Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England 9780801464102

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q Outlaw Rhetoric

Outlaw Rhetoric

n

F I G U R I N G V E R N ACU L A R E LO Q U E N CE I N S H A K ESP E A R E ’ S E N G L A N D

Jenny C. Ma nn

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University, which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mann, Jenny C. ( Jenny Caroline), 1978–   Outlaw rhetoric : figuring vernacular eloquence in Shakespeare’s England / Jenny C. Mann.    p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700— History and criticism.  2. Eloquence in ­literature. 3.  Figures of speech in literature.  4. National characteristics, English, in literature.  5.  Rhetoric, Renaissance—England.  6. English language—Rhetoric— Handbooks, manuals, etc.—Early works to 1800. I. Title.   PR418.E45M36  2012   820.9'003—dc23     2011027248 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Guy and the Manns

We have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another; tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not. —Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor”

q Conte nts

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction: A Tale of Robin Hood

1

1. Common Rhetoric: Planting Figures of Speech in the English Shire

29

2. The Trespasser: Displacing Virgilian Figures in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

55

3. The Insertour: Putting the Parenthesis in Sidney’s Arcadia

87

4. The Changeling: Mingling Heroes and Hobgoblins in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

118

5. The Figure of Exchange: Gender Exchange in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 and Jonson’s Epicene

146

6. The Mingle-Mangle: The Hodgepodge of Fancy and Philosophy in Cavendish’s Blazing World

171

Conclusion: “Words Made Visible” and the Turn against Rhetoric

201

Appendix of English Rhetorical Manuals  219 Bibliography  223 Index  237

q I l lustr ations

  1.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), p. 360v   2.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), p. 171   3.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598), sig. A   4. Thomas Blount, The Academy of Eloquence (1654), title page   5. William Shakespeare, Poems (1640), sig. B4   6. Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible (1679), p. 95

90 92 94 95 157 211

ix

q Ack now l edgments

The research and writing of this book have been made possible by the support of family, friends, colleagues, and teachers, and I am glad to have the opportunity to thank them here. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Sidney’s ‘Insertour’: Arcadia, Parenthesis, and the Formation of English Eloquence,” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 460–98. A version of chapter 5 appeared as “The ‘Figure of Exchange’: Shakespeare’s ‘Master Mistress,’ Jonson’s Epicoene, and the English Art of Rhetoric,” Renaissance Drama 38 (2010): 173–98. I would like to acknowledge Arthur Kinney and the editors of English Literary Renaissance at Blackwell Publishing, and Will West and the editors of Renaissance Drama at Northwestern University Press. For their support of my work I am grateful to the Departments of English at Northwestern University and Cornell University. Financial support has been generously provided by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Weinberg College at Northwestern University, the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University, the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the President’s Council of Cornell Women at Cornell University. When I was undergraduate at Yale University, Joseph Roach took me on as a thesis advisee, and tolerantly allowed me to spend an entire year sharing my every thought on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Even more important, he encouraged me to pursue graduate work in the English Department at Northwestern University, now one of the finest places in the country to obtain a doctorate in early modern literary studies. I am grateful to the faculty there who read and responded to the manuscript, including Kasey Evans, Jeffrey Masten, Martin Mueller, Wendy Wall, and Will West. I also thank my fellow graduate students, especially the participants in the Northwestern Early Modern Colloquium and my dear friend Coleman Hutchison. In 2004 I had the good fortune to participate in a Folger Institute seminar on “The Fate of Rhetoric in Early Modern England,” led by John Guillory. xi

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A c k n ow l e d g m e n ts

I had long admired John’s work, and through this seminar I learned that he is also a generous teacher. Much of the early conceptualization of this book derives from the conversations of this seminar, and I thank the other participants, especially Cathy Nicholson and Kirsten Tranter. I also thank the archivists at the Folger Shakespeare Library as well as the staff of the Folger Institute for making my time in the archive so productive, both in 2004 and on a subsequent fellowship in 2010. The arguments of this book have benefited from conversations, suggestions, and insights offered by a generous group of scholars at Cornell University. I am grateful for the contributions of many colleagues, including Rick Bogel, Barbara Correll, Walter Cohen, Stuart Davis, Debby Fried, Philip Lorenz, Bill Kennedy, and Tim Murray. I also thank the participants in the Cornell Society for the Humanities seminar on “Historicizing the Global Postmodern,” including Matt Hart, Suman Seth, and Philip Stern. I am especially grateful to Rayna Kalas and Bernie Meyler for reading the entire manuscript and providing invaluable direction for revision. Rayna I also thank for her friendship and guidance. Jonathan Culler has been my faculty mentor since I arrived at Cornell, and I thank him in particular for directing me to Cornell University Press. I also want to acknowledge all of the friends who have made living in Ithaca for the last five years such a pleasure. This book has been greatly improved by the scrutiny of Cornell University Press reviewers, including Wayne Rebhorn and two anonymous readers. I am grateful for their thorough attention and insightful suggestions. I thank Marie Flaherty-Jones for her attentive copyediting, Kate Mertes for compiling the index, and Susan Specter for her thoughtfulness in steering the book through production. I also offer my sincere thanks to Peter Potter, who has generously read multiple versions of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback at every stage. I feel lucky to have completed the manuscript under his careful guidance. I would like to close by thanking two scholars in particular for helping to bring this book into existence. Wendy Wall has been my most exacting reader, and I always knew a chapter was doing its job when I had finally persuaded her of the logic of its argument. I also owe her a debt of gratitude for discouraging me from specializing in Renaissance tragicomedy. I thank Jeffrey Masten not only for his careful reading of every draft of this book but also for his own work, which brilliantly shows how a historicist engagement with technical aspects of linguistic study can be united with critical methodologies that are attentive to questions of sex, gender, and power. Or, to put it another way, Jeff ’s work shows how seemingly antiquarian interests can produce delightfully scandalous scholarship. Jeff and Wendy have taught

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s      xiii

me how to be a scholar, a colleague, and a mentor, and for that I offer my deepest thanks. This book is dedicated to my family, Karen Mann, John Mann, Tama Baldwin, Annika Mann, Joseph Rheinhardt, and Guy Ortolano. All of them are scholars and writers, and I’m proud to have entered the family business. Because I had the good fortune to be born into such a clan, I’ve never doubted the seriousness and worth of scholarly inquiry, or of a life dedicated to reading, thinking, and writing. I thank my father, John Mann, for bequeathing a love of reading and a reverence for learning, and for his unconditional support of both his daughters. My mother, Karen Mann, offered insightful readings of every line of this book, and her help was essential to its completion. I must also give her credit for introducing me to Shakespeare in the form of a Betamax videocassette of Much Ado about Nothing, and for parenting under the assumption that Shakespeare is appropriate for grade-schoolers. Last, I thank my husband, Guy Ortolano. Like the rest of us, Guy has chosen the life of an academic—although he would want me to mention that he also possesses a great deal of natural athletic ability. He’s a good reader and a fine husband, and I offer him my love and gratitude.

Introduction A Tale of Robin Hood

Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), only the second rhetorical manual to be published in the vernacular, begins by imagining its own rejection by English readers. “Doubt not but that the title of this treatise all straunge vnto our Englyshe eares, wil cause some men at the fyrst syghte to maruayle what the matter of it should meane: yea, and peraduenture if they be rashe of iudgement, to cal it some newe fangle, and so casting it hastily from them, wil not once vouch safe to reade it: and if they do, yet perceiuynge nothing to be therin that pleaseth their phansy, wyl count it but a tryfle, & a tale of Robynhoode.”1 Sherry’s suspicion that his English readers will find the Greek words “scheme” and “trope” “straunge” seems eminently sensible, but the worry that they will dismiss his text as “a tale of Robynhoode” is more peculiar, given that the Treatise is entirely without narrative content—indeed, it consists of little more than a catalog of rhetorical figures of speech. How could Sherry’s text seem both “straunge” and “newe fangle” and also as familiar as a native English folktale? This passage is all the more perplexing when one considers that this association of English rhetoric with tales of Robin Hood is not merely an idiosyncrasy of Sherry’s text. References to Robin Hood periodically recur in English 1.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 2–3. 1

2    

Introduction

rhetorics published in the ensuing decades. Why does the English outlaw of medieval legend lurk around these founding attempts to make classical rhetoric an English art? And what can this union of rhetoric and Robin Hood tell us about vernacular literary production in the early modern period? In Outlaw Rhetoric I take these questions as a starting point for a study of the pursuit of a specifically vernacular eloquence in early modern England, an endeavor that Sherry describes as taking classical figures of speech and making them “speak English.”2 A central feature of Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet despite the cultural authority of classical literature, sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. For generations of literate English speakers who had been taught to read and write using Latin discursive techniques, this project required the elevation of the vernacular to the standards of idealized classical models. Thus the translation of the art of rhetoric into English aimed to create a new vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins but also self-consciously English in character. However, given that many sixteenth-century writers subscribed to the widely held belief that their vernacular language was deficient in comparison to Latin, the formation of an “artful” English language would prove no easy task. Although we now tend to think of rhetorical techniques as applicable across language cultures—after all, the Romans themselves adapted them from Greek—early modern English writers worried that their “barren” and “barbarous” tongue lacked the substance to supply the demands of the ancient art of rhetoric.3 Today, of course, it is commonplace to dwell on the rhetorical accomplishments of celebrated writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare when discussing the development of the English language and literature in the sixteenth century, but it is also important to acknowledge the unease felt by rhetors like Sherry, who feared that English might never overcome its own barbarousness. Rather than focusing exclusively on the “triumphs” of the process of vernacular self-fashioning in the Renaissance, Outlaw Rhetoric follows the approach of scholars such as Paula Blank and Margaret Ferguson, attending instead to moments of nervousness and failure in English rhetorical handbooks— moments when the vernacular language is found to be incompatible with

2.  Ibid., 8. 3.  See R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), chapters 3 and 4.

A TA L E O F RO B I N H OOD      3

the demands of Latin art.4 In their translation of the stylistic ornaments of classical rhetoric, vernacular rhetorical manuals encounter a number of Latin figures of speech that cannot be easily made to “speak English.” These figures expose the technical difficulties in enacting the much broader “translation of learning and empire” (translatio studii et imperii) from classical culture. Yet although such figures frustrate the attempts of their translators to accommodate every aspect of Latin rhetoric in English, I argue that they also provoke the elaboration of a vernacular English poesy born out of the struggle between Latin rule and English material.5 Sherry’s reference to “a tale” of Robin Hood emerges from this very struggle, and it suggests that the inability of English to approximate classical eloquence produces neither silence nor ineloquence, but storytelling.6 Although he wants to distance his rhetorical manual from the idea of Robin Hood, Sherry’s allusion to such a “tale” activates a series of potentially troubling connections between rhetoric and the English outlaw. In addition to associating his rhetorical manual with an act of storytelling, Sherry’s mention of Robin Hood also implicitly locates his vernacular rhetoric in the imagined space of the English countryside, suggesting that the process of linguistic translation is also one of geographic relocation. This geographic movement is reinforced in subsequent allusions to the English outlaw, which likewise affix the idea of vernacular eloquence to a particular place. The story of Robin Hood next appears in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric (1553), where, in recommending a strategy whereby an English speaker can win the attention of an indifferent audience, Wilson shares an unlikely anecdote, in which the greatest Athenian orator uses “a tale of Robin Hood” to capture the goodwill of his auditors. Wilson advises his readers: If [the audience likes] not to hear weighty affairs, we may promise them strange news and persuade them we will make them laugh, and think you not that they will rather hear a foolish tale than a wise and wholesome counsel? Demosthenes, therefore, seeing at a time the fondness 4.  The word “triumph” is meant to evoke Jones’s celebratory mode in The Triumph of the English Language. Blank and Ferguson, meanwhile, emphasize the internal contradictions of this process of vernacularization. Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996) and Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 5.  I use “poesy” here in its broader Renaissance sense to mean imaginative writing, which could encompass prose as well as poetry. 6.  For a study of the failures and breakdowns of vernacular eloquence, including mumbling, stuttering, and lexical confusion, see Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

4    

Introduction

of the people to be such that he could not obtain of them to hear him speak his mind in an earnest cause concerning the wealth of his country, required them to tarry and he would tell them a tale of Robin Hood. Whereat they all stayed and longed to know what that should be. . . . Whereupon Demosthenes, having won them together by this merry toy, rebuked their folly that were so slack to hear good things, and so ready to hear a tale of a tub, and thus having them ­attentive, persuaded with them to hear him in matters of great importance, the which otherwise he could never have done if he had not taken this way with him [sic].7 It is “strange news” indeed that Demosthenes, who lived in the fourth century BCE, would have on hand a repertoire of stories about a medieval English folk hero. This anachronism can be read as a kind of reverse allegory of Wilson’s text, which transports rhetorical techniques from the classical world to Tudor England. This translation is secured by a firm sense of England as a place, the location that makes vernacular eloquence “proper.” As I will show, this spatialization of language itself derives from the rhetorical tradition, especially the formulations of figures of speech, which are said to “move” and “transport” words from one place to another. But this “spatial logic,” to adopt Walter Ong’s term, which might seem to provide a ready model for translating the art of rhetoric to new cultural locales, was not easily applied in an English context.8 The imagined geographies of rhetoric resist translation to England because they were constituted precisely so as to exclude “vulgar” tongues and “vulgar” nations from the space of eloquence properly defined.9 That is, long before the sixteenth century the art of rhetoric had already identified England as a barbarous location, a place where eloquence emphatically does not travel. From the point of view of a humanist committed to this inherited framework, what could be more indecorous than to picture Demosthenes telling merry folktales to a rowdy English audience? 7.  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 134–35. 8.  Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 112. 9.  As Sean Keilen explains, derogatory passages about ancient Britain appear throughout Latin literature, and no less an authority than Virgil writes in the Eclogues that “the Britons lived so far from civilization as to be severed from the whole world” (penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos). Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 15–16. See also Catherine Nicholson, “Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation,” Spenser Studies 23 (2008): 41–72.

A TA L E O F RO B I N H OOD      5

Although the reader never learns the actual content of Demosthenes’ oration, Wilson’s anecdote establishes “the wealth of [the] country” as the proper subject of rhetorical eloquence. Demosthenes’ “foolish tale” of Robin Hood has a complicated relationship to this national subject matter: it digresses from the proper subject of rhetoric, but it also constitutes the only “way” for the orator to lead his listeners to “matters of great importance.” This sense of discursive errancy is doubly present in the allusion to Robin Hood: not only does the “tale of Robin Hood” provide the content of the digression, but it also functions as a byword for physical wandering, as in early modern descriptions of a roundabout journey as “going round by Robin Hood’s barn” and traveling a “Robin Hood’s mile.”10 Indeed, Wilson has already established the connection between Robin Hood and spatial digression in an earlier passage of the Arte, where, in warning orators to avoid unnecessary digressions in their speech, he writes, As for example, if I shall have occasion to speak in open audience of the obedience due to our sovereign king, I ought first to learn what is obedience, and after knowledge attained to direct my reasons to the only proof of this purpose, and wholly to seek confirmation of the same, and not turn my tale to talk of Robin Hood and to show what a goodly archer was he, or to speak wonders of the man in the moon, such as are most needless and farthest from the purpose. For then, the hearer looking to be taught his obedience, and hearing in the mean season mad tales of archery and great marvels of the man in the moon, being halfastonied [sic] at his so great straying, will perhaps say to himself: “Now wither the devil wilt thou; come in man again for very shame, and tell me no by-tales such as are to no purpose, but show me that which thou didst promise both to teach and persuade at thy first entry.”11 This passage describes an inept speaker who has wandered into “talk of Robin Hood” as someone who has physically strayed from acceptable territory: he is asked “wither the devil wilt thou” and told to “come in man again” to the proper space of eloquent speech. Again, as in Sherry’s text, Robin Hood’s name suggests “by-tales,” or even byways, a text that strays from its proper route. Wilson’s formulation associates tales of Robin Hood with wandering,

10.  William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse lists “a Robin Hood’s mile” as a mile several times its usual length. This proverb is collected in the appendix to Stephen Knight’s Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 59, 277. 11.  Wilson, Arte, 121.

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Introduction

unnecessary digression, and social transgression, and the name Robin Hood in turn figures the problem of digression as something peculiarly English. Though Wilson’s manual aims to translate classical rhetoric into the vernacular, the local stuff of English folktales remains as “[far] from the purpose” of this new vernacular eloquence as the man in the moon.12 As my readings have emphasized, what is noteworthy about such references to Robin Hood is the Englishness of the figure as well as his association with popular, oral culture. Unlike King Arthur, who enjoyed a comparable kind of folkloric circulation in England and on the Continent, Robin Hood was a figure of entirely British construction.13 By the 1550s the English outlaw had long been a familiar folk hero, a product of late medieval song who figured prominently in popular culture. The story of Robin Hood was transmitted into early modern culture in a range of elusive forms: snatches of song, ballads, proverbs, broadsides, romances, moral tales, and the plays, pageants, and morris dances of May Day celebrations.14 These modes of delivery were of special concern to Reformation moralists, who disapproved of the minstrels that performed tales of the outlaw hero, accusing them of leading good Christians astray.15 As such responses suggest, tales of Robin Hood were often constructed out of a series of spatialized social transgressions, especially his frequent trespass into the king’s forest.16 Indeed, the defining element of the legend is Robin Hood’s status as a masterless figure living outside of the law in the semiwild of the forest. For suspicious readers, tales of Robin Hood thus threaten to produce a double trespass: in narrating the movements of a vagrant hero, they may also lead audiences to abandon their proper  “place.” The associations evoked by the figure of Robin Hood are simultaneously both enabling and disturbing to the project of English rhetoric. Tales of 12.  George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) also associates Robin Hood with both digression and the violation of social decorum. Puttenham explains that “there is decency in that euery man should talke of the things they haue best skill of, and not in that, their knowledge and learning serueth them not to do, as we are wont to say, he speaketh of Robin hood that neuer shot in his bow.” Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 273. 13.  The British-ness of Robin Hood tends to be emphasized by the legends themselves: as Stephen Knight observes, “He is usually Robin Hood of somewhere, not a country or even a county, but a quite specific spot.” See Knight, Robin Hood, 103, 111. 14.  Knight, Robin Hood; Lois Potter, ed., Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 15.  In a 1549 sermon Bishop Hugh Latimer complained of a visit he had made in the 1530s to a town where the church stood empty on a Sunday because, he was told, “it is Robin Hoodes day. The parishe are gone abroad to gather for Robyn Hoode.” Knight, Robin Hood, 111–12. 16.  Peter Stallybrass, “ ‘Drunk with the cup of liberty’: Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in Early Modern England,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight, 297–328 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999).

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Robin Hood are emphatically English, yet they are also culturally and socially vulgar. The tales attract a wide audience, yet they may divert that audience’s attention from appropriate subject matter. These potentially negative associations with “vulgarity” help explain Sherry’s concern that his translated dictionary of rhetorical figures may be rejected as “a tale of Robynhoode.” In turn, such allusions to the English outlaw in early vernacular rhetorical manuals also remind us that the promise to make classical rhetorical figures “speak English” is a deceptively straightforward way of portraying a fraught—even dangerous—process of translation and transformation. In a pedagogical context, translation was understood as rescuing the discursive treasure of the classical world and carrying it forward to early modern England (translatio means a “carrying across”), but outside the schools this practice risked condemnation as trespass and even thievery.17 The legend of Robin Hood thus emblematizes the worst fears of the English rhetorical manuals: that they will be set aside as an indecorous transgression against the rightful prerogatives of classical art. Though these brief references to Robin Hood are seemingly marginal to the larger project of vernacular rhetoric, I argue that they encode and disclose the situation of vernacular English rhetoric as an outlaw itself, roaming at the margins of the classical tradition. Like tales of Robin Hood, the translation of rhetoric into English upends the cultural hierarchy, potentially turning an art of the trivium into mere storytelling. It may be taken by its readers as irredeemably common, popular, and ephemeral. In its most idealized form, the figure of Robin Hood, thriving in the English greenwood, provides much fertile ground for the valorization of English rhetoric as a national product. However, when these guides mention Robin Hood it is not to celebrate native traditions, but rather so that they can distance themselves from social inferiority, unnecessary digression, and trifling storytelling. If one were to mistake such “by-tales” for all of English rhetoric, as Sherry worries, then vernacular rhetoric itself risks dismissal as an indecorous digression, an outlaw. Despite Sherry’s and Wilson’s attempts to forestall any identification of vernacular rhetoric with stories of Robin Hood, I take the English outlaw as a figure for an outlying vernacular rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth 17.  The etymological confluence of “translation” and “trespass” leads Patricia Parker to argue that the lexical transports of figures such as metaphor can easily become understood as forms of trespass, transgression, and alienation. Parker, “The Metaphorical Plot,” in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 36–53. Paula Blank argues more specifically that discursive thievery was a key framework through which vernacular self-fashioning was understood in the sixteenth century. Blank, Broken English, 33–68.

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Introduction

centuries. Moreover, in addition to reading Robin Hood as a trope for an English rhetoric eager to deny its own outlaw status, I also consider the transformation of the art of rhetoric into a collection of stories and tales as a key result of the translation of classical rhetoric in the early modern period. In the chapters that follow, I argue that this correlation of rhetoric, translation, and storytelling moves far beyond the confines of vernacular rhetorical manuals, and that the transformation of classical figures of speech into English stories becomes a characteristic feature of vernacular literary production at the end of the sixteenth century. Outlaw Rhetoric thus follows the by-tales and byways traversed by vernacular rhetoric’s outlaw figures, arguing that this very journeying around the margins of classical rhetoric produces a distinctively English eloquence in the early modern period.

Renaissance Studies and the Empire of Rhetoric [Rhetoric is] a veritable empire, greater and more tenacious than any political empire in its dimensions and its duration. . . . Rhetoric—whatever the system’s internal variations may have been—has prevailed in the West for two and a half millennia, from Gorgias to Napoleon III; if we consider all that it has seen—watching immutable, impassive, and virtually immortal—come to life, pass, and vanish without itself being moved or changed: Athenian democracy, Egyptian kingdoms, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the great invasions, feudalism, the Renaissance, the monarch, the French Revolution; it has digested regimes, religions, civilizations; moribund since the Renaissance, it has taken three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now. —Roland Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire”

Always central to an understanding of Renaissance writing, our understanding of rhetoric’s influence on early modern culture has grown considerably since the middle of the twentieth century, and consequently we have a better sense than ever before of rhetoric’s prominent place in the wider spectrum of learning in the European Renaissance.18 Whereas once the art of rhetoric was defined in a limited fashion as a pedagogical technique—a

18.  The work on Renaissance rhetoric, both generally and in its specifically English uses and contexts, has been extensive and varied, and so my notes can only begin to make reference to the most central texts in that tradition. For examinations of the influence of rhetoric on Renaissance prose and poetry, see Morris Croll, “Attic” and Baroque Prose Style: Essays by Morris Croll, ed. J. M. Patrick and R. O. Evans, with J. M. Wallace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Rosamund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947); Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970); Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

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means of teaching boys to speak and write eloquently—we now see it not just as a method of schooling but as a defining mode of intellectual inquiry, knowledge production, and social negotiation.19 Rhetoric provided the gateway to learning in the postmedieval world, the method through which all other subjects were apprehended, and its practices extend far beyond schoolroom exercises. Scholars such as Nancy Struever, Joel Altman, and Victoria Kahn have traced the connections between rhetorical theory and modes of political and religious argument, identifying rhetoric as the practice responsible for generating a humanist culture committed to skepticism and debate.20 In addition to recovering the wide influence of rhetoric’s discursive techniques, literary critics have also exposed the ideological content of rules for rhetorical “style,” reminding us that standards of eloquent speech can be established only with reference to particular social situations. Because its handbooks make explicit the commonplace assumptions of Renaissance culture, as Wayne Rebhorn argues, the art of rhetoric can be analyzed as an anthropological guide to the early modern world as well as a theory of verbal expression.21 As a result of this attention to the social particularity of rhetorical discourse, Renaissance rhetoric is now treated as historically distinct from its classical and medieval forbears, and like the epoch in which it flourished, inflected with absolutist politics.22 The most prominent Renaissance rhetorics in use in England were written in Latin, but a small number of previously obscure vernacular rhetorical handbooks have gained visibility in literary criticism since the 1980s as scholars have turned to them for evidence of poetry’s function as a medium

19.  For examples of this older perspective on rhetoric and pedagogy, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944); Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). 20.  Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 21.  Rebhorn writes, “To put it simply, rhetoric speaks culture, providing a language in which human beings articulate themselves and their world. Upon analysis, the discourse can thus be seen to contain, at the very least, an anthropology, a sociology, a politics, an ethics, and a theology—all of which become visible as one examines its assumptions and assertions, its judgments and evaluations concerning human nature, the social order, the nature of power, and the workings of the universe.” Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 12. 22.  In locating early modern rhetoric firmly in its historical moment, Rebhorn revises what had been the “usual” view of Renaissance rhetoric—as a discourse committed to skepticism, dialogue, and debate—in order to argue that “Renaissance rhetoric is animated by a fantasy of power in which the orator  . . . emerges victorious in every encounter” (ibid., 15).

10    

Introduction

of political conflict and social mobility within Elizabethan culture.23 This scholarship reads both poetry and courtly behavior as manifestations of the same rhetorical system, with a common set of tropes yoking the productions of literature and history within a single cultural text. Handbooks of English rhetoric—especially George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), which promises to pull its readers from the “carte” to the “Court”—thus enabled the founding arguments of New Historicism, providing critics such as Louis Adrian Montrose, Frank Whigham, and Patricia Parker with one version of what Stephen Greenblatt eventually termed a “poetics of culture.”24 Through such scholarship, the insights of a cultural history of rhetoric have been used to outline a kind of alternate Elizabethan world picture, with the social cosmologies of the early modern world made visible through the functioning of the discursive techniques of the rhetorical tradition. This influential work on vernacular rhetoric has relied heavily on Wilson’s and Puttenham’s handbooks, with the result that English rhetoric has often been viewed as synonymous with courtly self-presentation. The identification of the art of rhetoric as a “motivated discourse” that links rhetorical forms with historically specific ideological frameworks has provided an interpretive opportunity to scholars hoping to unite formalist and historicist approaches to early modern literary studies. Once one acknowledges that the discourse of rhetoric is deeply implicated in the social and political order that produces it, it becomes possible to analyze rhetorical forms such as figures of speech not only as vehicles of local literary effects but also as instruments of wider cultural significance. To quote Parker’s influential formulation, “It is precisely such a concern with language and its ordering structures which might lead us to re-pose the question of moving beyond formalism, differently.”25 Thus the essays collected in Renaissance Figures of Speech (2007) can plausibly claim that a case study of a dozen rhetori23.  Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Louis Adrian Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50, no. 3 (1983): 415–59; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 24.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 304; see also the introduction to the recent modern edition of The Arte of English Poesie, edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). For important New Historicist work on Puttenham, see previous note as well as Parker, Literary Fat Ladies and Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser, 1–14 (New York: Routledge, 1989). For an analysis of the centrality of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie to the theorization of New Historicism, see Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 25.  Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 7.

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cal figures synthesizes formalist and historicist methodologies.26 Most often what is meant by the term “historicist” in such formulations is not a materialist or sociological analysis, but rather the situation of particular figures of rhetoric “in their place in the larger rhetorical system,” as well as the situation of the art of rhetoric itself “in its place in Renaissance literate culture.”27 The term “formalist,” meanwhile, tends to encompass post-structuralist modes of analysis, which is likely the reason why the figures of speech have attracted more interest than other categories of rhetoric, such as the various parts of an oration (i.e., exordium, narratio, etc.). Yet despite the now general assent to the proposition that the Renaissance art of rhetoric is inextricably entwined with the culture that produced it, and that to examine the forms of rhetoric is to think historically about the rules for language use in early modern culture, there has been no attempt to isolate and analyze the invention of a specifically English art of rhetoric in the sixteenth century. The most influential scholarship on rhetoric and English literature has considered the discourse of Renaissance rhetoric either in its broadest sense as a humanist, and thus Neo-Latin, European phenomenon, or in a very narrow sense, relying heavily on a few familiar vernacular handbooks.28 As my introductory discussion of Robin Hood suggests, I am interested in the incompatibilities between Latin and vernacular rhetoric, and how English rhetors, poets, and playwrights cope with those incompatibilities, often transforming them into literary opportunities. Outlaw Rhetoric thus responds to previous scholarship by both narrowing its focus (from the discourse of Renaissance rhetoric in its entirety) and expanding it (beyond the handbooks of Wilson and Puttenham), examining the full range of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in the period. This archive reveals a widespread interest in and market for a “common” English rhetoric, derived from classical art yet yoked to the local countryside. These rhetorical manuals take a variety of disparate forms—including translations of Aristotle and Cicero, letter-writing manuals, collections of orations, and dictionaries of figures of speech—but collectively they seek to render “England” the proper subject matter of vernacular rhetoric. If thinking historically about 26.  The editors describe their aim as follows: “To provide a synthesis of formalist and historicist approaches, attending equally to the linguistic specificity of the figures as forms of words and to the historical specificity of their functions in Renaissance writing and their power as formative influences on Renaissance thought and culture.” Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12. 27.  Ibid., 1. 28.  I am referring alternately to the research of Rebhorn and Quentin Skinner and the New Historicist analyses of rhetoric cited above. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

12    

Introduction

rhetoric requires that the forms and procedures of the art of rhetoric be put in their proper “place,” then according to the English manuals, the place of vernacular rhetoric is England. Studied as a group, the vernacular manuals and their allusions to England suggest how, in addition to organizing social behavior in the Renaissance court, the ideal of rhetorical eloquence also offered a means of a broader national self-fashioning.29 At the same time that the Protestant Reformation was producing new forms of religious and political community in the sixteenth century, English antiquarians were coming to awareness of their nation’s status as a former colony of the Roman Empire. As Richard Helgerson argues, in a compensatory response to this new sense of their postcolonial situation, many writers began to cultivate imperial ambitions of their own, fantasizing about planting English language and culture in the New World.30 As a sign of the military and cultural might of the Greco-Roman empires, rhetorical eloquence offered a paradigm for English writers eager to reimagine their native language and culture.31 It also promised to vest ambitious writers with imaginative power over the constitution of the national community.32 Vernacularizing their rhetoric, English writers began to use the tools of their humanist education to nurture native pride, drawing on classical tradition as the inspiration for a vernacular culture that would displace England’s barbarous past.

29.  According to Richard Helgerson’s influential argument, the sixteenth century marked an era of increasing national consciousness in English writing. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For an argument that traces this national consciousness even earlier into the Henrician era, see Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 30.  Helgerson cites Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus (1599) as evidence of English self-awareness of their own vernacular as a colonized language and culture, and the resultant recourse to fantasies of overseas linguistic expansion. After conceding that England is indeed a “scarce-discerned Ile, / Thrust from the world,” Musophilus forecasts an imperial future for England and its language, predicting that “worlds in th’yet vnformed Occident / May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours.” Helgerson, “Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and the Early Modern English Nation,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (1998): 289–299, 290, and Samuel Daniel, Musophilus: Containing a General Defense of All Learning, ed. Raymond Himelick (West Lafayette: Purdue University Studies, 1965), 961–62. 31.  The techniques of classical rhetoric provided a script for what Ian Smith calls a “national masquerade,” “a performance whose goal is the imputation of linguistic status and, in turn, its classical complements: geographic and racial hegemony.” Ian Smith, “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 168–86, 173. See also Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 32.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). This formulation has been important to critical work on early modern forms of nationhood; see Shrank, Writing the Nation, 3–7.

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Contextual histories of the rhetorical tradition thus tend to emphasize its “imperial” status, both because it was invented and elaborated during the Greek and Roman empires, and also because it has transcended all such historical empires to form a millennia-long “veritable empire” of eloquence. However, as this book will show, critical frameworks that stress rhetoric’s embedded imperial agenda can obscure the emphasis on England in the vernacular manuals. A focus on England as a particular place, a geographic territory inhabited by an ideally united community of native English speakers, permeates the discourse of vernacular rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, Richard Rainolde unites these strands of vernacularity, land, and nation in the apology for his Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563): “Many famous menne and greate learned, haue in the Greke tongue and otherwise trauailed, to profite all tymes their countrie and common wealthe. This also was my ende and purpose, to plante a worke profitable to all tymes, my countrie and common wealthe.”33 In his Garden of Eloquence (1577), Henry Peacham declares even more simply that by translating classical figures of speech into English, he aims “to profyte this my country.”34 This interest in capitalizing on rhetorical techniques in order to sustain the demands of a local, domestic context is no major innovation insofar as ideas of “home” were always as much a part of classical rhetoric’s ideological script as fantasies of expansionist enterprise. Rebhorn traces such metaphors to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which distinguishes between the polítikos (ordinary, domestic) and the xénos (“unhomelike”) in its discussion of appropriate style.35 As Kathy Eden has shown, “home” is also a guiding metaphor within the Roman rhetorical tradition, particularly in Quintilian’s discussions of rhetoric’s most significant metatechnical procedures: decorum (a principle whereby one’s oration is rendered fitting to the occasion) and oeconomia (a principle of order in the arrangement of one’s speech).36 Decorum and oeconomia are metaphorized as procedures that make strange things seem 33.  Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, 1563 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1969), a.ii.v. 34.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), A.iii.v. 35.  Aristotle insists that an appropriately elevated style will have an “unhomelike” quality, but that the rhetor also needs to conceal this outlandishness, since what is natural persuades an audience more than what is obviously artificial. Later writers adopt this distinction between the polítikos and the xénos; however, as Rebhorn demonstrates, Roman and Renaissance rhetorics insist that only the “homelike” can be truly decorous. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 3.2.6–7, and Rebhorn, “Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Renaissance Rhetoric,” Intertexts 4, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 3–24, 5–6. 36.  Quintilian describes the discursive impact of these rhetorical strategies by likening a successful oration to a cohesive social unit in which “different facts will not seem like perfect strangers thrust into uncongenial company from distant places, but will be united with what precedes and

14    

Introduction

f­ amiliar, ­rendering alien or foreign elements at home within the oikos, or “household,” and writers from Plutarch to Augustine to Erasmus continue to thematize the production and interpretation of rhetoric as a journey home.37 In other words, and in epic terms, the art of rhetoric shares a plot with the Odyssey as well as the Aeneid, and to ignore the homeward thrust of the rhetorical system in favor of its imperial ambition is to understand only part of its legacy in Renaissance Europe. Outlaw Rhetoric follows rhetoric homeward to England by focusing on the broader archive of vernacular rhetorical handbooks, texts that aim to domesticate foreign rhetorical devices and make the figures of speech “familier,” part of what Sherry calls “oure owne natiue broode.”38 These handbooks imagine not just an imperial English vernacular, but also a “common” English vernacular, one achieved by positing the English “country” as the selfcontained place of rhetorical eloquence. Nevertheless, as the Robin Hood references suggest, in transporting rhetoric away from its classical domus and relocating it in a new English home, the vernacular manuals also engage in trespass and thievery. Moreover, they threaten to overwhelm their vernacular with foreign devices and “stranger” words. As a result, although the English manuals follow the procedures set out by the classical art in order to carry rhetoric to England, the vernacular rhetoric thus produced is inevitably an outlaw rhetoric. As its title suggests, this book dwells on the implications of that predicament for ­English writing in the early modern period, which aims to domesticate a foreign eloquence without alienating the vernacular from its “native” speakers.

Translating Rhetoric into English The common scholemasters be wont in readynge, to saye unto their scholars: Hic est figura: and sometimes to ask them, Per quam figuram? —Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes

The charged combination of aspiration and inferiority that characterizes early modern perceptions of the English language and its relationship to Latin literature has its origins in the educational methods of the sixteenth-century

follows by an intimate bond of union.” Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 29–30. The quotation from Quintilian is Eden’s translation. 37.  Ibid., 3–4. 38.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 3. For an examination of English attempts to redefine the relationship between language and place in theories of vernacular eloquence, see Catherine Nicholson, “Geographies of Eloquence” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008).

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humanist school. The program of humanist education revived the Roman vision of the studia humanitatis, instituting a curriculum directed toward the texts of the classical world. Humanist reforms of English education produced a surprisingly uniform national school system oriented around a Latin pedagogy, whereby the sons of prosperous yeomen, burgesses, country gentry, and professional men, as well as the lower ranks of the nobility, received training in the art of rhetoric.39 As Peter Mack has shown, Elizabethan grammar schools did not provide a full course in classical rhetoric, but rather instilled a range of rhetorical skills aimed at reading and composition. These skills included the use of moral sentences, rhetorical topics, commonplaces, and figures of rhetoric, among others.40 The ability to produce figurative expressions was especially valued, and schoolboys were drilled by their masters until they could easily recognize and reproduce the linguistic features of rhetorical style. These pedagogical techniques provided the means through which schoolmasters trained their students to comprehend the texts of ancient culture, training that also prepared future secretaries and clerics to produce letters and sermons of their own. As this brief summary suggests, the pedagogy of the sixteenth-century grammar school was narrowly devoted to the production of style in language. As Richard Halpern observes, it is as if the entire Tudor educational system was adopted so as to train successful poets, playwrights, and pamphleteers.41 There were some educational reformers, most prominently Francis Bacon, who criticized the emphasis on stylistic eloquence in school training, but most educational theorists understood this training to be the best entry to advanced learning.42 This education endowed English boys with a series of rhetorical habits, a set of discursive techniques through which they were expected to achieve their place in early modern society. Many of these young scholars went on to Oxford or Cambridge, where college statutes required the study of classical manuals of the whole art of rhetoric. Although not every student would have pursued a rigorous course of rhetoric at the 39.  The classical writings on the ars rhetorica used in schools include the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De inventione and De oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. These Roman works were supplemented by Neo-Latin textbooks such as Erasmus’s De copia, Mosellanus’s De schematibus et tropis, and Susenbrotus’s Epitome troporum ac schematorum. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 32–65. For a comprehensive accounting of grammar school and university education in the art of rhetoric, see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially chapter 1. 40.  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 32–46. 41.  Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21. 42.  Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 24–25.

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Introduction

university level, rhetorical doctrines were widely used in the reading of classical texts, as well as in studies of history, ethics, and natural philosophy.43 Throughout the educational system, then, rhetoric was linked both to the analysis of ancient texts and the composition of new ones. In addition to rhetoric’s wide transmission through the educational system, a flood of printed material was produced on the subject throughout the early modern period.44 In keeping with humanist practice, the majority of rhetorical texts appeared in Latin, but between 1530 and 1680 at least forty rhetorical guides were produced in English, including manuscript as well as printed texts.45 Although many of these handbooks constitute English versions of standard grammar-school textbooks—including letter-writing manuals, dictionaries of figures of speech, and collections of exemplary orations known as progymnasmata—these guides were never included in grammar school or university curricula.46 The absence of English guides from early modern syllabi and the frequency with which standard Latin textbooks were reprinted evidence the marginalization of English rhetoric within educational culture.47 Likely used as cribs by students having difficulty with Latin 43.  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 51, 74–75. 44.  James J. Murphy calculates that more than a thousand treatises of rhetoric were produced in Western Europe during the early modern era. See Murphy, “One Thousand Neglected Authors,” in Renaissance Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy, 20–36 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Extrapolating from the number of rhetorical works published in the period, Brian Vickers estimates that several million Europeans who lived between 1400 and 1700 had a working knowledge of rhetoric. Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 256. 45.  See the appendix for a complete list of manuals consulted for this book. My archive begins with the first rhetorical manual published in English, Leonard Cox’s The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (1530), and concludes just after the publication of Samuel Shaw’s Words Made Visible (1679), which is the first vernacular rhetorical manual to seriously criticize rhetoric’s cultural influence. My research has been aided by the bibliography contained in Gerald P. Mohrmann, “Oratorical Delivery and Other Problems in Current Scholarship on English Renaissance Rhetoric,” in Renaissance Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy, 68–83 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). In tallying the number of English rhetorics at forty, I consider significantly revised second editions as distinct guides. Thus, for example, I count Henry Peacham’s 1577 and 1593 editions of The Garden of Eloquence as two rhetorics. I also include manuscript rhetorics held at the British Library and Folger Shakespeare Library. 46.  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 77. 47.  Popular Neo-Latin rhetorics such as Erasmus’s De copia (1512), Mosellanus’s Table (c. 1529), and Susenbrotus’s Epitome (1541) went through at least thirty-five printings. By way of contrast, with the exception of Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric (1553), which went through seven editions before 1600, English rhetorics were rarely reprinted. However, although the vernacular rhetorics were not reprinted with the frequency of Latin manuals, they were continuously printed during the later part of the sixteenth century, indicating the persistence of a market for such texts. Even more important, the content of the handbooks indicates that Philip Sidney’s Arcadia was widely regarded as a handbook of English rhetoric. If one takes frequency of publication as an indication of cultural value, then the wide circulation of the Arcadia, reprinted more than a dozen times before 1700, suggests the prominence of vernacular rhetoric in English culture.

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texts, by law students training at the Inns of Court, and by English speakers needing assistance with various forms of written discourse, vernacular handbooks made bits and pieces of the technical language of the art of rhetoric available to individuals outside the school system.48 They also show how English writers—mainly schoolmasters and secretaries—were beginning to bring the vernacular into what were originally classical technical contexts, employing the Latin language to reacquire a superior version of their mother tongue.49 The latter has spurred the research of this book, for it suggests how such manuals are a valuable, and still relatively neglected, resource for literary critics and historians hoping to understand the process of vernacular selffashioning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part of a movement of vernacular reform still in its infancy in the midsixteenth century, the figures of rhetoric became vehicles for the importation of classical art into English, with all the uncertainties that such a project entailed. At first glance, the English rhetorics seem ill equipped to bear the weight of such a claim, and scholars of rhetoric have not taken these documents particularly seriously. When read alongside canonical works of classical and Neo-Latin rhetoric, the vernacular handbooks appear as abbreviated, irregular documents, texts that bear only a nominal relation to the elaborate ars mapped in the Roman rhetorics of Cicero and Quintilian. Cicero describes five parts of rhetoric in his De inventione, including invention (inventio), the discovery of the material of the speech; arrangement (dispositio), the placement of that material in an appropriate order; style (elocutio), the artful expression of the speech; memory (memoria), the memorization of the speech; and delivery (  pronuntiatio), the use of voice and gesture to deliver the speech. These English manuals, however, concern themselves mainly with issues of style, and while there exists one handbook modeled on the full Ciceronian rhetoric—Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric—the majority of the guides focus on elocutio, the part of rhetoric concerned with linguistic ornament.50 Judging 48.  Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 70; Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 76, 80; Brian Vickers, “Some Reflections on the Rhetoric Textbook,” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 82. In a representative statement, the title page of John Stockwood’s Treatise of the Figures (1652) describes its aim as “for the help of the weaker sort in the Grammar Schools.” Stockwood, The Treatise of the Figures (London: Roger Norton, 1652). 49.  Rebhorn explains that for the writers of these handbooks, the production of an art of rhetoric helped accrue intellectual status, and thus credentials for a future career as a teacher or secretary. The dedications of these guides also allowed their authors to bid for aristocratic patronage. Rebhorn, Emperor of Men’s Minds, 7. 50.  The major sources for the stylistic tradition are Cicero’s Orator as well as the fourth book of the anonymously written Rhetorica ad Herennium and the eighth and ninth books of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 116.

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Introduction

by the evidence of the manuals, it would seem that the ornaments of style proved to be the most vendible aspects of the ancient art of rhetoric, constituting what Robert Matz identifies as a form of cultural capital available for purchase by those outside the circle of Latin learning.51 Although it is difficult to generalize about such an eclectic archive of texts, the English guides commonly begin with a brief prefatory letter enumerating the value of the art of rhetoric as well as its political and social utility, and then organize the body of the guide in a series of chapters divided according to stylistic topics (“To Amplify”) or figures of speech (“Metaphor,” “Synecdoche”). This emphasis on style prevails even before the educational reforms of the French humanist Petrus Ramus, who campaigned against perceived redundancies within the theories of the liberal arts, particularly the appearance of invention and disposition in both the arts of logic and rhetoric. Ramus’s rhetorical textbooks were first published in the 1540s, and by the end of the sixteenth century his theories had been widely adopted in English schools, where invention and disposition became apportioned to the art of logic alone, and style became taught as the first part of rhetoric.52 The impact of this shift reverberates in the English manuals, and from the 1580s onward none of the vernacular rhetorics provides instruction in rhetorical invention or disposition. Stylistic concerns so dominate the English handbooks that Mack refers to all Tudor rhetorics as versions of a single “architext”: the Renaissance English style manual.53 It is this emphasis on style that has done most to consign the English manuals to their currently marginal position in the larger history of rhetoric, and part of the burden of this book is to justify extensive and exclusive attention to the archive of vernacular rhetoric.54 The English handbooks contract rhetoric’s vast field of competence to a theory of figurative language, engaging in what Gérard Genette calls the “tropological reduction.”55 Because the 51.  Robert Matz, “Poetry, Politics, and Discursive Forms: The Case of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie,” Genre 30, no. 3 (1997): 195–213. 52.  See Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 147. 53.  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 84. 54.  In a statement representative of this widely held view, Thomas Conley writes, “On the whole, the English rhetorics of this period were derivative, not much more than translations or patchworks of close paraphrase of Continental authorities who wrote their treatises in the traditional Latin.” Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 134. 55.  Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 105. This process, whereby rhetoric became synonymous with “trope,” reached its culmination in the twentieth century with Roman Jakobson’s condensation of all rhetoric into only two figures of speech: metaphor and metonymy. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” The Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956).

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bulk of the English rhetorics do not treat either invention or arrangement, rhetoric emerges in their pages as an art of ornamentation rather than composition, a practice oriented toward style rather than content. The classical topoi and loci, the commonplaces that furnish the substance of an oration, are apparently absent from these rhetorics. And although the English guides did not determine the pedagogy of the humanist school, rhetoric eventually narrowed its focus there as well, a move that proved fatal to the art’s prestige at the end of the seventeenth century. From Plato onward rhetoric had long weathered accusations of epistemological deficiency, but when early modern theorists confined rhetoric to matters of linguistic ornament, the distinguished art could no longer be defended against such attacks. Rhetoric ceased to count as a mode of knowledge production and became instead, in the words of Roland Barthes, “what comes afterwards.”56 Controversies about the place and function of rhetoric in English culture from the 1660s on often took the form of a debate over whether English speech should be “plain” or “figured,” whether rhetorical ornament produced too great a distance between words and things. The art became diminished, so much so that it remains difficult to recall rhetoric’s institutional identity and cultural force in the premodern world. Yet as I argue in the pages that follow, the subject matter of traditional rhetoric did not disappear entirely from the pages of the English manuals, but instead moved inside the catalog of figures of speech.57 True, the English guides shrink rhetoric’s focus from invention to style, but their explication of the figures is animated by a sense of place that provides a covert content, the subject matter (res) animating what is in effect an explosion of words (verba). The English “country” provides the topoi or loci of vernacular eloquence—or, put another way, the commonplace material of vernacular rhetoric is “England.” At the same time, as the list of rhetorical figures grows longer and the taxonomies more elaborate—the first edition of Peacham’s Garden includes nearly two hundred figures of speech—the English guides unwittingly convey the impossibility of mastering vernacular speech within a stable, national system of discourse. The unmasterability of the figures of speech expresses what Terence Cave calls an essential truth of 56.  Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 34. 57.  The English rhetorics, like their classical and Neo-Latin models, carefully distinguish among the figures, apportioning the devices of style to a variety of subcategorizations including tropes, schemes, figures of words, and figures of thought. In imitation of Richard Lanham, I will refer to all of the ornaments under the general heading of “figures.” Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 116.

20    

Introduction

the rhetorical system: its tendency toward discursive wandering and verbal play.58 The system of rhetoric might establish a field of proper language use, but the figures of speech ignore those limits and turn, move, and reshape language, conjuring a sense of infinite displacement that undermines the pretenses of the art. Because the vernacular manuals strive so intensely to ground their translations in an idea of England, these unruly, wandering figures of speech take on a distinctly English shape in the manuals, becoming potential outlaws akin to Robin Hood. By focusing on the content of the figures of speech at this crucial moment in the formation of the English vernacular, I emphasize what might be called their “historicity” or cultural specificity rather than their formal continuity with their classical models and modern descendants. My approach thus differs from those studies that treat the art of rhetoric transhistorically, and does not assume continuity between classical rhetorics and their Renaissance adaptations.59 The vernacular guides I examine celebrate the transplantation of rhetoric to England as a form of service to the “country,” and at the same time they worry that because of its outlaw status, their English rhetoric will fail to meet the standards of linguistic decorum instituted by humanist pedagogy, allowing women and social underlings to trespass onto the rightful property of elite Latin art. This agonistic drama of translation—a drama in which efforts to achieve classical eloquence seem only to confirm English barbarity, while compromising the authority of cultural elites—manifests in the disposition of the vernacular figures of speech. A small number of English rhetorics attempt to displace the charge of linguistic and cultural trespass from English rhetoric as a whole to a smaller subset of figures by designating a series of previously unremarkable figures within the rhetorical catalog as “disorderly” or otherwise troubling to vernacular eloquence. Most of these figures are schemes, that is, figures that organize changes in word order and thus allow the writer to deviate from customary speech. Such figures are effective ornamental devices in inflected languages such as Latin, but threaten to confound sense in a word-order dependent language such as English. As a result, they become refigured as 58.  Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xviii. 59.  In leveling this critique at Vicker’s work, among others, Rebhorn writes, “Ironically, the literary work may be seen as the product of a specific era, but the rhetoric it supposedly rehearses belongs to no time or place; what such rhetorical readings have entailed in practice is the relating of literary texts to a rhetoric that is usually an amalgamation of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian” (Emperor of Men’s Minds, 19). Contra this view of the Renaissance as a direct “revival” of classical antiquity, Rebhorn argues that “the discourse of rhetoric in the Renaissance is historically distinct from everything that precedes it” (ibid., 10). See also Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry.

A TA L E O F RO B I N H OOD      21

outlandish tropes within a vernacular rhetoric already struggling against its own outlaw status, and are banished to chapters and appendixes at the periphery of the printed manuals. Very few of these newly designated outlaw figures have attracted the attention of literary scholars, but they include some of the most prominent devices of Latin literature.60 Take, for example, the figure hyperbaton, a rhetorical scheme that transposes words within a sentence, as in the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arms and the man I sing” (Arma virumque cano). Quintilian describes hyperbaton as “the transposition of a word, [which] is often demanded by the structure of the sentence and the claims of elegance, and is consequently counted among the ornaments of style.”61 Yet despite the imprimatur of classical authority, and the fact that hyperbaton could be fairly easily accommodated in vernacular writing, Puttenham’s English rhetoric disparages the “disorder” fomented by hyperbaton’s transpositions, renaming the figure the “Trespasser” and explaining that “because such disorder may be committed many wayes it receiueth sundry particulars vnder him, whereof some are onely proper to the Greekes and Latines and not to vs, other some ordinarie in our manner of speaches, but so foule and intollerable as I will not seeme to place them among the figures, but do raunge them as they deserue among the vicious or faultie speeches.”62 Figures such as hyperbaton force English rhetors to confront the incommensurability of classical art and vernacular expression, and, like Puttenham, some of the more assertive manuals manage the problem by declaring such figures troubling or even “intollerable” in English writing. Given that such figures of speech were so uncontroversial in classical rhetoric, and that they were subsequently adopted in English writing with little apparent trouble, it is important to understand why they are identified as problematic at precisely the moment when the English vernacular first asserts itself as a language capable of classical eloquence. Such reclassifications

60.  One exception is the figure hysteron proteron, otherwise known as the “preposterous,” which has been extensively examined by Patricia Parker as well as Joel Altman. Discussions of this figure, in which what should come last comes first, and vice versa, thus putting “the cart before the horse,” have primarily focused on its function as a trope for social disorder, rather than its specifically formal effects in English expression. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 67–69; Parker, “Preposterous Events,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 186–213; Parker, “Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events: From Late to Early Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 20–55; and Joel B. Altman, “ ‘Preposterous Conclusions’: Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello,” Representations, no. 18 (Spring 1987): 129–157. 61.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.6.62–63. 62.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 180.

22    

Introduction

are not systematic, and they did not have lasting influence within the broader rhetorical tradition, but they nevertheless reveal the problems associated with the project of English rhetoric at the moment of its inception. Because although these syntactically disruptive figures are periodically sent to “raunge” at the margins of English rhetoric, the problem of disorder continues to haunt the project of vernacular rhetoric as a whole, which risks condemnation as a transgression against the prerogatives of classical art. I consider this dilemma to be the defining “plot” of English rhetoric in the sixteenth century: in subordinating Latin figures of speech to the strictures of vernacular grammar, such translations inadvertently reconfirm English rhetoric’s outsider status, creating a tension between order and outlawry that cannot be resolved in the manuals. Thus Puttenham can say of hyperbaton only that it is sometimes “ordinarie,” sometimes “intollerable.” Moreover, I argue that these unruly figures of speech carry this plot into vernacular literary productions by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. As might be expected from such a “fugitive” art as Renaissance poesy, these literary texts are not nearly so concerned to contain the effects of the outlaw figures.63 Outlaw Rhetoric draws on the evidence of vernacular rhetorical manuals to interpret the effects of this process of linguistic translation and exchange on English literary productions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I focus in particular on the productive, reciprocal transit between disorderly figures of speech and larger structures of discourse. In so doing, I understand myself to be building most directly on the work of Patricia Parker, who argues that figures of speech are wellsprings of Renaissance literary forms.64 63.  Here I am quoting Helgerson, who writes that Elizabethans understood poetry to be “a fugitive and licentious toy.” Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 23. As Halpern argues, poetry “embodie[s] the ideological instabilities of rhetoric by representing a textual decoding without limits.” Thus the discourse of poesy often employs figurations of vagrancy and errancy to depict its own lawlessness. See Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 57, 60. 64.  As in the case of dilatio, a concept of stylistic amplification that Parker presents as a font of the narrative digressions characteristic of Renaissance romance. See Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Parker also argues that classical and Renaissance descriptions of figures of speech generate a variety of quasi-literary plots, as in discussions of metaphor, which figure the trope as a foreigner that usurps the proper place of the original term. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 37. In perhaps her most well-known treatment of a single figure, Parker argues that hysteron proteron, otherwise known as the “preposterous,” a rhetorical figure that reverses the order of first and last in a sentence, produces not only verbal but also social and hierarchical reversals in English writing. According to Parker’s analysis of the figure’s force in Shakespeare’s work, such reversals of priority and ordered sequence generate not only sentence-level inversions but also the interruptions of sequence and succession in his English history plays, which offer a chronologically disordered narration of disruptions to the line of royal succession. The figure

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It is important to remember that Renaissance schooling familiarized English writers with dozens, if not hundreds, of such figures, inculcating them as deeply ingrained habits of thought. As a result, such rhetorical devices “permeate Renaissance literature and culture as dynamic and evolving nuclei of thought and expression,” as the editors of Renaissance Figures of Speech similarly argue.65 This view of the figures as organizing devices of language and thought has emerged in the wake of post-structuralism, and constitutes a new method of thinking about the relationship between figures of rhetoric and other literary elements, such as character, scene, plot, and genre.66 The convergence of literary and rhetorical theory in our own era usefully evokes a similar convergence in the Renaissance, when the domains of rhetoric and poetics overlap in significant ways, most importantly in the devices of elocutio. However, while classical and Renaissance rhetoric presume the existence of two languages—one proper and one figured—modern literary theory identifies figures of speech as fundamental procedures of a single linguistic system rather than deviations from a preexisting norm.67 Although this theory of rhetorical figures as constitutive of, and coextensive with, language makes its exemplary arguments with reference to tropes such as metaphor and metonymy, it has resulted in a generalized critical method inclined to discover substantive meaning in the lexical patterns and shapes of all figures.68 Rather hysteron proteron thus allows Parker to theorize a large-scale notion of the “Shakespearean preposterous,” in which inversions at multiple levels of the literary text—from sentence to plot to the order of composition of the tetralogies themselves—produce a corresponding cultural inversion, one “that subverts the teleological underpinnings of Tudor providentialism itself.” See Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 36–45, 37. 65.  Adamson, Alexander, and Ettenhuber, Renaissance Figures of Speech, 11. 66.  Heinrich Plett taxonimizes critical attention to rhetoric in Shakespeare studies according to the following periods: positivist (T. W. Baldwin), encyclopedic (Sister Miriam Joseph), and functional (Brian Vickers). In a review of Plett’s work, Scott Crider adds a fourth stage labeled new historicist/ post-structural/feminist (Patricia Parker, Neil Rhodes, Lynn Magnusson, Lynne Enterline). Heinrich Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 416–19; Scott Crider, “Rhetorical Poetics and Shakespeare Studies,” Ben Jonson Journal 14, no. 2 (2007): 268–84, 269–70. 67.  Much of this theory draws on the work of modern linguistics, including most prominently that of Roman Jakobson, who grafted the linguistic categories paradigm/syntagm onto the domain of the rhetorical figures, aligning them with metaphor/metonymy and then using the terms to designate two general processes of semantic production. This binary categorization of language use was also taken up in the work of Paul de Man, and so has had a far-reaching impact on the arguments and methods of literary theory in the later part of the twentieth century. Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language; de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 3–19. 68.  The work on rhetoric in literary theory is extensive, and I can only gesture at the most prominent texts here. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading; de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness” and “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–41 and 187–228; de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,

24    

Introduction

than examining Renaissance literary texts in search of localized examples of particular rhetorical devices, scholars are now much more likely to think about how figures of speech organize thinking and expression beyond the level of the sentence or phrase. My approach to the figures thus loosely evokes modern literary theory, which understands literary texts to be organized by tropological structures and uses those structures as tools of analysis; however, rather than focusing primarily on a small number of “master” tropes, I allow the vernacular rhetorical manuals to direct my attention to much more obscure figures of speech. Moreover, in responding to the historically oriented literary criticism on Renaissance rhetoric in particular, I ask the question, if the figures are indeed the “nuclei” of Renaissance writing in an age of humanist education, which drilled English schoolboys in the ornaments of elocutio until they became habitual forms of expression, then how is that writing altered when those figures are turned from Latin into English? I pose this question because, despite a renewed engagement with the stylistic features of Renaissance rhetoric on the part of literary critics, there has been little concerted effort to understand the invention of particularly English figures of speech in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or to consider how the self-conscious vernacularity of English rhetoric shapes the effects of such figures in early modern literature. For an example of what I mean by this process of invention, consider Puttenham’s attempt to provide an English translation of the Greek figure hypallage: “The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage,] the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [underchange] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] nothing at all sweruing from his originall, and much more aptly to the purpose, and pleasanter to beare in memory: specially for your Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a terme often in their mouthes, and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called changelings, or Elfs.”69 This fairy tale of changelings and stolen babies not only translates the figure into a story but also enacts its transfer from the classical world to early modern England, turning a foreign rhetorical device into a familiar English plot. For those English writers living in an age of humanist education, I consider such productive transactions between the classical and the English to be inseparable from the transactions between figure and plot so astutely pointed out by Parker and others. 1984), 239–62; and Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986), 207–72. 69.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 183–84.

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By paying attention to the archive of English rhetorical manuals, Outlaw Rhetoric discovers a new set of interpretive possibilities contained within the catalog of rhetorical figures, ideas that are not in evidence if one follows either the priorities of the humanist school (emphasizing interpretive strategies such as arguing on both sides of the question) or those of contemporary literary theory (reading Renaissance rhetoric in terms of a struggle between metaphor and metonymy). The evidence of the vernacular rhetorical manuals focuses our attention instead on outlandish figures of speech, disorderly forms that foreground the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of making classical figures “speak English.” I argue that the process whereby such outlaw figures are accommodated at the margins of vernacular rhetoric also generates a series of particularly English stories, literary inventions that, like Sherry’s and Wilson’s tales of Robin Hood and Puttenham’s fairy tales, emerge from the tension between classical rhetoric and the English vernacular.

Outlaw Rhetoric Rhetorique, is that Faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne. —Thomas Hobbes, Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (1637)

In form, Outlaw Rhetoric follows the model of an English rhetorical manual, opening with an essay on the nature of eloquence in general, and following with a series of entries on individual figures of speech and examples of their use in vernacular literature. In the first chapter I explore how English manuals draw on the spatial imaginary provided by the ancient art of rhetoric to localize that discursive space as a particularly English place. By fostering the use of a “common” tongue identifiable with a “common” land that together constitutes an English commonweal, the vernacular guides threaten the raison d’être of the rhetorical art: that it distinguish itself from “common” or ordinary speech. The recognition of this paradox—our common land makes us English, but it also makes our language common—can be seen in the rhetorical manuals’ fear of vagrancy, and like those members of Parliament who worried about the social impact of unenclosed common fields, the English rhetorics wonder whether a common space of rhetoric might produce not just an eloquent nation but also bands of outlaws in revolt against the polity. The following chapters focus on five of these vagrant figures of speech. In each chapter I analyze a particular outlaw figure, explaining how the vernacular manuals define it as such. These definitions often acknowledge the threat the figure makes to English linguistic structure, before reaching some kind of accommodation between classical precept and vernacular grammar.

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Introduction

After examining the process of accommodation—the means whereby the figure is made “at home” in English—I then turn to literary texts that utilize the outlaw figure at the syntactic level and also dramatize its disorderliness on a larger scale. This method of reading reveals how poems, plays, and romances expand on, and indeed emerge from, the process of threat and accommodation contained within the Englished figures, turning that process into a literary structure. Interestingly, unlike the rhetorical manuals, the literary texts do not evince much if any nervousness about these processes of vernacular figuration; indeed, they often celebrate it. I thus read rhetorical manuals and literary texts side by side as evidence of a larger cultural project of translation and vernacular self-fashioning, arguing that we can apprehend this important phenomenon through an examination of how key literary and rhetorical texts inscribe a particular subset of disorderly rhetorical figures. This process of vernacular figuration results in Spenser’s adoption of Virgilian forms as tools of English courtesy in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, as well as the cohabitation of Athenian heroes and English hobgoblins in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (chapters 2 and 4). It also generates the disorderly narrative of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which syntactic interruptions generate an interrupted, incomplete romance narrative (chapter 3). In each of these texts the mode of figuration and the method of storytelling become versions of each other: disorderly, organized by a family of schemes contained under the umbrella of hyperbaton. English texts shape characters as well as plots according to these disorderly figures, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 and Jonson’s Epicoene, both of which take enallage, a figure that exchanges grammatical genders, and use it to produce a character that shifts between “he” and “she” (chapter 5). In each of these examples, a figure that seems to threaten English structure in the rhetorical manuals becomes a source of invention for playwrights, poets, and romancers. The union of menace and literary potential within these figures can be seen in the instrumentality of Puttenham’s English monikers: the “Trespasser,” the “Insertour,” the “Changeling,” and the “Figure of Exchange.” The literary texts under consideration in this book are all deeply selfreflexive; each is “about” problems of vernacular writing and figuration. They engage with the following questions, among others: How does one write an English epic? Through what means can one establish English literary ­authority? What is the place of native tales and traditions in vernacular artistic productions? What happens to the gender of English subjects when rhetoric leaves the enclosure of Latin learning? By examining a variety of genres, I also suggest how the translation of rhetorical figures helps

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c­ onceptualize a range of literary and theatrical phenomena, including the structure of the poetic line as well as narrative organization, characterization as well as performance. The now canonical status of these authors and texts suggests that such self-reflexivity about vernacular literary composition constitutes an important standard whereby modern critics identify certain works as exemplary of the imaginative range of English Renaissance literature. My final chapter highlights the operation of such a standard of vernacular eloquence by addressing a historical and canonical outlier: Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Cavendish composed her romance in the 1660s, just as rhetoric’s prestige in English culture began to falter, and as a so-called plain style of speech and writing was being put forward as a new standard for vernacular eloquence. This final chapter uses Cavendish’s philosophical romance to suggest how the linguistic anxieties first confronted by sixteenthcentury rhetorical manuals move from the relationship between Latin and English into a different arena: the relationship between words and things (chapter 6). In the late seventeenth century we begin to see the use of “rhetorical” that is still common today, as an epithet signifying verbiage in excess of (and often in opposition to) truth or substantive meaning. Prominent writers including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Milton began to rethink their humanist training in the art of rhetoric, and rhetoric entered a precipitous decline as a prestigious system of discourse and intellectual inquiry in English culture. This turn against rhetoric was a long time in coming, having been forcefully advocated by Francis Bacon some sixty years previously. Bacon inveighs against rhetoric’s preeminence in the schools in his Advancement of Learning (1605), arguing that the years after Martin Luther’s religious reformations “did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement.”70 Bacon’s charge that the study of rhetoric had grown to excess fell on deaf ears in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Like his contemporaries, I will also ignore Bacon’s entreaties, and engage in “an affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech.” Indeed, I take Bacon’s image of 70.  Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139.

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Introduction

men “hunting” furiously after words as an emblem of early modern literary production, not unlike a “tale of Robynhoode.” Ranging through the fields and forests of vernacular rhetoric, and taking outlaw figures of speech as its guide, Outlaw Rhetoric follows these huntsmen on their imaginative journey from Athens to Rome to the byways of England.

q Ch a p te r   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 1.  “Rhetoricen Logice soror est affata sororem / Quem didicit nuper; sermo Britannus erat. / Rhetorice tacuit mango perculsa dolore; / Nam nondum nostro noverat ore loqui, / Audiit haec Logices Wilsonus forte magister / Qui fuerat nostros addideratque sonos. / Rhetoricen mutam 29

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C h a pt e r 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 verbis solatus amicis / Se vocat et rogitat num esse Britanna velit. / Deiciens oculos respondit velle libenter, / Sed se qua possit non reperire via. / Ipse vias, inquit, tradam legesque loquendi, / Quomodo perfecte verba Britanna loces. / Liberat ille fidem, nostro sermone politur / Rhetorice nostra est utraque facta soror.  / Anglia nobelium si charus sermo sororum / Est tibi, sermonis charus et author ecrit.” Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 44, 247–48. I thank John Guillory for drawing my attention to this passage.

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“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

2.  Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5. See also Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 3.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria. trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.1.4. 4.  Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 112.

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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

5.  Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike ([Middelburg]: [R. Schilders], 1584), Dv. For an analysis of the spatial logic of the commonplace method, see Ong, Ramus, as well as Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 6.  Parker demonstrates how figures move words across a spatial field in classical and Renaissance writing on figures of speech, metaphor in particular. See Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 36–53; Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 116–84. 7.  Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996), 8. 8.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 156.

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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 damaging associations among such movement, Englishness, and outlawry. The   9.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 188. 10.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 150, 170. 11.  Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 3.5.19–20. 12.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 8.

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contemporary linkage between the idea of the common fields and the fear of vagabonds further suggests how the idea of an English rhetorical commons could be simultaneously enabling and disturbing. “Common” rhetoric proffered a mode of national self-fashioning that would allow “England” to speak eloquently, but it also risked the creation a “natiue broode” of masterless figures that might ignore the laws of that new national vernacular.13

Forging an English Rhetorical Commons In adopting a spatial logic to manage the translation of rhetoric into the vernacular, the English rhetorical manuals inevitably had to confront England’s own spatial limitations. As Richard Mulcaster writes in The First Part of the Elementary (1582), “our English tung . . . is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further then this land of ours, naie not there ouer all. What tho? Yet it raigneth there, and it serues vs there, and it wold be clean brusht for the wearing there. Tho it go not beyond sea, it will serue on this side.”14 To put it bluntly, England was small. Compared to Latin or even the continental languages, the English language had only a very modest geographical reach in the sixteenth century, not even covering all of what Mulcaster calls “this land of ours.” Mulcaster here admits that the notion that the “ile” and “England” are synonymous requires forgetting about Scotland and Wales, those parts of this “land” where the English tongue does not reach; however, despite these recalcitrant borderlands, the fantasy of a union of language and land stretching to the sea and back is a common one in writing of the period.15 In such arguments, the “small reatch” of the English land becomes redescribed as an asset, as when the narrator of Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus (1599) celebrates the narrow boundaries of the realm:   But if we shall descend from that high stand    Of ouer-looking Contemplation, 13.  Ibid., 3. 14.  Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementary, ed. R.  C. Alston (Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1970), 256. 15.  John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II is the most famous example: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle  . . . this little world, / This precious stone set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall, / Or as a moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands; / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” (2.1.40–50). William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

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And cast our thought, but to, and not beyond This spacious circuit which we tread vpon, We then may estimate our mighty land, A world within a world standing alone.

  Where, if our fame confind cannot get out,    What, shall we then imagine it is pen’d,    That hath so great a world to walke about,    Whose bounds, with her reports haue both one end?16 The final line of the passage praises the modest reach of the English vernacular in a fashion resonant with other early modern attempts to secure a new status for the vulgar tongue. It tells the reader that the English language is precisely coextensive with the boundaries of England—her “bounds” and her “reports haue both one end”—and as such, the language can function as a sign of a cohesive and contained national community, forming England as a “world” of its own. As tropes of national identity, language and land become self-identical, and so Tudor humanists such as Mulcaster become emboldened to challenge the widespread use of Latin by asking, “and why more a stranger in honor with vs, then our own people, all circumstances serued?”17 Vernacular rhetorical handbooks mobilize this very identification between language, land, and the English people in order to justify the translation of rhetoric into English, arguing for a common space of native rhetorical practice. Even with the burgeoning sense of national identity and purpose evident in defenses of the vernacular such as those quoted above, early English rhetorical manuals proclaim great uneasiness about the propriety of their translations. This is because they know that rhetorical eloquence properly belongs to Latin expression and to the rarefied social classes in possession of a Latin education. The complicated status of vernacular rhetoric—as a translation that potentially pilfers the property of the ancient world and trespasses into the space of high culture—can be seen in the multiple and sometimes opposing significations that cluster around the term “common”

16.  Samuel Daniel, Musophilus: Containing a General Defense of All Learning, ed. Raymond Himelick (West Lafayette: Purdue University Studies, 1965), lines 531–46. 17.  Mulcaster, First Part of the Elementary, 258. In this defense of English learning Mulcaster is like those midcentury humanists such as John Cheke and Thomas Smith, who also turned inward from the international humanism of Erasmus and Thomas More, applying their learning to explicitly national ends. See Shrank, Writing the Nation, 13–14.

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in the guides, a concept that is itself often understood through a topographical frame. Jean Howard and Paul Strohm identify “common” as a prominent term in social and political discourse in the late medieval and early modern periods, an era in which the commouns, commons, or commonweal was frequently invoked as the rationale for a variety of proposed social actions.18 Yet because of its ubiquity as a term of political debate, “common” is a highly unstable signifier, encompassing what Raymond Williams calls an extraordinary range of meaning in the English language. The root word is the Latin communis, which derives from com- (together) and munis (under obligation) and from com- and unus (one). Early uses of the term “common” merge these senses, and from the fourteenth century onward “common” signifies community, an organized body of people.19 This meaning, however, conflicts with other early uses of “common” as a term of social division, what Williams calls “the common and commons as contrasted with lords and nobility.”20 This tension persists in vernacular usage, where “common” can indicate either an entire group or a subordinate group, something shared by all or something particularly ordinary, low, or vulgar. In early modern English writing, something held in “common” signifies joint possession, particularly a swath of undivided land shared by all members of a local community. This community itself constitutes a “commonalty,” that is, the collective population of a single place; the diverse individuals who share a stake in the “common weal” are thus a “commonwealth.” Protestant reformers revitalized and reshaped the ideal of the common weal in the sixteenth century, imagining the English commonwealth in specifically agrarian terms and articulating a new vision of the “fields” of the nation, a place where preachers could plant the seeds of the reformed religion.21 “Common” might also refer to the vulgar tongue, the language spoken by all members of a united “commonalty.” To quote Mulcaster once again, the “common” tongue is that which supposedly stretches over “this land of ours.” In all these senses, “common” has a generally positive value, denoting bonds of local and national fellowship. However, in addition to signifying 18.  Jean Howard and Paul Strohm, “The Imaginary Commons,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 549–77, 549. There are also an increasing number of references to a “common law” in the period, a common law that was, paradoxically, often expressed in French or Latin. 19.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 70. 20.  Ibid., 71. 21.  Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31.

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community and fellowship, “common” also demarcates a particular group of people at the bottom of that larger community. The “common” folk are those undistinguished by rank, and so the term connotes ordinariness, vulgarity in its most negative sense, and it also serves as a derisive term for sexual availability. “Common” is thus potentially both pejorative (a signifier of low status, sexual openness, and the transgression of private property rights) and affirmative (a sign of unity and fellowship, something that cements an entire community, or a plot of land worked for mutual profit). These various and conflicting meanings of the term “common” touch on all the major ­concerns animating English vernacular rhetoric, including the national community, the English land, the relative social positions of English speakers, and the vulgar status of the English tongue. Despite its obvious relevance for the project of vernacularization and national self-fashioning, there are many reasons why “common” would not seem to be a particularly apt term for a new English rhetoric. First, rhetoric is the very thing that renders language “uncommon,” as when Henry Peacham writes in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), “A Figure is a fashion of words, Oration, or sentence, made new by Arte, tourning from the common manner and custome of wryting or speaking.”22 We can see the potentially pejorative valence of this term “common” in the 1593 revised edition of the Garden, when Peacham replaces “common” with “vulgar,” so that a figure turns language from the “vulgar maner and custome of speaking.”23 This shift suggests how social stratifications come into play when distinguishing plain from figured language, stratifications that are also in evidence in differentiations between English and Latin. This leads to the second reason why “common” is a peculiar term for the new vernacular rhetoric: rhetoric is properly contained in Greek and Latin, the “uncommon” languages. Roger Ascham deploys this very opposition in The Scholemaster (1570), distinguishing the vernacular from the ancient languages by calling one a common and the other a “private” language, writing that, “the rudenes of common and mother tonges, is no bar for wise speaking. For in the rudest contrie, and most barbarous mother language, many be found can speake verie wiselie: but in the Greeke and latin tong, the two onelie learned tonges, which be kept, not in common taulke, but in priuate bookes, we finde always, wisdome and eloquence, good matter and good vtterance, neuer or seldom a

22.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), B.i. 23.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), 1.

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sonder.”24 Although Ascham concedes that “wise speaking” might occur in a “common” mother tongue, “eloquence, good matter and good vtterance,” that is, rhetoric, are enclosed within the Greek and Latin languages that are likewise preserved in “priuate books.” Vernacular translations of the art of rhetoric open up that private store of wisdom and eloquence, and make it commonly available to English speakers, so as, in Mulcaster’s words, “by the mean thereof to turn to our vse all the great treasur, of either foren soil, or foren language.”25 The English rhetorics worry they will be condemned for this circulation of private discursive treasure, as we can see when Puttenham defensively attempts to preempt criticism by asking, why should not “our speech . . . yet in the generall points of that Art, [be] allowed to go in common with them?”26 Despite its obvious unsuitability for such a project, the very first vernacular rhetorical manual published in England signals the importance of all of these ideas of the “common” to the translation of rhetoric into English. Leonard Cox describes his Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (1532) as a “help [to] suche as are desirouse of this Arte (as all surely ought to be which entende to be regarded in any comynaltie).”27 As its introductory words explain, Cox’s Art is “partely translated out a werke of Rhetorique wryten in the Latin tongue: and partely compyled of myn owne: and so made a lyttle treatyse in maner of an Introductyon into this aforesayd Science: and that in our Englyshe tongue. Remembrynge that euery good thyng (after the sayengs of the Philosopher) the more comon it is: the more better it is.”28 This preface handily exploits the multivalent signification of the term “common” in order to mitigate the obvious strangeness of an “Englyshe” rhetoric. “Common” describes an individual of no particular social distinction, and it is the common people lacking a Latin education, those who speak the common vulgar tongue, who would most benefit from the assistance of Cox’s English rhetoric.29 However, 24.  Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1967), 46. 25.  Mulcaster, First Part of the Elementary, 256. 26.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 21–22. 27.  Leonard Cox, The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke ([London]: [In Fletestrete by Mr. Robert Redman], 1532), A.iii. 28.  Ibid. 29.  From Cox’s rhetoric onward, English guides almost uniformly refuse to specify the social status of their presumed audience beyond the term “common.” Their readers are defined, as Wayne Rebhorn notes, not by their place in the social order but rather by their need for instruction. In this regard, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie diverges from the other English rhetorics, specifying a courtly audience for its instruction (or at least an audience that aspires to courtliness). See Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 104.

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“common” also suggests that which belongs equally to all, something that relates to the whole community; the shared possession constitutes a coherent group where none existed before. In this case the common possession is the English language, that which constructs an English “comynaltie.” Cox concludes that anyone who wishes to be “regarded” as a part of this national community will desire to read his translated text. After Cox, the English manuals become even more explicit in highlighting rhetoric’s ability to cement the bonds of national community. In A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), Richard Rainolde argues that “Nothyng can bee more excellently giuen of nature then Eloquence, by the which the florishyng state of commonweales doe consiste: kyngdomes vniuersally are gouerned, the state of euery one priuatlie is maintained. The commonwealth also should be maimed, and debilitated, except the other parte be associate to it.”30 The description of rhetoric as a forger of political communities similarly appears in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric in a prefatory narrative titled “Eloquence First Given by God, and After Lost by Man, and Last Repaired by God Again.” Here Wilson describes eloquence as that skill provided by God to allow his appointed ministers to “with ease win folk at their will and frame them by reason to all good order.”31 Eloquence, or rhetoric, transforms the brutish existence of men into human civilization. As Wilson confesses, “Neither can I see that men could have been brought by any other means to live together in fellowship of life, to maintain cities, to deal truly, and willingly to obey one another.”32 This presentation of eloquence as an instrument used to construct harmonious civilizations is entirely conventional, and in keeping with positive figurations of rhetoric since the Greeks. However, at the conclusion of his brief history of eloquence, Wilson intervenes with something rather new: “Now then, seeing that God giveth his heavenly grace unto all such as call unto him with stretched hands and humble heart, never wanting to those that want not to themselves, I purpose by his grace and especial assistance to set forth precepts of eloquence, and to show what observation the wise have used in handling of their matters, that the unlearned, by seeing the practice of others, may have some knowledge themselves and learn by their neighbor’s device what is necessary for themselves in their own case.”33 Here Wilson signals his intention to provide the

30.  Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, 1563 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1969), i–iv. 31.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 41. 32.  Ibid., 42. 33.  Ibid., 43.

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“unlearned” former audience of Herculean orators with “some” knowledge that will allow them to achieve “what is necessary for themselves.” Rhetoric will be useful to people without any particular education or social position, and this translation thus removes the veil from a previously mystified practice. “Fellowship of life” will no longer be provided by an elite class of orators, but rather by common practice of rhetorical “device.” Again, spatial proximity is crucial, as English “neighbors” help one another to this greater knowledge. This description of vernacular rhetoric as an aid to the unlearned recurs throughout the sixteenth century, as do worries that such translations will give offense by making specialized knowledge “common.” In the prefatory matter to the first edition of The Garden of Eloquence, Peacham explains that his guide aims “to profyte this my country, and especially the studious youth of this Realme, and such as haue not the vnderstanding of the Latyne tongue, sure I am, it may profyte many, and I dare be bold to say, it can hurte none.”34 For the Creator, as Peacham notes, surely intended the power of speech to serve “the comon vse & vtility of makind.”35 As Dudley Fenner writes in The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584), these vernacular texts make “common too all which are wont to sit in the Doctours chayre.”36 Puttenham concurs in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), explaining that “our intent is to make this Art vulgar for all English mens vse.”37 These vernacular rhetorics accomplish what another anonymous translator from the period also hoped to achieve: “the same is made English, which before was Latin, and brought into the artificer’s shop, which was before in the studies and closets of the learned alone.”38 The relocation of the place of rhetoric here is twofold: a shift in language, or cultural location, entails a simultaneous shift in economic or social location. This removal of rhetoric from the “closets of the learned” assists not just artificers, but also would-be Courtiers, those who must seek political and economic advancement through the skillful use of their mother tongue. Puttenham addresses his Arte of English Poesie to just such an audience, repeatedly alluding to the “Courtiers for whose instruction this trauaile is taken,” and promising to lead his reader “from the carte . . . to the Court.”39

34.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), A.iiiv. 35.  Ibid., A.ii. 36.  Fenner, Artes of Logike and Rethorike, A2. 37.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 40. 38.  The Sacred Doctrine of Divinity (1599) quoted in R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 37. 39.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 170, 304.

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The language of common profit running throughout the archive of English rhetoric thus conjures both unlearned “artificers” and courtly “rimers” as the joint beneficiaries of this newly translated knowledge.40 This common rhetoric unites country folk with Elizabethan courtiers in a shared cause against the tyranny of pedantic clerks who would restrict access to the arts of discourse. Consequently, as Gabriel Harvey notes in the margins of the final page of his copy of Quintilian, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric became the “daily bread of our common pleaders and discoursers.”41 Having examined “common” as a mark of the presumed accessibility of these English guides to a wide population of English speakers, we must also consider the figuration of “common” as a shared plot of land, for the vision of a common audience frequently mobilizes this second signification of “common” as community property. For example, Dudley Fenner begins The Artes of Logike and Rethorike by asking, “Why should not all reape where all haue sowen? At least, why should not some of euery sort gleane, though by theyr cunning they had purchased these artes, as corne fieldes proper to themselves?”42 This formulation defends the translation of rhetoric into English by figuring the English art of rhetoric as a common plot of land from which “euery sort” of person would be able to “reape,” “gleane,” and profit.43 Furthermore, with the use of the mother tongue, this plot of land becomes coextensive with the English nation, Mulcaster’s “land of ours,” a common field that is also a commonwealth. Richard Rainolde unites these strands of vernacularity, tillable land, and nation in the following apology for his Foundacion of Rhetorike: “Many famous menne and greate learned, haue in the Greke tongue and otherwise trauailed, to profite all tymes their countrie and common wealthe. This also was my ende and purpose, to plante a worke profitable to all tymes, my countrie and common wealthe.”44 Rainolde plants rhetoric in England; his work, as its title suggests, provides a “foundacion” for an edifice that will be built on English land. This vision of England as a garden or field where rhetoric can grow and thrive persists in later rhetorics, as we can see in the full title of Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, which mobilizes the metaphor of planting and harvesting rhetoric in and

40.  Ibid., 170. 41.  Peter E. Medine, introduction to Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 9. 42.  Fenner, Artes of Logike and Rethorike, A2v. 43.  During the sixteenth century, humanist pedagogy was often imagined in terms of gardening theory, and humanist interactions with learned texts were described in terms of the twin activities of gathering bits of text and framing or arranging them. See Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Crane, Framing Authority. 44.  Rainolde, Foundacion of Rhetorike, a.iiv.

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from an English plot of land. It reads: “The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick, from whence may bee gathered all manner of flowers, Colours, Ornaments, Exornations, formes and fasions of speech . . . Set foorth in Englishe.” The promise of profit contained in these rhetorical prefaces demonstrates rhetoric’s status as a form of cultural capital in the early modern period, and the English manuals explicitly figure the translated parts of rhetoric as vendible commodities even as they claim to serve the common good of the nation. William Fulwood’s preface to The Castel of Memorie (1562), for example, offers his translation “for the common utilitie and profite of my natiue countrey.”45 In his translation of Sturmius’s rhetoric, A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata (1570), Thomas Browne reminds his dedicatee, the Earl of Surrey, of this potential profit, telling him that “I have . . . aduentured the translation of thys small volume . . . wherein I trust, if you vouchsafe but to imploy small traueyle, that you shall reape infinite and exceeding great commoditie.”46 Although the “traueyle” required of Browne’s reader is simply the purchase and study of a small book, that labor is given an agricultural cast with the verb “reape,” a term that reminds us that the “places” where knowledge is stored might be imagined as a field or garden as well as the “storehouse” cited in the title of the volume. In his rhetoric, Fenner acknowledges that the Greek and Roman languages had been the fittest “storehouse of the worlde for those commodities”—that is, the tools of logic and rhetoric—but his translation nevertheless opens up the ancient storehouse so that “by their trafficke, [those commodities] might . . . become common to euery particular nation, that euerie one who had neede, might buie of the same.”47 The transfer of classical treasure into the English language makes rhetoric, in the words of another sixteenth-century translator, “the common commodite of their countrey.”48 In other words, the profit of this investment promises to extend beyond the individual who purchases the handbook to the entire nation, as Peacham emphasizes when he reminds his readers that “by these manner of studies, we see that many haue attayned to a great excelency in their kinde, who haue got to themselues & their countrey, many commodities: cloathed themselues with ample honoures: an deserued 45.  Gulielmus Gratarolus, The Castel of Memorie, trans. William Fulwood (London: R. Hall, 1562), A.vi. 46.  John Sturmius, A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata, trans. Thomas Browne (London, 1570), A2. 47.  Fenner, Artes of Logike and Rethorike, A2v. 48.  Fabian Wither writes this in his dedication of Claude Dariot’s A breefe  . . . Introduction to the Astrological iudgement of the Starres (1583?), quoted in Jones, Triumph of the English Language, 45.

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by their worthy works to be praysed for euer of posteritie.”49 This enterprise of translation, as Philemon Holland claims in a preface to his English version of Pliny’s The History of the World (1601), “lay[s] abroad the riches and hidden treasures of Nature, in that Dialect or Idiome which was familiar to the basest clowne . . . to the commoditie of that countrey in which and for which he was borne.”50 By helping themselves to this translated art of rhetoric, common readers will inevitably serve their country, or at least so the manuals claim. After the confident, if also defensive, claims of the rhetorical prefaces, the English handbooks must immediately confront the actual difficulty of helping English “go in common” with the ancient art of rhetoric. One of the most confounding obstacles to planting rhetoric in the English country was the absence of vernacular equivalents to the Greek technical terminology. This was equally a problem for canonical Latin rhetoricians, including Cicero and the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium, who periodically sought to replace Greek names for figures of speech with Latin terms.51 These attempts to replace the original terms of art were not particularly successful, and the Greek labels persist into the sixteenth century. Thus when Richard Sherry introduces his Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), he worries that the Greek sound of his title will be “all straunge vnto our Englyshe eares, [and] wil cause some men at the first syghte to maruayle what the matter of it should meane.”52 Sherry can only hope that eventually such terms will become familiar to most Englishmen, “as if they had bene of oure owne natiue broode.”53 Thomas Wilson, however, does not manifest a similar patience with foreign terms, and he argues that you abuse the English vernacular by allowing strange words to traffic in the territory of the mother tongue. In speaking of elocution, he famously exhorts, Among all other lessons, this should first be learned: that we never affect any strange inkhorn terms but so speak as is commonly received. . . . Some seek so far outlandish English that they forget altogether their mother’s language. And I dare swear this, if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell what they say, and yet these fine English clerks will say they speak in their mother tongue, if 49.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), A.iiv. 50.  Jones, Triumph of the English Language, 43. 51.  George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 125. 52.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 2. 53.  Ibid., 3.

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a man should charge them for counterfeiting the king’s English. Some far-journeyed gentlemen at their return home, like as they love to go in foreign apparel so they will powder their talk with overseas language. He that cometh lately out of France will talk French English and never blush at the matter. Another chops in with English Italianated and applieth the Italian phrase to our English speaking, the which is as if an orator that professeth to utter his mind in plain Latin would needs speak poetry and farfetched colors of strange antiquity.54 Just as subsequent English rhetorics mobilize a vision of an agrarian English commonalty to construct standards for vernacular eloquence, Wilson’s first lesson of elocution contends that would-be orators must “speak as is commonly received.” Like other polemics in favor of “common” values, a spatial logic animates this rule, with terms that stray outside of speech as it is “commonly received” spurned as “outlandish English.” Such language is, like the fops who utter it, “far-journeyed” and “foreign,” and should be replaced instead with speech as “most men” use. The reader is interpolated into this common space of rhetorical practice when Wilson presents “our English speaking” as that which must be protected from “farfetched colors of strange antiquity.” More than any other early guide, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric reminds the reader that England is the site of his vernacular handbook. In a prologue to the 1560 edition, Wilson describes his vernacular logic and rhetoric as “things done in England,” what he later calls “my dear country, [which hath been delivered] out of great thralldom and foreign bondage.” The importance of England to Wilson’s manual is evident from its very earliest pages, and Wilson repeatedly cites the topic of the nation as the most fitting subject of vernacular discourse. For example, in listing the “Questions,” which comprise “The Matter Whereupon an Orator Must Speak,” Wilson prioritizes topics relevant to his own national community, asking, “Whether now it be best here in England for a priest to marry or to live single? Whether it were meet for the King’s Majesty, that now is, to marry with a stranger or to marry with one of his own subjects?” This English “Matter” surfaces again and again in Wilson’s examples of rhetorical speech, which become ever more particularized to the geography of England. For example, when Wilson describes the “places of logic” where a speaker can locate the matter of his oration, those places are insistently English. This is immediately apparent when

54.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 188.

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Wilson uses the term “places” rather than the Latin loci or even the Greekderived “topics.” Furthermore, in Englishing the classical loci, Wilson lists the “places” one considers in composing an oration in praise of a noble man as the following: “1. The realm 2. The shire 3. The town 4. The parents 5. The ancestors.” The English “shire” thus becomes a formal “place” of rhetoric in Wilson’s vernacular guide.55 This literalization of rhetorical loci as a particularly English locale continues in descriptions of “amplification,” which is Wilson’s archetypal figure of rhetoric, and appears as an amalgamation of Erasmian copia and amplificatio: “Amplifying of the matter consisteth in heaping and enlarging of those places which serve for confirmation of a matter. . . . Amplification may be used when we make the law to speak, the dead person to make his complaint, the country to cry out of such a deed. As if some worthy man were cast away, to make the country say thus: ‘If England could speak, would she not make such and such complaints? If the walls of such a city or town had a tongue, would they not thus and thus?’ And to be short, all such things should be used to make the cause seem great which concerned God, the commonweal, or the law of nature.”56 By giving rhetoric speech in the vernacular, and rendering the places of rhetoric as well as the substance of amplification native to England, Wilson gives his country a voice, helping it “to cry out.” This native rhetoric aids the cause of Wilson’s “country,” the English “commonweal”; further, the newly endowed voice of “England” speaks not with a Latin amplificatio, or even a Latinate “amplification,” but with an English “heaping and enlarging.” Although he does not systematically formulate a vernacular lexicon for the art of rhetoric, Wilson tries as much as possible to offer homespun English translations of Latin and Greek technical terms. He translates interrogatio not as “interrogation” but as “Snappish Asking,” and exclamatio not as “exclamation” but as “Outcrying.”57 George Puttenham takes on this project with greater dedication, not to mention greater playfulness, assigning more than a hundred new English names to the classical figures of speech.58 Puttenham justifies these strange translations by alluding to his vernacular 55.  Ibid., 38, 40, 45, 49, 54. My emphasis on “the shire.” John Guillory first brought the latter passage to my attention. 56.  Ibid., 147. 57.  Ibid., 209, 229. 58.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 21–22. Although he presents a much shorter catalog of figures than Puttenham’s Arte, John Barton also provides English equivalents for Greek tropes and figures in his English rhetoric, renaming metonymy “Substitution,” synecdoche “comprehension,” and metaphor “comparation.” See Barton, The Art of Rhetorick Concisely Handled ([London]: N. Alsop, 1634), 2, 10, 15.

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audience: “Now to make them [the figures] knowen (as behoueth) either we must do it by th’original Greeke name or by the Latine, or by our owne. But when I consider to what sort of Readers I write, and how ill faring the Greeke terme would sound in the English eare, then also how short the Latines come to expresse manie of the Greeke originals. Finally, how well our language serueth to supplie the full signification of them both, I haue thought it no lesse lawfull, yea peraduenture vnder licence of the learned, more laudable to vse our owne naturall, if they be well chosen, and of proper signification, than to borrow theirs.”59 This argument in favor of English terms mobilizes a spatial logic according to which classical terminology is “ill faring” in an English space. Puttenham’s Arte draws a distinction between Greek and Latin, non-“naturall” tongues, and a vernacular language that properly belongs to the English nation, a language that is “our owne.” The mother tongue does not need a “borrowed” habit to express the art of rhetoric, but rather can draw on native material to “supplie” the ancient art. Here the vernacular becomes the “proper” source of copia (“supplie”), displacing the classical tongue as the storehouse of artful expression. Like the other rhetoricians of his generation, Puttenham attends to the unlearned “sort of Readers” who will glean rhetorical material from his text. As such, to name only a few, Puttenham renames metaphor “the figure of transport,” metalepsis “the farrefet,” hyperbaton “the trespasser,” and soraismus the “Mingle mangle.”60 Unfortunately, Puttenham’s attempts to rename Greek figures with vulgar terms ignore the fact that the “strange” sound of the Greek “schemes” and “tropes” endows the rhetorical lexicon with the aura of learning, rendering the terms valuable as devices of social distinction for rude “rimers.” In this regard, the “mingle mangle” does not carry the same symbolic currency as soraismus. Consequently, as we well know, Puttenham’s vulgar titles are no more successful in overtaking the Greek terms of art than the Latin terms had been more than a millennium and a half previously. Although Puttenham’s English terms do not persist far beyond his own text, one of the more successful methods of keeping English rhetoric planted in the native “shire” was the use of English poets to exemplify excellent rhetorical style, and by the end of the sixteenth century the paradigmatic example of vulgar eloquence was Sir Philip Sidney. Indeed, by the late 1580s the prestige of Sidney’s person and his writing have already begun to retrospectively validate the entire project of vernacularization, and following his death in 1586, Sidney’s works became widely acknowledged as the place 59.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 169–70. 60.  Ibid., 188–89, 193, 180, 259.

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where English writers should go to glean rhetorical copia. Peter Heylyn explains as much in his Microcosmus (1621) when he recommends Sidney’s Arcadia as an aid to literary art: “It [Arcadia] is a Countrey whose fitnesse for pastorage and grazing hath made it the subiect of many worthy and witty discourses, especially that of Sr Philip Sidney (of whom I cannot but make honorable mention) a book which besides its excellent language, rare contriuances, & delectable stories, hath in it all the straines of Poesy, comprehendeth the vniuersall art of speaking, and to them which can discerne, and will obserue, notable rules for demeanour both priuate and publike.”61 This passage describes the Arcadia as both a courtesy guide (“rules for demeanour”) and a handbook of English rhetoric (“a vniuersall art of speaking”), and like the vernacular rhetorics already discussed, it represents the Arcadian “Countrey” as a “pastorage” open for common “grazing.” The Arcadia becomes the English locus for the art of rhetoric, the place where vernacular writers can learn “the vniuersall art of speaking.” Furthermore, in addition to demarcating a native rhetorical commons, Sidney’s literary works offer concrete evidence that the English language can produce rhetorical eloquence, and that it is not contradictory to posit rhetoric as a “vulgar Art.” Sidney’s example thus authorizes the translation of academic rhetorics into the vernacular, and his contribution to the culture is expressed as the foundation of a universally accessible common field of English eloquence. By the late sixteenth century, most English rhetorics anticipate Heylyn’s advice and plant their art of speaking squarely in the “Countrey” of Sidney’s Arcadia. John Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1590s) draws entirely on Sidney’s works to explain the use of rhetorical figures of speech, and Hoskins first presents his rhetoric to a young student along with an annotated copy of the 1590 Arcadia. Although Hoskins’s Directions circulated only in manuscript, it enjoyed a long afterlife in English rhetorical culture: long sections appear in Ben Jonson’s Timber (1641); Thomas Blount makes unacknowledged use of it in his Academy of Eloquence (1654); and John Smith quotes Blount, and through him Hoskins, in The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (1657). Sidney’s stature as the archetype of English eloquence only increases in each of these incarnations.62 Like Hoskins, Abraham Fraunce also produces an English rhetoric under the auspices of Sidney’s authority and prestige. He titles his handbook The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), in honor of Sidney’s romance. Whereas previous 61.  Hoyt H. Hudson, introduction to John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), xxii. 62.  Ibid., xv, v.

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English rhetorics advertise the English “country” in their title pages, Fraunce’s guide suggests that Arcadia can now function as a figure for “England” in a rhetorical text. Like all other vernacular rhetorics, Fraunce intends to profit the common inhabitants of England. The introductory poem to Fraunce’s manuscript treatment of dialectic, The Shepherd’s Logic (ca. 1585), summarizes his aims in translating classical arts into English in these very terms. The introduction exclaims, “Loe here a new and fresh Logician, / Who minds to proue what is [Logic’s] loue to simple countrey man.”63 Likewise, the title page of The Arcadian Rhetorike asserts that it presents “The Praecepts of Rhetorike made plaine.” These excerpts from the prefatory matter of Fraunce’s English logic and rhetoric describe the supposed audience of such vernacular texts as “simple countrey m[e]n” who need the language of such guides to be “plain” in order to acquire the scholarly arts. Fraunce’s text appeals to men who are, as one modern editor terms it, “in all the world’s new fashion planted,” and the field where these hopeful writers and speakers must plant themselves is Sidney’s Arcadia, the common space of English eloquence.64 Due in no small part to the influence of the Sidney legend, in the waning years of the seventeenth century assertions of the English language’s potential for “vulgar eloquence” cease to seem oxymoronic. The claim that rhetoric should be made “vulgar for all English mens vse,” articulated first in vernacular rhetorics as a defense against charges of transgression of the prerogatives of classical learning, eventually becomes installed as cultural orthodoxy. Indeed, mid-seventeenth-century vernacular handbooks are emboldened so far as to argue that rhetoric should speak English even in the sacrosanct space of the classroom. In his Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (1651), Thomas Horne declares that “[a] Man may bee a Rhetorician in anie Language; and an Orator in all Tongues may use this Art of curious perswasion, which I laie down to confirm the most certain position: That the precepts of Rhetorick and Oratorie are best taught, at first, and practiced in men’s native language,” and that the terms of rhetoric should not be “proposed to children in a Greek, and therefore unknown dress.”65 John Newton, in his Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (1671), likewise argues that “the precepts of Rhetorick may be best taught and practised, in mens native tongue.”66 He promises, 63.  Abraham Fraunce, The Shepherd’s Logic [ca. 1585], ed. R.  C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), 2. 64.  Ethel Seaton, introduction to Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588; repr., Oxford: Luttrell Society by Basil Blackwell, 1950), xx. 65.  Thomas Horne, Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (London: Franc. Eglesfield, 1651), 24. 66.  John Newton, An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (London: E. T. and R. H. for Thomas Passenger and Ben. Hurlock, 1671), A4v–A5.

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“I will not fear [the English rhetorical terms] being slighted, for their homespun garments in which they are clad; for I perswade my self, that none will be against their speaking English, but such illiterate Schoolmasters, who being sent to the University before they were fit for it, and compelled for want of maintenance, very quickly to forsake it again, do think it a disparagement to them to teach English.”67 Newton writes even more confidently in The English Academy (1677) that technical “Arts” are the same in all languages, and students may thus “[l]earn them in their own Native Language, or as many of them, as will be thought useful for them, in their several Stations in the World.”68 By the time of the Restoration, the vernacular had become the medium through which Latin was taught to schoolchildren, and English rhetoric was no longer in constant danger of being slighted by the learned. More than a century after Leonard Cox first attempts to make rhetoric “common” for every Englishman’s use, recalcitrant schoolmasters at last acknowledge England as the proper home of rhetorical practice.

Vagrancy within the English Rhetorical Field In chastising speakers who digress from the subject of their oration, Thomas Wilson asks, “Would not a man think him mad that having an earnest errand from London to Dover would take it the next way to ride first into Norfolk, next into Essex, and last into Kent? And yet assuredly many an unlearned and witless man hath strayed in his talk much farther a great deal, yea truly, as far as hence to Rome gates.”69 This passage from Wilson’s manual indicates the geographic particularity of this newly nativized art of rhetoric, in which the country of England becomes the place of discourse. It also suggests the emergence of a new problem: the potentially wayward movements of vulgar speech within that rhetorical country. In enjoining his readers to direct their orations toward a single purpose, Wilson uses the example of aimless wandering through the English countryside to illustrate the ill effects of an unplanned speech. Without the control provided by the art of rhetoric, language strays, it wanders away from a fixed meaning. Wilson’s example allegorizes this discursive wandering not just as a geographical dislocation (from Dover to Kent), but also as a far more serious

67.  Ibid., A4–A4v. 68.  John Newton, The English Academy; or, A Brief Introduction to the Seven Liberal Arts, 2nd ed. (London: A. Milbourn for Tho. Passenger, 1693), A3–A4v. 69.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 121–22.

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ideological dislocation (from the English Church to Rome). As we can see from this lapse into Protestant xenophobia, because the English manuals emphasize the place of rhetoric as a national location, uncontrolled movement within that space can have serious implications. Although the handbooks can fairly easily posit England as the topos of a newly constituted vernacular rhetoric, there was no way of maintaining the integrity of that space as the native ground of figurative language. Indeed, in their capacity to transport and transform ordinary speech, rhetorical figures confound attempts to ground language in a particular place and identify certain forms of speech as either “native” or “outlandish.” Because the English art of rhetoric imagines itself as a common field of vernacular eloquence, concern about linguistic unruliness also takes a particular form, one inflected by the social and political convulsions surrounding the proper use of land in the sixteenth century. The topic of the common fields was inextricably linked to the problem of vagrancy in the English imagination, and by representing their translations as a shared field of eloquence, the vernacular manuals also conjure the threat of vagrancy within their confines.70 Vagrancy was a particularly English problem in the sixteenth century, referring both to the waves of “masterless men” that so troubled Tudor officialdom, as well as to the English Church, which had wandered away from Catholic Europe and produced a nation of spiritual vagrants.71 In response to public panic, Elizabethan legal statute criminalized the movement of “masterless men,” making it illegal to be “runnagate,” that is, rootless and wandering.72 Many of these so-called vagrants were displaced rural laborers, and their presence on English highways signified the dissolution of the feudal economic system and the resulting collapse of traditional notions of social place. Vagrancy thus projected a different image of England than that suggested by the contented agricultural laborer who knows his place in a great chain of being. Patricia Fumerton’s study of “unsettled” early moderns

70.  In the aftermath of the Midlands revolt of 1607, a member of the House of Lords declared that “the nurseries of beggars are commons as appeareth by fens and forests,” and in 1610 King James proposed that the House of Commons move against the numerous cottages on commons and in forests, which were “nurseries and receptacles of thieves, rogues and beggars.” See William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 133. 71.  Jeffrey Knapp, “Rogue Nationalism,” in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, ed. Robert Newman, 138–50 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 72.  A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1456–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 4. William Carroll describes vagrants as “free-floating signifiers”; because they are not anchored to a particular place, their nature is to cross boundaries and transgress categories (Fat King, Lean Beggar, 6).

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emphasizes the “spaciousness” of such lower-order subjects, “a spaciousness of itinerancy, fragmentation, disconnection, and multiplicity that produces a very different topographical mapping of societal relations than those determined by place.”73 Within the system of rhetoric, the figures of elocutio operate very like these unsettled and displaced laborers in that they do not adhere to a fixed place, and they threaten the classifications through which the art of rhetoric distinguishes between orderly and disorderly speech. The movement of rhetorical figures cannot be mapped through a series of oppositions between center and margin, high and low, or native and foreign, nor do they respect notions of linguistic property or propriety. Whereas a nationalized place-logic would ground English rhetoric in a fixed, “common” location, the figures of rhetorical elocutio resist this placement, deconstructing the very idea of a common space of discourse. Two of the most prominent English manuals focus our attention on all of these problems when they incorporate an image of vagrancy into a retold history of rhetoric.74 In the preface titled “Eloquence First Given by God, and After Lost by Man, and Last Repaired by God Again,” Thomas Wilson describes the dark time after the fall of Adam and Eve when “all things waxed savage: the earth untilled, society neglected, God’s will not known, man against man, one against another, and all against order.”75 According to the fable, God eventually enables the formation of human society by providing the gift of eloquence to certain elect ministers, but before arriving at the divine restoration of order, Wilson first provides a lengthy description of the precivilized state of man. In Wilson’s reckoning, humanity’s savage condition manifests in its unsettled, dislocated existence. “Men lived brutishly in open fields,” he writes, “some like brute beasts grazed upon the ground; some went naked; some roamed like woodwoses; none did anything by reason.”76 Although he writes of a time before the advent of Christianity, these references to “open fields” and “woodwoses” envision Wilson’s savage state of nature with images particular to sixteenth-century England. “Woodwose” is an Old English term for a wild man of the woods, a kind of English satyr, and

73.  Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xiv. 74.  Richard Halpern cites Francis Clement’s The Petie Schole (1587) as another Tudor version of the Orpheus myth that depicts the wanderers tamed by eloquence as “wandryng vagabondes, and peragrant peasants.” Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 59. 75.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 41. 76.  Ibid.

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the “open fields” evoke the common fields that were the subject of so much economic, political, and social conflict in the sixteenth century.77 Debates over the fate of the common fields often focused on the problem of vagrancy and the question of whether land enclosure was responsible for producing a mass of wandering poor.78 The term “vagrant” could thus be considered a Latinate synonym for Wilson’s more homely “woodwose,” and Puttenham uses this very term when he shares the classical version of Wilson’s Christian fable, in which Orpheus and Amphion use “sweete and eloquent perswasion” to found the first cities of the world. Before the arrival of this ancient eloquence, “the people remained in the woods and ­mountains, vagrant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie prouision for harbour or sustenance vtterly vnfurnished: so as they little diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.” The art of eloquence provides law for these lawless beings, collecting and housing a vagrant people and persuading them “to a more ciuill and orderly life.”79 These fables thus figure vagrancy as the antithesis of the civil order constituted in and through the art of rhetoric. In the vernacular handbooks, this civil order becomes synonymous with the law of the English monarch and the English Church. Each of these fables ostensibly functions as historical narrative, with Wilson characteristically deferring the arrival of true eloquence until the birth of the Christian Church; but they can also be interpreted as allegories of the art of rhetoric itself, which organizes a wayward and dislocated language into a coherent theory of discourse. That this linguistic mastery becomes synonymous with civil order only renders the art of rhetoric more useful to the English national community. Rhetoric promises to master vulgar speech,

77.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “woodwose,” http://www.oed.com. Reading this passage we might correctly deduce that Wilson was not an advocate of the preservation of common husbandry rights and practices, and later in the handbook he ratifies the rights of enclosure: “Commons, or equality, is when the people by long time have a ground, or any such thing among them, the which some of them will keep still for custom’s sake, and not suffer it to be fenced and so turned to pasture, though they might gain ten times the value: but such stubbornness in keeping of commons for custom’s sake is not standing with justice, because it is holden against all right” (Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 75). 78.  Paradoxically, although anti-enclosure polemic uniformly blames the practice for the dispossession of tenant farmer and the beggary of rural laborers, even those who argue in favor of enclosure cite beggary as justification for the eradication of the common fields. See Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. J. Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4:238. 79.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 22. The fable of Orpheus and Amphion is told again and again in sixteenth-century defenses of poetry and rhetoric, including those of William Webbe and Philip Sidney.

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transforming the mother tongue into an artful and eloquent language, and it also promises to master vulgar people, producing a settled and harmonious nation. Nevertheless, it could not be assumed that the alliance between rhetoric and civil order would be maintained if the art of rhetoric was made commonly available to Wilson’s unlearned “neighbors.” In fact, vernacular rhetorics are especially vulnerable to charges of political subversion because they make rhetorical device available to all comers, demystifying the language of kings while also giving common Englishmen the means to criticize their betters. If common rhetoric unleashes social disorder, then the actual “plot” of English rhetoric inverts the Orpheus myth: it gives the power of eloquence to the people rather than the orator-kings, and in so doing dissolves civil order.80 In this allegory of rhetoric, the English rhetors would be identified not as the lawgivers of a new vernacular order, but rather as itinerant trespassers onto the property of classical eloquence, thieves who place pilfered rhetorical treasure for sale on the open market.81 By making rhetoric English, the rhetors may have turned themselves into Robin Hood. Already in the space of time between the publication of Wilson’s and Puttenham’s manuals, the orientation of vernacular rhetoric had begun to tilt inexorably toward the figures of speech and away from the matter of invention. Wilson’s is the first and the last English manual to give extended treatment to the topics of rhetorical invention; beginning with Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence, the vernacular handbooks confine themselves almost exclusively to cataloging the figures of speech. At the same time as invention disappears from English rhetoric, the list of rhetorical figures begins to swell in size, and this amplification gives the “runnagate” figures of speech a disproportionately large presence in the vernacular field of rhetoric. In this chapter I have largely respected the avowed priorities of the earliest sixteenth-century English manuals, emphasizing the means whereby they define vernacular rhetoric as a form of service to their native country. But just as English rhetoric confines itself more and more exclusively to the catalog of figures of speech, so too will the chapters of this book, which follow the wandering and disorderly figures that Thomas Wilson tries so mightily to

80.  As Frank Whigham observes, “The presumptive link between rhetoric and the current Godgiven order of things snaps when the Wilsons of the age, with fully conservative self-consciousness, convert the tools of rule, of domination, into a commodity packaged for the open market of the literate.” See Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 2. 81.  Paula Blank argues that early modern English was formed through a series of language “crimes,” including “the ‘begging’ of words, the unregulated ‘coining’ of words, the ‘counterfeiting’ of words, the contraband ‘trade’ in words” (Broken English, 33).

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place under national control. Like those subjects designated by English law as vagrants, the rhetorical figures of speech define themselves by a refusal to remain within fixed boundaries, and their intransigence calls into question the ordering principles of vernacular rhetoric. Ironically, these outlaw figures must be defined within the terms set out by the vernacular art, which means they must be understood as English. In subsequent chapters I will examine this conflict between order and disorder, place and movement, within vernacular rhetorical practice. In order to displace charges of trespass and thievery from the English art of rhetoric, the vernacular handbooks must carefully distinguish between orderly and disorderly formulations within their own linguistic garden. To borrow once again from Haddon’s poem, rather than worrying about whether or not Lady Rhetoric should indeed be shown the way to England, the guides instead concern themselves with ensuring that practitioners understand “how to place the English words correctly.” Figures that interrupt such orderly placement, and produce disorder in the mother tongue, are marginalized from the English rhetorical commons. Yet although some of the handbooks attempt to displace charges of discursive vagrancy onto a few classical figures, this linguistic outlawry is already marked with a distinctive “Englishness” that threatens to undo the entire project. The tendency toward figurative disorder within the vernacular rhetorical system suggests that, despite the rhetors’ attempts to disavow the barbarousness of the English language and forge a common space of vernacular eloquence, Wilson’s vagrant “woodwoses” might become the exemplary figures of English rhetoric.

q Ch a p te r 2 The Trespasser Displacing Virgilian Figures in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

In considering the ancient art of rhetoric’s passion for classification, Roland Barthes observes, “tell me how you classify and I’ll tell you who you are.” This gnomic promise suggests that we can discover a certain truth of identity in the taxonomic decisions made by different rhetorical cultures. Barthes clarifies this declaration by writing that “the taxonomic option implies an ideological one: there is always a stake in where things are placed,” and he later calls taxonomic variation the “place of place.”1 I have been arguing that the “place” of vernacular rhetoric must be understood as England, and Barthes’ reflections on taxonomy suggest that we can discover the mechanisms of this placement not only in the locating of rhetorical commonplaces in English shires, but also in the classification of the various figures of speech. Compare, for example, the discussions of the figure hyperbaton in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1593). Quintilian praises the artfulness of the figure; he explains, Hyperbaton, that is to say the “stepping across” of a word, which is often required for reasons of Composition or decoration, is quite properly 1.  Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 47, 49. 55

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reckoned as a thing of positive value. Language would very often be rough, harsh, limp, or disjointed if the words were constrained as their natural order demands and each, as it arises, were tied to the next, even if no linkage can be made. Some words therefore have to be postponed or taken early, and each has to be placed in its proper position, as in a structure of unshaped stones. We cannot cut or polish words to make them fit together better when juxtaposed; we have to take them as they are and choose places for them.2 Despite this authoritative endorsement of hyperbaton’s artfulness, Peacham cautions his English readers that “to naturall and seemly order are repugnant Hyperbaton and his kindes . . . all which are faultes of speech consisting in disorder and confusion.”3 In reading Quintilian’s and then Peacham’s treatments of the figure hyperbaton, we travel the distance from the ancient world to early modern England, a place where the figure changes from an ornament to a fault of speech. Peacham’s English rhetoric asserts its own identity through this taxonomic deviation, denying Quintilian’s conclusion that its language will be “disjointed” without the aid of the figure. Instead, it identifies the figure itself as disordered and confused, displacing what Quintilian would call the vernacular’s own lack of artistry onto a classical form of speech. Writing in the midst of what proves to be a formative moment in the development of English rhetoric, Peacham rejects such disorderly figures as “faultes of speech,” declaring classical linguistic forms to be inappropriate in English writing. And yet, in producing this new definition, Peacham shapes his language according to the very figure he cautions his readers to avoid. Greek for “overstepping,” hyperbaton serves as an umbrella term for a variety of rhetorical schemes that transpose words within a sentence—including anastrophe, hysteron proteron, tmesis, hypallage, and parenthesis—and together such schemes constitute some of the most frequently used devices in classical literature. Hyperbaton and its subfigures invert orders of precedence within the syntactical line, altering normal word order by putting first what should come last, as in the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arms and the man I sing” (Arma virumque cano).4 As in Quintilian’s discussion of the figure, definitions of 2.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.6.62–64. 3.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), 119. 4.  To offer a modern example, Yoda in Star Wars is famous for hyperbaton: “Help you I can”; “Size matters not”; “Impatient you are”; “Impossible to see, the future is.” George Lucas, Star Wars (Beverly Hills: Lucasfilm, 1977).

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hyperbaton often use a spatial language to describe this disordering of words in a sentence, calling it a “passing over” or an “overbearing” of terms. Although such figures are routine in Greek and Latin rhetoric, they often challenge grammatical sense in uninflected vernacular languages that depend on word order for meaning. Nevertheless, Peacham’s “Caution” exemplifies how one might use hyperbaton in the English vernacular: he oversteps the “natural” vernacular word order of subject, verb, object in order to declare that “To naturall and seemly order are repugnant Hyperbaton, and his kindes,” thus handing his text over to the figure he intends to discard. Given that Peacham’s own manual demonstrates the possible application of hyperbaton in English—like many other rhetorical handbooks, his language inhabits the figure it attempts to define—why then make a point of declaring its syntactical disorders “repugnant”? This question matters because Peacham is not the only English rhetor to query the appropriateness of the figure in the vernacular: George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) similarly disparages hyperbaton, renaming it “the Trespasser” and classifying it as a potential abuse of the English language. Contemporary treatises of vernacular poesy are equally uneasy about the adoption of Latinate word order in English compositions. But if such inversions of word order can be so easily accommodated in English writing, as Peacham’s own example would seem to suggest, why not simply translate the figure and move on? Peacham’s repudiation of hyperbaton asserts the precedence of “naturall” English order over classical practice in the vernacular art of rhetoric. Moreover, its new designation as a disorderly figure allows hyperbaton to absorb the condemnation to which English rhetoric is most vulnerable: that in presuming to translate a classical art, it trespasses the “limits” of a vulgar language. I have already begun to identify a network of associations that indicate English rhetoric’s nervousness about itself, associations that highlight the vernacular’s outlaw status within the space of classical art. Because the early modern manuals draw on rhetoric’s spatial logic in order to make England the proper place of eloquent speech, these moments of nervousness often describe vernacular impropriety as a form of wandering or boundary crossing. In identifying hyperbaton as a disorderly figure that “trespasses” the rules of English usage, a small number of sixteenth-century rhetorics attempt to displace those negative associations onto forms of speech that code as particularly foreign. Discussions of hyperbaton are also revealing in that, as the passages from both Quintilian and Peacham indicate, they require that rhetorical handbooks posit the idea of a “natural” or ordinary language against which syntactical

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transpositions become legible. This results in an additional complication for the writers of English rhetorics because they have been alienated from their “native” tongue by years of Latin training. In other words, vernacular word order may not be “natural” to these English writers. Moreover, it is the very “naturalness” of the vernacular language—its perceived lack of a formal grammar, not to mention rhetorical ornament—that the vernacular rhetorics aim to supersede through the translation of rhetorical ornament into English. Thus discussions of hyperbaton allow us to observe, in compressed form, the myriad contradictions of the cultural situation in which so many English writers find themselves at the end of the sixteenth century. In order to identify hyperbaton as an unnatural form of speech, Peacham must act as if the limits of his own language are clearly defined and understood, when in fact those limits are a site of ongoing contestation.5 By declaring hyperbaton a trespasser, these rhetorics attempt to demarcate the borders of what I identified in chapter 1 as the “common” English language. Thus I consider the efforts to determine hyperbaton’s place within the field of vernacular rhetoric as evidence of a larger effort to invent a new linguistic home comprised of artful and yet also “natural” English speaking. In addition to explicating the periodically uneasy attempts of English rhetorics to translate hyperbaton into the vernacular, I will also examine Edmund Spenser’s accommodation of the figure in the verse of The Faerie Queene. Just as the English rhetorics attempt to conjure a common space of vernacular eloquence, yoked to an idea of the English country while also organized according to classical tradition, so too does The Faerie Queene invent a new geography—Faery—that allows the classical past and English present to converge in a single location. The opening lines of the Aeneid initiate Virgil’s translatio imperii from Troy to Rome, and as Quintilian’s rhetoric will soon teach us, it is through the oversteppings of hyperbaton that the poem formally expresses this transfer of cultural authority from one site (Troy) to another (Italy) (Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit / litora). Spenser’s Faerie Queene aims to enact a similar transfer of authority from ancient Rome to a new cultural location, and we can observe some of the formal mechanisms of this transfer in microdetail in his adoption 5.  Paula Blank writes, “If there is any single ‘politics of language’ that can be identified with Renaissance poetic practice, as well as the practice of early English linguists, it surely lies in the effort of each individual writer to discriminate among versions of the language and to authorize preferred forms, to draw (and then, at times, deliberately to transgress) the borders that separate one dialect of English from another.” Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6.

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of hyperbaton. In using the figure, Spenser faces a similar predicament as the vernacular manuals: in making hyperbaton at home in his language, Spenser posits English as a fitting inheritor of classical tradition, yet also risks making his vernacular poem a trespasser into the space of proper Roman history. This may be why Spenser’s translatio imperii occurs not in England, but rather in an imaginary landscape, making hyperbaton at home in the not-quite English spoken in “that happy land of Faery, / Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show.”6 Spenser critics have argued that The Faerie Queene draws on its Virgilian sources in order to create an English poetics that is also a poetics of exile, alienation, and dislocation.7 My analysis of the uses of hyperbaton within book 6 builds on this work, attempting to understand how such a poetics obtains at the level of the line, in a figure that displaces words from their natural English order in imitation of classical art. It is fitting to focus an analysis of Spenserian hyperbaton on book 6, which is the Legend of Courtesy, because the virtue of courtesy provokes the same difficulties of definition and classification as the figure of the “Trespasser.” Just as any attempt to define and categorize an English hyperbaton is complicated by the unstable distinction between the natural and the artificial in vernacular practice, Spenser’s attempt to set forth procedures for the exercise of proper courtesy must similarly negotiate between the competing values of the natural and the artificial. If one thinks of courtesy as a form of sprezzatura, then it is an art that conceals its own art, a practice that makes artifice seem natural. This is precisely how classical rhetors celebrate the expressive potential of hyperbaton: the figure improves on ordinary speech while also passing itself off as natural. Yet just as certain English rhetorics are suspicious of hyperbaton’s ability to transgress the rules of “naturall” English order, so too does book 6 worry over courtesy’s blurring of the natural and the artificial. If courtesy is only outward behavior that purports to correspond to inward virtue, then there is no way to distinguish the genuinely courteous knight from one who merely feigns courtesy. The poem often wrestles with this conundrum through the use of hyperbaton, suggesting that the displacements of that figure help constitute courtesy’s incapacity for fixed meaning in the poem. Or, to put it another way, as Spenser works out the meaning of

6.  The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), bk. 2, proem, st. 1. Further references to this text cited parenthetically. 7.  For a perceptive explication of the paradoxically enabling effects of English estrangement from the classical world on Spenser’s poetry, see Catherine Nicholson, “Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation,” Spenser Studies 23 (2008): 41–72.

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courtesy in the plot of book 6, he is simultaneously developing new forms of vernacular eloquence in his language.

Translating Hyperbaton into English I wol now synge, yif I kan, The armes and also the man That first cam, thurgh his destinee, Fugityf of Troy contree, In Itayle, with ful moche pyne Unto the strondes of Lavyne. —Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame (ca. 1380)

Hyperbaton is something of an elusive figure in the history of rhetoric in that one never knows quite where or when it will appear in either classical or early modern rhetorical handbooks: the figure crosses borders and evades boundaries of classification. In antiquity hyperbaton had a very broad meaning, indicating not only narrowly syntactical inversions but also any transposition or interruption of what might be considered natural or expected word order.8 Quintilian attempts to simplify discussions of the figure by declaring that “when a word is moved to some distance for decorative purposes, it is properly labeled a Hyperbaton,” but notes that some rhetors classify this movement as a trope (which changes word meaning), while others label it a figure or scheme (which changes word order only).9 Because it manipulates word order and thus alters sentence structure, the figure appears at the border of many different classical arts, including grammar, rhetoric, and prosody.10 In any given treatise, it might be contained in a list of rhetorical figures as either a scheme or a trope, or it might be included in more general discussions of grammatical construction.11 Hyperbaton’s movements within these various

  8.  Bernard Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus A–Z, trans. Albert W. Halsall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).   9.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.65, 67. In book 9, Quintilian writes, “A Trope, then, is 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.’ A Figure, on the other hand, as its very name shows, is a configuration of language distinct from the common and immediately obvious form. . . . In Hyperbaton, we have a change of order, and this is why many exclude it from the list of Tropes. However, it does ‘transfer’ a word or a part of a word from its own place to a new one” (In hyperbato commutatio est ordinis, ideoque multi tropis hoc genus eximunt: transfert tamen verbum aut partem eius a suo loco in alienum) (9.1.4, 6). 10.  O. B. Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), xii. 11.  Aldo Scaglione, Classical Theory of Composition: From Its Origins to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 7.

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systems of classification make good on its etymological associations with transgression, associations that are further indicated in its successive Latin and English translations (transgressio, trespasser). Descriptions of the figure often express its verbal transpositions as a halting or circuitous journey, whereby endings become beginnings as words are either “postponed or taken early.” In surveying its movements from classical to early modern vernacular handbooks, we can see hyperbaton work its mischief even in those texts that wish to contain its effects or explicitly deny it entry into the space of artful English language. At the same time that the rhetorics register its “strangeness,” they simultaneously, perhaps unwittingly, make it at home in the vernacular language. The general absence of rigor in the ancient definitions and classifications of hyperbaton means that at times it may not be recognizable as an intended figure at all, in part because the figure imitates disordered, artless speech. As Longinus explains in On the Sublime, in the most extensive ancient discussion of hyperbaton, The figure consists in arranging words and thoughts out of the natural sequence, and is, as it were, the truest mark of vehement emotion. Just as people who are really angry or frightened or indignant, or are carried away by jealousy or some other feeling—there are countless emotions, no one can say how many—often put forward one point and then spring off to another with various illogical interpolations, and then wheel round again to their original position, while under the stress of their excitement, like a ship before a veering wind, they lay their words and thoughts first on one tack then another, and keep altering the natural order of sequence into innumerable variations—so, too, in the best prose writers the use of hyperbata allows imitation to approach the effects of nature. For art is only perfect when it looks like nature and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art.12 Longinus’s definition “tacks” from the introduction of the figure itself to the vehement emotions of individuals caught in the grip of genuine feeling, to a parenthetical allusion to the “countless emotions” one might experience, to the speech that results from such strong feeling, to the metaphor of a ship buffeted by weather, so that by the time the hyperbatons return to the center 12.  Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 22. English translations of Longinus’s text were published in 1680 and 1698.

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of the discussion, the reader has almost lost sight of the figure that grounds the entire exercise. The seeming breathlessness of the description conveys the experience an audience will have in listening to an oration shaped by such displacements. Through the skillful deployment of hyperbatons, orators are able to “[make] the audience terrified of a total collapse of the sentence, and [compel] them from sheer excitement to share the speaker’s risk: then unexpectedly, after a great interval, the long-lost phrase turns up at the end, so that he astounds them all the more by the very recklessness and audacity of the transpositions.”13 Thus it is hyperbaton’s ability to masquerade as an error, as the wandering language of a speaker who has lost his way, only to bring the speech triumphantly home at the end, that constitutes the source of the figure’s power as a rhetorical device. Not only could the various hyperbatons operate in extended form across a prose oration, but such figures also enable the localized linguistic inversions of ancient poetry. The figure is ubiquitous in classical verse; as Peter Mack observes, word order is altered in almost every line of Latin poetry in order to meet the demands of quantitative meter.14 We can begin to understand the expressive possibilities that accompany such transpositions by examining Quintilian’s instructions for delivering the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit / litora.” Quinitilian advises, We must also note where our speech should be held up and as it were left in the air . . . and where it should be brought to rest. Arma virumque cano (“Arms and the man I sing”) is left in the air, because virum belongs to what follows, giving us virum Troiae qui primus ab oris (“the man who first from the shores of Troy”), after which there is another suspension; for, although where he came from and where he arrived are two different things, yet we do not need punctuation here, because both are covered by the same verb, venit (“came”). There is a third pause at Italiam, because fato profugus (“exiled by fate”) is parenthetical and interrupts the continuity of Italiam Lavinaque. For the same reason, there is a fourth pause at profugus, after which comes Lavinaque venit litora (“and came to Lavinian shores”), where we do at last need punctuation, because a new sentence begins from this point.15

13.  Ibid. 14.  Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98. 15.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11.3.36–38.

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The length of Quintilian’s instructions for speaking barely three lines of verse indicates the complexity of Virgil’s syntactical constructions. These three lines contain two hyperbatons: Arma virumque cano and the parenthesis fato profugus, which breaks up the syntactical unit Italiam Laviniaque. This parenthesis interrupts the geographical logic of the sequence from Troy to Italy to Lavinium with the suggestion that Aeneas’s travels are due to fate.16 It is telling that in this canonical example of the figure’s use in ancient poetry, hyperbaton’s syntactical dislocations narrate the geographic dislocations imposed by Aeneas’s exile from Troy. Virgil’s stature in ancient Rome and early modern England would be enough to certify such forms of figuration as artful, but elsewhere Quintilian feels called on to defend the evident artificiality of these and other figures of rhetoric, because “some teachers rule out any care for Composition, and argue that raw language, just as it comes out, is sometimes more ‘natural’ and sometimes also more ‘masculine.’ If they confine the term ‘natural’ to what develops first by nature, in the state in which it is before cultivation, then that undermines our whole art of oratory. Primitive men did not of course speak with our rules and standards of care. . . . But if no improvements were to be allowed, neither ought we to have exchanged huts for houses, skins for clothes, or mountains and woods for cities.”17 This passage uses all of the familiar tropes of barbarity—homelessness, nakedness, outlandishness—to argue that artificial constructions of speech are the “greatest perfection” allowed by nature.18 Quintilian’s argument indicates how the syntactical disorders of hyperbaton were understood to be an essential part of artistic expression in the ancient world, hence a mark of civility. Unfortunately for the English translators of classical rhetoric, because the modern vernacular languages place different syntactical constraints on the order of words, many classical improvements to “primitive” language remain unavailable in English. The strictures of English word order likely explain why, despite its distinction in ancient discussions of artful syntax, hyperbaton does not feature prominently in early vernacular rhetorics. Thomas Wilson explicitly omits hyperbaton from his Arte of Rhetoric (1553), explaining, “I might tarry a long time in declaring the nature of divers schemes, which are words or sentences altered either by speaking or writing contrary to the vulgar custom of our speech without changing their nature at all, but because

16.  M. P. Cunningham, “Some Principles of Latin Phrasing: Quintilian 11.3.35–38 on Aeneid 1.1–3,” Classical Weekly 47, no. 2 (November 1953): 17–21, 20. 17.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.4.2–5. 18.  Ibid.

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I know the use of the figures in word is not so great in this our tongue, I will run them over with as much haste as I can.”19 Like Longinus before him and Peacham after him, Wilson literally translates hyperbaton—“I will run them over”—while disavowing any discussion of the figure.20 Indeed, apart from indicating that such figures are not much use in English writing, by and large the earliest vernacular guides seem neither interested in nor uncomfortable with hyperbaton, which suggests that its grammatical disorderliness does not yet threaten the larger pretensions of vernacular rhetoric. The first edition of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) likewise does not register a great deal of concern about the verbal transpositions of hyperbaton. The 1577 edition of the Garden classifies hyperbaton and its subfigures as part of a group of schemes that, “by bearing or remouing of wordes from their proper places, doe make the oration very darke & obscure, whose principall kinde is commonly called Hyperbaton. . . . Hyperbaton, when the right and lawfull order of wordes or clauses, is altered by vnproper placing, or thus: when wordes or clauses be transposed from the plaine order of construction, to make the oration more loftie. Cicero calleth it an apte and prettie bearing ouer of words. Virgil. What hart can of the Greekes or souldiers, one of all Vlisses route refraine to wepe.”21 This description refers to the darkness and obscurity—vernacular synonyms for barbarism and solecism—effected by hyperbaton, and also mentions that reordering words in such a manner is “unproper,” not “right and lawfull.” Although the example quoted from an Englished line of Virgil is unwieldy (a portion of the verb [“can”] interrupts the subject phrase [“hart of the Greekes”], making the sentence difficult to understand), this syntactical unlawfulness does not condemn the figure in Peacham’s text. Instead, the entry on hyperbaton emphasizes the imprimatur of Cicero’s authority, calling the figure “an apte and prettie bearing ouer of words.” Just as Quintilian advises, such figures elevate one’s discourse, making “plaine” speech “more loftie.” The figures anastrophe, hysteron proteron,

19.  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 202. 20.  Richard Sherry does not “run over” the hyperbatons, but he does adopt the classical sense of “upsetting” the strictures of grammar when he writes, “Nowe remayne those figures, which trouble the Grammaticall order: & therefore as to ye chiefe are under this Greke worde, hyperbaton, which is as muche to saye, of woordes and construction a troubled order.” Sherry’s example of a figure that troubles grammatical order is “The sea floweth all Englande about,” which suggests that even at the early stages of the project of making classical figures speak English, the disorderly hyperbaton somehow implicates the island of England. Richard Sherry, A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (London: Richard Tottill, 1555), xviiiv. 21.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), iii–iiiv.

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parenthesis, and hypallage are afterward also briefly defined, with none of their linguistic transgressions deplored. Yet by the time he publishes the 1593 revised edition of his English rhetoric, the figure hyperbaton and “his kindes” are no longer welcome in Peacham’s Garden, revealing the years between the two editions as a key moment in English discussions of the figure. Led by R. F. Jones and, more recently, Richard Helgerson, critics have long identified this span of years as a period of intense vernacular self-fashioning.22 However, within the context of this widely shared linguistic project it was difficult for vernacular polemicists to locate what Claire McEachern calls a “secure lexical common ground.”23 The debates over quantitative verse indicate that even poets committed to the advancement of the English tongue differed as to how such advancement would be achieved. Should English be forced to fit the rule of classical meter, or should poets engage in native rhyming?24 The competition between classical and native models of poetry reached a crisis point between the late 1570s and the early 1580s.25 In this span of years, the native “rhymers” became ascendant—Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar was published in 1579—and the court became the center of poetry in England. In the decade following the publication of The Shepheardes Calendar, just as the rhymers began to gain ground over those who demanded the strict importation of classical poetic techniques, Peacham and Puttenham published English rhetorics that marginalized hyperbaton. Earlier and later vernacular rhetorics are less strident about the threat such figures pose to English structure, but in those rhetorics published at this transitional moment, the English writers assert themselves against the disorderly forms of hyperbaton, and thus against classical rule.

22.  R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953). Richard Helgerson also argues that “the writing of England” became a generational project at the end of the sixteenth century. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 23.  Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32. 24.  For English writers, the choice seemed to reside between two different forms of poetic selffashioning, what Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster (1570) distinguished as the “Greek” and the “Gothic” identities, otherwise identifiable as the difference between classical and native custom, quantitative verse and vulgar rhyme. See Richard Helgerson, “Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, 278–81 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. 25.  See Jones, Triumph of the English Language; Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Helgerson, “Barbarous Tongues”; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood.

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In addition to these two vernacular rhetorical manuals, other texts from this period also question the appropriateness of Latin verbal forms in English writing. For example, the first published treatise on English prosody notes the troubling lack of correspondence between classical and English grammar, and unexpectedly endorses native custom over Latin practice. George Gascoigne’s “Certayn Notes of Instruction,” appended to the second edition of his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1575), advises vernacular poets to “use your verse after thenglishe [sic] phrase, and not after the maner of other languages: The Latinists do commonly set the adjective after the Substantive: As for example Femina pulchra, aedes altae, etc. but if we should say in English a woman fayre, a house high, etc. it would have but small grace: for we say a good man, and not a man good, etc.”26 Gascoigne recommends that English poets follow the rules of vernacular practice rather than Latin precept, instructing his readers to “frame all sentences in their mother phrase and proper Idióma.”27 A subsequent vernacular poetics, William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), advises similar caution in word placement. Webbe warns “that this is one especiall thing to be taken heede of in making a good English verse, that by displacing no worde bee wrested against his naturall propriety.”28 Webbe argues for the “naturalness” of English grammar in vernacular poetry by reminding his readers that “our wordes can not well bee forced to abyde the touch of Position and other rules of Prosodia . . . there [is] such a naturall force or quantity in eche worde, that it will not abide anie place but one, without some foule disgrace.”29 Consequently, poets must avoid what Webbe calls “ouerthwart placing, or rather displacing of words,” such as when the “verbe [is placed] out of his order and too farre behinde the nowne.”30 Although Gascoigne and Webbe acknowledge the flexibility allowed by poetic license in matters of grammar, both warn against the upheaval of vernacular word order. Though they do not identify it as such, the rhetorical term that describes such a “displacing” of words is hyperbaton. Though he does not reject hyperbaton altogether, Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) is also sensitive to the grammatical incongruities between English and the classical languages. His handbook translates the Greek hyperbaton (“overstep”) into the “Trespasser,” thus emphasizing not only the 26.  George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (1575; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 459. 27.  Ibid. 28.  William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:273. 29.  Ibid. 30.  Ibid., 1:274.

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figure’s ability to cross boundaries but also the presence of powerful interdictions against doing so. He then uses a spatial language to redefine hyperbaton as potentially transgressing the strictures of the English language; he writes, “To all their speaches which wrought by disorder the Greekes gaue a general name [Hiperbaton] as much to say as the [trespasser] and because such disorder may be committed many wayes it receiueth sundry particulars vnder him, whereof some are onely proper to the Greekes and Latines and not to vs, other some ordinarie in our manner of speaches, but so foule and intollerable as I will not seeme to place them among the figures, but do raunge them as they deserue among the vicious or faultie speeches.”31 Puttenham begins his definition of hyperbaton with an unidentified example of its use, upending the order of his phrase so that part of the predicate of the sentence (“To all their speeches . . . ”) appears before its subject and verb (“the Greekes gaue . . .”). The subsequent text is confusing, but it evidently distinguishes between what is proper to the “Greekes and Latines” and what is proper to “vs,” indicating that notions of grammatical abuse depend on linguistic context. Although hyperbaton’s “kindes” may be acceptable at times, they can easily become vicious in English usage, which lacks the requisite inflections to make full use of the varieties of hyperbaton available in Greek and Latin.32 This passage expresses the new category of figures in spatial terms, with some of the hyperbatons losing their “place” among the other figures and being sent to “raunge” at the margins of Puttenham’s text with the other vicious forms of speech. Although the use of the terms “foule and intolerable” in the context of a discussion of hyperbaton is startling, Puttenham’s dislocation of only some of the figure’s “sundry particulars” from the proper space of English rhetoric is restrained compared to Peacham’s unequivocal repudiation of them all a few years later. Peacham’s 1593 Garden is in general much more repressive when it comes to the figures of speech: it decreases the number of acceptable rhetorical figures from the previous edition’s 184 to 165, and adds to the discussion of most of the figures additional paragraphs detailing first “the use” and then “the caution” against their abuse. Peacham describes his new “cautions” as boundaries that will “compasse” the English figures and protect

31.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 180. 32.  Ibid., 181. For example, Puttenham lists hysteron proteron first after hyperbaton in the catalog of “figures Auricular working by disorder,” but the figure also reappears at the end of the Arte under a chapter titled “Some vices in speaches and writing are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne withall by licence of approued authors and custome” (180, 162). The figure is thus sometimes a virtue, sometimes a vice. The categorical ambiguity surrounding hyperbaton’s “kindes” in Puttenham’s text exposes the absence of any universally signifying difference between lawful figures and figures of trespass.

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them from transgression.33 The term “compasse,” which denotes the boundaries of moderation in sixteenth-century usage, introduces yet another spatial metaphor to the discussion of the figures, yoking a sense of the proper to an idea of place. The revised edition discards the earlier reference to Cicero and mentions the hyperbatons only briefly, listing them as faults of speech in conflict with catacosmesis (in Latin, ordo), a figure of speech whereby persons are named in descending order of rank, and events are listed in the correct order of time. Peacham writes that “The vse” of this figure of ordo “doth most properly serue to the proprietie and elegancy of speech, and due obseruation of nature and dignitie: which forme is well represented in the ciuil and solemne customs of nations, where the worthiest persons are alwaies first named and highest placed.” Then follows “The Caution”: “The grace and comelinesse of this order is often diminished, and much blemished through want of discretion, or by rashnesse of the speaker, putting the lesse worthie, before the more worthy, contrarie to ciuil obseruation and comelinesse as to say, it pleased the Counsell and the King to make this law: My Mistresse and my Maister haue them commended to your worship.” “The Caution” then concludes with the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “To naturall and seemly order are repugnant Hyperbaton, and his kindes, as Anastrophe, Hysterologia, Hysteron Proteron, Tmesis, Hypallage, and Synchisis: all which are faultes of speech consisting in disorder and confusion.”34 The marginal note emphasizes this point once again, marking this paragraph as “Faults opposed to naturall & necessary order.” In this new description of hyperbaton, the figure is charged with assaulting the “nature and dignitie” of vernacular order. Peacham links this syntactical disorder to an indecorous social disorder: the figure is now understood to be “contrarie to ciuil obseruation and comelinesse.” Peacham thus asserts himself in opposition to these commonplace figures of classical rhetoric and Virgilian poetry, organizing the catalog of figures instead within an English “compasse.” This new classification ignores the humanist conviction that classical expression sets the standards for “proprietie and elegancy of speech.” While hyperbaton may be “apte” in the speech of Cicero, the second edition of Peacham’s Garden identifies it as a transgression of the natural forms of English decorum, akin to placing the “Mistress” before the “Master.” Yet despite Peacham’s efforts to banish the disorderly figure from vernacular writing, hyperbaton continues to operate in the very passage used to define its outsider status (“My Mistresse and my Maister haue 33.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), A.B.iv. 34.  Ibid., 119.

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them commended”). His “caution” inverts the order of its words so that the passage reads “to naturall and seemly order are repugnant Hyperbaton, and his kindes” using the figure itself to give “naturall . . . order” primary place in the sentence, which otherwise should read “Hyperbaton is repugnant to naturall and seemly order.” The figure’s return within Peacham’s English “compasse” suggests that the attempt to place the rules of vernacular grammar before the rhetoric of Cicero only produces and itself constitutes yet another form of linguistic trespass. The eagerness of Peacham, and to a lesser extent, Puttenham, to dismiss or at least moderate the use of disorderly hyperbatons in English speech at the end of the sixteenth century signals a distinctive forcefulness within the English rhetorical tradition. Most of the other sixteenth-century guides, including those composed by Fenner, Fraunce, and Hoskins, simply omit any mention of such figures, but Peacham and Puttenham include the hyperbatons so that they can explicitly diverge from classical authority and bar the use of classical figures that do not work in English.35 This assertiveness in defense of vernacular rule is perhaps no longer necessary later in the period, when proponents of English eloquence can point to the poetry of Sidney and Spenser as evidence of native artistry, and seventeenth-century English rhetorics do not generally worry over the problem of hyperbaton in the way their sixteenthcentury counterparts did.36 By the mid- to late seventeenth century, vernacular English had perhaps achieved a status secure enough that allusions to hyperbaton no longer suggest that English may be a “primitive” tongue when compared to the classical languages. In the late sixteenth century, however, when the English language first asserts itself as an eloquent vernacular, hyperbaton finds itself under threat of exile as an outlaw figure. In these classical and early modern treatments of hyperbaton, we can see the outlines of a plot begin to emerge. The ancient rhetorics describe hyperbaton 35.  It is not coincidental that Puttenham’s and Peacham’s English rhetorics are regarded as the most “courtly,” given that the court endorsed English rhyme over quantitative meter. 36.  For instance, Thomas Horne’s Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (1651) reasonably describes hyperbaton as “When words agreeing in sens, are in site disjoined.” John Newton’s An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (1671) classifies hyperbaton as only a secondary figure, but does not express hostility toward it, writing that “An Hyperbaton is a Transposition of words from the right order of construction, into some more neat and compact form, for elegancy and variety sake.” Horne, Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (London: Franc. Eglesfield, 1651), 34; Newton, An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (London: E. T. and R. H. for Thomas Passenger and Ben. Hurlock, 1671), 124. The 1676 English translation of Bernard Lamy’s rhetorical manual does disparage hyperbaton as “too bold and frequent transposition of words,” advising that “our Language is so great a Lover of clearness, that it admits none of those transgressions,” but this is likely because Lamy’s French is even less hospitable to word-order inversion than the English vernacular. Lamy, The Art of Speaking (London: W. Godbid, 1676), 43.

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as figure that moves words through space and time, taking sentences on a wandering course that keeps audiences suspended in anticipation as they await the return of the “long-lost” words that have been displaced by the figure. Puttenham and Peacham attempt to “compasse” hyperbaton’s movement in the vernacular, arguing that what Quintilian identifies as proper improvements to natural language cannot be allowed free rein in English. These discussions emphasize the incompatibility of classical art and the vernacular language—one “trespasses” the boundaries of the other—which in turn implies the existence of a fixed domain of “natural” English speech. Thus the process of removing the figure from English rhetoric helps delimit a border of ordinary or standard vernacular speech that was at best uncertain prior to the figure’s threatened transgressions. And yet, despite these halting attempts to weed it out of vernacular expression, hyperbaton still works its way through the texts of Wilson, Puttenham, and Peacham, rendering their language resistant to the dismissal of the figure. It literally oversteps their objections to its presence. Thus the very rhetorics that attempt to displace hyperbaton also provide the opportunity for its return in English speech. In my view, it is this process of displacement and return, or exile and accommodation, that characterizes the plot of the “Trespasser” in the discourse of English rhetoric in the 1580s and 1590s, a plot directly implicated in the relationship between the classical and the vernacular. This leads me to ask, does this plot also come to bear on poetic uses of the figure? For at the same time that Puttenham and Peacham were assigning hyperbaton a new place at the margins of vernacular rhetoric, Spenser was also experimenting with how to adumbrate a native English poesy while also adhering to classical models of art. Just as we can chart the shifting relationship between English and classicism in the translations of hyperbaton into the vernacular, so too do Spenser’s uses of the figure in The Faerie Queene position English art in a new location vis-à-vis ancient authority.

Spenser’s “carefull Hyperbaton” Midway through the May eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser’s first published collection of verse, the shepherd Piers quotes a mother’s lament to her son, but before he actually delivers her words of sorrow he interrupts his own performance with an interjection: “Thy father (that word she spake with payne:/ For a sigh had nigh rent her heart in twaine).” These lines are not particularly noteworthy, and perhaps because readers might not otherwise attend to the passage, the commenter “E. K.” inserts a gloss that highlights

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the two hyperbatons contained within. The gloss identifies “that word” as “a patheticall parenthesis, to encrease a carefull Hyperbaton.”37 Published many years later, the proem to the last complete book of The Faerie Queene likewise contains a “carefull” deployment of the figure hyperbaton: The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,    In this delightfull land of Faery,    Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,    And sprinckled with such sweet variety,    Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,    That I nigh rauisht with rare thoughts delight,    My tedious trauell doe forget thereby;    And when I gin to feele decay of might, It strength to me supplies, & chears my dulled spight.38 (bk. 6, proem, st. 1) Produced at the beginning and the end of his poetic career, these two texts imply that Spenser followed the cursus Virgilii, or Virgilian course, tracing a path that took him from pastoral to epic in ascending order of generic status.39 Yet something curious happens in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, which veers from this Virgilian path in order to revert to the pastoral poetry with which Spenser began his writing career, a process of self-reflection that culminates when the Knight Calidore happens upon Colin Clout (Spenser’s alter ego in The Shepheardes Calendar) piping to the three Graces in canto 10.40

37.  The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 94, 103. 38.  A Folger copy of the 1596 Faerie Queene contains a printing error so that the final line reads “tI strength to me supplies,” further emphasizing the grammatical reversal at the end of the line. Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: William Ponsonbie, 1596), 355, my emphasis. 39.  William J. Kennedy explains, “This pattern is called the rota Virgilii or cursus Virgilii, the Virgilian wheel or course, and it is explained in a four-line proemium of unknown authorship appended to Renaissance editions of the Aeneid:  . . . I am he who, after singing on the shepherd’s slender pipe and leaving the woodside for the farmlands, urged the plowed lands ever so much to obey their eager tenant; my work was welcome to the farmers, but now I turn to the sterner stuff of Mars.” Kennedy, “Virgil,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 718–19. Patrick Cheney argues against this conceptualization of Spenser’s career in Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 40.  As Theresa Krier explains in a helpful survey of criticism on the later books of The Faerie Queene, scholarship on these parts of the poem was long marked by disappointment, yet following the publication of Jonathan Goldberg’s Endlesse Worke (1981), critics have tended to read these books as “an intensified, more explicit treatment of the conditions of storytelling per se.” From this perspective on the poem, the interruptions and discontinuities of book 6 are not (or at least, not only) the

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The oft-quoted proem to book 6 begins to explain what is happening to the poem at this late stage, referring to The Faerie Queene as a landscape in which the poet wanders to and fro, at times forgetting the ends of his “tedious trauell” and reveling in the delights of his own verse. In her analysis of Renaissance romance, Patricia Parker reads these lines as a sign that Spenser’s poem is beginning to explore its own sources, which include the digressive mode of vernacular romance as well the teleological narrative of classical epic.41 Like Parker, I begin with this passage because it shows us the poem coming to terms with its own form, but also because this moment of self-reflection begins with hyperbaton. The first line of the stanza upsets normal word order to delay the subject/verb phrase, so that “I guyde” comes at the end of the line.42 This displacement is not necessary to supply the demands of meter or rhyme—“I guyde” completes an iambic pentameter line whether it comes before or after “my weary steps,” and since it is the first line of the stanza, it is not yet constrained by a fixed rhyme pattern—but presumably to emphasize the word itself, as well as the thematic of delay expressed by the larger stanza. The inversion sets up “guyde” at the opposite end of “waies,” so that the two key terms anchor and balance the line, with the “weary steps” taking the reader from one end to the other. Having just narrated the history of hyperbaton’s migration to England and described its plot as one of displacement and return, I see in this figure an apt introduction to a book in which The Faerie Queene almost fully abdicates the quest structure of the larger epic in order to step through a series of pastoral and metapoetic interludes. Keeping in mind the larger narrative displacements that structure the Legend of Courtesy, I want to investigate a series of focused questions about poetic form: What other hyperbatons are upsetting word order in book 6? What is their significance in a book that so repeatedly declares itself to be off its right “course,” at times seeming to abandon its quest to transmit the virtue of courtesy? How do the displacements of hyperbaton convey the difficulty of recognizing “true curtesie” in the postclassical world (bk. 6, proem, st. 5)? What is the relationship

sign of a poet who has become disillusioned with his epic task, but rather devices that allow book 6 to reflect on the role of poetic language. Krier, “The Faerie Queene (1596),” in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es, 188–209 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 191, 197. See also Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral: Book Six of “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 41.  Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 54. 42.  There is also a hyperbaton at the end of the line: “It strength to me supplies.”

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between Spenser’s hyperbatons and his larger attempt to forge “a kingdom of our own language”?43 Narrative vagrancy and delay are typical of the romance tradition informing Spenser’s text, and yet many readers find these features particularly amplified in book 6, when the titular knight Sir Calidore disappears for many cantos, in the meantime abandoning his quest to slay the Blatant Beast, a quest that he fails to complete by the end of the book. Instead of following the knight on his quest, book 6 instead investigates the effects of poetry and poetic language in a series of episodes borrowed directly from medieval romance and folk tradition. Its central villain attacks its victims through verbal slander, and many of the minor malefactors also literalize and render disturbing the effects of poetic language, as in the case of the band of cannibals, who blazon the body of a captive woman in the manner of a love sonnet as they prepare to dine on her flesh (bk. 6, canto 8, st. 39). The cannibals are, in a sense, simply very bad readers and writers of poetry, and the question for the Knight of Courtesy is whether he can do any better in developing a virtue that provides, at best, a relative set of ethical guidelines.44 As Humphrey Tonkin notes, it is as if Calidore is on a quest to redeem poetic language, but there seems to be no sure principle that can enable the knight to become a more successful poet and reader than the savages and discourteous knights and ladies running loose in the countryside.45 The proem to book 5 has taught us to understand this problem as a historical condition, one brought about by the decay of modern times from antiquity: Let none then blame me, if in discipline    Of vertue and of ciuill vses lore,    I doe not forme them [my characters] to the common line    Of present dayes, which are corrupted sore,    But to the antique vse, which was of yore . . .  (bk. 5, proem, st. 3) The proem to book 6 echoes this complaint, noting that “true curtesie” is very “farre from that, which then it was,” figuring the present time of the 43.  For an influential discussion of this quotation from Spenser’s letters to Gabriel Harvey, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 1–18. 44.  Bruce Danner, “Courteous Virtù in Spenser’s Book 6 of The Faerie Queene,” SEL 38, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 1–18. 45.  Humphrey Tonkin, “The Faerie Queene, Book VI,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 283–87 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

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poem in terms of its geographical distance from the classical world (bk. 6, proem, st. 5). In its desire to follow not the “common line” but the path of “antique vse,” The Faerie Queene converges with the handbooks of English rhetoric around a key problem: How do you distinguish artful speech and behavior in the barbarous outland, far from the “antique world” (bk. 5, proem, st. 1)? The proem’s promise to ignore the “formes” of “the common line” implies, among other things, a willingness to transgress the “naturall” order of English speech. Given the situation in which the poem finds itself, could it be that hyperbaton can chart the path to vernacular courtesy by diverging from “the common line / Of present dayes”? Applied to the entire Faerie Queene, these questions are quite large, and a focus on inverted word order and the thematics of trespass and delay might lead us in any number of directions, both poetic and biographical. Spenser lived and wrote, literally, beyond the pale of Elizabethan courtly culture; as Richard Rambuss puts it, he is “the expatriate author of a national epic, the court poet stationed on the frontier,” occupying positions that are simultaneously inside and outside of his poetry’s chief frames of reference.46 In this regard, Spenser’s poetic career follows a trajectory much like that followed by vernacular rhetoric, which aims to fashion an art of English rhetoric in the barbarous hinterlands, far from the classical center of eloquent speech. Spenser follows Virgil’s career precisely so as to achieve such a relocation of cultural authority: just as Virgil moved the imperial center from Greece to Rome, so too would Spenser move it to Tudor England. Book 6 could be read as a withdrawal from this Virgilian, imperial course, one brought about by Spenser’s disillusionment with his reception at court and his own quasi exile in Ireland; and yet many critics have emphasized the persistence of political content in the Legend of Courtesy’s pastoral interludes.47 For example, Julia Reinhard Lupton argues that book 6 draws on the political content of Virgil’s Eclogue 1  in order to defend English “home-making” in Ireland, thus using the genre of pastoral to represent a new colonial program in which English rule in Ireland becomes a “restorative resettling rather than a usurping displacement.”48 This in turn alters Spenser’s own position within the structures provided by 46.  Richard Rambuss, “Spenser’s Life and Career,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield, 13–36 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13–14. For a more extensive analysis of Spenser’s career, see Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 47.  Krier cites Richard Helgerson’s and Richard McCabe’s studies of The Faerie Queene as examples of political or historical readings of Spenser, as well as the extensive work on Spenser and Ireland, most prominently by Willy Maley and Andrew Hadfield (Krier, “Faerie Queen,” 202–6). 48.  Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Home-Making in Ireland: Virgil’s Eclogue I and Book VI of The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 8 (1990): 119–46, 137–38.

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his classical sources and his political situation; in Lupton’s words, it “redefines ‘exile’—distance from the national center—as ‘home.’ ”49 The notion that “home” is something discovered through the procedures of the art of rhetoric is a key theme of rhetorical discourse from the classical period onward, and this leads me to observe that Spenser’s home-making occurs not only through his use of Virgilian pastoral but also in his accommodation of Virgilian figures of speech such as hyperbaton into English verse. The use of rhetorical ornament is habitually understood as a process of home-making, as we can see in Gabriel Harvey’s spring-term lecture as university praelector of rhetoric at Cambridge in 1575. Harvey advises, “I would like for you to . . . weave the fabric of your speech—that web that I spoke of—in such a way that all the stylistic ornaments and embellishments you interweave might seem like natives comfortably settled in their homeland, and not like interlopers, or invaders on alien soil.”50 This passage creates a plot of transport and resettlement that relies on an idea of “home” as the proper locale of rhetorical speech and thus potentially licenses the transportation of classical bonae into the English language. The problem for English writers of Spenser and Harvey’s generation was that nobody quite knew where to establish the proper home of native eloquence, a problem of reading and writing created by the project of vernacularization, which steps away from the guiding narrative of civilization provided by the classical tradition. Was vernacular eloquence to be found in the language of the schools or of the court? Was its admittedly limited vocabulary to be purely “English,” or should it be supplemented with foreign terms? Should it be primarily classical in organization, or framed according to native grammar and idiom? Spenser was a major actor in these debates, both in his published correspondence with Harvey and in the scholarly apparatus published with The Shepheardes Calendar, which is signed by “E. K.” but likely written by Spenser himself. And although he began his career as an advocate of what O. B. Hardison calls a “hard-edged classicism,” recommending the adoption of what proved to be unwieldy classical measures in English poetry, Spenser eventually moderated this position, using rhyme and other elements of the vernacular romance tradition in his own verse.51 Readers of Spenser have tended to focus on his more prominent linguistic eccentricities when discussing the vernacular poetics of the Calendar and The Faerie Queene,

49.  Ibid., 119. 50.  Gabriel Harvey’s Rhetor; or, A Two-Day Speech on Nature, Art, & Practice in the study of Rhetoric (1577), trans. M. Reynolds (2001), 27, http://comp.uark.edu/~mreynold/rheteng.html. 51.  Hardison, Prosody and Purpose, 124, 212.

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including the use of archaisms and dialect forms; however, we might also point to the hyperbaton from the May eclogue as an equally interesting example of Spenser’s method for interweaving classical and English forms. These two lines, “(that word she spake with payne: / For a sigh had nigh rent her heart in twaine),” take a string of English monosyllables and archaisms (spake, payne, twaine) and shape them according to the classical figure hyperbaton and its subfigure parenthesis. Spenser thus makes hyperbaton “speak English,” to quote Richard Sherry, and the translation of the figure is so unobtrusive—that is, the subject/verb/object inversion is now so commonplace as to seem almost “natural” to modern readers of English poetry—that without the gloss his readers might not even notice the presence of the inversion. Hyperbaton’s ability to convey either natural or artificial eloquence, depending on the skill of the poet, clarifies the conflicting significations of courtesy in The Faerie Queene. If making artificial or strange things seem natural is key to successful rhetorical practice, it is also central to the practice of courtesy, a calculated art of social behavior that passes itself off as natural or instinctive. Calidore himself is identified as more genuinely courteous than any other member of the Faery court in that his outward behavior actually correlates to and elaborates on an inward virtue. He is described as a knight In whom it seemes, that gentlenesse of spright And manners mylde were planted naturall; To which he adding comely guize withal, And gracious speech, did steale mens hearts away. (bk. 6, canto 1, st. 2) Calidore’s “comely guize” acts as a stylistic ornament to his “naturall” gentleness, just as the figures of elocutio ornament the material of inventio. Yet the Legend of Courtesy repeatedly offers up examples of characters in whom a “comely guize” does not correspond to inward virtue, and even in talking of Calidore the poet can only say “it seemes” that his manners are “naturall.” Although the forms of courtesy may be relatively fixed—they require that each knight behave according to the demands of his social position—their real meaning often shifts: courteous behavior might be a sign of either inner virtue or of masked intent. Book 6 repeatedly underscores how courtesy evades reliable confirmation, and thus, rather than fixing the meaning of “true curtesie,” Calidore’s adventures instead emphasize the problematic disjunction between inner virtue and outer show. The impossibility of knowing with any certainty whether outward appearances correspond to “naturall” virtue results in the troubled tone of the proem to book 6, which laments that courtesy has fallen off since antiquity: “Its

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now so farre from that, which then it was, / That it indeed is nought but forgerie, / Fashion’d to please the eies” (bk. 6, proem, st. 5). The aim of The Faerie Queene is to redeem such virtue in the present time of Tudor England, “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” (15). Yet rather than providing a program for the restoration of courtesy in the modern world, the stanza concludes in a defensive posture, declaring only that “virtues seat is deepe within the mynd, / And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd” (bk. 6, proem, st. 5). Apart from this warning, the proem offers no means of distinguishing between what it calls “fayned showes” and genuine courtesy, and courtesy remains a virtue that is only visible in “outward shows” (bk. 6, proem, st. 4). This suggests that just as rhetoric and courtesy share analogous aims—making the artificial seem natural—so too do they share analogous problems. Critics of rhetoric from Plato onward argue that the art of rhetoric privileges style over substance (or elocutio over inventio) and worry that its devices can persuade people to believe falsehoods. That is to say, the ornaments of rhetoric, like the fashions of courtesy, have no necessary relation to virtuous action or moral content. Moreover, the very idea of inward, authentic courtesy exists only as an imagined source of outwardly visible show. Within the English rhetorical manuals, hyperbaton expresses a parallel problematic—definitions of the figure rely on an idea of “naturall” English speech that may not have existed prior to the figure’s transgressions—and thus the figure is a fitting vehicle for The Faerie Queene’s attempts to define courtesy’s nature and its parameters. Within book 6, hyperbaton often appears at moments when genuine courtesy seems to be in question, in a sense becoming the figural expression of that question. For example, observe the first two stanzas of canto 2, which detail the “fitting” actions of courteous knights: What vertue is so fitting for a knight,    Or for a Ladie, whom a knight should loue,    As Curtesie, to beare themselues aright    To all of each degree, as doth behoue?    For whether they be placed high aboue,    Or low beneath, yet ought they well to know    Their good, that none them rightly may reproue    Of rudenesse, for not yielding what they owe: Great skill it is such duties timely to bestow. Thereto great helpe dame Nature selfe doth lend:    For some so goodly gratious are by kind,    That euery action doth them much commend,

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   And in the eyes of men great liking find;    Which others, that haue greater skill in mind,    Though they enforce themselues, cannot attaine.    For euerie thing, to which one is inclin’d,    Doth best become, and greatest grace doth gaine: Yet praise likewise deserue good thewes, enforst with paine. (bk. 6, canto 2, st. 1–2) The canto begins by describing the actions of courtesy as a kind of social decorum organized by differences of station, in which knights must “beare themselues aright / To all of each degree.” The avoidance of “rudeness” requires that the courteous knight recognize what is owed to individuals of various ranks, and line 9 identifies the difficulty involved in such decorous practice, for “Great skill it is such duties timely to bestow.” The hyperbaton that disorders the words in this last line suggests that the timeliness of courtesy inheres not only in the recognition of codes of decorum but also in the apt bestowing of words according to elegant figures of speech. Indeed, the figure works so well—that is, it so closely fits the idea it intends to convey— that it is difficult to think how it might read otherwise (“it is great skill to timely bestow such duties”?). The following stanza includes additional “carefull” hyperbatons as it describes the behavior of knights who “goodly gratious are by kind”: their actions “doth them much commend” (“much commend them”), help them “great liking find” (“find great liking”), and “greatest grace doth gaine” (“doth gaine greatest grace”). These lines praise the knight for whom courtesy comes as naturally as such figures come to the poet; however, the final alexandrine complicates the message of the preceding stanzas by conceding, “Yet praise likewise deserue good thewes, enforst with paine.” That is to say, the laborious efforts of those who are not naturally courteous likewise deserve praise. Just as such “thewes” are less successful than natural forms of courtesy because they are more obviously effortful, this hyperbaton sounds labored, even awkward, when compared to the previous alexandrine. The grammatical displacements make the poet’s meaning difficult to understand—on a first reading, the line seems to suggest that “praise deserves good shows.” The hyperbaton thus introduces a note of uncertainty into the previously confident discussion of courteous behavior: rather than conveying a sense of the poet’s unstudied mastery, the line leaves us with the memory of art “enforst with paine.” Does visible effort reduce the effects of courtesy? Further, will observers be able to tell the difference between the naturally courteous knight and one who puts on a good show? The potential incongruity between inward

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virtue and outward show is further explored in canto 7, which describes the actions of the “discourteous Knight” Turpine, who seeks revenge on Arthur, who has recently defeated and humiliated him. Turpine, “coming courteously, / To cloke the mischiefe, which he inly ment,” complains of Arthur to two stranger knights, and persuades them to assault the Prince on his behalf while he remains hidden in the forest (bk. 6, canto 7, st. 4). Thus the canto depicts the cowardly actions of “discourtesy,” which operate through deceit and manipulation rather than the direct approach of true courtesy. The first stanza of the canto compresses this distinction into 9 lines: Like as the gentle hart it selfe bewrayes,    In doing gentle deedes with franke delight,    Euen so the baser mind it selfe displayes,    In cancred malice and reuengefull spight.    For to maligne, t’enuie, t’vse shifting slight,    Be arguments of a vile donghill mind,    Which what it dare not doe by open might,    To worke by wicked treason wayes doth find, By such discourteous deeds discouering his base kind. (bk. 6, canto 7, st. 1) The period at the end of the fourth line divides the stanza in two, with the a-rhymes of the first four lines—“bewrayes” and “displayes”—emphasizing the outward evidence of courtesy and its opposite, and the c-rhymes of the last four lines—“mind,” “find,” and “kind”—focusing more closely on the “malice” of the “baser mind” introduced in the middle of line 3. The demands of this rhyme scheme necessitate the hyperbatons contained in line 8: “To worke by wicked treason wayes doth find.” This line doubly troubles normal word order, displacing “wayes doth find” from the beginning to the end of the sentence, an inversion that is further complicated by an additional reversal of verb and object which places “wayes” before “find.” The tension between order and syntax in the line thus enacts the convoluted motions of discourtesy in the course of making visible a baseness that attempts to succeed while remaining hidden. Although the “shifting” actions of a discourteous knight operate by stealth, the trespasses of normal syntax in line 8 constitute the most noteworthy figure of the entire stanza. The visibility of this hyperbaton might lead us to overlook the milder inversion that opens the stanza, “Like as the gentle hart it selfe bewrayes.” This line reverses the verb and its object so that “bewrayes” can be delayed until the end of the sentence, thus imitating the periodic structure

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of literary Latin. The third line of the stanza operates “Euen so,” as the “baser mind” likewise “it selfe displayes” in a periodic clause produced through hyperbaton. The ease of these parallel constructions unwittingly reveals an essential problem depicted in the canto: courtesy and discourtesy often look just the same. If one approaches the verse from the perspective of vernacular word order and also attends to the associations produced by the stanza’s rhymes, it becomes difficult to distinguish the treasonous “wayes” of line 8 from the milder “displayes” of lines 1 and 3. Thus we see that the difficulty of distinguishing between artful and abusive figures of speech parallels the particular difficulty of representing and transmitting the virtue of courtesy. As the first word of the stanza declares, courtesy and discourtesy operate in “Like” fashion. Only a knowledge of deeds done in private can “discover” the ungentle mind beneath a courteous form, which is why Arthur punishes Turpine by hanging him by his heels from a tree, so “that all which passed by, / The picture of his punishment might see, / And by the like ensample warned bee, / How euer they through treason doe trespasse” (bk. 6, canto 7, st. 27; my emphasis). The display of Turpine for all to “see” enacts the core fantasy of book 6: that discourtesy will become discernible just as genuine courtesy will “at the last breake forth in his owne proper kind” (bk. 6, canto 5, st. 1). Although he is supposed to be the embodiment of such courtesy, Calidore pushes against the limits of his defining virtue when he disrupts the dance of the three Graces in book 10, becoming a literal “trespasser” into Colin Clout’s private poetic vision. When Calidore approaches Mount Acidale and catches sight of one hundred naked women dancing around the three Graces, He durst not enter into th’open greene, For dread of them vnwares to be descryde, For breaking of their daunce, if he were seene; But in the couert of the wood did byde, Beholding all, yet of them vnespyde. (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 11) The b-rhymes of the stanza are achieved through a series of hyperbatons that delay the verb phrase until the end of the line (“of them . . . to be descryde”; “in the couert of the wood did byde”; “of them vnespyde”). In each case the trespass of normal syntax emphasizes the joint acts of hiding and spying on the dancing women. Calidore’s “dread” of his own discourtesy drives the deformed syntax of the line, a social trespass that corresponds to a syntactical one.

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Soon enough, Calidore’s dread is realized, for “resoluing,” in a hyperbaton, “what it was, to know,” he rises up from his hiding place to address Colin and the dancing women (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 17). But soone as he appeared to their vew, They vanisht all away out of his sight, And cleane were gone, which way he neuer knew; All saue the shepheard, who for fell despight Of that displeasure, broke his bag-pipe quight, And made great mone for that vnhappy turne. (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 18) Calidore’s intrusion introduces a new “turne” that causes the dancers to vanish, in a hyperbaton, “which way he neuer knew,” whereupon Colin breaks his pipe in exasperation. This interruption of the song and dance is abrupt, with the result that the nature of the discourtesy is not entirely clear—Is Calidore’s visible trespass a discourteous interruption, or was his passive hiding and watching proof of his baseness? Uncertain how to make sense of what he has witnessed, Calidore turns to Colin for guidance, asking the shepherd to “dilate” on the vision the knight has inadvertently “displace[d]” (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 21, 20). The Graces are the source of “all the complements of curtesie,” Colin at last explains: “They teach vs, how to each degree and kynde / We should our selues demeane, to low, to hie; / To friends, to foes, which skill men call Ciuility” (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 23). This explanation suggests that the virtue of courtesy can be fairly easily learned and enacted through careful social positioning. But then Colin complicates this vision of “Ciuility,” continuing, Therefore they always smoothly seeme to smile,    That we likewise should mylde and gentle be,    And also naked are, that without guile    Or false dissemblaunce all them plaine may see,    Simple and true from couert malice free:    And eeke them selues so in their daunce they bore,    That two of them still forward seem’d to bee,    But one still towards shew’d her selfe afore; That good should from vs goe, then come in greater store. (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 24) According to Colin’s interpretation, the nakedness of the Graces signifies their simplicity; however, the syntax of this passage is far from straightforward

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or “plaine.” In addition to creating a series of localized hyperbatons (“naked are,” “all them plaine may see,” “them selues . . . they bore”), the stanza also narrates a dance in which the placement of the Graces remains obscure. It’s not clear who is in front and who is behind, since the poem offers no fixed perspective from which the reader can understand the position of the dancers in the circle. The next stanza further complicates the vision of the dance, adding a “fourth Mayd, which there amidst them traced,” a maid who may or may not represent Queen Elizabeth (bk. 6, canto 10, st. 25). These verbal descriptions convey nothing more concrete than a sense of movement to and fro, a movement difficult to affix to a single allegorical or pedagogical meaning (is courtesy simply a constant turning about the queen?). If Calidore is on a quest to fashion the virtue of courtesy in the modern era, this vision, while evocative, offers little guidance. The system of “degree and kynde” that organizes life at court from “low to hie” cannot provide a structure for the dance, which enacts a cycle of advance and retreat that will never end in fixed positions. As he remains transfixed by this vision of pastoral poetry, Calidore’s charge to slay the Blatant Beast is largely forgotten. As a result, in the opening stanzas of canto 12 the poet finds himself acknowledging once more the vagrancy of the Legend of Courtesy, and promising to “come into my course againe” (bk. 6, canto 12, st. 2). Book 6 is thus framed at its beginning and its end by explicit admissions of narrative digression; like the figure hyperbaton, the book leads its readers the long way around. And although the proem to book 6 had described The Faerie Queene as a landscape through which the poet wanders in delight, here the poem is compared instead to a rough sea voyage: Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde    Directs her course vnto one certaine cost,    Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,    With which her winged speed is let and crost,    And she her self in stormie surges tost;    Yet making many a borde, and many a bay,    Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:    Right so it fares with me in this long way, Whose course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray. (bk. 6, canto 12, st. 1) This stanza likens the steering of the poem to that of a ship tossed about by contrary winds and tides; the ship must tack and turn before the wind,

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“making many a borde, and many a bay” in order to “winneth way.” Although the “way” of the ship might seem astray and vagrant, it is only by taking “this long way” that the poet can chart his course toward “one certaine cost.” Drawing once more on the displacements of hyperbaton, this analogy promises that, despite appearances, the poem “ne hath her compasse lost.” In the context of my investigation of the “ways” of hyperbaton in book 6, this stanza provides an unexpectedly fitting conclusion to the book, evoking Longinus’s description of the perilous thrills of orations organized according to such rhetorical schemes. Such orations, you will remember, “put forward one point and then spring off to another with various illogical interpolations, and then wheel round again to their original position, while under the stress of their excitement, like a ship before a veering wind, they lay their words and thoughts first on one tack then another, and keep altering the natural order of sequence into innumerable variations.”52 Spenser uses the same metaphor to describe how his poem moves forward in its course even when it seems to wheel around and veer from its proper direction.53 And thus it is perhaps no surprise that when Calidore vows to finally resume his quest to slay the Blatant Beast, he speaks the figure hyperbaton once again: “Asham’d to thinke, how he that enterprise, / The which the Faery Queene had long afore / Bequeath’d to him, forslacked had so sore” (bk. 6, canto 12, st. 12, emphasis mine). And so the poem comes back onto its “course” via a vagrant, dislocating Virgilian figure of speech. As we reach the end of book 6, which is also the last complete book of The Faerie Queene, we can ask: Can hyperbaton now be used safely in English? Has Spenser made the figure “natural” to the vernacular? The question remains unanswered, as Spenser cannot resolve whether or not English writers can decorously diverge from the “common line” and use the figure of the “Trespasser” any more than Peacham or Puttenham could. Nor can he offer a coherent idea of courtesy as a virtue that reliably unites inner virtue and outward show, the natural and the artificial. Instead, he writes about the very problem. Borrowing language from Gordon Teskey, we might call Spenser’s approach a “thinking through” of the dilemmas of vernacular rhetoric rather than a clear manual of its practices. Teskey compares Spenserian courtesy in book 6 to a kind of “thinking,” “an encounter with the strange to which courtesy is the key.” This thinking does not “seize” the object under consideration, but rather “moves into nearness” with it, as a courteous man might 52.  Longinus, On the Sublime, 22. 53.  Spenser likely borrows the metaphor from Ariosto, who uses it in the proem to the final canto of Orlando Furioso (46.1).

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move into nearness with the “otherness” of a stranger.54 In the various trials of courtesy documented in book 6, which often test the limits of hyperbaton in English, Spenser thinks through the challenges of vernacular rhetoric, bringing his language into nearness with “foreign” modes of speech. The result is not a fixed guide to whether hyperbaton “works” in English, nor a coherent vision of the virtue of courtesy. The result, instead, is an English epic poem that draws on wayward figures like the “Trespasser” in order to relocate cultural authority in the barbarous outland, and thereby chart a path to a newly eloquent vernacular home.

Coda: Spenser’s “homely verse” If they confine the term “natural” to what develops first by nature, in the state in which it is before cultivation, then that undermines our whole art of oratory. —Quintilian, Institutio oratoria Hyperbaton, is a transposition of words from a naturall or right, into a more feat order: for Elegancie, or variety’s sake: as, Geor: lib: 1. What makes rich Grounds: in wt Ceolestial Signes ’Tis good to plow, & marry Elms wth Vines; What best fitts Cattell, wt wch sheep agrees; And severall Arts improveing frugall Bees, I sing Mecoenas ——————— It ought naturall to be thus, [Mecoenas I sing of what makes rich Grounds & c —H. Walker, A Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677)

By the time Henry Walker composes his manuscript Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677), the hyperbatons have been safely relegated to the margins of the vernacular catalog: hyperbaton and its subfigures hysteron proteron, hypallage, and parenthesis are all delayed until the end of the manual, where they are listed in the “Appendix of Secondary Figures.”55 In the end, it was not so difficult to accommodate the displacements of hyperbaton safely at the borders of English rhetoric. So why all the fuss in the first place? Peter Mack wonders the same thing, writing, “The authors of the English manuals . . . are so concerned to resist the threat to English structure that they fail to mention the usefulness of what is, after all, hardly an uncommon 54.  Gordon Teskey, “ ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome’: Courtesy and Thinking,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 343–59, 343. 55.  Perhaps in imitation of William Dugard’s Rhetorices elementa (London: Roger Norton, 1657), which also includes hyperbaton in an appendix.

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device in English writing.”56 Even though the resistance to hyperbaton in these few sixteenth-century manuals now strikes us as rather silly—indeed, perhaps because it seems so idiosyncratic in the context of the subsequent history of English rhetoric and poetics—it highlights the particular concerns of theorists of the English language at a formative moment of self-definition. I confess that I find myself taken with Peacham’s willingness to deny hyperbaton “and his kindes” even at the risk of making his vernacular language seem barbarous and incapable of classical “cultivation.” For Peacham, the “naturall” order of English words takes precedence over the strange displacements of a self-evidently foreign figure of speech. Yet the wily “Trespasser” returns in the very language of Peacham’s repudiation, revealing the impossibility of establishing a stable border between “foreign” and “native” art. It is a figure that threatens to throw the very concept of English eloquence into crisis: if you can’t translate it into English, then the vernacular language remains “primitive” according to the framework provided by Cicero and Quintilian, but if you do introduce its displacements into your vernacular writing, then you risk producing grammatical solecism rather than rhetorical art. In either case, hyperbaton becomes a figure for English’s own indecorous trespass into the space of Roman tradition, as English rhetors and poets imagine themselves as inheritors of a classical eloquence for which they are ill equipped. The figure thus suggests how the triumphalist plot of translatio studii et imperii remains troubled by an alternate historical narrative in the sixteenth century. Spenser’s Faerie Queene constructs its stanzas out of this very contradiction, one of many paradoxes productively inhabited by his poetic writing. Hyperbaton may be Virgilian in its origin and associations, but in The Faerie Queene Spenser resettles the figure in English speech, domesticating it within the lines of what he calls his “homely verse” at the end of book 6 (bk. 6, canto 12, st. 41). If, as Quintilian writes in his definition of hyperbaton, the “place” of the “proper” is best “postponed” in artful speech, then Spenser makes a bid to redeem that promised end in a new English eloquence. Perhaps it is a sign of Spenser’s success that hyperbaton is today rarely used as a term of literary analysis in discussions of English poetry, as deviations in word order now seem synonymous with poetic language itself, rather than a particular form of figuration. Yet at the end of the sixteenth century the decorum of such figures was not a foregone conclusion, and in subsequent chapters I will follow the migrations of other disorderly “kindes” of hyperbaton through the

56.  Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 99.

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fields of English writing. These chapters will consider the effects of such disorder beyond the poetic line, exploring how the inversions and displacements of the hyperbatons shape the large narrative structure of Sidney’s Arcadia as well as the physical transformation of characters in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

q Ch a p te r 3 The Insertour Putting the Parenthesis in Sidney’s Arcadia

Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon that Honourable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (1638) itemizes the noble achievements we have come to expect from descriptions of England’s ­shepherd-knight, presenting a soldier and a poet who successfully navigates the competing challenges of otium (leisure) and negotium (employment):1 When England did injoy her Halsion dayes, Her noble Sidney wore the Crown of Bayes; No lesse an Honour to our British Land, Then she that sway’d the Scepter with her hand: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  More worth was thine, then Clio could set down. Thalia, and Melpomene, say th’ truth, (Witnesse Arcadia, penn’d in his youth) Are not his Tragick Comedies so acted, As if your nine-fold wit had been compacted; To shew the world, they never saw before, That this one Volumne should exhaust your store. 1.  For an analysis of the ideological forms of this mode of Elizabethan courtliness, see Louis Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50, no. 3 (1983): 415–59. 87

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I praise thee not for this, it is unfit, This was thy shame, O miracle of wit: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yet, he’s a beetle head, that cann’t discry A world of treasure, in that rubbish lye: And doth thy selfe, thy worke, and honour wrong, (O brave Refiner of our Brittish Tongue) That sees not learning, valour, and morality, Justice, friendship, and kind hospitality; Yea, and Divinity within thy Book, Such were prejudicate, and did not look.2 These verses indicate Sidney’s centrality to a nexus of associations among language, land, and English national identity. Sidney’s life and works bring honor to England in particular: he represents the “British land” as does the image of the now long-dead queen. Bradstreet credits Sidney as the “brave Refiner of our Brittish Tongue,” once again framing Sidney’s eloquence as a gift to the national empire.3 In addition, like Sidney’s niece Mary Wroth, Bradstreet justifies her own poetic efforts by citing a blood tie to the poet, asking that “none dis-allow of these my straines, / Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines.”4 All of this accords with our conventional picture of Sidney as the enabling figure for English letters. Yet there is also much in Bradstreet’s “Elegie” that is unexpected. Diverging from the popular taste of her age, Bradstreet disparages Sidney’s Arcadia as a “shame,” whose subject, as she reproves elsewhere in the poem, must make “Maids” and “Wives” blush.5 Bradstreet’s contemporaries read the Arcadia as the epitome of English eloquence, often likening it both to a plentiful garden of rhetorical flowers and to a storehouse filled with linguistic riches. But while Bradstreet’s “Elegie” admits that one can find a “world of treasure” in the Arcadia, it is treasure buried not in a garden but in a heap of “rubbish.” Bradstreet’s discomfort with Sidney’s prose romance is evidenced in her first and only mention of its name: “(Witnesse Arcadia, penn’d in his youth).” She relegates Sidney’s famous Arcadia, available to an adoring public in more than half a dozen printed editions between 1590 and 1640, to a parenthetical 2.  Martin Garrett, ed., Sidney: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1996), 233–34. 3.  Bradstreet, although born in England, settled in Massachusetts in 1630, and thus the relationship between “British land” and “our Brittish Tongue” is a potentially complicated one. 4.  Garrett, Sidney: Critical Heritage, 234. Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, claimed relation to Sidney’s maternal ancestors (ibid., 237). 5.  Ibid., 234.

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insertion into his life’s achievements.6 Bracketing the reasons for her disapproval, I consider the form of this dismissal to be an apt expression of the Arcadia’s structure as well as its impact on English literary culture. Although Bradstreet intends to diminish the importance of Sidney’s romance for his legacy, in fact this parenthetical reference precisely alludes to the rhetorical processes whereby the Arcadia helps constitute the eloquence of the “Brittish Tongue.” Although parenthesis might not register with modern readers as a rhetorical figure of speech, early modern manuals count it among the many subfigures of hyperbaton, one of a variety of schemes that disorder words within a sentence. The figure, which George Puttenham renames the “Insertour,” is one of the most commonly used rhetorical devices in the Arcadia; its distinctive typographical marks are repeatedly visible throughout the pages of early modern editions of the romance.7 Up to now, scholars and editors have tended to describe Sidney’s parentheses (if they address them at all) as punctuation marks that draw visual attention to a prose style that privileges syntactical complexity over clear communication.8 As a result, the parentheses running throughout the Arcadia have been rendered somewhat invisible to the criticism, something not to be read, but to be read through. This neglect of the rhetorical dimensions of the figure, and its specificity to the plot of the Arcadia, has persisted despite the fact that the abrupt breaking off midsentence in book 3 of the revised Arcadia—a famous textual crux in Sidney studies— happens in the form of a parenthesis (see figure 1). The critical disregard of the figure can perhaps be explained by the fact that, with the exception of Albert Feuillerat’s 1962 edition, every twentieth-century edition of the Arcadia replaces the half-moon punctuation marks of the final parenthesis with

6.  John King, the bishop of London, uses the same figure to condemn the Arcadia in his Lectures Upon Jonas, Delivered at York in . . . 1594 (1597), calling it “the sin of this land and age of ours (perhaps the mother of our atheism) to commit idolatry with such books.” Victor Skretkowicz, introduction to Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (1590, 1593; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), xliii. 7.  In a comprehensive study of Sidney’s use of the figure, Jonathan Lamb compares the incidence of parentheses in the Arcadia to nineteen other works of prose fiction published between 1565 and 1607, finding that these texts use the figure an average of 33.01 percent as often as the Arcadia. The frequency of Sidney’s parentheses far exceeds that of contemporary writers of prose romance. See Lamb, “Parentheses and Privacy in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,” Studies in Philology 107, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 310–35. 8.  Maurice Evans writes in his note on the punctuation and style of the Arcadia that “the sense [of Sidney’s meaning] forces itself triumphantly through all obstacles. It demands, however, alertness, effort and cooperation from the reader.” See Evans, introduction to Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (1590, 1593, 1598; repr., London: Penguin Books, 1987), 49.

Figure 1.  Final page of the first published edition of Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), p. 360v. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago, case Y 1565 S555.

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either a comma or em dash.9 By contrast, the 1590 edition, pictured in figure 1, includes both the opening and closing marks of the parenthesis and does not include a final punctuation. In fact, the Arcadia’s parentheses are more than idiosyncratic punctuation marks that can be replaced according to modern editorial conventions. They are typographical announcements of a practice of textual insertion operating not just at the level of the sentence, but also at that of the plot, a plot constructed out of a series of interruptions that halt the narrative line. We can best see the connections between the figure of parenthesis and the plot of the romance in the presentation of the Erona episodes in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, otherwise known as the “new” or revised Arcadia. Erona, the queen of Lycia, awaits rescue by the two heroes Pyrocles and Musidorus, and the narrative of her plight interrupts the action of the main plot, while also refiguring that “main” plot as yet another insertion into an earlier story. In another register, the engrafting logic of parenthesis also marks the production of the “new” Arcadia out of the text of the “old,” for in revising the Arcadia Sidney inserted vast amounts of new material into the original narrative before abruptly breaking off in mid-sentence. This practice of addition by insertion continues even after Sidney’s demise, as Sir William Alexander fills the narrative gap left between Sidney’s final parenthesis and the continuation provided by the Countess of Pembroke in her folio edition (figure 2). Finally, as we have already witnessed in Bradstreet’s “Elegie,” early modern responses to Sidney tend to use the figure of parenthesis almost compulsively in writing about his life and works.10 This chapter participates in that very tendency, adopting parenthesis as an interpretive device that can help us understand each of these moments of Arcadian literary production. To put it another way, I draw on the figure of parenthesis after the manner of Anne Bradstreet: as a means of thinking through the Arcadia’s impact on English letters, especially on what Gavin Alexander has termed the particular challenge of “writing after” Sidney.11

  9.  See, for example, Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, ed. Albert Feuillerat (1590; repro., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 519; Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia ( The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skertokowicz, 465; and Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans, 595. 10.  Modern responses too, as in a recent critical text by Regina Schneider titled Sidney’s (Re) Writing of the Arcadia (New York: AMS Press, 2008). 11.  Sidney was the most immediately influential writer of the Elizabethan period, with English authors in the fifty years after his death inevitably writing in response to his example. Gavin Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Figure 2.  The second edition of the Arcadia attaches the final books of the unrevised manuscript of the romance onto the end of the revised version. Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), p. 171. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Sidney’s Arcadia constitutes a special case within the history I have been charting because it was itself widely read as a vernacular handbook of rhetorical ornament. After its composition the Arcadia was swiftly interpolated into the vernacular rhetorical project as proof that classical eloquence could indeed be achieved in English. Starting with publication of Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588), nearly every English rhetorical manual cites Sidney’s romance as an exemplar of English eloquence. In his manuscript Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599), John Hoskins even claims that Sidney wrote an English art of rhetoric, writing that Aristotle’s Rhetoric was partly “Englished” by Sidney in a now lost translation.12 Hoskins first presented his manuscript rhetoric to its recipient along with an annotated copy of the 1590 Arcadia filled with marginal notations marking the appearance of various figures of speech.13 Together, the Arcadia and the Directions constitute a complete rhetorical handbook, with the student encouraged to read them as such. A surviving copy of the 1590 Arcadia at the Newberry Library in Chicago indicates that at least one other early modern student also carefully marked examples of figures of speech in the margins of the text (figure 3). We can see Sidney’s apotheosis as the exemplar of English eloquence in the frontispiece of Thomas Blount’s Academy of Eloquence (1654), which features the engraved portraits of Demosthenes, Cicero, Francis Bacon, and Sir Philip Sidney (figure 4). As Sidney’s cultural authority steadily increases in the seventeenth century, his example retroactively validates the promise of the earliest English rhetorics that the vulgar tongue could indeed supply the needs of ancient rhetoric. As I have detailed in earlier chapters, although the vernacular handbooks celebrate the transplantation of rhetoric to England as a means of national invention, they also worry that their English productions trespass against the rightful prerogatives of classical art. This trespass is both spatial and ­temporal—it is a historically belated intrusion into an area of classical practice—and English explanations of parenthesis resonate with this larger cultural concern. Descriptions of parenthesis outline a process of textual grafting that inserts unnecessary verba into a syntactical unit already perfectly complete 12.  Hoskins writes, “Sir Philip Sidney betrayed his knowledge in this book of Aristotle to me before ever I knew that he had translated any part of it. For I found the two first books Englished by him in the hands of the noble studious Henry Wotton.” John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (ca. 1599; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), 41. 13.  Hudson, introduction to ibid., xv. Hoskins’s manuscript rhetoric wielded great influence in English rhetorical culture: Ben Jonson’s Timber; or, Discoveries (1641) quotes long passages from the Directions; Thomas Blount’s Academy of Eloquence (1654) borrows greatly from the manual; and John Smith borrows from Blount, and through him Hoskins, in The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (1657).

Figure 3.  An early reader of this copy of Sidney’s Arcadia marked the rhetorical figures in the text and also named them in the margin. Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598), sig. A. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago, case Y 1565 S556.

Figure 4.  Title page of  Thomas Blount’s Academy of Eloquence (1654). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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in itself, a definition with uncomfortable implications for English rhetoric’s project of translation. (If classical rhetoric is perfect unto itself, what need is there for English?) At the same time, explanations of parenthesis often find it difficult to confirm the notion that the figure can be easily removed, that its disappearance would not render the text in question somehow incomplete. By exposing the impossibility of distinguishing between necessary and disposable pieces of text, parenthesis incarnates the paradoxical logic of the Derridean supplement.14 Derek Attridge identifies the problematic of the supplement—it augments that which needs no enhancement—as the poetic dilemma in the Renaissance. In an essay on Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, Attridge writes, “The only goal vernacular verse can set itself, given the controlling assumptions of humanism, is to match its model, classical verse; yet because that model is taken to be the absolute standard, the perfect exemplar, vernacular verse is necessarily condemned always to fall short.”15 Though Attridge draws on the self-contradictory force of the supplement primarily in order to emphasize the instability of the distinction between art and nature in Renaissance poetic theory, his utilization of this Derridean term indicates how the logic of the “Insertour” can provide modern critics with a means of describing English efforts to forge an artistic vernacular culture. This chapter likewise uses the problematic of supplementarity to schematize the unstable position of English rhetoric in the sixteenth century; however, rather than prioritizing Derrida’s terminology, it relies on English translations of the figure of parenthesis to articulate this predicament. As in chapter 2, I am using a disorderly figure of speech to highlight how exchanges between the classical and the vernacular animate key formal features of a particular literary text, while also suggesting how such exchanges constitute a response to one of the larger challenges facing the project of vernacular eloquence in the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 focused on the effects of hyperbaton at the level of the poetic line in book 6 of The Faerie Queene, suggesting how the displacements of the figure convey the difficulty of defining the virtue of courtesy, while also arguing that such localized lexical inversions enable Spenser to enact a larger-scale transfer of authority from a Virgilian to an English poetics. This chapter likewise uses the disorderly figure of parenthesis to interpret the form of Sidney’s Arcadia, although in

14.  Here I use the conventional English translation of Derrida’s supplément. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144. 15.  Derek Attridge, “Puttenham’s Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 263.

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focusing on the effects of vernacular figuration in a prose work, I will argue that the supplemental logic of the figure operates at a level far beyond that of the sentence or line: the plot of the romance itself is structured by a series of parenthetical interruptions and qualifications. Finally, as I have just indicated, the figure of the “Insertour” also expresses the difficulty of constituting English literary authority in the sixteenth century. As it happens, Sidney’s Arcadia, built out of the figure of parenthesis, eventually signifies the success of this project.

Translating Parenthesis into English George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) defines parenthesis as follows: Your first figure of tollerable disorder is [Parenthesis] or by an English name the [Insertour] and is when ye will seeme for larger information or some other purpose, to peece or graffe in the middest of your tale an vnnecessary parcell of speach, which neuerthelesse may be thence without any detriment to the rest. The figure is so common that it needeth none example, neuerthelesse because we are to teache Ladies and Gentlewomen to know their schoole points and termes appertaining to the Art, we may not refuse to yeeld examples euen in the plainest cases.16 As Puttenham notes, the figure parenthesis strikes one as “so common” and plain as not even to merit explanation.17 But explain it they did, over and over again—even the briefest English rhetorical guides include definitions of the figure. English handbooks describe parenthesis as an intruder, a figure of division that arrests the normal course of speech by casting itself between the parts of a sentence. Articulations of parenthesis rely on a familiar spatial logic to describe its syntactical function; indeed, thesis derives from the Greek root tithenai, which signifies “to place.” Parenthesis is thus defined by its status 16.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 180. 17.  In a treatment of English-language dictionaries produced in the seventeenth century, Juliet Fleming reveals how women are used within such texts to represent the lexical extravagance of nonstandard English, an extravagance that demands regulation through proper vernacular instruction. The allusion to feminine ignorance serves precisely this function in the passage from Puttenham’s Arte: it provides the opportunity to articulate the rules of vernacular usage. Fleming, “Dictionary English and the Female Tongue,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, 290–326 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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as a unit of signification “in between” a larger, more important structure.18 English descriptions of parenthesis often interrupt themselves with the figure even as they attempt to clarify its meaning. For example, H. Walker, the composer of the manuscript Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677), writes that “Parenthesie, is a little sentence profitably interserted (or put between) ye parts of a sentence.”19 As John Lennard observes in his book-length study of uses of the figure in English poetry, discussions of parenthesis tend to produce the very figure under consideration, multiplying its disorderly effects within the rhetorical text.20 The marks thus function epistemologically (as cues for the reader) and also ontologically (altering the status of the words they enclose). According to the English rhetorics, the addition or intrusion of parenthesis into a sentence produces either greater understanding or utter confusion. Hoskins’s Directions notes the varied impact of the figure, telling his reader that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech.”21 These “extremities” render parenthesis, as Puttenham writes, a “figure of tollerable disorder.”22 The figure is in fact more “tollerable” in writing than in speech, for as Obadiah Walker, the presumed author of Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (1659), explains, “Parentheses are not half so troublesom to a Reader, as to an Auditor, because they are marked out in the paper to the eye, but cannot be so in the voice to the ear.”23 But even with the marking of the “half Moons (which set aside),” interruptions inevitably hinder clarity whenever they appear, and so directions for the

18.  Richard Sherry calls it “a sense cast betwixte the speache,” and Abraham Fraunce terms it something that is “put betweene.” John Smith claims that the Greek term itself means to “cast between,” and John Newton likewise explains that parenthesis comes from “interposition, or an inserting between” derived from “to interpose or cast between.” Richard Sherry, A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (London: Richard Tottill, 1555), xix; Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Ethel Seaton (1588; repr., Oxford: Luttrell Society by Basil Blackwell, 1950), 35; John Smith, The Mystery of Rhetorick Unveil’d (London: Printed for George Eversden in Amen Corner, 1683), 178; John Newton, An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (London: E. T. and R. H. for Thomas Passenger and Ben. Hurlock, 1671), [139]. 19.  H. Walker, A Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, x.d.386, 82. 20.  John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 21. Lennard emphasizes the dichotomy between poetic and grammatical treatments of the figure since the fifteenth century: while English poets from Marlowe to Walcott have used parenthesis as a vehicle for literary effect, English grammarians have often argued that the figure is irrelevant and frequently damaging to clear expression. 21.  Hoskins, Directions, 44. 22.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 180. 23.  [Obadiah Walker], Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory ([London]: J. G. for R. Royston, 1659), 110–11.

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figure’s use always come with admonitions to avoid its abuse.24 John Smith’s Mysterie of Rhetorick Unveil’d offers two bits of advice regarding the figure: “Herein are two rules observable, viz. 1. Let it neither be long nor frequent, because then it will render the sentence obscure. 2. Let it be very seldome that one Parenthesis be inserted within another.”25 “The Caution” of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1593) likewise warns that “Parentheses if they be verie long they cause obscuritie of the sense, and sometime confusion of former and matter [sic], in so much that the speaker forgetting the former part of ye sentence knoweth not what the latter should be. Also a needlesse interposition is like vnprofitable houshold stuffe that filleth roome but doth no seruice: or like to the Misseltoe, which albeit it standeth in the tree, and liueth by his iuice, yet is neither of the like nature, nor beareth the like frute.”26 Peacham’s references to “Misseltoe” and “houshold stuffe” bring parenthesis into the realm of husbandry and household management, as does Puttenham’s use of the term “graffe” to describe the insertion of a parenthesis “in the middest” of a tale. Obadiah Walker also describes the figure as the “ingrafting of several matters into one another,” noting that such a figure should be “well husbanded.”27 The term “ingraft” is often used in the period with express reference to a metaphorical “tree” or “stock,” and means, for example, “to implant (virtues, dispositions, sentiments) in the mind; to incorporate (a thing) into a previously existing system or unity, (an alien) into a race or community.”28 As we have already seen, metaphors of gardening and husbandry appear repeatedly in formulations of English rhetoric, as writers plant classical rhetorical figures in English soil. These images of “ingrafting” parentheses likewise deploy a metaphor of vegetable growth, and in vernacular rhetorical guides this metaphor reminds the reader of English rhetoric’s reliance on a mature tradition to sustain its new development. Dedicatory verses to Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric (1553) signal the secondary nature of the vernacular treatise when they describe Wilson’s

24.  Smith, Mystery of Rhetorick, 250. 25.  Ibid., 178. 26.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), 199. The appearance of the word “matter” where one might expect to read “latter” evokes the materiality of a figure that must be accompanied by specific textual signs. Alternatively, the word “matter” might suggest that Peacham intended to write “form and matter,” which would indicate that the speaker gets so caught up in the style of what he is saying, he loses track of the substance, i.e., the confusion of form and matter. These “half moons,” as Obadiah Walker observes, ensure that the parenthesis is “marked out in the paper to the eye” (Walker, Some Instructions, 110–11). 27.  Walker, Some Instructions, 109. 28.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “ingraft,” http://www.oed.com.

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translation as having “added our sounds” to the classical arts of discourse.29 English rhetoric, as Richard Sherry and Dudley Fenner both concede in the introductions to their vernacular treatises, suffers in the eyes of the learned community because it appears to be “newe”: it lacks ancient authority.30 In other words, according to the ideals of Renaissance humanism, vernacular rhetoric cannot count as knowledge. In addition to their belated arrival on the historical scene vis-à-vis the classical arts, the English rhetorics present their instruction as supplementary in that it adds to the knowledge of people “such as haue not the vnderstanding of the Latyne tongue.”31 Indeed, Puttenham’s description of his own vernacular Arte in his explanation of the “Insertour” identifies English-language instruction with the “vnnecessary parcel of speech” of parenthesis. In describing the expendability of the figure, Puttenham writes that a parenthesis “neuerthelesse may be thence without any detriment to the rest.” The figure, the passage goes on to explain, “needeth none example,” yet instruction is included “neuerthelesse because we are to teache Ladies and Gentlewomen.” In Puttenham’s text, both the figure of parenthesis and the pedagogy of English rhetoric are “vnnecessary” and yet “neuerthelesse” present. In fact, most explanations of parenthesis highlight its irrelevance to the larger oration or text of which it forms a part. A defining characteristic of the figure is that its removal leaves a “whole,” “full,” or “entire” sense behind. Richard Sherry writes in A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (1555) that, “though it geue some strength, yet whe¯ it is take¯ away, it leaueth the sentence perfect inough.”32 The “perfect inough” sentence left behind by the removal of a parenthesis is a formulation repeated in later rhetorical guides. Dudley Fenner’s Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584) describes the figure as “somthing put in without the which notwithstanding the sentence is ful.”33 For John Smith, even the “strength” of parenthesis, first noted in Sherry’s Treatise, is contained within a removable syntactical unit: “Parenthesis is a form of speech or a clause comprehended within another sentence, which (though it give some strength) may very well be left out, and yet the speech perfect, or the sense sound.”34 Thus in definitions of parenthesis we see the 29.  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 44, 247–48. 30.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 3; Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike ([Middelburg]: [R. Schilders], 1584), A2. 31.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), A.iiiv. 32.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, xix. 33.  Fenner, Artes of Logike and Rethorike, E2v. 34.  Smith, Mystery of Rhetorick, 178.

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operations not just of a spatial logic (it is in-between) but also a temporal logic (it is a belated addition to an already complete text, an addition that may be subsequently removed). These definitions of parenthesis articulate what Derrida describes as the conundrum of the supplement: the figure adds an inessential extra bit of text to something already complete, and yet the very presence of the figure exposes a lack in what was supposed to be complete in itself.35 This paradox is legible in Newton’s Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick, which explains that “parenthesis is the interposing of one or more words of perfect sence, within another sentence, for the perfecting thereof; without which interposition, the sence would yet be perfect and entire.”36 The figure is both “perfecting” and yet unnecessary: it leaves, in its absence, an entirely “perfect” sentence. These references indicate that parenthesis tends to be understood only by imagining its lack. However, the deployment of the figure and its narrative expression in the Arcadia repeatedly challenges this formulation of removability. While the rhetorical manuals can largely ignore the contradictions inherent in the definition of the figure, the Arcadia illustrates how, in practice, parenthesis actually confounds distinctions between primary and secondary, necessary and expendable textual matter—it confuses what Peacham infelicitously terms “former and matter.”

Sidney’s Arcadian Parentheses Parenthetical insertions so populate the text of Sidney’s Arcadia that it can be difficult to decide where to begin in explicating their function. Two early nineteenth-century responses to the Arcadia underscore this difficulty. In Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), Charles Lamb praises Sidney’s parentheses, noting, “This way of description which seems unwilling ever to leave off, weaving parenthesis within parenthesis, was brought to its height by Sir Philip Sidney. He seems to have set the example to Shakespeare. Many beautiful instances may be found all over the Arcadia. These bountiful Wits always give full measure, pressed down and running over.”37 By contrast, William Hazlitt condemns Sidney’s use of the figure in his Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820), complaining, “Out of five hundred folio pages, there are hardly, I conceive, half a dozen sentences 35.  Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144. 36.  Newton, Introduction, 126–27. 37.  Garett, Sidney, 294-95.

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expressed simply and directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise the object, instead of displaying it in its true colours and real proportions.”38 These passages suggest the extent to which Sidney’s practice of insertion overwhelms critical responses to his romance. If one opens any single page of the Arcadia, John Smith’s “half Moons” immediately strike the eye in scanning the text. In a “Note on the Text,” one editor highlights parenthesis as the most obvious feature of Sidney’s style, claiming that “no other Elizabethan prose work uses brackets so extensively, and it would seem to be an idiosyncrasy of Sidney himself.”39 This identification of parenthesis with “Sidney himself ” is commonplace, as we can see in both Hazlitt’s and Lamb’s descriptions of the Arcadia. Readers often interpret the figure as the “interpolation” of the writer into his own literary invention, a sign of his wit “running over” into the text.40 This correlation of parenthesis with the opinions and even the presence of the author also characterizes early modern responses to the Arcadia, as in Abraham Fraunce’s dedication to his vernacular art of logic: “I first began, (when I first came in presence of that right noble and most renowmed [sic] knight sir Philip Sydney).”41 However, although Sidney’s parentheses have often been read as an interjection of authorial personality that comes at the expense of narrative drive, the interruptions of the figure cannot be distinguished from what Hazlitt calls the “true colours and real proportions” of the Arcadia. In fact, these parentheses signify one of the Arcadia’s primary narrative mechanisms, a compositional logic that inserts episodes into one another in a series of grafts that reverse the hierarchies of cause and effect, main plot and intervening episode, and what also might be termed classical source and Renaissance imitation. The appearance of the “Insertour” in the Arcadia often serves to underscore the heightened emotional state of the speaker: repeated interruptions and qualifications communicate mental distress or disorder. As Philoclea exclaims: “Alas, how painful a thing it is to a divided mind to make a well‑joined 38.  Ibid., 56. 39.  Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans, 49. 40.  This is doubtless due in part to a bibliographic history that treats parenthesis as a punctuation mark roughly equivalent to quotation marks. As Ronald B. McKerrow writes in his influential Introduction to Bibliography, “( ) were often used in the sixteenth century where we now use quotation marks, and were indeed the general way of indicating a short quotation. . . . They also seem sometimes to be used merely for emphasis.” See McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies and Oak Knoll Press, 1994), 317–18. 41.  Abraham Fraunce, The Lawiers Logike (London: William Howe for Thomas Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588).

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answer!”42 Distracted minds bring forth “disjointed speeches,” and there is much to distract the young lovers in this romance (246). In one passage especially marked by interruptions, we can see how parenthesis serves to convey an agitated emotional state. Here Pyrocles attempts to explain to Philoclea, whom he has just successfully courted, how the lady Zelmane fell in love with him rather than a more deserving suitor: “Such was therein my ill destiny, that this young lady Zelmane (like some unwisely liberal, that more delight to give presents than pay debts) she chose (alas the pity) rather to bestow her love (so much undeserved as not desired) upon me than to recompense him whose love (besides many other things) might seem (even in the court of honour) justly to claim it of her” (350). We can perhaps understand Hazlitt’s exasperation with the writer of such a passage, which utterly refuses to come to the point. The parentheses express Pyrocles’ increasing agitation as he broaches a difficult subject with the woman he loves. The insertions attempt to explain and excuse the impropriety of Zelmane’s attachment, while also delaying the uncomfortable announcement of her love. The figure of the “Insertour” thus transcribes the motions of a mind “doubting how to begin, though [its] thoughts already had run to the end” (327–28). In this regard, it can be described as a tool of psychological realism, one that is especially trenchant in a literary genre defined by the ways in which erring figures wander from the point.43 Elsewhere, however, the Arcadia suggests that such interruptions are not just the manifestation of a troubled mind, but also the product of an intentional narrative strategy. These moments help us understand how the figure parenthesis operates at both the syntactic and the narrative level, and that what we might elsewhere read as “psychological realism” could also be described as a manifestation of a pervasive literary structure. One such instance occurs very early in the romance: Prince Musidorus asks a steward to explain why his host, Kalendar, has just hurriedly retired from his company. The steward explains that Kalendar’s son Clitophon has been taken prisoner by the Helots. Greatly distressed, Musidorus begs the steward to communicate the circumstances of Clitophon’s capture. While appearing to acquiesce to the urgency of this request, the steward quite unexpectedly begins by telling the history of the lovers Argalus and Parthenia. Before Musidorus

42.  Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans, 329–30. Further quotations from this edition cited in the text parenthetically. 43.  As Patricia Parker argues, romance is historically associated with dilation, vagrancy, and a refusal to come to a point. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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can complain of this seemingly irrelevant digression, the steward interrupts himself to explain why he has inserted this tale into his description of Clitophon’s plight: “My master’s son Clitophon (whose loss gives the cause to this discourse, and yet gives me cause to begin with Argalus, since his loss proceeds from Argalus) . . .” (87). In this moment of narrative self-justification, we see how the figure parenthesis expresses the structure of the steward’s tale: the syntactic interruption duplicates the insertion of the tale of Argalus and Parthenia into Clitophon’s history, while it also theorizes that larger interruption. The insertion returns both Musidorus and the reader to the source of the narrative; the parenthesis provides a space where a past “cause” can be brought back into present “discourse.” Likewise, what is causal thus becomes parenthetical to a broader story. The tendency of parentheses to return the reader to the past “cause” of a present discourse can also be seen in the very first lines of the Arcadia. The dedication “To My Dear Lady and Sister, The Countess of Pembroke” places the countess, whom Sidney describes as the motivating spirit behind the circulation of the narrative, within a parenthesis. The dedication begins, “Here now have you (most dear, and most worthy to be most dear lady) this idle work of mine, which, I fear, like the spider’s web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you.” (57). Not only does the first “Insertour” bind the originary spirit of the Countess of Pembroke within the “half Moons” of the figure, but the second parenthesis also does the same to Sidney’s “cruel” Greek fathers, who constitute another kind of origin for the text. Within the romance, Musidorus likewise relegates his classical fathers to a parenthesis when he tells Pamela that he and Pyrocles resolved to “go privately to seek exercises of their virtue, thinking it not so worthy to be brought to heroical effects by fortune or necessity (like Ulysses and Aeneas) as by one’s own choice and working.”44 In a moment in which Musidorus seems to intuit his own status as a literary creation, the figure of parenthesis allows him to distinguish his own actions—which is to say, the plot of the story in which he stars—from those of his classical models. Sidney and his hero thus both deploy the “Insertour” in order to simultaneously acknowledge the origins 44.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philippe Sidnei (London: Iohn Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1590), 141. The Evans edition does not include this parenthesis.

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of their stories and to subordinate those origins within the space of a secondary textual graft. Let’s return to the interrupted tale of Clitophon and the Helots. When the steward finally reaches the conclusion of Argalus’s history, many pages after his first parenthetical interruption, he explains, “I have delivered all I understand touching the loss of my lord’s son, and the cause thereof: which though it was not necessary to Clitophon’s case to be so particularly old, yet the strangeness of it made me think it would not be unpleasant to you” (93). The tale of Argalus and Parthenia “was not necessary,” it was a parenthesis. ­Furthermore, the steward’s sense that the “strangeness” of what Puttenham calls “an vnnecessary parcel of speech” would be “pleasant” to the auditor reveals an insight central to the workings of the Arcadia. It indicates that such apparently unnecessary by-tales actually constitute the delights attendant upon reading a romance. This tale of Clitophon is just one of countless instances in the Arcadia in which one story interrupts another in order to explain the source of the framing story. But it is the narrative of Erona, queen of Lycia, that incurs perhaps the greatest number of delays and interruptions, and this tale will serve as my primary example of the way in which the supplemental logic of parenthesis correlates to a large narrative structure. Unfolded according to the “interserting” method of parenthesis, Erona’s history emerges in bits and pieces sprawled across more than one hundred pages of text. Even literary critics otherwise comfortable with the digressive tendencies of the romance genre complain of the sheer number of digressions grafted onto Erona’s tale, as well as the length and shifting stylistic modes of the inserted plots.45 We first hear of Erona when Musidorus begins regaling Pamela with tales of his heroic adventures since arriving in Greece. For the most part, Pamela listens raptly to the descriptions of his conquests; however, when Musidorus reaches the point in his tale when he and Pyrocles resolve to rescue Erona from the siege of Tiridates, she interrupts and asks him to omit that part of his history. She explains, “I have heard . . . that part of the story of Plangus when he passed through this country: therefore you may, if you list, pass over that war of Erona’s quarrel” (283). Pamela transforms Erona’s story into a parenthesis in Musidorus’ history, something that can be removed without

45.  For example, in an essay that otherwise celebrates the mixture of genres and styles within the Arcadia, Stephen Greenblatt writes, “There are moments—particularly in Book II of the revised Arcadia—when Sidney does not seem to be fully in control of the shifting genres, and the result is confusion and finally tedium.” See Greenblatt, “Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode,” Studies in Philology 70, no. 3 (1973): 269–78, 272.

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blemishing the perfection of his narrative. We also learn from her request that Erona’s story has already become a kind of interruption: it was delivered when Plangus “passed through” Arcadia, just as the “Insertour” passes through a sentence. Only later does the reader discover, along with the princes, that their knowledge of Erona’s history remains incomplete. Pyrocles learns of the gap in their knowledge of Erona’s fate while disguised as the Amazon Zelmane, when “she” discovers “The Complaint of Plangus.” “The Complaint” is a set of verses transcribed by Basilius, and it comes to Zelmane’s attention when a spaniel steals the book from Philoclea’s robes. On recovering the text from the spaniel’s owner, Amphialus, Zelmane learns that after she and Musidorus helped secure Erona’s victory over an invading army, the queen was betrayed and imprisoned, and that she faces a death sentence. Zelmane begs Pamela and Philoclea to communicate the details of Erona’s predicament; however, instead of proceeding directly to the matter, Philoclea takes the story back to the beginning, covering the terrain that Pamela first encouraged Musidorus to omit. Like the steward, Philoclea uses a parenthesis to explain her narrative choices regarding the course of her story, declaring that she will start first with Erona, “Erona (being the chief subject of this discourse)” (301). Again, the parenthesis inserts the past cause of the narrative into the present discourse. Philoclea then describes Erona’s contempt for the god Cupid, a hubris that is punished when she is struck with love for her nurse’s son Antiphilus. Erona’s irrational passion for the commoner leads her to reject the suit of King Tiridates, who then makes war on her kingdom. Musidorus and Pyrocles ride to the rescue, joining Antiphilus in a tourney against three of Tiridates’ champions. The princes are victorious, and in the ensuing conflict they kill the king, whose sister Artaxia vows revenge. However, all is apparently well, and as the princes depart her kingdom, it appears that Erona and Antiphilus will live happily ever after. At this point Philoclea breaks off the story and encourages Pamela to complete the narrative, but before Zelmane’s request can at last be satisfied, Pamela’s attendant Miso interrupts the continuation with a story of her own. Although Zelmane remains anxious to hear the conclusion of Erona’s history, the group then agrees to draw lots to see who next can tell a tale. Unfortunately for those interested in Erona’s predicament, Miso’s daughter Mopsa wins, but before she can finish regaling the group with a poorly delivered story of chivalric love, Philoclea silences her. Pamela then resumes Erona’s tale; however, instead of simply picking up where Philoclea left off, she instead travels far back in time, giving the complicated prehistory of Plangus. She shares the story of Plangus to satisfy Zelmane’s request, because the

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Amazon, “having understood the danger of Erona (of which before she had never heard) purposing with herself (as soon as this pursuit she now was in was brought to any effect) to succor her—[began] entreating once again that she might know as well the story of Plangus as of Erona” (312). The “main” plot of the romance, “this pursuit [Zelmane] now was in” to win the heart of Philoclea, has become parenthetical to Erona’s history. Although Pamela had first relegated Erona to a parenthesis in the history of Musidorus, Zelmane’s time in Arcadia now becomes bracketed as an interruption of Erona’s story. After Pamela’s long digression into Plangus’s history, at the very moment when she is about to answer Zelmane’s primary question and reveal how Erona was betrayed by Antiphilus, Basilius interrupts the group once more, having come to woo Zelmane. This interruption extends far longer than the others, during which time the rebels attack the Arcadians, and Zelmane must convince them to lay down arms. Only much later can Zelmane convince Basilius to complete Erona’s story. She learns that after their marriage, Antiphilus betrays Erona and attempts to court Artaxia, who thereby captures them both. Artaxia tortures Antiphilus, who eventually kills himself, and she then pledges to hold Erona in prison for two years, by which time Pyrocles and Musidorus must come to redeem her, or she will be executed. Rumor indicates that the two princes have already perished in a shipwreck, thus everyone despairs that Erona will ever be redeemed; hence, “The Complaint of Plangus.” As we can see, Erona’s story emerges, as Basilius admits, “by pieces,” with more than one hundred pages in the modern edition passing from the first mention of her name to the conclusion of the narration (406). Even my own attempt to document the narrative progression through paraphrase produces a lengthy text that would try any reader’s patience. This piecemeal unfolding of what Puttenham might call “parcells” of text, in which each new revelation is agonizingly interrupted and delayed, changes the reader’s perceptions of the “main” plot of the romance. The events of narrative present time—the crude actions of Miso and Mopsa, the arrival of Basilius, the attack of the rebels—become refigured as interruptions that divide the unity of Erona’s story. Thus Erona’s scattered history, which I have presented as a narrative expression of the figure parenthesis, reveals the tendency of the logic of the “Insertour” to confound hierarchical distinctions between main plot and intervening episode in the romance. As Henry Peacham predicts in his description of parenthesis, the figure perplexes the organization of “former and matter,” insisting on the “neuertheless” necessity of what Puttenham’s rhetoric defines as the “vnnecessary.” This logic of insertion, whereby what comes “latter” becomes that which matters, renders the Arcadia ripe for revision, and

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subsequent English writers are quick to supply their own textual grafts onto Sidney’s Arcadian “Countrey.”

Completing Sidney’s Interrupted Text In his “Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys” (1587), Edmund Molyneux praises Sidney’s Arcadia for its delightful eloquence. He writes, Not long after his return from that jorneie, and before his further imploiment by her majestie, at his vacant and spare times of leisure (for he could indure at no time to be idle and void of action) he made his booke which he named Arcadia, a worke (thou a mere fansie, toie, and fiction) shewing such excellencie of spirit, gallant invention, varietie of matter, and orderlie disposition, and couched in frame of such apt words without superfluitie, eloquent phrase, and fine conceipt, with interchange of devise, so delightfull to the reader, and pleasant to the hearer, as nothing could be taken out to amend it, or added to it that would not impaire it.46 This passage indicates how Sidney’s contemporaries both dismissed the Arcadia as superficial compared to his other works—it is “(a mere fansie, toie, and fiction)”—and also read the romance as perfectly complete and entire— “nothing could be taken out to amend it, or added to it that would not impaire it.” As it happens, Molyneux’s conviction that the Arcadia could not be improved or amended was not widely shared by Sidney’s family, friends, or countrymen, and in the century following Sidney’s death at Zutphen, the Arcadia inspired numerous sequels, imitations, and expansions.47 These other literary productions elaborate on the tale of Erona; for, despite all the 46.  This passage from Molyneux was included in the third edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles. Garrett, Sidney, 113. Molyneux spent much of his adult life in service of the Sidney family, primarily as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney, and this dismissal of the Arcadia (which appeared before the romance’s print publication) indicates, among other things, the antipoetic sentiment prevalent in Sidney’s lifetime. See Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 47.  Gavin Alexander explains the two ways in which Sidney’s contemporaries talked about the Arcadia: “One emphasizes the perfectness of their plan or fore-conceit, what Greville calls ‘that excellent intended pattern of his’  . . . so that works which are not finished can somehow be thought of as complete: as Sidney says, ‘the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself.’ The other sees them as mute fragments, ‘perfect-unperfect’: we do not know how they would have been ended, and we may try to end them ourselves.” Alexander, “Sidney’s Interruptions,” Studies in Philology 98, no. 2 (2001): 184–204, 186.

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attention given to her plight, Arcadia’s readers never learn whether or not Erona is rescued by Plangus and the princes.48 This is just one of many “strange stories” left unfinished by the narrator at the conclusion of the Arcadia for some other writer to “exercise his pen” (847–48). This concluding gesture toward other potential authors of Arcadian history—an invitation to completion grafted from the “old” Arcadia onto the “new”—brings us to the fragmented compositional history of the romance. For the supplementary logic of parenthesis can be used to analyze not only the internarrative structure of the romance but also the collage of engrafted texts that constitute the published body of the revised Arcadia as we read it today. The composite text of the Arcadia familiar to readers such as Anne Bradstreet participates in (and benefits from) the same method of belated engrafting embodied in the figure of the “Insertour.” By the same token, the logical problem created by the “Insertour”—it supplements a text that supposedly needs no amendment—also stymies attempts to make the various additions to the Arcadia cohere within a single volume. The revisions respond to this challenge by relegating Sidney himself into the space of parenthesis, thus subordinating what came first into a subsequent textual graft. The work that we know as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia comprises, as one editor has written, “a curious patchwork” assembled after Sidney’s death, including parts of two different versions by Sidney himself, together with corrections introduced by his sister and additions by various writers in the seventeenth century.49 Although the precise dates of composition are unknown, Sidney likely first began writing the Arcadia in 1577, finishing the text while staying at his sister’s country house in 1580. Scholars now refer to this first text as the “old” Arcadia, and although it circulated in manuscript among the Sidney coterie, it was not published until the early twentieth century. A few years following the completion of the first Arcadia, Sidney began to rewrite the romance, and he had already redrafted the first two books and a part of the third when he died in 1586. Fulke Greville, Sidney’s friend and biographer, first publishes the revised portion of the Arcadia in 1590, and this edition preserves the abrupt ending of Sidney’s revisions (figure 1). The 1590 version is then superseded in 1593 when the Countess of Pembroke publishes a folio edition that attaches the final two books of the “old” Arcadia onto the end of the revised version, which ends midsentence in the middle of book 3. This folio edition leaves a gap in the story between 48.  For example, Beaumont and Fletcher’s play Cupid’s Revenge (1615) dramatizes Erona’s history. 49.  Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans, 10.

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the end of the revisions and the resumption of the old manuscript (figure 2), but Sir William Alexander later fills this gap with a bridging passage. This bridging passage first appears in the fifth edition of the Arcadia in 1621, as well as all subsequent editions.50 Roughly speaking, this history results in the version that readers such as Lamb and Hazlitt have known as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.51 Each of these revisions and supplementations participates in the disorderly logic of parenthesis, including, I want to emphasize, Sidney’s own alterations.52 This characterization of Sidney’s rewriting is borne out by the typographical marks of the figure itself, which are among the most visible signs of the difference between the “old” and the “new” Arcadia.53 Indeed, the parentheses that so aggressively populate the pages of the revised Arcadia constitute a visual trace of his process of revision: many of Sidney’s alterations confound the arrangement of cause and effect, or “former and matter,” in the first Arcadia. For instance, to name just one of many narrative rearrangements, Sidney’s revisions take the text of the oracle, seven lines of verse that open the first book of the Old Arcadia, and bury it in the very middle of the third book. The oracle that first inspires Basilius to abandon his kingdom for the forest and causes all subsequent events in the narrative is thus, in the language of the “Insertour,” “cast between” the rest of the romance. Once again, the causal becomes, in a sense, parenthetical. In this regard the logic of parenthesis correlates to the epic convention of beginning in medias res, placing what came first in the middle of a text. The removal of the oracle keeps the reader ignorant of the event from which all else proceeds, and this textual rearrangement emblematizes the myriad ways in which Sidney’s revisions upend the narrative progression 50.  James Johnstoun also composed a second bridging passage, published with Alexander’s only in the edition of 1638. 51.  This publication history does not include what are known as the “continuations” (as opposed to the “supplements”) to the Arcadia, works that continue the narratives Sidney mentions at the end of the 1593 Arcadia as subjects for later pens. These works include Gervase Markham’s The English Arcadia (first part published in 1607, second part in 1613); Richard Beling’s A Sixth Book to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (first published in 1624, published with the Arcadia in 1627); and A. W.’s Continuation (1651). For a discussion of the distinction between the “supplements” and the “continuations,” see Patrick Colborn Cullen, introduction to Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, ed. Patrick Colborn Cullen (1651; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xxxvi–xxxviii. 52.  In fact, it is somewhat misleading to refer to Sidney’s elaboration of the Old Arcadia as mere “revisions,” for in rewriting his romance Sidney added so much material to the earlier manuscript that the new portions are themselves longer than the entire Old Arcadia. 53.  As Gavin Alexander writes, “One thing that marks the development from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ Arcadia is that the ‘new’ is based on a structure of interruptions.” Alexander, “Sidney’s Interruptions,” 199.

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of the first Arcadia. Apart from a series of narrative flashbacks to Pyrocles and Musidorus’s adventures, many of the amendments to the revised Arcadia center on a new character named Amphialus, son to the villainous Cecropia and cousin to Pamela and Philoclea. Looking closely, we can find in the character Amphialus a tangible identification of the new material with the figure of the “Insertour.” Amphialus’s name itself points to his status as an insertion: it means “between two seas.”54 Amphialus himself is an “Insertour,” a parenthesis, a text that lies between two “seas,” or “Cs,” or perhaps “( ).”55 Not only do Sidney’s revisions insert Amphialus into the middle of the Old Arcadia and into the middle of the courtship between Pyrocles and Philoclea, but the conclusion of the new material itself highlights the figure parenthesis. Sidney’s revisions end abruptly, not just in the middle of a fight, but also “between two Cs,” in a parenthesis. The last snippet of text in the 1590 edition of the Arcadia reads: “Whereat ashamed (as hauing neuer done so much before in his life)”—without even the punctuation of a period to conclude the final line of the text.56 Fulke Greville preserves without comment this truncated ending in the first published version of the romance. Greville thus maintains in printed form what he elsewhere calls the “unperfected shape” of Sidney’s works.57 But despite Greville’s attempt to retain what John Florio describes as the “perfect-unperfect” shape of the romance, it is perhaps not surprising that other readers of the Arcadia were inspired to write in the blank narrative space left after this ending.58 Indeed, as a figure defined by its status in between other pieces of text, Sidney’s final parenthesis seems to demand further writing. The Countess of Pembroke and her fellow editors first fill in the space after the parenthesis by pasting the final books of the first Arcadia onto the parenthetical ending of the revised version. However, although the 1593 Arcadia provides a conclusion to the story, what rhetoricians might call a necessary “retreat to the matter” after an interruption, it still preserves a gap “in the middest” of the romance.59 The folio marks this gap with the following explanation: “How this combate ended, how the Ladies by the comming of the discouered forces were deliuered, and restored to Basilius; and how Dorus againe returned 54.  Garrett, Sidney, 18. 55.  Amphialus can also be identified with Sidney himself: the revised Arcadia takes Philisides’ dream of Mira (who is often read as a shadow of Sidney’s sister Mary) from the Old Arcadia and reassigns that dream to Amphialus. 56.  Sidney, Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philippe Sidnei (1590), 361. 57.  Fulke Greville, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 134. 58.  Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz, lix. 59.  Hoskins, Directions, 44.

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to his old master Dametas, is altogether unknowne. What afterward chaunced, out of the Authors owne writings and conceits hath bene supplied, as foloweth.”60 The tale then continues with the return of the oracle in yet another parenthesis: “After that Basilius (according to the oracles promise) had receiued home his daughters.”61 Although the Countess of Pembroke’s folio provides a conclusion and a frame for Sidney’s final parenthesis, it preserves a narrative fissure in the middle of the text because none of the “Authors owne writings” remain to supply the missing content. This gap in the text of the Arcadia created an opportunity for other writers to insert their own material into the blank space left between Sidney’s parenthetical conclusion and his sister’s subsequent textual splice. When the 1621 folio first fills this space, it frames the insertion with both the language and typographical marks of parenthesis: Sir William Alexander titles his bridging passage as “A supplement of the said defect.”62 Before proceeding to Alexander’s “Supplement,” the folio inserts the following disclaimer: “What conclusion it should haue had, or how farre the Worke haue beene extended (had it had his last hand thereunto) was only knowne to his owne spirit, where only those admirable Images were (and no where else) to be cast.”63 This passage describes the breaking off of Sidney’s revisions as an “vnfortunate mayme” which, coupled with the parenthetical reference to his “last hand,” likens the truncation of the Arcadia to a physical amputation.64 Even though this passage upholds the “spirit” of the author as a guiding principle, by placing Sidney’s “hand” in a parenthesis, it transforms that authorial spirit into a belated insertion.65 This relegation of Sidney’s body into the figure of parenthesis prefigures Hazlitt’s and Lamb’s identification of the author’s “wit” with the parenthetical insertions in the Arcadia. In Alexander’s text, this bond between author and parenthesis actually serves to transfer authority from Sidney’s “hand”

60.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended (London: Printed [by John Windet] for William Ponsonbie, 1593), 171. 61.  Ibid. 62.  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight (Dublin: Printed by the Societie of Stationers, 1621), 327; my emphasis. 63.  Ibid., 326. 64.  Ibid. 65.  William Alexander later described the piecemeal structure of the Arcadia with a parenthesis, writing that “the Arcadia of S.P. Sidney (either being considered in the whole or in several Lineaments) is the most excellent Work that, in my Judgement, hath been written in any Language.” Dennis Kay, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 23.

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to the hands of other writers. In an extension of this transferal of Sidney’s “hand” into a parenthesis, Alexander also brings Sidney’s body fully into his inserted “Supplement” by narrating the death of Philisides (whose name is a contraction of “Philip Sidney”). In explaining the intrusion of this new episode into the original plot, Alexander reminds the reader once again how the supplemental logic of parenthesis haunts Sidney’s text. He writes, If this little Essay haue not that perfection which is required for supplying the want of that place for which it was intended, yet shall it serue for shadow to giue a luster to the rest. I have onely heerein conformed my selfe to that which preceded my beginning, and was knowne to be that admirable Authors owne, but doe differ in some things from that which followes, specially in the death of Philisides, making choise of a course, whereby I might best manifest, what affection I beare to the memorie of him; whom I tooke to be alluded unto by that name, and whom I onely by this imperfect parcell (designing more) had a minde to honour.66 This passage once more takes up concerns central to the definition of parenthesis: the notion that a small “parcell” of text “supplies” a “want” in a larger text that is already, nevertheless, perfect. (Notice how, as in descriptions of the figure in vernacular rhetorical guides, mention of this “parcell” immediately produces a parenthesis.) The actual narration of Philisides’ death duplicates the abrupt conclusion of the revised text of the Arcadia.67 While in his final throes, Philisides describes the sudden interruption of his death in terms of another figure of punctuation that refers to both grammatical and rhetorical discourse—the period, or point—explaining that “Death, the only period of all respects, doth dispense with a free speech” (612). Philisides is unable to provide his entire history to the knights gathered at his side, explaining “(the report whereof craves a longer time and a stronger breath than the heavens are like to afford me)” (613). Philisides’ inability to complete his own history is thus expressed in the form of a parenthesis. Here again we can see how William Alexander asserts himself as an author of the Arcadian text by binding Sidney’s own “report” within the typographical marks of parenthesis, which are themselves contained within the “Supplement” of the Arcadia. Just as the

66.  Sidney, Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight (1621), 346, italics in the original. 67.  Gavin Alexander (not to be confused with Sir William Alexander) notes that such “breaking off ” is a recurring trope in elegiac responses to Sidney (“Sidney’s Interruptions,” 185).

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Arcadia repeatedly uses parenthesis to insert origins into the middle of the text, Alexander’s supplement condenses the causal “breath” of the author himself into a belated textual graft.

(Coda: The “Insertour” and Women’s Writing) A Woman is the unnecessary Parenthesis of Nature. —Thomas Blount, The Academy of Eloquence (1654)

From Bradstreet’s verses onward, I have quoted passages that demonstrate how the use of parenthesis has become part of our shared understanding of Sidney’s writing. In this regard the critical tradition seems to preordain my adoption of the figure as a framework for interpreting both Sidney’s works and their impact on vernacular literary culture. However, I have chosen to use the vernacular parenthesis as a hermeneutic not only because its use is an observable tendency in Sidney’s work and responses to that work (although it is); and not simply because the structure of the figure correlates to the narrative mechanisms of the revised Arcadia (although it does); but finally because the supplementary logic of the “Insertour” provides a means of relating textual productions to a literary tradition that both precedes and potentially supersedes them. This compositional problem takes one form in the writing of Sidney and his contemporaries—who labored to graft their own vernacular productions onto the classical tradition—and it persists in a different guise for subsequent generations of writers—who found themselves working within a literary tradition that had come to bear Sidney’s name. The definition of parenthesis describes one version of the process whereby vernacular rhetoric asserted itself in the face of classical precedent, and it also provides the means for later writers to bracket Sidney’s hand and insert their own “supply” into the text of the Arcadia. By using the English “Insertour” as a means of accounting for each of these developments within the same argument, I am drawing on a historically specific rhetorical lexicon in order to understand the Arcadia’s answer to a perennial problem: How do you begin to write when so much has already been written? One way of doing so, according to Sidney’s romance, is by inserting a parenthesis. What I have described as a parenthetical mode of vernacular literary production, however, did not benefit all English writers uniformly. Readers might already be wondering about the relationship between parenthesis and women’s writing after reading Bradstreet’s verses as well as Puttenham’s explanation of the “Insertour,” a figure he describes as common and plain,

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and yet potentially unknown to “Ladies and Gentlewomen.”68 Puttenham’s subsequent description of parenthesis as one of the “plainest cases,” coupled with his derisive reference to the inadequate knowledge of his lady students regarding its use, suggests a reading of “case” as a pun on female genitalia. Furthermore, the descriptions of parenthesis as an insertion into a textual space echo conventional models of reproduction in the early modern period, whereby an active male seed fertilizes inert female matter.69 Are parentheses like female “cases,” empty vessels awaiting the insertion of masculine meaning? In such a context, could a woman writer be imagined as making a profitable insertion into the line of literary tradition? With this question in mind, this chapter will end with a brief allusion to the writing career of Lady Mary Wroth, which likewise resonates with the supplementary logic of parenthesis. In 1621, the same year that saw the publication of William Alexander’s “Supplement,” Wroth published The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, deliberately evoking The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.70 The Urania opens with a revised version of the very first scene of the New Arcadia; however, whereas Sidney’s text begins with two shepherds lamenting the absence of the nymph Urania, Wroth’s version restores the missing woman, forsaking the shepherds and providing instead Urania’s own words: “Alas Urania, . . . (the true servant to misfortune).”71 In other words, from its very beginning Wroth’s text intervenes within her uncle’s romance in order to explore the situation of women writers.72 The title page of the Urania signals Wroth’s interest (or perhaps her publisher’s interest) in capitalizing on her family connections, describing the author as “Neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sr Philips Sidney knight” and to “Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke.”73 If Sidney is the father of English eloquence, and the Countess of Pembroke the midwife of Sidney’s 68.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 180. 69.  As Thomas Laqueur has argued, these images reflect the idea that conception is for the male to have an idea within the female body. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 42. 70.  Josephine Roberts notes that the Urania may have been considered a companion volume to the 1621 Arcadia. Introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 70. 71.  Mary Wroth, The First Part of “The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 1. 72.  This is Maureen Quilligan’s argument in “Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gorden Teskey, 257–80 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Barbara Kiefer Lewalski also explores this idea in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 244. 73.  Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London: Printed [by Augustine Mathewes] for Ioh[n] Marriott and Iohn Grismand, 1621).

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literary legacy, might not Mary Wroth be their rightful progeny? Could she, or her text, be the offspring of the author and his parenthetical “(most dear, and most worthy to be most dear lady)”?74 The answer to this question in Wroth’s lifetime was resoundingly negative, and the effort to position her romance as the product of Sidney’s artistic parentage was condemned as the birthing of a monster. The Jacobean court read the romance as a thinly disguised roman á clef, and Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham charged that he and his family had been grossly slandered in the work. Denny circulated a caustic poem by way of revenge, calling Wroth a “hermaphrodite” and a “monster,” as well as a “common oyster” “gap[ing] wide.”75 Although this observation itself constitutes a belated and perhaps removable graft onto the conclusion of this chapter, I nevertheless want to end by noting that the logic of parenthesis—that is, of supplemental insertion— pervades readers’ responses to Wroth’s romance, from the scandalized horror of her contemporaries to the admiring praise of modern feminist scholars. Wroth’s most strident early critics castigated her for presuming to insert her female body into the public sphere in the form of a published work of secular fiction, and this condemnation resulted in her further retirement from court and the removal of her romance from the bookstalls by December of 1621.76 Often described as the first novel published by a woman, readers now celebrate the Urania for the very reason it was first condemned, as an example of female “intervention” into masculine print culture.77 In the seventeenth century, however, this “intervention” was read as a presumptuous insertion, a parenthesis that, after an outcry from powerful members of court, was apparently withdrawn from public circulation. The insertion and prompt removal of the Urania from the literary marketplace dramatizes the removability of 74.  Jonathan Goldberg addresses the question of Sidney family incest in “The Countess of Pembroke’s Literal Translation,” arguing that Mary Sidney’s authorship becomes legible within a preposterous logic of incestuous, cross-gender identification with her brother. Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 120–26. 75.  Wroth, First Part of “The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” ed. Josephine A. Roberts, 32–33. In characterizing Wroth as sexually loose—a wide-open oyster—Denny’s verses potentially align her with Puttenham’s “plainest cases.” 76.  Ibid., 70, 34. 77.  Paul Salzman, “The Strang[e] Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania: Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes, 109–24 (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 116. Modern responses to Wroth’s work—indeed, feminist descriptions of women’s writing in general—continue to be scripted by the supplemental and spatial logic of parenthesis: women’s writing creates a space for female self-assertion within the dominant culture; however, this space is usually only temporarily autonomous. It is, as in the logic of parenthesis, considered removable. See Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 100–106.

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items regarded as parenthetical, and demonstrates that although the Englishing of classical rhetoric presents itself as an egalitarian opening of the gates to the rhetorical garden, women writers were not necessarily expected to gather the newly planted English figures of speech. Yet despite all this, Wroth grafted her text onto the Sidney line; she wrote, as Puttenham might say, “neuerthelesse.”

q Ch a p te r 4 The Changeling Mingling Heroes and Hobgoblins in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Though brief, the following passage from Puttenham’s Arte returns us to two of my most important arguments. In describing the figure hypallage, Puttenham writes, The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage] the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [underchange] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] nothing at all sweruing from his originall, and much more aptly to the purpose, and pleasanter to beare in memory: specially for your Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a terme often in their mouthes, and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called changelings, or Elfs: so, if ye mark, doeth our Poet, or maker play with his wordes, vsing a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.1 First, in its attempt to translate the figure hypallage into “vulgar” English, this passage reveals the close relationship between figure and narrative in the 1.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 183–84. 118

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writings intended to constitute the art of rhetoric. A subfigure of hyperbaton, hypallage transposes the “natural” relationship of elements in a sentence, resulting in what the English manuals variously term “absurd” and “perverse” constructions. In order to give the figure a proper English name—the “Changeling”—Puttenham narrates a nursery tale, one in which fairies steal human babies and leave malformed elves in their place. The passage thus recapitulates the activity of the figure at the level of the story: hypallage allows one word or phrase to take the place of another in a sentence, just as a changeling takes the place of a human baby. The inclusion of a nursery tale in the definition of the figure points to the second major argument of this book: that self-consciously “native” vernacular tales emerge out of early attempts to make classical figures “speak English.” Although he begins his anecdote in the socially rarefied sphere of the court, Puttenham’s definition quickly swerves to a more homely social location, “alluding to the opinion of Nurses” in order to define the workings of a classical figure of speech. As I say in the introduction to this book, I read such references to native English stories as signs of uneasiness about the project of translating the classical art of rhetoric into the debased English vernacular. Such translations may be dismissed, as Richard Sherry worries, as nothing more than a “tale of Robynhoode.”2 In this sense, Puttenham’s nursery tale narrates not just the movements of the figure but also the process of translation itself. Like hypallage, English translations of classical rhetoric use “a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.” Puttenham’s definition of hypallage thus takes his own act of translation as the subject of its example, making the process of exchange from Greek to Latin to English part of the meaning of the newly vernacular figure. By the end of the passage, the referent of the figure has become the activity of the English poet-rhetor himself, who “play[s] with his wordes.” Puttenham’s brief allusion to changelings, fairies, and elves in his definition of hypallage has caught the attention of many literary scholars, in large part because such creatures were to become an integral part of late ­Elizabethan literary productions, such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The connection between Puttenham’s Arte and A Midsummer Night’s Dream has come to seem particularly apt because some of the most well-known vernacular uses of hypallage occur in this very play.3

2.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 2–3. 3.  Richard Lanham cites Bottom’s speech in the performance Pyramus and Thisbe (act 5, scene 1) as an illustration of hypallage in his influential Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

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When Bottom emerges from the forest in act 4, having been changed from a man to an ass and back again, he declares that “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.”4 This speech garbles a famous passage from 1 Corinthians, mixing the correspondence of senses and sense organs, and it has proven notoriously difficult to interpret. Is it a comic burlesque of scripture, meant to indicate that Bottom is an absurd, clownish character? Or should we read the passage more seriously, and understand its misplaced words as signs of a transcendent, hence inexpressible, vision? Taking a lesson from Puttenham’s translation of the figure hypallage, I interpret this passage—and indeed, the play as a whole—as the working out of a vernacular mode of figuration. For not only do the linguistic exchanges of hypallage manifest in Bottom’s language, but the cultural and fictive exchanges evident in Puttenham’s tale of the “Changeling” are also bodied forth by Dream’s dramatis personae, which intersperse characters from classical and vernacular source material. Moreover, Bottom’s body and social location are transformed by the events of the play, as he acquires the head of an ass and ascends to the bed of the Faery Queen. Along with other sixteenth-century English treatments of hypallage, Puttenham’s translation of the figure teaches us how to read the disparate levels of translation and exchange dramatized in the play. While other studies have correlated Dream’s metamorphic plot with modes of rhetorical figuration, some even alluding to the effects of hypallage, I argue that the process of translation that produces Puttenham’s English “Changeling” more precisely figures the play.5 As I have emphasized in earlier chapters, vernacular handbooks of rhetoric imagine the translation of classical rhetoric in spatial terms, as the transportation of the figures of rhetoric from the ancient world to the vernacular commonwealth. The handbooks thus work to construct a nativized art of speaking that is mindful of its classical origins yet deliberately yoked to an idea of the English country. To borrow the words of Theseus, the vernacular rhetorics help classical figures of speech find a “local habitation” on English soil (5.1.17). Dream takes this process of cultural translation and turns it 4.  Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 4.2.204–7. References in parenthesis in the text are to act, scene, and line of this edition. 5.  David Marshall, “Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” ELH 49, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 543–75; Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83–115; Thomas Moisan, “Antique Fables and Fairy Toys: Elisions, Allusion, and Translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler, 275–98 (London: Garland, 1998); Christy Desmet, “Disfiguring Women with Masculine Tropes: A Rhetorical Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Kehler, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 299–330.

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into a theatrical event. Indeed, Dream insists on being interpreted as a theatrical dramatization of rhetorical forms. The play frequently draws on the rhetorical lexicon to describe its own representations: characters are said to be transfigured and translated by the events of the plot. The forms of rhetoric shape not only the language of the play but also the performances of the actors onstage, who physically embody the transfigurations generated by the poetry of the script. In addition, not only does the play describe its own workings with the terms of English rhetoric, but the composition of Dream itself dramatizes that discourse’s characteristic activity: the play transports and transforms classical bonae, helping Athenian heroes cohabit with English hobgoblins. I do not mean to argue that Puttenham’s text is a “source” of Shakespeare’s play, and my claims do not rely on a “genetic” model of literary invention, in which one text or discourse is identified as the precursor of another. Rather, I am attempting to use the method of reading indicated by Puttenham’s translated rhetoric to make sense of the various exchanges and transfigurations bodied forth by Dream, which exemplify the conflicts attendant on the translation of classical rhetoric into the vernacular. Like the handbooks of English rhetoric, Shakespeare’s play reveals (and revels in) the problems that result from any attempt to affix classical figures of speech to a particularly English location. For in addition to dramatizing the cultural fantasies of vernacular rhetoric—by turning one of the great heroes of classical literature into an English duke, for example—Dream also attends to the greatest vulnerability of the English rhetorical project, suggesting that such translations might be condemned as a dis-figuring of ancient tradition that allies “vulgar Art” with “fairy toys” and “tragical mirth.” Like Puttenham’s translation of hypallage, Dream copes with this problem by redefining it as a trope of the creative activity of the individual poet-maker. Just as Puttenham’s translation culminates in an imagined scene of writing, so too does Shakespeare’s play suggest that such transfigurations call up a scene of literary composition and theatrical performance. After all, Bottom concludes his disorderly speech by promising, “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (4.2.207–11).

Translating Hypallage into English In providing examples of the figure hypallage, Arthur Quinn proffers the following advice to readers of his modern handbook Figures of Speech: “More than a little obvious are the risks of such a figure, both for the author who

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employs it and the reader who thinks he has found one.”6 Like other subfigures of hyperbaton, definitions of hypallage often emphasize the dangers of using such a figure, which in this case may not be legible as a figure at all, even to expert practitioners. Hypallage mixes the sequence in which words correspond to one another in a sentence, resulting in an exchange of words that often produces nonsense. Quinn cites an example of the figure from Virgil’s third Georgic: “The smell has brought the well-known breezes.”7 Unlike more common forms of hyperbaton such as anastrophe and hysteron proteron, the reversed syntactical elements of the figure hypallage are often not grammatically or syntactically parallel. In this sense, hypallage can be understood as hyperbaton carried to an extreme: its grammatical and logical exchanges frequently render sentences unintelligible. The figure thus tests the limits of rhetoric’s ability to turn a grammatical fault into a rhetorical figure. As Quinn’s warning suggests, hypallage may even prompt readers to discover figures where none exist at all. Thus a nineteenth-century treatise on figurative language claims that the figure “arises generally from confusion of mind, rather than seeking literary effects, as when a Carmelite friar mentioned in a sermon what a wise Providence it was that so often made a river run through a large town.”8 However, although the figure may emerge from a “confusion of mind,” when it reveals a previously unexpected meaning hypallage transforms a nonsensical construction into a figure of speech.9 The figure thus raises a series of interpretive problems related to the composition and reception of figurative expressions: Does hypallage have an authorial purpose, or is it merely the unplanned utterance of a confused mind? Does the figure suggest that rhetorical ornament may be unwittingly produced even without the control of art? These uncertainties animate the English translations of hypallage, which describe the syntactical exchanges of the figure as a kind of illicit movement of words that may produce nonsense, or even perversity. Although Renaissance rhetoricians understand hypallage to be a version of the scheme hyperbaton (and thus a figure that changes only word order, and not word meaning), classical rhetorics identify it with the trope metonymy. A Greek term that means “a change of name” or noun, metonymy is a figure

6.  Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1982), 44. 7.  Ibid., 43. 8.  John Walker Vilant Macbeth, The Might and Mirth of Literature: A Treatise of Figurative Language (n.p.: Harper & Brothers, 1876), 134. 9.  As another modern manual explains, “The mistake becomes a figure by expressing a meaning.” Bernard Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus A–Z, trans. Albert W. Halsall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 214.

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that designates something or someone by naming one of its attributes. Hypallage’s early association with metonymy provides some clues as to how we might understand the figure’s contradictory effects in early modern writing, particularly its tendency to suggest confusion rather than figuration as the source of its exchanges. In his De oratore, Cicero explains that because the figure transfers nouns within a statement, hypallage operates like tropes such as metonymy, metaphor, and catachresis: [Demetrius’s] oratory not only proceeds in calm and peaceful flow, but is lighted up by what might be called the stars of “transferred” words (or metaphor) and borrowed words. By “transferred” I now mean, as often before, words transferred by resemblance from another thing in order to produce a pleasing effect, or because of lack of a “proper” word; by “borrowed” I mean the cases in which there is substituted for a “proper” word another with the same meaning drawn from some other suitable sphere. It is, to be sure, a “transfer” when Ennius says I am bereft of citadel and town, but a “transfer” of quite a different kind from that which he uses when he says Dread Africa trembled with terrible tumult. The latter is called . . . “hypallage” by the rhetoricians, because as it were words are exchanged for words; the grammarians call it . . . “metonymy” because nouns are transferred. Aristotle, however, classifies them all under metaphor and includes also the misuse of terms, which they call . . . “catachresis,” for example, when we say a “minute” mind instead of “small”; and we misuse related words on occasion either because this gives pleasure or because it is appropriate.10 Much might be done with this passage, which anticipates many of the most salient issues in modern literary theory, including the relationship and relative priority of metaphor and metonymy, rhetoric and grammar.11 Like

10.  Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 92–94. 11.  Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

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Demetrius’s oratory, which is the ostensible subject of the passage, Cicero’s description “flows” from one figure to another, beginning with the notion of figurative “transfer,” which is then specified as metaphor, leading to a “different kind” of transfer, that of “hypallage,” or rather, “metonymy.” The conclusion of the passage returns us to metaphor by way of Aristotle’s classification of such transfers, adding to the definition of figurative transfer the possibility of “misuse” such as catachresis. It is difficult to extrapolate a definition of hypallage from this passage, as the figure is caught up in a series of movements from one master trope to another, from metaphor to metonymy and back again. Rather than explicitly defining the activity of hypallage in a sentence or phrase, Cicero instead uses the exchange of words produced by the figure in order to identify a conflict between rhetoricians and grammarians. Quintilian maintains Cicero’s classification in his Institutio oratoria, writing that “there is no great gap between Synecdoche and Metonymy, which is the substitution of one name for another [the force of which is to put the reason for which something is said in place of that which is said], but, as Cicero tells us, is called Hypallage by rhetoricians.”12 The absence of a clear definition in the major Roman rhetorics may explain why it proves difficult to define and provide undisputed examples of the figure in English writing. The figure becomes instead something of a diagnostic tool for identifying confusion on the part of a speaker. Like a metonymy that replaces cause with effect, or puts “the reason for which something is said in place of that which is said,” hypallage seems to signify the muddled, illogical mind from which the figure originates. English rhetorical guides do not usually give extended treatment to hypallage; like other forms of hyperbaton, it is a figure of limited value in an uninflected language whose grammatical sense depends on word order. Nevertheless, despite its marginal status within English rhetorical practice, most vernacular rhetorics still include hypallage in their catalogs. For example, Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) identifies the figure as “when a sentence is sayde with a contrary order of wordes, as he came with a long side, by his sword,” perhaps evoking Cicero’s humorous use of the figure to insult the short stature of his son-in-law by asking, “Who is it that has tied my son to that sword?”13 The vernacular rhetorical guides imagine this exchange of syntactical parts as a form of travel and transport, as in the definition of the figure in Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1599), which suggests that

12.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.6.23. 13.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), G.i; Quinn, Figures of Speech, 43.

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hypallage might exchange “darkesome wandring by the solitary night for wandring solitarilie by the darkesome night.”14 The syntactical exchanges of hypallage tend to result in nonsensical absurdity; the figure engenders, as Day writes, “darkesome wandring.” The definition of hypallage in John Newton’s An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (1671) also allies this sense of movement to the problem of incomprehension. Newton explains that the figure occurs “when two words do commute or change cases with one another; as, Thou has hid their heart from understanding, Job 17.4. that is, thou hast hid understanding from their heart.”15 In this case, the commutation of words is exemplified by a scriptural passage that specifically alludes to problems of understanding. Other English rhetorics define hypallage in more pejorative terms, as in Puttenham’s Arte, which describes the syntactical movement of the figure as a “perversion” of meaning. Puttenham explains that hypallage effects an exchange “whereby the sence is quite peruerted and made very absurd: as, he that should say, for tell me troth and lie not, lie me troth and tell not. For come dine with me and stay not, come stay with me and dine not.”16 Hypallage literally “perverts” a sentence in that it turns phrases away from their right course.17 Not only is the sense “perverted” in these examples, but they suggest a perverse or illicit sexual activity: the speaker requests that the listener “lie” with him and remain silent about it. Joshua Poole’s English Parnassus (1657) likewise describes the effects of figures such as hypallage in terms of sexual activity, writing: “To this head [of things to avoid] may be added a certain licentiousnesse, which some English Poets have in imitation of the Greek and Latine, presumed on to dismember, and disjoyn things that should naturally march together; placing some words at such a distance one from another, as will not stand with the English Idiome.”18 The figure produces what the first edition of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) calls a “contrary order” opposed to what John Smith’s Mystery of Rhetorick Unveil’d (1683) knowingly refers to as the “natural order” of words in a sentence.19 As I argued in chapter 2, these definitions allow the English rhetorics to posit an idea of

14.  Angel Day, The English Secretary, ed. R. O. Evans (1599; repr., Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967), 83. 15.  John Newton, An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (London: E. T. and R. H. for Thomas Passenger and Ben. Hurlock, 1671), 125; my emphasis on “commute.” 16.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 182–83. 17.  The verb “pervert” derives from the Middle French pervertir, “to turn away from the right course  . . . to lead astray,” and its classical Latin etymon, pervertere, “to turn round or about, to turn the wrong way.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “pervert,” http://www.oed.com. 18.  Joshua Poole, The English Parnassus, 1657, ed. R.  C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), [a6]. 19.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, G.i.; John Smith, The Mystery of Rhetorick Unveil’d (London: Printed for George Eversden in Amen Corner, 1683), 198.

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a “natural” English speaking that may not have been fully articulated prior to the figure’s threatened transgressions. Hypallage’s perversion of “natural order” leads Peacham to omit the figure entirely from the 1593 edition of The Garden of Eloquence, mentioning it only as one of a group of rhetorical schemes that are antithetical to rhetorical ordo, and designating the figure as one of hyperbaton’s “repugnant . . . kindes.”20 Later English rhetorics return hypallage to the English rhetorical garden, but their treatment is cursory, and it is subsequently described as merely a “secondary figure.”21 It would seem that vernacular eloquence has little use for a figure of speech that leaves one wandering in the midst of absurd and perverse phrases. However, what in a letter or an oration might be an incongruous misalignment of words provides poets with a potentially useful expressive device. Thus, as Angel Day explains, hypallage’s “vse . . . in Poesie is most rife.” 22 Perhaps its poetic usefulness justifies Puttenham’s extensive discussion of the figure in his Arte of English Poesie, which I will quote once again: The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage] the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [underchange] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] nothing at all sweruing from his originall, and much more aptly to the purpose, and pleasanter to beare in memory: specially for your Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a terme often in their mouthes, and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called changelings, or Elfs: so, if ye mark, doeth our Poet, or maker play with his wordes, vsing a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.23 Puttenham’s translation duplicates the absurdity of his poet who exchanges “a wrong construction for a right,” identifying the workings of a classical figure with the trickery of indigenous English sprites, and, even more unexpectedly, with the superstitions of women and servants. Puttenham first offers what appears to be a direct translation of the Latin and Greek, the 20.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), 119. 21.  Newton, Introduction, 125; H. Walker, A Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, x.d.386. 22.  Day, English Secretary, 83. 23.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 183–84.

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“underchange,” before quickly supplanting this name with what he considers a more apt and pleasant term: the “Changeling.” The passage articulates the structure of the figure as ancient and foreign while simultaneously familiarly English; it derives from the “Greekes” and “Latins,” and yet it can also be found in the “opinion of Nurses.” Puttenham’s definition thus multiplies the “manner of exchange” effected by the figure: first in its exchange of two different translations of a classical original into an English derivative, and then in its transfer of the term from ancient works into the “mouthes” and “memory” of women. Despite his defensive disclaimer that his translation is “nothing at all sweruing from his originall,” displacements abound in Puttenham’s text. Puttenham’s description of hypallage moves from texts into “mouthes,” and not just any mouths, but those of women and nurses. Puttenham makes sense of this potentially bewildering series of linguistic exchanges by narrating a story that both translates the work of the figure itself and serves as a mnemonic device. As such, Puttenham transmutes the Greek figure into an English plot. While Puttenham’s description of hypallage unfolds in a chain of transfers from Greek to Latin to English, it also moves his definition from the court to the nursery, from noble ladies to vulgar servants, and then from fairy tales to the English poet. Just as Cicero’s brief allusion to hypallage positions the figure in the midst of a process of exchange between metaphor and metonymy, Puttenham’s description also draws on the resources of both tropes so as to translate the figure into English. The nursery tale of fairies and elves operates both metaphorically—as a substitution for the syntactical exchanges of the figure—and metonymically—as a proximate link in a chain of associations among English vernacular rhetoric, native English tales, and the activity of English poets who will be trained by Puttenham’s manual. The passage’s metaphoric and metonymic “swerves” reveal how difficult it can be to contain the movements of figuration generally within any set bounds, emphasizing as well the uncomfortable proximity of the English vernacular to socially vulgar speakers and tales. This close association of English poets with “low” forms of vernacular culture was an object of particular concern for Renaissance humanists, yet despite humanist resistance, fairies begin to insinuate themselves into classically inspired literary productions in the late sixteenth century.

Wandering Fairies in English Literary Productions The series of displacements evident in Puttenham’s translation of hypallage into English—from classical to vulgar, from the court to the nursery, from

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figure to plot—should remind us of the conflicts that went along with the construction of a “common” English rhetoric. The vernacular rhetorics draw on classical rhetoric’s spatial logic so as to identify the common field of rhetoric with the country of England. In so doing, the vernacular rhetorics transform classical and humanist theories of decorum by identifying the English nation as the boundary dividing decorous speech from all other unfitting and inappropriate language. This new notion of a decorous English rhetoric in turn required that the handbooks develop a means of distinguishing between artful and indecorous vernacular speech. Like the references to Robin Hood in the early guides, Puttenham’s allusions to fairies and elves highlight the difficulties of this project. Stories of fairies and Robin Hood are signs of native English traditions, yet they also associate English with socially vulgar speakers such as women and nurses. Given the problematic status of native tales in humanist productions, the presence of vulgar “Elfs” in a dictionary of classical poetic forms might seem somewhat dissonant; however, Puttenham is just one among many Elizabethan writers to import fairy tales into a high cultural production. Work on early modern fairy lore by Wendy Wall and Mary Ellen Lamb has shown how representations of fairies contribute to the self-definition of various social constituencies within English culture.24 The late sixteenth century proved to be a decisive moment in transforming the status of such tales, turning them into signs of artfulness rather than vulgarity. Folktales of fairies and pucks originated in the oral traditions of agrarian communities, and consequently there exist few traces of fairy lore in written records up until the middle of the sixteenth century. As rural people gravitated to London in great numbers during the sixteenth century, stories of fairies and elves began to circulate among the literate urban population and their texts. From 1570 on, at the same time that vernacular rhetorical guides began to be published with increasing frequency, fairies likewise began to flourish in Elizabethan literary works.25 During this period the creatures of popular superstition and folklore belief became “lettered,” appearing in Thomas Phaër’s English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid and Arthur 24.  Lamb argues that the appearance of fairies in literary works such as Dream marks the emergence of popular culture as the means whereby elite and middling sorts could define themselves in opposition to lower-status groups. Taking a different view, Wall points out that fairy lore was taken up by a range of different social constituencies in the period, cutting across class lines. Mary Ellen Lamb, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (London: Routledge, 2006); Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 25.  Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 14.

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Golding’s vernacular rendering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.26 These translations substitute English fairies and elves for the nymphs and fauns of the Latin originals, thus rendering the hobgoblins of local superstition equivalent to the pantheon of classical sprites. Thomas Nashe explains as much in his Terrors of the Night (1594), writing that “the Robin-good-fellowes, Elfes, Fairies, Hobgoblins of our latter age” are the same beings “which idolatrous former daies and the fantasticall world of Greece ycleaped Fawnes, Satyres, Dryades, & Hamadryades.”27 Thus the “terrestrial devils” of oral tradition, as Robert Burton calls them in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), began to populate serious English poetry, joining popular traditions with classical knowledge.28 By the late sixteenth century, fairies were very much in fashion, featured most famously in Spenser’s Fairie Queene, but also appearing in pageants, royal progresses, plays, masques, poems, and pamphlets. By the end of James’s reign, the courtly fairies personated in entertainments such as Shakespeare’s Dream had largely usurped the place of the fairies of popular superstition.29 Robin Goodfellow ceased to be a rude hobgoblin terrorizing English farmwives, and became instead a courtier serving at the pleasure of the Fairy King. Despite their frequent appearance in aristocratic entertainments throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the time of publication of Puttenham’s Arte, fairies were still identifiable not as part of a classical inheritance or as figures of literary invention, but rather as indigenous creatures of local, popular tradition. As Edward Fairfax writes in his “Discourse of Witchcraft” (1621), fairies were visibly “rooted in the opinion of the vulgar.”30 Moreover, fairy tales were associated with childhood in particular, and with an unlettered discursive community of women and servants. Indeed, as Lamb emphasizes, nearly every allusion to fairy belief in the period, especially tales of Robin Goodfellow, includes reference to a loquacious female narrator who serves as the repository of fairy lore.31 This female storyteller presents herself, for example, in Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), which catalogs the fairies and spirits with which “our mothers maids have so terrified us.”32 She inhabits Puttenham’s text as well, which cites “the opinion of Nurses” in describing the work of the “Changeling.” Such an 26.  Ibid., 15–16. 27.  Katharine M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 23. 28.  Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 26. 29.  Ibid., 18. 30.  Ibid., 31. 31.  Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 277–312, 301. 32.  Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 39. As Peter Holland notes, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, perhaps the archetype of the garrulous female narrator, also reports of a time when “Al was this land fulfild of

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instructor—female, and a servant to boot—ostensibly should have no place in teaching the classical arts of discourse. However, as indicated by the commingling of Puttenham’s storytelling nurse and her courtly charges, female domestic servants provided points of contact between middling and upper-class households and a lower-class vernacular culture that might otherwise seem to be excluded from such a social sphere. The commonplace identification of vernacular culture with the domestic sphere, and with an underclass of female servants, greatly complicated attempts to raise the prestige of the mother tongue. As Wall argues in her study of stage representations of early modern domesticity, the proximity of domestic life to emerging forms of linguistic nationalism threatened the sex and gender affiliations encouraged by humanist pedagogy. Consequently, the deleterious effects of vulgar nurses were of particular concern within humanist educational theory. As many scholars have noted, humanist training advocated the repression of popular culture, and fairy stories and old wives’ tales were among the most visible signifiers of that common culture.33 As soon as they started school, boys were expected to forget their nurses’ fairy tales and replace them with the material of classical literature. Indeed, in his Aim and Method of Education (1529), Erasmus posits the rejection of fairy lore as a defining feature of humanist pedagogy, writing that “a boy [may] learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women.”34 Erasmus places the works of “ancient poets” in direct competition with “fairy rubbish,” and advocates an educational practice that will uproot what Fairfax calls the “opinion of the vulgar.” Erasmus’s polemic against old wives’ tales indicates how humanism secured its status by defining itself in opposition to a vulgar culture identified as shamefully domestic and effeminized. Fairies play an important role in this construction of a fixed, gendered distinction between popular and elite culture, and, as Wall argues, are thus part of a broader attempt to reduce the complex reality of multiple social groups into a series of binaries: popular versus elite, vulgar print versus ancient poetry, humanist pedagogy versus vernacular domesticity.35 Humanist purveyors of the classical arts treat fayerye.” Peter Holland, introduction to William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22. 33.  Lamb, Popular Culture, 14–15. See also Walter Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. 34.  Desiderius Erasmus, Concerning the Aim and Method of Education, ed. William Harrison Woodward (1529; repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 214. 35.  Wall, Staging Domesticity, 97.

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fairies as a signifier of the “vulgar” in its most derogative sense, identifiable with a feminized underclass of common English speakers. Why, then, would fairy lore reemerge in Puttenham’s attempt to make rhetoric an English art comparable to that of the ancient world? Part of the answer can be found in the complexities surrounding the formation of a “common” linguistic culture in English rhetorical guides, a project that signifies not just a class of people but also a particular place. Fairies are “terrestrial devils,” “rooted,” Edward Fairfax writes, not just in vulgar opinion but also in the English land.36 They comprise what Robert Kirk titles a “Secret Commonwealth” in his Essay of the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean . . . Invisible People (1691).37 Even as fairy lore circulated into the highest reaches of Elizabethan courtly culture, the elves and hobgoblins remained identifiable as the spirits of the English household and outlying forest, homespun domestic creations born of local materials. “The Changeling” thus, as Puttenham writes, “aptly” translates hypallage by affixing it to the contours of the English countryside. To use the language of Cicero and Quintilian, the English “Changeling” is aptus, “fitting,” replacing a Greek term that is ineptus, or “out of place.” Like references to Robin Hood, asserting the decorum of vernacular rhetoric through reference to local fairies remained a risky enterprise, because the link between fairies and the English countryside was not always or even usually positive. Tales of changelings in particular, that is, of fairies who steal human babies and leave malformed “elfs” in their place, are among the most disturbing reports of fairy behavior. Fairy allusions were frequently used as cover for illicit sexual behavior, and tales of changelings were often disparaged after the Reformation as the inventions of Catholic priests, who were said to abandon their illegitimate babies on church doorsteps and then call it the work of fairies. In fact, the phrase “going to see the Fayries” was a euphemistic expression for illicit sexual encounters, and a great deal of early modern fairy lore has a disturbing sexual content.38 If one considers the widespread eroticization of fairy activity in the period, the “Changeling” registers as an especially fitting translation of hypallage, a figure whose interchanges “pervert” sense. The verses of a contemporary anonymous ballad 36.  Or at least in the idea of the English land. The actual geographic and ethnic contours of the English nation are not altogether certain in the sixteenth century. For example, the Welsh people and lands are strangely foreign and yet also part of the same island as Shakespeare’s England. 37.  Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 12. 38.  Lamb, Popular Culture, 96. Allusions to Robin Goodfellow often indicate the sinister eroticism of the figure, and the title page of Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Iests (1639) features an illustration in which the hobgoblin displays an enormous phallus. For more on the sexual perversions of the fairy world, see Wall, Staging Domesticity, 101–6; Maureen Duffy, Erotic World of Faery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972).

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titled “The Fairies’ Farewell” thus taunt Catholic adherents by using fairy lore to allude to supposed clerical perversion, while also describing the loss of monastic property as the work of malicious sprites: Lament, lament old abbeys,    The fairies lost command. They did but change priests’ babies,    But some have changed your land, And all your children sprung from thence   now grown Puritans Who live as changelings ever since    For love of your demesnes.39 Fairies were in fact routinely associated with trespassing and property theft, especially attempts to challenge the property rights of the powerful. For example, Jack Cade’s rebels called their territory “fairyland,” and Cade himself was dubbed the “Queen of the Fairies.”40 Robin Goodfellow was particularly associated with property crime; one of his many aliases was “Robin Hood,” another folk figure notorious for liberating property from aristocratic possession.41 One pamphlet describing the Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Good-Fellow (1628) lists among his activities the “misplacing [of] things in ill ordered houses.”42 The presence of fairies in Puttenham’s rhetoric likewise suggests the confusion of an “ill ordered” house, potentially compromising any attempt to assert the decorum of vernacular eloquence. Fairy lore thus embodies the same contradiction plaguing English rhetoric: it signifies a nation united by land and a distinct culture, and yet it also evokes specters of social disorder, including rebels, thieves, and loquacious women. It marks out a shared field of common linguistic device, but it is a space troublingly populated by unlettered nurses. In identifying hypallage with a fairy tale, then, Puttenham foregrounds the greatest vulnerability of the English rhetorical project: it unravels the gendered work of the studia humanitatis, trespassing on the rightful property of antiquity by imagining a

39.  “The Fairies’ Farewell; or, God-A-Mercy Will” (1620), in Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, eds., A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 314. 40.  Lamb, Popular Culture, 40–41. Lamb’s research establishes that fairies were often cited by the disenfranchised in attempts to justify crimes against property. For example, peasant men might disguise themselves as fairies in order to poach deer. 41.  Katharine M. Briggs, The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Beliefs (London: B. T. Batsford, 1978), 199. 42.  Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland, 37.

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vernacular rhetorical practice. By exchanging a vulgar fairy tale for a Greek figure of speech, Puttenham exactly reverses the cultural trajectory of his humanist training, which was supposed to eradicate such “fairy rubbish.” In replacing the art of Cicero with a nursery tale, Puttenham, like the figure hypallage, exchanges “a wrong construction for a right.” Yet in the course of perverting the “natural order” of classical material, this disorderly text also produces the stuff of English imaginative literature. Shakespeare’s Dream dramatizes the disorderly content of this very process of vernacular figuration, allowing fairy tales and English artisans to enter the court of Theseus.

English Changelings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. —Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1594–96)

My description of the translation of hypallage into English, and the parallel attempts to incorporate native stories and tales into a newly decorous mode of vernacular expression, indicates how we might begin to make sense of the mixtures contained within Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like the handbooks of English rhetoric, Dream reveals the contradictions inherent in the formation of a classically inspired vernacular culture. The play dramatizes the blending of eloquent and vulgar forms also evident in Puttenham’s description of the “Changeling,” mingling the ancient and the English, the learned and the popular. Even after more than four hundred years of performance, the mixtures still startle. We begin quite sedately with a hero of ancient myth paying court to an Amazon queen, but before the middle of the second act a gaggle of English artisans, a country puck, and the king and queen of Fairy have joined their voices to the chorus. A play without a single narrative or dramatic source, scholars have posited an astonishing array of cultural materials as intertexts for bits and pieces of Dream, ranging from classical and vernacular literature (Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, Scot) to popular festivals and folklore (May games, fairy tales).43 Not 43.  Barbara Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 224. The play even jumbles material within what might otherwise seem an intact tradition. For example, the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow had never been represented as either a fairy or a puck before

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only does Dream combine popular and learned textual material, ignoring the cultural distinctions that Erasmus was so committed to secure, but the play also depicts characters who disregard orders of social distinction, including a daughter who defies the will of her father and a wife who refuses to accede to her husband’s wishes. This collision of literary and social disorder achieves its most traumatic expression when Titania raises Bottom the weaver into her bower: audiences see the Fairy Queen taking an English lover who is not her husband, not of her rank, and indeed, not even human. Could such a jumble produce anything other than dissonance, if not outright disgust? Many concluded that it could not, and from the late seventeenth century on, theatrical productions often omitted one or more of the play’s plotlines.44 Audiences and readers have gradually come round to Dream, which is now one of the most often produced of Shakespeare’s plays. Meanwhile, the play has proven to be a fruitful site for modern scholarship, and critics have provided a range of contextual frameworks to account for its various metamorphoses and exchanges, including debates about female sovereignty and social mobility, the social subversion of folklore and popular festival, racial discourse and “New World” travel writing, and the uneasy confluence of domestic and national ideologies.45 I want to emphasize that the varieties of cultural, social, and linguistic disorder conjured in the play are also directly shaped by the transfers and exchanges necessitated by vernacular rhetoric, particularly the translation of figures of disorder such as hypallage. Dream grapples quite explicitly with questions of representation, and it frequently deploys rhetorical terminology such as “turn,” “translate,” “figure,” and “disfigure,” even when describing events that otherwise seem to have little connection to verbal composition. Many of the allusions to figuration evoke the crossings and exchanges of those syntactical figures that achieve their effects through the manipulation of word order, figures such as anastrophe, chiasmus, hyperbaton, and, of course, hypallage. The play underscores Bottom’s experiences in particular as linguistic translations, which is perhaps why scholars often refer to the weaver as a figure for the “stitched together” Dream. The play thus amalgamates multiple strains of fairy lore within a single character. See Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 220. 44.  For example, The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver (1661) omits every action save that of the workers, while The Fairy Queen (1692) removes half the text in order to insert a series of aristocratic, masquelike entertainments at the close of each act (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland, 99–100). 45.  Louis Montrose, “ ‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983): 61–94; Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 52–70; Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies”; Margo Hendricks, “ ‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 37–60; Wall, Staging Domesticity, 94–112.

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play.46 For example, one collection of essays introduces the play by explaining that Dream “conflat[es] eras . . . melding the classical, medieval, and Renaissance worlds in a historical synesthesia much like the bodily amalgam Bottom makes of I Corinthians 2:9.”47 My argument builds on this identification of Bottom’s words and experience with the play’s amalgamated construction, positing the very rhetorical scheme he utters on exiting the forest as a means of understanding the play’s disparate levels of transformation. When Bottom wakes after a night spent in Titania’s bower, he declares that “the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (4.2.204–7). As he attempts to explain why his experience defies representation, Bottom “perverts” the correspondence between his words, misaligning sense organs and their proper sensations. This English hypallage appears in Bottom’s speech at the very moment he tries to narrate the events of the forest and his bodily transformation, which he describes as “Bottom’s Dream,” or, perhaps, Bottom’s Dream (4.1.209). Before exploring the disfiguring effects of the English hypallage on Bottom’s language as well as on the plot of the play, we must first attend to the Indian boy, whom Puck introduces as a “sweet changeling” and Oberon twice refers to as a “changeling” child (2.1.23; 2.1.120; 4.1.56). Why identify Bottom in particular with the figure of the “Changeling” when the play provides us with a literal changeling boy? Dream now determines most readers’ understanding of early modern fairy lore, so it becomes difficult to remember that in the context of early modern folktales, this label does not accurately fit the situation. Unlike changelings in Tudor fairy tales, which name the deformed children left behind by fairies in exchange for stolen human babies, Titania’s changeling is himself the mortal: Puck describes him as “A lovely boy stol’n from an Indian king” (2.1.22). Furthermore, Titania actively resists this moniker, never referring to the child as a changeling, and her narrative of the boy’s entry into the world of Faery challenges Puck’s accusation of theft. In Titania’s history the Indian king disappears, and the boy enjoys a uniquely female parentage. She explains, His mother was a vot’ress of my order, And in the spicèd Indian air by night Full often hath she gossiped by my side, And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, 46.  Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Norton Shakespeare, 809. 47.  Dorothea Kehler, introduction to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (London: Garland, 1998), 13.

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Marking th’embarkèd traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind, Which she with pretty and with swimming gait Following, her womb then rich with my young squire, Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. (2.1.123–34)

Titania describes the genesis of the child as an act of figuration: in this passage the metaphoric impregnation of the “big-bellied” sails by the “wanton wind” seems to simultaneously generate the votress’s pregnancy. She then gives birth to an Indian boy who goes by the name also given to an English rhetorical figure.48 Thus even before Bottom speaks the figure that Puttenham translates as the “Changeling,” the idea of a “changeling” enters the play as the product of a figure. Yet this boy, for all his importance to the Faery court, never actually appears in the play. We learn instead that while in the grip of her obsession with Bottom, Titania relinquishes the boy to Oberon’s care. Thus Bottom becomes a true changeling, the deformed replacement left in exchange for an adopted, if not stolen, child. In keeping the Indian boy from Oberon, Titania defies the authority of her husband and ruler, exchanging masculine rights for a female prerogative. The language of the play depicts this and other social disorders rampant in the forest by using the terms common to English rhetorical translations: change, cross, transpose, and turn. For example, Oberon identifies Titania’s disregard of spousal privilege and regal prerogative as an inversion, asking, “Why should Titania cross her Oberon?” (2.1.119). This crossing or inversion of gender behavior also perverts the actions of the Athenians: as Helena pursues Demetrius into the forest, she explains, “The story shall be changed: / Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase. / The dove pursues the griffin, the mild hind / Makes speed to catch the tiger” (2.1.230–33). As we can see from Helena’s “changed” story, the social disorder in the Athenian court mimics the tumult in the kingdom of Faery, and Helena’s speech likens 48.  The boy’s Indian heritage brings the exotic Eastern world into the mix of cultural materials circulating in Dream. This fantasy of “spicèd India” constitutes the crux of the play in Margo Hendricks’s analysis, which argues that India functions as the center of linguistic and ideological exchanges between Athens and the fairy world. In Hendricks’s reading, this racial subtext animates the lexicon of change within the play; what she calls the play’s “trope of change” thus links to racial mixedness (Hendricks, “ ‘Obscured by Dreams,’ ” 55).

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this disorder to an inversion of both classical myth and natural animal behavior. Indeed, we are invited to consider the twists and turns of the love plot as a process of figuration from the very first scene of the play, when Theseus informs Hermia that she must accede to the will of her father in the matter of her marriage. He explains, To you your father should be as a god, One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it. (1.1.46–51)

The lovers are indeed “disfigured” as Theseus threatens; however, they are transformed not by Egeus’s paternal authority, but according to the exchanges of the various figures of order and disorder. Thus, as Peter Holland notes in an introduction to the play, throughout Dream the four Athenians are shifted about and mismatched like parts of a sentence.49 The affections of first Demetrius and then Lysander attach to “inappropriate” objects: in grammatical terms, they are interchanged, or as Puttenham puts it, “underchanged.” One exemplary exchange between Helena and Hermia manifests the “contrary order” effected by the figures of exchange: Hermia complains, “The more I hate, the more he follows me,” while Helena responds, “The more I love, the more he hateth me” (1.1.198–99). The two women jointly produce a chiasmus in order to allude to contrary desires that deform and rearrange their experience like a sentence under rhetorical pressure. Like Oberon and Titania, the lovers are, as Hermia laments, “crossed” (1.1.150). This complaint evokes the letter x (chi) from which the term chiasmus derives, a “crossing.” As Helena confesses, further identifying the effects of desire with the displacements of rhetorical figuration, “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.2.232–33). Within the play, the physical catalyst for such transposing desire is the flower juice wielded by Puck, who has “some true love turned, and not a false turned true.” (3.2.91). These references to transposition and turning further evoke the processes of rhetorical figuration, especially that of tropes, 49.  Many readers have noticed what Peter Holland describes as “a formalization of pattern” in the presentation of the lovers; he writes that it is as if “they are turned into puppets by their couplets” (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland, 65, 64).

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a term often translated as “turnings” in vernacular rhetorical guides. Hippolyta later describes the minds of the young lovers as “transfigured” (5.1.24) by their night in the forest, aptly noting the manner in which they have been moved about by the language of the play. This transfiguration finally moves Theseus to withdraw his support for paternal authority, exclaiming, “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (4.1.176). Even this term “overbear” might be read as an evocation of the syntactical work of the figures of disorder, which effect the “bearing over of words.”50 Once the story is “changed,” Hermia need no longer “fit [her] fancies to [her] father’s will” (1.1.118). As these examples begin to suggest, transfigurations and exchanges abound in Dream; this terminology is used to refer to nearly every character and element of the plot, as well as the disposition of the play’s language. However, the process of figuration according to schemes of order and disorder receives its most explicit articulation in the parts of the play that feature Bottom. The characters in Dream repeatedly identify the hapless weaver as an object of linguistic translation. Bottom’s body becomes literally disfigured when Puck gives him the head of an ass, at which point both Peter Quince and Puck describe Bottom as “translated,” a term that functions as vernacular shorthand to describe the art of rhetoric, also called the “art of translating” in Peacham’s manual (3.1.105; 3.2.32).51 Puck rearranges Bottom’s parts with those of an ass, making his form an incarnation of the absurd exchanges of the “Changeling.” Thus, Tom Snout exclaims after laying eyes on the transformed weaver, “O Bottom, thou art changed!” (3.1.102). Here the play turns the idea of “transfiguration” into a visible theatrical performance of physical transformation. Like the translation of Latin rhetoric, which makes rhetoric available to English artificers, the disfiguring effects of the “Changeling” on Bottom’s form produce a change in social location. After Bottom’s bodily shape has been transfigured, he is also, as Starveling later declares, “transported” up away from the mechanicals and into the Fairy Queen’s bower (4.2.4). To use the terminology of English descriptions of hypallage, when an artisan shares a bed with the Fairy Queen, the “natural order” of things has indeed been “peruerted.” Bottom thus substitutes for the changeling boy in Titania’s affections; he takes the place of a stolen child, a changeling for a changeling. Many critics read this scene as an eroticized return to childhood, in which a grown man lies with the fictive material of his nursery tales, and as we have learned in the analysis of Puttenham’s Arte, this too constitutes part of the 50.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), F.iiiv. 51.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1593), 2.

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disorderly plot of English rhetoric.52 Bottom’s translation according to the forms of vernacular rhetoric is further manifest when he wakes in the forest and attempts to describe his “most rare vision” (4.1.199–200). In his wonder he actually speaks the rhetorical scheme that best figures the deformation of his body and experience, drawing on a sensory language that underscores the bodily nature of his transformation (“The eye of man hath not heard . . . ”). Although the unruly mixtures of the “night’s accidents” might seem to be confined to the forest outside Athens, the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe transports the disfiguring effects of this vulgar rhetorical disorder into the middle of the Athenian court (4.1.65). The rude mechanicals star in this final act of the play, and the audience is invited to join with the nobles in mocking their inability to “stand upon points” (5.1.117). The broad comedy of this scene thus turns on the artificers’ linguistic mistakes. Indeed, as Patricia Parker’s analysis of Dream emphasizes, the terms of rhetorical disposition surround the artisans throughout the play—most obviously, in the occupation of “Snug the Joiner”—and their linguistic ineptitude draws attention to the importance of the orderly placement of words to achieving rhetorical eloquence.53 In a discussion of Dream that focuses on the rhetorical misjoinings of the rude mechanicals, Parker argues that the inept vulgar rhetoric on display in Pyramus and Thisbe ironizes the telos of the comedy’s marriage plot, allowing us to view the aristocratic marriages “from the bottom up” and providing a subversive perspective on the cultural order associated with Theseus and the other aristocrats.54 We can see how the proper ordering of one’s discourse requires an apt “marrying” of terms in a passage from Richard Sherry’s Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (1555), a passage that Parker also quotes, which asserts that the “might and power” of rhetoric derives from the manner in which words are “coupled” and “ioyned”: “And out of this great streame of Eloquution, not onely must we choose apt & mete woordes, but also take hede of placying and setting them in order. For the might & power of Eloquutio¯, consisteth in wordes, considered by the¯ selues, & when thei be ioyned together. Apt wordes by searchying must be fou¯d out, and after by diligence, co¯ueniently coupled. . . . To chose them out fynely, and handsomely to bestowe them in their places, after the minde

52.  Montrose, “ ‘Shaping Fantasies,’ ” 65; Wall, Staging Domesticity, 113; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 125–43. 53.  See Marshall, “Exchanging Visions,” 562, and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 122. 54.  Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 97.

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of Cicero and Quintilian, is no easye thing.”55 This statement foregrounds the importance of the disposition of words in a sentence; above all else, the orator is responsible for bestowing words “in their places” and “setting them in order.” As Quintilian instructs in the Institutio oratoria, in a discussion of the figure hyperbaton, “Language would very often be rough, harsh, limp, or disjointed if the words were constrained as their natural order demands and each, as it arises, were tied to the next, even if no linkage can be made. Some words therefore have to be postponed or taken early, and each has to be placed in its proper position, as in a structure of unshaped stones. We cannot cut or polish words to make them fit together better when juxtaposed; we have to take them as they are and choose places for them.”56 Unfortunately for the practitioners of English rhetoric, the order of English syntax cannot always accommodate language organized “after the minde of Cicero and Quintilian.” In Dream, this problem reveals itself through the language of the rude mechanicals, who, among various other linguistic transgressions, animate Quintilian’s unhewn “wall” of “unshaped stones” in their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Thus, as Parker argues, the final act of the play “link[s] the disruption by these rude mechanicals of the ordered chain of discourse to the ironizing of the play’s own culminating period, point, or end.”57 This is, as I have been arguing, a particularly vernacular problem. By this final act of Dream, the crossings among the aristocratic characters have been reversed, the requisite marriages have occurred, and Titania has been reconciled to the will of her Oberon; the story has been “changed” back. Nevertheless, the rude mechanicals continue to manifest the disorderly effects of the translation of vernacular rhetoric as they confuse the English language and, in Quince’s words, “disfigure” the matter of Pyramus and Thisbe (3.1.52). Egeus uses terms of rhetoric to complain about their performance, warning the court that “in all the play / There is not one word apt, one player fitted” (5.1.64–65).58 The mechanicals are ineptus, that is, socially and linguistically out of place. Following Quince’s garbled prologue, Theseus notes that “his speech was like a tangled chain—nothing impaired, but all disordered” (5.1.124–25). The language of the workmen is, as Hippolyta notes, “not in government” (5.1.123), and this suggestive association between disordered speech and ungoverned political subjects indicates the extent to which, as

55.  Richard Sherry, Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (London: Richard Tottill, 1555), A.iiv–A.iii. 56.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.6.62–64. 57.  Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 99. 58.  The 1600 and 1619 quarto editions of the play assign this line to Philostrate.

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Parker puts it, “the ‘ordered chain’ of discourse is related to other orders and chains as well.”59 In the midst of this linguistic disorder and social ineptitude, hypallage proudly resurfaces, as Bottom’s Pyramus cries, “I see a voice. Now will I to the chink / To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face” (5.1.190–91). As in Bottom’s previous hypallage, the figure produces an image of sensory rearrangement, and its reappearance in the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe indicates the specifically theatrical nature of the manifestations of the figure in Dream. Although each “Jack” has now been successfully joined, or “co¯ueniently coupled,” to his “Jill,” the production of Pyramus and Thisbe does not, as Theseus hopes, “find the concord of this discord” (5.1.60). The play remains fitted, or as Sherry might say, “coupled,” to the disfigurations associated with the figure of the “Changeling,” and of all the joinings transcribed in this Dream of English rhetoric, we might say that this is the marriage of greatest effect. Despite its extreme linguistic disorder, this misgoverned theatrical performance does not offend the court. Though Peter Quince inadvertently requests the audience to “consider then we come but in despite,” Theseus instructs his bride to “amend” the apparent insult with her imagination (5.1.112, 5.1.209). This husbandly bestowal of the power to “amend” mimics a moment earlier in the play, when Oberon tells Titania she has the power to resolve their conflict over the changeling boy, commanding, “Do you amend it, then. It lies in you” (2.1.118). In teaching Hippolyta how to mend the disorderly performance of the mechanicals, Theseus interprets the linguistic ineptitude of the players as a manifestation of “the modesty of fearful duty” (5.1.101). In other words, such verbal disorder testifies to a properly organized social order, one in which Theseus’s stature intimidates his citizens into frightened incoherence. Although my argument has suggested that the exchanges of the figures of disorder pervert social hierarchies (a woman chasing a man, a weaver sleeping with a queen), Theseus interprets the disfiguring effects of English rhetoric in service of aristocratic power. Yet while the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe appears to secure Theseus’s rule over the world of the play, the authority to adjudicate meaning does not remain vested in his person. After the tragically mirthful conclusion of the mechanicals’ performance, Bottom speaks the figure hypallage once more, inquiring, “Will it please you to see the epilogue or to hear a bergamask dance between two of our company?” (5.2.338–39). Theseus quickly replies, “No epilogue, I pray you,” asking for the dance instead, and warning

59.  Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 125.

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Bottom once again to “let your epilogue alone” (5.2.340, 345). Nevertheless, although Theseus denies the last importunity of the figure of the “Changeling,” the creatures of Faery enter his palace anyway, providing the theatrical audience with the sight of a forbidden epilogue. Dream thus allows English audiences to see the activity of vernacular figuration, providing a theatrical as well as a poetic expression of the English hypallage. The fairies’ invasion of Theseus’s court realizes Puttenham’s picture of elite English society, in which fairies and elves emerge from the mouths of “pretie mistresses in Court.” This infiltration of the fairy world into the aristocratic household does not in itself disrupt Theseus’s rule, for the fairies have arrived so that they may bless the marriage beds and ensure the propagation of noble “issue” (5.2.35).60 But the fairies also defy Theseus’s direct command, allowing the audience to “see” Puck the Epilogue. Puck’s closing words then break the dramatic frame, taking the power to amend the production away from Theseus and transferring it to the paying audience in the public theater. Puck importunes the spectators, If we shadows have offended, Think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear; And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream . . .  (epilogue 1–6)

Imaginative authority has been conveyed from Theseus to the Elizabethan audience, and the play thus concludes by evoking not “antique fables” or “fairy toys,” but rather the contemporary space of the English public theater. As in the texts of English rhetoric, Dream’s fairy content interpolates native speakers of the lower and middling sort into a common practice of imaginative device. One of the earliest vernacular rhetorics describes this process as an attempt to make classical figures of speech part of “oure owne natiue broode.”61 This manner of procreation also lurks in the conclusion of Dream; not only do the fairies secure the reproduction of healthy aristocratic

60.  Although as Wall points out, the court’s inability to see the fairies perform this service suggests that there is some distance between the aristocrats’ and the play’s understandings of the place of English folk traditions in courtly reproduction. Wall, Staging Domesticity, 112. 61.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 2, 3.

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offspring, they also help produce a visible performance of vernacular culture united by the content of fairy lore and ancient tradition, a fantasy apprehended through the disfigured rhetoric of an English weaver.

Coda: “the poet’s pen” In this chapter I have argued that the strange mixtures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play in which classical and vernacular figures are coupled and joined, form themselves according to the shapes and practices of English rhetoric. Just as vernacular translations of Greek and Latin figures of speech transport classical material to a native location, so too does the play, which describes the workings of its own plot with the metatechnical terms common to the English art of rhetoric. Dream repeatedly and explicitly announces that translation and transfiguration produce the plot of the play, and as in Puttenham’s translation of hypallage, this process of translation results in a performance populated by fairies and hobgoblins as well as characters from classical myth. Although the presence of such vulgar superstition compromises the vernacular rhetorical project by identifying translated rhetoric with the storytelling of women and servants, it also firmly plants the art of rhetoric in the only place where such fairies gambol: England. The fairies of the forest “with this field-dew consecrate” not just the bridal beds of the Athenian court but also vernacular literary production and the English stage (5.2.44). In this regard, English rhetoric does indeed disfigure the classical tradition, exchanging (from a certain perspective) “a wrong construction for a right,” and transporting rhetoric into the sphere of nurses, pucks, and rude mechanicals. In the following soliloquy, Theseus attempts to contain the unruly effects of such exchanges by identifying them as the products of a frenzied poetic imagination. He intones, The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy

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It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (5.1.12–22)

Theseus explains away what Hippolyta terms the “strange” tales reported by the lovers after their night in the forest by comparing them to the inventions of poets. Theseus admonishes that the lovers’ reports are “more strange than true,” and he goes on to compare them to other works of the imagination based on their distance from reality (5.1.2). In order to make his point, and to contrast the lunatic fantasies of the imagination with the judicious observations of “cool reason,” Theseus describes a scene of poetic creation. In this scene, the “poet’s pen” transforms the inchoate forms of the imagination into particular “shapes” and “names,” giving “airy nothing / A local habitation” on a page of text. Theseus identifies this process of invention and transcription as a turning: “the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes.” Were we to translate Theseus’s words back into his native Greek, this “turn” of the poet’s pen would become a trope. The poet’s writing tropes the material of the imagination, verbally bodying forth what otherwise has no name. Theseus thus scripts a scene of rhetorical invention, one in which the techniques of the ancient art of discourse provide the mechanism whereby airy nothings can be shaped into words and shared with audiences and readers. This long speech allows the playwright and his company to have a joke at the expense of one of their own creations, as Theseus unwittingly disparages the sites of his own invention as well as that of the play in which he stars as “antique fables” and “fairy toys.” Theseus likewise dismisses the reports of the lovers as the “tricks” of a “strong imagination,” and in this formulation, the imagination operates through unregulated figuration, promiscuously substituting cause for effect: “if it would but apprehend some joy / It comprehends some bringer of that joy.” Yet audiences have just seen firsthand the events that Theseus dismisses as mere fiction, and our superior knowledge undercuts his confident dismissal of the lovers’ report, reminding us that Theseus himself is the product of “antique” invention. Moreover, although Theseus intends to disparage the “seething” compositions of the poetic imagination, audiences cannot help but identify the force of this anonymous “poet’s pen” with the troping power of Dream’s playwright, especially when Hippolyta next observes that the play’s “story of the night” has “transfigured” the minds of the young Athenian lovers (5.1.24). This passage thus returns our attention to the questions of intentionality and interpretation raised by treatments of the figure hypallage in classical and English rhetorics—Is it a figure at all,

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or merely the inadvertent expression of a confused mind? Does it become a figure only when discovered by an audience?—asking us to confront the status of the artist and his intentions relative to the figurative properties of the play. Just as Puttenham’s definition of the English hypallage concludes its list of exchanges from Greek to Latin to English by alluding to the activity of “our Poet” who “play[s] with his wordes,” so too does Theseus’s speech explain the strange fairy tales reported by the Athenians by referring to the imagination of a poet. Yet although this figurative exchange of cause for effect seems to authorize the poet as the source of any “play” with words, both Puttenham’s rhetoric and Shakespeare’s play construe the poet’s imagination as a product of figuration: the figure and the fairy tale conjure their own scene of writing. Thus, at the risk of making an “absurd construction,” we might say that the figures of English rhetoric produce the idea of an English poet, rather than the other way around.

q Ch a p te r 5 The Figure of Exchange Gender Exchange in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 and Jonson’s Epicene

The word “case” provides a common lexical ground for grammatical, legal, and erotic concerns in the early modern period. Thus in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, as the villain Cloten attempts to rouse Imogen from her chamber, he mutters, “I will make / One of her women lawyer to me, for / I yet not understand the case myself.”1 In sixteenth-century usage, “case” might signify a law case, the grammatical form of a word, the garments that clothe the human body, or, as this quotation emphasizes, a woman’s genitalia.2 The complexities of the term’s connotations in the English vernacular occur across these various senses of “case,” as it is a word that registers as either learned or vulgar (or both), depending on the context. We can best apprehend this nexus of meanings by considering Mistress Quickly’s interruption of a Latin lesson in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. This scene turns the confluence of the terms of grammar and

1.  Cymbeline, King of Britain, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 2.3.69–71. 2.  In inflected languages, “case” is “one of the varied forms of a substantive, adjective, or pronoun, which express the varied relations in which it may stand to some other word in the sentence, e.g., as subject or object of a verb, attribute to another noun, object of a preposition, etc.” It is marked through the addition of “endings” to words, and in a related sense, the term “case” also signifies the outer or exterior part of an object or person. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “case,” http:// www.oed.com. 146

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gender into broad comedy when Mistress Quickly overhears Will Page’s schoolmaster request the recitation of the “genitive case plural” of “horum, harum, horum.” Mistress Quickly, who knows no Latin and thus hears only the word “whore,” exclaims, “Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her child, if she be a whore.”3 Here an uneducated woman interrupts the orderly exchanges of humanist pedagogy with an inappropriately vulgar understanding of the terms of Latin grammar. In other words, as Patricia Parker argues in an influential reading of the scene, the problem created by the confusion between a Latin grammatical “case” and a vulgar female “case” attaches to unruly female speech, or what we might otherwise call the mother tongue.4 This scene suggests how the use of “case” as a slang term for the female “cut” potentially taints the English language with vulgarity in its most derogatory sense.5 George Puttenham’s allusion to the “plainest cases” in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), coupled with his derisive reference to the inadequate knowledge of his lady students, reinforces this reading. In speaking of the figure parenthesis, Puttenham writes, “The figure is so common that it needeth none example, neuerthelesse because we are to teache Ladies and Gentlewomen to know their schoole points and termes appertaining to the Art, we may not refuse to yeeld examples euen in the plainest cases.”6 I begin with this brief analysis of the term “case” and its use in Shakespearean drama because it suggests how discussions of linguistic forms open out onto cultural concerns that might otherwise seem to be distinct from questions of language and rhetoric.7 The formation of a vernacular rhetoric in the sixteenth century becomes particularly linked to the constitution of gender and sexual desire through the translation of a figure of speech responsible for 3.  The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 4.1.50–54. References in parenthesis in the text are to act, scene, and line of this edition. 4.  Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 29. For another close reading of Mistress Quickly and vernacular usage, see Elizabeth Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 389–408. 5.  In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus puns on “case” and “cut” while consoling Antony over his wife Fulvia’s death, explaining, “When it pleaseth the deities to take the wife of a man from him, it shows to man the tailors of the earth; comforting therein that when old robes are worn out there are members to make new. If there were no more women but Fulvia, then had you indeed a cut, and the case to be lamented” (1.2.147–52). 6.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 180. 7.  Madhavi Menon argues that discussions of sexuality in the period are marked by theoretical ideas about rhetoric, and that handbooks of rhetoric in turn link figures of speech with sexuality. Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

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manipulating grammatical “case”: enallage, or as Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie renames it, the “Figure of exchange.” Of all the disorderly figures of speech I have considered thus far, enallage proves to be the most resistant to translation into English. The figure manipulates grammatical accidents, substituting one case, person, gender, or tense for another, and it does not have any obvious function in an uninflected language apart from the system of pronouns.8 Yet despite its basic unworkability in the vernacular, enallage and its subfigure antiptosis appear in four English rhetorics published between 1550 and 1650. Its periodic inclusion in vernacular handbooks of rhetoric points to the desire to accommodate every aspect of the Latin style manual, no matter how intractable. In order to make enallage “speak English”—to turn it into the “Figure of exchange”—these rhetorics redefine it as a mode of pronoun substitution, turning enallage into a figure that exchanges “he” for “she.”9 Like the costumes of the early modern stage, the figure allows English words to change their “case,” or garments. As a result, within the catalog of English figures of speech, the “Figure of exchange” becomes the rhetorical expression of gender transvestism, even bodily hermaphroditism. Its use also signals the desire of rhetorical practitioners to exchange one thing for another, be that English for Latin, or perhaps even boy for girl. Moreover, in its impact on the system of pronouns, the “Figure of exchange” implicates audiences and readers in its transactions, for the effects of a figure that manipulates “I” and “you” can easily include audiences and readers in its exchanges. In all these senses, the English enallage refuses to respect boundaries of difference. The imperfect Englishing of this figure within vernacular rhetoric, and its appearance in other early modern texts, links the grammatical disorderliness of the mother tongue, disorderly figures of rhetoric, and sexual behavior marked as disorderly within English culture. As I argue in previous chapters, the English rhetorical manuals worry over the implications of their attempts to translate classical rhetoric into the vernacular language, particularly the concern that their handbooks will level social distinctions within the larger community of English speakers and also produce bands of outlaw figures. The “Figure of exchange” returns us to the problem of social leveling, focusing our attention on how the translation of classical 8.  Also called “accidence,” inflection is a change in the form of a word so as to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter, including distinctions of tense, person, gender, number, mood, and case. Although early modern English does have some inflection (as in the plural of nouns or the past tense of verbs), since it is not as broadly inflected as Latin or Old English it is classified as an uninflected language. 9.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 8.

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rhetorical forms reverses the masculinizing work of Latin language instruction and combines male and female into one “common” gender. Enallage presents itself as the locus from which to explore the complicated gender effects of English rhetoric because the figure’s unworkability signifies, quite literally, the troubling absence of gender distinctions within vernacular grammar.10 In addition, through its manipulation of grammatical gender and case, enallage employs the very taxonomies through which early modern culture already expressed the gendered relationship between Latin and English. English translations in the period were said to decline from their Latin originals, and early modern grammars argued, idiosyncratically, that the feminine gender declines from the masculine in classical grammar.11 English, the “mother” tongue, the language spoken by women and children, was understood to be subordinate to Latin, the “father tongue,” the language of adult men. Furthermore, the lack of visible noun inflection in English grammar provided evidence of its decline (so to speak) because it prevented English writers from accommodating the vernacular to the metric demands of classical verse. In short, the impotence of enallage in English writing reflects an absence of grammatical distinction mirrored by the vernacular’s lack of social distinction, as well as its inferiority to Latin art. The “Figure of exchange” thus figures (and is figured by) a difference between Latin and English that stands as gendered. As a discursive structure that does not maintain grammatical distinctions— indeed, as a vernacular figure of speech operating within a grammar that cannot recognize most differences of gender and case—the “Figure of exchange” can help us comprehend other early modern figures caught between the categories of male and female, subject and object. This is because although English grammar lacks the verbal accidents that would enable enallage to operate in the vernacular, many poetic and dramatic works nevertheless imagine an English figure—that is, a person—that undergoes a change of case. Indeed, this is a central device of the early modern stage. The translations that turn enallage into the “Figure of exchange” also produce moments 10.  According to William Lily and John Colet’s A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (1549)—the standard textbook of the period—Latin grammar has seven genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, commune of two, commune of three, the doubtful, and the epicene. By comparison, most English nouns signify only a “common” gender—male, female, and neuter—and only in third-person singular pronouns does the vernacular language register grammatical gender (Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly,” 404). 11.  Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 141–42. As Pittenger explains, Lily and Colet’s Grammar arranges grammatical genders in a hierarchy that cannot be rationalized according to grammatical principles: “The masculine gendre [sic] is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neutre [sic]” (Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly,” 404).

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of exchange in two imaginative works that stage a particular kind of gender disorder: the production of figures of “common” or “epicene” gender, bodies that could be either male or female, and yet are also neither. The grammatical exchanges produced by the “Figure of Exchange” give form to the beloved subject of Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet, known as the “Master Mistress,” and also alter the “case” of multiple characters in Ben Jonson’s Epicene; or, The Silent Woman. Shakespeare’s lyric and Jonson’s play do not rely on what we might call physiological correlates to express their gender disorders, and the application of the limited taxonomy of bodily genders cannot account for the variety of exchanges in their texts. Rather, the terms of grammatical gender and case constitute the disorderly forms of the Master Mistress and the Lady Epicene: these texts dramatize the “Figure of exchange” in bodies that shift between “he” and “she,” “subject” and “object,” “Master” and “Mistress.” Thus although the figure enallage reveals a gender problem endemic to English rhetoric, highlighting the debased status of the vernacular vis-à-vis Latin, its accommodation in Shakespeare’s sonnet and Jonson’s play gives the figure a new valence. Such works reveal how the English enallage’s ability to exchange grammatical case renders the figure sexually attractive, the object of many sorts of vernacular desire.

Translating Enallage into English Both Latin and English rhetorics insist that the constructions of enallage alter only the “shape” of a word, not its signification.12 Enallage thus provides rhetors with a range of grammatically different yet (purportedly) semantically equivalent verbal constructions, supplying a means for verbal variation and amplification in Greek and Latin. The figure appears prominently in Erasmus’s De copia, which describes enallage’s uses as “infinitely various . . . [for] there are as many possible ways of changing as there are grammatical forms of a word.”13 Such morphological variation remains largely unavailable in the vernacular, and more than any other sixteenth-century rhetoric, Puttenham’s Arte acknowledges the difficulty of applying enallage to English speech. Puttenham writes, Your figures that worke auricularly by exchange, were more obseruable to the Greekes and Latines for the brauenesse of their language, 12.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 182. 13.  Desiderius Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas (De utraque verborem [sic] ac rerum copia), trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix (1512; repr., Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), 26.

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ouer that our is, and for the multiplicitie of their Grammaticall accidents, or verball affects, as I may terme them, that is to say, their diuers cases, moodes, tenses, genders, with variable terminations, by reason whereof, they changed not the very word, but kept the word, and changed the shape of him onely, vsing one case for another, or tense, or person, or gender, or number, or moode. We, hauing no such varietie of accidents, haue little or no vse of this figure.14 Like Erasmus, Puttenham presents the “Figure of exchange” as a scheme that manipulates the “shape” or exterior of a word, its “case” rather than its signification, while also admitting that English has “no such varietie of accidents.” Given what we know about the social function of fashion in the sixteenth century, we should be immediately suspicious of this declaration that changes of “shape” or “case” do not alter the meaning of words. In a culture in which dress constitutes the semiotic system according to which personal identity becomes publicly legible, the inability of English words to distinguish themselves through the attire of grammatical accidents presents an obstacle to vernacular aspiration. As Puttenham explains in his chapter on poetic decorum, “It is comely that euery estate and vocation should be knowen by the differences of their habit: a clarke from a lay man: a gentleman from a yeoman: a souldier from a citizen, and the chiefe of euery degree from their inferiours, because in confusion and disorder there is no manner of decencie.”15 Without a system of grammatical dress, English speech may not be able to distinguish itself and prevent such confusion and disorder. The attempt to identify grammatical accidents as nonessential exterior shapes also emerges in the term “braueness,” which Puttenham uses to distinguish between English and the ancient languages. In the sixteenth century “braueness,” or “bravery,” signifies ostentatious show or splendor, especially as it relates to fashion or apparel.16 “Bravery” denotes adornment or embellishment, something that might capture the interest of an observer. Yet the term also connotes mere show, as opposed to actual worth. Puttenham’s distinction between the bravery of the ancients and the simplicity of the English thus might assume a range of opposed meanings. The grammatical embellishments of the Greek and Latin tongues allow rhetors and poets to increase the beauty and fashion of the language, and provide a means for cosmetic enhancement unavailable in the English vernacular; however, the 14.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 182. 15.  Ibid., 289. 16.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “bravery,” http://www.oed.com.

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manipulation of these “verball affects” might be disparaged as empty show. Bravery denotes courage or valor, but it also signifies false bravado. Furthermore, although bravery might seem to be a masculine virtue in its reference to courage and daring, the term’s connection to fashion and embellishment also associates it with what were often understood to be feminine concerns. Like the “Figure of exchange,” “brauenesse” is alternately both masculine and feminine. The union (or, perhaps, confusion) of masculine and feminine virtue in the “braueness” of the ancient tongues evokes a worrisome possibility faced by ancient and early modern rhetors alike, namely, that the ornaments of rhetoric might be effeminizing. Wayne Rebhorn argues that even before English writers begin to translate rhetoric into the vernacular, Roman and Renaissance rhetors were already nervous about the emasculating effects of rhetoric, particularly since rhetorical eloquence might be mistaken for idle talk, which is stereotypically female.17 The traditional identification of rhetorical ornament with cosmetics, a disparaging comparison first articulated in Plato’s Gorgias, further associates the rhetorical art with feminine concerns. Cicero and Quintilian respond to this problem by producing an image of Roman rhetoric as an art of combat and competition, while displacing the problem of idleness and loquacity onto the Graeculi, or “Greeklings.” Rebhorn explains that this diminutive identifies the Greeks as boys or boy-men, and so evokes a vision of passive, and thus effeminizing, sodomitical activity from which proper Roman rhetoric can be distinguished.18 Renaissance rhetorics adopt these very concepts when they denounce overmuch concern with style and adornment as effeminizing, but they also diverge from their Roman predecessors in presenting the relationship between rhetor and audience not in republican terms but as the relationship between ruler and subject.19 Through his eloquence the rhetor becomes, in a passage from Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1593), “emperour of mens minds & affections, and next the omnipotent God in the power of perswasion.”20 This fantasy of imperial power obscures the socially dependent position of the humanists who transmitted the art of eloquence to Renaissance Europe, most of whom were employed

17.  Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 143; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 8–35. 18.  Rebhorn, Emperor of Men’s Minds, 143–44. 19.  So Rebhorn argues in Emperor of Men’s Minds, which distinguishes itself from earlier work on Renaissance rhetoric that presents the art of rhetoric as committed to skepticism, dialogue, and debate. 20.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), A.B.iiiv.

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as teachers. In other words, even before it is translated into the historically degraded English vernacular, the art of rhetoric produces a socially doubled, sexually ambiguous subject position for its practitioners; it encompasses both masculine and feminine characteristics, while rendering its practitioners both king and subject. Consequently, Rebhorn designates the hermaphrodite as the appropriate figure for Renaissance rhetoric, selecting a sexually composite figure to communicate the hybridizing effects of rhetorical practice.21 Yet although the hermaphrodite suggests the sexual doubleness instituted by the art of rhetoric, it does not account for the myriad other exchanges endemic to English rhetorical practice. In its attempt to inscribe Latin grammatical distinctions within a vernacular language that does not differentiate among cases, or subject positions, or gender forms, the vernacular “Figure of exchange” more precisely figures the complex condition of the English rhetor. Given Puttenham’s disavowal of the “Figure of exchange,” it might seem that such masculine-feminine “brauenesse” has no place in English speaking. Indeed, somewhat uncharacteristically, Puttenham does not follow his definition with any explicit examples of enallage, having already declared that English has no real use for the figure. Yet despite this seeming absence, an example of English enallage does in fact lurk within Puttenham’s disclaimer. In describing the exchange of grammatical accidents in the language of the Greeks and Romans, Puttenham writes, “They changed not the very word, but kept the word, and changed the shape of him onely.” Puttenham’s explanation of this generic “word’s” transformation substitutes the masculine third-person pronoun for the neuter “it,” thus altering the grammatical gender of the word through the “Figure of exchange.” Renaissance writing often interchanges “he” and “it,” and thus this exchange might seem to be meaningless. However, its appearance in a discussion of enallage suggests that although the infinite variety of Latin grammatical inflection remains largely inaccessible in the English language, the system of pronouns might provide a native resource for altering the gender of English words.22 The evidence of other vernacular rhetorics bolsters this reading, for they likewise exemplify enallage in English through an exchange of pronouns. Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) defines the figure as “Casus pro casu, when one case is putte for another, as me thynke it is so.”23 In what might be the sole example of enallage in the definition, Sherry changes the first-person pronoun

21.  Rebhorn, Emperor of Men’s Minds, 195–96. 22.  Dennis Baron explains that pronouns serve as the major expression of linguistic gender in the English language. Baron, Grammar and Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 190. 23.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, B8r–B8v.

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from the subjective to the objective case, from “I” to “me thynke it is so.”24 Sherry does not imagine the possibility of an enallage of gender; however, the first edition of Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) does so, explaining it as the substitution of pronouns: “Enallage of gender, when we put the Neuter for the Masculine, or Femine, or any one of them for another, thus, he doth beare a countenance as it were an Emperour. For, as if he were an Emperour, the Neuter for the Masculyne, it is a wicked daughter that dispyseth hir mother, bycause she is olde: For, she is a wicked daughter that dispiseth hyr mother, the Neuter for the Femine; the wynde is loude, she bloweth colde, the Femine for the Masculine.”25 These three attempts to make enallage speak English suggest that vernacular rhetorics favor pronoun substitution as the method of making the “Figure of exchange” workable in the vernacular. Thus far, these English examples of enallage of case and gender do not seem to trouble the gendering of the actual subjects represented by these pronouns, unless one agrees with Henry Peacham that “wynde” must be definitively masculine. However, a subsequent English rhetoric indicates that shifts in grammatical gender might be used to express disorderly gender behavior on the part of actual subjects. John Smith’s The Mystery of Rhetorique Unveil’d (1657) defines enallage as “a change of order,” derived from “[enallos] inversus & præposterus, turn’d upside down and disorderly. A figure whereby the Number or Gender, Mood, Person, or Tense are changed, or put one for another.”26 Smith begins with a number of Latin examples of enallage, taken from Ovid, Cicero, and Virgil, before listing “Scriptural Examples of Enallage.” For enallage of gender, Smith provides the following passage: “Thus is Isa.3.12. Women shall bear rule over them, &c. (i.e.) effeminate men shall, &c. The feminine Gender put for the Masculine, effeminate men are called women.”27 Smith’s example is confusing in that it does not spell out the process of substitution transcribed in other guides—where the explanatory formulation commonly reads “this” for “that.” His example of the “upside down and disorderly figure” first expresses a grave social disorder, whereby actual women rule over men, before the explanation reverses the process of figuration and transforms the threatening women into emasculated men: “women” 24.  This might also be an enallage of number, from “me thinks it is so” (singular) to “me think it is so” (plural), or “me” could be read as the grammatically correct dative pronoun in the archaic use of the verb “thinke.” I thank Will West and Wayne Rebhorn for suggesting these alternate readings of the figure. 25.  Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), h.iiiv. The figure enallage is absent from the 1593 edition of Peacham’s Garden, in keeping with this latter edition’s tendency to eradicate figures that challenge the rules of English grammar. 26.  John Smith, The Mystery of Rhetorick Unveil’d (London: Printed for George Eversden in Amen Corner, 1683), 185. First published in 1657, Smith’s Mystery went through ten editions by 1721. 27.  Ibid., 186.

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here means not “women” but rather “effeminate men.” Smith thus presents enallage, a rhetorical structure concerned with grammatical gender, as a figure animated by early modern notions of appropriate gender behavior. Smith’s designation of the figure as “præposterus” further associates the “Figure of exchange” with the sexual disorder of sodomy, for the “preposterous” delineates many varieties of social disorder in the early modern period, especially those “unnatural” sexual practices that exchange back for front.28 Smith’s explanation places the “Figure of exchange” within this network of sexual and social disorderliness, using the figure to describe, and implicitly condemn, effeminate men. So despite the lack of “braueness” in the vernacular language, a linguistic inaptitude that leads Puttenham to explicitly reject enallage and causes most other English rhetorics to omit the figure from their catalogs, these few English rhetorics do indeed discover ways to accommodate enallage to the vernacular tongue. They apply the figure to the system of pronouns, those parts of the English language that visibly manifest a difference of ­grammatical person, case, and gender. In this exchange of pronouns, the “Figure of exchange” then impacts not just the grammatical accidents of English words, but also the gender of the English subjects to which those pronouns might refer. Thus the figure evokes the doubled social and sexual positions produced by English rhetorical practice, and it also allows John Smith’s Mystery to imagine a preposterous figure who might take men for women. Within the guides, these exchanges are primarily caught up in the drive to increase English’s standing as a language capable of art. However, the capacities of a figure of speech that allows words to change their case, to shift from masculine to feminine, might be construed as desirable in other ways. The erotic potential of this process of grammatical exchange, that is, the sexual desirability of a figure that has undergone a change of “case,” constitutes the central conceit of Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet, a lyric that imagines a figure both “Master” and “Mistris.”

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20; or, “The Exchange” In the literary criticism of Renaissance poetry, the sonnet bears a privileged relationship to rhetorical practice; like other courtly gestures, it can be

28.  On the multivalent signification of the “preposterous,” see Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Events,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 186–213; Parker, “Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events: From Late to Early Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare from the Margins; and Parker, “Hysteron Proteron: Or the Preposterous,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, 133–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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understood as the witty product of ingenious figurative play. The constricted length of the sonnet form necessitates that every word and phrase bear a dense signification, and sonnet writers often use their poems to demonstrate their own rhetorical mastery and test the effects of a particular figure of speech. Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 operates in just this fashion, using an English version of enallage to describe the sexually composite beloved in a poem that John Benson titled “The Exchange” in his 1640 edition and an early modern reader named “The M[ist]ris Masculine” in a marginal note (figure 5).29 Indeed, it could be argued that the word “Mistress” is “Master” given a feminine ending.30 Despite the constraints of grammatical and natural gender systems that distinguish between “he” and “she,” sonnet 20 imagines a figure that might exchange the shape of female for male, and then persist as something between the two. The lyric describes the transformation of its beloved according to the grammatical exchanges of enallage, and in so doing it produces a vernacular version of the classical figure, what the poem calls a “Master Mistris.” We can catalog many iterations of the English enallage in the poem, which I will quote in full here: A Womans face with natures owne hand painted, Haste thou the Master Mistris of my passion, A womans gentle hart but not acquainted With shifting change as is false womens fashion, An eye more bright then theirs, lesse false in rowling: Gilding the obiect where-vpon it gazeth, A man in hew all Hews in his controwling, Which steales mens eyes and womens soules amaseth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a dotinge, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.    But since she prickt thee out for womens pleasure,    Mine be thy loue and thy loues vse their treasure.31

29.  Sasha Roberts transcribes this annotation from copy two of John Benson’s edition of Shakespeare’s Poems in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 168. 30.  I thank Wayne Rebhorn, who suggested this reading to me. 31.  William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 21.

Figure 5.  A handwritten marginal note to the sonnet titled “The Exchange” in John Benson’s edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640), sig. B4. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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According to this condensed narrative of exchange, the poet’s beloved is first created female; however, nature subsequently changes her mind, transforming the newly formed woman into a man, presumably to better satisfy the demands of her “doting.” Nature achieves this exchange of gender through the addition of “one thing,” the male member, just as the grammatical exchanges of enallage occur through the addition or substitution of verbal “affects,” or endings. The beloved’s new ending marks the end or defeat of the poet’s ability to “vse” his (her? its?) body for his own pleasure. Yet although the beloved has been “prickt” out “a man in hew” long before the composition of the poem, the speaker still designates him (her? it?) as a figure of composite gender: a “Master Mistris” with a woman’s heart (sort of), a woman’s face, and a man’s complexion. This amalgamated figure throws both men and women (not to mention the anthropomorphic “nature”) into a state of confused desire. The poem concludes by suggesting that both the poet and women can share the “treasure” of the “Master Mistris,” although only the women will enjoy the “vse,” or sexual “pleasure,” of his (her? its?) body.32 Despite the seemingly composite gender of the beloved, not to mention the pansexual desire generated by the figure, the poem nevertheless makes sharp distinction between the “fashion” of men and women, their habits as well as their physical form. Men have “pricks,” while women have “nothing.” Unlike the beloved’s, women’s hearts engage in “shifting change”; their eyes are “rowling.” The speaker twice describes this propensity toward change and alteration as a “false” condition of womanhood. As remarked earlier, a new title affixed to the sonnet in a subsequent edition of Shakespeare’s poems, known as the Benson edition (1640), accounts for all of these modes of substitution, change, and alteration in one explanatory phrase: “The Exchange.”33 As this reading indicates, the grammatical properties managed by the “Figure of exchange” also produce the large structure of the sonnet, which focuses on the relationship of poet to beloved. Thus, by retitling as “The Exchange” what the 1609 quarto marks simply as “20,” the much-maligned Benson edition precisely identifies the rhetorical logic of the poem.34 The

32.  Another way of reading the sonnet might treat the “Master Mistress” as a woman, whereby the thing “added” becomes female refusal of a male suitor. But this reading is not prevalent. 33.  William Shakespeare, Poems, ed. John Benson (London: Tho. Cotes, 1640), B4. 34.  In using the phrase “rhetorical logic” to describe the relationship between the poem’s beloved and the structure of the “Figure of exchange,” I cite the influential work of Joel Fineman, who argues that certain rhetorical modes produce large thematic motifs in Shakespeare’s poetry. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 38.

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“Figure of exchange” exists between two rhetorical practices; it is the product of the distance between Latin and English, as well as a sign of the desire to close that distance. The beloved of sonnet 20 embodies this very condition of difference, distance, and desire, for the “Master Mistress” is neither entirely male nor entirely female, and the figure furthermore attracts equal attention from men and women. This body caught between two forms incarnates the “Figure of exchange”; it also generates the frustrated desire that constitutes the Petrarchan formula of thwarted love. In addition to providing the plot of the lyric, this rhetorical mode of exchange—a process which substitutes “he” for “she”—also accounts for the difficulty of affixing stable gender pronouns to the poet’s beloved. This problem of indeterminate reference is not confined to sonnet 20, but rather, as the copious scholarship attests, has vexed editors and readers of the entire sequence since Benson first produced his now controversial edition.35 Indeed, one could describe much of the massive volume of criticism on the sonnets as a meditation on the problem of pronouns. The uncertain referent(s) of the sonnets’ pronouns, especially the various forms of the second-person pronoun (you/thee/thou), constitute(s) the crux of a centuries-old critical debate because it leaves in question the sonnets’ direction of address. Despite Edmond Malone’s confident division of the sequence into two gendered groups in his influential eighteenth-century edition—a division that largely persists in modern critical thinking—the vast majority of the sonnets do not specify the gender of the poet’s beloved “you.”36 Unlike other sonnets in the sequence, sonnet 20 specifies the gender of the addressee—in the second line it immediately identifies “thou” as “the Master Mistris”—but does so with a common, in-between gender that does not align with either male or female. The sonnet titled “The Exchange” identifies the Sonnets’ shifting “yous” as “thou the Master Mistris of my passion,” a beloved whose polymorphous

35.  Benson reordered the sequence, conflated the 146 sonnets of the 1609 quarto into seventy-two poems, gave many of the poems titles, and introduced textual variants (Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, 158). Throughout its more recent literary history, the Benson edition has been condemned, as James Schiffer puts it, “as a piratical desecration.” Schiffer, “Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer, 3–71 (London: Garland, 2000), 17. Yet Benson has been defended, most prominently by Arthur Marotti and Margreta de Grazia, and his edition is perhaps no longer quite as infamous as it once was. 36.  Margreta de Grazia notes that an “astonishing” number of sonnets do not make the gender of the addressee explicit: about five-sixths of the first 126 sonnets leave the gender of the beloved unspecified. De Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer 89–112 (New York: Garland, 2000), 97.

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“hews” sound like pronominal “yous”; it defines the beloved, in other words, by means of the English enallage.37 Because the lyric that Benson anthologizes under the title of “The Exchange” has become a crux of the entire sequence, the locus classicus of the modern debate over the sexuality of the sonnets, the implications of this mode of figuration reverberate through discussions of the poems as a whole.38 Many of the most influential readings of the sonnets in the late twentieth century focus on sonnet 20, readings that have rendered the long-denied homoeroticism of the sequence the new critical orthodoxy.39 However, as with everything else related to the composition, publication, or signification of the sonnets, there is no consensus about the meaning of “The Exchange” or its relationship to the sex /gender system of early modern England (whether in 1609 or 1640).40 The correlation between this lyric and the “Figure of exchange” does not resolve this ambiguity—indeed, by its very nature this rhetorical figure resists a teleology of desire that could be adduced as either hetero- or homosexual. Rather, it specifies the emergence of English rhetoric as one shaping force of this ambiguity and erotic excitement. Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 suggests that we might rename the “Figure of exchange” the “Master Mistress,” or perhaps “The M[ist]ris Masculine.” Yet if we peruse the other sonnets in the sequence, another option emerges: we might avoid these compound nouns altogether and instead simply call the figure a boy. The gender play of pronouns authorized by the English enallage becomes dramatized in Ben Jonson’s Epicene, in which the polymorphous title character is a boy, disguised as a girl, played by a boy. This particular bodily correlate to the English enallage—one that can become either he or she—moves us from the confined space of the lyric to the public space of 37.  Stephen Booth and Joel Fineman both note the homophonic nature of “hews” and “yous,” although Fineman is considerably more persuaded by the potential pun than Booth (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Booth, 164; Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 213). 38.  Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 272. 39.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 40.  For example, Valerie Traub notes that although sonnet 20 does conflate masculinity and femininity into one beloved object (“Master Mistres”), it then reasserts gender difference by elevating the status of the male friend through a series of comparisons to women. The sonnet then concludes by ascribing an apparently natural inevitability to heteroeroticism. Traub, “Sex without Issue: Sodomy, Reproduction, and Signification in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer, 431–54 (New York: Garland, 2000).

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the early modern theater, where boy actors also incarnate the desirability of the shifting, in-between “Figure of exchange.”

Jonson’s Epicene; or, The Silent Woman “Take heed of such insectae hereafter . . .”41 This warning, delivered by the aptly named Truewit, comes at the conclusion of Jonson’s comedy, likely first performed in 1609, the same year that saw the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The allusion to insects is intended to insult two foppish knights who have lied about enjoying the sexual favors of the title character, Epicene, or the Silent Woman. These two knights are only secondary characters; the play focuses on the misfortunes of a misanthropic, noise-hating citizen named Morose, who hopes to marry and produce a son so that he can disinherit his despised nephew, Dauphine. At the beginning of the play it seems that Morose has found the perfect mate to achieve his plan: an extremely shy woman named Epicene, who almost never speaks aloud. After marrying the lady, however, Morose learns that he has been deceived about her shyness, and the Lady Epicene quickly transforms herself into a loud and loquacious wife. Morose then tries to divorce his bride, and in a shocking twist at the end of the play, learns that Epicene is in fact no woman at all, but a boy hired by Dauphine in order to preserve his inheritance and humiliate his uncle. Thus when Truewit, who is one of Dauphine’s companions, insults the knights Sir John Daw and Amorous La Foole, the audience has already seen the “Mistress” Epicene metamorphosed into a boy. Here the two knights travel quite the opposite course, becoming effeminized by their exposure at the hands of Truewit and the other gallants. Truewit expresses their emasculation with a Latin figure of speech, calling the knights “insects,” but using the feminine form of the plural ending, insectae, instead of the proper plural form of a neuter noun, insecta. In other words, like John Smith’s Mysterie, Truewit uses the figure enallage to insult two effeminate men. This line—which feels almost like an afterthought, coming as it does after the astonishing revelation of Epicene’s gender disguise—caps an entire theatrical production featuring bodies, relationships, and sentences constructed out of the shifting forms of the English enallage. Although I have begun with the end of the play, the action of Epicene manifests the gender effects of the “Figure of exchange” long before the 41.  Benjamin Jonson, Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Richard Dutton (ca. 1609; repr., New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 5.4.242. References in parentheses in the text are to act, scene, and line of this edition.

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revelation of Epicene’s gender and Truewit’s concluding witticism. Indeed, the very title of the play aligns its disorderly content with the grammatical accidents governed by the figure. “Epicene” is a term borrowed from Latin and Greek grammar: epicene nouns are words that, without changing their grammatical gender, may refer to either sex. The familiar instances of the epicene noun are pais in Greek and puer in Latin, both standard terms for “boy,” but which can also mean “girl.”42 The term denotes what grammarians also refer to as the “common gender.” “Epicene” thus names the condition of English grammar that prevents the translation of enallage into vernacular rhetoric. English nouns are nearly all de facto epicene terms, of a common gender that cannot be distinguished as either male or female. Thus although the concept has no proper application in English grammar, the term “epicene” was often used in the early modern period as a synonym for “common.”43 Jonson’s English Grammar (1640) plays on the sexually loose connotation of “common” when it defines epicene nouns as “the Promiscuous, or Epicene, which understands both kindes: especially, when we cannot make the difference.”44 It is impossible to “make the difference,” that is, to distinguish the gender of an epicene term because such words encompass “bothe kindes” of genders. By titling the play and its central character Epicene—a figure who is pais, or puer, or boy and girl—Jonson teaches us to use the grammatical concept as a means of labeling the gender identity of persons who likewise seem to “understand both kindes.”45 Such persons include, of course, boy actors. With a plot based on a cross-dressed boy who goes by the name “Mistress Epicene,” Jonson’s play takes as its avowed subject a central device of the early modern theater; it also marks that device with a term of grammar. Epicene thus places the erotics of theatrical cross-dressing under the purview of the “Figure of exchange,” which manipulates grammatical accidents for rhetorical effect. Whereas a previous generation of feminist scholarship emphasized the misogyny of Epicene, especially its discomfort with assertive women, these readings have lately given way to considerations of the erotic relationships at work both in the play and between theatrical audiences and the boy

42.  Steve Brown, “The Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: Notes on Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 30, no. 2 (1990): 243–63, 257. 43.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “epicene,” http://www.oed.com. 44.  Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8:507. 45.  Indeed, as Steve Brown argues, the connection between the common gender in grammar and bodily hermaphroditism becomes enfolded into the term “epicene” following the production of Jonson’s play. Jonson himself uses the term to signify sodomitical sexual activity when he excoriates the “tribade lust” and “epicene fury” of the female subject of his “Epigram on the Court Pucelle” (Jonson, Epicene, ed. Dutton, 277, lines 7, 8).

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acting companies who first staged Jonson’s productions.46 The play begins by alluding to the sexual malleability of prepubescent boys, opening with a scene in which Clerimont and his page joke about how the Ladies Collegiate enjoy dressing the boy as a girl and fondling him in the privacy of their bedchambers. Truewit then bursts in on this cozy domestic setting in order to complain about Clerimont’s absence from town, disparaging his friend for being caught in an erotic triangle “between his mistress abroad and his ingle at home” (1.1.23–24). Clerimont’s desire for both a woman and a boy places him somewhere “between” a series of sexual objects. The women in the play are caught there as well: Clerimont’s boy complains that the Ladies Collegiate enjoy dressing him as a lady and playing with him “o’ the bed” while showering him with kisses (1.1.12–17), and the women simultaneously lust after Dauphine, a man fully grown. Although Truewit’s description of Clerimont’s sexual pastimes indicates that a young gallant might alternately enjoy both women and boys, and the gentlewomen of town certainly attempt to seduce a variety of love objects, the play later suggests that one might also want to enjoy such diverse pleasures at the very same time. Jack Daw composes a madrigal dedicated to Mistress Epicene that indicates the sexual desirability of mixed or hermaphroditic figures. The verses declare: “No noble virtue ever was alone, / But two in one” (2.3.28–29). Lest we miss this couplet’s applicability to the sexual interests of the play, the other gallants persuade Daw to recite it a second time (2.3.34–35). This condition of being placed “between” a number of different desires was, for opponents of the theater, one of the most worrisome effects of the early modern stage. The evident desirability that boy actors held for their London audiences greatly disturbed Puritan critics of the English stage: such “ingles,” or “catamites,” generate an unfocused carnal desire that does not distinguish between women and boys. Antitheatrical polemic thus accused the theater of turning the English population into a multitude of sexually disordered Clerimonts. In addition to the title character, nearly all of the characters in Epicene manifest some kind of gender disorder, often exhibiting the characteristics of

46.  Influential feminist treatments of the play include Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987): 29–41; Jean E. Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1988): 418–40; and Karen Newman, “City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonson’s Epicoene,” ELH 56, no. 3 (1989): 503–18. These essays have been followed by attention to the homoerotics of Jonson’s drama in Brown, “Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”; Mario DiGangi, “Asses and Wits: The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy,” English Literary Renaissance 25, no. 2 (1995): 179–208; and Richmond Barbour, “ ‘When I Acted Young Antinous’: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theater,” PMLA 110 (1995): 1006–22.

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both sexes.47 In the words of one critic, the play “jostles” with gender slippage and inversion, with characters that do not maintain what Jonson’s English Grammar describes as the “difference” between male and female.48 A brief catalog of the characters that manifest either sexual doubleness or some kind of behavioral gender disorder suggests that, as in the case of the “Master Mistris,” the “Figure of exchange” produces those who lie somewhere between categories. For example, we have the Ladies Collegiate, who live apart from their husbands and constitute “an order between courtiers and country madams” (1.1.74–75). The Collegiates are, by period standards of female behavior, extremely verbose, to say the least; they “cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion, with most masculine or rather hermaphroditical authority” (1.1.76–79). Not only do the Ladies assume a masculine prerogative, thus rendering them “hermaphroditical” figures, they also produce an institution that lies somewhere “between” the court and the country. One of their members, “Madame Centaure,” even broadcasts this hybrid condition in her very name. As it happens, Madame Centaure is not the only mixed beast in the play, for Dauphine also describes a character named Captain Otter as “animal amphibium,” referring to a creature able to live both by land and by water (1.4.26). In its allusion to an animal of two natures, this reference also suggests Otter’s sexual doubleness. Captain Otter is something less than a man, for while in the presence of Mistress Otter, he submits to female authority. As Mistress Otter reminds her sulky husband, he has agreed “that I would be princess and reign in mine own house, and you would be my subject and obey me” (3.1.31–32). Thanks to a favorable marriage contract, Mistress Otter, in the words of La Foole, “commands all at home,” which leads Clerimont to afford her the title “Captain Otter” (1.4.29, 30). In his humiliating submission to the rule of his wife, Captain Otter’s domestic condition renders him just one of a series of male characters emasculated by the events of the play. Like Mistress Otter, Mistress Epicene asserts her right to govern her new husband’s household immediately following her marriage to Morose. Morose exclaims, “She is my regent already! I have married a Penthesilea, a Semiramis, sold my liberty to a distaff!” (3.4.53–54). Epicene proceeds to engage in what Truewit describes as a “masculine and loud commanding” (4.1.9–10), and as Epicene becomes more masculine in her governance (and more stereotypically feminine in her loquacity), Morose

47.  In The Broken Compass, E. B. Partridge lists the “epicene” properties of virtually every character in the play. Such a list has become conventional in analyses of Epicene, including my own. Partridge, The Broken Compass (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). 48.  Barbour, “ ‘When I Acted Young Antinous,’ ” 1014.

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becomes less and less a man, eventually offering to geld himself if it would extricate him from the marriage (4.4.8–11). Finally, as already mentioned, Daw and La Foole are likewise effeminized by the tricks of Truewit and the other gallants, tricked into giving up their rapiers and becoming, in terms of their gender, truly “adulterate knights” (4.6.2). Clerimont insults Daw and La Foole under cover of praise, declaring that “you two govern the ladies; where’er you come, you carry the feminine gender afore you” (5.1.28–29). This compliment seems to congratulate the two would-be gallants for their power over women’s affections, but it also implies that they behave like women. Truewit’s final joke clarifies the meaning of this insult, when the two insectae are indeed made to “carry the feminine gender.” These various exchanges of gender and desire throughout the play come together in the marriage between Morose and Epicene, a marriage that comes to be understood through the language of “cases” as Morose attempts to free himself from his loquacious spouse. In act 5, scene 3, Truewit disguises the barber Cutbeard and the buffoon Captain Otter as a canon lawyer and divine, and sends them to Morose in order to provide a sham consultation about “how many causes a man may have divortium legitimum, a lawful divorce” (5.3.70–71). Despite Morose’s plea that they take “no excursions upon words,” get “to the question briefly,” and “avoid [the] impertinency of translation,” Cutbeard and Otter proceed to take up nearly two hundred lines of text in a dizzying discussion of the various justifications, or “cases,” for divorce, playing on the multiple senses of “case” prevalent in the period (5.3.73, 74, 82–83).49 As Cutbeard explains, “The canon law affords divorce but in few cases, and the principal is in the common case, the adulterous case” (5.3.76–77). This is later referred to as “crimen adulterii: the known case” (5.3.132). In other words, if a wife’s “case” has become “common” or “known” (i.e., publicized, but also penetrated), a husband may dissolve the marriage. Cutbeard and Otter go on to list twelve additional potential legal justifications for divorce, including error personae, “if you contract yourself to one person, thinking her another,” and error qualitatis, “if she prove stubborn or headstrong, that you thought obedient” (5.3.91–92, 96–97). At this Morose thinks he has discovered a solution, only to be told that this is a lawful impediment “ante copulam, but not post copulam” (5.3.100). Throughout the scene Morose’s hopes for divorce are repeatedly encouraged and then crushed, which provokes Truewit to gleefully comment, “Alas, sir, what a hope are we fall’n from, by this time!” (5.3.104).

49.  Patricia Parker treats these associations at length in Literary Fat Ladies, especially pp. 106–7.

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Just as Morose begins to despair, Cutbeard and Otter arrive at the twelfth and final case for divorce, which they describe at length in the following exchange: twelfth and last is si forte coire nequibis. otter:  Ay, that is impedimentum gravissimum. It doth utterly annul and annihilate, that. If you have manifestam frigiditatem, you are well, sir. truewit:  Why, there is comfort come at length, sir. Confess yourself but a man unable, and she will sue to be divorced first. otter:  Ay, or if there be morbus perpetuus et insanabilis, as paralysis, elephantiasis, or so— dauhpine:  Oh, but frigiditas is the fairer way, gentlemen. otter:  You say troth, sir, and as it is in the canon, master doctor. cutbeard:  I conceive you, sir. clerimont:  [Aside] Before he speaks. otter:  That ‘a boy or child under years is not fit for marriage because he cannot reddere debitum’. So your omnipotentes— truewit:  [To Otter] Your impotentes, you whoreson lobster. otter:  Your impotentes, I should say, are minime apti ad contrahenda matrimonium. truewit:  [To Otter] Matrimonium? We shall have most unmatrimonial Latin with you: matrimonia, and be hanged. cutbeard:  The

(5.3.170–191)

After surviving these hiccups in which Otter’s bad Latin threatens to reveal his disguise, Otter at last concludes that only through “frigiditatis causa” will Epicene have “libellum divortii” against Morose. Although the sham legal consultation began with a series of jokes about female promiscuity (crimen adulterii: the known case), it culminates in a recommendation that Morose confess himself to be impotent, so that Epicene herself will sue for divorce. This recommendation implies that because women have such rapacious sexual appetites, they will never countenance being married to an impotent man. The payoff of the joke comes in the final scene of the play, when Morose publicly announces, as per the instructions of counsel, “I am no man, ladies” (5.4.43). This entire scene bristles with Latin errors and jokes, including the “the figure of Exchange,” for in addition to serving as both a legal term and a bawdy pun on women’s libidinal parts, “cases” also provide the grammatical content of the figure enallage. Although we do not yet know that the Lady Epicene is in fact a boy in disguise, Cutbeard and Otter’s garbled Latin hints

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at this conclusion, particularly when Otter mistakenly substitutes omnipotentes for impotentes (using an adjective that means “all powerful” rather than “impotent”) in his discussion of impotence’s legal effects on the marriage contract. Truewit corrects him in an aside, hissing, “Your impotentes, you whoreson lobster” (5.3.187). Otter then revises his speech, telling Morose, “Your impotentes, I should say, are minime apti ad contrahenda matrimonium [least suited to contracting marriages]” (5.3.188–89). To which Truewit, exasperated with Otter’s repeated errors, responds, “Matrimonium? We shall have most unmatrimonial Latin with you: matrimonia, and be hanged” (5.3.190– 91). Truewit fears that Otter’s Latin mistakes will ruin his disguise: Otter’s grammatical inflections are not properly “married” in that the plural form of contrahenda requires matrimonia, not–um.50 Likewise, as we will soon learn— and the theatrical audience would have been as surprised as anyone else— Morose and Mistress Epicene are not actually married because Epicene lacks the appropriate “case.” When Dauphine finally reveals Epicene to be a boy, he refers back to the divorce consultation, asking his humiliated uncle, “This is justum impedimentum, I hope, error personae?” (5.4.202–3). At this moment we learn that the shifting casus pro casu of the “Figure of exchange” has both married Morose to a boy and released him from the bond. Although the garbled Latinity of the divorce consultation renders it rather obscure to modern audiences, this debate about the status of Morose’s marriage and Dauphine’s allusion to “error personae” in the revelation of his trick confirms the connection between the events of the plot and the logic of the “Figure of exchange.” The misplaced grammatical accidents of Cutbeard and Otter’s “unmatrimonial Latin” foreshadow the terms of Dauphine’s soon-tobe-revealed trickery, which has caused Morose to marry a boy in disguise. Although Dauphine has up until now seemed to be only a secondary character, especially when compared to the extroverted Truewit, the finale reveals Dauphine to be the creator of the most astonishing trick in the play. As Truewit concedes, “Well, Dauphine, you have lurched your friends of the better half of the garland by concealing this part of the plot!” (5.4.220–22). In addition to one-upping his friends, Dauphine’s mastery of the “Figure of exchange” also allows him to claim inheritance of Morose’s estate by substituting a boy for 50.  Jonson, Epicene, ed. Dutton, 261, nn. 190–91. One further exchange between La Foole and Captain Otter uses the figure enallage. La Foole suggests that Captain Otter must not bring his drinking mugs to his wife’s party because “she says they are no decorum among ladies.” Otter replies, “But they are decora, and that’s better, sir” (3.4.121–22). By “no decorum” La Foole means that Mistress Otter does not think the drinking mugs appropriate for ladies’ company; however, Otter responds by substituting the grammatically correct plural ending—decora—in order to insist that they are both beautiful and appropriate.

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a lady in his Uncle’s household. Dauphine describes his new inheritance as a “composition,” a term that describes the play itself as well as the legal contract, and it is in service of both of these that the “Figure of exchange” has been put to use (5.4.201). Dauphine thus uses the grammatical resources and promiscuous appeal of the Latin enallage to compose a proper English inheritance.

Coda: Casus pro Casu I have used the “Figure of exchange” to interpret two literary texts in which the troubling of gender difference becomes legible through the manipulation of pronouns and grammatical accidents. My argument understands the “promiscuous” bodies of Shakespeare’s “Master Mistris” and Jonson’s “Mistress Epicene” not with the conceptual tools of medical theory or legal statute, but according to the discourse of vernacular rhetoric. Neither Epicene nor the beloved of sonnet 20 can be satisfactorily correlated to a bodily disposition derived from even the most elastic taxonomies of “natural” gender; their forms embody not an androgyne, eunuch, or hermaphrodite, but the much more versatile “Figure of exchange,” a figure whose pronouns generate bodies that remain unfixed, changeable, and caught between. These imaginative renderings of the English enallage are, by extension, haunted by the particular desires of vernacular rhetoric. English translations of enallage manifest the aspiration of vernacular rhetorics to narrow the distance between Latin and English linguistic practice, to discover vernacular forms for Latin figures, no matter how intractable. This mimetic desire produces an imperfect result: the “Figure of exchange,” a rhetorical structure caught between two grammars. These works testify to the wide appeal of a figure who encompasses “both kindes,” and I will conclude with another, even more exuberant dramatization of the figure’s erotic force. The effects of the “Figure of exchange” are also manifest in another famously cross-dressed comedy: Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In the beginning of this pastoral drama the lady Rosalind flees political treachery at court and spends most of the play in hiding, disguised as the boy Ganymede. While in the guise of a boy, Ganymede woos Orlando on her own behalf, while also attracting the desiring attentions of a local shepherdess. The play concludes with a series of marriages, at which time Ganymede reveals herself to be a woman in disguise. Subsequent to the marriages and the conclusion of the dramatic action, Rosalind reemerges to address the audience in the form of an epilogue, the text of which testifies to the desirability of the composite body of Rosalind/Ganymede to a theater

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full of men and women. Rosalind begins by noting, “It is not the fashion to see the Ladie the Epilogue,” famously going on to exclaim, What a case am I in then, that am neither a good Epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalfe of a good play? I am not furnish’d like a Begger, therefore to begge will not become mee. My way is to coniure you (O women) for the loue you beare to men, to like as much of this Play, as please you: And I charge you (O men) for the loue you beare to women (as I perceiue by your simpring, none of you hates them) that betweene you, and the women, the play may please. If I were a Woman, I would kisse as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me, complexions that lik’d me, and breaths that I defi’de not: And I am sure, as many as haue good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curt’sie, bid me farewell.51 Rosalind’s epilogue both conjures the audience and defines the play in the terms of the English enallage. Although Rosalind first announces herself as “the Ladie,” she goes on to break the dramatic frame of the play and remind the audience that she is not in fact “a Woman,” but a boy in costume. Rosalind laments this problem of non-identity—a woman who is not a woman, a woman who should not be an epilogue—by exclaiming, “What a case am I in then?” The boy actor thus describes this ambiguous situation simultaneously in grammatical and anatomical terms. Both Rosalind’s form and the play are happily situated “betweene” men and women, pleasing to all. This epilogue preserves multiple erotic futures, allowing the audience to imagine a “kisse” from the figure of their desire, whatever that figure may be.52 In fact, the effects of the “Figure of exchange” are manifest within the play just before Rosalind’s saucy epilogue, in a passage far less familiar: the liturgy of the wedding ceremony. The ceremony reveals Ganymede to be the lady Rosalind, heir to the exiled duke, and weds the former boy to Orlando. In the first folio printing of the play, when the goddess Hymen performs the marriage rites, she declares,

51.  William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 207, lines 76–96, my emphasis. 52.  Although, as Mario DiGangi emphasizes, in the epilogue these futures are all explicitly heteroerotic. DiGangi, “Queering the Shakespearean Family,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 269–90, 286.

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Good Duke receiue thy daughter, Hymen from Heauen brought her, Yea brought her hether. That thou might ioyne his hand with his, Whose heart within his bosome is.53 The particulars of this scene have been rendered invisible to readers and audiences because all modern editions of the play replace “his hand” with “her hand,” ascribing the double “his” to a compositor’s error.54 Without this modern emendation, what we read in the folio edition is the script of a marriage between a boy and a girl disguised as a boy (who is also played by a boy actor) enacted through the grammatical exchanges of the English enallage. Over the course of Hymen’s verses, the “Figure of exchange” describes Rosalind with first the feminine and then the masculine pronoun, eventually joining boy to boy in the final lines of the ceremony. These lines preserve the bride as both Rosalind and Ganymede, she and he, or “her” and “his,” allowing the “unmatrimonial” grammar of the English enallage to be embodied once again on the early modern stage.

53.  Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, 205, lines 88–92, my emphasis. 54.  I thank Jeffrey Masten, who first drew my attention to the folio version of this scene. On the negligence of an editorial tradition that is incapable of reading “his hand” as anything other than a compositor’s error, see Masten, “Textual Deviance: Ganymede’s Hand in As You Like It,” in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Garber, Paul B. Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 153–63 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

q Ch a p te r 6 The Mingle-Mangle The Hodgepodge of Fancy and Philosophy in Cavendish’s Blazing World

In the following passage from the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian coins the word sardismos to name a stylistic vice otherwise known by the Greek term soraismus, which refers to the mixture of different languages within a single speech. In defining this form of linguistic abuse, Quintilian writes, There is also what is called Sardismos, a style made up of a mixture of several kinds of language, for example a confusion of Attick with Doric, Aeolic with Ionic. We Romans commit a similar fault, if we combine the sublime with the mean, the ancient with the modern, the poetic with the vulgar, for this produces a monster like the one Horace invents at the beginning of the Ars Poetica: Suppose a painter chose to put together a man’s head and a horse’s neck, and then added other limbs from different creatures.1 Only by preserving a pure Roman expression uncontaminated by dialect forms can one avoid producing a monstrous style made up of “limbs from 1.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.3.59–60. 171

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different creatures,” added to a man’s head on a horse’s neck. Quintilian thus turns the centaur and other monsters into tropes for language unrestrained by proper boundaries. More than sixteen hundred years later, in a chapter titled “The Abuse of Words” in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1691), John Locke criticizes writers who abuse language’s multivalent potential by giving words new meanings rather than maintaining a one-to-one correspondence between words and their referents. Locke writes, “He that hath Names without Ideas, different from their common use, wants Propriety in his Language and speaks Gibberish. And he that hath Ideas of Substances, disagreeing with the real Existence of Things, so far wants the Materials of true Knowledge in his Understanding, and hath, instead thereof, Chimæras. He that thinks the name Centaur stands for some real Being, imposes on himself, and mistakes Words for Things.”2 In this passage the centaur once again becomes a trope for language that has strayed beyond its bounds by putting words in place of things and the inventions of the imagination in place of “the Materials of true Knowledge.” Locke concludes this same chapter with a now famous harangue against rhetoric, which Paul de Man calls an eloquent denunciation of eloquence.3 He writes, “If we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore, however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the Language or Person that makes use of them.”4 Locke does not want to eradicate rhetoric entirely—he concedes that such a thing would be impossible, given its great reputation—but rather wishes to confine its practices to those discourses that aim at “pleasure and delight” rather than “Truth and Knowledge.” And so, in a formative moment for the new science and empirical philosophy, he restricts the art of rhetoric to the domain of fiction and popular address. The centaurs of rhetoric must be contained within discourses that take the imagination as their referent,

2.  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1691; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 506, 507. 3.  Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 13–30, 13. 4.  Locke, Human Understanding, 508.

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such as the art of poesy, which Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) describes as “not tied to the laws of matter, [which] may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.”5 According to Bacon’s schema, an important precursor of Locke’s organization of the human sciences, both rhetoric and poesy traffic in words and work primarily on the imagination, and so cannot be said to produce “sound and fruitful knowledge.”6 In the context of this book, such an identification of rhetoric and fiction likely comes as no great surprise, given that my arguments depict the translation of classical figures of speech into English as a form of poiesis, or literary creation. Looking over previous chapters, one might imagine that rhetoric and poesy were already understood to be synonymous in the 1580s, when George Puttenham titles his rhetorical handbook The Arte of English Poesy. As Philip Sidney writes in his Defense of Poesy, oratory and poetry have “an affinity in the wordish consideration.”7 Yet even as writers such as Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson exploited the fictive potential of rhetorical figures of speech, rhetoric still retained its status as a self-contained art in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with a domain far exceeding what we would call the imaginative or the literary. Erasmus’s De copia emphasizes the importance not only of verba, words, but also of res, subject matter, and instruction in the art of rhetoric was intended to train students to locate the content of their arguments as well as the means of expression. Although the vernacular rhetorical handbooks published after Erasmus’s manual place an ever-increasing emphasis on the ornaments of elocutio, or style, those ornaments continued to be understood as essential equipment for a range of civic and scholarly endeavors. It is this broader understanding of rhetoric’s value and importance—indeed, its substance—that begins to change in the later seventeenth century, as philosophers such as Locke systematically detach rhetoric from its affiliation with “scientific” pursuits, including the invention and discovery of new knowledge about the natural world. In this later context, the identification of rhetorical figures with the inventions of poetry aims to diminish rhetoric’s cultural force. I will connect the two different notions of linguistic abuse outlined by Quintilian and Locke—the contamination of one’s language with dialect or foreign terms and the more widespread confusion of words and things

5.  Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 186. 6.  Ibid., 169. 7.  Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 247.

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perpetrated by figures of speech in general—through an analysis of the figure soraismus, or what Puttenham calls the “mingle mangle.” Unlike the disorderly figures analyzed in previous chapters, which are not uniformly understood to be vices of style by Roman and English practitioners, ancients and early moderns agree that soraismus is always an “intollerable” vice.8 Although it is a figure of speech that mixes foreign languages within a single text, the “mingle mangle” and its synonyms are often used by sixteenth-century language reformers to condemn the English vernacular as a whole, which was widely perceived to have supplemented its vocabulary with too many borrowed words. In this era, the phrase “mingle mangle” signifies what critics such as Stephen Mullaney, Paula Blank, and Carla Mazzio have identified as the internal alienation produced by a vernacular that has absorbed too many “strange” words and become disturbingly foreign to itself.9 The figure soraismus thus evokes what was then understood to be one of the core problems of the English language: its linguistic impurity resulting from an ongoing susceptibility to foreign contamination. I have already considered how sixteenth-century language reformers cope with English’s widely acknowledged “barbarity,” a struggle most evident in the shifting valuations of terms such as “common” and “natural” in the rhetorical manuals. At times the manuals celebrate the idea of a “common” language that is posited as having a natural connection to the English people and land. However, this valorization of English’s “naturalness” remains troubled by the parallel project of the manuals: to civilize the vernacular and raise it to the standards of artful classical models. The translators of English rhetoric aim to improve on the language’s natural state through the importation of classical rhetorical figures into the vernacular. Yet this process may render English unnatural to its own speakers by confounding the language with foreign devices. The art of rhetoric is thus potentially both a means of improvement and an agent of contamination and confusion. Artful classical figures such as hyperbaton emphasize this predicament by threatening to rearrange “natural” English word order, while soraismus does so by introducing 8.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 259. 9.  Stephen Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 65–92 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996); Carla Mazzio, “Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature 38, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 207–32; Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

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strange words into the vernacular vocabulary. In previous chapters I argued that figures such as hyperbaton, parenthesis, hypallage, and enallage threaten to become tropes for English’s outlaw status within the field of classical rhetoric. (Because the figures don’t work particularly well in the vernacular, they emphasize English’s inability to achieve the artfulness of Latin expression.) In the case of soraismus, this threat is fully realized: contemporary writers repeatedly and explicitly draw on the logic of the figure in order to identify the deficiencies of the vernacular. Sixteenth-century writers thus use the “mingle mangle” to refer to the unlawfully mixed vocabulary of their own “native” language. Yet despite its widespread use in sixteenth-century writings on the vernacular, soraismus entirely disappears from English rhetorics in the seventeenth century, suggesting that the figure ceases to be of interest for vernacular rhetoric in its later stages. However, although the “mingle mangle” vanishes from the catalog of vernacular figures of speech, its troping of linguistic abuse as unlawful mixture eventually reemerges in a different guise in the writings on rhetoric produced by Conformist preachers and natural philosophers in the later seventeenth century, writings that claim that English language and culture are disordered by the techniques of rhetorical style. The “mingle mangle” thus continues to operate as a figure for improper mixtures, but its referent changes. As Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663) complains of its hero’s “Rhetorick”: His speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect. It was a parti-colour’d dress Of patch’d and pyball’d Languages; ’Twas English cut on Greek and Latine, Like Fustian heretofore on Sattin.10 In this passage, which is characteristic of certain writings on rhetoric circulating in the 1660s, the techniques of classical eloquence make a Babel-like and pretentious hodgepodge of a previously intact, if coarse (“fustian”), English speech. Even when they express apprehension about certain disorderly figures, early English discussions of rhetoric take for granted the classical

10.  Samuel Butler, Hudibras: The First Part (London: J. G. for Richard Marriot, 1663), A4.

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argument that a truly artful eloquence can successfully domesticate “foreign” rhetorical devices. As Aristotle’s Rhetoric observes, an appropriately elevated style will often have an “unhomelike” quality (xénos), but the successful rhetor will conceal this outlandishness, and make it seem natural rather than artificial.11 The antirhetorical writings I consider in this chapter defy this long-standing argument about the power of eloquence to make strange things seem familiar: amazingly, it is no longer English that is figured as a barbarous intruder into the space of classical rhetoric, but rather the reverse. The “mingle mangle” might be concerned principally with questions of nonnative vocabulary in the vernacular rhetorics of the sixteenth century, but the linguistic confusions captured by the figure reappear in later antirhetorical critiques to support claims that all figures of rhetoric are irredeemably abusive. My analysis of soraismus thus extends the application of the figure, adopting it as a term to analyze the reevaluation of rhetoric in the decades following the English Civil War, whether or not the parties involved would have used it in such a way. After establishing the contours of the antirhetorical polemic and linking its characteristic forms by analogy to the figure of the “mingle mangle,” I examine the work of one writer who is particularly subject to this form of critique: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle.12 Virginia Woolf famously condemned Cavendish’s writing style as “higgledy-piggledy,” and Cavendish’s prolific output also overwhelms boundaries between kinds of knowledge discourses, combining fiction and philosophy in a mass of torrential writing.13 I read Cavendish’s A Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, a philosophical romance published as an appendix to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), as an instantiation of the mode of rhetorical eloquence put in question by preachers and natural philosophers in the late seventeenth century. That is to say, not rhetoric as understood by its ancient or Renaissance practitioners, but rhetoric as redefined in the polemics of the 1660s and 1670s: an agent of confusion that circulates words with no substantive connection to things. This analysis suggests how Cavendish’s work dramatizes the historical shift for rhetoric sketched above,

11.  Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 3.2.6–7. 12.  Cavendish herself signed her name as Margaret Newcastle; however, I will follow general critical practice and refer to her as Margaret Cavendish. 13.  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; repr., Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005), 61. During a twenty-year writing career, Cavendish published more than a dozen volumes, including collections of poetry and plays, a book of orations, scientific speculations, a book of letters, and a biography of her husband, the Duke of Newcastle.

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in which the linguistic anxieties first confronted by sixteenth-century vernacular rhetorics move to a new arena.

Translating Soraismus into English They say in my contrye, when they cal theyr hogges to the swine troughe Come to thy myngle mangle. —Hugh Latimer, 3rd sermon before Edward VI

Like the hyperbatons and figures of exchange analyzed in previous chapters, the figure soraismus poses a challenge to the very idea of an English art of rhetoric, reminding us of the fraught relationship between the early modern English vernacular and the classical tradition. A figure that mixes different languages within the same speech, soraismus constitutes the exemplary form of barbarous speech, what Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie calls the “foulest vice in language.”14 Puttenham explains that “when any straunge word not of the naturall Greeke or Latin was spoken, in the old time they called it barbarisme.”15 Thus, within a classical rhetorical context, the use of the English vernacular is by definition a barbarous intrusion of un-“naturall” language. Puttenham’s use of the phrase “in the old time” signals his awareness of the historical production of such rules for language use, an awareness that allows his text to revise the standards for linguistic decorum in a vernacular context. However, despite this willingness to forge a historically and culturally specific rhetorical practice in defiance of classical precedent, Puttenham’s text must nevertheless contend with the perceived impurity of the English vernacular. Even in the late sixteenth century, Latin remained the “one” tongue (versus the “many” vernaculars), and it thus proved difficult to produce a category of barbarous speech internal to vernacular practice and, by extension, to identify soraismus as a linguistic transgression against the English tongue. To confound the matter further, what Puttenham terms the “vulgar English” had in fact long been infiltrated by elements of the foreign, a reality apparent in his subsequent description of the vernacular standard as “Norman English.” Exhortations to linguistic purity in rhetorical practice—exhortations that arrive through the injunction to avoid barbarous, or “forrein,” speech—thus must continually confront the essential impurity of the vernacular. Not only

14.  Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 209. 15.  Ibid.

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is English barbarous vis-à-vis Latin speech, it is also foreign to itself. English translations of soraismus foreground this predicament. As previous chapters have emphasized, despite Puttenham’s identification of Greek and Latin as the “naturall” languages in his definition of barbarism, it was in fact the very naturalness, as opposed to artfulness, of the English tongue that was accounted its greatest disadvantage in the sixteenth century. The English vocabulary was inadequate to the demands of the classical arts in that it lacked the technical terms requisite for the practice of those arts. It eventually became widely acknowledged that only through the importation of foreign terms could the “indigent” and “barren” English vocabulary be remedied.16 As Richard Mulcaster explains in his Elementarie (1582), “For when the minde is fraught with matter to deliuer . . . it seketh both home helps, where theie be sufficient, and significant, and where the own home yeildeth nothing at all, or not pithie enough, it craueth help of that tung, from whence it receiued the matter of deliuerie. Hence commeth it that we haue our tung commonlie both stored and enlarged with our neighbours speeches, and the old learned tungs.”17 This defense of neologizing—the borrowing of terms from other “tungs,” ancient and modern—offers dispensation to those English speakers who must search beyond their mother tongue in order to express the “matter” of their knowledge. Such borrowed speeches add to the “store” of the English vernacular, enriching its ability to express itself. In fact, for defenders of such linguistic borrowing, it might be construed as a sign of barbarousness not to import such terms as allow the delivery of learning in the vernacular. As Philemon Holland asks, “Is our language so barbarous, that it will not admit in proper tearms a forrein phrase?”18 Or as George Chapman testily observes, “All tongues haue inricht themselues from their originall (onely the Hebrew and Greeke which are not spoken amongst vs) with good neighbourly borrowing, and as with infusion of fresh ayre and nourishment of newe blood in their still growing bodies, and why may not ours?”19 Philip Sidney himself argues that English benefits from its foreign borrowings, writing, “I know some will say it is a mingled language. And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other?”20 16.  These terms are quoted from a letter written by Richard Eden to Sir William Cecil (1562) and from the preface to William Barkar’s translation of Xenophon. R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 92, 70. 17.  Ibid., 69–70. 18.  Quoted from the preface to Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Historie of the World (1601), ibid., 43. 19.  Quoted from the preface to Chapman’s translation of Homer (1598), ibid., 209. 20.  Sidney, Major Works, 248.

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Although these writers defend neologizing as a means of achieving English eloquence, the use of borrowed words remained controversial throughout the early modern period, as is apparent in the recurring grumblings over the use of “inkhorn” or “inkpot” terms.21 In what would become an authoritative statement, Thomas Wilson counsels: “Among all other lessons, this should first be learned: that we never affect any strange inkhorn terms but so speak as is commonly received. . . . Some seek so far for outlandish English that they forget altogether their mother’s language.”22 Such critiques argue that attempts to supplement the patently inadequate English vocabulary were overwhelming the native elements of the language. William Fulwood complains that the “most part of our English termes, are very farre different from our vulgare and maternall speache, in such sort, that who so fully vnderstandeth not the Latin tongue, yea and also the Greek, can scarse vnderstand them.”23 According to this widespread point of view, neologizing was rendering the English language a foreign tongue to the majority of its native speakers. As Carla Mazzio documents, persistent complaints about the influx of foreign words conjured images of political chaos, with linguistic instability proving an easy figure for national insecurity.24 Thus Samuel Daniel likens foreign terms to illegal aliens, wondering “at the strange presumption of some men, that dare so audaciously aduenture to introduce any whatsoeuer forraine wordes, be they neuer so strange, and of themselues, establishe them as Free-denizens in our language.”25 Translations of English rhetoric could easily be cited as a contributing factor in the contamination of the mother tongue with elements of the foreign, as the vernacular guides work to make “straunge” terms part of England’s “owne natiue broode.”26 In a passage on oratory in his Defense of Poesy, Sidney agrees that eloquence has been compromised by the overuse of “far-fet words that may seem monsters but must seem strangers to any poor Englishman.”27 These concerned responses to the steady invasion of borrowed words reveal the essential paradox of sixteenthcentury attempts to forge a vernacular eloquence: in order to achieve an 21.  For a history of complaints about “inkhorn” terms, see Jones, Triumph of the English Language, 101–20. 22.  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 188. 23.  Quoted from The Enimie of Idleness (1568), Jones, Triumph of the English Language, 94. 24.  Mazzio, “Staging the Vernacular,” 209. 25.  Quoted from A Defence of Ryme (1603), Jones, Triumph of the English Language, 203. 26.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 3. 27.  Sidney, Major Works, 246.

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artful vernacular, English writers must supplement their vocabulary with foreign terms, and yet this importation of “stranger” words mangles English speech, rendering it, once again, barbarous. Puttenham’s English term for soraismus, the “mingle mangle,” aptly expresses the problematic of neologizing: the borrowing of foreign words enriches the English vernacular while also alienating that vernacular from itself. Earlier English rhetorics also describe soraismus as a linguistic “mingling”: Richard Sherry defines the figure as “a mynglyng and heapyng together of wordes of diuerse languages into one speche,” and Henry Peacham likewise describes the figure as “a mingling together of diuers Languages.”28 Puttenham’s English term further identifies the figure’s “heapyng” and “mingling” as a “mangling,” a mixture that is also a mutilation or a disfigurement. The term “mingle mangle” also showcases English’s unique ability to make compound words, what Sidney calls “happy . . . compositions of two or three words together.”29 Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) acknowledges the potential specificity of the figure to the English vernacular, observing that “some think wee speake but little English, and that our speech is for the most parte borrowed of other languages, but chiefely of the Latine, as to the Learned it is well knowne.”30 This reference to how “some” might disparage the English vernacular as a mingled tongue indicates how linguistic mixing registers as a kind of disfigurement perpetuated by the English language in particular. It also suggests that soraismus could be construed as a figure for the mixed English vocabulary. In fact, many sixteenth-century complaints about the growing impurity of the English vernacular draw on the language of the English soraismus. Sir John Cheke advocates the preservation of the vernacular from the “mingle mangle,” explaining in a preface to Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Courtier (1561) that “I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed bi tijm, euer borowing and neuer paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.”31 Ralph Lever’s The Art of Reason (1573) criticizes those who “with inckhorne termes doe change 28.  Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, C.ii.; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Iackson, 1577), G.iiii. 29.  Sidney, Major Works, 248. 30.  Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, G.iiii. Soraismus technically denotes the mixture of terms from modern languages, whereas the figure cacozelia mixes terms from classical languages. However, as is apparent from the Peacham example, the mixture of ancient and modern languages might also be defined under the rubric of soraismus. 31.  Baldessare Castiglione, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: Wyllyam Seres, 1561). The edition has neither page numbers nor signature symbols.

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and corrupt the [mother tongue], making a mingle-mangle of their natiue speache,” while the preface to Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579) similarly complains that writers who patch up “the holes [in the mother tongue] with peces and rags of other languages . . . have made our English tongue a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of al other speeches.”32 Such comments often analogize a mingled English vocabulary to a mangled English nation, as we can see in the prologue to John Lyly’s Midas (1592), which adopts the term “mingle mangle” to deride the mixture of the native and the foreign in the English nation. The prologue explains that “Trafficke and trauell hath wouen the nature of all Nations into ours and made this land like a Arras, full of deuise, which was Broadecloth. . . . Time hath confounded our mindes, our mindes the matter; but all commeth to this passe, that what heretofore hath beene serued in seuerall dishes for a feast, is now minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, for the whole worlde is become an Hodgepodge.”33 These passages liken the mingled stock of the English vernacular to a bankrupt borrower in debt to foreign tongues, a plain garment patched with foreign fabric, and a mishmash of food served in a single dish. Such formulations identify the English vernacular—and in Lyly’s case, the nation and even the “whole worlde”—as soraismus, or the “mingle mangle.” These worried complaints about the foreign contamination of the English language offer a counterargument to the project of English rhetoric, which aims to import the ornaments of classical rhetoric into the vernacular. As I have been arguing, the manuals respond to this problem by attempting to nativize rhetoric to the English countryside, where it would become the common property of all English speakers. Such arguments use the idea of a common rhetoric to create what Claire McEachern terms an “axis of identification” between the land, language, and people of England.34 Reading the above statements about the impurities of the mother tongue, it seems almost incredible that the mingled vernacular language could ever be successfully posited as having a “natural” connection to the English people and the English land. Yet despite the difficulty of adjudicating between the “native” and the “foreign” in the hodgepodge of English speech, and the intense interest in producing a linguistic standard that could make such a distinction, the 32.  Ralph Lever, The Art of Reason (1573) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), *.viv; Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 16. 33.  Mazzio, “Staging the Vernacular,” 212. 34.  Claire McEachern terms this axis of identification a “poetics of political proximity.” The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12.

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figure soraismus entirely disappears from English rhetorics of the seventeenth century. I credit this disappearance in part to an increased confidence in the artistic capabilities of the English vernacular in the seventeenth century, by which time English had begun to establish its own literary canon and shed many of its barbarous associations. Moreover, English writers became skilled in displacing the charge of barbarousness from their own, newly “artful” language onto other modes of expression, such as the speech of women and racial others.35 After the turn of the seventeenth century, the “mingle mangle” no longer seems to allude to the linguistic mixtures constitutive of the English vernacular, and language reformers have acquired a different set of concerns about the relationship between language and nation. Sixteenth-century writers agree that the English language is “barbarous,” but they disagree about how best to transform it into an eloquent language while also maintaining its “natural” connection to the English people and nation. Yet despite the seemingly intractable nature of this problem, the linguistic controversies of the mid- to late seventeenth century do not focus on the barbarousness of the vernacular, but instead debate the relative value of “plain” and “figured” language. It is easy to read such disputes as another iteration of the long-standing tension between the values of the natural and the artificial in linguistic practice, a tension that troubles the art of rhetoric from the classical period on. However, by the mid-seventeenth century this argument is no longer constrained by the core assumptions of the classical art of rhetoric, namely, that rhetoric is an agent of civilization and political stability. Instead, linguistic polemics often disparage the techniques of rhetorical eloquence as a source of civil unrest. In this new context, rhetoric itself becomes responsible for the mangling of the English nation. The virulence of some of the condemnations of rhetoric, unparalleled by anything earlier in the period, indicates that the 1660s constitute a drastically different moment in the history of rhetoric, one defined in large part by the sectarian conflict of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period. The early chapters of this book emphasized how fears of social turmoil and political chaos haunt the first attempts to forge a “common” vernacular eloquence in the mid-sixteenth century. If an ordinary man has access to the tools of rhetoric, Thomas Wilson wonders, would he not ignore social

35.  Juliet Fleming, “Dictionary English and the Female Tongue,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, 290­–326 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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distinctions and “look to rule like a lord [rather] than to live like an underling”? If every English speaker possesses the power of persuasion, “who would dig and delve from morn till evening? Who would travail and toil with the sweat of his brows? Yea, who would for the king’s pleasure adventure and hazard his life?”36 Yet despite this very real risk of fomenting social disorder by giving vulgar people access to the tools of rule, writers such as Wilson justify their attempts to make rhetoric widely available in the English vernacular as a means of constituting a united commonweal of native speakers. This justification of rhetoric’s value to England becomes less tenable in the mid-seventeenth century, when serious political and religious turmoil descends on the nation, upending assumptions about rhetoric’s power to shore up the laws of a stable polity. In the aftermath of what Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) calls “the passions, and madness of that dismal Age,” a range of polemicists accuse the art of rhetoric of encouraging the religious enthusiasms gripping the nation, as well as the resulting sectarian violence.37 Although they present themselves as part of a generalized revulsion against the chaos of the war, the most prominent attacks on rhetoric are animated by a specific politics: the most pointed critiques of rhetoric come from Royalists and Conformists who are interested in attacking the radical ministers who inspired the Levelers and other groups. As Brian Vickers explains, the most virulent complaints about rhetoric emerge from two interrelated projects in the 1660s and 1670s: the attempts of Conformist divines to marginalize Nonconformist sects and the attempts of natural philosophers to publicize a new experimental program and associate it with the established Church.38 Vickers thus argues that stylistic “plainness”—the supposed absence of rhetorical ornament— becomes the common ground for a range of distinct polemics in the period, all of which use arguments about style to affirm their commitment to truth and the preservation of a peaceful polity.39 Conformist divines oppose the use 36.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 42. 37.  Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London: T. R. for J. Martyn, 1667), 53. 38.  Brian Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style,” in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth, ed. Brian Vickers and Nancy Struever, 3–76 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1985). 39.  Scholars disagree about how to interpret these virulent critiques of rhetorical style. As just a sample of the range of interpretations: R. F. Jones claims that such polemicists truly wanted to encourage plainer forms of rhetorical expression, while Brian Vickers argues that such critiques should not be taken at face value as statements about language, but rather should be interpreted as one polemic contained within larger political and religious disputes. Ryan J. Stark argues contra Jones and Vickers that such critiques of rhetoric do not aim to reform syntactical expression at all, but rather are expressions of antipathy toward a rhetoric affiliated with occult philosophy and witchcraft. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century” and “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical

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of figures of speech in English pulpits, ascribing to them the capacity to stir up the passions and create civil disturbance. At the same time, an increasingly vocal group of natural philosophers demand the extraction of rhetoric from serious discourse, calling for a “plain” or “mathematical” means of communication that would allow men to come together and debate the contours of the material universe without violent dissent.40 While the English rhetorical manuals argue that the art of rhetoric will raise the status of the English language and produce a united commonweal, these polemicists argue that rhetoric must be removed from men’s speech in order to save that community from destruction. Such statements against rhetoric are motivated by a desire to marginalize philosophical and theological opponents, and so should not necessarily be taken at face value as sincere arguments about proper linguistic expression; however, they do allow us to observe the beginnings of a sharp decline in rhetoric’s prestige among English philosophers and preachers. They also document the developing framework for an antirhetorical critique that persists long past this immediate context: that rhetoric concerns words rather than things, and belongs to the domain of fiction rather than philosophy. In just one of the more intemperate examples of this critique of rhetoric, Samuel Parker, the eventual bishop of Oxford and fellow of the Royal Society, argues in A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1671) that “the Nation [is] shattered into infinite Factions, with senseless and phantastick Phrases. . . . So that had we but an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsome and luscious Metaphors, it might perhaps be an effectual Cure of all our present Distempers.”41 Parker’s proposed ban on the use of metaphor suggests that the mangling of the English nation derives not from an influx of foreign terms, but from the use of rhetorical figures, what he terms “senseless and phantastick Phrases.” This declaration illustrates how the ornaments of style were identified in some quarters as a source of conflict within English culture. Although rhetoric had been celebrated since the Greeks as a means of deflecting physical violence into verbal debate, writers such as Parker no longer accept that eloquence can, in the words of René Rapin’s treatise on rhetoric (1672), “reestablish a calm in the midst of the most violent agitations Standard for Prose,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951); Vickers, “Royal Society”; Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009). 40.  Sprat writes that the contemplation of nature “never separates us into mortal Factions; that gives us room to differ, without animosity; and permits us, to raise contrary imaginations upon it, without any danger of a Civil War.” Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 56. 41.  Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 3rd ed. (London: John Martyn, 1671), 75–76.

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of a mutinous and inflam’d multitude.”42 Instead they argue that rhetoric shatters an intact nation into “infinite Factions.” Such statements call for the replacement of rhetoric with an ideal of communication that would help the nation transcend sectarian controversy. The removal of rhetorical ornament from serious discourse would prove no easy task, especially given that, as Sprat concedes, “we . . . labour so long after it, in the years of our education: that we cannot but ever after think kinder of it, than it deserves.”43 In his satire of pulpit oratory (1670), the divine John Eachard explains that in order to understand the deficiencies of contemporary sermons, “we must go as deep as the very beginnings of Education: and, doubtless, may lay a great part of our misfortunes to the old fashion’d Methods and discipline of Schooling it self.”44 Training in the art of rhetoric was synonymous with a Latin education, and so critiques of rhetorical speech often recommend a new method for teaching English boys to read and write. Eachard asks “whether it be unavoidably necessary to keep Lads to sixteen or seventeen years of Age, in pure slavery to a few Latin and Greek words,” before explicitly condemning Latin education for the problems of rhetorical eloquence: Now it seems, Sir, very probably, that if Lads did but first of all determine in English what they intend to say in Latin, they would of themselves soon discern the triflingness of such Apologies, the pitifulness of their matter, and the impertinency of their Tales, and Phansies, and would according to their subject, age, and parts, offer that which would be much more manly and towards tolerable sense. And, if I may tell you, Sir, what I really think most of that ridiculousness, phantastical Phrases, harsh and sometimes blasphemous Metaphors, abundantly foppish Similitudes, childish and empty Translations, and the like, so commonly uttered out of Pulpits and so fatally redounding to the discredit of the Clergy, may in great measure be charg’d, upon the want of that which we have here so much contended for.45 Remarkably, this passage turns on its head the long-standing model of Latin language instruction as a male puberty rite, the process that removes a boy 42.  René Rapin, Reflections upon the Use of the Eloquence of These Times: Together with a Comparison between the Eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes (Oxford, 1672), 2. 43.  Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 114. 44.  John Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion (London: W. Godbid for N. Brooke, 1670), 3. 45.  Ibid., 4, 32.

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from his mother and makes him a man.46 Here the English vernacular is praised as the “manly” language, whereas the rhetorical ornaments acquired through years of study are condemned as “childish” and empty. Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and fellow of the Royal Society, also stages this reversal, identifying plain, natural speech as masculine. Glanvill remarks in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) that he now prefers “manly sense, flowing in a natural and unaffected Eloquence” to the “fine Metaphors and dancing periods” he enjoyed in his youth.47 In these formulations, a facility for rhetorical ornament becomes positioned not as a sign of education and status, but rather as a mark of immaturity. Although early English rhetorics use the ideal of a “common” English eloquence to dedicate their own productions in service of national unity, these critiques mobilize social division in order to disparage rhetoric as the province of the uneducated and effeminate. Yet despite their confident repudiation of rhetorical ornament, these statements against figurative language nevertheless evince a worried tone. This is because the devices of rhetoric can so easily captivate the attention of those whom Eachard describes as “the common sort of people”; such “Metaphor-mongers” are easily mesmerized by speeches “bespangled” with “Glitterings.”48 For advocates of the new experimental philosophy, this alluring rhetorical ornament threatens to turn all philosophy into mere romance. Parker outlines such an argument in an attack on the Cambridge Platonists, speaking in his other guise as a natural philosopher: My next Accusation is, that instead of pure and genuine Reason, they abound so much with gaudy and extravagant Phancies. I that am too simple or too serious to be cajol’d with the frenzies of a bold and ungovern’d Imagination cannot be perswaded to think the Quaintest plays and sportings of wit to be any true and real knowledge. I can easily allow their Discourses the Title of Philosophical Romances, (a sort of more ingenious impertinencies) and ’tis with this estimate I would have them read: But when they pretend to be Natures Secretaries . . . and yet put us off with nothing but rampant Metaphors, and Pompous Allegories, and other splendid but empty Schemes of speech, I must crave leave to account them (to say no worse) Poets &

46.  Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. 47.  Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three “Versions,” ed. Stephen Medcalf (1661; repr., Hove: Harvester Press, 1970),  Cv. 48.  Eachard, Grounds and Occasions, 46.

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Romancers. True Philosophie is too sober to descend to these wildnesses of Imagination, and too Rational to be cheated by them. She scorns, when she is in chase of Truth, to quarry upon trifling gaudy Phantasms: Her Game is things not words.49 This passage mobilizes a critique of rhetoric in order to assess the relative truth-value of certain philosophical claims. In order to disparage his intellectual opponents, Parker asserts that their use of the techniques of rhetoric is incompatible with the pursuit of knowledge. Although Parker’s few statements on this topic do not allow us to accurately assess the history or content of this particular philosophical debate—I am citing him here as an illustrative figure rather than analyzing the full range of pronouncements circulated by the various proponents of the “plain style”—his statements do reveal how references to figures of speech could be used to distinguish among knowledge discourses in the seventeenth century. According to Parker’s argument, writing that abounds with “gaudy and extravagant Phancies” and “rampant Metaphors” cannot produce “any true and real knowledge.” The use of such devices labels their authors “Poets & Romancers,” subject to the “wildnesses of Imagination.” “True Philosophie,” in contrast to this impassioned imagining, is sober, rational, and substantive. We can recognize it, Parker promises, by the presence of “things” and the absence of “empty Schemes of speech.” That Parker concludes his own frenzied argument with recourse to a trope— figuring “True Philosophie” as a sober woman—is an irony that apparently does not trouble his larger polemic. Here we see the basic outline of the critique of rhetoric that eventually appears in Locke’s Essay: it concerns words rather than things, the imagination rather than reason. Any discourse that diverts itself with such superficial glitterings has abandoned the “chase of Truth” in favor of “gaudy Phansies.” True philosophy will be recognizable by a mode of speech that “deliver[s] so many things, almost in equal number of words,” promises Sprat.50 According to these polemics, all of the figures of rhetoric produce disorder by disseminating the gaudy fantasies of an ungoverned imagination. Yet despite Parker’s hyperbolic call for an act of Parliament to ban metaphors from the pulpits, none of these reformers seems seriously to believe that rhetoric could be successfully removed from men’s speech—indeed, they do not even bother to remove rhetorical ornament from their own writing, which becomes ever 49.  Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censvre of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: W. Hall for Richard Davis, 1666), 73–74. 50.  Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 113.

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more densely figured as their ire increases. In fact, as Vickers argues, it is much more likely that these complaints are primarily intended to marginalize religious and intellectual opponents rather than remove rhetoric as such.51 However, whether or not the reformation of rhetorical style is their primary intent, these statements do advance a new valuation of rhetorical ornament, one that redefines all rhetorical devices as disorderly speech and connects that linguistic disorder to tumult within the nation. According to this view, rhetoric is the mingle-mangle. Reading such statements, is it any wonder that the members of the Royal Society reacted to Margaret Cavendish’s “blazing” writing with skepticism, if not outright alarm? Even as her contemporaries attempt to forcibly disentangle poetry from philosophy and create a one-to-one relationship between words and things, Cavendish collapses reason and fancy, yoking the productions of science to those of her imagination. She even titles her first published work of natural philosophy Philosophicall Fancies (1653). Cavendish’s work, in other words, enthusiastically opposes the priorities of these revaluations of rhetorical style, perhaps nowhere more so than in the philosophical romance titled The Blazing World.

Cavendish’s Higgledy-Piggledy World What could bind, tame or civilise for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. —Virginia Woolf,   A Room of One’s Own

When assessing the impact of Cavendish’s philosophical and poetic theories, it has never been easy to disentangle the writer from the work, a problem in evidence when Samuel Pepys describes the woman herself as a romance, writing that “the whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she do is romantick.”52 As many scholars have observed, this reputation for social disorderliness, if not outright madness, has long given critics license to dismiss

51.  Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style.” See also N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Noncomformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995). 52.  “April 11, 1667,” The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1895), 6:269. Quoted in Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle the First Woman to Live by Her Pen (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 295.

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her writing as similarly fanciful and unstructured.53 Virginia Woolf sets the precedent for such discussions in the modern era, lamenting, “the impetuosity of [Cavendish’s] thought always outdid the pace of her fingers.”54 She later concludes, “There [her plays and philosophies] stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume, swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity, the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. . . . The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on their backs.”55 Following Woolf, even sympathetic readers have described Cavendish’s writing as rambling, incoherent, and formless.56 Given this well-earned reputation for linguistic confusion and disorder, it is strange for me to associate Cavendish’s writings with the procedures of the art of rhetoric. Few if any readers would identify Cavendish’s writing as organized by a coherent rhetorical practice, in part because our modern perspective, coming as it does from beyond the antirhetorical turn, prevents us from grasping the logic of her brand of “eloquence.” In a world organized according to Bacon’s and Locke’s ideas about knowledge, any diversion into the realm of “fancy” interrupts the logical progression of “philosophy.” Without imposing a false coherence on Cavendish’s diverse writings, the disorderly logic of the “mingle mangle” can help us assess the “contorted vitality” of her prose with greater specificity than simple declarations of its “formlessness,” while also exposing the reasons for her subsequent illegibility to modern readers. Moreover, associating her writing with the logic of the “mingle mangle” highlights the extent to which Cavendish’s “swarming” prose precisely dramatizes seventeenth-century critiques of rhetorical figures of speech, particularly the instability they supposedly create in the relationship between words and things, truth and fiction. A driving concern of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary criticism on Cavendish has been to find a means of accounting for the sheer multiplicity and heterogeneity of her writing, which seems to require what one collection mildly terms a “hybrid” perspective.57 For those readers 53.  Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz, eds., Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writing of Margaret Cavendish (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 7. Marina Leslie observes that critics often read Cavendish’s writing as a kind of symptom of madness, a means of diagnosing the pathology of a distempered mind. Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 127–30. 54.  Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 99. 55.  Ibid., 103. 56.  See Sylvia Bowerbank, “The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Female Imagination,’ ” in Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Kirby Farrell, Elizabeth H. Hagement, and Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 407. 57.  Cottegnies and Weitz, Authorial Conquests, 8.

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groping for a poetics that might unite her vast corpus, it could be said that the disorderly motion of Cavendish’s cantering fancies aligns with her own theories of the physical universe, one in which all matter has the volitional power of motion and thus engages in incessant activity.58 In other words, Cavendish’s “scientific” commitments can go some way toward explaining her mode of expression. Jonathan Goldberg provides the most thoroughgoing treatment of the connection between Cavendish’s writing and her radical materialist philosophy, a philosophy that posits, in Goldberg’s words, that “each self-knowing part [of the natural world] is part of an ungraspable totality made up of parts, each of which is the replicant of the whole insofar as each part is made of parts joined together in a totality that is itself ungraspable.”59 Such a philosophy understands the material world as both totalizing and fundamentally unintelligible, a perspective that, as Goldberg argues, “ramifies on every level of analysis in [Cavendish’s] writing.”60 According to Cavendish’s materialist cosmology, as explained in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), nature is at root “a perpetual motion, and as full of division as composition.”61 The divisions within the “infinite Matter” of nature derive from the “self-motion [of the] Creatures or Parts, these Creatures or Parts may have exact figures according to their properties; yet those Figures or Parts are as Infinite as Infinite Matter, of which they were made.”62 This theory of matter presents the entire physical world as a “mingle mangle,” continuously fragmented even as it is composed. Such a universe also sounds something like a language system in which the unruly movements of the “figures” have been given precedence over all other forms of organization, a universe in which words are as material as anything else and verba thus indistinguishable from res. In her Observations, Cavendish

58.  This vitalist philosophy opposes the mechanical philosophy of Hobbes and Descartes, which argues that all natural phenomena can be explained by the impact of inert particles of matter. See Eileen O’Neill, introduction to Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) x–xxxvi, xxi; Peter Dear, “A Philosophical Duchess: Understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society,” in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, ed. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (London: Ashgate, 2007), 134. 59.  Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 145. For other arguments that connect Cavendish’s fictional strategies to her philosophical commitments, see Rosemary Kegl, “ ‘The World I Have Made’: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and The Blazing World,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 119–41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 137–77. 60.  Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 150–51. 61.  Cavendish, Observations, 22. 62.  Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: William Wilson, 1663), 5.

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explains, “When I speak of the parts of nature, I do not understand, that those parts are like grains of corn or sand in one heap, all of one figure of magnitude, and separable from each other: but, I conceive nature to be an infinite body, bulk or magnitude, which by its own self-motion, is divided into infinite parts; not single or indivisible parts, but parts of one continued body, only discernible from each other by their proper figures, caused by the changes of particular motions.”63 Within this philosophical system, the parts of nature cannot be analytically distinguished from one another like individual grains of corn, because they remain “parts of one continued body,” discernible only by their separate motions. These infinite parts, each moving in “particular motions,” comprise the “proper figures” of a single natural body. Thus Cavendish describes the figures and motions that underlie her own theory of matter—a theory that seemed to many other natural philosophers to be confused and disorderly—as having a kind of decorum, one that is appropriate to the “infinite body” of nature. What kind of writing is necessitated by such a theory of the material world? We can acquire a sense of the vitality and extravagance of Cavendish’s prose by reading letter 199 of her Sociable Letters (1664), in which Cavendish imagines a “Banquet of Wit” to which the Muses invite her as a “Poetess, or rather Poetastress.”64 The letter offers a kind of “through the looking glass” version of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, using the conceit of a banquet to outline an idiosyncratic taxonomy of the arts and sciences. The letter describes the eating of a somewhat ghoulish meal, as Cavendish soon realizes that the “Table we were set to, was a strange Table,” for, “it was made of all the Famous Old Poets Sculs, and the Table-cloth or Covering was made of their Brains, which Brains were Spun by the Muses, for they are Spinsters of Mens Brains, as the Fates are of the Lives of Men; but these Old Poets Brains were Spun into Cobweb Threads, as Soft and Thin as Air, and then Woven into Piece, or Web, and Old Time was the Weaver which Weaved this Web like Damask or Diaper, in Works and Figures of Golden Numbers.”65 This passage conveys the simultaneously proliferating and recursive nature of Cavendish’s prose, which circles around its key images, amplifying them with figurative detail before returning at last to the initial trope, an idea that has become only more obscure with each amplification.

63.  Cavendish, Observations, 125–26. 64.  Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (1664; repr., New York: Garland, 1997), 212. 65.  Ibid., 213.

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As Goldberg writes, to follow Cavendish’s sentences is “to lose hold of connection and logic, those normative forms of rationality that insist on exclusions.”66 In this case, we begin with an already catachretic notion of a tablecloth made of brains, brains that have been spun into threads by the Muses, and not thick threads but “Cobweb Threads,” “Soft and Thin as Air.” At this point the image of the tablecloth or “Piece” recedes and the cloth made of Poets’ brains becomes instead like a “web,” a web created by “Old Time” rather than the Muses, a web that is then likened once again to a “Damask” cloth, or a “Diaper,” decorated with “Works and Figures of Golden Numbers.” With the reference to “damask,” the original image of the “Table-Cloth or Covering” returns once again, and Cavendish is free to move on to describe the other table settings, which include plates made “of the Films or Drums of Sensible Ears,” knives made of “Orators Tongues,” and saltcellars “made of the Chrystalline part of Observing Eyes.”67 In each case the metaphors startle and stymie the reader—saltcellars are like eyes not because they reveal anything in a visual sense, but because they are clear containers of “salt-tears”—and such tropes tend to inhibit rather than produce understanding. The letter goes on to narrate a literal gallimaufry, as Cavendish describes how her “Poetastress” dines on the various arts and sciences in a minglemangle of dishes presented at a great feast. The banquet begins with “A Great dish of Poems, Excellently well Dress’d, and Curious Sawce made of Metaphors, Similitudes, and Fancies, and round the Sides or Verges of the dish, were laid Numbers and Rimes, like as we use on Corporeal Dishes and Meats, to lay Dates, or Flowers, or Slices of Limmons, or the like.”68 After consuming dishes of poems, epigrams, epithalamiums, elegies, comedies, and tragedies, Cavendish is served “a Dish of Natural Philosophy, a Dish I love to Feed on, although the Meat is very Hard, and not Easily to be Digested . . . this Dish was so Great and Full, as it might have Fed Numbers, indeed it was an Infinite Hash, and an Infinite deal of Meat; then there was a Grand Sallet of Rhetorick, with Oyl of Eloquence, also a Bagpudding of Sciences, made of Mathematical Cream, Logistical Eggs, and Astronomical Spices, which were Strewed as Thick as the Stars of the Skie.”69 Cavendish distinguishes the “Infinite hash” of natural philosophy from the “Bagpudding of Sciences,” in which the practices preferred by the members of the

66.  Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 146. 67.  Cavendish, Sociable Letters, 213. 68.  Ibid. 69.  Ibid., 214.

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Royal Society—mathematics, logic, and astronomy—are likened to a frothy dessert. As Ryan J. Stark observes, Cavendish thus inverts what will become an important trope in Royal Society writing: Abraham Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society” contends that philosophy is led astray when it is fed by the “Desserts of Poetry” rather than the “solid meates” of science.70 Cavendish, by contrast, presents the sciences as a “bagpudding” of cream, eggs, and spices, the dessert that supplements the “infinite hash” of the material universe and even the “Grand Sallet of Rhetorick.”71 Cavendish’s description of the “Banquet of Wit” reveals how her vitalist philosophy and mode of writing intersect with other topics central to the revaluation of rhetoric at the end of the seventeenth century, including the relative status of the various arts and sciences and the relationship between the productions of reason and those of the imagination. Like Bacon’s Advancement, this letter asks be understood as a taxonomy of knowledge practices, a schema of learning exemplified not through a map or table, but instead through the sequence of dishes served at a banquet. Yet unlike the Advancement, Cavendish’s taxonomy results in a hodgepodge of dishes, presented without regard for the Baconian distinctions between the activities of fancy and those of reason: poetry and philosophy both constitute main courses at the banquet. Moreover, rather than yoking her words to an equal number of things, Cavendish proliferates verbal figures within her text, with the frequent result that the reader often cannot ascertain just what is being represented—as with the tablecloth discussed above, where it is not clear how we are to interpret the figure of the cloth made of poets’ brains, and which seems to have no discernible referent outside of Cavendish’s own desire to triumph over dead male poets. In what could easily be a critique of Cavendish’s writing practice, Samuel Parker argues that “all those Theories in Philosophie which are expressed only in metaphorical Termes, are not real Truths, but the meer Products of Imagination, dress’d up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words,  . . . empty Phraseologies that have not Notion & Thing enough to fill them out.”72 In Cavendish’s banquet of learning the conceit of the meal

70.  Ryan John Stark, “Margaret Cavendish and Composition Style,” Rhetoric Review 17, no. 2 (1999): 264–81, 273–74; Sprat, History of the Royal Society, B. 71.  Cavendish repeats this association in her Observations, claiming that those who “most commonly take pleasure in making of Sweetmeats, Possets, several sorts of Pyes, Puddings, and the like  . . . would prove good Experimental Philosophers, and inform the world how to make artificial Snow by their Creams or Possets beaten into froth.” Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 105–6. Quoted in Dear, “Philosophical Duchess,” 139. 72.  Parker, Platonick Philosophie, 75–76.

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overtakes the taxonomy it attempts to transmit, with the metaphor evidently proving more interesting to the writer than the “Theories in Philosophy” that the figure aims to convey. Cavendish does not affix her “Phraseologies” to the “notions and things” they purport to represent (are the sciences delimited in a single “Bagpudding” or as infinite as the “Stars of the Skie”?), and as a result, her imaginative figures acquire more substance than her philosophical theories. Working on a much grander scale, Cavendish’s philosophical romance, The Blazing World, likewise proliferates verbal figures at the expense of logic or understanding, often mingle-mangling words and things. Although the first lines of the preface to the romance attempt to distinguish between philosophy and fancy, the text of The Blazing World suggests that Cavendish has no real interest in disentangling her philosophical notions from her fictional productions. Cavendish rightly worries that because she is appending a romance to a book of philosophical speculations, her readers will suspect that she believes that all philosophy is “but a fiction of the mind.”73 She sounds almost like Bacon or Locke when she tries to defend against this view, declaring that “reason searches the depth of nature, and enquires after the true causes of natural effects; but fancy creates of its own accord whatsoever it pleases, and delights in its own work. The end of reason, is truth; the end of fancy, is fiction” (123). But Cavendish can’t leave it there, and quickly qualifies this distinction, adding, “When I distinguish fancy from reason; I mean not as if fancy were not made by the rational parts of matter; but by reason I understand a rational search and enquiry into the causes of natural effects; and by fancy a voluntary creation or production of the mind, both being effects, or rather actions of the rational parts of matter” (123–24). Hearkening back to the theories outlined in her Observations, Cavendish identifies both reason and fancy as part of the “one continued body” of matter, “only discernible from each other by their proper figures, caused by the changes of particular motions.” Thus a romance can be justifiably joined to her philosophical observations “as two worlds at the ends of their poles,” both worlds issuing from the movements of Cavendish’s mind (124). In this way the text obscures any clear distinction between the inventions of philosophy and those of the imagination, both of which issue from the same matter in motion. Perhaps aware of its own strangeness, The Blazing World is a highly selfreflexive text: it frequently returns to metaphors of its own generation, 73.  Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 123. Further references to this text cited parenthetically.

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particularly the act of world making. Cavendish’s preface introduces this metaphor, describing The Blazing World as an imaginary world constructed because there are no other opportunities available for the author to exert her rule. In the preface she declares, “Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own” (124). The part-“romancical,” part-“philosophical” story that results from this process of world making follows the adventures of an unnamed “Lady” who becomes stranded in a new world after being abducted by unscrupulous merchants and is then miraculously made empress of that “Blazing World” (124). The bulk of the romance narrates a debate between the newly installed Empress and the members of various scientific societies under her rule, debates in which the Empress shares her theories of the material universe, theories that neatly accord with those already described by Cavendish in her Observations. Once she has reorganized the pursuit of knowledge according to Cavendish’s preferred philosophical methods, the Empress resolves to write a religious Cabbala. She confers with the immaterial spirits of the Blazing World, and asks them to provide her with a scribe to assist in this project. They comply by traveling to yet another world and collecting the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle, a woman they promise will write “sense and reason” (181). On her arrival, the Duchess convinces the Empress to abandon her plans and instead “make a poetical or romancical Cabbala, wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes, etc. and interpret them as you please,” a text that presumably would be much like the romance we are already reading (183). After the Duchess advises the Empress in this matter, the two women become great friends, at which time the Duchess confesses her ambition to rule a planet of her own. Since no new worlds are available to conquer, the immaterial spirits encourage the Duchess to invent an imaginary world in her own mind. The Duchess proceeds to construct a series of imaginary worlds based on the theories of ancient and early modern natural philosophers, before finally devising a world “composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter,” that is, a world that corresponds to the vitalist theories detailed in Cavendish’s Observations. It is thus probable that this new world is very like the Blazing World depicted in The Blazing World, both of which are created by a writer who goes by the title of “Duchess of Newcastle.” Thus multiple characters within the fiction engage in the very process of world making that Cavendish identifies as the source of the romance itself. Philosophy and

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romance are alike products of a process of invention initiated by the brain of the “Authoress,” and perpetuated continually within the text (224). The appearance of a character called “the Duchess of Newcastle” midway through the romance comes as something of a shock to most readers, who by this point in the story have already come to understand the Empress as Cavendish’s proxy, a fantasy version of her own desire for autonomy and authority in the production of scientific knowledge. According to such a reading, the Empress’s ascension to royalty duplicates Cavendish’s self-coronation as “Margaret the First” in the preface to romance.74 However, when the Duchess herself appears in the narrative, this identification of Cavendish the author with the Empress of the Blazing World becomes problematic, as the writer fragments herself by assuming yet another persona within her own fiction. It is a moment of both self-duplication and self-division, and it makes it impossible for the reader to hold on to any one-to-one correspondence between the elements of Cavendish’s imagined world and those of the “real” world.75 This mise en abyme—in which a character named for the author encourages another version of herself to compose another version of the romance we are already reading, and so on and so forth—results in precisely the activity interdicted by Locke and others: it introduces instability into the relationship between words and things, sacrificing understanding so as to multiply words at the expense of their referents. Not only is Cavendish the writer multiplied and dispersed throughout her own romance, but the romance itself also becomes replicated in an infinite regress of blazing-world making. In addition to creating new worlds within their own imaginations, the Empress and the Duchess journey in spiritual form to the Duchess’s home world, known as “E.” There they visit the court of a king who is the monarch of “the happiest people of all the nations or parts of that world,” a king who is presumably a figure for Charles II (191). The “united family” of the Blazing World, which the reader has already begun to identify as a utopian version of England, here proliferates into another fictional version of the English nation. Moreover, in addition to visiting the Duchess’s home world, the two women also travel to the world of the Empress’s birth, where her nation is under military attack. The Empress then 74.  Kate Lilley, introduction to Cavendish, Blazing World, xxvi. 75.  Critics have variously interpreted this startling moment by referring to the disjunctions resultant from Cavendish’s royalist politics, her radical scientific theories, her writing career, and her sexual desire. Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (March 1988): 24–39; Mary Baine Campbell, “Outside In: Hooke, Cavendish, and the Invisible Worlds,” in Wonder and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 181–218; Sandra Sherman, “Trembling Texts: Margaret Cavendish and the Dialectic of Authorship,” English Literary Renaissance 24, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 184–210; Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 122–52.

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helps her kingdom—known as “ESFI”—repel its enemies and achieve world domination by means of weapons known as “fire-stones.” Although the correlates of these initials remain a mystery, many scholars have concluded that they refer to the diverse components of the prerevolutionary kingdom of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland.76 Thus, multiple surrogate versions of Margaret Cavendish travel to multiple versions of England, all within a text that posits itself as one of many fictional worlds contained within the mind of the “Authoress.” For many critics, the metaphor of the “two poles” emerges as the key structural feature of The Blazing World, a figure for the union of the literary and the scientific within the text.77 Yet although Cavendish’s preface identifies the “twin poles” between worlds as a metaphor for the combination of philosophy and romance in a single volume, this image seems inadequate as a figure for the multiplicities presented within The Blazing World. The boundaries of knowledge and subjectivity transgressed by the text conjure a cosmological system far more complicated and difficult to grasp than the idea of two worlds conjoined at their poles. In keeping with her own theories of the physical universe, Cavendish declares that this disorderliness derives from a conflict in her own mind. When she describes the endeavor of transmitting her philosophical theories, Cavendish presents her writing self as a subjectivity in commotion, explaining that when she set forth to pen the Observations, a dispute chanced to arise between the rational parts of my mind concerning some chief points and principles in natural philosophy; for, some new thoughts endeavouring to oppose and call in question the truth of my former conceptions, caused a war in my mind: which in time grew to that height, that they were hardly able to compose the differences between themselves, but were in a manner necessitated to refer them to the arbitration of the impartial reader, desiring the assistance of his judgment to reconcile their controversies, and, if possible, to reduce them to a settled peace and argument.78 This text helps adjudicate the “civil war” in her mind by dramatizing the conflict and asking the reader to serve as final judge.79 It also reveals how, to quote Samuel Parker, Cavendish’s mind has been shattered into “infinite

76.  Lilley, introduction to Cavendish, Blazing World, xxviii. 77.  Both Kegl and Spiller make this argument. 78.  Cavendish, Observations, 23. 79.  Ibid., 41.

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Factions” by her own ideas. As the product of this internal fragmentation, the Observations and The Blazing World function not as “two poles,” but as a “mingle mangle.” Rather than resolving the confusion, Cavendish concludes her text by recommending that each of her readers simply follow her example and create “worlds of their own,” thus exacerbating the original problem of distinction ad infinitum (225). Cavendish’s works are only now beginning to be collected and published in modern editions, allowing twenty-first-century readers to respond to Cavendish’s invitation to world making. However, these anthologies all sever the philosophical Observations from the fictional Blazing World, and the two have not been published in the same volume since the seventeenth century. These modern editions reduce Cavendish’s civil war to a “settled peace and argument” by applying the knowledge categories of her rivals in the Royal Society, thus confining the higgledy-piggledy productions of an avowed philosophical romancer within a modern disciplinary framework.

Coda: Renaissance World Making But my desire that [my Atomes] should please the Readers, is as big as the World they make; and my Feares are of the same bulk; yet my Hopes fall to a single Atome agen: and so shall I remaine an unsettled Atome, or a confus’d heape, till I heare my Censure. If I be prais’d, it fixes them; but if I am condemn’d, I shall be Annihilated to nothing: but my Ambition is such, as I would either be a World, or nothing. —Margaret Cavendish, “To Naturall Philosophers” (1653)

I have accounted for the “enigma” of Cavendish’s poetics by drawing on a term from the English art of rhetoric—soraismus, or the “mingle mangle”— thus using a figure derived from a newly discredited knowledge discourse in order to understand the writing and self-presentation of a woman who likewise found herself at odds with her own culture. The Observations and its appendix, The Blazing World, are produced by the disorderly motions of a “Great searching brain” that was severely limited by the constraints of gender and politics.80 Denied the restoration of estates lost during the war, and refused entry into the scientific colloquies of her day, Cavendish invented another world without bounds in which her fancy constituted the final authority. Identifying Cavendish’s writing with the mixtures of the “mingle

80.  Albeit enabled by a social hierarchy that offered considerable latitude to duchesses. William Newcastle’s dedication to the Observations declares, “This book is book of books, and only fits / Great searching brains, and quintessence of wits.” See Cavendish, Observations, 3.

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mangle” exposes the process whereby the distinction between the classical and the barbarous in sixteenth-century vernacular rhetoric becomes less important than the distinction between standard and nonstandard uses of the vernacular in the seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, those writers whose speech is most often identified as nonstandard tend to be women. One effect of the so-called triumph of the English language in the early modern period is that the gendered distinction between high- and low-prestige languages moves inside the English vernacular. Thus we find Parker, Glanvill, and their ilk celebrating “manly sense” rather than a rhetorical ornament that has become, by implication, effeminate. In other words, it is not only disciplinarity (to use a modern term) that becomes a site of anxiety about rhetoric’s effects on English speaking, but also gender. By presenting Cavendish’s writing as a dramatization of this new understanding of linguistic abuse, I have also highlighted the challenges faced by vernacular rhetoric at the end of the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, the production of a national vernacular was figured as a kind of world making, a means of constructing the linguistic borders that could define a united English “commonweal.” This justified the evident artificiality, or unnaturalness, of the practice of rhetoric. A passage from Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric reminds us of this earlier context. In providing an English description of “amplification,” Wilson identifies the archetypal figure of rhetoric as a matter of “heaping”: Amplifying of the matter consisteth in heaping and enlarging of those places which serve for confirmation of a matter. . . . Amplification may be used when we make the law to speak, the dead person to make his complaint, the country to cry out of such a deed. As if some worthy man were cast away, to make the country say thus: “If England could speak, would she not make such and such complaints? If the walls of such a city or town had a tongue, would they not thus and thus?” And to be short, all such things should be used to make the cause seem great which concerned God, the commonweal, or the law of nature.81 Wilson helps his country find a voice, “to cry out,” by giving rhetoric speech in the vernacular and rendering it native to England. This rhetorically produced “heaping and enlarging” aids the cause of the English “commonweal.” Throughout the early modern period such “heaping” helps constitute the English “mingle mangle,” an artistic mother tongue enriched with

81.  Wilson, Arte of Rhetoric, 147.

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foreign device. I see Cavendish’s writing operating in just this way, as an “amplifying of the matter”: she aims to magnify her theories of the physical world by proliferating linguistic references to that world, thus intensifying her own arguments in order to “make the cause seem great.” Unlike philosophers such as Samuel Parker, Cavendish does not regard her figures as “empty,” but solid, that which conveys the substance of her own ideas. In this sense the “mingle mangle” is a particularly apt figure for her mode of writing, since it is also a trope that turns language from words into things, and in vernacular expression the “mingle mangle” is food. However, although Cavendish regards this mode of expression as solid and substantive, even meaty, her seventeenth-century reading audience largely does not: Edmund Waller dismisses her Philosophical Opinions by writing, “New Castles in the air this lady builds, / While nonsense with philosophy she gilds.” Moreover, in the century after the publication of Wilson’s English rhetoric, the devices of a heaping commonwealth of rhetoric begin to register as cause for alarm rather than celebration. In the late seventeenth-century cultural imaginary, the garden of rhetoric correlates not to an orderly English polity, but rather to something a bit more like Cavendish’s mingle-mangled utopia.

Conclusion “ Words Made Visible” and the Turn against Rhetoric

Cicero begins his De inventione worrying about rhetoric’s influence on civil society, confessing that “I have often seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence. For when I ponder the troubles in our commonwealth, and run over in my mind the ancient misfortunes of mighty cities, I see that no little part of the disasters were brought about by men of eloquence.”1 As the proponents of the “plain style” quoted in the previous chapter suggest, the sectarian conflict of the Civil War and its aftermath caused a growing number of English writers to conclude that “a consuming devotion to eloquence” had indeed caused more evil than good in their commonwealth. They reached this conclusion despite rhetoric’s longtime prestige in early modern culture, a prestige bolstered by Cicero’s argument that rhetoric is essential to the orderly functioning of the state. For although he begins his famous handbook for orators with an admission of unease about whether or not oratory has produced more good or evil in the world, Cicero goes on to rescue rhetoric from this critique, reasoning that though eloquence has troubled many commonwealths, it has also founded cities, ended wars, and forged strong alliances. He argues that 1.  Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.1.1. 201

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when allied with the study of philosophy, “the man who equips himself with the weapons of eloquence . . . will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of his community.”2 Cicero then tells his readers that it was an eloquent orator who first founded civilization: For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength. . . . At this juncture a man—great and wise I am sure—became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.3 In what would become a powerful origin myth for classical and Renaissance writers, Cicero argues that before rhetoric, there could be no civil culture. From this moment onward, advocates of the art of rhetoric justify its potentially dangerous power with reference to the civilizing force of eloquence and the service a wise orator can provide to the state.4 Quintilian promotes this vision of the orator as a founder of civilization in the Institutio oratoria, confessing that “I cannot imagine how the founders of cities would have made a homeless multitude come together to form a people, had they not moved them by their skilful speech, or how legislators would have succeeded in restraining mankind in the servitude of the law, had they not had the highest gifts of oratory.”5 Such origin myths align rhetoric with civilization, gentility, law, and urban culture, opposing it to the barbarism, savagery, disorder, and provincial obscurity of ungoverned people and ungoverned speech. Rhetoric gives an otherwise “homeless” people a settled place and occupa2.  Ibid. 3.  Ibid., 1.2.2. 4.  Wayne Rebhorn traces Renaissance versions of the myth of the orator-civilizer to passages in texts written by Isocrates, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 25. 5.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.16.9.

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tion, and according to these mythic versions of human history, its civilizing force counteracts its potential destructiveness. Renaissance writers from Petrarch and Salutati onward retell Cicero’s myth of the orator as civilizer, and as Wayne Rebhorn observes, their descriptions of the savage state of man before the foundation of the art of oratory tend to be intensified by a Christian sense of the depravity of the postlapsarian condition.6 In the power it ascribes to the eloquent individual man, this myth of the orator provided one of the enabling fictions not just of Renaissance humanism but also of the particular form of vernacular humanism articulated by sixteenth-century English writers. In Chapter 1 I recounted Thomas Wilson’s version of this origin myth in The Arte of Rhetoric (1553), in a preface titled “Eloquence First Given by God, and After Lost by Man, and Last Repaired by God Again.” After the fall, Wilson writes, “all things waxed savage: the earth untilled, society neglected, God’s will not known, man against man, one against another, and all against order.”7 Wilson extensively describes the chaos of this savage state, in which men “[live] brutishly in open fields,” act without reason, walk about in nakedness, follow the instincts of lust, fail to educate their children, and ignore all law. Pitying mankind’s plight, God gave his elect ministers “the gift of utterance, that they might with ease win folk at their will and frame them by reason to all good order.”8 Although these ministers struggled at first to reform the rude people, “after a certain space they became through nurture and good advisement of wild, sober; of cruel, gentle; of fools, wise; and of beasts, men. Such force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence and reason.”9 Wilson’s fable endows the early Christian orators with an Orphic power to turn beasts into men, evoking another classical fiction favored by humanists interested in defending the arts of discourse. As George Puttenham writes in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), “Orpheus assembled the wilde beasts to come in heards to harken to his musicke, and by that meanes made them tame . . . he brought the rude and sauage people to a more ciuill and orderly life.” Before the arrival of the first poet-orator, men were indistinguishable from wild animals: “The people remained in the woods and mountains,

6.  Rebhorn catalogs the Renaissance writers who circulated the myth of the orator-civilizer, including Italian, French, Spanish, and English writers such as Francesco Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Andrea Brenta, Joan de Guzman, Guillaume Du Vair, Raphael Regius, Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, and M. Le Grand (Emperor of Men’s Minds, 24–28). 7.  Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 41. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Ibid., 42.

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vagrant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie prouision for harbour or sustenance vtterly vnfurnished: so as they little diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.”10 Wilson’s and Puttenham’s vernacular retellings of the myth of the orator maintain Cicero’s opposition between savagery and civilization, but as I argue in chapter 1, the references to “open fields” and vagrancy give their descriptions of prerhetorical savagery a distinctly English cast, evoking the enclosure debates that periodically convulsed the English population throughout the late medieval period. In this way, rhetoric’s civilizing mission acquired a specific purpose in the vernacular manuals: the transformation of the English people from a savage and barbaric condition to a settled and orderly community, clothed and housed by the art of rhetoric. This Orphic origin myth becomes a characteristic feature of English humanist writing, appearing in vernacular defenses of rhetoric and poetry throughout the later sixteenth century.11 Francis Bacon even borrows its outlines so he can argue that natural philosophers were the first founders of civilization, taming the “savage and unreclaimed desires” of an unruly people.12 Yet despite the cultural authority of the myth of the orator in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, by the 1650s and 1660s the inheritors of Bacon’s claims on behalf of natural philosophy no longer rely on such classically derived fables in order to defend their theories of discourse. In the writings on language produced by the members of the Royal Society, the myth of the orator-civilizer ceases to function as an enabling fiction. In An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, published in 1668 and dedicated to the Royal Society, John Wilkins expresses contempt for such ancient myths and replaces them with a more explicitly Christian history of linguistic development. In an early section of the Essay titled “The Original of Languages,” Wilkins derides the outlines of the Orphic myth as pagan superstition: Nor is it much to be wondered at, that the ancient Heathen, who knew nothing of Scripture-revelation, should be inclined to believe,

10.  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction (1589; repr., Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 22. 11.  Sean Keilen observes that although Orpheus had represented eloquence since antiquity, only in the late sixteenth century did vernacular writers begin to adopt him as a representation of English eloquence. Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 32. 12.  Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 87–88.

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that either Men and Languages were eternal; or, that if there were any particular time when men did spring out of the Earth, and after inhabit alone and dispersedly in Woods and Caves, they had at first no Articulate voice, but only such rude sounds as Beasts have; till afterwards particular Families increasing, or several Families joining together for mutual safety and defence, under Government and Societies, they began by degrees and long practice to consent in certain Articulate sounds, whereby to communicate their thoughts.13 After dismissing this tale of prehistorical savagery as a heathen fantasy, Wilkins proposes a properly Christian explanation for the development of multiple vernacular languages: “But to us, who have the revelation of Scripture . . . ’tis evident enough that the first Language was con created with our first Parents, they immediately understanding the voice of God speaking to them in the Garden. And how Languages came to be multiplied, is likewise manifested in the Story of the Confusion of Babel.”14 Contained in Genesis, the story of Babel recounts how “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” when the people of Babylon attempted to build a tower that would reach all the way to heaven. As punishment for this prideful act, the “Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”15 Humanity once shared an original, Adamic language, and only through the sin of pride did this initially unified community dissolve into linguistic factions. In order to remedy the “Curse of the Confusion,” Wilkins and his peers at the Royal Society require not rhetoric, which is repeatedly critiqued in Wilkins’s Essay, but a “philosophical” or “universal language,” one that will obviate “the common mischief that is done, and the many impostures and cheats that are put upon men, under the disguise of affected insignificant Phrases.”16 In Wilkins’s text, accusations of rhetoric’s

13.  John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), 2. 14.  Ibid. 15.  Genesis 11:1, 11:9. 16.  Wilkins, Essay, b–bv. As Robert Markley documents, Robert Boyle writes to Samuel Hartlib in March 1646/47: “If the design of the Real Character take effect, it will in good part make amends to mankind for what their pride lost them at the Tower of Babel.” During the Interregnum, Boyle and Hartlib were both prominent members of a London intellectual circle that eventually coalesced in the Royal Society a generation later. Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 66. See also Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare’s View of Language: An Historical Perspective,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 374–88.

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harmful effects parallel references to Babel, suggesting that classically derived techniques of eloquence have only increased the division and confusion inherited from the Babelic curse, not repaired it. No longer does eloquence transform a rude and vagrant people into a united civilization; instead, it magnifies the chaos and disorder of an already fallen humanity. For the language reformers associated with the Royal Society, the curse of Babel prefigures the linguistic confusion that wracked English culture in the years preceding and following the Civil War, a confusion that can be repaired only with new forms of language characterized by “mathematical plainness” rather than classical eloquence.17 Coming after a century of humanist dominance of English intellectual culture, the resulting break from the Ciceronian understanding of eloquence and its function within the state could not be more startling. In his History of the Royal Society (1667), which is roughly contemporary with Wilkins’s Essay, Thomas Sprat even considers recommending “that eloquence ought to be banish’d out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners.”18 When Sprat concludes that rhetoric harms civil society, rather than sustaining its laws and customs, he undoes the civilizing trajectory of the ancient myth of the orator. In Sprat’s descriptions of rhetoric, “nakedness” signifies not rudeness or savagery, as it does in the classical fable, but rather a quasi-Christian “innocence.”19 Indeed, in Sprat’s text, the imagined prehistory before the arrival of rhetorical eloquence is celebrated as a kind of Edenic golden age. Sprat thus praises the resolution of the Royal Society “to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness [of style], when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words.” In order to regain the purity of their primitive past, the Royal Society has “exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.”20 In this attempt to dislodge rhetoric’s dominance in learned discourse, Sprat reframes the terms in which rhetoric used to be praised, identifying the “naked” and “natural” as the goal of a reformed language, not a barbaric past that must be transcended.

17.  Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London: T. R. for J. Martyn, 1667), 113; Markley, Fallen Languages, 69. 18.  Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 111. 19.  Ibid. This evokes the introduction of Bacon’s Magna instauratio, which begins, “It being part of my design to set everything forth, as far as may be, plainly and perspicuously (for nakedness of the mind is still, as nakedness of the body once was, the companion of innocence and simplicity).” The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman, 1861–79), 4:22. 20.  Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 113.

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I quote Wilkins’s critique of the Orphic myth and Sprat’s praise of a “naked” language to illustrate the drastically different circumstances in which rhetoric found itself at the end of the seventeenth century. In the 1550s, Wilson retells Cicero’s tale of eloquence finding accommodation for a vagrant people in order to argue for rhetoric’s value to the English nation and to position his vernacular rhetoric as a form of national service. Focusing on the contents of this and other vernacular manuals of rhetoric, I have argued that from the mid-sixteenth century on, English writers turned to the classical art of rhetoric in order to discover the means of constituting an artful vernacular that could accommodate their burgeoning national community. These would-be Ciceros want to reenact rhetoric’s civilizing trajectory within their own vernacular culture, and so they labor to nativize its formal practices to England. I have detailed how the handbooks draw on rhetoric’s spatial logic in order to posit the country of England as the commonplace, or locus, of a new vernacular art of rhetoric, one that would be commonly available to all native speakers and would thus solidify the bonds of the commonweal. But rather than presenting this process as a presage of the “triumph” of the English language, I have emphasized the uncertainties attendant on this project of translation, which, after all, was trying to translate the art of Cicero and Quintilian into a language widely understood to be barren and barbarous. The recourse to the “common” good of the national community did not fully assuage the nervousness of the rhetorical manuals, and the earliest printed rhetorics repeatedly allude to the potential impropriety of their translations, which make classical treasure “common” to vulgar audiences. The vernacular manuals do not question the efficacy of classical eloquence—they take it for granted that eloquence has the power to organize human society in an orderly fashion—but they worry that by making the tools of eloquence commonly available, that is, by making them English, they may be reversing the civilizing teleology of the Orphic myth, giving the “force” of eloquence to the “wild savages” rather than the wise orator. We can register the potency of these anxieties when one of the earliest English rhetorics begins not with Cicero’s origin myth but rather with the nervous concern that a vernacular rhetorical handbook may be taken for nothing more than “a tale of Robynhoode.”21 Although they aim to accommodate the vernacular language to the needs of an increasingly self-confident national community, the English rhetorics worry that they may in fact be seen to be empowering vagrants and thieves with the tools of rule. And if we agree with 21.  Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), ed. H. W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961), 3.

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the Renaissance poet haters that poets, playwrights, and actors are little better than outlaws, then, in a certain sense, they are. This is the drama of English rhetoric in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the classical art of rhetoric promises to master vulgar speech and vulgar people, offering a means of turning the “wild savages” of England into “a kind and gentle folk.” Yet by making the tools of rhetorical eloquence “common to all,” as Dudley Fenner’s vernacular rhetoric promises to do, the manuals compromise the civilizing force that makes rhetoric so desirable in the first place.22 I have argued that the rhetorical figures of speech become primary actors in this drama as it plays out on the pages of the English manuals of rhetoric. In an effort to maintain order within their own handbooks, a handful of the vernacular rhetorics designate a series of previously unremarkable figures contained under the umbrella of hyperbaton, or “the Trespasser,” as potentially “disorderly” in the English language, thus attempting to displace the charge of lawlessness from vernacular rhetoric as a whole to a smaller subset of rhetorical figures. Yet even as the manuals work to establish an orderly system of vernacular rhetoric that will correspond to a lawful English nation, the figures themselves refuse to remain confined within those newly created boundaries. The resistance of the English figures of speech to any fixed rule is nothing new within the history of rhetoric: the unruliness of the figures had been of periodic concern to teachers of rhetoric since the classical period, revealing a potentially disturbing tendency toward verbal vagrancy rather than topical control within the rhetorical system. As I wrote in the introduction, the system of rhetoric might establish a field of proper language use, but the figures of speech ignore those limits and turn, move, and reshape language, conjuring a sense of infinite displacement that undermines the pretenses of the art. By their very nature, figures of speech upend the course of Cicero’s civilizing narrative, in which rhetoric encodes an orderly progress from chaos to order, vagrancy to stability. Thus in creating one common field of rhetoric, the vernacular manuals also unleash troops of unruly figures of speech to wander throughout the national language. In this book I have gone against the wishes of the early English rhetorics and focused on the migrations of those figures identified as disorderly, following their movement from Greek and Latin into English, and from the pages of English rhetorical manuals into the lines and plots of vernacular plays, poems, and prose romances. Unlike the rhetorical manuals, which often recommend caution in deploying such

22.  Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike ([Middelburg]: [R. Schilders], 1584), A2.

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figures, texts such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Arcadia, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and sonnets, Jonson’s Epicene, and Cavendish’s Blazing World make exuberant use of their syntactical constructions. Instead of showing alarm at how such figures indicate English rhetoric’s outlaw status, these texts make that very predicament “an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention,” to quote Sidney’s Defense of Poesy.23 I refer to the figures as actors in the drama of English rhetoric in order to emphasize the agonistic struggle underlying attempts to make classical figures “speak English.” This entails a bit of poetic license on my own part, a flight of fancy that becomes evident when one makes even a cursory examination of the vernacular handbooks, most of which read more like catalogs or dictionaries than the plays of popular dramatists. However, my characterization is thoroughly literalized in one very late English treatment of rhetoric, which transforms the catalog of rhetorical figures into a list of dramatis personae for a play. Words Made Visible; or, Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (1679) dramatizes a conflict in the Kingdom of Rhetoric, and the tropes and figures of speech are the principal actors in the play (figure 6). Composed by Samuel Shaw, a Nonconformist preacher and the headmaster of Ashby-de-la-Zouch school, Words Made Visible was first “Acted by the Lads of a Country School.”24 The preface describes the play as a diversion from study, an opportunity for Shaw’s students to impersonate the tropes and figures of speech they have spent their days learning through rote memorization. Written in English rather than Latin, the play’s use of the vernacular provides a large part of the relief from schoolhouse drudgery alluded to in the preface. The play unfolds like most handbooks of English rhetoric: it presents an animated version of a dictionary of tropes and figures of speech, each of which describes itself in turn. However, unlike all other such handbooks previously produced in English, Shaw’s play depicts the figures not as tools of ornament and persuasion, but as agents of deceit and disorder. Given its emergence from within the grammar school, Shaw’s play is surprisingly satirical about the art of rhetoric; in some ways it goes even further than Sprat or Wilkins in assaulting the prestige of the rhetorical tradition. Words Made Visible signals rhetoric’s altered status in the 1670s, suggesting that the 23.  Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 235. 24.  Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible; or, Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (London: B. G. for Daniel Major, 1679), preface. (The preface to this edition has no page numbers.) Further references to this edition cited parenthetically. I learned the history of Shaw’s pedagogical career in Brian Vickers, “Some Reflections on the Rhetoric Textbook,” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 92.

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disorderly figures of speech have overwhelmed the entire system of rhetoric, with disastrous consequences for the kingdom. The action begins when the sons of King Eulogus (Rhetoric), the princes Ellogus (Style) and Eclogus (Pronunciation), meet at court to determine which son has been most successful in the charge “to propagate the Rhetorical Dominions” of their father (102). Ellogus advocates for the accomplishments of elocution in advancing the dominions of rhetoric, while Eclogus, arguing for the importance of pronunciation, takes the role of the belligerent skeptic who suspects elocution of deceit and manipulation. Ellogus summons Trope and Figure, his ministers of state, to plead his case, explaining that “to them indeed I have wholly committed the management of my affairs” (104). Trope speaks first, and assures the audience “[t]hat all the World is turn’d Tropical (save only what’s become Figurative) and that not only in those babbling things call’d words (for we have made a wide difference between words and things) but in manners and minds, in practices and principles too. It is no great thing for us now to be masters of mens tongues (how great soever it is reckon’d for them to be masters of their own, and greater of their Wives) we have set up the Dominions of [Style] in the very constitutions of mens minds, and made their conversations voluntary tributaries thereunto” (109–108, sic). Trope then goes on to give a satirical version of the myth of the orator-civilizer, one that ironically suggests that the prehistory of rhetoric was an ideal rather than a savage time. He brags, We have refin’d the World from its ancient rudeness and roughness, which by some Phanatick Philosophers was sometime . . . wont to be call’d Simplicity and Plainness. . . . Plain Speech was indeed an adjunct of the illiterate Ages of the World, and so was plain dealing (which some old fashion’d People call the ornament of those antique times) but the truth is, they were imperfections necessarily adhering to those unbred ages of men, which in course vanished away under a better education; and now . . . men not onely speak ingeniously and artificially, but live and act, love and hate, buy and sell, nay eat and drink, sleep and wake, as artificially as they speak, which his Excellency is pleas’d to call Tropically and Figuratively. (108) The dismayed Prince Eclogus responds by saying, “Come, come, call a spade a spade, dissemblingly and deceitfully you mean” (108). Shockingly enough, given that the Ciceronian tradition labored for so long to dispel the association of rhetoric with deceit, the tropes and figures happily concur with this assessment. As Irony explains, “There can be no Oratory without dissimulation” (117). In demonstrating their mastery over men’s “manners and

Figure 6.  The list of dramatis personae prefacing Samuel Shaw’s Words Made Visible (1679), p. 95. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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minds,” Shaw’s tropes and figures teach the audience to disapprove of their power and identify instead with the “old fashion’d People” mentioned in Trope’s parenthetical aside, those who think of plain dealing as “the ornament of those antique times” before a rhetorical education turned the world “Tropical,” that is, deceitful. Rather than producing an orderly and gentle community, the figures produce division, separating words from things, practices from principles. After Trope’s sons present themselves, Figure arrives with his “numerous issue,” who quickly overwhelm the play (128). Like the tropes, the figures are not content to detail their syntactical effects: they also allegorize their linguistic procedures as modes of troublemaking within the polity. As the figure Tmesis explains, “My nature and office is to interpose and disjoyne the parts of a compound word. But I have improv’d my faculty, and am no longer content to make division of Words, but divide Persons and Things too” (180–81). In each of their speeches, the figures freely acknowledge the damage they wreak within human society. For example, when the figure Noeme appears, he brags: “There is nothing so sound, nothing so sacred, but by a cleanly accommodation, shall be either made to patronize Tyranny or Rebellion, Oppression or Sedition, or what other Vice you please; or else condemn Vertue, against which an Argument would be asham’d to appear” (140). His brother Asyndeton proudly proclaims, “By me States and Kingdomes fight, and kill, and conquer one another. By me Sects of Philosophers, Colledges of Physicians, Assemblies of Divines fall foul upon one another, both in private, and before all the World. The high and mighty Common-wealths that act very unanimously, tho without any visible connection or regular dependence, subsist wholly by me. And all the Swarm of Beggars that go together by Apposition, without any Legal Conjunction (and yet prove as fruitful as the best licens’d Couple in the Countrey) are all my Disciples and Prosylites” (179). Rather than finding accommodation for an unsettled people, as Wilson’s and Puttenham’s rhetorics promise to do, these figures license swarms of beggars and accommodate rebellion, sedition, and vice. In the midst of these exuberant declarations of deceit and division, Eclogus can only complain, “Never was an Empire propagated by such a company of Jugglers” (151). The critique leveled at the figures by the play is somewhat perplexing when you consider that Shaw is implementing a rhetorical curriculum in his school, and the boys acting in the play are subject to this program. Yet although Shaw admits to training boys in the art of speaking, the preface to Words Made Visible offers a diatribe against the art of rhetoric. It complains that there is a certain Vein of Rhetorick running through the Humane Nature (much more natural to men than the Turn is to Calves) which

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infects all their Sentiments, and modifies all their Actions. So that indeed there is no such thing as Philosophy, or Divinity, but Rhetorick governs all the World; and Tropes and Figures (with a little Grammar to teach them to speak) carry all before them. They talk of plain, simple, literal, ingenious, cordial, real and I know not what; but the plain truth is, there is nothing plain nor true amongst men; but the whole life of man is a Tropical Figurative Converse, and a continual Rhetorication. If Vossius, Ramus, Talaeus, Farnaby, Butler, DuGuard (I will not say Walker, because he is yet alive) and a thousand more of them were hang’d out of the way, there would be no dearth of Rhetorick: for every individual man is a systeme of it. (97–99) This passage likens rhetoric to “the Turn,” a familiar word from the vernacular rhetorical tradition. “Turn” is an English translation of the Greek trope as well as a metatechnical term for multiple parts of the art of speaking. The “turn” is first a broad synonym for “style” in speech and clothing, such as a “turn of phrase” or a “turn of cloak.” In a different register, “turning” functions as shorthand for the characteristic grammar-school exercise: the translation of Latin texts into English and back again. In addition to describing the process whereby classical figures are translated into English, the “turn” also acts as a generic label for figures of speech themselves: metaphors in particular are often referred to as “turnings.” Yet in Shaw’s preface the “turn” no longer seems to signify any of these things—not an artful style, nor a mode of persuasion, nor a particular syntactic effect. Instead, “the Turn” refers to a kind of mental disease suffered by calves.25 John Fitzherbert’s popular Booke of Husbandrie (1598) explains the condition known as “the turne,” as follows: “Certaine Beasts there be that will turne about when they eate their meate, and will not feede, and are in great ieopardy of faling in pits, ditches, or waters, and it is because there is a bladder in the forehead, betweene the brayne-pan and the braines, the which must be taken out, or else he shall neuer mend but die at length.”26 Shaw’s vision of the art of rhetoric transforms it into a barnyard brain disease that causes its bearer to turn in circles and collapse into ditches. From this description, we might call rhetoric the

25.  Neil Rhodes has suggested to me that in this case the word “calves” might instead refer to human legs, in which case “the turn” would refer to a dancing maneuver rather than animal behavior. This would indicate that Shaw is arguing that rhetoric is even more natural to human activity than dancing, another form of artful social presentation. I think this reading is also plausible, although perhaps undercut by the opposition between “men” and “Calves” in the parenthetical reference, which strikes me as an odd formulation if “Calves” does indeed refer to a part of the body. 26.  John Fitzherbert, Fitzharberts Booke of Husbandrie (London: I. R[oberts] for Edward White, 1598), 63.

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early modern version of mad cow disease, and Shaw’s formulation thus suggests that Orpheus’s auditors have been turned back into beasts once again by the force of a now degraded eloquence. Incredibly, given the history of vernacular rhetoric documented in this book, Shaw posits rhetoric as “natural to men” rather than the product of art. This surprisingly modern attitude toward rhetoric distinguishes Shaw’s critique from that of Sprat and Wilkins, who, though they bemoan the wide influence of the art of rhetoric, still treat it as something akin to an art. That is to say, the condemnations of rhetoric that emerge from the writings of philosophers associated with the Royal Society preserve the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial that animates discussions of rhetoric from the classical period through the seventeenth century. The Orphic myth allows English rhetorical manuals to identify the “natural” with a debased linguistic barbarousness that can be repaired only through artful eloquence. These manuals cope with the evident artificiality of all rhetorical ornament by carefully distinguishing between orderly and disorderly figures of speech. This process of classification and differentiation, which is structured by the idea of what can be safely made “at home” in English, allows the manuals to posit a “common” space of vernacular rhetorical practice, one that can be shared equally by all English speakers. The newly formed common rhetoric is, ironically, constructed rather than natural—the very notion of a “commonplace” derives from the rhetorical tradition—but it is the very naturalness of English, in the most pejorative sense of the word, that the manuals aim to supersede. By contrast, Sprat and Wilkins claim to see no value in “artificial” linguistic constructions and instead celebrate the idea of a “primitive,” “naked” expression. These antirhetorical statements assume the existence of a common language prior to any process of rhetorical construction, and thus the practice of rhetoric becomes that which severs the English language from its “common use” and turns it into “Gibberish,” to quote Locke.27 Such critiques invert the priorities of the classical rhetorical tradition but do not discard its central mode of conceptualizing linguistic expression. In the preface to Words Made Visible, however, Shaw undoes the alignments of this framework, arguing instead that rhetoric exists deep within the minds of men, prior to any system of education.28 That is to say, for Shaw, rhetoric is nature.

27.  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1691; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 506. 28.  The preface is contradicted by Trope’s speech later in the play, which describes figuration as “artificial” speaking (108).

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Words Made Visible indicates the disrepute into which rhetoric has fallen at the end of the seventeenth century. Unlike the satirical treatment rhetoric receives in the play, earlier English dictionaries of figures of speech celebrate the persuasive utility and expressive force of rhetorical ornament. Shaw’s play thus stands in stark contrast to the archive of English rhetoric as described in this book, suggesting that even as natural philosophers were beginning to challenge rhetoric’s prestige in English culture, at least one local schoolmaster was likewise reframing the object of his pedagogy. After reading Words Made Visible, it is easy to see why members of the Royal Society wanted to set the tools of rhetorical ornament apart from the practice of philosophy. As Locke writes in a famous passage from An Essay concerning Human Understanding, already quoted in chapter 6 but worth repeating, “If we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore, however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault.”29 Locke’s bracketing of rhetoric to discourses unconcerned with “Truth and Knowledge” has been identified as a pivotal moment in rhetoric’s history, inaugurating a precipitous decline in the fortunes of the ars rhetorica. In order to protect philosophy and other serious knowledge practices from the various degradations of Shaw’s figures, rhetoric must be confined to nonserious speech and writing, that is, to poetry. With Locke, Bacon’s vision for a new map of knowledge begins to come to fruition, dislodging rhetoric from its central position among the arts and sciences. And so, with the help of Sprat, Wilkins, Locke, and their compatriots, after more than two millennia of prestige and good fortune, rhetoric met its apparent demise in early modern Europe.30 As John Bender and David Wellbery explain in their analysis of rhetoric’s decline, the assumptions of 29.  Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 508. 30.  On the “death” of rhetoric, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 62–78; Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 103–26; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 44–64; John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric, ed. J. Bender and D. Wellbery, 3–42 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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classical rhetoric proved to be incompatible not only with the values of transparency and objectivity so important to Enlightenment theories of scientific discourse, but also with the notions of subjectivity and individual genius that came to constitute Romantic theories of literary authorship. After Enlightenment philosophers removed rhetoric from the domain of theoretical and practical discourse, Romantic poets and critics banished it from the realm of imaginative expression as well, bringing on what Bender and Wellbery term a “second death of rhetoric” in the early nineteenth century.31 Yet rhetoric never disappeared entirely from the cultural horizon, and since the late twentieth century it has enjoyed renewed attention: as Roland Barthes observes, “[rhetoric] has digested regimes, religions, civilizations; moribund since the Renaissance, it has taken three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now.”32 Indeed, rhetoric’s corpse is today being reanimated, and the past few decades have witnessed multiple announcements of its “return” or “rebirth.”33 These developments vary across disciplines, but in some quarters of the humanities and social sciences, as inherited ideals of scientific objectivity and ideas about the power of the individual author have been called into question, “rhetoric” has reemerged as the term for a critical practice that accurately attends to the situated nature of all discourse. Rhetoric has since become an important theoretical framework in multiple disciplinary domains and fields of cultural production, including not only literary studies but also history, science studies, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science.34 31.  Bender and Wellbery, “Rhetoricality,” 15. 32.  Roland Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide Mémoire,” in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 15. 33.  For a critique of this supposed “return” of rhetoric as the motive of persuasion detached from any ars or technique, see John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 119. 34.  Important texts in this reevaluation of rhetoric have emerged from a variety of disciplinary quarters, including history (Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987]); literary criticism (Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969]; and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980]); science studies (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962]; and Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978]); economics (Deirdre McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]); sociology and cultural anthropology (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977]; Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981]; and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]); linguistics (J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962]; and Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978]); and cognitive science (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981]).

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Perhaps most significantly, at least in regard to the epistemological transformations charted in this conclusion, the linguistic work of theorists such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida has challenged the very distinction between rhetoric and philosophy posited by philosophers such as Locke.35 Although Locke defines his philosophical practice by presenting rhetoric as the “other” of philosophy, his theory of language reveals itself to be a theory of tropes. In an essay titled “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” de Man applies a method of rhetorical reading to Locke’s Essay to demonstrate how the apparent stability of Locke’s basic philosophical taxonomies—including his list of “simple ideas” that exist outside of language—is consistently undone by their own tropological structure. For example, de Man discerns the following from Locke’s definition of “motion”: The atomists, who define motion to be a passage from one place to another, what do they more than put one synonymous word for another? For what is passage other than motion? And if they were asked what passage was, how would they better define it than by motion? . . . Locke’s own “passage” is bound to continue this perpetual motion that never moves beyond tautology: motion is a passage and passage is a translation; translation, once again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play of words that “translate” is translated in German as “übersetzen” which itself translates the Greek “meta phorein” or metaphor. Metaphor gives itself the totality which it then claims to define, but it is in fact the tautology of its own position. [Locke’s] discourse of simple ideas is figural discourse or translation and, as such, creates the fallacious illusion of definition.36 Thus de Man concludes that “as soon as one is willing to be made aware of their epistemological implications, concepts are tropes and tropes concepts.”37 This passage suggests how “rhetoric” has become something like the condition of modern existence in certain corners of a scholarly world that no longer believes in unmediated facts so much as conceptual paradigms, or perhaps tropes, that determine how we know what we know. While Locke’s schema of philosophical discourse presumes the existence of two languages—one

35.  Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, 207–72 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 13–30. 36.  De Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor,” 17. 37.  Ibid., 23.

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proper and one figured—modern literary theory identifies tropes not as supplementary decorations, but rather as fundamental structures of language and thought. I allude to this return of rhetoric in modern knowledge practices in order to diverge from the arguments of Sprat and Wilkins and emphasize this alternate framework for understanding Samuel Shaw’s play, which declares, “The whole life of man is a Tropical Figurative Converse, and a continual Rhetorication.”38 Here, at the very moment of its apparent demise, Words Made Visible announces the form rhetoric will take on its return.

38.  In his essay on Words Made Visible, Brian Vickers also observes the seeming modernity of Shaw’s complaint that each individual man is an individual system of rhetoric, a conviction that accords with the arguments of Hayden White, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Vickers, “Reflections on the Rhetoric Textbook,” 93.

Appendix of English Rhetorical Manuals

The following is a list of English rhetorical manuals I consulted for the writing of this book, presented chronologically. Dates include first editions as well as revised editions. When a modern edition is not available, library call numbers are included for manuscript citations. For a complete list of rhetorical texts published in the British Isles between 1479 and 1660, see Heinrich F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 1530

Leonard Cox, The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke

ca. 1537

Thomas Swynnerton, The Tropes and Figures of Scripture

1550, 1555

Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes

1553, 1560

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetoric

1562

Gulielmus Gratarolus, The Castel of Memorie

1563

Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike

1568

William Fulwood, The Enimie of Idlenesse

1570

John Sturmius, A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata 219

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1577, 1593

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence

1580

Isocrates, A Perfite Looking Glasse for All Estates

1584

Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike

1586

Angel Day, The English Secretary

1588

Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike

1589

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie

ca. 1600

John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style Robert Cawdrey, A Treasury or Store-House of Similes

ca. 1600s

Of Rhetorick of Elocution, book 1 (British Library manuscript, Sloane.1112)

1609

Daniel Tuvill, The Dove and the Serpent

1634

John Barton, The Art of Rhetorick Concisely Handled

1637

Thomas Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique

1644

John Bulwer, Chirologia; or, The Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia; or, The Art of Manual Rhetoric

1650

Sir Balthazar Gerbier, Baron d’Ouvilly, The Art of Well Speaking

1651

Thomas Horne, Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice

1652

John Stockwood, The Treatise of the Figures

1654

Thomas Blount, The Academy of Eloquence

1657

John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d

1658 Edward Philips, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence Edward Reyner, Rules for the Government of the Tongue 1659

[Obadiah Walker], Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory

1663

Joshua Poole, Practical Rhetoric

1671

John Newton, An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick

1672

René Rapin, Reflections upon the Use of the Eloquence of These Times

1676

Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking

1677

H. Walker, A Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript,  x.d.386)

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John Newton, The English Academy; or, A Brief Introduction to the Seven Liberal Arts 1679

Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible

1680

Dionysius Longinus, A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech W. R. [William Richards], The English Orator Michel Le Faucher, An Essay upon the Action of an Orator: As to His Pronunciation and Gesture



q B i b l i og r aphy Primary Texts Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster (1570). Edited by R. C. Alston. Menston: Scolar Press, 1967. Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ——. The Works of Francis Bacon. 14 vols. Edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. London: Longman, 1861–79. Barton, John. The Art of Rhetorick Concisely Handled. [London]: N. Alsop, 1634. Blount, Thomas. The Academy of Eloquence. London: T. N. for Humphrey Moseley, 1654. Butler, Samuel. Hudibras: The First Part. London: J. G. for Richard Marriot, 1663. Castiglione, Baldessare. The Courtyer. Translated by Thomas Hoby. London: Wyllyam Seres, 1561. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. London: Penguin Books, 2004. ——. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. 1666. Edited by Eileen O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London: William Wilson, 1663. ——. Poems and Fancies (1653). Menston: Scolar Press, 1972. ——. Sociable Letters. Edited by James Fitzmaurice. New York: Garland, 1997. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De inventione. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. ——. De oratore. Translated by H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. [Cicero]. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Translated by Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cox, Leonard. The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke. [London]: [In Fletestrete by Mr. Robert Redman], 1532. Daniel, Samuel. Musophilus: Containing a General Defense of All Learning. 1599. Edited by Raymond Himelick. West Lafayette: Purdue University Studies, 1965. Day, Angel. The English Secretary. 1599. Edited by R. O. Evans. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967. Dugard, William. Rhetorices elementa. London: Roger Norton, 1657.

223

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Eachard, John. The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion. London: W. Godbid for N. Brooke, 1670. Erasmus, Desiderius. Concerning the Aim and Method of Education. 1529. Edited by William Harrison Woodward. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. ——. On Copia of Words and Ideas (De utraque verborem [sic] ac rerum copia). 1512. Translated by Donald B. King and H. David Rix. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963. Fenner, Dudley. The Artes of Logike and Rethorike. [Middelburg]: [R. Schilders], 1584. Fitzherbert, John. Fitzharberts Booke of Husbandrie. London: I. R[oberts] for Edward White, 1598. Fraunce, Abraham. The Arcadian Rhetorike. 1588. Edited by Ethel Seaton. Oxford: Luttrell Society by Basil Blackwell, 1950. ——. The Lawiers Logike. London: William Howe for Thomas Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588. ——. The Shepherd’s Logic [ca. 1585]. Edited by R. C. Alston. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969. Gascoigne, George. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. 1575. Edited by G. W. Pigman III. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Glanvill, Joseph. The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three “Versions.” 1661. Edited by Stephen Medcalf. Hove: Harvester Press, 1970. Gratarolus, Gulielmus. The Castel of Memorie. Translated by William Fulwood. London: R. Hall, 1562. Greville, Fulke. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. 1652. Edited by John Gouws. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Harvey, Gabriel. Gabriel Harvey’s Rhetor; or, A Two-Day Speech on Nature, Art, and Practice in the Study of Rhetoric (1577). Translated by Mark Reynolds. 2001. http://comp.uark.edu/~mreynold/rheteng.html. Hobbes, Thomas. The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy. 1637. Edited by John Harwood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Horne, Thomas. Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice. London: Franc. Eglesfield, 1651. Hoskins, John. Directions for Speech and Style. ca. 1599. Edited by Hoyt H. Hudson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935. Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson. Edited by C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52. ——. Epicene; or, The Silent Woman. ca. 1609. Edited by Richard Dutton. New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Lamy, Bernard. The Art of Speaking. London: W. Godbid, 1676. Lever, Ralph. The Art of Reason (1573). Menston: Scolar Press, 1972. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. 1691. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. Revised by Donald Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Lucas, George. Star Wars. Beverly Hills: Lucasfilm, 1977. Mulcaster, Richard. The First Part of the Elementary. 1582. Edited by R. C. Alston. Menston: Scolar Press, 1970.

B i b l i o g r a p h y      225

Newton, John. The English Academy; Or, A Brief Introduction to the Seven Liberal Arts. 2nd ed. London: A. Milbourn for Tho. Passenger, 1693. ——. An Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick. London: E. T. and R. H. for Thomas Passenger and Ben. Hurlock, 1671. Parker, Samuel. A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie. 3rd ed. London: John Martyn, 1671. ——. A Free and Impartial Censvre of the Platonick Philosophie. Oxford: W. Hall for Richard Davis, 1666. Peacham, Henry. The Garden of Eloquence. London: H. Iackson, 1577. ——. The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Edited by W. G. Crane. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954. Poole, Joshua. The English Parnassus, 1657. Menston: Scolar Press, 1972. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie: A Facsimile Reproduction. 1589. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970. ——. The Art of Englisy Poesy. 1589. Edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Rainolde, Richard. A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, 1563. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Da Capo Press, 1969. Rapin, René. Reflections upon the Use of the Eloquence of These Times: Together with a Comparison between the Eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes. Oxford, 1672. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ca. 1594–96. Edited by Peter Holland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ——. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623. New York: Routledge, 1998. ——. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. ——. Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent. Edited by John Benson. London: Tho. Cotes, 1640. ——. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Shaw, Samuel. Words Made Visible; or, Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men. London: B. G. for Daniel Major, 1679. Sherry, Richard. A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike. London: Richard Tottill, 1555. ——. A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550). Edited by H. W. Hildebrandt. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961. Sidney, Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: Written by Sir Philippe Sidnei. London: Iohn Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1590. ——. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight; Now since the first edition augmented and ended. London: [John Windet] for William Ponsonbie, 1593. ——. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Dublin: Societie of Stationers, 1621. ——. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. 1590. Edited by Albert Feuillerat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

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Bibliography

——. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia). 1590, 1593. Edited by Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. ——. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. 1590, 1593, 1598. Edited by Maurice Evans. London: Penguin Books, 1987. ——. The Major Works. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Smith, G. Gregory, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904. Smith, John. The Mystery of Rhetorick Unveil’d. London: George Eversden in Amen Corner, 1683. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. London: William Ponsonbie, 1596. ——. The Faerie Queene. 1596. Edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. ——. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Edited by William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. London: T. R. for J. Martyn, 1667. Stockwood, John. The Treatise of the Figures. London: Roger Norton, 1652. Sturmius, John. A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata. Translated by Thomas Browne. London, 1570. Walker, H. A Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments. 1677. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, x.d.386. [Walker, Obadiah]. Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory. [London]: J. G. for R. Royston, 1659. Weamys, Anna. A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. 1651. Edited by Patrick Colborn Cullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Webbe, William. A Discourse of English Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., edited by G. Gregory Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904. 1:226–302. Wilkins, John. An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetoric (1560). Edited by Peter E. Medine. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. ——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Wroth, Mary. The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. London: [Augustine Mathewes] for Ioh[n] Marriott and Iohn Grismand, 1621. ——. The First Part of “The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania.” 1621. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. ——. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Edited by Josephine Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

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q I n de x

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. A. W., Continuation (1651), 110 n51 The Academy of Eloquence (Blount, 1654), 47, 93 n13, 95, 114 Adamson, Sylvia, 11 n26, 23 n65 Advancement of Learning (Bacon, 1605), 27, 173, 191, 193 Aeneid (Virgil) hyperbaton used in opening of, 21, 56, 58, 62– 63 Phaër’s English translation of, 128 agriculture. See gardening and husbandry Alexander, Gavin, 11 n26, 23 n65, 91, 108 n47, 110 n53, 113 n67 Alexander, Sir William, 91, 110, 112–14, 115 Altman, Joel, 9, 21 n60 amplification  /amplificatio, 45, 199 anastrophe, 56, 64, 68, 122, 134 The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton, 1621), 129 antiptosis, 148 antirhetorical polemic, 27–28, 201–18 Cavendish and, 176 –77, 188, 189, 193–94, 199 –200 of Conforming ministers, 183–88, 193–94 English Civil War and Commonwealth Period, fears conjured by, 176, 182–83, 201, 206 gendered aspects of, 185–86, 199 of Locke, 27, 172–73, 187, 189, 194, 196, 214 –15, 217–18 of natural philosophers, 183–88, 193–94, 215–17 nature and the natural, valorizing, 206, 214 origin myth of rhetoric and, 202–7 poesy/fiction, restriction of rhetoric to, 172–73, 215 Shaw’s Words Made Visible (1679) and, 16 n45, 209 –15, 211, 218

soraismus and rise of, 175–77, 182–88 trespass and disorder, vernacular eloquence associated with, 207–9 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 147 n5 Apuleius, 133 Arcadia (Sidney) Alexander’s supplement (1621), 91, 110, 112–14, 115 Bradstreet’s discomfort with, 87–89, 91, 114 compositional history of, 109 –10 “continuations” of, 110 n51 Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), 90, 91, 92, 94, 109 –10, 111–12 Johnstoun’s supplement (1638), 110 n50 localization of rhetoric in English space and, 46 – 48, 88 “old” Arcadia (1577-1580), 109, 110 parenthesis in, 26, 101–14, abrupt ending of revised text in form of, 89 –91, 90, 92, 111; commentaries on Arcadia using, 88–89, 91; composite nature of text and, 108–14; critical responses to, 101–2, 105, 108; heightened emotional state, signifying, 102–3; identification with Sidney himself, 102, 112 n55; narrative strategy, as part of, 102, 103–8 revised version by Sidney (1586/1590), 109, 110 –11 rhetorical handbook, regarded as, 16 n47, 93, 94, 95 The Arcadian Rhetorike (Fraunce, 1588), 47– 48, 69, 93, 98 n18, 102 Ariosto, Ludovico, 83 n53 Aristotle, 11, 13, 20 n59, 93, 123, 124, 176 Ars Poetica (Horace), 171 The Art of Reason (Lever, 1573), 180 –81 The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (Cox, 1530), 16 n45, 38–39, 49 237

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Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham, 1589). See Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie Arte of Rhetoric (Wilson, 1553). See Wilson, Thomas, Arte of Rhetoric The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (Fenner, 1584), 31–32, 40 – 42, 69, 100, 208 Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster (1570), 37–38, 65 n24 Attridge, Derek, 96 Augustine of Hippo, 14 Babel, Tower of, 205– 6 Bacon, Francis, 15, 27–28, 93, 95, 173, 189, 191, 193, 194, 204, 206 n19, 215 Baldwin, T. W., 23 n66 “Banquet of Wit” in Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664), 191–93 barbarousness of England and English tongue, concerns regarding, 2, 4, 12, 20, 127, 130 –31, 174, 177–78, 182, 206, 214 Baron, Dennis, 153 n22 Barthes, Roland, 8, 19, 55, 216 Barton, John, The Art of Rhetorick Concisely Handled (1634), 45 n58 Beaumont, Francis, 109 n48 Beling, Richard, 110 n51 Bender, John, 215–16 Benson edition of Shakespeare’s poems (1640), 156 – 60, 157 Blank, Paula, 2, 3 n4, 7 n17, 32, 53 n81, 58 n5, 174 The Blazing World (Cavendish, 1666), 27, 194 –98 Blount, Thomas, The Academy of Eloquence (1654), 47, 93 n13, 95, 114 Booke of Husbandrie (Fitzherbert, 1598), 213 boy-actors playing women in early modern theater, 160 – 61, 162– 63, 169 Boyle, Robert, 205 n16 Bradstreet, Anne, 87–89, 91, 114 “braueness” or “bravery,” 151–52, 153, 155 Brenta, Andrea, 203 n6 Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (Hobbes, 1637), 25 Brown, Steve, 162 n45 Browne, Thomas, 42 Burton, Robert, 129 Butler, Samuel, 175 cacozelia, 180 n30 Cade, Jack, 132

Cambridge Platonists, 186 Carroll, William, 50 n72 “case,” as pun on female genitalia, 115, 116 n75, 146 – 48, 166, 167 The Castel of Memorie (Gratarolus, 1562), 42 Castiglione, Baldessare, Courtier (Hoby translation, 1561), 180 catacosmesis or ordo, 68 Catholicism, 49 –50, 52, 131–32 Cave, Terence, 19 –20 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 27, 188–200 antirhetorical polemic and, 176 –77, 188, 189, 193–94, 199 –200 The Blazing World (1666), 27, 194 –98 materialist philosophy of, 189 –91 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), 176, 189 –90, 194, 195, 198 Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663), 200 Philosophicall Fancies (1653), 188 Royal Society and, 188, 192–93, 198 Sociable Letters (1664), “Banquet of Wit” in, 191–93 social and linguistic disorderliness associated with, 188–89 “To Naturall Philosophers” (1653), 198 changelings, fairies, and elves hypallage translated as The Changeling, 24, 118–20, 127, 131 importance to late Elizabethan literature, 119, 127–33 localization of rhetoric as English space and, 131–33, 143 sexual transgression, associated with, 131–32 trespass, thievery, and outlaws, associated with, 131–33 women associated with, 118–19, 129 –31 Charles II (king of England), 196 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 60, 129 –30 n32, 133 Cheke, Sir John, 35 n17, 180 Chronicles (Holinshed, 1577/1587), 108 n46 Cicero Blount’s Academy of Eloquence (1654), on frontispiece of, 93, 95 De inventione, 15 n39, 201 n1 De oratore, 15 n39, 17 n50, 123 English translations of, 11 five parts of rhetoric described by, 17 on hypallage, 123–24, 127 on influence of rhetoric on civil society, 201–3, 204, 207 names for figures, struggles with, 43

i n d e x      239 Peacham’s citation of, on hyperbaton, 64, 68 pedagogical use of, 15 n39 Smith’s examples of enallage drawn from, 154 civil order and rhetoric, relationship between, 51–53, 201–7 Civil War, English, and Commonwealth Period, 176, 182–83, 201, 206 classical Latin rhetoric, English vernacular’s disjunction with, 2–3, 11, 21–22, 25–26 Clement, Francis, The Petie Schole (1587), 51 n74 Colet, John, 149 nn10 –11 “common” and “common language,” idea of, 32– 44 fairies and fairy stories, use of, 131–33 foreign words, vernacular use of, 43– 44, 181–82 multiple uses of term, 36 –39 national community, rhetoric viewed as forger of, 39 – 40 nature and the natural, associated with, 58, 174, 214 sexual connotations of “common,” 37, 162 shared or community property, rhetoric as, 41– 43 tension between preference for common speech and uncommon nature of rhetorical eloquence, 33, 35, 37–38 unlearned or common audience, vernacular rhetoric aimed at, 38, 40 – 41 vagrant use of common fields and linguistic unruliness, 50 –52 “common gender,” 149, 162 Commonwealth Period following English Civil War, 176, 182–83, 201, 206 Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Erasmus, 1529), 130 Conley, Thomas, 18 n54 Continuation (A. W., 1651), 110 n51 The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (Sidney, 1590), 90, 91, 92, 94, 109 –10, 111–12 The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (Wroth, 1621), 115–17 Courtier (Castiglione, Hoby translation, 1561), 180 Cowley, Abraham, 192–93 Cox, Leonard, The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (1530), 16 n45, 38–39, 49 Crider, Scott, 23 n66 cultural capital, rhetoric viewed as, 42– 43

Cupid’s Revenge (Beaumont and Fletcher, 1615), 109 n48 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 146 Daniel, Samuel A Defence of Ryme (1603), 179 Musophilus (1599), 12 n30, 34 –35 Day, Angel, The English Secretary (1599), 124 –25, 126 De copia (Erasmus), 15 n39, 16 n47, 150, 173 de Grazia, Margreta, 159 nn35–36, 205 n16 De inventione (Cicero), 15 n39, 201 n1 de Man, Paul, 23 n67, 172, 217, 218 n38 De oratore (Cicero), 15 n39, 17 n50, 123 De schematibus et tropis (Mosellanus), 15 n39 decorum, 13–14 A Defence of Ryme (Daniel, 1603), 179 Defense of Poesy (Sidney, written ca. 1579/ publ. 1595), 173, 179 Demosthenes, 3–5, 93, 95 Denny, Edward, Baron of Waltham, 116 Derrida, Jacques, 96, 101, 217, 218 n38 Descartes, René, 190 n58 A Description of a New World Called The Blazing World (Cavendish, 1666), 27, 194 –98 DiGangi, Mario, 169 n52 dilatio, 22 n64 Directions for Speech and Style (Hoskins, ca. 1590s), 47, 69, 93, 98, 111 n59 A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (Parker, 1671), 184 A Discourse of English Poetrie (Webbe, 1586), 52 n79, 66 “Discourse of Witchcraft” (Fairfax, 1621), 129 The Discovery of Witchcraft (Scot, 1584), 129, 133 disorder. See trespass and disorder dress or fashion and enallage, 151–52 Du Vair, Guillaume, 203 n6 Dupriez, Bernard, 122 n9 Eachard, John, 185–86 Eclogues (Virgil), 4 n9, 74 Eden, Kathy, 13–14 Eden, Richard, 178 n16 educational system dissemination of rhetoric via, 14 –16 English, arguments for classroom use of, 48– 49 fairy lore, rejection of, 130 –31 gardening theory, pedagogy imagined in terms of, 41 n43

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educational system (continued) Latin education, antirhetorical rejection of, 185–86 socially dependent position of teachers of rhetoric, 152–53 “Elegie upon that Honourable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (Bradstreet, 1638), 87–89, 91, 114 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 82, 88 elves. See changelings, fairies, and elves enallage, 26, 146 –70 boy-actors playing women in early modern theater, 160 – 61, 162– 63, 169 “braueness” or “bravery,” association with, 151–52, 153, 155 common or epicene gender, early modern literary production of, 150 defined, 148 emasculating effects of rhetoric, ancient and early modern concerns regarding, 152–53 in English rhetorical manuals, 150 –55 “Exchange,” Englished as, 148 fashion or dress and, 151–52 formation of vernacular rhetoric and constitution of gender and sexual desire, link between, 147– 48, 168–70 Jonson’s Epicene; or, The Silent Woman and, 26, 150, 161– 68 lack of gender distinction within English grammar, problem of, 149, 150 Puttenham on, 148, 150 –52, 153, 155 redefined as gendered pronoun substitution, 148 in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, 168–70 Shakespeare’s “Master Mistress” in Sonnet 20 and, 26, 150, 155– 61, 157, 168 Sherry on, 148 n9, 153–54 trespass and disorder in vernacular rhetoric typified by, 148–50 uninflected nature of English, problem of, 148 enclosures, 52 The English Academy (Newton, 1677), 49 English Arcadia (Markham, 1607/1613), 110 n51 English Civil War and Commonwealth Period, 176, 182–83, 201, 206 English Grammar ( Jonson, 1640), 162, 164 English rhetorical manuals, 9 –12, 16 –19, 209, 219 –21. See also vernacular eloquence in early modern England The English Secretary (Day, 1599), 124 –25, 126

English space, localization of rhetoric as. See localization of rhetoric as English space The Enimie of Idleness (Fulwood, 1568), 179 n23 Enlightenment theories of scientific discourse, incompatibility of rhetoric with, 216 Epicene; or, The Silent Woman ( Jonson, ca. 1609), 26, 150, 161– 68 “Epigram on the Court Pucelle” ( Jonson, 1640), 162 n45 Epitome troporum ac schematorum (Susenbrotus, ca. 1541/1562 in English), 15 n39, 16 n47 Erasmus, Desiderius, 14, 15 n39, 16 n47, 35 n17, 130, 134, 150 –51, 173 An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke, 1691), 172, 215 Essay of the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean . . . Invisible People (Kirk, 1691), 131 An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (Wilkins, 1668), 204 –7, 209, 214, 218 Ettenhuber, Katrin, 11 n26, 23 n65 Evans, Maurice, 89 n7 “Exchange.” See enallage “The Exchange,” Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 titled as, 156 – 60, 157 exclamatio (“Outcrying”), 45 expression (verba) and subject matter (res), tension between, 19, 32, 33, 173, 190 –91, 200 Faerie Queene (Spenser) fairies, use of, 119, 129 hyperbaton in. See Spenser’s use of hyperbaton in Book 6 of Faerie Queene Fairfax, Edward, 120, 130, 131 fairies and fairy tales. See changelings, fairies, and elves “The Fairies’ Farewell; or, God-A-Mercy Will” (1620), 132 farming. See gardening and husbandry fashion or dress and enallage, 151–52 feminist theory, 23 n66, 116, 162– 63 Fenner, Dudley, The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584), 31–32, 40 – 42, 69, 100, 208 Ferguson, Margaret, 2, 3 n4 Feuillerat, Albert, 89 fiction/poesy, restriction of rhetoric to, 172–73, 215

i n d e x      241 figures English manuals’ focus on, 17–25, 53–54 names for, 24, 26, 43, 45– 46 Figures of Speech (Quinn, 1982), 121–22 Fineman, Joel, 158 The First Part of the Elementary (Mulcaster, 1582), 34 –35, 36, 38, 41, 178 Fitzherbert, John, Booke of Husbandrie (1598), 213 Fleming, Juliet, 97 n17, 182 n35 Fletcher, John, 109 n48 Florio, John, 111 folktales. See changelings, fairies, and elves foreign words, vernacular use of, 43– 44, 173–75, 177–82 Foundacion of Rhetorike (Rainolde, 1563), 13, 39, 41 Fraunce, Abraham The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), 47– 48, 69, 93, 98 n18, 102 The Shepherd’s Logic (ca. 1585), 48 Fulwood, William, 42, 179 Fumerton, Patricia, 50 –51 Garden of Eloquence (Peacham, 1577/1593). See Peacham, Henry, Garden of Eloquence gardening and husbandry Arcadia referenced in terms of, 88 “grafting” metaphors in definition of parenthesis, 99 localization of rhetoric as English space via metaphors of, 31, 41– 42, 99 pedagogy imagined in terms of, 41 n43 rhetoric and “the turn” as animal disease, 213–14 Gascoigne, George, Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1575), 66 gender. See also sexuality; women of addressees of Shakespearean sonnets mostly unspecified, 159 antirhetorical polemic and, 185–86, 199 boy-actors playing women in early modern theater, 160 – 61, 162– 63, 169 “common gender,” 149, 162 crossing or inversion of gendered behavior, in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 136 –37 emasculating effects of rhetoric, ancient and early modern concerns regarding, 152–53 enallage, gender, and sexual desire. See enallage Genette, Gérard, 18

geographic location and rhetoric. See localization of rhetoric as English space; spatial logic of rhetoric Georgics (Virgil), 122 Glanvill, Joseph, 186, 199 Goldberg, Jonathan, 71 n40, 116 n74, 190, 192 Golding, Arthur, 128–29 Gratarolus, Gulielmus, The Castel of Memorie (1562), 42 Greenblatt, Stephen, 10, 105 n45 Greville, Fulke, 108 n47, 109, 111 Guillory, John, 30 n1, 45 n55, 216 n33 Guzman, John de, 203 n6 Haddon, Walter, 29 –31, 54 Halpern, Richard, 15, 22 n63, 51 n74 handbooks of rhetoric in English, 9 –12, 16 –19, 209, 219 –21. See also vernacular eloquence in early modern England Hardison, O. B., 75 Hartlib, Samuel, 205 n16 Harvey, Gabriel, 41, 73 n43, 75 Helgerson, Richard, 12, 22 n63, 31, 65, 74 n47 Hendricks, Margo, 136 n48 Heylyn, Peter, Microcosmus (1621), 47 History of the Royal Society (Sprat, 1667), 183, 185, 187, 193 n70, 206 –7, 209, 214, 218 The History of the World (Pliny, Holland translation, 1601), 43, 178 n18 Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 27, 190 n58 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 180 Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577/1587), 108 n46 Holland, Peter, 129 –30 n32, 137 Holland, Philemon, 43, 178 home Quintilian, as guiding metaphor in rhetorical tradition of, 13–14 in Spenser and Virgil, 74 –75 Horace, 171, 202 n4 Horne, Thomas, Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (1651), 48, 69 n36 Hoskins, John, Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1590s), 47, 69, 93, 98, 111 n59 House of Fame (Chaucer, ca. 1379-1380), 60 Howard, Jean E., 36 Hudibras (Butler, 1663), 175 humanist education. See educational system Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Gascoigne, 1575), 66 husbandry. See gardening and husbandry

242    

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hypallage, 26, 118– 45. See also Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), hypallage in The Changeling, Englished as, 24, 118– 20, 127, 131 changelings, fairies, and elves as translations of classical figures, 119, 127–33 defined, 121–22 in English rhetorical manuals, 124 –27 hyperbaton, as form of, 56, 84, 122 localization of rhetoric as English space in translation of, 127 metonymy, identified by classical rhetoricians with, 122–24 Peacham on, 65, 68, 124, 125–26 Puttenham on, 24, 118–20, 125, 126 –27, 131, 132–33 sexual activity, associated with, 125, 131 hyperbaton, 26, 55–86. See also Spenser’s use of hyperbaton in Book 6 of Faerie Queene Aeneid (Virgil), used in opening of, 21, 56, 58, 62– 63 defined, 56 –57, 60 – 61, 67, 69 –70 displacement and return in English rhetoric characterizing, 70, 72 Gascoigne on, 66 Longinus on, 61– 62, 64, 83 “natural” word order and, 57–58, 66, 68, 70, 76, 174 Peacham on, 55–58, 64 – 65, 67–70, 85 as problematic figure in English, 21–22, 26, 55–58, 63–70, 84 –85 Puttenham on, 21, 22, 46, 57, 66 – 67, 70 Quintilian on, 21, 55–57, 60, 62– 63, 70, 85 Sherry on, 64 n20 significance of English rhetoricians’ concern over, 84 –85 spatial logic of rhetoric and, 57, 67, 68 “The Trespasser,” translated as, 46, 57, 61, 66 – 67 as umbrella term for transpositional schemes, 56, 67, 84 vernacular self-fashioning of late sixteenth century affecting reception of, 65, 69 Webbe on, 66 Wilson’s omission of, 63– 64 hysterologia, 68 hysteron proteron or preposterous, 21, 22–23 n64, 56, 64, 67 n32, 84, 122 imperial aspirations and vernacular rhetoric, 12–13 inflection, problem of English lack of, 148

“Insertour.” See parenthesis Institutio oratoria. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria intellectual inquiry, rhetoric recognized as defining mode of, 8–14, 216 –18 interrogatio (“Snappish Asking”), 45 Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (Newton, 1671), 48– 49, 69 n36, 98 n18, 101, 125, 126 n21 invention, rhetorical, 17–19, 53, 144 Ireland, English rule in, 74 Isocrates, 202 n4 Jakobson, Roman, 18 n55, 23 n67 John of Gaunt on England in Richard II (Shakespeare), 34 n15 Johnstoun, James, 110 n50 Jones, R. F., 2 n3, 3 n4, 65, 179 n21, 183 n39 Jonson, Ben English Grammar (1640), 162, 164 Epicene; or, The Silent Woman (ca. 1609), 26, 150, 161– 68 “Epigram on the Court Pucelle” (1640), 162 n45 Timber; or, Discoveries (1641), 47, 93 n13 Joseph, Sister Miriam, 23 n66 Kahn, Victoria, 9 Kennedy, William J., 71 n39 King, John, 89 n6 Kirk, Robert, 131 Knight, Stephen, 6 Krier, Theresa, 71–72 n40, 74 n47 Lamb, Charles, 101–2, 110, 112 Lamb, Jonathan, 89 n7 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 128, 129, 132 n40 Lanham, Richard, 19 n57, 119 n3 Laqueur, Thomas, 115 n69 Latimer, Hugh, 6 n15, 177 Latin education, antirhetorical rejection of, 185–86 Le Grand, M., 203 n6 Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (Hazlitt, 1820), 101–2, 103, 110, 112 Lennard, John, 98 Leslie, Marina, 189 n53 Lever, Ralph, The Art of Reason (1573), 180 –81 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 115 n72 Lily, William, 149 nn10 –11 localization of rhetoric as English space, 25–26, 29 –54

i n d e x      243 civil order and rhetoric, relationship between, 51–53 classroom use of English, arguments for, 48– 49 “common,” idea of, 32– 44. See also “common” and “common language,” idea of fairies and fairy stories, use of, 131–33, 143 in Fenner’s Artes, 31–32 foreign words, vernacular use of, 43– 44 hypallage, translation of, 127 intellectual inquiry, rhetoric as defining mode of, 13–14 in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 120, 121, 143 names for figures, Englishing of, 45– 46 origin myth of rhetoric relocated to English countryside, 204 Robin Hood and, 3– 4 Sidney’s Arcadia and, 46 – 48, 88 small size and reach of England and English, 34 –35 spatial logic of rhetoric and, 31–32, 33, 34, 44, 46, 57 Spenser’s Faerie Queene and, 58–59 vagrancy as signifier of linguistic unruliness, 49 –52 in Wilson’s Arte, 29 –31, 32, 44 – 45 Locke, John, 27, 172–73, 187, 189, 194, 196, 214 –15, 217–18 Longinus, On the Sublime, 61– 62, 64, 83 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 74 –75 Luther, Martin, 27 Lyly, John, 181 Macbeth, John Walker Vilant, 122 n8 Mack, Peter, 15–16, 17 n48, 18, 62, 84 –85 Magna instauratio (Bacon), 206 n19 Malone, Edmund, 159 manuals of rhetoric in English, 9 –12, 16 –19, 209, 219 –21. See also vernacular eloquence in early modern England Markham, Gervase, 110 n51 Masten, Jeffrey, 170 n54 materialist philosophy of Cavendish, 189 –91 Matz, Robert, 10 n24, 18 Mazzio, Carla, 3 n6, 174, 179 McCabe, Richard, 74 n47 McEachern, Claire, 65, 181 Menon, Madhavi, 147 n7 Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 146 – 47

metalepsis (the farrefet), 46 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 129 metaphor, 13, 18 n55, 22 n64, 23 n67, 25, 45 n58, 46, 123–24, 127, 184, 187, 194 –95, 213, 217 metonymy, 18 n55, 23 n67, 25, 45 n58, 122–24, 127 Microcosmus (Heylyn, 1621), 47 Midas (Lyly, 1592), 181 Midlands revolt of 1607, 50 n70 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), hypallage in, 26, 133– 45 Athenian lovers, disorder and transposition amongst, 136 –38 Bottom as object of linguistic translation in, 120, 135, 136, 138–39, 141– 42 as exemplar of vernacular hypallage, 119 gendered behavior, crossing or inversion of, 136 –37 Indian changeling boy, Titania and Oberon’s fight over, 135–36 localization of rhetoric as English space in, 120, 121, 143 marriage theme, 139 – 41 poetic imagination as both source and product of figuration, 143– 45 Puck’s epilogue, 142– 43 Pyramus and Thisbe, performance of, 139 – 42 social order and disorder in, 141 as theatrical dramatization of rhetorical forms, 120 –21, 133–35, 138, 142– 45 Milton, John, 27 “the mingle mangle.” See soraismus Molyneux, Edmund, 108 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 10, 87 n1, 134 n45, 139 n52 More, Thomas, 35 n17 Mosellanus, 15 n39, 16 n47 Mulcaster, Richard, The First Part of the Elementary (1582), 34 –35, 36, 38, 41, 178 Mullaney, Stephen, 174 Murphy, James J., 16 n44 Musophilus (Daniel, 1599), 12 n30, 34 –35 The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (Smith, 1657/1683), 47, 93 n13, 98 n18, 99, 102, 125, 154 –55, 161 names for figures, 24, 26, 43, 45– 46 narrative, rhetoric transformed as, 3, 7 Arcadia (Sidney), parenthesis as part of narrative strategy of, 102, 103–8 hypallage associated with Changeling nursery tale, 118–20

244    

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narrative, rhetoric transformed as (continued) localization of rhetoric as English space, 24 –25 Midsummer Night’s Dream, as theatrical dramatization of rhetorical forms, 120 –21, 133–35, 138, 142– 45 Spenser’s use of hyperbaton in Book 6 of Faerie Queene, 72–76, 82–83 Nashe, Thomas, 129 national aspirations and vernacular rhetoric, 12 natural philosophers antirhetorical polemic of, 183–88, 193–94, 215–17 origin myth of rhetoric, rejection of, 204 –7 nature and the natural antirhetorical polemic valorizing, 206, 214 “common” and “common language,” idea of, 58, 174, 214 courtesy and rhetoric, blurring of natural and artificial in, 59 – 60, 73–74, 76 –82 hypallage and “natural” word order, 125–26 hyperbaton and “natural” word order, 57–58, 66, 68, 70, 76, 174 Quintilian on, 84 soraismus as threat to, 174 –75, 177–78, 181–82 vernacular rhetoricians’ association with barbarism, 206, 214 neologizing and neologisms, 43– 44, 173–75, 177–82 Newcastle, Margaret. See Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle Newton, John The English Academy (1677), 49 Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (1671), 48– 49, 69 n36, 98 n18, 101, 125, 126 n21 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (Cavendish, 1666), 176, 189 –90, 194, 195, 198 “Ode to the Royal Society” (Cowley), 193 Odyssey, 14 oeconomia, 13–14 On the Sublime (Longinus), 61– 62, 64, 83 Ong, Walter, 4, 17 n48, 31, 32 n5, 130 n33, 186 n46 ordo or catacosmesis, 68 origin myth of rhetoric, 202– 6 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto, 1516/1532), 83 n53

ornamentation, English manuals’ focus on, 17–25 Orpheus myth, 52–53, 203– 4, 214 “Outcrying” (exclamatio), 45 outlawry. See trespass and disorder Ovid, 129, 133, 154 parenthesis, 26, 87–117 as defined in English manuals, 97–101, 113 “grafting” metaphors used to explain, 99 hyperbaton, as form of, 56, 76, 84, 89 “Insertour,” Englished as, 89 Peacham on, 65, 99, 100 n31, 101, 107 as problematic figure in English rhetoric, 93–97, 100 –101 Puttenham on, 97, 98, 100 as rhetorical device, 89 –91 Sherry on, 98 n18, 100 in Sidney’s Arcadia, 26, 101–14. See also under Arcadia spatial logic of rhetoric and, 97, 101, 116 n77 in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), 65, 70, 75 vernacular eloquence itself as form of, 99 –100 women’s writing and, 97 n17, 114 –17 Parker, Patricia, 7 n17, 10, 21 n60, 22, 23 n66, 24, 32, 72, 103 n43, 120 n5, 139 – 41, 147, 149 n11, 155 n28, 165 n49 Parker, Samuel, 184, 187, 193, 197, 199, 200 Partridge, E. B., 164 n47 Peacham, Henry, Garden of Eloquence (1577/1593) “common,” idea of, 37, 40, 41– 42 cultural capital, on rhetoric as form of, 42– 43 on enallage, 154 England as home country, focus on, 13 on hypallage, 65, 68, 124, 125–26 on hyperbaton, 55–58, 64 – 65, 67–70, 85 number of figures in, 19 on parenthesis, 65, 99, 100 n31, 101, 107 on power of rhetor, 152 on soraismus, 180 pedagogy. See educational system Pembroke, Mary Sidney, Countess of, 104, 111, 115–16 Pepys, Samuel, 188 The Petie Schole (Clement, 1587), 51 n74 Petrarch, Francesco, 159, 203 Phaër, Thomas, 128 Philosophical and Physical Opinions (Cavendish, 1656), 200

i n d e x      245 Philosophicall Fancies (Cavendish, 1653), 188 Pittenger, Elizabeth, 147 n4, 149 n11 place and rhetoric. See localization of rhetoric as English space; spatial logic of rhetoric Plato and Platonism, 19, 77, 152, 186 Plett, Heinrich, 23 n66, 219 Pliny, 43, 178 n18 Plutarch, 14, 133 poesy/fiction, restriction of rhetoric to, 172–73, 215 Poole, Joshua, English Parnassus (1657), 125 preposterous, concept of, 154 –55 preposterous or hysteron proteron, 21, 22–23 n64, 56, 64, 67 n32, 84, 122 profitable investment, rhetoric viewed as, 42– 43 progymnasmata, 16 Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie (1589) academic use of, 10, 11 “case,” as pun on female genitalia, in, 115, 147 “common,” idea of, 32–33, 38, 40 courtly but unlearned audience, aimed at, 38 n29, 40 on enallage, 148, 150 –52, 153, 155 fairies and fairy tales, reference to, 129 –30, 131 on hypallage, 24, 118–20, 125, 126 –27, 131, 132–33 on hyperbaton, 21, 22, 46, 57, 66 – 67, 70 names for figures, Englishing of, 24, 26, 45– 46, 89 narrative, rhetoric transformed as, 25, 118–20 on new or secondary nature of vernacular rhetoric, 100 origin myth of rhetoric in, 52, 203– 4 on parenthesis, 97, 98, 100, 114 –15 poesy and rhetoric, identification of, 173 Robin Hood, use of, 6 n12 on soraismus, 174, 177–78, 180 vagrancy as signifier of linguistic unruliness, use of, 52 on women, 97 n17, 114 –15, 118–19, 129 –30 Quilligan, Maureen, 115 n72 Quinn, Arthur, 121–22 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria Aeneid, instructions for delivering opening lines of, 62– 63 elaborate rhetorical curriculum of, 17

home as guiding metaphor in rhetorical tradition of, 13–14 on hypallage, 124 on hyperbaton, 21, 55–57, 60, 62– 63, 70, 85, 140 on influence of rhetoric on civil society, 202 on nature and natural, 84 pedagogical use of, 15 n39 on sardismos (soraismus), 171–72 spatial logic used by, 31 Rainolde, Richard, Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), 13, 39, 41 Ramus, Petrus, 18 Rapin, René, Reflections upon the Use of the Eloquence of These Times (1672), 184 –85 Rebhorn, Wayne, 9, 10 n24, 11 n28, 13, 17 n49, 20 n59, 38 n29, 152–53, 154 n24, 156 n30, 202 n4, 203 Reflections upon the Use of the Eloquence of These Times (Rapin, 1672), 184 –85 Regius, Raphael, 203 n6 religion antirhetorical polemic of Conforming ministers, 183–88, 193–94 fairy allusions to Roman Catholicism, 131–32 origin myth of rhetoric, Christian retelling of, 204 –5 vagrancy and linguistic unruliness as signifiers of disruption in, 49 –50, 52 Renaissance Figures of Speech (Adamson, Alexander, and Ettenhuber, eds., 2007), 10 –11, 23 res (subject matter) and verba (expression), tension between, 19, 32, 33, 173, 190 –91, 200 rhetoric decline of. See antirhetorical polemic English vernacularization of. See vernacular eloquence in early modern England revival of, 216 –18 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 13, 93, 176 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 15 n39, 17 n50, 43 Rhetoricae compendium, Latino-Anglice (Horne, 1651), 48, 69 n36 Rhodes, Neil, 23 n66, 213 n25 Richard II (Shakespeare), 34 n15 A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata (Sturmius, Browne translation, 1570), 42

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Roberts, Josephine A., 115 n70 Roberts, Sasha, 156 n29 Robin Goodfellow, 129, 131 n38, 132, 133–34 n43 Robin Hood, 1–8, 33, 119, 132 Roman Catholicism, 49 –50, 52, 131–32 Romantic theory, antirhetoricism of, 216 Royal Society antirhetorical thrust of, 215 Cavendish and, 188, 192–93, 198 Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), 183, 185, 187, 193 n70, 206 –7, 209, 214, 218 Wilkins’s An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), 204 –7, 209, 214, 218 Salutati, Coluccio, 203 sardismos, 171 Schneider, Regina, 91 n10 The Scholemaster (Ascham, 1570), 37–38, 65 n24 Scot, Reginald, The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), 129, 133 sexuality. See also gender Bottom’s eroticized return to childhood in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 138–39 boy-actors playing women in early modern theater, 160 – 61, 162– 63, 169 “case,” as pun on female genitalia, 115, 116 n75, 146 – 48, 166, 167 changelings, fairies, and elves associated with transgressions of, 131–32 “common,” idea of, 37, 162 emasculating effects of rhetoric, ancient and early modern concerns regarding, 152–53 enallage, gender, and sexual desire. See enallage hypallage associated with perverse or illicit sexuality, 125, 131 Wroth, parenthesis, and women’s writing, 116 Shakespeare, William Benson edition of poems of (1640), 156 – 60, 157 cross-dressing in As You Like It, 168–70 gender of addressees of sonnets mostly unspecified, 159 hypallage in Midsummer Night’s Dream. See Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), hypallage in John of Gaunt on England in Richard II, 34 n15

“Master Mistress” of Sonnet 20, 26, 150, 155– 61, 157, 168 puns on “case” as female genitalia in, 146 – 47 Shaw, Samuel, Words Made Visible; or, Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (1679), 16 n45, 209 –15, 211, 218 Shepheardes Calendar (Spenser, 1579), 65, 70, 75 The Shepherd’s Logic (Fraunce, ca. 1585), 48 Sherry, Richard, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) on enallage, 148 n9, 153–54 geographic location of vernacular eloquence in England, importance of, 14 on hyperbaton, 64 n20 on marrying of terms, 139 – 40, 141 names for figures, struggles with, 43 narrative, rhetoric transformed as, 3, 7, 25 on new or secondary nature of vernacular rhetoric, 100 on parenthesis, 98 n18, 100 Robin Hood, use of, 1–3, 6, 7, 119 on soraismus, 180 on use of foreign words in English, 179 n26 A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (Lily and Colet, 1549), 149 nn10 –11 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 104, 111, 115–16 Sidney, Philip. See also Arcadia Defense of Poesy (written ca. 1579/publ. 1595), 173, 179 influence on English letters, 91 n11 use of Orpheus and Amphion fable by, 52 n79 A Sixth Book to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (Beling, 1624/1627), 110 n51 Skinner, Quentin, 11, 15 n39, 15 n42 small size and reach of England and English, 34 –35 Smith, Ian, 12 n31 Smith, John, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (1657/1683), 47, 93 n13, 98 n18, 99, 102, 125, 154 –55, 161 Smith, Thomas, 35 n17 “Snappish Asking” (interrogatio), 45 Sociable Letters (Cavendish, 1664), 191–93 social disorder. See trespass and disorder Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (attrib. Obadiah Walker, 1659), 98, 99

i n d e x      247 Sonnet 20 (Shakespeare), enallage and the “Master Mistress” of, 26, 150, 155– 61, 157, 168 soraismus, 27, 171–200 antirhetorical polemic, rise of, 175–77, 182–88 barbarousness/vulgarity, concerns regarding, 174, 177–78, 182 Cavendish and, 27, 188–200. See also Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle classical rhetoricians on, 171–72, 174 connection of different notions of linguistic abuse through, 173–74 defined, 180 n30 disappearance from English rhetorics of seventeenth century, 175, 182 English rhetoricians on, 174 –75, 180 foreign words, concern over adulteration of English with, 173–75, 177–82 Locke and, 172–73, 187, 189, 194, 196 “the mingle mangle,” Englished as, 46, 174 natural language, as threat to, 174 –75, 177–78, 181–82 Peacham on, 180 Puttenham on, 174, 177–78, 180 Sherry on, 180 spatial logic of rhetoric, 207 hypallage and, 120 –21, 128 hyperbaton and, 57, 67, 68 localization of rhetoric as English space and, 31–32, 33, 34, 44, 46, 57 parenthesis and, 97, 101, 116 n77 translation to new cultural locales, difficulties of, 4 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Lamb, 1808), 101–2, 110, 112 Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), 65, 70, 75, 181 Spenser’s use of fairies in Faerie Queene, 119, 129 Spenser’s use of hyperbaton in Book 6 of Faerie Queene, 26, 70 –84 courtesy, blurring of natural and artificial in, 59 – 60, 73–74, 76 –82 cursus Virgilii of Spenser and, 71, 74 –75 Ireland, English rule in, 74 narrative vagrancy and themes of trespass and delay emphasized by, 72–76, 82–83 naturalization of hyperbaton in English by, 75–76, 83–84, 85 questions raised by, 72–73

relocation of cultural authority via rhetoric in, 58–59 Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society (1667), 183, 185, 187, 193 n70, 206 –7, 209, 214, 218 Star Wars, Yoda’s use of hyperbaton in, 56 n4 Stark, Ryan John, 183 n39, 193 Strohm, Paul, 36 Struever, Nancy, 9 Sturmius, John, A Ritch Storehouse or Treasure Called Nobilitas literata (Browne translation, 1570), 42 style, English manuals’ focus on, 17–19 subject matter (res) and expression (verba), tension between, 19, 32, 33, 173, 190 –91, 200 supplement, problematic of, 96, 101. See also parenthesis Susenbrotus, 15 n39, 16 n47 synchisis, 68 synecdoche, 45 n58, 124 Table (Mosellanus), 16 n47 Terrors of the Night (Nashe, 1594), 129 Teskey, Gordon, 83 thievery and trespass. See trespass and disorder Timber; or, Discoveries ( Jonson, 1641), 47, 93 n13 tmesis, 56, 68, 212 “To Naturall Philosophers” (Cavendish, 1653), 198 Tonkin, Humphrey, 72 n40, 73 Tower of Babel, 205– 6 Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (Henry Walker, 1677), 84, 98, 126 n21 A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Sherry, 1550). See Sherry, Richard, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes trespass and disorder Cavendish, social and linguistic disorderliness associated with, 188–89 changelings, fairies, and elves associated with, 131–33 enallage, gender and social disorder typified by, 148–50 English Civil War and Commonwealth Period, fears conjured by, 176, 182–83, 201, 206 hyperbaton translated as “The Trespasser,” 46, 57, 61, 66 – 67 Robin Hood as signifier of, 1–8, 33, 132 Shaw’s Words Made Visible (1679) dramatizing, 209 –15

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trespass and disorder (continued) soraismus as realization of, 175 Tower of Babel, 205– 6 vernacular eloquence associated with, 6 –7, 14, 207–9 “the Turn,” 213 uninflected nature of English, problem of, 148 unlearned persons, vernacular rhetoric aimed at, 38, 40 – 41 Urania (Wroth, 1621), 115–17 vagrancy as signifier of linguistic unruliness, 49 –52 The Vanity of Dogmatizing (Glanvill, 1661), 186 verba (expression) and res (subject matter), tension between, 19, 32, 33, 173, 190 –91, 200 vernacular eloquence in early modern England, 1–28 antirhetorical polemic, 27–28, 201–18. See also antirhetorical polemic barbarousness/vulgarity, concerns regarding, 2, 4, 12, 20, 127, 130 –31, 174, 177–78, 182, 206, 214 classical Latin rhetoric, disjunction with, 2–3, 11, 21–22, 25–26 decline of, 27–28. See also decline of rhetoric in late seventeenth century dissemination of, 14 –17 emasculating effects of rhetoric, ancient and early modern concerns regarding, 152–53 enallage, 26, 146 –70. See also enallage figures, style, and ornamentation, English manuals’ focus on, 17–25, 173 hypallage, 26, 118– 45. See also hypallage; Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), hypallage in hyperbaton, 26, 55–86. See also hyperbaton; Spenser’s use of hyperbaton in Book 6 of Faerie Queene intellectual inquiry, rhetoric recognized as defining mode of, 8–14, 216 –18 localization of, 25–26, 29 –54. See also localization of rhetoric as English space manuals of rhetoric in English, 9 –12, 16 –19, 209, 219 –21 narrative aspects of, 3, 7. See also narrative, rhetoric transformed as national and imperial aspirations, 12–13

as new or secondary, 99 –100 origin myth of rhetoric and, 52–53, 203–5, 207 parenthesis, 26, 87–117. See also Arcadia; parenthesis problematic schemes and figures, 20 –22 Robin Hood metaphors, significance of, 1–8, 33 self-reflexivity of literary texts considered, 26 –27 soraismus, 27, 171–200. See also Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle; soraismus trespass and disorder, association with, 6 –7, 14, 207–8. See also trespass and disorder Vickers, Brian, 8 n18, 16 n44, 17 n48, 20 n59, 23 n66, 183, 184 n39, 188, 209 n24, 218 n38 Virgil on barbarousness of England, Eclogues, 5 n9 hypallage, use of, in Georgics, 122 hyperbaton used in opening of Aeneid, 21, 56, 58, 62– 63 Phaër’s English translation of Aeneid, 128 Smith’s examples of enallage drawn from, 154 Spenser’s cursus Virgilii, 71, 74 –75 vulgarity of England and English tongue, concerns regarding, 2, 4, 12, 20, 127, 130 –31, 174, 177–78, 182, 206, 214 Walker, Henry, Treatise of Grammatical Figures and Rhetorics Rudiments (1677), 84, 98, 126 n21 Walker, Obadiah, Some Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) attributed to, 98, 99 Wall, Wendy, 128, 130, 131 n38, 134 n45, 142 n60 Waller, Edmund, 200 Waltham, Edward Denny, Baron of, 116 Webbe, William, A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), 52 n79, 66 Wellbery, David, 215–16 Whigham, Frank, 10, 53 n80 White, Hayden, 218 n38 Wife of Bath (Chaucer, late 14th century), 129 –30 n32 Wilkins, John, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), 204 –7, 209, 214, 218 Williams, Raymond, 36

i n d e x      249 Wilson, Thomas, Arte of Rhetoric (1553) academic use of, 10, 11 on amplification, 199 Ciceronian schema, use of, 17 civil order and rhetoric, relationship between, 51–53 “common,” idea of, 33, 39 – 40, 44 on enclosure, 52 n77 foreign words, on vernacular use of, 43– 44, 179 hyperbaton, omission of, 63– 64 localization of rhetoric as English space in, 29 –31, 32, 44 – 45 names for figures, Englishing of, 45 narrative, rhetoric transformed as, 3, 7, 25 origin myth of rhetoric in, 51–52, 203, 204, 207 reprintings of, 16 n47 Robin Hood, use of, 3– 6, 7 as secondary or supplementary to classical discourse, 99 –100 on social disorder and access to rhetoric, 182–83

on use of foreign words in English, 179 vagrancy as signifier of linguistic unruliness, use of, 49, 51–52 women. See also gender; sexuality boy-actors playing, in early modern theater, 160 – 61, 162– 63, 169 “case,” as pun on female genitalia, 115, 116 n75, 146 – 48, 166, 167 fairies and fairy beliefs associated with, 118–19, 129 –31 nonstandard usage, association with, 97 n17, 114 –15, 199 parenthesis and women’s writing, 97 n17, 114 –17 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 on, 158 “woodwoses,” 51, 52, 54 Woolf, Virginia, 176, 188, 189 Words Made Visible; or, Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (Shaw, 1679), 16 n45, 209 –15, 211, 218 Wotton, Henry, 93 n12 Wroth, Mary, 88, 115–17