Outlaw Rhetoric

Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England

Jenny C. Mann

• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801464577
• Argomento: Literatur
• Categoria: Literaturkritik des Mittelalters & der Frühen Neuzeit

A central feature of English Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. Thus, one of the main cultural projects of Renaissance rhetoricians was that of producing a "common" vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins yet self-consciously English in character. The process of vernacularization began during Henry VIII's reign and continued, with fits and starts, late into the seventeenth century. However, as Jenny C. Mann shows in Outlaw Rhetoric, this project was beset with problems and conflicts from the start.

Outlaw Rhetoric examines the substantial and largely unexplored archive of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in England between 1500 and 1700. Writers of these guides drew on classical training as they translated Greek and Latin figures of speech into an everyday English that could serve the ends of literary and national invention. In the process, however, they confronted aspects of rhetoric that run counter to its civilizing impulse. For instance, Mann finds repeated references to Robin Hood, indicating an ongoing concern that vernacular rhetoric is "outlaw" to the classical tradition because it is common, popular, and ephemeral. As this book shows, however, such allusions hint at a growing acceptance of the nonclassical along with a new esteem for literary production that can be identified as native to England. Working across a range of genres, Mann demonstrates the effects of this tension between classical rhetoric and English outlawry in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, and Cavendish. In so doing she reveals the political stakes of the vernacular rhetorical project in the age of Shakespeare.

CHAPTER 1

Common Rhetoric

Planting Figures of Speech in the English Shire

Walter Haddon’s dedication to Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric (1560) imagines the translation of rhetoric into English as a modest woman’s journey to a new country.

Sister Logic spoke to her sister Rhetoric whom she recently became acquainted with; the language was English. Rhetoric, struck with great sadness, grew quiet; for she still did not know how to speak in our tongue. Wilson, who had been the teacher of logic and had added our sounds to her, by chance overheard these things. Having consoled silent Rhetoric with friendly words, he addresses himself to her and asks whether she wishes to be English. Casting her eyes downward, she responds that she would willingly but that she is unable to find the way. “I myself,” he says, “shall teach you the ways and the rules of speaking and how to place the English words correctly.” He kept his promise; Rhetoric is arrayed in our language; and each of the two is made our sister. England, if the language of these two noble sisters is dear to you, the language of this author will be dear to you.1

At first glance, this scene in which Logic and Rhetoric converse with a learned man might not appear noteworthy. First published in Latin, its personifications seem familiarly medieval, as representations of scholastic training traditionally depict rhetoric as a woman. This familiarity disappears when Thomas Wilson presumptuously offers to teach a timid and grateful Lady Rhetoric to speak English, which in the poem means helping her to be English (Se vocat et rogitat num esse Britanna velit). In order to be turned English, Rhetoric must first be able to use the English vernacular; she must learn how to “place the English words correctly” (Quomodo perfecte verba Britanna loces). This passage suggests how the use of English might signify a particular place, somewhere to which the metaphorically naked Rhetoric must “find the way [via]” by learning the “ways [vias] and the rules of speaking.” At the close of the passage the poet hails this destination, the nation of “England [Anglia],” urging it to value its native language just as it values the ancient arts of discourse. This exhortation uses the vernacular to conjure a particular location and community, creating a union of language, land, and population according to which speaking English becomes a form of travel to and habitation in the country of England.

Considering the context in which Wilson first composed his English art of rhetoric, the pretense of these verses is almost laughable. In the 1550s the art of rhetoric had little apparent need of “English speaking [verba Britanna].” In fact, quite the contrary: English writers required the tools of rhetoric in order to render the vernacular capable of classical feats of eloquence. When Walter Haddon publishes his dedication in Latin, he confirms that English is not a fit vehicle of conversation among a scholarly coterie. Nevertheless, the content of Haddon’s poem reverses the relationship of dependency between English and Latin, embodying the rhetorical art in a shy lady who requires the instruction of a confident English master. Preposterous though it was, a growing number of writers shared this fantasy of vernacular ascendancy. Given the cultural preeminence of the classical languages, this project required a powerful justification, and the English rhetorics defend their translations as a form of national service. They contend that the newly created eloquent vernacular will establish the territorial identity and integrity of “England,” the final addressee of Haddon’s dedication. The rhetorics thus produce one version of what Richard Helgerson calls the “Elizabethan writing of England,” with England understood as an imagined national community constituted by a shared language and geography.2 Helgerson argues that this burgeoning geographical consciousness was shaped cartographically, but the manuals of English rhetoric suggest another source for such an emphasis on the physical space of the nation. When they ground their translations in the territory of “England,” these manuals localize spatial metaphors already available within the rhetorical tradition. In other words, the “forms of nationhood” depicted in the English handbooks derive from the very rhetorical art they purport to translate.

In this chapter I will examine the rhetorical operations whereby the vernacular language and the island of England become figures for one another, focusing in particular on the spatialization of discourse within the art of rhetoric. In the handbooks produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the spatial dimension lightly suggested in the “ways [viae]” of Haddon’s poem becomes central to the articulation of a native rhetorical practice. The guides describe the process of translation as the transportation of rhetoric to England, while the nation in turn becomes identified as a “garden” or “field” of eloquence. In adopting this spatial model to explain their art, the English rhetorics imitate their classical and Neo-Latin sources, which likewise portray discourse as a spatial field. Thus Quintilian defines “trope” as “language transferred from its natural and principal meaning to another for the sake of embellishment, or (as most grammatici define it), ‘an expression transferred from a context in which it is proper to one in which it is not.’”3 Such metaphors so dominate early modern writing on logic and rhetoric that Walter Ong posits a “spatial logic” as the defining feature of Renaissance epistemology.4 This spatial logic obtains most prominently in the commonplace method of instruction, but it also helps conceptualize figurative language, as in Dudley Fenner’s The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584), which, like Quintilian, defines “trope” as “a garnishing of speech, whereby one word is drawen from his first proper signification to another. . . . This changing of words was first found out by necessitie, for the want of words, afterward confirmed by delight, because such wordes are pleasaunt and gracious too the eare. Therefore this change of signification must be shamefest, and as it were maydenly, that it may seeme rather to be led by the hand to another signification, then to be driuen by force vnto the same.”5 As Patricia Parker explains, such definitions conjure a space of discourse within which tropes move words (verba) and signification (res) from one place to another.6 Because the art of rhetoric often uses such spatial metaphors to theorize its own operations, the translation of rhetoric into English seems to be scripted in advance by the art itself. Thus Fenner’s description of a “maydenly” change of signification reads uncannily like Wilson’s transport of Lady Rhetoric to England. For English translators, theories of figurative language seem to authorize the movement of classical rhetoric to a new locale as a kind of figuration “found out by necessitie.”

The spatial logic of the art of rhetoric takes on a particular construction as the English manuals attempt to create an artful vernacular aligned with the geographic territory of the nation. The phrase most often used by early modern language reformers to describe the nascent national vernacular is the “commen dialecte,” or common language, and the vernacular rhetorics likewise use the term “common” to designate an eloquent vernacular as something shared by all English speakers. As Paula Blank argues, such uses of the term perform a kind of verbal chicanery that allows English writers to posit preferred forms of the vernacular as a national language pertaining to the entire country.7 For example, although it aligns its use of rhetoric with the elite social milieu of the Tudor court, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie describes the “English tong” as the language that is “fully fashioned to the common vnderstanding, and accepted by consent of [the] whole countrey and nation.”8 When deployed in the English rhetorical manuals, which emphasize the particularity of England as a place, the meaning of “common” as a shared plot of land intrudes on this sense of the common language. Thus while instructing English speakers in the Ciceronian art of rhetoric, Thomas Wilson calls on would-be orators not to search for “outlandish English,” but to “speak as commonly received.”9 This is a curious instruction to be levied by a rhetorical manual because the art of rhetoric enables writers to produce language that is distinctive—that is, uncommon. As Puttenham explains, the ornaments of rhetoric “convey” vulgar poesy away “from the common course of ordinary speech,” helping “to make of a rude rimer, a learned and a Courtly Poet.”10 In other words, the use of the phrase “common language” as a marker of shared linguistic identity conflicts with definitions of figurative language as well as the social system that the art of rhetoric helped secure.

The competing imperatives of vernacular rhetoric—that it align itself with the common space of the nation while simultaneously distinguishing itself from common speech—can be understood as the “Englished” version of the historical tension between subject matter (res) and expression (verba) within the rhetorical system. Ancient rhetoric concerns itself with content as much as it does with style, and a basic premise of the art of rhetoric is the inseparability of thought from expression.11 But despite this underlying conviction, rhetoric systematizes its own theory of discourse by artificially dividing content from form, distinguishing what is said from how it is said. The commonplaces and the figures of speech can be understood within the terms of this dichotomy, as the commonplaces provide the matter of discourse while the figures produce style of expression. When the manuals identify the subject matter of vernacular rhetoric as England, they also locate the commonplaces squarely in English territory. Yet although the figures of speech can be similarly “planted” in an English rhetorical field, by their very nature they refuse to remain in a fixed place. Put simply, figures move. Thus while the rhetorical system provides a spatial logic whereby the handbooks can assert the territorial boundaries of vernacular rhetoric, the handbooks struggle to maintain these boundaries when dealing with the figures of speech. Because rhetoric has been made to “speak English,” to be English, the potentially unmanageable movement of the figures also takes on an English cast.12 The references to Robin Hood I cited in the introduction reveal the potentially ...