It has been suggested to me by Mr. Lupton that Shakespeare may have had Mulcaster in his mind when he put Holofernes the schoolmaster in Love’s Labour’s Lost. There was, as we know, rivalry between Shakespeare and the boy actors, and when Armado says (Act V, sc. 2), “I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical; too too vain, too too vain,” he uses a common expression of Mulcaster’s.
That Shakespeare had a contempt for the schoolmasters or “pedants” of his time is tolerably clear, and he must have seen in Mulcaster a typical schoolmaster and also a rival of his in producing court entertainments. Holofernes is both a “pedant” and a court entertainer, but in other respects he does not answer to Mulcaster, for he is a parish schoolmaster and teaches both boys and girls. However, as Mulcaster was a favourite at court, Shakespeare, if really thinking of him, may have had reasons for not making the resemblance too striking.
In Hamlet (Act II, sc. 2) there is a very remarkable dialogue which shows the rivalry that then (i.e., about 1603) existed between “the tragedians of the City” and “the boys.” There is, too, a very beautiful epitaph by Ben Jonson on a boy who had become famous for playing the part of an old man. Mulcaster no doubt had had a great share in keeping the playing of boy actors in fashion; but he probably had nothing to do with “the children of Powles” whose acting was stopped by edict from about 1589 to 1600, and then started again with increased popularity (see J. P. Collier, “Annals of the Stage,” edition of 1879, vol. i, pp. 271 ff), or with “the children of the Revels” who acted at Blackfriars Theatre, and are probably the “aiery of children” talked of by Rosenkrantz.
To return to Elizabeth, it seems that Mulcaster took part in preparing the pageant at Kenilworth in 1575. I have not read the accounts by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham or Langham to which Collier refers (“Annals of Stage,” i, 225), but the late Mr. Mulcaster gives some Latin verses preserved by Gascoigne which were, as he says, “devised by Master R. Muncaster.” The “Middlesex Minstrel” also recited King “Ryence’s challenge to King Arthur.” Of this Bishop Percy says: “It was sung before Queen Elizabeth at the grand entertainment at Kenelworth Castle in 1575, and was probably composed for that occasion” (Percy’s “Relics,” Wheatley’s edition, 1877, vol. iii, p. 24). If so, it may have been Mulcaster’s as well as the Latin verses, though for my part I doubt his writing so simply.
On Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Mulcaster published “Nænia consolans in mortem Serenissimæ Reginæ Elizabethæ,” in which he seems quite consoled by the accession of James.
Mulcaster was a correspondent of Sir Philip Sydney’s, and he wrote to him in Latin. This was against his own principles, for perhaps his best chance of being remembered rests in his vigorous protest against the use of Latin, and his advice to his learned countrymen to write in their own language (cfr. Masson’s Life of Milton).
Perhaps Mulcaster’s enthusiasm for English may have influenced one of his pupils who lived to write imperishable verse in it. The late Mr. Mulcaster, in his MS. notice of his ancestor, surmised that Spenser may have been a “Merchant Taylor” and therefore have come under Mulcaster. The guess was a happy one. Dean Church, in his volume on Spenser (“English Men of Letters”), tells us how the account books of the executors of a bountiful citizen, Robert Nowell, have been preserved, and that at his funeral in 1568 two yards of cloth were given to selected scholars of the great London Schools. The names of these scholars are recorded, and at the head of the Merchant Taylors’ list stands Edmund Spenser.
It is very remarkable that a schoolmaster noted for his classical attainments should before the last decade of the fifteen hundreds have urged the literary use of the mother tongue. It is remarkable, too, that this man was the master of Edmund Spenser. In these and some other respects Mulcaster seems to have been more memorable than Ascham. Yet Ascham is known by all, and Mulcaster is unknown, not only by ordinary Englishmen, but even, as it would seem, by scholars like Mr. George Saintsbury, the author of a book on Elizabethan Literature. In Professor Arber’s invaluable work for the bibliography of our old books, his “Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640,” we find in vol. ii, p. 178b, the following curious entry:——“Thomas Chare sub manu Episcopi Londinii. Sexto die Marcii [1581] Receaved of him for his license to printe positions whereupon the trayning up of children and so consequentlie the wholle course of learninge ys grounded ... xvjd. Provyded alwaies that yf this booke conteine any thinge prejudiciall or hurtfull to the booke of maister Askham that was printed by master Daie called the Scholemayster, That then this lycense shal be voyd.” But Ascham’s widow needed no protection from the Bishop of London. His posthumous book did for the English language what Mulcaster tried to do in vain: it showed how English might be used for clear and even graceful expression. Mulcaster thought that the English language had then reached its highest point. In his very curious and interesting allegory of the progress of language (“Elementarie,” pp. 66 ff.) he says that Art selects the best age of a language to draw rules from, such as the age of Demosthenes in Greece, and of Tully in Rome. “Such a period in the English tongue,” he continues, “I take to be in our days for both the pen and the speech.” And this language, then at its best, was, he thought, shown at its best in his own writings. After enumerating its excellencies he says, “I need no example in any of these, whereof mine own penning is a general pattern.” This tempts one to exclaim with Armado, “I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical; too too vain, too too vain” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, sc. 2), and posterity has most emphatically rejected the offered pattern. Dean Church describes the writers of that time as “usually clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which alone can give permanence to writing,” (“Spenser,” p. 3). Some of these epithets certainly hit Mulcaster hard. I have spent much time on what he calls his “so careful, I will not say so curious writing” (“Elementarie,” p. 253), and I perfectly agree with him when he says, “Even some of reasonable study can hardly understand the couching of my sentence and the depth of my conceit” (ib., p. 235). This, no doubt, explains to us why Mulcaster has been long forgotten.
But if he had taken less pains with his “style,” Mulcaster would have been recognised as a master of his subject. A right conception of education could not be formed by the worshippers of “learning;” and the false ideal set up at the Renascence has had a disastrous effect on European education ever since. But Mulcaster, scholar though he was, was not in bondage to scholarship. With him education was not instruction in the classics. How few schoolmasters have asked the question, “Why is it not good to have every part of the body and every power of the soul to be fined to his best?” (“Positions,” p. 34.) The following passage from the “Elementarie” (p. 22) shows how much he had risen above the ideal of the learned:——“The end of education and train is to help nature unto her perfection, which is, when all her abilities be perfected in their habit.... Consideration and Judgment must wisely mark whereunto Nature is either evidently given or secretly affectionate, and must frame education consonant thereto.” And having shown this admirable conception of the end to be attained, he sets to work to consider what are the powers that need training. “We have,” he says, “a perceiving by outward sense, to feel, to see, to smell, to taste all sensible things; which qualities of the outward being received in by the common sense, and examined by fancy, are delivered to remembrance and afterward prove our great and only grounds unto further knowledge” (“Elementarie,” p. 28). Here we see him feeling after the foundation of a science of education. He goes still further when in the “Positions” (p. 27) he tells us of the natural inclinations in the soul, and of the three things which we shall find “peering out of the little young souls,” viz.: Wit to take, Memory to keep, and Discretion to discern.
Michelet (“Nos Fils,” p. 170) with justice gives credit to Montaigne for avoiding the great blunder of his time, and basing his scheme of education, not on what was to be learned, but on the nature of the learner, “non l’objet, le savoir, mais le sujet, c’est l’homme.” This was indeed a wonderful step in advance, a step which placed Montaigne before most schoolmasters of that time, perhaps of any succeeding time. But in Mulcaster we have a schoolmaster who in Montaigne’s own day seems to have shown similar wisdom. Perhaps admirable results might have followed had Mulcaster’s mode of expression only been somewhat less “curious.”