Parts of Speech: The Grammar of Redemption in De Worde’s Printed Interludes

Abstract

Abstract This essay proposes that Hyckescorner and The Worlde and the Chylde, playbooks printed by Wynkyn De Worde in 1515–1522, were made to resemble his Latin schoolbooks, or grammars, in order to function like textbooks of virtue and vice. Using De Worde’s output as a linchpin, the essay considers the plays’ personified abstractions (such as Contemplation, Manhood, and Free Will) in ‘grammatical’ terms and refers to standard school-texts of the day—from the so-called Auctores octo to the contemporary grammars of Robert Whittington—which might have helped lay readers to mine the plays for moral teaching. The teaching of elementary Latin provides a surprisingly apt metaphor throughout. I also suggest that The Worlde and the Chylde was published because it transposed the recent pedagogical controversy of the Grammarians’ War of 1519–1521 into the sphere of spiritual education, depicting the dangers of blind imitation and the fruits of preceptive instruction. The essay challenges the prevailing scholarly view that dramatic dialogue was the foremost feature which printers sought to emphasize when they first began publishing English plays. It also posits ‘pedagogical’ reading, shaped explicitly by schoolroom practice, as one tool which printers and book designers anticipated in publishing didactic works, and demonstrates how interpretatively fruitful De Worde’s sometimes confusing, and often maligned, blackletter quartos can be.