Main description:

This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century.

This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare's Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called "actio"-acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today.

This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

Contents:

Timeline

Cast of Characters

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. Time Travel: Setting the scene

Chapter 2. Engagement before Information: Instruction in both colloquial and rhetorical language in Elizabethan schools

Chapter 3. Angels and Eaglets: Schoolboy actors set the scene

Chapter 4. Good Behavior and Audacity: The training up of Elizabethan schoolboys

Chapter 5. The Lego Snap of Learning: Research in arts education and neuroscience

Chapter 6. Context: The Hatch and Brood of Time: A brief history of the English Reformation

Chapter 7. Erasmus' Egg: His life and his works in support of performing arts in education

Chapter 8. The Delightful Mulcaster: Playmaking schoolmasters in Tudor England

Chapter 9. Per Quam Figuram? Rhetoric in Shakespeare's classroom

Chapter 10. Erasmus Writes Colloquies: Classroom training in Latin conversation

Chapter 11. The Little Eyases: Professional boy actors in the 16th century

Chapter 12. Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix I: Performing the Colloquies

Examples of Erasmus' Colloquies in Latin and English

Proci and puellae (Courtship)

Naufragium (The Shipwreck)

Uxor (Marriage)

Abattis et eruditae (The Abbot and the Learned Woman)

Herilia (A Master's Commands)

Appendix II: Selection of Educational Drama Resources for Teachers

Index