Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Ingo Berensmeyer, Andrew Hadfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138651784
• eBook ISBN: 9781317229506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a wide range of early modern English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems, and narrative texts in this period were sites of negotiation, and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. What were the cultural norms of truthfulness and lying, and on what basis were they constructed? What were the consequences when someone did not share the assumed common project of truth-telling? And which forms of communication were exempt from the pragmatic strictures on mendacious discourse? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Anna Swärdh

Hiding the Peacock’s Legs: Rhetoric, cosmetics and deception in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trussell’s Hellen

This essay explores rhetorical and cosmetic deception in William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and John Trussell’s Raptus I Helenae. The First Rape of Faire Hellen (1595). The essay focuses on instances of ‘colouring’ and ‘cloaking’ in the poems, terms used by contemporary rhetoricians to describe their art, to show how tensions between rhetorical skill and anxieties related to rhetorical deception are played out. Shakespeare and Trussell both employ narratorial commentary together with cloaking imagery to mark the rapists’ rhetorical dissembling as morally despicable, whereas other strategies are used to portray the women’s rhetorical and cosmetic cloaking and colouring as more defensible, if not completely unambiguous, forms of self-representation.

‘Let her have shame that cannot closely act’, Rosamond is told in Samuel Daniel’s vogue-setting poem from 1592, The Complaint of Rosamond. The ‘seeming Matrone’ who helps seduce her into becoming the king’s mistress uses various arguments, among them the idea that seeming or acting chaste is always more important than being chaste (Daniel, 1930: 216, 285).¹ The problem of authenticity is central to the complaint poems that followed on Daniel’s in the 1590s, all dealing with the delicate task of defending a fallen woman in a setting of rhetorical self-representation. In these poems, we find explicit comments on the duplicitousness of rhetoric but also constant references to seeming versus being, to masking and hiding, and to cosmetics. In this essay I focus on rhetoric as deception in two complaints, William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and John Trussell’s Raptus I Helenae. The First Rape of Faire Hellen (1595).² What singles these two texts out from the complaint group is their repeated employment of the terms ‘cloaking’ and ‘colouring’, terms that are used at the time by rhetoricians to describe their art and denoting concealment as well as rhetorical embellishment.³ Shakespeare’s and Trussell’s use of these terms signals the poets’ rhetorical self-awareness as well as consciousness of the moral ambiguity inherent in the art of rhetorical persuasion.

Suspicions about rhetoric were regularly expressed in the early modern period, and rhetorical dissimulation was part of a larger context that has been called ‘a culture of secrecy’ by Jon Snyder (Snyder, 2009), and described in terms of ‘dissimulation’ by Perez Zagorin (Zagorin, 1990). A central text of early modern rhetorical culture is Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528, translated into English in 1561), with its stress on sprezzatura, the ‘certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless’ (Castiglione, 1967: 67; cf. Snyder, 2009: 70–8). With its focus on the concealment of any art or skill that one possesses, The Courtier presents rhetorical skill as part of a larger enterprise of courtly self-representation and deception. In the same vein, as Frank Wigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn point out, George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy (1589) defines all figures of speech as deceptions, ‘as deliberate attempts by the writer or speaker to “make our talk more guileful and abusing”’ (2007: 55). Andrew Hadfield points to one classical and one early modern source to exemplify the anxieties surrounding rhetoric in the early modern period. Quintilian, author of the extremely influential Institutio oratoria, is ‘repeatedly anxious about the abuse of rhetoric to produce falsehood’, and the same fear that the art of rhetoric is the art of lying ‘characterises the anxieties expressed throughout the one substantial treatise on lying that was printed in sixteenth-century England’, Mathieu Coignet’s A Politic Discourse upon Truth and Lying (1586) (Hadfield, 2013: 139).

While Lucrece employs verbal rhetoric in Shakespeare’s poem, Trussell’s Helen uses make-up to achieve her goals; and the same fears of deception that surrounded rhetoric in the early modern period clung to cosmetics. Castiglione finds make-up acceptable as long as it is used in moderation, even if the clean face is most attractive to men, ‘who are always afraid of being deceived by art’ (Castiglione, 1967: 86). As Farah Karim-Cooper observes, the problem is the same, that of distinguishing between art and artfulness, in rhetorical as well as cosmetic embellishment (2006: 132–5). The connection between rhetorical and cosmetic ornamentation was frequently made at the time, often, as in Claudius’ speech in Hamlet, verbalising worries about wrongful deception: ‘The harlot’s cheek, beautified with plast’ring art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most painted word’ (Shakespeare, 2003: 3.1.52–4). As we shall see, through her use of cosmetics Trussell’s Helen can be read as an embodiment of rhetorical embellishment.

With their interest in authenticity and deception, the complaint poems of the 1590s participate in the contemporary culture of rhetorical self-representation and dissimulation, working against as well as within anxieties about the deceptive power of rhetoric belonging to that culture. Starting from the figure of paradiastole (redescribing vices as virtues), this essay will explore instances of ‘colouring’ and ‘cloaking’ found in Shakespeare’s and Trussell’s poems, to show how tensions between rhetorical skill and anxieties related to rhetorical deception are played out in Lucrece’s and Helen’s stories.

Tarquin and Theseus, Jove and Brutus

As several critics have pointed out, rhetoric and rhetorical training are central to Shakespeare’s Lucrece (among them Dubrow, 1987; Enterline, 2000; Ellis, 2003; Roe, 2006; Greenstadt, 2010; Weaver, 2012). The words ‘orator’ and ‘oratory’ occur five times in the poem, and we find references to reading, books, tales, schools, eloquence, words, cipher, debate and disputation. When colouring and cloaking occur in the poem, it is often in close vicinity to words related to rhetoric, signalling what was at the time a well-established connection. Similarly, in their manuals and guides, rhetoricians speak of their art in a language borrowed from the fields of painting, cosmetics and clothing. In The English Secretorie (1586), Angel Day opens the epistle dedicatory (to Edward de Vere) with two references to skilled painters, deception being a part of Zeuxis’ skill:

ZEUXES endevouring to paint excellentlie, made Grapes in shewe so naturall, that presenting the[m] to view men were deceaved with their shapes and their birds with their cullours. When Apelles drew Venus (though the shew of bewutie seemed woonderful) he daunted not in his workmanship, because he knew his cunning excellent.

Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), writes that elocution ‘beautifieth the tongue with great change of colours and variety of figures’ (in Vickers, 1999: 120), and in the section on ‘Exornation’, he advises that ‘we may boldly commend and beautify our talk with divers goodly colours and delightful translations, that our speech may seem as bright and precious as a rich stone is fair and orient’ (in Vickers, 1999: 123). Puttenham uses both clothing and colouring repeatedly throughout The Art of English Poesy: for instance, we are told how ‘our vulgar poesy’ cannot show itself ‘either gallant or gorgeous if any limb be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and colours’ (Puttenham, 2007: 3.1.221f.).

While rhetorical embellishment was thus generally spoken of in terms of colouring and cloaking, Quentin Skinner has claimed that they are ‘the two favourite metaphors’ used by rhetoricians to capture specifically the power of the figure of paradiastole to ‘disorder the vices and virtues’ (Skinner, 2007: 156f.). Richard Sherrey, Angel Day, George Puttenham and Henry Peacham all offer definitions of paradiastole in their rhetorical handbooks, and two of them make use of these metaphors. Peacham defines paradiastole as vices covered in ‘the mantles of vertues’ (Peacham, 1593: 169; Skinner, 2007: 157), while Day uses the term ‘colour’ in his definition: ‘Paradiastole, when with a milde interpretation or speech, wee color others or our owne faultes, as when wee call a subtill person, wise, a bold fellow, couragious, a prodigall man, liberall: a man furious or rash, valiant: a Parasite, a companion: him that is proud, Magnanimous: and such like’ (Day, 1592: 90f.). The concepts of colouring and clothing are thus central to the idea of rhetorical embellishment and redescription in early modern England, and they are used with positive as well as negative connotations.

Both Shakespeare’s and Trussell’s poems include rhetorical redescription of a kind that can be termed paradiastolary, and instances that make use of colouring and cloaking. Such rhetoric is given negative connotations in relation to the rapist men, and can be taken as one strategy the poets use to set up a contrast between unacceptable and acceptable versions of rhetorical dissimulation. In Lucrece, the narrator comments on Tarquin’s premeditated justification of the rape in terms that define Tarquin’s venture as paradiastole:

Thus graceless holds he disputation

’Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will,

And with good thoughts makes dispensation,

Urging the worser sense for vantage still;

Which in a moment doth confound and kill

All pure effects, and doth so far proceed

That what is vile shows like a virtuous deed.

(Shakespeare, 2006: 246–52)

John Roe glosses ‘disputes formally’ for ‘holds … disputation’ (Roe, 2006: note to line 246), placing the section of Tarquin’s internal battle, and the particular stanza, squarely within the field of formal rhetorical debate. Tarquin debates with himself for a long time, and at this point the narrator sums up and signals disapproval. Peacham’s 1577 description of paradiastole as a figure used ‘when vices are excused’ (Peacham, 1577: Sig. Niiiiv) is, as Skinner points out, changed to a more negative dismissal in the 1593 edition of The Garden of Eloquence, when it is referred to as ‘a faulty term of speech’ and a ‘vice of speech’ that is ‘a fit instrument of excuse serving to self-love, partial favour, blinde affection, and a shamelesse person, which for the better maintenance of wickednesse useth to cover vices with the mantles of vertues’ (Peacham, 1593: 168f.; Skinner, 2007: 158). In the passages from Lucrece, Peacham’s negative attitude to paradiastole (and the dissembling it stands for) is echoed in the narrator’s ‘graceless’ and ‘vile’. And Tarquin’s rhetoric is indeed paradiastolary when he redescribes his lust for Lucrece in terms of love, first to himself – ‘there is no hate in loving’ (240), and ‘Love thrives not in the heart that shadows dreadeth’ (270) – and later to Lucrece, describing his ‘loving tale’ (480), and demanding: ‘Yield to my love, if not, enforced hate, / Instead of love’s coy touch, shall rudely tear thee’ (668f.).

The poem uses terms of colouring and cloaking to show how Tarquin hides his intentions in the company of the innocent and unsuspecting Lucrece before the rape. His exterior does not show ‘his inward ill’ that ‘he coloured with his high estate, / Hiding base sin in pleats of majesty; / That nothing in him seemed inordinate’ (91–4). Here both colours and the folds of garments (‘pleats’) are used to portray his deceit, and the naive Lucrece cannot ‘pick’ any meaning from his ‘parling looks, / Nor read the subtle shining secrecies / Writ in the glassy margents of such books’ (100–2). In these passages, colours and garments, together with books, margins and failed reading, form a situation of successful rhetorical deception, but one condemned by the narrator.

John Trussell’s Raptus I Helenae. The First Rape of Faire Hellen, published the year after Shakespeare’s Lucrece, is heavily influenced by that poem (see Shaaber, 1957: 415–18). That influence also includes a rhetoric of cloaking and colouring. The bulk of the poem is narrated by Helen, framed by eight stanzas in the poet’s voice. The Helen of Trussell’s poem is young, ‘eight score moneths’ (43), which is 13 years and four months, but suitors are already approaching her to see her famed beauty, and amongst the visitors is Theseus. The Theseus episode exists in a number of early accounts of the Helen myth (Shaaber, 1957: 418–20; Maguire, 2009: 14), but Trussell’s version is unusual in that the rape (usually an abduction for safekeeping) is a sexual rape. The ‘first rape’ of the poem’s title thus refers to this rape by Theseus, and not the later abduction by Paris.

Like Tarquin, Theseus displays a paradiastolary attitude. ‘Oft nam’d he love, but then he thought of lust, / oft nam’d he fancy, meaning lechery’ (109f.), Helen tells us, and she goes on to explain that she is too innocent to correctly understand Theseus: ‘Yet I not knowing lust, too yoong to love, / Could neither fancie nor affection proove’ (113f.). Understanding that Helen is not interested, Theseus hides his intentions, and in this section of the poem we find the same terminology we saw used about Tarquin. ‘So cunningly he cloked his desire’ that Helen believes he has changed his mind (129f.), and when he catches Helen alone on the beach where the rape will take place, again, until the very moment ‘his sparks of hidden fire’ break forth, he ‘did it while then so slylie cloake, / That there might be perceived, nor flame, nor smoke’ (148f.). Just like Tarquin, Theseus is successful in his self-representation, cunningly and slyly cloaking his desire and evil intent, and Helen’s adverbs signal how we should read this specific instance of cloaking.

Another rapist who figures in the poem is Jove, who famously approached Leda (Helen’s mother) in the guise of a swan. Here the cloaking imagery recurs, as ‘this Swans shape that shrouded Deity’ is termed ‘but a shift to cloke impiety’ (617f.). Here too the cloaking serves to hide intentions before the act, which Jove carries out in ‘his pristine shape’, the disguise thrown off: ‘For though he counterfeits a feathered weed, / In his owne shape he doth the devillish deed’ (628–30). ‘Weed’ is defined by the OED as ‘a garment’, or ‘clothing, apparel’ (OED 1.a., 2). In this instance too, the narrator (at this point Lerna, Leda’s nurse) signals a condemnation of the behaviour.

In the cases of Tarquin, Theseus and Jove, the concepts of cloaking and colouring thus have negative connotations. However, at the end of Lucrece, after the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Note from the Publisher
• Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture: An Introduction
• 1. Hiding the Peacock’s Legs: Rhetoric, cosmetics and deception in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trussell’s Hellen
• 2. Mendacity and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III
• 3. ‘An Anxious Entangling and Perplexing of Consciences’: John Donne and Catholic recusant mendacity
• 4. Truth and Lying in Early Modern Travel Narratives: Coryat’s Crudities, Lithgow’s Totall Discourse and Generic Change
• 5. ‘Betrayed My Credulous Innocence’: Mendacity and Female Education in John Milton and the ‘Battle of the Sexes’
• 6. Lying, Language and Intention: Reflections on Swift
• Index