Abstract
A thin description of early modern literature could characterize it simply as extremely personal in nature. During the closing years of the sixteenth century, in particular, English books became remarkably thick with the personal. It is now usual, of course, to evaluate literary works of this period in relationship to the self; “personal” in criticism concerned with the self typically refers to a new interest in subjectivity and inwardness.1 Yet beyond this narrow conception of personal selfhood lies a more expansive personalism, one that unfolded textually in the production of books across various modes. From controversial pamphlets to Ovidian erotica, and from à clef poems to verse satire, an intensively familiar approach to others’ bodies and identities—to their persons as objects of discourse—became a central feature of late Elizabethan print culture. The strong attraction of personal reference led many writers to ignore Gabriel Harvey’s censorious creed of “no Liberty without bounds, nor any Licence without limitation.”2 Whether the liberties that these writers took served political comment, sexual titillation, or social positioning, readers could expect to find everywhere a more sustained and more graphic relationship between book and body. Works like The Faerie Queene (1590), Venus find Adonis (1593), and Have With You to Saf-fron-Walden (1596) offer familiar instances of this relationship.
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Notes
The expressive individual has, of course, been crucial to definitions of the Renaissance from Burckhardt forward. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2 vols. (1860; New York: Harper & Row, 1958), esp. vol. 1, “The Development of the Individual” and “The Perfecting of the Individual,” 143–50; and vol. 2, “The Discovery of Man—Spiritual Description in Poetry,” and “Biography,” 303–33.
For more recent examinations of the self in works of this era, see Thomas Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 241–64;
Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
and Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Stephen Greenblatt describes print’s increasing openness to the self in the following remarks on Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man: “In seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography, the inner life is represented in outward discourse; that is, the reader encounters the record of events that have already transpired, that have been registered and brought from the darkness within to the clear light of the page. In the early sixteenth century there is not yet so clearly a fluid, continuous inner voice—a dramatic monologue—to be recorded.”
Greenblatt , Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 86.
My understanding of the relationship between print and the body in early modern England has benefited from a number of studies, including the foundational essay by Mary Claire Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relationships and Implications,” Studies in Philology 38.2 (1941): 125–57. I also have profited from John G. Norman’s unpublished manuscript, “Literature After Dissection in Early Modern England.”
See also Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993);
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); and Norman’s extended review of Sawday’s work in Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 23 (1996): 176–80. Kristen Elizabeth Poole has argued that the Marprelate tracts’ “polyvalency of competing, overlapping, and interactive voices” opened “a space for the reader’s internal participation,” thus altering the relations among reader, author, voice, and page. Poole, “Talking Back: Marprelate and His Readers,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, April 5, 1997.
See, for representative studies along these lines, Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), esp. chapter 4, section 2, “The New Ovid,” 72–85; et passim. Acknowledging the strong influence of “the dogma ut pictura poesis” Bush writes that “mythological poets vied with painters in rich ornamentation and warm flesh tints. The body had come into its own, although in mythological verse it often seems to be under glass” (78). See also Bush’s bibliography of English mythological poems to 1680, 301–23. For other approaches to these traditions,
see Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959);
John S. Coolidge, “Martin Marprelate, Marvell, and Decorum Personae as a Satirical Theme,” PMLA 74 (1959): 526–32;
Roma Gill, “The Renaissance Conventions of Envy,” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 9 (1979): 215–30;
and Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), who grounds Elizabethan religious satire in a diverse but cohesive aesthetic, a “poetics of dissent” stretching back to the Lollard preachers. For the influence of the flyting and débat,
see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 5–6, 60, 80, 116. Concerning the influence of Petrarch upon the lyric in early modern England,
see Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 63–108. Greene argues that Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella “distinctly plays down the temporal process passed on from the Canzoniere in favor of a still more person-oriented scope and order” (107).
See also Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79, who speaks of Petrarch’s “legacy of fragmentation” as it relates to “the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm” (277). H. Davison is only one of many critics who have explored the importance of Old Comedy for Jonson and other playwrights of this era; see “Volpone and the Old Comedy,” Modern Lan-ßuaße Quarterly 24 (1963): 151–57. On the voyeuristic quality of many early modern texts,
see Wendy Wall, “Disclosures in Print: The ‘Violent Enlargement’ of the Renaissance Voyeuristic Text,” Studies in Enßlish Literature 1500–1900 29.1 (1989): 35–59.
and William Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts (London: A. Constable & Co, 1908). See also the entry by Joseph Black in The Dictionary of Literary Bioßraphy, vol. 132: ‘Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers.’ First Series, ed. David A. Richardson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), 240–44; Black’s doctoral thesis, Pamphlet Wars: The Marprelate Tracts and Martinism’ 1588–1688 (University of Toronto, 1996),
and Black’s “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–1589), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 28.3 (1997): 707–25 (I am indebted to Black for sharing this with me prior to its publication);
and Leland Carson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981).
Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 90. My remarks in this chapter come as a kind of footnote to Weimann’s foundational arguments, in the above text and various essays, concerning the changing shapes of authority in early modern England.
For insightful surveys of early Tudor polemic, see Louis A. Schuster, “Thomas More’s Polemical Career, 1523–1533,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Schuster et al., vol. 8, Part III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 1137–268; and John M. Headley’s Introduction to More’s Responsio ad Lutherum, vol. 5, Part II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 715–831, esp. “Form and Style in the Responsio” 803–23. Headley discusses More’s use of Lucian, Horace, Juvenal, Terence, and Plautus in fashioning his abusive satire (814–20). Exploring the intensively ad hominem nature of the controversy between More and Luther, Schuster notices that More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer contains “more than sixty references” to the potentially incriminating fact of Luther’s marriage (to Katherine von Bora, a former Cistercian nun) (1477).
In William Pierce, ed. The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589 (London: James Clarke & Co., 1911), 262–63. This passage refers to William Gravet (d. 1599), vicar of St. Sepulchre in London since 1566, and from the following year prebendary of Willesden in St. Paul’s. “[D]umb John” here is John Aylmer (1521–1594), Bishop of London; “T. C.” is, of course, Thomas Cooper.
John Dover Wilson, “The Marprelate Controversy,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (New York: Macmillan, 1939), vol. 3, 436; qtd. in Weimann, Authority and Representation, 90.
Allan Holaday, ed., The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 235–36, 11. 13–19.
E. D. Pendry, ed., Thomas Dekker: Selected Prose Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 101.
Here I disagree with Richard A. McCabe’s belief that the terms of the Bishops’ Ban “show quite clearly that its primary target… was neither eroticism nor lewdness but satire itself.” McCabe , “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 188–93; 189. The presence of works that were, variously, primarily misogynistic, politically à clef privately controversial, and satirical cannot be covered by any current or early modern understanding of “satire.” I would argue that satire, eroticism, lewdness, misogyny (of the kind evidenced in The Fifteen Joys of Marriage and Of Marriage and Wiving) were objectionable because they too openly brought the human body—both generally and particularly—onto the printed page. Lynda E. Boose also departs from McCabe’s position, suggesting that to see pornography and satire in an “either-or context… is not only unnecessary but misses something vital.” (“The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], 185–200; 196.) However, Boose’s solution—as the Muse labored, it brought forth a monstrously hybrid creature which combined the salaciously erotic with the violent, misogynistic excoriations of the Juvenalian satiric speaker (196)—remains unpersuasive, as it cannot account for the otherwise wide range of materials included in the Ban, including prose controversy and the “English his-toryes” not allowed by the Privy Council. See Boose, 199 n. 7. Cyndia Susan Clegg has argued that the Bishops’ Ban is not “representative of a widespread, long term, and efficient cultural practice,” but is instead “an improvisational play of competing personal interests” related to Essex’s activities in the closing years of the century.
Clegg , Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217, and chapter 9, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban: ‘Shreud Suspect of 111 Pretences’,” 198–207, passim. Obviously my argument would dovetail with Clegg’s interest in the intensive personalism of many of the works covered by the Ban— especially those that may be linked with Essex himself.
Ian Frederick Moulton, “‘Printed Abroad and Uncastrated’: Marlowe’s Elegies with Davies’ Epigrams,” in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1997), 77–90. Moulton continues: “Given an understanding of corruption which does not draw strong distinctions between a ‘private’ realm of the erotic and a ‘public’ political realm, I believe that Marlowe’s translations of Ovid may well have been perceived as socially disorderly.” I am grateful to Moulton for sharing this material with me prior to its publication. See also Moulton’s insightful, recent study, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 231. Keach speaks of “the conflict and convergence of satire and erotic poetry at the turn of the century,” as evidenced in Weever, and in Marston’s Pygmalion’s Image (188). On the subversive nature of these narratives’ Ovidian inheritance,
see also Jonathan Bate, “Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 80–92.
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, from The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971), 11. 175–91; 11. 188–91.
On the early modern libel, see Pauline Croft, “Libels, Popular Literary and Public Opinion in Early Modern England,” Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 68, no. 167 (1995): 266–85. Croft relates that “The fifteen-nineties saw a proliferation of libels, the result of the strains imposed both by disastrous harvests and by an apparently endless international war which disrupted trade” (269). Libels concerning the Essex uprising and concerning the trials of Walter Ralegh and those involved in the Bye and Main plots of 1603 demonstrated the continuing unease in the political sphere of early modern England (274–75). For studies of libelous material during the Stuart era,
see Alastair Bellany, “‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libelous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter G. Lake (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1994), 285–310;
and Tom Cogswell, “Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995), 277–300.
The publication figures in the following paragraphs are derived from research by this writer, using information in The Short-Title Catalogue. They form part of a chronological, year-by-year analysis of publications by topic and by frequency of imprint tentatively titled “What They Read: English Books in the Early Modern Era.” Concerning publication in early modern England, see Edith Klotz, “A Subject Analysis of English Imprints for Every Tenth Year from 1480 to 1640,” Huntington Library Quarterly 1 (1937/38): 417–19;
and H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); English Books and Readers 1558 to 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and English Books and Readers 1603 to 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Arthur Marotti, “Southwell’s Remains: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England,” in Texts and Cultural Change, 1520–1700, ed. Arthur Marotti and Cedric C. Brown (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
John Weever, Epigrammes—Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut and Newest Fashion, ed. R B. McKerrow (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1911; reissued 1922), v.
E. A. J. Honigmann, John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599) (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1987), 27.
On Tarlton’s “celebrity image” in early modern England, see Alexandra Halasz, “‘So beloved that men use his picture for their signs’: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 19–38. Halasz charts the development and shapes of Tarlton’s celebrity and explores the “appropriation of [Tarlton’s] reputation by the book trade in its effort to expand and create a market for printed texts” (20).
See also Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 186–89.
Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Discours sur le Style (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1901), 25. The general sentiment was not new with Buffon, of course (see n. 2 in this edition of the Discours for classical precedents), but his has been the most succinct and lasting expression.
J. J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (1894), 105;
quoted in R. Warwick Bond, ed. The Complete Works of John Lyly, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 160.
G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 259.
Robert Joyner, Itis, or Three Sever all Boxes of Sporting Familiars (London: Thomas Judson, 1598), A9v–B1r.
See Epigram 93, “Against Itis a Poet,” in Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 185.
Norbrook, “Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere,” 7. See, for a critique of Habermas’s idealism that stresses the entrenched hierarchies of early modern Europe, Robert Darnton, “An Enlightened Revolution?” New Tork Review of Books, October 24, 1991, 34. For this reference I am indebted to Annabel Patterson’s “Rethinking Tudor Historiography,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1993): 185–208,
an essay that contributes to but is not superseded by Patterson’s Reading Holinshed’s “Chronicles” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). There Patterson suggests that we can read the Chronicles as a “textual space … in which the public’s right to information could to some extent be satisfied” (21). My argument with Patterson’s claim concerning the public implications of the Chronicles—a claim that dovetails in many ways with my own—is that it replicates Habermas’s rational emphasis on information and communication. In contrast, I would suggest, the late Elizabethan public sphere often entertained the irrational and the ludic.
On the shapes of decorum in relation to courtly practice in the Elizabethan era, and the ways in which, as vehicles of exclusion, decorum handbooks were used by these growing ranks of the meritorious to gain power and prestige, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
That is, Robert Wilson’s Fair Em the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester, with the Love of William the Conqueror (1590), apparently owned by Strange’s Men. On Shakespeare’s probable connections with this company, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost years’ (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1985), 59–76.
Richard Corbett, “Iter Boreale,” 11. 343–52, in The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
For a theoretical meditation on the relationships among actors, writers, audience members, and readers in the early modern era, see Robert Weimann, Authors Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 8.
D. Allen Carroll, ed., Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: Bought With a Million of Repentance (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), preface. For convenience, in what follows I will speak of Groatsworth without naming the author; as Caroll indicates in his unpaginated preface, much recent scholarship shows that “the case for a serious participation by Henry Chettle” in the writing of this text “is much stronger than has been generally thought. Greene may have had something to do with the writing of Groatsworth, Chettle certainly did.”
For an extended meditation on the relationship between such intensively self-conscious language—evident in the notorious puns on “Will” in Sonnets 135 and 136—and developing forms of poetic subjectivity in the era, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
and, more recently, Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; rpt. 1970), “Of Stile,” Book 3, chapter v, 148.
Edward Arber, ed., “An Introductory Sketch to the cc Martin Marprelate” Controversy, 1588–1590. The English Scholar’s Library of Old and Modern Works, no. 8 (London: 1879), 176.
My argument here about the pivotal nature of the 1590s draws on a number of recent studies, including John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); The European Crisis of the 1590s, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985);
Eric Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Peter C. Herman, “‘O, ‘tis a gallant king’: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Crisis of the 1590s,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204–25;
Mark Thorton Burnett, “Apprentice Literature and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 27–38;
and Margreta de Grazia, “Fin-de-Siècle Renaissance England,” in Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 37–63. For a study that focuses on the effects of urbanization and the dialectic of “court” and “town” cultures within London as portrayed in the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
see Janette Dillon, Theater, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 372.
Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 439.
For the Reformation as “the story of great books,” see John E. Booty, ed., The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England: Great Books of the English Reformation (Wilton, CT.: Morehouse-Barlow Co., 1981), 8.
[R Wilson?], Martine Mar-Sixtus (London: 1591), A3V, and Address to the Reader from Florio’s World of Words (1598), reproduced in Appendix I of Frances A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 337.
Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966), xvi.
For more comprehensive accounts of the issue of “age” during the transition to the modern period, see Keith Thomas, “Age and Authority in Early Modern England,” Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1977 for 1976): 205–48;
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994);
and Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle, eds., The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1996). We still lack a comprehensive study of the University Wits and their influence on the literary scene of early modern England. But for the marked rise of educational opportunities in sixteenth-century England,
see Lawrence Stone, “The Educational Revolution in England 1560–1640,” Past and Present 28 (1964): 41–80.
For the importance of Latin, and Latin literary models to the late Elizabethan era, see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age, ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 24 (Leeds, England: Francis Cairns Publications Ltd., 1990). Binns notes “the pervasive nature of the Latinate culture of Elizabethan England at the zenith of the Queen’s reign,” and relates that the “age of greatest popularity of the new Latin books is perhaps the fifty-year stretch from 1570–1620” (xv, 3). On the role of the epigram— popular with this generation, and arguably the building block of many larger textual forms—
see Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (1947; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1966);
and Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 136–161. On the relationship of humanism’s agonistic basis to the activities of its scholar-authorities,
see Charles Nisard, Les gladiateurs de la république des lettres aux XVe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Michel Levy frères, 1860). For the roles of discipline in the early modern schoolroom,
see Rebecca Bushneil, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2 “The Sovereign Master and the Scholar Prince,” 23–72. On the “discipline” of Latin language instruction,
see Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. Ong sees Latin learning in the Elizabethan grammar schools as a “Renaissance puberty rite”; the sexual segregation of the schools, their strict corporal discipline, insistence upon obedience and imitation, and emphasis on such epic/heroic values, in classical literature, as courage and bravery, led to a hardening of the individual student “for the extra-familial world in which he would have to live” (123).
A useful qualification of Ong’s thesis, however, may be found in Marjorie Woods’ “Boys Will Be Women: Musings on Classroom Nostalgia and the Chaucerian Audience(s),” in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. Charlotte C. Morse and Robert F. Yeager (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), 143–66.
For the influence, on embodied writing, of the Inns of Court, see Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969);
and Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 3–95, who explores the social conditions of Donne’s early verse. Kenneth Alan Hovey also has explored the lingering influence of Francis Bacon’s tenure at the Inns of Court, and its hospitality to “parabolic” dramas, for our understanding of his later works and politics. See “Bacon’s Parabolical Drama: Iconoclastic Philosophy and Elizabethan Politics,” in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts: The Art of Discovery Grows With Discovery, ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 215–36.
For the early modern “commonwealth of wit” as a “social institution in Vosskamp’s and Luhmann’s sense,” see Eckhard Auberlen, The Commonwealth of Wit: The Writer’s Image and His Strategies of Self Representation in Elizabethan Literature. Studies and Texts in English 5 (Tübingen: Narr, 1984).
See Paul Yachnin, “The Powerless Theater,” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 49–74; reprinted in revised form in his book Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
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Bruster, D. (2003). The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England. In: Shakespeare and the Question of Culture. Early Modern Cultural Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05156-1_3
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