Judith Owens, Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Faerie Queene’, and ‘Arcadia’. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xi + 218 pp. ISBN: 9783030431488. £59.99 hardback.
Judith Owens’ Emotional Settings in Early Modern Pedagogical Culture: ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Faerie Queene’, and ‘Arcadia’ is an innovative study of these seminal works of early modern literature. Drawing together studies of emotion, early modern humanist education, and the history of the family, Owens offers new insights into the instructional settings of home and school by exploring the role of emotion in these contexts of learning. She then explores the ways in which the tensions between the competing demands of school and family inform representations of selfhood and heroic agency in early modern literature. In seven chapters, including chapters on texts by early modern pedagogues, letters between children and parents, Sidney’s Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, she reads literary and non-literary texts with attention to the role of emotion in order to reveal how preconceived images of an institution, social practice, pedagogical regimen, relationships, and canonical works of literature can ‘change when we focus our attention on emotional dynamics’ (3). This approach results in a reimagining of the humanist schoolroom and of familial relations and in fresh readings of Sidney’s Musidorus, Spenser’s Arthur, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Emotional dynamics are at the heart of the questions that Owens asks of early modern contexts of instruction and of the period’s texts. She investigates the role of emotion in shaping learning, demonstrates how this differs in the sites of school and home, and evaluates the ways in which ‘affective tremors’ (3) are registered in and inform selfhood in literary texts. Chapter 1, an introductory chapter, establishes the important critical contexts for this approach. Here Owens identifies the three main scholarly fields upon which she draws – studies of emotion, studies of pedagogical culture, and the history of the family – and carefully situates her work within them. Acknowledging the diversity of work on early modern emotions from early research by Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt to more recent studies that historicise emotions, she insists that this study is not another contribution to the history of emotions per se. Instead, through her close reading of texts through the lens of emotions, she aims to offer new understandings of the period’s texts and contexts. The potential benefits of this approach are apparent even in this first chapter, where Owens’ lively synopsis of scholarship on humanism and on the family makes it immediately clear that this study’s attention to the emotional dimensions of learning discloses new dimensions of the early modern schoolroom and of patriarchal authority in the home.
In Chapter 2, ‘Discipline and Resistance in the Schoolroom: Emotional Possibilities’, and Chapter 3, ‘Paternal Authority in the Home: Emotional Negotiations’, the benefits of this approach are fully realised. Through an analysis of the approaches of three early modern pedagogues – Edmund Coote, Roger Ascham and Richard Mulcaster – Owens provides a new perspective on the humanist classroom. Looking beyond the coercion and violent discipline commonly advocated as a pedagogical method and the focus of much scholarship on early modern schooling, Owens identifies an emphasis on emotional intimacy, gentleness, and encouragement in these pedagogical tracts. She argues for the wide range of emotional responses accommodated by the classroom and for the intimacies created within its communities of peers and inter-generational relations. A section on laughing and tickling as practices recommended by Mulcaster effectively conveys a schoolroom that is boisterous and forges not just dutiful learners but potentially disruptive boys. Readers of this journal may be interested in the extent to which Spenser informs this conceptualisation of the schoolroom. Chapter 2, for example, opens with a brief analysis of The Shepheardes Calendar as highlighting two features of humanist schooling via its representation of Colin: namely, supportive affection between pupil and schoolmaster and the encouraging fellowship of schoolboys. While the chapter explores three individual approaches to instruction, it is Mulcaster – Spenser’s schoolmaster – who is held up as facilitating an instructional setting that underpins Spenser’s account of school as ‘mirthful’ (47).
Chapter 3 moves to explore the home as an alternative site of instruction, similarly informed by emotional dynamics but shaped by vastly different demands of family life. It reads family letters through case studies of seventeen-year-old Philip Gawdy writing to his parents and of Henry Sidney writing to his son Philip. Owens argues that letters have the potential to bring us close to the lived experience and feelings of family members. It is here that her strategy of close rhetorical analysis reveals what might be gained by applying this traditional approach to texts not normally considered in this way (that is, to letters by children and youths) and by prioritising emotional dynamics. Her careful reading of what might appear to be conventional articulations of duty as evidence of what is not said offers a persuasive case for the extent to which the structures of family could accommodate resistance and defiance as well as obedience.
Emotional Settings then shifts focus to look at the three key literary texts that act as case studies for applying this new understanding of instructional methods and settings and of the tension between school and home in moral learning. Chapter 4, ‘Sidney and Heroic Paideia’, focuses on Sidney’s New Arcadia and on key passages in The Defence of Poesy to argue that Sidney challenges the idea that heroism comes from traditional formal sites of learning. It focuses on Musidorus’ stay at the home of Kalender to examine alternative mechanisms and settings of instruction. In Arcadia, Owens argues, alternative settings become the sites from which heroism emerges. These places of ‘emotion and delight’ (107) include maternal love, gardens, private retreats, and fellowships. Through this reading, this chapter advances the study’s attention to emotional learning communities and further insists on the significance of the settings of learning, illuminating the different emotional tenors and demands of multiple sites of instruction.
Spenser is briefly alluded to in Chapter 4 as a point of comparison to Sidney, but it is Chapter 5 that is likely to be of most interest to readers of this journal. This chapter – ‘Learning and Loss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’ – begins by delineating the ways in which the wealth of work on Spenser’s pedagogical projects, by scholars such as Jane Grogan, Andrew Wallace, and Jeff Dolven, ‘has opened rich new veins of sustained analysis’ (119). It proceeds by providing another fresh analysis by focusing on the representation of Arthur’s tutelage and upbringing in The Faerie Queene. Owens continues to focus on what learning feels like by asking this question of Spenser’s poem. Exploring the links between feeling, learning, and heroic careers, she ‘re-examine[s] Spenser’s conception of heroic agency in The Faerie Queene in the light of his pedagogical concerns’ (120) and assesses the ‘affective possibilities’ (121) that surround Arthur. Beginning with an exploration of the tensions between familial and pedagogical imperatives and bonds in Arthur’s backstory in the ‘Letter to Raleigh’, Owens explores how these key issues are carried over to the representation of Arthur’s upbringing in Book I. Through detailed reading of his recollection of his tutelage, Owens develops her argument for the existence of intimate and supportive relationships between tutors and pupils in the period and contends that in Una’s response there is evidence of a revision of the balance of instruction versus lineage in the production of heroic agency. She then examines the ways in which Spenser attends to the role of emotion in scenes of learning, reading Arthur’s instructing of Una and then of Redcrosse as demonstrating empathy and flexibility before progressing to an analysis of Arthur at Alma’s Castle in Book II. Reading the castle’s upper chambers as an instructional setting, Owens charts the affective responses of Arthur and Sir Guyon to these sites of learning, noting affinities between the second, organised chamber and the positive experiences of learning discussed in Chapter 2. She contends throughout that Arthur’s narrative explicates the demands of formal instruction and family, and suggests that the reading of Briton moniments, which leaves him ‘ravisht with delight’ (147), is to a certain extent the healing of a breach between familial and humanist education. But it is also, she ultimately suggests, a loss, as family gives way to a place in the commonwealth, the ultimate goal of humanist education.
If Emotional Settings starts by raising the possibility of a challenge and disruption to established orders through the emotional dynamics of instruction, the literary interrogations of this motif seem to expose its limitations. The reading of Spenser reveals a negotiation of the tension between instruction and family but suggests that the ends of humanist learning are ultimately realised. Owens’ reading of Hamlet goes further in exposing the potential tragic consequences of the tensions between school and family. Chapters 6 and 7 are both dedicated to Shakespeare’s text. These chapters focus on Hamlet’s soliloquies, exemplifying the detailed close reading strategy employed throughout this study, to argue that Hamlet is trapped between schooling and family and that the difficulties of carrying the practices of school into the familial setting, ultimately lead to his delay in taking action. Chapter 6, ‘Familial Feeling and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet’, charts the ‘incommensurability between schooling and family feeling’ (152) by reading the ‘O that this too too sallied flesh would melt’ soliloquy as evidence that the humanist practices to which Hamlet returns are inadequate for the emotional family turmoil in which he finds himself. Chapter 7, ‘Familial Imperatives and Humanist Habits of Intellection in Hamlet’, analyses both Hamlet’s exchanges with the ghost, and his soliloquy in which he vows to remember his father, as means of more fully revealing Hamlet’s crisis, which, Owens suggests, is the collision of the imperatives of home and school. Bringing together two obvious components of the play – sons and scholars – Owens’ readings continue to demonstrate the extent to which understanding can be enabled by her approach. Why Hamlet delays is a question that has been worked through thoroughly, yet by attending to the ‘structures of thought and feeling that scaffold Hamlet’s actions (and inaction)’ (151), Owens posits a fresh and interesting understanding of Hamlet’s inaction as caused by the ‘contradictions between humanist pedagogy and the imperatives of families’ (152).
By concluding with Hamlet’s fate, Emotional Settings ultimately demonstrates the cost of the conflicting emotional and moral imperatives of home and school in the early modern period. Nonetheless, by illuminating these tensions and bringing them to bear on the literature of the period, Owens makes a lively contribution to scholarship on Sidney, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. It is, however, arguably even more noteworthy for its broader contributions to the fields of the history of education, instruction, and familial relations. Owens’ claims about alternative cultures of laughter, encouragement, and flexibility, and the opportunities to challenge authority, are persuasive and shed new light on the possibilities of early modern schooling to produce disruptive and unruly boys as well as civic subjects. She thus extends recent work in generative ways, even if suggesting that the possibilities she identifies are not fully realised in the literature of the period. Moreover, Owens’ modes of reading her material open up new avenues for further work. She acknowledges, for instance, that her study focuses primarily on boys and men (apart from some brief consideration of mothers), and it would be productive to apply her methods to a wider range of texts pertaining to instruction at home and school to explore the place of girls and women in these contexts. Or indeed, it would be fascinating to see what new readings of scenes of instruction in literary texts beyond the three main case studies could be facilitated by extending Owens’ approach. Ultimately, Owens’ Emotional Settings focuses on two interrelated concerns: the shaping of boys into civic subjects and the fashioning of heroic selfhood in literature. These are issues which – like the three main texts upon which this study focuses – have been thoroughly explored in scholarship. Yet, through this new attention to emotion, Owens offers fresh perspectives on these issues, suggesting the potential to read a range of early modern texts in new ways via this approach.
Edel Lamb
Queen’s University Belfast
51.1.9
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Through this reading, this chapter advances the study’s attention to emotional learning communities and further insists on the significance of the settings of learning, illuminating the different emotional tenors and demands of multiple sites of instruction.
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