Shakespeare Education in Stratford The Guild

Shakespeare

Education in Stratford • The Guild of the Holy Cross

School • 'The King's New School of Stratford-upon. Avon'.

Schedule • Schedule: – – – Summer 6 AM-5 PM Winter 7 AM-4 PM 12 -2 PM lunch break

Program • ‘Trivium' of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the 'quadrivium' of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Program • The School concentrated on teaching Latin. • Tudor text-book, Lily's Latin Grammar, served as an introduction to the works of the classical authors. • Boys were punished if they spoke in English to one another instead of Latin.

Sir Hugh Evans • Evans: What is 'lapis', William? 
 • William: A stone. 
 • E: And what is 'a stone', William? 
 • W: A pebble. 
 • E: No, it is 'lapis'. . . • W: 'Lapis'.

Evans • E: That is a good William. What is he, William, that does lend articles? 
 • W: Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be thus declined, Singulariter, nominativo, hic, haec, hoc. . . 
 • E: What is your genitive case plural, William ? 
W: Genitive case? 
 • Evans: Ay. 
 • W: Genitive, - horum, harum, horum. 
(Act 4, Scene 1)

Curriculum • Ovid • Plautus • Terence • Cicero • Quintilian

Curriculum • Students studied and imitated the ancient masters. • The plays of Terence and Plautus introduced the students to the conventions of Roman comedy

Methods • The declamation of Latin speeches from these plays was an important part of the pupils' practice of rhetoric.

Laughter and Elizabethan Society • Cultural Distance – Feste the clown’s lines Twelfth Night 2. 3. 28 -9 “signposts in foreign alphabet; ” if we do laugh it is for different reasons. – Social functions of laughter • Perceptions of laughter change • Constant: laughter as a form of coping with anxiety, embarrassment, etc. • Freud: laughter and the subconscious

Everyday laughter • A Hundred Merry Tales (1526) • Narrative + emphasis on wit and word-play • Confrontations: town—country, English— foreigners, educated—uneducated, men— women • Example from Kempe: the country lass

Renaissance perceptions of laughter • Joubert Treatise on Laughter (‘one of the most astounding actions of man’) • Structure – Book 1: physiological description – Book 2: taxonomy • Laughable in deed (accidental versus deliberate) – Accidental: body parts, fall (damage cannot be too serious) – Deliberate: practical jokes, imitation • Laughable in word (stories, wordplay) – Book 3: effects of laughter

Inversion and Laughter • The Lord of Misrule (source Philip Stubbes) – Election followed by an visit to the church during which religious ceremonies were parodied – Saints whose feasts often occasioned inversionary laughter: Nicolas, Thomas, Catherine, also Feast of Epiphany (12 th Night)

• Bakhtin: – carnival spirit was separate from official celebrations; it offered ‘a second world outside officialdom’ – Carnival laughter attacks all people, including the participants of the carnival; it often brought things to a the materialistic and bodily levels

Shakespeare • Stubbes on Lord of Misrule: ‘Then, every one of these men… with his liveries of green, yellow of some other light and wanton colour…’ • Stockwood 1578: Morris dancers Maygames in the time of divine service… men dancing naked in nets • Theater—the place of freedom replacing the time of freedom

Pieter Brueghel, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559)

Morris dance

Romanesque Style

Carnivalesque figure, France, c. 1120

Green Man, Bamberg, c. 1239 AD

Green Man Norwich, 1415

Tawny Gray, Entrance to the Custard Factory