THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

stemmed order in the state, but he sought to determine that those placed in authority under that sovereign should truly
be ‘noble wits’, trained for public service and capable of broadly advancing the public good. In the twelfth and
thirteenth sections of his first book he catalogues examples of well-educated rulers of the past and bemoans the fact
that ‘noble men be nat as excellent in lernyng as they were in olde tyme amonge the Romanes and grekes’. Although
his stress is on the importance of a modern boy's grasp of the grammar of the classical tongues, and on his later
advances into the study of rhetoric, cosmography, history, and philosophy, Elyot shows an equal interest in the
acquisition of skills in drawing, sculpture, swimming, riding, hunting, music, and dancing. His book is a summary of
the broad humanist ideal of aristocratic cultivation tailored to a court and a nobility which looked back nostalgically to
fanciful Arthurian codes of chivalry and which attempted to enhance that vision with reference to the modern values
embodied in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (translated into English as The Courtyer in 1552-3 by Sir
Thomas Hoby (1530-66)).
In one vital sense, however, Elyot was aware that he was writing in and for an age which delighted in scholarly
novelty. He was one of the most deliberate and assiduous neologizers of the sixteenth century, a man as proud of his
learning as he was of his application of it to the enlargement of his native tongue. In addressing his prospective
audience in English and not Latin he acknowledged the need to borrow words ‘publicke and commune’ from Latin in
order to make up for what he saw as the ‘insufficiencie of our owne language’. In his Of the Knowledg whiche maketh
a wise man of 1533 he proudly describes the King himself remarking on the fact that The Boke named the Governour
contained ‘no terme new made by me of a latine or frenche worde, but it is there declared so playnly by one mene or
other to a diligent reader that no sentence is therby made derke or hard to understande’. What Elyot referred to as the
‘necessary augmentation’ of the English language was to include the introduction of such adapted borrowings as
‘maturity’, ‘discretion’ and ‘industry’, though others amongst his new words (such as ‘illecebrous’, ‘pristinate’, and
‘levigate’) failed to establish themselves as indispensable.
In the dedication of his dialogue on the pleasures of archery, Toxophilus (1545), to the ‘Gentlemen of England’,
Roger Ascham (1515-68) half apologized for, and half defended, his use of the English language. His gentlemanly
dedicatees, he acknowledges, may not share his command of Latin and Greek, but in using the vernacular as his
medium he professes to regret the relative inelegance of his native tongue (‘every thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe
for
[p. 96]
the matter and handelynge that no man can do worse’). Ascham is assertively nationalistic in his pride in the
longbows which had gained the victory at Agincourt, but he maintains an apologetic stance about what he sees as the
clumsiness of the native language of the bowman. In The Scholemaster (written c. 1563 and published posthumously
in 1570) he returns to the premiss that only Latin and Greek provide ‘the trew preceptes, and perfite examples of
eloquence’ though later in his text he will allow that ‘the rudenes of common and mother tonges, is no bar for wise
speaking’. Unlike Elyot, he was no great cultivator of Latinate neologisms. The Scholemaster attempts to set out, in
plain and unfussy English, the advantages and uses of a classical education. It recommends kindness not coercion as
the wisest course for a teacher and it recognizes the dangers and limitations of flashy intelligence in a boy (‘Quicke
wittes commonlie, be apte to take, unapte to keepe ... in most part of all their doinges, over quicke, hastie, rashe,
headie, and brainsicke’). His book began, he tells us, with a discussion over dinner at Windsor; it develops as a chatty
and discursive series of observations, examples, and anecdotes. He admires Italian culture and the Italian language,
but worries about the corruptions of Roman religion and Venetian morals, prejudices he bases on Protestant theology,
xenophobia, and a nine days’ visit to Venice (‘I sawe in that litle tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than ever I
hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in ix yeare’). If women are notable for their absence from Elyot’s The
Governour, they are conspicuous for their presence in The Scholemaster. The book’s Preface pointedly refers to
Ascham’s reading Demosthenes in Greek with Queen Elizabeth as an after-dinner relaxation, and its most famous
anecdote, an account of his encounter with Lady Jane Grey (discovered studiously reading Plato while her family was
out hunting), is introduced to demonstrate the true pleasures of learning. When Ascham later returns to the praise of
Queen Elizabeth’s command of ancient and modern languages he flatteringly compares her achievement to that of the
cream of her academic male subjects: ‘She hath obteyned that excellencie of learnyng, to understand, speake, and
write, both wittely with head, and faire with hand, as scarce one or two rare wittes in both the Universities have in
many yeares reached unto.’ For Ascham, a scholar steeped in liberal humanist concepts and in the experimental
theology of the Reformation, knowledge meant freedom. For all its eccentricities, The Scholemaster attempts to
establish the bases of a discourse on the nature of education in a society. Ascham was also well aware that he was
writing for a society which was inclined to accept that the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king had been realized in
the person of a Protestant philosopher-queen.