William Poole has strong views on the merits of student ‘thesping’

I was recently reading the ‘Warden’s Punishment Book’ of All Souls College, which was maintained from 1601 to 1850. It’s usually defaulting on prayers and bills, but we do get some fighting, stealing, and at least one legally fascinating case of fondling.

Like my own college, All Souls was traditionally a lawyerly society, and it shows in the slippery backchat of offenders. ‘No fellow shall abuse another’; ‘reverence should be shown to the warden’ — therefore a lawyer abusing the warden defended himself by saying that it was not done irreverently. (The warden in question was rather fittingly called ‘Mocket’.) My prize performer in the Punishment Book, however, is Robert, son of that notable early-modern legal theorist, Alberico Gentili, founder of international law.

Although Robert was only 14 or 15, and so technically under-age, he was pushed on the college by his famous dad and his famous dad’s famous pals, including the King. Pa Gentili even affably supplied a legal ‘opinion’ on how to ‘reinterpret’ his son’s age.

Robert got his fellowship in 1606, but this child prodigy promptly cracked up, and was repeatedly in trouble for absence and brawling. He was known around Oxford as ‘King of the Beggars’.

Gentili senior is also remembered for getting involved in an academic quarrel about whether students should put on plays or not. Gentili insisted that this was a legal question, and declared that plays were permitted. He was opposed by the godly faction, headed by the theologian John Rainolds of Corpus Christi. Boys dressing as women!?! Not for Rainolds — who was also the main force behind the translation project that resulted in the King James Bible.

The academic drama of the 16th and 17th centuries is an almost lost continent of literature. Much of it is Latin. Most of it has, I confess, not aged with grace. But these plays are a fascinating window on to the academic world of centuries ago.

In the play season, students were prone to riot: chapel glass was smashed, or taken down for safety. Trouble-makers at performances were forcibly locked up. There was fierce rivalry between colleges; Gown swiped at Town. A performance before Queen Elizabeth at Christ Church resulted in several spectators being crushed to death. Students fashionably smoked the new drug, tobacco. And while the plays written by the academics were never as racy as those of the popular stage, they could have a damagingly satirical, even sexual edge, especially in their exploitation of the claustrophobically male world of the academe.

Props were ingenious, including in one play a live snail, stroked by the young poet Suckling, acting as prologue, who likened his snail to the play.

An Oxford flop prompted Cambridge glee; but a Cambridge play greeted by royal indifference was followed, astonishingly, by the suicide of their Vice-Chancellor.

These days, when my students confess to acting, I howl, growl, and mutter about those great unscholarly perversions of rowing, shopping, religion, and anything to do with plays. One essay-light brat tried it on me in tutorial only yesterday. It is with difficulty that I have to remind myself of this once-great academic tradition.

Dramatically-inclined students, however! You can always tell which ones they are going to be.

Dr William Poole is a tutor in English and Fellow at New College. He is researching early-modern, intellectual and scientific history