Lynn Enterline

Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools

In sixteenth-century English grammar schools, the theory and practice of imitation slowly replaced older methods of learning Latin by precept. Juan Luis Vives claimed that humanist training would turn a ‘beast’ into a ‘man’ and virtually every pedagogue who commented on the matter claimed that instruction in grammar and rhetoric directly benefited the English commonwealth.1 Critics in the 1940s and 1950s demonstrated the profound impact of humanist pedagogy on England’s literary Renaissance, but in the last 15 years, scholars have been far more interested in the school’s participation in the process of social reproduction .2 My investigation draws on both traditions, expanding the first by taking archival evidence about the school’s material practices into account when analysing subsequent literary history and the second by bringing psychoanalytic questions about subjectivity, language, and sexuality to bear on the texts its schoolboy subjects produced. I examine several kinds of archival evidence about grammar school training and discipline in conjunction with one former schoolboy’s exercise in classical imitation (a poem better known by the title, Venus and Adonis).