ABSTRACT
Grammar schools in early Elizabethan England had few problems filling their classes with boys from the lower ranks and the middling sort, but they were less successful in attracting boys from wealthier and gentle families. Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School and an ardent supporter of public education, wrote at length on the problem of over-enrollments from lower class families and under-enrollments from the wealthier sort. He argued that poorer parents should consider the good of the commonwealth before their own ambitions and “thinke that it is not best to have their children bookish, notwithstanding their owne desire.”1 Wealthy parents, on the other hand, were admonished for shunning grammar schools in favour of private tuition. “Why is private teaching so much used?” asks Mulcaster, and his answer deems emulation of the gentry to be the cause: “riche men which being no gentlemen, but growing to wealth by what meanes soever, will counterfeit gentlemen in the education of their children.”2 A number of Tudor interludes deal precisely with the gentry’s resistance to public schooling, and none more astutely and thoughtfully than The Disobedient Child, a 1560s play that displays all the hallmarks of grammar school origins.
