Robin Lithgow spent many years in charge of arts education for the Los Angeles public schools. Having retired, she is now writing a book and blogging about the arts, especially theater and drama and their relation to cognition.
I think you will enjoy this delightful meditation about rhetoric, what it meant in Shakespeare’s day, and what it means today.
She begins:
This is fun!
In The Taming of the Shrew, before the shrew, Kate, matches wits with Petruchio in their hilarious first encounter, the illiterate servant Grumio warns her that Petruchio will “disfigure” her with his “rope-tricks.” He’s referring to Petruchio’s scathing facility with rhetoric (which Grumio hears as rope-tricks) and his ability to use rhetorical “figures” to counter and obliterate any argument she might throw at him.
When Shakespeare was a student, only a few generations after the printing press had been invented, rhetoric had been at the core of a child’s education for over two thousand years. Before literacy was prevalent, the ability to persuade though speech gave enormous power to the “rhetor,” the public speaker. The ability to make language punch and pop, to make the listener sit up and pay attention (or else!), was considered the most important skill of a person educated in the liberal arts. All through ancient times, the middle ages, and well into the Enlightenment, the “Trivium” (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) were the foundational subjects taught first to a child in elementary, or “trivial” school.
Shakespeare had to be able to recognize and practice in his speaking and in his writing at least 132 rhetorical figures, tropes, and devices. He had to be able to practice expressive, physical rhetoric (or rhetorical dance) every time he stood on his two feet and spoke to his teachers or his classmates. “Per Quam Figuram?” was the question asked repeatedly, all day, every day: “What figure are you using?”
refreshing
Thank you, Robin, for making the delightful connection between the classroom rhetorical instruction in Shakespeare’s day and the glorious fecundity of invention in his plays!
“[Y]ou don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be? ‘Must try harder.’ Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, ‘Go to bed, now,’ to William Shakespeare, ‘and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing everybody.’” –Ken Robinson
The play’s the act, wherein we’ll catch the cat in gunny sack! — Shakespeare as a child
To pee or not to pee, that is the question!
What softball through yonder window breaks? It is my neighbor’s window and I am screwed
SDP, a Shakespearean spirit
Double trouble, I’m in trouble
There is no thing either good or bad, buy lying makes it good!
Something is rotten in the garage
Get me to a funnery
I needed a good chuckle. Thank you. This above all: to thine own blog poet be true.
Mommy, yo! mommy yo!, wherefore art thou mommy, yo!
DeVos by another name smells as feet.
Good whiff, good whiff. Farting is such sweet smell, oh, that i shall spray good whiff, til it be morrow
Shall I compare Rhee to a summer’s day?
No.
Shall I compare Rhee to the Wicked Witch?
Yes
Get Rhee to a nuttery
Those last three would be categorized under “Rheetoric”
Or maybe it’s spelled Rheetorick
Shakespeare had a classical education. Our kids have Lucy Calkins and Common Core test prep.
Anyone considered educated at that time studied Latin and sometimes Greek. Without all the modern distractions, they read and wrote incessantly. They read and wrote poetry. I can even recall in elementary school I had to memorize poetry and recite it in front of the class.
Even as late as the Civil War, soldiers wrote beautiful, literate letters to loved ones that alluded to Greek and Roman wars and mythology. They wrote poems to loved ones as well.
Today our young people tweet along with semi-literate #45. The art of language is suffering in the dot-com era.
Americans spend, on average, 16.8 minutes a day reading and 2.77 hours a day watching television, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. American teens spend and average of NINE hours a day online, mostly on their phones.
We scapegoat “modern distractions” but the real evil is our inane curriculum. Kids are learning nothing; they’re just doing stuff that we HOPE results in mental value added, but it’s not adding any real value to brains. Teachers have been miseducated. All the skills they’re trying to teach really emerge from a well-stocked long term memory, as recent science shows. Long term memory, which Shakespeare’s teachers loaded with useful information, makes us skillful by instantaneously supplying the working memory with memorized pre-fab solutions and relevant date on an as-needed basis. By freeing up limited working memory space, a well-stocked long term memory makes critical thinking and problem solving possible. The sharp minds we hope to cultivate by giving kids mental workouts can really only be cultivated by augmenting long-term memory with useful information. There is no “thinking muscle” in the brain that is strengthened by Common Core type literacy exercises; the “thinking muscle” is long-term memory. Unless we endow that, we’re not really giving the kids anything. If modern pedagogues were right, Shakespeare would have turned out a moron –devoid of literacy and thinking skills. If Shakespeare’s teachers were right, modern pedagogues are morons.
Cx: “date” should be “data”.
“Just try to imagine, dear reader, the mental flexibility required of a child of ten or eleven, every day having to invent phrases based on the models above. No wonder they were so smart!”
These words sent fear into my heart. What if some reforming academic gets wind of this and decides to evaluate me on the basis of whether my children can do this sort of stuff? O, woe is me, woe, woe woe ! I am undone! O how the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune do gyre and gimbel in the weg.
Of course, they were not so smart. The distribution of intelligence was probably about the same as it is today. We just have this tendency for self-flagellating. No wait! that was back then. Were they so smart?