ABSTRACT
Representing an expository and, apparently, promotional rendering of humanist discourse, Gascoigne's play reflects the cultural centrality of the role assigned to education and teachers for maintaining the status quo. Yet, projected through a tragicomic lens and against the background of a corrective educational agenda, the idealized model of a moral tutor, Gnomaticus, and positive reinforcement of humanist doctrine refract the waning confidence in humanist values. Specifically, the chapter considers the schoolmaster's modes of authority in relation to the dominance of learning as economic over social capital and pedagogical authority as determined by market value. It considers the play's engagement with the reputational status and power afforded to a particular, logocentric, brand of knowledge and its profiteering purveyor in a market impelled by a contest for social preferment and legitimation that largely serves the aspirations of the affluent middle ranks. It also discusses Gascoigne's dramatizing pedagogical techniques that equate learning with a virtuoso recital based solely on memory and imitation while alluding to growing disaffection among those elements of the educated population striving for autonomy from traditional authority. Enacting the tedium of humanist practice, Gascoigne's glass proffers a challenge to literary methods that foster a disrespect for scholarship and the intellectual stasis evinced by the conflict of ‘so many men so many minds’.
