recommends that teachers refrain even from frown-
ing when they are correcting the work of their pupils: “If the child miss …
I would not have the Master either frown or chide with him” (The Schole-
master 15). Schoolmasters should be approachable: “Let your scholar be
never afraid to ask you any doubt, but use discreetly the best allurements
you can to encourage him to the same” (16). Ascham’s cautions point to
both an ideal of pedagogical intimacy between master and pupil, and the
degree to which sixteenth-century schoolboys remained attuned to their
masters’ moods. A contemporary woodcut showing a lesson in progress
captures a moment of just such attentiveness. One of the six pupils is look-
ing up from his book at the schoolmaster who stands directly in front of
him, one hand holding a birch switch and the other extended towards the
boy, making a point. The switch notwithstanding, this particular moment
poses no immediate threat: the master’s expression is mild, the boy’s face
and demeanour unguarded, even eager in anticipation of the point or
34 J. OWENS
comment to come.29 Even allowing for idealization (or propagandizing),

we can suppose that the illustration reflects some measure of truth, that
pupils did warm to their masters, and that, while severe punishment dev-
astates the scholar, mild correction can invigorate and sustain the pupil.
Ascham is one of the staunchest proponents of the idea that the school-
room should be a “sanctuary against fear” and the relationship between
master and scholar pleasant rather than painful to the child (The Schole-
master 38). He counts himself among those progressive thinkers who are
“laugh[ed] at” by men “wise indeed” when “we thus wish and reason,
that young children should rather be allured to learning by gentleness
and love, than compelled to Learning by beating and fear” (31). Per-
haps it is for this reason that he labels as “strange” the news that scholars
have run away from Eton to escape beating (Preface 6). It is not that
Ascham is opposed, tout court, to strong disciplinary measures. Indeed,
he regrets the fact that the youth of England, the seventeen- to twenty-
seven-year-olds, traipse about undisciplined. It is rather that he shifts the
responsibility for harsh punishment from schoolmasters to fathers:
The godly Counsels of Solomon and Jesus son of Sirach, for sharp keeping
in and bridling of Youth, are meant rather for fatherly correction, than
masterly beating; rather for Manners, than for Learning; for other Places,
than for Schools. (37; my emphasis)
Scholars at Eton should have no reason to fear the rod, although pre-
sumably they should still count on the “sharp chastisement” that Ascham
recommends for “all evil touches, wantonness, lying, picking, sloth, will,
stubbornness, and disobedience” (37). These offences might seem to
us to belong in the category of “manners,” whose correction Ascham
reserves for fathers. For Ascham, however, “manners” do not have to do
with specific behaviours (or misbehaviours) but with social distinctions.
The fathers to whom he delegates the responsibility for bridling youth are
the noblemen whose sons will inherit positions of power and influence
in the commonwealth. Writing at a point in sixteenth-century England
when long-established ideals of aristocratic education were just beginning
to be jostled by the ideas of new humanist programmes, Ascham draws
an occasionally unsteady line between the new learning, with its invest-
ment in moral virtues, that is the province of teachers and the “bringing
up of children” in the virtues, many of them indistinguishable from social
graces, that fit them for service to Queen and country. He can be vague,
for instance, on the division of labour with respect to the instilling of

“honesty” and the correction of “every vice” (20); and he cannot affirm
as unequivocally as will Mulcaster a couple of decades later that humanist
schooling is both necessary and sufficient to produce men fit to serve the
commonwealth. But what he does seize upon eagerly as something that
sets the schoolroom apart from virtually all other realms of experience is
the equanimity characterizing the relationship between master and pupil.
In doing so, as we shall see, he adumbrates what will come to be large
claims about the value of humanist education.
We catch glimpses of this equanimity in Ascham’s comments about
frowning and approachability, but it is his often-cited anecdote about
an encounter with Lady Jane Grey that provides the fullest picture of
a schoolroom defined by the absence of perturbation (35–36). Surprised
to find Lady Jane “in her Chamber, reading Phaedo Platonis in Greek”
while her parents and the rest of the household were engaged in that most
quintessential of aristocratic pleasures, hunting, Ascham asks her “why she
would lose such Pastime in the Park.” Replying that such “Sport in the
Park is but a Shadow to the Pleasure that I find in Plato,” Lady Jane seems
merely to be confirming one of the lessons of Phaedo: that the life of the
mind “gathered into itself” is far superior the corporeal life. When asked
to explain “what did chiefly allure [her] unto” her pleasure in study, how-
ever, she cites factors with much wider implications. “One of the greatest
Benefits that ever God gave me,” says a remarkably composed Lady Jane,
is, that he sent me so sharp and severe parents, and so gentle a school-
master. For when I am in presence either of father or mother; whether
I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be
sewing, playing, dancing, or doing any Thing else; I must do it, as it were,
in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the
world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently
sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways which I will not
name for the honour I bear them, so without measure misorder’d, that I
think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Aylmer; who
teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning,
that I think all time nothing, while I am with him. And when I am called
from him, I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do else, but learning, is
full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. (36)
In his relaying of Lady Jane’s explanation, Ascham takes (rhetorical) pains

to draw as telling a contrast as possible between her unhappy home-life
36 J. OWENS
and the schoolroom that is her “sanctuary against fear” as well from other
kinds of turmoil (38). Extended—haphazardly, it seems—through both
polysyndeton and asyndeton, Lady Jane’s enumeration of the activities and
actions that earn reprimands, and worse, from her parents paints a vivid
picture of the inward perturbations that make her home-life hellish. This
rhetorical effect is heightened by the staccato-like accumulation of verbs,
the concreteness of the diction, and the shift to gerunds. The classroom,
on the other hand, is rendered by calmly measured relative clauses sus-
tained by the lilt of anaphora and parison and the comfort of abstrac-
tions. What is more, the peacefulness of the classroom enables Lady Jane
to develop (under Ascham’s hand), if not a critique of her parents’ sys-
tematic abuse, then at least a perspective on it that reflects a considerable
degree of self-possession.
The equanimity afforded by the classroom takes on added, almost
incalculable, value when we register the implications of Lady Jane’s feeling
that “all time [is] nothing” while she studies with her tutor, and take note
of Ascham’s allusion to the fate that would befall Lady Jane. “I remember
this talk gladly,” muses Ascham, “both because it is so worthy of mem-
ory, and because also it was the last talk that ever I had, and the last time
that ever I saw that noble and worthy Lady” (The Scholemaster 36). More
than a refuge from verbal and physical assaults, Lady Jane’s classroom is a
space in which the flux of history and circumstance can seemingly be tran-
scended. The lessons and exercises of the classroom, unlike the activities
that mark the round of daily life at the home of the Duke and Duchess
of Suffolk, transport Lady Jane, not simply to the ancient past, but to
a timeless realm of settled ideals, values, and virtues. Compared to the
hurly-burly of the historical moment that would soon catch Lady Jane
in its deadly controversies, politics, and plots, the calm of the classroom
would be heavenly indeed.30
Although offered simply as evidence that “love [rather than] fear
works more in a child for virtue and learning,” Ascham’s anecdote,
then, anticipates the grand claims that would undergird the human-
ist programme for several generations to come—namely, that the learn-
ing possessed and purveyed by humanist teachers is the key to good
kingdoms on earth (The Scholemaster 35). When so much is at stake,
the relationship between master and pupil must be carefully tended
to ensure the child will grow into the necessary virtues and habits.
For Ascham, it is not quite enough that the master uses gentle rather
than severe means of instruction, thus making the classroom an emo-
tional haven for the pupil. The master must also encourage his pupils
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Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture Hamlet The Faerie Queene and Arcadia 1St Ed Edition Judith Owens Full Chapter

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Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture Hamlet The Faerie Queene and Arcadia 1St Ed Edition Judith Owens Full Chapter

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Emotional Settings in Early Modern

Pedagogical Culture: Hamlet, The

ISBN 978-3-030-43148-8 ISBN 978-3-030-43149-5 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

knowledge of Shakespeare. Paul Dyck helped me to sharpen ideas, often at

1 Introduction: Emotional Settings in Pedagogical Culture 1

2 Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional

3 Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations 57

4 Sidney and Heroic Paideia 85

5 Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 119

6 Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in

7 Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection

Introduction: Emotional Settings

A sixteenth-century English woodcut included in John Day’s 1563 Whole

© The Author(s) 2020 1

My reading of this illustration reflects the primary questions under-

to the last two questions is that we can do so most effectively by paying

of letters—organize emotional responses in particular ways; and, fourth,

the intimacies cultivated in epistolary exchanges; the links between classi-

more nuanced understanding of patriarchal authority. As Pollock puts it

In Chapter 3, after showing how much letter-writing manuals of the

narrowly concentrated, remains on Hamlet’s recursion to techniques of

home. Throughout, Spenser remains concerned with the emotional con-

sons to become like their fathers—which, in Hamlet’s case, would mean

Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare focussing on theatre,

———. “Little Commonwealths I: The Household and Family Relationships.”

Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom:

In the final eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, the

© The Author(s) 2020 21

to Spenser’s years at Merchant Taylors’ School might seem inconsequen-

These studies have been useful in directing attention to the emotional

My child and scholar take good heed

Following this general admonishment, in which the threat of punishment

If that you Curse, Mis call or Swear,

This is brutal punishment, perhaps even recognized as such by the writer

both self-subjection and self-abasement. There is ample evidence that for

judgements will be qualified rather than categorical; the beaten schoolboy

Your Cloaths unb[u]tton’[e]d do not use,

fellows to his accomplishments and failings, which we can safely imagine

of conduct. But attunement to the emotional community of the class-

characterized by wrangling, debate, and resistance as much as it was by

As I indicated at the outset of my discussion of disciplinary measures,

varying stripes leavened ideals and fleshed out abstractions, by engaging

comment to come.29 Even allowing for idealization (or propagandizing),

for instance, on the division of labour with respect to the instilling of

In his relaying of Lady Jane’s explanation, Ascham takes (rhetorical) pains

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