Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline (review)

In Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, Lynn Enterline boldly connects grammar school education during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the building of a performance consciousness and the development of essential dramatic skills in budding playwrights. In five chapters, she considers early modern English techniques of character formation; she contrasts their projected and actual impacts on the transformation of unruly schoolboys to institutionalized gentlemen, from creatures steeped in their “mother tongue” to experts on the “father tongue”—the decorum legitimized by early capitalist norms. Enterline reassesses the familiar evidence of educational theories, while introducing a wide range of archival sources (vulgaria, educational plays, commonplace books, school ordinances, student poems). Pedagogues, she argues, ventured to exploit dangerous grounds, emotional rupture points, while developing a child’s identity. She shows that such practices were bound to bear subversive side effects both on the performativity of affect in everyday life, and the affect that will act as the raw material for performance later on.

Enterline avoids the familiar narratives of the universal success of the august principles of renaissance educational schemes; she also contradicts Harold Bloom’s theories on the invention of the modern human by Shakespeare. Instead, she combines psychoanalytic theory and Marxist cultural analysis to formulate her primary claim that “school training engrained . . . habits of alterity at the heart of schoolboy identity” (8) through the combined effects of the presence of the teacher and the systematic interpretation of classical texts. Enterline uses as her primary psychoanalytic lens the theories of Jean Laplanche on the generation of trauma. As the sexuality of the teacher forcefully intruding from the outside into the world of childhood and puberty calls for a mystifying physiological awakening, traumas are created in the guise of emotional memories that are to be recalled more readily than the original events in every situation that latently contains them. Enterline’s Marxist line of argument is that a series of rhetorical exercises was employed to dissect the bodies of the texts into dissociated bits of decoded materials, devoid of any dangerous ideological content. Youths were inculcated into processing texts of high emotional stakes by sterilizing them—enacting them as mere exercises in the classroom as if they had no impact on their constitutions.

In the first two chapters, Enterline discusses the construction and performance of human gender and emotion through disciplinary techniques. She introduces the prevailing notion of habits of alterity, the predisposition to shape one’s own emotional content by imitating instances of passion witnessed in the speech or corporeal expression of others. In chapter 3, Enterline skillfully explicates Shakespeare’s epyllion “Venus and Adonis” by referring to the framing device that places Venus in the role of the Ovidian praeceptor amoris, the love-tutor. In Enterline’s reading, Venus reverses Adonis’s sexuality by construing him as a woman “more lovely than a man.” She is paradoxically aligned with the institution of the schoolmaster, the parental surrogate, which is doomed to fail in its suppressive normative educational enterprise. The scene of teaching is bound to become inextricably connected to the scene of the original seduction: the adult fantasy of the teacher cannot help but intrude in “pre-sexually sexual” young boys’ bodies.

According to the early modern program of instruction, imitation ought to be carried out through lessons in translation that involved displays of theatrical showmanship. Boys varied their postures, gestures, and voices so as to portray mythological personae using as their materials persons from their immediate experience, transforming characters from everyday life into dramatic personae. The way that this book presents this constant drilling in prosopopoeia, the adoption of an artificial voice, developing expressive means, and the character of an Other as an irrevocable blurring of the boundaries of educational environment, rhetorical training, and theatrical practice is one of its major strengths.

Chapters 3 and 4 guide readers through the impact of such an instructional program on Shakespeare’s work itself. The Taming of the Shrew is read as an inverted, valid lesson for “swine taming”—or how...