laugh—even though “translation” no longer calls up the intense, embodied memories and emotions it must once have done for writers and audiences trained up in Latin grammar and rhetoric at the hands of humanist schoolmasters. Rather than merely act a part in a play based on a Roman poem, as many schoolboys had been required to do before him, Bottom also undergoes a physical, classically derived metamorphosis that his peers understand in terms of translation, a common sixteenth-century lesson in Latin vocabulary and grammar. On a daily basis, schoolboys were set to translate passages from English to Latin and back again; and a master backed up his demand for such linguistic agility by the sting, or the threat, of his birch. Such early lessons in bilingual translation were the basis for more advanced training in the tropes and, eventually, physical gestures of an orator—the embodied aspect of rhetoric called actio thought necessary to the performance of eloquence. As numerous schoolmasters had it, “Eloquence and wisdom are one.” Read in light of the discursive and disciplinary school practices that once made Bottom’s metamorphosis viscerally funny to contemporaries, “translation” in a play that shuttles between the classical world of Athens and the vernacular world of English fairies is not merely a matter of moving from one language to another, or from one cultural context to another. Translation involves social, emotional, and bodily change too: It offers the Mechanicals the possibility of any interaction whatsoever with Athens’s aristocrats; signifies terror when the literary history they have imitated comes alive; and allows Bottom, in his classically altered dream state, to see, act, touch, taste, and take imaginative as well as sensory pleasure in Midsummer’s woods of desire.2
Much like the sixteenth-century schoolboys trained up in the techniques of verbal, vocal, and bodily performance necessary for eloquence, Bottom tries to memorize a dramatic rendition of a Latin precursor (in this case, Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisby) only to embark on an emotional experience made flesh. Translated from his early conviction that he is not the same thing as the Ovidian part he is playing (“I Pyramus am not Pyramus” [3.1.20]), Bottom soon loses any such certainty: “Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had …” (4.1.207–8). His metamorphosis changes organs of perception, makes him an “ass,” and thereby mediates the vernacular world of English fairies through the eyes and ears of a new head derived from precedent classical texts. When Bottom wakes up and reaches for synaesthesia to capture his translation’s ecstasy, not only do sensations cross, but so do word and body: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.1.211–14). Acts and threats of flogging at school vividly joined early lessons in Latin grammar to a boy’s physical experiences of learning that language; more advanced lessons continued to connect ancient words, tropes, and stories intimately to his body, and did so in ways that required him to co-ordinate all its parts to gain social approval and advancement. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, grammar school training in rhetorical delivery (actio), as well as rehearsing for school theatricals, drilled boys in the techniques of Latin eloquence through exercises in physical as much as verbal imitation. Schoolmasters required young orators to learn how to use and refine the chief tools of their trade: eyes, ears, hands, tongues. As pictured in a mid-century treatise on “manual rhetoric,” actio was closely associated with synaesthesia like Bottom’s: An orator’s outstretched palm displays a fountain of water (eloquence) pouring from an open mouth (Figure 1). The collected individual hands depicted at the bottom of the engraving reinforce that larger image, illustrating particular aspects of oratorical success with specific body parts centered in the palm—a tongue, an ear, an eye. If well synchronized, a schoolboy came to know through practice, these organs might combine to achieve rhetoric’s chief aspiration: the ability to move minds and hearts.
Expanding our standard view of early training in Latin as a rather silent, solitary drilling in reading and writing, I argue throughout this book that humanism’s platform of imitatio—the demand that boys imitate the schoolmaster’s facial movements, vocal modulation, and bodily gestures as much as his Latin words and texts—was designed to train young orators in physical as well as verbal techniques that would touch the “hearts” of those who heard and saw them. And as we will see, humanist masters understood, and integrated in various ways into their educational program, the ancient premise that true eloquence also relies on the power of emotions. As one sixteenth-century schoolboy wrote in his notebook’s section on actio, “Cicero saith yt is almost impossible for an Orator to stirre up a passion in his Auditors except he be first affected with the same passion hymselfe.”3 Success in becoming a Latin-speaking gentleman involved not merely the good memory and bodily deportment necessary to theatricals, which Bottom immediately evokes when he wakes up from his dream: “When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is, ‘Most fair Pyramus.’” (4.1.200–1). Social success also required a boy to imitate movements of eye, ear, hand, tongue, and heart in persuasive performances of the passions; a transfer of emotion was the desired end, and bodily and verbal facility the practical means, that schoolmasters offered a boy for obtaining a position of esteem in the school’s carefully structured hierarchy. The organs that coalesce in Bottom’s list of body parts are those that schoolboys were disciplined to bring together effectively enough to give life to memorized Latin scripts, imbue old words with emotion, and achieve the transfer of feeling necessary to persuasion. Whether such transfers of feeling worked in precisely the way schoolmasters believed they would is a question I raise throughout this book.
Which is the Latin “ass” through which Bottom experiences the world of English fairies? Did his night with Titania rival the sexual exploits of Apuleius’s Lucius? The unusual situation certainly solicits such a comparison. Does he hear through the ears of Ovid’s Midas? Shakespeare intimates as much in a joke on Bottom, who boasts to Titania, “I have a reasonable good ear in music” (4.1.28). That Bottom has no idea that in the Metamorphoses Midas got his ass’s ears as punishment for judging Pan’s music superior to Apollo’s only increases the incongruous conjunction between Shakespeare’s weaver and the Latin texts he doesn’t know. Or is Bottom speaking in the voice of an asinus, the derogatory name given in some grammar schools for those who lapsed into English too many times in one day? Whether mediated through any one of these Latin asses or all of them, the joke at first seems to be on Bottom. Yet it quickly becomes more than funny. Bottom’s metamorphosis may frighten his friends; and it may have caused former grammar schoolboys in the theater to laugh at the surprising intersection between a weaver and the Latin texts he wouldn’t have been able to read. Perhaps for some it brought back memories of their own first attempts to take part in school plays. But it also allows Bottom alone of the Mechanicals a transforming, erotic “vision” comparable to those shared that night in the woods by the play’s aristocratic lovers (4.1.205). As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, Shakespeare was not alone among contemporaries in the distinctly sexual hue he gives to the language, texts, and rhetorical techniques he learned to imitate during puberty. But this book also shows that the many kinds of “love” intimately connected with Latin pedagogy in Shakespeare’s texts are no more predictable, nor socially useful, than the one experienced that night in Athens’s woods between an ass and a fairy queen.
Figure 1. Title page to John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (London: Thomas Harper, 1644). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
If the synaesthesia of “Bottom’s Dream” speaks to the complex way the school’s verbal and physical training transmitted the texts of the Latin past to the bodies and minds of its students, it is important to remember that Tudor schoolmasters explicitly designed these lessons to “train” their boys “up” the social ladder. Read in light of the school’s announced goals, Bottom’s translation also speaks to the school’s carefully planned intervention in social reproduction. His vision takes flight from both the texts and the techniques of humanist pedagogy, but at the same time it reveals the new dissonances
