ABSTRACT
The urban literate and the rural unliterate lived in the same society, but in what sense did they share the same culture? There were crucial abilities which differentiated people by status in early modern England. Grammar-school boys with a working knowledge of Latin possessed one of the most valued skills which could enhance their life-chances, enabling them to progress in education and employment. Part of their cultural credentials included the ability to quote impressively or recognize classical allusions in supremely learned vernacular works such as Jonson's Sejanus or Milton's Paradise Lost. Bizarre as it now seems, possession of a classical language was in effect a defining skill in this pre-industrial society, without which a male would find it more difficult to rise in status and esteem. Peter Cook's pub-bore E.L. Wisty, lamenting to Dud that he was condemned to be a coal miner because he did not have ‘the Latin for the Judgin’ ‘contains a painful truth about English society, then and now. Ralph Verney in 1647 was worrying about his 8-year-old daughter Peg's education: ‘she grows a great girl and will be spoiled for want of breeding…being a girl, she shall not learn Latin, so she will have the more time to learn breeding hereafter; and needlework too’. Readers and writers without Latin in some ways occupied a different cultural ambit. As authors they tended not to compose in the highstatus literary forms modelled on classical conventions—elegy, ode, epithalamium, epic—and some knowledge of French or Italian was probably also necessary to compose conventionally sophisticated sonnets. Milton wished that he had published his divorce tracts in Latin rather than English because this would have restricted their readership to more ‘sober’ judgements—perhaps what he meant was that they would then have been beyond the reading powers of most women. All of the dramatists in the period were grammarschool products, and their plays were informed, however indirectly, by classical conventions of tragedy and comedy. 1
