Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion by William P. Weaver (review)

William Weaver’s Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion is a recent volume in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture series. The title of this series signals the breadth of its scope and the ambitiousness of its aim. Explaining the rationale behind choosing to use the word culture rather than literature in the series title, series editor Lorna Hutson states: “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims . . . to shift the emphasis from a story of progress—early modern to modern—to a series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity” (vii). Similarly, Hutson explains the rationale behind using the word Renaissance in the series title rather than the more commonly expected term early modern, observing: “The term ‘Renaissance’ . . . retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the ‘universality’ of a local, if far-reaching, historical phenomenon” (viii). This is a series full of promise and potential richness.

As a volume in this series, Untutored Lines is also full of promise and potential richness. A book devoted to English epyllia is, indeed, a welcome addition to Renaissance studies, for the epyllia is a largely understudied and underappreciated genre for scholars of Renaissance literary history and culture. And, like the series itself, Untutored Lines is also ambitious in its scope and aim. As Weaver states, Untutored Lines “shows that English poets of the 1590s used the exercises of the grammar school, and the transition between the lower and upper forms of the grammar school, to imagine and celebrate the coming of age of boys in the epyllion” (2). Poets, Weaver goes on, used epyllia to represent rites de passage, and “this ritual process centres on the progymnasmata, or ‘preliminary exercises’, the written rhetorical themes (mostly in Latin) that formed a key part of the humanist literary curriculum from the early sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century” (3). Stating his strategy explicitly, Weaver clarifies the ultimate aim of his book: “By comparing humanist theory and practice of the progymnasmata with poetic performances and representations of these exercises in the epyllion,” Untutored Lines “seeks out the precise terms of becoming ‘perfect man’ in the humanist grammar school” (3).

In Chapter 1 of the book, Weaver traces the development of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and its adoption and adaptation by such classical rhetoricians as Quintillian and such humanists as Erasmus and Charles Hoole. Rather than a brief history, however, Weaver focuses his discussion with an eye toward the social and cultural significance of these “rudiments” and “first exercises” as rites de passage for students as they move from boyhood into adolescence. As Weaver explains, exercises in the “rudiments” for boys are designed “to give free rein to eloquence,” while “the purpose of the first exercises is to restrain eloquence and direct it into certain channels of verbal and social competency” (9), thus marking the student’s transition from boyhood into adolescence, a process, Weaver emphasizes, that is marked by literal and symbolic violence.

In the introduction to Untutored Lines, Weaver explains the structure and strategies of his book. He divides epyllia into two categories: mythological and historical, which, he says, follows the division of classical rhetoric and Renaissance humanism into two forms of narration: fictional and historical. He further specifies that mythological epyllia are “denizens . . . of a transitional, idyllic, green world of verbal plenitude, while the epyllia treating historical themes are representative of probationary, initiatory, and violent processes of discipline” (7). To discuss the thematic and dramatic differences between mythological and historical epyllia, Weaver focuses on what he calls “scenes of performance,” “the dramatic circumstances that poets evoke to contextualize the...