We are constantly told that gender was constructed and performed in the early modern period, but most critics never get their hands dirty by showing us how it was done, step by step. This volume is an exception because it explores how the English were schooled in gender performance all their lives, and how maleness and femaleness were scripted, rehearsed, memorized, and sometimes debated as part of formal, humanist-oriented education on the one hand and theater on the other. As the editors maintain in their excellent overview chapter, the “stage is also a key pedagogical site” (4) where actors and writers represented and subverted conventions about teaching, authority, and gender. Schoolboys (and a few girls) were taught rhetoric and literature by reading and performing plays, and playwrights used didactic popular literature and scenes of teaching in cobbling together plays in many forums, from professional theaters to closet drama.
The book’s fifteen essays are arranged in four parts, “Humanism and Its Discontents,” “Manifestations of Manhood,” “Decoding Domesticity,” and “Pedagogy Performed.” Many of the essays open with standard texts devoted to reminding women of their sinfulness, weakness, and incapacity for learning, but then show how a particular document or play contested those givens. Contributors draw on some fresh and fascinating sources, such as a young girl’s French translation exercises including casual dialogues between master and pupil; records of Catholic girls acting in convents abroad; and letters to Robert Cecil by Lady Elizabeth Russell about fighting off soldiers besieging a castle she claimed as her own. Plays familiar and obscure share the spotlight as contributors examine who teaches what to whom and why. In a subtle essay Caroline Bicks argues that Ophelia teaches her watchers to remember England’s repressed Catholic history, and Deborah Uman shows that Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia instructs posterity on civic virtue in The Tragedie of Iphigenia. In Alyssa Herzog’s chapter on The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tam’d, Bianca emerges as the witty resisting student who debates her suitor-teachers and later disciplines and punishes the shrew-tamer. Kent Lenthof argues that Mariam rejects rhetoric in The Tragedy of Mariam as theatrical and inconsonant with “true” chastity, a losing tactic since chastity cannot be shown, only enacted. In the multiple-wooing plots of Love’s Labor’s Lost and the anonymous and anomalous The Wit of a Woman (subjects of essays by Kathryn Moncrief and Jean Lambert) young women take the reins of their own instruction from their fathers and suitors. Elizabeth Hodgson’s “Alma Mater” eloquently and searchingly examines early modern cultural anxieties about the mother-child bond from which language arises, linking the lowly “mother tongue” to discourses about identity, intelligence, Englishness, and masculinity.
The volume’s reach exceeds its grasp in some ways, however. Class difference, especially as it concerns access to literacy, does not receive enough sustained attention, nor do key relational categories of labor and service, which encoded “scenes of instruction.” Addressing so many arenas and texts while attempting to do justice to both male and female experience creates a baggy canvas full of gaps and inconsistencies. Two of the three essays in “Manifestations of Manhood” are more gender-exclusive than warranted by the stated aims of the volume. Katherine M. Moncrief’s essay on Love’s Labour’s Lost provides an admirable balance in its comparison of male and female teaching and learning, but the other two in the section stand apart in their insistent focus on the male body and its passions, both martial and marital. Jim Casey focuses on challenging violence through war and brutal sports, and David L. Orvis on channeling same-sex desire through a permanent monogamous bond. Casey contributes a solid essay on martial training for boys and men that draws on plays, training manuals, and histories of sport and war for his analysis of Macbeth and Coriolanus, but he does not consider Lady Macbeth or Volumnia as tutors and trainers in killing. Orvis reads the notorious opening scene in Marlowe’s Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage — in which Jupiter hugs pretty Ganymede and bribes him for kisses, giving him jewels that had been his wedding gift to Juno — as Marlowe’s depiction of a same-sex marriage founded on classical paederastia that outlasts that of heterosexual couples in the play. His argument is more audacious than persuasive, since Ganymede sets a price on his embraces, and disappears after the outrageous opening scene. The essay inevitably draws attention to another gap in the book, the topic of female desire and how it is shaped or denied within the educative regimes that produce both gender and sexuality. All in all, however, this volume is a valuable new resource for those studying the ubiquitous gendered trope of teaching on the early modern stage, in all sorts of texts on education and gender ideology, and in the lived experiences of Englishmen and Englishwomen.
