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Reading Boyhood: The Books and Reading Practices of Early Modern Schoolboys

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Reading Children in Early Modern Culture

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the books and reading experiences of early modern schoolboys to investigate the ways in which the gendered and aged identity of the boy was produced through reading experiences. It argues that training in the witty deployment of reading material enabled early modern schoolboys to assert their boyhood. Evaluating the ways in which the books for schoolboys (including John Brinsley’s Children’s Dialogues [1617] and Charles Hoole’s Children’s Talke [1659]) posit an ideal model of instilling manhood through reading, it argues that the spaces of schoolboy reading—including the school performances of dialogues and plays, such as William Hawkins’ Apollo Shroving (c. 1626), and the margins of schoolboy texts—are sites in which boys might offer alternative versions of age-specific masculine identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Third Intermean, 37–38.

  2. 2.

    Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 72.

  3. 3.

    On grammar school books, see T. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), vol. 1, 272–531; Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 132–139; Ronald S. Crane, ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan Youth’, Modern Philology 11.2 (1913): 269–271; Helen Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1998), 99–102; Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800 (London: Longman, 1982), 62–76; Amanda Piesse, ‘Reading English Renaissance Children and the Early Modern Stage’, in Studies in Children’s Literature, 1500–2000, ed. Celia Keenan and Mary Shine Thompson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 19–30; John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School (London: Methuen, 1898), 39.

  4. 4.

    For example, Anthony Grafton, ‘The Humanist as Reader’, in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 179–212; Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

  5. 5.

    Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 298–302; Fred Schurink, ‘An Elizabethan Grammar School Exercise Book’, Bodleian Library Record 18 (2003): 174–196.

  6. 6.

    Thomas Newbery, A Booke in Englysh Metre (London, 1563), A3v. See Chap. 3 for discussion of the books that were marketed at early modern youth.

  7. 7.

    Jonson, 36.

  8. 8.

    OED, 1.

  9. 9.

    See Edward Forset, Pedantius Comoedia (London, 1631); Charles Hoole, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (London, 1659), 198; William Hornby, Hornbyes Hornbook (London, 1622); William Lily, A Short Introduction of Grammer (Cambridge, 1621).

  10. 10.

    A Pleasant Conceited Comedie, Wherein is Shewed How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (London, 1602), C3r.

  11. 11.

    Amanda Piesse, ‘Character Building: Shakespeare’s Children in Context’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76.

  12. 12.

    William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 4.1.11–12; John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 2.2; Edward Sharpham, Cupid’s Whirligig (London, 1607), I3v. On Lily’s text as standard in grammar schools, see Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 127–154.

  13. 13.

    See the depiction of Prince Edward as schoolboy in Samuel Rowley, When You See Me, You Know Me (London, 1605), F4v.

  14. 14.

    Deanne Williams argues for the importance of considering the intersections between the discourses of childhood, education and theatre, proposing that these ‘three major discourses “grew up” together in the early modern period, each coming to understand itself through interaction with the others’. See ‘Introduction’, in Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Deanne Williams and Richard Preiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3.

  15. 15.

    Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 27; Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology 61.2 (1959): 103–124; Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–15.

  16. 16.

    Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Bianca Calabresi, ‘“you sow, Ile read”: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers’, in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine Kelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 79–104; Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Juliet Fleming, ‘Dictionary English and the Female Tongue’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 290–325; Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson, ‘“Shall I teach you to know?” Intersections of Pedagogy, Performance and Gender’, in Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction and Performance, ed. Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 1–20; Eve Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Wendy Wall, ‘Literacy and the Domestic Arts’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 383–412.

  17. 17.

    On the ways of reading taught in the early modern grammar school, see Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003): 11–28; Lynn Enterline, ‘Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools’, in Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 173–190; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986); Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–12; Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  18. 18.

    Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1850, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 18. On masculinity as developmental and a state that must be performed, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  19. 19.

    On the gendering of the early modern processes of moving out of the first stage of childhood, often perceived as ending c. age 7, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992), 7; Edel Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 29–31; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15.

  20. 20.

    Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Theorizing Age with Gender: Bly’s Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity’, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 113.

  21. 21.

    John Reading, The Old Man’s Staffe (London, 1621), 1; Henry Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607), 118. See also Shepard, 21–59, on the role of age in defining early modern manhood.

  22. 22.

    Cuffe, 118. For a useful overview of early modern understanding of the stages of the life cycle see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–16.

  23. 23.

    Cuffe, 118.

  24. 24.

    Jewell, 93.

  25. 25.

    William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2.7.144–146.

  26. 26.

    Katie Knowles, Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 104.

  27. 27.

    William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3.1.37–39 and 3.1.33. Further references are given in the text.

  28. 28.

    Scholars have usefully highlighted that the early modern grammar school was not an exclusively male institution. See Jewell, 11–12; Sanders, 204. However, in many instances the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammar school room consisted of boys and their male teachers. Chapter 5 will consider examples of schools for girls in the period.

  29. 29.

    See Bushnell; Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

  30. 30.

    Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 7–8, 16.

  31. 31.

    As Michel de Certeau suggests, it is in the difference between the production of the image (in this case of the schoolboy reader) and the secondary production of that image in the process of utilization (of these books by schoolboys) that the schoolboy reader emerges. See The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xiii.

  32. 32.

    See also Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play (London: Routledge, 2007), 34–95; Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Performing Dido’, in Public Declamations: Essays on Medieval Rhetoric, Education and Letters in Honour of Martin Camargo, ed. Georgiana Donavin and Denise Stodola (Brepols: Turnhout, 2015), 253–265, on how training in rhetoric allowed boys to inhabit a range of subject positions.

  33. 33.

    Knowles, 1–12, 63–70.

  34. 34.

    Halpern, 37.

  35. 35.

    See David Shaw, ‘The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 220–231.

  36. 36.

    On the curricula of early modern grammar schools, particularly the recommendation of books for different forms (suggesting a progressive and varied engagement of schoolboys with their books as they moved through classes within the school), see John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (London, 1612), 121; Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (London, 1660), n.p.; Mack, 34–45; O’Day, 70–71. While there was variation across schools throughout the period, some standard authors from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century were, as Amanda Piesse points out, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Terence, Sallust, Prudentius, Suetonius and Castalion. See Piesse, ‘Reading English Renaissance Children’, 19–30.

  37. 37.

    Mack, 12.

  38. 38.

    Charles Hoole, for example, recommended that every grammar school should have its own library of specific reference works for each class and recommended 250 desirable books. See Hoole, A New Discovery, n.p.; O’Day, 70–71. On occasion books were chained to desks to prevent them being removed from school. See Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 152–153.

  39. 39.

    Baldwin, vol. I, 494–553.

  40. 40.

    See O’Day, 70–71.

  41. 41.

    Susan Flavin, Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 88; Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 34.

  42. 42.

    O’Day, 70.

  43. 43.

    William Dugard, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School, printed his own and other school books and manuals from within the school in the 1640s. See W. R. Meyer, ‘Dugard, William (1606–1662)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, ed. David Cannadine, 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8182, accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

  44. 44.

    W. R. Meyer, ‘Hoole, Charles (1610–1667)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13701, accessed 27 Jan. 2016; John Morgan, ‘Brinsley, John (bap. 1566, d. in or after 1624)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3440, accessed 27 Jan. 2016. Mack, 12, notes that Brinsley’s ideas are in line with those of humanist educators since the sixteenth century and therefore, although he writes in the seventeenth century, his work sheds light on common teaching methods across the early modern period.

  45. 45.

    John Brinsley, Cato Translated Grammatically (London, 1612); John Brinsley, Corderius Dialogues (London, 1614); John Brinsley, Esop’s Fables (London, 1617); John Brinsley, The First Book of Tullies Offices (London, 1616); John Brinsley, Ovid’s Metamorphosis (London, 1618); John Brinsley. The Posing of Parts (London, 1612); John Brinsley, Sententiae Pueriles (London, 1612); John Brinsley, Virgil’s Eclogues (London, 1620); Charles Hoole, Aesop’s Fables (London, 1657); Charles Hoole, Catonis Disticha de Moribus (London, 1659); Charles Hoole, The Latine Grammar Fitted for the Use of Schools (London, 1651); Charles Hoole, A Little Vocabulary English and Latin for the Use of Little Children (London, 1657); Charles Hoole, Maturinus Corderius’s School-Colloquies (London, 1732); Charles Hoole, Sentences for Children (London, 1658); Charles Hoole, Six Comedies of Terentius (London, 1663).

  46. 46.

    H. S. Bennett, English Books and their Readers: 1475 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 170.

  47. 47.

    Hoole, ‘The Usher’s Duty’, in A New Discovery, 9.

  48. 48.

    John Brinsley, A Consolation for our Grammar Schools (London, 1622), 52–56; Hoole, ‘The Epistle’, in A New Discovery, A8r.

  49. 49.

    John Brinsley, Pueriles Confabulatiunculae: or, Children’s Dialogues, Little Conferences, or Talkings Together, or Little Speeches Together, or Dialogues Fit for Children (London, 1617); Charles Hoole, Children’s Talke, English & Latine, Divided into Several Clauses: Wherein the Propriety of both Languages is kept, That Children by the Help of their Mother Tongue May More Easily Learn to Discourse in Good Latine Amongst Themselves (London, 1659). Further references to Brinsley and Hoole’s translations of Pueriles Confabulatiunculae are given in the text as Children’s Dialogues and Children’s Talke respectively.

  50. 50.

    William Kempe, The Education of Children (London, 1588), F4. Charles Hoole makes a similar claim, stating ‘Colloquies are most suitable to children (who like nothing serious long)’ (Children’s Talke, n.p.). On the use of dialogues in Renaissance education, see Gillian Avery, ‘The Voice of the Child, Both Godly and Unregenerate, in Early Modern England’, in Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, ed. Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark Heberle and Naomi Sokoloff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 16–27; Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance Dialogue’, Renaissance Studies 3 (1989): 1–12.

  51. 51.

    See Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 165; Green, 177–180; David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. I: Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534–1698 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 228.

  52. 52.

    Joseph Webbe, Children’s Talke: Claused and Drawne into Lessons (London, 1627).

  53. 53.

    Stewart, 92–121.

  54. 54.

    On play in the early modern schoolroom, see O’Day, 53–54. Brinsley highlights the importance of play in his Ludus Literarius and Consolation, claiming, that ‘play’ is the way to ‘make the least to love the Schoole and Learning’ (Consolation, 27). On the final page of his Children’s Talke, Hoole cites Erasmus, stating: ‘I matter not how I play the Boy, so it be for their profit./And I cannot tell whether any thing be better learn’t then that which is learn’t by play’ (96).

  55. 55.

    See Richard Mulcaster, Positions Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined Which Are Necessary For the Training Up of Children (London, 1581).

  56. 56.

    Foster Watson, Tudor School-Boy Life: The Dialogues of Juan Luis Vives (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1970), 7–8.

  57. 57.

    On the grammar school and social status, see Halpern, 25.

  58. 58.

    See discussion of The Book of Merry Riddles in Chap. 3, 86–87.

  59. 59.

    Anthony Fletcher, Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 22; Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2007), 39–41.

  60. 60.

    Halpern, 25.

  61. 61.

    Mack, 135–145.

  62. 62.

    Brinsley, Esop’s Fables, A2v.

  63. 63.

    Purkiss, 16.

  64. 64.

    See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78; Mack, 11–12.

  65. 65.

    Hoole, ‘Epistle’, n.p.; Hoole, ‘The Usher’s Duty, 50.

  66. 66.

    Hoole, ‘The Usher’s Duty’, 5. Hoole continues to stress the importance of reading in English, suggesting that even when proficient in Latin the pupil should read ‘Tully, Pliny, Seneca or Lipsus for Epistles. Justin, Salust, Lucius Florus, or Caesar for History. Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, or Horace for Poetry’ in English and Latin (122).

  67. 67.

    Hoole, ‘The Usher’s Duty’, 50–51.

  68. 68.

    Hoole, ‘The Usher’s Duty’, 51.

  69. 69.

    Brinsley, Consolation, 56.

  70. 70.

    Green, 178.

  71. 71.

    On the irrelevance of Latin literacy for lower classes, see Halpern, 36.

  72. 72.

    James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford, 1607), 76. See Sanders, 58, on reading aloud as a method of developing a ‘masculine’ voice.

  73. 73.

    Lamb, 99; Ursula Potter, ‘Performing Arts in the Tudor Classroom’, in Tudor Drama Before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, ed. Lloyd Kermode, Jason Scott-Warren and Martine Van Elk (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 143–166.

  74. 74.

    Hoole explicitly recommends that schoolboys perform their reading when he suggests that scholars act comedies of ‘a Colloquy’ ‘first in private among themselves, and afterwards in the open Schoole before their fellowes’ (‘The Master’s Method’, in A New Direction, 142).

  75. 75.

    Bloom, 21–65.

  76. 76.

    Brinsley, Consolation, 61; Hoole, A New Discovery, 2–3.

  77. 77.

    Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 35.

  78. 78.

    Hoole, ‘The Master’s Method’, 207, 289.

  79. 79.

    Humanist pedagogues throughout the early modern period recommended active reading through the marking and copying of material as examples. See Bushnell, 131–134; Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 49; Sanders, 59–62; Sharpe, 41. Brinsley recommends that the ‘very little ones’ should ‘make some secret markes … with some little dint with their naile’, while older students should mark their books with ink (Ludus Literarius, 46–47). Hoole suggests that pupils ‘cull out the most significant words, and phrases, and write them in a Pocket-book’ (‘The Master’s Method’, 139).

  80. 80.

    See Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 151–152.

  81. 81.

    See Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, ‘Introduction: The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 351–353, for a summary of critical work on the practice of reading in parts. Eugene Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), suggests that reading was always for the purpose of collecting examples. Robert Bolgar, ‘From Humanism to the Humanities’, Twentieth Century Studies 9 (1973): 8–21, contends that the primary aim of the boy reader was to collect material for his own compositions and as a result texts were rarely studied in totality. Sharpe suggests that ‘the commonplace method made every educated Englishman or woman into a reader who very much made his or her own meaning’ (41). Mary Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) suggests that such examples were used with little regard to their context, whereas David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 204, disagrees, stating that although scholars were trained to excerpt quotations they were also disciplined to recognize allusions. Hoole advises his pupils to note ‘where to finde them [their examples] in their Authour’ when they copy phrases in their ‘Pocket-book’ (‘The Master’s Method’, 139).

  82. 82.

    Marston, 2.2.833–836.

  83. 83.

    Ann Blair, ‘Lectures on Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Class Notes of a Sixteenth-Century Paris Schoolboy’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 50 (1989): 117–144, points out that the official curricula may not have been adopted by individual teachers and is, therefore, a problematic source of evidence on school experience. Schurink similarly highlights that it is difficult to prove that Brinsley and Hoole’s methods and textbooks were used (174).

  84. 84.

    See Green, 179, on the extensive reprinting of Brinsley’s and Hoole’s schoolbooks.

  85. 85.

    Cited in Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 49.

  86. 86.

    See T. H. Motter, The School Drama in England (London: Longman, 1929), 12–13; Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 8–9; Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1976). On youth groups and misrule beyond the schoolroom, see Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past & Present 50.1 (1971): 41–75.

  87. 87.

    de Certeau, 173.

  88. 88.

    de Certeau, xiii.

  89. 89.

    Marston, 2.2.882–3.

  90. 90.

    John Fletcher, The Elder Brother (London, 1637), B3r, C1r.

  91. 91.

    Fletcher, F1r.

  92. 92.

    Marston, 2.1.450–1.

  93. 93.

    Marston, 2.2.855–6.

  94. 94.

    Marston, 2.2.880–88. Halpern, 36.

  95. 95.

    Patricia Parker, ‘Preposterous Reversals: Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Modern Language Quarterly 54.4 (1993): 435–482.

  96. 96.

    H. R. Woudhuysen, ‘Introduction’, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (London: A. & C. Black Publishers, 1998), 51.

  97. 97.

    Details of the play’s performance are provided on the play’s title page. See William Hawkins, Apollo Shroving (London, 1626). Further references are given in the text.

  98. 98.

    Sanders, 7.

  99. 99.

    See Jonathan Walker, ‘Introduction’, in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–18.

  100. 100.

    See Shapiro, 2–5.

  101. 101.

    Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006), 59–64.

  102. 102.

    See 4.4, F1r–F2r. The Latin language lesson is also reduced to the nonsensical ‘Rup, tup, snup, slup, bor, hor, cor, mor – holla, holla, holla!’ in Marston’s What You Will (2.2.748–749).

  103. 103.

    See Ursula Potter, ‘Cockering Mothers and Humanist Pedagogy in Two Tudor School Plays’, in Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England, ed. Kari Boyd McBride (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 244–278.

  104. 104.

    On The Mirrour of Knighthood, see Chap. 3, 79–80.

  105. 105.

    Sanders, 2, 62.

  106. 106.

    Cuffe, 121.

  107. 107.

    Christopher Marlow, Performing Masculinity in English University Drama, 1598–1636 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 6. See also Steven Smith, ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past & Present 61 (1973): 149–61.

  108. 108.

    Hornby, A2r.

  109. 109.

    Schurink, 174–196.

  110. 110.

    See William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), on the authors of marginalia as ‘users’ rather than ‘readers’ of books.

  111. 111.

    On children’s marginalia, Gillian Adams, ‘In the Hands of Children’, The Lion and the Unicorn 29 (2004): 38–51; Edel Lamb, ‘The Riddles of Early Modern Childhood’, in Material Worlds of Childhood in Northwestern Europe, c. 1350–1800, ed. Philippa Maddern and Stephanie Tarbin (London: Routledge, 2017); Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 80; Sherman, 92; Keith Thomas, ‘Children in Early Modern England’, Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 45–77.

  112. 112.

    See Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 365, on such ‘graffiti’ as ‘a useful heuristic category’.

  113. 113.

    See Richard Hodges, The Grounds of Learning (London, 1650), British Library copy, RB.23.a.37583. For more detail on the copy see Maddy Smith, ‘Value in Unexpected Places: The Sole Surviving Copy of The Grounds of Learning, a Seventeenth-Century Schoolbook’, Untold Loves Blog, 7 Feb. 2017, http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2017/02/value-in-unexpected-places-the-sole-surviving-copy-of-the-grounds-of-learning-a-seventeenth-century-.html

  114. 114.

    See Hodges, first free endpaper from front.

  115. 115.

    See William Bullokar, Aesopz Fablz in tru Ortography with Grammar-notz. Her-untoo ar also joined the short sentencez of the wyz Cato translated out of Latin in-too English (London, 1585), 3. Dodson’s inscriptions are on the British Library copy, C58.c.23. He also writes: “Iames Dodson is my/name and with my/pen i write the same/and if my pen had/beene a litle better/I would mend every/Letter/1690’. Another seventeenth-century boy practises writing his name and marks ownership of his edition of The First Five Books of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (1621, STC 18963.5, held in the Folger), writing ‘Thomas Hickman is my nane [sic] and England is my nation’ (6v) in a ‘childish scrawl’. See James McManaway, ‘The First Five Bookes of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, 1621, Englished by Master George Sandys’, Studies in Shakespeare, Bibliography and Theatre (1990): 81. See also Blaine Greteman, The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17, on the inscription of the alphabet on the Folger Library’s copy of the 1697 edition of Charles Hoole, Children’s Talke.

  116. 116.

    See Orme, 298–304.

  117. 117.

    See Sir Bevys of Southampton, c. 1503, Bodleian Douce B, subt. 234, 4–5. John Good copies ‘Nowe yonge Bevys knowynge’ beneath the section containing text ‘Nowe yonge Bevys knowinge’.

  118. 118.

    See Sir Bevys of Southampton, 6, 8, 9, 13, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 39.

  119. 119.

    See Orme, 301–302; Sir Bevys of Southampton, 9, 13, 18, 39.

  120. 120.

    See Thomas, ‘Children’, 66.

  121. 121.

    Greteman, 17.

  122. 122.

    Idleness states ‘geve me a litel water/That y may wesshe my book’. See Brian Lee, ‘Occupation and Idleness’, in Medieval Literature for Children, ed. Daniel Kline (London: Routledge, 2003), 275.

  123. 123.

    Pollard, 34.

  124. 124.

    Deborah Thorpe’s fascinating study of doodles by fifteenth- or sixteenth-century children in a Latin medieval manuscript has recently shown that developmental psychology might offer a methodology to acquire information about the age of those drawing on early texts. This excellent case study is persuasive. However, it assumes an understanding of the abilities of children in drawing that is constant across history that would be difficult to apply to writing, given that, as I argue throughout this monograph, constructs of childhood and the processes of acquiring basic literacy vary across historical and cultural contexts. See Deborah Thorpe, ‘Young Hands, Old Books: Drawing by Children in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript, LJSMS. 361’, Cogent Arts and Humanities (2016): 3.

  125. 125.

    A number of these are dated and hence can be linked to the book’s location in the school library.

  126. 126.

    Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 69–88.

  127. 127.

    See Sebastian Munster, Dictionarium Trilingue, In Quo Scilicet Latinis Vocabulis: In Ordinem Alphabeticum Digestis Respondent Graeca & Hebraica: Hebraicis Adiecta Sunt Magistralia & Chaldaica (Basel, 1530), Newcastle University Library, Post Incunabula Collection, PI 492.4 MUE. The first leaf contains the writing ‘Liber Scholae Keperiensis ab Hugone Hutchinson/Bibliopego Dunelmiensi de novo compactus,/Anno Domini 1671’. It is likely that this is written by Hugh, son of Hugh Hutchinson, of Bitchburn, who married Eliza, daughter of Richard Rowe of Plawsworth, gent, and was living in 1666. See R. W. Ramsey, ‘Kepier School, Houghton-Le-Sprint, and its Library’, Arcaeologia Aeliana 3 (1907): 319. Among the signatures, demonstrating varied writing skills of the boy markers, are the names ‘Thomas Dawson/1686’, ‘William: Shaw: 1684’, ‘George Canne. 1684’, ‘William Davison 1684’ and ‘Matthew: Crow his booke: Anno Domini/1684’. These markings are all on the reverse of the final blank leaf. The dates indicate that these are written by schoolboys as the book was in the school library from at least the date of Hugh Hutchinson’s annotation in 1671. It is also known that William Davison, son of Timothy Davison, gentleman, Newcastle, was a pupil at the school at this time. Following his attendance there, he was admitted to Cambridge in 1690. See Ramsey, 314. Boys writing ‘When this you see: Remember mee’ include Philip Douglas, Christopher Dagnia, George Baker and William Dawson in 1731.

  128. 128.

    The signatures of Hugh Hutchinson (1671), Christopher Dagnia (1731) and Peter Lascelles (1736) can also be found on 1537 edition of Muenster and on Valerius Maximus, Valerius Maximus cum commento Oliverii Arzignanensis Vicentini (Venice, 1500).

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    Edel Lamb

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Lamb, E. (2018). Reading Boyhood: The Books and Reading Practices of Early Modern Schoolboys. In: Reading Children in Early Modern Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70359-6_4

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