We are obsessed with tools. Our education system is increasingly geared towards technology – coding, engineering, AI – all of which play critical roles in wiring the modern economy.
But there is rather less emphasis on another tool we are using more than ever: language. We are constantly firing off texts, posting to social media, responding to emails, joining Zoom calls.
In our connected world we need to use it well. But good writing is hard. We are tempted to use AI tools that promise to do it for us. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I don’t think we should do.
As Scott Newstok’s exploration of Renaissance education, How to Think Like Shakespeare, shows, our educational priorities used to be rather different.
The book vividly recreates Shakespeare’s education at Stratford Grammar School in the late 16th century, a parallel world in which the entire curriculum was focused on cultivating skilled use of language. ‘[I]n Shakespeare’s era’, writes Newstok, ‘rhetoric was nothing less than the fabric of thought itself.’
Latin from dawn till dusk…
To us, it sounds scarcely tolerable, a remorseless drilling in Latin grammar from dawn to dusk, six days a week, all year round (though Thursdays and Saturdays were half days!). This was rote-learning at the limits of endurance. Students did nothing but imitate Greek and Roman writers such as Cicero, Horace, Terence, Ovid and Virgil, endlessly copying and recopying selected passages, endlessly translating and retranslating them into English and back again. In their final year the scholars were allowed to speak to each other only in Latin.
The system was impelled by the belief that the ability to think and speak well was the essential qualification for participation in public life, whether in the law courts, the church, public fora or trade.
For the Elizabethans those skills could only be acquired through a thorough immersion in tradition, the best of what had been thought and said. Culture was often spoken of in horticultural terms, as an organic process through which new growth sprung from weathered soil. Rhetorical manuals had titles like Gardens of Eloquence, and ‘flowers of verse’ were ‘gathered’ into anthologies.
’A mental gymnasium’
The curriculum, which could be traced to the classical Progymnasmata, a ‘mental gymnasium’ for the teaching of rhetoric, followed a severe but rigorous logic. ‘Today’, as Newstock puts it, ‘we tell students to find their voice. Tudor educators did the opposite: sound like someone else.’
By copying passages verbatim, over and over again, students were steeped in the rhetorical techniques employed by the masters, feeling in their hands, not just the imagination, what it is like to write well. Newstock compares their instruction with that given by the Baroque composer Christopher Simpson, who had his pupils take a score of music they wished to emulate, place a blank score below it, and use a needle to puncture the paper, thereby creating ‘a Pattern to emulate’.
Once they had mastered Latin syntax students went on to paraphrase rather than simply copy passages, recomposing them to explore how they might be differently expressed. An infamous example in a textbook by the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus listed 195 ways in which the words ‘your letter pleased me greatly’ could be recast. Shakespeare was to lampoon these and other pedantic exercises in plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost, but they had their uses in developing an acute sense of language’s versatility.
So too did exercises in ‘double translation’, in which a Latin model was translated into English then back into Latin, obliging the translator to pay minute attention to the composer’s style. By porting thoughts, images and figures of speech from one language to another the student was obliged to render them with precision, avoiding the temptation to get stuck in the grooves of their own language by resorting to platitude and cliche.
The same thought inspired a related discipline, that of writing an original composition in the voice of another, typically a figure from classical history or mythology. In Soul of the Age, another fine account of Shakespeare’s era, Jonathan Bate quotes an exercise set by with which pupils would have been familiar:
Write a letter as if you were Antenor persuading Priam that he should return the stolen Helen to her Menelaus, either because it was just in itself, or because it would be a very foolish ruler who caused many brave men to enter battle on account of the most shameful love of such an effeminate youth as Paris.
The task sought to nurture the scholar’s capacity for imaginative sympathy, to view the world in different ways. The technique clearly made its mark on Shakespeare, whose plays are celebrated for their many-sidedness, holding ‘as ’twere the mirror up to nature’, inhabiting the thought worlds of a multitude of characters.
There were also exercises to inculcate conversational skill, the capacity to weigh arguments against each other. As the Greek rhetorician Isocrates put it truth emerges through dialectic:
The same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts; and, while we call eloquent those who are able to speak before a crowd, we regardless call sage those who most skilfully debate their problems in their own minds.
Dialectic deliberation propels the many Shakespearian soliloquies in which characters weigh alternative possibilities for action. Newstok notes that ‘To be or not to be’ was actually a set question in a logic textbook that may well have been used at Stratford:
When Hamlet launches into ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, he’s alluding to the pedagogical practice of setting up ‘To X or not X’ disputes, then arguing on both sides of the question: on the one hand this on the other hand, that.
Remorseless as it was, the curriculum’s forensic attention on the nuts and bolts of the writing process equipped its best graduates with skills they could use to express their own thoughts, and push the tradition forward. As Newstock puts it, through this educational model ‘play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraints, freedom through discipline’. Shakespeare and other grammar school boys – including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Kyd – went on to produce perhaps the greatest flowering of English stage and verse.
Indeed, the curriculum’s unsentimental emphasis on imitation and repetition recalls the advice given by a much later writer, Ezra Pound, to fellow poet W.S. Merwin:
If you want to be a poet, you have to take it seriously. You have to work on it the way you work on anything else, and you have to do it every day.’ He said, ‘You should write about 75 lines a day, but you don’t have anything to write 75 lines about a day. You don’t really have anything to write about. At the age of 18 you think you do, but you don’t … The way to do it is to learn a language and translate it – that way you can practice and find out what you can do with your language – your language. You can learn a foreign language, but translation is a way of learning your own language.’
From the grand to the plain style
The Elizabethan era proved to be the final flourishing of the rhetorical tradition that had been passed on from the classical and medieval eras. By the 18th century the classical model of rhetoric was no longer appropriate. The increasingly mature legal system required appeal to detailed statutes and presidents, witnesses and evidence, rather than rhetorical oratory. Richard Toye, in Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction, quotes David Hume’s remark that it would be ridiculous to ‘introduce the relations of the dead; and, at a signal, make them throw themselves at the feet of the judges, imploring justice with tears and lamentations’.
Rhetoric continued to play a crucial role in the realm of politics. The French and American revolutions were driven and shaped by charged language. But as politics gradually assumed a more technocratic character through the 19th century the grand style was replaced by plainer modes of speech. Political communication moved towards the model we know today, emphasising policy rather than character, exhorting voters to support programmes rather than personalities.
Today, the teaching of English focuses on literature rather than the mechanics of language. There’s no doubt that direct engagement with novels, poetry and plays is much more engaging than the relentless drilling endured by Shakespeare and his peers. But something has been lost: that exacting attention to how language works, and how the best writers have used it.
I hope we don’t lose sight of it. And I certainly hope we don’t start letting AI write for us. The Elizabethans knew that good writing, and good thinking doesn’t come from nowhere. It is a skill that has to be learned. One that comes from grappling with language ourselves, not entrusting it to a tool.