'Bookish people': Roles for scholars in early modern England (Richard Mulcaster, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, Roger Ascham, William Shakespeare, John Webster)

This dissertation considers how scholarly characters in pedagogical treatises, plays, and prose fiction from the period 1570--1630 help to reconceive attitudes towards learning in general and rhetorical learning in particular. In the introduction I note how the education system is perceived during the period as over-productive, turning out more rhetorically skilful scholars than there are offices for them to fill. This coincides, I argue, with an increasing willingness to consider the troubling aspects of rhetoric.; In the first chapter I read the pedagogical texts of Elyot, Ascham, and Mulcaster. I differ from previous critics by arguing that Mulcaster's views about the nature of children and the effect upon them of learning break with the humanist tradition. Seeing "too great a spring of bookish people," he concludes "that there must be a restraint, and that all may not passe on to learning which throng thitherward." In this conjuncture, he rejects the Augustinian psychology of humanism and adopts a neo-Stoic framework. Where the humanists see the emotions as amoral and rhetoric as the force that directs them towards virtuous ends, Mulcaster sees the emotions as tending towards vice and rhetoric as powerless to redirect them---as in fact further enflaming diem. In the governing place of rhetoric, he installs a coercive force sanctioned by a concept of reason he repeatedly defines in opposition to the emotions.; In the following chapters I show how scholarly characters in plays and prose fiction mediate these humanist and anti-humanist positions, and so reconceive the social place of learning, rhetoric, and intellectual labour. My main texts are Gascoigne's Glass of Government in chapter two, Lyly's prose fiction and plays in chapter three, Jonson's Catiline in chapter four, and Shakespeare's King Lear and Webster's Appius and Virginia in chapter five. I situate these texts amidst, respectively, debates about the social role of poetry, changing attitudes towards retirement, ambivalence about Ciceronian values (in politics as well as prose), and concern about the role of secretaries in disseminating a burgeoning quantity of socially disruptive language.