Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Puberty rites....................................?
In the summer the school day began at 6 A. M.; in the winter, as a concession to the darkness and the cold, at 7. At 11 came recess for lunch—and Will presumably ran home, only three hundred yards or so away—and then instruction began again, continuing until 5:50 or 6. Six days a week; twelve months a year. The curriculum made few concessions to the range of human interests: no English history or literature; no biology, chemistry, or physics; no economics or sociology; only a smattering of arithmetic. There was instruction in the articles of the Christian faith, but that must have seemed all but indistinguishable from the instruction in Latin. And the instruction was not gentle: rote memorization, relentless drills, endless repetition, daily analysis of texts, elaborate exercises in imitation and rhetorical variation, all backed up by the threat of violence.
Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin. A good teacher was by definition a strict teacher; pedagogical reputations were made by the vigor of the beatings administered. The practice was time-honored and entrenched: as part of his final examination at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy. Learning Latin in this period was, as a modern scholar has put it, a male puberty rite. Even for an exceptionally apt student, that puberty rite could not have been pleasant. Still, though it doubtless inflicted its measure of both boredom and pain, the King's New School clearly aroused and fed Will's inexhaustible craving for language.
-Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
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Beating or 'flogging' as practiced in Elizabethan grammar schools was not only barbaric, but was also an indecent, vile and sexually degrading punishment. Boys were flogged on their naked buttocks with a thick, heavy bundle of birch branches and twigs whilst kneeling and bent spreadeagled over a specially made 'flogging block' - an obscene posture in which their buttocks, anus, perineum and genitals were completely exposed and vulnerable. A severe flogging, often consisting of several dozen strokes of the birch, would leave the whole of the victim's buttocks and upper thighs, including the anal and perineal sphere, a mass of bloodied, raw and lacerated flesh.
ReplyDeleteThe Children's Petition of 1669 (a little after Shakespeare's time) graphically described the nature of school floggings thus:- "Our schools are not merely houses of correction but also of prostitution in this vile method of castigation in use wherein our secret parts, which are by nature shameful and not to be uncovered, are exposed to the immodest gaze and filthy blows of the smiter".
School floggings with the birch were in reality nothing less than a vile form of sadistic sexual abuse, done under the respectable 'cloak' of necessary 'discipline' for the 'correction' of boys in their learning of latin.
The most common historical slang terms for a schoolmaster, from medieval through to Hanoverian times, were 'whip-arse' 'bum-brusher' or 'flaybottomist'. It's interesting to note that these terms have nothing to do with the higher aspirations of learning, but everything to do with the 'vile method of castigation' used in schools of the period.
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