Imitating women: Rhetoric, gender, and humanist pedagogy in English Renaissance drama

"Imitating Women: Rhetoric, Gender, and Humanist Pedagogy in English Renaissance Drama" takes as its starting point the apparently paradoxical humanist educational project of having schoolboys memorize and imitate classical speeches by female characters. Humanist educators distinguished themselves from their medieval predecessors by emphasizing the ways in which studying classical texts could prepare boys to become exemplary citizens rather than esoteric philologists. But how could speaking in the voice of a woman help one become a man? I argue that such exercises are grounded in humanism's own (ambivalent) acceptance of the rhetorical power of women in classical texts, women like Hecuba, Medea, and Helen of Troy, who were offered to schoolboys as models of appropriate rhetoric. This model of women's speech provides a contrast to the conception of women's speech as simplistically transgressive or threatening that has been posited by many critics of the Renaissance. Additionally, I argue that the inclusion of women's voices in the early modern schoolroom allows the Renaissance dramatists who were trained in this system to conceive of speaking women as part of a formal rhetorical tradition. The liminal position of these female characters, included in a pedagogical realm from which their real-world counterparts were excluded, allows them to function as a site from which Shakespeare and others can interrogate the values of humanist pedagogy.