Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature

Katherine Acheson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754662839
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351875592
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related to concepts of space, truth, art, and nature, and reveals their importance to poetry by Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. The genres of illustration considered in this book include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy, and Aesop's Fables. The argument produces unique insights into the ways in which visual rhetoric affected verbal expression, and the book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange, and beautiful literature of early modern England.

Chapter 1
SPACE
“The discription of the worlde”:
Military, Horticultural, and Technical
Illustration and Andrew Marvell’s Gardens

In the eighth chapter of The boke named the gouernour (1531), Thomas Elyot writes that “it is commendable in a gentilman to paint and kerue [i.e., carve woodblocks for printing] exactly if nature ther to doth induce hym” (sig. C8r). Elyot is not speaking of what we might think of as fine art, nor, as he hastens to add, does he intend to demean the gentleman as “a mason or peynter” (sig. C8v). Rather, Elyot is referring to the creation of images that he calls “figures and chartis” (sig. D2r), which will help the governor “discriue the countray of his aduersary, whereby he shall eschue the daungerous passages with his hoste or nauie: also perceyve the placis of aduauntage, the forme of embataylynge of his enemies: the situation of his campe, for his mooste suertie, the strength or weakenes of the towne or fortresse whiche he intendeth to assault” (sig. Dr). These skills are also helpful, writes Elyot, in one’s own “dominions,” which the governor shall set “out in figure, in suche wise that at his eie shal appere to hym where he shall employ his study and treasure, as well for the saulfgarde of his countray, as for the commodite and honour thereof, havyng at al tymes in his sight the suertie and feblenes, aduauncement & hindrance of the same” (sigs. Dr–Dv). Elyot’s governor will measure, assess, and make use of territory (his own, and that of others) using techniques of visualization and representation that apply to the construction of “figures and chartis” so that “at his eie shal appere to hym where he shall employ his study and treasure.” Elyot writes that diagrams are the best means of conveying information about the physical world:

Experience we have therof in lernynge of geometry, astronomie, and cosmographie, called in englisshe the discription of the worlde. In which studies I dare affirme a man shal more profite, in one wike, by figures and chartis, well and perfectly made, than he shall by the only reding or heryng the rules of that science by the space of halfe a yere at the lest. (D2^r)

Diagrams are the form in which the would-be governor apprehends “the discription of the worlde,” exercises his control over his dominions, and plots his aspirations for the territories that belong to others.

“Figures and chartis” of the type to which Elyot refers were a key feature of manuals of military strategy and tactics, a genre that flourished throughout the early modern period across Europe. While few works of this type had yet been published in England at the time of Elyot’s writing, there were continental examples with which he may well have been familiar; the genre was well-established in print in England by the end of the sixteenth century.¹ These works were an important part of the revolution in the tactics and technologies of warfare that followed the invention of gunpowder-based weaponry at the end of the fifteenth century: as John R. Hale writes, “war, its techniques and its issues, penetrated the imaginative life of the people more deeply than at any previous time, and the proliferation of books ensured that this penetration was not restricted to the places in which wars were actually being fought” (Art of War 3; see also Arnold and Fissel). The books – and their sometimes fantastical depictions of military technology and strategy – were so popular that Ben Jonson made them one of the many targets of satire in The Staple of News. In Act 3, Scene 2, Lickfinger says to Madrigal (the “Poetaster” and “Jeerer”) that the Master-Cook is the “man o’ men”:

… he designes, he drawes,

He paints, he carves, he builds, he fortifies,

Makes Citadels of curious fowle and fish,

Some he dri-ditches, some motes round with broths.

Mounts marrowbones, cuts fifty-angled custards,

Reares bulwark pies, and for his outer workes

He raiseth Ramparts of immortall crust;

And teacheth all the Tacticks, at one dinner:

What Rankes, what Files, to put his dishes in;

The whole Art Military. (ll. 20–29)

Later in the play, Peni-boy Junior describes his mock academy, “Canter’s Colledge,” in which “Shunfield shall read the Military Arts” (4.4.93). As Jonson’s satire points out, these books were not necessarily useful in the field: they often proposed the use of incredible equipment, and they outlined ornate and even impossible formations and encampments for thousands of soldiers. And while some of these books were published in pocket-sized formats, many were too large for easy transportation: thick folios on the topic were published in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These features, the fact that the genre combined classical and contemporary knowledge, and the importance of these works to the education of the young gentleman, suggest that books of military strategy and tactics had a wide audience that included those with particular interest in the topic, and those with broader curiosity about history, technology, international affairs, and gentlemanly knowledge.

Works of military strategy and tactics have one of the highest ratios of illustration to text in any early modern genre. Some genres, of course, did have higher proportions of illustration to text: herbals or botanical works, emblem books, and bound collections of plates used as copyist’s sources for decorative arts, for example. But military matters are not ordinarily thought of as visual concerns, as are these other topics, and the ubiquity and prevalence of illustration in these works may surprise some readers. Even small and inexpensive publications often had illustrations within the text, and larger woodcuts that fold out. William Garrard’s The arte of vvarre was published in 1591, and is typical of the late sixteenth-century English contributions to the genre, both in its content and in the density and type of illustration. According to its prefatory matter, it was intended to “shew and teach the order of the Fielde, the duety of Officers, the charge of Generals, the arte of Warre, & the whole discipline belonging to the exercises of Armes, and marshalling of a Campe and Armie, how great soeuer” (sig. A4r). After dealing with the higher purposes of military training with exemplary brevity (in one sentence), The arte of vvarre details its topic with a fine brush, devoting its nearly 400 quarto-sized pages to descriptions of the establishing, manning, and equipping of virtually every possible battle formation and troop encampment. The arte of vvarre has 72 woodcut illustrations integrated with the text, or on pages of their own, and seven foldouts that vary in size from about twice the size of a leaf to about five times that size. Of the 72 smaller illustrations, 25 are diagrams formed with type characters; these are set from type normally used for the text, although other examples are formed from woodcut characters, in Roman and Greek letters, massed into formations. The remaining 47 illustrations in The arte of vvarre are diagrammatic woodcuts. The larger foldouts depict more elaborate encampments and formations, and include iconographic representations of soldiers, cannons, fortifications, and geographical features.

Some texts in this genre have more illustrations than The arte of vvarre, and some have fewer, but almost all have some, and even modest formats often have large foldouts. Most of the illustrations are woodcuts, but a few examples from the sixteenth century, and a higher proportion in the seventeenth century, are engravings (e.g., the 1616 publication of Aelian’s Tactiks has engravings by Aedigius Gelius, and the same title, published in 1631, has engravings by Martin Droeshout). The authors and publishers of these works speak eloquently of the value of these illustrations to prospective purchasers and readers of the works. Thomas Styward prefaces his work, The pathwaie to martial discipline, with a poem in which he writes “Two bookes I haue therefore set foorth, to shew thee how to traine, / To march, incampe, and battles make, with Tables verie plaine” (“The Author to the Reader,” sig. A4). In his 1591 work, The approoved order of martiall discipline, Giles Clayton says that figures are included as the concepts are “more plainely seene” through “tables” such as those to which Styward refers (58). Captain Robert Hichcock’s letter prefacing Garrard’s text characterizes the illustrations as both an aid to memory, and a selling point of the book: “Thys Booke dooth likewise plainly expresse the mistery & hid cunning of fortification, and declare in ample and fine drawne plots, goodly plotformes, needful inuentions, and noble works of great suretie and maiestie, worth the noting, and meete for men of warre to haue in euerlasting memory” (sig. A4v).

Whether or not they were successful in revealing “the mistery & hid cunning” of the works they were published within, we can assume that these “fine drawne plots” and “goodly plotformes” were important to the genre. Their ubiquity and frequency argue that the illustrations were key parts of how those works communicated with their audience. As is typical of this kind of illustration, what they convey is complementary to, but not identical with, the verbal content of the works. They have distinctive forms that ask readers to absorb, assess, and make use of information in ways that are different from the ways that verbal discourse works: non-naturalistic, they make no effort to represent the world as it is seen, but instead convey geographical space as it is experienced; non-perspectival, they are not about the agency of the eye or the perception of the individual, but instead about the schematic deployment of masses of men in large spaces; non-realistic, they are instrumental and instructional, rather than representational. These illustrations are about “dominion,” as Elyot calls the land controlled or owned by the humanist gentleman to whom The boke of the gouernour is addressed.²

These illustrations derive from the application of ideas and techniques that were germane to early modern arts of mensuration, through which earth was measured and thereby transformed into territory, property, or land. Diagrams of this sort appear in a variety of genres, but they are especially common in, and important to, manuals of military strategy and tactics. They also appear in works of garden design, and in the concluding section of this chapter I will turn to illustrations of sundials, which demonstrate the means by which three-dimensional phenomena were translated into two-dimensional image. The illustrations with which this chapter is concerned help us widen the ways that we imagine that early modern people saw, and enrich our understanding of their forms of interaction with the world around them, each other, and the visual and verbal aspects of their culture. The literary text with which the bulk of this chapter is concerned is Marvell’s long poem, Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax. Michael Wilding calls Upon Appleton House “this most enigmatic poem of this most enigmatic of poets” (172), but what Elyot calls the “discription of the world” expressed in military and horticultural designs illuminates key aspects of the poem, particularly the form of consciousness it represents. In the concluding section of the chapter I will turn to “The Garden” and illustrations of the operation of the sundial to elaborate on the importance of technical illustration to the remarkable and innovative points-of-view articulated in Upon Appleton House and Marvell’s equally enigmatic lyric poem.

Upon Appleton House’s setting, a militarized garden, has perplexed many critics. To some, the armed flowers and drum-beating bees are ingenious or even “absurd” biographical allusions (Brand 485; see also Legouis 45), designed to impress Marvell’s patron and remind the general reader of Fairfax’s profession and accomplishments (Cotterill 119–20; Whitaker 300; Jenkins 135). For others, the bellicose garden is “playful” (Wilcher 152; see also Hunt 98 and Jenkins 126) or “pleasant” (Low 282), a conceit of extraordinary extension and virtuosity, intended to give pleasure and earn admiration. For others still, it revives the ancient topos of the furor hortensis and thereby comments on the contemporary state of the perpetual philosophical stand-off between art and nature (Salerno 103–20). A few commentators have considered the yoking of horticultural tenor to military vehicle to be more deeply meaningful: Derek Hirst and Stephen Zwicker interpret it as an expression of the immediate historical conditions in which the poem was written, in which the countryside had become a set of battlegrounds. Andrew Shifflett sees the marriage of opposites in the militarized garden as expressive of stoic ideals fitting Fairfax’s circumstances; James Turner argues that Marvell deconstructs the conventional mythographic and metaphoric relations between gardening and warfare to increase both discursive and poetic complexity. But all of these critics suffer some unease at the juxtaposition of military and horticultural, and ascribe the invention more or less to the virtuosity of Marvell’s ingenious mind. Without wishing to detract at all from the compliment to the poet (with which I wholeheartedly agree), I would like to show in this chapter that the military and the horticultural do indeed belong together, not only in Upon Appleton House, but in the culture in which Marvell, and Fairfax, lived. In this reading, the militarized garden of Upon Appleton House is an expression of a fundamental wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Printed Images and Early Modern English Literature
• 1 SPACE “The discription of the worlde”: Military, Horticultural, and Technical Illustration and Andrew Marvell's Gardens
• 2 TRUTH The “Way of Dichotomy”:1 Dichotomous Tables and John Milton's Paradise Lost
• 3 ART “Speculatory Ingenuity”:1 Painting, Writing, and Andrew Marvell's “Last Instructions to a Painter”
• 4 NATURE “Surveying Nature, with too nice a view”:1 Naturalistic, Realistic, Anatomical, and Allegorical Animals in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
• Works Cited
• Index