Of course, we know of female puberty rites. However, in Renaissance England, the few girls who learned Latin were homeschooled by tutors. For example, The English educator Roger Ascham (1515-1568) tutored Princess Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603) in Latin and Greek she had a better formal education than Shakespeare did. Whatever else may be said about being tutored, I cannot imagine that Ong or anybody else would liken being tutored to a puberty rite.
For Ong's discussion of Roger Ascham's 1564 book The Scholemaster, see pages 134-138 of Ong's essay.
Whatever else may be said about our contemporary American education, I cannot imagine that anybody would liken it to a puberty rite. But the lessons from a Renaissance education that Newstok celebrates were part of the Renaissance Latin language study that Ong likens to a male puberty rite.
However, puberty rites or no puberty rites aside, children in the Renaissance were regarded as small adults, as Philippe Aries shows in his book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of [European] Family Life, translated from the French by Robert Baldick (1962; orig. French ed., 1960).
Both male puberty rites and female puberty rites alike subjected pubescent children in age-cohort groups to stressful situations designed and overseen by adults. At times, however, certain participants committed suicide. Sadly, such tragic losses to suicide were commonly seen as collateral damage. The larger goal of puberty rites was for the participants to work together with one another under stress and thereby earn a position of respect and recognition as a reliable member of the adult society.
In any event, the classic study of Shakespeare's limited formal education is the American scholar T. W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 volumes (1944). Baldwin says that "we do not have the curriculum of the [grammar] school at Stratford" (volume 1, page 75), and so he sets out to examine in detail the grammar school curriculums in England that we do have. (For understandable reasons, Curtius does not happen to advert explicitly to Baldwin's monumental 1944 study which he surely would have had he known of it.)
In contrast with the English Renaissance poet and playwright and actor William Shakespeare (1564-1616) with his limited formal education in Latin and Greek, the Cambridge University educated English Renaissance poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1608-1674) was fluent not only in Latin and Greek but also in Hebrew.
The wording in Baldwin's title is taken from Ben Jonson's epitaph in the posthumously published works by Shakespeare known as the First Folio edition of 1623. Baldwin says, "To admit that Shakespeare had any Greek is to put him in the upper branches of grammar school. More significantly still, it is to grant him a very definite proficiency in Latin, for Greek grammars were written in none too easy Latin" (page 13).
Baldwin also says, "If, then, we accept Jonson's evidence [i.e., his testimony as evidence] at all, we must permit Shakespeare to have some Greek, and thence infer that he had acquired considerable proficiency in reading Latin" (page 13).
However, if we do not accept Jonson's testimony about Shakespeare's formal education, we can surely accept the common verdict of Jonson's day that Shakespeare was more deeply the product of Nature than of Art (and education). In short, he had natural talent, not the kind of talent acquired through education in the verbal arts.
However that may be, Ong explores certain aspects of Shakespeare's art in his 1955 article "Metaphor and the Twinned Vision: The Phoenix and the Turtle" that is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 239-245).
Ong also explores certain other aspects of Shakespeare's art in his 1976 essay that is reprinted as "Typographic Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare" in An Ong Reader (pages 429-463).
Of related interest is Ong's 1965 essay "Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style," which is also reprinted in An Ong Reader (pages 313-329).
After Ong published his 1959 essay "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance [Male] Puberty Rite," he subsequently further explored the psychodynamics of structured stress in the following three publications:
(1) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967; see the index for "Polemic" for specific page references), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University;
(2) Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University;
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