Latin was the medium as well as the main subject of early modern education both at school and university: classes were conducted in Latin and any other subjects (including other languages, such as Greek and Hebrew) were taught in and via Latin. Many major early modern English writers (including, most famously, Shakespeare) had no university education, but they all shared the experience of this Latin-medium grammar school curriculum, or its privately tutored equivalent. For the thoughtful reader, this creates a paradox — why and how did this intensive training in reading, speaking and writing a classical language produce between the later sixteenth century and the early eighteenth century what might reasonably be considered the single richest 150 years of poetry in English?

Existing scholarship on early modern schooling and its relationship to literature has tended to focus on the role of translation, especially “double translation” (into English and then back into Latin).[1] Such exercises were certainly one element of pedagogy used in many schools, but the role of translation in the early modern classroom has in general been overstated – probably because over the last century Western teaching of the classical languages has largely been via the ‘grammar-translation’ method.[2] Contemporary classicists, trained themselves primarily by means of translation into and out of the vernacular, have tended to focus on the role of translation in early modern pedagogy as well.

The most characteristic early modern exercise, however, was not translation as such, but the broader category of paraphrase: recasting one text as another text, whether orally or in writing. ‘Paraphrase’ in this sense does not imply, as the term tends to do today, a shortening or summarising of the original text, and in fact plenty of early modern paraphrases are substantially longer than their models.[3] Paraphrase could and often did include translation between languages (Latin to English; English to Latin; Latin to Greek and so on), but more often did not: the single most common type of paraphrase found in early modern school exercises is Latin to Latin.[4] Paraphrase often included the turning of prose into verse or verse into prose (Ascham’s ‘metaphrase’), but also other kinds of formal and generic transformation, such as narrative (hexameter) verse into lyric verse, or prose history into a letter or speech. Paraphrase in this broad sense was the most common type of school “exercise” and it was also (in various written and oral forms) the most common mode in which knowledge was both displayed and assessed. Early modern schoolchildren did not demonstrate their understanding of a text by answering comprehension or multiple-choice questions, or by writing an essay — they did so primarily by paraphrase, very often into verse. In this way, the ability to demonstrate knowledge about a text was indivisible from the ability to generate texts in a range of established literary forms and styles.

In his printed edition of Progymnasmata (‘Exercises’, 1590), John Brownswerd (c. 1540-1589), schoolmaster in Macclesfield, for example, begins his volume of exemplary exercises with the rendering of a single scriptural episode (in this case the story of David and Goliath from 1 Samuel 17) into four Latin versions, each in a different metre.[5] The book also includes an example of verse-verse Latin paraphrase, in this instance of Horace Odes 1.1 into elegiac couplets.[6] Sixty years later, Nicholas Grey’s Parabolae evangelicae (1650), written for use at Tonbridge school, works in much the same way: though misleadingly catalogued by the ESTC as a Latin grammar, the volume is in fact a set of verse paraphrases of the Gospel parables in a wide variety of Latin verse forms, effectively a textbook of the New Testament and of Latin verse composition simultaneously.[7]

Ready-made paraphrases of various kinds were also widely used in the classroom, in a whole range of contexts. Schoolboys working through any challenging original text, whether Virgil’s Georgics, or a piece of Greek tragedy or lyric, or even the psalms in Hebrew, did so in editions with a running Latin prose paraphrase, to aid comprehension, and we find the same feature also in many editions intended primarily for adult use, such as Theodore de Bèze’s popular 1580 edition of the psalms, used by Mary Sidney in preparing her English versions.[8] Elementary textbooks for the younger pupils regularly included simple Latin verse paraphrases of key texts, such as the Lord’s prayer and the catechism. More advanced versions of this kind of didactic paraphrase include John Harmar’s Hymnus ad Christum, Historia de Christo Metrica (‘Hymn to Christ, the Story of Christ in Verse’, 1658), which synthesises the Gospel accounts to tell the story of Christ in ancient Greek verse, with a Latin (prose) paraphrase on the facing page, each line numbered individually for easy classroom use:

[Caption: John Harmar, Hymnus ad Christum, Historia de Christo Metrica (1658), sig. A3^v-A4^r]

Printed textbooks of this kind, produced by successful schoolmasters, gives us an insight into classroom practice; but by far the richest resource are examples of schoolboy exercises themselves, which, though rarely studied and in most cases barely catalogued, survive in their thousands in archives around the country.

Paraphrase tested and displayed a range of skills we would today tend to classify separately, including translation; comprehension; close reading; the mastery of metrical and rhetorical rules; critical interpretation; historical, moral and even political context and commentary; and creative writing. A verse paraphrase of an episode from Livy, for instance, might incorporate the Christianising interpretation of the story provided by a commentary; in another instance, such a paraphrase might be personalised as an address to a schoolmaster, parent or local grandee, or rendered topical by including contemporary references. Such “exercises” surprisingly often contain personal, topical or political elements: in an extraordinary set of verse compositions prepared by pupils at Eton for presentation to Queen Elizabeth I in 1563, by far the longest piece is a young Giles Fletcher’s 314-line ‘eclogue’: in fact an extended verse paraphrase of a passage from Livy, Ab urbe condita 9, telling of the humiliating Samnite victory over the Romans at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC. This is presented to the queen somewhat oddly – we might even think, slightly tactlessly – as a consolation for the defeat of the English at Le Havre earlier in 1563.[9]

Well over one hundred years later, Image 1 shows two facing pages of Dutch school exercises dating from around 1690. On the left, the student recasts Horace Odes 1.3 from one lyric metre (the fourth asclepiad) into another, more common one (sapphic stanzas): the heading says ‘Ode tertia in oden Sapphicam reformata’, ‘The third ode [of Horace’s first book] reshaped into a Sapphic ode’. On the right, he rewrites Odes 1.6, originally a lyric poem addressed to Augustus’ general Agrippa, as a poem in hexameter verse addressed to William III. Such exercises demonstrate a student’s understanding of the political and historical context of the original, as well as their ability to recast the poem to contemporary effect and in the style appropriate to a different form.

Image 1 caption: BL Sloane MS 2832, fol. 51^r-50^v

The single most commonly found examples of school paraphrase are based either upon scriptural texts (such as a parable, canticle or proverb) or upon the handful of Latin texts commonly read at the beginning of a grammar school education, such as Aesop’s fables.[10] For these very commonly paraphrased texts, enough examples survive to be able to make direct comparisons between multiple versions. The next part of this essay looks at two representative examples of school paraphrase of the fable which appears first in the standard early modern school editions of Aesop.[11]

Image 2 shows the first fable of Aesop as it appears in a typical late-sixteenth century school edition. This fable tells the story of the cock who finds a jewel in the dung-heap but, not recognising it for what it is, wishes he had found a barleycorn instead. The story recalls the Gospel expression ‘pearls before swine’ (Matthew 7:6), and the unrecognized ‘jewel’ may be interpreted generally as wisdom, more precisely as Christian truth, or, as in the case of several school editions, as the acquisition specifically of humanist learning – that is, what you acquire at school.

[Caption: An image of the first fable as printed in Aesopi Fabulae (London: Robert Robinson, 1591). There are dozens of similar school editions extant, many of them heavily marked. Most of them print the same texts in the same order.]

Here the fable itself (in italics) is only seven lines long, and the moral (printed in plain type) is nearly as long again. The fable runs as follows:

De Gallo gallinaceo

Gallus gallinaceus dum vertit stercorarium, offendit gemmam. Quid inquiens, rem sic nitidam reperio? Si gemmarius reperisset, nihil esset eo laetius, ut qui pretium sciret. Mihi quidem nulli est usui, nec magni aestimo: imo equidem omnibus gemmis granum hordei malim.[12]

Of the farmyard cockerel

The farmyard cockerel, while turning over the dung heap, found a gem. “What,” he said, “is this shiny thing I have found? If a jeweler had found it, nothing would have made him happier, for he knows its value. But for me, it’s of no use at all, nor do I value it highly; in fact, I would prefer a grain of barley to all the gems in the world.”

The moral in this (and many closely related school editions) reads:

Per gemmam, artem sapientiamque intellige: per gallum, hominem stolidum & voluptuarium. Nec stolidi artes liberales amant, cum usum earum nesciant: nec voluptuarius, quippe cui una placet voluptas.

For the jewel, understand art and wisdom: for the cock, [understand] a stupid and pleasure-seeking man. Stupid men do not love the liberal arts, since they do not understand what use they are; and nor does the pleasure-seeking man, for he is interested only in pleasure.

Here the interpretation of the jewel as, specifically, ‘the liberal arts’ is obviously relevant to its schoolroom context. Even in this earliest kind of Latin text, schoolboys encountered immediately the relationship between a text and its interpretation. With this in mind, let’s look at two examples of surviving schoolboy paraphrases of this first fable.

The first example comes from a manuscript now the Staffordshire County Record Office: a presentation copy of student work made as a gift, probably in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and inscribed: ‘To that uniquely best and most wise man, Master Bagot, Esquire, patron of letters, for whom Nicholas Fox, Edward Sprott and all the pupils at Bromley earnestly desire the greatest possible happiness and success in all his endeavours’.[13] The volume contains verse paraphrases of the first ten fables of Aesop as they appeared in the standard school editions, evidently intended to display the high quality of the work achieved by the pupils there. Although lightly expanded versions of the stories, these verse paraphrases reflect faithfully both the content and the interpretations of the school edition. In Image 3, showing the first paraphrase, you can see that the format of the paraphrase reflects the structure of the print edition, with the moral appended. Much of the vocabulary is borrowed directly from the prose original – in the ‘moral’ you might be able to pick out, for instance, gemmam (jewel), rusticus (a countryman) and stolidus (stupid). Both elements – the fable and the moral – have been put into Latin elegiac couplets (a hexameter followed by a pentameter) which was the standard “starter” metre for children learning to write Latin verse.

Image 3 caption: Staffordshire County Record Office, MS D(W)1721/3/248, fol. 3^r

This is a very straightforward verse paraphrase of the school edition, but the manuscript is additionally interesting because for each fable it includes also an English verse paraphrase of the story. It is unusual to see this kind of systematic English verse paraphrase in schoolwork of the period – even in presentation volumes of this kind – and the English element was perhaps intended to appeal to Bagot and mark out the collection from the usual run of school material. Here is the English version of this first fable:

Image 4 caption: Staffordshire County Record Office, MS D(W)1721/3/248, fol. 2^v

The English poem is in alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, a metre quite often chosen at this period as a rough equivalent for elegiac couplets in Latin. Despite some awkwardness and repetition, this is a very competent piece of English versification:

MORAL

The paraphrases in the Bromley manuscript are largely straightforward in terms of content: they contain no real additional material or evidence of alternative interpretations, but they demonstrate very clearly two types of paraphrastic transformation: from Latin prose into both Latin and English verse. Meanwhile the relative rarity of systematic English versions at this period perhaps suggests the particular tastes or interests of the schoolmaster or the addressee.

A second example of a paraphrase of this same fable is found in a manuscript dating from between about 1623 and 1633 (Image 5).[14] This poem is a more complex and sophisticated response to the original text, with a much greater degree both of addition and of interpretation. Converted into seventeen lines of competent Latin hexameter, the poem is a very significant expansion of the original, and the student – probably following some specific guidance along these lines – has taken the opportunity to add several set pieces familiar from rhetorical and poetic manuals of the period. The poem begins, for instance, with a set-piece description of the calm of the night, borrowing one phrase from one of the most famous classical examples of this scene, in Aeneid 4:[15]

Image 5 caption: BL Sloane MS 1466, fol. 380. Note the signature ‘Lionel: Hollus’ at the bottom of the page.

As well as  being a significant expansion, the tone, style and (implied) moral of this version of the story are all quite different from the concise prose original. From a literary perspective, the hexameter metre, set-piece opening, allusion to Virgil and mention of Crassus all suggest a significantly elevated register.[18] In other words, the schoolboy who wrote this paraphrase of Aesop has not only converted the story from prose to verse, but also – probably as part of the terms of the exercise – into verse of an entirely different and more elevated style than the prose original.

The most interesting feature, however, is the difference in the lesson that is drawn from the fable. Rather than reading the story as a reproach to the cockerel for his stupidity and pleasure-seeking, and a reminder of the importance of appreciating true value and virtue over immediate gratification, this version of the fable seems to point towards an acceptance of different stations in life and even a validation of the cockerel’s perspective. Reading this version, we feel that the cockerel – and by extension, anyone of relatively humble birth – is right not to yearn for wealth or power beyond his station. The lingering and mildly romanticized depiction of rural life and labour at the start of the poem perhaps contributes to this effect, implying a kind of nobility in ordinary life. Notably, there is no explicit “moral” appended, so we are left to draw our own conclusions about the message of the poem based on its tone, pace and perspective. A second version of this fable, in a different hand and attributed to a different pupil (‘D. T.’) but adjacent in the manuscript, treats the story in much the same way, suggesting that the boys may have been following their master’s guidance in their interpretation of the story.[19]

Paraphrase is most creatively, critically and even politically effective when all those involved know the source text well – and in some cases also other, previous paraphrases. Lionel Hollus’ little exercise is in many ways routine – thousands of similar pieces survive in archives around the country. The hint of a political edge, even a kind of dispute with the original only emerges if the reader recalls immediately the conventional school interpretation of the poem, if we know that – for thousands of ex-schoolboys – the jewel the cockerel finds is “supposed” to be the precious nugget of learning, and the gift of an education in the liberal arts, rejected only by the stupid or the self-indulgent.

Even the non-scriptural texts read in the early years of grammar school attained a kind of quasi-scriptural status, presumably because they were read so carefully and repeatedly. We see this reflected even in adult life, where adults under pressure quite often return to texts of this kind alongside scriptural and liturgical passages and tags.[20] The verse paraphrase of scripture in both Latin and English, though little read by students and teachers of early modern literature today, was by far the most popular single genre of poetry and was also – as thousands of surviving manuscript sources demonstrate – a very common private exercise. But we see the same kind of ‘paraphrastic reflex’ in adult life in a whole range of occasional contexts, not only in relation to scripture. Hundreds of extant early modern formal letters, for instance, append a brief verse paraphrase of their prose message as a gesture of respect – a practice directly continuous with the standard school exercise in which children produced a paragraph of Latin prose on a given theme, followed (depending on their age and facility) by a short or long version in Latin verse.[21] John Ashmore, in his very popular print anthology of 1621 misleadingly titled Certain Selected Odes of Horace – since the largest section by far is in fact devoted to a collection of contemporary epigrams, in Latin and English – cannot resist offering three different English versions of a particularly famous and fashionable Latin epigram on the royal favourite Buckingham’s appointment as Lord Admiral in 1619 (Image 6).[22] The original Latin poem was so well-known at this point that he doesn’t bother to quote the Latin epigram itself, not even its title or first line. He assumes instead that all his readers know and can recall the epigram in question, indicating merely that the versions he offers are ‘ex Latino’ (‘from the Latin’).

Image 6: Ashmore, Certain Selected Odes of Horace (1621), p. 41. The last and loosest of these versions of the epigram continues over the page.

The familiarity and stability of the source text means that paraphrases are particularly useful indices of changing literary style, both for modern readers trying to gauge the evolution of past literary fashions, but also for readers and authors at the time. Compare for instance the Latin verse paraphrases of the Song of Simeon (Luke 2.29-32), made by two of the most popular Latin poets of early modernity. The Song of Simeon was one of the best known of all scriptural texts for English readers because worshippers recite this canticle at every service of Evening Prayer or Evensong. Here is the text as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer:

Consider first the Latin verse paraphrase of this prayer by George Buchanan (1506-1582), probably the single most important Protestant Latin poet of the sixteenth century, whose Latin psalm paraphrases – to which this poem was regularly appended – are almost ubiquitous even in the smallest private libraries of the period.

This is a dignified and fairly straightforward Latin literary version of the prayer, with certain classicizing touches which are typical of Buchanan’s paraphrases. But it is highly fashionable, too, in its way. The lyric metre used here – sometimes called the fourth asclepiad – is found several times in Horace but is one of the lyric metres taken up with great enthusiasm is the new-found craze for complex Latin metrical display in the later sixteenth century. This fashion is associated in particular with psalm paraphrase, and Buchanan himself uses the metre three times in his psalter (Psalms 14, 35 and 43).

Writing just a few decades later, the very popular Dutch Jesuit poet Bernhard Bauhusius treats the prayer entirely differently:

The emotional intensity of Bauhusius’ version and its imaginative recreation of Simeon’s private thoughts have their roots in Jesuit devotional practice and are typical of Jesuit Latin verse of this period. But this style quickly became popular across Europe and influenced Protestant as well as Catholic literature in both the Latin and the vernacular – as is clear, for instance, in the poetry of George Herbert and later Richard Crashaw in both Latin and English.

Contrasts of the type we see here between the style of Buchanan and that of Bauhusius – two demonstrably widely-read and influential Latin poets paraphrasing the same scriptural text only a few decades apart – offer a vivid and helpful index of changing literary fashions. But a fuller understanding of the role of paraphrase in early modern pedagogy and creative practice does more than just help us to identify shifting trends. Paraphrase as a practice lies at the heart of early modern textuality and is often a more useful way for understanding how texts of the period relate to one another than ‘translation’, ‘imitation’, ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’. Paraphrase starts in the schoolroom, but there is nothing boring, basic or purely instrumental about the paraphrastic literary culture of early modernity. The suggestive power of paraphrase is perhaps best summed up by George Herbert hiself, who describes prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’ in one of his best-known English poems:

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth

(‘Prayer (I)’, 1-4)