Judith Owens explores poetic transformations in the emotional education of heroes—Sidney's Musidorus, Spenser's Arthur, and Shakespeare's Hamlet—as they struggle beyond conventional forms of family ties and humanist schooling. These princes can make deep commitments to civic virtue and heroic action only by way of inward questing, often with hard pains of loss.
To reveal these emotional enfoldings, Owens relies on the method of close reading, artfully deployed, with special attention to the affective weight of rhetorical devices, diction, grammar, and syntax. Though this analysis is mostly formal, these readings enrich historical arguments on all sides of long-running debates about the effects of humanist schooling.
Owens shows how these princes in their immaturity are constrained by humanist idealizations of filial duty, and by commonplace maxims and oppositions. She finds plenty of evidence for critics who, with Grafton, Jardine, and others, fault humanist disciplines for preaching civic virtue while propagating tractable clerks.
Even so, in densely detailed readings with ample scholarly contexts, Owens finds fruitful instructional encounters in (among other places) an Arcadian garden, a castle's inmost chamber, and on a rampart of Elsinore. In these settings, princes overstep the more rote forms of humanist schooling to learn the heroic—and more deeply humanist—practices of personal intimacy, inwardness, and creative adaptation of commonplace ideas to hard new circumstances.
Chapters 1 and 2: To frame these critical encounters, Owens expands narrow views of the punitive schoolroom and the patriarchal home in Tudor England. Roger Ascham reports on the solace Lady Jane Grey took in her lessons, in contrast to her rigid home life. Richard Mulcaster calls the schoolmaster to “terrify and check” the errant boy, but also to supply fatherly affection, ample sport and music, and convivial community, all tending to civic life. In the December eclogue in The Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser affirms that he found such nurture in his own days as Mulcaster's pupil. A letter from Sidney's father to “little Philip” away at school includes a postscript from his mother and urges both duty and merriment.
Chapter 3: In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney exalts the figure of Aeneas “preserving his old father” in the sack of Troy as an emblem of heroic action. In the syntax of Sidney's praise of “that much-lauded act of filial, patriarchal piety”(102), Owens finds a strain of doubt and impatience. Likewise, in Arcadia, the shipwrecked Musidorus finds fatherly stability in the house of Kalander, but in the open air of its garden he finds new strength in a statue of a different Aeneas, an infant at the flowing breast of his mother Venus. In Sidney's sensuous description, Owens detects the feeling “that heroism does not emerge from such ‘civic’ places as the schoolroom and the commonplace topic, but from maternal love, from gardens and private retreats behind great houses, from fellowship” (107).
Chapter 4: In The Faerie Queene, Owens notes that “tutelage emerges as foundational to Arthur's quest,” but that he matures only when his “instruction in virtue is shaped and layered with emotions” (123). Orphaned at birth, fostered by kindly teachers, Arthur only attains his full powers in Alma's castle when, reading a chronicle of Britain, he is ravished by love of country. Thus brought to his full self, he becomes capable of teaching others.
Chapters 5 and 6: For any reader who uses Hamlet to teach rhetorical analysis, Owens provides virtuosic models in her close readings of act 1 soliloquies and ghostly visitations. Hamlet, trapped in a “moral grammar” (187) of commonplace maxims and oppositions, is moved by paternal demands to a grim resolve: “from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms . . . That youth and observation copied there” (1.5). Owens stops here, but her exacting scrutiny might move us to invite students to examine the rest of the play as she has done, maybe to discover in the emotional possibilities of its rhetorical art how the forms of humanist schooling confine and empower Hamlet, and people who read him in this way.
