ABSTRACT
In staging Latin, Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton are interested in the comic interface between texts and their performance, for more than the other languages, Latin in Protestant England was encountered in texts. This chapter focuses on the comic scenes, though Latin is prominent in Faustus' scenes as well. Play brings multiple ways of speaking into contact. It describes the implications of comic textual reception rather than on the psychologically and sexually violent possibilities of the Latin exercise, both David Landreth and Pittenger emphasize the darker possibilities that shadow the scene's representation of school room practice. The sound of Latin, how it is pronounced and how it is heard, defines and reinforces social boundaries, between citizens and gentlemen, between educated boys and their uneducated mothers, between Englishmen and aliens, even as it complicates and temporarily elides social boundaries dividing playgoers.
