Abstract
‘I will teach the children their behaviours’ (4.4.66) announces the schoolmaster, Sir Hugh Evans, as he helps the Fords and the Pages plot their revenge on Sir John Falstaff in the closing scenes of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Though accustomed to drilling his schoolboy charges in their Latin grammar, the ‘behaviours’ that Evans turns to teaching here are decidedly less scholarly and would certainly be termed misbehaviours were they not sanctioned by the adults involved: disguised as ‘urchins, oafs and fairies, green and white, / With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads’ (4.4.46–7), a handful of the children of Windsor — girls and boys — are to rush at Falstaff, who thinks he is keeping a midnight assignation in the forest with Mistresses Ford and Page, pinching him and burning him with their tapers, while singing of his misdeeds:
Fie on sinful fantasy,
Fie on lust and luxury!
Lust is but a bloody fire,
Kindled with unchaste desire,
Fed in heart, whose flames aspire,
As thoughts do blow them higher and higher.
Pinch him fairies, mutually,
Pinch him for his villainy.
Pinch him and burn him and turn him about,
Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out. (5.5.83–92)
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Notes
John H. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage-Playing (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 39.
Darryll Grantley, Wit’s Pilgrimage: Drama and the Social Impact of Education in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 15.
For a more detailed discussion of the growth of formal schooling in sixteenth-century England, see Ursula Potter, ‘To School or Not to School: Tudor Views on Education in Drama and Literature’, Parergon, 25.1 (2008), 103–21.
For information on Shakespeare’s own boyhood and education, and the myths that have developed in the absence of evidence about them, see, for example, Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 5–13
Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 70–101
Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare: His Life and Work (London: Abacus, 2000), pp. 30–76.
Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 177.
Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), ed. Henry Morley (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894), pp. 65 and 66.
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 366.
Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982), p. 3.
For information on the master apprenticeship relationship see, for example, Steven R. Smith, ‘The Ideal and Reality: Apprentice-Master Relationships in Seventeenth Century London’, History of Education Quarterly, 21.4 (1981), 449–59
Margaret Pelling, ‘Apprenticeship, Health and Social Cohesion in Early Modern London’, History Workshop, 37 (1994), 33–56. Francis Beaumont’s satirical play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607) provides a theatrical example of a close and affectionate master-apprentice relationship in its depiction of the Grocer George and his wife Nell’s indulgence of their apprentice Rafe.
Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. 34–5.
For more information see H.W. Jackson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952).
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© 2013 Emily Katherine Knowles
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Knowles, K. (2013). Pages and Schoolboys: Early Modern Educations. In: Shakespeare’s Boys. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005373_4
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