Stage Pedants and Magisterial Nonsense

Abstract

Abstract This chapter extends the ideas of Chapter 2 to reconsider the opportunities for communal understanding generated by Tudor and Stuart ‘pedant’ plays, including Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad. The discussion returns to the problem of nonsensical language, here in the form of garbled Latin that appears in the early printings of both these plays, and in the term ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus,’ the Tudor period’s favorite ludicrous Latinate construction. In addition to anatomizing the ways the pedant figure embodies the comic, hopeful uselessness of scholarly labor, this chapter charts out early modern drama’s interest in noisy forms of unexpected, socially disruptive competency that are often occluded by unthinking acceptance of the codes of learnedness and semantic rigor. It concludes with a story about the author’s students learning unexpected lessons in Shakespearean improvisation.