as a quality that speaks across linguistic, cultural, geographic, and temporal divides—as the most mobile of linguistic effects—Elyot can conceive of the study of remote, long-dead tongues as an experience of profound, near-perfect intimacy, and he can write prose that effaces lexical difference even as it testifies to persistent gaps in expressive capability. In addition he can dream of a time when such education and such prose produce an English home, and perhaps even a mother tongue, whose walls enclose the “encyclopedia” of eloquence.
But would such a home, and such a tongue, remain English? In his 1533 preface to Knowledge, Elyot scoffs at the question, berating for their ingratitude those readers who are “offended (as they say) with my strange terms.”28 But in The Governour he seems—briefly and obliquely—to wonder. In the final chapter of book 1, having just urged the Governour’s readers to set themselves vigorously to the work of translating classical wisdom into England, he departs conspicuously from that wisdom. Citing, but then disavowing, Cicero’s injunction against sports and games, he proceeds to make a rather plaintive case for the merits of the dying art of English longbow shooting, a skill that “is, and always hath ben” England’s security “from outwarde hostilitie” and the source of its fame throughout the world, “as ferre as Hierusalem” (99v–100r). Elyot attributes the decline of longbow shooting to an encroaching cosmopolitanism, as foreign and new-fangled modes of defense—crossbows and handguns—have eroded a skill that “continuell use” made “so perfecte and exacte amonge englisshe men” (102r). “O what cause of reproche shall the decaye of archers be to us nowe liuyng?” he demands. “Ye what irrecuperable damage either to us or them in whose time nede of semblable defence shall happen?” (100r).
This plangent appeal for the preservation of an already (or once) “perfect” native art—an art that has shored up England’s defenses against outsiders and extended its renown to the far corners of the world—makes for an odd conclusion to the litany of not yets that propels the rest of book 1 and justifies its radical conflations of domesticity and estrangement. Indeed, Elyot rather casually observes at one point, midway through his attack on English legal discourse, that eloquence is no different than embroidery, drawing, or sculpture: if Englishmen are not able or willing to cultivate a particular skill at home—if, that is, they are to face the fact that they inhabit a realm where “the langage is barberouse” and “the steering of affections of the mind,” rhetoric itself, “was never used” (56r)—they must “be constrained … to abandone [their] owne countraymen and resorte unto straungers” (55r). That matter-of-fact resorting unto strangers exacts an unexpected toll in the final pages of book 1, as Elyot imagines a future England enervated and demoralized by its blind embrace of things novel and strange, its neglect of what it once knew and practiced best.
Cicero the Sea Captain
It is a bit of an interpretive leap to link this elegiac defense of the longbow to a latent concern for the vernacular, but I am nudged to make that leap by the fact that Elyot’s most important sixteenth-century reader—the heir to his zeal both for the English longbow and for foreign-language study—seems to have made it too. In 1545, a year before Elyot’s death, Roger Ascham, the young Cambridge lecturer in Greek, made his debut as an author, publishing a pseudo-Socratic dialogue on the merits of longbow shooting, citing Elyot’s enthusiasm for the sport as inspiration for his own labors on its behalf.29 “[T]o haue written this boke either in latin or Greke … had bene more easier and fit for mi trade in study,” he confesses in the dedicatory epistle to Toxophilus: The Schole of Shotyng, “yet neuerthelesse,” he deems it best to “haue written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue, for Englishe men” (x). The epistle to readers amplifies this claim by way of a fable borrowed from Herodotus:
Bias the wyse man came to Cresus the ryche kyng, on a tyme, when he was makynge newe shyppes, purposyng to haue subdued by water the out yles lying betwixt Grece and Asia minor: What newes now in Grece, saith the king to Bias? None other newes, but these, sayeth Bias: that the yles of Grece haue prepared a wonderful companye of horsemen, to ouerrun Lydia withall. There is nothyng vnder heauen, sayth the kynge, that I woulde so soone wisshe, as that they durst be so bolde, to mete vs on the lande with horse. And thinke you sayeth Bias, that there is anye thyng which they wolde sooner wysshe, then that you shulde be so fonde, to mete them on the water with shyppes? And so Cresus hearyng not the true newes, but perceyuyng the wise mannes mynde and counsell, both gaue then ouer makyng of his shyppes, and left also behynde him a wonderful example for all commune wealthes to folowe: that is euermore to regarde and set most by that thing whervnto nature hath made them moost apt, and vse hath made them moost fitte. (xii)
“By this matter,” Ascham explains, “I mean the shotynge in the long bowe, for English men,” but the fable—like Toxophilus—serves equally well as defense of the practice of writing in the vernacular: English, after all, is the language that nature and use have conspired to make most apt and fit for his own undertaking; to write in Latin or Greek would be to set sail in unseaworthy vessels. Indeed, as Ryan Stark and Thomas Greene have suggested, Ascham’s interest in archery is always also an interest in eloquence: the strengths developed by the former (clarity of vision, precision of aim) are, to his mind, exactly correspondent to the skills requisite for the latter.30 In his epistle to Toxophilus Ascham elucidates the analogy: “Yf any man wyll applye these thynges [that is, writing and shooting] togyther, [he] shal nat se the one farre differ from the other,” he alleges, for “[i]n our tyme nowe, … very many do write, but after suche a fashion, as very many do shoote … , tak[ing] in hande stronger bowes, than they be able to mayntayne” (xiii). For Ascham, his defense of the longbow and his advocacy for the vernacular are interchangeable commitments, and he scoffs at “any man [who] woulde blame me, eyther for takynge such a matter in hande, or els for writing it in the Englyshe tongue” (xiii).
Ascham’s attitude toward his mother tongue is hardly uncritical, but neither does it partake of Elyot’s faith in the enriching effect of intimacy with foreign tongues. Indeed what Ascham seems to have taken from his reading of Elyot—and especially from his reading of the mournful conclusion to book 1—is a keen awareness of the dangers of false intimacy or overeager identification. Like Elyot, he frames his decision to write in English in terms of a desire to improve the tongue and profit his vernacular readership, but he betrays no optimism that such improvement or profit will come easily or without cost. Where Elyot emphasizes likeness, contiguity, and kinship, Ascham insists on a radical and perhaps insuperable estrangement: “as for ye Latin or greke tonge, euery thing is so excellently done in them, that none can do better,” he bluntly declares, but “in the Englysh tonge contrary, euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse” (xiv). Rather than search for terms or syntactical arrangements that might, like Elyot’s neologistic couplets, ease the passage between the learned and the vulgar, Ascham advocates for prose that eschews foreign affectations and neologistic borrowings, arguing that “[h]e that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste … speake as the common people do” and lamenting the fact that “[m]any English writers haue not done so, but vsinge straunge wordes as latin, french and Italian, do make all thinges darke and harde” (xiv).
As for the possibility that the vernacular requires such augmentation, he dismisses it summarily: “Ones I communed with a man whiche reasoned the englyshe tongue to be enryched and encreased therby, sayinge: Who wyll not prayse that feaste, where a man shall drinke at a diner, bothe wyne, ale and beere? Truely quod I, they be all good, euery one taken by hym selfe alone, but if you putte Maluesye and sacke, read wyne and white, ale and beere, and al in one pot, you shall make a drynke, neyther easie to be knowen, nor yet holsom for the bodye” (xiv). Where Elyot sees nurturing and intimacy—the infant at his nurse’s breast—Ascham sees the threat of contamination, an unwholesome and unpalatable brew. This is not to suggest that Ascham believed the vernacular had nothing to learn from the classical tongues, nor English youth from the study of classical literature. His career as a writer and a teacher was founded on the promotion of Greek and Latin literacy, and indeed in the very next lines he hints that not all attempts
