The Elizabethans (16 page)

Not all teachers at other schools were so restrained. In July 1563 a teacher named Penred beat a boy with a belt buckle ‘that left no skin on his body’. This was too much, even by Elizabethan standards, and Penred was prosecuted. The thrasher was given a punishment even more sadistic than his own mistreatment of schoolboys. He was pilloried at the Standard in Cheapside, his neck, hands and feet fastened to a stake with iron cuffs while the Beadles of the Beggars whipped him. Sometimes as many as three beadles at a time beat him. The Lord Mayor of London came to watch, and the victim of Penred’s cruelty, the half-flayed boy, was also displayed on the pillory, his bare torso gashed and bruised. Henry Machyn, a London draper who kept a diary, said that the sight of the child was the most pitiful he could imagine.
¹⁷

In that same year of 1563 the Queen was dining with her old tutor Roger Ascham, Sir William Cecil and Sir Richard Sackville. The conversation turned to some Eton boys who had lately run away from the school because of excessive beating. Ascham argued that children were sooner allured by love than driven by beating to good learning. The schoolhouse, in general a place of torment, should, argued Ascham, be ‘a refuge against fear’. Sackville, a Boleyn cousin of the Queen through his mother, and the father of Thomas Sackville, was silent, but after dinner he drew Ascham aside, saying how much he agreed and how he lamented his own harshness as a parent. ‘Surely, God willing, if God lend me life, I will make this my mishap some occasion of good hope to little Robert Sackville my son’s son. For whose bringing up I would gladly if it so please you, use specially your good advice. I hear say you have a son much of his age [Ascham had three sons]: we will deal with this together.’
¹⁸

This was the origin of Ascham’s book
The Schoolmaster
, dedicated to William Cecil, but left incomplete at Ascham’s death (in 1568) and published by his widow in 1570. The little dinner table of these extremely clever people – Ascham, Cecil, the Queen – reminds us, if reminder were required, that the Queen herself was the direct beneficiary of the revival in learning. When her tutor William Grindal died in 1548, when she was still fourteen, he was replaced immediately by his mentor Roger Ascham – ‘not only the greatest teacher of the age; he was also one of its most notable gossips’.
¹⁹
Ascham, like William Cecil, like so many other influential Elizabethans, had learned Greek at Cambridge from John Cheke. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, and thirty-four years old, when he joined the Princess’s household in Chelsea. Their mornings together began with the study of the Greek New Testament, a book that was in effect for the sixteenth century a Protestant text. In classical Greek they read Sophocles, Isocrates and Demosthenes. In the afternoons they read the Roman historian Livy and the statesman-rhetorician Cicero. Among the Greek texts of late antiquity they read the North African Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage. Cyprian among the ancients, and Philipp Melanchthon, the Protestant reformer, among the moderns, were studied because they ‘convey pure doctrine in elegant language’. It has been questioned whether Ascham admired the Princess’s prose style,
²⁰
but he did admire her proficiency in the classical tongues. Oral Greek she spoke ‘frequently, willingly and moderately well’.

Because of the educationalists’ emphasis on repetition and on the ‘correct’ pronunciation of Latin and Greek – Erasmus had pioneered the reconstruction of what ancient Greek
sounded
like
²¹
– and because many of the educationalists and grammarians were also advocates of spelling reform, they have left behind abundant evidence of how Elizabethan English was spoken.

As in modern English, there was a huge variety of pronunciation. But in London, and at court, there was a Received Pronunciation as there was throughout the period of English cultural self-confidence, 1550–1950. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Devon accent was
noted
at court.
²²
Something that would strike any modern time-traveller, if transported back to Elizabeth’s court, or Grindal’s church, or Shakespeare’s theatre, would be the differences in vowel-sounds. Words that we now pronounce [i:] while spelling
ea
would all, in Elizabeth’s reign, have been rendered [e:] or [eI], as would many words with the long
a
vowel. By extension the [e:] or [eI] pronunciation was used for
conceive
,
receive
,
deceive
,
feature
,
supreme
. The vowels in these words would have been all but identical to the
a
in father – [fayther]. The long [a], so noticeable a feature of
southern
RP in modern English, with its
bahth, plahstic
, and so on, barely existed in early modern or Elizabethan English. Even foreign names and loan-words were assimilated into an English
ay
sound.

So we find Milton, in the middle of the seventeenth century, punning on the word
Gaza
. ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ for him, as for Queen Elizabeth, would have sounded like the cruel paradox of a blind man in a place that sounded like
Gazer
. Some modern Roman Catholics pronounce ‘Mass’, the monosyllabic synonym for the Eucharist,
marce
to rhyme with
farce
. For an Elizabethan the vowel would have been short (as for the French from which it derived in Middle English –
messe
) and scarcely distinguishable from
mess
. Had the Elizabethans lengthened the vowel, they would have pronounced it
mace
.
Marce
is a Victorian Irishism (cf. some modern Irish pronunciation of
gas
as
garce
).

If we owe to the Elizabethan schoolmasters and grammarians a knowledge of how they spoke, we also owe to them the immense growth in English vocabulary that occurred in the decades before and during Shakespeare’s acquisition of the language. True, much of the vocabulary enrichment derived from trade. During the marriage of Mary Tudor and Philip II the English for the first time adapted and adopted the words
sherry
,
anchovy
,
comrade
,
carrot
,
flotilla
,
castanet
and
guitar
. Portuguese trade made them familiar not only with the words
coco-nut
and
molasses
, but also with such Africanisms as
yam
and
palaver
. Travellers in Italy made the English familiar for the first time with
volcano
,
bandit
,
casino
,
broccoli
and, as architects copied Italian taste, they needed the words
balcony
,
arcade
,
colonnade
and
loggia
. From Turkey they introduced
caviar
and
kiosk
, while Persian traders introduced
caravan
and
divan
. But by far the greatest number of loan-words came to English by literary means. Those London schools that introduced the boys to elementary Hebrew were responsible for the much wider number of English speakers for whom
myrtle
,
jubilee
,
mammon
and
leviathan
were part of their word-hoard. The Renaissance passion for Greek made it natural for English to speak of
irony
,
alphabet
,
drama
,
tome
,
dilemma
,
idea
,
enigma
,
cynic
,
labyrinth
,
scheme
,
chorus
,
bulb
or
nausea
. But the greatest number of foreign words absorbed into the English language during the Renaissance period came from Latin. A century and more ago two great philologists stated, ‘we are safe in asserting that our language has appropriated a full quarter of the Latin vocabulary, besides what it has gained by transferring Latin meanings to native words’.
²³
To the Renaissance humanists the English are indebted for their
cadaver
,
arbiter
,
genius
,
cornea, acumen, folio, alias, area, exit, peninsula, quietus, pus, miser, circus, interim, vacuum, species, hiatus
and
decorum
.
²⁴

7

A Library at Mortlake

FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE
Elizabeth became the Queen of England, there died in Frauenberg (now Frombork, Poland), a clergyman-mathematician named Mikolaj Kopernik (1473–1543). This scholarly canon of Wroclaw is known to history by his Latin name of Copernicus; and he is one of those rare beings – to be named with Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Rutherford – who changed the way humanity viewed the whole of life: on the planet, and in the cosmos.

Legend has it that, a few days before he lost consciousness, from a stroke, Copernicus had placed in his own hands a copy of that world-changing book that he had completed –
Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs
(
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi
). Copernicus possessed no powerful telescope. He was not, in the modern sense, an astronomer so much as he was a theoretical mathematician and physicist. His revolution in thought was a simple one, and perhaps the most outstanding achievement of Renaissance humanism. Hitherto, the human race had believed itself to live in a geocentric universe. The Earth was the centre and the Sun and the Moon and the other planets, according to this theory, revolved around it. Copernicus posited something very different: a heliocentric universe. We lived in a solar system with the Sun at its centre.

Such was the danger of this revolutionary notion that, although it was printed in the most free-thinking of European cities, Nuremberg (the German Athens
¹
), it was felt necessary to publish Copernicus’s revolution as if it were a fiction illustrated with numerous woodcuts. And a preface was attached to the book, written by a clergyman named Andreas Osiander, pointing out that Copernicus’s version of astronomy was only a theory, and might well be untrue.
²
It was simply a mathematical theorem, not a picture of the universe as it actually was.

This was to enable the printers to escape any dangerous consequences, for the revolution was an absolute one. Goethe wrote:

of all discoveries and opinions, none can have exercised a greater effect on the human spirit than the teaching of Copernicus . . . never, perhaps, has mankind had a greater demand made upon it. For this discovery, so many things vanished in mist and smoke. Whatever happened to our Garden of Eden, our world of Innocence, piety and poetry: the testimony of our senses, the certainties of poetic-religious faith?
³

Suddenly, the world, rather than being a fixed thing, the still centre of the universe where we all knew our place, became a thing of flux. The world of physics posited by Aristotle and Ptolemy – and which the Catholic Church had enshrined not simply as a scientific idea, but as a doctrine of faith – had in fact been dismantled. Dante’s still Earth in the early fourteenth century, surrounded by a hierarchy of moving planets, had been surrounded in turn by a sphere of perfect stillness. God himself inhabited the next sphere, which could, technically at least, be envisaged as a physical location. Copernicus changed all that. The future belonged not to the clergy who preserved the old doctrines, but to mathematicians, scientists and (same thing in many sixteenth-century cases) mages. That is to say, Nature, instead of being a reality to which humanity was asked to submit, became an object that humanity could potentially set out to master, to explore, to control.

Humanity was not going to absorb the Copernican revolution overnight. (When Hermann Kesten wrote his biography of Copernicus in 1948, he pointed out that the book had seen five printings in 400 years: at Nuremberg in 1543, Basel in 1566, Amsterdam in 1617 – the first edition to admit that Copernicus did not write the Preface and to concede that the theory was seriously advanced – Warsaw in 1854 and Torun in 1873. Though it was translated into German, Polish, French and Italian, it had not been translated into English – Kesten was wrong, but only by a year, the first English translation being made by J.F. Dobson for the Royal Astronomical Society in 1947.)
⁴

In 1596, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer at the Middle Temple registered with the stationers a poetic work entitled
Orchestra, or, A Poeme of Dancing
, in which he invoked the old idea of the music of the spheres and saw the universe itself as a dance – as Dante had done in the
Paradiso
. For poetic purposes, John Davies holds fast to the pre-Copernican universe, as Dryden would do a hundred years later, a fixed geocentric universe guided by heavenly harmony. But Davies the skilful lawyer knew that the fiction would not last for ever. The dance would last their time out, but thereafter science had drawn a less-certain universe:

Only the earth doth stand for ever still,

Her rocks remove not now her mountains meet,

(Although some wits enrich with learning’s skill

Say heav’n stands firm and that the earth doth fleet

And swiftly turneth underneath their feet):

Yet, though the earth is ever stedfast seen,

On her broad breast hath dancing ever been.