"Playful" Poetry and the Public School

Not to name the school or the masters of men illustrious for literature, is a kind of historical fraud, by which honest fame is injuriously diminished.

—Samuel Johnson: Addison (Lives of the Poets)

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginary activity as early as in childhood? . . . Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer?

—Sigmund Freud: Creative Writing and Daydreaming

Often overlooked in studies of poetic history is the manifold influence provided by an institution through which many major poets passed, and which introduced to them the idea of poetic tradition itself: the school. In the English tradition, one school in particular was known as "the cradle of the Muses" for its production of poets, and for its lifelong influence on their work: Westminster School, Britain's leading school between, roughly, 1600 and 1750, the period between the headmasterships of William Camden and Vincent Bourne. Those who trained at Westminster were readily identified as Westminster poets throughout their careers, and an examination of this literal "school of poetry" yields broad insights into the way a school could promote a political and social mission through its poetic training.

The poetry produced at Westminster during its golden period is also pertinent to an ongoing debate within studies of humanist education generally. Some recent scholarship has promoted a vision of humanist education as shaped by skepticism and rebelliousness.¹ Rebecca Bushnell, for instance, argues in A Culture of Teaching that the humanist school is notable for its "ambivalence" and "insistence on play."² This essay will investigate such an insistence on play at Westminster School in order to shed light upon both institutional control and individual resistance, to reveal the lasting importance of youthful poetic training, and to suggest a different way of understanding the power of the school.

While Westminster was famous for its effective poetic training, particularly during the reign of its legendary headmaster, Dr. Richard Busby, it was equally well known for those students who seemed to resist that training. The mischievous "Westminster Boy" was among the most familiar characters of late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century London. Though the alumni of the school included Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, Matthew Prior, Charles Churchill, Robert Lloyd, and William Cowper, it was the more rebellious Westminster students who were notorious, with the pranks and schemes of the witty and ill-behaved Westminster boy providing the basis for numerous novels, poems, and stories. In The London Bully (1683), a self-described "perfect Example of a Debauched Youth" becomes a master of mischief and bad behavior at the school. The novel delights in detailing his various capers, including the introduction of a goat into a classroom. Taking a similar approach, Francis Coventry, in Pompey the Little (1751), has "Qualmsick"

receiv[e] the first Part of his Education at Westminster School, where he had acquired what is usually called, a very pretty Knowledge of the Town; that is to say, he had been introduced, at the Age of Thirteen, into the most noted Bagnios, knew the Names of the most celebrated Women of Pleasure, and could drink his two Bottles of Claret in an Evening, without being greatly disordered in his Understanding.³

This reputation for naughtiness went hand in hand with a reputation for wittiness. In 1730, a collection of epigrams and short poems by Westminster boys entitled Lusus Westmonasterienses ("playful things from Westminster") was published, and this and succeeding editions popularized not only the students' verbal felicity but also their prankish attitude, as several of the poems featured their authors bragging about their rebellious exploits. This became a popular trope: the following year, for example, saw the publication of The London Medley: Containing the Exercises Spoken by Several Young Gentlemen, at The Annual Meeting of the Westminster Scholars, which included an epigram describing the schoolboys' predilection for tobacco alongside one promising that if "Heydegger" (that is, John James Heidegger, the famous impresario) should show up at Westminster, "Pitt and I will toss him in a Blanket."⁴ Even in the nineteenth century, Hazlitt could still...