Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion - Softcover

Enterline, Lynn

 
9780812223712: Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812223713 ISBN 13: 9780812223712
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Shakespeare's Schoolroom places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry—portraits of what his contemporaries called "the passions"—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English "gentlemen." But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of "love" and "woe" betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain.

In contrast to attempts to explain early modern emotion in relation to medical discourse, Enterline uncovers the crucial role that rhetoric and the texts of the classical past play in Shakespeare's passions. She relies throughout on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continuously interact: tropological (requiring formal literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Each chapter moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to illustrate the significant difference between what humanists claimed their methods would achieve and what the texts of at least one former schoolboy reveal about the institution's unintended literary and social consequences. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of "modern" subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lynn Enterline is Nancy Perot Mulford Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is author of The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing.

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Introduction: "Thou art translated"

This book places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry—narrative and dramatic portraits of what his contemporaries called "the passions"—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. The analysis moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to put pressure on institutional goals and effects. And it brings evidence about the theatricality of everyday life in humanist grammar schools to bear on Shakespeare's representations of character and emotion—particularly expressions of "love" and "woe." Throughout the book, I rely on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continually interact: tropological (requiring formal, literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Humanist training in rhetorical copia was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to defining and producing proper English "gentlemen." But the method I adopt in this book brings out a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote their new pedagogical platform and argue for its beneficial effects on the commonwealth. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of "modern" subjectivity, that is, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

Each chapter traces the classical texts, rhetorical techniques, and school disciplinary practices that enabled Shakespeare to invent characters and emotions so often taken to resemble modern ones, demonstrating in the process that seriatim genealogy cannot possibly account for the startling literary and social effects of sixteenth-century pedagogy. Rather, a more complex temporal perspective is required to explain the evident modern appeal of Shakespeare's characters—dependent as they were on ancient examples absorbed in an educational institution that, while laying the foundation for what we now call "the humanities," trained and disciplined its students in ways quite alien to our own practices and expectations. This analysis leans forward and backward in two ways. First and most generally, by highlighting the ancient rhetorical models and texts that made Shakespearean emotions possible, I put the retrospective force of "re-naissance" (a rebirth from the classical past) into productive tension with the prolepsis implicit in the now widely accepted label "early modern studies." Second, I pay attention to many of the early Latin lessons that helped shape Shakespeare's portraits of personal character and emotion. But I also read those portraits back into grammar school archives, assessing that institution's disciplinary and discursive practices by way of Shakespeare's frequent engagement with early Latin training. Here I take my cue from Freud, whose evolving ideas about "psychical reality" led him to suggest that a memory, as an event arising within the subject, might produce a "more powerful release" of affective energy "than that produced by the corresponding experience itself." Implicit throughout this book is the idea that Shakespeare's affectively charged returns to early school training in Latin grammar and rhetoric are so emotionally powerful precisely because these personifications reenact, or reengage, earlier institutional events, scenes, and forms of discipline that were not fully understood or integrated when they first occurred.

One scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play intimately engaged with classical antecedents, will help capture how much school discipline reveals about character and the passions in Shakespeare's texts and vice versa. "Bless thee, Bottom, Bless thee! Thou art translated" (3.1.117): Peter Quince's frightened outburst still makes audiences laugh—even though "translation" no longer calls up the intense, embodied memories and emotions it must once have done for writers and audiences trained up in Latin grammar and rhetoric at the hands of humanist schoolmasters. Rather than merely act a part in a play based on a Roman poem, as many schoolboys had been required to do before him, Bottom also undergoes a physical, classically derived metamorphosis that his peers understand in terms of translation, a common sixteenth-century lesson in Latin vocabulary and grammar. On a daily basis, schoolboys were set to translate passages from English to Latin and back again; and a master backed up his demand for such linguistic agility by the sting, or the threat, of his birch. Such early lessons in bilingual translation were the basis for more advanced training in the tropes and, eventually, physical gestures of an orator—the embodied aspect of rhetoric called actio thought necessary to the performance of eloquence. As numerous schoolmasters had it, "Eloquence and wisdom are one." Read in light of the discursive and disciplinary school practices that once made Bottom's metamorphosis viscerally funny to contemporaries, "translation" in a play that shuttles between the classical world of Athens and the vernacular world of English fairies is not merely a matter of moving from one language to another, or from one cultural context to another. Translation involves social, emotional, and bodily change too: It offers the Mechanicals the possibility of any interaction whatsoever with Athens's aristocrats; signifies terror when the literary history they have imitated comes alive; and allows Bottom, in his classically altered dream state, to see, act, touch, taste, and take imaginative as well as sensory pleasure in Midsummer's woods of desire.

Much like the sixteenth-century schoolboys trained up in the techniques of verbal, vocal, and bodily performance necessary for eloquence, Bottom tries to memorize a dramatic rendition of a Latin precursor (in this case, Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe) only to embark on an emotional experience made flesh. Translated from his early conviction that he is not the same thing as the Ovidian part he is playing ("I Pyramus am not Pyramus," [3.1.20]), Bottom soon loses any such certainty: "Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had . . . " (4.1.207-208). His metamorphosis changes organs of perception, makes him an "ass," and thereby mediates the vernacular world of English fairies through the eyes and ears of a new head derived from precedent classical texts. When Bottom wakes up and reaches for synesthesia to capture his translation's ecstasy, not only do sensations cross, but so do word and body: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was" (4.1.211-14). Acts and threats of flogging at school vividly joined early lessons in Latin grammar to a boy's physical experiences of learning that language; more advanced lessons continued to connect ancient words, tropes, and stories intimately to his body, and did so in ways that required him to synchronize all its parts to gain social approval and advancement. As we'll see in Chapter 2, grammar school training in actio, as well as rehearsing for school theatricals, drilled boys in the techniques of Latin eloquence through exercises in physical as much as verbal imitation. Schoolmasters required young orators to learn how to use and refine the chief tools of their trade: eyes, ears, hands, tongues. As pictured in a midcentury treatise on "manual rhetoric," actio was closely...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812223713
ISBN 13 
9780812223712
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Anja's
service@anja-karge.de

Von-Gumppenberg-Str. 94
Pöttmes
86554
Deutschland

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