‘With his Head Broke’: The Occupational Hazards of Shakespeare’s Schoolmasters

ABSTRACT

Placed in largely comedic situations and portrayed as objects of mockery, Shakespeare’s schoolmasters serve as prime and highly visible representations of the precarious and emergent teaching profession of the time. They are the ‘self-wise-seeming’ schoolmasters that Sidney designates as laugh-worthy personages in his Defence of Poesy. Beyond staging their ridiculousness as characters, Shakespeare also accentuates these professionals’ precarity by making visible physical, environmental, and emotional hazards inherent to their occupation. In the comedies, Shakespeare’s schoolmasters provide valuable insights on the intersectionality of professional identity and health. Whether it is Hortensio, whose temporary disguise as a schoolmaster, results in him returning to stage with ‘his head broke’ (Taming of the Shrew II.i.136), or Holofernes who renders his own demise so poignantly as that which is ‘not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii.617), it is impossible to overlook these characters’ overall wellbeing as professionals. Considering the schoolmaster in Shakespeare’s work via contemporary accounts of the figure's occupational hazards, I hope to make visible the abiding nature of what seems to be a decidedly modern portrayal of the sad, stressed, and wounded teacher.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational health
• burnout
• education
• schoolmaster
• professionalisation
• status

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The date of this letter is a source of contention among scholars, some of whom assign the year 1515 to the correspondence. Other translations and editors refer to Johann Witz as Joannes Sapidus. I have quoted the letter from James K. McConica, ed., The Correspondence of Erasmus, trans. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson, (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976), 243–45.

2 Published in the same year as the cited letter to Witz in 1516, Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince is a courtesy book that prescribes the ideal education of a future ruler at the hands of a competent, dignified teacher whose character and skills are instrumental to the future ruler’s success.

3 Keith Thomas in Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading, 1976) elevates the school as a social institution of prime importance, ‘By examining the internal life of the school it is possible to learn something about the workings of society as a whole’ (5). For examples of histories that celebrate a culture of teaching and learning, see, for example, Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640’, 41–80; Simon Education and Society in Tudor England; Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England.

4 Dowden in ‘William Shakespeare’, counts ‘but two schoolmasters’ appearing ‘in all the multitude of Shakespeare’s characters’ (47). Writing over a century later, Winson in ‘‘A Double Spirit of Teaching’: What Shakespeare’s Teachers Teach Us’, arrives at a total of six ‘actual teachers, only four of whom are solely schoolmasters’ (par. 4).

5 Holofernes and Gerald do not pose many interpretative challenges since, as will become clear in the forthcoming analysis, both characters at the very least are recognised within the world of the play as schoolmasters—oftentimes supplementing this external validation of status with forms of self-identification, including their costuming and comportment.

6 When it comes to the failures of Shakespeare’s educators, Winson argues in ‘A Double Spirit’ that ‘Shakespeare does not totally denigrate educators; rather he will invite us to reconsider the blind faith we place in them’ (par. 31).

7 Winson, ‘A Double Spirit of Teaching’, n. pag. Web. 26 July 2010.

8 Brooks in ‘“To Show Scorn Her Own Image”’, borrows a concept from Sir Philip Sidney to suggest that Shakespeare’s comedy enacts ‘an eikastic education’ in which the theatre and classroom fold into one educational venue (8). Brooks elaborates on his comparison, stating: ‘Throughout The Shrew’s various plots, the eikastic function of mimetic art is contrasted with the continental theories of rote learning and tutorials in quadrivium and trivium subjects’ (13).

9 Various accounts of perspectives and theories concerning the use of corporal punishment in the classroom are plentiful in the era’s pedagogical treatises, as humanists and pedagogues alike offer their points of view which range from Roger Ascham’s advocacy for gentleness in his The Scholemaster to Richard Mulcaster’s anatomizing discipline techniques in his Positions.

10 Several critics seek to understand the play’s portrayal of Bianca’s education against the backdrop of its historical context. Herzog in ‘Modeling Gender Education in The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed’, argues that the curriculum proposed by Lucentio and Hortensio, which contains music, philosophy, Latin, and Greek, ‘remains something of an anomaly’ when applied to female students (194). When it comes to the age of Bianca’s instructors, Kim Walker in ‘Wrangling Pedantry: Education in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Lloyd Davis (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2003) notes that the tutors’ youth ‘also works against the strictures of the humanist pedagogues who argued, with a similar anxiety in mind, that daughters should be educated by either women or by grave old men’ (196). The only ‘grave’ man in the play who happens to be a schoolmaster does not actually serve in an educational capacity and is instead roped into standing in for Lucentio’s father.

11 Brooks in ‘Varieties’ associates the schoolmasters’ collective pedagogy—its pretence notwithstanding—to the ‘regimented rote-learning favored by Continental theorists and the English grammar school tradition’ (18).

12 The Jailer’s Daughter refers to Gerald as Emilia’s schoolmaster in the following act, calling him ‘Giraldo’ (Kinsmen IV.iii.11). It is possible to attribute the misnaming of Gerald to a textual irregularity as a result of the collaboration, or we can ascribe the naming to the Jailer’s Daughter altered mental state.