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

This is a smart, well-informed scholarly study that makes a solid contribution to our understanding both of Shakespeare’s works and the educational culture that impacted their production. Enterline’s thesis has three parts. The first involves a revision of what went on in the Renaissance English grammar school. While she does not disagree with the classic argument of Walter Ong that the study of Latin in school constituted a puberty ritual, she does take issue with the elaboration of that thesis by critics such as William Kerrigan who argue that schoolmasters used ritual, which included a considerable amount of corporal punishment, to instill a conventional masculine identity in their pupils, thus successfully reproducing the patriarchal social order. Instead, Enterline argues that the gender embraced in the educational process by both masters and pupils was ambiguous and that the latter, especially, were able to adopt roles that allowed them to reject the normative position of gentleman they were being taught and to identify with women as they learned to voice the emotions needed for a persuasive oratorical performance.

The second part of Enterline’s thesis concerns Shakespeare and continues the work of critics such as Joel Altman and Emrys Jones in order to revise what might be considered the “origins” of his poems and plays. Like these scholars, she argues that however important, say, the morality play tradition may have been for Shakespeare, what he learned in grammar school from constructing arguments on both sides of a question to taking on roles both high and low, male and female, during Latin instruction to performing actual plays in that language had a decisive influence on his literary production. Finally, the third part of Enterline’s thesis could be seen as the second part turned inside out. For while she wants to claim that what went on in Shakespeare’s schoolroom affected the way he conceived his characters, she also wants to argue that he used his poems and plays self-consciously to undercut the patriarchal ideology that schoolboys were learning. Although much of what Enterline argues here is not especially new, she does bring a significant amount of interesting archival material to our attention, and she is to be commended for stressing the gender ambiguities of masters and pupils in the Renaissance English schoolroom. She also offers some fine readings of a select number of Shakespeare’s works, although on this score, as I will note later, her study does not achieve as much as it could (and should) have done.

After an introduction presenting her thesis, Enterline writes two chapters that elaborate that thesis and describe the dynamics of Shakespeare’s schoolroom. The first chapter stresses the conflicted, if not self-defeating, way in which the schoolroom attempted to reproduce the social order. For although boys were expected to embrace the patriarchal terms that defined their masters and the Latin language they taught, they were also being trained in alterity: that is, to imitate in speeches and plays the language of others, such as women and members of the lower classes, thus undermining the training supposed to make them into proper gentlemen. In the next chapter, Enterline looks in some detail at Shakespeare’s schoolroom, stressing the fact that boys were forced to imitate others in their exercises or be subjected to beatings, thus tying the performance of emotion to pain and punishment. Moreover, this punishment was sexually ambiguous—the schoolmaster’s rod, for instance, being identified in both maternal and paternal terms. According to Enterline, this gender instability in the schools, combined with the schools’ linking of punishment to the erotic, deeply influenced Shakespeare’s representation of teaching situations, as well as his characterization of pedagogues.

In her third chapter, Enterline turns to Venus and Adonis, in which Adonis plays pupil to Venus as teacher, a teacher whose love for her student is both erotically charged and associated with pain. Enterline notes that although educators saw classical epic...