ABSTRACT
The appeal of a classic lies in its timelessness, and the appeal of a classical education in its promise of a timeless curriculum. In Shakespeare's plays and poems, school, learning, study, and their cognates are emphatically time-bound. Time, a basic category by which Shakespeare talked about school, offers a convenient point of reference for imagining and reevaluating humanist education. Furthermore, it offers an interesting lens on the classics, which supplied a good portion of the grammar school curriculum, and which were, in turn, shaped by that curriculum. A salient feature of the school statutes is their chronometric organization. School routines from as early as the 1450s were structured by the clock. The humanist regimentation of time was also polemical, intended as a rebuff to lax standards of education by monks at the cathedral schools. Time was not simply a measure of the extent to which a student's early unruly life had been subdued by study.
