Abstract
This chapter demonstrates how reading Moth as a queer schoolboy in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost forces audiences to reflect on the gendered ideal early modern schooling was expected to produce, and then compare it to the masculinity actually performed by the adult male characters in the play. While critics have long studied this comedy’s investment in wit, wordplay, and rhetoric as a satirical attempt to outwit the University Wits, Moth is as routinely left out of those discussions as he is cut from performances. Moth, imbued with this tradition, uses his wit to queer the humanist pedagogical ideal by exposing how it is in language’s queer flexibility that true wit resides.
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Notes
- 1.
All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare (1997).
- 2.
Similarly, in Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, Mary Bly notes several instances in early modern drama wherein writers “adapt the Ovidian metaphor of an insect kissing the beloved’s lips” to suggest the potential queer connection between insects and the erotic .
- 3.
On the various ideals of manhood in early modern England, see Bruce Smith ’s Shakespeare and Masculinity, 39–66.
- 4.
One possible exception is Falstaff’s page in 2 Henry IV and Henry V, who has the second most speaking lines of any boy character in Shakespeare , is not named, and is a sort of metaphorical son of Falstaff, as I have argued in a forthcoming article in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.
- 5.
During Shakespeare ’s life, England experienced a significate expansion in the number of licensed schoolmasters in villages across England, though this number would decline in the years during and after the civil war (Wrightson 1982, 194–5; O’Day 1982, 35–7). Those boys who did not immediately enter experiential work as an apprentice or servant , entered schooling , and in so doing, they were often separated from parents and boarded at the school , a process known as tabling out, as they continued their early education .
- 6.
This book, as Lamb has shown, and others such as Youth’s Treasury (1688), Sports and Pastimes (1676), and Wit’s Interpreter (1655), confirms what Merrie Riddles author “J. M.” believes as the purpose of these books being “for the recreation of Youth, especially School-boys , whose wits are generally sharpened on such Whetstones” (A3r; also qtd. in Lamb, 2012, 71).
- 7.
- 8.
Surprisingly, H. R. Woudhuysen, editor of the Arden Love’s Labour’s Lost, corrects the line to “quod” without mentioning the potential misspelling in the Quarto and Folio; William C. Carroll also makes the change for The New Cambridge Shakespeare , but does note the original spelling; the Riverside maintains the misspelling and provides the correct “quod” in footnote.
- 9.
These misspellings and mispronunciations are often noted in critical editions of the play, and this summary amalgamates how Woudhuysen, Carroll, and Barten edit these lines. All three note the error(s) and respond based on individual editing practices.
- 10.
I am indebpted to Mark Johnston for this observation and idea.
- 11.
Sonnet 129 begins as follows: “Th′ expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action” (1–2). According to the OED, spirit alludes to “semen” as well as the “soul” or “higher part” of a person (16a, 1a).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and express gratitude to Jameela Lares, who first provided me feedback on this project; to Mark Johnston and Jennifer Higginbotham for extremely generous and detailed direction, and also for organizing an SAA seminar devoted to queering early modern childhood ; and finally to the English Department and Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama for providing the funds for me to travel to the 2016 SAA. I would like to express additional gratitude to Mark Johnston, who was especially instrumental in the improvement of this chapter throughout the revision process. Much of the success of this essay is the result of his thoughtful, critical, and continuous feedback, and I am grateful for such care and precision.
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Sasser, M.T. (2018). Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal in Love’s Labor’s Lost. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_7
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