Grammar War Plays in Early Modern England: From Entertainment to Pedagogy

he bella grammaticalia (“grammar wars” or “language wars”) are allegorical works in which parts of speech or rhetorical devices typically face t one another in battle and fight for powerwithin a grammatical kingdom. The development of grammar is thus presented as if it were a human story, with parts of speech motivated to act according to ideas such as tribal loyalty, inheritance, and ancestry. The characters’ experiences of battle are used, comically, to explain the status quo of the grammatical scheme and its rules; irregular nouns and verbs, for instance, are portrayed as wounded veterans who have sustained permanent injuries in the fighting. Leonard Hutten in his Bellum Grammaticale, one of the best-known examples of the genre, lingers on this explanatory scheme with a noteworthy attention to detail: