many critics, this ambivalent stance toward the vernacular constitutes an essential difference between humanist writers of the early and mid-sixteenth century and their late Elizabethan successors. If, as Richard Foster Jones argues, the final decades of the sixteenth century were marked by wholehearted faith in the vernacular’s expressive powers, this is a faith that Elyot and Ascham evidently did not share. The fact that such writers “employed the vernacular is no proof that [they] admired it,” Jones observes: Elyot, though he “did not disdain to use the vernacular in The Governour,” treats eloquence as “a quality beyond the abilities of the vernacular,” while Ascham “gives [in The Scholemaster] unmistakable evidence that the language he is using has no claim to eloquence.”3 In a broader sense, Latin-promoting humanists such as Elyot and Ascham are understood to have chosen the wrong side in an unfolding rivalry between the vernacular and the classical tongues: English “triumphs” at the necessary expense of Latin and Greek.4 Or, in Richard Helgerson’s more neutral phrasing, “the sufficiency or insufficiency of the English language … came to matter with a special intensity” only when “other sources of identity and cultural authority mattered less.”5
But such formulations cannot account for the pains both Elyot and Ascham took to shape their prose and the cause that justified those pains: these are texts whose innovative and artful English is crafted in the service of Latinity. Indeed, The Governour and The Scholemaster suggest that for early English humanists—who might otherwise, and with greater ease, have written in Latin—the vernacular came to matter precisely because other sources of cultural authority mattered so much more. For the most part, however, the formal achievements of Elyot’s and Ascham’s prose have been read against the grain of their pedagogical commitments: for literary critics, The Governour and The Scholemaster are exemplary of a movement at odds with itself, obtusely blind to the real value of its own investment in the vernacular. Thus C. S. Lewis credits Elyot as a “convinced and conscious neologizer,” the composer of “lucid” and “literary” sentences, and one of the first English writers to be “aware of prose as art,” but he insists that, as a work of pedagogical theory, The Governour has “nothing in it which suggests a mind of the first order.” Ascham he hails as an “irresistible” writer, but only if one pays minimal attention to his educational precepts: “the literary historian can have no opinion on the mischief of ‘making Latines’ or the virtues of the ‘two paper bokes,’ ” he writes, but “once get [Ascham] out of the schoolroom and he pleases us all.”6 In more recent criticism, Lewis’s instinctive distaste for humanism’s classicizing ambitions has ramified into a consensus about the adversarial relationship between pedagogy (and, above all, foreign language learning) and literature in the sixteenth century. According to this consensus, humanist pedagogy, with its emphasis on rote learning and unthinking submission to authority, threatened to develop in English schoolboys the very qualities least conducive to linguistic experimentation and literary achievement, and the vernacular Renaissance testifies to the happy failure of its methods.7 Classical education is still acknowledged as a shaping influence on Elizabethan writers, but attention has fixed on “the slippage between the august ideals of humanist education and its practical shortcomings, between its ambitions and its unintended consequences.”8
In a similar way, by dint of their prowess as writers and their influence as theorists, Elyot and Ascham continue to find their way into studies of sixteenth-century literature, but the lines of formal influence are traced across a more basic plot of departure: prodigality, opposition, rebellion, and critique.9 Thomas Greene’s admiration for Elyot and (especially) Ascham as prose stylists prompts him to offer the most generous possible version of this plot. The crucial feature of early English humanism, he writes, is that “it lacked still a sure sense of where it was headed”: what seems like a rigid adherence to antique precepts is simply a not-yet-realized sense of literary and linguistic ambition.10 But if Jones’s description of Elyot and Ascham exaggerates their disdain for English, Greene’s account understates their confidence in the classical tongues. To say that early English humanism lacked a clear sense of where it was headed dismisses the one thing Elyot and Ascham thought they knew for sure: “[A]ll men couet to haue their children speake Latin: and so do I verie earnestlie too,” Ascham reassures readers of The Scholemaster. “We bothe, haue one purpose: we agree in desire, we wish one end: but we differ somewhat in order and waie, that leadeth rightlie to that end.”11 From Ascham’s perspective, the end of the journey was its only fixed point: well-intentioned humanists might disagree about how to arrive at fluency in the Latin tongue (and, as we shall see, he and Elyot emphatically do), but it never occurs to him that anyone might question the goal itself.
It is precisely the firmness, even the stubbornness, with which The Governour and The Scholemaster cling to this end that draws them closest to the vernacular poets and playwrights of a later generation, with whom they share—to whom they communicate—the notion that eloquence both depends and thrives on estrangement. Indeed it is in the writing of men strenuously committed to a linguistic ideal anchored in classical antiquity, and prone to see England in terms of its remoteness from that ideal, that we find a rationale for the willfully eccentric literary vernaculars of the late sixteenth century: in the context of the humanist schoolroom, English is a language constituted and regenerated by its difference and distance from the classical tongues. We find, moreover, a precedent for the impulse to narrate the experience of linguistic estrangement, projecting one’s own rhetorical maneuvers onto characters whose actions allegorize fraught transactions within and between languages. The self-reflexive stories of errancy, alienation, and trespass in Euphues, The Shepheardes Calender, and Tamburlaine riff on fantasies of estrangement and transport original to scenes of foreign language learning in The Governour and The Scholemaster. In their eloquence and their indelible strangeness Euphues, Colin Clout, and Tamburlaine are kin to a cluster of imaginary figures who preside over the transmission of eloquence in Elyot’s and Ascham’s treatises: classical writers reimagined in the guise of foreign-born nursemaids and native archers, expert sea captains and wayward exiles, figures whose skill resides precisely in their negotiation of estrangement. From our own perspective, the linguistic transactions such figures are asked to mediate can appear, as Richard Halpern writes of humanist education as a whole, like “miracle[s] of impracticality.”12 That impracticality is, in fact, a central preoccupation for Elyot and Ascham, manifested most clearly in their self-conscious reflections on their own use of the vernacular—a practical necessity that begets a sense of possibility. For both writers, the strain of moving between tongues is initially legible only as an obstacle to their ambitions for England, a country whose historic marginality and insularity seem to condemn it to rusticity, if not outright barbarity. Each ultimately arrives, however, at a more positive sense of what distance and difficulty might mean for English culture and language: the labor of translating their classical ideals into the vernacular subtly refashions their conceptions of eloquence.
Virgil the Nursemaid
When Ascham says that he and his fellow pedagogues “differ somewhat in [the] order and waie” of language study, he points to a debate that swirls around a single, fundamental question: how were sixteenth-century English schoolmasters, self-appointed heirs to classical antiquity, to accommodate the fact of living in sixteenth-century England? As he observes in The Scholemaster, “if ye would speake as the best and wisest do, ye must be conuersant, where the best and wisest are, but if yow be borne or brought vp in a rude contrie, ye shall not chose but speake rudelie: the rudest man of all knoweth this to be trewe.”13 For Elyot, this truth is a source of frequent embarrassment, a recurring impediment to his desire to “devulgate or sette fourth” the substance of classical learning.14 The difficulties arise literally from the start. As he acknowledges in the opening pages of The Governour, classical theories of education have little to say about language instruction for infants: most “olde authors holde oppinion that, before the age of seuen yeres [the moment at which the care of the mother or nursemaid yields to the supervision of the pedagogue] a chylde shulde nat be instructed in letters.” But Elyot insists that it is only by distinguishing itself
