In an era when many are concerned with the scope and transmissibility of schoolroom content, with the capacity of literature to encourage civic participation, and with the responsibility of instructors to cultivate productive emotional responses in students, a return to the possibilities of humanist pedagogy seems appropriate. Knecht's The Grammar Rules of Affection: Passion and Pedagogy in Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson is a vital contribution to this important conversation. The book synthesizes debates about Renaissance humanist pedagogy and discourses of the passions while illuminating how literary writers lean on their grammatical training to dramatize the work and language of emotions and its effect on the world. In this way, the book is practicing precisely what it argues. Contributing to the history and literature of Renaissance humanist pedagogy, the book bridges principle and example to show how poetry and drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England contributed to an understanding of an emotional life as one determined by linguistic practice.

The key aims of the book are twofold: to examine emotion as a rule-guided practice and to theorize about emotion itself (5). Readers will arrive here from critical studies of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Jonson that argue that the “singular synthesis of affective and pedagogical discourse in Renaissance literature implies a sophisticated conception of emotion as a normative practice, an activity structured and constrained by conventional standards just as language is governed by grammatical rules” (5). It takes Wittgenstein's understanding of emotions as practice as a starting point and merges this with recent work in affect theory suggesting that both physical and verbal expressions function in affective practices and forms of life (15). The first chapter following the introduction examines how medieval Modist grammatical theory, which suggested that grammar reflected an ideal world gave way to humanist pedagogies. For the pragmatic humanist, against earlier theories, the meaning of grammar was to be found, not to reflect ideals, but in the everyday experience, in linguistic use (25–26). A kind of drama of words, Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is the focus of chapter 2, where Knecht argues that “feelings are cultivated and sustained through language, manifest in the avowals and the rehearsals that made up the daily practice of the schoolroom” (45). In this chapter, he makes a convincing point that the book will return to while also complicating the historical overview of the first chapter. Placing the first sonnet in the legacy of Petrarch, he argues that the speaker doesn't simply reject the artifice of established tradition but rather embraces both study and experience which positions himself as the proper student of the Muse. Astrophil has therefore completed his learning and initiation into love (48).

Chapters 3 and 4 examine Shakespeare's plays Love's Labours Lost and Hamlet, respectively. The first of these two contributes a refreshing perspective to an understudied play. Knecht argues that this is a comedy about the agency of language and the capacity of words to enact things in the world, and it functions as a dramatization of schoolroom exercises (81). He argues that love is conceived as a form of social action and involves language. In short, love is labor. Moving then to Shakespeare's most famous play, Hamlet, Knecht urges readers to attend not to “an inner being that purports to lie outside the text” but instead to the vivid language of the play itself (92). What we gain from this is, for example, a consideration of Polonius's account of Hamlet's melancholic state as a nominal declension that implies melancholy's progression as a kind of grammatical progression rather than something nebulous and unwieldy. Melancholy, associated with the passion of grief, is public practice enacted over time like spoken or written language, not just private behavior (95).

The final chapter before the conclusion, discussing Jonson's two humor plays, further supports the book's claim that emotions are social and malleable and claims that, in these plays, “the rules are nothing other than actions that have acquired the force of example over time” (129). Humor, or emotion, is not simply something that shapes public and political behavior but is rather a practice itself, a pattern of behaviors which themselves are governed by social convention. Even emotion, we come to learn, has a grammar.