A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A living dead man. This pernicious slave,
Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer;
And, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,
And with no face, as 't were, out-facing me.
Cries out, I was possess'd."
Pinch is not called a schoolmaster in the text of the play, but in the stage-direction of the earliest edition (1623) he is described, on his entrance, as "a schoole-master call'd Pinch."
In old times the village pedagogue often had the reputation of being a conjurer; that is, of one who could exorcise evil spirits—perhaps because he was the one man in the village, except the priest, who could speak Latin, the only language supposed to be "understanded of devils."
A certain master of St. Alban's School in the middle of the 16th century declared that "by no entreaty would he teach any scholar he had, further than his father had learned before them," arguing that, if educated beyond that point, they would "prove saucy rogues and control their fathers."