ABSTRACT
The chapter provides four thematic sections: humanism and its discontents, manifestations of manhood, decoding domesticity, and pedagogy performed. Employing methodologies from gender, literary, and cultural studies, and social history, they address the performances and performativity of pedagogy in early modern England. It provide scholars of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, lyric poetry, life writing, social history, gender, and performance studies both breadth and depth in terms of topics, sources, and theoretical approaches. The contributors examine instructional moments in a range of sources, from poetry and plays to diaries and catechisms, enabling a broad survey of gendered negotiations of teaching in early modern England. The study of masculinity has been revitalized in recent years by gender studies and queer theory. The chapter reveals how both the construction and display of masculinity, particularly as it was performed on stage, remains intertwined with complexities of gender in the early modern period.
