Shakespeare's Schoolroom by Enterline Lynn;

Author:Enterline, Lynn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dost Thou Love Pictures?

The intimate connection between “love” and “mastery” that pervades Lucentio’s translation lesson, as well as Lily’s inaugural example of the accusative case, surfaces in a slightly different way in the Induction; once again, Ovid’s precedent paves the way. When the Lord tries to translate Christopher Sly from “a beggar and a tinker” into “a Lord and nothing but a lord” (Induction 1.2.61) he puts another Ovidian representation of desire into service. The Lord’s “jest” on Sly reminds us of humanist social aspirations—that schoolmasters intervened in social reproduction in order to train young boys up the ladder of social rank (with an eye, of course, to improving their own standing). The Lord’s final and most effective technique for inducing Christopher Sly to believe he has risen above his former social position (beggar, cardplayer, pedlar, and tinker) is to describe a series of erotic pictures drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That is, if Sly is to move up to the status of “mighty Lord,” he must learn a lesson in classical desire.

In addition to flaunting the attractions of the cross-dressed Page, and therefore reminding us of sixteenth-century theatrical as well as school practice, the Lord’s trick betrays something of its institutional genealogy because changing Sly’s social status is negotiated not simply in relation to the classical past, but in relation to imitations of it that are elaborately framed as such. The several servants perform their parts under the watchful eye of their master, vying to fulfill the “instructions” he has set them by trying to “persuade” Sly into a new sense of himself (1.124). Before hearing the “wanton pictures” described so well, Sly speaks in prose and truculently clings to name, geography, education, and profession as fixed marks of identity:

“What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bearheard, and now by present profession a tinker?” (Induction.2.16–22)

The deciding fiction that prompts his transformation upward follows from the query, “Dost thou love pictures?” Two servingmen and the Lord cooperate in performing an ekphrastic depiction of three scenes from the Metamorphoses which offer Sly the chance to see the “loves of the gods.” After the ekphrasis, he begins to speak in verse with new questions about who “I” am:

Am I a lord and have I such a lady?

Or do I dream? Or have I dream’d till now?

I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;

I smell sweet savors and I feel soft things.

Upon my life, I am a lord indeed,

And not a tinker, nor Christopher Sly.

Well, bring our lady hither to our sight,

And once again a pot o’ th’ smallest ale.

(1.2.68–75)

At first glance, his transformation mocks the humanist effort to “train” young men “up” the social ladder by way of a classical education: Ovid substitutes for a former lesson in “card-making,” and Sly still hankers after “small ale.” Indeed, the Latin epic so prominent in school curricula comes on stage as “wanton pictures”—more in the guise of early modern pornography than worthy exemplar.

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