ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a commonplace version of a pejorative type of teacher as performed by the pedantic character of the rural schoolmaster Rombus in Philip Sidney's The Lady of May, a pastoral entertainment presented before Elizabeth I while on progress in 1578. The action of this festive show makes comic capital of this foolish schoolmaster impresario and the disintegration of his scholarly pretensions. Combining a holiday pastime with a combative game that he is incapable of playing and on which he cannot impose his mastery exposes the insecurity of traditional authority and relational statuses, individual as well as institutional. Whilst the May game underlines the notions that authority is culturally produced and contextually determined, it also reaffirms the monarch's authority as other, a sacred presence transcending temporal hierarchies. Small, misremembered, or half-forgotten learning paraded and misapplied may also enact a self-parody of Sidney's own disillusionment with educational idealism and the social relevance of a liberal arts syllabus that turns on a more personal lament for lost intellectual prowess and purpose, a loss epitomized by the mangling of Cicero's familiar line of lament ‘O tempora, o mores’ as ciceronianism: ‘O tempore o moribus’.
