The refusal to imitate

Mr. Andrew Hadfield is anxious to let the membership know about the relationship between an educational system and the forms of writing that it produces. "It is often argued that the reason why Philip Larkin has been such a popular poet is that his work resulted from a schooling in practical criticism that privileged the close reading on which his poetry depended," asserts Mr. Hadfield. He goes on to remind us that "Shakespeare mastered the rhetorical trope of prosopopœia, the ability to create an articulate persona. One of his most successful and enduring creations is Venus in Venus and Adonis, notably in her verbal sparring with Adonis, a striking example of the classroom staple of arguing in utramque partem, weighing up two competing claims and then working out which one was the better. In doing so - according to a Miss Enterline, the authoress of 'Shakespeare's Schoolroom' - Shakespeare was using his education to challenge the gender norms that it assumed. The purpose of rhetorical training may well have been to turn pupils into men, but many found the pleasures of imitating women difficult to resist and used their learning to subversive effect. Shakespeare's Venus assumes the role of the teacher, producing an impressive ecphrasis of a painted horse that her pupil, the sullen Adonis, refuses to imitate, preferring to go his own way. In casting the teacher as a woman and the pupil as a wayward schoolboy, Shakespeare has overturned the normal hierarchies of the Tudor classroom, while showing how much he learned in one himself."

So what, we wonder, can kleines c's mode of writing tell us about kleines c's educational circumstances? And Miss Enterline's about Miss Enterline's?