| This study examines representations of scholars in drama written by university trained playwrights at the turn of the seventeenth century. These playwrights used drama to scrutinize their own role in English society, to critique the uses of their education, and to sound the socio-cultural discontinuities in their connections with the theatrical world. This critique presages the early 17th century calls for reform of figures such as Bacon and Montaigne; the long-term social effects of the Reformation, the influence of humanism and the advent of capitalism had considerably altered both the education and social relations of scholars within the universities, as well as their opportunities upon leaving. Literary "characters" of scholars in this period commonly portrayed them as threadbare starvelings, beggars, fools, hypocrites-pretenders to learning with unmerited social pretensions. Instead of defending their compatriots against such stereotypes, university-trained playwrights' portrayal of scholar-figures shows a deep ambivalence about the value of university training, a critical diagnosis of a humanistic education primarily concerned with rhetoric, poetry and oratory, as well as the cultural precepts underlying it.; The best illustration of this critique is the Cambridge University trilogy, The Parnassus Plays (1598--1602). Closer to London dramatic satire than the humanist model of the classically-based pedagogical drama, these plays not only reinforce many scholar-stereotypes, but they also put scholars in a context that distinctly connects their practical difficulties with their academic training.; However, the critique of humanist education in drama of the period is complicated in the children's company satires of Chapman, Marston, Middleton and Fletcher, for they portray scholars depending not on their abilities to engage in disputation, oratory or philosophical inquiry---the skills which humanists had harnessed drama to instill---but instead on their histrionic skills as cony-catchers and toadies.; Their education has been of great use to these scholar characters, but hardly in the way the advocates of drama as a pedagogical tool had imagined. The humanist goals in using drama are subverted: these scholars (both the characters and the actual playwrights themselves) have taken a primary means of humanist education-dramatic activity-and transformed it into an end. |
