In early Tudor grammar schools, the use of vulgaria , or English-Latin phrase books, linked literary instructin and dramatic play as rehearsals for social self-advancement. Schoolmasters composed several remarkable collections of these "vulgars" to inform the practice of colloquial Latin and to season schoolboy conversation with ludic pleasure. The earliest printed vulgaria include vivid expressions of school life, but they also thrust boys into speaking in a broad variety of roles well beyond their own experience and social circumstances. Recent criticism has tended to emphasize the regulatory functions of humanist pedagogy, but the vulgaria provide impressive evidence for emancipatory possibilities. From these daily acts of impersonation, a schoolboy learned to regard social rank as the performance of roles. Moreover, the vulgaria arguable contributed to the development of English drama: first, as they conditioned a relatively sophisticated audience of readers and writers, practiced in impersonation and in performing the language of social striving; second, as they introduce into English monologue and dialogue a rich and various rhetoric of worldly ambition.