Chapter 1

Style

George Gascoigne’s “Patched Cote”

Elizabethan children’s encounters with written vernacular poetry likely began near the start of their formalized education (if they were fortunate enough to receive one).¹ Petty schools, roughly equivalent to modern kindergarten or nursery school, often used verse and song to help five-to-seven-year-olds learn basic English literacy, memorize prayers and the catechism, and develop social skills. For example, All the Letters of the A. B. C, a 1575 ballad, is an acrostic that introduces both the letters of the alphabet and assorted biblical passages, which are cited in the margin:

A.

Attend yee Youngones / and learne Understandinge

B.

Beare-fauor to the Loue / that she in you may have plantinge.

C.

Com to the meekmynded Beeing of Bounteousness.

D.

Directlye the right humilitie, to you it doth expresse.²

Written by the founder of the religious sect the Family of Love, Niclaes Hendrik, it employs the mnemonic affordances of meter, rhyme, and alliteration to connect the acquisition of reading with an incipient theological “understanding.”³ Following along with the broadsheet during school, children learned how to “attend” not just to the ballad’s examples and instructions, but also to the congregation of voices reciting a shared text in unison. In this way, early ballads such as Hendrik’s participated in a pervasive educational program linking poetry and communal piety. This linkage was most evident in how the biblical psalms were used throughout both childhood and maturity for cultivating piety; they were sung by church congregations and daily at some schools.⁴ The Whole Booke of Psalmes Collected into Englysh Metre (1562), widely known as “Sternhold and Hopkins,” was among the best-selling books in early modern England and was used in churches to “ameliorate tedium” as a “multimedia guide to devotional practice.”⁵ The psalms, and the common meter they would propagate throughout England, were the pinnacle of what Hendrik’s ballad aspires toward: reverberating doctrinal decrees, introducing an archive of shared cultural media, and setting the behavioral rhythms of social life.⁶

After learning how to read (and, to a lesser extent, write) English in petty school, Tudor schoolboys with means would have entered grammar school, where poetry took on a new role.⁷ By 1530, the humanist program that Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet introduced at St. Paul’s in 1512—which prioritized the acquisition of rhetorical eloquence in Latin—had become the framework that English grammar schools would adopt throughout early modernity.⁸ Grammar school students advanced through seven “forms” wherein they would encounter increasingly complex exercises in Latin prose and verse composition that tested their verbal resourcefulness and attention to tone, pacing, structure, and rhythm.⁹ While some schoolmasters prohibited the use of English, others integrated scraps of vernacular verse into their techniques, usually to facilitate translation.¹⁰ Being able to translate Latin and Greek verses into English was necessary for the foundational pedagogical technique of double translation, whereby students rendered sample texts into English and then, after some time, translated their English translations back into the original language to compare their work with that of the source. An illustration of how versification was involved in this linguistic intermingling may be seen in the seventeenth-century grammar school notebook of Robert Pendarves (Folger MS V.a.629).¹¹ After a series of Latin compositions on sententious themes, the notebook records a collection of “an hundred emblemes” drawn from Thomas Combe’s English translation of Guillaume de la Perriere’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614). On one page appears a drafty attempt at rendering one of the verse emblems, number 35, into Latin (figure 1.1). The student apparently began by translating “The way to pleasure is soe plaine, / To tread the paths few can refraine” word for word: “via ad voluptatem est sic plana.” Underneath this effort, he reconsiders the end of the line, writing, “Sic plana est” as an alternate option—perhaps recognizing the differences between English and Latin syntax, perhaps preferring the sound, or perhaps anticipating the second half of the couplet with an opportunity for a different rhyme.

While instructional ballads index what children were supposed to learn, exercises such as the one in Pendarves’s notebook reveal how poetry could introduce even assiduous students to the possibility of outcomes different from those anticipated by their teachers. Once a student is given permission to experiment with language such as through the task of translation, distraction, inclination, or even simple misunderstanding will make new options available. By availing itself of the stuff of words, such as sounds and textures and affinities with other words, poetry could insinuate lessons into children’s brains—but it could also expose children to linguistic effects such as polysemy, homophony, and punning. Poetry was useful in educating children because it mixed instruction with delight, but if it was the spoonful of sugar that accompanied doctrinal medicine, in private moments children could satisfy themselves with the sugar alone. Babbling nursery rhymes, doggerel folk songs, and folk ballads would have been part of the everyday soundscape of early modern life.¹² On a blank page in a copy of King James VI’s Poetical Exercises (1591), for example, Gabriel Harvey jotted down some nursery rhymes before dashing them out in an apparent fit of self-consciousness.¹³ One of these rhymes goes, “When pucketts away, when shall we go play? / When the puckett is a sleap, then may wee go sow owr wheat.” The other runs, “My Dame hath in a hutch at home / A little Dog / With a Clog; / Hey dogs hey.” Meant to exercise the tongue more than the brain as training in elocution, such gleeful gobbledygook inevitably accompanied vernacular poetry into adulthood. Its pleasures—which Harvey himself would performatively dismiss, in a letter to Edmund Spenser, as noise that “hunt[s] the letter” and resembles “friulous boyishe grammer schole trickes”—could not be fully shaken even by its detractors.¹⁴ On the versos of their self-serious labors, even scholars could not resist toying with trifles.

A lapse in attention or an ebullient elaboration may produce what seems at first to be an error. Yet such moves may prove charming enough, or striking enough, or potent enough to be defended in the name of “poetic license”—or what may more broadly be called style. Susan Sontag defines style as a “deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world” that manages to be “both autonomous and exemplary,” and Theodor W. Adorno as “the inclusive moment whereby art becomes language.”¹⁵ Jeff Dolven’s variation on this theme identifies in style a host of “ironies”—“part and whole, art and nature, individual and group, description and judgment”—that constitute “a life-enabling double consciousness, a way of living with contradiction, carrying on in the face of a problem that cannot, on its own terms, be solved.”¹⁶ Despite formally belonging, in the context of classical rhetoric, to the domain of elocutio, it may be understood as emblematic of rhetoric itself.¹⁷ As Dolven points out, “Any new style must somehow convince us that it is not a botched attempt at something more familiar”; it must persuade onlookers that “its difference is a matter of skill, not incompetence; that we might just want to try it ourselves, or that someone might.”¹⁸ A student suspended between not just two options but within half of a rhyming couplet, such as the author of the exercise in Pendarves’s book, experiences the thrill and peril of style. Witnessing the possibility of unexpected, surprising, pleasing, or frustrating deviations, the author left the final decisions permanently unmade.¹⁹ Style names a manner and technique of using language that invites imitation; it also names a lapse in imitation, a distracted phrasing that nevertheless ends up managing to rhyme.

This chapter focuses on the problem of style, presenting it as a problem because it names a fundamental contradiction in poetry’s relationship to education in early modern England. In Erasmus’s approach to rhetorical education, style was an essential component of the cultivation of eloquence. Developing a sense of style allowed students to distinguish themselves as orators while nevertheless demonstrating that they had, as Richard Halpern observes, “achieved a certain continuity and regularity” and had “learned to obey certain decora.”²⁰ Poetry’s role in the cultivation of rhetorical style was to present students with curated models to imitate and absorb as demonstrations of acceptable deviation. Writing verses enabled stylistic practice because it gave students a little bit of clearance to differentiate themselves; it allowed the fun of distraction to become fodder for composition. Once exposed to this clearance, however, they were also exposed to the possibility of breaching decorum and committing errors. “At the moment of its emergence,” as Dolven notes, “perhaps a style can only distinguish itself by failing, failing at least to be what was expected of it.”²¹ In theory, humanist students would learn to fail correctly; they would, over time, have their eccentric impulses checked. As they were conditioned to put away childish things by the schoolmaster’s corrections, they would eventually internalize the requisite sense of restraint. It is no surprise, given the centrality of error to this educational process, that Tudor teachers adopting Erasmus’s curriculum feared poetry’s volatility. The failure to acquire decorous restraint could undermine the socializing project of education in general. Because poetry allowed children to “scramble and recombine received materials” and to experience the pleasure and delight of such maneuvers, Halpern pinpoints it as a site whereupon “textual decoding [broke] free from instrumental finalities and hence from social control.”²² If on the one hand poems were instruments of normalization, as witnesses to the excesses of style, they were on the other hand demonstrations of how rules could be relaxed, bent, or even broken.

The contradictions that attend the problem of style, I propose, challenge us to reconsider what it means to teach early modern poetry in the context of the modern classroom. Focusing on the writings of George Gascoigne (ca. 1535–77), the first professional teacher of vernacular English poetic style, this chapter identifies in Gascoigne’s influential poetics a commitment to discomposition—that is, a commitment to resisting prescriptive protocols of compositional decorum. Gascoigne began his career frustrated by how poetry was being taught, written, and read in Elizabethan England, and in witnessing his frustrations, we might perceive some of our own.

Despite initially falling under a cloud for his own personal and literary indiscretions, Gascoigne published the first printed guide to vernacular English poetics: Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse (1575). This document, read in the context of his career, presents the problem of style as a framework for teaching writing by teaching poetry. In what follows, I read Certayne Notes alongside what was probably the first literary work Gascoigne wrote in its wake: The Glasse of Governement (1575), a closet drama preoccupied with humanist educational practices. This understudied (for understandable reasons, as we will see) play depicts the divergent paths of pious and prodigal sons through the Tudor humanist educational system. Unlike most prodigal son narratives, however, it does not find its protagonists restored to their fathers’ embraces after having learned their lessons. Instead, the prodigal sons end up disgraced and dead, and the play implies that this ignominious fate is the result of the boys not being transformed, or even improved, by their pious teacher.²³ Showcasing what Julian Lamb describes as the closed loop of humanist instruction, which expected its students to already possess judgment in order to acquire the judgment that instruction was designed to produce, The Glasse of Governement invites audiences to wring their hands at the failure of the play’s schoolmaster to reach his students.²⁴ Leaving readers confused as to whether the moral fable warrants applause or condemnation, Gascoigne connects the problem of compositional style to the challenge of teaching people to engage in critical thinking without stifling their individual intellectual propensities.

The first section below contextualizes Gascoigne’s relationship to style within Tudor humanism by focusing on the resonances between his complaints about poetic education and Erasmus’s attention to a particular form of student error: “patchwork” writing. Erasmus advised that in cultivating copia, or an “abundant style,” student writers would inevitably appropriate scraps and shreds of canonical authors’ discourse. To accommodate such educationally necessary appropriation, he made poetry the curricular home for reckless pilfering and verbal play. As Erasmus and Colet’s program was implemented in English classrooms in the Tudor era, though, patchwork writing became the more maligned category of “botching” or “bodging.” These terms for clumsy craftsmanship appeared in sixteenth-century dictionaries and meant both “repayre, or to mende” and more specifically the “patch[ing] of olde garments.”²⁵ For English teachers like John Brinsley, the awkward appropriations of bodgery evinced inattentive work that was not near enough to its model rather than either idiosyncrasy or ambition. This transition, from an approbation of poetic license toward a pedagogy that attempted to abolish it, serves as the backdrop for Gascoigne’s poetic career.

The subsequent two sections of the chapter study how Gascoigne developed his poetics at the intersection of patchy ambition and botched discretion, with the first examining The Glasse of Governement. As a story about homework, the play affiliates the pedagogical machinery of poetic insipidity with the products of tragic rigidity. While the text was overtly designed to demonstrate Gascoigne’s reformation, its self-conscious tedium also appears to serve as a warning. The play’s disastrous conclusion suggests that affording too narrow a warrant for clumsy audacity will do more than stifle the promise of English poetic style. It warns that the eradication of stylistic experimentation among educated officials precipitates a reduction in the capacity of government to address rapid social change. Gascoigne saw “patching” and “botching” as evidence of the faltering of an author’s will. In his earlier writings, and latently in Certayne Notes, the focus of this chapter’s third section, he orients poetic composition around a principle of poetic invention he calls “quick capacity.” Writers, he realized, could be lured by temptation, thwarted by distraction, or compelled by external authorities—all of which might discompose their judgment. Quick capacity, which names the stylist’s ability to make free choices, was the poet’s safeguard against both patchwork and bodgery.

In the reflection following this chapter, I consider what the promotion of “quick capacity” might look like in the context of the modern literature classroom. Turning to discussions among compositionists about the relationship between composition and correction, and to a specific form of compositional error that Rebecca Moore Howard calls “patchwriting,” I trace continuities between the contradictions of humanist composition pedagogy and problems facing critical writing pedagogy in literary studies. When we invite students to write literary criticism, we are also, we must realize, challenging them to adjust their styles of expression into closer conformity with the norms of our discipline. Taking heed of Gascoigne’s defense of the virtues of deviation for the cultivation of critical attention, I join writing teachers who argue that the teacher’s role does not have to be one that passes judgment, but instead can be one that may help students become more attentive to their own choices.

The Fabric of Poetry

At the start of 1575, George Gascoigne was mending a tattered reputation. A whirlwind early career—which included participation at Elizabeth I’s coronation, service as a member of Parliament, study at the Inns of Court, imprisonment for debt, and an unsuccessful stint in the military—had preceded his first publication, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, in 1572/73.²⁶ This book was a diverse collection of raucous poetical, dramatic, and narrative works facetiously presented as authored by several gentlemen. It apparently aroused so much scandal for licentiousness and potential libel that within two years, Gascoigne was compelled to revise and reissue the collection as The Posies (1575), this time claiming sole authorship of its entirety and prefacing it with a series of apologetic letters.²⁷ He also added to this volume an entirely new work, Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse. While presenting its author as a poetic authority now in control of his powers by cautioning readers against indiscretion and offering concrete advice about accentual meter and stanzaic forms, Certayne Notes also reflects traces of the irrepressible spirit that originally motivated Gascoigne to produce Flowres.²⁸

Certayne Notes suggests that writing poetry is an energetic balancing act more than it is an exercise in following instructions. For example, during some remarks on proper word choice, Gascoigne offers the following advice: “Frame your stile to perspicuity and to be sensible: for the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse that is to[o] easie is like a tale of a rosted horse: but let your Poeme be such as may both delight and draw attentive readyng, and therewithal may deliver such matter as be worth the marking” (459.3–8). Unwilling to simply conform to disciplined and unadventurous versifying, Gascoigne makes the poet’s remit acceptable eccentricity, or felicitous indecorousness.²⁹ Style should earn the attention of readers, he insists, without earning their scorn. Gascoigne’s understanding thus reflects how poetic style in Elizabethan England accrued around the generation of exempla that others might quote in their own compositions.³⁰ In the shadow of classical authors such as Virgil or Cicero, whose sententiae early modern writers deployed in their own writings, poets like Gascoigne tried to distinguish themselves enough to warrant quotation, but not so much as to appear outlandish. His famously “botched attempt” with A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres must have made the dangers of literary risk taking abundantly clear to him, and in response to the scandal he had caused, in the second of The Posies’ apologetic prefatory epistles he repents the “barbarousnesse of the stile” of the earlier volume. As compensation, he presents himself as a different sort of example: “Make me your myrrour,” he suggests, so that you might “eschue betymes the whirlepoole of misgovernment” (368.30–36).

Though he overcame his youthful missteps and rose to become the most prominent poet of his era, Gascoigne’s career traces the path of an unlucky generation that Richard Helgerson influentially termed the “Elizabethan Prodigals.”³¹ A product of a humanist curriculum centered on cultivating eloquence in part via poetic composition, his education in grammar school, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn resulted only in the disappointing revelation that the skills cultivated by his schooling would not automatically lead to employment.³² Needing to market himself, he used his lively verses to seduce the attention of those who held the keys to civic offices, since compositional acumen and wittiness were believed to demonstrate both reverent governmentality and bold political savvy.³³ According to Roger Ascham’s increasingly influential pedagogical guide, The Scholemaster (1570), the fundamental technique of humanist pedagogy, double translation, developed “a true choice and placing of words, a right ordering of sentences, an easy understanding of the tongue, a readiness to speak, a facility to write, [and] a true judgment both of his own and other men’s doings.”³⁴ Flowres revealed Gascoigne to have lapsed in his sense of his own and other men’s doings, and to rehabilitate his career, he had to defend his own decision-making. He seems to have bristled at this. In Certayne Notes he acknowledges that some kinds of deviation can cajole readers into “marking” their text—for example, catching the reader off guard with a few “straunge wordes” (455.19) or some “straunge discourse of intollerable passion” (458.39–40)—before tempering such suggestions by cautioning, “Yet I woulde have you therein to use discretion” (459.1–2). As we will see, his advice attempted to both demonstrate disciplined authority and also retain the poetic sensibility and appetite for strangeness that he cultivated in Flowres. Knowing that he had a knack for winning attention, he felt that his “great diversitie both in stile and sense” was being overlooked and undervalued (368.23–24).

As noted above, Gascoigne’s Posies begins with a collection of letters apologizing for the apparent indiscretions of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. The first of these is addressed to “the reverend Divines”—that is, to the Court of High Commission—and it sees the poet trying to defend himself while also performing his own reformation. Torn between these somewhat mismatched impulses, his account of how he thought his first volume would fare glimpses the rift between the urgent aims of aspiring poets and the rigid expectations of Elizabethan authorities:

For although I have bin heretofore contented to suffer the publication thereof, only to the ende men might see my Methode and maner of writing: yet am I nowe thus desirous to set it forth eftsoones, to the ende all men might see the reformation of my minde: And that all suspitions may be suppressed and throughly satisfied, by this mine unfeined protestation which I make unto you in that behalfe. Finally, were it not that the same is alreadie extant in such sort as hath moved offence, I should rather be content to cancel it utterly to oblivion, than thus to returne it in a new patched cote. (363.15–24)

Had A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres not “moved offence,” Gascoigne admits, he would have been content to have the book serve as a demonstration of his personal style—that is, of his “Methode and maner.” Michael Hetherington notes how in such invocations of “method,” Gascoigne endeavors to “have his cake and eat it” by appearing “to avow and disavow statements and attitudes about his own artfulness in almost the same breath.” He thus “manages to occupy a shifting yet fertile middle ground, laying claim to just enough method to win him authority and to just enough daring opportunism to elicit admiration.”³⁵ When his efforts at seeking acclaim were poorly received, however, Gascoigne felt compelled to show evidence of “reformation” by rereleasing his work in a “new patched cote.” This most directly refers to how the most controversial work in The Posies, “The Adventures of Master F.J.,” had been “so clensed from all unclenly wordes, and so purged from the humor of inhumanitie, as percase you woulde not judge that it was the same tale” (363.13–15).

Gascoigne’s immature perspective toward poesy, as reflected by an idea pervasive throughout A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, was that a poet’s style may excuse or even justify certain indiscretions.³⁶ In his apologies, he retracts that perspective by conceding that some issues cannot be excused by that “shrewde fellow,” poetic license, who, as he suggests in Certayne Notes, otherwise “covereth many faults in a verse” (459.29–30). Or at least, he seems to concede this. As Felicity Hughes notes, despite all of his posturing, “the ‘revised’ and supposedly expurgated volume of 1575 is not really any ‘cleaner’ than the first.” He could not fully bring himself to conceal the fruits of his labor, and so, as Hughes puts it, he sought to “brazen it out with the censors.”³⁷ This maneuver, however, was evidently transparent enough that The Posies was itself recalled by the Court of High Commission in 1576.³⁸

At least initially, Gascoigne had a hard time figuring out how to write poetry he found pleasurable while also avoiding the sorts of things that invited rebuke. The safest solution, his letter to the divines suggests, was to hyperbolically cede his agency before the censors’ corrections. But he also could not help drawing attention to this gesture; if his opening letters are an apology, they also advertise the presence of illicit materials in ways that may have enticed young gentlemen readers. Being ideologically right, Gascoigne knew, was not the same as being widely read, and in the parsimonious Elizabethan court, being read was a pathway to employment. In April of 1575, just three months after the publication of The Posies, he published the closet drama The Glasse of Governement. I read this play as an extreme version of his “patched cote”: parts of it are so self-consciously cobbled together that they read as if the playwright is thrusting others’ words into readers’ faces, challenging them to reapprove that which has already been deemed acceptable. By having an opening half burdened with such passages, the play actively risks not being read—and challenges those who stick with it to revise their own demands about what sort of literary material they truly desire. In the following section of this chapter, I read the play as a rallying cry against the sort of pedagogy that created a demand for poetry prioritizing obedience and piety above all else. In order to construct this reading, however, in this section I recount the origins and principles of that pedagogy.

As has been well documented, thanks largely to the monumental scholarship of T. W. Baldwin, the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum was inspired by the reforms put in place by Erasmus and Colet at St. Paul’s School.³⁹ These reforms instituted a composition pedagogy that hinged on accumulation, imitation, and recombination; as Emrys Jones puts it, Tudor grammar schools produced “[b]oys who had spent the best part of six long days a week for perhaps as many as ten or eleven years reading, translating, analysing, and explicating Latin literature” and who “would have memorized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lines or scraps of lines from [classical] poets, as well as having innumerable phrases, constructions, and rhythms from the prose writers impressed on their minds.”⁴⁰ This focus on reading widely and memorizing fragments of others’ writings owes to injunctions like this one from Erasmus’s De copia: “We must keep our eyes open to observe every figure of speech that [the great authors] use, store it in our memory once observed, imitate it once remembered, and by constant employment develop an expertise by which we may call upon it instantly.”⁴¹ The pursuit of one’s own style, which Erasmus regards as “to thought as clothes are to the body,” was from its start a fundamentally social practice.⁴² Appropriating words from others would help those who are “unable to clothe our thought in other colours or other forms” avoid being “tongue-tied” or “bor[ing their] wretched audience to death.”⁴³ To enhance students’ store of ready phrases, Erasmus advised allowing them chances at practicing audacity through poetic manipulation. Taking fine-sounding phrases and injecting them into new contexts gave students opportunities to tame strange language within structure and form. When their “employment” of snatches of language went to an extreme or their words borrowed too obviously, Erasmus equated such writing to a “patchwork,” or cento.⁴⁴

The cento was a genre of poetry composed by stitching together lines from classical sources such as Virgil or Homer.⁴⁵ While in his youth Erasmus himself apparently composed at least one cento, in his mature writings he reveals a negative appraisal of them as insincere and shallow, because “they neither impart information, nor stir the emotions, nor rouse to action.” Regarding those who restrict their compositions to such patchworks, “[t]he best you can say of them,” he writes, “is that they know their Virgil, and have put a lot of effort into constructing their mosaic.”⁴⁶ Writers must internalize rather than imitate, Erasmus explains in The Ciceronian, so that their “speech will not be a patchwork or a mosaic, but a lifelike portrait of the person you really are, a river welling out from your inmost being” (nec oratio tua cento quispiam videatur aut opus Musaicum).⁴⁷ He warns that writing means that “[a]ll that you have devoured in a long course of varied reading must be thoroughly digested and by the action of thought incorporated into your deepest mental processes, not your memory or word-list.”⁴⁸ He adopts a similar warning in his treatise on epistolary composition, recommending that writers employ a “living model” for their composition before “borrowing” the “best words and sentiments” from great authors and applying necessary changes “to suit the topic at hand.” If this is not done, he says, the letter will appear “like a bit of bad patching or faulty soldering” (male assuta, maleque conferruminata).⁴⁹ Sourcing one’s imitations to a variety of texts was not sufficient in and of itself to produce eloquence; students had to learn how to make educated choices about how to incorporate others’ words and stitch them together.

Erasmus regarded patchwork writing as an inevitable step in the cultivation of eloquence and style. It signaled engagement with a variety of authors and the infusion, at first intermittently and eventually more pointedly, of words claimed as one’s own. “It will be of enormous value to take apart the fabric of poetry and reweave it in prose,” he writes in De copia, “and, vice versa, to bind the freer language of prose under the rules of metre, and also to pour the same subject-matter from one form of poetic container into another.”⁵⁰ Beyond advising attention to the thread-like sinews of sentences, Erasmus encourages boldness: “It will also be very helpful to emulate a passage from some author where the spring of eloquence seems to bubble up particularly richly, and endeavour in our own strength to equal or even surpass it.”⁵¹ In the effort to “surpass” great ones, students are meant to grasp for something more than what the sources have to offer. Trusting in their copious stores, they might eventually deviate from models on surer footing. Erasmus concedes that missteps in this process would appear as “faults in a mature writer,” but that they “are inevitable in those who are learning proficiency.”⁵² Such errors signal a mind at work attempting to practice judgment, and consequently, things should be allowable during poetic composition that would be unacceptable or rare elsewhere.⁵³ In a memorable object lesson, right after his famous practical demonstration of copia with the sentence, “Your letter pleased me mightily,” wherein he tries to show “how far we can go in transforming the basic expression into a Protean variety of shapes,” he concedes that some of his excesses may strike fans of prose writing as extreme. “If anyone thinks that some of these suggestions would hardly be tolerable in prose,” he writes, “he should remember that this exercise is designed for the composition of verse as well.”⁵⁴

The implementation of Erasmus’s curriculum both on the Continent and in England—and consequently as witnessed in The Glasse of Governement—involved many compromises. One of them was an understanding of style as something with identifiable and teachable contours. Ascham mentions style when approving of how Demosthenes has “so straite, fast, & temperate a style,” but he more often brings up stylistic failures of texts not worthy of imitation. In one instance, for example, he sees style as “ouer rancke and lustie” and therefore signaling a lack of temperance; in another, it is “ouer rough” and therefore unsuited to “learned judgement.”⁵⁵ Nearly all grammar school teachers in Ascham’s wake were influenced directly or indirectly by this sensibility. Their composition pedagogy involved roughly four interlinked phases, as outlined by William Kempe, the headmaster at Plymouth in the 1580s: “First the scholler shall learne the precepts: secondly, he shall learne to note the examples of the precepts in vnfoulding other mens workes: thirdly, to imitate the examples in some worke of his owne: fourthly and lastly, to make somewhat alone without an example.”⁵⁶ Style formed one of the bridges between these phases, as it almost certainly came up when students noticed that revered authors failed to consistently demonstrate proper grammatical precepts. Whether working through sentences, epistles, themes, or verse forms, students were asked to take an example, digest it, and reproduce it according to their internalization of acceptable discursive patterns. They would invariably deviate from the “perfect” translation—or what the original writer would have done—based on their own habituated grammatical instincts, and those instincts could then be gently reformed by a teacher “unfolding” how Cicero’s or Virgil’s errors actually amounted to stylistic techniques. After sufficient exposure to authoritative examples, students were supposed to have a storehouse of linguistic resources and, moreover, a sense of the kinds of techniques that writers were allowed to employ in order to reanimate this storehouse as eloquence.

A century after Erasmus’s and Colet’s implementation of the humanist curriculum at St. Paul’s, John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar Schoole (1612) was first published. Brinsley, who had taught at Ashby-de-la-Zouch for over two decades, devotes an entire chapter of his guide to the problem of students’ “bodging,” which he does not explicitly define but which, it quickly becomes clear, is akin to what Erasmus described as patchwork writing. Here is Brinsley’s advice on how to control and contain bodgery:

To keepe them that they shall neuer bodge in their entrance, neither for phrase nor otherwise, but to enter with ease, certainty and delight; this you shall finde to be a most speedy way:

Take Flores Poetarum, and in euery Common place make choise of Ouids verses, or if you find any other which be pleasant and easie: and making sure, that your schollars know not the verses aforehand, vse to dictate vnto them as you did in prose. Cause also so many as you would haue to learne together, to set down the English as you dictate.

Secondly to giue you, and to write downe all the words in Latine verbatim, or Grammatically.

Thirdly, hauing iust the same words, let them trie which of them can soonest turne them into the order of a verse: which they will presently doe, being trained vp in the vse of the translations; which is the same in effect.

And then lastly, read them ouer the verse of Ouid, that they may see that themselues haue made the very same; or wherein they missed: this shall much incourage and assure them.⁵⁷

Brinsley adapts the program of double translation, which he appropriates nearly wholesale from Ascham, to poetic composition. Students are told to sift through commonplace books or reference volumes like the Flores poetarum for Ovid’s verses, translate these verses into English, then translate them into Latin verbatim, and then finally reattempt the translation in “the order of a verse” to compare with Ovid’s original.⁵⁸ Authority explicitly lay with the source texts; there was a correct answer. While Erasmus directed writers to a plurality of authors to imitate, such that they might have a copious store of language with which to play, Brinsley’s pedagogy oriented each student toward predetermined targets. As Ascham puts it, “In double translating a perfite peece of Tullie or Caesar, neyther the scholer in learning, nor y^e Master in teaching can erre. A true tochstone, a sure metwand [measuring rod] lieth before both their eyes.”⁵⁹ Students internalized the “style” and “phrase” of Ovid and Virgil, and after enough time would hopefully “pass” as poets, in both the sociological and academic sense.⁶⁰ “[T]hose who take a delight in Poetry, and haue sharpness & dexterity accordingly,” Brinsley boasts, “will in a short time attaine to that ripenesse, as that they who know not the places which they imitate, shall hardly discerne in many verses, whether the verse bee Virgils verse, or the schollars.”⁶¹ Such pedagogy, to impose on it a modern phrase, teaches to the test.

Lurking in the background of patchwork compositions is the successful forgery: the document that does not show its seams and satisfies the stylistic terms of the discursive community within which it wishes to pass. It was and continues to be important to learn this sort of compliance as part of participating in discursive communities, but there are drawbacks to treating composition as if it has a predetermined end. Tracking the gradual institutionalization of Erasmian imitatio in the Elizabethan grammar school, Dolven finds that because Erasmus’s vision of composition “would be more difficult to judge,” programs like Kempe’s and Brinsley’s prioritized imitation: “Imitatio is a method: a step-wise, rule-based project in which every stage ought to be present in the mind of the imitator, and demonstrable to his teacher.”⁶² Imitation thus “teaches students to see through texts to the skeleton of principles by which they were constructed,” but the program’s stress falls on “method” and a “rule-bound account of the mind’s work in learning.”⁶³ Schooling began with precepts that Dolven argues would ultimately “regulate and even displace the instinct that it nonetheless claims as its mainspring.”⁶⁴ Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine similarly conclude that the “practical emphasis on procedure signals a shift in intellectual focus on the part of the pedagogic reformers, from the ideal end-product of a classical education (the perfect orator, perfectly equipped for political life), to the classroom aids (textbooks, manuals and teaching drills) which would compartmentalise the bonae litterae and reduce them to system.”⁶⁵ The skillful student reanimated others’ words to suit the present, but this reanimation also risked revivifying the corpses of ancient authorities as unstylish creatures shuffling through the world with their seams visible. One such monster is visible in a school exercise undertaken by King Edward VI as a twelve-year-old. Reprinted in Baldwin, it is described by Grafton and Jardine as an example of the “carefully competent and utterly soulless orations, crafted out of Cicero’s and Erasmus’ borrowed phrases.”⁶⁶

If, in Erasmus’s program, patchwork was the product of students trying too hard to imitate the styles of ancient authorities and sacrificing their own liveliness, in English classrooms bodgery arose when students did not try hard enough to sound like their source texts. For Erasmus, patchwork signaled when students’ use of others’ words was too easily discerned and seemed superficial, but for later teachers like Brinsley, bodging was when students’ own words crept in too obviously and marred the illusion of ventriloquism. Between these two poles, both historically and practically, was George Gascoigne. When he refers to his revised poems in The Posies as a “patched cote,” then, one thing he means is that the revised document bears the marks of nonauthorial hands. If one’s style, or individual “Methode and maner,” proved acceptable only once patched, what use was there in cultivating it at all? This question might have animated the composition of The Glasse of Governement, as well as the resentment rippling under its fabric. Through dramatizing the wholesale rehearsal of others’ words, Gascoigne shows off a well-honed ability to write without style, foreshadowing Theodor W. Adorno’s contention that “[t]he more ambitious art works are, the more vigorously do they pursue the conflict between style and non-style, if need be at the expense of success.” Adorno goes on to add that “an obligatory style is unthinkable except within the objective structure of a closed, repressed society.”⁶⁷

The appraisal of a text as “patchwork,” “botchery,” or “bodgery” was usually employed by later Elizabethan writers to condemn others’ rough craft, but it was also an index of the vagaries of judgment. “Bodger” became a favorite insult of Thomas Nashe, who used it to accost the Gabriel Harveys of the world, whom he felt were inauthentic, pedantic, and too committed to abandoning vernacular English for stuffy obscurities and importations.⁶⁸ In Shakespeare’s plays, references to botching sometimes signal insincerity on the part of authors or performers—Henry V charges bodging hypocrites with “glistering semblances of piety,” and Feste in Twelfth Night undermines the perfection of all pretentions by observing, “Anything that’s mended is but patched.”⁶⁹ Elsewhere, however, botching also connotes misconstrual by audiences and readers. In Hamlet, an anonymous gentleman suggests that “the unshaped use” of Ophelia’s mad speech “doth move / The hearers to collection; they aim at it, / And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts.”⁷⁰ On the writer’s end, patchwork aligns with Roland Barthes’s sense of a text as a “tissue of quotations,” but on the reader’s end, bodging emerges as akin to Michel de Certeau’s account of reading as “poaching.”⁷¹ Whereas the Elizabethan grammar school might have seen bodgery as a failure of execution, Erasmus anticipated English poets like Gascoigne, Nashe, and Shakespeare, who understood that the scene of writing, like the scene of reading, is always unruly, compromised, and contingent—that as authors and readers proceed in stitching an idea together, the thread itself might be called the stuff of style.

Tedious Traditions

The Glasse of Governement begins with two fathers hiring a “godly Tutor,” Gnomaticus, to instruct the four sons they have between them in piety and obedience. These boys—two elder brothers who are quick-witted but easily distracted, and two younger brothers who are slower learners but dutiful—have just finished grammar school and are intent on going off to university. In order to ready the boys for the world beyond their hometown, Gnomaticus, after learning that they had become familiar with writings by Erasmus, Cicero, Terence, and Ovid in grammar school, issues a series of lectures about the importance of revering God and obeying authorities. The elder brothers find these long lectures arid, while the younger brothers ponder them attentively. Accordingly, although the elders do well in school because of their ability to regurgitate familiar moral lessons, they descend into a life of debauchery and crime. The younger brothers are slower to excel, but are ultimately rewarded with respectable jobs.

This narrative takes as one of its governing principles a maxim Ascham records as “Quicke wittes commonlie, be apte to take, vnapte to keepe.”⁷² As noted above, despite this conventionality, what proves surprising about Glasse is that the prodigal elder brothers do not ultimately reform and return to their fathers’ embrace. One is executed after a trial for robbery—at which his supposedly eloquent younger brother speaks unsuccessfully on his behalf—and the other is whipped nearly to death and cast out of the city for fornication. As a result, the “straight” reading of this play, shaped by the Gascoigne biographer Charles Tyler Prouty, sees it showcasing Gascoigne putting away impious and childish things.⁷³ But while Richard C. McCoy observes that “[t]here is nothing playful or equivocal about [the play’s] assertions of obedient piety, and no chances are taken with censors,” other critics have found it difficult not to read in Glasse a deep ambivalence.⁷⁴ Indeed, most have found the play difficult to read at all, with Linda Bradley Salamon describing its “longueurs” as “sermonizing” and “mechanical,” and Ursula Potter calling it a “a dreary and ominous picture of what happens when censorship and reformist policies control education.”⁷⁵ Building on these responses, I propose that Glasse’s seemingly willful dramatization of tediousness is evidence, if not of Gascoigne insisting on the aesthetic costs of compositional compliance, then at least of his failure to reconcile poesy’s irrepressible creativity with demands that compositions be reverent.

Gascoigne’s program of compliance begins on the play’s title page, which announces the play as having been “seen and allowed, according to the order appointed in the Queenes majesties Injunctions” (1).⁷⁶ That it was printed by “C. Barker,” or Christopher Barker, gave it a further seal of approval, as Barker was the queen’s printer and best known for producing Bibles. A few pages in, among the play’s prefatory materials, Barker’s guiding hand is further emphasized through the suggestion that he literally prompted Gascoigne’s labor. “This worke is compiled upon these sentences following, set downe by mee C.B.” appears atop a table of moral axioms, including, “Feare God, for he is just,” “Obey the King, for his aucthoritie is from above,” and “Studie to profite the common wealth, for it is commendable with God and man” (7).

The play’s plot elaborates on Barker’s sentences with Gnomaticus’s lectures, which are laden with quotations affirming the theses that God, the state, and one’s father should be obeyed. These lectures are prolix and exhausting. After the nearly six-page first lecture, the two elder brothers, Phylosarchus and Phylautus, reveal their proverbial quick-wittedness by having no difficulty regurgitating the main points. “Who is ignorant,” they snidely whisper after class, “that God is to be feared above all things?” (34). They later call these lectures a rehearsal of “tedious traditions” (48), tacitly affirming what must have been on the minds of at least some of Gascoigne’s initial readers. After a number of such classes have passed, Gnomaticus presents the students with a writing prompt, and it is their responses to this prompt that foreshadow the students’ divergent outcomes. The assignment includes a summary of Gnomaticus’s lectures that is nearly identical to those paratextual sentences from Barker, and it challenges the students to convert this summary into poetry. By this we must understand that the main characters of the play are given a task fundamentally resembling the one their author was himself undertaking.

Presented a series of “sentences,” the students are told they must translate them into “verse” and labor to prove the “pleasantest Poet” (48). The assignment is versification rather than poetics, evincing Gnomaticus’s belief that poetry is best used as a mnemonic aid, as a “comforte or recreation,” and as a demonstration of students’ internalization of principles of “decorum.” He clarifies that decorum mainly means that students avoid anything inappropriate, such as the use of “tryfling allegories” to render serious matters (47–48). While he gives instruction on how to avoid offending, however, he offers no advice on how the pupils are meant to prove the “pleasantest.” The poems this prompt elicits consequently show that the ideal student within the Tudor humanist program regarded poetry as a means mainly to satisfy the teacher.⁷⁷ This sanctioned approach to composition is given the descriptor “compendious,” which generally means “economical” and “succinct.”⁷⁸ By applying this term to Gnomaticus’s regurgitation of “tedious traditions,” however, the play renders his teaching ironic. We might better sense the valence of the term by affiliating it with the one Gascoigne uses to describe his own project: the play has been “compiled” out of sentences provided to him. Unlike compendiousness, compilation evokes accumulation rather than curation. If compendiousness at its best suggests synthesis—the digestion and internalization for which Erasmus hoped—for Gascoigne it tokened an artless patchwork of permissible doctrine.

When the first of the younger brothers, Phylotimus, shares his poem, he prefaces it by declaring that he followed the directions as precisely as he could: “I have no more but conveied in to verse,” he explains, “the verie briefe which our Master delivered us in prose, adding neither dilatations, allegories, nor examples” (55). Gnomaticus’s written summary of his lectures begins in this manner: “1 Feare God because he is mightie, / 2 Love God because he is mercifull, / 3 Trust in God because he is just …” (33). Here are the first four lines of Phylotimus’s poem:

Feare God alwais whose might is most, & joyn thy feare with love

Since over all his worthy workes, his mercie stands above:

In him thou mayst likewise be bold, to put thy trust alwaie,

Since he is just and promyse keepes, his truth cannot decay.

(55)

The young student demonstrates a willingness to embellish a little, flashing some alliteration in “his worthy workes” and employing the figure of truth “decaying.” He also takes some degree of license by contorting syntax in order to maintain the meter (“Since he is just and promyse keepes”). In reverse engineering these lines, as Tudor schoolmasters might have done with curious phrases in the writings of the ancients, we might recognize that Phylotimus’s lines grab from Gnomaticus’s lectures beyond the remit of the summary prompt: “Feare him then for he is most mightie … And yet with this feare you must also joyne love … Love him then since his mercy is over all his works … Trust in him then for his woords shall never fayle” (19–21). The labor involved in Phylotimus’s compiling now looks fairly straightforward, and akin to what went into King Edward’s “carefully competent and utterly soulless orations”: take your teacher’s words, tweak them enough to satisfy your meter and rhyme scheme, and use the pool of words from his lectures to patch up any gaps.

We should remember that Phylotimus’s lines of regular iambic heptameter were actually written by an accomplished poet, George Gascoigne, self-consciously offering something less than remarkable. After all, for the sake of the narrative, the first poem must be outshined by the second—that of Phylomusus, whose name has “muse” in it. He prefaces his reading with the caveat that he has “some what more dilated and enlarged everie point” (56). Here are his opening stanzas:

The man that meanes, by grace him selfe to guyde,

And so to lyve, as God may least offende:

These lessons learne, and let them never slide,

from out his mynde, what ever he pretende.

Since God is greate, and so omnipotent,

as nothing can withstand his mighty powre,

he must be fearde, least if his wrath be bent:

we perishe all, and wither lyke a flowre.

(56)

Regardless of what we think about this poem as a work of art, it is clear that we are meant to see it as more accomplished than Phylotimus’s, if only because it shows more work—that is, a greater willingness to demonstrate one’s compliance by risking noncompliance. While nevertheless still mainly drawing phrases and ideas from Gnomaticus’s lectures to supplement its backbone of sententiae, it flaunts precisely the kind of creativity demanded by a narrow view of decorum. Phylomusus reflects the ideal outcome of the puritanical grammar school, and by writing in his voice, Gascoigne reveals himself to be an accomplished graduate as well. In the margins of the play, Phylomusus’s stanzas are even marked by the topics they concern, signaling to readers that Gascoigne has self-consciously constructed passages worth extracting. The students, and their creator, in this way know that they have succeeded even before being evaluated. Phylotimus gloats, upon hearing his peer’s poem, “[V]erie glad I am that wee have eche of us so well accomplished our dueties, nothyng doubting but that our enstructer will also like the same accordingly” (58).

By evacuating the writers’ doubts, The Glasse of Governement presents poesy as craft that, because it does not worry over its decisions, also does not merit the reader’s attention to those decisions. It is busywork, and is meant to turn a moment of recreation into a site of compliant labor. When the quick-witted elder brothers receive Gnomaticus’s homework assignment, by contrast, one of them appears to be at a loss: “Oh that I had now the vayne which Virgill had in writing of a delectable verse,” Phylosarchus complains. He reveals shortly thereafter that his frustration has nothing to do with the assignment:

[S]hall I tell you Phylautus, wherfore I desired the excellencie of Virgil, in compounding of a verse? not as they thinke God knoweth, to convert our tedious traditions there into: for a small grace in a verse wil serve for such unpleasant matter, but it was to furnish me with eloquence, for the better obteyning of this heavenly dame, whose reme[m]brance is sweet unto me, neyther yet am I able to expresse such prayses as she doth deserve. Oh how it delighteth me to behold in myne imagination the counterfeyt of her excellent face, me thinkes the glimsing of her eyes have in it a reflexion, farre more vehement than the beames of the Sunne it selfe, and the sweetnesse of her heavenly breath, surpasseth the spiceries of Arabia. Oh that I had skill to write some worthy matter in commendation of her rare perfections. (48–49)

Phylosarchus knows how to quickly turn sentences into verses, so the challenge of the assignment does not bother him at all. Moreover, he regards the source material provided him as “unpleasant matter,” and resolves that he needs only “a small grace” to versify it (48). It would be difficult for readers to disagree with this assessment. The assignment was mainly meant, after all, to help Gnomaticus’s lessons stick in the students’ memories. The elder brothers, whose memories took up the ideas quickly for verbal regurgitation, found the assignment simple enough to be not worth doing at all. Phylosarchus’s complaint here consequently reveals a different problem: he currently holds something in his “remembrance” quite deeply but does not know how to treat it in verse. Seeking after Virgil’s “vayne,” or a distinctive stylistic attitude, he has the aspiration to make something of his wit but confronts his own lack of skill. His limitations in aspiring after “worthy matter,” moreover, are manifest: his descriptions of his beloved as having eyes like the sun, breath sweeter than Arabian spices, are utterly commonplace. Whatever poem he might produce would be just as bland as his homework. In order to improve, he would require precisely the faculties his education was meant to instill: copia, compositional acumen, and decorousness. This student wants to sound like Virgil—just not in the way his teacher expects.

Glasse in fact repeatedly insists that Phylosarchus and Phylautus are not really delinquents. Their plan was always simply to go to college; they say they want to attend “lectures daily read of all the liberall sciences, of all languages, and of all morall discourses” and “have choyse company of gallant young gentlemen, with whom we might acquaint our selves, and passe some times in recreation” (35). Such ambitions were likely not too reprehensible in the eyes of the young gentlemen Gascoigne envisioned as his primary readership. Gnomaticus even recognizes that the boys are not entirely responsible for their failures, and that he is partly culpable as their guardian because they fell “into the snares which [he] least of al mistrusted.” The “entisements of others,” he claims, are the real culprit here, and in identifying them, he also confesses his inability to thwart them (69). The blame for the play’s ending thus falls most directly on his methods:

[T]heir misgovernment may become not onely a great grief to their parents, but also a hinderance to such commendation as I might else have gayned by the others: … Well I will go talke with their parentes, and if they wilbe ruled by my councell, they shall give them leave a little to see the world, and to followe any exercise that be not repugnant unto vertue, for unto some wittes neyther correction, nor frendly admonition, nor any other perswasion will serve, until their owne rodde have beaten them, and then they prove oftentymes (though late) men of excellent qualities. (80)

Recognizing that learning often happens through experiences of meaningful but not catastrophic failure, Gnomaticus resolves to give his wayward students a little more license. “Such fine wittes have such an universall desire commonly,” he later explains, “that they never prove stayed untill the blacke oxe hath troden on their toes.” Unfortunately his new curriculum emerges too late—instead of being gently punished by their “owne rodde” (80–81), the elder brothers have been ensnared by the state and are set to be patched out of both society and existence. This ending comes to pass despite other characters repeatedly resisting the idea of imposing harsh punishments. Gnomaticus knows that “in florishing youth every punishment may not be used, but discretion must foresee what kynde of punishment wil most prevaile and best gayne reformation in the mind of the offender” (53). This principle of leniency even extends to local authorities, such as the local margrave, appropriately named Severus, who reveals that he takes no joy in enforcement. “What pleasure redoundeth unto an honest minde,” he complains, “to pronounce sentence of death upon an offendor?” The problem with the law, he reflects, is that the world changes too quickly for policy to keep up, and “constitucions are needful to be devised or renewed, for to meete with the dayly practises and inventiones of lewde persones” (67). The law is too slow, so it ends up using its bluntest instruments to compress and eradicate anything—any sort of “invention”—that might threaten the norms it is meant to uphold.

Quickness, in The Glasse of Governement, is the domain of “parasites, and bawdes” who repeatedly gull “yonkers” with fleet-footed lies (43). This term, slang for “youngster” or “young gentleman,” is one Gascoigne also employs for those in danger of being fooled not just by deception but by the misapprehension of poetry itself.⁷⁹ Gascoigne warns the “lustie yonkers” in the second epistle of The Posies to realize that true understanding does not reside with those who “thinke it sufficient if (Parrot like) they can rehearse things without booke” (365.34–35). The idea that schoolroom activities and book smarts must be supplemented with experiential knowledge is dramatized onstage in real time: one of the parasites’ deceptions of Gnomaticus, which he later boasts of as being wholly improvised and “upon the sodeyne,” takes form in the space of a few seconds: “[W]el, we must find some device to bleare his eye for a while: let me alone, I knowe how to bring it to passe” (38–39).⁸⁰ While yonkers are working hard at regurgitating old lines, parasites use simple lies and misdirection to gull them into disorientation and ruin.

In contrast to the quick inventions of deceivers, moreover, the play presents the boys’ parents, who try to work quickly but find themselves always a step behind. When they realize that they must rescue their sons from their perilous dalliances, they, too, strive for “sodaine” wit (76)—but they prove too tragically slow. If deviance is quick, the play suggests, correction needs to try and match its pace, lest its only recourse be the executioner’s axe. It is with this realization that Glasse concludes, without even asking its audience to applaud. Offering only a garish solution to youthful folly, it makes the final word spoken by a character a barb against the main cause of the play’s woes: “[T]he common saying is clap your handes, but the circumstance of this wofull tragicall comedie considered, I may say justly unto you wring your hands, nevertheless I leave it to your discretion” (88).

Quick Capacity

How might things have gone differently? Near the end of The Glasse of Governement, Gnomaticus realizes his errors and changes his methods to allow the elder brothers “their choyce what kinde of lyfe they will followe, so that it be vertuous, and not contrary to Gods worde” (81). This transformation arrives too late, of course, but I propose that it is fundamentally the basis of Gascoigne’s own approach to poetry’s role in education. By successfully tempering license with gentle correction, Gnomaticus might have helped the elder brothers put their good wits to good use. The younger brothers, who begin the play pious, do not necessarily learn how to become pious—just how to parrot piety’s inventory of quotations. Unlike their younger siblings, Phylosarchus and Phylautus never actually complete Gnomaticus’s assignment. Later in the play, the schoolmaster finds that the former had “spent the time in wryting of loving sonets” while the latter “made verses in praise of Marshiall feates and pollycies” (60). The play never actually shares those poems with the reader, and even as the prodigal brothers careen toward depraved lives ending in unceremonious deaths, it cannot help but present them as tragic emblems of lost promise. The teacher they needed, it turns out, was George Gascoigne, and his manual, Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of a Verse. It is to this text that I now turn, to present the regrettable end of The Glasse of Governement as an act not of submission to the “reverend Divines,” but of subtle admonition.

In Certayne Notes, Gascoigne adopts the posture of a reluctant instructor invited by a noble young friend for guidance in versification. His first advice is that a poem must have an “invention” savoring of “aliquid salis [a pinch of salt],” by which he means, “some good and fine devise, shewing the quicke capacitie of a writer” (454.19–20). While to modern ears, “invention” may sound like the purview of creativity, for much of European history the term—which derives from the Latin invenire, meaning “to come upon, discover, find out, devise, contrive”—connoted “finding out or selection of topics to be treated, or arguments to be used” in a rhetorical debate.⁸¹ It was the first phase of oratorical composition, and the study of it, as Peter Mack explains, included learning “ways to obtain the sympathy and interest of the audience at the start of a speech; lines of argument appropriate to different types of case … ; topics of invention to assist in discovering arguments about any subject; forms in which to present arguments; and topics for emotional appeals.”⁸² Especially as taught in the humanist curriculum, rhetoric understood “invention” not as the generation of an original idea but as the outcome of a process of study rooted in logical method and the accumulation of authoritative moral arguments. It was fundamentally rooted in two interlinked approaches: (1) discovering claims by proceeding through the “topics” and commonplaces of invention, and (2) considering “both sides” of a given problem or issue (arguing in utramque partem).⁸³ Elizabethan schoolboys practiced these approaches through composition exercises such as Apthonius’s Progymnasmata and as oratorical declamations or debates—the latter often with theatrical flair.⁸⁴

The next chapter will examine the rhetorical practices of invention with much greater scrutiny, but this background nevertheless reveals Gascoigne’s poetics both as a product of this rhetorical training and as resistant to it. By way of an example that might have proven useful to Phylosarchus, in Certayne Notes he treats as a case study what he himself would do if he were compelled “to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman.” He immediately cautions against simple regurgitation in the form of cliché: “I would neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, etc” (455.11–13). In the absence of canned phrases and poetic commonplaces, he offers some suggestions. The first one, “find some supernaturall cause wherby my penne might walke in the superlatiue degree,” is not particularly practical, but he follows the appeal to the muses with some other options: “[O]r els I would vndertake to aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath, and therevpon rayse the prayse of hir commendacion. Likewise, if I should disclose my pretence in loue, I would eyther make a strange discourse of some intollerable passion, or finde occasion to pleade by the example of some historie, or discouer my disquiet in shadowes per Allegoriam, or vse the couertest meane that I could to auoyde the vncomely customes of common writers” (455.14–22).

As advice for a grammar school student emerging from years of emulative composition, this is not a bad place to start. The instructions are somehow both constraining and liberating. On the one hand, Gascoigne tells poets to use the techniques provided them by their rhetorical education—debating, comparison, and circumlocution—and insists on compositional discipline. On the other hand, he allows poets to source their inventions from practically anywhere: “To deliver unto you generall examples it were almoste unpossible, sithence the occasions of Inventions are (as it were) infinite” (455.8–10). Echoing Aristotle’s recognition that metaphor “has clarity and sweetness and strangeness” that “cannot be learned from someone else,” Gascoigne encourages the poet to test out novel conceits.⁸⁵ By licensing discourse that is cautiously “strange,” he injects poetic composition with the “quicke capacitie” absent from Gnomaticus’s compendious world. Among the instructions, after all, is to “avoyde prolixitie and tediousness,” qualities that The Glasse of Governement, or at least the first half of it, obviously evinces (461.22).

Quickness is tethered to the shifting sands of occasion, and while the occasion selected may be frivolous, scandalous, or even libelous, the poet’s art will be regarded as successful if the occasion is handled well. By this, Gascoigne means a style that can capably sustain invention without lapsing into either tired tropes or impulsive irrationalities. In Gascoigne’s conception of poetic composition, invention extends throughout the whole process and is animated by quick capacity. One’s challenge as a poet becomes that of the plate spinner—exercising continual attention and engaging steady reflexes to ensure that one’s mind will not go astray into patches of corruption or compromise. Invention’s entanglement with style cannot be overstated: each twist and turn of the writing process must be checked against an original principle. The main problem faced by the elder brothers in Glasse, in this light, is focus; they are not stimulated by the task at hand, and so, seeking other means of engaging themselves, they fall prey to the quicker “inventiones of lewd persons.”

Gascoigne explains that one of the reasons one’s own invention may go awry is the allure of simple solutions, and here we can infer the advice he might have given students like Phylosarchus:

I would exhorte you also to beware of rime without reason: my meaning is hereby that your rime leade you not from your firste Invention, for many wryters when they have layed the platforme of their invention, are yet drawen sometimes (by ryme) to forget it or at least to alter it, as when they cannot readily finde out a worde whiche maye rime to the first (and yet continue their determinate Invention) they do then eyther botche it up with a worde that will ryme (howe small reason soever it carie with it) or els they alter their first worde and so percase decline or trouble their former Invention: But do you alwayes hold your first determined Invention, and do rather searche the bottome of your braynes for apte wordes, than chaunge good reason for rumbling rime. (458.7–18)

The invention is a “platforme” that dictates the shape of the poetic edifice that will be constructed on it. Recognizing that an unskilled writer can “botche” a poem by being lured by a facile rhyme, Gascoigne shows his personal awareness of how the writing process is invariably subject to the vicissitudes of inattention or laxity. The poet attracted to flourishes or derailed by lexical shortcomings might drift toward a rhyme that sounds good at the time but threatens to sideline one’s wit and will. He thus envisions poetic composition as a continual struggle between one’s “quick capacity” and the contingencies, both alluring and coercive, that influence the turning of thoughts into things. Caught between constructivist resignation and a fantasy of pure expression, Gascoigne’s poet confronts the problem that every word constitutes an active choice. He wants aspiring poets to catch themselves—whether it is to sustain a central conceit or make it to university without being derailed by rogues. Contingency, as Hetherington observes, preoccupies Gascoigne’s own poetry, as “accident and occasion” are for him “always inescapable elements of the creative process.”⁸⁶

In the space between one word and the next, writers are subject both to the comfort of thought easing into habituated patterns and to the danger of thought veering off into distraction. Barthes, for one, observes how even something as simple as adjectives can “imprison” writers and threaten the “purity” of language, due to the “pleasure of the lure.”⁸⁷ The challenge of cultivating style, then, is the challenge of maintaining attention. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Jacques Rancière defines attention as “the act that makes an intelligence proceed under the absolute constraint of a will.”⁸⁸ Recounting the program for “universal teaching” practiced by Joseph Jacotot in France and Belgium at the turn of the nineteenth century, Rancière argues that a pedagogy of explanation presumes the incapacity of learners. Jacotot’s method evacuated explanation by prioritizing attention: his Flemish students taught themselves French despite Jacotot knowing no Flemish himself. The students simply studied a dual-language book at length while their teacher verified that attention had been paid by asking them questions. In time, they became fluent readers of French. This led Jacotot to posit that one could teach something one did not know, only by finding strategies to verify that the students had paid attention.

The methods employed by Brinsley and Gnomaticus may be seen as stultifying schoolchildren by convincing them of their inadequacy before the intelligences of Virgil, Cicero, and the schoolmaster. Allowing intelligence to believe itself complete is not just a recipe for reaffirming knowledge as a matter of institutional accreditation, however—it is a recipe for error. Rancière describes the “logic of explanation” as “a time-machine producing at the same rhythm an imaginary concordance and an actual discordance of times”; this rhythm reaffirms a social hierarchy while sensing in its offbeats that hierarchy as not fixed or self-evident.⁸⁹ In Gascoigne’s Glasse, which ends with teachers, parents, and siblings alike racing to rescue the prodigal brothers, even the margrave Severus feels this drumbeat bearing down on the crimes of the young prodigals. He bemoans it even as he must continue playing it. One way to derail the rhythm, Rancière observes, is via a pedagogy that “unties the stitches of the veil that the explanatory system has spread on everything.” This pedagogy of unstitching restores things to their “opacity” and builds a “community of equal speaking beings” who may debate and argue about what it is that they see.⁹⁰ “Stumbling is nothing” when one attempts to articulate perception; “the wrong is in diverging from, leaving one’s path, no longer paying attention to what one says, forgetting what one is.”⁹¹ If the stultification of explanation robs students of their own will, so does temptation. A pedagogy of intellectual liberation would strive to help the student proceed in thought by choice rather than via manipulation.

How does poetry fit into this pedagogy? As we saw, in Erasmus’s ideal system, poetry would afford students opportunities to experiment. Given license to imitate and to overgo, the student writer might tear apart language and, in so doing, find new ways of expressing thoughts. They would do this alongside their other more strictly emulative exercises that subordinated that play to compliance. Poesy was where writers could let their intelligence run rampant, so that they could learn to constrain it via the exertion of will. Bodgery was not necessarily evidence of a failure of attention; it might just as likely index a student experimenting with license. The next step in their education would be to discover the limitations of that license. Gascoigne’s warnings about rhyme demanded just this sort of cognizance. He required that poets’ own inventions guide their hands while selecting each new word—to help them resist both the distractions of alluring temptation and the coercions of rote method. His poetics were founded on the exercise of attention and the conscious awareness of one’s own choices.

In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the work he was forced to retract, Gascoigne labored to show off his ability to pay close and sustained attention to the world around him. Throughout the collection, he performs his nimble quick-wittedness by framing his poems with accounts of the occasions that supposedly prompted them. In many instances, this meant providing a paratextual gloss recounting the poem’s rhetorical situation. A section of verses commending “Gascoignes memorie,” for example, is presented as having been solicited by members of Gray’s Inn prior to his admission into their coterie. It reveals that Gascoigne was presented with five “themes” on which he was to compose verses (274.0.8).⁹² In his poem responding to Alexander Nevile’s prompt, “Sat cit, si sat bene” (quick enough, if good enough), he adapts the theme to reflect on his catastrophic earlier attempts to be a courtier:

I moughte have kepte a chaire of quiet state,

But hastie heades can not bee settled so,

Till crooked Fortune give a crabbed mate:

As busye braynes muste beate on tickle toyes,

As rashe invention breedes a rawe devise,

So sodaine falles doe hinder hastie joyes.

(289.76–81)

Even here, prior to his public chastening, Gascoigne recognizes that “rashe invention” can lead to failed poetic conclusions. Rambunctious wits’ “busye braynes” only end up producing flashes in the pan; their “rawe devise[s]” are just as suddenly dismissed as they are begot. His sonnet sequence’s conclusion offers the same advice with which he began his instructions about poetic invention: “I fynde this proverbe true, / That Haste makes waste, and therefore still I saye, / No haste but good, where wysedome makes the waye” (281.96–98). How one becomes “wise” enough to become a poet, in a context wherein even the supposedly learned could not agree on what makes a good poem, posed a challenge that humanist pedagogy did not really have the tools to address. Nevertheless, in these early poems reflecting on his own early rashness, Gascoigne actively cultivated an image of himself as “quick”—after the last of the five “themes,” he boasts that they amounted to “the number of. CCLVIII. verses” and were devised “riding by the way, writing none of them untill he came at the end of his Journey, the which was no longer than one day in riding, one day in tarying with his friend, and the third in returning to Greys Inne” (282.6–9). His theme argues that rash inventions breed raw devices, but he also clearly expects readers to be a little impressed with how quickly he produced it.

“Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” is perhaps the most notorious example of this quickness. It invites the reader to witness how the poet’s alert attention used experience to provoke his imagination, and his imagination to produce poetry excusing other kinds of failure. The poem is set during a day of hunting, and this occasion finds Gascoigne’s speaker first justifying his refusal to shoot at passing deer by talking about his lifelong habit of shooting “awry.” He then shifts gears and contrives a new argument on the spot:

But since my Muse can to my Lorde reherse

What makes me misse, and why I doe not shoote,

Let me imagine in this woorthlesse verse:

If right before mee, at my standings foote

There stoode a Doe, and I shoulde strike hir deade,

And then shee prove a carrion carkas too,

What figure might I fynde within my head,

To scuse the rage whiche rulde mee so to doo?

(316.125–32)

A poem, Gascoigne suggests, can be an exculpatory instrument that can imagine alternative answers to familiar questions. His own verses could thereby be a means by which a mistake or personal failing might be translated into something others might find tolerable, or even pleasurable. While poesy might have presented an opportunity to showcase his own nimble powers of attention, however, the reception of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres revealed a readership incapable of mirroring those powers. By performatively patching his audacious work, he attempted to publicly acknowledge his deviations from social norms and show that he was capable of taking instruction. At the end of his letter to the reverend divines, he points to his poetic labors as training for more serious duties because of their explicit demonstration of continuous attention: “Surely you shall finde me no lesse readie to undertake a whole yeares travaile in anie worke which you shall thinke me able to overcome,” he advertises, “than I have beene willing heretofore to spende three houres in penning of an amorous Sonnet” (363.28–31). We might read The Glasse of Governement, then, as Gascoigne’s dutiful completion of an acceptable compilation. It dramatizes, in painstaking (and pains-giving) fashion, what it took to get a courtly appointment in Elizabethan England. Even as it buys into the fiction of ready opportunities, however, the world that Glasse reflects in its mirror is a cold, slow, and strict one.

Reflection: The Academic Death Penalty

In a foundational essay in composition studies, David Bartholomae confesses, “I don’t expect my students to be literary critics when they write about Bleak House.” Bartholomae defines the literary critic as “a person who wins publication in a professional journal,” a goal beyond the grasp of nearly all undergraduate writers. Instead of aiming for this standard, Bartholomae argues, “what our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, the set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine ‘what might be said’ and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community.”⁹³ There are many resonances between Bartholomae’s account of what it means to become an academic writer and the assumptions of humanist grammar schools discussed in the preceding chapter. Like the grammar school teacher who fears that his or her students’ indecorousness will leave them ill equipped for public service, Bartholomae reminds his students, “The language is not yours… . You did not invent it; it is not yours and yet, ironically, it is one of the most crucial ways you have of being present— of being present in the world, in the workplace, in the academy.”⁹⁴ While students doubtless have much to learn about academia’s discursive conventions, a pedagogy of approximation reaffirms the idea that, as new initiates, their primary task is to ventriloquize those who already seem authoritative.

It is partly for this reason that Geoffrey Sirc, in a response to Bartholomae, argues that composition studies is often guilty of institutional practices that actively diminish writing’s capacity to surprise, shock, and offer new ideas. “Can we allow a composition that is definitively unfinished,” Sirc asks, “deferring this need for writing as a revision toward a certain style, toward a certain end?”⁹⁵ Teachers of literature concerned with cultivating their students’ critical writing skills—skills that would see them reconcile the invention of a novel argument with the observance of formal protocols—might follow Sirc’s lead and attend more closely to the ironies of style. When students are asked to write about written works that openly chafe and bristle against formal prescriptions, to what extent are the classroom’s formal prescriptions undermining their capacity to critically engage with those texts? Can we try to reconcile the stylistic exuberance of the texts in our syllabuses with the sorts of assignments we challenge our students to write— assignments that, we tell them, must look and sound a certain way?

It is unsurprising that, in response to tacit or explicit cues to practice formal obedience, many students produce bodgeries—cribbed-together writing assignments with their component patches apparent. “This is how we teach students to write,” John Warner laments. “Don’t be a writer, we tell them, just do some things that make it look like you know how to write. And when in doubt, at least sound smart by using words like ubiquitous and plethora.”⁹⁶ Warner observes that when students are assigned an essay in an undergraduate course, the assignment is “treated not as an occasion to discover something previously unknown—to the author, above all—but as a performance for an audience of one, the teacher, one hoop among many to be jumped through as part of the college grind.”⁹⁷ Confronted with this grind—a frantic “busy-ness” that Susan D. Blum describes as bred from a “focus on evaluation as the goal of education”—many students strive to sound exactly like their teachers, as the younger brothers in The Glasse of Governement do, while also working at the quick pace of their prodigal elder siblings.⁹⁸ These contradictory pressures lead many to “dash off a paper, seeking mainly to satisfy requirements regarding number of pages, references, quotations.”⁹⁹ When such techniques prove inadequate, the students may avail themselves of more insidious techniques in order to sound “correct,” and end up committing plagiarism. Blum observes that while some students plagiarize intentionally with the explicit goal to deceive, others “don’t know how to avoid it, because the rules are terribly subtle and take many years to master,” and others still “deliberately do so to get the job done.”¹⁰⁰ The fact that many students end up poorly navigating the terrain between clumsy academic style and outright plagiarism should make us reflect on our own pedagogy, because, as Blum suggests, students’ acts of plagiarism are in part a response to “all the supporting messages from the educational and social contexts in which they find themselves.”¹⁰¹ If our goals are different from those of humanist pedagogy, how different are our methods?

Rebecca Moore Howard emphasizes that there is a difference between accidental and intentional plagiarism, a distinction that I align with the one described above between Erasmian “patchwork writing” and Elizabethan “bodgery.” When student errors relating to imitation and appropriation are not inherently deceitful, Howard argues, the perpetrators do not deserve the “academic death penalty”—failure or expulsion. Instead, such instances present “pedagogical opportunity, not a juridical problem.”¹⁰² Inadvertent slips may be a form of academic writing Howard calls “patchwriting,” a compositional phenomenon of “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes.”¹⁰³ Patchwriting, like patchwork poetry, reveals students attempting to wield a discourse that does not yet belong to them. Errors of this kind may be associated with what Bartholomae sees as “evidence of choice or strategy among a range of possible choices or strategies” and “evidence of an individual style of using language and making it work.” In this light, patchwriting may not be “a simple record of what a writer failed to do because of incompetence or indifference,” but rather a record of “stylistic features, information about this writer and this language.”¹⁰⁴ When students try to sound like their professors or like formal literary criticism and come up short, the difference may be a mistake. It may also be their own latent style bursting the seams of the text. What would it take, considering this awareness, to take “sounding like their professors” out of the classroom equation—to make the standard for students’ writing something other than their professor’s gnomic speech? How might literature classes avoid enforcing students’ words by constraining their wills and implement the pedagogy Gnomaticus decides on too late: allowing them license “to followe any exercise that be not repugnant unto vertue”?

Just as Gascoigne recommends that poets manage their style so as not to either blandly proceed on autopilot or veer into indecorous muck, Warner champions writing for how its demands on an author’s attention also enable intellectual liberation. Central to the writer’s practice is choice, which Warner identifies as “the writing equivalent of balance when it comes to writing on a bicycle.” The absence of choice lies at the center of Warner’s diagnosis: “[T]he way our nation’s schoolchildren are taught—and, more importantly, the way their learning is assessed—gives them little experience with making choices in the context of writing. These distortions of what it means to write offer students even less opportunity to write about things that matter to them or to engage with their own passions.”¹⁰⁵ Allowing students latitude to practice making choices first requires acknowledging the constraints they are under when presented with writing assignments: the threat of evaluation, the absence of a variety of models, feelings of alienation from the readings.

Faced with such circumstances, professors might acknowledge and warn students against the ethical impropriety of plagiarism, but they might also try to promote approaches to writing wherein the advantages and appeal of plagiarism are nullified. One way to diminish the threat of evaluation is to adopt “ungrading” or labor-based assessment for all assignments—both creative and critical—in our classrooms, indicating to students that their effort and attention will be assessed rather than the quality of their writing.¹⁰⁶ One way to diversify the number of models that students have available is to ask them to find genres, forms, and styles to imitate of their own choosing, and help them appraise the successfulness of their emulation. One way to address feelings of alienation might be to engage with the “relevance” of early modern literary texts as a concept rooted in political positionality and in relation to community service.¹⁰⁷ If we are interested in soliciting the risky work required of actual thought, we must help students recognize that imitation and deviation are both choices available to them. Sometimes we must require students to demonstrate facility with certain textual forms, and in doing so we might make clear that the lesson at hand is how to assert their will over their own impulses and to practice imitation. The primary consequence of failing to hit a target, when practicing imitation, should be more knowledge about the target. Sometimes we might want students to venture out on their own, to show us what they can do—in doing so, we might make clear that the lesson at hand is how to assert their wills over cliché, convention, and banality. This latter challenge is a much more difficult one, and one explored in depth by the subsequent chapters of this book.

The Glasse of Governement, a parable for the uses of literature in education, encourages us to cultivate a more student-centered approach to the role of writing in the early modern literature classroom. What writers like Gascoigne—including the other writers studied in this book—possessed, and what we today are quickly conceding to the pressures of professionalization, is a sense that writing is an opportunity to exercise agency and to reckon with how agency may be taken away. While we retain the privilege of teaching their texts, we might follow the poets’ lead and advance an argument for the social benefits of the writing process as a site of contestation—not only with institutional norms and protocols, but also with oneself and one’s ingrained and acquired habits.

1.On the rates of education of Elizabethan children, see Stone, “Educational Revolution in England”; Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, esp. 19–41; and Hackett, “ ‘Better Scholar.”

2.Hendrik Niclaes, All the Letters. For more on Niclaes, see Moss, “ ‘Godded with God,’ ” 34.

3.On the uses of music and song in grammar schools, see Willis, “ ‘By These Means,’ ” esp. 302–3. For other (often quite endearing) examples of educational songs for children, see Clement, Petie Schoole, sig. A5r; S[egar], Schoole of Vertue, sig. Av; Beau Chesne and Baildon, Divers Sortes of Hands; Newberry, Booke in English Metre. Newberry’s book may be considered alongside other “language helps” for apprentices from the period; see Wright, “Language Helps.”

4.Willis points out that “Kirkby Stephen grammar school required the metrical psalms to be sung on a daily basis” as a part of early childhood musical education. Willis, “ ‘By These Means,’ ” 300. T. W. Baldwin notes that at Rivington school, boys carried “the Psalms in prose and meter, besides those books he shall occupy at the School”; see Baldwin, Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 1:345–46.

5.Willis, “ ‘By These Means,’ ” 304–5.

6.On “Sternhold and Hopkins,” see Valdivia, “Mere Meter.”

7.Cressy explains that while reading and writing went hand in hand in many educational settings, writing was “a subordinate part of the elementary curriculum.” Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 23.

8.Baldwin titled two chapters in William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Less Greeke “Erasmus Laid the Egg,” and Emrys Jones memorably concluded that “without humanism, in short, there could have been no Elizabethan literature,” and “without Erasmus, no Shakespeare.” Jones, Origins of Shakespeare, 13. Also see Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities.

9.See Hackett, “ ‘Better Scholar.’ ”

10.William Nelson traces how instruction in English composition was a necessary and desirable outcome for grammar schools long presumed to be preoccupied with classical tongues. Nelson, “Teaching of English.”

11.Pendarves and Weale, “His Booke Amen.” Pendarves (1633–?) appears to have shared the notebook with his brother Richard as well as someone named Job Weale over a few years the 1640s. As students in the seventeenth century, Pendarves et al. were given more access to English composition in their classrooms than students would have received a century earlier, but we can see the operations of double translation, composition, and versification at play throughout. An “index verborum,” or table of Latin words with their English translations, constitutes the first twenty or so pages of the manuscript, followed by several pages of transcriptions of Latin instructions on composition (“Exordium est prima orationis pars …” [fol. 22r]). On fols. 31r–35r appears a practice “theme” composed on the sentence “Damnare neminem facile debemus,” taken from one of the favored grammar school sourcebooks, Leonhard Cullman’s Sententiae Pueriles (1543). The end of the book contains a few pages with rules for composing and construing Latin, presumably placed there for ease of reference.

12.See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 26–27.

13.Eleanor Relle attributes Harvey’s obliteration of these verses to a fear that “they were unworthy of a place in a book of serious poetry” and also points out that these verses are close to another nonsense line, “My dame hath a lame tame crane,” which may have been “used as an exercise in elocution.” Relle, “Some New Marginalia,” 404.

14.Harvey, “Letters on Reformed Versifying,” esp. 126. Also see Lerer, Children’s Literature, 70–71.

15.Sontag, “On Style,” 155; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 293.

16.Dolven, Senses of Style, 122–23.

17.Jeanne Fahnestock argues that among the canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, ornament, memory, and pronunciation—“style is arguably the most implicated in the others, since linguistic choice is the point of realization for the rhetorical precepts and theories belonging to the other canons.” Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style, 7.

18.Dolven, Senses of Style, 17.

19.Seth Lerer documents another example, pointing to a copy of Paul Bush’s The Extripation of Ignorancy (1526) that is “full of scribbles, pictures, announcements of ownership, cryptic pen trials, and occasionally quotations from other works.” Among these writings is a child’s attempt at verses following the metrical patterns of Sternhold and Hopkins; these lines, Lerer observes, are “a form of metrical psalmistry in the style of the age—the fragment of a poem, an imaginative response to a printed text in a child’s hand.” Lerer, Children’s Literature, 79–80.

20.Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 56.

21.Dolven, Senses of Style, 17.

22.Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 57.

23.For more on the contradictions of Tudor and humanist pedagogy, see Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities; Bushnell, Culture of Teaching, esp. 18–19; Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, esp. 3, 57; and Lamb, Rules of Use.

24.Lamb, Rules of Use, 49.

25.“Bodges” also appears as a gloss for the Italian sbozzi and linked to “bunger-like workes.” See Huloet and Higgins, Huloets Dictionarie, STC 13941, sig. Eiiiv; Florio, worlde of Wordes, STC 11098, p. 346. Patricia Parker identifies “botching” as a limit case in the discourses of joinery that characterized much early modern commentary on “right writing”; see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, esp. 88–108.

26.On Gascoigne’s biography, I have relied on Austen, George Gascoigne.

27.On the controversy over A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, see Austen, George Gascoigne, 84–105; Hughes, “Gascoigne’s Poses”; and Pigman, “Textual Introduction,” l–li. For a different perspective rooting the controversy in libel rather than licentiousness, see Clegg, Press Censorship, 110.

28.For example, Gascoigne admonishes the poet to avoid clichés and overworn analogies because they will prove distractingly “trita & obvia” (455.14), and to resist unfamiliar polysyllabic words because they will “cloye a verse and make it unpleasant” (458.2–6). George Gascoigne, “Additions from The Posies,” in Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 359–462; all references to material from The Posies, including prefatory letters and Certayne Notes, are to this volume and are indicated by page and line number.

29.For more on the relationship between eccentricity and eloquence, see Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues; Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking; Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity, esp. 29–53; and Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric.

30.See Lesser and Stallybrass, “First Literary Hamlet.”

31.Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals.

32.Rhodes, Origins of English, 46.

33.On Elizabethan literary patronage, see Van Dorsten, “Literary Patronage.” Also see Sheavyn, Literary Profession, 22.

34.Ascham, Scholemaster, STC 832, sig. 1v. On Gascoigne’s indebtedness to Ascham, see Salamon, “Face in ‘The Glasse.’ ”

35.Hetherington, “Gascoigne’s Accidents,” 38–39.

36.Throughout A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, Gascoigne suggests that a poet’s style may be excused through the lens of the poet’s original occasion for writing—and if not through that, then through its demonstration of “Aliquid salis” or through the affordances of “licentia poetica” (145.1; 282.46.11–12).

37.Hughes, “Gascoigne’s Poses,” 1.

38.See Austen, George Gascoigne, 85–86; and Pigman, “Textual Introduction,” liii (esp. n19).

39.Baldwin, Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 1:75–133.

40.Jones, Origins of Shakespeare, 12–13.

41.Erasmus, De copia, 303.

42.Erasmus, De copia, 306.

43.Erasmus, De copia, 302.

44.Erasmus, Dialogvs Ciceronianvs, 626 (LB 985, line 38).

45.For more on the early modern cento, see Tucker, “From Rags to Riches.”

46.Erasmus, Ciceronian, 368, 438. For Erasmus’s cento, see “Cento from Homer,” 139.

47.Erasmus, Ciceronian, 442; Erasmus, Dialogvs Ciceronianvs, 704 (LB 1022, lines 27–28).

48.Erasmus, Ciceronian, 402.

49.Erasmus, Writing of Letters, 74.

50.Erasmus, De copia, 303.

51.Erasmus, De copia, 303.

52.Erasmus, Writing of Letters, 40; Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, 317 (LB 381, line 19).

53.Erasmus, De copia, 327, 339. Erasmus has in mind such errors as the use of patronymics, the use of metalepsis, or certain kinds of repetition.

54.Erasmus, De copia, 348, 354.

55.Ascham, Scholemaster, 44r, 43v, 49v.

56.Kempe, Education of Children, F2.

57.Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 192–93.

58.Octavio Mirandula’s compilation of Latin poetic commonplaces, widely known as the Flores poetarum, was first published in 1480 in Cologne as Flores poetarum de virtutibus et viciis. It saw multiple reprints over the course of the Renaissance as Illustrium poëtarum flores. It was printed in London in 1598 and 1611 prior to Brinsley’s mentions of it. For more, see Watson, English Grammar Schools, 468–84.

59.Ascham, Scholemaster, 42; see also Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Metewand, n.,” accessed July 1, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/117525.

60.Daniel Bender cites a moment in Ascham wherein the schoolmaster castigates a boy for not imitating Cicero perfectly, as evidence of “the hidden curriculum of Latin schools” that reaffirms the “elite capacity for social control.” See Bender, “Whip Hand,” 67–68.

61.Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 194.

62.Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 23, 26.

63.Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 21.

64.Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 26.

65.Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities, 124.

66.Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities, 155. See Baldwin, Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 1:211–12; also see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 26.

67.Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 294–95. As Kenneth Charlton observes, faced with “religious atomism, political danger, and economic dislocation,” English monarchs and the state “saw the schools as an important instrument with which to maintain public order and achieve political and religious conformity.” Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, 130.

68.See Nashe, Strange Newes, B4r–v.

69.Henry V, 2.2.111–15; Twelfth Night, 1.5.40–41. All references to Shakespeare are from Greenblatt et al., Norton Shakespeare.

70.Hamlet, 4.5.7–10.

71.Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 146; Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 165–76.

72.Ascham, Scholemaster, 4v.

73.Prouty, George Gascoigne, 240.

74.McCoy, “Gascoigne’s ‘Poëmata Castrata,’ ” 44.

75.Salamon, “Face in ‘The Glasse,’ ” 48; Potter, “ ‘No Terence Phrase,’ ” 384.

76.Gascoigne, Glasse of Governement. All references appear in text and are to page numbers.

77.As McCoy argues, Gnomaticus’s use of this “grim pedagogical exercise” reveals how, in his classroom, poetry “subverts instead of enlarging freedom in two ways: first by serving as a means of subservient paraphrase of another’s ideas and secondly by reconciling its practitioners to subservience through its ameliorative charms.” McCoy, “Gascoigne’s ‘Poëmata Castrata,’ ” 45–46.

78.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Compendious, adj.,” accessed July 2, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37538.

79.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Younker, n.,” accessed July 2, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/232175.

80.Lorna Hutson’s bravura reading of this scene locates The Glasse in a trend of increasingly realistic early modern representations of legal workings. See Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, 201–16.

81.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Invent, v.,” accessed July 7, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98960#eid184603; and Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Invention, n.,” accessed July 10, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/98969.

82.Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 9. The other phases are by dispositio (“placing that material in an appropriate structure”); elocutio (“clothing the ideas of the speech in the most effective words”); memoria (“memorising the speech”); and accentio (“the use of voice and gesture”).

83.Sloane, On the Contrary, 38–39.

84.See Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 27–28; also see Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity, 68–70.

85.Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 200 (1405a).

86.Hetherington, “Gascoigne’s Accidents,” 57.

87.Barthes, Neutral, 60–61.

88.Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster, 25.

89.Rancière, “Un-What?,” 33.

90.Rancière, “Un-What?,” 35.

91.Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster, 57.

92.Many poetic exercises at the Inns of Court, Jessica Winston explains, were “similar to the verse on set themes that the authors were required to write in school, verses that affirmed the importance of work, friendship, duty, humility, and other social and moral virtues.” Winston, Lawyers at Play, 77.

93.Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 69.

94.Bartholomae, “Living in Style,” 15.

95.Sirc, English Composition, 49.

96.Warner, Why They Can’t Write, 7.

97.Warner, Why They Can’t Write, 155.

98.Blum, My Word!, 4.

99.Blum, My Word!, 4.

100.Blum, My Word!, 6.

101.Blum, My Word!, 6.

102.Howard, “Plagiarisms,” 788.

103.Howard, “Plagiarism Pentimento,” 233. Also see Hull and Rose, “Rethinking Remediation.”

104.Bartholomae, “Study of Error,” 258.

105.Warner, Why They Can’t Write, 5.

106.Blum, Ungrading; Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts.

107.See Bender, “Whip Hand”; and Eklund, “Embattled Humanities.”