So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. It was also the decade in which the word ‘pedant’ first appeared in print in English. It said: ‘I can entertain you with all the big words; but being solid and English I can also laugh at these obstupefacting excrescences.’