Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture 9783110201895, 9783110174618

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Heinrich F. Plett Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture

Heinrich F. Plett

Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture

≥ Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

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ISBN 3-11-017461-8 Library of Congress - Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at . 쑔 Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Disk conversion: Meta Systems, Wustermark Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

Foreword

The present publication is the result of more than thirty years’ work on Renaissance rhetoric. This has yielded a complex archive of material on diverse aspects of the subject, a considerable part of which found its way into the lengthy English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995). Certain facets of the broad compass of rhetorical phenomena in the Renaissance have been dealt with in shorter or longer essays, articles, and book reviews - many of them listed in the aforementioned bibliography. Various arguments and results of such previous investigations are integrated into the lines of thought found in the chapters of the present book. It also goes without saying that there is some overlap between chapters; this is not, however, a matter of redundancy, but is meant to serve the purpose of argumentative reinforcement. The illustrations are not inserted as mere decoration but intend to support the verbal argumentation and are often interpreted in the chapters in which they are embedded. Section E is wholly devoted to the presentation and analysis of icons of rhetoric and eloquence. Section D on Poeta Orator: Shakespeare as Poet Orator serves to illustrate the theories presented in section B on Poetica Rhetorica by referring to Shakespeare’s works. It thus broadens the argumentative basis of the concept of rhetorical poetics with additional material. Some individual chapters in section D are based on essays first published in German; their original places of publication are mentioned here together with acknowledgement and thanks for the permission to have them republished here in English translations: “Shakespeare and the ars rhetorica” - first published as “Shakespeare und die Rhetorik,” in: Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch [Tübingen: Niemeyer] 10 (1991), 57-70. “Hamlet’s Speech to the Players” - first published as “Hamlets Rede an die Schauspieler,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West [Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer] 1981, 133-153. “The Rhetoric of Othello” - first published as “‘Action Is Eloquence’: Zur rhetorischen Aktionstypik in Shakespeares Othello,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift [Heidelberg: C. Winter] 63 (1982), 1-21. “Immediacy: The Rhetoric of Presence in Renaissance Drama” - first published as “Gegenwärtigkeit: Über Präsens und Präsenz im Theater der

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Foreword

Renaissance,” in: “Nicht allein mit den Worten”: Festschrift J. Dyck. Ed. T. Müller et al. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995, pp. 114-123. Furthermore it was the unfailing energy of my secretary and assistants that contributed to the successful conclusion of the present work. Antje Dietrich-Strölau, Andrea Grün, Ulrike Küpper, Anika Wassilowsky, and Dr. Jürgen Fröhlich always proved helpful and reliable in providing textual and iconic source-material, proof-reading, and compiling indices. Some of these activities were substantially furthered by Richard Nate, formerly Privatdozent at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and presently professor of English Literature at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In its final stage Dr. Myra Scholz (Amstelveen, Netherlands) critically reviewed the style of the work. H. F. P.

Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VII

Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XI

Introduction: Renaissance Culturology and Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . .

1

A. SCOPE AND GENRES OF RENAISSANCE RHETORIC . . . .

11

B. POETICA RHETORICA Rhetorical Poetics in the Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inventio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Imagination . Dispositio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Genres . . . . Elocutio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Style . . . . . Memoria Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Architecture . Actio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Acting and Poetry .

......

85

. . . . . . 111 . . . . . . 151 . . . . . . 179 . . . . . . 201 . . . . . . 251

C. INTERMEDIAL RHETORIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Pictura Rhetorica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of the Visual Arts and Pictorial Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Musica Rhetorica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Music and Musical Poetry . . 365 D. POETA ORATOR: SHAKESPEARE AS ORATOR POET . . . . 413 Shakespeare and the Ars Rhetorica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Hamlet’s Speech to the Players: Rhetorical Delivery (actio) as Dramatic Acting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435

X

Contents

The Rhetoric of Othello . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Intertextual Rhetoric The Comic Interlude in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream . . . 477 Immediacy The Rhetoric of Presence in Renaissance Drama . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 E. ICONOGRAPHY OF RHETORIC AND ELOQUENCE . . . . . 499 F. INDICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565

Illustrations Frontispiece: Allegorical representation of Rhetorica (1577). Wooden panel in the Hall of Peace, townhall of the city of Münster (Germany). - Photo courtesy Ms Irmingard Gelau. 1. Lintel above the entrance to the School of Rhetoric, University of Salamanca (Spain). 2. Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593): “Rhetorica condotta da Cicerone Romano et Demosthene Atenieˆse. Vesta rosa.” Design of a costume for the Viennese pageant Ringlrennen (1571). 3. Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560): Portrait by Albrecht Dürer. 4. David Chytraeus (1530-1600): Portrait. 5. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465-1536): Portrait by Albrecht Dürer. 6. Thomas Wilson (c. 1525-1581): Title-page of the first edition of The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). 7. Friedrich Riederer (c. 1450-c. 1510): Title-page of Spiegel der waren Rhetoric (1493). 8. Henry Peacham (1546-1634): Title-page of The Garden of Eloquence (1577). 9. John Bulwer (fl. 1644-1654): Chironomia (1644), chirogrammatic plate. 10. Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638): Portrait. 11. Johann Sturm (1507-1589): Portrait. 12. Petrus Ramus (1515-1572): Portrait. 13. Thomas Se´billet: Title-page of Art poe´tique franc¸ois (1548). 14. Martin Opitz (1597-1639): Title-page of Buch der Deutschen Poeterey (1624). 15. Marco Girolamo Vida (1480/85-1566): De Arte Poetica (1517). 16. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586): Title-page of An Apologie for Poetrie (1595).

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Illustrations

17. Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mesnardie`re: Title-page of La Poe¨tique (1640). 18. Stage facX ade for the rederijker performance of the landjuweel at Antwerp (1561). 19. Stage facX ade for a 1582 rederijker performance at Antwerp. 20. Du Bartas (1544-1560): Title-page of the English translation of Les Semaines by Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618). 21. Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525): Margarita Philosophica (1583), representation of the inventive hunt of logic. 22. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465-1536): Title-page of Proverbes or Adagies (1539). 23. Robert Allott: Title-page of England’s Parnassus (1600). 24. George Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie (1589), portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. 25. Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558): Title-page of Poetices libri septem (1561). 26. George Puttenham: Title-page of The Arte of English Poesie (1589). 27. Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525): Margarita Philosophica (1583), “Turris Sapientiae.” 28. Johann-Heinrich Döbelius: Collegium Mnemonicum (1707). 29. German Ars memorativa (c. 1490): “fünf stet” (five places). 30. John Willis: The Art of Memory (1621), memory stage. 31.a. Cosmas Rossellius: Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Hell. 31.b. Cosmas Rossellius: Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Heaven. 32. Johannes Romberch of Kierspe (fl. 1485-1533): Congestorium Artificiose Memorie (1533), “Abatia” (abbey). 33. Johannes Romberch of Kierspe (fl. 1485-1533): Congestorium Artificiose Memorie (1533), Aula, Library, Chapel. 34. E.M.: Ashrea (1665), frontispiece. 35. E.M.: Ashrea (1665), “The Seventh Beatitude.” 36. Hawstead Hill: Lady Drury’s Oratory.

Illustrations

XIII

37. Henry Hawkins: Partheneia Sacra (1633), “hortus conclusus.” 38. The memory artist (woodcut by the “Petrarca artist” [Hans Weidlitz?], Augsburg 1532). 39. Henry Colman: Divine Meditations (1640), “The Altar.” 40. Johannes Buno (1617-1697): Rationarum euangelistarum (1647), first mnemonic image on the gospel of Saint John. 41. John Bulwer (fl. 1644-1654): Chirologia & Chironomia (1648), title-page and frontispiece with Mercury as the God of Eloquence. 42. Francis Quarles (1592-1644): Argalus and Parthenia (1629), the theatricalized title-page. 43. Andrea Alciato (1492-1550): Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1542), emblem no. 111: “In aulicos.” 44. Leonardo da Vinci (1492-1519): Sketch of Judas for The Last Supper fresco in Milan (1495-1497). 45. Daniel Mytens (c. 1590-1647): Painting of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (c. 1618), pointing at his art collection. 46. Franciscus Junius (1598-1677): Frontispiece by Wenzel Hollar after a painting by Anthony van Dyck in De schilderkonst de oude (1641). 47. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528): Melencolia I. 48. Lucas Cranach (1472-1553): The Crucifixion. 49. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665): The Judgement of Solomon. 50. Michael Drayton (1563-1631): Poly-Olbion, or a chorographical Description of Great Britain (1612/1622), title-page. 51. George Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie (1589), table of geometrical pattern poems. 52. Franciscus Lang (1645-1725): Dissertatio de actione scenica (1717), representation of sorrow. 53. Hans Burgkmair (1473-1531): Emperor Maximilian I amidst the musicians of his Hofkapelle. 54. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): L’Orfeo (1609). 55. Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533): Young David playing on a harp before King Saul in order to cure him of melancholy.

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Illustrations

56. Denis Gaultier (1597/1603-1672): La Re´thoriqve des Dievx (c. 1652). 57. Townhall of the city of Münster (Germany), Hall of Peace: Allegory of Music with harp and shawm. 58. Anonymous Venetian: Woodcut from Bonsignori’s edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus playing before the animals. 59. Luis de Milan (16th cent.): El maestro (1536), “El grande Orfeo.” 60. Marin Mersenne (1588-1648): Harmonie Universelle (1636), “Laudate eum in Psalterio & Cithara. Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum.” Psalm 150. 61. Henry Purcell (1659-1695) as Orpheus Britannicus. 62. Elizabethan playhouse. 63. Henry Peacham: Drawing of a pathetic performance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (I.i): “Enter Tamora and pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution.” 64. David Kandel (16th cent.): Pyramus and Thisbe. 65. Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525): Margarita Philosophica (1583), allegory of Rethorica as regina artium. 66. Matthijs de Castelein (1485-1550): De Const van Rhetoriken (1555), allegory of Rhetorica. 67. Stephen Hawes (c. 1475-1511): The Pastime of Pleasure (1509), the School of Rethoryke. 68. Herrad von Landsberg (c. 1130-1195): Hortus Deliciarum, Rhetorica as a teacher of the discipline. 69. Peter Wagner: The Seven Liberal Arts and Theology (Nuremberg, 1493/94). 70. Thomasin von Zerklaere (1185/86-1235): Der welsche Gast (c. 1215). 71. Friedrich Riederer (c. 1450-1508): Spiegel der waren Rethoric (1493), Rhetoric as an elegant and powerful lady. 72. Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506): Rhetorica. 73. Christophoro Giarda (1595-1649): Icones Symbolicae (1626, 21628), Rhetorica. 74. Cesare Ripa (1560?-1625): Iconologia (1603), Persuasione. 75. Cesare Ripa (1560?-1625): Iconologia (1603), Poesia.

Illustrations

XV

76. Christophoro Giarda (1595-1649): Icones Symbolicae (1626, 21628), Poesia. 77. Marius d’Assigny (1643-1717): The Art of Memory (1699), Hercules Gallicus. 78. Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini de gli dei de gli antichi (1624), Hercules Gallicus. 79. Andrea Alciato (1492-1530): Emblemata (1542), emblematic representation of Hercules Gallicus. 80. King Henri IV of France as Hercules Gallicus. 81. Achille Bocchi (1488-1562): Symbolicae Quaestiones (1555), trionfo of Hercules Gallicus. 82. Achille Bocchi (1488-1562): Symbolicae Quaestiones (1555), Pericles as representative of vis eloquentiae. 83. Balthasar Kindermann (1636-1706): Teutscher Wolredner (1688), female Hercules Gallicus. 84. Medieval manuscript: Mercury as a scribe. 85. Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1647), Mercury as inventor of Letters, Music, Geometry, and other arts. 86. Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini de gli dei de gli antichi (1624), a hybrid figure composed of Mercury and Hercules Gallicus. 87. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528): Drawing of Mercury as Hercules Gallicus. 88. Edward Phillips: The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), Mercury and Eros symbolizing the “Arts of Wooing and Complementing.” 89. Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638): Templum Musicum (1664), Mercury and Orpheus. 90. Thomas Morley (1557-1603?): A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), Mercury as a seated old man. 91. Flavius Philostratus: Les Images. Trans. Blaise de Vigene`re (1614), Amphion. 92. Antoine Furetie`re (1619-1688): Nouvelle Alle´gorique (1658), the battle of the troops of Rhe´torique and Galimatias. 93. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): The Battle of the Books (1704). 94. Matthias Holtzwart (c. 1530-1590): Emblematum tyrocinia sive picta poesis Latino-Germanica (1581), picture of Eloquentia.

Introduction Renaissance Culturology and Renaissance Rhetoric In 1648 an anonymous Latin romance published in London under the title Nova Solyma (New Jerusalem) contained a chapter (III.ii) in which symbolical prize pens are awarded to the best students by a college tutor. The prize for rhetoric is made of silver, and the discipline that it symbolizes is explained by the tutor with the following words: “Rhetoric within the due bounds of prudent restraints is a most powerful weapon, and can be turned to the highest uses. How often can it overcome the most prejudiced man present by a subtle chain of reasoning adapted to the abilities of the audience! What power it has to encourage or depress! As by a magic charm, it can alter and attract man’s very power of will. By the varied modulations of voice, and by the appropriate gestures which accompany it, it takes unobserved possession of our two most important senses. Nay, more, by the artful way of its fascination it can often lead a whole audience captive at its will. “Neither conversation nor business, private or public, can be successfully conducted without this great art. A vulgar, paltry speech soon upsets the audience; but when the speaker is dignified both in himself and in his subject, his sonorous periods seem to roll forth like the voice of many thunders round the throne. With what silence and reverence, with what good will and agreement, will a vast crowd listen to an eloquent, grave, and free-spoken speech from a prominent citizen! What valour is kindled in the breasts of the rawest recruits when their General cheers them on by a brave, vigorous address! “Rhetoric cannot be tied down by ordinary rules, though what I have said forms the foundation of the art. It will be found that a noble mind will best follow its own course, and pour forth new figures of speech, new surprises, and new intellectual feats, as the occasion for them arises, for the right expression at the right moment can hardly ever be made a certainty by any rule or by any speaker. Wherefore, to be a perfect orator, one requires not only an exhaustive gift of a voluble tongue, but also a certain special skill and tact in managing his audience. “So long as the great human family and its social instincts remain, so long must Rhetoric too remain with us. She cannot be expelled from our words or even from our thoughts (how often do we play the silent rhetorician there!). She is different with different nations and tribes, but it is just this variety that makes her acceptable and permanent.

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Introduction

“This being so, we so not depend much on models or rules of this art. In our lectures we rather illustrate by selections from the best authors, showing what is required from an orator for a democracy, what for a monarchy, what suits to a town audience, and what to the camp and the army, by what art to soothe the savage barbarians, and, most important of all, by what kind of reasons and what method of eloquence we may bring over to our side the wise and prudent.” 1

The words of this teacher of rhetoric cover almost the entire range of the cultural phenomena of rhetoric: the power of rhetoric in public and private life, its manifestations in oral and written, formal and informal communication, its symbiosis with the character of the orator, its importance for heterogeneous political constitutions, for democracies as well as for monarchies, the ubiquity of rhetoric in all societies and its differentiation according to different cultures. As far as rhetoric has been discussed in Western societies, it is a matter of fact that attention has been focused on Western rhetoric or rhetoric in the European tradition, 2 normally understood as the rhetoric of Southern, Central and Northern Europe and its (post-)colonial descendants, whereas Eastern Europe with its variety of Slavic languages has been largely neglected. 3 Non-European rhetoric has, as a rule, been totally ignored, even though recent tendencies in rhetoric research are preparing the way for a comparative or multicultural rhetoric. 4 Before breaking this new ground of research, it should be asked, however, how far the rhetorical culture of Europe has been explored. With regard to the cultural period which is the subject of the present book the same question has to be narrowed down to the Renaissance.

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2

3

4

NOVÆ SOLYMÆ Libri Sex. LONDONI, Typis JOHANNIS LEGATI, MDCXLVIII. // NOVA SOLYMA / THE IDEAL CITY; OR JERUSALEM REGAINED: An Anonymous Romance Written in the Time of Charles I. Now First Drawn from Obscurity, and Attributed to the Illustrious John Milton. Ed. Rev. W. Begley. Vol. I. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1902, pp. 253-255. Thomas M. Conley makes this idea explicitly the subject of his book Rhetoric in the European Tradition. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1990, rpt. 1994. An illustration of this neglect is the encyclopedic French work Histoire de la rhe´torique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450-1950. Ed. M. Fumaroli. Paris: P.U.F., 1999. In contrast the American Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. T.O. Sloane. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 contains an excellent article “Slavic Rhetoric” (pp. 716-720) by the Czech rhetorician Jirˇi Kraus. George A. Kennedy first launched this idea in Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and CrossCultural Introduction. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Introduction

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The first and by now classical study of Italian Renaissance culture, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien 5 by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), contains six comprehensive chapters on the following topics: I. “Der Staat als Kunstwerk” (The State as a Work of Art), II. “Entwicklung des Individuums” (Development of the Individual), III. “Die Wiedererweckung des Altertums” (The Resuscitation of Antiquity), IV. “Die Entdeckung der Welt und des Menschen” (The Discovery of World and Man), V. “Die Geselligkeit und die Feste” (Sociability and Feasts), VI. “Sitte und Religion” (Morals and Religion). Only a few subchapters of chapter III, however, deal with individual aspects of rhetoric: its classical sources or its contemporary manifestations in diplomacy, politics, epistolography, historiography, and homiletics in a country that substantially contributed to the rediscovery and propagation of rhetoric in other European countries. A century later Peter Burke’s important study Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy 6 offers valuable chapters on art, architecture, music, and literature, investigating their social conditions and functions; but the role of rhetoric in Renaissance culture, which would have proved an essential item in this context, is entirely neglected. About the same time a more ambitious book which claimed to cover Renaissance culture at large was published by the noted Italian scholar Eugenio Garin under the title La cultura del Rinascimento. 7 It deals with the rediscovery of the ancients, among them Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and other classical authorities on rhetoric, and continues with the description of libraries, education, the New Science, national literatures, the arti belle (architecture, sculpture, and painting), every now and then taking a glimpse at rhetoric; but a coherent outline of its origin, distribution and social importance is missing. The second and third decades of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of cultural theory and history in Germany that left its traces in representations of the Renaissance. Thus books like Walter F. Schirmer’s Antike, Renaissance und Puritanismus 8 and Paul Meissner’s posthumously published England im Zeitalter von Humanismus, Renaissance und Reformation 9 offer a broad 5

6 7 8

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Modern edition by K. Hoffmann. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1985. English trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Introd. P. Burke. Notes P. Murray. London / New York: Penguin, 1990; New York: Modern Library, 2002. Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy. London: Batsford, 1972. Eugenio Garin, La cultura del Rinascimento. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. Walter F. Schirmer, Antike, Renaissance und Puritanismus: Eine Studie zur englischen Literaturgeschichte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. München: Hueber, 1924. - Shakespeare’s rhetoric is the subject of Schirmer’s lecture “Shakespeare und die Rhetorik” held in 1935; it is reprinted in the author’s Kleine Schriften. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1950, pp. 83-108. Paul Meissner, England im Zeitalter von Humanismus, Renaissance und Reformation. Ed. H. Kauter. Heidelberg: Kerle, 1952.

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Introduction

overview of cultural phenomena in the Renaissance, such as the rediscovery of the classical authors, the humanist movement, antagonisms and syncretisms of classical and Christian traditions, grammar-school and university education, the uses of mythology in literature and the arts, Neoplatonism and other philosophical revivals with their rivalries and symbioses, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the New Science, the discovery of new worlds. Though these extensive studies are concentrated on the cultural developments in Renaissance England and contain no coherent outlines of rhetoric, they nevertheless draw attention to its importance in their representations, whenever they deem it necessary. English publications written in the wake of the history of ideas movement like E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) or Basil Willey’s The Seventeenth-Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934) placed their major emphasis on philosophical ideas, which led to total exclusion of the disciplina pedestris of rhetoric. In the mid-1930’s Hardin Craig tried to catch the spirit of the Renaissance, but in a more down-to-earth manner, in a book whose florid title The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (1950) 10 at first sight seems to approach its subject in a way comparable to that of Tillyard and Willey. But in contrast to these authors, Craig deals with logic and rhetoric, topics that were not even touched upon in the aforementioned works. In Chapter VII, called (after a quotation from Bacon) “The Eloquence of Persuasions,” he sees himself inspired by John Mathews Manly’s study Chaucer and the Rhetoricians (1926) 11 which introduced rhetoric as an instrument of analysis for medieval English literature and makes the following statement with regard to the English Renaissance: It should also be said that, as a whole, Elizabethan writers entered more strongly than the writers of Chaucer’s time into the rhetoric of public speaking, the oration and the declamation. Possibly their greatest interest was in oratory and its principles as applied to politics and theology; these branches of rhetoric they reflect widely and constantly. Shakespeare introduced formal orations into Julius Caesar and many set speeches before battle into the history plays. According to Stow, when the soldiers were within a mile of the town of Axel, on which (6 July 1586) they were about to make an attack, Sidney addressed his troops after the ancient mode, and exhorted them to acquit themselves in the approaching battle

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11

Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936; rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975. John Mathews Manly, Chaucer and the Rhetoricians. London: Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926; rpt. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.

Introduction

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like Englishmen, ‘which oration of his did so link the minds of the people that they desired rather to die in that service than to live in the contrary.’ 12

Such a statement does not make literary rhetoric appear an artificial procedure with a reality deficit but grounds it deeply in the pragmatics of social and political life. With William G. Crane’s Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style (1937) the first book to provide a broad overview of the genres and manifestations of rhetoric appeared at about the same time, with its prime purpose of ascertaining the meaning of the term wit, “as it was used with reference to literary skill in the age of Elizabeth,” 13 and its further aim of creating a theoretical basis for the comprehension of Elizabethan prose style. The book contains chapters on English commonplace books (III), the role of rhetoric in education, the theory of imitation and its relation to amplification and wit (VI), English rhetorics of the sixteenth century (VII), books of instruction for the courtier (IX), the essay and the character as rhetorico-literary prose genres (X), and narrative discourse (XII). As can be gathered from this list, rhetoric is here not only considered in its intrinsic constitution and development, but also in its influence upon literature and, more than that, in its impact upon important socio-cultural domains like the feudal court in the Renaissance. The main emphasis is on the British development, yet Crane’s book also encompasses significant aspects of the Continental Renaissance. The works of Craig and Crane deal mainly with literary rhetoric, and it is this connection that represents the focus of the earliest modern treatments of rhetoric. In the United States research on Renaissance rhetoric began with two studies that prove valuable aids to the literary scholar even nowadays: Donald Lemen Clark’s Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance: A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Criticism (1922) 14 and Charles Sears Baldwin’s Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France, and England, 1400-1600 (1939). 15 C.S. Baldwin’s treatise is thus a 12 13

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Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, p. 163. William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964 (1937), p. 1. Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance: A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Fifty years later a terminological dictionary was published by Ursula Kuhn, English Literary Terms in Poetological Texts of the Sixteenth Century. PhD diss., Universität Münster, 1972; Salzburg: Universität, Institut für Engl. Sprache und Literatur, 1974. Charles Sears Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France, and England, 1400-1600. Ed. & introd. D.L. Clark. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959. The posthumously pub-

6

Introduction

comparative one encompassing both the English and the Continental Renaissance, with the exception of Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. The first chapters of the work focus on general topics of the vernacular languages and of imitation, the subsequent ones deal with the literary genres and their subclassifications, with Renaissance poetics and types of prose narratives such as tale, history, and essay. Donald Lemen Clark can also claim the merit of having written a book which combines biography and literary works of one of the greatest English poets in a rhetorical investigation. His treatise John Milton at St. Paul’s School (1948) 16 marks a culmination of his many contributions to the history of rhetoric. 17 An even greater achievement in literary rhetoric appeared four years earlier with Thomas Whitfield Baldwin’s two-volume work William Shakspere’s “Small Latine & Lesse Greeke” (1944). 18 This masterful study takes its starting-point from Ben Jonson’s negative aphorism on Shakespeare’s education and sets out to refute it by a thorough exploration of the conditions of learning in the Age of William Shakespeare. This manifests itself in richly documented chapters on the “evolution of the grammar school curriculum in the sixteenth century” (II) and “Shakspere’s grammar school training” (III), in which such subchapters as “Rhetorical Training” provide an outline of the books of logic and rhetoric in use in English schools and universities, as for instance the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s Topica, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the rhetorics of Erasmus (De Copia, etc.), and Susenbrotus’ epitome of schemes and tropes. 19 Furthermore under the heading “Prose Composition” Shakespeare’s epistles, “themes,” declamations, and orations are traced back to their rhetorical origins. 20 The book closes with chapters on Shake-

16

17

18

19

20

lished book is a continuation of the author’s previously published works: Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Interpreted from Representative Works (1924/1971) and Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (to 1400): Interpreted from Representative Works (1928/1972). 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; rpt. New York: Archon Books, 1964. Cf. also Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957. - For his other publications, see H.F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995, pp. 85, 222, 293-294, 341, 357, 439. - A recent study which focuses on rhetorical education in English grammar schools and universities is Peter Mack’s work Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. T[homas] W[hitfield] Baldwin, William Shakspere’s SMALL LATINE & LESSE GREEKE. Urbana, Ill., 1944; 21956. T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s SMALL LATINE & LESSE GREEKE, vol. II, pp. 1238. T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s SMALL LATINE & LESSE GREEKE, vol. II, pp. 239-379.

Introduction

7

speare’s “Latin Poets” (Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, Martial, etc.), “Moral History,” “Moral Philosophy,” and the “Greek Curriculum.” 21 The quintessence of this kind of factual research by a profound expert in the history of Renaissance education, rhetoric, and the works of Shakespeare may be termed positivistic: a heaping up of facts and figures without establishing interrelations between rhetoric, literature, and society. Nevertheless this compendium of carefully researched information represents an imposing achievement, a reference work of outstanding originality and reliability, a summary, as it were, of the rhetorical scholarship of English and American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. 22 The second half of the twentieth century witnessed an international revival of rhetoric to a degree unknown since the cultural period of the Renaissance. In the wake of this revival an International Society for the History of Rhetoric was founded in 1978 that together with its official publication organ, the journal Rhetorica, propagated rhetoric as an interdisciplinary and intercultural discipline of the humanities. Furthermore bibliographies on Renaissance and later rhetoric were compiled, 23 Renaissance rhetoric conferences were organized and followed by publications of the papers presented there, 24 research reports, and review articles, 25 as well monographs and essays too numerous to mention here. 21

22

23

24

25

T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s SMALL LATINE & LESSE GREEKE, vol. II, pp. 562-661. Cf. e. g. the editions of, and essays on, Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553), as registered in Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics, pp. 41-43. Cf. e. g. Dieter Breuer & Günter Kopsch, “Rhetoriklehrbücher des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” in: Rhetorik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.-20. Jahrhundert. Ed. H. Schanze Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1974, pp. 217-355 (Renaissance: pp. 221-292); James J. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue of Works on Rhetorical Theory from the Beginning of Printing to A.D. 1700, with Special Attention to the Holdings of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. With a Select Basic Bibliography of Secondary Works on Renaissance Rhetoric. New York / London: Garland, 1981; H.F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995. Cf. e. g. Thomas O. Sloan / Raymond B. Waddington (eds.), The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1974; Brian Vickers (ed.), Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982; James J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1983; H.F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993; id. (ed.), Renaissance-Poetik / Renaissance Poetics. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1994; Peter Mack (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Cf. Don P. Abbott, “The Renaissance,” in: The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Modern Rhetoric. Ed. W.B. Horner. Columbia, Mo. / London: University of Missouri Press, 1983, rev. ed. 1990, chap. 3; H.F. Plett, “Texte und Interpretationen: Zum Forschungsstand

8

Introduction

The attention generally given to rhetoric made itself felt in several cultural histories of the Renaissance, where it appeared as an integral factor. Heinz Otto Burger’s far-reaching German treatise Renaissance - Humanismus - Reformation: Deutsche Literatur im europäischen Kontext (1969) 26 is, according to its subtitle, confined to a representation of German literature in its European context. However, this context is expanded to encompass the entire cultural history of the Renaissance, thereby communicating valuable insights into the rhetoric of Humanism and Reformation and its propagators: Desiderius Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, Rudolph Agricola, Konrad Celtis, and others. Ten years later Jacob Burckhardt’s idea of a cultural history of the Italian Renaissance was again revived, this time by the Russian scholar Leonid M. Batkin whose study Die italienische Renaissance: Versuch einer Charakterisierung eines Kulturtyps (1979) 27 tried to extract typological insights from the mass of factual material. Starting from a sociological perspective, he first analysed the humanists as a specific cultural group, then interpreted the lifestyle of the period as an expression of a mental attitude, furthermore treated the relationship of Antiquity and Christianity, and finally discussed the problem of cultural periodization: Into this series of chapters he inserted one on the dialogue (IV), a rhetorical phenomenon typical of Renaissance communication and the social practice of conversation of the succeeding centuries. 28 In her recent cultural history entitled Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996) Lisa Jardine, herself an expert rhetorician, does not devote a specific chapter to rhetoric but throughout uses descriptive categories which may be found in rhetoric as well. 29

26

27

28

29

von Rhetorik und Poetik der englischen Renaissance", Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 237 (1985), 77-97. An earlier survey of research was published by Walter Jens in his article “Rhetorik” for the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Merker & Stammler. Vol. III. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1971, pp. 432-456. Heinz Otto Burger, Renaissance - Humanismus - Reformation: Deutsche Literatur im europäischen Kontext. Bad Homburg v.d.H. / Berlin /Zürich: Gehlen, 1969. - The publication by A.J. Krailsheimer (ed.), The Continental Renaissance, 1500-1600. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 also focuses on literature, but without attributing a major part to rhetoric. Leonid M. Batkin, Die italienische Renaissance: Versuch einer Charakterisierung eines Kulturtyps. Basel: Stroemfeld, 1979. The book evidently exists only as a German version. The English translation of the title reads: “The Italian Renaissance: An Attempt at Characterizing a Type of Culture.” On conversation, its theory and practice, see also Christoph Strosetzki, Konversation und Literatur: Zu Regeln der Rhetorik und Rezeption in Spanien und Frankreich. Frankfurt/M. / New York: Lang, 1988; Dieter A. Berger, Die Konversationskunst in England, 1660-1740: Ein Sprachphänomen und seine literarische Gestaltung. München: Fink, 1978. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Introduction

9

One of the broadest treatments of Renaissance culture as a whole can be found in Albert Rabil’s anthology of essays on Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy (1988). 30 It treats the manifold facets of Humanism, but attributes an important role to rhetoric, a discipline which permeates most manifestations of this revolutionary intellectual movement. Other anthologies often neglect rhetoric 31 in favour of other cultural aspects, though the evidence of its importance is strong, as the meanwhile impressive multitude of rhetorical studies has demonstrated. Some Renaissance reference works contain results of these studies - to the profit of their users. 32 The present study attempts to elucidate the cultural significance of rhetoric in the Renaissance; it does so in four sections, each of which is subdivided into several chapters: A. SCOPE AND GENRES OF RENAISSANCE RHETORIC B. POETICA RHETORICA: FOUNDATIONS OF RHETORICAL POETICS IN THE RENAISSANCE C. INTERMEDIAL RHETORIC D. POETA ORATOR: SHAKESPEARE AS POET ORATOR E. ICONOGRAPHY OF RHETORIC AND ELOQUENCE 30

31

32

Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1988. Of importance are Chapters 1. “Renaissance Humanism and Classical Antiquity” (Paul Oskar Kristeller), 4. “Petrarch, Cicero, and the Classical Pagan Tradition” (Maristella Lorch), 7. “The Significance of ‘Civic Humanism’ in the Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance” (Albert Rabil, Jr.), 13. “Lorenzo Valla” (Maristella Lorch), 17. “Humanism in England” (Richard J. Schoeck), 21. “Humanism in Germany” (Noel L. Brann), 23. “Desiderius Erasmus” (Albert Rabil, Jr.), 26. “Humanism in the Slavic Cultural Tradition with Special Reference to the Czech Lands” (Rado L. Lencek), 27. “Humanism and Education” (Benjamin G. Kohl), 29. “Renaissance Grammar” (W. Keith Percival), 30. “Humanism and Poetics” (Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli), 33. “Humanism and Rhetoric” (John Monfasani), 34. “Humanism and Jurisprudence” (Richard J. Schoeck), 37. “Humanism and the Protestant Reformation” (Lewis W. Spitz), 38. Humanism and Art” (David Cast), 39. “Humanism and Music” (Claude V. Palisca), 40. “Humanism and Science” (Pamela O. Long). Cf. the otherwise very useful works by Charles S. Singleton (ed.), Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968, rpt. 1970, and, recently, Anthony Levi (ed.), Renaissance and Reformation: Its Intellectual Genesis. New Haven, N.J.: Yale University Press, 2002. The latter compendium intersperses remarks on the role of rhetoric in pertinent chapters. Cf. e. g. Ilan Rachun, The Renaissance: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. London: Octopus / New York: MayFlower, 1979, where only an entry on the Rhe´toriqueurs can be found, and above all Marjorie Donker / George M. Muldrow, Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance. Westport, Conn. / London: Greenwood Press, 1962, a very valuable reference work for the Renaissance scholar. The anthology of articles on Renaissance Humanism. Ed. J. Kraye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, contains a chapter (5.) by Peter Mack on “Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic” (pp. 82-99).

10

Introduction

Figure 1: Lintel above the entrance to the School of Rhetoric, University of Salamanca (Spain).

Section A and its subchapters proceed systematically according to the Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis) of rhetoric. Section B analyses the contributions of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio to rhetorical poetics. Section C presents Shakespeare as rhetorician in some of his ‘rhetorical’ plays. Section D discusses the rhetorical intermediality of theory and practice in music and the visual arts. Section E demonstrates visual intermediality on a metarhetorical level by a gallery of expressive artistic manifestations of rhetoric and eloquence together with their explanations. An inscription on a plaque (Figure 1) fixed above the lintel of the entrance to the School of Rhetoric in the time-honoured University of Salamanca (Spain) can be regarded as a kind of motto to the following study. It reads in English translation: For the purpose of providing ornate and lucid speech for expressing the mind’s secret thoughts and tempering them with gracefulness and elegance, the (academic) senate has opened this School of Eloquence.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

The rhetoric of the Renaissance 1 represents a decisive climax in the history of Western rhetoric. It does not, however, emerge as an abrupt cultural turn but gradually develops in several stages of imitation and innovation. Having reached its telos in a widely diversified range of persuasive activities both in theory and practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it continues to exert its influence through the end of the eighteenth century, when the cultural periods of Sturm und Drang and Romanticism witness its gradual decline. 2

I. Renaissance Rhetoric and the Renascences of Rhetoric Renascences of rhetoric recur at almost regular intervals in the history of Western culture. 3 They are preceded and followed by almost equally regular periods of rhetorical decline either caused by neglect or by deliberate suppression. Renascences of rhetoric were initiated by Cicero at the end of the Roman Republic, - by St. Augustine and other Church Fathers in late Antiquity, - by Alcuin under the reign of Charlemagne; - by Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Lord Kames during the 18th century Scottish Renaissance, and by linguists, theorists of style, semioticians, and literary historians in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrasted to these renascences, rhetoric regained an importance in the time span from about the middle of the fourteenth to 1

2

3

A survey of scholarship up to the early 1980’s is given by Don Paul Abbott in chapter 3 (“The Renaissance”) of Winifred Bryan Horner’s meritorious book The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Columbia / London: University of Missouri Press, 1983, pp. 75-100. - Bibliographies were compiled by James J. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue of Works on Rhetorical Theory from the Beginning of Printing to A.D. 1700, with Special Attention to the Holdings of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. With a Select Basic Bibliography of Secondary Works on Renaissance Rhetoric. New York / London: Garland, 1981 (2nd edition by J. J. Murphy and Lawrence Green: Renaissance Rhetoric: A Short-Title Catalogue. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); James J. Murphy & Martin Davies, “Rhetorical Incunabula: A Short-Title Catalogue of Texts Printed to the Year 1500,” Rhetorica 15/4 (1997), 355-470; and H.F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995. The continuity of rhetoric even during these cultural periods, though to a lesser degree, is testified by such authors as Klaus Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik: Vier Aufsätze zur Ideengeschichte der Vormoderne. Bad Homburg v. d. H. / Berlin / Zürich: Gehlen, 1968, esp. p. 46 ff., and P.W.K. Stone, The Art of Poetry, 1750-1820: Theories of Poetic Composition and Style in Late Neo-Classic and Early Romantic Periods. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul / New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Similarly Erwin Panofsky ascertains both recurrence and flourishing of art concepts and art motifs in his study Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. London: Paladin, 1970.

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A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

about the middle of the seventeenth century, which it did not possess before or after. Many iconographical representations furnish evidence of this. One item can be found in Gregor Reisch’s encyclopedic work Margarita Philosophica (1507). In it a woodcut depicts Rhetorica (Figure 65) personified as a sovereign queen dressed in a splendid garb with a sword in her hand and a lily issuing from her mouth, seated on a royal throne and surrounded by the ancient authorities of natural and moral philosophy (Aristotle, Seneca), of poetry (Virgil), historiography (Sallust), and law (Justinian), indeed a truly majestic regina artium et scientiarum. 4 In the eyes of the humanists, rhetoric is equivalent to culture as such, the perennial and substantial essence of man, his greatest ontological privilege. Renaissance rhetoric was, however, not confined to the cultural e´lite of the humanists but became a substantial factor of a broad cultural movement which had great impact on the educational system of the humanities and encompassed increasingly more social groups and strata. It was not limited to Italy, from whence it took its origin, but spread to northern, western and eastern Europe and from there to the overseas colonies in North and Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

II. Rhetoric Rediscovered: The Academic (Humanist) Strain 1. Manuscripts Renaissance rhetoric originated in the rediscovery of some manuscripts of classical rhetoric by humanists: 5 of two speeches of Cicero and his correspondence with Atticus, by Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374); of Cicero’s Familiar Epistles, by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1404); of the complete text of Cicero’s De Oratore in a manuscript containing also his Brutus and Orator, by 4

5

For an analysis of this icon, see Birgit Stolt, Wortkampf: Frühneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetorischen Praxis. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1974, p. 789 ff. and section E in the present book. On humanism and its attitude towards rhetoric in general, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York / Evanston / London: Harper & Row, 1961; Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 497-514; Fabio Cossutta, Gli umanisti e la retorica. Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984; Marc Fumaroli (ed.), Histoire de la rhe´torique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450-1950. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999, especially the contributions of Cesare Vasoli (chap. 2: “L’humanisme rhe´torique en Italie au XVe sie`cle”), JeanClaude Margolin (chap. 4: “ L’apoge´e de la rhe´torique humaniste”), and Jean-Louis Fournel (chap. 6: “Rhe´torique et langue vulgaire en Italie au XVIe sie`cle: la guerre, l’amour et les mots”); Pierre Laurens, “La me´diation humaniste: Instauratio totius artis rhetoricae,” in: Laurent Pernot & Marc Fumaroli (eds.), Actualite´ de la rhe´torique. Paris: Klincksieck, 2002, pp. 59-69.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

15

Figure 2: Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593): “Rhetorica condotta da Cicerone Romano et Demosthene Atenieˆse. Vesta rosa.” Design of a costume for the Viennese pageant Ringlrennen (1571).

16

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Gerardo Landriani, bishop of Lodi, in 1421; and of the integral text of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), a papal secretary, at the monastery of St. Gallen on his way to the Council of Constance in 1416. 6 As a rhetorician Cicero was not unknown in the Middle Ages; his fame derived mainly from the rather unimaginative technical treatise De inventione and the spurious Rhetorica ad Herennium attributed to him. In Petrarca’s studies his image changed, and he became known as the witty writer of charming conversations composed in an elegant Latin style. Moreover, he now emerged both as the author of theoretical writings on rhetoric and simultaneously as its practitioner as a lawyer and statesman, thus uniting the qualities of both vita activa and vita contemplativa. 7 In summa, he became the personified rhetoric as such (Figure 2). 8

2. Editions A further stage in the revival of rhetoric occurred when the rediscovered Latin and Greek manuscripts were printed thus opening up the possibility of disseminating their knowledge all over Europe. Cicero’s De Oratore, for instance, was published as a single edition at Subiaco (1465?), Rome (1468), Venice (1470?), Naples (1475), Milan (1477), and went through at least 18 further editions by the 1696 Oxford edition. 9 Less attention was given to Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Declamationes of which an edition was published at Frankfort in 1629: QVINTILIANI / INSTITVTIONVM / ORATORIARVM / Libri duodecim. / […] / Accesserunt etiam Quintilianorum / DECLAMATIONES. An edition of Isocrates’s orations and letters was published in London in 1615: ISOCRATIS / ORATIONES ET / Epistolae. / 6

7

8 9

Cf. Robert R. Bolgar The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries. New York / Evanston / London: Harper & Row, 1964 (1954), pp. 275-276. The cultural movement called Ciceronianism has generated many noteworthy publications, among others, Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del Ciceronianismo e di altre questioni literarie nell’eta della Rinascenza. Torino: Loescher, 1885; Thaddäus Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte. Leipzig / Berlin: Teubner, 41929, Stuttgart: Teubner, 51967 (1897); Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero. Davis, Cal.: Hermagoras, 1991 (1910). Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric, pp. 79-80. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric, p.79. - From the English viewpoint, a specific, though noteworthy, contribution to the Ciceronian debate was made by Gabriel Harvey in his lecture Ciceronianus held in his function as praelector of Rhetoric at Cambridge University in 1575; see the modern edition with an introduction and notes by Harold S. Wilson and an English translation by Clarence A. Forbes: Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus” (1577). Lincoln, Neb.: The University Press, 1945.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

17

EDITIO POSTREMA. / LONDINI, / Apud haeredes Ioann. Norton, & Ioannem Bill. / M.DC.XV. An important collection of Rhetores Graeci appeared at the Aldine press 10 in Venice from 1508 to 1509 in two folio volumes containing, according to their Latin table of contents, the following works: Apthonii Sophistae progymnasmata; Hermogenes ars rhetorica; Aristotelis rhetoricorum ad Theodecten libri tres; Eiusdem rhetorice ad Alexandrum; Eiusdem ars poetica; Sopatri Rhetoris quaestiones de comp[on]endis declamationibus in causis praecipuae judicialibus; Cyri Sophistae differentiae statum; Dionysii Alicamesei ars rhetorica; Demetri Phaleri de interpretatione; Alexanderi Sophistae de figuris sensus et dictionis; Adnotationis innominati de figuris rhetoricis; Menandri Rhetoris divisio causarum in genere demonstrativo; Aristeidus de civili oratione; Eiusdem de simplici oratione; Apsini de arte rhetorica praecepta. 11

The sheer quantity of these texts by Greek authors, who for the greater part are perhaps hardly known to present-day specialists, displays the immense interest and even enthusiasm aroused by the rediscovery of this cultural terra incognita. 3. Translations Lack of linguistic competence led to another stage of rhetorical revival: the translating of the classical texts into the vernacular to render them accessible to those readers who, as in Ben Jonson’s famous dictum about his rival Shakespeare, knew “little Latine & lesse Greeke.” But first of all, the poor knowledge of Greek among humanists raised the necessity of having the relevant Greek texts translated into Latin, the language of the international respublica literaria. Thus Aristotle’s Rhetoric was translated into Latin by Georgius Trapezuntius (Paris, 1475?; Lyons, 1541). Italian translations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics were produced by Bernardo Segni in 1549 under the title Rettoricca, et poetica d’Aristotile. Tradotte […] di greco in lingua vulgare fiorentino da Bernardo Segni. 12 Another Italian translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric was published under the title RETTORICA / D’ARISTOTILE / FATTA IN

10

11 12

On the cultural and economic importance of the printing-press of Aldus Manutius, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric, pp. 254-255. Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric, p. 31. - English translation: “The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. Translated from Greek into the Florentine Vernacular by Bernardo Segni.”

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A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

LINGVA TOSCANA / DAL COMMENDATORE / ANNIBAL CARO. / con Priuilegio. / IN VENETIA, / Al segno della Salamandra, / M D LXX. 13 A notable English specimen is Thomas Wilson’s translation of The three orations in favour of the Olynthians by Demosthenes, “chiefe orator among the Grecians” (London, 1570). 14 4. Commentaries A third stage of the revival of the rhetorical classics was the hermeneutic procedure of producing annotations and commentaries. Of foremost importance are the glosses and commentaries on Cicero’s rhetorical works, which in turn show several stages of erudition and complexity. 15 But also Aristotle’s Rhetoric was frequently annotated and commented upon in learned humanistic text editions. 16

III. Rhetoric Reinvented: From Imitation to Emulation In the wake of the humanist rediscovery and interpretation of the classical treatises of rhetoric, new treatises were composed by the humanists them-

13

14

15

16

Translation: “The Rhetoric of Aristotle translated into the Tuscan language by Annibal Caro by privilege. At Venice at the sign of the Salamander.” Annibale Caro (1507-1566) was an Italian humanist and poet who wrote Rime, Lettere familiari in the style of Petrarca, the Italian prose comedy Gli Straccioni, and a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid posthumously published. On the French development, see Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and Their Humanist Antecedents. Gene`ve: Droz, 1984, esp. chap. III.1: “Translation and the Rhetorical Tradition” (pp. 186-198). For Renaissance commentators on Cicero, see John O. Ward, “Renaissance Commentators on Ciceronian Rhetoric,” in: Renaissance Eloquence. Ed. J.J. Murphy, pp. 12-73; id., Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1995. - Juan Luis Vives’s commentary on the Rhetorica ad Herennium has been made accessible in Latin text and English translation in the anthology of his Early Writings. Vol. II. Ed. J. IJsewijn et al. Leiden: Brill, 1991, pp. 126-137. Cf. the series of articles by Charles H. Lohr, “Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries”, registered in Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics, B.1.8 (pp. 29-30). Of great value for the history of rhetorical scholarship in the Renaissance are John Rainolde’s Oxford lecture notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric edited and translated with a commentary by Lawrence D. Green, John Rainolde’s Lectures on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric.” Newark: University of Delaware Press / London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

19

Figure 3: Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560): Portrait by Albrecht Dürer.

selves, some of these in a close imitation of their ancient models, others freely adapted in order to adjust them to the exigencies of the time. As bibliographical research has shown, Renaissance rhetoricians sometimes wrote several treatises which they published in different forms - as a textbook, as part of an anthology of treatises, as extensively annotated folios or quartos as well as in epitomized versions or tabulae, first in Neo-Latin and later in vernacular translations. It seems possible that their total number runs up to several thousands by 1650. Illustrative examples of how a humanist wrote and revised a rhetorical work are the three treatises of the praeceptor Germaniae Philipp Melanchthon (i. e. Schwartzerdt [1497-1560]), an ardent supporter and propagator of the

20

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Reformation (Figure 3). 17 His rhetoric first appeared at Basel in 1519 under the title PHILIPPI / MELANCHTHONIS DE / RHETORICA LIBRI TRES. It follows the classical (Ciceronian) schema of the five duties (officia) of the orator: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio, of which the latter two receive no full treatment; but it also includes, as innovative additions, chapters on hermeneutics (“De enarratorio genere,” “De commentandi ratione”) and sermons (“De sacris concionibus”). A characteristic feature that pervades the whole of this rhetoric is the emphasis placed on dialectic the study of which its author recommends to his students time and again. For this treatise was composed as a textbook for the University of Tübingen, where Melanchthon taught as one of the first professors of rhetoric. It is therefore no small wonder that a second version of the same textbook bears the programmatic title Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521). Smaller in size than its predecessor, indeed consisting only of a few leaves, it is confined to precise terminological definitions of the rhetorical categories and short illustrative examples that can easily be memorized. Its overall disposition is, with minor alterations, patterned after De rhetorica, but, by contrast, the section on elocutio is enlarged (from 11 per cent up to 56,5 per cent), thus illustrating the importance humanists attached to style. The same practice is observed in the last revision of the original work, the Elementa rhetorices of 1542, with the difference that it is divided into two books, the first dealing with inventio and dispositio, the second with elocutio alone. Here, as in his first version, Melanchthon emphasizes the relevance of dialectic and now refers to his own work. The Elementa rhetorices were immensely popular in their day, as is documented by the large number of editions, a total of 33 by Melanchthon’s death in 1560.

17

Cf. Joachim Knape, Philipp Melanchthons “Rhetorik.” Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993; Olaf Berwald, Philipp Melanchthons Sicht der Rhetorik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994 - Further publications: Karl Hartfelder, Philipp Melanchthon als Praeceptor Germaniae. Berlin: Hofmann & Co., 1889 (rpt. Nieuwkoop, 1972); M.B. Aune, To Move the Heart: Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetorical View of Rite and its Implications for Contemporary Ritual Theory. San Francisco: Christian Universities Press, 1994; Hans Scheible, “Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560): Melanchthons Werdegang,” in: Humanismus im deutschen Südwesten: Biographische Profile. Ed. P.G. Schmidt. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2000, pp. 221-238 [with bibliography]; Gerhard Binder (ed.), Philipp Melanchthon: Exemplarische Aspekte seines Humanismus. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1998; Carl J. Classen, “Die Bedeutung der Rhetorik für Melanchthons Interpretation profaner und biblischer Texte,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologischhistorische Klasse, No. 5 (1998), pp. 235-272; Jürgen Leonhardt (ed.), Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts. Universität Rostock: Universitätsbibliothek, 1997 (contains an excellent collection of essays on Melanchthon’s textbooks, among them an informative contribution by Olaf Berwald, “Philipp Melanchthons Rhetoriklehrbücher” [pp. 111-122]).

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

21

Figure 4: David Chytraeus (1530-1600): Portrait.

Melanchthon’s influence is shown in such transformations of his Elementa as the Praecepta rhetoricae inventionis (1556) by David Chytraeus (1530-1600), first a student and later a professor and rector at the University of Rostock,

22

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Germany, who reworked Melanchthon’s treatise as a textbook of precepts for courses of rhetoric (Figure 4). Restricting its content to inventio, the first part of the ars, he proposed a total of four classes of rhetorical genres (causae): didactic, demonstrative, deliberative, and judicial, the first being Melanchthon’s addition to the classical triad: Didaskaliko¡n seu doctrinale [genus] monstrat rationem tractandi omnes res, de quibus alii docendi sunt. Demonstrativum continet personarum, factorum et rerum descriptiones, laudationes et vituperationes. Deliberativum rationem petendi, consolandi, adhortandi, suadendi etc. indicat. Iudiciale tractat controversias forenses. 18

The popularity of Melanchthon’s rhetorical concept is also evident by its skeletonized summary in the tabulae of Petrus Mosellanus (i. e. Peter Schade [1393-1424]), who was one of the great epitomizers of the time. His In Philippi Melanchthonis Rhetoricae Tabulae appeared shortly after the publication of the Institutiones Rhetoricae and went through several editions. On the whole, the three versions of Melanchthon’s rhetorical concept, together with their numerous editions, as well as Mosellanus’ Tabulae, amply demonstrate the wide dissemination of Neo-Latin rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, particularly when it was associated with a general practical purpose, in this case with Protestant education at grammar schools and universities. Nonetheless, Melanchthon’s rhetoric has not been made generally accessible in popular vernacular translations.

IV. Rhetoric Differentiated: The Rhetorical Genres The growing complexity of social life in the Renaissance required the availability of diversified rhetorical manuals supplying practical and suitable techniques of persuasion for each profession and occasion. The printed manuals

18

David Chytraeus, Praecepta rhetoricae inventionis / Vorschriften der Rhetorik [etc.]. Ed. with introduction and (German) translation by N. Thurn et al.. Universität Rostock: Universitätsbibliothek, 2000, pp. 34-35. English translation: “The didactic or instructive genre shows the method of handling all the topics other people have to be taught. The demonstrative genre contains descriptions, praises and vituperations of persons, actions and things. The deliberative genre refers to the method of beseeching, consoling, admonishing and persuading. The judicial genre deals with forensic controversies.” On the author, see Karl-Heinz Glaser (ed.), David und Nathan Chytraeus: Humanismus im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Ubstadt-Weiher: Verl. Regionalkultur, 1993; id., David Chytraeus (1530-1600): Zum 400. Todestag des Gelehrten. UbstadtWeiher: Verl. Regionalkultur, 2000.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

23

Figure 5: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465-1536): Portrait by Albrecht Dürer.

still partly adhered to the classical exempla which they imitated more or less closely, but they gradually detached themselves from their normative constraints and gained in independence and contemporariness. From the generic point of view, the most prolific and versatile author of specialized treatises

24

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

on rhetoric is Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465-1536), and in this he was often imitated (Figure 5). 19 A generic classification of Renaissance rhetoric presents the following types: 1. The Rhetoric of the Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis) Renaissance manuals of this type are patterned on such classical archetypes as Cicero’s treatises on rhetoric and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Humanists with a predilection for this rhetoric of the “five great arts” 20 aimed at completeness; hence, their books were often voluminous and contained learned glosses and commentaries as well as detailed tables of contents and indices of names and subjects. One of the first Renaissance rhetoricians to compose such a comprehensive work was Georgius Trapezuntius (1395-1484) in his Rhetoricorum libri V (Venice, 1433/1434), “the only large scale secular rhetoric produced by an Italian humanist in the fifteenth century.” 21 The same model served as the basis of Melanchthon’s didactic concept of rhetoric, though this was realized on a smaller scale. The Englishman Leonard Cox (fl. 1535), a schoolmaster in Reading, made use of a pirated print of Melanchthon’s De rhetorica published in Cologne in 1521, 22 for his translation The arte or crafte of Rhethoryke (London, c. 1535), which is, however, limited to invention, the first part of the rhetorical discipline. Cox’s rhetoric is thus an incomplete and unfinished version of the Ciceronian five-part rhetoric. It does not raise a claim to originality but rather promises to impart “the ryght pleasaunt and persuadyble arte of Rhetoryke” to “all suche as wyll eyther be aduocates and proctoures in the lawe or els apte to be sente in theyr prynces Ambassades

19

20

21

22

As long as a monograph on the entire rhetorical work of Erasmus remains a desideratum, information about individual treatises is mainly provided by special articles; for these, see Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics, Index, s. v. Erasmus. On this term see Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961, p. 66 ff. John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic. Leiden: Brill, 1976, p. 261. Supplementary documents are published by the same scholar as Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984. This discovery is owed to Klaus Dockhorn, “Rhetorica movet: Protestantischer Humanismus und karolingische Renaissance,” in: Rhetorik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland vom 16.-20. Jahrhundert. Ed. H. Schanze. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum Fischer, 1974, pp. 36-39.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

25

or to be techars of goddes worde in suche maner as maye be moste sensible and accepte to their audience.” 23 The uses of rhetoric in law, statecraft, church-service, and on numerous social occasions are also proclaimed in Thomas Wilson’s (c. 1525-1581) Arte of Rhetorique (1553); with a total of eight editions it was an Elizabethan best seller (Figure 6). 24 This work further underscores its usefulness by filling the classical structure with practical English illustrations, as in chapters he added “To aduise one, to study the lawes of Englande” or “An example of an Oration Judiciall, to prove by Conjectures the knowledge of a notable and most heinous offence, committed by a Souldiour.” 25 Neo-Latin rhetorics of a compact format continued to appear. Thomas Farnaby’s (1575?-1647) Index Rhetoricvs, Scholis & institutioni tenerioris aetatis accommodatus (1625) is, as its title indicates, a textbook for classroom teaching. It makes this purpose visible by rendering its content in nice systematic dichotomies which facilitate its memorization. On the other hand the author of this compact little treatise boasts of his erudition by adding to his text numerous marginal glosses. Among these glosses, references are to be found to the Eloquentiae sacrae et humanae parallela which is a large work of sixteen books composed by the French Jesuit Nicolaus Caussinus (1583-1651), professor of rhetoric and confessor of King Louis XIII, to whom this rhetoric is dedicated. 26 First published in Paris in 1619, it was many times reprinted, the last time in Cologne in 1681. Because of its complexity and learning, this rhetorical manual won international acclaim and, though an outstanding product of the Counter-Reformation, transgressed the boundaries of religious creeds. Book IV begins with an introduction to the traditional five arts of rhetoric and gives an explanation of inventio; the other parts are successively dealt with in books VI (dispositio), VII (elocutio), and IX (actio/pronuntiatio).

23

24 25

26

Facsimile reprint: Leonard Cox, The Arte of Rethorique. London, (1524). Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / Norwood, N.J: W.J. Johnson, 1977, sig. A. ii.v; other edition: The arte or crafte of rhethoryke. Ed. with an introd., notes, and a glossarial index by F.I. Carpenter. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1899. Editions of Wilson’s rhetoric: 1553, 1560, 1562, 1563, 1567, 1580, 1584, 1585. Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, pp. 80, 195. Cf. Franz Günter Sieveke, “Eloquentia sacra: Zur Predigttheorie des Nicolaus Caussinus, S.J.,” in: Rhetorik. Ed. H. Schanze, pp. 43-68 and, on the general context, Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de l’e´loquence: Rhe´torique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’ ´epoque classique. Gene`ve: Droz, 1980, chap. II.2: “Rhe´torique et spiritualite´ ignatienne (1624-1643),” and, with reference to the present state of the discipline, Daniel M. Gross, “Caussin’s Passion and the New History of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 21/2 (2003), 89-112.

26

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Figure 6: Thomas Wilson (c. 1525-1581): Title-page of the first edition of The Arte of Rhetorique (1553).

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

27

Other important aspects of rhetoric treated in separate books are amplificatio (V), the affections (VIII), the demonstrative genre (X, XI), civil eloquence (XII, XIII), and homiletics (XIV). This broad treatment of the complete rhetorical system is typical of the baroque era and has many parallels in vernacular treatises of the seventeenth century. 27

2. The Art of Preaching (Ars Concionandi) The fourth book of St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana legitimizes Ciceronian rhetoric for the preaching of the gospel and hence achieves a synthesis of Christian doctrine and pagan rhetoric. 28 One of the most important sixteenth century humanistic attempts to adopt it is Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes sive de ratione concionandi (1535), the structure of which follows the system of the five arts of the rhetorical discipline. In the post-Erasmian era, the theories of preaching branch out according to the respective Christian denominations of their authors, Roman Catholic or Protestant, and, in their turn, are distinguished by the kind of orthodox or liberal stance taken within each denomination. Andreas Gerhard Hyperius (1511-1564), a moderate Protestant, who lived in England between 1536 and 1540 and in 1542 became professor of theology at Marburg, wrote the Latin treatise De formandis concionibus sacris (Marburg, 1553) in two books, which were translated into English as THE PRACTISE / of preaching, / OTHERWISE CALLED THE / Pathway to the Pulpet: / Conteyning an excellent Method how to / frame diuine Sermons, & to interpret the / holy Scriptures according to the capacitie / of the vulgar people. First written in Latin / by the learned pastor of Christes Church, / D. Andreas Hyperius: and now lately (to / the profit of the same Church) Eng-/ lished by Iohn Ludham, vicar / of Wethersfeld (London, 1577).

This treatise, then, serves not only the purpose of providing rhetorical techniques for producing sermons but also for the reverse process of textual hermeneutics. In doing so it expressly refers to classical rhetoric and its Christian legitimation by St. Augustine:

27

28

Cf. Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik: Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970, 22002, and Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische ‘ars rhetorica’ im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe. Frankfurt/M. / Bern / New York: Lang, 1986. Cf. James J. Murphy, “Saint Augustine and the Debate about a Christian Rhetoric,” in: Readings in Rhetoric. Ed. L. Crocker & P.A. Carmack. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas: 1965, pp. 203-219.

28

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

That many thinges are common to the Preacher with the Orator, Sainct Augustine in his fourth booke of Christian doctrine, doth copiously declare. Therfore, the partes of an Orator, whiche are accounted of some to be, Inuention, Disposition, Elocution, Memory, and Pronounciation, may rightlye be called also the partes of the Preacher. Yea and these three: to Teache, to Delight, to Turne: Likewise againe the three kyndes of speakyng, Loftye, Base, Meane: Moreouer, the whole craft of varienge the Oration by Schemes and Tropes, pertaineth indifferently to the Preacher and Orator, as Sainct Augustine in the same booke doth wittily confesse and learnedly proue. 29

The equation of pagan orator and Protestant preacher is to the Christian humanist not a contradiction in terms but a self-evident cultural phenomenon. When he utters reservations, for instance against invention, memory, and the three genres of causes, it is not for ideological reasons but because of their professional practicality. On the one hand, Hyperius modifies the rhetorical concept of the affections in that its importance for the preacher is secondary compared to the moving power of the divine word; but, on the other hand, the impact of the classical canon with which he has become acquainted at Paris University is so strong that in chapter 16 he gives a broad outline of the Stoical doctrine of the affections. Different in character is the homiletic theory of the prominent Cambridge theologian William Perkins (1558-1602), which was published in two versions: in Latin as Prophetica, sive de sacra et vnica ratione Concionandi (1592) and in an English translation by Thomas Tuke as The arte of prophecying or a treatise concerning the sacred and onely true maner and methode of Preaching (1607), each of them extant in several reissues that propagated their doctrine not only in the British Isles but also in North America. 30 The treatise concludes with a catalogue of the numerous authorities Perkins confesses to rely on: “Augustine, Hemingius, Hyperius, Erasmus, Illyricus, Wigandus, Iacobus Matthias, Theodorus Beza, Franciscus Iunius.” Eclectic though this work seems

29

30

John Ludham, The Practise of Preaching. London: Thomas East, 1577, p. 9. - For Hyperius’s and Ludham’s source, see Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine. Translated, with an introd. by D.W. Robertson, Jr., Indianapolis / New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958, pp. 117-169. On the theory and practice of ecclesiastical rhetoric, see, among others, John W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons, 1450 - c. 1600. Oxford: Blackwell / New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964; Peter Bayley, French Pulpit Oratory, 1598-1650: A Study in Themes and Styles, with a Descriptive Catalogue of Printed Texts. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cf. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 41970 (1939), chaps. I & II.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

29

to be, it is nonetheless firmly rooted in the theological axioms of the Puritan (or Calvinist) creed. This is evident from Perkins’s preface “To the Faithfvll Ministers of the Gospell” whom he admonishes that “Prophecy […] serveth to collect the Church, and to accomplish the number of the Elect.” He curtails the five parts of the discipline by dismissing “Artificiall Memorye” altogether; for according to him “the animation of the image, which is the key of memorie, is impious; because it requireth absurd, insolent and prodigious cogitations, and those especially which set an edge upon and kindle the most corrupt affections of the flesh.” 31 This mental iconoclasm and anti-emotional bias is in accordance with a demand for “a speech both simple and perspicuous, fit both for the peoples understanding and to expresse the Majestie of the Spirit.” 32 Perkins’ postulate of the sermo humilis or plain style is a basic axiom of many Protestant theories of preaching and marks the practice of those of a more moderate orientation, such as George Herbert (1593-1633). Contrary to some Protestant zealots, Martin Luther (1483-1546), the founder of the Reformation and of Protestantism, did not entirely abandon the tradition of classical rhetoric altogether but in a famous dictum in his Tischreden retained the doctrine of the affections for propagating the Christian faith: Dialectica docet, rhetorica movet. Illa ad intellectum pertinet, haec ad voluntatem. Quas utrasque Paulus complexus est Rom. 12., quando dixit: Qui docet in doctrina, qui exhortatur in exhortando. 33

A moderate position is also taken by the Englishman Jeremy Taylor (16131667) who, like Perkins, received his education at Cambridge University but joined the royalist faction and served as a chaplain both to William Laud and King Charles I. In his work with its characteristic title A DISCOURSE OF 31

32

33

William Perkins, “The Art of Prophecying,” in: The Works of … William Perkins … the Second Volume: Newly Corrected According to his owne Copies, etc. London: John Legatt, 1631, p. 670. Perkins, ibid. - On the Scriptural sermo humilis and its theory, see Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in the Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Translated from German by R. Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Cited by Andrea Grün-Oesterreich & Peter L. Oesterreich in their fundamental essay “‘Dialectica docet, Rhetorica movet’: Luthers Reformation der Rhetorik,” in: “Rhetorica movet”: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett. Ed. P.L. Oesterreich & T.O. Sloane. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 1999, pp. 25-41, here: p. 29 (English translation: “Dialectic instructs, rhetoric moves. The former belongs to the intellect, the latter to the will. St. Paul refers to either in Rom. 12 when saying: Who teaches, does so in doctrine, who exhorts, does so in exhortation.”). See also Eberhard Ockel, “Martin Luther und die rhetorische Tradition,” Muttersprache 94 (1983-1984), 114-126, and Birgit Stolt, Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000 and further studies by the same author.

30

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The Liberty of Prophesying. SHEWING THE UNREASONABLENES of prescribing to other mens Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting differing opinions (London, 1647), he assumes a counter-position to the iconoclasm of William Perkins by taking a critical view of the contrasting creeds and arriving at the following conclusion: There is a memorable instance in one of the greatest questions of Christendome, viz. concerning Images. […]. And it is a great subtlety of the Devill so to temper truth and falshood in the same person, that truth may lose much of its reputation by its mixture with error, and the error may become more plausible by reason of its conjunction with truth. And this we see by too much experience, for we see many truths are blasted in their reputation, because persons whom we think we hate upon just grounds of Religion, have taught them. 34

While a rational stance both in theology and rhetoric is typical of many Protestant manuals of preaching, the Roman Catholic (mostly Jesuit) treatises 35 are distinguished by their thorough activation of all available means of persuasion of the classical tradition 36 in order to achieve the propagandistic aims of the Counter-Reformation at their best. Hence these manuals emphatically stress the sensuality of rhetorical effect and the concept of the affections. 37 A famous Austrian preacher to illustrate this baroque exuberance in rhetoric was Abraham a Santa Clara (1644-1709) 38; his French counterpart was Jacques Be´nigne Bossuet (1627-1709). 39 34

35

36

37

38

39

Facsimile reprint: Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647). Menston, Yorkshire, England: Scolar Press, 1974, pp. 173-174. The quotation is taken from Section XI: “Of some causes of Errour in the exercise of Reason which are inculpate in themselves.” Cf. Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische “ars rhetorica” im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe. Frankfurt/M. / Bern / New York: Lang, 1986. In his treatise Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979, John W. O’Malley interprets the “new rhetoric” practised in the early Renaissance at the Papal Court primarily as an epideictic ars laudandi et vituperandi, i. e. an art of praise and blame. Cf. Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988 and “Sacred Rhetoric in the Renaissance,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 121-142. Cf. Dieter Breuer, “Abraham a Sancta Clara: Der Kaiserliche Prediger als Erfolgsschriftsteller,” in: Die österreichische Literatur. Ed. H. Zeman. Graz, Austria: Akad. Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1986, p. 1335 ff. Editions: Œuvres oratoires comple`tes de Bossuet. 2 vols. Paris, 1946; Œuvres. Ed. l’abbe´ Velat. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. - Studies: La pre´dication au XVII e sie`cle: Actes du colloque tenu a` Dijon le 2, 3 et 4 de´cembre 1977 pour le trois cent cinquantie`me anniversaire de la naissance de Bossuet. Ed. T. Goyet & J.-P. Collinet. Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1980; Richard Lockwood, The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal. Gene`ve: Droz, 1996.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

31

3. Epistolary Rhetoric (Ars Epistolica) In the Middle Ages the art of speaking well had been transformed by Alberich (Albericus) of Monte Cassino (12th cent.) 40 and others into the art of writing well (ars dictaminis) 41 in order to meet the practical exigencies of state and church administration. In the Renaissance, however, the rediscovery of Cicero’s letters by Italian humanists led to appreciation of their stylistic merits and admiration for their author. They were used for the teaching of Latin in secondary schools in an edition with a commentary by the Strasbourg humanist Johann Sturm (1507-1589). The admiration for Cicero is apparent in the title of one of the earliest vernacular epistolary rhetorics composed in German by the Freiburg humanist Friedrich Ried(e)rer (c. 1450-c. 1510) as Spiegel der waren Rhetoric / vß M. Tulio vnd andern / getuetscht (Freiburg/Breisgau, 1493). 42 (Figure 7). This quarto publication of some 400 pages contains, on the one hand, translations of parts of Cicero’s De inventione and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium and pursues the purpose of improving the user’s style. On the other hand it contains a large collection of model letters, some of which reproduce the administrative and judicial formalities of the medieval artes dictaminis, while others present the epistolary treatment of moral, political, and even fictitious (jocular) subjects. The new manuals of letter-writing often define the letter in analogy to the orality of the oration, such as Juan Luis Vives in his De conscribendis epistolis (1536) with its definition: “Epistola est sermo absentium per litteras”. 43 40

41

42

43

Cf. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cleveland / New York: Meridian Books, 1957, p.140 f. Text anthology: Ludwig v. Rockinger (ed.), Briefsteller und Formelbücher des 11. bis 14. Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Aalen: Scientia: 1969 (1863-1864). - A recent edition and examination of a medieval epistolary rhetoric was made by Jürgen Fröhlich, Bernhard Hirschvelders Briefrhetorik (Cgm 3607): Untersuchung und Edition. Bern / Berlin / Frankfurt/M. / New York: P. Lang, 2003. Translation: “Mirror of true rhetoric translated into German from M. Tullius Cicero and others.” On Riederer and his rhetoric, see Erich Kleinschmidt, “Humanismus und urbane Zivilisation: Friedrich Riede(e)rer (um 1450 - um 1510) und sein ‘Spiegel der waren Rhetoric,’” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 112 (1983), 296-313; Joachim Knape, “Friedrich Riederer, Spiegel der wahren Rhetorik (1493),” in: J. Knape, Allgemeine Rhetorik: Stationen der Theoriegeschichte. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000, pp. 207-235. - Other 15th century German vernacular treatises on rhetoric (mostly epistolary rhetoric) are edited by Joachim Knape & Bernhard Roll, Rhetorica deutsch: Rhetorikschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002. - The transition from medieval ars dictaminis to humanistic ars epistolica is discussed by Martin Camargo, “The Waning of Medieval Ars Dictaminis,” Rhetorica 19/2 (2001), 135-140. Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis. Ed. C. Fantazzi. Leiden / New York: Brill, 1989, p. 22; translation, p. 23: “A letter is a conversation by means of the written word between persons separated from each other.”

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Figure 7: Friedrich Riederer (c. 1450-c. 1510): Title-page of Spiegel der waren Rhetoric (1493).

Often they add a special section on the personal letter (epistola familiaris). 44 This kind of letter became a fashionable means of communication among humanists who used it for the exchange and circulation of ideas in the respublica literaria, as is testified by the correspondence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Sir Thomas More (1477?-1535), and Roger Ascham (1515/16-1568) with 44

Cf. Annabel Patterson, “Letters to Friends: The Self in Familiar Form,” in: A. M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, pp. 203-232 (265-267).

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

33

their learned friends. 45 But there was also a notable increase of private correspondence among the literate members of the middle classes. 46 The most important Neo-Latin epistolary manuals such as De conscribendis epistolis (1522) 47 by Erasmus, Methodus conficiendarum epistolarum (1537) by Conradus Celtes (1459-1508), and De ratione scribendi (1545) by Aurelius Lippus Brandolinus (c. 1454-c. 1497) used the structural pattern of the classical rhetorical genres for the classification of the official letter, which, according to Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1588), takes place “vnder foure especial heads, that is to saie, Demonstratiue, Deliberatiue, Iudiciall, and Familiar Letters.” 48 These epistolary genres are again divided into subclasses, for instance “the Deliberatiue kinde into Hortatorie, Dehortatorie, Swasorie and Disswasorie, Commendatorie, Monitorie, or Reprehensorie.” 49 Not only is the structure of the classical oration adopted for the letter, but also the traditional five procedural phases for its production, with the exception of memory and delivery, which the medium of writing renders superfluous. Thus, the majority of the Renaissance epistolary treatises claim traditional categories, procedures and structures of oral rhetoric for a different mediality. A notable exception to this rule is Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), who refuses the rhetoricization of the letter, as, in his opinion, the epistolary genre is generally confined to the familiar letter. In the mainstream of epistolary rhetoric, some treatises put a particular emphasis on style, which can be illustrated by the fact that beginning with the 1592 edition of his treatise The English Secretary Day adds a second part to it: “With a declaration of such / Tropes, Figures or Schemes, 45

46

47

48

49

Cf. Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum. Ed. P.S. & H.M. Allen & H.W. Garrod. 12 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1906-1958; The Correspondence of Erasmus. 11 vols. Ed. R.J. Schoeck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-1994; The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More. Ed. E.F. Rogers. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947; Letters of Roger Ascham. Ed. A. Vos. Trans. M. Hatch & A.Vos. New York / Bern / Frankfurt/M. / Paris: Lang, 1989. Cf. the works registered in Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Liverpool: University Press, 1942; rpt. Folcroft: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973; Philadelphia: R. West, 1978. Modern edition with German translation: Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis / Anleitung zum Briefschreiben (Auswahl). Ed. & trans. Kurt Smolak. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1980. Angel Day, The English Secretary (1599). A Facsimile Reproduction by Robert O. Evans. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967, p. 20. - A less formal but rather more practically orientated treatise was written by the Italian Tommaso Costa (c. 1560 c. 1630): Tomaso Costa / Michele Benvenga, Il segretario di lettere. A cura di Salvatore S. Nigro. Palermo: Sellerio, 1991. - In later centuries the classical paragon loses its influence on the ars epistolica; see Angelika Ebrecht et al., Brieftheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts: Texte, Kommentare, Essays. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Day, The English Secretary (1599), p. 21.

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as are fittest / for Ornament.” In books on epistolography the illustrations often exceed the prescriptions in number and length. Their importance is underlined by the existence of numerous collections of sample letters that offer themselves for a broad range of occasions and purposes of writing. Thus, a collection of English epistolae familiares was published by Thomas Gainsford in London in 1616 under the title THE / SECRETARIES / STVDIE: / CONTAINING NEW / familiar Epistles: / OR / DIRECTIONS, / for the formall, orderly, and iudicious / inditing of Letters / […] / Amorous. Morall. Oeconomicall. Political. Obiurgatory. Excusatory. Petitionary. Gratulatory. Nuncupatory. 50

A collection devoted exclusively to love-letters was published in London about 1633 under the title Cupid’s Messenger or A trusty Friend stored with sundry sorts of serious, witty, pleasaunt, amorous, and delightfull Letters. Anthologies of this kind are exempla of practical rhetoric and resemble in form and function the genre of the commonplace book. The fictional character of sample letters motivated Renaissance dramatists to adopt them in their plays, where they replaced the classical nuntius, and furthermore gave rise to collections of fictional letters 51 such as the witty and ironical Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515/1517), satirizing under the guise of invented persons the lives and opinions of the ecclesiastical establishment from an enlightened humanistic point of view. This work that is written in brilliant macaronic style was published anonymously on the eve of the Reformation and for the greater part attributed to the Erfurt humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523). 52

4. Formulary Rhetoric This genre of rhetoric does not consist of precepts but of examples, of models for imitation. It manifests itself in collections of proverbs, aphorisms 50

51

52

Facsimile reprint: Thomas Gainsford, The Secretaries Studie (London, 1616). The English Experience, 658. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / Norwood, N.J.: W.J. Johnson, 1974. Cf. Claudio Guille´n, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in: Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Ed. B. K. Lewalski. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 70-101. Edition: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. - English translation: On the Eve of the Reformation: Letters of Obscure Men. [Attributed to] Ulrich von Hutten, et al. Trans. F.G. Stokes. Introd. H. Holborn. New York: Harper & Row, [1964]. - German translation: Briefe der Dunkelmänner. Ed. P. Amelung. Trans. W. Binder. München: Winkler, 1964. - Cf. Sari Kivistö, Creating Anti-Eloquence. Epistolae obscurorum virorum and the Humanist Polemics on Style. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2002.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

35

and sententiae, compendia of sample letters, poetic anthologies, and dictionaries of quotations. These are usually published in so-called commonplacebooks, because they have become the common property of speakers and writers. 53 This is due to the fact that their content consists of notable sayings or excerpts from outstanding works of classical authors or contemporary works that are regarded as modern classics. The material assembled in such publications has been used and offers itself for reuse in imitative or secondary inventions. Thus, a commonplace-book can be interpreted as frozen inventio or memoria. It represents a printed inventory which renders superfluous the often complicated and time-consuming labour of the inventive quest by means of formal topoi or places. The matter stored up in the treasure-houses of printed memory has the advantage of being ‘authorized’ by the auctoritas of famous historical works and personalities, which ensures its validity. This kind of practical rhetoric enjoyed an immense popularity in the Renaissance. It became a reservoir of virtual discourses or excerpts from discourses, which were often arranged in alphabetical order or according to criteria supplied by philosophical concepts, theological doctrines, and educational curricula. Many encyclopaedic works of the seventeenth century testify to this guideline. The outstanding collector and compiler of such commonplaces was Erasmus, whose Adagia (1500), according to bibliographical evidence, was many times augmented, reissued, and translated into vernacular languages and thus became, according to Margaret Mann Phillips, “one of the key books of the sixteenth century.” 54 The growing advancement in size and diversity of such works is aptly documented by the numerous editions and translations of Erasmus’ collections of commonplaces which is testified, among others, by the English translation of his Apophthegmata announcing its multiple usefulness in its title-page: APOPHTHEGMES, / that is to saie, prompte, quicke, wittie and sentencious saiynges, of certain / Emperours, Kynges, Capitaines, Philoso=/phiers and Oratours, as well Grekes, as Ro=/maines, bothe veraye pleasaunt & profita=/ble to reade, partely for all maner of / persones, & especially Gentlemen. First gathered and compiled / in Latine by the ryght fa=/mous clerke Mai=/ster

53

54

On the history of the common-place-book, see William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964, chap. 3: “The English Commonplace Book”; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with Translations. By Margaret Mann Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 3.

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Erasmus / of Rotero=/dame. And now translated into / Englyshe by Nico=/ las Udall. Excusum typis Ricardi Grafton. / 1542. / Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum. 55

Truly baroque in its size and variety of quotable commonplaces is the folio Novissima Polyanthea in libros XX. dispertita (Francofvrti, M.C.XVII) consisting of a multitude of poeticae sententiae, sententiae philosophicae, similitudines, exempla biblica, exempla profana, emblemata, adagia, apophthegmata, hieroglyphica, etc. which was compiled by one Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius.

5. The Rhetoric of Figures and Tropes There is a long tradition of the rhetoric of figures and tropes (elocutio) that is represented by treatises and short compilations of late antiquity and continued by the medieval poetriae novae, 56 which are little else but compendia of schemes and tropes. Humanism, with its rediscovery of the elegance of Cicero’s style and its awareness of the linguistic inadequacy of many contemporary writings, endeavoured to enlarge and refine the resources of language by collecting the vocabulary and phraseology of the best classical authorities. By far the most influential stylistic rhetoric to serve the purpose of augmenting and refining the resources of language is Erasmus’ De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512). 57 Originally commissioned by John Colet for St. Paul’s School, London, it quickly found its way into most countries of Renaissance Europe, above all in conjunction with the learned commentary of M. Veltkirchius, but also in Petrus Mosellanus’ abbreviated version Tabulae de schematibus et tropis. Consisting of detailed explications of the figures of speech, as well as rich illustrations, it occupies an intermediate position between a theoretical treatise of precepts and a practical compendium of examples. Like Erasmus’ 55

56

57

Facsimile reprint: Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmes (London, 1542). The English Experience, 99. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Cf. Edmond Faral, Les arts poe´tiques du XII e et du XIII e sie`cle. Paris: Editions Champion, 1971 (1924). Traugott Lawler published an excellent edition of The “Parisiana Poetria” of John of Garland. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1974 with introduction, translation, and notes. - On the medieval theory of style, see Ernest A. Gallo, The “Poetria Nova” and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine. The Hague / Paris: Mouton, 1971, esp. chaps. III & IV. Translation: Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, On Copia of Words and Ideas (De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia). Trans. Donald B. King & H. David Rix. Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1963. - Cf. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, chap. I/1: “Copia.;” Thomas O. Sloane, On the Contrary. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997, chap. 3: “Copiousness.” Cf. also Dietrich Harth, Philologie und praktische Philosophie: Untersuchungen zum Sprach- und Traditionsverständnis des Erasmus von Rotterdam. München: Fink, 1970.

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37

De copia, many figurative treatises were conceived as textbooks for stylistically elegant composition. But for pupils, an earlier opportunity of becoming acquainted with the figures offered itself in the grammars which, like those of Johannes Despauterius (c. 1460-1520) or William Lily (1468?-1522) 58, contained large sections on the figures. 59 Many figurative rhetorics were composed for secondary education, as for instance Joannes Susenbrotus’ (d. 1543) Epitome troporum ac schematum 60 or - in England - Richard Sherry’s (c. 1506-c. 1555) A Treatise of the Figures / of Grammer and Rhetorike, / profitable for al that be studious of / Eloquence, and in especiall for / suche as in Grammar scho=/ les doe reade moste elo=/quente Poetes and / Oratours (London, 1555) 61.

The structure of such treatises is almost always the same. A brief, general outline of the virtues of style and its three levels (high, middle, low) is followed by a broad treatment of the figures which are divided into schemes involving a change in form, and into tropes consisting of a change in the meaning of words (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony) or sentences (allegory, similitude, fable, emblem). Their principal aim was not to supply poets with stylistic techniques. Instead of being a kind of stylistic poetics in the manner of New Criticism, they served thoroughly pragmatic uses, as is shown by Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577, 21593) 62 which, despite its florid title, was written by a clergyman for clergymen (Figure 8). An early Tudor rhetoric manifesting this orientation has come down to posterity in a unique manuscript preserved in the London Public Record Office and made generally accessible in print only a few years ago. Dedicated to Thomas Cromwell, then Lord Privy Seal, the manuscript was probably written between 1536 and 1540 and bears the informative title 58

59

60

61

62

Facsimile edition: William Lily, A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (1567). Introd. V.J. Flynn. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1945, sig. G.i.r-G.iiij.r. Cf. Lawrence D. Green, “Grammatica movet: Grammar Books and Elocutio,” in: “Rhetorica Movet:” Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric. Ed. P. L. Oesterreich & T. O. Sloane. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 1999, pp. 73-115. For the considerable number of English editions, see Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics, p. 139. A modern edition was published by Joseph Xavier Brennan, The “Epitome Troporum ac Schematum” of Joannes Susenbrotus: Text, Translation, Commentary. PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1953. See also the essay by the editor, “Joannes Susenbrotus: A Forgotten Humanist,” PMLA 75 (1980), 485-496. This is the title of the second edition of the treatise which, in contrast to the first edition (1550), contains the text in both a Latin and an English version. On the author, see H.W. Hildebrandt, “Sherry: Renaissance Rhetorician", CSSJ 11 (1960), 204-209. An excellent modern edition was published by Beate-Maria Koll, Henry Peachams “The Garden of Eloquence” (1593): Historisch-kritische Einleitung, Transkription und Kommentar. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / New York: Lang, 1996.

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A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Figure 8: Henry Peacham (1546-1634): Title-page of The Garden of Eloquence (1577).

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

39

THE TROPES / AND FIGVRES / OF / Scripture, a matter desyred of so / muche necessitie, that withoute / it can not easely be avoy-/ded the daunger of he-/resy. Written by / Thomas Swy-/nnerton, / other / wise / Ro-/bertes. - Pro, 15 / Cor sapientis queret doctrinam, / et os stultorum pascitur imperitia. 63

While even the title of this figurative rhetoric testifies to the Protestant zeal of its author, a rather neutral religious position was taken by John Smith one century later in a treatise with a truly enigmatic advertising title: The Mysterie / OF / RHETORIQUE / UNVAIL’D, / Wherein above 130 / The TROPES and FIGURES / are severally derived from the Greek / into English, together with lively Definitions / and Variety / Of / Latin / English / Scriptural / Examples, / Pertinent to each of them apart. / Conducing very much to the right understand-/ing of the Sense of the Letter of the Scripture (London, 1657). 64

A dramatic change in the condition and status of figurative rhetoric took place with the Ramist reform that allocated invention and disposition to dialectic and left only elocution and delivery to rhetoric. This identification of rhetoric with style led to a “rhe´torique restreinte” (G. Genette), the conception of a curtailed rhetoric that is still alive today. Ramist rhetoricians dissected the corpus of figures and tropes into neat dichotomies and arranged them in logically conclusive hierarchical stemmata that facilitated their memorization. Thus Audomarus Talaeus (Omer Talon [c. 1510-1562]), a follower of Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Rame´e [1515-1572]), begins his treatment of style in the following way: ELOCVTIO ET EIVS SPECIES. Elocutio est orationis exornatio. cuius species duo sunt, Tropus & Figura. TROPVS. Tropus est elocutio, qua propria significatio in aliam mutatur: a verbo tre¬pv, id est muto. 65

A remarkable feature of Ramist treatises is their extensive employment of literary examples for illustration. The most famous works of antiquity are quoted; in an English adaptation like Abraham Fraunce’s (1558?-1593) treatise The Arcadian Rhetorike (c. 1588), also outstanding works of contemporary

63

64

65

Modern edition: Thomas Swynnerton, A Reformation Rhetoric. Ed. Richard Rex. Cambridge: RTM Publications, 1999. Proverbs 15:14 reads in Coverdale’s version: “A wyse herte wil seke after knowledge, but the mouth of fooles medleth with foolishesse.” Facsimile edition: R.C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500-1800, 205. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969. AVDOMARI TAlæi Rhetorica, AD CAROLVM LOTHARINGVM Cardinalem. […] CVM PRIVILEGIO. LVTETIAE; Ex typographia Matthæi Dauidis, via amygdalinaˆ, ad Veritatis insigne. 1552, p. 6.

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authors such as Tasso, Sidney, Spenser, Du Bartas, Boscan, and Garcilasso are mentioned. 66 The importance of the figures of speech for the constitution and interpretation of poetry is even more evident from the fact that a special book is reserved for them in some Renaissance poetics. Thus, the fourth book of the Poetices Libri Septem (1561) by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) contains, besides a description of the characters of style, an extensive chapter on the figurae. 67 In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham differs from Scaliger in the treatment of the figures in that he emphasizes their affective and social functions. The third book of his poetic theory, which bears the title “Of Ornament,” contains English translations of the figures such as Meiosis = “the Disabler,” Sententia = “the Sage Sayer,” Gnome = “The Directour,” Hipallage = “the Changeling,” Ironia = “the drie mock,” etc. The identification of Allegoria with “the Courtier” reveals the royal court or, more generally, courtly society as the adequate social ambience for this kind of rhetorical poetics. 68 In France the treatise De l’art de parler (Paris, 1675) 69 by Bernard Lamy (1640-1715) is regarded as the follower of the restrictive Ramist concept of rhetoric and the forerunner of Dumarsais’ (1676-1756) treatise Les Tropes (1730), 70 representative of the eighteenth, Pierre Fontanier’s Les Figures du Discours (1821-1830), 71 representative of the nineteenth, and the structuralist Rhe´torique ge´ne´rale (1970) 72 of the Lie`ge Groupe Mu, representative of the twentieth century. 73

66

67

68

69

70

71 72

73

Modern edition: Ethel Seaton, Luttrell Reprints, 9. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1979. Facsimile Reprint: of the 1561 Lyon edition with a preface by August Buck: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1964. Modern edition with a German translation by Luc Deitz & Gregor Vogt-Spira, Poetices Libri Septem / Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994 ff. Vol.II (1994) contains Book III. Chaps. 1-94 on the figures of speech. On Scaliger’s theory of language, see Kristian Jensen, Rhetorical Philosophy and Philosophical Grammar: Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Theory of Language. München: Fink, 1990. On Puttenham cf. the thorough study of Dorothee Rölli-Alkemper, Höfische Poetik in der Renaissance: George Puttenhams “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589). München: Fink, 1996. Modern reprint of the second edition (1676) with a parallel print of the early German translation (Altenburg, 1753) by Johann Christian Messerschmidt (1720-1794): Bernard Lamy, De l’art de parler / Kunst zu reden. Ed. E. Ruhe. Introd. R. Behrens. München: Fink, 1980. M. Dumarsais, Les Tropes. Avec une commentaire raisonne´ par M. Fontanier. Ed. & introd. G. Genette. Gene`ve: Slatkine Reprints, 1967. Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours. Ed. & introd. G. Genette. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Groupe Mu: J. Dubois et al., Rhe´torique ge´ne´rale. Paris: Larousse, 1970; cf. Groupe Mu: F. Edeline et al., Traite´ de signe visuel: Pour une rhe´torique de l’image. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Cf. Ge´rard Genette, “La rhe´torique restreinte,” Communications 16 (1970), 158-171.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

41

6. Memory (Ars Memorativa) This type of rhetoric, which describes the fourth phase of the constitution of a speech or of any oral discourse, became increasingly detached from the five-part system of rhetoric and achieved an autonomous status. This is manifested by independent treatises such as Congestorium Artificiose Memorie (1533) by the Dominican Johannes Host de Romberch (fl. 1485-1533), who addressed himself especially to preachers, or Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579) by Cosmas Rossellius (d. 1578) whose large compendium looks for a wider range of possible recipients: preachers, philosophers, physicians, lawyers, and procurators. The English theologian John Willis (d. 1628?) wrote the Latin treatise Mnemonica (1618), which was translated into English. In it, he extended and modified the traditional visual concept considerably; for he included not only pictorial but also verbal representations and such hybrid phenomena as emblems. On the whole, the Renaissance witnessed a change in the architecture of memory. The Roman villa of Ciceronian rhetoric is converted to a theatre, or, occasionally, to the medieval structure of a cathedral or a monastery. Radical Protestant reformers like William Perkins (1558-1602) abhorred the classical art of memory as inflicting damage to the human soul through its appeal to fantasy and the emotions. Though the printing-press had created a new medium that produced a new type of memory of greater objectivity, the classical ars memorativa was not rendered altogether superfluous but acquired new aesthetic functions in the sister arts of poetry and painting. Sixteenthcentury treatises sometimes combined the classical theory with medical prescriptions for the preservation of a good memory; in the following century it was developed further and became the structural basis for numerous encyclopedias. 74

7. Delivery (Actio/Pronuntiatio) This rhetorical genre, originally the fifth art in the five-part schema, received some attention in this most extensive type of rhetorical manual and also in Ramist rhetoric, but was rarely published in a separate book. John Bulwer’s Chironomia: Or, The Art of Manuall Rhetorique (1644) specializes in the persuasive faculties of hands and fingers. These are represented by a number of “canons,” in which he links certain positions and movements of hands and 74

Cf. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983.

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A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

Figure 9: John Bulwer (fl. 1644-1654): Chironomia (1644), chirogrammatic plate.

A. Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric

43

fingers to certain affections. In Canon IX this relationship is described as follows: “The palm (the fingers all joined together) turned up, and by the return of the wrist, in one motion, spread and turned about with the hand, is an action convenient for admiration.” 75 or in Canon XXI: “To shake the hand, with bended brows, doth abhor, deny, dislike, refuse, and disallow.” 76 These verbal prescriptions are accompanied by chirogrammatic plates (Figure 9), which contain visual representations of the rhetorical gestures and, as a whole, form a general sign system which can be transferred to creations in the visual arts. While action / pronunciation had been established as technical English terms for oral delivery since the early sixteenth century, the latter gave way by an etymological error to elocution in the seventeenth century and initiated an “elocutionary movement” (Henley, Mason, Sheridan, Walker, Austin) which made its way across the Atlantic in order to become established as an academic subject in American universities. 77

8. Intermedial Rhetoric During the Renaissance, rhetoric expanded its range of applications and served as a semiotic model for the theory and practice of the non-verbal media. As R.W. Lee demonstrates in Ut Pictura Poesis, 78 such concepts as decorum and invention were transferred from rhetoric to pictorial theory (Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci) and also served the purpose of raising the former ars mechanica to an ars liberalis. In musical theory and practice an analogous transfer of rhetorical categories took place, of which Joachim Burmeister’s Musica Poetica (1600) provides good testimony. This tradition of rhetoricizing music continued well into the eighteenth century, 75

76 77

78

John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand & Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Ed. J.W. Cleary. Carbondale / Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, p. 177. Bulwer, Chirologia, p.181. Cf. Wilbur S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971, esp. chap. 4: “The British Elocutionary Movement (1702-1806)” (pp. 144-256). Cf. also essays by Douglas Ehninger (on John Ward), Charles A. Fritz (on the beginnings of English elocution), James A. Winans (on Whately), Warren Guthrie (“The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America”), and Lester L. Hale (on James Rush); in: Readings in Rhetoric. Ed. L. Crocker & P.A. Carmack. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1965, pp. 257-282, 319-332, 397-408, 429-455, 529-541; further Thomas O. Sloane, “Rhetorik an amerikanischen Colleges und Universitäten,” in: Die Aktualität der Rhetorik. Ed. H.F. Plett. München: Fink, 1996, pp. 190-209. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton, 1967.

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where the Klangrede (“musical eloquence” [Johann Mattheson, 1681-1764] 79) was still practised by such outstanding composers as Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) . 80 9. The Encyclopedic Strain The seventeenth century witnessed an enormous increase of the quantity and diversity of rhetoric accumulating all the results of the philological research of the preceding century. Dutch humanists such as Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649) published voluminous Latin treatises like Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum libri sex (Leiden, 1630). 81 Large encyclopedias like Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia in duo volumina secundum Cosmi differentiam divisa (Oppenheim, 1618) by the internationally renowned Robert Fludd (1574-1637) and the multi-volume Encyclopaedia (Herborn, 1630) by Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638), one of the most important seventeenth century encyclopaedists (Figure 10), who was professor of philosophy and (Calvinistic) theology at the recently founded Protestant University of Herborn in Hessen-Nassau, Germany, 82 displayed an immense wealth of classical and contemporary scholarship that also included rhetoric. 83 Thus the Seventh Book of Alsted’s Encyclopaedia defines the structure and end of rhetoric by the following praecepta: RHetorica est ars tradens modum ornandi orationem. Estque generalis, vel specialis: & illa iterum est docens vel utens. Rhetorica generalis docens explicat finem, subjectum, & media seu instrumenta sua. Finis Rhetoricae est tradere modum ornate` dicendi. 84 79

80

81 82

83

84

Cf. Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739). Facsimile reprint. Ed. M. Reimann. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1954; English trans. with critical commentary E. C. Harris. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981. Cf. e. g. James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1981. Facsimile reprint: Kronberg/Ts. (Germany): Scriptor, 1974. On Alsted and the University of Herborn and their influence on English 17th century radicals, see J. H. Alsted, Herborns calvinistische Theologie und Wissenschaft im Spiegel der englischen Kulturreform des 17. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu englisch-deutschen Geistesbeziehungen der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. J. Klein & J. Kramer. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1988. On Alsted cf. also Walter Michel, Der Herborner Philosoph Johann Heinrich Alsted. PhD diss., Frankfurt/M., 1969; on the University: Gerhard Menk, Die Hohe Schule Herborn in ihrer Frühzeit (1584-1660): Ein Beitrag zum Hochschulwesen des deutschen Kalvinismus im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation. Wiesbaden: Selbstverlag der Historischen Kommission für Nassau, 1981. Alsted himself wrote a rhetorical treatise in six books: Orator. Editio tertia. Herbornae Nassoviorum, 1616. Johann Heinrich Alsted, Encyclopaedia. Facsimile reprint of the edition Herborn 1630. Ed. W. Schmidt-Biggemann. 4 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989, vol. I,

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Figure 10: Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638): Portrait.

In his heavily annotated treatise Alsted draws on Vossius and Talaeus as his primary sources. His rhetoric is limited to elocutio and actio/pronuntiatio as partes artis in the Ramistic manner and entirely structured in dichotomies proceeding from the more general to the more concrete in the manner of the Arbor p. 373. Translation: “Rhetoric is an art treating the mode of decorating an oration. And it is general and special, the former being again either theoretical or practical. Theoretical (general) rhetoric explicates its end, subject and media or instruments. The end of rhetoric is to handle the mode of speaking ornately.”

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Porphyriana. All these seventeenth century encyclopedias are based on the principle of eclecticism. This also holds true for a bulky thesaurus of rhetoric which was published at Venice in 1599 and whose title-page advertises its content with full-bodied promises: IOAN. BAPTISTAE / BERNARDI, / Patricij Veneti, / THESAVRVS RHETORICAE: / IN QVO INSVNT OMNES PRAECEPTIONES, / quae ad perfectum Oratorem instituendum, ex Antiquis, & re-/centioribus Rhetorum monumentis, accurate` desumptae / sunt, ordine´que admirabili, ac facillimo in vnum / velut locum digestae, ita vt vno intuitu omnia, / quae ad artem pertinent inueniri possint. / Opus vtilißimum non modo Oratoribus, & Concionatoribus, sed etiam / omnibus his, qui Rhetoricae operam dant, pernecessarium. / Cum Priuilegijs, & Authoritate Superiorum. / VENETIIS, MDXCIX. / Apud Haeredes Melchioris Sessae.

On a total of 175 double-pages this book presents the entire body of the ars rhetorica from A to Z in alphabetical order which is thus made accessible “at a glance.” The encyclopedia proper is preceded by a long catalogue of rhetorical authorities of both the classical and the early modern age. The compiler of this volume, the ambitious Venetian senator Giovanni Battista Bernardi, proves both a learned humanist and a skilful businessman; for he secures himself the rights to the publication by the privilege of his superiors.

V. Practicalities of Renaissance Rhetoric During the Renaissance, rhetoric was not confined to a single human occupation but in fact comprised a broad range of theoretical and practical activities. It likewise affected the contemplative lives of scholars and philosophers and the active lives of statesmen and ministers of the church. The fields in which rhetoric played a major part included scholarship, politics, education, philosophy, history, science, ideology, and literature. 1. Scholarship Renaissance rhetoricians were initially humanist scholars whose primary task was the retrieval of texts long lost. But besides this kind of text archaeology, they considered it equally necessary to establish linguistically and historically correct printed editions of their rediscovered treasures. Thus, critical editions of the standard works of Aristotle, Cicero, Hermogenes, and Quintilian were issued, often furnished with learned annotations and commentaries. When scholars began composing rhetorical treatises of their own, they tried to emulate the ancients, demonstrating their erudition by numerous references

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Figure 11: Johann Sturm (1507-1589): Portrait.

to the entire classical canon as well as to select modern authorities. Excellent examples of this learned philological practice are the works of the Strasbourg humanist and pedagogue Johann Sturm (1507-1589) (Figure 11), for instance in his De imitatione oratoria libri tres (1576), and, later on, of the Leiden humanist Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), for example in his De rhetorices natura ac constitutione (1622). 2. Politics The humanists were not only ardent lovers of classical rhetoric and excellent scholars but also practical-minded men whose professions were often those of a lawyer, notary or secretary, and as such they pursued public careers. In

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Italy, 85 Coluccio Salutati became chancellor of the Republic of Florence; in England, 86 Thomas Wilson was appointed secretary of state; in France, 87 Nicolaus Caussinus was entrusted with the functions of an advisor and confessor to the King. Rhetoricians, as a rule, had ambitions of entering a diplomatic career as ambassadors of their governments. A notorious example of a politician turned rhetorician is Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469-1527), who in his treatise Il Principe (1532) developed a theory of statesmanship recommending that the ruler imitate not the strong lion but the crafty fox in his speaking and acting, a virtu` that enables him to outwit even superior enemies. Shakespeare’s plays contain a whole range of Machiavellian villains (Richard III, Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Edmund in King Lear, Iago in Othello), 88 who commit their crimes through an insinuating, hypocritical rhetoric. The line of such rhetorical malefactors reaches as far as John Milton’s Satan in his epic Paradise Lost. 89 In contrast to Machiavelli’s concept of a utilitarian rhetoric devoid of any moral scruples, The Book Named The Governor (1531) by Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?1546) sketches the picture of an exemplary Christian ruler who embodies

85

86

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88

89

Literature: Delio Cantimori, “Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937-1938), 83-102; Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 21966 (11955); Peter Herde, “Politik und Rhetorik am Vorabend der Renaissance: Die ideologische Rechtfertigung der Florentiner Außenpolitik durch Coluccio Salutati,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 47 (1965), 141-220; Daniela de Rosa, “La politica e la retorica: Poggio e la controversia su Cesare e Scipione,” in: Poggio Bracciolini, 13801980: Nel VI centenario della nascita. Firenze: Sansoni, 1982, pp. 281-342; John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975; Peter L. Schmidt, “Zur Rezeption von Ciceros politischer Rhetorik im frühen Humanismus,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 23-42. Literature: Hildegard Gauger, Die Kunst der politischen Rede in England. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1952, esp. chaps. I & II; Egon Jungmann, Die politische Rhetorik in der englischen Renaissance. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1960; A.J. Schmidt, “Thomas Wilson, Tudor ScholarStatesman,” HLQ 20 (1956-1957), 205-218; id., “Thomas Wilson and the Tudor Commonwealth: An Essay in Civic Humanism,” HLQ 23 (1959-1960), 49-60. Literature: Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de l’e´loquence: Rhe´torique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique. Gene`ve: Droz, 1960, Paris: Champion, 21980, Troisie`me Partie: “Le stile de Parlement.” For the broader context, see Mario Praz, “‘ The Politic Brain’: Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” in: M. Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958, pp. 90-145. Cf. Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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both moral principles and practical eloquence. 90 Less prominent is the moral dimension in Thomas Blundeville’s Of Councils and Counselors (1570), a free translation of the Spanish treatise El consejo i consejeros del principe (1559) by Federico Furio´ Cerio´l in the Italian version of Alfonso de Ulloa, in which, besides “a quicke and liuely wytte,” “knowledge of tongues” and good “Reading of Hystories,” eloquence belongs to the virtues necessary for a counsellor at court: The seconde qualitie, meete for a counseler is to be eloquent to the intent he may be able to persvvade or dissvvade, to accuse, or to defende, to prayse, or disprayse, to reioyce, or to sorrovv vvith others, to entertaine Ambassadours vvyth pleasaunt talke or to doe any message, or Ambassage from the Prince, also in time of tumults and commotions, the eloquent counseler vvith his authority & good persvvasion, maye cause much quietnesse, and profite the common vvealth dyuers vvayes. Novve vvhyther the counseler be eloquent or not, the Prince maye knovve partlye by hys vvords, and partly by his deeds, for by oft talking vvith him, he shall knovv his order of speech, vvhat vvordes and phrases hee commonly vseth, and he maye cause hym to tell some tale or Hystorye, marking him hovve he beginneth, deuideth, follovvith, and endeth the same, and vvith vvhat grace & proprietie of vvords, also hovv he delateth or abridgeth the same. Againe, the Prince may knovv hym by his deeds, by considering vvhat Maysters he had to teache him, also vvhat diligence he vsed, & vvhat time he emploied therin, vvhyther he made any vvorke or not, & to examine the same: or fayning that hee hath some Ambassage of importaunce to sende somevvhyther, he maye cause him to endight the same in his ovvne presence. 91

Shakespeare’s plays present many eloquent counsellors of either good or bad moral quality. As can be gathered from Blundeville’s treatise, their character is largely shaped by their education. 3. Education Many humanists were not content with academic scholarship but endeavoured to disseminate its intellectual substance among a wider public. Like some of his fellow humanists Heinrich Bebel (1472-1518), a Swabian poeta laureatus, wrote a Latin school-drama for the education of the youth bearing the title Comoedia de optimo studio iuvenum (1501), where he uses the figure of 90

91

Cf. Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, Chap. 4: “Sir Thomas Elyot.” Thomas Blundeville, Of Councils and Counselors (1570): An English Reworking of El consejo i consejeros del principe (1559) by Federico Furio´ Ceriol. A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by K.-L. Selig. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963, pp. 48-50.

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Aulicus to emphasize the superiority of rhetoric over the other studia humanitatis in education: Eloquentia enim vel sola est, quae cunctas artes vel obscuras et incognitas vel clarissimas et notissimas reddit. Sine enim eloquentia, quae per studia ista politiora atque poetica acquiritur, omnes aliae artes ieiunae, aridae et non satis ornatae haberi possunt. 92

Desiderius Erasmus 93 and Juan Luis Vives, like Erasmus a cosmopolitan, sought to establish rhetoric in school curricula in order to make it the property of every educated citizen. Pedagogues of lesser talent but equal enthusiasm followed their examples and wrote rhetorical textbooks and educational treatises, such as The Schoolmaster (1570) by Roger Ascham (1515/16-1568) or the Ludus Literarius (1612) by John Brinsley (fl. 1633). 94 These authors propagated a kind of pedagogy that laid the basis of a civic humanism. In the tradition of the classical progymnasmata, Richard Rainolde composed A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, because all other partes of Rhetorike are grounded thereupon, euery parte sette forthe in an Oracion vpon questions, verie profitable to bee knowen and redde (London, 1563), 95 containing orations such as: An Oracion vpon the Fable of the Ante and the Greshopper, teachyng prouidence. An Oracion Historicall, howe Semiramis came to bee Queene of Babilon. An Oracion Historicall, vpon Kyng Richard the thirde sometyme Duke of Glocester. An Oracion Historicall, of the commyng of Julius Cesar into Englande. An Oracion Poeticall vpon a redde Rose. 92

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Heinrich Bebel, Comoedia de optimo studio iuvenum / Über die beste Art des Studiums für junge Leute. Ed. & trans. W. Barner et al., Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982, p. 52. English translation: “Eloquence is the only art that renders all the other arts, even if they are obscure and unknown, very distinguished and esteemed. For without eloquence that is acquired through these stylistic and poetic exercises, all the other arts can be regarded poor, dry and not enough ornate.” - On early humanist colloquia and their comments on Roman rhetoric and stylistic theories, see the well researched study by Gerhard Streckenbach, Stiltheorie und Rhetorik der Römer im Spiegel der humanistischen Schülergespräche. Göttingen: Gratia, 1979 (1932) which supplies a large quantity of carefully classified and analysed material. Erasmus’s influence on English education is treated competently in Helmuth Exner’s valuable study Der Einfluß des Erasmus auf die englische Bildungsidee. Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1939. On the development of the school system, see the standard work by Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908; rpt. Clifton, N.J.: Kelley, 1973. Facsimile Reprint: Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (London, 1563). Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo, 1969. - Cf. F.R. Johnson, “Two Renaissance Textbooks of Rhetoric: Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata and Rainolde’s A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike,” HLQ 8 (1942-1943), 427-444.

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The confutacion of the battaile of Troie. A comparison betwene Demosthenes and Tullie. A lamentable Oracion of Hecuba Queene of Troie. A descripcion vpon Xerxes kyng of Persia. An Oracion called Thesis, as concerning the goodly state of Mariage. An Oracion confutyng a certaine lawe of Solon.

Such models of orations served as school exercises for practising rhetoric on various occasions of oral and written communication. 96 In the same tradition the conduct book The Complete Gentleman (1622) by Henry Peacham (1576?1643) regarded rhetoric as an essential factor of education in the chapter “Of Style in Speaking and Writing and of History.” 97 A rhetorical textbook such as Rhetorices Elementa quaestionibus et responsionibus explicata (London, 1648) by William Dugard (1606-1662), a simplified version of Charles Butler’s edition of Talaeus’ Rhetorica arranged in questions and answers and designed for use by the Merchant Taylors’ School at London, was recommended by the pedagogue Charles Hoole (1609-1667) as a grammar-school textbook for the fourth, fifth and sixth forms. 98 An easier way of teaching grammar and rhetoric was by means of the colloquium method, not in Latin, as was the practice of Erasmus and the early humanists, but in English, as demonstrated by Samuel Shaw (1635-1696), schoolmaster and nonconformist divine, in his allegorical dialogue WORDS / Made Visible: / OR / GRAMMAR / AND / RHETORICK / Accommodated to the / LIVES AND MANNERS / OF /MEN. (London, 1679), composed for the requirements of countryschool education. At about the same time Obadiah Walker (1616-1699), in his treatise Of Education (1673), stresses the importance of rhetoric in two chapters, the first named “Of Invention, Memory, and Judgment” and the second “Brief Directions for Elocution and how to help, better, and direct them.” 99 The study of rhetoric is not, however, confined to grammar school curricula but is also an important factor in the curricula of European universities in the Renaissance, where the studia humanitatis grew to such an importance that they led to the constitution of faculties for the humanities. 100 Some 96 97

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Their popularity can be testified by the famous Hecuba speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman [et alia]. Ed. V.B. Heltzel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, chap. VI (pp. 54-67). Charles Hoole, A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660). Facsimile Reprint. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1973, p. 129 ff. Obadiah Walker, Of Education (1673). Facsimile Reprint: Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1970, Part I. Chaps. XI & XII. Cf. Anthony Grafton & Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press / London: Duckworth, 1986.

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of the rhetorical exercises that were practised at Cambridge have come down to us. 101 The career of a highly talented student of rhetoric could end in the respected position of praelector rhetoricae. Gabriel Harvey (1550?-1631), an enthusiastic collector of books and their learned annotator as well, 102 once held this position at Cambridge, as did George Herbert later on.

4. Philosophy From its beginning the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric has alternatively been marked by cohabitation, polarization, or subordination. 103 In the Renaissance the medieval subordination of rhetoric to scholastic philosophy was questioned and suspended. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), who was first professor of rhetoric at Pavia and later at Rome, wrote, in a letter dated 1434, to Pope Eugene IV: “Ego quidem, beatissime Pater, ab eunte aetate cum ceteris liberalibus disciplinis, tum maxime oratoriae studui, quam adamasse et ita complexum esse toto corpore confiteor, ut hac tempestate pauci vehementius.” 104 101

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Cf. K.M. Burton, “Cambridge Exercises in the Sixteenth Century,” The Eagle 54 (1950/ 1951), 248-258; Lisa Jardine, “The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge,” SRen 21 (1974), 31-62; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, chaps. 1 & 2. - The best source of information about rhetorical teaching at schools and universities in Renaissance England is still the standard work of Thomas W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s “Small Latine & Lesse Greeke.” 2 vols. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944, rpt. 1956. Cf. Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. A comprehensive history of this relationship has not yet been written. Some important chapters of it are discussed by Brian Vickers in his book In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon / New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A still useful, if short, survey of its history from its beginnings is provided by Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Rhetoric and Philosophy from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” in: Renaissance Thought and Its Sources. Ed. M. Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 211-259. Cit. in Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 139, n. 2. English translation: “From my early youth, Holy Father, I have pursued the study of both the other liberal arts and in particular of rhetoric, and I confess that I have so much loved and embraced the latter with my whole physical existence, as few can do with greater passion.” - Other literature: Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1964, chap. 2: “Valla” (pp. 19-36); Brian P. Copenhaver & Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 209-227: “Lorenzo Valla: Language against Logic;” Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1993; Paul R. Blum, “Lorenzo Valla (1406/07-1457): Humanismus als

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In Valla’s view the philological erudition of his Elegantiae linguae Latinae (1471) substantially contributed to the promotion of rhetorical culture. In consequence, the status of philosophy changed from one of superiority or equality to one of subordination to rhetoric. Lorenzo Valla, who was regarded as a more argumentative and uncompromising character than Coluccio Salutati (1380-1459) and his teacher Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), both humanists of the older generation and at one time chancellors of the Florentine Republic, vigorously stated: “Siquidem philosophia velut miles est aut tribunus sub imperatrice oratione, et ut magnus Tragicus appellat, regina.” 105 Valla admired Cicero, who had been both a theorist and practitioner of rhetoric. Like other humanists, he was interested in moral philosophy and discussed it in a treatise variously titled De vero falsoque bono and De voluptate (1431) in which he defended, in the form of a dialogue, an Epicurean view of life. But he also inaugurated a new understanding of dialectic by describing its aim as a search not for veritas (truth) but for verisimilitudo (verisimilitude). In his treatise Dialecticae disputationes (1439), which was revised and retitled several times, the rhetoricization of dialectic assumes the shape of a methodological procedure employing the argumentative places (loci) of inventio, thus creating a new concept of truth similar to the consensus theory of truth advanced by some twentieth-century German philosophers. A similar procedure of imposing categories and aims of rhetorical inventio upon traditional dialectic was initiated by Rudolph Agricola (1444-1485) 106 in his famous work De inventione dialectica libri tres (1539), 107 a treatise on dialectic, which, as its title indicates, is an adaptation of rhetorical inventio to the exigencies of this philosophical discipline. This means the rejection of scholastic logic in favour of a system of topics (loci, topoi) modelled on classical examples, such as the Topica of Cicero and Boethius. 108 Topics are search-

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Philosophie,” in: Philosophen der Renaissance. Ed. P.R. Blum. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1999, pp. 33-40. Cit. in Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism, p. 142, n. 13. English translation: “Philosophy is like a soldier or a tribune under the command of oratory, the queen, as a great tragedian calls it.” Literature: F. Akkerman & A.J. Vanderjagt (eds.), Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius, 1444-1485. Leiden / New York / København / Köln: Brill, 1988; Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1993; Rudolf Agricola, 1444-1485: Protagonist des nordeuropäischen Humanismus zum 550. Geburtstag. Ed. W. Kühlmann. Bern / New York: Lang, 1994. Modern editon: Rudolf Agricola, De inventione dialectica libri tres / Drei Bücher über die Inventio dialectica. Ed. with a German translation, introduction and commentary by Lothar Mundt. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. For the continuity of their tradition, see Niels J. Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of Topics in the Middle Ages: The Commentaries of Aristotle’s and Boethius’ “Topics.” München: Philosophia Verlag, 1984.

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formulae for finding (or retrieving) arguments in a systematic way. They replace the categories of the Aristotelian organon, with which they are partly identical, but their purpose is different in that they aim at the fullest predication possible of a referential object. By systematically running through them in his mind, selecting some and rejecting others, the dialectician may discover mediated relationships between a number of objects. Agricola analyses passages from some of the best-known authors in order to demonstrate how the same topical procedures can be applied to different objects. He thus proposes an inventio concept that can serve as a technique of finding arguments to establish probability and belief. On the other hand, rhetorical elocutio takes over the function of a verbal mediator in the sphere of communication. Through his “Rhetorikdialektik” (W. Risse) Rudolph Agricola became the founder of a school of “discourse or discursive reasoning, which made the transition from philosophical dogmatism to discursive probabilism on the threshold of the modern age.” 109 At the University of Paris, as part of the audience listening to the lectures of Johann Sturm, a disciple of Agricola, was Pierre de la Rame´e (15151572), otherwise known by his Latinized name Petrus Ramus (Figure 12). As he himself testified, it was these lectures that roused his interest for the study of dialectic. 110 While still a comparatively young scholar, Ramus stunned the academic world with two books attacking Aristotle’s logic, his Aristotelicae Animadversiones and his Institutiones Dialecticae (both of 1543), and four years later with one further book contesting Cicero’s rhetoric, his Brutinae Quaestiones (1547) on the Roman author’s Brutus. 111 The reactions of the University of Paris and even the French government to these manifestly scandalous

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Lisa Jardine, “Distinctive Discipline: Rudolph Agricola’s Influence on Methodical Thinking in the Humanities,” in: Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius, 1444-1485. Ed. Akkerman / Vanderjagt, p. 45. On Agricola’s relation to Valla, see by the same author, “Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins of Humanist Dialectic,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990), 181-200. Literature on Ramus and Ramism: Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics, pp. 367369; furthermore: Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, pp. 146-281; Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue. From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1958, rpt. 1983; C. Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo. Parte Quinta: “Intorno a Pietro Ramo e alle dispute logiche del maturo Cinquecento” (pp. 331-601); Peter Sharratt, “The Present State of Studies on Ramus,” Studi Francesi 1 (1972), 201-213; id., “ Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970-1986),” Rhetorica 5 (1987), 7-58; Guido Oldrini, “La retorica di Ramo e dei Ramisti,” Rinascimento II/39 (1999), 467-513. Modern edition: Peter Ramus’s Attack on Cicero: Text and Translation of Ramus’s “Brutinae Quaestiones.” Ed. with Introd. by J.J. Murphy. Trans. C. Newlands. Davis, Cal.: Hermagoras, 1992.

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Figure 12: Petrus Ramus (1515-1572): Portrait.

publications followed immediately: their author was forbidden by royal edict either to teach or publish any more in the field of philosophy. But Ramus nevertheless continued to do both with the help of academic friends, above all Omer Talon whose name often served as a pseudonym for Ramus himself. The ideas advanced in Ramus’s early writings were truly revolutionary, for two of the greatest authorities of the time came under attack: Aristotle, acknowledged as the philosophus per se since mediaeval scholasticism, and Cicero, the celebrated magister eloquentiae, together with Quintilian, the icon of rhetorical education. The principal objection directed against these authorities by the French iconoclast was that they had brought confusion into the system of the Liberal Arts. As a remedy for solving this methodological deficit a strict separation of the responsibilities of dialectic and rhetoric with regard to the Five Great Arts was proposed. Thus Ramus allocated inventio and dispositio / iudicium to dialectic, while retaining elocutio and actio / pronuntiatio for rhetoric. Thus the beginning of MacIlmaine’s English translation of the French version of Ramus’s dialectic (Dialectiqve, 1555) reads as follows: Dialecticke otherwise called Logicke, is an arte which teachethe to dispute well. It is diuyded into two partes: Inuention, and iudgement or disposition.

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Inuention is the first parte of Dialecticke, whiche teachethe to inuente argumentes. An argumente is that which is naturally bente to proue or disproue any thing, suche as be single reasons separatly and by themselues considered. An argumente is eyther artificial or without arte. Artificiall is that, which of it self declare and is eyther first, or hathe the beginning from the first. The first is that which hathe the beginning of it self: and is eyther simple or compared. 112

In this sequence of definitions the dichotomic procedure according to the arbor Porphyriana is all too apparent. The separation of the two verbal sister arts is performed according to three laws which constitute the famous Ramistic methodus: truth (lex veritatis), justice (lex iustitiae), and wisdom (lex sapientiae). Ramus gives this methodus the following explanation: Method is the arrangement of many good arguments. It is twofold, method of teaching and method of prudence. Not that both kinds do not make use of prudence, but rather that the latter has almost no training or art in it, depending merely on man’s natural judgment and prudence. 113

Ramus constantly revised and republished his numerous works on the Liberal Arts and, as one of the most widely published authors in Renaissance Europe, later extended his influence even to North America. His prodigious literary output naturally attracted many opponents, so that the controversies raised by Ramus fill a bulky bibliography of book titles. 114 In his later life he sympathized with, and converted to, Calvinism and, like so many Huguenots, lost his life on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Immediately afterwards he was proclaimed a martyr for the Protestant cause, of which Christopher Marlowe’s historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris (1573/74) provides an elo112

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THE LOGIKE / OF THE MOSTE / EXCELLENT PHILO/-sopher P. Ramus Martyr, / Newly translated, and in diuers places corrected, / after the mynde of the Author. / PER / M. Roll. Makylmenæum Scotum, rogatu viri ho-/nestissimi, M. Ægidij Hamlini. / Imprinted at London by Thomas Vau-/troullier dwelling in the Blackefrieres. / ANNO M.D. LXXIIII: / CVM PRIVILEGIO, sig. Br. Cit. Ong, Ramus (1983), p. 245 (English translation); cf. Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Ed. & trans. W. A. Rebhorn. Ithaca, N.Y. / London: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 154; cf. also Peter Ramus, “That There is But One Method of Establishing a Science.” Trans. E. J. Barber & L.A. Kennedy. In: Renaissance Philosophy. New Translations [of] Lorenzo Valla, Paul Cortesa, Cajetan et al. Ed. Leonard A. Kennedy. The Hague / Paris: Mouton, 1973, pp. 109-155. Walter J. Ong, Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and of Omer Talon (ca. 1510-1562) in Their Original and in Their Variously Altered Forms. With Related Material […]. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1958, rpt. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977.

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quent literary testimony, and rose to fame as an unquestionable authority on any subject in the humanities. His impact on French philosophy extended as far as the rationalism of Rene´ Descartes (1596-1650) and the Port-Royal Logic (La Logique, ou L’Art de Penser) of 1662. The early humanists not only endeavoured to reform the language of persuasive discourse but also combined these activities with practical philosophical concepts. According to Copenhaver and Schmitt, they “gave three gifts to philosophy in the Renaissance: new methods, new information, and new doubts.” 115 One of these humanists was Juan Luis Vives, himself a Spaniard of Jewish descent who left his native country for Bruges in 1512, where he spent most of his lifetime as a private teacher, with occasional excursions to Louvain and England, where in 1523 he spent part of his time teaching at Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College, a new humanist foundation of 1516. As a philosopher he became very influential through his moral treatise Introductio ad sapientiam, which was first published at Louvain in 1524 and subsequently appeared in numerous editions throughout Europe. 116 The philosophical bias of this book is decidedly Stoic: “the aristocratic character of virtue, the recommendation of moderation and stability, and, especially, the classical reminders in times of adversity such as the shortness of ‘life’s comedy,’ the vanity of wealth and honor, the transient and mercurial character of fortune and fate.” 117 The work consists entirely of aphorisms, which are arranged in the manner of a commonplace book; they are subsumed under an abstract heading that defines their common denominator. Thus in the Latin original the following aphorisms appear under the heading DE VERBIS: 453. Linguam dedit deus hominibus, vt sit instrumentum societatis & communionis, ad quam natura hominem homini conciliat. 454. H[a]ec magnorum & bonorum, & malorum est caussa, prout vtaris. scite Iacobus apostolus assimilauit eam clauo nauis. fræni sunt illi inijciendi, & cohibenda, ne vel alijs noceat, vel sibi ipsi. 455. Nullum est peccati, vt facilius instrumentu˜, ita nec crebrius. 118 115

116

117 118

Brian P. Copenhaver & Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 196. Cf. Carlos G. Noren˜a, Juan Luis Vives. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970, p. 305: Paris 1524, 1526; Lyon 1530; Paris / Bruges 1531; Lyon 1532; Leyden 1535, 1536; Basel / Leipzig / Leyden / Cologne 1539; London / Basel 1540; Paris 1541, 1543; Basel 1543; Burgos / Sevilla / London 1544; etc. Noren˜a, Juan Luis Vives, pp. 204-205. IOANNIS LODOVICI VIVIS Valentini Introductio ad sapie˜tiam. […]. PARISIIS Apud Simone˜ Colinæum 1527. - Modern English translation: 443. God gave man a tongue to be an instrument of communication in society, in which Nature binds man to man.

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The English translation of R. Morsine (London, 1550) registers the following entries under the key term “Of the Minde”: Study not so muche to gather woordes, as to vnderstand the propre significacions of them rehersyng and techyng suche thynges, as thou haste redde and herde, partely to thy scholers in latyne, partely in vulgar tongue, to other vnlerned persones. Prouidyng alwaie, that thou do reherse and teache theim with no lesse grace than thou haste herd and redde the same before, for thus doing, thou shalt exercise both thy wit and thy tongue. Thy style must also be exercised, whiche is the beste maister of cleane and eloquent speche. Write, and write againe, makyng euery seconde daie, or at the leaste euery thyrde daie, an epistle vnto som man, that knoweth howe to answere therunto agayne. Howe be it, thou shalt shew it first vnto thy master, there to be refourmed, before thou presume to sende the same, noting and bearing well in mind such fautes, as he shall correcte, that thou maist not mysse in theim, or any lyke in tyme to come. 119

Such examples testify to the humanist’s preoccupation with language, style, and (epistolary) communication as well as to the Christian basis and pedagogical impetus underlying this philosophical praxis. For Vives was a member of the humanistic circles of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, with whom he shared the same ideals and beliefs. A philosopher who broke new ground for a truly modern worldview was Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who began a public career as a lawyer and politician 120 and finally emerged as England’s trail-blazing thinker in the Early Modern Age. 121 In his most important works, the Essays, The Advancement of Learning, and the Novum Organum, he complained that philosophy had made

119

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444. This tongue is the cause of great benefits and mischiefs, depending on its use. Therefore, James, the Apostle, compares it properly to the rudder of a ship. Roping must be thrown on it and drawn tight, so that it neither hurts others, nor itself. 445. Sin is wrought by no instrument so easily, nor so often, as by the tongue. (Vives’ “Introduction to Wisdom:” A Renaissance Textbook. Ed. & introd. M.L. Tobriner. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1968, p. 140 [different paragraphs]). Johannes Ludovicus Vives, An introduction to wysedome. [et alia]. [London, 1550], sig. E.iiiirE.v.v.m On some stages of his public career, see Jonathan L. Marwil, The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976. Concise general surveys of Bacon’s philosophy are provided by Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone: Della magia alla scienza. Torino: Einaudi, 1974 (11957) and Wolfgang Krohn, “Francis Bacon: Philosophie der Forschung und des Fortschritts,” in: Philosophen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ed. L. Kreimendahl. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1999, pp. 23-45. The manifold aspects of Bacon’s writings are dealt with in a collection of essays edited by B. Vickers, Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972.

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little progress since Antiquity. Above all he, like Petrus Ramus, criticized Scholasticism and the humanist reformers of logic for their formalism. His main targets of criticism were what he called idols: Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Market-Place, and Idols of the Theatre. Instead he invented and practised an empirical natural philosophy based on a close observation of nature. In his fundamental treatise The Advancement of Learning (1605) Francis Bacon outlines his concept of rhetoric: 122 Now we descend to that part which concerneth the illustration of tradition, comprehended in that science which we call rhetoric, or art of eloquence; a science excellent, and excellently well laboured. For though in true value it is inferior to wisdom, (as it is said by God to Moses, when he disabled himself for want of this faculty, Aaron shall be thy speaker, and thou shalt be to him as God:) [Exod. iv.16] yet with people it is the more mighty: so Salomon saith, Sapiens corde appellabitur prudens, sed dulcis eloquio majora reperiet [Prov. xvi.21]; signifying, that profoundness of wisdom will help a man to a name or admiration, but that it is eloquence that prevaileth in an active life. […] It appeareth also that logic differeth from rhetoric, not only as the fist from the palm, the one close, the other at large; but much more in this, that logic handleth reason exact and in truth, and rhetoric handleth it as it is planted in popular opinions and manners. 123

Though referring to biblical and classical authorities, Bacon treats rhetoric as an eminently practical activity which, though inferior to philosophy, is based on precepts whose validity is proved by the efficacy of the communicative act. Thus its concept integrates psychological, social and even political aspects. For in contrast to the closed fist of logic, the open palm of rhetoric does not deal with pure reason but with the opinions of men. Being an advocate not of logos but of doxa, it appears as the true popularizer of all possible communicative contents. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who is best known for his political philosophy in Leviathan (1651) and related writings, grew up in the humanist tradition. As the tutor of William Davenish, third earl of Devonshire, he first translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric into Latin and later dedicated to his pupil an English version that appeared anonymously in 1637 under the title A Briefe

122

123

For Bacon’s concept of rhetoric, see the various interpretations by Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse. London / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974; James Stephens, Francis Bacon and the Style of Science. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1975; Jürgen Klein, Francis Bacon oder die Modernisierung Englands. Hildesheim / Zürich / New York: Olms, 1987; John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1989. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning. Ed. G.W. Kitchin. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1954, pp. 145-146, 148.

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of the Art of Rhetoriqve / Containing in substance all that ARISTOTLE Hath written in his Three Bookes of that subject. As the first published English version of Aristotle’s treatise, it does not present a word-by-word translation but a simplified, truncated text based on a specific structure, as is stated at the beginning: We see that all men naturally are able in some sort to accuse and excuse: some by chance; but some by method. This method may be discovered: and to discover method is all one with teaching an Art. If this Art consisted in Criminations only, and the skill to stirre up the Judges, to Anger, Envy, Feare, Pitty, or other affections; a Rhetorician in well ordered Common-wealths and States, where it is forbidden to digresse from the cause in hearing, could have nothing at all to say. 124

By conflating method and art Hobbes displays a Ramist tendency which is also visible in his adoption of Ramus’ spatial binary model throughout parts of his version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. For this reason Hobbes’ rhetoric is also termed a “rhetoric of logic.” 125 On the other hand, the passage quoted demonstrates that in his early years Hobbes was conscious of the socio-political significance of rhetoric. In writings like De Cive (Latin ed. 1642, English ed. 1651) he sharply distinguishes between the ends of logic and of rhetoric and defines the first as truth and the other as victory; in the former he sees a connection with wisdom, in the latter almost none. 126 He therefore arrives at the sceptical conclusion that eloquence and civil disorder are almost causally related and, like Plato in his Politeia, banishes it from his commonwealth. 127 The same scepticism is to be observed in Hobbes’ main work Leviathan, in which he states that, since “eloquence is power,” orators can be dangerous in assemblies. For […] in an Assembly of many, there cannot choose but be some whose interests are contrary to that of the Publique; and these their Interests make passionate, and Passion eloquent, and Eloquence drawes others into the same advice. 128 124

125

126 127

128

The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy. Ed. with an Introduction and a Critical Apparatus by J.T. Harwood. Carbondale & Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986, p. 39. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y. / London: Cornell University Press, 1985, Chap. 6: “Hobbes: A Rhetoric of Logic.” Thomas Hobbes, De Cive. Ed. Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983, pp. 154-155. Cf. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Other works on the role of rhetoric in the political philosophy of Hobbes are: David Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986; Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’ “Leviathan.” New York / London: Garland, 1991. A general critical survey of the writings of Thomas Hobbes is provided by the articles in the anthology of Robert Shaver (ed.), Hobbes. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Ed. R. Tuck. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997 (rev. ed.), pp. 63 (I.x), 181 (II.xxv).

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By being impassioned speakers, politicians themselves engender passions in their audience and thus obstruct a rational discourse and prevent the cognition of truth, in other words, they “represent to others, that which is Good, in the likenesse of Evill; and Evill, in the likenesse of Good.” 129 This is a restatement of the well-known reproach of Plato against such sophists as Gorgias and Protagoras. Hobbes concedes two exemptions from this negative verdict, allowing a suspension of Judgement in favour of the predominance of Fancy; this is in “Orations of Prayse, and in Invectives, […] because the designe is not truth, but to Honour or Dishonour; which is done by noble, or by vile comparisons.” 130 In the chapter “Of Reason, and Science” (I.v), however, he criticizes “the use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures” 131 and thus follows the established mainstream of English natural philosophy and its negative attitude towards the use of rhetoric in scientific discourse.

5. Science In a continually changing world, where new scientific inventions and geographical discoveries permanently revolutionized the established world picture, a new stylistic expression was required. 132 There was, however, no specific rhetoric of the New Sciences. In its first stage its axioms can be deduced from a critique of Ciceronianism with its emphasis on linguistic resourcefulness (copia). 133 In England the Royal Society was not only founded for the improvement of “natural philosophy,” but also as an English Academy, which

129 130 131 132

133

Hobbes, Leviathan, p.119 (II.xvii). Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 51 (I.viii). Hobbes, Leviathan , p. 35 (I.v). The philosophical presuppositions of the new view of the world in Renaissance Europe are excellently outlined by Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans. M. Domandi. New York / Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964; rpt. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000, and Hans Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974 und Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde. Frankfurt/M:. Suhrkamp, 1973. In the first book (Chap. IX) Blumenberg rightly coins the poignant phrase “Die Rhetorik der Verweltlichungen” (the rhetoric of secularizations). On the continental development, see Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1993; ead. & William A. Wallace, Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2003.

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was to be a counterpart to the Acade´mie FrancX aise of 1635. 134 In his History of the Royal Society (1667) Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) formulates the Society’s often-quoted program for a reformation of style, which mainly consisted in a curtailing of the excesses of Ciceronianism: They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution, the only Remedy, that can be found for this extravagance: and that has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have 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: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars. 135

The direct verbal access to the referential object demanded a plain style with perspicuity as its principal feature. 136 The rejection of the artificiality of rhetoric led to a kind of anti-rhetoric which is still visible, for example, in John Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding (1690): […] 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 therby 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 (III.x.34). 137

134

135

136

137

Cf. Hermann M. Flasdieck, Der Gedanke einer englischen Sprachakademie in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Jena: Frommannsche Buchhandlung, 1928. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society. Ed. J.I. Cope & H. Whitmore Jones. St. Louis: Washington University Press / London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 31966, p. 113 (Second Part. Sect. XX). Cf. Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style. Cambridge, Mass. / London: M.I.T. Press, 1968; John M. Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and Certitude in Milton and His Near-Contemporaries. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984, esp. chap. 6: “‘New Philosophy’ and Seventeenth-Century Style” (pp. 101-112); Brian Vickers, The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library, University of California, 1985; Richard Nate, “The Rhetoric of the Early Royal Society,” in: “Rhetorica Movet”: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric. Ed. P.L. Oesterreich & T.O. Sloane. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 1999, pp. 215-231; id., Wissenschaft und Literatur im England der Frühen Neuzeit. München: Fink, 2001. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Ed. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1979, p. 508.

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In the twentieth century, however, a reversal of this attitude has taken place. Rhetoric is no longer denied or even rejected for scientific discourse, but is, as the verbalization of processes in the modern electronic media make evident, even deemed necessary for communication. 138 The use of metaphor and metonymy and also of antithesis, incrementum and gradatio lead to the postulation of such rhetorical figures as “epitomes” in scientific discourse. 139

6. Historiography Historiography had been under the impact of rhetoric since the classical age. Historians such as Thucydides, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus employed the representational devices of inventio and the stylistic techniques of elocutio for specific narrative situations, in which, for instance, rulers or statesmen addressed their subjects or political assemblies, and military leaders their soldiers. That this kind of historical verisimilitude (eiœko¬w ), as exemplified by Thucydides’ famous dialogue between the Athenians and the inhabitants of Melos, 140 was related to literary fiction, and especially to the Homeric epic, became a subject of theoretical reflections both in classical and modern times. 141 Lucian of Samosata (c.120 - c.180) dedicated several chapters of his theoretical treatise Pv` w dei˜ i«stori¬an syggra¬›ein (How to Write History) to the use of rhetoric in historiography; he admonished its future authors to use it sparingly and in doing so to observe the principle of decorum (pre´pon) (chap. 50). This was conceived to be applicable to orations, descriptions, and the praise and blame of persons in order to avoid boredom and - in the 138

139

140

141

Cf. Richard Nate, “Rhetorik und der Diskurs der Naturwissenschaften,” in: Die Aktualität der Rhetorik. Ed. H.F. Plett. München: Fink, 1996, pp. 102-119; id., “The Rhetoric of Science: Past, Present, and Future,” Logo: Revista de Reto´rica y Teorı´a de la Comunicacio´n II/3 (2002), 103-113. Cf. Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. On various readings of it, see Hans Herter. “Pylos und Melos” (1954), in: Thukydides. Ed. H. Herter. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1968, pp. 369-399. Cf. Anthony J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies. London / Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988; Timothy P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature. Leicester: Leicester University Press / Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979. In recent times Carlo Ginzburg proposed the hypothesis that as a means of representation rhetoric provides the proof of historical credibility (History, Rhetoric, and Proof. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999). Cf. also Dominick LaCapra, “Rhetoric and History,” in: D. LaCapra, History and Criticism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 15-44.

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latter case - historical inaccuracy. In the Renaissance Lucian’s treatise was translated into Latin, paraphrased, and commented upon, and in general found wide recognition in the theory and practice of historiography, for instance in Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) and many other Neo-Latin and Italian treatises. 142 In spite of the warnings of a classical authority and his humanist followers, rhetoric found entry into most historical writings, above all in the employment of fictive orations attributed to historical figures, as in Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine of 1532. 143 Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard the Third (c. 1513) makes use of the same rhetorical techniques by attributing orations to most protagonists, as for instance to the Duke of Buckingham, whose oration for winning over the citizens of London (nobiles & senatus Londinenses) to proclaim Richard Duke of Gloucester King of England represents a rhetorical inventio: And there in the east ende of the hall where the maire kepeth the hustinges, the maire & al the aldermen being assembled about him, all the commons of the citie, gathered before them, after silence commaunded vpon greate pain in the protectors name: the Duke stode vp, and (as he was neither vnlearned, and of nature marueilouslye well spoken) hee saide vnto the people with a clere and a loude voice in this maner of wyse. Frendes, for the zeale & heartye fauour that we beare you, we be comen to breake vnto you, of a matter ryghte great & weighty, and no lesse weightye, then pleasing to God and profitable to al the realm: nor to no part of the realm more profitable, then to you the citezens of this noble citie. For why, that thyng that we wote well ye haue long time lacked and sore longed for, that ye woulde haue geuen great good for, yt ye woulde haue gone farre to fetche, that thynge wee bee comme hyther to bringe you,

142

143

A useful collection of such treatises is to be found in Eckhard Kessler’s anthology Theoretiker humanistischer Geschichtsschreibung: Nachdruck exemplarischer Texte aus dem 16. Jahrhundert. München: Fink, 1971. Kessler also contributes a highly informative introduction. Thomas Blundeville’s treatise The true order and Methode of wryting and reading Hystories (1574) was reedited with an introduction and a commentary by H.P. Heinrich. Frankfurt/M. / Bern / New York: Lang, 1986. Cf. also Robert Black, “Ancients and Moderns in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and History in Accolti’s Dialogue on the Preeminence of Man in His Own Time,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43/1 (1982), 3-32. Edition: Firenze: Successori Le Monnier, 1896; English translations: The Florentine historie. Written in the Italian tongve, by Nicholo Machiavelli, citizen and secretarie of Florence; and translated into English, by T.B. Esquire. London: Printed by T.C. for VV.P., 1595; Florentine Histories. A new translation by L.B. Banfield & H.C. Mansfield, Jr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. - On the Florentine context, see Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970; Eckhard Kessler, Petrarca und die Geschichte: Geschichtsschreibung, Rhetorik, Philosophie im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. München: Fink, 1978.

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withoute youre labour, payne, coste, aduenture, or ieopardie. What thynge is that? certes the suretye of your owne bodyes, the quiete of youre wiues and youre doughters, the safegarde of youre goodes: of all whiche thynges in tymes passed ye stoode euer more in doubte. For who was there of you all, that woulde recken hym selfe Lorde of his own good, among so many grennes and trappes as was set therfore, among so much pilling and polling, among so many taxes & tallages, of whiche there was neuer ende, & often time no nede: or if any wer, it rather grew of riote & vnresonable wast, then any necessarye or honorable charge. […] Wherefore soo muche the more cause haue we to thank god, that this noble parsonage which is so ryghteousely intitled thereunto, is of so sadde age, and therto of so great wisedome ioined with so great experience: whiche albeit he wil be lothe as I haue said to take it vpon him: yet shall he to oure peticion in that behalf the more graciously encline if ye ye worsshipfull citezens of this the chiefe citie of this realme, ioyne wyth vs ye nobles in our said request. Which for your own weale we doubte not but ye will, and natheles I hartelye praye you so to doe, wherby you shall doe gret profite to all this realme beside in chosing them so good a king, and vnto your selfe speciall commodite, to whome hys maiesty shall euer after beare so muche the more tender fauour, in howe much he shall perceiue you the more prone & beneuolently minded toward his eleccion. Wherin dere frendes what mind you haue, wee require you plainely to shew vs. When the duke had saied, and looked that the people whome he hoped yt the Mayer had framed before, shoulde after this proposicion made, haue cried king Richarde, king Richard: all was husht and mute, and not one word aunswered therunto. 144

Though this oration appears to be somewhat long-winded and fails to achieve its immediate purpose, the persuasion of its audience, it makes use of many rhetorical techniques such as the exordial topoi of rendering the recipients attentive, benevolent, and informed and concluding the speech with a recapitulation of the important items and an appeal to the affections. The use of rhetorical figures like interrogations, alliterations, and descriptions enforces the rhetorical character of this passage. Its persuasive fictionality evidently inspired Shakespeare’s dramatization of the figure of Buckingham in his history play King Richard III who, in the corresponding scene, introduces himself before that act of persuasion as a Machiavellian hypocrite: 145

144

145

Cited from the English translation (1557) published in: The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Vol. II. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 69-75 (marginal gloss: “The duke of Buckinghams oracion”). On this character type, see Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Shakespeare’s Liars,” Proceedings of the British Academy 69 (1984), 137-168; Brian Vickers, Returning to Shakespeare. London / New York: Routledge, 1989, chap. 3: “Shakespeare’s Hypocrites” (pp. 89-134).

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Doubt not, my lord: I’ll play the orator As if the golden fee for which I plead Were for myself; and so my lord, adieu. (III.v.94-96)

Thus as a historiographer Thomas More makes use of rhetorical enargeia, which effects a vivid actualization of the past and creates a semi-literary genre that in its turn serves as the source of literary inventions. The fictionalization of history through rhetoric met, however, with the fierce opposition of an anti-rhetorical group of later historians of the same generation: William Camden (1551-1623), Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), and Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). 146 Of these men, who were in touch with each other by correspondence, William Camden in the preface to his Annals of the reign of Queen Elizabeth rigorously stated: “I have thrust in no orations but such as were truly spoken; or those reduced to fewer words; much less have I feigned any.” 147 In similar fashion he deliberately avoided sententiae and digressions, both important elements in the tradition. By suspending rhetoric from historiography, William Camden and his fellow combatants created a consciousness of the fundamental difference between the truth of historiography and the verisimilitude of literary fiction, a distinction which marked the beginning of a scientific concept of historiography in the Early Modern Age. Nevertheless historians continued to employ rhetoric as a means of effective representation. Jesuit historiographers did so in their accounts of the tribes they had converted to Christianity. Charles le Gobien, for example, in the Histoire des Isles Marianes (Paris, 1700), did not hesitate to imitate the example of Titus Livius in attributing “artful speeches” (des discours ´etudiez) to a noble tribesman named Hurao, who tried to persuade his countrymen to expel the foreign invaders from their territory. 148 In France rhetorical historiography was still alive in the nineteenth century, when one of its most prominent subjects was the French Revolution. 149 146

147

148

149

Cf. Peter Burke, “The Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric of History in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in: Anamorphosen der Rhetorik: Die Wahrheitsspiele der Renaissance. Ed. G. Schröder et al. München: Fink, 1997, pp. 71-79. William Camden, Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elisabetha. London: G. Stansby, 1615 (English translation: London, 1625), preface. Cf. C. Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, chap. 3: “Alien Voices: The Dialogic Element in Early Modern Jesuit Historiography.” On the general problem, see also Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Cf. Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. For describing the rhetoric of these histories she uses the image of the actor (e. g., chap 3: “The configuration of actors I”). On the parliamentary rhetoric practised during the French Revolution, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Funktionen parlamentarischer Rhetorik in der Französischen Revolution. München: Fink, 1978.

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VI. Metarhetoric: Evaluation and Ideology of Rhetoric From its very beginnings rhetoric as an ars / te¬xnh was subject to critical evaluation from its users and opponents and was praised or blamed, accepted or rejected. The rhetorical genre employed for these purposes was, of course, the epideictic one, the genus demonstrativum. Often the teachers and practitioners of rhetoric assumed an apologetic attitude which manifested itself in defensiones. Though the humanists had a predilection for dialogues, the deliberative genre was less frequently used to discuss the pros and cons of rhetoric. A prominent example of this kind, Erasmus’ Ciceronianus sive de optimo dicendi genere (1528), contains an internal rhetorical debate on which style is best. The majority of utterances on rhetoric and eloquence have the form of a monologue, be it oration, treatise or letter. Whatever its form of representation, metarhetoric is biased either one way or another; on a sociocultural level, it exerts an ideological function.

1. Praise and Blame of Rhetoric An early example of the difficulties the early humanists had in propagating the ars rhetorica is an oratio de laudibus eloquentie by George of Trebizond beginning with these words: Cum preclarissimam omnium liberalium artium dicendi facultatem, nobilissimi viri, iacere his temporibus tenebrisque obvolutam perspiciam, succurrere atque subvenire tam privatim quam publice ei constitui. Non enim ferre potui utilissimam atque honestissimam humano generi artem et huic civitati precipue vel eorum qui eam profitentur ignorantia vel obtrectatorum insidiis tam diu et quidem summo cum incommodo omnium abiici atque contemni. Nec tamen preceptis institutionibusque meis omnia me preclara eius artificia posse vobis exponere fretus sum. Non sum ita amens ut non videam multo plura mihi deesse quam adsint. Verum quicquid in me est, quod sentio quam sit exiguum, id totum ad communem utilitatem ideo conferre placuit ut etsi nihil aliud, attamen quanta honesta utilitas, quanta dignitas, quod ornamentum, que gloria insit oratori perspiciatur. 150 150

Cited in Monfasani, George of Trebizond, Appendix 11 (p. 365). - Translation: An Oration in Praise of Eloquence. “Most noble men, since I see how rhetoric, the most distinguished of the liberal arts, lies in ruin, covered up by darkness nowadays, I have decided to rush to its aid and to defend it both privately and publicly. For I could not bear that this art, so honorable and useful to the human race and especially to this city, should have been insidiously slighted and scorned for so long - indeed, with the greatest inconvenience to everyone - either by those who practice it ignorantly or by those who are its detractors. Nevertheless, I have no confidence that I can expound all its remarkable intricacies to you by means of my

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The laudatio of eloquence here presents itself as a kind of apology towards its despisers and detractors, whose ignorance of its praiseworthy advantages surround them with a cloud of unknowing and locate them in the Dark Ages, the era the early humanists sought to enlighten through an alliance with the outstanding authorities of Classical Antiquity. This attitude changed with such humanists who regarded themselves primarily as philosophers and not as restorers of the classical Liberal Arts. One of these was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). Together with Marsilio Ficino he was the most important spokesman for Neoplatonism in the Renaissance and a prominent member of the Florentine Academy the former had founded in order to translate and study the works of Plato and his ancient followers. Unlike his compatriot Lorenzo Valla, his specific philosophical alignment led him to imitate Plato’s verdict against the Sophists by denouncing rhetoric as an art of deceit and giving philosophy absolute preference. This attitude finds eloquent expression in Pico’s famous letter to his friend Ermolao Barbaro, dated 3 June 1485: There is such a great opposition between the functions of the orator and the philosopher that they could not contradict one another more. For what is the office of the rhetor other than to lie, deceive, circumvent, practice sleight-ofhand-tricks. It’s your business, as you say, to turn black into white and white into black as you will; by means of speech to raise up, cast down, amplify, and diminish whatever you wish; and finally, to transform things themselves, as if by the magical force of eloquence, which you boast about, so that they assume whatever face and dress you wish, not appearing what they are in actuality, but what your will wants them to be - and even though they are not really transformed, they nevertheless appear that way to your auditors. All this is nothing other than sheer lying, sheer imposture, sheer trickery, since by its nature it enlarges things through amplification or reduces them through diminishment, and by producing the deceptive harmony of words, like so many masks and simulacra, it dupes the minds of your auditors while it flatters them. Can there be any affinity between this and the philosopher whose entire activity is consumed in discovering the truth and demonstrating it to others? 151

Compared to Pico della Mirandola, whose convictions are firmly rooted in Neoplatonism, other humanists criticize rhetoric from a ludic viewpoint be-

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precepts and instruction: I am not so insane not to see that I lack more than I have. However, I am happy to devote all of whatever knowledge I have - which I recognize is very slight - to the common good, so that even if nothing else is accomplished, at least we see how much honor and utility, how much worth, what distinction, and what glory the orator possesses.” (Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, p. 31). Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, p. 59 (translation).

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hind which the eiron conceals himself. A very famous, if not notorious antirhetorical harangue is to be found in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s (1486-1535) wide-read book De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (Antwerp, 1531), which received an early English translation as Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, of the Vanitie and vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences: Englished by Ia. Sa. Gent. […] Imprinted at London, by Henrie Bynneman, dwelling in Knightryder streete, at the signe of the Mermayde. Anno. 1575, where we read in Chap. 4, “Of Rhetorike:” There is a controuersie among men, whether Rhetorike, whiche is nexte to these [i. e., poetry and history, the subjects of the preceding chapters] be an Arte, or not, and the matter is yet before the Judge. For Socrates in Plato dothe proue with very strong reasons, that it is neither Arte, neither Science, but a certaine subtiltie and sharpnesse of witte, and that it is neyther commendable, nor honest, but rather a dishonest and seruile flatterie. Lisias moreouer and Cleanthes, and Menedemus haue sayde that Eloquence can not be comprehended in any Arte, but that it proceedeth onely of nature, which teacheth euery man when he shoulde flatter, and tell his owne matters, and to strengthen it with argumentes: and that true pronuntiation, memorie, and the finest manner of inuention did proceede of nothing else but nature, the which was seene in Antonius the Prince of the Roman Oratours. Besides this although before Tisias, Corax and Gorgias, none did teache or write the Arte of Rhetoricke, there were notwithstanding many very wise and eloquente men. And furthermore whereas the Arte is destined to be a collection of precepts, which tende to one ende: the Rhetoritians striue vnto thys houre what the ende thereof is, whether to persuade, or to speake well, and not contente with the true causes, do deuise new and fayned. They haue besides this founde out so many Theses, Hypotheses, figures, colours, guidinges, caracters, persuasions, controuersies, declamations, prohems, insinuations, gettings of good wyll, and moste artificiall narrations, that vnneth they can be bee numbred, and notwithstanding they denie that there is an ende of Rhetorike. 152

Agrippa’s On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences (written between 1527 and 1528) satirizes the false pretensions of the Liberal Arts and Sciences. It is in this context that his critique of rhetoric must be seen; for it is not conceivable that the author of this book, who in 1518 was appointed public orator and advocate of the town of Metz, should utterly condemn the art which he had professed himself ten years earlier. Besides the irony of representation, which he shared with his fellow-humanists Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More, Agrippa raises a number of serious points

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Henrie Cornelius Agrippa of the Vanitie and vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences. London: Henrie Bynneman, 1575, pp. 17r-17v. Cf. Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, pp. 76-81.

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concerning the ars rhetorica in the passage cited: its status as an art or technique of perfect speaking and writing to be taught and learnt, furthermore its general aim and the quality and number of its basic constituents, and finally its common social value. Another detractor of rhetoric, John Jewel (1522-1571), was a praelector rhetoricae or Public Orator at Oxford University (Corpus Christi College) when he composed his Oration against Rhetoric (Oratio contra rhetoricam) sometime between 1544 and 1552, a work published only in 1848. Though acknowledged as an expert in classical oratory and as an eloquent speaker and preacher, he nevertheless assumes an attitude of confession and renunciation in denouncing the art of his profession: Now the gravest and greatest motives impel me to change my course. For I see - I, of all men! - that the whole time which thus far we have devoted to eloquence has been wasted and worse than wasted. Many of you marvel, I know when you hear these words from me - yes, from me. Yet it is as I say. So long as my zeal is for your instruction, I see no reason for pretence. Would that the hours we have up to the present time spent in study might be brought back, entire! For we have learned from experience in this case that rhetoric holds neither reward nor dignity; that the whole study of eloquence, I say, which so many Greek and Latin writers descant upon, which I so desirously embraced, and to which by my exhortations I drove all of you, - I openly say and announce that it is void of dignity and reward, it is wholly idle, inane, futile, and trivial. Whilst I briefly and in few words expound this, seeing that it is a matter of concern to you (which circumstance I place above any personal consideration), I beg you to attend closely (as is your wont) that this vain study of speaking you may hold in little esteem, and may turn your minds more fruitfully to some other kind of work. All that is to be said of rhetoric I do not promise here to say; nor do I judge that anyone, in any place, unless a prater and rhetor indeed, could in so brief a time tell all. For since there are so many things - nay, all things - in this art empty and frivolous, the very business of speaking seems to me idle and absurd. 153 153

English translation by Hoyt H. Hudson, “Jewel’s Oration against Rhetoric: A Translation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 14 (1928). 374-392, here: 379-380 (with an informative introduction); cf. also Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, pp. 161-172, here: p. 163. The Latin text is printed in: The Works of John Jewel. Ed. by John Ayre for the Parker Society. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850, vol. IV, pp. 1283-1291, here p. 1284: “Hoc autem tempore ut mutarem consilium, gravissimae me causae et maximae commoverunt. Video enim tandem, atque equidem video tempus illud omne, quod hactenus in eloquentia posuimus, inutiliter et turpiter perdidisse. Mirari scio plerosque vestrum, cum ista ipsa ex me, me praesertim ipso, audiatis: verum sic est ut dico; nam simulare, dum vobis prodesse studeo, non video cur debeam. Atque utinam tempus illud quod hactenus lusimus liceret in integrum revocari. Nam rhetoricam quidem jam olim re ipsa experti sumus nihil nec fructus habere, nec dignitatis; studium, inquam, illud omne eloquentiae, quod tot Graeci Latinique scriptores illustrarunt, quod ego tam cupide complexus sum, et in quod vos omnes mea cohortatione compulerim, illud unum nihil habere nec dignitatis nec fructus,

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These words of a professed anti-rhetorician are so eloquent 154 that his oration does not appear to render his true opinion. It rather seems a typical humanist jest in the manner of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, a less prominent link in the long chain of carnivalesque literature in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin. While in Jewel’s opinion the study of rhetoric is a waste of time and rather detrimental to university education, Philip Melanchthon considers “artful speaking” an absolute requirement for humanist education. This attitude is expressed in an oration in praise of eloquence that has come down to us in the corpus of his declamations. 155 He here emphasizes the point that eloquence is something altogether grander than a confused heaping up of words and that all affairs of public life are managed by speech, which testifies to the social benefit of the art of rhetoric. Contrary to this linguistic optimism of the early humanists, 156 the scepticism of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) puts in doubt the value of rhetoric in general and of the figures of speech in particular. This is done in essay 51 of Book I of his Essais titled “De la vanite´ des paroles,” where he writes: UN Rhetoricien du temps passe´ disoit que son mestier estoit, de choses petites les faire paroistre et trouver grandes. C’est un cordonnier qui scX ait faire de grands souliers a` un petit pied. […]. Ariston definit sagement la rhetorique: science a` persuader le peuple; Socrates, Platon, art de tromper et de flatter; et ceux qui le nient en la generale description le verifient partout en leurs preceptes. Les Mohametans en defendent l’instruction a` leurs enfans, pour son inutilite´. […]. C’est un util invente´ pour manier et agiter une tourbe et une commune desreigle´e, et

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et totum otiosum esse, inane, futile, nugatorium, aperte denuntio et prae me fero. Idque dum breviter paucisque doceo, quoniam vestra res agitur, quam ego rebus meis semper anteposui omnibus, quaeso diligenter (ut soletis) animum attendite, et inanem dicendi curam pro parvo habeatis, et animos majore cum fructu ad aliud studiorum genus referatis. Omnia autem quae de rhetorica dici possunt, nec me polliceor hoc loco dicturum, nec ea ab alio quopiam, nisi admodum loquaci et rhetore, tam brevi tempore dici posse arbitror. Nam cum multa sint, vel potius omnia, in ea facultate inania et levia, tum professio mihi multa sint, vel potius omnia, in ea facultate inania et levia, tum professio mihi ipsa dicendi otiosa videtur esse et perridicula.” On Jewel as a stylist, see David K. Weiser, The Prose Style of John Jewel. Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1973. - J.W.H. Atkins wrongly places Jewel’s Oratio in the history of literary criticism in which rhetoric is said to represent kind of pre-stage to criticism proper (English Literary Criticism: The Renascence. New York: Barnes & Noble / London: Methuen, 1968 [rpt., 11947], pp. 66-101, here: p. 71 f.). Philippus Melanchthon, Declamationes. Sel. & ed. K. Hartfelder. Berlin: Weidmann, 18911894. Cf. Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. Bonn: Bouvier, 1963.

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est util qui ne s’employe qu’aux estats malades comme la medecine; en ceux ou` le vulgaire, ou` les ignorans, ou` tous ont tout peu, comme celuy d’Athenes, de Rhodes et de Rome, et ou` les choses ont este´ en perpetuelle tempeste, la` ont afflue´ les orateurs. […]. Oyez dire metonymie, metaphore, allegorie et autres tels noms de la grammaire, semble-t-il pas qu’on signifie quelque forme de langage rare et pellegrin? Ce sont titres qui touches le babil de vostre chambriere. 157

This passage is rendered into English by John Florio in “Of the Vanitie of Words” as follows: A RETHORICIAN of ancient times, said, that his trade was, to make small things appeare and seeme great. It is a shooemaker, that can make great shooes for a little foot. […]. Ariston did wisely define Rhetorike to be a Science, to perswade the vulgar people: Socrates and Plato, to be an Art to deceive and flatter. And those which denie it in the generall description, doe every where in their precepts verifie the same. The Mohametans, by reason of it’s inutilitie, forbid the teaching of it to their children. […]. It is an instrument devised, to busie, to manage, and to agitate a vulgar and disordered multitude; and it is an implement imployed, but about distempered and sicke mindes, as Physicke is about crazed bodies. And those where either the vulgar, the ignorant, or the generalitie have had all power, as that of Rhodes, those of Athens, and that of Rome, and where things have ever beene in continuall disturbance and uproare, thither have Orators and the professors of that Art flocked. […]. Doe but heare one pronounce Metonymia, Metaphore, Allegory, Etimologie, and other such trash-names of Grammer, would you not thinke, they meant some forme of a rare and strange language; They are titles and words that concerne your chamber-maids tittle-tattle. 158

This denunciation of rhetoric as an art of no use and deceit is generalized by the Englishman Samuel Purchas (1575?-1626) in his popular book MICROCOSMVS, OR THE HISTORIE of MAN (London, 1619), where he writes: Rhetoricke is yet worse, (when Grace preuents not) it is a swelling Poyson, it climbes into Pulpits, Tribunalls, Theaters, to proue a publike Pestilence; it knowes the Arts of Adulation, of Hypocrisie, of malicious Slaundering, of Æquiuocations; of all sorts of Iuggling, and Lying; it makes Men see with others Eyes, with strange Glasses, which make things seeme bigger, or lesse, or double, or not at all; it is Master of Mens furious Passions, and leades them (so Hercules was pictured) by the Eare (as Beare-wards their Beares, by the ringed Snowts) to any Out-rage. Therefore did Plato banish Orators and Poets together out of his Commonwealth. Tertullus against Paul is bitterly eloquent; Cicero against Antonie is fruit157 158

Montaigne, Essais. Ed. M. Rat. 3 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1958, vol. I, pp. 338-340. Montaigne’s Essays. Translated by John Florio. Ed. L.C. Harmer. 3 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1965 (rpt.), vol. I, pp. 345-346, 348.

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lessely bitter; vnlesse this be the fruit which followes these swelling Rhetoricians, that they are brewers of Sedition & Schisme in the Church and Commonwealth. 159

This condemnation of rhetoric, which seems characteristic of the pessimism of the early seventeenth century, singles out for criticism one outstanding positive myth of the civilizing force of eloquence that had developed into a humanist and even political ideology: the myth of Hercules Gallicus.

2. Rhetorical Ideology In the Renaissance rhetoric became a determining factor in the creation of a humanistic cultural consciousness. Its core was the Ciceronian belief that through eloquence (eloquentia) wisdom (sapientia) could be achieved. This was stated at the beginning of his De Inventione (I.i.1-ii.2): Ac me quidem diu cogitantem ratio ipsa in hanc potissimum sententiam ducit, ut existimem sapientiam sine eloquentia parum prodesse civitatibus, eloquentiam vero sine sapientia nimium obesse plerumque, prodesse nunquam. Quare si quis omissis rectissimis atque honestissimis studiis rationis et offici consumit omnem operam in exercitatione dicendi, is inutilis sibi, perniciosus patriae civis alitur; qui vero ita sese armat eloquentia, ut non oppugnare commoda patriae, sed pro his propugnare possit, is mihi vir et suis et publicis rationibus utilissimus atque amicissimus civis fore videtur. Ac si volumus huius rei quae vocatur eloquentia, sive artis sive studi sive exercitationis cuiusdam sive facultatis ab natura profectae considerare principium, reperiemus id ex honestissimis causis natum atque optimis rationibus profectum. Nam fuit quoddam tempus cum in agris homines passim bestiarum modo vagabantur et sibi victu fero vitam propagabant, nec ratione animi quicquam, sed pleraque viribus corporis administrabant; nondum divinae religionis, non humani offici ratio colebatur, nemo nuptias viderat legitimas, non certos quisquam aspexerat liberos, non, ius aequabile quid utilitatis haberet, acceperat. Ita propter errorem atque inscientiam caeca ac temeraria dominatrix animi cupiditas ad se explendam viribus corporis abutebatur, perniciosissimis satellitibus. Quo tempore quidam magnus videlicet vir et sapiens cognovit quae materia esset et quanta ad maximas res opportunitas in animis inesset hominum, si quis eam posset elicere et praecipiendo meliorem reddere; qui dispersos homines in agros et in tectis silvestribus abditos ratione quadam compulit unum in locum et congregavit et eos in unam quamque rem inducens utilem atque honestam primo

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Samuel Purchas, Microcosmus or The Historie of Man. (London, 1619). Facsimile Reprint. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, pp. 537-538.

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propter insolentiam reclamantes, deinde propter rationem atque orationem studiosius audientes ex feris et immanibus mites reddidit et mansuetos. 160

Thomas Wilson (c. 1524-1581), who was the most prominent representative of English civic humanism and in 1579 reached the pinnacle of his public career when he was appointed Elizabeth’s secretary of state, gave this oratio/ ratio or eloquentia/sapientia topos a Christian interpretation in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553): Eloquence first given by God, after loste by man, and laste repayred by God agayne. Man (in whom is poured the breathe of lyfe) was made at hys firste beinge an everlivyng Creature, unto the likenes of God, endued with reason, and appoynted Lorde over all other thinges living. But after the fall of our firste father, Sinne so crept in, that our knowledge was muche darkened, and by corruption of this oure fleshe, mans reason and entendement were bothe overwhelmed. At what time God beinge sore greved with the folye of one man, pitied of his mere goodnesse, the whole state and posteritie of mankind. […]. And therefore, where as Menne lyved Brutyshlye in open feldes, having neither house to shroude them in, nor attyre to clothe their backes, nor yet anye 160

Cicero, De Inventione [et alia]. Ed. with an English translation by H.M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, pp. 3-7: Translation: “For my own part, after long thought, I have been led by reason itself to hold this opinion first and foremost, that wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of states, but that eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous and is never helpful. Therefore if anyone neglects the study of philosophy and moral conduct, which is the highest and most honourable of pursuits, and devotes his whole energy to the practice of oratory, his civic life is nurtured into something useless to himself and harmful to his country; but the man who equips himself with the weapons of eloquence, not to be able to attack the welfare of his country but to defend it, he, I think, will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of his community. Moreover, if we wish to consider the origin of this thing we call eloquence - whether it be an art, a study, a skill, or a gift of nature - we shall find that it arose from most honourable causes and continued on its way from the best of reasons. 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; there was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties; no one had seen legitimate marriage nor had anyone looked upon children whom he knew to be his own; nor had they learned the advantage of an equitable code of law. And so through their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant. 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

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regarde to seeke their best avayle: these appoynted of God called theim together by utteraunce of speache, and perswaded with them what was good, what was badde, and what was gainefull for mankynde. And althoughe at firste, the rude coulde hardelie learne, and either for straungenes of the thing, would not gladlye receyve the offer, or els for lacke of knoweledge could not perceyve the goodnes: yet being somewhat drawen and delighted with the pleasauntnes of reason, and the swetenes of utteraunce: after a certaine space, thei became through nurture and good advisement, of wilde, sober: of cruel, gentle: of foles, wise: and of beastes, men. Suche force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth againste their will. And therfore the Poetes do feyne that Hercules being a man of greate wisdome, had all men lincked together by the eares in a chaine, to draw them and leade them even as he lusted. For his witte was so greate, his tongue so eloquente, and his experience suche, that no one man was able to withstand his reason, but everye one was rather driven to do that whiche he woulde, and to wil that whiche he did, agreing to his advise both in word and worke, in all that ever they were able. […]. And emonge all other, I thinke him most worthye fame, and emongest menne to be taken for halfe a God, that therin doth chiefelye, and above all other excell menne, wherin men doo excell beastes. For he that is emonge the reasonable, of all moste reasonable, and emonge the wittye, of all the moste wittye, and emonge the eloquente, of all the mooste eloquente: him thincke I emonge all menne, not onelye to be taken for a singuler manne, but rather to be counted for halfe a God. For in sekynge the excellencye hereof, the soner he draweth to perfection, the nygher he commeth to GOD who is the chiefe wisdome, and therefore called God, because he is most wise, or rather wisdome it selfe. 161

Such a belief led to an ideology of the origin of culture by means of the eloquent word. Cultural heroes of antiquity were adduced as authorities, like Hercules Gallicus, who by the golden chains of his eloquence had tamed the barbarous Gauls and converted them from primitive to civilized men. This mythologeme is used by Andrea Alciato (1492-1550) in his Emblematum Libellus, where the motto (inscriptio) “Eloquentia fortitudine præstantior” is illustrated by the pictura of Hercules Gallicus (Figure 79) and explicated by the following Latin subscriptio: Arcum læua tenet, rigidam fert dextera clauam, Contegit & Nemees corpora nuda leo.

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had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.” Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, pp. 16-20.

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Herculis hæc igitur facies? non conuenit illud Quo`d uetus & senio tempora cana gerit. Quid quod lingua illi leuibus traiecta cathenis, Queis fissa fialeis allicit aure uiros? An ne quo`d Alciden lingua , non robore Galli Præstantem, populis iura dedisse ferunt? Cedunt arma togæ, & quamuis durißima corda Eloquio pollens ad sua uota trahit. 162

Jacques Amyot (1513-1593), a prominent French humanist, poet, and translator of Plutarch, concludes chapter II (“Combien l’e´loquence est utile et ne´cessaire”) of his Projet d’Eloquence Royale for King Henri III by way of praeteritio: Je ne ferai point ici mention de notre Hercule Gaulois tant renomme´, que les peuples suivoient attire´s par le fil de sa langue, et me suffira de dire que si l’e´loquence est reine de toutes choses, ainsi que quelque poe`te l’a laisse´ par e´crit, il n’y a Roi, tant soit grand et puissant, qui ne doive de´sirer de l’avoir pour sa compagne. 163

The Hercules Gallicus myth was sometimes surpassed by the myth of the orator, poet, and musician Orpheus (Figures 58-60), who tamed wild animals (i. e., men) and - in another reading of the myth - made the cosmos rise out of primeval chaos. 164 Thus the magical force of rhetoric combined 162

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CLARISSIMI VIRI D. ANDREÆ AL-ciati Emblematum libellus, uigilanter recognitus, & ia˜ rece`ns per Wolphgangum Hungerum Bauarum, rhythmmis Germanicis uersus. […] PARISIIS. Apud Christianum Wechelum, sub scuto Basiliensi, in uico Iacobeo: & sub Pegaso in uico Bellouacensi. Anno. M.D. XLII. (facsimile reprint: Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1967), pp. 206-207 (Emblem XCIII.). - The English translation reads: “Eloquence superior to strength - His left hand holds a bow, his right hand a stout club, the lion of Nemea clothes his bare body. So this is a figure of Hercules. But he is old and his temples grizzled with age - that does not fit. What of the fact that his tongue has light chains passing through it, which are attached to men’s pierced ears, and by them he draws them unresisting along? The reason is surely that the Gauls say that Alceus’ descendant excelled in eloquence rather than might and gave laws to the nations. - Weapons yield to the arts of peace, and even the hardest of hearts the skilled speaker can lead where he will.” (Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Lyons, 1550). Ed. & trans. Betty I. Knott. Introd. J. Manning. Aldershot, Hants., England. / Brookfield., Vt.: Scolar Press, 1996, p. 194.). Jacques Amyot, Projet d’Eloquence Royale. Ed. Ph.-J. Salazar. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992, p. 49. The title of an earlier edition describes more exactly the circumstances of its origin: Projet d’e´loquence royale compose´ pour Henri III, Roi de France … d’apre`s le manuscrit autographe de l’auteur. Versailles: Ph. O. Pierre, 1805. Cf. August Buck, Der Orpheus-Mythos in der italienischen Renaissance. Krefeld: Scherpe, 1961; Hannelore Semmelrath, Der Orpheus-Mythos in der italienischen Renaissance: Eine Studie zur Interpretationsgeschichte und zur Ikonologie. PhD diss. Köln, 1994; Silke Leopold, Al modo d’Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts. Laaber: Laaber, 1995. An excellent collection of source texts (in German) with a useful bibliography was compiled by Wolfgang Storch under the title Mythos Orpheus: Texte von Vergil bis Ingeborg Bachmann.

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with music was believed to create, maintain, and restore harmony and order in all spheres of the universe. In his exegesis of the Orpheus myth the English educator William Kempe (1563?-1601) writes: […] with his sweet eloquence and wisdom, he mollified the fierce manners of vnreasonable men, and mooued their stonie hearts to embrace vertue 165

For this reason, rulers liked to be celebrated as Hercules Gallicus or Orpheus, which meant that they were considered preservers of peace and civil harmony. Thus the favourite image of the French King Henri IV was that of the Gallic Hercules (Figure 80), by which he had himself emblazoned as the restorer of religious and national peace not by military force but by acts of verbal diplomacy that led to the legalization of the Huguenot population by the Edict of Nantes in 1595. 166 The identification of a ruler with the mythical demigod Hercules was a common epideictic practice in humanism, as demonstrated by the elevation of King (and later Emperor) Maximilian I as Hercules Germanicus in a contemporary woodcut by an anonymous artist. 167 And whenever Hercules is mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, it is with a view to the ideal ruler (e. g. in Hamlet I.ii.153 or Antony and Cleopatra I.iii.85, IV.iii.21). 168

165

166

167

168

Leipzig: Reclam, 1997. Selected aspects of the reception history of the Orpheus myth are presented in an anthology of essays by Christine Mundt-Espin (ed.), Blick auf Orpheus: 2500 Jahre Rezeptionsgeschichte eines antiken Mythos. Tübingen / Bern: Francke, 2003. William Kempe, “The Education of children in learning” (1588), in: R.D. Pepper (ed.), Four Tudor Books on Education. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966, p. 199. Cf. Corrado Vivanti, “Henri IV, the Gallic Hercules,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 176-197; id., Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1963, pp. 74-131. - A print distributed after the consecration of Henri IV at Chartres shows the king clad in armour and standing in a triumphal arch which bears the subscriptio: HERCVLI GALLICO. Cf. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. On its interpretation cf. Erwin Pokorny, “Maximilian I. als Hercules Germanicus,” in: Hispania - Austria: Kunst um 1492. Die Katholischen Könige, Maximilian I. und die Anfänge der Casa de Austria in Spanien. Milano: Electa, 1992, pp. 349-350. (no. 162).- A noteworthy historical as well as political phenomenon is the fact that in the Renaissance several members of the Italian noble family d’Este bore the first name Ercole, e. g. Ercole d’Este I (1431-1505) and Ercole d’Este II (1508-1559). Cf. Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. On Shakespearean mythography and its background, see Noel Purdon, The Words of Mercury: Shakespeare and English Mythography of the Renaissance. Salzburg, Austria: Universität Salzburg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974. On the Hercules myth in general cf. Angelo Walther, Die Mythen der Antike in der bildenden Kunst. Düsseldorf: Albatros, 2003 (1993), pp. 28-32 (with illustrations), and Herbert David Brumble, Classical Myths and Legends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: A Dictionary of Allegorical Meanings. London etc.: Dearborn, 1998.

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When humanist culture declined and the oratio/ratio ideologeme was questioned by the reality of events, rhetoric established itself once more, but now in a different way, as the basis of courtly culture. First formulated by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528), 169 it was now no longer regarded as appropriate to exhibit the art of persuasion (demonstrare artem) but rather to conceal it (celare artem): “pero´ po dir quella esser vera arte, che non pare esser arte.” 170 This concealment of art, which in Italian is termed sprezzatura 171 and appears comparable to “understatement” in English, is now considered the utmost in artistic achievement and is identified with an altera natura or a second nature. Altera natura is art so skilfully hidden that it can no longer be recognized as such but has the appearance of artless nature, not, however, of nature in its original primitive state but of one domesticated by art. The locus classicus of the dissimulatio artis concept is to be found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (IV.vii.10), but the idea was widespread in ancient rhetoric. 172 In the last chapter (III.xxv) of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), which deals with the topic of dissimulatio artis, George Puttenham reports on his experience of courtiers at foreign courts, from which he then draws his conclusion: […] Or as I haue obserued in many of the Princes Courts of Italie, to seeme idle when they be earnestly occupied & entend to nothing but mischieuous practizes, and do busily negotiat by coulor of otiation. Or as others of them that go ordinarily to Church and neuer pray to winne an opinion of holinesse: or pray

169

170

171

172

The reception history of Castiglione’s work is outlined by Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the “Courtier”: The European Reception of Castiglione’s “Cortegiano.” Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. - Cf. also Arthur F. Kinney, Continental Humanist Poetics: Studies in Erasmus, Castiglione, Marguerite de Navarre, and Cervantes. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, chap. 3: “Della mortal oblivione questa chiara memoria: Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, and the Poetics of Eloquence” (pp. 87-134). Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano. Torino: Einaudi, 1960, p. 55 (I.xxvi) - Translation: “Therefore that may bee saide to be a verie arte, that appeareth not to be arte.” (B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Translated by Sir Thomas Hoby. Introd. W.H.D. Rouse. London: Dent/ New York: Dutton, 1959, p.46). On the sprezzatura concept, see Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978, pp. 33-40. Joseph A. Mazzeo asserts that of the four concepts that are constitutive for the Cortegiano grazia, gravita`, sprezzatura, leggiadria - grazia as the telos of them occupies a position of pre-eminence. For a list of sources, see Harry Caplan’s note in his Loeb edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.vii.10. The subject is dealt with at large by Christoff Neumeister, Grundsätze der forensischen Rhetorik - gezeigt an den Gerichtsreden Ciceros. München: Hueber, 1964, chap. IV: “Das Verbergen der rhetorischen Kunst” (pp. 130-155).

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still apace, but neuer do good deede, and geue a begger a penny and spend a pound on a harlot, to speake faire to a mans face, and foule behinde his backe, to set him at his trencher and yet sit on his skirts for so we vse to say by a fayned friend, then also to be rough and churlish in speach and apparance, but inwardly affectionate and fauouring, as I haue sene of the greatest podestates and grauest iudges and Presidentes of Parliament in Fraunce. These & many such like disguisings do we find in mans behauiour, & specially in the Courtiers of forraine Countreyes, where in my youth I was brought vp, and very well obserued their maner of life and conuersation, for of mine owne Countrey I haue not made so great experience. Which parts, neuerthelesse, we allow not now in our English maker, because we haue geuen him the name of an honest man, and not of an hypocrite: and therefore leauing these manner of dissimulations to all base-minded men, & of vile nature or misterie, we doe allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte: that is, when he is most artificiall, so to disguise and cloake it as it may not appeare, nor seeme to proceede from him by any studie or trade of rules, but to be his naturall: nor so euidently to be descried, as euery ladde that reades him shall say he is a good scholler, but will rather haue him to know his arte well, and little to vse it. 173

Puttenham, who draws a sharp distinction between life and literature, also equates allegoria, the basic trope of courtly rhetoric, “which is when we speake one thing and thinke another,” with both “the figure of faire semblant” and “the figure of false semblant,” 174 thereby illustrating the delicate balance of courtly culture between appearance and reality, between falsehood and truth. Hence it is only a small step from the aesthetics of artful artlessness to Machiavelli’s rhetoric of deceit. When the middle classes rose to economic prosperity and social power, they at first sought to compete with the aristocracy by adopting its cultural code. 175 This sometimes proved a ridiculous failure, which is wittily exposed in Molie`re’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). With the “crisis of the aristocracy” (L. Stone), 176 however, the courtly concept of culture was increasingly criticized by the one-dimensional mentality of the middle classes, which regarded it as expressive of decadence and decay. As a consequence, the figurative style of ornamentation was replaced 173

174 175

176

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 (1936), pp. 301-302. - Cf. on this attitude also Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 186, 299. Cf. e. g. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1935; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1980. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; new ed.: London / New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

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by the artless plain style, which turned out to be the new verbal expression of the prototype of bourgeois literature, the novel.

VII. The Waning of the Renaissance At the beginning of the Renaissance Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who because of his merits for rediscovering the culture of classical antiquity and inaugurating its synthesis with modern Christian belief is also called the “father of the Renaissance,” discussed the importance of studying eloquence in a letter to his student friend Tommaso da Messina: The care of the mind requires a philosopher; the education of the tongue belongs to the orator. Neither one should be neglected by us if, as they say, we are to rise up from the earth and soar on the lips of men. But I will speak of the former elsewhere, for it is an important subject which, though involving immense labor, promises a very rich harvest. Here, lest I go off on some matter other than the one that led me to write, I will encourage and admonish that we correct not just our life and conduct, although that is the first thing necessary for virtue, but also our habit of speaking, something we can accomplish through the study of the art of eloquence. For speech is no small index of the mind, and the mind, no small guide for speech. Each depends on the other, but while the one is hidden away in our breasts, the other emerges into the outside world. The mind adorns what is about to appear and forms it as it wishes to, while the speech, as it comes out, declares what the mind is like. People obey the judgment of the mind, which gains their credence through the testimony of speech. Therefore, both are to be cultivated in such a way that the mind may learn to be reasonably severe in managing speech, and speech may learn to be truthfully magnificent in expressing the mind. However, we cannot really be neglecting speech when we are caring for the mind, just as, on the other hand, dignity cannot be present in speech unless its majesty is also present in the mind. […] How many people have we seen in our time who have not been affected at all by received models of correct speech, but who, as if awakened, have been suddenly converted from the most wicked course of life to the greatest modesty merely by the words spoken by others! I will not repeat to you now what Cicero says about this subject at great length in his De inventione [I.ii.2-3] - for the passage is extremely well known - nor will I bring up the fables of Orpheus and of Amphion, the first of whom is said to have moved monstrous beasts by his songs, and the latter, trees and rocks, which he was able to lead wherever he wished, except to say that, by relying on their superior eloquence, the first is believed to have induced gentleness and patient endurance in lustful, savage beings whose behavior resembled that of brute animals, while the second did the same thing for beings who were rustic, intractable, and hard as rocks. Add to

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this that by means of this art we are permitted to be useful to many people who live far away, for our speech reaches those with whom we will perhaps never share the riches of our social intercourse. Finally, just how much we will be able to bestow on our posterity through speech can best be judged by remembering how much the words of our forefathers have bestowed on us. 177

The first part of this passage stresses the necessity of uniting ratio and oratio, or, in other words, philosophy and rhetoric, which is regarded as the ultimate telos of civil life. The second part goes back to prehistoric times and refers to Orpheus and Amphion as mythical cultural heroes who by the civilizing forces of music and eloquence converted hitherto barbarous and unsocial human beings into homines vere humani, that is citizens abandoning the homo homini lupus way of behaviour in favour of living in well-ordered social communities ruled by the rationality of laws. More than one hundred years later the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives wrote a treatise De causis corruptarum artium (1531), which investigated the causes of 177

English translation by Rebhorn (ed.), Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, pp. 15-16. - A different translation is available in: Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarium libri I-VIII. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1975, pp. 47-49. - Latin source in: Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari. Ed. Vittorio Rossi. 4 vols. Firenze: Sansoni, 1933-1942, vol. I, No. 9: “Ad eundem Thomam Messanensem, de studio eloquentie”, pp. 45-48, here pp. 45-46: “Animi cura philosophum querit, eruditio lingue oratoris est propria; neutra nobis negligenda, si nos, ut aiunt, humo tollere et per ora virum volitare propositum est. Sed de priore alibi; magna enim res est et labor ingens, sed messis uberrima; hoc loco, ne in aliud exeam quam quod me ad calamum traxit, exhortor ac moneo ut non vitam tantum et mores, quod primum virtutis est opus, sed sermonis etiam nostri consuetudinem corrigamus quod artificiose nobis eloquentie cura prestabit. Nec enim parvus aut index animi sermo est aut sermonis moderator est animus. Alter pendet ex altero; ceterum ille latet in pectore, hic exit in publicum; ille comit egressurum et qualem esse vult fingit; hic egrediens qualis ille sit nuntiat; illius paretur arbitrio, huius testimonio creditur; utrique igitur consulendum est, ut et ille in hunc sobrie severus, et hic in illum veraciter norit esse magnificus; quanquam ubi animo consultum fuerit, neglectus esse sermo non possit, sicut, ex diverso, adesse sermoni dignitas non potest, nisi animo sua maiestas affuerit. […] Quam multos, quibus nichil omnino loquentium exempla contulerant, etate nostra velut experrectos agnovimus et a sceleratissime vite cursu ad summam repente modestiam alienis tantum vocibus fuisse conversos! Non referam tibi nunc que de hac re MARCUS cicero in libris Inventionum [De inv. I.1] copiosius disputat - est enim locus ille notissimus -, nec fabulam Orphei vel Amphionis interseram, quorum ille beluas immanes, hic arbores ac saxa cantu movisse et quocunque vellet duxisse perhiberetur, nonnisi propter excellentem facultatem facundiam, qua fretus alter libidinosas ac truces brutorumque animantium moribus simillimos, alter agrestes et duros in saxi modum atque intractabiles animos, ad mansuetudinem et omnium rerum patientiam creditur animasse. Adde quod hoc studio in longinqua regione degentibus prodesse permittimur; ad quos enim nostri copia et convictus nunquam forte venturus est, sermo perveniet. Iam vero quantum posteris collaturi simus, optime metiemur, si quantumnobis contulerint maiorum nostrorum inventa, meminerimus.”

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the corruption of the arts, including those of rhetoric. 178 The problems posed here were on the whole discussed and solved during the ensuing century, partly in theoretical treatises and partly in the practicalities of life and the arts. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, a new phase in the cultural development of Europe set in, named by some historians Counter-Renaissance, 179 by others Mannerism, 180 and again by others Baroque. 181 Irrespective of the terminology chosen, the waning of the Renaissance witnessed the following tendencies in the development of rhetoric: the increase of rhetorical theories and their expansion to bulky encyclopedic handbooks with lengthy quotations of classical and modern sources, erudite commentaries and glosses as well as highly differentiated indices; a tendency towards sophistication (mannerism) on the one hand and towards simplicity (‘plain style’) on the other; the disintegration of the Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis) in favour of the autonomy of the individual Art as an independent discipline. Thus inventio was changed into dialectics, elocutio into a theory of style, and pronuntiatio/actio into a theory of delivery and acting strangely called 178

179 180

181

Juan Luis Vives, De causis corruptatum artium / Über die Gründe des Verfalls der Künste. LatinGerman edition. Ed. E. Hidalgo-Serra. München: Fink, 1990. Cf. Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance. Gloucester: P. Smith, 1966 (1950). Cf. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. See by the same author: The Social History of Art II: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Cf. also John Shearman, Mannerism: Style and Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; Hans-Joachim Lange, Aemulatio veterum sive de optimo genere dicendi: Die Entstehung des Barockstils im 16. Jahrhundert durch eine Geschmacksverschiebung in Richtung der Stile des manieristischen Typs. Bern / Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1974. On a sociological basis the Hungarian scholar Tibor Klaniczay examines the difference between Renaissance and Mannerist style in: Renaissance und Manierismus: Zum Verhältnis von Gesellschaftsstruktur, Poetik und Stil. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1977. Without using the term Mannerism Rosemond Tuve refers to the same phenomenon in the second item of her antithetical book title Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947, rpt. 1961. The term was coined and preferably used by German art-historians, of whom the most prominent was Heinrich Wölfflin. A differentiated discussion and survey of ‘Baroque’ phenomena is provided by the anthology of essays Die Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters. Ed. Rudolf Stamm. Bern: Francke, 1956. The term was adopted by the editors of “Attic” & Baroque Style: The Anti-Ciceronian Movement. Essays by Morris W. Croll. Ed. J. Max Patrick & R. O. Evans, with J. M. Wallace. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969; furthermore by Wylie Sypher in his Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. A broad survey of rhetorical Baroque phenomena is provided by E. Castelli (ed.), Retorica e barocco: Atti del III Congresso internazionale di Studi Umanistici, Venezia, 15-18 giugnio 1954. Roma: Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, 1955. Manfred Windfuhr, Die barocke Bildlichkeit und ihre Kritiker. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966 gives an excellent survey of the stylistic developments in German Baroque rhetoric and literature.

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elocution, which term was even transferred to the North American university curricula. This process of disintegration and independence inaugurated by the Ramistic reform of rhetoric continued far into the seventeenth century, until the end of the Renaissance. To determine exactly when this end had come is as impossible as to define the beginning of the Renaissance. 182

182

Discussions of cultural periodization are to be found in books by Eugenio Battisti, Rinascimento e barocco. Torino: Einaudi, 1960, and Werner Bahner, Renaissance, Barock, Aufklärung: Epochen- und Periodisierungsfragen. Kronberg/Ts. (Germany): Scriptor, 1976.

B. Poetica Rhetorica Rhetorical Poetics in the Renaissance

Renaissance poetic theories differ from preceding and subsequent ones in a number of constituents, the most pervasive and persistent of which is their rhetoricization. This common feature entitles them to be classified as rhetorical poetics. Nevertheless rhetoricized poetic theories are clearly differentiated from each other by some fundamental criteria which allocate them to heterogeneous groups of treatises embedded in traditions of their own. Such fundamental criteria concern I. structure, II. purpose, and III. idiosyncrasies of rhetoricized poetry and rhetorical poetics. In the latter case rhetoric assumes the function of metarhetoric, that is a corpus of rhetorical concepts and categories determining the constitution of poetic theories. The criteria mentioned will be dealt with successively in the following paragraphs and be illustrated by (Neo-) Latin, Italian, French, English, and German treatises.

I. The Structural Concept of the Five Great Arts in Poetics Chapter 4 in Book I of the Art poe´tique (1555) by Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517-1582) has the following heading and beginning: De la Composition du Poe`me en ge´ne´ral: Et de l’Invention, Disposition et Elocution Toutes sortes d’E´crits s’accomplissent de trois parties principales, qui sont Invention, Disposition, E´locution. Invention est un dessein provenant de l’imagination de l’entendement, pour parvenir a` notre fin. Elle est re´pandue par tout le Poe`me, comme le sang par le corps de l’animal: de sorte qu’elle se peut appeler la vie ou l’aˆme du Poe`me. Disposition, est une ordonnance et enseignement des choses invente´es. Et est celle qui donne la beaute´ et la dignite´ a` tout le Poe`me. E´locution que les Grecs appellent Phrase, est une structure de mots et de clauses les unes avec les autres. C’est celle qui expose les conceptions de l’esprit et qui sert de truchement aux deux susdites. Ces trois ici s’entrefavorisent fide`lement en toute la Composition. 1

According to Peletier, each kind of writing is subject to the triple rhetorical process of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio which cooperate in the constitution of a discourse. If one constitutive component is missing, the entire discourse

1

Jacques Peletier du Mans, “Art poe´tique (1555)”, in: Traite´s de poe´tique et de rhe´torique de la Renaissance. Ed. F. Goyet. Paris: Librairie Ge´ne´rale FrancX aise, 1990, pp. 235-344, here: pp. 251-252. Cf. also edition and commentary by Andre´ Boulanger, L’Art Poe¨tique de Jacques Peletier du Mans (1555). Paris: Socie´te´ d’E`dition: Les Belles Lettres, 1930, p. 88.

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Figure 13: Thomas Se´billet: Title-page of Art poe´tique franc¸ois (1548).

fails; for instance: “Sans la Disposition, l’Invention serait confuse, difforme, de´sagre´able, et comme si elle n’e´tait point.” 2 Other poetic theories of the French Renaissance argue in a similar way, with particular emphasis on their subject, poetry; as does the Art poe´tique franc¸ais (Figure 13) by Thomas Se´billet (1512-1589), which makes the following statements on the relationship between poet and orator and the roles assigned to invention, disposition and elocution: 2

Jacques Peletier du Mans, “Art poe´tique (1555)”, in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 252.

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Le fondement et premie`re partie du Poe`me ou carme, est l’invention. Et ne doiton trouver e´trange si je donne en l’art poe´tique les premie`res parties a` celle, laquelle les Rhe´toriciens ont aussi nombre´e premie`re part de tout leur art. Car la Rhe´torique est autant bien e´pandue par tout le poe`me, comme par toute l’oraison. Et sont l’Orateur et le Poe`te tant proches et conjoints, que semblables et e´gaux en plusieurs choses, diffe`rent principalement en ce, que l’un est plus contraint de nombres que l’autre. […] Et pource que la disposition dite par le Grec, E´conomie, suit de pre`s cette invention, et est ne´cessaire au Poe`te: il regardera aussi soigneusement a` joindre les unes choses aux autres proprement au progre`s de son poe`me: et y mettre les fins et les commencements tant biense´ants, […] Ce fondement jete´ par l’invention, et le projet de tout le futur baˆtiment pris par l’e´conomie, suit la queˆte des pierres ou briques pour l’e´lever et former. Celles sont les dictions, mots ou vocables: entre lesquels a autant bien choix et e´lection, comme entre les choses, pour en rejeter les mal convenantes et aptes, et retenir les propres et biense´antes. Encore ici recourrons-nous a` nos pe`res les Grecs et Latins, Rhe´teurs et Poe`tes: qui enseignant l’usage des mots, on dit qu’il est le Monsieur, au gre´ duquel les plus huppe´s s’efforcent e´crire. 3

Thus poet and orator share the first three of the Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis), the difference between poetry and oratory being that the former makes use of the oratio ligata of verse, a point which gave rise to a widespread debate with arguments pro and contra in the Renaissance. Particular emphasis is put by Se´billet on the principle of decorum (“biense´ance”) which governs the proper arrangement of the matter provided by invention and the appropriate implementation of invented and structured matter by means of apt words and phrases. In every question of decorum both the poets and rhetors of Greek and Latin Antiquity must be considered as normative models. Thomas Se´billet and Jacques Peletier du Mans evidently initiated a tradition in French poetic theories; for the same rhetorical concept is to be found in such works as the Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1565) 4 by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), L’art poe´tique franc¸ois (1597) 5 by Pierre de Laudun d’Aigaliers (1575-1629), and L’Acade´mie de l’art poe´tiqve (1610) 6 by Pierre de Deimier (c. 1570-c. 1618). As early as 1549 Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) in La Deffence et Illustration de la langue francoyse adopts the Five Great Arts of rhetoric as useful instruments for achieving a good style: 3

4 5

6

Thomas Se´billet, “Art poe´tique francX ais (1548)”, in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, pp. 37-183, here: 57, 59, 60. Edition in: Traite´s de poe´tique et de rhe´torique de la Renaissance. Ed. F. Goyet, pp. 465-493. Edition: Pierre de Laudun d’Aigaliers, L’Art Poe´tique Franc¸ais. Ed. J. Dedieu. Gene`ve: Slatkine Reprints, 1969, esp. pp. 75-77. L’ACADEMIE DE L’ART POETIQVE. Ou` par amples raisons, demonstrations, nouuelles recherches, examinations & authoritez d’exemples, sont viuement esclaircis & deduicts les moyens, par ou` l’on peut paruenir a` la vraye & par parfaicte connoissance de la Poe´sie

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Et premier, c’est une chose accorde´e entre tous les meilleurs aucteurs de rethorique, qu’il y a cinq parties de bien dire, l’invention, l’eloquution, la disposition, la memoire & la pronuntiation. 7

A remarkable feature in this enumeration is the fact that with regard to dispositio and elocutio the natural order is reversed. While discarding memoria and pronuntiatio as not adequate to the “benefice des Langues,” du Bellay contents himself with the treatment of “eloquution et invention,” because these are necessary requirements for translations, the subject of chapter 4 of book I: “L’office donques de l’orateur est de chacune chose propose´e elegamment & copieusement parler.” 8 For un orateur est juge´ plus excellent, & un genre de dire meilleur que l’autre: comme celle dont est apelle´e la mesme eloquence: & dont la vertu gist aux motz propres, usitez, & non alie´nes du commun usaige de parler, aux methaphores, alegories, comparaisons, similitudes, energies, & tant d’autres figures et ornemens, sans les quelz tout oraison & poe¨me sont nudz, manques & debiles: je ne croyray jamais qu’on puisse bien apprendre tout cela des traducteurs, pour ce qu’il est impossible de le rendre avecques la mesme grace, dont l’autheur en a use´: d’autant che chacune Langue a je ne scay quoy propre seulement a` elle, dont si vous efforcez exprimer le naif en une autre Langue, observant la loy de traduyre, qui est n’espacier point hors des limites de l’aucteur, vostre diction sera contrainte, froide, & de mauvaise grace. 9

The principal focus of this passage is on style, defined as a decorative dress bestowed on discourse, which without it appears deficient and lacks its proper grace and attraction. Reference to inventio, dispositio, and elocutio is made in poetic theories of much earlier date, as in Marco Girolamo Vida’s De Arte Poetica of 1517, the second book of which is devoted to inventio and dispositio, while book 3 discusses elocutio, emphasizing the close relationship of poetry and oratory and even everyday communication on this point: Nec tamen haud solis fugit haec me nota poetis, Verum etiam auctores alii experiuntur, & audent,

7

8 9

FrancX oise. […]. Par le Sieur DE DEIMIER. A PARIS, Chez IEAN DE BORDEAVLX, rue¨ S. Iean de Beauuais, vis a` vis la porte de l’Eglise, M.D.C.X., p. 209 ff. “De l’Inuention premier ornement de Poe¨sie, & de la Disposition & Elocution dont l’inuention est perfectionnee. De la dignite´ des Oeuures d’Homere, De l’imitation, & de la diuision d’icelle en deux sortes. De la Paraphrase & traduction.” Joachim du Bellay, La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. Ed. L. Terreaux. Paris / Bruxelles / Montre´al: Bibliothe`que Bordas, 1972, p. 32. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

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Præcipue orantes caussas, fandique magistri, Seu fontes tendant legum compescere habenis, Seu caros cupiant atris e mortis amicos Faucibus eripere, & defletos reddere luci. Quin etiam agricolas ea fandi nota voluptas Exercet, dum læta seges, dum trudere gemmas Incipiunt vites, sitientiaque ætheris imbrem Prata bibunt, ridentque satis surgentibus agri (III. 84-93). 10

More than one hundred years later the same rhetorical categories recur, this time in a theory composed for future German poets, the Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey of 1624 (Figure 14) by Martin Opitz (1597-1639), who writes in Chapter V “Von der zugehöer der Deutschen Poesie / vnd erstlich von der invention / oder erfindung / vnd Disposition oder abtheilung der dinge / von denen wir schreiben wollen.” 11 As thus announced, Opitz first deals with poetic invention and disposition, followed by a theory of prosody and the poetic genres. Whereas the first three of the Five Great Arts are regularly mentioned as being necessary requirements for a rhetorical concept of poetry, the latter two, namely memoria and actio, seem to be quantite´s ne´gligeables, with the result that often they are not even mentioned in the context of rhetorical poetics. But they nevertheless do occur in poetic theories, the difference being that normally they do not appear in the systematic sequence inventio - dispositio - elocutio - memoria - actio but fairly irregularly in such places where they contribute to the respective contextual arguments. A certain preference is given to the systematic sequence of the first three of the Five Great Arts, because these often serve as structural principles of rhetorical poetics. Such a triadic division based on three partes artis was observed in Renaissance poetic theories as early as Vida’s De Arte Poetica of 1517

10

11

Marco Girolamo Vida, The De ARTE POETICA. Trans. with commentary, & with the text of c. 1517 edited, by Ralph G. Williams. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, p. 90. Translation (p. 91): “I am aware that figurative language is not known to the poets alone; indeed, other authors make bold use of it as well. Particularly is this true of those masters of eloquence, the men who plead causes, whether their attempt is to curb the guilty by the restraints of the law or their desire is to snatch dear friends from the black jaws of death and return them, much mourned, to the light of day. Indeed, one common ornament of speech imposes itself even on farmers, when they speak of “happy” crops, of vines beginning to “push out” their “gems,” of “thirsty” fields “drinking” in heaven’s shower, and of fields “smiling” on their “growing offspring.” Martin Opitz, Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624). Facsimile Reprint ed. by R. Alewyn. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1963, p. 17.

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Figure 14: Martin Opitz (1597-1639): Title-page of Buch der Deutschen Poeterey (1624).

(Figure 15), and subsequently by many Neo-Latin and the French poetics mentioned. In England a prominent case is George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), of which Book I (“Of Poets and Poesie”) deals with the basic axioms of poetry as well as the fundamental functions of an epideictic concept of invention and the poetic genres derived from it, Book II (“Of Proportion Poetical”) with prosody and graphemic poems, Book III (“Of Ornament”) with tropes and figures and the principle of decorum governing their use. In such theories of poetry rhetoric exerts a metapoetic function, imposing on the traditional structure of poeta - poesis - poema 12 a secondary rhetorical structure. 12

Cf. Hellfried Dahlmann, “Varros Schrift de poematis und die hellenistisch-römische Poetik,” Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, Abh. d. geistes- u. sozialwiss. Kl., no. 3.

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Figure 15: Marco Girolamo Vida (1480/85-1566): De Arte Poetica (1517).

Classical rhetorical structures are not only imposed on poetic theories, however, but also on poetic works. Another important structure is that of a classical oration with its constitutive components exordium - propositio Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953; Charles O. Brink, Horace on Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, 21982.

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narratio - confirmatio - refutatio - peroratio. An examination of Melanchton’s and Iodocus Willichius’ commentaries on the comedies of Terence reveals that these are annotated in the structural terms of the classical partes artis and partes orationis. 13 This hermeneutic practice of humanism was followed by, among others, Aron Kibedi Varga and Milton Boone Kennedy in the twentieth century, the one analysing French classicist works, the other plays of Shakespeare in terms of the classical rhetorical schemata of the partes artis and the partes orationis. 14 These structures are not always laid open by the authors but may also be hidden according to the celare artem principle. Such a procedure of structural concealment was disclosed in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar 15 but can also be discovered in Iago’s rhetorical seduction of Othello, as will be shown in chapter D. III of this book.

II. Rhetorical Poetics con variazioni Rhetorical poetics can assume heterogeneous shapes. Of some even their title reveals a rhetorical purpose and content. A wide-spread humanist fashion was the defensio or apology, as indicated by such titles as Joachim du Bellay’s La Deffense et Illustration da la Langue Francoyse (1549) or Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595), alternatively titled The Defence of Poesy (Figure 16). Both treatises are partly argumentative in character, refuting the negative viewpoints of their opponents in the manner of the genus iudiciale. Sidney, however, whose poetics is clearly structured in the manner of a classical oration, 16 sometimes makes use of rhetorical epideixis, praising poetry instead of defending it. The archetypal predecessor of a poetics of defence is Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313-1375) Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1373), of which Books XIV and XV contain a defence of poetry. It accordingly has a 13

14

15

16

Cf. Marvin T. Herrick, “The Place of Rhetoric in Poetic Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 34/1 (1948), 1-22 who renders the subtitle of Willichius’ 1550 edition of Terence in the following way: “The commentaries of Iodocus Willichius Resellianus on the same, in which is presented an account of invention, disposition, and style in each of the scenes, with an explanation of some obscure passages” (1). Cf. also Edwin W. Robbins, Characterization in Printed Commentaries on Terence, 1473-1600. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1951. ´ tudes de structures classiques. Paris / Bruxelles / A. Kibe´di Varga, Rhe´torique et Litte´rature: E Montre´al: Didier, 1970; Milton Boone Kennedy, The Oration in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. Cf. Wolfgang G. Müller, “A Hidden Oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Sprachkunst 6 (1975), 104-114. Cf. Neil Rudenstine, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 21965, chap. 2: “The Defence of Poesie as a Classical Oration” (pp. 46-83).

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Figure 16: Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586): Title-page of An Apologie for Poetrie (1595).

chapter on the argument “Poetry Is a Useful Art” (XIV.vi) beginning with the following statement: I am about to enter the arena, a manikin against these giant hulks - who have armed themselves with authority to say that poetry is either no art at all or a useless one. In the circumstances, for me first to discuss the definition and function of poetry would be hunting a mare’s nest. But since the fight must be fought I wish these past masters of all the arts would declare upon what particular point they desire the contest to bear. Yet I know full well that with a sneer and a brazen front they will unblushingly utter the same ineptitudes as before. Come, O merciful God, give ear to their foolish objections and guide their steps into a better way. 17 17

Boccacio on Poetry. Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s “Genealogia Deorum Gentilium.” An English version with introductory essay and commentary by Charles G. Osgood. Indianopolis / New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956, pp. 36-37.

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The apology for poetry is thus carried out as a verbal fight in which the position of the opponents, Sidney’s misomousoi, which is based on Platonic, Christian, and ethic ideas, is systematically contradicted with practical proofs and classical authorities, leading to the confirmation of the usefulness of poetry. The apologist defines himself as a kind of lawyer making his appearance before a law-court; in a typical self-diminution (mea parvitas) he describes his position as by far inferior to that of his adversaries, who seem to have won a victory even before the opening of the trial. In the wake of such apologies a great chain of apologies and refutations followed, not only on the matter of poetry and especially comedy but also on theatre and acting, subjects of particular importance to the English Puritans, whose convictions led to a strict censorship and finally to the closing of the theatres in 1642. A less rhetorical but rather scholarly type of rhetorical poetics is that of a commentary. It may be a metarhetorical one analysing a poetic theory, such as William Temple’s Ramist Analysis (1584-1586) of Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. 18 Another scholarly type is a running commentary on a poetical work, such as E.K.’s commentary on Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579). 19 In the Argument to the Februarie eclogue a clear reference is made to the rhetorical principle of enargeia or evidentia: For as in this time of yeare, so then in our bodies there is a dry and withering cold, which congealeth the crudled blood, and frieseth the wetherbeaten flesh, with stormes of Fortune, and hoare frosts of Care. To which purpose the olde man telleth a tale of the Oake and the Bryer, so liuely and so feelingly, as if the thing were set forth in some Picture before our eyes, more plainly could not appeare. 20

In E.K.’s running commentary on Spenser’s pastoral poetry numerous glosses on rhetorical categories, figures and tropes occur, e. g. on epanorthosis, allegory, description / icon / hypotyposis, metaphor, “an exordium ad preparandos animos,” narration, fictio, pathetical parenthesis, hyperbaton, epiphonema, epanorthosis or correction, description, syncope, (poetical) metaphor, praise (panegyrica), ironical sarcasm, comparison, cacozelon, (gallant) exclamation, lively icon or representation, “as if he saw her in heauen present,” (pretty) allegory, (fine ) description, metaphor, and others. 21 18

19

20

21

Edition: John Webster (ed.), William Temple’s “Analysis” of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry.” Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984. Edition: Patsy Scherer Cornelius (ed.), E.K.’s Commentary on “The Shepheardes Calender.” Salzburg, Austria: Universität Salzburg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974. Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works. Ed. J.C. Smith & E. de Selincourt. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 423. Spenser, The Poetical Works, pp. 423, 426, 427, 433, 435, 440, 443, 451, 455, 458, 459, 463, 466, 467.

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A third category of rhetorical poetics is normative in character and is composed of rules for the adequate constitution of a poetical work. This type regularly appears in conjunction with poetological conceptions of Horatian and Aristotelian descent. Bernard Weinberg in his monumental twovolume work on A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961) 22 attempts to disentangle and classify the confused multitude of treatises by creating more than twenty categories intended as an almost orderly system. A similar procedure is to be observed in Marvin T. Herrick’s more limited but extremely useful study The Fusion of the Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531-1555, 23 of which Chapter 5 on decorum bridges the gap between poetics and rhetoric. Other book titles like Charles Sears Baldwin’s Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France and England, 1400-1600 (1939) 24 or Donald Lemen Clark’s Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (1922) 25 seem to focus on the interdisciplinary fusion of the two approaches but for the greater part treat each of them separately. 26 A synthesis is only achieved in the epoch-making study Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (1954) 27 by Madeleine Doran, though rhetoric does not provide a consistent perspective here. In spite of such research in rhetorical poetics the results remain fragmentary, because a systematic examination of its fundamental structural components has not yet been undertaken.

III. Basic Constituents of Rhetorical Poetics The easiest and at the same time logically most convincing manner of analysing the rhetoricity of poetry in a systematic way is to proceed chronologically by the Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis) and investigate the sequence inven22

23

24

25

26

27

Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531-1555. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1946. Charles Sears Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France and England, 1400-1600. Ed. D.L. Clark. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922. The same remark applies to Renato Barilli’s useful book Poetica e Retorica. Milano: U. Mursia, 1969, in which separate chapters are devoted to rhetoric and poetics. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954.

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tio - dispositio - elocutio - memoria – actio. This will be done in the chapters B.I through B.V. But it is also evident that these viewpoints do not cover the whole spectrum of rhetorical poeticity. Some further rhetorical constituents promote the rhetoricization of poetry and poetics. Four of them to be highlighted in this section are 1. enargeia / evidentia, 2. tropicity, 3. epideixis, and 4. affections. These permeate not only poetic but also non-poetic, intermedial works, be they made up of words, pictures, musical compositions or hybrid compounds of them. 1. enargeia / evidentia Beginning with Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1410b 33-36, 1411b 22-1412a 10), where energeia as a rhetorical category of style is defined as pro¡ oœmma¬tvn tiue¬nai (“to put before one’s eyes”), this rhetorical principle made a victorious passage through the theories and textbooks of the arts, verbal and non-verbal ones, in the Renaissance and beyond. Richard Whately (1787-1863) presents a chapter “Of Energy” in his Elements of Rhetoric (1828) in which he bestows a “wider sense” on this term than Aristotle on eœne¬rgeia, nearly corresponding with what Dr. Campbell calls Vivacity; so as to comprehend every thing that may conduce to stimulate attention, - to impress strongly on the mind the Arguments adduced, - to excite the Imagination, and to arouse the Feelings. 28

It is not, however, energeia 29 but usually the phonetically related form enargeia or its Latin equivalent evidentia that plays a major part in the history of rhetoric and rhetorical poetics. And here the most effective mediator certainly is Quintilian, who in his Institutio Oratoria VIII.iii.61-62 equates enargeia with evidentia and repraesentatio while distinguishing it from perspicuitas. 30 In English, 28

29

30

Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric. Ed. D. Ehninger. Carbondale / Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963, p. 275 (II.ii.§1). - In Modern Painters v. 3, Pt. iv. (1860) John Ruskin’s synonym of Aristotle’s energeia is “pathetic fallacy,” which denotes “the presentation of the inanimate world as possessing human feeling.” On humanist commentaries on energeia, see H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975, Appendix (pp. 184-193). - On enargeia/evidentia in classical antiquity, see the ´ vidence (philosophie et anthology of essays edited by Carlos Le´vy & Laurent Pernot, Dire l’E rhe´torique antiques). Cahiers de philosophie de l’Universite´ de Paris XII., No. 2. Paris / Montre´al: L’Harmattan, 1997. - On Erasmus and enargeia, see Terence Cave, “Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century,” L’Esprit Cre´ateur 16/4 (1976). 5-17. Cf. Bernhard F. Scholz,”Ekphrasis and enargeia in Quintilian’s Institutionis Oratoriae Libri XII,” In: “Rhetorica Movet”: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett. Ed. P.L. Oesterreich & T.O. Sloane. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 1999, pp. 3-24.

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terms like evidence, illustration, or pictoriality may serve as equivalents. In other languages the same concept appears under various terms, in German for instance as Anschaulichkeit / Anschauung 31 or Schilderung. 32 It is furthermore identified with ekphrasis or descriptio and serves as an intermedial category between poetry and painting, denoting the genre of literary pictorialism. Whatever its synonyms and qualifications, enargeia / evidentia are categories of representation, of one that is lifelike, lively, natural, realistic, and illusionistic in various degrees of manifest materialization - from mental image to theatrical performance or, in terms of literary rhetoric, from poetic inventio to poetic actio. 2. Tropicity In the Renaissance every kind of representation, whether verbal or nonverbal, whether realistic or non-realistic, is tropical in character, which means that it has a twofold semantic status, a literal and a transcending, tropical one. This can above all be shown in the visual arts, such as portraits of rulers, but also in the details of Dutch landscape paintings and Flemish still life paintings. 33 Beginning with Erich Auerbach’s fundamental essay 31

32

33

Cf. Gottfried Willems, Anschaulichkeit: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen und des literarischen Darstellungsstils. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989; Andreas Solbach, Evidentia und Erzähltheorie: Die Rhetorik anschaulichen Erzählens in der Frühmoderne und ihre antiken Quellen. München: Fink, 1994; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 18/19 (1980), 1-13. This number of the journal is dedicated to the general topic “Anschaung als ästhetische Theorie,” with further contributions by Arthur C. Danto, Hartmut Schnelle, Max Imdahl, and others. Bernhard Asmuth, “Schilderung: Zur literarischen und schulischen Geschichte eines malerisch-affektiven Textbegriffs,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. Beiheft VII/3: “Erzählforschung”(1978), pp. 307-336. - The following American doctoral dissertations deal with the subject of enargeia/evidentia and their equivalents: Marie E. Brittin, “Concepts of Evidence in Rhetoric,” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1949; Hugh Pettis Munro, “The Function and Measurement of Rhetorical Energeia,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1963 (Da 25[1964], 1411-1412); Vernon Lyle Taylor, “The Concept of Illustration in Rhetorical Theory,” PhD diss., Northwestern University Graduate School, 1959. - Articles: Ken Adams, “Notes on Concretization,” British Journal of Aesthetics 4 (1964), 115-125; Wayland Maxfield Parrish, “The Concept of ‘Naturalness’,” QJS 37 (1951), 448-454; D.R. Bormann, “Enargeia: A Concept for all Seasons,” Proceedings of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences 4 (1977), 155-159. On the symbolism of Renaissance portraits cf. the publications of the Warburg School (e. g., F.A. Yates) and Roy Strong on Elizabeth I and other rulers; cf. also the informative catalogue of a Rostock University Library exhibition on Fürst und Land: Das illustrierte Buch in den Beständen der Universitätsbibliothek Rostock. Ed. Markus Völkel et al. Rostock: Universität, 2002. - On Dutch landscape and still-life painting, see Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch Landscape

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“Figura,” 34 modern scholarship has rediscovered the figural, tropic or allegorical tradition in European culture. Auerbach points out the growth of a tradition: Figural phenomenal prophecy, however, had grown out of a definite historical situation, the Christian break with Judaism and the Christian mission among the Gentiles; it had a historical function. Its integral, firmly teleological view of history and the providential order of the world gave it the power to capture the imagination and innermost feeling of the convert nations. By its success it paved the way for less concrete schools of allegorism, such as that of the Alexandrians. But although this and other spiritualistic methods of interpretation may be older than the figural method of the apostles and Church Fathers, they are unmistakably late forms, while the figural interpretation with its living historicity, though scarcely primitive or archaic, was assuredly a fresh beginning and rebirth of man’s creative powers. 35

The creative powers mentioned were awakened in the invention of several allegorical readings of the Holy Scriptures, leading to the systematic concept of four senses of the Bible and other sacred texts which was later secularized and applied to all kinds of poetic texts. 36 This can be demonstrated by John Harington’s preface to his translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso (1591): The ancient Poets haue indeed wrapped as it were in their writings diuers and sundry meanings, which they call the sences or mysteries thereof. First of all for the litterall sence (as it were the vtmost barke or ryne) they set downe in manner of an historie, the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memorie; then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the Morall sence, profitable for the actiue life of man, approuing vertuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Manie times also vnder the selfesame words they comprehend some true vnderstanding of naturall Philosophie, or sometimes of politike gouernement, and now

34

35 36

Painting of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Phaidon, 31981; Peter C. Sutton et al., Masters of 17th-century Landscape Painting. London: Herbert, 1987; Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956, and the excellent exhibition catalogue Die Sprache der Bilder: Realität und Bedeutung in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts. Braunschweig: Herzog Anton-Ulrich-Museum, 1978. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in: Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Six Essays. New York: Meridian Books, 1959, pp. 11-76. Auerbach, “Figura,” in: Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, p. 56. On this development cf. Jon Whitman (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 2000. Cf. also Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the Renaissance. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970.

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and then of diuinitie: and these same sences that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegorie, which Plutarch defineth to be when one thing is told, and by that another is vnderstood. 37

Harington distinguishes between the following allegorical senses of a text - sensus literalis/historicus, sensus moralis, sensus philosophicus/theologicus (anagogicus) of which he makes practical use in his running commentary on Ariosto’s epic. The same method of interpretation (and composition) is also practised in other epic poems, for instance in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 38 continuing as far as Daniel Defoe’s epic in prose, his novel Robinson Crusoe. 39 3. Epideixis In the feudal society of the Renaissance, rhetoric could not unveil its full potential but faced a number of restrictions imposed upon its public realization. While the genus iudiciale was firmly embedded in the education of future lawyers, who then as now applied their knowledge of judicial rhetoric in their lawsuits, the genus deliberativum, the basis of parliamentary rhetoric, though rarely practised in public, conquered the territory of school and university debates that still have a place in England today. The privileged genre of rhetoric was epideixis or the genus demonstrativum. It was of such a great importance in Renaissance literature that Coluccio Salutati, disciple of Petrarca and chancellor of Florence, first defined the ideal orator in the approved Catonian fashion as vir bonus dicendi peritus and the poet as vir optimus laudandi peritus. 40 Comprehending the functions of praise and blame, epideixis assumed an important role in public life for the numerous occasions the feudal system offered the subjects to express their attitude towards the ruling class. This publicized attitude could, of course, only be one of loyalty and obedience manifesting itself in elaborate oratorical and poetic demonstrations of praise. 37

38

39

40

Sir John Harington, “A Preface, or rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie,” in: Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, by Iohn Haringto˜. (1591). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1970, sig. iiij.r. The allegorical tradition from the Middle Ages through the 17th century is represented in Rosemond Tuve’s comprehensive study Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966, rpt. 1974 which focuses especially on the works of Spenser, who in his dedicatory epistle to Sir Walter Raleigh calls The Faerie Queene “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit.” Cf. J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in “Robinson Crusoe.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966. According to O.B. Hardison, Jr., “The Orator and the Poet: The Dilemma of Humanist Literature,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1971), 33-44, here: 36.

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Such epideictic manifestations could take place on one of the numerous celebratory occasions of the court, be it one of happiness or mourning. On such occasions a strictly persuasive purpose was, of course, not pursued; the aesthetics of the text was of primary importance. A. Kibe´di Varga aptly describes the specific character of the “demonstrative situation”: Un orateur se faisant admirer pour la beaute´ de son discours ou faisant admirer, par cette meˆme beaute´, un illustre personnage - voici la situation du de´monstratif. Contrairement a` ce qui se passe dans les deux autres genres, l’auditeur fait a` peine partie de cette situation. C’est pourquoi, en litte´rature, la situation interne analogue a` celle du de´monstratif ne pre´sente gue`re d’inte´reˆt: dans les pie`ces de the´aˆtre et les romans on trouve des sce`nes dans lesquelles un personnage de´crit quelque chose a` quelqu’un, ou fait l’e´loge d’un autre personnage. 41

The aesthetic or, in other terms, autotelic character of the rhetorical genus demonstrativum effects that its generic components can be transferred to epideictic poetry. The epideictic category can include such rhetoricized poetic works as blazons, birthday odes, epithalamia, and funeral elegies but also such poetry as celebrated a victory over the country’s enemy. Examples of epideictic occasional poetry are Pierre de Ronsard’s Hymne de Charles, Cardinal de Lorraine (1559) and Thomas Shadwell’s Ode for Queen Mary’s Birthday (1689). The entire range of epideictic poetry rooted in classical antiquity has been explored by O.B. Hardison in his thorough study The Enduring Monument, 42 which emphasizes the importance of the epideictic scheme of Menander Rhetor. 43 It is only a change of medium which makes possible the production of victory paintings, such as the Armada portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, and of victory odes set to music, such as George Frideric Handel’s Dettingen Tedeum. The epideictic mode of both literary production and interpretation grew to such an extent that it was even conferred on the concept of epic poetry. 44 41

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A. Kibe´di Varga, Rhe´torique et Litte´rature, p. 93. - On pp. 193-230 he exemplifies epideictic oratory of praise with Jean-Baptiste Massillon’s Sermon pour le jour de Saint Louis, roi de France; Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet’s Pane´gyrique de Saint Victor; and Antoine le Maistre’s Pre´sentation de Monsieur le Chancelier Seguier en la Cour des Aides. - Cf. also Richard Lockwood, The Reader’s Figure: Epideictic Rhetoric in Plato, Aristotle, Bossuet, Racine and Pascal. Gene`ve: Droz, 1996. O.B Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in the Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973 (1962). Edition: Menander Rhetor. Ed. D.A. Russell & N.G. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. - Cf. also Theodore C. Burgess, Epideictic Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, and, for the political function of epideictic rhetoric in late Antiquity, Johannes A. Straub, Vom Herrscherideal in der Spätantike. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964, pp. 146-159: “Die publizistische Bedeutung der panegyrischen Literatur.” Cf. Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” New Literary History 14 (1983), 497-537.

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In the Italian Renaissance this concept served as an interpretative model of Virgil’s Aeneid. 45 In England it inspired Edmund Spenser to write The Fairie Queene as an epideictic epic for Queen Elizabeth I: In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphœbe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phœbe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.) 46

Thus Spenser in his dedicatory epistle to Sir Walter Raleigh distinguishes in Elizabeth two personae, the private ego of a virtuous and beautiful lady and the social alter ego of a queen. It is to both personae that his praise is directed, but this is performed under the mask of mythological impersonations in the classical manner. 47 A far more radical rhetorical reinterpretation of literature takes place in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), which imposes an epideictic concept upon all poetic genres. This, however, will be dealt with in the subsequent chapter on Dispositio Poetica.

4. Affections The general importance of the emotions for the efficiency of rhetoric was stressed time and again by Klaus Dockhorn. 48 While criticizing the rhetorical conceptions of Ernst Robert Curtius and Heinrich Lausberg, he pointed out the significance of the Ciceronian triad docere - delectare - movere and the 45

46

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Cf. Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works. Ed. J.C. Smith & E. de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 407. - Cf. Thomas H. Cain, Praise in “The Faerie Queene.” Lincoln, Neb. / London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978; Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth. London & Canberra: Croom Helm / Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1983. - H.F. Plett, “Epideictic,” in: The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A.C. Hamilton et al. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 249-250. Cf. H.F. Plett, “Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England,” New Literary History 14 (1983), 597-621, here: 612-615. Some important writings are collected in Klaus Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik: Vier Aufsätze zur Ideengeschichte der Vormoderne. Bad Homburg v.d.H. / Berlin / Zürich: Gehlen, 1968.

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Aristotelian triad logos - ethos 49 (i. e., mild, moderate, benign emotions) – pathos (i. e., vehement, passionate affections), together with the psychology of affections which later became an integral part of many treatises on rhetoric. 50 In early Christianity it was St. Augustine (354-430) who in De doctrina Christiana adapted the Ciceronian triad of effects to the office of the preacher, from whence it found its way into numerous medieval and Renaissance artes praedicandi (sive concionandi). 51 The Renaissance was a cultural period, that brought the rediscovery of the affective dimension of rhetoric. In the Paraphrasis (1588) of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by the Paduan professor Antonio Riccoboni (1541-1599), the pa¬uh were translated as perturbationes animi (“disturbances of the mind”) which he attributed to the Stoic tradition of pathos. 52 The significance of the affections for Renaissance rhetoric may be gathered from the treatise De affectibus movendis (1586) by the Rostock humanist Nathan Chytraeus (1543-1598). 53 Actually a commentary on Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and bearing the additional Greek title h
uh kai¡ pa¬uh, this work at first raises the question “Quid sunt affectus?” which it answers in the following way: Sunt motus, qui efficiunt, vt homines immutati, non eodem modo, de rebus tamen iisdem, sentiant; sed a` prioribus suis iudiciis multu`m discrepent. 54

In the following pages Chytraeus explicates several antithetical affections, first of all anger (ira) and gentleness (lenitas), which he illustrates by examples taken from Latin literature, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Terence’s comedies. Then he analyses love and hate in a section “De amore et odio,” followed 49

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On ethos and pathos in Antiquity cf. Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos: From Aristotle to Cicero. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1989. On Aristotle’s conception of the emotions cf. the contributions of Stephen R. Leighton, Jon M. Cooper, Dorothea Frede, Gisela Striker, and Martha Craven Nussbaum to the anthology Essays on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric.” Ed. Ame´lie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 206-323. Cf. James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of the Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, rpt. Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001; Peter Prestel, Die Rezeption der ciceronischen Rhetorik durch Augustinus in “De doctrina Christiana.” Frankfurt/M. / New York: Lang, 1992. Cf. Lawrence D. Green, “Pathos,” in: Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. T.O. Sloane. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 554-569, here: p. 563. - On the role of the affections in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics cf. H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte: Englische Wirkungsästhetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975. Full title: h
uh kai¡ pa¬uh, Seu DE AFFECTIBVS MOVENDIS, ARISTOTELIS EX II. RHE=toricorum doctrina, accurate` & perspicue` explicata in Academia Rostochiana, a` NATHANE CHYTRAEO. HERBORNÆ, Excudebat Christophorus Coruinus. M.D.LXXXVI. Nathan Chytraeus, De affectibus movendis, pp. 4-5. Translation: “They are motions which effect that people are changed and think not in the same way on the same things; but differ much from their former judgement.”

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again by another pair of contrasting affections, and so on. The conclusion of the book is on the manners of the mighty (“De moribus potentium”) and on the ‘ethical’ oration (oratio morata). The affective (“pathetic”) strain in treatises on rhetoric grows stronger with the Counter-Reformation in the wake of the Tridentine Council (15451563) and reaches its peak in seventeenth-century sacred rhetoric with such treatises as De eloquentia sacra et humana (1617) of the French Jesuit Nicolaus Caussinus (1581-1651), who devotes ample space to the use of affections in ecclesiastical oratory. 55 The authors of poetological tracts did not hesitate to transfer the affective concept of rhetoric to poetry and its telos. While the Horatian dyad utiledulce or prodesse-delectare at first claimed priority in Renaissance poetics, as for instance in Girolamo Fracastoro’s dialogue Navgerivs (1540), 56 the rhetoric of affections made itself felt in a poetic concept like that proposed in Alessandro Lionardi’s Dialogi della inventione poetica (1554), which reads as follows: Perche´ la maggior fatica che abbia il poeta, e` quella che reca eziandio non poca difficulta` al pittore, dico il saper bene gli effetti naturali delle cose, dipingendo, fingere, et imitare le passioni dell’animo sı` che vere e palesi e non finte e nascose paiano. 57

In his voluminous Latin treatise De Poeta (1559) Antonio Sebastiano Minturno adapts the rhetorical triad of effects to poetry but subordinates docere - delectare - movere to admiratio, another affective category borrowed from rhetoric: Illud autem ne te prætereat uelim, sic poetis esse dicendum, ut siue doceant, siue oblectent, siue moueant, hæc singula statim admiratio legentis, audientisue consequatur. 58

Minturno amplifies his affective concept by dealing extensively with the essence and functions of emotions in poetry. In England such a conception 55

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Book VIII is “De affectibus” which are meticulously analysed in the scholastic manner. On the various developments cf. Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Cf. also Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1983, who deals with the meditative work of six English poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the influence of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Girolamo Fracastoro, Navgerivs, sive de Poetica Dialogvs. Ed. & trans. Ruth Kelso. Introd. M. W. Bundy. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1924, p. 74: “[…] the aim of the poet is to please[delectare] and to instruct [prodesse].” Alessandro Lionardi, Dialogi di Messer Alessandro Lionardi della Inventione Poetica. In Venetia, Per Plinio Pietrasanta, MDLIIII, p. 52; rpt. in: Trattati de poetica e retorica del Cinquecento. Ed. B. Weinberg. Vol. II. Bari: Laterza, 1970, p. 259. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, De Poeta. Venetiis, Ann. M.D.LIX, p. 106.

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found imitation, for instance in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, which defines tragedy as a genre “that, with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world.” 59 The affections not only dominated poetry and poetics but extended their influence to music and painting as well. Further, psychological theories such as Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde (1601) treated the relations between speech and the affections, as in chapters on “Scoffing speeches” and “Discouerie of Passion in Praysing,” “Discouery of Passions in play,” and “Discouerie of Passions in gesture,” / “In Voyce.” 60 Not only from the titles of these chapters but even more from their content their relation to the rhetorical tradition (epideixis, actio) is evident. In his bulky treatise La Poe´tique (1640) Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mesnardie`re put an even greater emphasis on the role of affections in tragedy (Figure 17). The chapter on “Les paßions” begins with a reference to Aristotle’s Poetics (chap. 14) by making the following statement: Il les [sc. passions] faut de´crire en ce lieu par vne De´finition accommode´e a` la Sce´ne, & apprendre a` noˆtre Poe¨te que Ce sont des sentimens pleins de tristesse & de douleur, dont noˆtre ame est agite´e a` la re´ception des Objets que le Poe¨me lui fournit, soit par l’oreille, ou par les yeux, quand il fait voir ou qu’il raconte quelques Actions pitoyables. […] C’est proprement en ce lieu que le Poe¨te iudicieux, & tres-scX auant en e´loquence, doit employer adroittement toutes les forces de ce´t Art qui dispose des sentimens, & qui force les volontez par des charmes ine´uitables. Car les Maximes du The´atre sont directement oppose´es a` celles de l’Areopage, ou` il e´toit defendu par la voix du crieur public aux Aduocats qui haranguoient, d’exciter aucunes passions qui pussent troubler l’esprit, & surprendre le iugement. La gloire du Poe¨te consiste a` renuerser toute vne ame par les mouuemens inuincibles que son discours excite en elle. Il ne lui fait point e´prouuer les effets de sa Science, s’il ne la rend forcene´e d’vne forte & courte fureur qui l’arrache violemment de son assiette naturelle; Et a` parler absolument, vn Poe¨me n’est point raisonnable s’il n’enchante & s’il n’e´blouı¨t la Raison de ses Auditeurs. 61

This remarkably passionate passage on the passions in tragedy and poetry in general declares the emotional effect the only criterion by which to judge the aesthetic quality of a work of art. In this respect he accords with Sidney, but 59

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Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, 1965, p. 118. On admiration cf. Marvin T. Herrick, “Some Neglected Sources of admiratio,” MLN 62 (1947), 222-226. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde. London: V.S. for W.B., 1601, pp. 175-182, 216219; 197-203, 209-216. H.-J. Pilet de la Mesnardie`re, La Poe´tique (1640). Gene`ve: Slatkine Reprints, 1972, pp. 7072. - On this poetics cf. Helen Reese, La Mesnardie`re’s “Poe¨tique,” 1639: Sources and Dramatic Theories. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press / London: Oxford University Press, 1937; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1973.

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Figure 17: Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mesnardie`re: Title-page of La Poe¨tique (1640).

the extent to which he generalizes and highlights pathos exceeds the rather moderate position of a sixteenth-century humanist. When the representation of passions is regarded the “glory of the (dramatic) poet,” we have left the period of the rather esoteric rhe´toriqueurs (1450-1520) and the more popular civic entertainments of the rederijkers far behind and entered the Baroque Age with its self-interpretation in the light of the theatrical metaphor as the quintessence of its existence: totus mundus agit histrionem.

IV. Rhetoricized Poetry Institutionalized: The Rederijkers In the early fifteenth century, guilds in Flanders and Zeeland, now Belgium and the Netherlands, began to found “Chambers of Rhetoric” for the pro-

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Figure 18: Stage facX ade for the rederijker performance of the landjuweel at Antwerp (1561).

duction of poetry and plays. While here they were named rederijkers, 62 similar developments took place in northern France and southern Germany, where these orator poets called themselves rhe´toriqueurs or, in Nuremberg, Meistersinger, although the latter devoted themselves mainly to music. In the Low Countries the large and wealthy cities competed with each other for the laurel 62

Literature: George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944, chap III; Jelle Koopmans et al. (eds.), Rhetoric - Re´toriqueurs - Rederijkers. North-Holland, Amsterdam / Oxford / New York / Tokyo, 1995; Marijke Spies, “Rederijkers,” in: Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. T.O. Sloane. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 683-685; M. Spies, “Developments in Sixteenth-Century Dutch Poetics: From ‘Rhetoric’ to ‘Renaissance’,” in Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 72-91.

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Figure 19: Stage facX ade for a 1582 rederijker performance at Antwerp.

of the best poetry and the most magnificent spectacles. Thus the city of Ghent had five chambers, Audenarde and its suburbs even seven. The names which the Chambers of Rhetoric gave themselves were often metaphorical, such as De Fontein (fountain) of Ghent, one of the oldest in the country (1448), De Helighe Gheest (Holy Ghost) of Bruges, De Pellicanisten (Pelicanists)

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of Haarlem, De Eglentier (Eglantine) and De Violieren (Stock-gillyflower) of Amsterdam. Each society was organized in a strict hierarchy; most had among its members a poet and a fool who were called upon to perform their parts in the annual contests inside and outside the Chamber. An important series of competitions organized in the Duchy of Brabant was the landjuweel (the country’s jewel) (Figure 18); the winner had to organize the following one. The poetry was characterized by an abundance of rhymes and elaborate lyrical forms influenced by the seconde rhe´torique of the French rhe´toriqueurs. 63 Particularly striking in the staging of rederijker plays was their sumptuous scenography. Often the stage facX ade was composed of several sections and showed a statue of personified Rhetorica enthroned on the upper stage surrounded by allegorical figures like Virtue, Love, Joy, and Knowledge. The configuration of static sculptures resembled a tableau vivant, with its combination of decorative effect and moralizing message. The latter, usually fastened by a board to the stage facX ade, was in some cases interpreted in an oration by Rhetorica. The point of such productions, besides the emblematic message, was to provide a magnificent spectacle of stage architecture, decorated with gothic turrets and gay coloured pennants, as can be seen from drawings and printed illustrations of the period like that of an Antwerp rederijker stage of 1582 (Figure 19). But it was the word that provided the “soul” of the spectacular “body” of the scenic representation.

63

Cf. Rudolf H. Wolf, “Der Stil der Rhe´toriqueurs: Grundlagen und Grundformen,” Gießener Beiträge zur Romanischen Philologie 29 (1939), 1-95; Robert Griffin, “Second Rhetoric and the grands rhe´toriqueurs,” in: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. III: The Renaissance. Ed. Glyn F. Norton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 155-160. - M. Ernest Langlois (ed.), Recueil d’arts de seconde rhe´torique. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902.

Inventio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Imagination Both in rhetoric and poetry the first thing an author has to consider is inventio(n). Thus Thomas Wilson in his Arte of Rhetorique (1553) writes: The findyng out of apte matter, called otherwise Invencion, is a searchyng out of thynges true, or thynges likely, the whiche maie reasonably sette furth a matter, and make it appere probable. 1

In contrast to an orator a poet does not attempt to search out true things but rather imaginary ones. The poet’s faculty to create imaginary worlds is therefore called imagination (Greek: ›antasi¬a). This concept, however, is fairly vague and open to a great number of different interpretations, depending on the focus chosen by the analyst. The medical focus investigates the physiological and psychological reasons for and effects of a healthy and a sick imagination, as, for instance, Robert Burton (1577-1640) did in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The philosophical focus, deriving mostly from Plato and Neoplatonism, deals with the epistemological, ontological, and creative dimensions of this human faculty, as in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s (1469-1533) De imaginatione (1501), the first printed treatise on the subject. 2 A rhetorical concept of imagination can only be founded if it at least partly adopts some basic constituents of rhetorical inventio. In his Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1565), Pierre de Ronsard calls inventio the “me`re de

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2

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, p. 31. On the various traditions cf. e. g. Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, 1927, rpt. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970; id., “Invention and Imagination in the Renaissance,” JEGP 29 (1930), 535-545; William Rossky, The Theory of Imagination in Elizabethan Literature: Psychology, Rhetoric, and Poetic. PhD diss., New York University, 1953; John Martin Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas. Ed. P. Murray. London / New York: Routledge, 1991. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s treatise De imginatione was edited by Eckhard Kessler with a German translation, together with an introduction by C.B. Schmitt & K. Park. München: Fink, 1984.

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toutes choses” 3 and, in his Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1548), Thomas Se´billet explains the procedure of poetic invention in the following statement: Le surplus de l’invention qui consiste en l’art, prendra le poe`te des Philosophes et Rhe´teurs qui en ont e´crit livres propres et particuliers, comme celui que j’ai devant suppose´ savant en l’art de Rhe´torique. Si le veux-je bien aviser que l’invention, et le jugement compris sous elle se confirment et enrichissent par la lecture des bons et classiques poe`tes francX ais comme sont entre les vieux Alain Chartier, et Jean de Meun: mais plus luis profiteront les jeunes comme imbus de la pure source francX aise, eclaircie par feu tre`s illustre et tre`s savant Prince FrancX ois Roi de France, vivant pe`re de son peuple, et des Poe`tes francX ais, entre lesquels lira le novice des muses francX aises, Marot, Saint-Gelais, Salel, He´roe¨t, Sce`ve, et tels autres bons esprits, qui tous les jours se donnent et e´vertuent l’exaltation de cette francX aise poe´sie, pour aider et roborer de leur invention et industrie son encore imbe´cile jugement: et autrement les suivre pas a` pas comme l’enfant la nourrice, partout ou` il voudra cheminer par dedans le pre´ de Poe´sie. 4

From this statement it may be concluded that there are two sources of poetic invention: a conceptual (theoretical) and a material one. The conceptual type is founded on the “places” (loci) of rhetorical inventio. The material type draws its substance (“nourrice”) from classical authors of either Greek and Latin or vernacular origin and is based on the principle of mimesis or imitation. An abbreviation of this procedure is the commonplace book in which the imitable passages of classical authors are collected and serve as a thesaurus or memory repository for creating new poetic inventions.

I. Ideas and Procedures of Conceptual Invention When Se´billet refers the poet to philosophers and rhetoricians for their inventions, one possible author to supply concepts and procedures is Petrus Ramus, who with his followers identified rhetorical heuresis / inventio with dialectic and illustrated it with examples from literature. Thus chapter 2 of the first book of his Logike (1574) - in the English translation by M. Ægidius Hamlin - titled “Of the cause efficient” begins with the words: The cause is that by whose force the thing is: and therfore this first place of inuention is the fountayne of all sciences: for that matter is knowen perfectly, whose cause is vnderstanded: So that not without good reason, the Poet dothe saye: 3

4

Pierre de Ronsard, “Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique francX ais (1565),” in: Traite´s de poe´tique et de rhe´torique de la Renaissance. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 472. Thomas Se´billet, “Art poe´tique francX ais (1548),” in: Traite´s de poe´tique et de rhe´torique de la Renaissance. Ed. F. Goyet, pp. 58-59.

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Happye is the man withouten doubte, Of thinges who maye the causes well fynde oute. The cause is eyther efficie˜t and materiall, or formal and fynall.

Later he goes on: Secondlie the cause efficient is eyther solitarie or ioined with some others, of the which some be principall and chief doers, others helpers & seruers to the principall. An example of the cause solitarie we haue in the 9. of Eneidos: Here, here, am I (o Rutilleus) in me Your swordes bare, thrust in with pythie hande. The fraude is myne, I am the cause onlie The impotente nothing durst take on hande. 5

Throughout Ramus’ logic illustrative examples are chosen from classical authors, preferably from Virgil (“the Poet”), Ovid, and Cicero (“the Orator”). The same method may be applied both to the production and interpretation of entire poetic texts, in the radical sense postulated by Thomas Se´billet: “Car la Rhe´torique est autant bien e´pandue par tout le poe`me, comme par toute l’oraison.” 6 It is evident that in this way not only the process of invention is initiated but that this invention is ordered composition, as emphasized by Jacques Peletier in his Art poe´tique (1555): Car l’Invention est si digne, que meˆme il y a invention a` disposer: et y a invention encore en l’E´locution, savoir est en l’e´lection des mots. Et est trop certain que nous n’avons rien a` ordonner qui ne soit premie`rement trouve´. Sans la Disposition, l’Invention serait confuse, difforme, de´sagre´able, et comme si elle n’e´tait point. Finalement, sans l’E´locution serait inutile et sans fruit toute notre invention et disposition, ainsi q’un couteau demeurant en sa gaine. Comme l’Invention et Disposition s’entretiennent, nous le figurerons sur le Poe`me de Virgile, auteur que je veux prendre pour mon principal guidon en mes traditions Poe´tiques. 7

Thus the procedural steps of invention, disposition, and elocution are interdependent. If one is missing, the whole composition lacks concept, order, and substance. Peletier exemplifies this interdependence by an examination of Virgil and other classical authors. The following paragraph will do the same by analysing the famous passage on imagination taken from Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595).

5

6 7

Petrus Ramus, The Logike of the moste excellent philosopher P. Ramus Martyr. Newly translated, and in diuers places corrected, after the mynde of the Author. London: Tho. Vautrollier, 1570, pp. 18, 20. Se´billet, “Art poe´tique francX ais (1548),” in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet. p. 57. Jacques Peletier, “Art poe´tique (1555),” in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 252.

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I.1. A Case Study in Poetic Invention: Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” V.i.4-22 Whenever reference is made to Shakespeare’s immanent poetics, one of the passages unavoidably mentioned is the description of the work of imagination by Theseus in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.12-17): 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. 8

Unlike any other of Shakespeare’s statements on poetry these verses have been the subject of scholarly comment. In his book about the theatre of passionate imagination, Rainer Lengeler chooses them as the basis for his interpretation of the entire comedy. 9 Other authors have concerned themselves with the concepts and sources of the passage under investigation. 10 The present analysis will proceed from this focal point and supplement it with analogous contemporary statements and concepts in order to reveal Shakespeare’s “logic of imagination.” Hans Blumenberg offers a plausible explanation for this procedure: Der Redner, der Dichter können im Grunde nichts sagen, was nicht auch in theoretisch-begrifflicher Weise dargestellt werden könnte; bei ihnen ist nicht das Was, sondern nur das Wie spezifisch. 11

Thus, the decoding of the “how” (i. e., metaphors) is the necessary precondition to the understanding of the “what” (i. e., concepts) of a verbal work of art. This procedure is, from the viewpoint of hermeneutics, at the same time both literary and rhetorical.

8 9 10

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Citations follow the Arden edition by Harold F. Brooks. London: Methuen, 1979. Rainer Lengeler, Das Theater der leidenschaftlichen Phantasie. Neumünster: Wachholz, 1975. Cf. Karl Hämmerle, “‘The Poet’s Eye’ (MND 5.1.12): Zur Auffassung Shakespeares vom Wesen des Dichters,” Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 1 (1953), 101-107; Robert W. Dent, “Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964), 115129; Diana Akers Rhoads, Shakespeare’s Defense of Poetry: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest.” Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1979, chap. IV; Ekbert Faas, Shakespeare’s Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, chap. VII. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Bonn: Bouvier, 1960, p. 8. Translation: “Basically orators and poets cannot say anything that could not be represented in theoretical and conceptual language as well; with them not the what but the how is specific.”

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I.1.1. Imagination as Restless inventio in Infinite Space The “poet’s eye” possesses a radius of action that spans from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven (V.i.12-13).

The faculty of sight, which ranks highest among the senses according to Renaissance physiology, is here - parallel to the Neo-Platonic furor poeticus - assigned an energy of search-activity that traverses the entire macrocosm. Consequently, this searching activity does not have boundaries, but takes place in the openness of infinite space. An equivalent to this idea can be found in Sidney’s statement that the poet has “all, from Dante’s heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen.” 12 William Davenant and Thomas Hobbes later open the same realm of action to wit and fancy, the latter author adding the horizontal dimension to the vertical space. 13 The following description of the possibilities of the soul concerning “Fantacie” by John Davies of Hereford, from his poem Mirum in Modum (1602), is closer in time to Shakespeare’s drama: Shee with hir wings (that can out-fly the wind;) Through Heau’n, Earth, Hell, and what they hold, doth fly. And so imprintes them liuely in the Minde, By force of hir impressing property, Seeing all in all, with her quick-sighted Eye. 14

The triad of heaven, earth, and hell in this context signalizes the totality of space. Gabriel Harvey’s description of inventio proclaims a slightly different concept of infinite space: “No varietie, or infinity, as Inuention which hath a huge worlde, and a maine Ocean of scope, to disport, and raunge itselfe [… ].” 15 As much as the terms might vary in these statements - “poet’s eyes,” “wit,” “fancy,” “fantasie,” or “inuention” - the concept of space remains constant. The world of the imagination is infinitely high, wide, and 12

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Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 111. - the parallel to Shakespeare was first discovered by Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney: The Influence of “The Defense of Poetry.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947, rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967, p. 8 ff. J.E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957, vol. II, pp. 20 (Davenant); 57 (Hobbes: “… from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth.”). John Davies of Hereford, Works. Ed. A.B. Grosart. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968 (1878); vol. I: “Mirum in Modum”, p. 8. Gabriel Harvey, Works. Ed. A.B. Grosart. 3 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1966, vol. I, p. 217.

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manifold. In this point the poetic concept of imaginatio and rhetorical inventio coincide. 16 Common to the characteristics assigned to the mental powers of poetic creation is the notion of restless activity. Its main attribute is nimble ranging. 17 A marginal gloss in the English translation of Du Bartas’ epic Les Semaines (Figure 20) exemplifies that in the Renaissance this attribute can be applied to the soul in general “of the quicke swiftnes, and sodaine motion of the Soule: comprehending all things in Heauen and Earth.” 18 It is the imagination, however, that is commonly characterized in this manner. In James Shirley’s masque The Triumph of Peace (1633) “nimble” is a term frequently used to describe the nature and actions of the personification of Fancy. 19 Phantastes, an allegorical figure in Spenser’s House of Alma, possesses a “working wit, / That never idle was, ne once could rest a whit” (The Faerie Queene II.ix.49.8-9). 20 His descendant by the same name in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island (VI.46.7) bears the predicates “the fount of speedy apprehension / Father of wit, the well of arts, and quick invention.” 21 In the anonymous drama Lingua (1607) a further literary offspring of Phantastes appears sporting the features “nimble” and “quick-eyed.” He is occasionally addressed as “Invention” and is accompanied by Heuresis, a nimble-spirited page who is characterized as the personification of “quick invention.” 22 In the examples last mentioned personifications illustrate the agility of imagination in ranging. The metaphor of flight is especially frequent in poetological statements of the time, which often evoke the image of the poet as a 16

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On the interrelation of both concepts cf. Murray W. Bundy, “’Invention’ and ‘Imagination’ in the Renaissance,” JEGP 29 (1930), 535-545. On medical and poetological perspectives on imagination cf. William Rossky, “Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic,” SRen 5 (1958), 49-73. Cf. Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes. rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964, p. 91. BARTAS: His Deuine Weekes and Workes (1605). Trans. Joshua Sylvester. Facsimile Reprint. Introd. F.C. Haber. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965, p. 219. James Shirley, “The Triumph of Peace,” in: A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 275-313, here: p. 287: Opinion about Fancy: “he is not / So nimble as I wish him” (vv. 196-197); p. 288: Opinion to Fancy: “your brain’s nimble” (v. 246); p. 294: Fancy: “you shall taste other / Variety, nimble as thought” (vv. 245-246). Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works. Ed. J.C. Smith & E. de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 117. Giles & Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works. Ed. F.S. Boas. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 (1909), vol. II, p. 79. W.C. Hazlitt (ed.), A Selection of Old English Plays. Vol. IX. London, 41874, pp. 338, 367, 368. A brawl between Heuresis and Anamnestes is commented on by Mendacio as follows: “Here’s the lively picture of this axiom, A quick invention and a good memory can never agree” (p. 390).

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Figure 20: Du Bartas (1544-1560): Title-page of the English translation of Les Semaines by Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618).

bird or as Pegasus, the steed of the muses. 23 Sidney, in this context, speaks of the “high flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet” as well as the “poet [..] lifted up with the vigour of his own invention.” 24 Further embodiments of the “inventive” imagination of the poet are presented by the nimble spaniel, the bustling bee, and the active advocate at the court of law. 25 However, 23

24 25

On the Pegasus metaphor cf. Mary Lascelles, “The Rider on the Winged Horse,” in: Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies. Presented to Frank Percy Wilson. Ed. H. Davis & H. Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, pp. 173-198. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 99 f. On the metaphor of the spaniel cf. Karl Josef Höltgen, “John Drydens ‘nimble spaniel’: Zur Schnelligkeit der inventio und imaginatio,” in: Lebende Antike: Symposium für Rudolf Sühnel.

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the poet is not allowed to range freely at pleasure. This becomes evident through restrictive metaphors. In Sidney’s Apology the poet is restrained (“reined”) by “learned discretion” - surely an allusion to Pegasus. 26 The images of the bird in a cage and the falcon on the leash illustrate the same point. 27 John Dryden’s inventive dog is hindered in his freedom of movement by wooden blocks, 28 as lawyers are subordinate to judges. 29 The image of hunting inventions is also found in rhetoric, where it is above all the “places” or loci of inventio which are the target of the orator. This inventive hunt is visualized by Gregor Reisch in his representation of the Typus Logice in his wide-spread encyclopedic work Margarita Philosophica (1503), where Logic appears as a sprightly huntress blowing her horn and vigorously striding across a field in the company of two dogs, one of which is named veritas and the other falsitas (Figure 21). An explanation of what Logic is doing here is given by Thomas Wilson in his Rule of Reason (1551), where the inventio argumentorum is described in this way: A Place is, the restyng corner of an argumente, or els a marke whiche geueth warning to our memorie what wee maie speake probably, either in the one parte, or the other, vpon al causes that fal in question. Those that bee good harefinders will soone finde the hare by her fourme. For when thei see the grounde beaten flatte round about, and faire to the sighte: thei haue a narrowe gesse by al likelihode that the hare was there a litle before. Likewise the Huntesman in huntyng the foxe, will soone espie when he seeth a hole, whether it be a foxe borough, or not. So he that will take profeicte in this parte of Logique, must bee like a hunter, and learne by labour to knowe the boroughes. For these places bee noth-

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Ed. H. Meller & H.-J. Zimmermann. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1967, pp. 233-249; on the bee cf. Sr. Joan Mary Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces. New York: Pageant, 1962, p. 136 f.; on the advocate cf. Peter [Pierre] Charron, Of Wisdom. Trans. S. Lennard. London: E. Blount & W. Aspley, n.d., p. 51: “[…] the Aduocates and Procters, in whom there is great stirre and much adoe […]; this is the picture of the imagination, an vndertaking, vnquiet facultie, which neuer resteth […].” Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 20. - Compare the collection of quotes by authorities in Thomas Pope Blount, De Re Poetica (1694). Facsimile Reprint: Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1972, pp. 18-19, in which the following parallel is of interest in the present context: “No Man (sayth Dryden in his Preface to Troilus and Cressida) should pretend to write, who cannot temper his Fancy with his Judgment. Nothing is more dangerous to a raw Horseman, than a hot-mouthed Jade without a Curb.” Francis de Sales, An Introdvction to a Devout Life. Translated into English. By I.Y. Facsimile Reprint: D. Rogers. Ilkley, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1976, pp. 139-140. John Dryden, Preface to “The Rival Ladies” (1664), in: J. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Ed. G. Watson. 2 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1962, vol. I, p. 8: “For imagination is a faculty so wild and lawless that like a high-ranging spaniel it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment.” Charron, Of Wisdom, p. 51.

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Figure 21: Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525), Margarita Philosophica (1583), representation of the inventive hunt of logic.

ing elles, but couertes or boroughes, wherin if any one searche diligently, he maie finde game at pleasure. 30 30

Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteynying the Arte of Logique. Ed. R.S. Sprague. Northridge, Cal.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972, p. 90 (according to a reference by K. J. Höltgen [n. 25]).

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Neither in Gregor Reisch’s representation of the Typus Logice nor in Thomas Wilson’s description of “hunting” for arguments are any restrictions given. This stands in obvious contrast to the statements issued on poetry by poets and theorists alike. Here the impeding authority is called Judgment. As will be demonstrated, this fact is of crucial importance to the composition of the mental image in poetry.

I.1.2. The EmBodiment of Mental Images in Poetic Pictures The mental act of imaginary searching ends in the creation of physical pictures consisting of words, as stated by Shakespeare’s Theseus in the continuation of his speech about imagination: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown … (MND V.i.14-15)

The second phase of poetic inventio consists in the formation of mental images that create the impression of physical presence. All poetry requires these images, and, as they are not without form, they have a pre-structuring function in the verbal work of art. John Hoskins refers to Philip Sidney as having had the habit “to imagine the thing present in his own brain that [h]is pen might the better present it to you.” 31 And Sidney himself emphasizes the necessity of an imaginary conception of images in his Apology: “[…] for any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself.” 32 Thus, the visually imagined conception of the work of art is awarded great significance for its realization as well as for its final success. Therefore the pre-structuring of the poetic invention through the power of imagination is more important than its verbal implementation. The quality of the mental images, however, is to be verified through the work of art itself, as Sidney continues in his Apology: “And that the Poet hath that Idea is manifest, by delivering them [sc. the works] forth in such excellency, as he hath imagined them.” 33 The only measure applicable to judge this is the effect the created verbal image brings forth. 31

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John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style. Ed. H.H. Hudson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1935, p.42. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 101. The term idea was at that time used to denote “an Image or Patterne of things conceiued in the Fancie” (BARTAS: His Deuine Weekes and Workes, Index, s. v.). Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 101.

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This introduces rhetoric to the context, as its rules and regulations have always taken into consideration the connection between mental image, its embodiment in the text, and its persuasive effects. The mental image is given many names within the framework of rhetoric: enargeia, evidentia, demonstratio, hypotyposis, illustratio, etc., as is the effect: energeia, efficacia, actio, vis, etc. The result is a frequent confusion of the two first named terms due to their graphophonetic similarities. 34 The locus classicus of this context is to be found in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.28-30: Primum est igitur, ut apud nos valeant ea quae valere apud iudicem volumus, adficiamurque antequam adficere conemur. At quomodo fiet, ut adficiamur? neque enim sunt motus in nostra potestate. Temptabo etiam de hoc dicere. Quas ›antasi¬aw Graeci vocant, nos sane visiones appellemus, per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur. Has quisquis bene conceperit, is erit in adfectibus potentissimus. Has quisquis bene conceperit, is erit in adfectibus potentissimus. Hunc quidam dicunt eyœ›antasi¬vton, qui sibi res, voces, actus secundum verum optime finget; quod quidem nobis volentibus facile continget. 35

If the orator wants to reach his audience on the emotional level, he must be moved by the same emotions he wants to stir up. This is achieved through the presentation of mental images (visiones), which make the absent seem present as well as the past and future seem contemporary. The act of presentation is therefore at the same time an act of fictionalization. A fictional, imagined reality is created through an artificial process (ars), the skilful employment of mental images, which is capable of influencing reality itself. In

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Cf. a. o. Perrine Galand-Hallyn, “De la rhe´torique des affects a` une me´tapoe´tique: E´volution du concept d’enargeia,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 244-265. On the classical tradition cf. P.H. Schryvers, “Invention, imagination et the´orie des e´motions chez Cice´ron et Quintilien,” in: Rhetoric Revalued. Ed. B. Vickers. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1982, pp. 47-57. Translation: “Accordingly, the first essential is that those feelings should prevail with us that we wish to prevail with the judge, and that we should be moved ourselves before we attempt to move others. But how are we to generate these emotions in ourselves, since emotion is not in our own power? I will try to explain as best I may. There are certain experiences which the Greeks call ›antasi¬ai, and the Romans visions, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the motions. Some writers describe the possessor of this power of vivid imagination, whereby things, words and actions are presented in the most realistic manner, by the Greek word eyœ›antasi¬vtow; and it is a power which all may readily acquire if they will.” (H.E. Butler).

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The Complete Gentleman (1622) Henry Peacham (1576?-1643?) defines this process as follows: Efficacy is a power of speech which representeth a thing after an excellent manner, neither in bare words only, but by presenting to our minds lively ideas or forms of things so truly as if we saw them with our eyes; as the places in hell, the fiery arrow of Acesta, the description of Fame, the flame about the temples of Ascanius; but of actions more open and with greater spirit, as in that passage and passion of Dido preparing to kill herself. 36

What Quintilian applies to the orator, is demanded by Peacham for the poet. Both emphasize the crucial importance of the emotional effect (efficacy) of presentation. The effects spring from mental images, but also produce them anew. The construction of mental design (designo interno [Lomazzo]) for a fictive reality thus takes place twice: in the production of the work as well as in its reception. The author achieves the transformation of mental images into verbal pictures, while the recipient performs the contrary. The act of decoding leads to mental images which introduce “the forms of things unknown” to the recipient: Heaven and Hell, mystical and spiritual entities. All of the aforementioned forms take on a bodily presence, according to the words of Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The metaphor “[to] body forth” in this context refers to more complex meaning than what the OED lists under the lemma “body” 4.a. The meaning presented there is “to represent oneself as in a bodily form, to give mental shape to.” However, the process of becoming corporeal to which Theseus is referring has two meanings: first the act of birth or creation, and second the plastic appearance of the mental image itself. 37 Thus, the imaginary inventio in effigie anticipates the medial concreteness of the ‘embodied’ fantasy. Since Theseus describes its objects as being of unknown origin, we can conclude that he is not, in a topical sense, referring to the heuresis of existing objects but rather, in a Neo-Platonic sense, to the transformation of an amorphous chaos into concrete shapes. 38 In this activity the poet resembles the Deus Artifex. In Du Bartas’ religious epic we read: “Of Nothing God created the matter, where36

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Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman [et al.]. Ed. V.B. Heltzel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 96. In a similar way Sidney defines mimesis as “a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth” (Apology, p. 101). The metaphor of “figuring forth” denotes both the procedure of birth and the sculptural plasticity of a finished work of art. On topical inventio cf. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Über die Leistungsfähigkeit topischer Kategorien - unter ständiger Rücksichtnahme auf Renaissance-Philosophie,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett, pp. 179-195; on Neo-Platonic invention cf. Lengeler, Das Theater der leidenschaftlichen Phantasie, pp. 106-108.

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unto afterward he gaue the forme and figure which now we behold in the creatures.” 39 The result is a cosmic order of aesthetically designed entities.

I.1.3. Eikastic and Fantastic Mental Images Through the words of Theseus, Shakespeare contrasts the “fine frenzy” of the poet’s eye with two other kinds of mental furor, which he associates with the madman and the lover: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. (MND V.i.3-11)

This passage is followed by the verses quoted at the beginning of this chapter and the following ones: […] Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy: Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! (MND V.i.18-22)

What is common to the madman, the lover, and the poet is imagination. However, they make use of this faculty in a different manner. While the poet’s force of imagination is a “fine frenzy,” the madman and the lover possess an imagination of a pathological nature. This is manifested in the image of the “seething brain,” which is also used by Charron: “[…] it makes a noise in the braine, like a pot that seetheth, but neuer settleth.” 40 Yet even the “seething brain” is able to create forms and shapes. 39

40

BARTAS: His Deuine Weekes and Workes, p. 9 (marginal gloss). Here, two myths of creation which were treated separately in the Renaissance are mentioned simultaneously: the creatio ex nihilo and the creatio ex chao; cf. Blossom Grayer Feinstein, Creation and Theories of Creativity in English Poetry of the Renaissance. PhD diss., City University of New York, 1967. Shakespeare uses two terms for the basis of the act of creation: “(the forms of) things unknown” (v. 15) and “airy nothing” (v. 17) which seem to leave the problem pending. In the present context, however, preference is given to the chaos theory. Charron, Of Wisdome, p. 51.

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These forms and shapes developed through the imagination of a “seething brain” differ greatly from those created through poetic imagination. The main feature of the former is the absence of “cool reason,” which functions as a controlling authority to the mental images. Timothy Bright characterizes this deficit in A Treatise of Melancholie (1586): For where that naturall light [sc. of reason] is darkened, their fancies arise vaine, false, and voide of ground: euen as in the externall sensible darknesse, a false illusion will appeare vnto our imagination, which the light being brought in, is discerned to be an abuse of fansie. 41

When the light of reason no longer shines the darkness of an untamed, “groundless” fantasy engenders “false” illusions. These possess the character of the absolutely unreal, which means that they have no objective correlative in reality. Shakespeare’s madman who sees more devils than “vast hell can hold” has lost his hold on reality. His imagination is strongly influenced by the hyperbole of unfounded fear. Robert Burton gives a short pathography of the imagination of the fearful man in the chapter “Of the force of imagination” in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): But most especially in passions and affections it shows strange and evident effects: what will not a fearful man conceive in the dark? what strange forms of bugbears, devils, witches, goblins? Lavater imputes the greatest cause of spectrums, and the like apparitions, to fear, which above all other passions begets the strongest imagination (saith Wierus), and so likewise love, sorrow, joy, etc. 42

Overwhelmed by his passions, bare of reason, the pathologically fearful man invents visions of terror and chimeras such as ghosts, devils, witches, and goblins. Beautiful form is replaced by the weird and “strange,” the completely unfamiliar. In Shakespeare’s drama the “night” of passion results in the loss of reason and reality whereby a harmless bush is transformed into a threatening bear. Such metamorphoses are effected by a pathological imagination, which must be healed through the “light” of reason. Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream materializes such fantastic metamorphoses in images, characters, and actions. The drama is centred rather on the passio than on the fruits of love. The character of the lover is akin to that of the dreamer who fails to recognize reality. In seeing the beauty of the mythical Helen in every woman, however unattractive she might be, his imagination is dominated by an excess of senseless admiration. The characterizing feature of such a vulgaris amor is delusion, as Marsilio Ficino notes in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium: 41 42

Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie. London: J. Windet, 1586, pp. 125-126. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. H. Jackson. 3 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1961, vol. I, p. 254.

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Insanie speties quedam est anxia illa solicitudo qua vulgares amantes diu noctuque vexantur. Qui amore durante bilis incendo primum, deinde atre bilis adustione afflicti, in furias ignemque ruunt, et quasi ceci quo precipitentur ignorant. 43

The lover’s reasonless passion renders him blind to reality. Melancholy, which befalls him as a consequence of his torturing worries, accumulates into attacks of madness. According to Ficino, this brings with it the danger of regression to an animal level of existence (in bestie naturam). The lover’s whole being is determined by his false sight. It is at this point that not only Shakespeare but also the poetic theory of the Early Modern Age makes a clear distinction between pathological fantasy and poetic imagination. George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) illustrates the difference between true and false sight. In the 8th chapter of Book I he differentiates between two completely different types of visions (imaginations, inventions): the well proportioned as opposed to the monstrous and chaotic. To illustrate this he uses the image of a mirror, which sometimes represents the image in exquisite beauty while at other times distorting it to a grimace. He concludes that statement with the following explication: Euen so is the phantasticall part of man (if it be not disordered) a representer of the best, most comely and bewtifull images or apparances of thinges to the soule and according to their very truth. If otherwise, then doth it breede Chimeres & monsters in mans imaginations, & not only in his imaginations, but also in all his ordinarie actions and life which ensues. Wherefore such persons as be illuminated with the brightest irradiations of knowledge and of the veritie and due proportion of things, they are called by the learned men not phantastici but euphantasiote, and of this sorte of phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines stratagematique, all cunning artificers and enginers, all Legislators Polititiens & Counsellours of estate, in whose exercises the inuentiue part is most employed and is to the sound & true iudgement of man most needful. 44

In this passage Puttenham differentiates between euphantasiote (eyœ›antasi¬vtoi), 45 who possess an ordered imagination and are represented by good poets, legislators, and counsellors on the one hand, and on the other the 43

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Marsilio Ficino, Über die Liebe oder Platons Gastmahl. Latin-German edition by P.R. Blum. Hamburg: Meiner, 21984, p. 348 (Oratio septima, XII). George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock / A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1936, rpt. 1970, pp. 19-20. On this passage and its context, see Dorothee Rölli-Alkemper, Höfische Poetik in der Renaissance: George Puttenhams “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589). München: Fink, 1996, chap. 2.2: “Dichtung als imitation, imagination und invention” (pp. 47-56, esp. p. 52 ff.). Puttenham’s terminology could be based on Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.30, as RölliAlkemper, Höfische Poetik, pp. 54-55 conclusively demonstrates.

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phantastici, who have a distorted fantasy. The former are characterized by their true and harmonious images of reality, which results in a successful mimesis: a synthesis of imagination and judgement. The ideal poet uses judgement as a corrective to imagination; the fantastic dreamer, in contrast, lets his imagination run wild. The mental images he produces are therefore not beautiful and harmonious but hideous chimeras bare of reality. These images fall under the negative verdict pronounced in Horace’s Ars Poetica, the first verses (1-4) of which forbid the creation of such monstrosities. In the end, the distinction between two kinds of eiœdvlopoii¬a can be traced back to Plato’s Sophistes (236c). The difference made here between eiœkastikh¬ (“true image”) and ›antastikh¬ (“fantastic, misleading image”) is taken up again in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, where eikastike is equated with “figuring forth good things” and phantastike with “infect the fancy with unworthy objects.” 46 Thus, eikastic images are connoted positively, fantastic ones negatively. The dichotomy of eikastic and fantastic images is not a relation seen only in the Renaissance; it is also a theme in many European works on poetry and art. Generally the artist who proceeds eikastically is presented as a rolemodel, while the artist who produces fantastic images is rejected. This can be seen in Pierre de Ronsard’s Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1565), in which the dichotomy discussed assumes the following shape: L’invention n’est autre chose que le bon naturel d’une imagination concevant les Ide´es et formes de toutes choses qui se peuvent imaginer tant ce´lestes que terrestres, anime´es ou inanime´es, pour apre`s les repre´senter, de´crire et imiter. […] Quand je te dis que tu inventes choses belles et grandes, je n’entends toutefois ces inventions fantastiques et me´lancoliques, qui ne se rapportent non plus l’une a` l’autre que les songes entrecoupe´s d’un fre´ne´tique, ou de quelque patient extreˆmement tourmente´ de la fie`vre, a` l’imagination duquel, pour eˆtre blesse´e, se repre´sentent mille formes monstrueuses sans ordre ni liaison: mais tes inventions, desquelles je ne te puis donner re`gle pour eˆtre spirituelles, seront bien ordonne´es et dispose´es: et bien qu’elles semblent passer celles du vulgaire, elles seront toutefois telles qu’elles pourront eˆtre facilement concX ues et entendues d’un chacun. 47

Ronsard’s “mille formes monstrueuses” find their parallel in the exorbitant visions of hell brought forth by Shakespeare’s lunatic as well as in the day46

47

Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 125; on this passage cf. also the commentary by Shepherd, pp. 202-203. Pierre de Ronsard, “Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique francX ais” (1565), in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, pp. 472-473. - Ronsard’s introduction to La Franc¸iade (1572) interprets “fantastic poetry” such as Ariosto’s as to such an extent ill-formed and monstrous “qu’il resemble mieux aux resveries d’un malade de fievre continue qu’aux inventions d’un homme bien sain” (Œuvres Comple`tes. Ed. P. Laumonier. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1983, vol. XVI, p. 4).

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dreams (“songes”) of his lover. 48 Shakespeare’s linguistic counterpart to Ronsard’s “fre´ne´tique” is, even from an etymological viewpoint, “frantic.” The condition of being beside himself leads such a man to misjudge reality. This may be manifested by mistaking a bush for a bear. The inanimate is thus changed into something living which in his view means that vegetative nature is endowed with animated features. 49 Of course even the healthy, creative imagination relies on the process of representing the sensual, the emBodiment of the abstract which is not accessible to the senses. “Cold reason” alone is only capable of an argumentative discourse, not of fictionality. Dispositio is not possible without inventio, just as judgement is not thinkable without imagination. The “things unknown” could otherwise never cross the boundary between absent invisibility and visual presence in the imagination. This process relies on the technique of visualization, which is thus described in Shakespeare’s verses: Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. (MND V.i.18-20)

The procedural technique of the imagination consists in replacing a vague emotion by a specific cause. This process of inventing mental images is thus basically tropical. The trope, which is in this case used exempli gratia, is the same metonymy that Roman Jakobson has identified as the procedural basis of Realism. 50 In contrast to this mimetic form of mental design, a monstrous invention, in Shakespeare’s words, effects a hyperbolic or animistic disfigurement of reality. In this context figures of speech are not restricted to the material quality of elocutio but assume the character of figures of thought. In contrast to this modern interpretation a Renaissance view would recur to the places of invention. And here the “cause efficient” mentioned above 48

49

50

Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, pp. 109-110 criticizes the difference between poetic and erotic day-dreams postulated by Plutarch and subsumes the three types of imagination under the term enargeia: “It was this rhetorical tradition of the force and vividness of simple reproductive phantasies in poetry and oratory which was to develop into the commonplace of Renaissance thought, of which the well known passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most famous expression.” Centuries later John Ruskin explains the pathetic fallacy in Modern Painters (1856), III.4 in a similarly negative way using the example of “cruel, crawling foam”: “The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterise as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’” (cited in E.D. Jones [ed.], Critical English Essays (Nineteenth Century). London: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 326). Cf. the discussion by David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: E. Arnold, 1979, p. 73 ff.

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seems to provide an adequate methodological approach to an explanation of Theseus’ “tricks of imagination”; for what is the relationship of “a bringer of joy” to “joy” but one of a causa efficiens. Thus the expression “tricks of imagination,” which refers to a metapoetic concept, at the same time reveals a metarhetorical plane, namely Shakespeare’s procedure of illuminating the act of invention; in this case it is faulty because it represents a contrast to an aesthetic creation. I.1.4. From Head to Pen - the Sensual Evidence of Materialized Mental Images The last stage in the poetic process is described by Shakespeare’s Theseus as follows: […] the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (MND V.i.15-17)

The pen, like the quill (stilus), is a traditional symbol for the vita contemplativa of poets and scholars, which stands in contrast to the vita activa of the military or political leader, characterized by the sword. 51 At the same time it represents, per metonymiam, written language as a cultural achievement, as can be seen in Albrecht Dürer’s famous portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Figure 5). 52 Last but not least it symbolizes a phase in text production which is traditionally termed elocutio in rhetoric: the material concretization of the mentally conceived inventio through the medium of language. Theories of poetry adopt the schema of the three phases inventio - dispositio - elocutio, as demonstrated by the structure of the three books of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and that of many French Renaissance theories of poetry. Pierre de Ronsard, in whose aforementioned Abre´ge´ de l’Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1565) the same schema can be found, gives the following definition in the chapter “De l’e´locution”: 51

52

On the topic ‘pen and sword,’ see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press / London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953, rpt. 1990, chap. IX.6; Robert J. Clements, Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem Books. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960, chap. VII: “Pen and Sword” (pp. 135-149). See the interpretation by Helmut Schanze in his essay “Gedruckte Renaissance: Mediengeschichtliche Überlegungen zur Transformation der Rhetorik von 1500-1700,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett, pp. 213-222, here: pp. 216-217. Several illustrations of persons writing with a quill or a pen are to be found in Georges Jean, Geschichte der Schrift. Ravensburg: Otto Maier, 1991 (English edition: Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992).

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Sous l’E´locution se comprend l’e´lection des paroles, que Virgile et Horace ont si curieusement observe´e. Pour ce tu te dois travailler d’eˆtre copieux en vocables, et trier les plus nobles et signifiants pour servir de nerfs et de force a` tes carmes, qui reluiront d’autant plus que les mots seront significatifs, propres et choisis. Tu n’oublieras les comparaisons, les descriptions des lieux, fleuves, foreˆts, montagnes, de la nuit, du lever du Soleil, du Midi, des Vents, de la Mer, des Dieux et De´esses, avec leur propres me´tiers, habits, chars, et chevaux: te facX onnant en ceci a` l’imitation d’Home`re, que tu observeras comme un divin exemple, sur lequel tu tireras au vif les plus parfaits line´aments de ton tableau. 53

Thus the selection of words is guided by such criteria as suitability, elaborateness, ornamentation, and aesthetic appeal. 54 This is how the “belle invention” of mental images attains its beautiful material shape in a verbal tableau of perfect lineaments, as Virgil and Horace and above all Homer conspicuously demonstrate. In Shakespeare’s play Theseus’ words illustrate the phase sequence of inventio and elocutio. The dispositio implied in it marks the boundary between a beautiful and a monstrous imagination. The transition from “airy nothing” to the localization and naming of forms at the same time recalls the act of creation, the genesis of which Du Bartas concisely summarizes in a marginal gloss of his epic Les Semaines (in the English translation by Joshua Sylvester [Figure 20]): “What the newcreated Chaos was, before God gaue it forme, figure, place, and scituation.” 55 What holds for the creation of the macrocosm is analogously true for the creation of the poet’s fictional microcosm. The mental images gain in density and concreteness in order to be transformed into beautifully structured verbal constructs. Each word from the copia verborum is given a specific name and place in the syntactic sequence. Perhaps this process also signifies the entrance of the imagined into the spatio-temporal continuum of history. In Sidney’s Apology the problem of giving names is reduced to the acceptability of the author’s act of giving names to fictive characters. Is the poetic work of art thus a deception of the recipient? The answer to this question refers to an old legal practice, which already existed in Roman declamatory exercises, namely the actualizing of fictive cases by giving the parties appearing in them specific names. 56 Sidney states: 53

54

55 56

Pierre de Ronsard, “Abre´ge´ de l’art poe´tique francX ais” (1565), in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 474. Here the modern concept of “style as choice” is in a way anticipated; cf. Nils Erik Enquist, “On Defining Style: An Essay in Applied Linguistics,” in: Linguistics and Style. Ed. N.E. Enkvist et al. London: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 1-56. BARTAS: His Deuine Weekes and Wordes, p. 10. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria III.viii.52. On declamation in general cf. S.F. Bonner, Roman Declamation. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969.

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And doth the lawyer lie then, when under the name of ‘John a Stile’ and ‘John a Nokes’ he puts his case? But that is easily answered. Their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history: painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. 57

The name lends the poetic image credibility, as it is individualized. This individualization of the poetic image stands for particularity and possibly a fictional historicity as well. However it does not suggest the truth or reality of the representation, but only enhances its vivacity, as the function of poetry is different from that of history. It was Aristotle who in the 7th chapter of his Poetics (1451.b.9 ff.) already treated the topic of giving names in this context. Even though, following Aristotle’s line of thought, the poetic characters are similar to historic characters by virtue of their names, they nevertheless possess a more general meaning. This is stated by Sidney, and in a way typical for him: “The poet nameth Cyrus or Aeneas no other way than to show what men of their fames, fortunes, and estates should do.” 58 Thus, the evidentia of giving names is a means of mimesis used to create an ethical effect. The telos of poetry lies not in gnosis, but in praxis. Shakespeare differs from Sidney in that he does not proclaim an ethical imperative. Rather he reflects - in the role of Theseus - how the constitution of poetic fiction proceeds. This process demands images, shapes, places, and names, and certainly much more besides. However, Shakespeare is not interested in a normative theory of poetry, but exclusively in the sensual evidence of its nature. Its realization is made possible by the particularity of details (circumstantiae). These have the character of tropes or, more specifically, of metonymies. Like the mental images of the imagination they can be generated by inventive procedures. The process of description in the case of Shakespeare’s Theseus may be called metapoetic: poetry on poetry.

I.1.5 The Metapoetic “Logic of Imagination” The particularity of Shakespeare’s metapoetic representation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.4-22 becomes evident through the description of the effects of imagination itself. Imagination in poetry is explained through the language of poetic imagination. The method which allows this venture to take place is a multiple diaeresis (divisio) which systematically splits up the

57 58

Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 124. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 124-125.

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substratum of the text. The most general statement is contained in the twoline aphorism: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” This aphorism is ultimately the core from which all diaereses proceed: the negative similarities (4-6) between lunatic and lover as well as their differences (4-6). These are presented twice, first in their original sequence, then in inverted order: first of lunatic and lover (9-11), then again of lover and lunatic (18-22). At the centre of the pericope is the “fine frenzy” of the poet, which shares the furor with the other types of imagination while contrasting to them through its own aestheticity (12-17). A further diaeresis of the poetic creation is developed by dividing it into the inventio of mental images and the elocutio of their linguistic realization (15-17). The procedure of diaeresis is, however, not employed so excessively as to reduce the passage to a plurality of Ramistic dichotomies. This is avoided by the amplification of the propositio to include the poet as well as by the smooth transition made from the eikastic to the fantastic imagination in the final segment of the passage. Thus, Shakespeare’s discourse on imagination is not so much orientated towards school rhetoric but rather takes into consideration those licences which the ranging imagination allows to the amplificatio of the “poet’s pen.” Following Erasmus’ line of thought, the copia verborum thus makes possible the varietas of mimesis. If the dispositio of Shakespeare’s images does not follow the iron rules of dialectic, its inventio definitely does not follow the loci of possible areas of searching. The basis for the iconization of this abstract subject, which is more often to be found in a medical or poetological treatise, is the fictionalization of persons that embody certain features of the imagination. The discourse thus gains in sensual evidence and becomes more realistic. The actions of these characters exemplify their own features, those of the eikastic or of the fantastic imagination. The seething brain of melancholy and the rolling eye of “fine frenzy,” the devils of hell and the beautiful gypsy, the herald of good news and the bear in the bush - these are all enargetic images that originate from the same source: the theatre of the passionate imagination.

II. The Material Invention of Commonplace Rhetoric Inventio represents a system of discovery procedures, elocutio one of tropes and figures, memoria one of mnemonic places (loci ) and images (imagines), and pronuntiatio/actio one of communicative media, each of them divided into diverse subsystems and their respective categories. If persistently put into practice, these systems generate series of texts interlinked by a number of

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common structural features. This is the origin of a rhetorical intertextuality whose methodological basis is not one of shared signs, but rather of shared structures. 59 Varieties of the latter extend from the one extreme, their total reproduction, through various degrees of deviation, to the opposite extreme, their total inversion. Hence the genres and categories of rhetorical intertextuality allow for a broad range of possible realizations. An interesting case is the inversion of a category like irony or of a genre like epideixis. Intertextual irony results from the tropical inversion of a pre-text statement in a posttext. And intertextual epideixis in its negative form is brought about by a generic inversion of praise and blame in parodies and travesties. Common to all the structural varieties of rhetorical intertextuality is the fact that they refer to rules (praecepta), not to examples (exempla). It is these examples on which our principal interest is focused in the following outline. Its subject is the rhetorical topics (topoi), or, to be more precise, the koinoı´ to´poi, loci communes, lieux communs, commonplaces, or Gemeinplätze, as they are well known in various languages. They were rediscovered by Ernst Robert Curtius in his epoch-making study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, first published in German in 1948 and made available to the anglophone world in a translation by Willard Trask in 1953. 60 Its central hypothesis - the postulate of historical “Toposforschung” - often met with disapproval and even hostility, for under this concept Curtius subsumed such formulae as “puer senex” or “arma et litterae” and such metaphors as “totus mundus agit histrionem” or “all the world is a stage.” Classical scholars blamed him for his alleged historical “incorrectness,” the leftist intelligentsia despised him for his evident conservatism. The reproach of historical error was mainly directed against his abandonment of the theoretical and argumentative approach in favour of a material and pragmatic reinterpretation of the topoi. In contrast to the philosophically inspired criticism in the wake of the critical modes of “Geistesgeschichte” and history of ideas, 59

60

For a survey of concepts of intertextuality, see H.F. Plett, “Intertextualities,” in: Intertextuality. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 3-29. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: Francke, 1948, 10 1984; English translation: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. Trask. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, rpt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. For later discussions of the topos concept, see the essays contributed to the anthology Toward a Definition of Topos: Approaches to Analogical Reasoning. Ed. L. Hunter. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991; Die Formel und das Unverwechselbare: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Topik, Rhetorik und Individualität. Ed. I. Denneler. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1999; Topik und Rhetorik: Ein interdisziplinäres Symposium. Ed. T. Schirren & G. Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000; Michael Patrick Welsh, Commonplace. Los Angeles: Equator Books, 2003. - The Library of Congress Online Catalog registers a total of 368 entries on “commonplace.”

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which continue up to the present, Roland Barthes in his brief but essential outline of classical rhetoric titled “L’ancienne rhe´torique: Aide-me´moire” (1970) maintains a twofold definition of the term: “1) ce sont des formes vides, communes a` tous les arguments (plus elles sont vides, plus elles sont communes) - 2) ce sont des ste´re´otypes, des propositions rebaˆche´s.” 61 It is the same “re´ification de la Topique” which also Curtius had in mind, and it is this materialization of commonplaces which represents the centre of the concept of an intertextual rhetoric. This concept is not based on an interpretation of classical authorities such as Aristotle’s or Cicero’s Topics but is extracted from the commonplaces themselves. As a textual basis for the discussion of this material concept of topics and intertextuality we shall examine the commonplace book of the Renaissance, which was the heyday of this rhetorical phenomenon. The research carried out by William G. Crane (1937), Sister Joan Mary Lechner (1962), and, more recently, Francis Goyet (1996) and Ann Moss (1996) supplies empirical evidence relating to the formation of such a concept, which has survived even unto the age of Postmodernism. 62 Collections of commonplaces do not consist of abstract rules but of concrete examples. This does not mean, however, that such examples lack a theoretical foundation. Such a foundation undoubtedly exists but not in an explicit manner. The axiomatic basis is the imitatio auctorum of classical rhetoric. Its presupposition is the idea that some authors, works, or parts of works are more prestigious than others and hence can be regarded as models for future texts. In their entirety these represent a body of literature which constitutes a “Weltliteratur” (Goethe), a “muse´e imaginaire” (Andre´ Malraux) or, in straightforward terms, the “western canon” (Harold Bloom). Such a canon was upheld by the antiqui, the classicists, and contested by the moderni, their progressive opponents. It not only marks a superiority of value but also one of familiarity. For such works as form part of the canon are as a rule much better known than the rest. Once they have achieved this status, they offer themselves readily for the reuse or, more technically speaking, the recycling of their material. This means an intertextual career, first on a national and 61 62

Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhe´torique: Aide-me´moire,” Communications 16 (1970), 207. William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937; rpt. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1964, chap 3: “The English Commonplace Books”; Sr. Joan Mary Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces. New York : Pageant, 1962, rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974; Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “lieu commun”: l’invention rhe´torique dans l’antiquite´ et a` la renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1996; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

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then possibly on an international basis. It proceeds from popular collections variously referred to as anthologies, dictionaries, scrapbooks or, as a generic term, commonplace books. In these the works of the canon continue to exist, not in their entirety but usually as fragments culled from their original contexts. Having become independent entities by now, they find themselves dependent again, this time in a new community of texts which may be quite heterogeneous in nature. In this new context they exist as virtual intertexts (or an intertextual competence) which offer themselves for a reactivation (or an intertextual performance) in further texts. These texts are not original creations but - in one way or other - repetitions of older texts. Such commonplace intertextualities can be described by a number of features. II.1. The Place of Commonplaces Commonplaces are not hapax legomena or singular occurrences but widely circulated meaningful phenomena. Their invention is closely connected with memory. For invention provides the materials for memory and retrieves them from there once they are needed. How often a dictum has to be repeated in order to become a commonplace cannot be measured by statistics alone. The commonplace book came into being with the Gutenberg era and quickly gained currency in Western Europe. Erasmus’s Adagia, first printed in 1500, was one of the most successful commonplace books in the Renaissance. Though its publishing history displays an almost infinite variety of additions, abbreviations, commentaries, adaptations, translations, and formats, a complete bibliography of this work can only give a faint idea of its popularity with the reading public. An English translation by Richard Taverner was issued under the title Proverbes or Adagies in 1539 (Figure 22). Before the invention of the printing press the mnemonic receptacle of the commonplace was either the individual memory or the manuscript. Classical rhetoric is centred on the individual memory with its postulate of a memoria artificialis composed of places and images. In the Renaissance this now obsolete technique of an oral culture survived in the visual and verbal images of religious literature (emblem, meditation) which transcended the mental subjectivity of its origin. The manuscript culture prepared the ground for greater objectivity in storing commonplaces, producing with pen and ink on sheets of paper what were often called “tables” or “table books,” “notebooks,” or even “miscellanies.” 63 What they shared was their usefulness as aide-me´moires for their 63

Cf. Peter Beal, “The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” in: New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society. Ed. W. Speed Hill. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993, pp. 131-147.

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Figure 22: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1465-1536): Title-page of Proverbes or Adagies (1539).

respective compilers, who evidently adhered to the belief that human knowledge could be epitomized in brief entries. Thus some of the most distinguished Cambridge poets of the seventeenth century - Milton, Herbert, Cowley, Herrick, and others - kept such private notebooks, most of which were published in the twentieth century. Ben Jonson’s famous notebook with transcriptions and translations from his reading (e. g., Daniel Heinsius’ treatise De tragoedia) was printed posthumously in 1641 under the title Timber, or Discoveries (with the further specification Explorata), indicating thereby that it represents an inventory of prefabricated matter (timber) waiting for possible reemployment in further texts. Once made public, it started a commonplace book career of its own. The process of transition from manuscript to printed

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book marked a progress from private to common intellectual property. While in the Gutenberg Galaxy the commonness of commonplaces was restricted by the spatio-temporal limits of postal services and the book trade, the Electronic Age effects it within an instant of time. Intertextual rhetoric becomes an omnipresent virtuality in Marshall McLuhan’s global village (a commonplace in itself). 64 Thus the shift of place from individual memory to the written notebook, from there to the printed commonplace book and again from there to the electronic database safeguards the commonplace an ever widening circle of distribution. This does not mean that each older mnemonic “store-house” is entirely superseded by a newer one; all types rather coexist together. II.2. The Disposition of Commonplaces Commonplace books may consist of entries put together in a random manner. Such are to be found in private manuscript notebooks which often follow the chronology of the writer’s reading experience. But it was already the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives who advised his students to impose a certain structure on their own collections: Make a book of blank leaves of a proper size. Divide it into certain topics, so to say, into nests. In one, jot down the names of subjects of daily converse: the mind, body, our occupations, games, clothes, divisions of time, dwellings, foods; in another, idioms or formulae dicendi; in another, sententiae; in another, proverbs; in another, difficult passages from authors; in another, matters which seem worthy of note to thy teacher or thyself. 65

An illustration of this procedure is made available by the publication of the early seventeenth-century Southwell-Sibthorpe manuscript commonplace book (Folger MS. V.b.198), which contains poems (sonnets, epitaphs), letters, apophthegms, abstracts (Pliny, Plutarch, Sueton), paraphrases (Seneca), Scriptural commentaries (on the Decalogue), and a mini-bestiary. 66 In this manuscript collection less emphasis was, of course, placed on the structure - or, to use the rhetorical term, on the dispositio - than in the printed common64

65

66

Cf. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Cited in: Robert R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. New York / Evanston / London: Harper & Row, 1964 (1954), p. 273. J. Klene, C.S.C. (ed.), The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book (Folger MS. V.b.198). Tempe, Ar.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997.

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place book. Two principles of ordering are particularly noteworthy: 1. an alphabetical sequence of topics, or 2. their division according to hierarchical or general semantic criteria (Arbor Porphyriana, similarities and contrasts, binary [Ramistic] classifications). The former is the simpler one and can be found in such book-titles as “set forth in commonplaces by order of the alphabet” (B.106) or “ranked in alphabetical order” (B.120) but also, for that matter, in the indices affixed to commonplace books (B.122.B). 67 The latter, more complex one, presupposes a philosophical concept, a theological doctrine, or an educational curriculum. Many encyclopaedic works of the seventeenth century (Alsted, Comenius, Fludd, Keckermann, Kircher), follow such a guideline, which ultimately goes back to Aristotle’s Topica (I.xiv.105b). On the other hand the more popular commonplace books try to avoid the impression of being strictly “methodical” because this may evoke boredom and hence prove detrimental to a commercial success. Thus metaphorical titles like Bel-vede´re, or The Garden of the Muses (B. 108), The Forest of Fancy (B.113), The English Treasury of Wit and Language (B.119), The Banquet of Sapience (B.121), The Golden Chain of Divine Aphorisms (B.131), The Jewel House of Art and Nature (B.159.B), Mel Heliconium, or Poetical Honey (B.162.A), and The Golden Grove (B.170) promise delight, wealth, variety, and copiousness - features that seem to stand in direct opposition to the commonness of commonplaces. A compilation by Thomas Gainsford (B.129) makes this particularly clear; it announces “The rich cabinet furnished with variety of excellent descriptions, exquisite characters, witty discourses, and delightful histories divine and moral.” Here all the qualities are assembled that are required by the rhetorical tradition: copia (“rich”), varietas (“variety”), ornatus (“exquisite”), ingenium (“witty”), delectatio (“delightful”). This commonplace book addresses itself to poets who are not looking for inspiration but for practical inventories of topical material. Their ideal of poetry is the creation of aesthetic delight by means of stylistic ornamentation. This is manifest in Robert Allott’s commonplace book England’s Parnassus (B.100.B), which promises “the choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets, with their Poeticall comparisons. Descriptions of Bewties, Personages, Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines, Groues, Seas, Springs, Riuers, etc.” (Figure 23). The voluminous book arranges its topics in alphabetical order and illustrates them with poetical excerpts from Sidney, Spenser, Lodge, Chapman, Drayton, Sylvester, and less prominent authors.

67

The registration numbers in brackets are those of H.F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics: A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995, where full bibliographical details are available.

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Figure 23: Robert Allott: Title-page of England’s Parnassus (1600).

II.3. The Genres of Commonplaces Commonplace books are of two kinds. Some address the specialist; others offer a mixed assortment of topics. In the chapter of his encyclopedia Polyhistor entitled “De locorum communium scriptoribus” (I.xxi), Daniel Georg Morhof (1639-1691) enumerates commonplace books on history, medicine, the natural sciences, and literature but also hybrids with a wide variety of topics. 68 Biblical and literary collections are among the most popular ones, because they propagate quotable maxims and purple patches for everybody. One of the principal reasons for compiling commonplaces is moral instruc68

Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor Literarius, Philosophicus et Practicus. 2 vols. Lübeck: P. Böckmann, 41747, vol. I, pp. 236-258.

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tion. In his Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) Richard Rainolde makes this evident with his definition: “A Common place is a Oracion, dilatyng and amplifiyng good or euill, whiche is incidente or lodged in any man,” and illustrates it with marginal glosses added to an oration such as: “Man borne by nature to societee” or “Order conserueth common wealth” or “Theiues not mete to be in any societie.” 69 The genres of commonplaces are academic on the one hand and literary on the other. The literary ones are often genera minora and encompass, for instance, epigrams, songs, riddles, jests (facetiae), aphorisms, apophthegms, proverbs, maxims, sentences, characters, descriptions, allegories, emblems, etc. A multitude of these are contained in Edward Phillips’ Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), a handbook of polite wooing and complimenting. As early as 1597 Francis Bacon had published a mixed commonplace book under the title Essays. Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion. Indeed, as research has shown long ago, the essay is firmly installed in the commonplace tradition. This holds true not only for Bacon’s but also, though in a different way, for Montaigne’s essays and the lesser known Resolves / Diuine, Morall, Politicall (B.125.A) by Owen Feltham. That the contact with the rhetorical tradition was still extant, is demonstrated by Bacon’s addition of Places of perswasion and disswasion to his anthology. Most of these commonplace genres of literature have declined in importance nowadays. They are not held in great esteem by literary historians and often share the fate of rhetoric. Yet these genres of rhetorical literature prove more durable than their adversaries tend to believe. That their popularity has never really died out is documented by numerous best-sellers of this kind. A modern instance of interest is John Robert Colombo, Canada’s best-known maker of “found poetry.” The very term already indicates that this kind of poetry is the product of rediscovery, not of ´ecriture but rather of re´´ecriture. His works not only include The Mackensie Poems (1966), Praise Poems (1972), Monsters (1977), but also: Colombo’s Canadian Quotations (1974), Colombo’s Little Book of Canadian Proverbs, Graffiti & Other Vital Matters (1975). The rhetoricity of such poetry has never been called into question, but its poeticity certainly has.

II.4. The Mediality of Commonplaces Commonplaces are not limited to the verbal arts but include all sorts of media. In classical rhetoric, especially in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (XI.iii), 69

Richard Rainolde, A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike. London, 1563. Facsimile Reprint: Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977, Fol. xxxiijr.

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we find a highly elaborate topics of actio, i. e. of body language expressing a wide range of affections. This provides the starting point for iconic representations in kinesics, painting and sculpture. A Renaissance illustration of this is John Bulwer’s Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644), which he structures as a series of “canons.” Canon XXXVII, for example, runs: “Both hands clasped and wrung together is an action convenient to manifest grief and sorrow.” 70 In addition, a number of chirogrammatic plates “paint” affections like Admiratur, Hortatur or Dolebit in rhetorical postures of the fingers. Bulwer’s manual is in fact an anthology of iconic commonplaces which are paralleled by European practices of acting and painting, particularly in the multimedial theatre of the Jesuits (Jacob Masen, Gabriele Paleotti, Franciscus Lang). 71 Another type of commonplace iconicity is provided by the largeformat panel paintings of the Brueghel family illustrating The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Netherlandish Proverbs, or The Triumph of Death in their manifold appearances. 72 All of them contain visual metonymies which by selection and combination allow for multiple interpictorial configurations. Here the rhetorical principle is transferred to the medium of painting and prepares the ground for an ars multiplicata, the inexpensive engraved copies available to members of many a middle-class household. The so-called “Kunstbuch,” a handbook of reproducible patterns for artisans (goldsmiths, sculptors, silkweavers) working with more or less precious materials, displays a still broader spectrum of intermedial transformations. 73 While here the commonplace clearly undergoes an intermedial transformation, the rhetoric of musical commonplaces has not yet been explored enough to allow for substantial conclusions. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Inventiones (1723) certainly derive their name from rhetoric, in the sense both of a method and of the product of invention. In translation, the title-page of the 1723 manuscript reads: 70

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John Bulwer. Chirologia: or, the Natural Language of the Hand & Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Ed. J. W. Cleary. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, p. 187. On the context of Bulwer’s theory, see Richard Nate, Natursprachenmodelle des 17. Jahrhunderts. Münster: Nodus, 1993, esp. chap. 6. Cf. Barbara Bauer, “Multimediales Theater: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Synästhesie bei den Jesuiten,” in: Renaissance-Poetik / Renaissance Poetics. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1994, pp. 197-238. Cf. Wolfgang Stechow, Pieter Brueghel the Elder. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, pp. 52 ff., 56 ff., 68 ff.- Reproduction and explanations of the same topics by members of the Brueghel family are available in the exhibition catalogue Pieter Breughel der Jüngere Jan Brueghel der Ältere: Flämische Malerei um 1600. Kulturstiftung Ruhr Essen. Lingen: Luca Verlag, 1997. Cf. Ingrid Höpel, Emblem und Sinnbild: Vom Kunstbuch zum Erbauungsbuch. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1987.

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Straightforward instruction, whereby lovers of the keyboard, and especially those eager to learn, are shown, not only (1) of learning to play distinctly in two parts, but also, after further progress, (2) of managing three obligato parts correctly and satisfactorily; and in addition not only of arriving at good original ideas [Inventiones] but also of developing them satisfactorily; and most of all acquiring a cantabile style of playing while at the same time receiving a strong foretaste of composition. 74

Thus these musical inventions were evidently meant to serve as models for imitation and learning. The same term recurs with some frequency in musical treatises of the Renaissance, where it may refer to the “discovery” of music as such and to the process of its composition. One illustrative example is the treatise De inventione et usu musicae by Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1430/35c. 1511). 75 A fairly great number of Renaissance and Baroque musical works bear the title “inventions.” Whether these inventions are commonplaces is doubtful, however. 76 Such are more clearly present in the musical quotations, adaptations and transcriptions of the Modern and Postmodern Age: in Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony (from the canon “Fre`re Jacques, dormez-vous?”) or in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella (after Pergolesi), in Edison Denisov’s Schubert paraphrases or in Alfred Schnittke’s polystylistic compositions. In light music intertonal commonplaces have always been favourites. To return to Bach again: he himself is the creator of a musical commonplace: BACH. Its history is intertonal, its genesis intermedial: the conversion / transformation of graphic signs (Bach’s proper name) into acoustic ones (a musical phrase). II.5. The Intermediality of Commonplaces Commonplace intermediality refers to the transformation of words into pictures, of words into music, of pictures into music - and vice versa. It takes 74

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Cited from John Caldwell’s article “Invention,” in: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. Stanley Sadie. New York: Grove, 22001; cf. Wolfgang Horn’s article “Invention,” in: Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Vol. IV. Kassel / Basel / New York: Bärenreiter, 21996, pp. 1139-1150 (with extensive bibliography). - Cf. also Arnold Schering, “Geschichtliches zur ‘ars inveniendi’ in der Musik,” Jahrbuch Musikbibliothek Peters 1925, 2534; W. Arlt, “Zur Handhabung der inventio in der deutschen Musiklehre des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts,” in: New Mattheson Studies. Ed. G.J. Buelow & H.J. Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 371-391. Cf. Caldwell, “Invention” (n.74) who further mentions Janequin’s Premier livre des inventions musicales (1555), Cesare Negri’s Nuove inventioni di balli (1604), Biagio Marini’s Sonate, symphonie con altre curiose e moderne inventioni (1629), and Bonporti’s Invenzioni da camera for violin and continuo (1712). - On Tinctoris, see Ronald Woodley, “The Printing and Scope of Tinctoris’s Fragmentary Treatise De inventione et usu musicae,” EMH 5 (1985), 239-268. For a possible musical commonplace book, see Johann Theile (1646-1724), Musikalisches Kunstbuch. Kassel / New York: Bärenreiter, 1965; facsimile, score: 139 pp.

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place on a double axis of communication, a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic one. Syntagmatic intermediality extends from the combination of two different media to the multimedial simultaneity of the Gesamtkunstwerk. A syntagmatic hybrid in the commonplace tradition is the emblem, in which both picture (pictura) and epigram (subscriptio) “embody” the topic expressed in the motto (inscriptio), the one by visualization, the other by verbalization. From Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Libellus (1531) 77 onwards this type of intermedial commonplace book steadily gained popularity and found its way into every European country, bringing with it a multitude of pictures, pictorial motifs, and languages - with the result that it, in turn, became the source of pictorial and literary inventions. 78 A modern synopsis of emblematic topoi compiled by Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne under the title Emblemata can serve as a contemporary reference work of commonplaces for both the literary and the art historian. 79 Paradigmatic intertextuality on the other hand describes the substitution of sign configurations of different mediality. An outstanding rhetorical genre practised from antiquity to postmodernism is ekphrasis, or rhetorical description, for which European poetics derives its literary legitimacy from Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis and Simonides’ intermedial metaphors pictura loquens - muta poesis, referring to poetry and painting respectively. The commonplace nature of this exchange has been established by standard procedural and material topoi which are recurrent throughout history. The rhetoricization of poetics and art theory furthered the interchangeable character of these “sister arts” by claiming for them such common categories as invention, imitation, decorum, instruction, delight, and, of course, the “colours of rhetoric,” that is to say, the rhetorical figures. 80 A narrowly circumscribed repertoire of subject-matters taken from the Bible and the classical authors facilitated their reproduction and their recognition in either medium. Perhaps the most popular hybrid genre of this intermediality is the technopaignion or carmen figuratum, which arranges letters, verses and stanzas of a poem in such a way that it takes the shape of an object, 77

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Cf. Berhard F. Scholz, “The 1531 Augsburg Edition of Alciato’s Emblemata: A Survey of Research,” Emblematica 5 (1991), 213-254. For an analysis of specimens of pictorial/verbal intermediality, see Sr. M. Simon Nolde, Whitney’s “A Choice of Emblemes” and Three Commonplace Collections of Erasmus: A Study in the Interaction of the Emblematic and Commonplace Traditions. PhD diss., St. Louis University, 1964; Jean Michel Massing, Erasmian Wit and Proverbial Wisdom: An Illustrated Moral Compendium for Franc¸ois I. Facsimile of a dismembered manuscript with introduction and description. London: Warburg Institute, 1995. Arthur Henkel & Albrecht Schöne (eds.), Emblemata. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976, 21996. See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

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usually a column, an obelisk, a pyramid, an altar, a cross, a wing, an urn, or any kind of geometrical figure. This object poetry or konkrete Poesie continues to exist even today, though in non-topical forms. Its twofold perceptive appeal realizes the rhetorical ideal of enargeia or evidence, that is the co-presence of both the sensual and the intellectual in the human mind.

II.6. The Normativity of Commonplaces The commonness of commonplaces is grounded in their conventionality. Once they are firmly established they are rarely called into question. They are not eternal universals, but dependent on space and time, on culture and society, on class, education, gender, age, and the context of communication. Above all, they are part of shared beliefs and values in a certain community, which acts as a kind of guardian of such commonplaces by confirming them time and again through repeated usage. From a rhetorical viewpoint their acceptance is considered as decorum, that is in accordance with the generally acknowledged social (behaviourial, ethical, aesthetic) norms. But this normativity is not valid forever. When commonplaces become outdated and worn out, they become void of content and degenerate into meaningless formulae. In order to stop this process of semantic decay that finally leads to oblivion, systematic techniques have to be applied for their revitalization. Such are available from a secondary rhetorical grammar of additions, omissions, substitutions, and permutations imposed on the extant material. Its transformations may be categorized according to two stages of intensity. The first, more moderate stage is based on the principle of variatio, well known from the tema con variazioni in music (e. g., Johannes Brahms’ Haydn Variations). In this case the semantic nucleus of the commonplace sign configuration is retained, while its adjuncts are changed. Illustrations of such alterations are paraphrases and abstracts, quotations and allusions, collages and centos. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and his Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1976), Robert Rauschenberg’s Quote (1964) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Cathedral (1969) can serve as examples. Umberto Eco’s novel Il nome della rosa is a pasticcio of learned commonplace material from mediaeval and modern times. The second, more radical stage aims at the deconstruction of pretextual material by its semantic inversion. Such a procedure takes place in intertextual irony. This rhetorical mode affects medial and intermedial commonplaces alike. When in his picture L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) Marcel Duchamp adds a moustache to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous La Gioconda, he deconstructs a commonplace icon of feminine beauty by adding to it a characteristi-

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cally male feature (androgyny). J.S. Bach’s substitution of a secular text by a religious one in a birthday cantata, which later became Part I of his Christmas Oratorio, is called sacred parodia by musicologists. In John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) the reversed procedure takes place as heroic texts and figures are substituted by ones of lower-class provenance in opera music largely composed by George Frideric Handel (e. g., in Tamerlano). Both examples demonstrate the working of intermedial irony in hybrid sign configurations. Their decomposition is followed by their recomposition. Commonplaces of any mediality can thus obtain a new semantics that will perhaps develop a commonplace normativity of its own.

II.7. The De-Authorization of Commonplaces In an intertextual rhetoric of commonplaces the author is neither a creator ex nihilo nor a genius of nature laying claim to the originality of his inspiration - such are the postulates of idealistic aesthetics. On the contrary, he is a discoverer or rather a retriever of something existing before, of “secondhand literature,” of palimpsests or of “litte´rature au second degre´” (Genette). Irrespective of its descent, be it high or low, this literature represents the triviality of the trivium. It is offered for sale in a “well-sorted emporium” (J. Huizinga) or, in the terms of early capitalism, in The Royal Exchange (B.132), which is the title of a commonplace book by Robert Greene (1590). For here it is not stocks that are traded but more or less “de-authorized” texts and text segments. In this stock market the author is a broker or, in less metaphorical terms, a “mediator” (R. Barthes) 81 His intertextual creativity is confined to the reception and transmission of available material. Consequently, his reputation diminishes with the emergence of the originality concept. Quintilian had already complained that orators made collections of sayings and arguments about subjects likely to recur in the practice of their art instead of fortifying themselves with methodological topoi by which to discover new arguments that had never occurred to them before. In Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), the male protagonist joins the rhetorician’s complaint by blaming himself for “oft turning others’ leaves” (1.7) and others for bringing “Dictionarie’s methode” into their rhymes; he concludes with the warning: “And sure at length stolne goods do come to 81

Roland Barthes, “The death of the Author”, in: R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language. Trans. R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986, pp. 49-55.

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light” (15.5,11). 82 In the twentieth century the same practice finds new support, not only in Colombo’s “found poems” mentioned before but also, to name a German example, in Max Bense’s concept of künstliche Kunst, that is, an art which owes its existence entirely to mathematical (synthetic and analytic) operations, as set forth in his works Semiotik (1969), Nur Glas ist wie Glas (1970), and Kosmos Atheos (1985). Richard McKeon names three stages in the development: “Whereas the rhetoric of the Romans took its commonplaces from the practical arts and jurisprudence and the rhetoric of the humanists took its commonplaces from the fine arts and literature, our rhetoric finds its commonplaces in the technology of commercial advertising and of calculating machines.” 83 In Karel Capek’s play R.U.R (= Rossum’s Universal Robots) of 1921 robots take over the rule of the world. Will the (allegedly flawless) artificial intelligence of computers supplant the (allegedly faulty) natural intelligence of human beings in the arts? Computergenerated poetry, music, and painting seem to lead in this direction. Computer generation attributes to poet, composer and painter a new role: that of an engineer. In oral culture the poet is a mnemonist, in manuscript culture a copyist, in print culture a compiler, in electronic culture an internet surfer. Common to these roles and professions is the aspect of mediation. Invention is recollection - that is the prerequisite for de-authorizing the author in this “interrhetoric.”

II.8. The Re-Cognition of Commonplaces Commonplaces as components of an intertextual rhetoric literally exist in common places, that is in spatial, temporal, social and other contexts shared by the common (wo)man. They are, in Francis Bacon’s terms, idols of the market-place (idola fori ), in terms of Greek philosophy, the expression of doxa. To the recipient a commonplace offers an inestimable advantage: the appeal to acedia or indolence. What is already known is the source not of cognition but of re-cognition. It confirms the familiar, offers release from the unexpected. It creates a sense of identification and suppresses any idea of opposition. Recognition of the familiar in imitations and repetitions causes delight, certainly not of the sophisticated sort but rather of a comfortable ease. Empathy may be one consequence, another a loss of critical distance. The result 82

83

Citations after the edition by W.A. Ringler, Jr., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, pp. 165, 172. Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973), 207.

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is at best intellectual stagnation, at worst a total surrender to the dictatorship of commonplaces. These commonplaces are stored in mnemonic inventories: verbal and non-verbal, visual and acoustic, uni- and multimedial ones. In this century these inventories may possess a mental, material, or digital co-presence of existence. They enable the user to select among various kinds of intertextuality and intermediality enforcing and reinforcing each other. Without such continuous reinforcements communication is impossible. For commonplaces are stabilizers of social life and mutual understanding - and at the same time open and hidden persuaders. The same holds true for the perception of the arts in general. Innovations only take place when commonplaces are radically questioned. This happens when discontinuities emerge. Then the pretended normativity of commonplaces is deconstructed, and the continuous flow of recognition is disrupted by a sudden shock - as by the fortissimo beat in the Andante of Joseph Haydn’s symphony no. 94 in G major. This does not mean an end to intertextuality but a different way of approaching it. For the means of destruction (drumbeat, irony, collage) and the reaction to them (shock, bewilderment, critical distance) have been part of this intertextual rhetoric right from the start. A commonplace rhetoric (poetics, art theory, music aesthetics) implies both its topicality and its atopicality. This paradox is manifested in Renaissance commonplace books by title advertisements like “choicest flowers” (B.100.B), “witty apophthegms” (B.105.C), “witty conceits” (B.106, B.126), or “strange definitions” (B.132), and even a “defence of contraries” (B.151) - certainly for a commonplace book a contradictio in adiecto. The only explanation for this is that commonplace intertextuality is the necessary background for the rise of the uncommon, for any kind of artistic innovation.

III. The Compass of Poetic Invention In his L’Acade´mie de l’Art Poe´tique (1650) Pierre de Deimier (c. 1570-c. 1618) begins Chapter IX on invention with the aphoristic announcement: “De L’Inuention premier ornement de Poe¨sie, & de la Disposition & Elocution dont l’inuention est perfectionnee.” His point here is that of the triad inventio - dispositio - elocutio the first element is of foremost importance in the creation of poetry, which nevertheless is subject to the other two rhetorical processes if it is to be finalized as a concrete work of art. This concept is outlined in greater detail in the following chapter: Puis que cest ancien prouerbe qui dict, Qu’il est facile d’ajouster aux choses inuentees, est receu de tout le monde comme vne tresclaire maxime de la raison,

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il doit estre vray que l’inuention sera tousiours plus estimee, que ce que l’on aura faict a` l’imitation d’autruy. C’est ainsi donc qu’a` ceste consideration, vn bon Poe¨te doit se trauailler de treuuer en son esprit quelque heureuse & nouuelle conception sur le subject qu’il s’est propose´ d’escrire, & parmy le cours de ceste recherche si honorable, il ne doit point estimer receuable en toutes choses ceste autre opinion d’vn certain Poe¨te Latin, qui chante. Que rien ne se dict qu’il n’ait este´ dit autrefois. Veu que si ceste opinion estoit fondee sur la verite´, il faudroit par necessite´ conclure vne chose des plus absurdes & fabuleuses que les hommes ayent iamais pensees: Par ce qu’en proposant que les FrancX ois n’ont rien dict que les Italiens & les Latins n’ayent dict auparaua˜t; par la mesme raison, il faudroit remettre ce droict aux Latins & aux Italiens, & de mesme consequence aux Grecs, & des Grecs aux Egyptiens & Arabes, & de ceux-cy aux Hebrieux & aux Caldees. Et en fin pour treuuer par l’equite´ de ceste proposition, l’origine & la propre inuention de tout ce qui a` este´ dict par les Poe¨tes, Philosophes, Orateurs, Historiens, Theologiens, Sybiles, Prophetes, & Patriarches, veu que toute chose a` quelque principe, & que rien n’est d’eternel que Dieu, il seroit raison d’attribuer au premier homme le Patriarche Adam, la source, la facX on & la mesme forme de tout ce que tant de diuers esprits on escrit ou discourut en tant de siecles diuers qui ont coule´ depuit le iour que co˜me pere des humains il fut cree´ auec le monde. Et ainsi il faudroit auoue¨r que ce grand Patriarche Adam auroit dit & raconte´ a` sa femme & a` toute sa famille, tout ce qu’Eumolpe, Musee, Hesiode, Orphee, Mercure Trismegiste, Homere, Line, Pindare, Euripide, Socrates, Platon, Aristote, Virgile, Saluste, Ouide, Ciceron, Seneque, Tite-liue, Plutarque, & tout le reste des Autheurs qui sont en oubly, ou en renommee, on dict, ou laisse´ par escrit. Ce qui est vne chose autant des-raisonnable a` croire, comme elle est du tout impossible a` preuuer. […] il est impossible d’escrire beaucoup en quelque subject que ce soit, sans se rendre semblable en plusieurs endroicts aux escrits des Poe¨tes, & des autres escriuains qui nous ont precedez. […]. A ceste occasion i’ay voulu engrauer les raisons de ce subject d’inuention parmy les traictez de ce liure, afin qu’au moyen dicelles ie fortifie le courage a` ceux qui ont le cœur d’attenter a` conceuoir quelques belles inuentions, & pour le mesme respect, de donner aux autres, qui comme encheinez de negligence, ne peuuent escrire que par maniere d’emprunt, & ne veillent iamais que pour s’approprier tout au long les ouurages d’autruy. […]. Donques ie diray ainsi, que l’Inuention est vne nouuelle Idee que l’esprit se forme sur la contemplation & image de quelque chose soit spirituelle ou corporelle, pour apres la representer parfaictement soit au moyen de la parole, de l’escriture, de la peincture, ou d’autres humains artifices. Mais aussi en ceste facX on Ronsard l’a d’escrit ainsi en son abrege´ de l’art Poe¨tique. L’Inuention n’est autre chose que le bon naturel d’vne imagination conceuant les Idees & formes de toutes les choses, qui se peuuent imaginer tant terrestres que celestes, animees ou inanimees pour apres les representer, descrire ou imiter. 84 84

Deimier, L’ACADEMIE DE L’ART POETIQVE. A PARIS: Iean de Bordeavlx, M.DC.X, pp. 209-215. - First edition: Paris, 1610.

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Deimier’s last definition of poetic invention appears like a theoretical discourse on the same subject that Shakespeare’s Theseus expounds in a poetic manner in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Deimier transcends the concept of Theseus in two ways: first, he claims for the inventive faculty the force of innovative ideas and hence poetic progress, and, secondly, he extends the concept of invention to encompass not only poetry but all kinds of art. Like Theseus Deimier (and before him Ronsard) 85 allows a “good imagination” to range freely within the macrocosm of visible and invisible entities in order to conceive and design mental images (ideas) and finally to convert these into poetic representations. Contrary to these imaginative concepts of invention is a material one: the imitation of a canon of poetic models which are supplied by ancient and modern authors of a classical status. And it is here that the poet of the Early Modern Age faces a problem, the problem of epigonality. He sees himself as an inventor in an endless chain of predecessors that goes over the stages of prestigious contemporary (Italian) and classical (Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew) cultures, all the way to the Patriarch Adam, who is regarded not only as the primus inventor but also the archipoeta par excellence. This fact raises the problem of whether later poets have anything left at all for inventions of their own in view of the fact that much or perhaps most has been said and invented before. In an age that regards itself not as progressive but as culturally declining 86 the meaning and value of present inventions, whether in the humanities or in the natural sciences, are radically questioned. This was the subject of a debate in mid-seventeenth century France which became known by the term Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, 87 with the opposing factions led by Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711). In England this debate found a continuation in Essays Upon Ancient and Modern Learning and Of Poetry (1690) by Sir William Temple (1626-1699) 88 and Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) by William Wotton (1666-1727). 89 It is only with the satire The Battle of the Books 85

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Pierre de Ronsard, “Abre´ge´ de l’art poe´tique francX ais” (1565), in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 472. Cf. Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth Century Controversy over Disorder and Decay in the Universe. London: Cass, 1966 (11949). Cf. Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns. A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Dover, 1982 (11961); Hans Gerd Rötzer, Traditionalität und Modernität in der europäischen Literatur. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1979 (with further literature). Martin Kämper (ed.), Sir William Temples Essays “Upon Ancient and Modern Learning” and “Of Poetry.” Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1995. Cf. Marie-Luise Spieckermann, William Wottons “Reflection Upon Ancient and Modern Learning” im Kontext der englischen “querelle des anciens et des modernes.” Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1981.

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(1704) by Jonathan Swift, Temple’s former secretary, that this controversy about the originality and rank of poetic inventions came to a preliminary end. By his witty manner of representing the battle between ancients and moderns Swift clearly suggested that he took sides with the ancients. But this did not mean that he thought all new poetic inventions entirely superfluous. That is not only demonstrated by his own writings but also by three centuries of poetic inventions from Swift’s satire up to the present. As for the later use of “invention” as a critical term, it gradually disappeared from poetry and poetic theory. In the late 1780’s, however, the French poet Andre´ Che´nier (1762-1794) wrote a poem dealing specifically with poetic theory, and he entitled it L’Invention. It includes a passage encouraging young poets not to despair but to work hard in order to achieve great conquests by poetic inventions: Qui que tu sois enfin, oˆ toi, jeune poe`te, Travaille; ose achever cette illustre conqueˆte. De preuves, de raisons, qu’est-il encor besoin? Travaille. Un grand exemple est un puissant te´moin. Montre ce qu’on peut faire en le faisant toi-meˆme. (vv. 291-295) 90

These words of Andre´ Che´nier recall the opinion expressed by his lesser known predecessor Pierre de Deimier in his Acade´mie de l’Art Poe´tique. And, though himself an admirer of the classics, Che´nier proves his point with his own poetry.

90

Cited from Andre´ Che´nier, Œuvres comple`tes. Ed. & Comm. G. Walter. Paris: Gallimard, 1958, p. 129. Cf. Graham Castor, Ple´iade Poetics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Thought and Terminology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, chap. 8: “Invention and Imagination: The Sixteenth Century and After” (pp. 86-94).

Dispositio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Genres Genres are manifestations of intertextuality. Intertextuality means that a text does not exist as an isolated monad, but is related to other (inter)texts. This relationship may be structural or material. 1 If it is material, the segments of a preceding text (pretext) or a subsequent text (posttext) refer to a(n) (inter)text; if structural, the general constitutional rules are responsible for similarities between texts. If these rules are organized within coherent systems, they can produce text types or genres. In such a case we may speak of generic intertextuality. As a more comprehensive category, it should not be confused with genre poetics. In accordance with a broad meaning of “text” that includes non-verbal and non-poetical configurations of signs, it has a great potential for generating new text types. In contrast, traditional genre poetics comprises only a part of all types which are logically possible. In this latter case, topicalization means a reduction and conventionalization of systems of rules. Generic intertextuality in a wider sense formed a central topic of poetic textbooks and poetic theories during the Renaissance. Historically, it is based on the idea of imitatio, which refers to the relationship between texts and text types. 2 This idea can be found in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics as well as in humanist treatises on painting, music and architecture. The following sections will be concerned with the Renaissance theory of literary genres. 3 1

2

3

Cf. H. F. Plett, “Intertextualities,” in: Intertextuality. Ed. H. F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 3-29. A previous approach to the relationship between imitatio and intertextuality can be found in Richard J. Schoeck, Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts. Bamberg: H. Kaiser, 1984; Andreas Kablitz, “Intertextualität und die Nachahmungslehre der italienischen Renaissance: Überlegungen zu einem aktuellen Begriff aus historischer Sicht,” Italienische Studien 8 (1985), 2738 (I), 9 (1986), 19-35 (II); J.-C. Carron, “Imitation and Intertextuality in the Renaissance,” NLH 19 (1988), 565-579. Selected literature: Irene Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst - vornehmlich vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Geschichte der poetischen Gattungen. Halle/Saale: Niemeyer, 1940; Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Ed. B.K. Lewalski. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1973; Rüdiger Ahrens, “The Poetics of the Renaissance and the System of Literary Genres,” in: Functions of Litera-

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Rather than dealing with the genres themselves, however, they will focus on their principles of classification. Two of these will be discussed in detail: (1) the hierarchical paradigm, which is characterized by a high degree of conventionality; (2) the functional paradigm, which is based on a rhetoricization of genres. In addition, two further paradigms, the mimetic and the historical, will be sketched briefly. It should be noted that in Renaissance compendia these paradigms do not appear in a unified, complete or coherent form. Only on a superficial level would this be attributed to a methodological deficiency. On a deeper level, however, two other causes may be assumed: either a normative pressure resulting from conventions, or an innovative striving to achieve the plus ultra. Both of these forces create an intergeneric tension, which calls for closer investigation. In the following, several English and continental compendia of poetic theory will be discussed.

I. The Hierarchical Paradigm (Canonization) Like other historical periods, the Renaissance was marked by attempts at establishing a canon of genres. Generally speaking, such a canon may be more self-contained or more open. It is self-contained if its number and the order of genres are fixed; it is open if it allows for possible extensions. Taken as a whole, the literary situation of the Renaissance was one of transition. Medieval and classical genres existed simultaneously; new ones were developed gradually. Poetics textbooks responded to this development in various ways. Reactions ranged from self-contained lists, based on the model of classical sources, to more open ones, which were inspired by contemporary writings. Some of these textbooks will be examined below. In one section of his commonplace book Palladis Tamia (1598), subtitled “A Comparatiue Discourse of our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets,” Francis Meres writes: As there are eight famous and chiefe languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latine, Syriack, Arabicke, Italian, Spanish, and French: so there are eight notable seuerall kindes of Poets, Heroick, Lyricke, Tragicke, Comicke, Satiricke, Iambicke, Elegiacke & Pastoral. 4

4

ture. Ed. U. Broich et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984, pp. 101-117; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass./ London: Harvard University Press, 1986; Günter Walch, “Gattungstheorie und RenaissanceLiteratur: Tendenzen und Probleme,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 127 (1991), 53-62. D.C. Allen (ed.), Francis Meres’s Treatise “Poetrie”: A Critical Edition. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1933, rpt. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977, p. 77.

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Although this paragraph does not include an explicit evaluation, an implicit one may be discerned in the order of the listed items. Its salient feature appears to be the parallelization of languages and genres. As can be seen from contemporary theories, languages were classified according to their supposed age, which was interpreted as a sign of dignity. 5 The order of genres likewise represented a scale of dignity. In numerous sources from Italy, France and England the heroic genre was regarded as the highest. 6 The fact that the pastoral was ranked as the lowest genre, can be explained by the tradition of the rota Vergilii, which was still influential during the Renaissance. 7 The most important element in the two lists, however, is the number eight: Eight principal languages correspond to eight principal genres. The number eight seems to possess an almost magical quality, producing a canon of timeless validity. In the English Renaissance we often encounter an eight-part canon of genres. Francis Meres’ source seems to be Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595), in which we read: The most notable [sc. poets] be the Heroic, Lyric, Tragic, Comic, Satiric, Iambic, Elegiac, Pastoral, and certain others. 8

A follower of Sidney was Sir John Harington, who also proposed a canon of eight genres (“kinds”) in his Brief Apology for Poetry (1591), which he prefixed to his translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Harington’s canon has the sequence: Heroicall, Tragicall, Comicall, Satyrike, Elegie, Pastorall, Sonnet, Epigramme. 9 Finally, George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie (1589) 5

6 7

8

9

These languages are often mentioned in the source texts; cf. Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. 4 vols. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1957-1963. There is no evidence, however, for a canon of eight principal languages. Cf. Behrens, Lehre von der Einteilung, pp. 67-129 (passim). Cf. Edmond Faral, Les Arts poe´tiques du XIIe et du XIIIe sie`cle. Paris: Champion, 1971, pp. 8689; Paul Klopsch, Einführung in die Dichtungslehren des lateinischen Mittelalters. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1980, p. 151. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd. London: Nelson, 1965, p. 103. Shepherd’s commentary ad loc (p. 163) mentions the classical grammarian Caesius Bassus (1st cent. AD) as the founder of this canon; his suggestion, however, is incorrect. Caesius Bassus mentions altogether twelve poeticae species latinae: “Epos sive dactylicum, epigramma, iambica, lyrica, tragoedia, satira, praetexta, comoedia, tabernaria, Atellana, Rhintonica, mimica” (“De metris Horatii,” in: Grammatici Latini. Ed. H. Keil. 8 vols. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1981 [11857], vol. VI, p. 312). William H. Race, Classical Genres and English Poetry. London / New York / Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988, deals with minor genres that are partly based on rhetorical premises: recusatio, priamel, ekphrasis, rhetoric of lament and consolation, carpe diem poems, hymn, eulogy. ORLANDO FVRIOSO / IN ENGLISH / HEROICAL VERSE. / BY / IOHN HAR˜ (1591). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrvm Orbis Terrarvm / New York: INGTO Da Capo Press, 1970, sig. vv-vir.

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includes a comprehensive generic poetics in its first book (chaps. 10-30), mentions eight kinds of authors: heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic, pastoral, satirical and epigrammatic. 10 Probably Puttenham wrote his text even before Sidney. 11 A comparison of the canons proposed by prominent Elizabethan theorists leads to the following conclusions: (1) All authors implicitly demonstrate that they want to maintain the number eight as a fixed reference quantity. In this respect one may almost speak of a petrified intertextuality. Sidney’s formulaic phrase “and certain others,” however, seems to question this point. The number of genres should therefore be regarded as an open list. At the same time, however, Sidney shows no attempt to extend the canon of eight genres. Only Puttenham and Meres did so. Meres added the epigram to his discussion of the eight genres, as an appendix, as it were. He probably did so because the epigram had sometimes been named as the last of the eight genres. 12 Puttenham extended the canon by adding the non-canonical “Poets Mimistes” and “Pantomimi,” whom he would never mention again. 13 It should be noted that these extensions of the traditional canon were arbitrary rather than methodical. Contemporary innovations in textual practice were not taken into consideration, only classical genres of minor importance played a role. It was this methodological deficit which induced the Ramist William Temple to step in. In his discussion of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry he criticized the logical imprecision which marked the composition of the canon. Genres were not classified on the basis of one fixed criterion, but by using two criteria: subject-matter and metre, the former being “clothed” in the latter. Temple argued for a unified classification which would rest solely on metre. 14 10

11

12

13 14

G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, rpt. 1970, pp. 25-27 (chap. 11). The following quotations are taken from this edition. In George Puttenham’s “The Arte of English Poesie”: A New Critical Edition. PhD diss., Harvard University, 1983, p. lxviii S.J. Doherty concludes: “Given Puttenham’s critical and poetic sources and the lack of reference to contemporary English verse, it seems probable that most of Book I was written during or shortly after Puttenham’s time abroad (1563-8).” Cf. Benedetto Varchi’s Lezioni della Poesia classification of poets: Eroici, Tragici, Comici, Lirici, Elegiaci, Satirici, Bucolici, Epigrammatici (Behrens, Lehre von der Einteilung, pp. 81-82). - Meres, “Poetrie,” p. 80. Puttenham, Arte, pp. 26-27. William Temple’s “Analysis” of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry”. Ed. & trans. J. Webster. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984, p. 86: “Accuratior est illa poetae distributio e poetici numeri differentia.” This is the conclusion drawn from an extensive critical discussion of Sidney’s paradigm.

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(2) The intertextual scale tended to be arranged hierarchically. Superior genres were followed by lower ones. Whether the pastoral or the epigram were placed at the end of the scale seems to be of minor importance. While Meres discussed each genre within the strict sequence of the canon, beginning with the highest and ending with the lowest, Sidney reversed the traditional sequence by beginning with the pastoral as the lowest and ending with the heroic poem as the highest and “most accomplished kind.” 15 Puttenham’s account seems to lack any overall principle of order. What makes Sidney’s, Puttenham’s, and Meres’ account astonishing at first sight, is the fact that lyric poetry is given the second rank instead of tragedy, which had been favoured by Aristotle. By referring to Pindar, the representative of the great ode, 16 they grant some dignity to lyric poetry, which in the Renaissance was often used as a vague cover-term for diverse text types of minor importance. The fact that Sidney and Puttenham were not dramatists but lyricists may be responsible for the elevation of lyric poetry on the intertextual scale. A variant of Sidney’s canon can be found in Joachim Vadianus (i. e. Joachim von Watt [1484-1551]), a noted reformer and lord mayor of the Swiss town St. Gallen. 17 (3) The items on the scale of hierarchical intertextuality are open to changes. To choose a more precise term, variability will be defined as transformation. Transformations include operations such as addition, subtraction, substitution, and permutation, and are responsible for modifying the scope and the composition of the literary canon. 18 If lyric poetry advances in the generic rank scale, this involves a change of places and thus a permutation. An extension of the canon, as undertaken by Puttenham and Meres, involves an 15 16

17

18

Sidney, Apology, pp. 116, 119. It is to be noted, however, that by referring to Anacreon, Callimachos, Horace and Catullus, Puttenham and Meres also mention the representatives of less important lyric forms. For the status of lyric poetry in antiquity cf. Hans Färber, Die Lyrik in der Kunsttheorie der Antike. München: Neuer Filser Verl., 1936. Joachim Vadianus, De poetica et carminis ratione. Ed. & trans. P. Schäffer. 3 vols. München: Fink, 1973-1977; Titulus VIII contains the following sequence: 1. Heroicum, 2. Lyricum, 3. Elegiacum, 4. Satyra, 5. Comoedia, 6. Tragoedia, 7. Bucolicum, 8. Epigramma, and ends by saying: “Et hae, Frater, praecipuae Poematum species sunt, quibus non ignoro alias adnecti, quae si recte perpendemus, cum superioribus vel sunt vicinae vel commercium habent” (vol. I, p. 82). In order to illustrate this point, epithalamium, monodia, georgica and silva are added as related or subordinate genres. For the rhetorical significance of this transformational model cf. Jose´ Antonio Mayoral, Figuras reto´ricas. Madrid: Editorial Sı´ntesis, 1994 and Alexandru N. Cizek, Imitatio et tractatio: Die literarisch-rhetorischen Grundlagen der Nachahmung in Antike und Mittelalter. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994.

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additive transformation, whereas a reduction of the canon, such as found in Ben Jonson, 19 involves a subtractive one. In each of these modifications personal idiosyncrasies may play a major role. Perhaps the most interesting intertextual operation is Harington’s replacement of a classical genre with the sonnet. Here the traditional canon is adapted to a contemporary innovation. (4) The topicalization of the canon is not an explicit goal of Renaissance poetics. On the contrary, classical authorities dominate. Thus the title of Puttenham’s chapter on the canon reads: “Of poemes and their sundry formes and how thereby the auncient Poets receaued surnames” (I.11). Puttenham does not refer to English poets in this case. In France, however, a controversy arose over classical and contemporary genres and their respective dignity. While Thomas Se´billet, in his Art poe´tique franc¸ais (1548), reviewed a whole range of classical and vernacular genres (e. g. epigram, sonnet, rondeau, ballad, “chant Royal,” blason, e´nigme, complainte, lai, virelai) 20, Joachim du Bellay dismissed the vernacular genres in La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse (1549). The introduction of the fourth chapter of book II, which bears the title “Quelz genres de Poe¨mes doit elire le Poe¨te Francoys”, reads as follows: Ly donques & rely premierement (o` Poe¨te futur), fueillete de main nocturne & journelle les exemplaires Grecz & Latins: puis me laisse toutes ces vieilles poe¨sies Francoyses aux Jeuz Floraux de Thoulouze & au Puy de Rouan: comme rondeaux, ballades, vyrelaiz, chantz royaulx, chansons, & autres telles episseries, qui corrumpent le goust de nostre Langue, & ne servent si non a` porter temoingnaige de notre ignorance. 21

As far as the epigram is concerned, Du Bellay recommended an imitation of Martial, for the elegy he proposed the example of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Sidney and Puttenham moved along similar lines. There were, however, also relevant exceptions. Sidney praised the poetical ballad of Percy to Doug-

19

20

21

Ben Jonson, “Timber, or Discoveries,” in: B. Jonson, [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford / P. & E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952, vol. VIII, p. 635 mentions “an Epick, Dramatick, Lyrike, Elegiake, or Epigrammatike Poeme.” Thomas Se´billet, “Art poe´tique francX ais (1548),” in: Traite´s de poe´tique et de rhe´torique de la Renaissance. Ed. F. Goyet, pp. 101-144 (II. 1-15). Joachim du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse. Ed. L. Terreaux. Paris / Bruxelles / Montre´al: Bordas, 1972, p. 74. - Cf. the critical remarks in Barthe´lemy Aneau, “Le Quintil horacien” (1550), in: Traite´s. Ed. F. Goyet, p. 209: “[…] tu ne connais, ou ne veux connaıˆtre, que ces nobles poe`mes sont propres, et pe´culiers a` la langue FrancX aise, et de la sienne, et propre, et antique invention.”

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las as a classical example of lyric poetry and ranked it alongside Pindar’s odes. 22 In order to illustrate the dramatic paradigm, Sir John Harington did not hesitate to refer to Oxford and Cambridge university plays. 23 From here, it was only a short step to a canonization of English poets. Francis Meres, who dedicated one section of his commonplace book Palladis Tamia to a “comparative discourse” between English, Greek, Latin and Italian poets, obviously intended to view English literature on equal terms with ancient and other modern literatures. His procedure is marked by formulaic comparisons which follow the same syntactic pattern: “as … and … and …: so …”. In the case of the heroic poem, the highest genre of the literary canon, it reads as follows: As Homer and Virgil among the Greeks and Latines are the chiefe Heroick Poets: so Spencer and Warner be our chiefe heroicall Makers. 24

In this rough comparison, which totally ignores the achievements of epic poets in Renaissance Italy, Homer, Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and William Warner are named as outstanding representatives of the heroic genre. They are treated within their own cultural contexts, with no attention paid to the differences between them. After all, this is a typological synkrisis, not a historical one. The other genres of the canon are treated in a similar fashion. Here the lists of authors grow larger and larger - especially those of the English poets, who are thereby ‘canonized.’ Meres’ synkrisis implied the hypothesis that vernacular literature was able to compete with classical authors: As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among ye English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Ge˜tleme˜ of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lost, his Loue labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King Iohn, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Iuliet. 25

As a dramatist who impressed his contemporaries by writing in two genres, Shakespeare personified the principle of aemulatio. It is this principle which would later form the core of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Swift’s literary satire The Battle of the Books transformed Meres’ commonplace book poetics into an eristic parable, in which ancient and modern representatives 22 23

24 25

Sidney, Apology, p. 118. Harington, “Preface,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G.G. Smith. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1959 (1904), vol. II, p. 210. Meres, “Poetrie”, p. 77. Meres, “Poetrie”, p. 76. - For the context of literary criticism cf. Levin Ludwig Schücking, Shakespeare im literarischen Urteil seiner Zeit. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1908 (which includes an anthology of sources).

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of each genre fight against each other. It is not the moderni, however, who win the battle, but the antiqui. This was perhaps the last time that the classical system of genres was defended successfully. There is no need to discuss the eight-part canon of genres any further. Other canonical paradigms existed in the Renaissance as well, of course, but these were of minor importance. The triadic canon of epic, dramatic and lyric poetry is worth mentioning in this respect. First initiated by Roger Ascham in his tetradic division of the Genus Poeticum into Comicum, Tragicum, Epicum and Melicum, thereby splitting the Genus Dramaticum into Comicum and Tragicum, 26 it was fully developed in John Milton’s prose works. 27 More interesting than a search for other scattered classificatory paradigms, however, is the problem of the subdivision of genres. Contemporary discussions demonstrate how the traditional canon of the major genres was extended. Drama is a case in point. The most famous subdivision of drama was probably articulated by Shakespeare’s Polonius when he praised the players’ comprehensive repertoire: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historicalpastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited (Hamlet II.ii.392-396).

In contrast to a reading which underlies many theatre productions, Polonius’ statement does not involve an ironical enumeration of dramatic forms, rather it outlines a generic system and some possible subspecies. Tragedy, comedy, history and pastoral 28 are the basic types. In accordance with the contemporary eight-part canon of genres, the generic term “drama” does not appear. Tragedy, comedy and pastoral, however, are derived from it. Within this framework, history represents an innovation. In the first folio edition of 1623 it also formed a classificatory element, alongside tragedy and comedy. 29

26

27

28

29

Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570). Ed. L.V. Ryan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 138. John Milton, “Of Education” (1644), in: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J.E. Spingarn. 3 vol. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1957, vol. I, p. 206: “[…] that sublime art which in Aristotles poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, […].” Cf. also Milton’s “The Reason of Church-Government” (1641) ibid., pp. 196-197. Evidence for pastoral poetry as a type of drama is provided in David Klein (ed.), The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970, p. 185. The title runs: “MR. VVILLIAM / SHAKESPEARES / COMEDIES, / HISTORIES, & / TRAGEDIES. / Published according to the True Originall Copies. / LONDON / Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.”

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5 1

tragedy

2

comedy

3

history

4

pastoral

6

7

8

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

Table 1: Generic schema of Polonius

Polonius’ dramatic paradigm is used for a further subclassification. Mixed types, or hybrid forms, are generated from a combination of two, three or four basic types. In other words, the unilinear intertextuality of the basic genres is transformed into bi-, tri- and tetralinear mixed genres. The obvious idea behind such a transformation is the extension of the scope of the dramatic genre. It conforms to the general Renaissance fashion of searching for copiousness (copia) and variety (varietas). If rhetoric is concerned with a copia verborum, genre poetics will aim at a copia generum: 2 5

6

7

X

X

1

tragedy

X

2

comedy

X

3

history

4

pastoral

3 8

X

X X

10

11

12

X X

X

9

X X

X

4 13

14

15

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

Table 2: Typology of basic and mixed dramatic genres

The diagram of Polonius’ typology (Table 1) shows that it covers only a fraction of all possible dramatic hybrids. Four basic genres (1-4) correspond to four mixed ones (5-8), among them three two-digit items and one fourdigit item. The maximum of these generic combinations, however, is considerably higher. As table 2 shows, there exist eleven possible hybrids altogether, including six two-digit ones (5-10), four three-digit ones (11-14) and one four-digit (15) one. It is probable that Polonius’ formulaic phrase “scene individable, or poem unlimited” 30 is meant to describe this copious30

Cf. Harold Jenkins’ interpretation in the commentary of his Hamlet edition (Arden Edition). London / New York: Methuen, 1982, p. 259.

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ness in terms of a paradigmatic summary. Concrete examples of every type of this generic ars combinatoria can be found in dramatic productions of the English Renaissance, with a different emphasis placed on the different components in each particular case. 31 As Polonius’ schema seemed to lack any principle of order, the authors of contemporary poetry and poetics reacted with helplessness or even disapproval. In the prologue to his play Midas (1592), John Lyly (1554?-1606) complained that what in earlier times had been served on the occasion of a banquet in separate dishes was now being assembled in a colourful mixture, and with a gesture of resignation he commented ironically: “If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole worlde is become an Hodge-podge.” 32 What Lyly himself practised in his mythological drama was strongly disapproved of in Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595): namely the insertion of clownesque scenes in a serious plot with the aim of amusing the audience. 33 The same had already been condemned as an indecorum in George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575), a standpoint which would become predominant in classicism. 34 Sidney, however, did not deny the aesthetic permissibility of mixed genres; he rather gave the following differentiated comment: Now in his parts, kinds, or species (as you list to term them), it is to be noted that some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragi-comical. Some, in the like manner, have mingled prose and verse, as Sannazzaro and Boethius. Some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral. But that cometh all to one in this question, for, if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful. 35

31

32

33 34

35

In his paper “’Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral’: Elizabethan Dramatic Nomenclature,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 43 (1960), 70-87, Allardyce Nicoll writes: “[…] we must remember both that of the thousands of plays presented between 1500 and 1640 only a sorry remnant has come down to us, and that, if Shakespeare invented this combination, he did so on a fairly sure foundation” (75). In contrast to Nicoll, who denies the possibility of a four-part hybrid, R.B. Rollin finds such a form in John Milton’s biblical epic: “Paradise Lost: ‘Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral’,” Milton Studies 5 (1973), 3-37. John Lyly, “Midas,” in: The Complete Works. Ed. R.W. Bond. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, vol. III, p. 115. Sidney, Apology, p. 135; cf. p. 223 in G. Shepherd’s commentary. G. Gascoigne, “Certayne Notes of Instruction,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G.G. Smith, vol. I, p. 48: “to entermingle merie iests in a serious matter is an Indecorum.” - On French classicism, see Rene´ Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en France. Paris: Nizet, 1963, pp. 215-230 (III.2: “Les biense´ances”). Sidney, Apology, p. 116. The quotation shows that Elizabethan terms for “genre” vary: Apart from the frequently used “kind(e)”, the term “form(e)” (Puttenham) is also used.

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According to this view even the synthesis of the highest (heroic) genre and the lowest (pastoral) genre is permissible as long as such a “conjunction” may be regarded as successful in aesthetic terms. If this principle is adhered to, the tragicomedy and, it may be added, every other hybrid form of Polonius’ schema is permitted. Sidney’s wavering between rejecting the “mongrel tragi-comedy” on the one hand and regarding it as an autonomous genre on the other is symptomatic of the theorists’ attitude. In Italy, a fierce controversy raged on the aesthetic legitimacy of the “tragicomedia pastorale” Il Pastor Fido (1585) between its author Giambattista Guarini on the one hand and Giason Denores and other critics on the other. 36 In France, the battle over the genre mixte continued. Here the proponents of generic purity were reminded that tragicomedy shared the advantages of both tragedy and comedy and should therefore be regarded as the highest genre. 37 English authors would consider the pros and cons by using similar arguments, until the following statement in John Fletcher’s (1579-1625) prologue to The Faithful Shepherdess (1610) brought the whole matter to an end: A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be questioned, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie. 38

With this definition, which cautiously modified the norms of decorum and the Ständeklausel, an aesthetic compromise was achieved that met the demands of both genre poetics and the interests of the audience. In this way, a genre sui generis was produced which was not based on generic interference but on its own set of rules.

36

37

38

Cf. the account in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961, vol. II, pp. 1074-1105. Cf. Wilfried Floeck, Die Literarästhetik des französischen Barock: Entstehung - Entwicklung Auflösung. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1979, pp. 199-214, here: pp. 212-214. John Fletcher, “The Faithful Shepherdess,” in: The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Ed. F. Bowers. 10 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966-1996, vol. III, p. 497. - On English theories cf. Susanne Stamnitz, “Discordia Concors: Aspekte der englischen Tragikomödientheorie 1540-1640,” in: Englische und amerikanische Literaturtheorie: Studien zu ihrer historischen Entwicklung. Ed. R. Ahrens & E. Wolff. 2 vols. Heidelberg: Winter, 1978-1979, vol. I, pp. 149-174. - On historical developments: Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and England. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1955; Susanne Stamnitz, “Prettie Tales of Wolues and Sheepe”: Tragikomik, Pastorale und Satire im Drama der englischen und italienischen Renaissance 1550-1640. Heidelberg: Winter, 1977.

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Extensions of the generic canon can be found not only in verbal communication but also in combinations of verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. Pictorial and musical texts were combined with literary texts to create new artistic entities. Emblems, madrigals, trionfi, masques, and operas are examples of a more or less complex intermediality. The mutual approximation of the heterogeneous sign systems is reflected in programmatic formulae, such as ut rhetorica pictura, ut rhetorica musica, ut pictura poesis. The vogue of intermedial genres would reach its peak during the baroque period. It was accompanied by a contest (paragone) for the highest rank in the hierarchy: a contest between painting and poetry, poetry and stage architecture, music and text. 39 To comment on these debates and on the theoretical foundations of the intermedial genres would go beyond the scope of this chapter. The fact that poetics increasingly took these genres into account largely speaks for itself. 40

II. The Functional Paradigm (Rhetoricization) Genres can be defined as configurations of signs, and they can be described with respect to the effects which they produce. A well-known effect is catharsis, which is typical of tragedy. During the Renaissance period, however, catharsis was not always understood as Aristotle had defined it. The syncretistic attitudes of literary theorists allowed for several possible interpretations of catharsis. 41 One of these interpretations was rhetorical, because rhetoric, as the ars persuadendi, comprised a whole range of effects. 42 These were considered among the following three headings: 39

40

41

42

Cf., among others, Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone”. Leiden: Brill, 1992; D. J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones” (1949), in: The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D.J. Gordon. Ed. S. Orgel. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1975, pp. 77-101 (294-297); James A. Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1981. See for instance the pattern poem (carmen figuratum) in Julius Caesar Scaliger (1561), George Puttenham (1589), Juan Dı´az Rengifo (1606) and Justus Georg Schottelius (1641). - Literature: Jeremy Adler & Ulrich Ernst, Text als Figur: Visuelle Poesie von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Weinheim: VCH, 1987; B. Westerweel, “Emblematic and Non-Emblematic Aspects of English Renaissance Pattern Poetry,” Emblematica 6 (1992), 37-64. Cf. Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, pt. III: “A Purgation of Passions” (pp. 203-300). Cf. Klaus Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik. Bad Homburg v. d. H. / Berlin / Zürich: Gehlen, 1968, passim.

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a) a rhetorical doctrine of emotions based on several philosophical sources (Peripatos, Stoa, Epicureism); b) three intended effects, docere (teach) - delectare (delight) - movere (move), which at the same time represented an ascending scale of persuasive effects; c) a triad of binary speech functions which constituted a corresponding number of genera causarum: the judicial genre realized through accusation and defence, the deliberative through positive and negative advice, and the epideictic or demonstrative genre realized through praise and blame. These areas are not without overlap. The principle of delectare, for instance, is manifested in eulogies which themselves may produce emotions such as pleasure, amusement, and admiration. In the Renaissance a functional view of genres was achieved by viewing literature from a rhetorical perspective. Rhetorical effects were introduced into the area of poetics. The poet was thereby turned into an orator (poeta orator) whose telos was not primarily art itself but the emotional control of his audience. 43 In his discussion of love poetry, Sidney criticized the eclectic formalism of imitatio auctorum, and he demanded that the poet feel himself the very passions he wanted to arouse in the hearer. 44 In tragedy rhetorical functions were applied even more rigidly. Sidney referred to: the high and excellent Tragedy, […] that, with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded. 45

This definition fundamentally modified the Aristotelian concept of catharsis. The ultimate aim of tragedy was now not the cleansing of emotions but moral instruction (docere). Such instruction was to be initiated through movere (“stir”), which was the highest possible effect. Two major emotions were assigned to it: “admiration” and “commiseration.” These inverted the original sequence of the principal emotions in catharsis and, what is more, they re-

43

44

45

Cf., among other sources, Erwin Rotermund, “Der Affekt als literarischer Gegenstand: Zur Theorie und Darstellung der Passiones im 17. Jahrhundert,” in: Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Ed. H. R. Jauss. München: Fink, 1968, pp. 239-269; Birgit Stolt, Wortkampf: Frühneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetorischen Praxis. Frankfurt/M. Athenäum, 1974; H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte: Englische Wirkungsästhetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975; Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature. New York etc.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Sidney, Apology, pp. 137-138; the rhetorical contexts are: Cicero, De Or. II. 45. 189-190, Or. 38. 132; Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 102-105; Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI. 2. 26-36. Sidney, Apology, pp. 117-118.

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placed ›o¬boå by admiratio. 46 Thus a totally rhetoricized concept of catharsis was created, which included astonishment, pity and rational reflection as stages of effect. In a similar manner Sidney defined particular genres rhetorically; yet a functional paradigm sub specie rhetorica was not achieved. Attempts to establish a generic paradigm by means of rhetorical effects are rarely observed in the Renaissance, because the traditional canon resisted a thorough rhetoricization. An attempt was, however, made by William Webbe, whose treatise A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) subsumed all possible poetical phrases under three principal text types (“sortes”), which are Comicall, Tragicall, Historiall. Vnder the first may be contained all such Epigrammes, Elegies, and delectable ditties, which Poets haue deuised respecting onely the delight thereof: in the seconde, all dolefull complaynts, lamentable chaunces, and what soeuer is poetically expressed in sorrow and heauines. In the third we may comprise the reste of all such matters which is indifferent betweene the other two, [which] doo commonly occupy the pennes of Poets. 47

This fragmentary system of genres is atypical in several respects. Comical, tragical and historical text types are not treated as subcategories of drama but as genres in their own right, transcending the traditional boundaries of the dramatic genre. Epigram and elegy, for instance, are assigned to the comical genre. What makes this classification so special, however, is its reliance on only two basic affections: pleasure and pain. The genus comicum rests on pleasure, the genus tragicum on pain, the genus historicum on an adiaphoron. The fact that this concept was not developed any further indicates how difficult it was to alter the received canonical paradigm. George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie made an even more daring attempt. His poetics was intended to be a handbook of both courtly literature and courtly conduct and subscribed to rhetorical principles in structure and intent. Its addressee was the courtly poeta orator, whom it should serve as an effective and flexible instrument when he wanted to stand his ground among various social forces at work in the court. 48 The ideological and political

46

47

48

On admiratio(n) cf. Allen H. Gilbert (ed.), Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962, pp. 459-461. William Webbe, “A Discourse of English Poetrie,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, pp. 249-250. On the concept in general cf., among others, Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984.

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Figure 24: George Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie (1589), portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.

centre of the court was the prince; in 16th-century England this was Queen Elizabeth. The frontispiece of Puttenham’s poetics shows her portrait (Figure 24), and the book itself is dedicated to her. The imprese added to the portrait (“A colei Che se stessa raßomiglia, & non altrui”) 49 reveals the form of 49

The translation is: “For the one who can’t be compared to others.”

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communication considered fitting for the courtier when he addressed his sovereign. It was the epideictic genre, the third of the rhetorical genera causarum, 50 which had formed a part of courtly discourse since antiquity. 51 It could be realized through a praise of rulers (enkomion) as well as through eulogies on the occasion of courtly events such as birthdays, weddings, jubilees, and funerals. As can be seen in the following description of the praise of princes, it rested on a differentiated topics: shewing their high estates, their Princely genealogies and pedegrees, mariages, aliances, and such noble exploites, as they had done in th’affaires of peace & of warre to the benefit of their people and countries, by inuention of any noble science, or profitable Art, or by making wholsome lawes or enlarging of their dominions by honorable and iust conquests, and many other wayes. 52

The same topoi which Puttenham lists here for the praise of princes can be found in rhetorical inventio. 53 Of epideictic occasional poetry such as the genethliacum, the epithalamium or the epitaph, an outline can also be found in rhetoric, for instance in the Peri Epideiktikon of Menander Rhetor (3rd cent. AD). 54 Epideictic poetry of this kind originated in a corresponding type of oratory. Puttenham, however, was not content with adding merely a rhetorical touch to his poetics by introducing epideictic genres. Like no other author before him he aimed rather at a rhetorical theory of genres. The whole spectrum of traditional literary genres became the subject of an epideictic classification with the basic functional categories of praise and blame. In so doing, Puttenham did not restrict the epideictic to its positive component, as was the typical fashion in courtly contexts, but made ample use of the binary opposition which constituted the genus demonstrativum. That Puttenham 50

51

52 53

54

Theodore C. Burgess, Epideictic Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, rpt. New York: Garland, 1987; Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode. München: C.H. Beck, 1974, pp. 177-210. - O.B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Cf., among others, Johannes A. Straub, Vom Herrscherideal in der Spätantike. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964, pp. 146-174. - T.O. Cain, Praise in “The Faerie Queene”. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978; Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth. London & Canberra: Croom Helm / Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1983; id., Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Puttenham, Arte, p. 35. Cf. T. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. London 1553, Fol. 6v-9v; Thomas Vicars, Xeiragvgi¬a: Manuductio ad Artem Rhetoricam. London 1621, pp. 21-29; Thomas Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus. London 1625, sig. A. 6r-v, A. 8r-v. Menander Rhetor. Ed. & trans. D.A. Russell & N.G. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 158-161 (genethliakos), 134-147 (epithalamium), 170-179 (epitaphios). An overview of Menander’s epideictic genres is given in Hardison, The Enduring Monument, pp. 195-196.

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was well acquainted with the eight-part canon of genres is revealed in the eleventh chapter of the first book, yet the author did not carry this thread any further. Within the context of the entire book, the eleventh chapter functions as a digression within the dominating epideictic paradigm. Table 3 illustrates the structure of this paradigm. 55 It shows that it falls into two categories. The first category (chaps. 12-21) includes moral and didactic poetry, the second (chaps. 22-30) emotional and expressive poetry. The first type strives to convey moral values, particularly through praising virtue and blaming vice. 56 As the titles of Puttenham’s chapters indicate, this task is achieved in such genres as hymns, dramas and histories, which contribute to the stabilization of the existing order of feudal society. Didactic poetry falls into this category, because it is concerned with those doctrines and arts “as the common wealth fared the better by.” 57 The second category of the paradigm includes the smaller genres and is based on the principal emotions of pleasure and pain, recalling William Webbe’s fragmentary sketch. Chapter 23 describes “The forme of Poeticall reioysings”, and chapter 24 “The forme of Poeticall lamentations.” That positive and negative emotions are subsumed under the binary categories of praise and blame can be concluded from Puttenham’s remarks on the genethliacum and the epithalamium (praise), the epitaph, the epigram (praise / blame), and the Dirae (blame). The chapter heading of the latter genre typically reveals the author’s approach: “A certaine auncient forme of poesie by which men did vse to reproch their enemies” (chap. 29). It becomes clear that Puttenham was not so much interested in generic terminology as in the rhetorical functions of each genre. In order to demonstrate the innovative character of Puttenham’s epideictic poetics of genres, the following paragraphs will concentrate on some of the courtly genres as well as those that were adapted for the court. It should be noted that Puttenham did not use the epideictic principle in a puristic manner, but that he mixed it with two others: a hierarchical one, which was based on the idea of social ranks, 58 and a chronological one, which was based 55

56 57 58

This is taken, with minor modifications, from a monograph by Dorothee Rölli-Alkemper: Höfische Poetik in der englischen Renaissance: George Puttenhams “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589). München: Fink, 1996. - Due to their introductory or summarizing character the chapters 10, 20 and 22 of Puttenham’s treatise are not included in the table. The same applies to chapter 11 which contains a brief history of theatrical stages. Puttenham, Arte, p. 24: “the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice”. Puttenham, Arte, p. 44. Chap. 20 is headed: “In what forme of Poesie vertue in the inferiour sort vvas commended.” It closes with the remark: “So haue you how the immortall gods were praised by hymnes, the great Princes and heroicke personages by ballades of praise called Encomia, both of them by historicall reports of great grauitie and maiestie, the inferiour persons by other slight poemes” (Puttenham, Arte, p. 44). Thus, the hierarchy is formed by the se-

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CHAP

PRAISE/ POSITIVE

GENRE

BLAME/ NEGATIVE

I. didactic poetry 12

X

Divine Hymn

13

Satyre

X

14

Comedy

X

15

Tragedy

X

16

X

18

Praise of Princes (Panegyric) Eglogue / Bucolick

19

X

Historical Poesy

21

X

Ballads of Praise / Encomia

X

II. emotional poetry 23

X

24

The forme of Poeticall reioysings: Triumphall, encomium, epithalamium, genethliacum The forme of Poeticall lamentations: epicedium, monodia, elegy

X

25

X

Genethliacum

26

X

Epithalamium

27

X

Epigram

X

28

X

Epitaph

X

Dirae

X

29 30

X

Posies

Table 3: George Puttenham’s epideictic paradigm of occasional poetry

on cultural history. 59 In our present context, the hierarchical principle is of particular importance, because it points to the social origin of Puttenham’s view of poetry: the court.

59

quence of gods - princes - other people. It appears also in chapter 10: “The subiect or matter of Poesie” which introduces Puttenham’s generic poetic. Cf. chap. 3.

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According to chapter 12 (“In what forme of Poesie the gods of the Gentiles were praysed and honored”) hymns to gods were the most ancient of all genres. Here, Puttenham departed from the traditional canon which he had pointed out in the previous chapter. In this chapter the genus heroicum, represented by Homer and Virgil, is placed at the top of the list. As far as the divine hymn is concerned, Puttenham mentioned no originator or prv˜ tow ey«reth¬w. Poet-priests would perform it before a religious congregation in a shady grove - an indication of an archaic cultural stage. Stories concerning the gods could be either historical or fictional. While the former were subject to an euhemeristic interpretation, the “figurative or mystic” character called for an allegorical reading. 60 In a similar manner antiquity presented the improbability and the immorality of myths in order to extract from them useful doctrines to increase the theoretical and practical knowledge of man. In contrast to the ways in which the heathens praised their gods, Christian hymns are mentioned only in passing. As Puttenham is eager to show, it is not the praise of princes and kings (“in soueraignety and function next vnto the gods”) which follows next to praising the gods, but the blame of human vices. The reason is to be found in the barbaric state in which people of archaic ages lived: “[…] for as yet for lacke of good ciuility and wholesome doctrines, there was greater store of lewde lourdaines then of wise and learned Lords”. 61 The poets, who were also priests and moral authorities, had three kinds of poems reprehensive at their disposal through which they reformed the moral state of man: 1. satires, 2. comedies, and 3. tragedies. In the course of his discussion Puttenham amplified and specified this spectrum of genres, which he commented on as follows: And thus haue ye foure sundry formes of Poesie Dra˜matick reprehensiue, & put in execution by the feate & dexteritie of mans body, to wit, the Satyre, old Comedie, new Comedie, and Tragedie, […]. 62

Following the course of classical literary history, Puttenham thus classified comedy into old (archaia) and new (nea) forms and, what is more, he interpreted this three-part system in terms of a dramatic paradigm, the shared ele60

61 62

Cf. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. New York: Harper & Bros., 1961; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970. Puttenham, Arte, p. 30. Puttenham, Arte, p. 34.

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ments of which were: a moral telos, the reprehension of vices, and the political purpose of stabilizing feudal order. Puttenham’s first dramatic genre, which he called Satyre (chap. 13), was the offspring of an etymological misunderstanding typical of the Renaissance period. It rested on a confusion 63 of the term satire, lat. satira (or satura), with the play of satyrs, the burlesque ending in the Attic trilogy of tragedies. This confusion, probably caused by the graphophonetic affinity of the two terms, led to satire being interpreted as a theatrical disguise with the aim of social criticism. Poets and actors put on the masks of satyrs in order to teach moral manners and cultivated behaviour. Such a definition of satire was in perfect accordance with other definitions of the period. 64 While Puttenham’s classification of satire - which was supposedly a Roman invention 65 - results from a historical error, his characterization of comedy is much closer to the historical record (chap. 14). Even if comedy did not spring from satire, as Puttenham suggests, a variety of roles and a fictional plot are among its constitutive elements. Puttenham’s distinction between ancient (archaia) and new (nea) comedy is correct: The former is directed against social abuse and those who are responsible for it, the latter is confined to a general condemnation of vices, and is thus a predecessor of the comedy of manners. 66 In this case the poetic mask no longer fulfils the function of protecting the critic from the revenge of the mighty, but becomes the requisite of a quick and frequent role switching. Tragedy (chap. 15) deals with the fall of depraved princes, “to shew the mutabilitie of fortune, and the iust punishment of God in reuenge of a

63

64

65

66

Cf. Diomedes, “Ars Grammatica.” Grammatici Latini. 8 vols. Ed. H. Keil. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1981, vol. I, p. 485: “satira autem dicta sive a Satyris, quod similiter in hoc carmine ridiculae res pudendaeque dicuntur, quae velut a Satyris proferuntur et fiunt.” Two other possible etymologies are however, assumed. Cf. Ulrich Knoche, Die römische Satire. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 21957, pp. 10-13 and B. Harris, “Men like Satyrs,” in: Elizabethan Poetry. Ed. J.R. Brown & B. Harris. London: E. Arnold, 1960, pp. 175-201. Cf. e. g. John Harington: “The Satyrike […] being wholly occupied in mannerly & couertly reprouing of all vices.” (sig.vir ) - Literature: Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976 (rpt, 11959); James S. Baumlin, “Generic Contexts of Elizabethan Satire: Rhetoric, Poetic Theory, and Imitation,” in: Renaissance Genres. Ed. B.K. Lewalski, pp. 444-467. Quintilian, Inst. Or. X.1.93 self-confidently asserts: “satura quidem tota nostra est”; cf. Knoche, Römische Satire, pp. 7-8. A possible source is J. C. Scaliger’s historical account, which places middle comedy (mese¯) between the old (archaia) and the new (nea): Poetices Libri Septem (1561), pp. 12-14 (Lib. I, Cap. vii: “Comoediae Species”). The comedy of manners is described in Sidney, Apology, p. 117.

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vicious and euill life.” 67 Rather than Aristotle’s Poetics, the models of this concept are Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and The Mirror for Magistrates (1559 ff.), writings of epic quality which hold a mirror up to rulers by presenting a variety of deterrent exempla. 68 The aims of such a de-casibustragedy 69 are didactic: the vicious behaviour of princes is condemned. The relevance of this telos makes the technical aspects of tragedy seem less important. The only one mentioned is the lofty style, which is determined by the subject matter. Although a medieval understanding of tragic poetry is revived in this way, it is adapted to the requirements of a courtly poetics. Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories prove its popularity in Elizabethan drama. Puttenham’s comparative view of satire, comedy, and tragedy shows that the development of these genres ran parallel to cultural developments. While those actors who disguised themselves as satyrs would still perform in the open countryside, the actors of comedies played on moveable stages, and the actors of tragedies performed on high cothurns in theatre buildings. 70 The cultural level of the audience corresponded to their social rank and included peasants, citizens, and aristocrats. A political dimension was common to all dramatic genres. In each case the audience was urged to condemn vices which were seen as threats to the social order. 71 Thus it stands to reason that in Puttenham’s discussion tragedy precedes the hymns to princes (chap. 16), and the condemnation (vituperatio) of the negative precedes the praise (laus) of the ideal. According to Puttenham the two genres fulfil complementary functions, but they share the same goal in order to affirm the hierarchical order of the courtly society.

67 68

69

70

71

Puttenham, Arte, p. 33. The full title of the Mirror runs: “A MYRROVRE / For Magistrates. / Wherein may be seen by / example of other, with howe gre=/uous plages vices are punished: and / howe frayle and vnstable worldly / prosperitie is founde, even of / those, whom Fortune see=/ meth most highly / to fauour. / […] / Anno. 1559. / LONDINI, / In ædibus Thomæ Marshe.” The source is Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960 (1938), p. 62. For the origin and distribution of this understanding of tragedy cf. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1959, chap. I (pp. 3-24) and Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 116-128. Puttenham, Arte, p. 34. Chapter 17, which in a digression offers a history of the theatrical stage, creates a more complicated picture. The subject is more thoroughly treated by Scaliger, Poetice, pp. 33-37 (I.xxi: “Theatrum”). Cf Jonathan Crewe, “The Hegemonic Theatre of George Puttenham,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 71-85.

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It is no accident that chapter 18 includes a discussion of the “Eglogue.” 72 In Puttenham’s (historically correct) analysis, the pastoral was the invention of a sophistic age and was developed after satire, comedy and tragedy. In this way Puttenham distances himself from Scaliger, who regarded it as the product of an archaic society of primitive shepherds and as a kind of primordial poetry (“vetustissimum Poematis genus”). 73 Puttenham, on the other hand, characterized the pastoral as an artful and allegorical masquerade of “homely persons” and “rude speeches,” apt “to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters.” 74 He explained that the disguise was necessary because of the moral and social criticism which conflicted with political censorship. Within Puttenham’s epideictic paradigm, the pastoral is associated with the function of vituperatio. 75 As a representative of this genre Puttenham cites the poet Mantuanus (i. e. Johannes Baptista Spagnoli [1448-1516]) and his didactic and satirical eclogues. Historical poetry (“historicall Poesie”) is seen as a highlight of epideictic poetry. According to the heading of chapter 19 its subject matter includes a praise of the heroic deeds of princes and the virtues of the ancestors. Forming an antipode to the tragedy, this genre represents a topical memory (memoria) of exemplary models, which are held up to posterity, as it were, “in a mirror,” in order to be imitated. What is to be understood by “historical,” however, is not entirely clear. Puttenham’s distinction of three kinds of history, a true, a false (fictional) and a mixed one, is qualified by the statement that aesthetic and ethical values are of singular importance. Following this principle, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Kyrupedia, 72

73

74

75

This is a pseudo-etymology which can be traced back to the Middle Ages and is based on Lat. Egloga or Aegloga as “caprinus sermo,” which appears in Spenser as Aeglogues and is translated as “Goteheards tales.” The correct meaning eœklogh¬ = “selection,” however, was already known. Cf. E. Kegel-Brinkgreve, The Echoing Woods: Bucolic and Pastoral from Theocritus to Wordsworth. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1990, pp. 219-220, 417. Puttenham, Arte, pp. 37-38. - Scaliger, Poetice, I.iv. An extensive discussion is included in Kegel-Brinkgreve, The Echoing Woods, pp. 371-375. Puttenham, Arte, p. 38. The distinction between primitive and secondary or allegorical pastoral, which can be found in Louis A. Montrose “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983), 415-459, is thus rejected as incorrect. Webbe, “A Discourse of English Poetrie,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, p. 262 uses the scheme of laus and vituperatio, in order to describe the (allegorical) characterizations in Theocritus, Virgil, and Mantuanus: “For vnder these personnes [i. e. simple clownes], as it were in a cloake of simplicitie, they would eyther sette foorth the prayses of theyr freendes, without the note of flattery, or enueigh grieuously against abuses, without any token of bytternesse.” As regards the materia of the pastoral, Scaliger, Poetice, p. 9 writes: “Materia prorsus communis, laudes, vituperationes, conuicia, criminum obiectiones.”

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an idealized (“fained and vntrue”) ruler’s biography, and Homer’s Iliad (“a fabulous or mixt report of the siege of Troy”) may all be numbered among historical poetry, particularly, because Puttenham - like Sidney - dismisses the difference between verse and prose as a distinguishing criterion of poetry. 76 In all its manifestations “history” is regarded as moral philosophy exemplified by concrete instances, in other words, as a collection of ethical exempla which fulfil the persuasive function of praising virtue and blaming vice. Such a relationship between the epideictic and the epic had existed since antiquity, particularly in allegorical exegeses of Virgil’s Aeneid. 77 The fact that Puttenham added the romance as a “historicall ditty” to the historical epic may be regarded as a cautious attempt at topicalization. Puttenham’s discussion of the more important epideictic genres is followed by a sequence of chapters on lyric poetry of smaller format (chaps. 22-30). Pleasure and pain, however, the principal emotions which are used for its classification into “Poeticall reioysings” and “Poeticall lamentations,” do not constitute an emotional poetry in the Romantic fashion. This is prevented by its public and situational nature, which is also responsible for its characterization as occasional poetry. It is used to represent passiones in a rigid and ritualized manner. Its source is the rhetorical genus demonstrativum, which is interpreted here in a literal sense. During the Renaissance period the ceremonial epideixis 78 was a European phenomenon. In every court there were numerous occasions on which a poeta orator could express the people’s pleasure and pain, thereby acting as their representative. The various rules of such occasional poetry could be found in Puttenham’s poetics or in J. C. Scaliger’s Poetices Libri Septem, which was Puttenham’s probable source. 79 Scaliger dealt with the various forms of lyric poetry in an encyclopedic manner. It was George Puttenham’s merit to have incorporated the genera maiora as well as the genera minora into an overall epideictic framework of genres.

III. Generic Syncretism The hierarchical and functional paradigms represent remarkable attempts at systematizing the great variety of genres. Although both strive for coherence, 76 77

78

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Puttenham, Arte, p. 41; cf. Sidney, Apology, p. 103. Cf. Brian Vickers, “Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance,” NLH 14 (1983), 497-537; Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Cf. on this term A. Leigh DeNeef, “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1973), 203-231, here: 203. Scaliger, Poetice, III. c-cxxvii; cf. the overview in Hardison, The Enduring Monument, pp. 196-198.

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this coherence is constantly broken. A cause for this deficit is the lack of clarity in criteria like “hierarchy” and “function.” The former could refer to the dignity of the subject matter as well as to the age, the quantity or the generality of a poem, the latter to its intentions or effects. As a rule these features were combined in a contaminatio. What is more: the paradigms did not exist in isolated form, but were interwoven. Such an interweaving could be the result of either dependency or interference. In each case a ruling paradigm became more open and gained in perspective. The result was a generic syncretism marked by a tendency to transcend the limits of existing paradigms as well as those of received genres. Two paradigms which contributed to such a syncretism will now be considered more closely. They are of particular relevance, because they were responsible for the shape of two important works of the Elizabethan period: Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie. These paradigms may be called mimetic and historical. Both paradigms relate to the generic question only indirectly. Therefore they possess - sub specie generica - a supplementary status. The mimetic paradigm is expressed most explicitly in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, which partly adopted the taxonomies presented by Julius Caesar Scaliger 80 and Richard Wills. 81 Three types of poets are distinguished: 1. poetae theologi who imitate the unspeakable glory of God. To these belong, among the Jews, Solomon, Moses, Deborah, and the author of the book of Job, and among the heathens, Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer; 2. poetae philosophi who convert a proposed concept into poetry. This may be concerned with ethics (Tyrtaios, Phocylides, Cato), natural philosophy (Lucretius, Virgil), astronomy (Manilius, Pontanus), or history (Lucan); 3. the “right poets” who, relying solely on their creative faculty of invention, express not the real but that which is possible and necessary (“what may be and should be”). 82 Within this tripartite system, no statements on literary genres are made. However, two basic kinds of poets and poetry are distinguished. Theological and 80

81

82

Scaliger, Poetice (I.ii), p. 5 (“Aetates & classes Poetaru˜”). - A comment on Scaliger’s paradigm is given by F. Lecercle, “La Compulsion taxinomique: Scaliger et la the´orie des genres,” in: La Statue et l’empreinte: La Poe´tique de Scaliger. Ed. Claudie Balavoine & Pierre Laurens. Paris: Vrin, 1986, pp. 89-99. Richard Wills, De re poetica (1573). Ed. & trans. A. D. S. Fowler. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, pp. 60-63. Sidney, Apology, pp. 102-103. By introducing the “right poets” as a category, Sidney deviates from Scaliger and Wills.

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philosophical poets are limited in their mimesis by virtue of the chosen materia: the former by a focus on matters divine, the latter by the different areas of teaching, which are realized by skilful versificatores in various forms of didactic poetry. 83 According to Sidney the “right poets” do not rely on verse. It is they who are associated with the canon of eight principal genres. This canon, consequently, is marked by a relationship of dependency on the mimetic paradigm. The historical paradigm, as expressed by Scaliger 84 and Richard Wills, 85 assumes three cultural stages of poetry: 1. the pre-historic period of Apollo, 2. the mythical period of Orpheus, Musaios, Linos, and Olympos, 3. the (civilized) period of Homer and Hesiod. It should be noted that this model of diverse cultural stages partly overlaps with the mimetic one. In both models Orpheus appears as a mythic poeta musicus who civilized mankind. George Puttenham refers to this concept of cultural history at the beginning of the first book (chaps. 3-4) of his Arte of English Poesie, attributing to it a particular prominence that asks for further explication. A group of poets who were the founders of culture (Amphion, Orpheus, Linos, Musaios, Hesiod) is followed by those who created a consciousness for religion (priests, prophets) and society (law givers, politicians). These, in turn, were succeeded by those who discovered new areas of learning (philosophers, astronomers, historiographers, orators, musicians). A further attempt at reading poetry in historical terms is undertaken by Puttenham when he merges the system of epideictic functions with an ascending model of culture. The structure of his outline reflects this model, which includes as elements: divine hymn; satire; comedy; tragedy; praise of princes; pastoral poetry; historical poetry; didactic poetry. 86 The historical perspective employed by Puttenham to give an outline of English literary history (chap. 31) 87 consists of three periods: a period of warlike barbarity in which no literature 83

84 85 86

87

As the example of Lucanus shows, it is also discussed whether these didactic authors should be regarded as poets after all; cf. Helmut Papajewski, “An Lucanus sit poeta,” DVLG 40 (1966), 485-508. Scaliger, Poetice (I.ii), p. 5. Richard Wills, De re poetica, (1573). Ed. A.D.S. Fowler. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, pp. 60-61. Although this diachronic account is hardly systematic, there are explicit references to a progress of civilization; cf. Puttenham, Arte, pp. 30-39, 44. Puttenham, Arte, pp. 59-63. This double mentioning of the same list of English authors, together with the fact that the preceding chapter 30 ends with a reference to the contents of book II, leads to the assumption that this chapter is a later interpolation of two contaminated manuscript-versions.

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was produced that would be worth mentioning; a primordial age of archetypal poets such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Langland, and Hardyng; and finally the courtly period of the 16th century, whose authors are classified according to the genres they used: satire, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, pastoral poetry, ode, elegy, translation. 88 This first account of English literature closes with an encomium on Queen Elizabeth, who is praised as a master in all genres, “be it in Ode, Elegie, Epigram, or any other kinde of poeme Heroick or Lyricke”. 89 It is, at the same time, the end of an attempt at establishing a historical paradigm in poetics. Although the historical paradigm is employed more than once, only in the section on literary history does it achieve a higher degree of independence. In the section on genres it is interference which dominates. A look at the generic poetics of the English Renaissance reveals that the new genres, such as utopian fiction, essay, novel, romance, sonnet, ballad, emblem or masque, were scarcely taken into account. As they do not fit into any of the paradigms outlined above, they appear primarily in poetological paratexts. The generic paradigms themselves are characterized by ongoing transformations and hybridizations. These represent intertextual innovations, 88

89

Puttenham, Arte, pp. 62-63. The following representatives are mentioned with respect to the specific genres: satire: John Skelton; sonnet: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Baron Vaux; tragedy: Thomas Sackville, Baron Buckhurst, Edward Ferrys [=George Ferrars] (the latter two are co-authors of A Mirror for Magistrates); comedy: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Richard Edwards; pastoral: Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Chaloner, “that other Gentleman who wrate the late shepheardes Callender” [=Edmund Spenser]; “amourous ode” and “dittie”: Sir Walter Raleigh; elegy: Sir Edward Dyer; translation: Thomas Phaer, Arthur Golding. Webbe’s overview of English poets: “A Discourse of English Poetrie” (1586), in: Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, pp. 239-247 appeared earlier in print; a comparison between the authors mentioned by Webbe and Puttenham, however, leads to the conclusion that Puttenham’s account probably is the earlier one. The most recent works are missing here. Earlier accounts are confined to lists of authors - e. g. by George Lily, “Virorum aliquot in Britannia, qui nostro seculo eruditione, & doctrina clari, memorabilesque fuerunt, Elogia, per Georgium Lilium Britannum, exarata,” in: Paolo Giovio the Elder (Bishop of Nocera), Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae, et Orchadum, ex libro Pauli Iovii, Episcopi Nucer. Venetiis: Apud M. Tramezinum, 1548, pp. 45r-54v. These sometimes function as evidence for a cultural equality or even superiority of Britain in relation to the continent. Thus John Bale compiles a list of ca. 500 names of English authors in alphabetical order, first in Latin, then in English, “to theˆ that be fryndely harted to their co˜trey and fauorable to good letters” (“A Regystre of the names of Englysh Wryters,” in: The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande. London 1549, sig. G.ijr-H.vijv, here: sig. H.vv). The majority is made up of non-literary authors. John Coke’s THE DEBATE Betweene the Heraldes of Englande and Fraunce. [London:] Richarde Wyer, 1550, sig. J.viiiv-K.ir attempts to prove England’s cultural superiority over France by pointing to poets and scholars such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Lily and Linacre.

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which are in turn reflected in literary practice. The greatness of such works as Shakespeare’s King Lear or Milton’s Paradise Lost rests mainly on the fact that they represent, as it were, encyclopedias of the genus mixtum. While Shakespeare’s dramas made full use of the potentials of Polonius’ paradigm, Milton’s epic - written at the end of the Renaissance period - revived an even broader spectrum of generic possibilities. 90 It is possible that Milton’s complex knowledge of genres was a burden, because it impeded poetic imitation. The defining feature of such an imitation is syncretism. During the Renaissance such syncretism resulted in some excellent works as well as some poetic failures. The latter are marked by a lack of structural coherence; they crumble into disiecta membra. The former, however, represent impressive syntheses of generic intertextuality. Their principle of order is concordia discors, the harmonious variety which constitutes aesthetic beauty.

90

Cf. Barbara K. Lewalski, “The Genres of Paradise Lost: Literary Genre as a Means of Accommodation,” Milton Studies 17 (1982), 75-103 and “The Genres of Paradise Lost,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Ed. Dennis Danielson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, rpt. 1999, pp. 79-95.

Elocutio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Style Towards the end of his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney bursts out in the ironical complaint: But what? methinks I deserve to be pounded for straying from Poetry to Oratory: but both have such an affinity in this wordish consideration, that I think this digression will make my meaning receive the fuller understanding - which is not to take upon me to teach poets how they should do, but only, finding myself sick among the rest, to show some one or two spots of the common infection grown among the most part of writers; that, acknowledging ourselves somewhat awry, we may bend to the right use both of matter and manner: whereto our language giveth us great occasion, being indeed capable of any excellent exercising of it. 1

The digression for which the author virtually apologizes here is devoted to stylistic criticism. The theory of style forms the link between rhetoric and poetics. In the tradition of the rhetorical model, it constitutes the third phase in the production of a text; it is preceded by two other phases, the inventio, or the search for arguments, and the dispositio, the structuring of these arguments. The rhetorical theory of style regularly comprises the stylistic principles (virtutes elocutionis), levels (genera dicendi), and, above all, figures (figurae). By incorporating stylistic elements into his poetics, Sidney is availing himself of an already existing convention. It originates in the Poetics of Aristotle, chapters 19 to 22, which deal with questions of grammar, metaphor, and rare words. Ever since Aristotle’s treatise, which expressly refers the reader to the same author’s Rhetoric for a full treatment of these topics, doctrines of poetry have repeatedly been influenced by the neighbouring discipline of rhetoric. Some of them display so extensive an influence that they might justifiably be referred to as rhetorical poetics. Sidney’s Apology, then, far from being an isolated case in the history of rhetoric reception, is but one of many instances within a development, culminating in the Renaissance. 1

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 139-40.

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That Sidney and other theorists of poetry regard stylistics as part of their discipline gives rise to the question of what the status of language and style was in the Renaissance. The answer has long been known: in the light of present knowledge, it seems scarcely an exaggeration to say that the Renaissance was as much a renaissance of style as of anything else. 2 The beginnings of this revival can be traced back to Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero; its end is in sight when in 1667 Thomas Sprat calls for an exact equivalence of words and things: quot res tot verba. 3 Between these historical milestones the idea of style enjoyed a great prestige - in spite of the controversies it was subjected to (e. g., Ciceronianism vs. Senecanism, Atticism vs. Asianism, copious style vs. plain style, Renaissance vs. Baroque) - because language was thought of as a social indicator both of man’s individual character and his way of communicating with his fellow beings. Wherever the question of style was debated, the larger issues of anthropology, sociology, and politics were sure to be involved. Thus a history of Renaissance stylistics possesses a seismographic quality in that it constantly points to the general history of man’s attitudes towards himself and others. Irrespective of the kind of treatise in which the theory of style is articulated in the Renaissance, whether it be a Ciceronian, an epistolary, a Ramistic or a stylistic rhetoric, 4 its exponents would appear to have the following aims in common: 1. Some kind of systematic representation, generally based on linguistic levels and various forms of deviation from the linguistic norm. 2

3

4

Cf. Karl Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. Bonn: Bouvier, 1963, rpt. 1975; Charles S. Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1959; Donald L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922, rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963; Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. Ed. J.M. Patrick & R.O. Evans, with J. M. Wallace and R.J. Schoeck. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966; Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968; Hans-Joachim Lange, Aemulatio Veterum sive de optimo genere dicendi: Die Entstehung des Barockstils im XVI. Jahrhundert durch eine Geschmacksverschiebung in Richtung der Stile des manieristischen Typs. Bern / Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1974; G. A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500-1700: The Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Thomas Sprat, “The History of the Royal Society” (1667), in: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J. E. Spingarn, vol. II, p. 118: “…to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words.” - On the subject in its broader context cf. Richard Nate, Wissenschaft und Literatur im England der frühen Neuzeit. München: Fink, 2001. For a typology of Renaissance rhetoric, see Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956, rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961.

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2. A functional explanation of the stylistic devices in terms of the emotions they are likely to engender. 3. An evaluation of the stylistic devices characterizing them as either acceptable or unacceptable in specific communicative situations. All three of these aspects - systematic, functional, and evaluative - form what can be considered the stylistic norm. It changes according to the verbal and cultural contexts of which it is a part. There are two basic types of Renaissance poetics containing two different types of stylistic theory, humanistic and courtly. Each arose from different motives and served a different social purpose. Thus they also differed in their organization. Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem (1561) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) will serve, in the main, as representative specimens of each type.

I. Style in Humanistic Poetics: Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561) Scaliger’s Poetics, a Neo-Latin treatise (Figure 25), is the work of a humanistic scholar who in his great erudition aspired to the ideal of the “uomo universale.” 5 The practising physician of later years had not only studied botany and medicine but had also distinguished himself with his extensive knowledge of philosophy, theology, art and, of course, philology. His classical erudition is exceptional even for a humanist, as is illustrated not only by the large-scale comparison of Virgil with Homer and other authors in the fifth book, but above all by the sixth book of the treatise, in which Scaliger traces the history of literature in the Latin language back to its origins. This example shows furthermore that he was not particularly interested in contemporary vernacular literature. He was concerned rather to restore Latin poetry to the heights of classical achievement, an ambition that in view of the development of Neo-Latin since Petrarch he was confident of being able to fulfill. With this purpose in mind, Scaliger aimed at making his poetics as complete a compendium as possible of all available contemporary knowledge of litera5

Scaliger’s vita is analysed by Vernon Hall, Jr., “Life of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558),” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 40/2 (1950), 87-170; Myriam Billanovich, “Benedetto Bordoni e Giulio Cesare Scaligero,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 11 (1968), 187256. On the genesis of his poetics consult the article by L. Corvaglia, “La ‘Poetica’ di Giulio Cesare Scaligero nella sua genesi e nel suo sviluppo,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 38 (1959), 214-39.

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Figure 25: Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558): Title-page of Poetices libri septem (1561).

ture. Not only was it to afford information about the intricacies of technical rules but also to expound their philosophical foundations. Not only did it aim to open up historical perspectives but also to set up critical standards for the evaluation of literature. The result of this complex synthesis of literary theory, history and criticism is a bulky folio containing seven books on poet-

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ics published in Lyon three years after the author’s death. 6 Its readership consisted of an elite, not one of fixed social class such as the aristocracy, but one that shared the necessary standards of humanistic education. These necessary standards included a profound knowledge not only of classical literature but also of the most important sources for Scaliger’s poetics: the Poetics of Aristotle, the Epistola ad Pisones of Horace, and Marco Girolamo Vida’s treatise De arte poetica libri III (1527). 7 It is an indication of how important a role Scaliger accorded to language and style in the framework of his poetic theory that he devoted a great deal of the third (“Idea”) and fourth (“Parasceve”) books to discussing them. Even more telling is perhaps the fact that the first chapter of his treatise opens with a discourse on the themes of the necessity, origin, use, purpose and cultivation of the oration: “Orationis necessitas, ortus, vsus, finis, cultus” (1.1.). He makes it clear that for him human speech is no less than a source of culture. It is speech that makes possible such important cultural achievements as philosophy, rhetoric, historiography, and poetry. As Scaliger emphatically asserts, Est sane` portitor animi quasi quidam sermo noster, cuius communicationi ciuiles conuentus indicuntur, artes coluntur, sapientiæ necessitudines homini cum hominibus intercedunt. 8

By virtue of its esthetic quality, poetry occupies a special place among the artes mentioned. But Scaliger stresses that it would be wrong to look on 6

7

8

Editions: Facsimile reprint ed. by August Buck: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964, rpt. 1987. - Modern edition with Latin text and parallel German translation. Ed. L. Deitz & G. Vogt-Spira: Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994 ff. - Partial edition with translation and commentary by Ilse Reineke: Julius Caesar Scaligers Kritik der neulateinischen Dichter: Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar des 4. Kapitels von Buch VI seiner Poetik. München: Fink, 1988. Cf. Eduard Brinkschulte, Julius Caesar Scaligers kunsttheoretische Anschauungen und deren Hauptquellen. Bonn: Hanstein, 1914, pp. 43-98; Rose Mary Ferraro, Giudizi critici e criteri estetici nei “Poetices libri septem,” 1561, di Giulio Cesare Scaligero rispetto alla teoria letteraria del Rinascimento. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Scaliger’s deviations from Aristotle are discussed by Bernard Weinberg, “Scaliger versus Aristotle on Poetics,” Modern Philology 39 (1942), 337-60. His relations with baroque aesthetics are dealt with by M. Costanzo, Dallo Scaligero al Quadrio. Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce D’oro, 1961, pp. 9-66; his influence on French neo-classicism is taken account of by Rene´ Bray, La formation de la doctrine classique en France. Paris: Nizet, 1963. IVLII CAESARIS / SCALIGERI, VIRI / CLARISSIMI, / Poetices libri septem: /…/ APVD ANTONIVM VINCENTIVM./M.D.LXI., p. 1. - Translation: “Our speech is, as it were, the postman of the mind, through the services of whom civil gatherings are announced, the arts are cultivated, and the claims of wisdom intercede with men for man” (Frederick M. Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1905, p. 1).

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pleasure alone as its ultimate objective; its proper aim is rather the Horatian unity of instruction and delight: Hic enim finis est medius ad illum vltimum, qui est docendi cum delectatione. Nanque Poeta etiam docet, non solu`m delectat. 9

Moreover, it shares with the other arts the rhetorical element of the persuasio; 10 however, it is distinguished from these by its use of verse and its imitation of fictitious objects. According to Weinberg, Scaliger’s conception of poetry as language results in its entering into a twofold relationship: (a) with the objects signified by the words used, and (b) with the public for whom the meanings of the words are intended. 11 In the further argument the aspect of the public is discussed mainly in terms of the functions of ethical persuasion poetry exercises; according to this conception poetry has the task “vt scilicet humana vita compositior fiat” or “vt bonos [sc. affectus] amplectamur atque imitemur ad agendu˜: malos aspernemur ob abstinendum.” 12 Viewed in this light, poetry appears as part of a practical social ethics. Conversely, there is the aspect of representation that concerns the relationship of verba and res. To Scaliger’s mind words are not independent of things; they are the images of things (imagines rerum). At the beginning of the third book their relationship is described more precisely. Things are said here to have primacy over words: “Res autem ipsæ finis sunt orationis, quarum verba notæ sunt.” 13 The further discussion abides by this principle. It plays an important part in the definition of style and levels of style. The concept of style underlying the passage at the beginning of the fourth book (“Est aute˜ Character, dictio similis eius rei, cuius nota est, substa˜tia, qua˜titate, qualitate”) 14 is a “material” one (i. e., one that bears on the object of representation) or an “ontological” one. 9

10

11

12 13 14

Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 1. Translation: “The end is the giving of instruction in pleasurable form, for poetry teaches, and does not simply amuse, as some used to think (Padelford, Select Translations, p. 2). Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 2: “An vero` omnibus his [sc. artibus], Philosophicæ, Ciuili, Theatrali, vnus demum finis propositus sit? ita sane´ est. vnus enim ide´mque omnium finis, persuasio” (Translation: “Now is there not one end, and one only, in philosophical exposition, in oratory, and in the drama? Assuredly such is the case. All have one and the same end - persuasion” [Padelford, Select Translations, p. 3]). Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961, vol. II. p. 744. - On Scaliger’s conception of language in general cf. Kristian Jensen, Rhetorical Philosophy and Philosophical Grammar: Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Theory of Language. München: Fink, 1990. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, pp. 80, 348. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 174; cf. p. 183. For the notion of a “material” concept of style see Franz Quadlbauer, Die antike Theorie der genera dicendi im lateinischen Mittelalter. Wien: Böhlau, 1962.

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The rhetorical categories of style are treated by Scaliger at two different points of his treatise: in the third book beginning at chapter 29, the semantic figures or tropes, in the fourth book beginning at chapter 26, the remaining figures. Corresponding to this division there is more than one definition of the term figure. The third book presents an ontological as well as an epistemological characterization of the figure. Qvum re & verbo omnis constet oratio, & figura in vtroque reperiatur: ab vniuersali definitione iacienda fundamenta primu`m, vt eius essentiam agnoscamus. […]. Figura est notionum quæ in mente sunt, tolerabilis delineatio, alia ab vsu communi. Notiones voco reru˜ species externarum, quæ per sensus delatæ, in animo repræsentantur. 15

The fourth book, by contrast, stresses the decorative aspect of the rhetorical figure, its deviation from everyday language: Figura loquutionis, quam superiore libro Tropon agnoscebamus, est decora facies orationis a` vulgari diuersa. 16

This distinction is certainly not to be explained merely by reference to a certain disunity Scaliger’s argumentation occasionally exhibits. The different definitions derive from different conceptions of the inventory of stylistic categories. The tropes are accorded an unmistakable priority since these stylistic devices are most amenable to the author’s “ontological” conception of language. Scaliger sets up six classes according to the image of reality presented. The first (significatio or aequalis tractatio) reflects reality precisely, the second (hyperbole) signifies more, the third (eclipsis) less, the fourth (allegoria) something different, the fifth (ironia) the opposite; the sixth class comprises all tropes that do not fit into any of the categories mentioned. As each class is subdivided further, the result is an abundance of semantic categories of textual change. The classification of the remaining figures is performed in a similarly scholastic manner. It is not, however, the res-verba relationship that plays the main role, but the principle of grammatical deviation, although cases of overlap with the tropes do occur. Classification according to this principle yields figures of abbreviation (e. g., ellipsis), word repetition (e. g., anadiplosis), amplification (e. g., periphrasis), opposition (e. g., antithesis), position (e. g., hyperbaton), quantity (e. g., parison), and quality (e. g., homoeoptoton). The rather formalistic character of these stylistic categories is the more obvious as Scaliger follows up his remarks on the figures with his theory of metrics. At the beginning of the same book the traditional three-style doctrine is expounded in terms 15 16

Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 120. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 198.

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of affectus; these affectus, however, which are divided into general and particular, remain peculiarly abstract, so that it is scarcely appropriate to speak of the concrete elaboration of a dimension of stylistic effect. 17 What Scaliger considers relevant to his conception of style is evidenced particularly by the “quat[t]uor virtutes poetæ” outlined in the third book (chapter 25). These are prudentia (chapter 26), efficacia (chapter 27), varietas (chapter 28), and suavitas, which as the product of the other qualities does not receive special attention. These virtutes are obviously meant to supplant the four classical principles of style: puritas, perspicuitas, ornatus, and aptum. Scaliger departs from the assumption that all poetry intends to teach and delight and goes on to say: Quorum vtrunque consecuturi sunt ii, qui & res vero propiores, ac sibiipsis semper conuenientes exequuti fuerint, & operam dederint vt omnia varietate condiantur. Nihil enim infelicius, qua`m saturare auditorem ante`, qua`m expleatur. Quæ enim epulæ quibus fastidium pro voluptate pariatur? Tertia res ea est, quam ego Efficaciam, Græci quo designent nomine suo loco dictum est. Eam paucis in Poetis reperies. Est autem vis quædam tum rerum, tum verborum, quæ etiam nolentem propellit ad audiendum. Quarta est suauitas, quæ efficaciæ illius vim vegetam deducit ex asperitate, cui sæpenumero est affinis, ad certam temperationem. Hæc igitur esto summa sic: Poetæ prudentia, varietas, efficacia, suauitas. 18

Prudentia demands of the poet a rich and well-ordered invention, efficacia vivid and effective depiction, varietas a varied arrangement of ideas and words, suavitas a pleasant and winning tone. If we take efficacia as a representative example of all the virtutes, we recognize that here again the ontological perspective dominates: Efficaciam Græci eœne¬rgeian vocant. Ea est vis orationis repræsentantis rem excellenti modo. Intelligo nu˜c no˜ verborum virtutem, sed Idæarum, quæ rerum species sunt. Nam tametsi in verbis esse videtur: tamen in rebus ipsis est primo`. 19 17 18

19

Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, pp. 184-193. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 113. Translation: “Now to realize these ends one’s work must conform to certain principles. In the first place his poem must be deeply conceived, and be unvaryingly self-consistent. Then he must take pains to temper all with variety (varietas), for there is no worse mistake than to glut your hearer before you are done with him. What then are the dishes which would create distaste rather than pleasure? The third poetic quality is found in but few writers, and is what I would term vividness (efficacia); there is also a Greek name for it which will be given in the proper place. By vividness I mean a certain potency and force in thought and language which compels one to be a willing listener. The fourth is winsomeness (suavitas), which tempers the ardency of this last quality, of itself inclined to be harsh. Insight and foresight (prudentia), variety, vividness, and winsomeness, these, then, are the supreme poetic qualities” (Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics. New York: Holt, 1905, p. 53). Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 116.

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Later on this definition is extended to include the intellect as well: “Efficacia est, aut in facto, aut in dicto, aut in animo.” 20 The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that stylistics has no claim to independence in Scaliger’s work; it is embedded in a general ontology of the work of art. It is obviously inadmissible here to reduce poetry to poetic language. The Poetices libri septem presents a poetics of representation, not a rhetorical poetics, even though the adoption of various rhetorical concepts suggests the latter. Weinberg, however, exaggerates the ontological standpoint when he concludes, “There can be thus no independent science of poetics; poetry can be considered only in relationship to the scheme of things entire.” 21 Scaliger’s treatise does not disavow aesthetics. Scaliger’s theory of style and his poetics as a whole are not topical but retrospective in character. The authorities cited in his treatise are from classical antiquity, just as are the vast majority of the examples used to illustrate stylistic concepts and rules. Contemporary literary production plays a role only insofar as it attempts - in Latin - to emulate the classics. Classical theorists (Aristotle, Horace) and poets (Virgil) provide the foundations of a poetics claiming normative validity. This claim is evidenced not only by the recommendation of certain stylistic concepts but also by the prohibition of such vitiosae formae as the genus siccum and the genus pingue (IV.24). Socially, however, despite its precision in laying down certain norms and standards, Scaliger’s poetics is peculiarly abstract in character. Apart from various references to contemporary science and the traditional Ständeklausel (i. e., the adaptation of stylistic level to social rank), the author refrains from comment on the social circumstances and the forms of political power that shape his own life and those of his contemporaries. This fact might be seen as typifying the seclusion of scholarly life; in its broader implications it reflects the sociopolitical abstinence espoused by those humanists who preferred knowledge to concrete action. 22

II. Style in Courtly Poetics: George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589) The Arte of English Poesie (Figure 26) appeared anonymously in 1589, almost thirty years after the first appearance of Scaliger’s poetics. Its place of appear20 21 22

Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 116. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. II, p. 750. This remark seems to be contradicted by Scaliger’s report on action: “Aristoteles ita censuit: Quum poema comparatu˜ sit ad eam ciuium institutionem, quæ nos ducit ad beatitudine˜:

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Figure 26: George Puttenham: Title-page of The Arte of English Poesie (1589).

ance is not the French country town Lyon, but London, the capital of Queen Elizabeth, who had just delivered King Philip’s armada a devastating blow. The author of this poetics, who has been identified by literary scholarship as George Puttenham, 23 tells us that he has spent time at the courts of France,

23

beatitudo vero` nihil aliud qua`m perfecta sit actio: neutiquam ad mores co˜sequendos deducet poema, sed ad facta ipsa. Recte` sane´. neque vero` aliter sentimus nos” (Poetices libri septem, p. 348). This actio is not, however, specified in concrete socio-political terms. Cf. G.D. Willcock’s and A. Walker’s introduction to their edition of The Arte of English Poesie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, rpt. 1970, pp. xi-xliv. Only very few articles

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Spain, Italy, and the Empire. Thus it is no wonder that he does not address himself primarily to scholars and schoolmasters but to the lords and ladies of the court, “idle Courtiers” who wish to perfect the command of their mother-tongue and perhaps now and again to write a poem for their “priuate recreation.” 24 As well as this, Puttenham’s treatise pursues a further aim: to instruct an uneducated man how to become a court poet, in the somewhat drastic words of the author: pulling him first from the carte to the schoole, and from thence to the Court, and preferred him to your Maiesties seruice, in that place of great honour and magnificence to geue enterteinment to Princes, Ladies of honour, Gentlewomen and Gentlemen. 25

At the same time he makes it clear that it is not sufficient for the poet who has become a courtier to command the technical equipment of the versesmith but that he must also satisfy the requirements of courtly etiquette. In the context of the court, poetry means the artistically sublimated expression of a way of life. Conversely, the representative of this social class must allow the esthetic standards of this construct to be applied to himself. The highest authority supervising the observance of this “socio-esthetic” system of standards is the monarch herself. This is evidenced by the fact that the treatise - according to the printer Richard Field - was written “to our Soueraigne Lady the Queene, and for her recreation and seruice.” 26 Furthermore, the opposite side of the title page (frontispiece) is embellished by a copperplate portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (Figure 24); and the closing pages of the book contain a declaration of homage combined with the entreaty to “conceiue of myne abilitie to any better or greater seruice” - an indication that the au-

24 25

26

and book chapters have been dedicated to other topics of the Arte, e. g., by La Rue van Hook, “Greek Terminology in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 45 (1916), 111-28; J.W.H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence. London: Methuen, 1947, rpt. 1968, pp. 156-78; Philip Traci, “The Literary Qualities of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie,” Renaissance Papers (1957), 87-93; D.M. Knauf, “George Puttenham’s Theory of Natural and Artificial Discourse,” Speech Monographs 34 (1967), 35-42; Daniel Javitch, “Poetry and Court Conduct: Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie in the Light of Castiglione’s Cortegiano,” Modern Language Notes 87 (1972), 865-82. The best study hitherto written on Puttenham’s treatise is D. Rölli Alkempers doctoral dissertation Höfische Poetik in der englischen Renaissance: George Puttenhams The Arte of English Poesie (1589). München: Fink, 1996. Cf. also Daniel Javitch’s monograph Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 158. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 298-99. Perhaps in this context the fact is not insignificant that a copy of the Arte was owned by Ben Jonson (Figure 26). Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 2.

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thor’s dedication was designed to further quite concrete political or social ambitions. 27 The instruction of the courtly poet in the Arte is performed in three steps, to each of which the author dedicates one book: I. “Of Poets and Poesie,” II. “Of Proportion,” and III. “Of Ornament.” Besides a general discussion about poet and poetry, the first book contains a theory of literary genres, while the remaining two are devoted to prosody and the doctrine of style, respectively. Thus the structure corresponds broadly to the rhetorical scheme of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio, with the reservation that inventio and dispositio are subjected to a poetological reinterpretation. 28 In books I and II elements of the courtly code are incorporated into the poetological argument, for instance, the panegyric attitude that informs the epideictic genre classification, or the conservative concept of order underlying the derivation of the prosodic dispositio from the harmony of the spheres. 29 The third book displays particularly clearly the interpretative dependence of esthetic categories from the norms of courtly conduct. In the broad view, this influence is unmistakably visible in the constant use of courtly adagia or analoga to explain or justify esthetic rules. The language of court, or rather of the monarch, provides the ideal for the language of poetry. To cite some concrete examples, this dependence can be clearly observed in the following concepts: (1) in the norm of decorum, (2) in the ornamental concept of style, (3) in the sprezzatura concept, (4) in the esthetic sensualism of language. Each of these concepts is a constituent of style, which Puttenham, in accordance with an old topos, calls “the image of man;” he might have called it more aptly “the image of the courtier.” 30 27

28

29

30

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 308. As D. Javitch points out in “Poetry and Preferment at Elizabeth’s Court,” George Gascoigne similarly published his early poetry, according to his own words, “To the ende that thereby the vertuous might bee incouraged to employ my penne in some exercise which might tende both to my preferment, and to the profite of my Countrey” (in: Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Ed. A. Buck et al., 3 vols., Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981, vol. II, pp. 163-69). In this respect Puttenham follows a well-established practice of humanistic poetics, which is, for instance, illustrated by M.G. Vida’s De Arte Poetica, “with Book I devoted to the training and indoctrination of the poet and to the defence of poetry, Book II to invention and disposition, Book III to elocution” (Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. II, p. 715). On these topics see Catherine Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics: A Study in the Development of English Metres and Their Relation to Poetic Effect. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951, rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969, pp. 42-55, 89-96 as well as the chapters on Dispositio Poetica and Musica Rhetorica in this book. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 148. For the history of the topos, see Wolfgang G. Müller, “Der Topos ‘Le style est l’homme meˆme,’” Neophilologus 61 (1977), 481-94 and

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Decorum has always comprised both a socio-ethical and a socio-esthetical component. 31 This is clearly reflected in the fact that Puttenham’s chapter on stylistic decorum (23) is immediately followed by another on social decorum: “Of decencie in behauiour which also belongs to the consideration of the Poet or maker” (24). The author is quite well aware that it is unusual thus to incorporate a short courtesy book into a poetics. For in his introductory remarks he explicitly points this out and furthermore draws the reader’s attention to another book he has written under the title De decoro, which contains additional material; about this book nothing more is known. 32 In the chapter in question he restricts himself to an abundance of examples supposed to illustrate the normative restraints to which all social behaviour (e. g., the wearing of clothes) is subject. Anyone who infringes them is not only violating a prevailing social convention but is ultimately calling the entire social and political system into question. The ruling monarch is the guarantor of its stability; the hierarchy of norms borne by him reflects feudal habits of thought. Style, by transference, is adapted to the social norms in accordance with the various components of the communication model (in terms of rhetoric, the following “circumstances”: speaker, hearer, object of reference, time, place, and so forth). Puttenham stresses that an emperor, for example, is not referred to in the same way as a “meane souldier or captaine.” 33 Each of the three estates is accorded a style appropriate to it, be it in depiction, address, or self-expression; “the nature of the subiect” has ordained it thus. 34 “Nature” in this case has the character of a topos used to sanction the existing hierarchy of values and society. To meet the required stylistic standard is, according to Puttenham, to display not only the correct kind of social morality but artistic distinction as well: “good grace.” An adequate stylizing of the poetic inventio results in esthetic gracefulness, as is expressed by such transla-

31

32 33 34

Topik des Stilbegriffs: Zur Geschichte des Stilverständnisses von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1981. A (necessarily incomplete) history of the critical term up to the English Renaissance is to be found in D.A. Richardson’s Decorum and Diction in the English Renaissance. PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1972, pp. 1-100. The social aspect of decorum is emphasized by L. Fischer, Gebundene Rede: Dichtung und Rhetorik in der literarischen Theorie des Barock in Deutschland. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968. Its formal structures are briefly discussed in chapter 9 (“The Criterion of Decorum”) of R. Tuve’s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947, rpt. 1961, pp. 192-247. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 277. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 273. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 151. On the gradual dissolution of the Ständeklausel and the ideological and social developments accompanying it, see Peter Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.

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tions of pre¬pon or decorum as seemelynesse (“for his good shape and vtter appearance”), comelynesse (“for the delight it bringeth comming towardes vs”), and pleasant approche (“euery way seeking to expresse this prepon of the Greekes and decorum of the Latines”). 35 At the bottom of this line of argument is the ideological concept: beauty is affirmation. Anything that fails to fulfill this postulate is ugly, unseemly, unpleasant. It is significant that when the reader is cautioned about an indecorum these warnings do not have the form of negative literary examples but are couched in political anecdotes in which a subject behaves in a linguistically inappropriate manner towards his sovereign. In every case the offender is punished by being banned from court and hence from social and political activity. An undesirable stylistic vitium can be avoided by learning the rules governing each stylistic level. Puttenham impresses them on the reader’s mind with vivid examples. He advises strongly against too great a flexibility in applying them and even more against departing from them altogether, as he foresees undesirable consequences. Thus the decorum concept obstructs social as well as esthetic development, albeit the latter to a lesser extent. It does not permit a substantial change of values, much less a revolution. How Puttenham would like his stylistic concept to be understood is explained concisely in the title of the third book (“Of Ornament”) and in detail in a comparison elsewhere: And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise neuer so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and ciuilitie haue ordained to couer their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselues more amiable in euery mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes & costly embroderies, then when they go in cloth or in any other plaine and simple apparell. Euen so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and coulours, such as may conuey them somwhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must needes yeld it much more bewtie and commendation. 36

This comparison takes up the traditional personification of rhetoric as a female figure, commonly known ever since Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. 37 As Puttenham expresses it, the decorum of courtly dress 35 36 37

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 262. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 137-38. For the iconographical history of Rhetorica, see section E in this book.

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etiquette demanded in the courtesy books and elsewhere is used to provide the basic justification for a theory of style that might be referred to as artificial, decorative, and hedonistic. The courtly style of poetry is artificial because its deviant linguistic structures alienate everyday language, but not to the excess of violating decorum. 38 This style can be said to be decorative because it embellishes the depicted object by means of the figures. Despite the metaphorical terms of description chosen by the author (colours, flowers, precious stones, gold, fine fabrics), it would be wrong to dismiss this decorative rhetoric as a mere esthetic accessory, for it is an essential constituent of courtly literature just as much as magnificent clothing is an integral part of the courtier’s existence. The informing principle is the Neo-Platonic idea that outer appearance is an image of inner being and that physical beauty reflects the beauty of the soul. In accordance with the same principle, high social rank calls for adequate representation and noble poetry for an abundance of figurative adornment. This symmetry (“proportion”) creates a harmony that gives esthetic pleasure. The courtly poet is called upon to afford his listeners “mirth” and “sollace” by his treatment of “pleasant & louely causes.” 39 Elsewhere Puttenham writes: “Poesie is a pleasant maner of vtteraunce varying from the ordinarie of purpose to refresh the mynde by the eares delight.” 40 Hence “vnworthy” objects and themes are excluded from this poetry. (In selecting illustrations of his theory, Puttenham shows a preference for the poetry of the early “courtly makers.”) Just as style reflects the matter depicted, poetry must reflect the court. Should a discrepancy arise, the claim to beauty is forfeited. On these premises a “l’art pour l’art” conception that presupposes an autonomy of style is neither permissible nor possible. The sprezzatura concept, which Castiglione - in accordance with classical authorities on the celare artem (e. g., Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero, Quintilian) 38

39 40

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 159: “Figuratiue speech is a noueltie of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinarie habite and manner of our dayly talke and writing and figure it selfe is a certaine liuely or good grace set vpon wordes, speaches and sentences to some purpose […].” Puttenham’s concept of style evidently belongs to the tradition of the genus mediocre: see G. L. Hendrickson, “The Origin and Meaning of the Ancient Characters of Style,” American Journal of Philology 26 (1905), 24990; Franz Quadlbauer, “Die genera dicendi bis Plinius d.J.,” Wiener Studien 71 (1958), 55111; and Die antike Theorie der genera dicendi im lateinischen Mittelalter (cf. n. 12); Hugo Friedrich, Epochen der italienischen Lyrik. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1964, pp. 49-83, 88 ff., 458 ff.; I. Sowton, “Hidden Persuaders as a Means of Literary Grace: Sixteenth-Century Poetics and Rhetoric in England,” University of Toronto Quarterly 32 (1962), 55-69; M. E. Hazard, “An Essay to Amplify ‘Ornament’: Some Renaissance Theory and Practice,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 16 (1976), 15-32. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 154-55. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 23.

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- applied to the courtly code of conduct, means in brief the alleged artlessness of art or the pretended effortlessness with which the artificiality of the courtly code is practised in social life. 41 The courtier fashions his existence into a work of art, but he does so in such a way that it has the appearance of supreme naturalness, an altera natura. The illusion that thus arises presupposes the ability to disguise oneself. The courtier is an actor playing roles; he takes pleasure in fictionalizing his existence, that is to say, in practising detached self-control. The consequence of this process is an attitude of dissimulating irony. Puttenham now transfers these constituents of the courtly code to poetry. Both share the aim of pleasing illusion: “beau semblant, the chiefe professio˜ aswell of Courting as of poesie.” 42 Dissimulation, the ability to conceal art, is called for in both cases. According to Puttenham poetic dissimulation is linguistically realized in tropes. The author selects allegory as the basic trope and renames it sub nomine agentis as “Courtier or figure of faire semblant.” 43 This principle has two corollaries: (1) allegory and a number of other tropes are a prerequisite of esthetic illusion, and (2) they imitate courtly role playing. The latter remark can be corroborated by two further observations. First, Puttenham describes various rhetorical figures by reference to the category of dissimulation (e. g., enigma, ironia, periphrasis); second - and this is exceptional in Elizabethan stylistic rhetoric - many figures in the Arte are assigned an English translation identifying them - in analogy to the equation of allegory and courtier - with a social role: e. g., meiosis = “the Disabler,” tapinosis = “the Abbaser,” antitheton = “the Quarreller,” aporia = “the Doubtfull,” sententia = “the Sage sayer,” hyperbole = “the Ouerreacher,” and so on. 44 In these examples stylistic categories indicate social roles, which implies the converse truth, that social roles are manifested in certain stylistic categories. However, Puttenham warns against the unthinking equation of 41

42 43

44

On the classical sources of the celare artem concept, see Harry Caplan’s note in his edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954, pp. 250-51 (4.7.10). Very illuminating is J.A. Mazzeo’s chapter “Castiglione’s Courtier: The Self as a Work of Art” in his book Renaissance and Revolution. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965, pp. 131-60. On Sidney consult Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935; Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 21965, pp. 298-315 (“Sprezzatura”). Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 158. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 299; cf. p. 186 ff. On the “socio-esthetic” context of this trope, see H.F. Plett, “Konzepte des Allegorischen in der englischen Renaissance,” in: Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie. Ed. W. Haug. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979, pp. 310-35, esp. pp. 324 ff.; on the rhetorical semiotics at court cf. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 185(219), 185(259), 191, 210, 226, 236.

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artistic and social norms. While role playing in the social sphere can lead to moral depravity by turning the courtier into a hypocrite - the stereotype of satirical criticism of court 45 - it is restricted in the esthetic sector to the type of artistic practice: “we doe allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte.” 46 The decorative esthetics of courtly conduct inclines to sensuous exhibition. It is with good reason that Puttenham chooses to elucidate his stylistic ideal by using the image of the magnificently attired ladies of the court. This was indeed in accordance with the courtly code. To choose an example from Castiglione, speaking of the “jestes or merrie conceites” of gallant conversation he refers to some men that with so good an utterance and grace and so pleasantly declare and expresse a matter that happened unto them or that they have seene and heard, that with their gesture and wordes they set it before a mans eyes, and (in manner) make him feele it with hand, and this peradventure for want of an other terme we may call Festivitie or els Civilitie. 47

The principle underlying this thought is the rhetorical category of enargeia (Lat. evidentia), occasionally identified with energeia, that is, vividness, efficacy. The principle of sprezzatura, however, remains a necessary restraint on its practical realization. An excess of art (mala affectatio) is just as harmful as a lack of it (barbarolexis). 48 To characterize affectation, Sidney reverses Puttenham’s image: the courtly Lady Rhetoric turns into a painted whore: “that honey-flowing matron eloquence apparelled, or rather disguised, in a courtesan-like painted affectation.” 49 This does not, however, prevent him from demanding of love poetry energia, that is, sensuous and emotional diction. Both rhetorical categories of effect, enargeia and energeia, occur in Puttenham’s work, where they assume the criterial function in the setting up of classes of 45

46

47

48 49

Cf. Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der europäischen Moralistik. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1973; and M.C. Miller, Courtliness in the English Renaissance, PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1978. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 302. The moral ambiguity of dissimulatio is again made clear by Puttenham’s rendering of allegoria as the “Figure of false semblant” (p. 186). Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, London: Dent, 1928, rpt. 1959, p. 134. - On the topic of festivity cf. Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978, Richard Alewyn, Das Grosse Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste. München: Beck, 21989 (11959), Theatrum Mundi: Die Welt als Bühne. Ed. U. Küster & S. Grundler. Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva, 2003 (catalogue of the 2003 Munich exhibition in the Haus der Kunst). Cf. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 249-61; cf. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 116. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 138.

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figures. This process is unique in that it departs from rhetorical tradition by classifying according to receptive rather than formal criteria. Figures of style are divided up according to whether they appeal to the ear, the intellect, or both. Correspondingly, the following classes are distinguished: 1. auricular figures = enargetic figures (“seruing to giue glosse onely to a language”), 2. sensable figures = energetic figures (“to geue it [sc. a language] efficacie by sence”), 3. sententious figures (“for bewtifying them [sc. full sentences] with a currant & pleasant numerositie, but also giuing them efficacie, and enlarging the whole matter besides with copious amplifications” “serue[s] as well th’eare as the conceit”). 50 Expressions such as “pleasant and agreable to the eare” or “pleasant sweetenesse” 51 characterizing the “auricular figures” indicate that the language of poetry is regarded as a source of esthetic sensualism. The same phonesthetic quality is manifest in the description of prosody in the second book. In the detailed discussion of carmina figurata 52 and emblems, it is joined by the graphesthetic component that appeals to the eye. The most courtly and at the same time most sensuous of Renaissance art forms, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the masque, is omitted from Puttenham’s treatise. In the masque, stagecraft, music, and language unite in a single appeal to eye, ear, and intellect. The controversy between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones over the superiority of poetry or stagecraft is a striking illustration of how seriously the different modes of perception in this synaesthesia were taken. 53

50 51

52

53

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 143, 160. Ibid., p. 160; cf. pp. 162, 163. These expressions are, moreover, indicative of the oral (conversational) nature of courtly culture. A detailed study of this aspect of the English Renaissance has yet to be written. W.J. Ong in his contribution “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style” to his Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 23-47 only touches upon the humanistic strain, whereas D.A. Berger devotes himself to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ development: Die Konversationskunst in England 1660-1740. München: Fink, 1978. Cf. J. Adler / U. Ernst, Text als Figur: Visuelle Poesie von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Weinheim: VCH, 1987. The semantics of the term “synaesthesia” is discussed by Stephen Ullmann, The Principles of Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell & Mott, 1957. - On the masque problem cf. D.J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), 152-78; Stephen Orgel, “To Make Boards to Speak: Inigo Jones’s Stage and the Jonsonian Masque,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 1 (1968), 121-52.

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Taking critical stock of the foregoing discussion, we arrive at the following results. The Arte of English Poesie was written at a time when a courtly, as distinct from a humanistic, poetics was being called for. This demand arose from the court’s need for sublimated self-articulation and the aesthetic affirmation of its own claim to power. The adoption of Italian theories of courtly conduct (Della Casa, Castiglione, Guazzo) had provided a general response to this need. What now required special attention was the application of this general response to poetry. The conversation theory of the courtesy books and their conception of “wit” served as models for literature, but more lasting in their effect were the concepts discussed above: decorum, the ornamental, celare artem, and the sensual. These provide the point of departure for the aestheticization of the courtly ethos; but at the same time they have the function of committing art in turn to a social class with an aesthetic consciousness of self. This interdependence of the two codes indicates a remarkably self-contained ideology, but it also betrays a want of realism that precludes their realization. With regard to this initial situation, the difference between courtier and poet was such that it seemed infinitely easier for the latter, living as he did in the realm of fantasy, to endow the “beau semblant” with existence, or in the words of Shakespeare, to give “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name” (MND V. i. 16-17).

III. Humanistic and Courtly Concepts of elocutio poetica: A Synopsis In Renaissance poetics the structure and function of style vary with the kind of treatise of which they form a part. Two basic types can be distinguished, a humanistic one and a courtly one. The first type, which is illustrated by Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem, represents a scholarly approach to the subject. Its main features are the use of Latin, a retrospective interest in classical literature, a learned display of the ars, and a primarily ontological interpretation of style that manifests itself in the heavy emphasis laid on the tropes. The courtly idea of style can be exemplified by the third book of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie. It is different from the humanistic one in that both its language and its literary examples are vernacular, its intention not a demonstration of art but rather its concealment and its conception of the figures more pragmatic than semantic. Whereas Scaliger’s affective aim is to teach and delight in a modified Horatian way, Puttenham primarily seeks to please. A synopsis of the basic differences between the two approaches may lead to the dichotomies shown in Table 4. This classification, which certainly admits

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Stylistic Principles

Humanistic: Scaliger

Courtly: Puttenham

Type of Poet

scholar

courtier

Aim

teach-delight (utile/dulce)

delight (recreation) (dulce)

Attitude towards art

demonstrare artem (scholastic)

celare artem (sprezzatura)

Classification of figures

1. according to semantic categories: tropes (a) aequalis tractatio (b) hyperbole (c) eclipsis (d) allegoria (e) ironia (f) remaining tropes

according to sensorial/mental perception (a) auricular (= enargetic figures) (ear) (b) sensable (= energetic) figures (conceit) (c) sententious (= enargetic/energetic) figures (ear + conceit)

2. according to formal operations: figures (4.26) (a) abbreviation (b) word repetition etc. Description of figures

primarily semantic (ontological)

primarily pragmatic: (a) dissimulation (b) social roles

Illustrative texts

mainly classical (Latin, Greek) - retrospectivity -

mainly contemporary (English) - topicality -

Table 4: Synopsis of Renaissance Theories of elocutio poetica

of still further subcategorizations, presupposes two sets of social rules. Of these only fragmentary details could be specified here. Suffice it to say that the humanistic style concept is primarily addressed to the learned respublica literaria and that it implies a pedagogical ethos that ascribes to the language of poetry a civilizing power of immense effect. Such is the ideology of what historical scholarship has come to term “civic humanism.” 54 Still, the aims 54

Cf. Hans Baron’s classical work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Rev. ed., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. The role eloquence played for humanism is concisely

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of the courtly poet are of a much more modest nature. His principal objective is not social reform but to “retaine the credit of his place, and profession of a very Courtier, which is in plaine terms, cunningly to be able to dissemble.” 55 In the hands of a poet who has turned a “cunning Princepleaser,” 56 literary style becomes the instrument of epideictic affirmation. 57 During the Renaissance persons with both scholarly and courtly ambitions had to be acquainted with the humanistic as well as the courtly code as is, for instance, shown by the life and works of Ben Jonson. Scaliger’s and Puttenham’s poetics do not remain isolated phenomena in the literary landscape of the sixteenth century, for each has its antecedents and successors. Scaliger’s treatise looks back on Vida’s poetics as its immediate predecessor and in its turn exerts great influence on the rise of French, English, and German classicism. Conversely, Puttenham’s poetics is rivaled by the literary theory of his famous contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney’s Apology shares the Arte’s anti-scholastic attitude towards style, which is clearly marked by its opposition of “smally learned courtiers” and “professors of learning” (i. e., humanists) in the following passage: Undoubtedly (at least to my opinion undoubtedly) I have found in divers smally learned courtiers a more sound style than in some professors of learning; of which I can guess no other cause, but that the courtier, following that which by practice he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, though not by art: where the other, using art to show art, and not to hide art (as in these cases he should do), flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art. 58

55 56

57

58

dealt with by Hannah H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence”, Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 497-514. For the English development see, among others, Fritz Caspari’s Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, rpt. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968. This study needs, however, to be complemented and partly corrected by more recent research (e. g., L. Borinski, K. Charlton, J. Simon). The humanists’ dilemma and eventual failure are excellently described by O.B. Hardison, “The Orator and the Poet: The Dilemma of Humanist Literature,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (197l), 33-44. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 299. The term was chosen as part of a book-title by Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1980. On the contrast between humanism and courtliness, see G.K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, esp. chap. 1 (pp. 1-35, 350-54). The panegyric attitude is discussed by M.F. Muth, Elizabethan Praise of the Queen: Dramatic Interaction in Royal Panegyric. PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1977. Cf. also Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975; and Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 139.

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This antithesis, however, proves artificial in that men like Sidney and Puttenham had acquired enough scholarship to be able to compete with the best humanists of their day. Thus the contrast between “humanistic” and “courtly” stylistics is not primarily one of ars but of its adaptation to heterogeneous social circumstances. It only reaffirms Puttenham’s dictum of 1589 that style is the “image of man” and what Buffon declared more than 150 years later in his famous aphorism: “le style est l’homme meˆme.”

Memoria Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Poetic Architecture The history of architecture, of the visual arts, and of literature is full of imaginary edifices. It starts with the Tower of Babel, the Labyrinth of Daedalus, and the Palace of Alcinous and extends to Piranesi’s Carceri, the factory moloch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the Babylonian Library in Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones. Less spectacular but no less significant are the mnemonic architectures which have been erected by orators and rhetorically inspired artists for some 2,500 years. The first attempt at such an edifice can be traced back to a mnemonic reconstruction which took place in 515 B.C. After the collapse of a house, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is said to have identified the corpses of the totally mutilated victims by being able to recollect the seating arrangement exactly. Cicero in his De oratore reports this story and infers from it that persons desiring to train this faculty [of memory] must select localities [loci] and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities [ordo locorum] will preserve the order of the facts, and the images [effigies] of the facts will denote the facts themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it. 1 1

Cicero, De Oratore II.lxxxvi.354. English translation by E. W. Sutton & H. Rackham. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 355. - Latin text: “Itaque eis qui hanc partem ingeni exercerent locos esse capiendos et ea quae memoria tenere vellent effingenda animo atque in eis locis collocanda: sic fore ut ordinem rerum locorum ordo conservaret, res autem ipsas rerum effigies notaret, atque ut locis pro cera, simulacris pro litteris uteremur.” - For the history of memoria, see Ludwig Volkmann, “Ars Memorativa,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 39, n.s. 3 (1929), 111-200; Paolo Rossi, Clavis Universalis: Arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. Milano: R. Ricciardi, 1960; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; Helga Hadju, Das mnemotechnische Schrifttum des Mittelalters. Amsterdam: Bonset, 1967; Herwig Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1969; Harry Caplan, “Memoria: Treasure-House of Eloquence,” in: H. Caplan, Of Eloquence: Studies in Ancient and Mediaeval Rhetoric. Ed. A. King & H. North. Ithaca, N.Y. / London: Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 196-246; Richard Howard Abrams, Memory and Making in the Poetics of Renaissance England. PhD diss., Graduate School of the University of New York, 1971; Mary

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Thus Simonides attained the legendary reputation of being the founder of the ars memorativa, which has ever since been almost exclusively topographical, that is it consists of structured loci (places) and meaningful imagines (images). Both visual components were codified in a series of prescriptions which were amplified into comprehensive manuals by Renaissance authors. Their principal sources were the Rhetorica ad Herennium as well as the treatises by Cicero and Quintilian. In Renaissance England these doctrines became so popular that Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), recommended his readers “to study the art of memory, Cosmus Rosselius, Pet. Ravennas, Scenkelius detectus” 2 in order to rid themselves of the said “humour.” Between Simonides of Ceos and Robert Burton a great span of time had elapsed, and hence it is to be expected that several fundamental conditions of the ars memorativa as such had changed. They can be summed up as follows: 1. Classical memoria is chiefly of a private nature; that is, after proceeding through the stages of inventio, dispositio and elocutio, the individual orator has to memorize the finished text and then deliver it (actio). - Renaissance memoria is not only of a private but also of a collective nature; that is, it stores communal knowledge in mnemonic structures accessible to everyone. Such a collective knowledge is codified, for instance, in the doctrines of the Church and the educational syllabus of the Septem Artes Liberales. 2. Classical memoria is practised in a primarily oral culture with communicative interaction taking place between individuals and groups of individuals. - Renaissance memoria emerges in an age of growing concern for the written and, in the wake of Gutenberg’s discovery, for the printed word. As it has been put into effect since about 1500, memoria is an ars multiplicativa; in other words, it addresses a larger number of people, in the best of cases a mass public. 3. In the Classical Age memory architecture is a house or a patrician villa; in the Middle Ages it consists of churches, monasteries and castles; and in the Renaissance these types are supplemented by treasure-houses, temples,

2

Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Janet Coleman (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Jörg J. Berns / Wolfgang Neuber (eds.), Ars Memorativa: Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst, 1400-1750. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993; Douwe Draaisma, Die Metaphernmaschine: Eine Geschichte des Gedächtnisses. Darmstadt: Primus, 1999. - Cf. also Friedrich Ohly, “Bemerkungen eines Philologen zur Memoria,” in: Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter. Ed. K. Schmid & J. Wollasch. München: Fink, 1984, pp. 9-68. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. 3 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1961, vol. II, p. 95.

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Figure 27: Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525): Margarita Philosophica (1583), “Turris Sapientiae”.

and theatres. 3 The range of architectural manifestations may be illustrated by two buildings: the late medieval Turris Sapientiae with Grammar holding the key to its entrance in Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica 4 (Figure 27) and the elegant classicist Memory House (“das wohl eingerichtete Gedächtniss-Hauss”) 3

4

In rhetoric a building serves a variety of functions; cf. Leland M. Griffin, “The Edifice Metaphor in Rhetorical Theory,” Speech Monographs 27/5 (1960), 279-292. Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica […] ab Orontio Finae […] Auctarijs locupleta. Nunc verb. innumeris in locis restituta, etc. Basileae: per Sebastianum Henricpetri, 1583.

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Figure 28: Johann-Heinrich Döbelius: Collegium Mnemonicum (1707).

decorating the title-page of Johann-Heinrich Döbelius’ Collegium Mnemonicum (Figure 28). 5 Numerous illustrations, even of a non-architectural kind (zodiac, 5

Johann-Heinrich Döbelius, Collegium mnemonicum, Oder gantz neu eröffnete Geheimnisse der Gedächtniß-Kunst / Darinn/ Vermöge der in Kupfer gestochenen Gedächtniß-Stube […]. Hamburg: In Verlegung Samuel Heyli und Johann Gottfried Liebezeit / Buchhändlern in St. Johannis Kirche, 1707.

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human body), can be found in Renaissance treatises such as Cosmas Rossellius’ Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae 6 and Johannes Romberch’s Congestorium Artificiosae Memoriae. 7 Modern printing techniques - woodcutting, copperplate engraving - mark a threefold progress of Renaissance as opposed to classical memory architecture, consisting of (a) heightened visual objectivity, (b) increased diversity, and (c) greater propagation among the learned. 4. The affiliation of the memory places and images with the visual arts became a fact acknowledged, though sometimes grudgingly, by the theorists of the Renaissance. Thomas Wilson mentions the medieval biblia pauperum which he calls “laye mennes bokes,” and he adds: “The whiche surely hadde bene well done, if God had not forbidden it.” 8 The sixteenth century invented the emblem and propagated the Ignatian theory of meditation with its compositio loci, both of which were in the course of time absorbed by mnemonic theory and practice. Thus the Art of Memory developed into an interdisciplinary activity, which sometimes makes it difficult to allocate the proper hermeneutic function to the painted or printed icon. 5. With the advent of the Gutenberg Galaxy visual mnemonic icons could not only be replaced by verbal ones but the iconographic (and hence imaginary) character of memoria seemed now altogether superfluous. The following analogies formulated by Thomas Wilson had evidently become obsolete: i. ii. iii. iiii.

The places of Memory are resembled unto Waxe and Paper. Images are counted lyke vnto letters or a Seale. The placing of these Images, is like unto wordes written. The utteraunce and using of them, is like unto readynge. 9

The modern Art of Printing makes the classical Art of Memory look like an archaic residuum of a waning oral culture. In order to analyse more closely the ars memoriae and its relation to the ars poetica we shall deal with the following topics: the types of mnemonic theories, the concepts of mnemonic places and images, and the varieties of mnemonic architecture.

6

7

8

9

Cosmas Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae. Ed. Damianus Rossellius. Venetiis: apud Antonium Paduanium, 1579. Joannes Romberch, Congestorium Artificiose Memorie… Omnium de memoria preceptiones aggregatim complectens. Venetiis: per Melchiorem Sessam, 1533. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York & London: Garland, 1982, p. 430. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, p. 424.

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1. Types of Mnemonic Theories Treatises on memoria can be subdivided into two basic types: Type I: Memoria is a part of the Ciceronian system of the Five Great Arts which comprehend inventio - dispositio - elocutio - memoria - actio. Fundamental classical sources for this approach are the Rhetorica ad Herennium III.xvi.28-xxiv.40, Cicero’s De Oratore III.lxxxv350-lxxxviii.40, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria XI.ii.1-51 and the treatises of late classical excerpters. Among the Elizabethan treatises Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553) is of major importance. In the Renaissance many more similarly structured Neo-Latin and vernacular treatises can be added. Type II: Memoria is outlined in a monograph. In the above quotation from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) the author refers to three famous contemporary representatives: the Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae (1579) by Cosmas Rossellius (d. 1578), Phoenix (1608) by Petrus Ravennas / Tommai (c. 1448-1508), and Schenckelius detectus (1617) by Johannes Paepp. Of importance are also The Castel of Memorie (1562), an English translation of the NeoLatin work by the Italian Guilelmus Gratarolus (1516-1568), the Compendium Memoriae Localis (1585?) by Thomas Watson (c. 1557-1592), John Willis’ Mnemonica (1618) and its English translations The Art of Memory (1621 [of book III]) and Mnemonica (1661) as well as other treatises which can, however, be attributed to philosophy or magic rather than to rhetoric, like the mnemonic works by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). 10 Of the treatises named above many contain not only a description of rhetorical mnemonics but also extensive medical sections on the therapy of memory diseases. Compared to the classical sources, the Renaissance publications on rhetorical mnemonics are often more extensive and display a multitude of learned references in their notes and commentaries. This is especially true of such encyclopedic compendia as the Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris […] Historia (1617-1619) with its large section on the ars memoriae by Robert Fludd (1574-1637). Other publications, such as the Gazophylacium Artis Memoriae (1611) by Lambert Thomas Schenckel (1547-c. 1603), contain additional treatises in their appendix. 11 Taken together, the great number and the wide dissemination of such trea10

11

For detailed bibliographic references cf. H.F. Plett, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1995, B.202-B.216, section B.1.11. Lambert Schenckel, Gazophylacium Artis Memoriae […]. His accesserunt de eadem Arte Memoriae adhuc 3. Opuscula: quorum 1. Ioannis Austriaci, 2. Hieronymi Marafioti, 3. Joh: Sp. Herd. Omnia lectu & cognitu dignißima. Argentorati M.DC.XI.

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tises may be interpreted as a sign of their general accessibility to educated people in humanistic circles of the Renaissance.

2. Mnemonic Fundamentals and their Constitution Rhetorical memoria rests on two basic constituents, places (loci ) and images (imagines). The mnemonic places neither occur by themselves nor in arbitrary combinations with other places. Rather they are defined as five subdivisions of a large room (Figure 29) in which they carry out the structural function of organization. Rossellius introduces the terminological differentiation with loca communia and loca particularia, their subdivisions which, as a rule, contain images. 12 In his Art of Memory John Willis similarly draws a demarcation between the larger “repositories” or “imaginary houses” and the smaller “places.” 13 The larger spatial units, sometimes called thesauri or store-houses, are usually structured according to number, quality, size, sequence, and distance. Most mnemonic theories contain very detailed prescriptions concerning these criteria. Generally the loci should represent different parts of a memory building and be neither too near nor too far from each other, the memory building should not be too much frequented and should be located within moderate reach. Petrus Ravennas (c. 1448-1508), who set up these topical rules, according to his own report created some 110,000 memory places for storing away pericopes from the Holy Scriptures and from canon and civil law. 14 The types of mnemonic repositories are certainly of greater significance than the rules concerning their features. Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique was by far the most widely disseminated rhetorical manual in sixteenthcentury England, mentions three principal spatial systems: the physiognomy of an animal, the anatomy of a human being, and the architecture of a building. 15 Besides, the mnemonic tradition knows other important spatial structures such as the zodiac (Metrodorus Scepsius, Giordano Bruno) and landscape (St. Augustine). According to Cosmas Rossellius all areas of human

12 13

14

15

Cosmas Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae, pp. 1v-2r. John Willis, The Art of Memory. London: Printed by W. Iones, and are to be sold by Henry Seely in Pauls churchyard at the Tygres head. 1621. Facsimile-Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1973, pp. 2-12. Petrus Ravennas, Phoenix: siue ad artificialem memoriam comparandam brevis quidem et facilis, sed reipsa & vsu comprobata introductio. Coloniae M.DC.VIII, pp. 8-10. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, pp. 424-425.

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Figure 29: German Ars memorativa (c. 1490): “fünf stet” (five places).

knowledge and belief can serve as mnemonic space: heaven, hell, the elements, countries, provinces, cities, houses, men, animals, objects of all kinds. 16 Even if the possibility is conceded that the sensuous perceptions may take over the function of a specific spatial type, one specific local structure proved dominant, namely memory architecture. In Cicero’s rhetorical treatises mnemonic architecture is regularly manifested in the Roman villa. As most conspicuously documented by Giulio Camilli’s (1480-1544) elaborate construction, the Renaissance contributed the memory theatre as an innovation to this tradition of mnemonic architectures. 17 During the Middle Ages memory architecture assumed the character of ecclesiastical buildings which, 16 17

C. Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae, p. 1.r ff. Cf. Yates, The Art of Memory, chap. 6: “Renaissance Memory: The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camilli” (pp. 129-159); Lu Beery Wenneker, An Examination of “L’Idea del Theatro” of Giulio Camillo, Including an Annotated Translation, with Special Attention to His Influence on Emblem Literature and Iconography. PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1970.

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however, did not entirely disappear with the advent of the Renaissance but continued to be adapted to the storing and structuring of homiletics and religious literature. The third edition of William Caxton’s encyclopedia The myrrour & dyscrypcyon of the worlde (1527?) contains the following description of mnemonic imagines: Also in this crafte as I sayde before thou must haue euer images of corporall thynges that thou must se with thyn eye whiche thou muste ymagyn in thy mynde that thou seest them sette in the places / And so of euery corporall thynge thou muste ymagyn that thou seest them sette in the places / And so of euery corporall thynge thou muste ymagyn that thou seest the same corporall thyng in the place / As when thou wylte remembre a man / a horse / a byrde / a fysshe / or suche other to Imagyn that thou seest the same man / hors / byrde / or fisshe / in thy place and so of euery corporall thyng / But yf thou canst not haue a corporall ymage of the same thynge / […] / That thou muste yet take an ymage therfore that is a corporall thynge. 18

Thus mnemonic images materialize abstract contents by attaching them to corporeal phenomena. These can be either real or fictive. They are fictive, when they are not based on empirical perception. Therefore it is comparatively easy to remember a man, a horse, or a bird but more difficult to memorize an abstract notion like ‘truth.’ In this case Caxton proposes the image of an old man with white hair. Whatever the condition of an item for memorization, an artificial memory has to initiate a process of sensualization. To do so requires an act of imagination. Hence this kind of mnemonist is an artist as well. He makes use of hieroglyphs and emblems as well as woodcuts, engravings, and even paintings. 19 For this reason representations of memoria artificialis often draw parallels to the visual arts, which in turn can sometimes be analysed as mnemonic icons. In his Art of Memory (1621) John Willis sets up an extensive canon of rules for mnemonic images, which he calls “ideas.” Not all his prescriptions will be mentioned here but only those concerned with quantity, position, colour, and genre. 20 1. Quantity: The image or idea is to be of such size as can find its place on a stage which Willis prefers as a memory depository (Figure 30). The decisive criterion for the adjustment of the image is the aptum, which is 18 19

20

William Caxton, The myrrour & dyscrypcyon of the worlde. [London, 1527?], sig. d.iii.v. Cf. Claudie Balavoine, “Hie´roglyphs de la Me´moire: E´mergence et me´tamorphose d’une e´criture hie´roglyphique dans les arts de me´moire du XVIIe sie`cle,” XVII e Sie`cle 158 (1988), 51-63. John Willis, The Art of Memory, pp. 14-24.

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Figure 30: John Willis: The Art of Memory (1621), memory stage.

interpreted in the following way: If the idea is too large, it has to be diminished (diminutio), if, however, too little, it has to be augmented (amplificatio). An example of augmentation is the heaping up of pearls, because a single one is too small to be noticed. 2. Position: The rule is to be observed that things should occupy their natural position, as for instance a picture commonly hangs upon the wall. 3. Colour: When images are stored in a mnemonic room, they each require a different colour in order to be distinguished from one another. Above all these colours should be “liuely;” otherwise they cannot activate the memory of the imaginative observer. Other memory theories add the requirements of solidity and precision. 4. Genres: While the preceding properties are more of an accidental nature, the “kinds” or genres of images touch the very core of the problem. The mnemonic forms are registered here with a precision, systematicity, and completeness, hardly matched by any other memory treatise. First Willis distinguishes between simple and compound ideas, then he subdivides the former into direct and oblique ones. These correspond to Caxton’s images of corporeal and abstract subjects or Rossellius’ differentiation of figurae reales and figurae imaginareae. Willis, however, proceeds beyond this distinction already known in classical times. His main concern is for the indirect or oblique ideas, which are subdivided into Relatiue, Subdititiall, and Scriptile Ideas. As a rule, Relatiue Ideas are identical with tropes. Willis defines seven types of these:

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First, when the cause is signified by the effect. […]. Secondly, when the effect is signified by the cause […]. Thirdly, when the Subiect is noted by the Adiunct. […]. Fourthly, when the Adiunct is noted by the Subiect […]. Fiftly, when the like is put for the like […]. Sixtly, when a sentence is expressed by a familiar example […]. Finally, when any thing may fitly be resembled by its correlatiue. 21

This means that of the Relatiue Ideas the first four mentioned here can be classified as metonymies, while the fifth and seventh categories may be defined as metaphors. A Subdititiall Idea can be stated, “when a mans name signifieth something visible, […] As if a mans name be Smith, his name may be reme˜bred by thinking vpon a Smith at work in one of the roomes of the Repositorie, hauing forge and anvile in it, as if it were a Smiths shop.” 22 A Scriptile Idea occurs when the subject to be memorized is written on a white tablet hung up in the middle of the opposite wall belonging to the room in which it is placed. The second class of mnemonic images, those of a compound nature, results from the combination of two simple ideas. Willis mentions two kinds. The first is based on a combination of Direct and Scriptile Idea. The second is constituted by the combination of Relative and Scriptile Idea, which is best illustrated by the emblems of The´odore Beza, Andrea Alciato, and Henry Peacham: “For in all Emblemes, the picture occupying the vpper part of the table, is a Relatiue Idea; and that which is written vnderneath, a Scriptile.” 23 This catalogue of criteria demonstrates how during the Renaissance the mnemonic doctrine of images was expanded into a scholastic system of rules that by far surpassed their classical antecedents in differentiation. Two pictorial types deserve closer inspection. The first consists of imagines agentes, or moving images that perform actions. In his educational treatise Ludus Literarius (1612) John Brinsley (fl. 1633) writes: “[…] the more we doe animate or giue life vnto the obiect, or thing wherby we would remember, the more presently will the word which we would remember come to our minde.” 24 Remarkable examples of actional imagery are Francis Bacon’s personifications of the Five Great Arts. Thus, inventio is represented as a hunter

21 22 23 24

John Willis, The Art of Memory, pp. 27-30. John Willis, The Art of Memory, p. 31. John Willis, The Art of Memory, p. 48. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius. London: Printed for Thomas Man, 1612, p. 234. - The dissemination of rhetorical memoria by educational treatises is further documented by O. Walker’s Of Education Especially of Young Gentlemen. Oxon. 1673, p. 123 ff.

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chasing a hare, dispositio as an apothecary ordering his boxes, elocutio as a pedant delivering a speech, memoria as a boy reciting verse, and actio as an actor performing on a stage. 25 As can be gathered from such illustrations, the imagines agentes are sometimes pantomimic monodramas. Willis iconicizes melancholy as a sad man who walks to and fro in a discontented manner, with his arms crossed and his hat drawn deeply into his face. Such imagines agentes possess a high degree of memorability, since they are apt to move affections. An inherent danger in them, however, is their ability to produce pernicious passions. This warning similarly applies to a second relevant pictorial type: the grotesque memory image. It is the product of an unrestrained fantasy. One example here is Thomas Wilson’s “monstruous [sic] horse,” another is Cosmas Rossellius’ horse with a golden head and ivory feet. 26 A grotesque mnemonic image is therefore not something found in nature but a figure composed of incommensurable parts originating from diverse origins. It is particularly effective when it is imagined as a moving image. The emotions triggered by such actiones deformes are laughter, compassion and above all admiration. Gratarolus, in the translation by William Fulwood, recommends the invention of “madde iestes and toyes” 27 for the memorization of proper names. Thus he visualizes the names of Peter and James by having the latter pour a urinal of water upon the former’s head. Furthermore he makes one Henry smear one Steven with salve. And as the climax of this grotesquecomic series he describes the following imago agens: […] yf I shoulde sette or place in the mouthe of a madde Asse the head of Antonye to bee almost bitten in pieces, the bloude to gushe out of him, and that he asketh helpe, and holdinge vp his handes crieth out: for it can not be, but that when I would, I should see him with the eyes of my minde, & declare or expres Antony to him that should aske or enquire for him. 28

In this description diverse components of the rhetorical ars memoriae converge: a significant place (mad ass), an imago agens (Antony), and the source 25

26

27

28

Francis Bacon, “De Augm. Scient. V,5,” in: F. Bacon, Works. Ed. J. Spedding, / R.L. Ellis / D.D. Heath. 14 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1961-1963, vol. I, p. 649. - On Bacon and rhetorical memory cf. K.R. Wallace, Francis Bacon and the Nature of Man. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1967, chap. 4: “Memory” (pp. 55-68). Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, p. 423; Cosmas Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae, p. 123r: “Quartodecimo Chimerae quaedam, a` nostra imaginatione confectae, vt equus cum capite aureo, pedibus eburneis & c.” Guilelmus Gratarolus, The Castel of Memorie (London, 1562). Facsimile-Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1971, sig. H.ii.v ff. Guilelmus Gratarolus, The Castel of Memorie, sig. H.iii.r-v.

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of these, namely the mnemonic pictorial fantasy of the speaker (“the eyes of the minde”) as well as his function as presenter of a mnemonic spectacle and both the production and the reception of emotions.

3. Poetry and Memory Since its very beginnings mythical Memory or Mnemosyne has been the mother of the Muses. 29 A poem by the little known English Renaissance poet Anthony Sherley may serve as an illustration of the mnemonic function of poetry: Of Memorie The Heartes owne priuie key, I will call good Memorie: It keepes all close, and opens all, That Securitie cannot slip or fall. The Mother to the Muses, Turns thoughts to their best vses: Tis Wisdomes light, And the Blindes sight. The Memorie of man, Is like a curious Net, The small thinges it lets slip, But greater thinges doth get. The Minde’s a smooth fayre Table, On which doth Memorie write The occurrence of mens dealinges, With streakes of blacke and white. Blest Memorie tempers all States, It is the Soules white wonder: It delightes Age with long-past Fates, Keepes riotous Youth much vnder. Memorie is an Angell, And Memorie is a Deuill: The Register of happiness, And Chronicle of Euill. 30

29

30

Memory has also been of great importance to the rhapsodes of oral poetry; cf. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales. Ed. S. Mitchell & G. Nagy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000 (1960). Anthony Sherley, Witts New Dyall: or, A Schollers Prize. London: Imprinted by W.W., for Iohn Browne, 1604, sig. E.2r.

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Figure 31.a: Cosmas Rossellius: Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Hell.

These lines contain a traditional memory metaphor: the mind as a slate (tabula) on which memorable contents can be written. 31 Artificial memory is relevant to poetry, because its constituents, places and images, can exert a shaping influence on its pictorial composition. Mnemonic rhetoric is particularly useful for such poetic works as display the following criteria: a) efficacy: the affective communication of philosophical, theological, or other abstract didactic contents; b) division: the intention of displaying such doctrines in a structured composition; c) evidence: the emblematic sensualization of these abstract and structured doctrines. While loci and imagines serve the functions of systematizing and sensualizing abstract doctrines, rhetorical mnemonics generally aims to convert abstract doctrines into concrete, sensuous images of great memorability. Significant literary works that have been analysed mnemonically, such as Dante’s La Vita Nuova and La Divina Commedia and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, visualize

31

Cf. the words of Hamlet addressing the ghost: “Remember thee? / Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there […]” (Hamlet I.v.97-101). Of course, this metaphor is not to be taken literally, as some performances of this scene do.

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Figure 31.b: Cosmas Rossellius: Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Heaven.

theological and moral contents. 32 Hell and Paradise are visualized by Cosmas Rossellius in mnemonic place systems, the first having a horrible well in its centre, with steps leading up to it that serve as the places of punishment of Heretics, Jews, Infidels, Idolaters, and Hypocrites (Figure 31.a). Paradise is surrounded by a wall of sparkling gems, with the throne of Christ in its centre (Figure 31.b). 33 Besides such complex illustrations of the theological ars memorativa there is a strong visual tradition in Christianity which encompasses the biblia pauperum as well as religious emblematics and meditative exercises. The question now is: Which functions, if any, accrue in this context of social history to mnemonic architectures in verbalized form? To demonstrate such functions we will choose a specific mnemonic type of architecture which came into existence in the Middle Ages and still lived on into the Renaissance and Baroque times, namely ecclesiastical architecture. Its principal representatives are the church and the monastery.

32

33

Cf. Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 95-96, 163-165; Antonio d’Andrea, “Dante, la me´moire et le livre: Le sens de la Vita Nuova,” in: Jeux de Me´moire: Aspects de la mne´motechnie me´die´vale. Ed. B. Roy & P. Zumthor. Montre´al: Presses de l’Universite´ / Paris: Vrin, 1985, pp. 9197; Luigi De Poli, La structure mne´monique de la “Divine Come´die.” Bern / Berlin / Frankfurt/ M. / New York: Lang, 1999; Marlene Spiegler, ‘Imagines Agentes’ in “The Faerie Queene,” Book I. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971. C. Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae, pp. 7v ff., 29v ff.

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4. Religious Mnemonic Architectures In his Congestorium Artificiosae Memoriae (1533), the Dominican Johannes Romberch of Kierspe made use of the architectural plan of an abbey (Abatia) to construct a comprehensive memory system (Figure 32). Its structure is determined by a twofold order: an alphabetical one of loci and a numerical one of decades, which constitute subdivisions of the respective loci. Thus the following sequence is established: Aula 1-10, Biblioteca 11-20, Capella 2130, Dormitorium 31-40, Estuarium 41-50, etc. (Figure 33). 34 This floor plan is accompanied by a number of detailed instructions. The book addresses itself to preachers and students of theology but also to all professores of the Liberal Arts. The second type of ecclesiastical architecture, the church, is represented by several variants in the artes memorativae: cathedral, minster, temple, synagogue, and chapel. To illustrate the mnemonic practicalities of such a location we shall consult two early sixteenth-century memory treatises. The first is preserved in a manuscript (MS.102 [2718]; c. 1510) of the Gräflich Schönbornsche Bibliothek, Pommersfelden, Germany, and lists 48 loci of the imperial cathedral of Bamberg. Their very sequence suggests that their organizational principle is based on a systematic tour of the building. 35 A similar structure underlies a memory treatise composed by the noted physician, astrologer and geographer Lorenz Fries of Colmar. It was published simultaneously in Latin and German at Strasbourg in 1523. The ecclesiastical architecture it chooses for its mnemonic purpose is the Strasbourg cathedral. Fries describes the procedure thus: Volo constituere loca decem: intro igitur a latere templum summi collegij Argentoratensis & statim se offert ara, diuo Laurentio consecrata, quam pro primo loco reseruo. De hinc a latere dextram versus statuitur fons baptismatis, secundum locum adimplens. Vltra eundo, statera insignis introitum chori, praestans tercij loci inditium prebet. Vlterius viando perpassum, ingressus subterrati fornicis obijcitur, quartum locum describens. Directo amplius itinere mox apparet in angulo vasta columna, quintum locum vendicans. Quam statim subsequitur diuae annae simulachrum, mira arte exsculptum, quod pro sexto loco detineo. Pauculo ab hinc interuallo, adheret statuae ara, eijdem auae christi dedicata, septimum locum praestans. Octauum deinceps locum altare decem mille martiribus sacrum relinquit. Hinc Leonardi soluentis vincula sedes, nonum locum gubernat. Decimus locus orphanorum dominio subijcitur. Et sic ultra procedere potes, quo usque 34 35

J. Romberch, Congestorium Artificiose Memorie, fol. 35v-7r. Bernhard Bischoff, “Die Gedächtniskunst im Bamberger Dom (etwa 1510),” in: Anecdota Novissima: Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhunderts. Ed. B. Bischoff. Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, vol. 7. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1984, pp. 204-11.

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Figure 32: Johannes Romberch of Kierspe (fl. 1485-1533): Congestorium Artificiose Memorie (1533), “Abatia” (abbey).

suffitientem locorum venaberis portionem, quorum si viginti quatuor habes, ter vel quater in mente visitatas, chartam habes varijs ijmaginibus aptam. 36

This is the description of a sacred building in the perspective of a visitor who wants to connect individual memory data with several localities. In rhetorical elocutio such a description is termed topographia. Yet the topographia me36

Lorenz Fries, ARTIS MEMORA/TIVÆ NATURALIS ET ARTIFITIALIS / certa, facilis et verax traditio […], experientia Laurentij Phrisij med/ Doc. diligentissime congesta Completa est ars illa Anno 1523. sole in 26 gra-/du piscium existente, opera providi Joan/ nis Grieningeri civis Argentoratensis, fol. B IVr-v. Quoted by J. M. Massing, “Laurent Fries et son Ars Memorativa: La Cathe´drale de Strasbourg comme espace mne´monique,” Bulletin de la Cathe´drale de Strasbourg 16 (1984), 76. See also Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, p. 1045 f.

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Figure 33: Johannes Romberch of Kierspe (fl. 1485-1533): Congestorium Artificiose Memorie (1533), Aula, Library, Chapel.

morativa, as practised by Fries, lacks an element crucial to the actualization of things past. It is enargeia or evidentia. Evidentia cannot be dispensed with in the mnemonic verbalization of abstract contents that are deposited in imaginary buildings. 37 Rhetoric calls the corresponding ekphrastic procedure topothesia. Henry Peacham explains it as follows in his Garden of Eloquence (1593): 37

Two kinds of mnemonic places, real and fictive ones, are distinguished by Thomas Watson, Compendium Memoriae Localis. London, [1585?], sig. C.4.r-v: “Sunt ergo´ duo genera locorum, quos poßumus constituere. Nam aut veri sunt, aut ficti.”

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Topothesia, a fained description of a place, that is, when the Orator describeth a place, and yet no such place: As is the house of enuy, in the 6. booke of Metamorphosis, the house of sle´epe in the eleuenth booke, or else whe[n] the place is not such a one as is fained to be, as is heauen and hell: In the fourth booke of Aeneidos. 38

and he adds the caution: “This figure is proper to Poets, and is seldom vsed of Orators.” 39 If we look for ecclesiastical memory buildings constructed according to the rules of topothesia in English literature we find examples in John Donne, Christopher Harvey, George Herbert, and John Bunyan. All use the ars memorativa and its ekphrastic method of textual composition in order to convey abstract messages in an enargetic manner. Beginning with John Donne (1572-1631), we first encounter the ars memorativa in his sermons. There he states: “Plato plac’d all learning in the memory; wee may place all Religion in the memory too.” and “The art of salvation, is but the art of memory.” 40 In this sense Donne uses the evidence of memory architecture in what is known as “Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body,” which provides an explicatio and divisio of the following biblical pericope: PSA.68 VERSE 20 IN FINE. And unto God the Lord Belong the Issues of Death, i. e. from Death.

These are then carried out in the following way: Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that susteine and support them, and of their butteresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit and unite them: The foundations suffer them not to sinke, the butteresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting suffers them not to cleave. The body of our building is in the former part of this verse. It is this, hee that is our God is the God of salvation; ad salutes, of salvations in the plurall, so it is in the originall; the God that gives us spirituall and temporall salvation too. But of this building, the foundation, the butteresses, the contignations are in this part of the verse, which constitutes our text, and in the three divers acceptations of the words amongst our expositors, Vnto God the Lord belong the issues of death. For first the foundation of this building, (that our God is the God of all salvations) is laid in this; That unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death […]. And then secondly, the butteresses that comprehend and settle this building, […], are thus raised; unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death: 38

39 40

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / New York: Lang, 1996, p. 139. Ibid. John Donne, Sermons. Ed. E.M. Simpson & G.R. Potter. 10 vols. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, vol. II, pp. 73-74.

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[…] And then lastly the contignation and knitting of this building, [..] consists in this, Unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, that this God the Lord having united and knit both natures in one, and being God, having also come into this world, in our flesh, he could have no other meanes to save us, he could have no other issue out of this world, nor returne to his former glory, but by death; And so in this sense, this exitus mortis, this issue of death, is liberatio per mortem, a deliverance by death, by the death of this God our Lord Christ Jesus. […]. And these three considerations, our deliverance a` morte, in morte, per mortem, from death, in death, and by death, will abundantly doe all the offices of the foundations, of the butteresses, of the contignation of this our building. 41

In this homiletic passage the exegesis of the pericope quoted proceeds in such a way that the basic thought is subsumed under the central image of a building of which the parts visualize its argumentative details per divisionem, thus fulfilling the three criteria established above: division, evidence, and efficacy. Viewed in its entirety this exegesis of a biblical text appears as a synthesis of the mnemonic technique of visualization and a logical dichotomizing in the Ramistic manner. The pictorial structure is underlined by italics which emphasize most of the relevant expressions. Continuing with The Synagogue (1661) 42 by Christopher Harvey (15971663), we notice that this poetic building is systematically constructed of four parts described as “Synagogue” (proper), “Church-Offices,” “ChurchFestivals,” and “Invitation.” This local arrangement is reminiscent of Cosmas Rossellius’ differentiation into loca communia and loca particularia, into common and more particular mnemonic places. 43 Though not all loca particularia belong to the architectural type, the ordo principle is evident in the “Church-Offices” and “Church-Festivals,” too, the former being structured on the hierarchical and the latter on the chronological pattern. The “Synagogue” (proper) is systematically described according to the so-called “Ankunftsschema” (arrival device) - a term invented by Paul Friedländer. 44 It means, in this case, that the lyrical speaker undertakes an imaginary walk which leads him from the 41

42

43 44

Donne, Sermons. vol X, pp. 230-231. - Cf. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artefacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1972, pp. 47-54; Robert L. Hickey, “Donne’s Art of Memory,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 3 (1958), 29-36; A.M. Guite, “The Art of Memory and the Art of Salvation: The Centrality of Memory in the Sermons of John Donne and Lancelot Andrews,” The Seventeenth Century 4/1 (1989), 1-17. Christopher Harvey, “The Synagogue, or, The Shadow of the Temple,” in: The Complete Poems of Christopher Harvey. Ed. A.B. Grosart. London: Robson and Sons, 1874, pp. 1-85. Cosmas Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae, fol. lv-2r. Paul Friedländer, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius: Kunstbeschreibungen justinianischer Zeit. Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner, 1912.

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“Churchyard” to the “Church” and the “Church-Porch” and proceeds from there to the “Font,” the “Pulpit,” and finally to the “Communion-Plate” (all locales are titles of poems). On the boundary between the outside and the inside of the church, at the “Church-Porch”, the procedure of topical recollection is mentioned expressly: Now, ere thou passest further, sit thee down In the Church-Porch, and think what thou hast seen; Let due consideration either crown Or crush thy former purposes: between Rash undertakings and firm resolutions Depends the strength or weakness of conclusions. Trace thy steps backward in thy memory; And first resolve of what thou heardest last, Sincerity: it blots the history Of all religious actions, and doth blast The comfort of them, when in them God sees Nothing but outsides of formalities. […] Next to sincerity, remember still Thou must resolve upon integrity: God will have all thou hast - thy mind, thy will, Thy thoughts, thy words, thy works. A nullity It proves, when God, that should have all, doth find That there is any one thing left behind. […] Then call to mind that constancy must knit Thine undertakings and thine actions fast: […] Lastly, remember that humility Must solidate and keep all close together. […] Contract thy lesson now, and this is just The sum of all; - he that desires to see The Face of God, in his religion must Sincere, entire, constant, and humble be. If thus resolve`d, fear not to proceed; Else the more haste thou mak’st, the worse thou’lt speed. 45

The memory activity demanded by the speaker is to be visualized as a stepping backwards in space. In the course of this the addressee is to associate abstract qualities with the memory places: “sincerity” with the “Church,” “integrity” with the “Church-Walls,” “constancy” with the “Church-Gate,” 45

Christopher Harvey, The Complete Poems, pp. 11-13.

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“humility” with the “Church-Stile.” Although the individual locations are not directly repeated, the reading implies these references clearly. Here a traditional memory rule is put into practice saying that it is necessary to walk back and forth past the mnemonic loci - preferably not only once but several times - in order to memorize the contents the better. 46 In its entirety Harvey’s series of poems forms (with the exception, perhaps, of the “Invitation”) a systematic instructional edifice which takes the place of rather abstract theological manuals and devotional treatises. Compared to The Synagogue, its acknowledged paragon, George Herbert’s earlier poetry collection The Temple (1633), 47 is mapped out much less systematically. The loca particularia - such as “The Church-Porch,” “Superliminare,” “The Altar,” “Church-Monuments,” “The Church-Floore,” and “The Windows” - do not form a locally or logically coherent series but are intermingled with titles of a dogmatic or psychological kind, in keeping with the subtitle of the collection: “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” Such an apparent neglect of macro-structure may be due to the influence of Sir Philip Sidney, who favoured varietas and celare artem as his aesthetic principles. Sidney also propagated and practised the idea of energ(e)ia, often confounded by him (and not by him alone) with enarg(e)ia, which means visual (lively, vivid) representation and changes the reader / listener, as it were, into a spectator of something taking place before his very eyes. 48 George Herbert professes the same rhetorical / poetological creed and, in the architectural poems of his cycle, neglects a systematic didacticism in favour of the vividness of “topothetical” details. This feature is especially apparent in the poem “The Church-floore” which we should inspect a little more closely:

46

47

48

Cf. Petrus Ravennas, Phoenix, p. 9: “Accipio ergo` Ecclesiam mihi notam, cuius partes diligenter considero, in ea ter quater deambulans discedo, domumque redeo, & ibi per me visa meˆte reuoluo, & hoc pacto principiuˆ locis do.”; Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 423. George Herbert, “The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations,” in: The Works of George Herbert. Ed. F.E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964 (first edition: Cambridge: Thomas Buck / Roger Daniel, 1633). For a comparison between Harvey and Herbert, see A.C. Howell, “Christopher Harvey’s The Synagogue (1640)”, Studies in Philology 49/2 (1952), 229-47, esp. 239-45. - For other attempts to discover a structure in Herbert’s The Temple, see a.o. E. Stambler, “The Unity in Herbert’s Temple,” Cross Currents 10 (1960), 251-266; J.D. Walker, “The Architectonics of George Herbert’s The Temple,” ELH 29 (1962), 289305; V. Carnes, “The Unity of George Herbert’s The Temple: A Reconsideration,” ELH 35 (1968), 505-526. Cf. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry: or, the Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 137-8.

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Mark you the floore? that square & speckled stone, Which looks so firm and strong, Is Patience: And th’ other black and grave, wherewith each one Is checker’d all along, Humilitie: The gentle rising, which on either hand Leads to the Quire above, Is Confidence: But the sweet cement, which in one sure band Ties the whole frame, is Love And Charitie. Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains The marbles neat and curious veins: But all is cleansed when the marble weeps. Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore, Blows all the dust about the floore: But while he thinks to spoil the room, he sweeps. Blest be the Architect, whose art Could build so strong in a weak heart. 49

The poem is made up of two ekphrastic parts: a topothesia (1-12) of the church floor and a pragmatographia (13-18) of two actions which are intended to sully this floor. The memory place is introduced enargetically by the traditional cernas formula (“mark you …”) and represents a hierarchically structured sequence of abstract qualities (“virtues”) which form the religious basis of a Christian life. While in the first part of the poem the memory architecture appears to be static (through the defining “copula metaphor” 50), a dynamic change takes place in the second part. The reason for this is Sin and Death, two personifications, which enact a kind of morality play. They are 49

50

George Herbert, “The Church-floore,” in: The Works of George Herbert, pp. 66-67. A comparable iconic program, though on a much larger scale, is to be found in the marble floor of the cathedral of Siena, as was convincingly proved by the magisterial study of Friedrich Ohly, “Die Kathedrale als Zeitenraum: Zum Dom von Siena”, in: F. Ohly, Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1977, pp. 171-273. The temple also occurs as a metaphor for sermons: cf. Thomas Adams, The Temple. / A Sermon Preached at Pauls / Crosse the fifth of August /1624. London: A Mathewes for J. Grismond./ 1624 (STC 129); Robert Barrell, The Spiritual Architecture. A Sermon. 1624 (STC 1498); Matthew Brookes, The Hovse of God in a Sermon. London: Printed by G.P. for Richard Cartwright, 1627 (STC 3836). See Christine Brooke-Rose, The Grammar of Metaphor. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958, pp. 24, 105 ff.

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no strangers to the student of the Art of Memory, because they are identical with the imagines agentes of the mnemonic manuals, that is, with particularly striking and unusual “active pictures.” In this case they prove extremely dangerous; for they threaten to destroy the memory place, in other words, to make man oblivious of the Christian virtues which lead him towards his salvation. Therefore the memory architect is not the sinful and hence forgetful human being but the Deus Artifex who erects and restores his divine system of virtues in every man’s heart. The “House of the Interpreter” in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) 51 does not represent the traditional church or cathedral but is undoubtedly a religious memory building. When Christian is about to leave it, he is emphatically enjoined to remember well what he has seen: “Well, keep all things so in thy mind, that they may be as a Goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the way thou must go”. 52 The House of the Interpreter is divided into a multitude of rooms which are shown one after the other: “a private Room,” “a very large Parlour,” “a little Room,” “a place,” “a pleasant place where was builded a stately Palace,” “a very dark Room with an iron cage,” and “a Chamber.” In the second part of the novel Christiana and her companions are confronted with even more rooms, amongst them “the Slaughter-House,” “Garden,” and “Field.” These are mnemonic places that partly violate the classical rules: one room is too dark, another one (the stately palace) simply does not fit into the House of the Interpreter. Yet these violations of the rules are justified by the tropical nature of these “significant rooms,” as they are called: the dark room symbolizes despair, the stately palace the magnificence of the Heavenly Jerusalem. All in all, though, the memory places in Bunyan, as compared to Herbert and Harvey, are less differentiated than the pictures they hold. It is in these that the whole spectrum of the two- and three-dimensional visualizations as displayed in the Arts of Memory makes its appearance: a painted picture (a portrait of the Evangelist); a natural phenomenon (the spider on the wall); a tableau vivant of seated allegorical figures (Patience and Passion); mute imagines agentes (the butcher slaughtering a sheep; the hen and the chicken), and speaking imagines agentes (the question-and-answer dialogue with the Man of Despair in the iron cage); and, finally, the synthesis of actio and pronuntiatio in the short drama of the imago agens who tells his dream of the Last Judgment 51

52

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: from this World to that which is to Come. Ed. J.B. Whare and R. Sharrock. 2nd rev. ed. Oxford / London: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. 28-37. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 37.

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the climax of the places-and-images sequence in the House of the Interpreter. In some cases the mnemonic icon explains itself, in other cases it requires the hermeneutic assistance of the Interpreter. The result is an emblematic text structure. That this structure was very well known to the experts of the Art can be gathered from John Willis’ treatise The Art of Memory (1621), which speaks of “ideas” instead of “images” and describes the emblem as a “compound idea,” namely of a “relative” and a “scriptile idea.” 53 John Bunyan’s writings include other works that make use of the edifice metaphor, often with a mnemonic purpose. Such are A Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellence, and Government of the House of God. With Counsels and Directions to the Inhabitants thereof (1688), Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized or, Gospel Light Fetched out of the Temple at Jerusalem (1688), and A Discourse of the House of the Forest of Lebanon (1692). The first of these works is written in prose, the remaining two are in verse. All of them pursue a didactic theological purpose. A synopsis of the seventeenth-century literary memory buildings and their topothetical realizations leads to the conclusion that emphasis is at times placed more on the architecture and at other times more on the contents (pictures) of the mnemonic structure. What these examples have in common is the fact that such imaginary architectures do not leave the reader indifferent; their aim is to appeal to his emotions, to “move” him in the rhetorical sense of the term. In this they continue the tradition of Sidney’s “speaking picture of poetry,” though with a different message. When we look into the history of theological writings, it seems that it is not by accident that the ekphrastic structure underlying the literary works analysed above is of mnemonic origin. The source of this enargetic approach could be the commentary on the psalms by the church father St. Jerome which begins with these words: Psalterium ita est quasi magna domus, quae unam quidem habet exteriorem clauem in porta, in diuersis uero intrinsecus cubiculis proprias claues habet. […] sic singuli psalmi quasi singulae cellulae sunt, habentes proprie claues suas. Grandis itaque porta istius domus primus psalmus est, qui ita incipit: Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum. 54

In this commentary the Psalter as a whole is metaphorically identified with a large building, a memory palace with a great number of rooms and keys belonging to them, of which the entrance or foyer has a particularly majestic porch marking the entrance to the first psalm: “Blessed is the man that 53 54

John Willis, The Art of Memory, pp. 46-48. Hieronymus, Opera, Pars II: “Opera Homiletica,” in: Corpus Christianorum, Ser. Lat., 78, Pars II. Turnholt: Brepols, 1958, p. 3.

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walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” 55 In A Preparation to the Psalter (1619), George Wither (1588-1667), who is also known for A Collection of Emblemes (1634/35), makes use of the same imagery. 56

5. The “Pious Art of Memory” in Emblems and Meditations In the emblem-book Ashrea: or, The Grove of Beatitudes (1665) by one E. M., later identified as Edward Mico (c. 1628-1678), the son of an Englishman of Protestant family, the preface asks “to what end the Artificial Memory should be inserted here, to render man mindful of Beatitude,” and receives the answer “that it is one thing to desire Beatitude, and another, to know what it is, and wherein it consists.” 57 This emblem book has a meditative purpose and in order to achieve that end makes use of the ars memorativa. It initiates the meditating process by confronting the reader with a frontispiece showing the crucified Saviour with eight banderoles issuing from the parts of his body with the eight beatitudes written on them (Figure 34). The author interprets this representation as a “speaking picture” and comments upon it thus: So that, as good Examples speak in silence; so our Blessed Lord and Saviour crucifi’d, 1. By his Nakedneß; 2. By his Head meekly bowing down; 3. By his Eyes weeping; 4. By his Mouth, saying, I thirst; 5. By his Side bleeding; 6. By his pure Heart pierc’d; 7. By his Hands nail’d; and lastly by his Feet; doth teach us what we ought to do in order to our attainment of eternal bliss. 58

These words emphasize the anagogical intention of this religious icon, which is further explained as follows: Behold here the eight places for exercise of this pious Art of Memory, wherein the devout Reader may find, as it were written, the Eight Beatitudes, in a Book, which lies always open, to be read, with such large Characters, as the shortest sight must needs reach, and the weakest memory retain; so lively set forth, that Beatitude, as in a Crystal-Mirrour, shall still present it self unto us. 59 55 56

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According to the Authorized Version (King James’s Bible). George Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter (1619). Manchester: Spenser Society, 1884, sig. A.r, A.2.r. E.M., Ashrea, or, The Grove of Beatitudes, Represented in Emblemes: And, by the Art of Memory, To be read on our Blessed Saviour Crucifi’d: With Considerations and Meditations suitable to every Beatitude, and to the holy time of Lent. London: Printed for W.P. at Grayes-Inn Gate in Holborne, 1665, sig. a.7.r. E.M., Ashrea, sig. a.7.r. E.M., Ashrea, sig. a.7.r-v.

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Figure 34: E.M.: Ashrea (1665), frontispiece.

This passage assembles a number of mnemonic topoi: the cernas formula (“behold here”), the evidence (enargeia) of representation (“so lively set forth”), the icon as replacement of the spoken / written word, the mirror metaphor as an instrument of self-knowledge. The local memory of which the author is speaking does not consist here of a mnemonic architecture but uses the human body in its parts as places to store the contents important for the salvation of the human soul. In the book the eight Beatitudes are represented in the following graphic order: first by the quotation of the Scriptural words, then by an emblem consisting of a motto, a picture of a tree, and an epigram-

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Figure 35: E.M.: Ashrea (1665), “The Seventh Beatitude.”

matic exegesis, and, lastly, by a longer explication in prose. The structural components are illustrated by Figure 35. The mnemonic emblem-book closes with what is superscribed as “A Short Recapitulation of the VIII. Beatitudes, By way of Meditation” following thus a well-known rule of the ars memorativa which, as we have seen, is also observed by Christopher Harvey in his cycle of poems entitled The Synagogue. As is evident by the example of Ashrea, the Art of Memory exerts its influence both on emblematics and meditation and sometimes even on a fusion of both. The meditative archetype is The Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius of Loyola, in which the structural element called compositio loci can be identified with a memory place; in the words of Ignatius: The first preamble is a composition, seeing the place. Here it should be noted that in contemplation, or visible meditation, such as contemplating Christ our Lord, who is visible, the composition will be to see with the eye of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing which I wish to contemplate is found. I say the corporeal place, such as a temple or mountain, where Jesus Christ or

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our Lady is found, accordingly as I wish to contemplate. In invisible matters, as in this case of the sins, the composition will be to see with an imaginative sight and to consider that my soul is imprisoned in this corruptible body, and that the whole compound of body and soul in this valley is like an exile among brute animals. 60

Thus the meditating person is invited to create an evidence or enargeia of a biblical location with the help of the imagination in order to reflect the sinful mortality of human life. If the object of meditation is something invisible and abstract, the process of meditation establishes the illusion of visibility and corporality by an act of imagination. In a poem from Steps to the Temple (1646) by Richard Crashaw (1612/13-1649) a biblical compositio loci is created in the following manner: Mat.28. Come see the place where the Lord lay. Show me himselfe (bright Sir) O show Which way my poore Tears himselfe may goe, Were it enough to show the place and say, Looke, Mary, here see, where the Lord once lay, Then could I show these armes of mine, and say Looke, Mary, here see, where the Lord once lay. 61

The biblical situation to which the quotation (Math. 28.6) refers is the visit of the three Marys to the sepulchre of Jesus Christ, who is risen from the dead. The words of the title are spoken by the angel. The answer which contains an apostrophe to the angel (“bright Sir”) does not occur in the gospel but is totally fictitious. The dialogue simulates the presence of a seemingly past event and places it, as it were, before the reader’s eyes. By the compositio loci the meditation amplifies the biblical situation and enriches and animates it with further rhetorical techniques such as repetitions and apostrophes. In this way a little drama is created, almost in the manner of a medieval Easter play. Such imaginative places and persons may also assume the visual embodiment of a picture or statue, as can be seen in Richard Crashaw’s A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Sainte Teresa, which is paralleled in the visual arts by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque statue in her honour. 62

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St. Ignatius Loyola, “Spiritual Exercises” (Trans. J.C. Nelson), in: A Renaissance Treasury. Ed. H. Haydn & J.C. Nelson. New York: Greenwood, 1968, p. 231. Richard Crashaw, The Poems: English, Latin, and Greek. Ed. L.C. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 21966, p. 87. Cf. Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw. New York: Atheneum, 1974.

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Altar paintings or the stations of the Holy Cross in Catholic churches serve the same mnemonic-meditative function. In the wake of Ignatius’s meditation theory others appeared that took up the local concept and made it the foundation of their own method of meditation. Thus St. Francis of Sales (1567-1622) in his Introduction to a Devout Life (1613) writes “Of the third point of preparation, consisting in proposing the mystery which we meane to meditate”: 1. After these two ordinarie pointes of preparation, there is a third, which is not common vnto all sorts of meditatio˜s which some call, the forming or figuring of the place, or an interiour lecture, or reading of the passage to be meditated on. And this is nothing els, but to represent vnto thy imagination, the summe and substance of the mysterie which thou wilt meditate, and to paint it out in thy thoughts so liuelie, as though it passed reallie & verylie in thy presence. For example sake; yf thou wouldest meditate our Lord vpon the crosse, imagin thy self to be present vpon the mount of Caluary; and that there thou beholdest and hearest, all that is done or sayd in the passion of our Lord; or yf thou wilt (for it cometh all to one end) imagin to the self, that in thy very same place where thou art, they crucifie our Sauiour, in such man˜er, as the holy Euangelists doe describe. […] 3. By the meanes of this imagination, we lock vp our spirit as it were, within the closet of the mysterie which we meane to meditate: to the end it range not idly hether and thether, euen as we shutt vp a bird in a cage, that she flie not away; or as we tye a hauke by her leash, that so she be forced to tarie quietly vpon the hand. 63

Again, the emphasis is placed on the visual imagination and on the enargetic presence of both the imaginary item meditated upon and the meditating mnemonist. The same feature can be observed in a number of treatises, as the following examples illustrate: (1) we must endevour to represent them [sc the places] so lively, as though we saw them indeed, with our corporall eyes […]. 64 (2) to procure the imagination to forme within our selves some figure, or image of the things we intende to meditate with the greatest vivacity, and propriety that wee are able. 65 63

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St. Francis of Sales, The Introdvction to a Devovte Life. Composed in Frenche. By the R. Father in God Francis Sales Bishop of Geneua. And Translated into English By I.Y. By John Heigham. With Permission. London, 1613. Facsimile-Reprint: Ed. D.M. Rogers. Ilkley, Yorkshire / London: Scolar Press, 1976, pp. 138-140. Vincentius Buno, An Abridgement of the Meditations of the Life, Passion, Death, & Resurrection of our Lord and Sauiour Iesvs Christ. […] translated into English by R.G. [= Richard Gibbons]. [St. Omer], 1614, §. 2.10. - emphasis mine. Luis de la Puente, Meditations vpon the Mysteries of ovr Holy Faith, with the Practise of Mental Prayer Tovching the same. Trans. I. Heigham. 2 vols. At St. Omers, 1619, vol. I, p. 23.

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(3) get the liveliest Picture of them [sc heavenly matters] in thy minde that possibly thou canst; meditate of them, as if thou were all the while beholding them, and if thou were even hearing the Hallelujahs, while thou art thinking of them. 66 (4) When it recals things formerly past, sets them in present view before our consideration and judgment Meditation sends a mans thoughts afar off, cals over and revives the fresh apprehension of things done long before, marshals them al in rank together, brings to mind such things which were happily quite out of memory, & gone from a man, which might be of great use and special help to discover our condition according to the quality of it; may be Conscience starts the consideration but of one sin, but meditation looks abroad, and brings to hand many of the same, and of the like kind and that many dayes past and long ago committed. 67

Visibility - vivacity - presence: these are the features ascribed to the meditative imagination. The same principles are inscribed in the metapoetic texture of a number of contemporary poems. Of these the beginning of a Nativity poem by Robert Southwell (1561-1595) entitled New Prince, new pompe will be adduced here: Behold a silly tender Babe, In freesing Winter night; In homely manger trembling lies, Alas a pitteous sight. 68

Another poem is by William Alabaster entitled Of Christ and beginning with the words: See how the Sun unsetting doth uphold, From out the ocean of unfathomed being, The unfathomed ocean of his Father’s seing; See how the virgin morning doth unfold The golden cabin where he was enrolled; See how the Baptist with angelic wing Doth scatter crystal dew of true repenting, To bathe our eyes these glories to behold. 69

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Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest. The fourth edition. 4 pts. London, 1653, pt. 4, pp. 220-221. Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption. (London, 21659), quoted in: The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings. 2 vols. Ed. P. Miller & T.H. Johnson. New York: Harper & Row, 2 1963, vol. I, p. 303. Cited from: Louis L. Martz (ed.), The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse. New York: New York University Press, 1963, p. 34. - Cf. John R. Roberts, “The Influence of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius on the Nativity Poems of Robert Southwell,” JEGP 59 (1960), 450-456. The Sonnets of William Alabaster. Ed. G.M. Story & H. Gardner. London: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 21. - Italics (mine) stress the cernas formula.

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Both poems begin with the so-called cernas formula (“behold”) which intends to appeal to the reader’s fantasy and make him imagine the presence of the depicted event. 70 In the second poem the threefold apostrophe “thee” calls on the recipient to contemplate successively three closely interlinked mental pictures (imagines agentes): the “unsetting Sun” which is Jesus Christ as sol invictus, 71 the golden cabin that denotes the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist who scatters the dew of repentance. Sense and sensuality are here entirely congruent. Their constitution is due to a wide-ranging fantasy which Luis de la Puente, in compliance with a rule of the ars memoriae, describes as follows: […] meditation runneth from one thing to another, seeking out hidden verities […] after we have meditated these mysteries of our Saviour Christ, it shall not be amisse to runne over eache of them againe with this manner of affectuous contemplation, which we call application of the faculties. 72

Yet this fantasy or meditation is not allowed to range “idly” (Francis of Sales) in the campus memoriae 73 but is confined by reason in a closet of meditation resembling that narrow space of the painted closet of Lady Drury’s Oratory (Figure 36) from Hawstead Hill. 74 A further meditative aspect is role-playing, which the meditating person has to practise both with regard to the figures of his imagination and to himself. This can be gathered from three alternative “compositions” proposed by the English Jesuit Robert Southwell: Consider first how thou wert the captive and slave of the devil, bound hand and foot by the chains of sin and at the very gates of hell. Thy King, hearing of this, laid aside His royal majesty, His power, His attendants, and His state, clothed Himself in coarse and torn garments and came into this vale of tears. For thirtythree years He sought thee, wandering about hidden and unknown and suffering many injuries and misfortunes. As He was praying for thee, with many tears and with sweat of blood, thy sins rushed in upon Him, tortured and scourged Him, and put Him to a shameful death, whilst thou didst go free.

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A less visual beginning of a meditation is Thomas Traherne’s initial sentence “Suppose a Curious and fair Woman” in meditation no. 68 of The Second Century, in: Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries, and Three Thanksgivings. Ed. A. Ridler. London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 244. Cf. Franz J. Dölger, Sol Salutis. Münster: Aschendorff, 21925; Dietrich W. Jöns, Das Sinnenbild: Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit bei Andreas Gryphius. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966, p. 94 ff. Luis de la Puente, Meditations vpon the Mysteries of ovr Holy Faith, vol. I, p. 385. This mnemonic landscape metaphor occurs in Saint Augustine’s Confessiones X.8.12. Cf. Norman K. Farmer, Jr., Poetry and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England. Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, 1984, chap. 7: “Lady Drury’s Oratory: The Painted Closet from Hawstead Hill” (pp. 77-105), together with Figure 50 (p. 79). In poetry the restraining of a wild-ranging imagination is effected by the traditional norms of the poetic form.

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Figure 36: Hawstead Hill: Lady Drury’s Oratory.

Next regard thyself as a son who has left his Father and wandering far has at length fallen in with the army of His enemies. […]. Or again think of Him as the Good Shepherd who has left His sheep upon the mountains and sought thee far and wide in the desert. […]. 75

This means that the meditating person turns himself into an actor. As this actor meditans he becomes a slave in an allegorical spectacle or the Prodigal Son of the well-known biblical parable. On the other hand the meditative imagination enables him, as in the first case, to encounter Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane or, as in the third case, in the parabolic role of the 75

Exercitia et Devotiones / Spiritual Exercises and Devotions of the Blessed Robert Southwell, S.J. Ed. J.-M. de Buck. Introd. & Trans. P.E. Hallett. London: Sheed & Ward, 1931, pp. 47-48; quoted in Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1962, p. 29. On meditation and memory, see the essays collected by G. Kurz (ed.), Meditation und Erinnerung in der frühen Neuzeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2000; on rhetoric and meditation cf. Thomas O. Sloane, “Rhetoric and Meditation: Three Case Studies,” JMRS 1/1(1971), 45-58; Edward J. Whelan, The Rhetoric of Early Renaissance Meditation. PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 1972.

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Good Shepherd. In each case the biblical narrative is changed into a mnemonic play in which the meditating person performs a role of his own whilst being conscious of his own sinfulness. The faculty which enables him to design such a play and to immerse himself in it as an actor is his selfinduction of passions, a rhetorical technique he has learnt from classical and contemporary treatises. An extremely dramatic meditation which shifts its compositio loci from a biblical location to the macrocosm is John Donne’s meditation upon the Last Judgment: At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise From death, you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe, All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow, All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes, Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe. But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space, For, if above all these, my sinnes abound, ‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace, When wee are there; here on this lowly ground, Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou ‘hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood. 76

The poem opens with a dramatic scene: the meditating mnemonist in the role of the apocalyptic archangel is calling up the “numberlesse infinities” of souls to appear to the Last Judgment. In view of this gigantic event the speaker uses a highly pathetic language consisting of imperatives and repetitions in the form of geminatio, anaphora, and enumeratio. The place where this event is located is macrocosmic, yet it is not real but imaginary; for it exists only in the fantasy of the meditating person. The procedure resembles the meditative practice recommended in A Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises (1618) composed according to the rules of Ignatius of Loyola: To consider, how the last day being now come, an Archangel with a fearfull voice, in manner of a trumpet, shall summon all the dead to Iudgement. And in a moment all, both good and bad, shall rise againe with their proper bodies which they liued in heere on earth, and come togeather in the valley of Iosaphat, there to attend the Iudge that is to iudge them. 77 76 77

John Donne, The Divine Poems. Ed. H. Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 21978, p. 8. Ignatius of Loyola, A Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises, Instructing how to pray mentally. Drawne for the most part, out of the spirituall Exercises of B. F. Ignatius. Written in Spanish by the R.F. Thomas de Villa-Castin of the Society of Iesus. Trans. H. M[ore].[St. Omer], 1618, p. 105.

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In both this excerpt from a theory of meditation and in John Donne’s sonnet an important factor of representation is enargeia. Donne realizes this aim by identifying his speaker with the archangel of the Apocalypse and thus staging an awe-inspiring macrocosmic drama. After the first two quatrains, however, the initial pathos subsides and gives way to the more moderate ethos reflecting the speaker’s state as a sinner who meekly prays to God to postpone the Last Judgment in order to grant him enough time for repentance. Though John Donne was a Protestant, the following characterization of meditation by the Carthusian monk Antonio de Molina (d. 1619?) in A Treatise of Mental Prayer (1617) can serve as an analytical instrument for understanding the structure of the above sonnet: Meditation is nothing else but a discourse made by the vndersta˜ding, in which it co˜sidereth something or other, and fro˜ that draweth other different thoughts, conceites, or considerations, gathering one thing from another: In the same manner as when one is alone, plotting some thing which he is to do, & considering that he must do it in this, or that manner, for this reason or for that; and that he must procure this thing, and take heed of the other, for such and such reasons; & many other like things which the Vnderstanding frameth, all directed to attayne to the end which he pretends. In this very manner is meditation of spirituall things, that the Vnderstanding considering one of the mysteries of our Faith, maketh discourses vpon it, and conceites, of what it behooueth vs to loue, and what to hate, of what we must seeke to procure, and what to fly and take heed of, and the like. And this is properly meditation. 78

In the very same way Donne’s speaker or lyrical ego first designs a gigantic macrocosmic spectacle in his imagination (“imagin’d corners”) which he then uses as a basis for rational reflections about the consequences for himself. In the meditation imagination gives way to understanding and both lead to a prayer which is a dialogue (“colloquy”) 79 with God in the manner prescribed by Ignatius of Loyola. Antonio de Molina continues his treatise by postulating that “the circumstances which generally may be considered in the mysteries of our Sauiour, especially in his holy Passion are these, VVho? VVhat? For whome? For what? Of whome? How?” 80 These cicumstantiae are no doubt identical with the loci of the rhetorical inventio. In the following pages the author explicates these very systematically, yet so strict a concept is rarely implemented in religious poetry, where such rhetorical categories are used selectively. 78

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Antonio de Molina, A Treatise of Mental Prayer (1617). Facsimile-Reprint: Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970, pp. 1-3. Ignatius of Loyola, A Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises, p. 76: “The Speach, or Colloquy to end the Prayer, is alwayes to be drawne out of the matter of the Meditation.” Antonio de Molina, A Treatise of Mental Prayer (1617), p. 11.

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In this selective way William Alabaster employs the mnemonic topoi of meditation for the constitution of his religious poetry; for he submits the topos “what” to a cycle of sonnets entitled Upon the Ensigns of Christ’s Crucifying in which the compositions of place are attached to instruments and actions of Christ’s martyrdom and bear such titles as “The Sponge,” “Upon the Crown of Thorns,” “Of the Reed that the Jews Set in Our Saviour’s Hand,” “The Spitting Upon Our Saviour,” and “Upon the Crucifix.” 81 While Alabaster establishes a chronological sequence of meditative objects, Henry Hawkins (1577-1646) in his Partheneia Sacra (1633) proceeds from the central image of a garden (Figure 37), which he alternatively calls symbol, devise, or impresa, and which he describes as follows: The Garden is a goodlie Amphitheater of flowers, vpon whose leaues, delicious beauties stand, as on a stage, to be gazed on, and to play their parts, not to see much, as to be seen; and like Wantons to allure with their looks, or enchant with their words, the ciuets and perfumes they weare about them. It is euen the pride of Nature, her best array, which she puts on, to entertaine the Spring withal. It is the rich Magazin or Burse of the best perfumes or Roman wash: A poesie of more worth, then a bal of pomander, to make one grateful where he comes; the one being sweetly sweet, the other importunely. It is a Monopolie of al the pleasures and delights that are on earth, amassed togeather, to make a dearth therof els-where, and to set what price they list vpon them: It is the precious Cabinet of flowrie gems, or gems of flowers: The shop of Simples in their element, delighting rather to liue delicious in themselues at home, where they are bred, then changing their conditions, to become restoratiues of others; or to dye to their beauties, to satisfy the couetous humour of euerie Apothecarie, to enrich himself with their spoyles. It is the Pallace of Flora’s pomps, where is the wardrobe of her richest mantles, powdred with starres of flowers, and al embroadred with flowrie stones. It is the laughter and smile of Nature: Her lapful of flowers, and the Garland she is crowned with in triumphs. It is a Paradice of pleasures, whose open walks are Tarrases, the Close, the Galleries, the Arbours, the Pauillions, the flowrie Bancks, the easie and soft Couches. It is, in a word, a world of sweets, that liue in a faire Communitie togeather, where is no enuie of another’s happines, or contempt of others pouertie; while euerie flower is contented with its owne estate; nor would the dazie wish to be a rose, nor yet the Rose contemnes the meanest flower. 82

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The Sonnets of William Alabaster. Ed G.M. Story & H. Gardner, pp. 13-18. Of some subjects there exist several poetic versions, e. g. of “Upon the Crucifix.” Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra, or The mysteriovs and Deliciovs Garden of the Sacred Parthenes; Symbolically set forth and enriched with Piovs Devises and Emblemes for the Entertainment of Devovt Soules. Printed by Iohn Covstvrier. M.DC.III, pp. 5-6. On life and literature of Hawkins cf. Wolfgang Lottes, Henry Hawkins: Leben und Werk eines englischen Jesuiten des 17. Jahrhunderts. PhD diss., Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1974.

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Figure 37: Henry Hawkins: Partheneia Sacra (1633), “hortus conclusus.”

Though the image of the garden, especially that of the enclosed garden, looks back on a long history and is profusely represented in seventeenth century poetry, 83 it is here collated with other images, typical mnemonic metaphors 83

Cf. Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry. Madison / Milwaukee / London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

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theatre, repository (warehouse, thesaurus), cabinet, shop, and palace - which are partly identical with the titles of Renaissance commonplace books. 84 The meditative emblem book Partheneia Sacra is divided into 24 units which render aspects of the general subject - just as the propositio of an oration is made concrete by presenting its details (circumstantiae). These units are the Rose (II. Symbol), the Lily (III. Symbol), the Violet (IV. Symbol), the Heliotropion (V. Symbol), the Dew (VI. Symbol), the Bee (VII. Symbol), the Heavens (VIII. Symbol), the Iris (IX. Symbol), the Moon (X. Symbol), the Star (XI. Symbol), the Olive (XII. Symbol), the Nightingale (XIII. Symbol), the Palm (XIV. Symbol), the House (XV. Symbol), the Hen (XVI. Symbol), the Pearl (XVII. Symbol), the Dove (XVIII. Symbol), the Fountain (XIX. Symbol), the Mount (XX. Symbol), the Sea (XXI. Symbol), the Ship (XXI[I]. Symbol), and, following the Conclusion, the Phoenix and the Swan (without numbers). These meditative emblems are rooted in heterogeneous sources including the Scriptures, the Physiologus tradition and Christian mysticism. They are mostly patterned on a similar schema: the Emblem / the Devise the Poesie / the Character - the Theories / the Morals - the Apostrophe. Sometimes this sequence is shortened, sometimes it is amplified with additional parts. In general it can be stated that according to the Ignatian structure of the Spiritual Exercises imaginary components precede rational ones, while the whole is regularly concluded with a colloquy or an apostrophe of the Virgin Mary, i. e. a prayer. That natural phenomena play an important role in Henry Hawkins’ Partheneia Sacra is due to the fact that the seventeenth century regarded nature as a mundus symbolicus or liber naturae from which the expert ‘reader’ could gather theological and philosophical knowledge or, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne (1505-1682), “suck Divinity from the flowers of Nature.” 85 At the end of a meditation on Nature entitled Man Henry Vaughan (16211695) prays: 84

85

Cf. Harald Weinrich, “Metaphora memoriae,” in: H. Weinrich, Sprache in Texten. Stuttgart: Klett, 1976, pp. 291-294; Harry Caplan, “Memoria: Treasure-House of Eloquence;” in: H. Caplan, Of Eloquence. Ed. A. King & H. North, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 196-246; Walter J. Ong, “Memory as Art,” in: W.J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology. Ithaca, N.Y. / London: Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 104-112; and the above chapter on Inventio Poetica. Sir Thomas Browne, Works. Ed. G. Keynes. 4 vols. London: Faber & Faber, 1964, vol I, p. 25 (Religio Medici, Pt. I, Sec. 16). - Cf. Robert Bellarmine, The Ascent of the Mind to God By a Ladder of Things Created. In the first English Translation by T.B. Gent. Published at Doway, 1616. Introd. J. Brodrick. London: Buns, Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1928, p. 52 ff. (chap. IV), 142 ff. - Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981.

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Grant I may so Thy steps track here below, That in these Masques and shadows I may see Thy sacred way, And by those hid ascents climb to that day Which breaks from thee Who art in all things, though invisibly; Shew me thy peace, Thy mercy, love, and ease. 86

The unmasking of Nature - a theatrical metaphor - is the meditating person’s task in that part of the meditation which is occupied by the rational faculty and its analysis of the preceding image designed by the imaginative faculty. This procedure also occurs in a sonnet by William Alabaster: My soul a world is by contraction, The heavens therein is my internal sense, Moved by my will as an intelligence, My heart the element, my love the sun. And as the sun about the earth doth run, And with his beams doth draw thin vapours thence, Which after in the air do condense, And pour down rain upon the earth anon, So moves my love about the heavenly sphere, And draweth thence with an attractive fire The purest element wit can desire, Whereby devotion after may arise. And these conceits, digest by thoughts’ retire, Are turned into april showers of tears. 87

The meditative process depicted here is divided into three phases: (1) The love which circles the heavenly sphere, as the sun does the earth, draws from thence “the purest element.” (2) This is reflected upon (“digested”) by reason (“thoughts”) in a retraite spirituelle. 88 (3) The consequence is emotions (“tears”) which effect a spiritual rebirth (“april showers”). A remarkable feature of this meditation is that the role of memory or fantasy is here transferred to their driving force, love, which is of great importance in mysticism and almost interchangeable with fantasy in the Petrarchan tradition. 89 The resemblance to William Davenant’s definition of wit is evident: 86 87 88

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Henry Vaughan, Works. Ed. L.C. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 21957, p. 479. The Sonnets of William Alabaster. Ed G.M. Story & H. Gardner, p. 8. On the retraite spirituelle, see Paul Rabbow, Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike. München: Kösel, 1954, p. 91 ff. Cf. Hugo Friedrich, Epochen der italienischen Lyrik. Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1964, p. 221.

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Wit is not only the luck and labour, but also the dexterity of thought, rounding the world, like the Sun, with unimaginable motion, and bringing swiftly home to the memory universal surveys. 90

Again we have a comparison with the sun, but with this difference that in Davenant it visualizes a universal and in Alabaster a spiritual invention. The motion is common to both. It is, in fact, the principal feature of the mnemonic fantasy, as was already stated by Ignatius of Loyola: It moves from locality to locality in order to visit the places where Jesus Christ lived and taught. The important point is that this journey is a spiritual one. An excellent literary illustration of this mnemonic process is Henry Vaughan’s poem The Search, in which the meditating ego passes from station to station in the life of Jesus Christ: ’Tis now cleare day: I see a Rose Bud in the bright East, and disclose The Pilgrim-Sunne; all night have I Spent in a roving Extasie To find my Saviour; I have been As far as Bethlem, and have seen His Inne, and Cradle; Being there I met the Wise-men, askt them where He might be found, or what starre can Now point him out, grown up a Man? In Egypt hence I fled, ran o’re All her parcht bosome to Nile’s shore Her yearly nurse; came back, enquir’d Amongst the Doctors, and desir’d To see the Temple, but was shown A little dust, and for the Town A heap of ashes, where some sed A small bright sparkle was a bed, Which would one day (beneath the pole,) Awake, and then refine the whole. Tyr’d here, I come to Sychar; thence To Jacobs wel, bequeathed since Unto his sonnes, (where often they In those calme, golden Evenings lay Watring their flocks, and having spent Those white dayes, drove home to the Tent Their well-fleec’d traine;) And there (O fate!) I sit, where once my Saviour sate; The angry Spring in bubbles swell’d 90

Sir William Davenant, Preface to Gondibert (1650),” in: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J.E. Spingarn, vol. II, p. 20.

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Which broke in sighes still, as they fill’d, And whisper’d, Jesus had been there But Jacobs children would not heare. Loath hence to part, at last I rise But with the fountain in my Eyes, And here a fresh search is decreed He must be found, where he did bleed; I walke the garden, and there see Idea’s of his Agonie, And moving anguishments that set His blest face in a bloudy sweat; I climb’d the Hill, perus’d the Crosse Hung with my gaine, and his great losse, Never did tree beare fruit like this, Balsam of Soules, the bodyes blisse; But, O his grave! where I saw lent (For he had none,) a Monument, An undefil’d, and new-heaw’d one, But there was not the Corner-stone; Sure (then said I,) my Quest is vaine, Hee’le not be found, where he was slaine, So mild a Lamb can never be ‘Midst so much bloud, and Crueltie; I’le to the Wilderness, and can Find beasts more mercifull then man, He liv’d there safe, ‘twas his retreat From the fierce Jew, and Herods heat, And forty dayes withstood the fell, And high temptations of hell; With Seraphins there talked he His fathers flaming ministrie, He heav’nd their walks, and with his eyes Made those wild shades a Paradise, Thus was the desert sanctified To be the refuge of his bride; I’l thither then; see, It is day, The Sun’s broke through to guide my way. 91

The meditating speaker sets out on a spiritual quest which makes him see and experience with his mind’s eye all those places where Jesus once had spent and lost his life - from the manger in Bethlehem to the cross on the hill of Golgotha. Yet he cannot find him in any of those mnemonic places and therefore continues his spiritual imitatio Christi by withdrawing into a 91

Henry Vaughan, Works. Ed. L.C. Martin, pp. 405-407.

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desert where once Jesus had fasted and meditated for forty days. But when even this attempt of meeting him fails, he is addressed by a voice singing thus: “Search well another world; who studies this, / Travels in Clouds, seeks Manna, where none is.” 92 In Vaughan’s poem The Search as well as in all the other meditative works the mnemonic experience becomes public by achieving that enargeia or evidence of rhetorical communication which is the outstanding mark of a good poeta mnemonicus. This may also be gathered from the physico-meditative proof of the existence of God by Thomas Traherne: His Power is evident by Upholding it all. But how shall His Life appear in that which is Dead. Life is the Root of Activity and Motion. Did I see a man sitting in a Chair, as long as he was quiet, I could not tell but His Body was inanimat: but if He stirred, if He moved his Lips, or stretched forth his Arms, if he breathd or twinkled with his Eys: I could easily tell He had a Soul within Him. Motion being a far greater Evidence of Life, then all Lineaments whatsoever. Colors and features may be in a dead picture, but Motion is always attended with life. What shall I think therfore when the Winds Blow, the Seas roar, the Waters flow, the Vapours ascend, the Clouds flie, the Drops of rain fall, the Stars march forth in Armies, the Sun runneth Swiftly round about the World? Can all these things move so without a Life, or Spring of Motion? But the Wheels in Watches mov, and so doth the Hand that pointeth out the figures. This being a Motion of Dead things. Therfore hath GOD created Living ones: that by Lively Motions and Sensible Desires, we might be sensible of a Diety. They Breath, they see, they feel, they Grow, they flourish, they know, they lov. O what a World of Evidences. (Cent.II.22) 93

What is said here about the mundus symbolicus of Nature can be applied, on a metapoetic level, to the mundus symbolicus of mnemonic literature as well. In Traherne’s view even painting may serve as a mirror for illustrating the beings of Nature, but in a negative way; for it provides static images, not moving ones. The liveliness of Nature is a hieroglyph for the existence of God as the Unmoved Mover. By analogy a lively image betrays the true artist who is endowed with a creative mnemonic imagination. Its artistic products represent indeed “a world of evidences.”

6. Memoria in the Eyes of Antagonists and Revivalists It is no secret that the classical ars memorativa was under heavy attack from critical humanists and Puritans who instead recommended logical techniques 92 93

Vaughan, Works. Ed. L.C. Martin, p. 407. Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries, and Three Thanksgivings. Ed. A. Ridler. London: Oxford University Press, 1966, pp. 224-225.

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of memorizing, mostly of a Ramistic origin. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim questions the usefulness of the Art of Memory: This is that Arte, whiche in times paste being offered to Themistocles by Simonides, or by some other, he saide: I had leifer forget, bycause I remember many thinges, that I would not, and cannot forgette that I woulde. And Quintilian speaking of Metrodorus, saithe: Doubtelesse his vanitie & boasting was to auaunte of his Memorie rather gotten by Arte, than giuen by nature. Cicero hath written thereof in his newe Rhetorike, Quintilian in his Institutions, Seneca, and of the fresher sorte, Franciscus Petrarcha, Mareolus of Verona, Petrus of Rauenna, and Hermannus Buschius, and others, but vnworthie of rehersal, men little knowen: and many dayly professe this, but there is none founde, that hath muche profited in it, and the teachers thereof doe oftentimes in stead of gaine receiue reproche. For some knaues are wonte oftentimes in the Scholes with profession of this Arte to beguile scollers with the strangenesse of the thing, craftily to despoile the vnaduised of their monie. Finally it is a childishe bragge to boaste of Memorie: it is a shamefull thing, and a shamelesse mannes propertie to set out in al mens sighte, the reading of many thinges, like as Marchaunts doe their wares: whereas in the meane while the house is emptie. 94

Besides the alleged uselessness of the ars memorativa, Agrippa criticizes here the memory artist (Figure 38) and memory teacher as mere braggarts and even impostors in their trade. While this critique by a humanist who himself had been a public orator was part of a debate among scholars and hence not very influential in Renaissance society, the theological condemnation of the Art of Memory had a far greater impact on public opinion. In his Art of Prophecying the prominent Cambridge Puritan William Perkins writes: Artificiall memorie, which standeth upon places and images, will very easily without labour teach how to commit sermons to the memorie: but it is not to be 94

Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, of the Vanitie and vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences: Englished by Ia. San. Gent. […] Imprinted at London, by Henrie Bynneman, dwelling in Knightryder streete, at the signe of the Mermayde. 1577, p. 25. - Latin text: “Hanc [sc. artem memoratiuam] itaque cu`m Simonides aut alius quiuis Themistocli obtulisset, ait ille: obliuionis mallem, nam multa memoro quae nollem, obliuisci non possum quae vellem. Et Quintilianus de Metrodoro: Vanitas, inquit, nimirum fuit atque iactatio, circa memoriam suam, potius arte qua`m natura gloriantis. Scripserunt de ea Cicero lib. Rhetoricorum nouorum, & Quintil. in institutionibus, & Seneca: & ex recentioribus Franciscus Petrarcha, Mateol. veronensis, Petrus Rauennas, & Hermannus Buschius, & alij, sed indigni catalogo, obscuri homines permulti &, multi hanc quotidie profitentur, sed non reperitur, qui in ea multu`m proficiat, & magistri eius pro lucro infamiam saepe reportant. Solent enim in gymnasijs plerunque huius artis professione nebulones quiddam scholaribus imponere ac rei nouitate pecuniolam ab incautis emungere: denique puerilis gloria est ostentare memoriam: turpe & impudentis est, multarum rerum lectionem instar mercimoniorum ante fores explicare, cu`m interim vacua domus sit.” (From: Das enzyklopädische Gedächtnis der Frühen Neuzeit: Enzyklopädie- und Lexikonartikel zur Mnemonik. Ed. J.J. Berns & W. Neuber. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998, p. 34.)

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Figure 38: The memory artist (woodcut by the “Petrarca artist” [Hans Weidlitz?], Augsburg 1532).

approved. 1. The animation of the image, which is the key of memorie, is impious; because it requireth absurd, insolent and prodigious cogitations, and those especially, which set an edge upon and kindle the most corrupt affections of the flesh. 2. It dulleth the wit and memorie, because it requireth a threefold memorie for one: the first of the places: the second of the images: the third of the thing that is to bee declared. 95

The main attack against the rhetorical ars memorativa is directed against the affections it is supposed to engender, though in the view of moderate Protestants, such as William Fenner in his Treatise of the Affections (1641), they were judged positively when channeled in the right manner. 96 The question to be addressed to Perkins from a modern perspective is whether it is not this very “triple task” together with the affections so strongly condemned by him that constitute the true essence of poetry. John Bunyan (1628-1688) knew this, when, in “The Authors Apology for His Book,” he referred to the “Types, Shadows and Metaphors” of the Bible as 95

96

William Perkins, “The Art of Prophecying”, in: The Works of … William Perkins … the Second Volume: Newly Corrected According to his owne Copies, etc. London: John Legatt, 1631, p. 670. William Fenner, A Treatise of the Affections; or The Soules Pulse. Whereby a Christian may know whether he be living or dying. Together with a description of their Nature, Signes, and Symptomes. London, Printed by E.G. for I. Rothwell, at the signe of the Sunne in Pauls Church-yard. 1641.

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aesthetic guidelines for his novel The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). 97 His contemporaries, predecessors and successors must have thought no differently; for they constructed numerous memory architectures. Henry Colman wrote a series of poems entitled Divine Meditations (1640) which he initiated with a mnemonic poem The Altar in the manner of the poem with the same title in George Herbert’s The Temple (1633): Behold oˆ Lord thy servant offers thee A broken Altar, ‘tis a heart both free Humble, and contrite, drown’d in teares High swoll’n with sighes, with sobbes, with feares. Accept it I thee pray, And then on it I’l lay In sacrifice A soule renew’d, And still devise By pray’r t’intrude Thy mercy seate For wondrous greate Thy goodnes is, each houre I’l magnifie thy power, And as to thee alone I offer, Soe (I beseech thee) doe not suffer, Although the brittle Altar passe to Clay, The precious Incense to be cast away. 98

Henry Colman’s cycle of meditative poems was preserved in manuscript form until 1979. They were signed by “H: C: Philo-poeticus. / Studiosus diem diuidit. Otiosus frangit / Secundo Julij /Anno / 1640.” and contain a number of poems which the author clearly designed as pattern poems. This is evident from the manuscript rendering of The Altar (Figure 39), where the strokes of the author’s pen emphasize his synaesthetic intention. Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670) published his elementary educational work Orbis sensualium pictus (1658) based on an intermedial mnemonic concept; it won international acclaim and was widely disseminated in Renaissance Europe. 99 On the other hand the Bilder=Bibeln (pictorial bibles) of Johannes Buno display more complicated, mannerist memory pictures; they contain a number of woodcuts which symbolize the chapters of the Gospels. 97 98

99

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 4. Henry Colman, Divine Meditations (1640). Ed. K.E. Steanson. Published for the Elizabethan Club. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 71. Cf. Werner Hüllen, “Picturae sunt totius mundi icones: Some Deliberations on Lexicography, ars memorativa and the Orbis sensualium pictus,” Acta Comeniana 10 (1993), 129-140.

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Figure 39: Henry Colman: Divine Meditations (1640), “The Altar.”

The eagle stands for the Gospel according to Saint John, of which the first chapter with the titulus “Primum de Trinitate & de verbo incarnato” deals with the Holy Trinity (Figure 40). 100 With his mannerist mnemonic configu100

Cf. Gerhard F. Strasser, Emblematik und Mnemonik der Frühen Neuzeit im Zusammenspiel: Johannes Buno und Johann Justus Winkelmann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000, pp. 20-22. An explication of this complex figure is given by J.M. Massing: “The designer of the woodcut [..] has represented (as 1) the Father and the Son to either side of the head of the eagle, and the dove of the Holy Ghost perched on its head. An inscription on the preceding page (De trinitate et de verbo incarnato, etc.) specified that this refers to the Trinity and the incarnation. The next image (2), of a lute, refers to the festivities at the Wedding at Cana while the three bags suspended from it, quite obviously, allude to the merchants driven out of

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Figure 40: Johannes Buno (1617-1697): Rationarum euangelistarum (1647), first mnemonic image on the gospel of Saint John.

rations Johannes Buno did not meet with common assent but was sometimes reprehended for lack of intelligibility, as by Christian Röttgen, rector of the Kreuzschule at Dresden: the temple (De nuptiis in Chana Galilee et numulariis extra templum pulsis), all from the second chapter of St. John. The third symbol (3) is intended as a womb and refers to the discussion between Christ and Nicodemus (De Nicodemo), a member of the Jewish Council, found in chapter three (John 3, 45).[…] The bucket and the crown (4) refer to the fourth chapter, respectively to Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, and the cure

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Es hat ja der bekannte Bildermann, Johann Buno, die Institutiones Justiniani und die Universal=Historie in so seltsamen Bildern vorgestellet / daß man sich drüber brechen möchte. Denn erstlich siehet ein junger Knabe lauter alberne Chimeren, die zu gar nichts nutze sind: hernach muß er zweyerley lernen, erstlich die abgeschmackten Bilder, und denn die Sache selbst. Das ist nicht vernunftmässig gehandelt. 101

This was written in the Age of Enlightenment, which rejected all kinds of representation that did not stand the test of rationality. In the preceding century matters were different. Thus, at the end of his treatise wittily titled Ars Mnemonica, sive Hersonus Bruxiatus; vel Bruxus Herdsoniatus (London, 1651), Henry Herdson proudly unfolds the broad range of the ars memorativa by enumerating its “useful authors”: Prosunt Hieroglyphica Pierij. Et Emblemata Alciati. Comes Natalis in explicandis fabulis Poeticis. Textor & similes: Adagia Erasmi, & similitudines, item picturae. Cicero in Oratore. Author ad Herennium, Quintilianus, Rhetores omnes, Ravennas, Margarita Philosophica, Mergius, Gratarolus, Joannes Austriacus, Rosellius, Notanes, Lullus, Syntaxis Gregorij Tolosani, Marfiotus, Chartiludium Logicum Muneri. 102

Besides grammars and rhetorics, the Art of Memory plays an important role in hieroglyphs, emblems, commonplace books, mythological handbooks, and encyclopedias of all kinds. In such works as these Renaissance authors employ a seemingly obsolete rhetorical technique with great success. With the late Renaissance, however, the Art of Memory and the history of mnemonic meditation did not come to an end. In his preface to the

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of the son of an officer in the royal service effected by Christ at Cana (De muliere Samaritana circa fontem & de regulo). The fish (5) symbolises the Pool at Bethesda (De piscina probatica) where Jesus cured a cripple, while the two smaller fish and five loaves on the upper right more obviously stand for the multiplication of the loaves; the host with a cross on it (6) denotes that this miracle is a figure of the eucharist (De quinque panis et de eukaristia). The woodcut clearly functions as an aid to memorising content and indicating the order of the chapters. No doubt, like other such late medieval images, it would have been carefully analysed, discussed and memorised.” (Jean Michel Massing, “From Manuscripts to Engravings: Late Medieval Mnemonic Bibles,” in: J.J. Berns & W. Neuber (eds.), Ars Memorativa: Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400-1750. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993, pp. 101-115, here: pp. 104-105. Christian Schöttgen, Ars scholastica, worinnen, nebst einem gründlichen Auszuge derer auserlesensten Programmatvm, der gegenwärtige Zustand Derer Berühmtesten Schulen und der dahin gehörigen Gelehrsamkeit entdecket wird. Nürnberg: Stein & Raspe, 1747, quoted in: G.F. Strasser, Emblematik und Mnemonik der Frühen Neuzeit, p. 96. Henry Herdson, Ars Mnemonica, sive Herdsonus Bruxiatus; vel Bruxus Hersoniatus. Londini: Typis G. Dawson, 1651, p. 40. - In his English memory theory Ars Memoriae: The Art of Memory Made Plaine. London, Printed by Gartrude Dawson, in Aldersgate-street. 1651, pp. 90-91, Herdson analyses as more modern mnemonic techniques the “memory of quotations” and stenography.

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second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) William Wordsworth (1770-1850) states that “[poetry] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” 103 Here memoria is identified with recollectio or recordatio (Quintilian). 104 In poems like Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, and Memorials of a Tour in Scotland (1803, 1814) local memory is revitalized and serves as source of poetic creations. In a similar way the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) created meditative poems on both architectural and natural loci such as Manhattan and Brooklyn Ferry as well as the Leaves of Grass and the Garden the World. Numerous examples could be adduced to illustrate the continuity of the ars memorativa even into the Age of Modernism and Postmodernism. Their discovery and interpretation form part of a general history of culture. As a last reference, we can identify a possible postmodern arrangement of memory architectures in Umberto Eco’s novel Il nome della rosa. There we find an abbey, a church, and a tower (the Library) - all buildings that stand in the tradition of the ars memorativa. If this interpretation should prove correct, and there is evidence to support it, the ancient myth is once again confirmed that the Muses are daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne - that is, of Memory.

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William Wordsworth, “Poetry and Poetic Diction” (1800), in: English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century). Ed. E.D. Jones. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 22. Cf. Klaus Dockhorn, “Memoria in der Rhetorik (1964),” in: K. Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik. Bad Homburg v.d.H. / Berlin / Zürich: Gehlen, 1968, pp. 96-104, here: p. 98. Dockhorn refers to Friedrich Schiller’s statement concerning the poet: “aus der sanften und fernenden Erinnerung mag er [der Dichter] dichten.” As with Wordsworth, the emphasis is here on moderate affections or ethos.

Actio Poetica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Acting and Poetry 0. Prologue: Theatrum (dis)simulationis “Totus mundus agit histrionem” - this motto of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (1599) can serve as a key to understanding the Renaissance era. Not only is this the cultural epoch that ushers in the drama of modernity, it also interprets reality and its manifestations as theatre. The world as a stage, man as an actor - this notion like no other dominates the age of the Renaissance. As an interpretation of the condition humaine it embraces the entire spectrum of conceptual possibilities, from the optimistic in Juan Luis Vives’ Fabula de homine to the fatalistic of Jacques’ monologue “All the world’s a stage” in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It (II.vii.139). 1 At the one extreme a human being appears as a Proteus, whose repertoire of roles even includes the mask of Jupiter; at the other extreme he proceeds through the predetermined seven stages of life, finally reaching his last role ‘sans everything.’ The theatrum mundi offers the homo histrio a host of alternatives - that much Shakespeare’s dramas make clear. 2 1

2

On the concept of theatrum mundi cf. J. Jacquot, “Le ‘ The´aˆtre du Monde’ de Shakespeare a` Caldero´n,” Revue de Litte´rature Compare´e 31 (1957), 341-372; Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Richard Alewyn, Das große Welttheater: Die Epoche der höfischen Feste. München: Beck, 21985; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973; Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik: Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970, rpt. 2000, pp. 86-131; Brian Vickers, “Bacon’s Use of Theatrical Imagery,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 4 (1971), 189-226; Franz Link / Günter Niggl (eds.), Theatrum Mundi: Götter, Gott und Spielleiter im Drama von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1981; Theatrum Mundi: Figuren der Barockästhetik in Spanien und Hispano-Amerika. Ed. M. Bosse et al. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1997; Theatrum Mundi: Die Welt als Bühne. Ed. U. Küster. Wolfratshausen: Ed. Minerva, 2003. On the metaphor of the theatre and the concept of play-acting in Shakespeare, see, among others, Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; G. E. Bentley (ed.), The Seventeenth Century Stage: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1968; James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971; Thomas F. van Laan, Role-playing in Shake-

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The following discussion is devoted to the rhetorical conceptualizations of the theatrical. The two underlying principles here are simulatio and dissimulatio. Simulation in the rhetorical sense refers to the acting-as-if, or a feigning of that which is not present (res absens), dissimulation on the other hand to the acting-as-if-not, or a concealing of that which is present (res praesens). 3 Common to both are the characteristics fictive, artificial, and affective. For neither simulation nor dissimulation creates a reality but merely the semblance of such; the orator who dissembles is therefore an actor. In addition, neither form of rhetorical illusion originates in naturalness but exclusively in the ars rhetorica; the orator who stages a drama is therefore an artist in the literal sense of the word. This means that simulation and dissimulation are not an end in themselves but always serve goal-oriented, affective persuasion. The orator is therefore a psychagogue, his aim extreme pathos. The combination of the three components fictiveness, artificiality, and affectivity in the act of dissembling is the foundation for a theatrum rhetoricum, in which the orator is a psychagogue, the listener an empathetic spectator, the presentation a dramatic illusion, the effect pathos. Rhetorical dissembling manifests itself in words and actions, that is, in the media of elocutio and actio. In the first case there is a staging of language, in the second a staging of the body. The rhetorical illusion of the play of the body falls under the competence of the orator as an actor (and vice-versa), that of the play of language under his competence as a poet (and viceversa). Both aspects will be discussed in detail in the following pages. A few concluding observations will be devoted to the conceptions of the courtier and politician in the Renaissance. Here the theatrum rhetoricum becomes the arena of social and political action.

3

speare. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1978; Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1979; Michael Shapiro, “Role-playing, Reflexivity, and Metadrama in Recent Shakespearean Criticism,” Renaissance Drama, N.S., 12 (1981) 145-161; David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1984; Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Urbana / Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984, chaps. II + VI; Ekbert Faas, Shakespeare’s Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 28-51. Cf. August Buck, “Die Kunst der Verstellung im Zeitalter des Barocks,” Festschrift der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981, pp. 85-103; Wolfgang G. Müller, “Ironie, Lüge, Simulation, Dissimulation und verwandte rhetorische Termini,” in: Zur Terminologie in der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. C. Wagenknecht. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989, pp. 189-208; Ursula Geitner, Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992.

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1. Theatrum Actionis, or Stagings of the Body In Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Coriolanus, Volumnia, the mother of the protagonist, gives her son advice on how to deal with the plebs: Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand, And thus far having stretch’d it (here be with them), Thy knee bussing the stones (for in such business Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant More learned than the ears), waving thy head, Which often thus correcting thy stout heart, Now humble as the ripest mulberry That will not hold the handling: […]. (III.ii.73-80) 4

The equation of “action” and eloquence here carries multiple meanings. First of all, “action” signifies a physical “act,” a pantomimic action directed at the eye and immediately comprehensible without any use of language. “Action” is in addition a technical term in rhetoric, identical to the delivery of the oration, the fifth stage in the scheme of rhetorical text production. Finally, “action” also denotes “drama” and thus refers to the role of the humble person Coriolanus is told to play in order to deceive the simple plebeians. Actio(n) with the component meanings “act,” “delivery of oration,” and “drama” constitutes a semantic unity to the extent that each presupposes a physical presence. This is also the feature that distinguishes actional evidence from lower forms of evidence. As Thomas Heywood writes in his An Apology for Actors (1612): A description is only a shadow, received by the eare, but not perceived by the eye; so lively portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture to moove the spirits of the beholder to admiration: but to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier; to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling upon the bulkes of kinges; a Troilus returning from the field, as if man and horse, even from the steed’s rough fetlockes to the plume on the champion’s helmet, had bene together plunged into a purple ocean; to see a Pompey ride in triumph, then a Caesar conquer that Pompey; labouring Hannibal alive, hewing his passage through the Alpes. To see as I have seene, Hercules, in his owne shape, hunting the boare, knocking down the bull, taming the hart, fighting with Hydra, murdering Geryon, slaughtering Diomed, wounding the Stymphalides, killing the Centaurs, pashing the lion, squeezing the dragon, dragging Cerberus in chaynes, and

4

All quotations are from the Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

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lastly, on his high pyramides writing. Nil ultra, Oh, these were sights to make an Alexander! 5

There is thus a three-level scale of evidence: (1) acoustic (descriptive) directed only at the ear, (2) optical (iconic), only at the eye, and (3) actional, simultaneously at both ear and eye. In terms of effect, actional evidence has the greatest potency. This is particularly true of theatrical action. Apologists like Heywood ascribe to it a moral effect; their opponents fear the opposite. 6 Both groups agree on one thing, however: actions elicit actions. Volumnia’s equation of “action” and “eloquence” highlights the last of the five parts of rhetoric, known as the pronuntiatio or actio. 7 A Demosthenes 5

6

Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612). London: Shakespeare Society, 1841, rpt. Nendeln: Kraus, 1966, pp. 20-21. - Cf. Owen Felltham, Resolves: A Duple Century. London: Seile, 31628, rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / Norwood, N.J.: Johnson, 1975, p. 70: “Things acted, possesse vs more, and are too more retaineable, then the passable tones of the tongue.” In his Refutation of Heywood’s Apology, I.G. [= John Greene?], London: W. White, 1615, rpt. P. Davison. New York / London: Johnson, 1972, p. 56 attacks the theatrical actio as follows: The action in deede is the setting forth of all enormities, and exorbitances, with the personating of the doers of them; with false representations, lying shewes, killing, stabbing, hanging, and fighting; actiue demonstration of cosenage, whorish enticeing, all kinde of villany, and hypocrisie. Joannes Ferrarius in A Woorke of Ferrarius Montanus, touchynge the good ordrynge of a common weale. London: J. Kingston, 1559; rpt. P. Davison. New York / London: Johnson, 1972, p. 100v already condemns theatrical representation with equal vehemence, in the full awareness of its relation to classical rhetoric. […] it is meruailous to consider, how that gesturing, whiche Tullie elegantlie tearmeth, the eloquence of the bodie, is able to moue any manne, and to prepare him to that which is euill, considering that soche thinges be bothe disclosed to the iye and eare, as might a great deale more godlilye be kepte close, & to the greater benefite of the audience.

7

The Puritan opposition to the theatre is presented in Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970; Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Baudrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson. Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974, pp. 1-67; and, from a broader perspective, in Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1981, chaps. IV-VI. For classical terminology cf. the references in Ursula Maier-Eichhorn, Die Gestikulation in Quintilians Rhetorik. Frankfurt/M. / Bern / New York / Paris: Lang, 1989, pp. 11-14. The nomenclature fluctuates in the Renaissance: Gerhard Johannes Vossius, Commentariorum Rhetoricorvm, sive Oratoriarum Institutionum Libri Sex. Editio Tertia. Leiden: J. Maire, 1630, rpt. Kronberg/Ts., Germany, 1974, bk. II, p. 498 speaks of pronunciatio sive actio, but gives preference to the first term; Charles Butler, Rhetoricae Libri Duo. Oxford: J. Barnes, 1598, sig. F3v and Thomas Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus. London: F. Kingston, 1625, rpt. Menston: Scolar Press, 1970, p. 30 opt for pronuntiatio, as does Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1983, p. 431 in the anglicized form pronunciation.

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anecdote illustrates the importance that the art of rhetoric attaches to the technique of delivery. When asked three times about the most important element of rhetoric, the famous orator’s answer was in each case the actio. 8 The delivery presupposes a situation of oral communication and for this reason has no place in epistolary theory. In the classical tradition the theory of actio comprises two areas: that of the human voice (vox) and of gesture (gestus). In the seventeenth century some attempts were made to extract the rhetorical doctrine of delivery from the five-part scheme; in the English development this leads to the (misleading) term elocution. 9 The doctrine of the human voice (pronuntiatio) shades into phonetics, as Robert Robinson’s The Art of Pronunciation (1617) makes clear. The actio doctrine gives rise to a theory of non-verbal communication, which comes to be applied to visual forms of representation. This will be discussed later.

1.1. The Orator as Actor In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus the third meaning which Volumnia attaches to the term “action” (III.ii.76) is the theatrical one: Coriolanus is told to feign humility but at the same time to conceal his true nature. This implies a double act of deception, both simulation and dissimulation. The orator, in other words, becomes an actor. This is not a completely new idea, for y«po¬krisiw, the Greek term for the art of delivery, also means “hypocrisy” and “dissembling”; and both y«pokrith¬w and the Latin actor first denotes “actor” but later “orator” as well. 10 Classical theoreticians frequently point out that the orator

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The English translation of Juan de Dios Huarte Navarros’s Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of Mens Wits. Translated out of the Spanish tongue by Camillo Camilli. Englished out of his Italian by Richard Carew, Esquire. London: A. Islip, 1594, rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, pp. 134-135, on the other hand, uses the term “action.” Cf. Cicero, De Or. III.lvi.213; id., Or. 17.56; Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.6. - Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 431: “Pronunciation”; Andreas Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching. Trans. John Ludham. London: East, 1577, p. 44r; Charles Butler, Rhetoricae Libri Duo. Oxford: J. Barnes, 1598, sig. F3v; Owen Felltham, Resolves. London: H. Seile, 31628, p. 71; Gerhard Johannes Vossius, Commentariorum Rhetoricorum, sive Oratoriarum Institutionum libri sex. Leiden: J. Maire 31630, bk. II, p. 498. - Francis Bacon, Essays. Ed. O. Smeaton. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1955, p. 35 begins his essay XII: “Of Boldness” with the Demosthenes anecdote, which he calls “a trivial grammar-school text.” Cf. Wilbur S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 145-256. References in Maier-Eichhorn, Die Gestikulation, pp. 11-14.

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can learn from the actor how to hone his persuasive skills. Cicero expresses this pointedly in his De Oratore (I.v.18): Nam quid ego de actione ipsa plura dicam? quae motu corporis, quae gestu, quae vultu, quae vocis conformatione ac varietate moderanda est; quae sola per se ipsa quanta sit, histrionum levis ars et scaena declarat: in qua cum omnes in oris, et vocis, et motus moderatione elaborent, quis ignorat, quam pauci sint, fuerintque, quos animo aequo spectare possimus? 11

The most reliable means an orator can use to achieve his goal of persuasion is the simulation of affects, for - as a principle of rhetoric states - only the person who is himself moved can move others. 12 Andreas Hyperius formulates this requirement as follows, quoted here in the English translation by John Ludham (1577) intended for the Protestant preacher: Before all thinges it is very necessary that hee which speaketh, doe conceyue such lyke affections in his mynde, and rayse them vpp in himselfe, yea, and (after a sorte) shewe them forth to be seene vnto others, as hee coueteth to bee translated into the myndes of his auditors. For hee that both in wordes, voyce, countenaunce, and apte gesture, declareth himselfe to lamente and bee sory either for the perill of some, or for the common misery of all men, hee alone seemeth forthwyth to prouoke the residewe to pitie and compassion. 13

The self-inducement of emotion is a theatrical act, which can only succeed if all the components of the delivery - language, voice, facial expression, gesture - are in harmony. As an artificial product that can be repeated at any time, it is subject to the rules of rhetoric. One of the techniques of effective autosuggestion, according to Hyperius-Ludham is a vehement imagination or fantasy, when a man with most attentiue cogitation apprehendeth, and depaynteth to himselfe the formes and simylitudes of the thinges whereof hee entreateth, which afterwarde he so fixeth & setleth in his minde, as if his owne priuate cause were in handling, and as though hee shoulde perpetually muse vppon that thinge alone. 14 11

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Trans. E.W. Sutton: “And why should I go on to describe the speaker’s delivery? That needs to be controlled by bodily carriage, gesture, play of features and changing intonation of voice; and how important that is wholly by itself, the actor’s trivial art and the stage proclaim; for there, although all are labouring to regulate the expression, the voice, and the movements of the body, every one knows how few actors there are, or ever have been, whom we could bear to watch!” (Cicero, De Oratore. 2 vols. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967, vol. I, p. 15). - More classical references: Cicero, De Or. I.28.128, I.34.156, III.26.102; Quintilian, Inst. Or. I.11.12, II.10.13, III.8.51, VI.1.26, VI.1.52, XI.3.4, XI.3.178-182. Cf. Cicero, De Or. II.xlv.189; Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.2.26-36; Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 102103. – Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, pp. 272-273; Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus (1625), pp. 30-31. Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching (1577), p. 43r. Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching, p. 43v.

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The locus classicus of this argumentation is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (VI.ii.29-36), where the author recommends that the orator fantasize images (›antasi¬ai, visiones) in order to be able to feign emotions. A textbook example of an eyœ›antasi¬vtow is the tragedian who after removing his mask still has tears in his eyes. What the orator and the actor therefore have in common is that an inner actio forms the precondition for an effective outer actio. 15 A further look at the passage from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus reveals that the speaker Volumnia not only makes the actio absolute, but also ascribes to each of the gestures she mentions a specific semantic charge that makes speech superfluous. The doffing of the hat, the kneeling on the pavement, the bowing of the head - all these are conventionalized non-verbal signs of humility, even servility. The gestures thus have a ‘language’ of their own. Cicero already acknowledges this when he calls the actio “as it were” (quasi ) “body language” (sermo corporis [De Or. III.lix.222]) and even “body eloquence” (corporis eloquentia [Or. 17.55]). 16 Like many other theoreticians of the Renaissance, Thomas Wilson follows his lead here with his definition in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553): “Tullie saith well: the gesture of man, is the speache of his bodie.” 17 This kind of anthropomorphic metaphorizing of the actio is all the more justified if it achieves a greater persuasive effect than language itself: Atque in eis omnibus quae sunt actionis inest quaedam vis a natura data; quare etiam hac imperiti, hac vulgus, hac denique barbari maxime commoventur: verba enim neminem movent nisi eum qui eiusdem linguae societate coniunctus est, sententiaeque saepe acutae non acutorum hominum sensus praetervolant: actio, quae prae se motum animi fert, omnes movet; eisdem enim omnium animi motibus concitantur et eos eisdem notis et in aliis agnoscunt et in se ipsi indicant. 18 15

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17 18

The octolingual dictionary of Ambrosius Calepinus subsumes this technique under the term energia, which he defines as follows: “Energia itaque est quaedam quasi actio & operatio interior, quae est veluti via et dux ad exteriorem corporis actum” (Dictionarivm Octolingve, Geneva, 1609, s. v.). Huarte Navarro, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of Mens Wits (1594), p. 135 describes the “action” as “a worke of the imagination.” Cf. also Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde. London: V.S., 1601, rpt. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1973, pp. 196-197. Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.3.1 cites both Cicero passages. - Cf. also Vossius, Commentariorum Rhetoricorum (1630), vol. II, p. 498. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 437. Cicero, De Or. III.lix.223; translation: “And all the factors of delivery contain a certain force bestowed by nature; which moreover is the reason why it is delivery that has most effect on the ignorant and the mob and lastly on barbarians; for words influence nobody but the person allied to the speaker by sharing the same language, and clever ideas frequently outfly the understanding of people who are not clever, whereas delivery, which gives the emotion of the mind expression, influences everybody, for the same emotions are felt by all people and they both recognize them in others and manifest them in themselves by the same

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Volumnia’s words in Shakespeare’s drama seem to paraphrase Cicero’s formulation. There the actio represents a natural sign language comprehensible to everyone, even the uneducated and those untrained in language. From this it derives its superior persuasive quality. Volumnia points out to her son the advantages of this actional eloquence: on the one hand it is directly accessible, and on the other it spares the speaker the need to use treacherous words. In this case it functions as an instrument of dissembling. The rhetoric of the delivery comprises all imaginable forms of voice control and gesticulation. Taken together they form a rhetorical grammar of action, which is in turn divided into several sub-grammars, for such matters as foot, hand, or finger positions. The most detailed classical description of body eloquence can be found in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria XI.iii. Renaissance rhetorical treatises use this and other ancient sources as their point of departure when they present, in varying degrees of thoroughness, the actional categories, their operationalization, and their communicative (affective) dynamics. 19 This comes to involve ever-greater specialization. John Bulwer, for example, outlines in his Chironomia: Or, The Art of Manuall Rhetorique (1644) a hand rhetoric that elaborates on Quintilian’s presentation (Inst. Or. XI.iii.85124), adopting the postulate of naturalness to ascribe specific emotional effects to certain hand and finger movements. To cite one example: Canon XXXVII Both hands clasped and wrung together is an action convenient to manifest grief and sorrow. 20

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marks” (H. Rackham). (This passage is quoted by Charles Butler, Rhetoricae Libri Duo [1598], sig. F7v-F8r). - Francis Bacon, Essays. Ed. O. Smeaton. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1955, p. 35 considers the “action” the most superficial part of rhetoric, “rather the virtue of a player,” and thus an instrument that influences human foolishness. Cf. B.L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 21964, chap. I; Marc Fumaroli, “Le corps e´loquent: Une somme d’actio et pronuntiatio rhetorica au XVIIe sie`cle: Les Vacationes Autumnales du P. Louis de Cressolles (1620),” XVII e Sie`cle 33 (1981), 237-264; Emilio Bonfatti, “Vorläufige Hinweise zu einem Handbuch der Gebärdensprache im deutschen Barock: Giovanni Bonifacios Arte de Cenni (1616),” in: Virtus et Fortuna: Zur deutschen Literatur zwischen 1400 und 1700. FS H.-G. Roloff. Ed. J. Strelka & J. Jungmair. Bern / Frankfurt/M. / New York: Lang, 1983, pp. 393-405; Mechthild Albert, “L’Eloquence du corps: Conversation et se´miotique corporelle au sie`cle classique,” Germanischromanische Monatsschrift 39 (1989), 156-179; Dilwyn Knox , “Late Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Gesture,” in: Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder. Ed. V. Kapp. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990, pp. 11-39. John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand & Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Ed. J. W. Cleary. Carbondale / Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, p. 187. - Cf. on Bulwer also Anne-Marie Lecoq, “Nature et rhe´torique: De l’action oratoire a` l’e´loquence muette (John Bulwer),” XVII e Sie`cle 33 (1981), 265-277.

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A whole series of such actional schemes is illustrated in chirograms. Canon XXXVII quoted above, for example, is graphically presented in Table D in Field Y under the rubric “Dolebit.” Examples like these show that the theory of body eloquence can also be applied to other forms of visual communication. An early influence on the theory of art can be found in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pittura (1436). 21 But it also left traces in the physiognomy theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. 22 The same John Bulwer who authored the hand rhetoric also published a Chirologia: Or, The Natural Language of the Hand, which appeared in the same year and in the same volume as the Chironomia (Figure 41). The convention of the actional sign allows the orator, like the painter, to make himself understood without the use of words. He can draw on this inventory as he sees fit, combine roles of various types, and even exchange one for another as needed. As a theatrical artist of this kind the orator realizes the rhetorical principle of varietas. He is an embodiment of Proteus, the mythical archetype of metamorphosis. 23 In a poem entitled Eloquence Francis Thynne identifies both the forms of rhetoric and the multiplicity of their effects with this figure: But I this Proteus severall formes doe deeme, the force of Eloquence for to vnfould; for as he oft did make his shape to seeme a beast, a fowle, greene earth, or water cowlde, Soe devyne Eloquence, mens mindes doth change, Even as it lists, to like of thinges most straunge. 24 21

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24

Cf. John R. Spencer, “Ut rhetorica pictura: A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 26-44; Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton, 1967 (1940); Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, chap. II.6: “The Body and Its Language”; Lars Olaf Larsson, “Der Maler als Erzähler: Gebärdensprache und Mimik in der französischen Malerei und Kunsttheorie des 17. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel Charles Le Bruns,” in: Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder. Ed. V. Kapp, Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990, pp. 173-189. - The catalogue volume Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes: Zur Körpersprache in der Kunst. Ed. I.B. Fliedl & Ch. Geissmar. Salzburg: Residenz, 1992 ignores rhetoric. Cf. Rüdiger Campe, Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990, pp. 279-471. Natalis Comes - with an appeal to Lucian - interprets Proteus as, among other things, a comedy actor: “Au reste Lucian au Dialogue de la dance cuide que Protee ait este´ quelque comedien & ioüeur de farces, qui sceust si bien ioüer tous personnages, que se de´guisant en toutes facX ons il contrefist tout ce qu’il vouloit” (Mythologie. Lyons: P. Frelon, 1607, p. 846). Francis Thynne, Emblemes and Epigrames (A.D. 1600). Ed. F.J. Furnivall. EETS, OS, 64. London: Trübner, 1876, rpt. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1973, pp. 34-35 (vv.13-18). J.C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 73 C gives the name Proteus to a type of verse, “cuius verba toties sedes commutare queunt: vt innumeras pene` facies ostendant: Perfide sperasti diuos te fallere Proteu.”

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Figure 41: John Bulwer (fl. 1644-1654): Chirologia & Chironomia (1648), title-page and frontispiece with Mercury as the God of Eloquence.

In 1664 Richard Flecknoe celebrates Richard Burbage as “a delightful Proteus, […] wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes,” 25 thus making it clear that the protean finds artistic expression in the actor. The orator as a theatrical Proteus gives up his own identity when inventing fictional roles. This is the one, simulative aspect of rhetorical illusion. Its complement is dissimulation, the denial of rhetoric as the cause of illusion: Am I an orator, Alazon? no: Though it hath pleas’d the wiser few to say Demosthenes was not so eloquent… (III.iv)

With these words Eiron (“that, out of an itch to be thought modest, dissembles his qualities”) in Thomas Randolph’s The Muses’ Looking-Glass (1630) pretends to know nothing of rhetoric, although he has at his disposal great 25

In: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J.E. Spingarn. 3 vols. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957, vol. II, p. 95.

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skills of this sort. 26 He is thus practising the acting-as-if-not, here specifically the principle of ars est celare artem, which came to full bloom in the Renaissance. 27 The orator-as-actor is thus an ironist in two ways: as a simulation ironist he conceals his nature, and as a dissimulation ironist his art. Exemplary instances of this structure of histrionic rhetoric can be found in various dramas of Shakespeare. Prominent names on the list of orators are Marc Antony, Richard III, Iago, Edmund. The orations/dramas that they stage reveal them to be dissemblers 28 in perfect command of their role-play. Two virtuosi of this art are Gloucester, the later Richard III, and Buckingham in Shakespeare’s history play: Gloucester. Come, cousin, canst thou quake, and change thy color, Murther thy breath in middle of a word, And then again begin, and stop again, As if thou were distraught and mad with terror? Buckingham. Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian, Speak and look back, and pry on every side, Tremble and start at wagging of a straw; Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks Are at my service, like enforced smiles;

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Thomas Randolph, Poetical and Dramatic Works. Ed. W.C. Hazlitt. 2 vols. London: Reeves & Turner, 1875, vol. I, p. 235. - In Samuel Shaw’s Words Made Visible. London: B.G., 1679, rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1972, p.116 personified Irony declares to Eclogus: “Sure I am, that both your Daughter Voice, and your Son Gesture would be very plain and homely things, were it not for some Ironical dissimulation which they have borrow’d of me.” - John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d. London: E. Cotes, 1657, rpt. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1973, p. 45 equates ironia with simulatio: “[eiron] Simulator, qui aliter dicit ac sentit: from which Ironia is taken for dissimulation, whereby one thing is thought and another spoken.” This quotation shows that a clear distinction is not always made between simulation and dissimulation. On the theory of irony in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony. Leiden / New York: Brill, 1989. John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Ed. G. Watson. 2 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1964, vol. I, p. 79. - The ancient references for this theorem are collected by Harry Caplan in the Loeb edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (ad IV.7.10; pp. 250-251). The dissimulatio artis in classical treatises and works of Cicero is discussed by Christoff Neumeister, Grundsätze der forensischen Rhetorik. München: Hueber, 1964, pp. 130-155. - Ben Jonson, [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford / P. & E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952, vol. VIII, p. 632 states as a stylistic requirement, “to use (as Ladies doe in their attyre) a diligent kind of negligence, and their sportive freedome.” - Cf. also note 68. Cf. Brian Vickers, “Shakespeare’s Hypocrites,” in: Returning to Shakespeare. London / New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 89-134 and on individual plays: Wolfgang G. Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare. Tübingen: Narr, 1979, pp. 126-149.

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And both are ready in their offices At any time to grace my strategems. (Rich. III III.v.1-11)

Here vocal and mimetic-gesticulative forms of actio are made thematic. Each one has its own semantics: trembling, changing facial colour, and stammering convey distraction and fear, uncertain glances and nervous starting deep suspicion, etc. Both of these noble villains can vary them at will, in order to create the rhetorical illusion of ‘as if.’ This is precisely the distinguishing feature of simulation rhetoric, which conjures up unreal realities. The model that it imitates (‘counterfeits’) is the stage play. But the irony of dissimulation is also a mark of the theatrical orator. This becomes clear as the scene from Richard III unfolds further. Gloucester is to be offered the English crown in a coup d’e´tat, a move for which Buckingham intends to “play the orator”: I’ll play the orator As if the golden fee for which I plead Were for myself. (III.v.95-97)

These words betray the simulation ironist who invents an actio role, here that of the petitioner. But he has a very different role in mind for his conversation partner: The Mayor is here at hand. Intend some fear, Be not you spoke with but by mighty suit; And look you get a prayer-book in your hand, And stand between two churchmen, good my lord For on that ground I’ll make a holy descant And be not easily won to our requests: Play the maid’s part, still answer nay, and take it. (III.vii.45-51)

In a staged tableau vivant Gloucester is to appear as a representative of Christian humility, playing the part of the refuser, behind whom we can see the person nodding yes. This acting-as-if-not is a rhetorical masquerade; it dissimulates knowledge, strength, and artfulness in the pose of the inge´nu, a person weak and uncultivated. While simulation involves active creativity, dissimulation is passively negative. Both, however, are constitutive elements of the theatrum rhetoricum. 29 To return to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, we have seen that Volumnia recommends to the protagonist a rhetoric of theatrical action in order to attain his 29

Cf. on this point Bacon’s Essay VI: “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” which postulates three levels of the concealment of individuality (“a man’s self ”): 1. Silence (neutral); 2. Dissimulation (negative): “when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is”; 3. Simulation (affirmative): “when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not” (Essays, pp. 17-18).

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political goal of the consulate. As the deictic “thus” and “here” indicate, she even demonstrates for him, in some sort of theatrical rehearsal, details of his advanced rhetorical role, which according to Menenius Agrippa guarantee success. Yet Coriolanus doubts whether he can play his assigned part with any ‘naturalness’: You have put me now to such a part which never I shall discharge to th’life. (Cor. III.ii.105-106)

In the end he paints for himself the actional details of the decorum of the aspiring consul and decides against them: I will not do’t, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness. (Cor. III.ii.120-123)

The rhetorical drama of simulation assigned to Coriolanus necessarily entails a dissociation of body and mind. But he is no more able to accept this than the rhetorician Thomas Wilson, who with an appeal to the authority of Cicero, requires the following of the delivery: Tullie saith well: the gesture of man, is the speache of his bodie, and therfore reason it is, that lyke as the speache must agree to the matter, so must also the gesture agree to the mynde, for, the iyes are not geuen to man onely to se, but also to shewe, and set forth the meanyng of his mynde […]. 30

By following this maxim, Coriolanus preserves the unity of the rhetorical act and the integrity of his person. At the same time he transgresses the prevailing norm of social communication; he is declared an enemy of the people and forced into exile. Such is the fate of a vir bonus dicendi imperitus, who scorns all theatrical action, even the exhibition of expressive signa like the scars of his war wounds. Such signa were especially favoured in the lofty conclusion (peroratio) of the oration (Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.i.30). Cicero, in De Oratore II.xlvii.195, has Antonius recount how in a defence he tore off the tunic of his client and showed his scars, as a way to demand pity from the judges. 31 Coriolanus thus represents the anti-rhetorician, who rejects the theatrum rhetoricum as an arena of political opportunity. 30 31

Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, pp. 437-438; cf. Cicero, De or. III.59.222. Shakespeare departs significantly from his source here, the Plutarch translation of Sir Thomas North. In Plutarch Coriolanus follows the old custom without objection: “Now Martius, following this custom, showed many wounds and cuts upon his body, which he had received in seventeen years’ service at the wars” (Shakespeare’s Plutarch. Ed. T.J.B. Spencer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, p. 319). His rejection for reasons of state comes only at a later point.

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1.2. The Actor as Orator The Renaissance brought not only a dramatizing of rhetoric but also a rhetoricizing of the theatre. This is especially evident in attempts at a theory of drama, in apologies for the theatre, as well as in panegyrics on outstanding actors. Flecknoe, for example, extols Richard Burbage in 1664, ascribing to him the gradatio of “an excellent Orator, animating his words with speaking, and Speech with Action.” 32 Approximately half a century earlier John Webster began his ‘character’ entitled An excellent Actor (1615) in a similar fashion: Whatsoever is commendable in the grave Orator, is most exquisitly perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body, he charmes our attention: sit in a full Theater, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the Actor is the Center. 33

Here the actor appears as a theatrical version of the mythical Hercules Gallicus, who enthralled the barbarian Gauls with the golden fetters of his eloquence. In this capacity he uses the same body language as the orator - a point clearly made in the preface to the anonymous drama The Cyprian Conqueror (ca. 1633): Action is a power of so much efficatiousness that it is the eloquence of the body by which the mind has a generous impression, so that the voice, hands and eyes are made the instruments of eloquence. 34

This description of theatrical action could appear in either an ancient or a humanist rhetoric, for in both of them the criterion of a successful actio is the persuasive effect. Rhetoric offers the actor a prescriptive grammar of action from which he can draw ideas for shaping a role. The preface quoted above goes on to say: The other part of action is in the gesture, which must be various as required; as in a sorrowful part the head must hang down, in a proud the head must be lofty; in an amorous, closed eyes, hanging down looks and crossed arms, in a hasty, fuming and scratching the head, etc. 35

32 33

34 35

In: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J.E. Spingarn, vol. II, p. 95. John Webster, The Complete Works. Ed. F.L. Lucas. 4 vols. New York: Gordian Press, 1966, vol. IV, p. 42. In: Actors on Acting. Ed.T. Cole & H.K. Chinoy. New York: Crown, 1949, p. 89. In: Actors on Acting. Ed. T. Cole & H.K. Chinoy, p. 90. Cf. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike. Ed. E. Seaton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, p. 120-129; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, pp. 209-216.

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Here certain bodily signs are associated with certain affective roles (grief, pride, love, haste). In the early modern age the near identity of the arts of acting and rhetorical delivery was taken for granted. This explains why even in Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors it was sufficient to allude only briefly to rhetoric and, as the author emphasizes, to the prominent place it accords to “action.” 36 That actors commonly consulted rhetorical theories of actio also speaks from the polemical statement of a certain I.G. (John Greene?) in his Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615): “Surely M. Actor would be esteemed for a Rhetorician, and haue Plaies become one of the seuen liberall Arts.” 37 Only in the course of the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century did independent theories of acting evolve, which nevertheless bear unmistakable traces of their origin in rhetoric. 38 The German translation (1818) of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia (1806) still refers explicitly to the bond between the two ‘sister arts’ in its title, Die Kunst der rednerischen und theatralischen Declamation (The Art of Rhetorical and Theatrical Declamation). 39 The shortest but also most substantial Elizabethan rhetorical theory of acting is found in Hamlet’s famous speech to the players (III.ii.1-45). Since it is being dealt with at length elsewhere, it will appear only marginally in the following discussion. 40 An actor is expected to employ a body language that moves the spectator emotionally. This effect makes for a lifelike and lively performance, as a dialogue of the emperor with his freedman Epaphroditus makes clear in the anonymous drama Nero: Nero. Come Sirs, i’faith, how did you like my acting? […] Did I not doe it to the life? Epaphr. The very doing never was so lively As was this counterfeyting. 36 37

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40

Heywood, An Apology for Actors, p. 29. I.G. (John Greene?), A Refutation of the Apology for Actors. London: W. White, 1615, p. 18. The author was not far off the mark with this observation, as the parallel case of painters and sculptors shows. Cf. Angelica Godden, “Actio” and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting. Heidelberg: Winter, 1987; Volker Kapp (ed.), Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder: Rhetorik und nonverbale Kommunikation. Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990, p. 40-43. Facsimile Reprint: Hanau: Müller & Kiepenheuer, 1970. Sources mentioned are, among others, Cicero, Quintilian, Nicolas Caussin, Louis de Cressolles as well as the English ‘elocutionists’ of the 18th century, Thomas Sheridan und John Walker (cf. Howell, EighteenthCentury British Logic and Rhetoric, pp. 251-256). Further bibliographical references to the Elizabethan theory of acting in the chapter on “Hamlet’s Speech to the Players” in this book.

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Nero. And when I came Toth’ the point of Agripp- Clytemnestras death, Did it not move the feeling auditory? Epaphr. They had beene stones whom that could not have mov’d. (III.ii.1. 4-9) 41

The perfected art of acting, which manifests itself in the movere of the spectator, depends on a realistic imitatio vitae - here with a tinge of irony owing to Nero’s slip of the tongue. ‘Realistic’ in this context means ‘energetic,’ a rhetorical term to which English dramas of the Renaissance often appeal with such phrases as “acted to life” or “lively action.” 42 An energetic performance is characterized by a mimesis that is not only true to reality but above all effective. This is the essence of rhetorical realism. The way this theatrical realism produces its effect is illustrated in numerous anecdotes by apologists and panegyrists of the theatre. The following story is the one most frequently told. A criminal sees his downfall depicted on stage; deeply moved, he confuses theatrical illusion with reality and reveals himself to the astonished audience; in the end he makes a full confession. This set of anecdotes about the effect of a ‘lively’ performance includes the case reported by the actor Paris in Philip Massinger’s Drama The Roman Actor (1629): I once observ’d In a tragedy of ours in which a murder Was acted to the life, a guilty hearer Forc’d by the terror of a wounded conscience To make discovery of that which torture Could not wring from him. (II.i.90-95) 43

Sidney gives poetological depth to these actor anecdotes by citing an example mentioned in Plutarch as an illustration of tragic catharsis: Alexander Pheraeus, a notorious tyrant who shrank from no crime, was moved to tears while attending the performance of a tragedy “well made and represented.” 44 41

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44

Quoted from A Collection of Old English Plays. 4 vols. Ed. A.H. Bullen. New York / London: Blom, 1964, vol. I, p. 47. References: Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, p. 1 ff.; Alan S. Downer, “Prolegomenon to a Study of Elizabethan Acting,” Maske und Kothurn 7 (1964), 625-636; Andrew J. Gurr, “Who Strutted and Bellowed?” Shakespeare Survey 16 (1963), 95-102; id., “Elizabethan Action,” Studies in Philology 63 (1966), 144-156; David Klein, The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970, pp. 211-213, 217-218. Philip Massinger, “The Roman Actor (1629),” in: Five Stuart Tragedies. Ed. A. K. McIlwraith. London: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 345-346. The drama contains elements of a theory of acting. - Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors. London: Shakespeare Society, 1841, rpt. Nendeln: Kraus, pp. 57-60 reports several similar incidents, indicated by the marginal glosses: “A strange accident happening at a play.” Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 118.

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A dramatization of this concept is found in the performance of the play “The Murder of Gonzago” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The protagonist, who has heard of these actor anecdotes, stages a play with a plot reminiscent of events surrounding the death of his father. Like Alexander Pheraeus, Claudius undergoes a cathartic shock during the performance of this drama; but - in complete contrast to the popular anecdotes - he does not reveal himself to the audience. Orators are actores, while actors are imitatores of the truth - this is Cicero’s pointed formulation of the difference between the sister arts (De Or. III.lvi.214). Hamlet graphically describes the imitative character of theatrical performance with the metaphor of a mirror: “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature” (III.ii.22-23). Nature, in other words, must not be disfigured. As John Webster puts it ex negativo in An excellent Actor: He doth not strive to make nature monstrous, she is often seen in the same Scaene with him, but neither on Stilts nor Crutches; and for his voice, tis not lower then the prompter, nor lowder then the Foile and Target. 45

Thus the unnatural quality of mimesis consists in the indecorum of the theatrical action, which can in turn arise from two different types of shortcomings: either too little or too much in the way of performance. Too little in the pronuntiatio is barely audible whispering, too much is loud shouting. The rhetoric of Thomas Wilson cautions against the same errors in rhetorical delivery: Some speakes as thoughe they shoulde tel a tale in their sleeve. Some cries out so loude, that they would make a mans eares ake to heare them. 46

An analogous point is made with regard to the vitia of facial expression and gesticulation. They distort nature and produce scenic monstrosities. The problem is caused by a failure to follow the middle road between the two extremes. But decorum functions as a guardian of moderation; in the delivery it pays attention to an apte orderinge bothe of the voyce, countenaunce, and all the whole bodye, accordynge to the worthines of suche woordes and mater as by speache are declared. 47 45 46

47

Webster, Works, vol. IV, p. 42. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 435. - Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.45; Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, p. 116 B. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 431. - Cf. already John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes. Ed. H. Bergen. EETS, ES, 121-124. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, VI.3347-3351 (vol. III, pp. 764-765): An heuy mateer requereth an heuy cheer; To a glad mateer longeth weel gladnesse; Men in pronouncyng mut folwe the mateer, Old oratours kan bern herof witnesse, A furious compleynt vttrid in distresse.

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This decorum or aptum therefore coordinates the elements of the rhetorical actio with the performed verba and res. This law of the fitness of theme, style, and delivery of the oration, which the pedagogue William Kempe similarly requires of the teaching of rhetoric, 48 is also formulated by Thomas Heywood - with a reference to rhetoric - in An Apology for Actors 49 and by Hamlet in his instruction to the player: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (III.ii.17-19). The appropriateness of the components in fact guarantees the naturalness of the theatrical action. Nowhere is this rule expressed more clearly than in the introduction scene of The Taming of the Shrew, where the Lord recalls: but sure that part Was aptly fitted and naturally perform’d. (Ind. i.86-87)

“Fit” and “natural” stand in a relation of mutual determination; their interaction, however, is governed by rules of rhetoric, both in orations and in acting. Two examples from Shakespeare’s plays illustrate violations of theatrical decorum. The first is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second from Troilus and Cressida. In the one case the indecorum arises from a ‘too little,’ a lack of an adequate understanding of art. In the other it derives from a ‘too much,’ a hypertrophy of the artistic means. The result of the theatrical indecorum is in each case a disfiguring of nature. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the prologue of the rude mechanics’ play of Pyramus und Thisbe begins with the words: If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend,

48

49

Cf. also the presentation in Stephen Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure. Ed. W.E. Mead. EETS, OS, 173. London: Oxford University Press, 1928, p. 50-52. William Kempe, The Education of Children (1588), qtd. in T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s “Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.” 2 vols. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 21956, vol. I, p. 446: “Agayne, he [sc. the scholler] shall obserue not only euery trope, euery figure, aswell of words as of sentences; but also the Rhetoricall pronounciation and gesture fit for euery word, sentence, and affection.” - On the theory of decorum in the Renaissance cf. Rosamond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961, chap. IX: “The Criterion of Decorum” (pp. 192-247); Volker Sinemus, Poetik und Rhetorik im frühmodernen deutschen Staat: Sozialgeschichtliche Bedingungen des Normenwandels im 17. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978, chap. II: ‘Decorum-Lehre und Stiltheorie’ (pp. 53-206, 277-390 [with additional literature]). Heywood, An Apology for Actors, p. 29: “It [sc. rhetoricke] instructs him [sc. a scholler] to fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both.” - Cf. Lise-Lone Marker, “Nature and Decorum in the theory of Elizabethan Acting,” in: The Elizabethan Theatre II. Ed. D. Galloway. Toronto: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 87-107.

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But with good will. To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end. Consider then, we come but in despite. We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is. All for your delight We are not here. That you should here repent you, The actors are at hand; and, by their show, You shall know all, that you are like to know. (V.i.108-117)

The prologue, which normally serves as the captatio benevolentiae of the spectator, achieves exactly the opposite here, with its berating of the audience. This comes about through continuous violation of the decorum or aptum. Even before the beginning of the performance the master of the revels Philostrate warns: in all the play There is not one word apt, one player fitted. (V.i.64-65)

The specific indecorum of this pronuntiatio consists in the faulty distribution of pauses. This prompts comments from the audience: Theseus. This fellow does not stand upon points. Lysander. He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord: it is not enough to speak, but to speak true. (V.i.118121)

If the actor has no command of punctuation (“points,” “stop”), or - phonetically speaking - caesuras, he lacks rhetorical training in pronunciation. For as Thomas Heywood writes in An Apology for Actors: rhetoricke […] instructs him [sc. the scholler] to speake well, and with judgement to observe his commas, colons, and full poynts; his parentheses, his breathing spaces, and distinctions […]. 50

The technical shortcomings of the speaker of the prologue create a semantic inversion in the mechanics’ play. The original meaning is turned upside-down, as it were. Mere speaking does not in itself depict the truth; on the contrary, it creates an assortment of monstrosities. The audience reacts with incomprehension and laughter. 51 In Troilus and Cressida Ulysses tells Agamemnon how Achilles and his friend Patroclus amuse themselves while absenting themselves from the army: 50 51

Heywood, An Apology for Actors, p. 29. Cf. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 136: “[…] laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature”; p. 136: “We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight.” - Cicero, De Or. II.lviii.236 sees the ridiculum in turpitudo and deformitas.

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With him [sc. Achilles] Patroclus Upon a lazy bed the livelong day Breaks scurril jests, And with ridiculous and [awkward] action, Which, slanderer, he imitation calls, He pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon, The topless deputation he puts on, And like a strutting player, whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound ’Twixt his stretch’d footing and the scaffolage, Such to-be-pitied and o’er-wrested seeming He acts thy greatness in; and when he speaks, ’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms [unsquar’d], Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp’d Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff The large Achilles, on his press’d bed lolling, From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause, Cries, “Excellent! ‘tis Agamemnon right! Now play me Nestor, hem, and stroke thy beard, As he being dress’d to some oration.” That’s done, as near as the extremest ends Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife; Yet god Achilles still cries, “Excellent! ’Tis Nestor right. Now play him me, Patroclus, Arming to answer in a night alarm.” And then forsooth the faint defects of age Must be the scene of mirth; to cough and spit, And with a palsy fumbling on his gorget, Shake in and out the rivet; and at this sport Sir Valor dies; cries, “O, enough, Patroclus, Or give me ribs of steel! I shall split all In pleasure of my spleen.” And in this fashion, All our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes, Severals and generals of grace exact, Achievements, plots, orders, preventions, Excitements to the field, or speech for truce, Success or loss, what is or is not, serves As stuff for these two to make paradoxes. (Troilus and Cressida I.iii.146-184)

The topic here is the theatrical imitation (“action” … “imitation”) used by Patroclus to mock the Greek commanders. Two perspectives come into play in this speech, the narrative perspective of Ulysses and the narrated of Achilles. From the Achilles perspective the role-play of Patroclus is successful mimesis: “’tis Agamemnon right,” “’tis Nestor right.” From the Ulysses per-

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spective, on the other hand, there is a gross indecorum between the imitation and the imitated, which renders spectacle worthy of ridicule: “ridiculous and [awkward] action.” In the Achilles perspective Patroclus is realizing a rhetorical figure that unites elocutio and actio, orator and actor - mimesis. Henry Peacham offers the following definition in his rhetoric of style The Garden of Eloquence (1593): Mimesis is an imitation of spe´ech whereby the Orator counterfaiteth not onely what one said, but also his vtterance, pronunciation and gesture, imitating euery thing as it was, which is alwaies well performed, and naturally represented in an apt and skilfull actor. 52

The acting orator thus also needs a high level of artistic understanding in order to give a natural, that is, fitting form to his imitation. If he succeeds in this, he presents a veritable feast for the eye and ear. Baldassare Castiglione in his book on the courtier recommends the same procedure for creating good cheer. 53 Achilles and Patroclus are well-versed in rhetorical mimesis; they even believe that they are realizing this perfectly in their role-play, in instances of complete naturalness. Unlike Achilles, Ulysses sees in the aping mimesis of Patroclus an “o’erwrested seeming,” a distorted portrayal marked by exaggeration. The hyperboles of actio bear attributes of the scurrilous, the awkward, and the ridiculous. They assume concrete form in the pretentious bombast of the swaggering actor, whose wild stamping and shouting is out of all proportion. Hamlet also warns against this kind of indecorum in his speech to the players; as familiar negative examples he mentions the common impersonations of Termagant and of Herod. In both dramas Shakespeare’s point of orientation is the rules of rhetoric, which forbid such vices (vitia). 54 Peacham’s cautionary statement about the use of mimesis is precisely applicable to the parasite Patroclus: 52

53

54

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York / Paris: Lang, 1996, p. 137. - Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes & Tropes. London: J. Day, [1550], sig. E.iiir [69] considers Mimesis one of the figures of enargeia: “The .viii. kynd is called Mimisis, that is a folowing eyther of the wordes or manoures whereby we expresse not onlye the wordes of the person, but also the gesture.” Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. IX.ii.58. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1959, p. 141. - Source: Cicero, De Or. II.59.241. - In both cases it is a matter of the theory of facetiae. Cf. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, pp. 433-436. - Against exaggerated walking: Cicero, Or. 18.59; Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.3.126; against loud shouting: Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.3.45. - Cf. also Andrew J. Gurr, “Who Strutted and Bellowed?” Shakespeare Survey 16 (1963), 95-102.

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This form of imitation is commonly abused by flattering gesters and common parasites, who for the pleasure of those whom they flatter, do both depraue and deride other mens sayings and doings. Also this figure may be much blemished, either by excesse or defect, which maketh the imitation vnlike vnto that it ought to be […]. 55

Cicero (De Or. II.lix.242) condemns exaggerated imitation because it is the stock-in-trade of buffoons and strolling players. And Castiglione rejects grimaces and “antiques” as not suitable for a gentleman but only for a “common jeaster.” 56 Ulysses endorses this opinio communis in his negative verdict about the mimetic performance of Patroclus. One thing he rightly observes is that the heroic world serves Patroclus merely as raw material “to make paradoxes.” The theatrical-rhetorical procedure here consists in inverting this world, turning it upside-down, as it were, “against (prevailing) opinion.” 57 But that is the method of parody, travesty, and satire. The actor of the Renaissance adopts the sign vocabulary of the rhetorical actio in order to depict nature in keeping with the rules of decorum. But he can also break these rules, and what he then produces is a caricature of nature. If this is not his intention, the actio is a failure, the art imperfect. But if a conscious violation of decorum is successful, it brings about an artistic inversion of mimesis. This is an expression of a ‘paradoxical’ acting rhetoric, which aims at critical innovation. Common to all the forms of actional mimesis is the verbal text that gains physical reality only through the mimesis. The actio of the discussion thus far has therefore been primarily language-bound. There are two other forms as well, namely non-verbal actio and actionless language. The first could be mentioned here only briefly. The question that arises with regard to the latter is how it can achieve a theatrical reality without the concreteness of the actio. A preliminary answer is that language has to stage itself. And in this case the author becomes an actor, or better, an actor-poet.

2. Theatrum Elocutionis, or Stagings of Language In the preface to his edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella from the year 1591 Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) invites the reader, 55 56 57

Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 137. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1959). Trans Sir T. Hoby, p. 142. On this function of the rhetorical paradox cf. H.F. Plett, “Das Paradoxon als rhetorische Kategorie,” in: Das Paradox: Eine Herausforderung des abendländischen Denkens. Ed. P. Geyer & R. Hagenbüchle. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1992, pp. 89-104.

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to turn aside into this Theater of pleasure, for here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau’n to ouershadow the fair frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, while the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight. The chiefe Actor here is Melpomene, whose dusky robes, dipt in the ynke of teares, as yet seeme to drop when I view them neere. The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire; videte, quaeso, et linguis animisque fauete. 58

In this ironic piece of advertizing, which roughly sketches the ‘argument’ of the performance, the editor compares the paper pages with a theatre, Sidney’s sonnet cycle with a tragicomedy (or tragedy), and the reader with a person attending a play. He himself assumes the pose of the theatre director hawking his wares, as at an annual literary fair. The Latin imperatives have a modern counterpart in the directions “Enter!” and “Applause!” The theatrical fictionalization of the verbal work of art and its reception is rooted in two causes. The first is related to the medium, the second to the genre. Both deprive Astrophel and Stella of the energy of directness produced by a theatre performance. The ‘dead’ letters of early modern printing destroy the oral culture of recitation, which forms the basis of Sidney’s aristocratic sonnet cycle. And because they belong to the lyrical genre, the poems lack the actional presence of the body language characteristic of theatre productions. Nashe’s theatrical metaphorizing of Sidney’s work is therefore a compensatory act, one that attempts to make up for this twofold energy deficit in an ironic way. The deficit inherent in the medium is of more recent origin, a product of the Gutenberg revolution, as many Renaissance authors and publishers were aware. 59 This may explain their preference for title pages with ‘speaking pictures’ (picturae loquentes) as visualized ‘arguments.’ Often localized in a theatrical space or frame, emblematic figures or configurations proclaim a message that ‘speaks’ directly to the eye. The frontispiece of the erotic epyllion Argalus and Parthenia (1629) by Francis Quarles (1592-1644) shows a classical stage entrance with a half-open curtain, behind which a printed page, “The Argument of ye History” (Figure 42), is visible. In this pictorial fiction the reader becomes a spectator, the epic a drama, and the author the director who stages this impressive scene. 60 In such cases the iconic representation functions as a substitute for the oral presence. For the non58 59

60

Elizabethan Critical Essays, Ed. G.G. Smith, vol. II, p. 223. Cf. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, rpt. 1967. Modern edition by D. Freeman: Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia. London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986. Further examples in: Margery Corbett & R.W. Lightbowm, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550-1650. London / Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

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Figure 42: Francis Quarles (1592-1644): Argalus and Parthenia (1629), the theatricalized title-page.

dramatic genres have to grapple with a general problem faced by writers since antiquity. It can be phrased as follows: With what stylistic procedures can non-dramatic texts create theatrical presence, physicality, and action? The answer to this question is offered by a rhetorical poetics. In general it declares that the poet must simulate theatrical action as much as the orator, in other words, transform himself into an actor, the reader into a spectator and the text into a linguistic theatre production. As William Webbes’ translation of the Horace paraphrase by Georg Fabricius formulates it:

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A Poet should be no lesse skylfull in dealing with the affectes of the mynde then a tumbler or a Iuggler shoulde bee ready in his Arte. And with such pyth shoulde he sette foorth hys matters that a Reader shoulde seeme not onely to heare the thing, but to see and be present at the dooing thereof. Which faculty Fabius calleth y«poty¬pvsin, and Aristotle pro¡ oœmma¬tvn ue¬sin h
poi¬hsin. 61

This passage deviates from its source - Horace, ep. II.i.210 ff. - in a number of characteristic ways. Horace applies the image of a tightrope walker to the dramatic poet in order to contrast his creative activity with his own; in Webbe-Fabricius the same image is applied, with slight variations, to every literary author. While in Horace this is born of an ironic superiority, WebbeFabricius turn it into a general principle: the writer should move the emotions like a skilled acrobat or juggler. In a syncretistic procedure such as favoured by learned humanists, Quintilian and Aristotle are called in one after the other as authorities on a method of representation known as hypotyposis, or ‘making visual.’ 62 Only the person who is himself moved can move the emotions of others - this rhetorical axiom, which in the Renaissance also took root in the theory of art and music, was already formulated as a model for the poet by Horace (A.P. 102-4). In the translation of Drant: If thou wouldste haue me weepe for the firste muste thou pensyfe be. Thy harmes shall hitte me, when I spye that they haue harmed the. 63 61

62

63

Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G.G. Smith, vol. I, pp. 299-300 (no. 49). - The Latin original of Georgius Fabricius reads: “XLIX. Poe¨ta affectuum tractandorum non sit minus peritus, quam funambulus aut magus artis suae esse solet: tum ea euidentia res describat, vt lector non audire, sed ipsis locis & negociis, vbi quid agitur, interesse videatur. Eam facultatem y«poty¬pvsin Fabius, pro¡ oœmma¬tvn ue¬sin h
poi¬hsin vocat Aristoteles.” (Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, p. 421). - The Aristotle quotation is incorrect in this form; what could be intended is Rhet. III.1411.b.23 or Poet. XVII.1455.a.22-25. Joannes Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum. London: G. Dewes, 1562, p. 86: “Hypotyposis y«poty¬pvsiw est, quando persona, res, locus, tempus, aut aliud quippiam tum scribendo tum dicendo ita verbis exprimitur, vt cerni potius ac coram geri, qua`m legi, qua`m audiri videatur. Haec etiam eœna¬rgeia Enargia, Euidentia, Illustratio, Suffiguratio, Demonstratio, Descriptio, Effictio, Subiectio sub oculos appellatur.” This figure appears under numerous synonyms. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 238 translates hypotyposis as “counterfait representation.” Thomas Drant, Horace His Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished. London: T. Marshe, 1567, sig. A.iijv [18]; cf. Ben Jonson, [Works]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952, vol. VIII, p. 311 (vv. 145-146). Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.2.34 clearly formulates the requirement of the identification of role and actor: “Nos illi simus, quos gravia, indigna, tristia passos queremur, nec agamus rem quasi alienam, sed adsumamus parumper illum dolorem. ita dicemus, quae in nostro simili casu dicturi essemus.”

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The humanist Horace commentators, in their eagerness to produce synopses of analogous classical passages, discovered not only the rhetorical parallels but also the even greater authority of Aristotle’s Poetics (1455 a 30-32). 64 Antonio Sebastiano Minturno refers directly to this source in his De Poeta (1559), where he states: Quia uero` ij maxime` suopte ingenio permouent, qui perturbantur, atque ita se affectos esse ostendunt, quemadmodum afficere contendunt; conandum est ut animi habitum ore, uerbisque exprimamus. Verissime` enim exagitatus exagitat, excitatque iram iratus. 65

Like Aristotle, Minturno demands of the poet that he conceive an imaginary picture of the dramatic action, so that a listener or reader will also be able to imagine it - to attend it, so to speak, as a spectator. In analogy to the orator, the poet here functions as an actor, whose art of simulation evokes imaginary scenes and affections in the recipient. But dissimulation is also part of the actor-poet’s trade. The Horace commentary of Webbe-Fabricius quoted above clarifies this concept as well: Let a Poet first take vppon him as though he were to play but an Actors part, as he may bee esteemed like one which wryteth without regarde; neyther let him so pollish his works but that euery one for the basenesse thereof may think to make as good. Hee may likewyse exercise the part of gesturer, as though he seemed to meddle in rude and common matters, and yet not so deale in them, as it were for variety sake, nor as though he had laboured them thoroughly, but tryfled with them, nor as though he had sweat for them, but practised a little. For so to hyde ones cunning, that nothing should seeme to bee laborsome or exquisite, when, notwithstanding, euery part is pollished with care and studie, is a speciall gyft which Aristotle calleth kry¬cin. 66

The actor-poet thus follows the same maxim of celare artem articulated in ancient rhetoric. It gained ground in England only toward the end of the sixteenth century, gradually displacing the earlier striving to cultivate what was felt to be an inadequate language and literature by means of a high degree of artificiality. 67 Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie of 1589 reflects the altered situation in the title of the last chapter: “That the good Poet or maker

64

65

66 67

Cf. Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literay Criticism, 1531-1555. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1946, p. 8 f., who points out that Cicero, De Or. II.45, and Aristotle, Rhet. III.vii.4, are cited most frequently as rhetorical parallels. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, De Poeta. Venetiis: Apud Franciscum Rampazetum, MDLIX, rpt. B. Fabian. München: Fink, 1970, p. 261. G.G. Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, pp. 300-301 (no. 53). Cf. Richard F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974, passim.

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ought to dissemble his arte […]” (III.xxv). 68 Puttenham’s contemporary Sir Philip Sidney does not limit the celare artem to literature, but elevates it to a general principle of art and life. In his novel Arcadia a lady’s hair is arranged with such a careless care, & an arte so hiding arte, that she seemed she would lay them for a paterne, whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be more excellent. 69

The most accomplished and most effective art is therefore one that creates an altera natura. The oxymoron “careless care” here aptly describes its Januslike quality of suggesting an illusion of nature while at the same time revealing its artifice to the initiated. It thus contains the double aspect of illusion and perception, of actor and spectator. We have seen that the poet is an actor in two ways: as a simulator and as a dissimulator of imaginary dramas. Created by the imagination of the author, they are supposed to be realized anew in the imagination of the recipients. But how is this possible? Lodovico Castelvetro expresses scepticism about the possibility of this kind of imaginary drama because Aristotle (Poet. XVII.1455 a 24) indicates no concrete way of bringing it about. 70 This makes the realization of the imaginative act doubly problematic for its repetition in the recipient. One thing is certain: the medium that transports this imaginary drama from the poet to the reader is language. And the shape it is given determines whether the drama will materialize at all and thus be reproducible. Ever since antiquity two rhetorical figures were viewed as competing with theatrical performance: rhetorical description (ek›rasiw, descriptio) - pragmatography in particular - and prosopopoeia. Both give birth to literary forms in the Renaissance. In these figures there is an effective mise en sce`ne of language - with the poet as fictive actor and the reader as equally fictive spectator.

68 69

70

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 298. Sir Philip Sidney, The Prose Works. Ed. A. Feuillerat. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, vol. I, p. 75. Further examples of celare artem in Arcadia: works of art (1718), a woman’s attire (104, 376), a knight’s armour (454), landscaped garden (91-92). The most famous lyrical articulation of this artistic principle is Robert Herrick’s poem Delight in Disorder. - On celare artem in (courtly) poetics cf. Laurence Manley, Convention, 1500-1750. Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 175-188; H.F. Plett, “Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England,” New Literary History (1983), esp. 600-605. Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata, et sposta. Vienna: G. Steinhofer, 1570, rpt. B. Fabian. München: Fink, 1967, p. 205r: “Aristotele conforta bene il poeta ad imaginarsi le cose come rappresentate in atto, ma non insegna via niuna per la quale possa peruenire a questa imaginatione.” (commentary on Aristotle: oyÕtv ga¡r aœn eœnarge¬stata o«rì˜ n).

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2.1 Pragmatography, or the Theatricality of Description If for some reason the author is unable to create a lifelike representation of actions on stage, he makes use of description. Stated in rhetorical terms, elocutio then substitutes for actio, the drama of words takes the place of the drama of gestures. As an elocutionary category description has a long history, in the course of which it split up into numerous subcategories - descriptio personae, rei, loci, temporis, etc. 71 It not only refers to a rhetorical school exercise but also governs a specific type of literature, namely ekphrastic poetry, which claims to compete with the arts of painting and theatre in terms of its effective power. 72 A claim of this kind is based on the notions of enarg(e)ia, hypotyposis, evidentia (and their equivalents) or vividness. 73 This allows Richard Sherry in A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) to equate enargia with ‘rhetorical description’: Enargia, euidence or perspicuitie called also descripcion rethoricall, is when a thynge is so described that it semeth to the reader or hearer that he beholdeth it as it were in doyng. 74

Description presents something to a listener or reader in such a way that it takes place, as it were, before his eyes. The theatricality of such a procedure speaks even more clearly from the definition of pragmatography, the description of an action or an object: Pragmatographia pragmatvgra›i¬a, rei descriptio est quum id quod fit aut factum est, omnibus fucatum coloribus ob oculos ponimus, vt auditorem siue lectorem, iam extra se positum, velut in theatro, auocet. 75

71

72

73

74

75

Cf. Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo. Una cum commentariis M. Veltkirchii oratoriae professoris in schola Wittenbergensi, iam recens natis ac aeditis. London: H. Middelton, 1573, pp. 121r-129r; Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, pp. 86-89; Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike. London: J. Kingston, 1563, rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, sig. ljr-liijr; Aphthonius, Progymnasmata. Partim a Rodolpho Agricola, partim a Ioanne Maria Catanaeo Latinitate donata. Cum luculentis & utilibus in eadem Scholiis Reinhardi Lorichii Hadamarii. London: T. Marsh, 1583, pp. 181v-195r; Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 132 ff. On the history cf. Edmond Faral, Les Arts poe´tiques du XII e et du XIII e sie`cle. Paris: Champion, 1971, pp. 75-84. Cf. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 31968. Cf. Gottfried Willems, Anschaulichkeit: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen und des literarischen Darstellungsstils. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989. Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), sig. E.iv [66]. - Cf. Erasmus, De duplici copia, pp. 121r, 127r; Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, p. 86. Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, p. 87. - Cf. Erasmus, De duplici copia, p. 121r.

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The enargeia of pragmatography transforms the theatre of the senses into a stage of the imagination, the real spectator into a fictional eyewitness, the described action into an actio conjured up in the mind. Johannes Susenbrotus accordingly notes that this figure appears especially frequently in poets and historiographers. George Puttenham agrees, interpreting pragmatography as “counterfait action” and citing as an illustrative example Lord Vaux’s allegorical poem on the battle of Cupid. 76 The success of an author in creating the illusion of an action depends almost completely on whether he knows how to employ the rhetorical ‘colours’ - i. e., the figures and tropes - effectively. Expressions like “(it) seems,” “as it were,” or “as if,” which accompany the definitions and instances of enargeia, signal that the perception is not a sensory but an imaginative act. They at the same time imply that the sensory reality of things is superior to the imagined reality in terms of vividness. This explains Francesco Patrizi’s (1529-1597) statement that dramatic poetry does not make actors appear ‘as if ’ they were present, but rather in persona, so that no “words of evidence” are needed to perceive them. 77 Ben Jonson, on the other hand, in his masque Hymenaei (1606) admits that no powers of the imagination, and certainly no description can adequately render the fascination of a theatrical spectacle. The same poet who elsewhere places the timeless “soul” of the poetic word above the ephemeral “body” of the staging has to concede here that in his description he is able to convey only a “shadow” of the sensory opulence of the performance. 78 Pragmatography is thus only a poor verbal substitute for physical presence. Despite Patrizi’s objection, pragmatography, in fact every type of description, did find its way into drama. It is firmly anchored in the epic components 76 77

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 239-240. Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 11. Edition: F. Patrizi, Della Poetica. Ed. Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli. Firenze: Instituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1969-1971. - Cf. Horace, Ars Poetica (180-182), in the translation of Thomas Drant, Horace His Arte of Poetrie (1567), sig. A.vjr-v [23-24]: The things reported to the eares moue not the myne so sone As lyuely set before thyne eyes, in acte for to behold.

78

Ben Jonson’s translation: [Works]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952, vol. VIII, p. 317 (vv. 256-259). Jonson, [Works], vol. VII, p. 229. - Similarly in Shakespeare, Henry VIII I.i.40-42; Thomas Campion, “The Lord’s Masque,” in: Works. Ed. Percival Vivian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, p. 93; Samuel Daniel, “Tethys Festival (1610),” in: Works. Ed. A.B. Grosart. 5 vols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963, vol. III, p. 307.

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in particular - prologue, messenger’s narration, teichoscopy, epilogue - because there that which is absent must be depicted as if it were directly present. This comes to striking expression in an action description of the chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V: Play with your fancies: and in them behold Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing; Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give To sounds confus’d; behold the threaden sails, Borne with th’invisible and creeping wind, Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, Breasting the lofty surge. O, do but think You stand upon the rivage and behold A city on th’inconstant billows dancing; For so appears this fleet majestical, Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow! (III. Prol. 7-17)

The listener here becomes a fictional eyewitness who in his imagination is supposed to convert a narrated event into a present action. The imperatives “play with your fancies,” “hear,” “behold,” and “think,” challenge his imaginative powers to combine the individual details of the action into a lively mental image. Several kinetic metaphors contribute to the animation, for example, “the shrill whistle which doth order give” (9), “creeping wind” (11), “sails, / Borne with […] wind” (10-11) and “a city dancing” […] (15). At the end of the passage the speaker of the prologue challenges the spectators to travel in their imagination and create more such mental scenes. The reason for this is the inadequacy of the theatre in depicting complex historical events. Exhortations such as “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (I. Prol. 23) or “eche out our performance with your mind” (III. Prol. 35) show that the drama of the imagination forms a necessary complement to the drama in the theatre. The rules of decorum and verisimile lead the author of drama to replace physical with verbal staging. What in rhetoric is known as enargeia Horace in his Ars Poetica (184) calls facundia praesens. 79 Its purpose in his view was to ban immoral or incredible depictions from the stage. Elizabethan dramatists were acquainted with this maxim, but in practice they relied more on the persuasive power of dramatic action than on that of its description. Horace’s recommendation is adopted as a genre rule by John Dryden, however, who forbids death on the stage and demands instead an enargetic description: 79

Cf. the translations of Drant, Horace His Arte of Poetrie, 1567, sig. A.vjv [24] and Jonson, [Works], vol. VIII, p. 317 (v. 263) as well as the Horace paraphrase of Webbe-Fabricius, in: Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, p. 293 [no. 17], who limits the problem to comedy.

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The words of a good writer, which describe it [sc. dying] lively, will make a deeper impression of belief in us than all the actor can persuade us to when he seems to fall dead before us […]. 80

Death belongs to those events that can never be imitated in a fitting way; and that which is unnatural evokes laughter. A rule like this one, which gains canonical status in classicism, is presented paradigmatically by Shakespeare in Hamlet. He does not have Ophelia drown in water on stage, which no doubt could have happened in a grotesquely comical scene, but has Gertrude report her death (IV.vii.166-183). Her speech is a textbook example of a rhetorical description: first the statement of the theme (propositio), then its amplification in visual details (circumstantiae); beginning with a description of the place, it proceeds to that of the action, weaving in anthropomorphic metaphors, ornamental epithets, and suggestive similes. All these elocutionary means form the word scenery of a drama that the queen experiences as a sympathetic spectator. They thus also fulfil the function ascribed to pragmatographia by Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence (1593): “This kinde of exornation helpeth much to amplifie, to declare things plainly, and none more forcible to moue pittie.” 81 “Pittie” - the effect of tragedy is here produced not by the actio itself but by the enargeia of its rhetorical description. The epic relevance of pragmatography is frequently emphasized in rhetorical treatises. The locus classicus to which they typically refer is from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (VIII.iii.67-69), where the example of a conquest of a city illustrates the concretizing potential of ornatus. While the abstract term ‘destruction’ has little effect, breaking it down into concrete details makes for great plasticity. Renaissance treatises, which place this exemplum in the category of pragmatography, never tire of citing other instances of this technique from the epics of Homer. 82 Joshua Sylvester’s (1563-1618) translation of Du Bartas’s (1544-1596) religious epic Les Semaines (1578) points out to the reader in marginal glosses exceptionally successful examples of “lively” descriptions of action: “A liuely description of the end of the World,” “A

80

81 82

Cf. John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Ed. G. Watson. 2 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1964, vol. I, p. 51. - On the discussion among the Italians cf. extracts in Allan H. Gilbert (ed.), Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962, pp. 222-223, 245, 257, 309, 349, 515. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 138. Erasmus, De duplici copia (1573), pp. 121v-123v; Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum (1562), pp. 87-88; Aphthonius, Progymnasmata (1583), p. 185r; Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, pp. 137-138.

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liuely description of thunder and lightening,” “Liuely description of people occupied in some great busines.” 83 Sir Philip Sidney’s novel Arcadia is also so full of such descriptions that long passages of this narrative work read like a series of pragmatographies. The theorist of style John Hoskins, an admirer of Sidney, provides a whole list of examples: And for actions of persons, there are many, rarely described: as a mutiny and fire in a ship (210); causes of an uproar (223, 218); the garboil (215); an armed skirmish (268, 271); policy and preparation (286); […]. Sir Philip Sidney’s course was (besides reading Aristotle and Theophrastus) to imagine the thing present in his own brain that [h]is pen might the better present it to you. Whose example I would you durst follow till I pulled you back. This have I written of illustration in conveyance and well gaining of the substance of a treatise. Where evident and lively descriptions are in Arcadia, you have this note, des; where the person is aptly fitted with speech and action, dc: both these give light to the handling and grow into very pleasant acquaintance with the understanding and memory of the reader. 84

For an adept of the London law school The Temple, Hoskins highlights “lively” descriptions and models of a personal decorum of speech and action in the 1590 edition of Arcadia. Ekphrastic enargeia presupposes in his view an imaginary acting-out in advance of the action to be depicted: a drama conjured up in the mind. Sidney himself postulates in An Apology for Poetry (1595) that the skill of the artist reveals itself less in the work than in its “Idea or fore-conceite.” 85 He immediately qualifies this, however, by declaring that in the final analysis the work is the test case for the quality of the idea. Sidney’s own works reflect this poetological process in their repeated use of theatrical metaphors and dramatic techniques: poetry is theatre. 86 Nashe, in his ironic preface to Astrophel and Stella, simply perpetuates what rhetoric demands and the poeta orator practises. 83

84

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86

Guillaume Saluste du Bartas, Bartas His Devine Weekes and Workes. Trans. Iosuah Sylvester. London: H. Lowenes, 1605, rpt. F.C. Haber. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965, pp. 14, 54, 416. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style. Ed. Hoyt H. Hudson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935, p. 42. - Cf. the almost verbatim citing of these explanatory statements in Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence. London, T.N., 1654, rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1971, p. 37. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 101. On the concept of ‘idea’ cf. Erwin Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Berlin: B. Hessling, 1960 (11924). Cf. Richard B. Young, “English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella,” in: Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958, pp. 1-88.

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2.2. Prosopopoeia, or the Theatricality of the Fictive Role If the action of figures is not merely described but presented in persona, as it were, rhetoric speaks of prosvpopoii¬a or fictio personae: Fictio personae, when the person is not there, but brought in upon the stage speaking as if he were present. So a thing that is mute oft-times, is dressed up in a person, and words put in his mouth. In this, there ought to be a decorum observed, that ye dresse not the servant like the master, but that there be a respect had to the thing personated, and accordingly to be clothed with words. 87

Prosopopoeia is therefore a theatrical impersonation in keeping with the rules of decorum. Its poetic application leads to manifestations known in literary scholarship as the dramatic monologue. In prosopopoeia the poet assumes the costume of a fictive role in order to address his fictive audience from a fictive stage. 88 This figure consequently possesses a high degree of the enargeia that influences the imagination and emotions of the recipient. 89 Dramatic exercises of this kind occupy such an important place in the teaching of rhetoric in the Renaissance that practically every pupil was trained to be an actor-poet. 90 A well-known progymnasma reads: “What lamentable Oracion Hecuba Quene of Troie might make, Troie being destroied.” 91 The fact that the subject here is taken from mythology indicates the inherently poetic char-

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John Prideaux, Sacred Eloquence: Or, The Art of Rhetorick, As it is layd down in Scripture. London: W. Wilson, 1659, p. 68. - Cf. Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, p. 68: “Etiam iam olim defunctos e` sepulchris excitamus, ac velut in scenam producimus.” On the “induere personam” of the orator (poet, historiographer) in prosopopoeia cf. the explanation of Quintilian, Inst. Or. III.8.49-54 and VI.2.36. In their dictionaries Randle Cotgrave (A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611) and Thomas Blount (Glossographia, 31670) render this figure as “a disguising.” Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes & Tropes (1550), sig. E.iir [67] considers it one of the figures of enarg(e)ia, as does Erasmus, De duplici copia (1573), 123v-126r. Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus, p. 25 categorizes it under the trope Ad affectuum concitationem. Cf. T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s “Small Latine and Less Greeke.” 2 vols. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 21956; F.R. Johnson, “Two Renaissance Textbooks of Rhetoric: Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata and Rainolde’s A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike,” Huntington Library Quarterly 6 (1942-1943), 427-444; Donald L. Clark, “The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Grammar School,” Speech Monographs 19 (1952), 159-263; Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961, pp. 138-145. - On antiquity: S.F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969. Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike. London: J. Kingston, 1563, facsimile reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, pp. lv-ljr; cf. Aphthonius, Progymnasmata. Partim a Rodolpho Agricola, partim a Ioanne Maria Catanaeo Latinitate donata. Cum luculentis & utilibus in eadem Scholiis Reinhardi Lorichii Hadamarii. London: T. Marsh, 1583, pp. 177r-177v.

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acter of these dramatic monologues: “Haec liberius fiunt in Poe¨matibus, in Tragoedijs, Comedijs, ac Dialogis.” 92 The humanist treatises resemble those of antiquity in that they differentiate dramatic monologues in terms of two aspects, namely fictionality and content of affect. Ethopoeia depicts mild affections, pathopoeia vehement ones. The Hecuba speech is therefore a pathopoeia. Ethopoeia, on the other hand, creates the semblance of natural persons, and prosopopoeia that of non-natural ones: As concerning Prosopopoeia, it is as Priscianus saith, when to any one againste nature, speache is feigned to bee giuen. 93

Like the kinetic metaphor, it clothes that which is inanimate (e. g., abstractions, objects, deceased persons) in human form, language, and action. Distinctions like these, however, have only a limited validity in the Renaissance, since prosopopoeia is in some cases expanded to all fictional impersonations, and certain other categories are added for the purpose of specialization eidolopoeia, for example, for the depiction of dead persons and anthropopatheia for the depiction of God. 94 A speaking embodiment of that which by its nature is unreal or incredible requires great rhetorical powers of the author. Quintilian (Inst. Or. IX.2.33) recommends the use of suggestive formulas with prosopopoeia, such as “videtur mihi” or “nonne videtur tibi?”, to temper the boldness of the fiction. Prosopopoeia gained such popularity in literature of the sixteenth century that the Italian Francesco Bonciani (1552-1620) in 1578 composed a Lezione della Prosopopea, in which he combines rhetorical with Aristotelian ideas. The resulting definition is, 92

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Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum (1562), p. 68. - Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. III.viii.49; Erasmus, De duplici copia (1573), pp. 125v-126r; Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes & Tropes (1550), sig. E.iir [67]; Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, pp. 134-135; Butler, Rhetoricae Libri Duo (1598), sig. E8r; Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1950). Ed. E. Seaton, pp. 85-93 [ancient and contemporary exempla]. - Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561), p. 126 (III.xlviii: Attributio, Prosopopoeia). Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), sig. lr. - Cf. Priscian, Praeexercitamenta, § 9: “conformatio vero, quam Graeci prosvpopoii¬an nominant, est, quando rei alicui contra naturam datur persona loquendi” (in: C. Halm [ed.], Rhetores Latini Minores. Leipzig: Teubner, 1863, rpt. Frankfurt/M.: Minerva, 1963, pp. 557-558). On eidolopoiia: Aphthonius, Progymnasmata (1583), pp. 167r, 169r-v; Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), pp. xlixv-lr; on anthropopatheia: John Barton, The Art of Rhetoric. London: N. Alsop, 1634, p. 15; John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d. London: E. Cotes, 1657, pp. 204-206. - Sidney speaks in An Apology for Poetry of David’s “notable prosopopeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in his Maiesty.” (p. 99).

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imitazione di cose impossibili in maniera convenevole, fatta nel modo narrativo semplice o misto o nel rappresentativo, a fine d’insegnare o dilettare o persuadere. 95

The imitation of that which is impossible becomes possible through the agency of the imagination, which combines familiar elements into an unfamiliar and unnatural whole - always, however, within the limits of decorum and verisimile. While poets subordinate pleasure to instruction, prosopopoeia serves the orator as a means of persuasion. To illustrate his points Bonciani cites numerous examples from the works of Dante and Petrarch. Around the same time the most important prosopopoeia collection appeared in England, The Mirror for Magistrates, a work first published in 1559 and steadily expanded in the later editions (1563, 1578, 1587). According to William Baldwin, one of its initiators, it is a continuation of “the booke of Bochas [i. e., Giovanni Boccaccio], translated by Dan Lidgate [i. e., John Lydgate]” and aims to hold up a mirror to all who hold public office “for the purpose of speedy betterment.” 96 The Mirror is thus a synthesis of a medieval tragedie and a Renaissance guide for princes. Compared to its predecessors it certainly exhibits a much more intensive enargeia. John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes contains only a few examples of prosopopoeia and de´bat; by far the largest part of this long work is narrated by a person who refers frequently to “myn auctour Iohn Bochas” as an authority, with the result that the narrative lacks liveliness, despite various pathetic devices (exclamationes, for example). The English predecessor of The Fall of Princes, “The Monk’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, contains only narrationes; the use of the simple past tense creates a great distance between the narrator and the narrated. The Mirror, on the other hand, consists of fictiones personae, dramatic monologues: dead persons are raised to life, appear before the reader and begin to talk about themselves - about their guilt, their lamentable end, but especially about the unpredictable turns of the Wheel of Fortune. The dramatic figures brought to life in this way were well known to the English public of the sixteenth century from the chronicles. Generally they were English kings or members of the high nobility who had made history. For this reason alone their appearance was more dramatically charged than that of the ‘tragic’ mythological or non-English historical figures. Thomas Wilson, who in The Arte of Rhetorique subsumes the fictio personae under the 95

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Francesco Bonciani, “Lezione della Prosopopea (1578),” in: Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento. 4 vols. Ed. B. Weinberg. Bari: Laterza, 1972–1974, vol. III, pp. 239-240. Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960, pp. 69, 65-66.

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“Description of persone,” emphasizes not only the “commelinesse” (aptum) but also the liveliness of a historical prosopopoeia from the recent past: By this figure also we imagine a talke for some one to speake, and according to his person we frame the Oration. As if one should bryng in noble Henry the .viii. of most famouse memorie to enveigh against rebelles, thus he might order his Oration. What if Henry theight were alyve, & sawe suche rebellion in this Realme, would not he say thus, and thus? yea me thynkes I heare hym speake even now. And so set forthe suche wordes as we would have hym to saie. 97

A speech well suited to the figure of Henry VIII will so stimulate the imagination of the spectators that they become eyewitnesses of historical events. In order to achieve this the speaker must activate his own imagination to the utmost; and this can only happen if he becomes an actor-poet. Baldwin was evidently familiar with this rhetorical doctrine, for he reports that he and his assistants had agreed “that I [Baldwin] shoulde vsurpe Bochas rowme, and the wretched princes complayne vnto me,” while of the assistants he says that they “tooke vpon themselues euery man for his parte to be sundrye personages, and in theyr behalfes to bewayle vnto me theyr greuous chaunces, heuy destinies, & wofull misfortunes.” 98 A dramatic fiction is being constructed here: Baldwin slips into the role of a fictional audience, each of the other poets into the role of a great tragic figure from English history. They are, in short, actor-poets. The donning of a role is often signalled by a formula such as “I will take upon me the person of […].” 99 A successful actio of this kind evokes intense emotions in the spectators. 100 But some criticism is voiced as well, for example about the uneven metrics in which the speech of Richard, the Duke of Gloucester and later English king, is written. As a counterargument an appeal is made to “the cumlynes called by the Rhetoricians decorum”: a person like Richard who himself knows no moderation, cannot be depicted in an even-flowing metre. 101 Decorum is thus assigned the same position here as in the theories of Wilson and Bonciani. 97

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Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 358. In the same context Wilson also mentions Henry VI und Richard III. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 235 gives as examples of Dialogismus (“So if by way of fiction we will seem to speake in another mans person …”) the kings Henry VIII und Edward III. - The frequent confusion of prosopopoeia (speaking person) und prosopography (described person) makes for problems with precise definitions in rhetorics und poetics: e. g., Sherry, A Treatise for Schemes and Tropes (1550), sig. E.iv-E.iir [66-67]; Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 238-239. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 69. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, pp. 71, 132, 138, 142. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 154: “This straunge aduenture of the good erle drave vs al into a dumpne, inwardly lamenting his wofull destynye.” Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 371: “[…] it were agaynst the decorum of his personage, to vse eyther good Meter or order.” On metrical decorum cf. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 419.

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More than once the actor-poet addresses his audience - first Baldwin, then every reader - with the imperative “Imagine … .” 102 He thus challenges them to help with the construction of an imaginary stage; he himself provides the descriptio, as in the following example: And therfore imagine Baldwin that you see him [sc. Richard II] al to be mangled, with blew woundes, lying pale and wanne al naked vpon the cold stones in Paules church, the people standing round about him, and making his mone in this sort. 103

Similarly, a whole series of constructed scenes appears before the inner eye of the reader, all of them arresting the terrible moment of greatest pathos as a rule the moment just before or just after a particularly horrible death. 104 In the scenes conjured up we can distinguish two spectator perspectives: (1) the spectator ‘in the picture’ (“the people standing round about him”) and (2) the spectator outside the picture (Baldwin, the reader). The evidence of the prosopopoeia then consists in moving the second spectator to identify with the first one, which amounts to ‘putting him in the picture.’ It is also possible that the actor-poet becomes his own spectator. The Mirror for Magistrates describes how a weary author dozes off while leafing through old chronicles: […] but my imaginacion styll prosecutyng this tragicall matter, brought me suche a fantasy. me thought there stode before vs, a tall mans body full of fresshe woundes, but lackyng a head […] me thought there came a shrekyng voyce out of the weasande pipe of the headles bodye, saying as followeth. 105

In his imagination the speaker becomes a fictive spectator who leaves the real world behind. But he is at the same time an actor; for as a member of the circle of poets he has to assume the role of a historical person, in this case that of Richard Plantaganet, Duke of York. The poet here, in other words, conceals himself in the role of a spectator in order make his rendering of the actor role all the more credible. The powerful effect of prosopopoeia on Elizabethan readers is evident not only from the large editions of the Mirror for Magistrates but also from its many imitations that employ the same dramatic technique. Thomas Rogers’ dramatic monologue Leicester’s Ghost (1605?, printed 1641), for example, bears 102

103 104 105

Campbell (ed.), Mirror, pp. 111, 205, 245, 267, 359, 402; cf. p. 191 (“suppose”), 483 (“thinke”). The potential mood “may (lament, say, …)” also appears as an indicator: pp. 101, 120, 132, 138, 142, 154, 161, 170, 211. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 111. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, pp. 120, 191, 205, 211, 245, 359, 402, 483. Campbell, (ed.), Mirror, p. 181.

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clear traces of its rhetorical origins. 106 The ghosts of deceased persons are also a favourite element in dramas of the Senecan type, where they - like the ghost of the murdered king in Hamlet (I.v.9-91) - describe their fate in a prosopopoeia and challenge the listener to act. Edmund Spenser labels his fable Mother Hubberds Tale as a prosopopoeia. 107 Thomas Lodge uses the same term for a meditation. 108 The dramatic monologue also became popular in the domain of devices and emblems, which then depict something resembling miniature dramas. Henri Estienne’s treatise The Art of Making Devises (1646) recommends prosopopoeia as “a certain manner of speech used by Rhetoritians, very efficacious to move and strike the mind,” one with unlimited applicability: And as for the use of the Prosopopoeia, you need not feare, to cause all kind of beasts, all mechanicall instruments and other things as well naturall as artificiall to speak, though they have no Principle, faculty or organs proper to forme words; And it is in respect that Devises ought in some sort to imitate Poetry, which doth not onely introduce brute beasts, but also frequently causeth inanimate things to speak, for greater delight, to expresse the fancy better, and to perswade more powerfully. 109

The imagination of the poeta orator therefore seizes every opportunity to bestow speech on animate and inanimate objects, natural and artificial figures. The world in this way becomes one grand stage on which the actor-poet performs in varying costumes. This idea applies not only to the production of poetry but also to its interpretation. Thus Puttenham discerns in the Aeneid “Virgil speaking in the person of Eneas, Turnus and many other great Princes, and sometimes of meaner men.” 110 The actor-poet seems truly omnipresent. And his instrument is the elocutio, the rhetorical staging of language. 106

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The epistle to the “iudiciall readers” bears the subtitle, undoubtedly intended as clarification of the main title: “A Prosopopeia of the Earle of Lecesters Ghoast.” The ghost of the earl also appears as the author of the dedicatory sonnet to King James I, a truly remarkable fictio personae of the actor-poet Thomas Rogers. - Text edition: Franklin B. Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Cf. also E. K. on Spenser’s May Eclogue (v.182): “She set) A figure called Fictio. Which vseth to attribute reasonable actions and speaches to vnreasonable creatures.” He alludes here to the animal fable of the fox and the kid. Thomas Lodge: Prosopopeia / CONTAINING / THE TEARES OF THE / holy, blessed, and sanctified / MARIE, the Mother / of GOD. / […] / LONDON. / Printed for E. White. / 1596. Henri Estienne, The Art of Making Devises. Trans. Tho. Blount. London: W.E. & J.G., 1646, p. 54. - The Frankfurt Alciato edition of 1567 contains frequent instances of the rhetorical term Prosopopo(e)ia (emblems 121, 122) and Dialogismus (emblems 7, 10, 69, 86, 104, 147, 185), but the examples are very heterogeneous. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 235.

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3. Epilogue: Theatrum Aulicum Simulatio and dissimulatio form the basis of a rhetorical illusion that manifests itself in stagings of the body and of language. The result is an art that nevertheless denies its claim to being an art. The totality of manifestations constitutes a theatrum rhetoricum, which views the human being as an actor. If he plays his role badly, i. e., if in the process of simulation he forgets dissimulation, he falls into bombast and makes himself ridiculous. On the other hand, if he merges completely with his role, i. e., if in his dissimulation he forgets simulation, he runs the risk of a flat and insubstantial performance. In the first case the rhetorical illusion never comes about; in the second case it threatens to overpower its creator. The via media consists in moderation (temperantia) between the two extremes; this requires - formulated as an oxymoron - a passionate rationality and a rational passion. Such a state can only be achieved if the homo rhetoricus is at the same time both a thoroughly involved actor and a distanced spectator. This idea comes to clearest expression in Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528), where Cicero’s philosophy of the ideal orator is converted into reflections on cultural esthetics. This epoch-making work, which in recent decades has attracted increased scholarly attention, interprets the courtier as an actor, who in the elegant nonchalance (sprezzatura) of his performance exhibits a grace (grazia) that belies every artistic effort. 111 This leads to the conclusion - in Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of 1561: Therefore that may bee saide to be a verie arte, that appeareth not to be arte, neither ought a man to put more diligence in any thing than in covering it: for in case it be open, it looseth credite cleane and maketh a man litle set by. 112

Although the courtier is a tireless inventor of poses, he must nevertheless not appear to be a pretender, or he will lose credibility. This also holds for the entire spectrum of courtly forms of expression, the theatre first of all, but also fashion, sport, dancing, singing, music, art, and last but not least, literature. In Castiglione the rhetorical illusion is transformed into a social illusion, in Puttenham on the other hand - through the mediation of Castiglione into a poetic illusion. As a result, The Arte of English Poesie assigns a central 111

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Cf. Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978, chap. I: “Spectacles in a Courtly Theater” (pp. 23-51, 208-210); id., “Baldesar Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the Courtly Body of Renaissance Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 11 (1993), 241-274. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Tho. Hoby, p. 46. - Cf. note 68.

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position to allegory, also called “the Courtier or figure of faire semblant,” as a stylistic category. 113 As a figure of pleasing illusion it heads a list of tropes that have one feature in common, namely disguise - Enigma, Parimia, Ironia, Sarcasmus, Asteismus, Micterismus, Antiphrasis, Charientismus, Hiperbole, Periphrasis and Synecdoche, etc. 114 To other rhetorical figures Puttenham gives English names of the kind that also denote social roles: “Metanoia, or the Penitent”; “Antenagoge, or the Recompencer”; “Paradoxon, or the Wondrer.” 115 Both the poet and the courtier make use of disguise in language roles of this kind in order to create a pleasing illusion. This again achieves its most consummate effect when it appears to be completely natural. On this point the theatrum aulicum reveals its deep ambiguity. For what happens if the pleasing illusion created by all the tropes of courtly culture is exposed as a “false illusion” (false semblant) - Puttenham’s translation variant of “allegory” 116? If behind the mask of the courtly poet the flatterer and hypocrite becomes visible, and behind that of the courtly poet the sycophant and denouncer? Then the courtly code proves identical to the political theory of a Niccolo` Machiavelli, who in the famous eighteenth chapter of Il Principe (1532) advises the prince to follow the example of the sly fox in order to achieve his political ends, but to “whitewash” (colorire) his foxy nature - “ed essere gran simulatore e dissimulatore.” 117 Viewed in this light, every court official is a potential Machiavellian, and every staging of words or body in the courtly context is hypocrisy. Court theorists like Philibert de Vienne or Lorenzo Ducci were as aware of this possibility of amoral pragmatism as the poets who developed into court critics and satirists. 118 Their attacks are

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Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 299. - on the tropical character of courtly culture cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1980, chap. IV; Frank Whigham, The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 188-196. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 215, 216, 218, 219, 226. English nomina agentis take the place of Greek termini technici. In Samuel Shaw’s Words Made Visible: or Grammar and Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men. London: B.G., 1679 the technical rhetorical terms appear in the form of speaking prosopopoeias. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 186. - The courtly poet should in his view be only a “dissembler” (302) in his art, not in his (moral) character. Niccolo` Machiavelli, Tutte le opere. Ed. Mario Martelli. Firenze: Sansoni, 1971, p. 283. Cf. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der europäischen Moralistik. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1973.

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Figure 43: Andrea Alciato (1492-1550): Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1542), emblem no. 111: “In aulicos.”

levelled at a courtly reality that in no way lives up to the hypothetical claim of the cultural-esthetic idea. Andrea Alciato’s moral emblem no. 110 In aulicos (Against Courtiers) gives expression of a wide-spread critique of courtly culture, both in the pictura (Figure 43) showing a nobleman with his legs in the stocks and even more clearly in the subscriptio: Vana Palatinos quos ducat aula clientes Dicitur auratis nectere compedibus. 119

119

Translation: “The court, so full of vanities, supports the palace entourage, but binds them with fetters of gold, it is said” (Betty Knott, ed. & trans., “Emblemata” (Lyon, 1550) by Andrea Alciato. Aldershot, Hants.: Scolar Press, 1996, p. 94).

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The same emblem recurs somewhat varied in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) displaying the inscriptio “Aureae compedes” (golden fetters) and a subscriptio of the following kind: IT better is (wee say) a cotage poore to houlde, Then for to lye in prison stronge, with fetters made of goulde. Which shewes, that bondage is the prison of the minde: And libertie the happie life, that is to man assign’de, And richely are adorn’d in silkes, and preste with massie chaines. Yet manie others liue, that are accompted wise: Who libertie doe chiefely choose, thoughe clad in gounes of frise, And waighe not POMPEYS porte, nor yet LVCVLLVS fare: So that they may adorne their mindes, they well contented are. Yea, rather doe accepte his dwelling in the tonne, And for to liue with CODRVS cates: a roote, and barly bonne. Where freedome they inioye, and vncontrolled liue: Then with the chiefest fare of all, attendance for to geue. And, if I should bee ask’d, which life doth please me beste: I like the goulden libertie, let golden bondage reste. 120

In its pictorial component this emblem aptly illustrates the precarious situation of the Earl of Kent put in stocks in front of Gloucester’s Castle in Shakespeare’s King Lear (II.ii) but its verbal exegesis also comments upon this tragedy as a whole. It furthermore points ahead to the political pamphlet Der hessische Landbote (The Hessian Courier [1834]) with its revolutionary battlecry “Friede den Hütten, Krieg den Palästen” by the German poet Georg Büchner (1813-1837). These illustrations give support to the assumption that only a comprehensive social history of the European courts can give an adequate picture of the bright and dark sides of the theatrum aulicum. 121 The true face of the cortegiano, gentleman, or honneˆte homme is often drawn more clearly in literature than in historiography. In the Renaissance it is especially the dramas of Wil120

121

Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586). Facsimile Reprint. Ed. J. Horden. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1973, p. 202. Besides the well-known publications of Norbert Elias and Roy Strong, the lectures and papers of a Wolfenbüttel Congress edited by August Buck et al., Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. 3 vols. Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981 also deal with the many aspects of European courtly culture. The reigns of the Stuart kings James I and Charles I have received special attention in: Graham Parry, The Golden Age restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983; R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. These studies hardly give due credit to the role played by rhetoric, however.

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liam Shakespeare that present penetrating portraits of courtly actors princes, advisers, attendants, emissaries, artists. From the treacherous Proteus, the actor of the false illusion in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to the corrupt entourage of the usurper Antonio in The Tempest, they present a gallery of all types of courtly amorality and decadence. Among the great tragedies of his mature years, Hamlet appears as the prototype of the courtly drama. The protagonist, Claudius, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all actors of the false illusion, whose method is one of “By indirections find directions out” (II.i.63). Polonius, the former lay actor, stages small dramas of revelation, as in the fishmonger scene (II.ii.171-218) and the nunnery scene (III.i.89-149). Each one of them falls flat, however. His last failed performance ends in his death behind the (theatre) curtain in the queen’s chamber. Hamlet, the educated humanist, surpasses his antagonists in creating courtly-rhetorical illusion. As an actor of an “antic disposition,” he simulates the person gone mad with love, a performance with both a bodily-pantomimic (II.i.74-97) and a linguistic-literary (II.ii.109-124) dimension. On the other hand he dissimulates his nature by practising in front of his antagonists the rhetorical figure of “Amphibolia or the Ambiguous.” 122 At its most complex his actio becomes the ‘tropical’ play within the play, in which he functions simultaneously as poet, actor, and spectator. His lectio ad actores (III.ii.1-45) actually presents him as the professional theatre director setting forth a rhetorical theory of acting. What becomes clear at the end of the drama is the futility of courtly simulatio and dissimulatio. In view of the reality of death the theatrum aulicum gives way to a dance macabre, the theatrum rhetoricum to speechlessness - “the rest is silence” (V.ii.358).

122

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 260: “[…] when we speake or write doubtfully and that the sence may be taken two wayes.” This figure is significantly classified as “vicious speach,” vitium orationis, and associated with the “false prophets” of the Delphic oracle.

C. Intermedial Rhetoric

Pictura Rhetorica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of the Visual Arts and Pictorial Poetry 1. The Combat Between the Arts: Poetry versus Painting and Architecture In the first scene of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens a poet and a painter enter into a verbal combat over the question of whose art is to be preferred; for they are competing for Timon’s patronage: Painter. You are rapt, sir, in some work, some dedication To the great lord. Poet A thing slipp’d idly from me. Our poesy is as a gum which oozes From whence ’tis nourish’d; the fire i’ th’ flint Shows not till it be struck: our gentle flame Provokes itself, and like the current flies Each bound it chases. What have you there? Painter. A picture, sir. When comes your book forth? Poet. Upon the heels of my presentment, sir. Let’s see your piece. Painter. ’Tis a good piece. Poet. So ’tis; this comes off well and excellent. Painter. Indifferent. Poet. Admirable. How this grace Speaks his own standing! What a mental power This eye shoots forth! How big imagination Moves in this lip! To th’ dumbness of the gesture One might interpret. Painter. It is a pretty mocking of the life. Here is a touch: is’t good? Poet. I will say of it, It tutors nature; artificial strife Lives in these touches, livelier than life. (I.i.18-38) 1 1

Quoted after the Arden edition of Timon of Athens. Ed. J.H. Oliver. London: Methuen, 1959, pp. 4-6. Analyses of this passage are provided by Anthony Blunt, “An Echo of the ‘Para-

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While the poet’s pride lies in the concept of inspiration, to which he alludes in the images “fire i’ th’ flint” and “gentle flame,” he has difficulties describing the excellencies of the book he has dedicated to his prospective patron. On the other hand he readily concedes the superior qualities of a good painting, in this case probably a portrait of Timon. Its perfection consists not only in the exact rendering of the features of the person represented, its lifelike appearance, but also its spiritual dimension transcending the surface structure of a successful imitatio naturae. The expressive immediacy of its virtu` visiva induces Timon to give his preference to painting: Timon. Painting is welcome. The painting is almost the natural man: For since dishonour traffics with man’s nature, He is but out-side; these pencill’d figures are Even such as they give out. I like your work, And you shall find I like it. Wait attendance Till you hear further from me. (I.i.159-164)

In these words Timon does not appreciate the artist’s skill to represent the psychological dimension of a figure he portrays, but rather praises the success of a perfect mimesis of the “outside,” since he seems disillusioned with “man’s nature,” in which inner and outer being diverge. In the further course of action the truth of this dictum will be fulfilled and proved on the speaker himself: he develops into a misanthrope who comes to hate everything on earth. The combat between Poet and Painter in Timon of Athens continues a debate that goes back as far as Antiquity and manifests itself in the aphorism of pictura as muta poesis and poesis as pictura loquens, 2 whose invention is ascribed to Simonides of Ceos (fl. 530 B.C.) and which is explicated more at large in a passage of Coignet’s Politique Discourses, as translated by Sir Thomas Hoby:

2

gone’ in Shakespeare,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938-1939), 360-362 and John Dixon Hunt, “Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of Timon of Athens,” in: Werner Habicht et al. (eds.), Images of Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press / London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 47-63. - On the practice of patronage in the Renaissance, see Guy Fitch Lytle & Stephen Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance. Folger Institute Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981, esp. Part III, chaps. 5 & 6, 12-14. Cf. Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.xxviii.39: “Poe¨ma loquens pictura, pictura tacitum poe¨ma debet esse.” Harry Caplan, the editor of the Loeb Classical Library edition, translates this as: “A poem ought to be a painting that speaks; a painting ought to be a silent poem.” Caplan furthermore adduces sources of the classical reception history: Plutarch, De glor. Athen. 3 (346 F); Quaest. Conviv. 9.15 (748 A), Quomodo adulesc. poet.aud. deb. 3 (17 F), Quomodo adulat. ab amic. internosc. 15 (58 B), De vita et poes. Hom. 216 (ed. Bernardakis, 7. 460).

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For as Simonides saide: Painting is a dumme Poesie, and a Poesie is a speaking painting; & the actions which the Painters set out with visible colours and figures the Poets recken with wordes, as though they had in deede beene perfourmed. 3

Leonardo da Vinci points out the difference between painting and poetry [Differentia che ha la pittura con la poesia] in the following way: Painting is a poem that is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting that is heard and not seen. So these two poems, or paintings so to speak, have exchanged the senses by which they should penetrate the intellect. For if both are painting, both pass to the senso commune by the most noble sense, which is the eye. And if both are poetry, they have to pass [there] by the less noble sense, which is [the sense of] hearing. So we will let painting be judged by a man born deaf, and poetry be judged by one born blind. And if a painting is figured with movements appropriate to the mental accidents of the participants, without any doubt the man born deaf will understand the workings and the intentions of the participants in every case, but the man born blind will never understand anything that the poet demonstrates. [The poet] who does honor to his poetry does so because of the nobility of its parts: to figure gestures and the components of narratives and places embellished and made delightful by transparent waters where, in the verdant depths coursing waters play like waves over meadows, where wriggling fish mix with minute stones and grass, and where similar details [are seen]. These details may as well be addressed to a stone as to man blind from birth because he has never seen anything of the beauty of the world, which is composed of light, darkness, color, body, figure, place, remoteness, propinquity, motion, and rest, which are the ten ornaments of nature. But the deaf man, having lost the less noble sense, even though he has lost it together with speech, which he never heard and so could never learn any language, will understand every accident of human bodies better than anyone who can speak and hear; and, similarly, he will understand the painter’s works, and what is represented in them and who his figures are suited [to be]. 4

In this summary of the criteria submitted to the paragone between poetry and painting, the mimesis of representation appears of primary importance. Thus Leonardo was admired for the realistic expression he bestowed on his figures, and in his biographical art history Le vite de piu excellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani (1550) Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) describes the astonishment and admiration with which the young Raphael perceived the grace and movement 3 4

Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G.G. Smith, vol. I, p. 342. From: Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone”: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas. Leiden / New York / København / Köln: Brill, 1992, pp. 215-217 (n. 20). The Italian text is facing the English translation. A further English translation is provided by Elizabeth Holt (ed.), A Documentary History of Art. Vol. I: The Middle Ages & the Renaissance Illustrated. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957, pp. 277-278.

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Leonardo gave to his figures, which led him to study them zealously. 5 In his Trattato della pittura Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) declares that a painting represents the works of nature with more truth and certitude than words or letters do: “La pittura rapressenta al senso con piu` verita` e certezza l’opere de la natura che non fanno le parolle o le lettere.” 6 To achieve this aim of perfect naturalness, Leonardo made many physiological and even anatomical studies. But he did not stop at reproducing the external features of human beings, but pursued the ambition of making his painted physiognomies reveal the mental frames expressed by them. Thus each figure represented in his famous Milan fresco The Last Supper expresses an individual habit of mind. 7 This practice is also laid down in his prescriptions for the representation of psychological types. Thus, according to Leonardo, a desperate person should be painted with his/her clothes torn, a knife in one hand, with his/her legs standing apart, and his/her body bent down to the ground. 8 An angry person should be represented as grasping somebody by his/her hair and bowing his/her head to the earth, with his/her throat blown up, and with his/her brows knit and bent downwards. Equally the difference between laughing and crying is made outwardly visible by a number of precise features. The same technique of exteriorizing applies to the representation of the various ages of mankind. Thus old men are to be represented with slow and lazy movements and with bent knees in a standing position. The sum of these prescriptions constitutes a corpus of pictorial topoi comparable to those of the rhetorical inventio. In each kind of pictorial representation the painter is strictly required to observe the principle of decorum. A number of Leonardo’s 5

6 7

8

Cf. Irma A. Richter, Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts by Leonardo da Vinci. With an Introduction and English Translation. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1949, p. 37. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone”, p. 186. Cf. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his biography of Leonardo on the Last Supper: “Leonardo succeeded to perfection in expressing the doubts and anxiety experienced by the Apostles, and the desire felt by them to know by whom their Master is to be betrayed; in the faces of all appear love, terror, anger, or grief and bewilderment, unable as they are to fathom the meaning of their Lord. Nor is the spectator less struck with admiration by the force and truth with which, on the other hand, the master has exhibited the impious determination, hatred, and treachery of Judas. The whole work indeed is executed with inexpressible diligence even in its most minute part; among other things may be mentioned the table-cloth, the texture of which is copied with such exactitude, that the linen-cloth itself could scarcely look more real” (“Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” in: Hiram Haydn & John C. Nelson [eds.], A Renaissance Treasury. New York: Greenwood, 1968, p. 42). For the following, see Leonardo da Vinci, Sämtliche Gemälde und Schriften zur Malerei. Ed. & comm. Andre´ Chastel. Trans. M. Schneider. München: Schirmer-Mosel, 1990, pp. 306-311.

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Figure 44: Leonardo da Vinci (1492-1519): Sketch of Judas for The Last Supper fresco in Milan (1495-1497).

sketches that are exercises in topical representation are preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (see Figure 44). They illustrate the fact that the praise of painter and painting expressed in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens does not reflect an idealistic attitude but originates from a rhetorical concept of the ars pictoria. The paragone between the verbal and the visual arts was not confined to theory and Italy but became the foundation of a professional quarrel between a poet and an architect in Jacobean England. This quarrel, which to a certain extent had been anticipated by a fictitious contest between poet and painter

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in an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth I at Mitchum in 1598, 9 took place between the poet, playwright and critic Ben Jonson (1572/731637) on the one hand and the architect, stage designer, and man of letters Inigo Jones (1573-1652) on the other. 10 It arose in 1631 over the masque Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, on which publication Ben Jonson put his own name before Jones’ on the title-page: “The Inuentors. Ben Ionson. Inigo Jones.” Jones may have been angry at this insult; for as the surveyor of the King’s Works (since 1615) and the architect of the Queen’s House, Greenwich (1616-1618, 1629-135), as well as of the Banqueting House, Whitehall (1619-1622), he had the stronger position at the Stuart Court. 11 For besides having introduced the modern Palladian style into English architecture, he was also employed as the chief designer of stage architecture and actors’ costumes for the popular court masques on which he had collaborated with Ben Jonson since The Masque of Blackness of 1605. But whereas Ben Jonson was assigned the role of a librettist, providing only the words for a primarily sensuous spectacle, the pleasure of a masque performance derived mainly from the splendid visual effects of elaborate stage architecture and extravagant costumes for which Inigo Jones assumed responsibility. 12 It is therefore a matter of logic that in this quarrel the Court took sides with that artist to whom it owed the fulfilment of its desire for self-representation and excluded the poet from further employment as a masque author. Ben Jonson, however, defended himself against this slight in An Expostulacion with Inigo Jones with the power of words, which form the principal document in this quarrel: O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose 9

10

11

12

Cf. Leslie Hotson (ed.), Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainment at Mitchum. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953. The following outline is based on the excellent article by D.J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones (1949),” in: The Renaissance Imagination. Essays and Lectures by D.J. Gordon. Collected and Edited by Stephen Orgel. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1980, pp. 77-101. Cf. also Stephen Orgel, “To Make Boards to Speak: Inigo Jones and the Jonsonian Masque,” Renaissance Drama, N.S., 1 (1968), 121-152; Inga-Stina Ewbank, “‘The Eloquence of Masques’: A Retrospective View of Masque Criticism,” Renaissance Drama, N.S., 1 (1968), 307-327; Judith Dundas, “Ben Jonson and the Paragone,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9/4 (1978), 57-65. Cf. the biography by John Summerson, Inigo Jones. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966. Cf. Stephen Orgel & Roy Strong (eds.), Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court; including the complete designs for productions at court for the most part in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire, together with their texts and historical documentations. 2 vols. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet / Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

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Or Verse, or Sense t’express Immortall you? You are ye Spectacles of State! Tis true Court Hieroglyphicks! & all Artes affoord In ye mere perspectiue of an Inch board! You aske noe more then certeyne politique Eyes, Eyes yt can pierce into ye Misteryes Of many Coulors! read them! & reueale Mythology there painted on slit deale! Oh, to make Boardes to speake! There is a taske Painting & Carpentry are ye Soule of Masque. 13

These words, which also direct satirical arrows against the Court, assert that a masque is composed of the two constituents called “body” and “soul.” The “body” of a masque is its scenic representation, the “show,” whereas its “soul” or “invention” constitutes the intellectual concept or meaning of the scenic “body” and is normally expressed by words. The two metaphorical terms are topoi borrowed from emblem literature, 14 whose meaning the last line of the passage quoted ironically inverts. What Ben Jonson is here complaining of is the exact opposite of the “mental power” that the poet praises in the painter’s picture in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. In spite of his aversion to his rival he is, however, aware that architecture can no longer be considered a minor ars mechanica; for he had read Vitruvius’ De architectura and studied at least the first chapter thoroughly. In one place the classical author explains that [the architect] must be naturally talented … and willing to be taught (for neither talent without training nor training without talent can produce the perfect craftsman), and he should be well-read, skilled in drawing, excellent at geometry, not ignorant of optics, a trained mathematician; he should know the results of new research, listen diligently to philosophers, be interested in music, learned in the law, and understand astrology and astronomy. 15 13

14

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Ben Jonson, [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford & Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Vol. VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. 403-404. Cf. Bernhard F. Scholz, Emblem und Emblempoetik: Historische und systematische Studien. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2002, II.7: “‘Das Bild wird für den Leib, die Schrifft für die Seele eines Sinn-Bildes geachtet’: zur Rekonstruktion einer frühmodernen poetologischen Metapher” (pp. 215-230). - “Body” and “soul” occur in: THE Worthy tract of Paulus Iouius, containing a Discourse of rare inuentions, both Militarie and Amorous called Imprese. Whereunto is added a Preface contayning the Arte of composing them, with many other notable deuises. By Samuell Daniell late Student of Oxenforde. AT LONDON, Printed for Simon Waterson, 1585. Quoted from: Gordon, “Poet and Architect,” in: The Renaissance Imagination, p. 86. - The Latin original reads: “Itaque eum etiam ingeniosum oportet esse et ad disciplinam docilem; neque enim ingenium sine disciplina aut disciplina sine ingenio perfectum artificem potest efficere. Et ut litteratus sit, peritus graphidos, eruditus geometria, historias complures noverit, philosophos diligenter audierit, musicam scierit, medicinae non sit ignarus, responsa iurisconsultorum noverit, astrologiam caelique rationes cognitas habeat.” (Vitruvii De Architectura Libri Decem. / Vitruv, Zehn Bücher über Architektur. Ed., trans. & comm. C. Fensterbusch, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 51991, p. 24 [I.i. 10-17]).

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This passage was noted by Ben Jonson, who thereby acknowledged that architecture could no longer be classified as a mechanical art but claimed higher aspirations. He clearly expressed this opinion in his commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries (1641) in a passage taken over from Juan Luis Vives on the distinction between the liberal and the mechanical arts: Arts that respect the mind were ever reputed nobler, then those that serve the body: though wee lesse can bee without them. As Tillage, Spinning, Weaving, Building, &c. without which, wee could scarce sustaine life a day. But these were the workes of every hand; the other of the braine only, and those the most generous, and exalted wits, and spirits that cannot rest, or acquiesce. The mind of man is still fed with labour: Opere pascitur. 16

In this opinion Jonson was also influenced by the Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616), who upheld “the traditional system of the Liberal Arts with philosophy as ‘nutrice di tutte delle scientie’ and music in its old place in the quadrivium ‘delle Matimatiche,’” of which architects should have a knowledge “because they ought to be acquainted with the reasons for the consonance and dissonance of sounds.” 17 Such a doctrine is based on the classical authority of Vitruvius and his adoption of the terms eurythmia and simmetria for architecture together with its aphoristic definition as “frozen music.” 18

2. Illusionistic Realism of Art through Perfect Imitation of Nature In his longest remark about a particular work of art, a twelfth-century stucco relief of St. Ambrose he saw on a wall of Sant’Ambrogio near his lodgings in Milan, the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) expands Simonides’ topos of the picture as muta poesis and the related formulas of signa spirantia (statues that breathe) and vox sola deest (only the voice is lacking): […] it almost lives and breathes in the stone, and I often look up at it with reverence. It is no small reward for my coming here. I cannot say how much 16

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18

Ben Jonson, Works. Vol. VIII, p. 568. Quoted in: Gordon, “Poet and Architect,” in: The Renaissance Imagination, p. 90. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London: Academy Editions, 1973, p. 123. Vincenzo Scamozzi was author of L’idea della architettura universale. Venetiis, expensis avctoris, 1615. The treatise was translated into English: The mirror of architecture. London: Nath. Rolls, 41693. - On Scamozzi cf. Rainald Franz, Vincenzo Scamozzi (15481616): Der Nachfolger und Vollender Palladios. Petersberg: Imhof, 1999. On the adoption of musical terminology in theories of art, see Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, esp. Part IV: “The Problem of Harmonic Proportion in Architecture” (pp. 101-154).

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power there is in its expression, how much grandeur in the brow and serenity in the eyes; only the lack of a voice prevents one seeing the living Ambrose. 19

This utterance anticipates the praise of realistic representation in Shakespeare’s phrase “livelier than life” as well as his praise of the “mental power” which the eyes of the person portrayed “shoots forth.” Both the imitation of nature and the psychological expression in works of art grew to such a perfection in the course of the Renaissance that painting and sculpture advanced from the disrespected condition of artes mechanicae to the highly reputed state of artes liberales, claiming equality with the disciplines of trivium and quadrivium. The perfect pictorial imitation of nature which obliterates the boundaries between art and reality was often illustrated in classical antiquity by anecdotes centred on artists. 20 Thus it is reported in the Natural History (XXX, 65) by the elder Pliny that the Greek painter Zeuxis (fl. c. 400 B.C.) could produce such grapes on a canvas that sparrows came flying thither and picked at them. 21 This anecdote of painterly illusion was so famous in the Renaissance that it was retold in an Elizabethan epistolary rhetoric: Zeuxes endeavouring to paint excellentlie, mades Grapes to shewe so naturall, that presenting them to view men were deceaved with their shapes and the birdes with their cullours. […] If in penning I were as skilful as the least of these in painting, I should neither faint to present a discourse to Alexander, nor to tell a tale to a Philosopher. 22

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20

21

22

From Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 51. Original: Fam. xvi: “vox sola defuerit vivum ut cernas Ambrosium.” Most examples of this paragraph are taken from Ernst Kris & Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch. Mit einem Vorwort von E.H. Gombrich. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1980, Chap. III.1: “Der Künstler als Magier. - Das Kunstwerk als Abbild der Wirklichkeit”, p. 89 ff. - English original: Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Cf. also Ingeborg Scheibler, Griechische Malerei der Antike. München: C.H. Beck, 1994, chap. I.1: “Maleranekdoten” (pp. 10-13). For classical source-texts cf. Adolphe Reinach (ed.), Recueil Milliet: Textes Grecs et Latins relatifs a` l’histoire de la peinture ancienne. Paris: Editions Macula, 1985 (11921). Classical anecdotes on artists as well as classical art criticism are also handed down in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; cf. R.G. Austin, “Quintilian on Painting and Statuary,” Classical Quarterly 38 (1944), 17-26. Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586); quoted from Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 15601620. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England: James Hall, 1981, p. 34 & n. 127. - The Zeuxis legend is taken as a starting point by FrancX ois Lecercle to provide a detailed and carefully structured survey of the manifold relations between poetic and painterly portraiture in his book La Chime`re de Zeuxis: Portrait poe´tique et portrait peint en France et Italie a` la Renaissance. Tübingen: Narr, 1987.

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On the other hand the same artist is reported to have asked his colleague Parrhasios during a visit in his atelier to remove a curtain covering a painting which, however, proved an error; for the curtain was not real but painted. In imitation of such classical predecessors the lifelike appearance of works of art also became a favourite pictorial topos in the Renaissance. Its general purpose evidently is to prove and praise the ingenious craftsmanship of the painter or sculptor, elevating him to the rank of a divino artista or even an alter deus. Thus Titian or, with his proper name, Tiziano Vecellio (14881576) is said to have placed a portrait of Pope Paul III 23 he had just finished in his window for drying and the effect was that passers-by stopped in order to do it reverence, because they thought it was the Holy Father in person. And Philip II King of Spain is reported to have thought the picture of his father just finished by Titian to be his apparition. According to Federigo Zuccaro 24 Raphael (1483-1520) painted Pope Leo X in such a deceptively realistic manner that a cardinal handed the portrait ink and pen asking for a signature. The imitatio naturae practised by these artists results in a deceptive realism which transcends the boundaries drawn between illusion and reality. From the perspective of the viewer the kind of aesthetics that manifests itself in such an attitude towards art and such anecdotes may be termed an “aesthetics of impressions.” 25 These and other anecdotes on classical painters and sculptors found entrance into literary works of the Renaissance, where they contributed to the praise of the skill of the artists and the magic of their works of art. Thus the prose comedy Campaspe (1584) by John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) dramatizes the story of Alexander, who is enamoured with the Theban captive Campaspe and engages Apelles 26 to paint her portrait; when the artist and his model 23

24

25

26

This portrait is reproduced, with explanation, in the catalogue Titian: Prince of Painters. Ed. Susanna Biadene. München: Prestel, 1990, pp. 246-247. Federigo Zuccaro, L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti. Ed. H. Heikamp. Firenze 1961, p. 99; quoted in Kris & Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler, p. 91. See Kris & Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler, p. 89. The same term may also apply, but with a different tinge, to “impressionistic” poetry at the end of the 19th century; cf. H.F. Plett, “Oscar Wilde, Whistler et l’esthe´tique des impressions,” in: L. H. Hoek & K. Meerhoff (eds.), Rhe´torique et image: Textes en hommage a` A. Kibe´di Varga. Amsterdam / Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 1995, pp. 263-276. The historical Apelles was born in Colophon and lived in the 4th century B.C. He painted portraits of Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great. His famous Aphrodite Anadyomene inspired the Florentine painter Botticelli to create his own version of the subject (cf. Ernest H. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study of the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of his Circle” (1945), in: E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London / New York: Phaidon, 1972, pp. 31-81 and Horst Bredekamp, La Primavera: Florenz als Garten der Venus. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1988).

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then fall in love, Apelles uses a trick for prolonging the sittings after finishing the portrait. But Alexander, perceiving the deceit, renounces love and surrenders Campaspe to Apelles to pursue his own career as a warrior and conqueror. It is only in a marginal subplot episode that reference is made to the miraculous effects of the artist’s illusionistic paintings, when Psyllus, an apprentice to Apelles, complains of his thrifty master’s frugal meals: This he doth then: bring in many examples that some have lived by savours, and proveth that much easier it is to fat by colours, and tells of birds that have been fatted by painted grapes in winter, and how many have so fed their eyes with their mistress’ picture that they never desired to take food, being glutted with the delight in their favours. Then doth he show me counterfeits, such as have surfeited with their filthy and loathsome vomits, and with the riotous bacchanals of the God Bacchus and his disorderly crew, which are painted all to the life in his shop. To conclude, I fare hardly though I go richly, which maketh me, when I should begin to shadow a Lady’s face, to draw a lamb’s head, and sometime to set to the body of a maid a shoulder of mutton, for semper animus meus est in patinis (I.ii.71-86). 27

The magic of art that is here reported in a farcical manner assumes a more serious and even important function in Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale (1611). The anecdote referred to in this play is about Pygmalion, a legendary king of Cyprus and a sculptor who, having fashioned an ivory statue of such a beautiful woman that he fell in love with it, asked Aphrodite to give it life, whereupon the lifeless artefact became a living being. 28 In The Winter’s Tale the former queen Hermione, believed to be dead, is presented by her confidante Paulina in her art gallery to her husband and her daughter disguised as a statue so true to life that it appears to the viewers as a living person. Paulina displays this seeming statue to the spectators in a theatrical manner: But here it is: prepare to see the life as lively mock’d as ever Still sleep mock’d death: behold, and say ’tis well. [Paulina draws a curtain, and discovers Hermione standing like a statue] I like your silence, it the more shows off Your wonder; but yet speak; first you, my liege, Comes it not something near? (Winter’s Tale V.iii.18-23) 29 27

28

29

John Lyly, “Campaspe,” in: A.K. McIlwraith (ed.), Five Elizabethan Comedies. London: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 12. The story is narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses X, 243-297 and John Marston’s The Metamorphoses of Pygmalion’s Image (1598). Quoted from the Arden Edition of J.H.P. Pafford. London: Methuen / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

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In this stony portrait the imitation of nature has succeeded so well that the Poet’s compliment from Timon comes true: “livelier than life.” The energeia of the stone is emphasized, among others, by Polixenes and Leontes: Masterly done: The very life seems warm upon her lip. Leon. The fixure of her eye has motion in ’t, As we are mock’d with art. (V.iii.65-68) Pol.

The illusionistic realism of this representation is anticipated by the report of the Third Gent. in the preceding scene: […] the princess hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina, - a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer. (V.ii.93-101)

Apart from its mentioning Giulio Romano (1499-1546), an Italian painter who was a pupil of the famous Raphael, this passage alludes to the simia naturae topos, 30 which denotes a lifelike imitation of reality. In that respect it is similar to what Armenini recounts as Michelangelo’s response to a Roman gentleman who wished to know how to tell good painting from bad: This must be kept in mind, that the closer you see paintings approach good sculptures, the better they will be; and the more sculptures will approach paintings, the worse you will hold them to be. Whence it is to be understood that good paintings consist essentially of much relief [roundness] accompanied by a good style. Let it be understood also that sculptures and reliefs, which perfect paintings must resemble, are of course not only those of marble or bronze, but even more, living sculptures, like a handsome man, a beautiful woman, a fine horse, and other similar things; and because the most true paintings are expressed with these, one sees then how wrong are those simpletons of whom the world is full, who would rather look at a green, a red, or some other high colors than at figures which show spirit and movement. 31

30

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For a masterly treatment of the topos, see Horst W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1952, pp. 287-325. Quoted from Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1961, pp. 311-312. - The reference is taken from Leonard Barkan’s excellent essay “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale,” ELH 48 (1981), 639-667; rpt. in: Stephen Orgel & Sean Keilen (eds.), Shakespeare and the Arts. New York / London: Garland, 1999, pp. 137-165. Further interpretations: H. Carrington Lancaster, “Hermione’s Statue,” Studies in Philology 29 (1932), 233-238; Giorgianna Ziegler, “Parents, Daughters, and ‘That Rare Italian Master’: A New Source for The Winter’s Tale,” in: Orgel & Keilen (eds.), Shakespeare and the Arts, pp. 244-252.

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Thus the paragone is primarily not between the arts, for instance between painting and sculpture or between poetry and painting, but between ars and natura. In becoming a “living sculpture” every art achieves its telos: to represent Nature in such a way as to be able to assume the appearance of its identity, even surpassing it in naturalness; or in the hyperbolic words of the Poet in Timon: “livelier than life.” In The Winter’s Tale the statue is finally revealed to be Hermione in person, which enables her to initiate the anagnorisis and peripeteia of the play. In the act of recognition Paulina assumes the role of a magician awaking the dead statue to life (“Music; awake her; strike!” [98-99]) and thus evokes in the viewers the effect of admiratio, sometimes described in Renaissance theories as the affective aim (affetti, passioni) of verbal artefacts (e. g., tragedies) 32. By adopting the part of the goddess Aphrodite, the stage-manager Paulina reenacts the Pygmalion myth. Thus the final scene of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale may be interpreted as an inversion of this myth that looks back on a long history in European art, literature, and even music. 33

3. The Visual Arts Upgraded: From artes mechanicae to artes liberales In Francesco Lancilotti’s Tractato della pittura of 1509 the personified Pittura says: “You know what displeased me above all else was that I was not placed among the seven liberal arts and that I was born in ignorance.” 34 This complaint would soon be refuted, both theoretically and practically: practically by such outstanding works as the Primavera by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), the mysterious portrait La Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci, the Sistine Madonna, as well as the Stanzas in the Vatican by Raphael, actually Raffaello Santi (1483-1520), the sculptures of David and Moses, the frescoes in the Sistine 32

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34

For references (Minturno, Scaliger, Sidney), see Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962, pp. 459-461 (Appendix to Sidney). Cf. Annegret Dinter, Der Pygmalion-Stoff in der europäischen Literatur: Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Ovid-Fabel. Heidelberg: Winter, 1979; Hans Sckommodau, Pygmalion bei Franzosen und Deutschen im 18. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970; Joseph Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990; Ana Rueda, Pigmalio´n y Galatea: refracciones modernas de un mito. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1999; Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature. Aldershot, Hants., England / Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001. Quoted from Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 31968, p. 66.

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Chapel, and the dome of San Pietro, Rome, by the sculptor, painter and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), 35 and theoretically by numerous treatises on painting, sculpture, and architecture, both in Latin and the vernacular, by Italian and other European writers. 36 Thus the painter and art historian Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600) in his Trattato dell’ Arte della Pittura (1584) writes (in the English translation [1598] by Richard Haydocke): Hence it appeareth that Painting is an arte; because it imitateth naturall thinges most precisely, and is the Counterfeiter and (as it were) the very Ape of Nature: whose quantity, emenencie, and colours, it euer striueth to imitate, performing the same by the helpe of Geometry, Arithmeticke, Perspectiue, and Naturall Philosophie, with most infallible demonstrations. But because of artes, some be Liberall, and some Mechanicall, it shal not be amisse, to shew amongst which of them Painting ought to be numbred. Now Plinie calleth it plainly a Liberal arte; which authority of his may be prooued by reason. For although the Painter cannot attaine to his ende, but by working both with his hand and pencel; yet there is so little paines and labour bestowed in this exercise, that there is no ingenuous man in the world, vnto whose nature it is not most agreeable and infinitely pleasant. 37

In a more self-conscious attitude Paolo Pino (fl. 1534-1565) in his Dialogo della Pittura (1548) arrives at a similar conclusion: Certo e` che la pittura impera e supera di virtu` tutte le arti, come guida e calamita di esse, per l’ordine e per la perfezione del disegno, e per cio` colui che l’acetta e ch’ in lei si diletta dovrebbe anco esser commodo delle cose al viver nostro 35

36

37

Cf. Karl Ludwig Gallwitz, The Handbook of Italian Renaissance Painters. Munich / London / New York: Prestel, 1999. Cf. the surveys by Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte. Wien: Anton Schroll, 1924; Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1965 (11921); Götz Pochat, Geschichte der Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie: Von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Köln: DuMont, 1986; Udo Kultermann, Kleine Geschichte der Kunsttheorie. Darmstadt: Primus, 21998. - Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann. London / New York: New York University Press, 1985; Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940, rpt. 1962; Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Art Theory. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1947; Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton, 1967 (11940). Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Building. Written first in Italian by Jo: Paul Lomatius painter of Milan, and Englished by R.H. student in Physik (1598). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969, The first Booke, p. 14. - On Lomazzo’s treatise cf. Gerald Martin Ackerman, The Structure of Lomazzo’s Treatise on Painting. PhD diss., Princeton University, 1964; Marilena Z. Cassimatis, Zur Kunsttheorie des Malers Giovanni-Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1600). Frankfurt/M. / New York: P. Lang, 1985; on R.H. = Richard Haydocke cf. Karl Josef Höltgen, Richard Haydocke: Translator, Engraver, Physician. London: Bibliographical Society, 1978 and Lucy Gent, “Haydocke’s Copy of Lomazzo’s Trattato,” The Library, 6th ser., 1 (1979), 78-81.

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necessarie, e prima aggiarsi bene e poi filosofare, che´ la pittura e` una specie de natural filosofia, perche´ l’imita la quantita` e la qualita`, la forma e virtu` delle cose naturali. 38

In a more or less apologetic manner many theoreticians argue for an equality of painting with the traditional artes liberales. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), man of letters, architect, and theoretician of the visual arts, 39 wrote a Latin treatise on painting titled De pictura (1435), which he translated into Italian as Della pittura (1436). 40 In this work, which can be regarded as the most important pictorial theory in Renaissance humanism, its author emphatically points out in Book III (“De pictore”): The aim of painting: to give pleasure, good will and fame to the painter more than riches. If painters will follow this, their painting will hold the eyes and soul of the observer. We have stated above how they could do this in passages on composition and the reception of light. However, I would be delighted if the painter, in order to remember all these things well, should be a good man and learned in liberal arts. 41

In the following paragraph Alberti becomes more precise in his postulates for the education of the painter: “It would please me if the painter were as learned as possible in all the liberal arts, but first of all I desire that he know geometry” 42 Geometry comprehends the knowledge of Euclidean optics and the construction of spatial perspective. These belong to the technical equipment of the painter, but other disciplines of the quadrivium do as well, such as arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Alberti’s statement that the painter 38

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Paolo Pino, “Dialogo della Pittura (1548),” in: Paola Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’Arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Controriforma. Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1960, p. 109. On his architectural achievement, see Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Hill & Wang, 2000. Editions: L.B. Alberti, De pictura. Ed. Cecil Grayson. Roma-Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1975; id., De statua - De pictura - Elementa picturae. Ed., trans. & comm. Oskar Bätschmann et al. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 2000; Leone Battista Alberti’s kleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften [Della pittura]. Ed. Hubert Janitschek. Repr. Osnabrück: Zeller, 1970 (11877). Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. Ed. & trans. John R. Spencer. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 41973, p. 89. - Latin text: “Finis pictoris laudem, gratiam et benivolentiam vel magis quam divitias ex opere adipisci. Id quidem assequetur pictor dum eius pictura oculos et animos spectantium tenebit atque movebit. Quae res quonam argumento fieri possint diximus cum de compositione atque luminum receptione supra disceptavimus. Sed cupio pictorem , quo haec possit omnia pulchre tenere, in primis esse virum et bonum et doctum bonarum artium” (Alberti, De statua - De pictura - Elementa picturae. Ed. O. Bätschmann et al., p. 292). Alberti, On Painting, p. 90. Latin text: “Doctum vero pictorem esse opto, quoad eius fieri possit, omnibus in artibus liberalibus, sed in eo praesertim geometriae peritiam desidero” (Alberti, De statua - De pictura - Elementa picturae. Ed., tr. & comm. O. Bätschmann et al., p. 292).

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should be “a good man and learned in liberal arts” refers to Cato’s famous definition of the ideal orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus, which means that he unites in his person both artistic and ethical perfections. Transferred to the ideal painter this definition would read vir bonus pingendi peritus. Thus the ethos of the painter comprehends both a good character and a good education in the liberal arts. This twofold qualification raises his status above that of a technically gifted craftsman. The result is a new type of painter, the pictor doctus, the learned painter whose competence in poetry also made him a pictor poeticus or pictor literatus who was able to transmediate poetry and literature, above all classical mythology, biblical narratives, and episodes of Greek, Latin, and contemporary history, into all kinds of visual art. Thus many artists from the Renaissance up to the nineteenth century successfully converted episodes from Ludovico Ariosto’s (1474-1533) great epic Orlando Furioso (1516/32) into paintings, drawings, and also woodcuts for book illustrations. 43 As a consequence of raising the social rank of the visual artist, academies of art and architecture were founded which taught the humanist concept that painting and architecture had their foundations in the painter’s and architect’s intellectual mastery of their respective subject-matters. Together with poetry and music, this process of exalting the visual arts led to the constitution of what Paul Oskar Kristeller called “The Modern System of the Arts.” 44

4. Ut rhetorica pictura Renaissance painting as a newly established liberal art lacked the tradition of a classical pictorial theory to which it could refer for the justification of its claims in social life. For in the course of time aristocrats and wealthy middleclass citizens had developed into collectors of art, and even such a famous 43

44

In his book Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977 Rensselaer W. Lee considers how artists from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century have interpreted Ariosto’s story of Angelica and Medoro. The same epic, which is regarded as the epitome of the Italian Renaissance, also furnished numerous librettists and composers with subject-matters for dramatic musical monologues and operas. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12/ 4 (1951), 496-527 & 13/1 (1952), 17-46; rpt. in: P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts. New York / Evanston / London: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 163-227. Cf. also Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962 (1951), Chap. 3: “The Social Status of the Renaissance Artist” (pp. 46-75); Rudolf Wittkower, The Artist and the Liberal Arts. London: Lewis & Co., 1952.

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painter as Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) had an art gallery (“Kunstkamer”) in his Antwerp palace, furnished with some 300 paintings of Flemish, Dutch, and Italian artists like Jan van Eyck, Lucas van Leyden, Pieter Breughel the Elder, Anthonis van Dyck, Titian, Raphael and Veronese. Among the collectors in England were Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Figure 45), 45 and the Stuart dynasty, which laid the foundation of the present-day Royal Art Collection. 46 These collections were established for both idealistic and materialistic reasons. The quality of their pictures and sculptures was primarily measured by their technical standard with regard to their perfect imitation of nature. 47 Apart from anecdotes on artists, the theoretical foundations for Renaissance concepts of painting were laid by philosophical (Neo-Platonic) and rhetorical theories in the classical tradition. While the philosophical theories of art focus on the aesthetic concepts of imitation and beauty, 48 rhetorical theories are employed by art theorists both as semiotic constructs for the description of the production stages and structures in the composition of paintings and as concepts of affective persuasion for the hermeneutic analysis of the effects of pictures on their beholders. 49

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49

Cf. Ernest B. Gilman, Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future. New York / Washington, D.C. / Baltimore / Bern / Frankfurt/M.: P. Lang, 2002. The Earl of Arundel had himself painted by Daniel Mytens (c. 1616-1618) while pointing at his art collection with an owner’s pride. See Figure 1 in Gilman’s monograph, which also contains a portrait of the Countess of Arundel in front of the picture gallery (Figure 2) as well as portraits of Earl and Countess of Arundel by Anthony van Dyck (Figures 3 & 4). For portraits commissioned by members of the Tudor and Stuart Court and the English aristocracy, see the opulent catalogue Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England. London: Tate Gallery, 1995. A great part of the Royal Collection was acquired in the 17th century from the Court of the Gonzaga at Mantua; cf. David Howarth, “‘Mantua Peeces’: Charles I and the Gonzaga Collections,” in: Splendours of the Gonzaga. Catalogue. Ed. David Chambers & Jane T. Martineau. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1981, pp. 95-100. The exhibition catalogue gives a good impression of the treasures that in this manner found their way from Italy to England. Cf. Ludovico Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura (1557): “Dico adunque la Pittura, brevemente parlando, non essere altro, che imitatione della Natura: e colui, che piu nelle sue opere le si avicina, e` piu perfetto Maestro.” - English translation: “To put it briefly, then, I say that painting is nothing other than the imitation of nature; and the closer to nature a man comes in his works, the more perfect a master he is.” (From: Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento. New York: New York University Press, 1968, pp. 96-97). Cf. Wilhelm Perpeet, Das Kunstschöne: Sein Ursprung in der italienischen Renaissance. Freiburg / München: Alber, 1987; Michael Jäger, Die Theorie des Schönen in der italienischen Renaissance. Köln: DuMont, 1990. Cf. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton, 1968; Gerard LeCoat, The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550-1650. Bern / Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1975.

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Figure 45: Daniel Mytens (c. 1590-1647): Painting of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (c. 1618), pointing at his art collection.

In fifteenth-century Florence the famous humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II (1405-1464), claimed a close relationship between painting and oratory in a letter of 1452:

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These arts, painting and oratory, love each other mutually. The genius of both painting and oratory desires not to be common but lofty and great. It is a strange thing that as oratory flourishes so does painting. This is seen from the period of Demosthenes and of Cicero. After eloquence was cut down, painting fell. When oratory revived, painting also raised its head. Painting was an almost wholly unpolished art for two hundred years. The writings of that time are rude, inept, unelegant. After Petrarch letters emerged; after Giotto the hand of the painter arose; and we already see both arrived at a very high point. 50

Irrespective of the historical correctness of this statement, it is important to note that painting and oratory are regarded as sister arts here, in the sense that they both flourish and decline simultaneously. Their rebirth in the Early Modern Age not only leads to a rather speedy flowering but also a mutual interaction in theory and practice. As a rule, theories of art display a syncretism of the two traditions of rhetoric and (Neo-Platonic) philosophy, but for practical reasons they will be disentangled in the following discussion to give precedence to the rhetorical perspective. In his Dialogo della Pittura, intitolato l’Aretino (1557) the Venetian Ludovico Dolce (1508-1568) describes the three stages to be observed by an artist for the composition of a picture: Tutta la somma della Pittura a mio giudicio e` divisa in tre parti: Inventione, Disegno, e Colorito. La inventione e` la favola, o historia, che’l Pittore si elegge da lui stesso, o gli e` posta inanzi da altri per materia di quello, che ha da operare. Il disegno e` la forma, con che egli la rappresenta. Il colorito serve a quelle tinte, con lequali la Natura dipinge (che cosi si puo dire) diversamente le cose animate e inanimate.

And in English translation: The whole sum of painting is, in my opinion, divided into three parts: invention, design and coloring. The invention is the fable or history which the painter chooses on his own or which others present him with, as material for the work he has to do. The design is the form he uses to represent this material. And the coloring takes its cue from the hues with which nature paints (for one can say as much) animate and inanimate things in variegation. 51 50

51

Quoted from John R. Spencer, “Ut Rhetorica Pictura: A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 26- 44, here: 27. - Original text: “Amant enim se artes he (eloquentia et pictura) ad invicem, Ingenium pictura expetit, ingenium eloquentia cupit non vulgare, sed altum et summum. Mirabile dictu est, dum viguit eloquentia, viguit pictura, sicut Demostenis et Ciceronis tempora docent. Postquam cecidit facundia iacuit et pictura. Cum illa revixit, haec quoque caput extullit. Videmus picturas ducentorum annorum nulla prorsus arte politas. Scripta illius aetatis rudia sunt, inepta, incompta. Post Petrarcham emerserunt litere; post Jotum surrexere pictorum manus; utramque ad summam iam videmus artem pervenisse” (ibid., p. 27, n. 4). Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art of the Cinquecento. New York: New York University Press, 1968, pp. 116-117.

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This sequence roughly corresponds to the three rhetorical partes artis of Inventio - Dispositio - Elocutio. Of the latter the colores rhetorici are made identical with the colores pictoris. Later in the Cinquecento Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo tried to establish painting as an art by referring to the classical authority of Horace and the first two (Inventio and Dispositio) of the five rhetorical partes artis in writing: Where wee must note that the Painter in his descriptions, doth not drawe lines at randome without rule, proportion, or arte, (as some vainely haue imagined) since the arrantest bunglers that are, proceede with some litle methode. And although Horace in his booke de arte Poe¨tica saith: that, The Poet and the Painter hath like patent to invent A story, and dispose the same as shall him best content: Yet that is thus to be vnderstoode, that it is lawfull for him to expresse a figure in what action hee list: As in shewing Julius Cæsar in the Pharsalian warre in some action, which peradventure he never did. 52

By these words Lomazzo first defends the necessity of rules that constitute painting as an art but later suspends their orthodoxy in imitation to emphasize the freedom of the imagination to create its own image of life. About half a century later Franciscus Junius (1589-1677) in his treatise De Pictura Veterum (Amsterdam, 1637), or the author’s own English translation The Painting of the Ancients (1638), both written at the express desire of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, stressed the affiliation between painting and rhetoric on the basis of the classical authorities of Cicero and Quintilian: The ancients observed in Picture these five principall points. Invention, or Historicall argument. Proportion, or Symmetrie. Colour, and therein Light and Shadow, as also Brightnesse and Darknesse. Motion or Life, and therein Action and Passion. Disposition, or an Oeconomicall placing and ordering of the whole worke. The foure first were carefully observed in all sorts of Pictures, whether they did consist of one figure, or of many. Disposition alone was observed in Pictures that had many figures: seeing a piece wherein there doe meete many and severall figures shall be nothing else but a kinde of mingle-mangle or a darksome and dead confusion of disagreeing things, unlesse they receive light and life by a convenient and orderly disposition. Yet did not the ancients think that the perfection of Art consisted in a meete observing of these five points, except the whole worke did breath forth a certaine kinde of Grace proceeding out of a decent comelinesse of every point by it self, and out of a mutuall accord of all five. 53 52

53

Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Building. Written first in Italian by Jo: Paul Lomatius painter of Milan, and Englished by R.H. student in Physick (1598), The first Booke, p. 16. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638). Facsimile Reprint: Westmead, Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg, 1972, pp. 221-222 (“The Thirde Booke: The Argument”).

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Again, these “five principall points” are grosso modo analogous to the partes artis of rhetoric. 54 Yet the author not only stresses their individual importance but also the decorum of their interconnection for the composition of a pleasant picture. The principal aim in doing so is grace or comeliness, which is the necessary prerequisite of pictorial beauty. From a technical and terminological point of view a number of vernacular Italian art theories adopted rhetorical categories. Of these are to be mentioned Francesco Lancilotto’s short didactic poem Trattato di pittura of 1509 (disegno, colorito, compositione, inventione), Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di pittura of 1548 (disegno, invenzione, colorito), Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo of 1584 (inventione, dispositione, attitudini, membri, colori) and Gianbattista Armenini’s De’ veri precetti della pittura of 1587 (disegno, lumi, ombre, colorito, compimento). 55 As late as 1695 John Dryden’s preface to his translation of Charles Alfonse du Fresnoy’s Latin poem De arte graphica (1668) is subtitled “Perfect Nature - Epic Heroes - Comedy - Imitation (Invention, Disposition, Colouring).” 56

Roland de Fre´art, Sieur des Cambray (1606-1676), in his Ide´e de la perfection de la peinture (1662), translated into English as An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1668), still adopts the same rhetorical paradigm. Referring to “that Learned Hollander” Franciscus Junius, he writes: The Ancients, says He [sc. Junius], constantly observ’d Five Parts in all their Works. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Invention, or the History. Proportion, or Symmetrie. Colour, (wherein is also contain’d the just dispensation of the Lights and Shades.) Motion, in which are expressed the Actions and Paßions. And lastly, the Collocation or regular Position of the Figures of the whole Work.

But these four being Treated in so general Terms, that it were almost impossible, our Workmen should derive the Fruit and Instruction which is so necessary for

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Cf. Allan Ellenius, De Arte Pingendi: Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and its International Background. Uppsala & Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1960, pp. 33-54: “Franciscus Junius, De Pictura Veterum (1637): General Background and Philological Character”; Colette Nativel, “Franciscus Junius et le De Pictura Veterum,” XVII e Sie`cle 35 (1983), 7-30 and “La comparaison entre la peinture et la poe´sie dans le De Pictura Veterum, (1,4) de Franciscus Junius (1589-1677),” Word & Image 4/1 (1988), 323-330; M. Vasilov, “Rhetoric and Fragments of a High Baroque Art Theory,” Marsyas 20 (1979/1980), 17-29. Ellenius, De Arte Pingendi, p. 69. John Dryden, “Preface of the Translator, with a Parallel of Poetry and Painting [Prefixed to De Arte Graphica: the Art of Painting, by C.A. du Fresnoy, Translated by Mr Dryden (1695)], in: John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Ed. George Watson. 2 vols. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1962, vol. II, p. 181.

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them to practise; I will here explain them in Order, and more at large, and endeavour to render them intelligible, both by Reasons and Examples. 57

This general introduction is followed by detailed descriptions of the parts of the rhetorico-pictorial paradigm.

4.1. Inventio (invenzione, invention) 58 In his treatise on painting Alberti suggests that pictorial inventions should be obtained from a knowledge of reality and particularly from its representations in the sister art of poetry: For their own enjoyment artists should associate with poets and orators who have many embellishments in common with painters and who have a broad knowledge of many things. These could be very useful in beautifully composing the istoria whose greatest praise consists in the invention. A beautiful invention has such force, as will be seen, that even without painting it is pleasing in itself alone. Invention is praised when one reads the description of Calumny which Lucian recounts was painted by Apelles. 59

The Calumny of Apelles did indeed play a major part in Quattrocento literature and painting. 60 More important, however, from a general point of view, is that in art invention is regarded as equivalent to a story or a narration 57

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An Idea of the Perfection of Painting. […]. Written in French by Roland Freart, Sieur de Cambray, and rendred English by J. E. Esquire, Fellow of the Royal Society. [London:] In the Savoy: Printed for Henry Herringman at the Sign of the Anchor in the Lower-walk of the New-Exchange. 1668, pp. 10-11. A collection of French testimonies on the (rhetorical, poetical pictorial) term invention is presented by Peter-Eckhard Knabe, Schlüsselbegriffe des kunsttheoretischen Denkens in Frankreich von der Spätklassik bis zum Ende der Aufklärung. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1972, pp. 339-346. Alberti, On Painting, p. 90. - Latin text: “Proxime non ab re erit se poetis atque rhetoribus delectabuntur. Nam hi quidem multa cum pictore habent ornamenta communia. Neque parum illi quidem multarum rerum notitia copiosi litterati ad historiae compositionem pulchre constituendam iuvabunt, quae omnis laus praesertim in inventione consistit. Atqui ea quidem hanc habet vim, ut etiam sola inventio sine pictura delectet. Laudatur, dum legitur, illa Calumniae descriptio quam ab Apelle pictam refert Lucianus. Eam quidem enarrare minime ab instituto alienum esse censeo, quo pictores admoneantur eiusmodi inventionibus fabricandis advigilare oportere” (Alberti, De statua - De pictura - Elementa picturae. Ed. O. Bätschmann et al., p. 294). Cf. Rudolph Altrocchi, “The Calumny of Apelles in the Literature of the Quattrocento,” PMLA 36 (1921), 454-491; Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 158; Götz Pochat, “Rhetorik und bildende Kunst in der Renaissance,” in H.F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 266-284, esp. p. 271 (on Sandro Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles [Figure 5] in imitation of Lucian’s fictive ekphrasis of this topic).

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(narratio) but also to an idea of the subject to be painted. The preference given to the idea in comparison to its pictorial implementation is, of course, not derived from rhetoric but from Neoplatonism. 61

4.2. Dispositio (dispositione, disegno 62, compositione) In classical rhetoric dispositio is the one of the five partes artis that receives least attention and therefore lacks detailed structural categories and procedures. Nevertheless the theorists and practitioners of Renaissance art attribute a fairly great importance to it. Franciscus Junius (Figure 46), a scholar bred in the tradition of classical learning, emphasizes the importance of pictorial disposition or proportion and its affiliation with invention: Disposition is it annexed to the Invention, from the Disposition as it is the worke of an accurate Proportion. Disposition as it is annexed to the Invention, doth expresse a lively image of that order which the nature of the invented things imprinteth in our mind: this is a worke of great consequence, and it requireth singular care: for if the ancients had knowne a certaine way of Disposition which might have fitted all matters, a good many should have excelled in it: Apelles especially, that same bright lode-starre of Art, should have attained this praise above all the rest: who now, not daring to ascribe this glory unto himselfe, was compelled to yeeld unto Amphion: see Plinie lib. xxxv, cap. 10. […]. The chiefest helpe of Disposition consisteth therein, that wee acquaint our thoughts with the very presence, as it were, of the conceived matter: for if the history doth but once beginne to plant her image in our imagination, the very handling of the matter and the reentring into the presence of things will instantly suggest into us a readie and sure way how to order and place every figure. 63

Thus the imaginary concept (design) of a picture represents a necessary requirement for its realization in a lively picture whose prominent quality is energeia. The French art theorist Roger de Piles (1635-1709) stresses the importance of pictorial dispositio in his Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture (1677) in the following way: 61

62

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Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Berlin: Hessling, 21960. - English trans. by Joseph S. Peake: Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. On this term cf. M. Poirier, “The Role of the Concept of Disegno in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in: The Age of Vasari. Notre Dame, Ind., 1970, pp. 53-66 and Michael Baxandall, “English Disegno,” in: Edward Chancey & Peter Mack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance. Woodbridge, England / Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 1990, pp. 203-214. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, p. 309.

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Figure 46: Franciscus Junius (1598-1677): Frontispiece by Wenzel Hollar after a painting by Anthony van Dyck in De schilderkonst de oude (1641).

Le peintre est comme l’Orateur, & le Sculpteur comme le Grammerien. Le Grammerien est correct & juste dans ses mots, il s’explique nettement & sans ambiguite´ dans ses discours, comme le Sculpteur fait dans ses Figures, & l’on doit comprendre facilement ce que l’un & l’autre nous representent. L’Orateur doit estre instruit des choses que scX ait le Grammerien, & le Peintre de celles que scX ait le Sculpteur. Elles leurs sont a` chacun necessaires pour communiquer leurs pense´es, & pour se faire entendre: mais & l’Orateur, & le Peintre, sont obligez de passer outre. Le Peintre doit persuader les yeux comme un homme Eloquent doit toucher le cœur. 64 64

Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des Tablaux (Paris, 1677). Facsimile Reprint: Gene`ve: Slatkine Reprints, 1970, pp. 102-103. On Roger de Piles cf. Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1985, esp. Chap. III: “Rhetoric and Painting: L’ordre naturel and l’ordre artificiel in pictorial imitation and attraction.”

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In order to “persuade the eyes” of the beholder the painter must strive to achieve an effective arrangement of the subjects of his composition. Both sculptor and painter make use of what linguists call a grammar, but the painter makes additional use of a secondary grammar consisting of a system of deviations from the natural order (ordo naturalis). This is done not by a random or natural disposition of details but by one that subordinates less important ones to the principal subject. The implementation of such an ordo artificialis is performed with a view to the effectiveness of the representation: Dans la composition d’un Tableau, le Peintre doit faire en sorte, autant qu’il lui sera possible, que le Spectateur soit frappe´ d’abord du caractere du sujet, & que du moins apre`s quelques momens de reflexion, il en ait la principale intelligence. 65

By employing the appropriate techniques for directing the beholder’s attention to the central focus of the subject represented, the painter is able to practice a visual persuasion or, in other words, a pictorial rhetoric.

4.3. Colores rhetorici (colori, colorito, couleur, coloris) 66 According to Moshe Barasch it is above all the Venetian authors that are fascinated by colour. 67 Paolo Pino subdivides colour into three categories, proprieta`, prontezza, and lume, which sometimes overlap. As a pictorial category proprieta` denotes the application of decorum to colour. By using proper hues or combinations of tones the painter reveals the ethos (age, sex, etc.) of a figure. Colours thus have the function of a semantic representation (symbolization) of physical, psychological, and social qualities. Prontezza is used to denote expressive, dramatic movements. The category lume (light), which ever since Alberti had been felt to be closely related to colour, was in the Venetian view part of a uniform entity. In painting the major task of light is to bestow volume on the figures and objects represented, to make them appear threedimensional, and thus let them “emerge” from the flat canvas or wall on which they are depicted in order to assume a lifelike plastic shape. This is what rhetoric terms enargeia or evidentia. The same opinion is expressed by Franciscus Junius in The Painting of the Ancients: 65 66 67

Roger de Piles, Conversations, p. 96. For French testimonies on couleur and coloris, see Knabe, Schlüsselbegriffe, pp. 129-140. Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann. New York / London: New York University Press, 1985, p. 257 ff. which are the primary source of the following outline.

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These are the most observable things in colour, and it is no great marvell that pictures graced with these perfections should take our eyes after a strange and unusuall manner. Colour mooveth us more in pictures, sayth Plutarch [De Poetis audiendis.], then a simple delineation; and that because of the neere resemblance of man it hath together with a certaine aptnesse to deceive: for although there be sometimes in lineall pictures, according to our former discourse, a deceitfull similitude of Life and Motion, and that statues very often may seeme to live and breath; coloured pictures for all that, as they shew a more lively force in the severall effects and properties of life and spirit, so doe they most commonly ravish our sight with the bewitching pleasure of delightsome and stately ornaments. 68

Thus an ascending scale in the realization of energeia in pictorial representation may be discerned: beginning with an imaginary concept that becomes visible in the dispositio of lineaments on paper or canvas, it reaches its full illusory mimesis in the use of colour and light. Add to these the actio of movements, and the result is a picture that is “livelier than life,” which is mimesis and energeia in perfection.

4.4. Styles (modes) of rhetoric and painting Classical and medieval rhetoric regularly distinguish three styles (genera dicendi ): low (genus humile, tenue), middle (genus medium, mediocre), and high (genus grande, sublime). These styles also apply to the visual arts and their representations, so that a pastoral scene with shepherds and animals may be attributed to the low style, whereas mythological and historical scenes (portraits) with kings, noblemen, and warriors (as in Rubens and Poussin) belong to the grand style. 69 The classification is different in a concept informally set forth by Nicolas Poussin in a letter to Chantelou (dated: Rome, November 24, 1647) 70; here he refers to the ancient doctrine of musical 68 69

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Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, p. 285. In the course of art history the ranks of subjects and styles have changed: Whereas, for instance, in the Baroque Age a still-life composed of plants and flowers was regarded as dealing with low objects and therefore as low, the Romantic Age raised landscape painting, as with William Turner, to a sublime status. Cf. Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. English trans. in: Elizabeth G. Holt (ed.), A Documentary History of Art. Vol. II: “Michelangelo and the Mannerists: The Baroque and the Eighteenth Century”, pp. 154-156; Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin. London: Pallas Athene, pp. 367-370 (French and English). – Discussions by Jan Białostocki, “Das Modusproblem in den bildenden Künsten: Zur Vorgeschichte und zum Nachleben des ‘Modusbriefes’ von Nicolas Poussin” (1961), in: J. Bialostocki, Stil und Ikonographie: Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft. Köln: DuMont, 1981 (Dresden, 1 1966), pp. 12-42; Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, Chap. VII; Barasch, Theories of Art, pp. 329-330.

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modes 71 which could arouse the soul of the recipient to various passions: “Hence the fact that the ancient sages attributed to each style its own effects.” 72 Poussin transfers this system of modes, in an act of transmediality, to the visual arts and illustrates it in the following way: I hope, before another year is out, to paint a subject in the Phrygian Mode. The subject of frightful wars lends itself to this manner. They [the ancients] also decided that the Lydian Mode lends itself to tragic subjects because it has neither the simplicity of the Dorian nor the severity of the Phrygian. The Hypolidian Mode contains a certain suavity and sweetness which fills the souls of the spectators with joy; it lends itself to subjects of divine glory, and paradise. The ancients invented the Ionic, with which they represented bacchanalian dances and feasts in order to achieve a festive effect. The good poets used great care and marvellous artifice in order to fit the words to the verses and to dispose the feet in accordance with the usage of speech, as Virgil did throughout his poem, where he fits the sound of the verse itself to all his three manners of speaking with such skill that he really seems to place the things of which he speaks before your eyes by means of the sound of the words, with the result that, in the portions where he speaks of love, one finds that he has skilfully chosen such words as are sweet, pleasant and very delightful to hear; whereas, if he sings of a feat of arms or describes a naval battle or a storm, he chooses hard, rasping, harsh words, so that when one hears or pronounces them, they produce a feeling of fear. Therefore, if I had made you a picture in which such a style were adhered to, you would imagine that I did not like you … . 73

Thus in this letter Poussin undertakes a very audacious ‘synaesthetic’ enterprise by postulating a homology of artistic styles in the musical, pictorial, and poetical media. The effect of this procedure can be described in rhetorical terms as energeia. 4.5. Actio (motions) In An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (1662/1668) Roland Fre´art emphatically stresses the overriding importance of “motion and expression”: 71

72 73

On Greek music, see Thrasybulos Georgiades, Musik und Rhythmus bei den Griechen: Zum Ursprung der abendländischen Musik. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958; id., Greek Music, Verse, and Dance. Trans. E. Benedikt & M.L. Martinez. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. Holt (ed.), A Documentary History of Art. Vol. II, p. 155. From Holt (ed.), A Documentary History of Art. Vol. II, pp. 155-156. Poussin copied the concept of musical modes, almost verbatim, from a treatise of the Venetian musicologist Gioseffe Zarlino (1517-1590), who studied classical Greek ideas of musical melodies.

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But as the three first Parts are highly necessary for all Painters in general; this Fourth, which concerns the Expreßion and Motion of the spirit, excells them all, and is indeed admirable; for it gives not only life to Figures, by representing their Gestures and Passions; but seems likewise to make them vocal and to reason with you. It is from hence, a Man is enabl’d to judge of the worth and abilities of a Painter; for such an Artist paints Himselfe in his Tables, and represents, as in so many Mirrours and Glasses, the temper of his own humour and Genius. 74

Such a statement is, like others, suitable to supply a theoretical commentary on the paragone between poet and painter in the first scene of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The second book of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura (1584) deals with the “actions, gestures, situation, decorum, motion, spirit, and grace of pictures.” At the beginning of the first chapter of this book he stresses the importance of realistic representation as the general basis of painting: It is generally confessed of all men, that all such motions in pictures, as doe most neerely resemble the life, are exceeding pleasant; and contrariwise those which doe farthest dissent from the same, are voide of al gratious beauty; committing the like discord in Nature, which vntuned strings doe in an instrument. Neither doe these motions, thus liuely imitating nature in pictures, breed only an eie-pleasing co˜tentment, but do also performe the selfe same effects which the natural doe. For as he which laugheth, mourneth, or is otherwise affected, doth naturally mooue the beholders to the selfe same passion of mirth or sorrow (whence the Poet saith, If thou in me would’st true compaßion breede, And from mine heauy eies wring flouds of teares: Then act thine inward griefes by word and deede Vnto mine eies, as well as to mine eares:) So a picture artificially expressing the true naturall motions, will (surely) procure laughter when it laugheth, pensiueness when it is grieued &c. And, that which is more, will cause the beholder to wonder, when it wondereth, to desire a beautiful young woman for his wife, when he seeth her painted naked: to haue a fellow-feeling when it is afflicted; to haue an appetite when he seeth it eating of dainties; to fal asleepe at the sight of a sweetesleeping picture; to be mooued and waxe furious when he beholdeth a battel most liuely described; and to be stirred with disdaine and wrath, at the sight of shameful and dishonest actions. All which pointes are (in truth) worthy of no lesse admiration, then those Miracles of the ancient Musitians; who with the variety of their melodious harmony, were wont to stirre men vp to wrath and indignation, loue, warres, honourable attemptes, and all other affections, as they listed: or those strange conclusions of the Mathematical motions, recorded of those vndoubted wise men, who made Statuaes to mooue of their owne accord. 75 74 75

Roland Fre´art de Cambray, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, p. 14. Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge, & Buildinge. Written first in Italian by Jo: Paul Lomatius painter of Milan. And Englished by R.H. student in Physik (1598),

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These statements display a host of rhetorical and intermedial references. The poet quoted in an English verse translation is, of course, Horace, who in his Ars Poetica asks the poet to produce not only beautiful works but such as move the recipients to various passions. 76 But in order to attain that aim, the poet himself must be affected by the selfsame passions. In this regard he learns from the rhetoricians, who in the chapters on delivery (actio / pronuntiatio) of their treatises require that the orator be completely immersed in the passions which he wishes to engender in his audience. 77 The same procedure, according to Lomazzo, exists in music with regard to its diversity of affections. As to painting, he attributes to the motions and gestures of the figures represented spiritual and emotional qualities in a similar way as was already practised by Leonardo da Vinci. But in his theory he is more systematic than his great predecessor. Chapter 9 of the second book titled “Of the Motions of Melancholy, Fearfulnesse, Maliciousnesse, Covetousnesse, Slownesse, Envie, Bashfulnesse, and Anxietie” sketches a topic of the relations between certain emotions and motions. As the most prominent emotion melancholy heads the long line of descriptions:

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The Second Booke, pp. 1-2. - Cf. Ludovico Dolce: “Ne puo muovere il Pittore, se prima nel far delle figure non sente nel suo animo quelle passioni, o diciamo affetti, che vuole imprimere in quello d’altrui” (quoted from Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, p. 24). Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 99-113: non satis est pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto. ut ridentibus adrident, ita flentibus adflent humani voltus. si vis me flere, dolendumst primum ipsi tibi: tum tua me infortunia laedent, Telephe vel Peleu: male si mandata loqueris, aut dormitabo aut ridebo. tristia maestum voltum verba decent, iratum plena minarum, ludentem lasciva, severum seria dictu. format enim natura prius nos intus ad omnem fortunarum habitum; iuvat aut inpellit ad iram, aut ad humum maerore gravi deducit et angit: post effert animi motus interprete lingua. si dicentis erunt fortunis absona dicta, Romani tollent equites peditesque cachinnum. Cf. e. g. Cicero, De Oratore II.xliv.189: “Neque fieri potest, ut doleat is, qui audit, ut oderit, ut invideat, ut pertimescat aliquid, ut ad fletum misericordiamque deducatur, nisi omnes illi motus, quos orator adhibere volet iudici, in ipso oratore impressi esse atque inusti videbuntur.” - Translation: “Moreover it is impossible for the listener to feel indignation, hatred or ill-will, to be terrified of anything, or reduced to tears of compassion, unless all these emotions, which the advocate would inspire in the arbitrator, are visibly stamped or rather branded on the advocate himself ” (E.W. Sutton). - Cf. also Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.ii.26-36.

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Having generally intreated of all the motions, vnto what kinde of bodies they do particularly appertaine, and howe they may accidentally befall all sortes of men; it remaineth that I touch each of them seuerally, beginning with MELANCHOLIE: whose motions are pensiue, sorrowfull, and heauie: and are to be expressed in the picture of Adam and Eue immediatly vpon their fall, making them with declined countenances, and eies fixed on the earth, bowing the head, with one elbow resting vpon the knee, & the hand vnder the cheeke, sitting in some conuenient place, as vnder a shadowie tree, betweene the rockes, or in some caue; Where you may likewise place Agar, when growing great with childe, and thrust out by Abrahams wife, shee betooke her selfe to a solitary place, where she fell into a most deepe fit of sorrowfull bewailing and lamentation, hanging the head, till the Angell came and comforted her. In like sort shall you represent Dauid after his adultery; Peter after his denial of his master, &c. which Ariosto hath in some measure shaddowed in Sacripante Cant.: I. where he saith: He tarried in this muse an howre and more, VVith looke cast downe, in sad and heauy guise. And againe Cant : 2. His eies were swolne with teares, his minde oppreßed. VVith bitter thoughts, which had his hart distressed. 78

The description given here of melancholy immediately calls to mind such Renaissance representations as Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (Figure 47). 79 The subsequent paragraphs of chapter 9 of Book II present further emotions and the motions expressing them, Timiditie, Malice, Covetousnesse, and others. In each case a meticulously precise description of this relationship is given. And in each case this relationship proves very constant, admitting only of a limited range of variations of the stock description. As a whole, the entire repertoire of actio manifestations in painting represents a kind of pictorial collection of actional topoi whose potential stands ready for reactivation in pictures of various kinds. It represents a collective memoria of kinesic commonplaces from which the artist may gather ideas and prefabricated exempla for his own creations. It is, however, not a ‘universal language’ but a conventionalized fundus of corporeal signs, a topics in the sense of E. R. Curtius. In late Renaissance Italy Giovanni Bonifacio (1547-1635), author of L’Arte de Cenni con la quale formandosi favella visibile, si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non e altro che un facundo silentio (Vicenza, 1616), complains that the communication barriers set up by the confusion of languages at Babel could be broken down 78 79

Lomazzo, Tracte, The Second Booke, p. 25. Cf. Raymond Klibansky / Erwin Panofsky / Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. London: Nelson / New York: Basic Books, 1964; Peter-Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild. 2 vols. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991; Hartmut Böhme, Albrecht Dürer: Melencolia I. Im Labyrinth der Deutung. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1993.

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Figure 47: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528): Melencolia I.

by the use of the “mute eloquence” of gestures whose character is of a more general nature. But the pictorial practice in Western and Eastern Europe had long anticipated this idea by employing a fixed set of gestures and motions of the hands and arms that carry with them equally fixed meanings. 80 In a character with the title “An excellent Actor” attributed to the English dramatist John Webster (1580?-1625?) the perspective of the relationship 80

Cf. Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. An outstanding example of this pictorial constancy is the icon of the Orthodox Church.

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between painter and actor in the twofold sense of orator and player is reversed and enriched: Hee [sc. the actor] is much affected to painting, and tis a question whether that make him an excellent Plaier, or his playing an exquisite painter. Hee addes grace to the Poets labours: for what in the Poet is but ditty, in him is both ditty and musicke. He entertaines us in the best leisure of our life, that is betweene meales, the most unfit time, either for study or bodily exercise: the flight of Hawkes, and chase of wilde beastes, either of them are delights noble: but some think this sport of men the worthier, despight of calumny. 81

The concept of art presented here is one of the synthesis of the arts which raises both painter and actor to the status of an uomo universale who is an expert in poetry and music as well. The artistic effect of these joint artes liberales is described as aesthetic delight; they are enjoyed as noble entertainments of a truly aristocratic culture of the human mind.

4.6. Evidentia and the Affections In his treatise The Elements of Architecture (1624) the English man of letters and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639) postulates four “Requisites, and Perfections in Picture,” the last being affection, of which he writes: Lastly, Affection is the Liuely Representment, of any passion whatsoeuer, as if the Figures stood not vpon a Cloth or Boorde, but as if they were acting vpon a Stage. 82

The evidentia or enargeia principle underlying such an utterance means in this context that the figures painted in a picture are expressive of certain affections in such a way that they appear as actors on a stage where they enact scenes of joy or grief, as in a theatrical performance. Their pictorial threedimensionality, the precondition of a feigned realism, is demanded by the author in his third principle, which he calls force (or energeia) and identifies as “Roundings & Raisings of the Worke, according as the Limbes doe more or lesse require it, So as the Beholder, shall spie no sharpenesse in the bordering Lines.” 83 Thus the principles of force and affection are in a way interdependent and,

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John Webster, Complete Works. Ed. F.L. Lucas. 4 vols. New York: Gordian Press, 1966, vol. IV, p. 43. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architectvre (1624). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1970, pp. 88, 89. - Wotton’s poetical and other writings were published as Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651). His biography was written by his friend Izaak Walton (1651). Wotton, Elements, p. 86.

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as in the verbal arts, supported by another one, namely rhetorical celare artem, as is clearly stated by Wotton: But as in the Arte of perswasion, one of the most Fundamentall Precepts is; the concealement of Arte. Soe here likewise, the Sight must be sweetly deceaued, by an insensible passage, from brighter colours, to dimmer, which Italian Artizans calle the middle Tinctures; That is, Not as the whites, and yolkes of Egges lie in the Shell, with visible distinction; But as when they are beaten, and blended, in a Dish: which is the neerest comparison, that I can suddenly conceiue. 84

The deception of sight is achieved, in the process of painting, by the mezzotint procedure of creating pictorial transitions by the blending of colours; this results in a picture exhibiting the principle of difficulte´ vaincue, which is synonymous with the rhetorical celare artem. A comparison between poetical and pictorial evidentia leads to the conclusion that because of its higher degree of sensuality the latter is more affective and hence more eloquent. Franciscus Junius, who in The Painting of the Ancients relies on classical authorities, especially on Cicero and Quintilian, expounds this matter in these words: Both [sc. poet and painter] doe hold the raines of our hearts, leading and guiding our Passions by that beguiling power they have, whithersoever they list. […] Saint Basil speaketh of both, Eloquent Writers and Painters, sayth he [Homil. 40. martyr.], doe very often expresse the warlike deeds of valiant men; and both do stirre vp a great many to courage; whilest the one studieth to set forth in lively colours, what the other goeth about to adorne with eloquence: both then have a hidden force to move and compell our minds to severall Passions, but Picture for all that seemeth to doe it more effectually; seeing things that sinke into our hearts by means of our eares, sayth Nazarius [In Panegyrico], doe more faintly stirre our minde, then such things as are drunke in by the eyes. Polybius [Lib.XII.] doth likewise affirme, that our eyes are more accurate witnesses then our eares: and it may be very well that Quintilian out of such a consideration hath drawne this same conclusion; Picture, sayth he [Lib.XI. orat. institut. cap.3], a silent worke, and constantly keeping the same forme, doth so insinuate it selfe into our most inward affections, that it seemeth now and then to be of greater force then Eloquence it selfe. 85

Thus even such classical authorities as propagate the value and importance of rhetoric must concede that the visual medium possesses a greater energeia than the verbal one. For the former is subject to ocular perception, which is superior to the ear because of the greater intensity and more forceful immediacy of visual sense impressions.

84 85

Wotton, Elements, pp. 86-88. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, pp. 55-56.

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5. Pictures as Orations: Two Case Studies In the Renaissance the superior natural effectiveness of the picture over the word was fortified by such humanist artists and theoreticians as adopted verbal techniques from rhetoric textbooks in order to create vivid paintings that fulfilled the postulates of a perfect imitatio naturae and a plastic enargeia of representation. Analysing pictures rhetorically means treating them like orations, and this in its turn presupposes that works of art are attributed a linguistic character. 86 The following analysis of two oil paintings will illustrate a rhetorical approach to pictorial hermeneutics. The first is the so-called Viennese Crucifixion (c. 1500) by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), who was both a painter and a copperplate engraver and is commonly regarded as the founder of a Protestant German art; the second is the painting The Judgement of Solomon (1649) by the French classicist artist Nicolas Poussin (15941665), who spent the greater part of his life in Rome and was noted for scriptural, historical, and mythological subjects. In each case the inventio is evident: a subject taken from the Bible, in Poussin’s painting from the Old Testament, in Cranach’s painting from the New Testament, both exemplifications of the ut poesis pictura theorem. In Cranach’s picture (Figure 48) 87 the transmedialization of the scriptural narrative into a visual text takes place in the imposition of the structure of an oration on the composition of lines and colours. At the left margin of the picture, somewhat sequestered from the remaining figures, in fact almost standing outside the representation of the crucifixion scene proper, stands an unemotional traveller observing the scene, perhaps one of the Jews mentioned by St. John the Evangelist (XIX:20) as having come from the nearby city in order to read the trilingual inscription on Jesus’ cross. This anonymous man, perhaps a duplicate of the viewer, may sub specie rhetorica be interpreted as the exordium of a pictorial oration, preparing an entry to the biblical story depicted on the panel. Its continuation is to be found further to the right in 86

87

This factor is stressed by Georg Kauffmann, “Humanitas und Rhetorik,” in: Ernesto Grassi (ed.), L’Humanisme Allemand (1480-1540). Paris: Librairie Vrin / München: Fink, 1979, pp. 493-504. The present interpretation largely follows the argument of Edgar Bierende, Lucas Cranach d.Ä. und der deutsche Humanismus: Tafelmalerei im Kontext von Rhetorik, Chroniken und Fürstenspiegeln. München / Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002, pp. 16 ff., 57 ff. who attributes the rhetorical influence on painting to the humanist Konrad Celtis and stresses the significance of figures of actio (“Gebärdefiguren” [81]). - A useful monograph on the painter and his works is Die Gemälde von Lucas Cranach by Max J. Friedländer & Jakob Rosenberg. Stuttgart: Parkland Verlag, 1989 (11932).

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Figure 48: Lucas Cranach (1472-1553): The Crucifixion.

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the group composed of the apostle John and four mourning women joined by a soldier lifting a sponge soaked with vinegar and looking at the cross. In contrast to his apathy, the women display a variety of affections - grief, misery, despair, and compassion with a swooning Mary who is held in John’s arms. The linearity of their representation can be understood as a rhetorical text in the display of pathos caused by Christ’s death. It finds a structural oratorical equivalent in the narratio probabilis, 88 which by presenting and stimulating affections opens the case under investigation. In Cranach’s picture it visualizes several verbal utterances from St. John’s gospel, such as Jesus’ address to Mary concerning John, “Woman, behold thy son!” (St. John XIX:26) and Jesus’ utterances: “I thirst” (XIX:28) and “It is finished” (XIX:30), whereupon he died. The pictorial narratio is followed by the argumentatio, which is placed at the centre of both an oration and a picture. Here as elsewhere it is split into a confirmatio visualized by Jesus on the cross and the believing criminal to his right, while the unbelieving criminal to his left is something like an embodied refutatio. But this negative argument is again counterpoised by the centurion, who in the midst of his fellow-soldiers points at the dead Jesus on the cross as if saying with the words of St. Mathew’s Gospel: “Truly this was the Son of God” (XXVII:54). Which in rhetorical terms represents a kind of deictic peroratio. At the same time the mounted group of haughty soldiers on the right side of the picture forms an effective antithesis to the mourning group of distressed women on the left side. Both groups are distinguished from the crucified figures at the centre by the use of speaking gestures belonging to rhetorical delivery (actio). A clear proof of the impact of rhetoric upon painting in Cranach’s Crucifixion is the expression of affections, be it passionate ones or pathos in the group of women or, in contrast, moderate ones or ethos in the group of soldiers on the opposite side of the picture. If several of the figures represented can be attributed a dramatic quality, this is due to the fact that they practise a rhetoric of dialogue. 89 They enter into a conversation either among themselves and/or with the beholder. Such a verbal interaction originating from gestures creates a speaking picture in the sense that Simonides bestowed on this paradox. Its evident purpose is a didactic one, as was the function of one of his influential sources, Konrad Celtis’ 1492 commentary on Cicero’s rhetoric, dedicated by this humanist to Emperor Maximilian I.

88 89

Cf. Lausberg, Handbook, § 325. The same feature is also found in two other representations of the Crucifixion; cf. Friedländer & Rosenberg, Lucas Cranach, Figs. 5 & 377.

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Figure 49: Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665): The Judgement of Solomon.

A rhetorical analysis of Poussin’s painting The Judgement of Solomon (Figure 49) mainly proceeds from the focus of actio, i. e. the symbolic grammar of gestures. 90 The picture, which is characterized by a singular severity of composition, shows a Solomon, like a Byzantine icon, seated on a royal throne and pointing with his hands at the two groups of persons at his sides. By their gestures these figures express, in accordance with Poussin’s theory of art, the whole range of human emotions: anger, disapproval, fear, embarrassment, and cruelty. The story depicted here is well known from the Old Testament (I Kings IV:16-28). In the biblical narrative two women quarrelling over the claim to the possession of a newly born baby asked Solomon for his judgement, which he passed and thereby enhanced his fame of wis90

Poussin’s paintings as a whole are analysed by Christopher Wright in his monograph Poussin: Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonne´. London: Jupiter, 1984. - The present argument follows the elucidating interpretation of H. James Jensen, The Muses’ Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age. Bloomington / London: Indiana University Press, 1976, p. 60 ff. - Further analyses of Poussin’s paintings are by Marc Fumaroli in “Muta Eloquentia: La re´pre´sentation de l’e´loquence dans l’œuvre de Nicolas Poussin,” Bulletin de la Socie´te´ d’Histoire de l’Art Franc¸ais 1982 (1984), 29-48 and in L’inspiration de poe`te de Poussin: Essai sur l’alle´gorie du Parnasse. Paris: Ministe`re de la Culture, da la Communication, des Grands Travaux et du Bicentenaire, Editions de la Re´union des Muse´es nationaux, 1989.

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dom. Poussin’s painting catches the moment of Solomon’s decree to have the disputed child divided in two equal parts between the claimants. The visual expression of action and reaction in this scene finds its embodiment in gestures, which belong to rhetorical actio. Solomon’s hand indicates his insistent, dramatic purpose. With three fingers doubled under his thumb and his index finger extended for the purpose of denunciation and indication, Solomon’s attitude fulfils an actio rule of Quintilian (Inst. Or. XI.iii.94). The real mother, who expresses her desire to stop the execution of the child, makes use of Quintilian’s prescription: “In continuous and flowing passages a most becoming gesture is slightly to extend the arm with shoulders well thrown back and the fingers opening as the hand moves forward” (Inst. Or. XI.iii.84). 91 Quintilian’s rule for vehement affections is slightly modified in the present judicial situation. The other woman who crouches emotionally has her neck indecorously outstretched, of which gesture Quintilian disapproves (Inst. Or. XI.iii.82). 92 While the marginal figures in the picture display various emotional reactions to Solomon’s decision, the child at the right side just shows the curiosity of an outsider to the whole scene; as such he forms a parallel to the uninformed traveller in Cranach’s Crucifixion and hence also a reduplication of the spectator. In both paintings emotional gestures of the figures represented serve as concrete embodiments of their words and thoughts. They thus create “speaking pictures” in the metaphorical sense of Simonides’ aphorism.

6. ut pictura poesis The starting-point of the paragone between poetry and painting is a passage from Horace’s Epistola ad Pisones popularly called his Ars Poetica, lines 361365 read: ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes, te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes; 91

92

“Brachii moderata proiectio, remissis humeris atque explicantibus se in proferenda manu digitis, continuos et decurrentes locos maxime decet.” Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.82: “Cervicem rectam oportet esse, non rigidam aut supinam. Collum diversa quidem, sed pari deformitate et contrahitur et tenditur, sed tenso subest et labor, tenuaturque vox ac fatigatur; adfixum pectori mentum minus claram et quasi latiorem presso gutture facit.” Translation: “ The neck must be straight, not stiff or bent backward. As regards the throat, contraction and stretching are equally unbecoming, though in different ways. If it be stretched, it causes strain as well, and weakens and fatigues the voice, while if the chin be pressed down into the chest it makes the voice less distinct and coarsens it, owing to the pressure on the windpipe” (H.E. Butler).

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haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri, iudicis argutum quae non formidat acumen; haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit.

which is literally translated by the poeta doctus Ben Jonson as follows: As Painting, so is Poe¨sie: some mans hand Will take you more, the nearer that you stand; Some the farther off: this loves the dark; This, fearing not the subtlest Judges mark, Will in the light be view’d: this, once, the sight Doth please, this ten times over will delight. (vv. 515-520) 93

By placing the verb erit in the first clause, which then reads ut pictura poesis erit, he makes Horace’s meaning appear more dogmatic, namely as: “a poem will be like a painting;” 94 this later receives a still more dogmatic interpretation, when an imperative renders it as “a poem shall be like a painting.” 95 Starting from such a premise, Renaissance theorists of poetry inserted Horace’s dictum as a postulate in their tracts, sometimes merging it with, or substituting it by, Simonides of Ceos’ pictura loquens aphorism. In Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) the iconicity postulate finds entry in his definition of poetry based on Aristotle: Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, a counterfeiting, or figuring forth - to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture - with this end, to teach and delight. 96

In this definition a fusion takes place of Aristotle’s mimesis concept, Simonides’ iconicity postulate, and Horace’s theory of the two effects of poetry, prodesse and delectare (A.P. 333). Sir William Temple (1555-1627), Sidney’s private secretary, in his Latin Ramist Analysis tractationis de Poesi contextae a nobilissimo viro Philippo Sidneio equite aurato (c. 1584-1586), writes that Sidney’s definition of poetry as imitation is the very foundation on which his treatise 93

94

95

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Ben Jonson, [Works.] Ed. H. Herford and P.& E. Simpson. Vol. VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, p. 351. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp. 59-60 traces this kind of reading back to a classical Pseudo-Acron who is quoted in Landino’s early Renaissance edition Horatius cum quattuor commentariis (1498). On the history of the relationship between art theory and poetics and the ut pictura poesis theoreme before the 19th century, see Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie: Vom Ausgang des klassischen Altertums bis auf Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1965 (Leipzig, 11914); William G. Howard, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” PMLA 17 (1909); 40-123; Cecily Davies, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” MLR 30 (1935), 159-169. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 101.

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almost entirely stands. He identifies imitation with fiction-making (fictio) and this concept again with the “invention (inventio) of something that has never existed.” 97 Invention is for Temple the creation of logical arguments, “namely causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, contraries, comparisons, or the rest of those things which originate from these.” 98 On Sidney’s “speaking picture” he makes no comment, although he considers him a rhetor and his treatise a disputatio. 99

7. Ekphrasis: Painting Pictures with Words In the preface to his poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) George Chapman (1559?-1634) stresses the necessity of enarg(e)ia or evidentia for verbal representations: Enargia, or cleerenes of representation, requird in absolute Poems is not the perspicuous delivery of a lowe invention: but high, and harty invention exprest in most significant, and unaffected phrase; it serves not a skilfull Painters turne, to draw the figure of a face onely to make knowne who it represents, but hee must lymn, give luster, shaddow, and heightening; which though ignorants will esteem spic’d, and too curious, yet such as have the judiciall perspective, will see it hath motion, spirit, and life. 100

In order to achieve the evidentia of such visible artefacts as paintings, poets must endeavour to “figure forth” (Sidney) their inventions in such a lively manner that the readers imagine to be witnesses of mental pictures. The rhetorical devices to be applied for such an enargetic purpose are subsumed under the Greek technical term ekphrasis, which in Latin is descriptio and in English description. As a category of style it looks back on a long rhetorical tradition and is one of the elementary exercises or progymnasmata on which Richard Rainolde in his Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) writes: This exercise profitable to Rhetorike, is an Oracio˜ that collecteth and representeth to the iye, that which he sheweth, so Priscianus defineth it. […] Descripcio˜ serueth to these things, the person, as the Poete Lucane describeth Pompey & Cesar: the person is described, thynges or actes, tymes, places, brute beastes. 101 97

98 99 100

101

John Webster, William Temple’s “Analysis” of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry”: An Edition and Translation. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1984, pp. 8081. - p. 80: Poesis est ars imitationis seu fictionis ad Docendum & delectandum.” Ibid. Webster, William Temple’s “Analysis,” pp. 166-167. George Chapman, Poems. Ed. Ph. B. Bartlett. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 (11941), p. 49. Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (London, 1563). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo, 1969, Fol.lj.r-v.

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As a rule ekphrasis or description is attributed to epideixis or the genus demonstrativum which, with its autotelic functionality, is closest to the poetical code. In Renaissance rhetoric descriptio often appears as a subcategory of amplificatio, as is the case in Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1593), where it is analysed as follows: Descriptio is a generall name of many and sundry kindes of descriptions, and a description is when the Orator by a diligent gathering together of circumstances, and by a fit and naturall application of them, doth expresse and set forth a thing so plainly and liuely, that it seemeth rather painted in tables, then declared with words, and the mind of the hearer therby so drawen to an earnest and stedfast co[n]templation of the thing described, that he rather thinketh he seeth it then heareth it. By this exornation the Orator imitateth the cunning painter which doth not onely draw the true proportion of thinges, but also bestoweth naturall colours in their proper places, whereby he compoundeth as it were complexion with substance and life with countenance: for hence it is, that by true proportion and due coloure, cunning and curious Images are made so like to the persons which they represent, that they do not onely make a likely shew of life, but also by outward countenance of the inward spirite and affection. So great and singuler is that science, that there is no creature vnder heauen, no action, no passion, no frame in art, nor countenance in man, whose true proportion and externall forme is not finely counterfaited, and wonderfully imitated. Trees and plaints in their colours, flowers in their bewty, beastes & birdes in their natures, men in their countenances and habite, some graue, some smiling, some angry, some weeping, some yong, some old, some asleepe, some dead, also in their degrees, as Princes and subiects, magistrates and prisoners, riche men and beggers, men of artes and occupations, ladies, gentlewomen, maidens, old women, captains, souldiers, finally al kind of persons in their countenance, gesture and apparell: euen so doth the Orator by his art and his spe´ech describe and set forth to the contemplation of mans mind, any person, de´ede, thing, place or time, so truly by circumstances, that the hearer shall thinke that he doth plainly behold the matter described. Now vnder the generall name of Description, I do not only reckon speciall kindes of description, but also all other figures, which do chiefly respect circumstances and adiuncts without form of comparison seruing onely to make matters euident and lightsome. 102

This extensive discussion, though written by an Anglican clergyman, not only contains a rhetoric but also a poetics of ekphrasis. Its constituents are: (1) the ekphrastic generation of mental images creating the illusion of reality by the likeliness of verbal representation, (2) a broad compass of natural phenomena represented, 102

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. with a critical historical introduction and a commentary by Beate-Maria Koll. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1996, pp. 132-133.

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(3) a representation of human beings according to a topics of age and social degree, including both physical and psychological features, (4) the requirement of likely “circumstances” (loci ) as prerequisites for an effect of realistic (“lively”) representation, (5) a classification of descriptive genres according to the objects represented: Prosopographia, Prosopopoeia, Sermocinatio, Mimesis, Pragmatographia, Topographia, Topothesia, Chronographia, Pathopeia, and Icon in Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1593); the majority of them deal with the representation of persons. Several of these constituents are to be found in theories of art as well, the difference being that visual representations can rely on the immediately sensual evidentia of their material for which verbal pictorialism has to compensate by taking the detour of mental images that only suggest a direct access to sight and the other senses. As such, description is always connected with evidentia and in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique is identified as “An evident, or plaine settyng forthe of a thyng as though it were presently doen.” 103 Literary pictorialism looks back on a long tradition based on theoretical explications but still more on practical examples which are not necessarily initiated and influenced by theories of rhetoric or poetry. Perhaps the most famous instance in the genealogy of poetic ekphrasis is Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles, which in its turn inspired the “re-imagining” (Heffernan) of similar verbal shields in the heroic poetry of Virgil, Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, and other Renaissance authors. 104 A great repository of iconic poems and art epigrams is the Hellenistic Anthologia Graeca, the source of numerous imitations from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism. In late Antiquity the strain of literary pictorialism is strengthened by the Eikones of the

103 104

Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 355. Cf. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, p. 19 ff.; James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 10 ff.; Andrew Sprague Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis. Lanham, Md. / London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995; Erika Simon, “Der Schild des Achilles,” in: Gottfried Boehm / Helmut Pfotenhauer (eds.), Beschreibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung. München: Fink, 1995, pp. 123-141. - On the topic in general cf. John Hollander, “The Poetics of ekphrasis,” Word & Image 4/1 (1988), 209-219; William H. Race, Classical Genres and English Poetry. London / New York / Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988, chap. 3: “Poetry and the Visual Arts: The Ekphrasis” (pp. 56-85); Philippe Hamon, La Description litte´raire: Anthologie des textes the´oriques et critiques. Paris: Editions Macula, 1991; Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; Valerie Robillard & Els Jongeneel (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998.

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Greek sophist Philostratos, a description of real or fictitious paintings, which begins as follows: Whosoever scorns painting is unjust to truth; and he is also unjust to all the wisdom that has been bestowed upon poets - for poets and painters make equal contribution to our knowledge of the deeds and the looks of heroes - and he withholds his praise from symmetry of proportion, whereby art partakes of reason. For one who wishes a clever theory, the invention of painting belongs to the gods - witness on earth all the designs with which the Seasons paint the meadows, and the manifestations we see in the heavens - but for one who is merely seeking the origin of art, imitation is an invention most ancient and most akin to nature; and wise men invented it, calling it now painting, now plastic art. […] The occasion of these discourses of mine was as follows: It was at the time of the public games at Naples, a city in Italy settled by men of the Greek race and people of culture, and therefore Greek in their enthusiasm for discussion. And as I did not wish to deliver my addresses in public, the young men kept coming to the house of my host and importuning me. I was lodging outside the walls in a suburb facing the sea, where there was a portico built on four, I think, or possibly five terraces, open to the west wind and looking out on the Tyrrhenian sea. It was resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, but it was particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in the walls, paintings which I thought had been collected with real judgment, for they exhibited the skill of very many painters. The idea had already occurred to me that I ought to speak in praise of the paintings, when the son of my host, quite a young boy, only ten years old but already an ardent listener and eager to learn, kept watching me as I went from one to another and asking me to interpret them. So in order that he might not think me ill-bred, “Very well,” I said, “we will make them the subject of a discourse as soon as the young men come.” And when they came, I said, “Let me put the boy in front and address to him my effort at interpretation; but do you follow, not only agreeing but also asking questions if anything I say is not clear.” 105

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Philostratus, Imagines / Descriptions. Ed. with an English translation by Arthur Fairbanks. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931, rpt. 1960, pp. 3-7. - Some Renaissance editions: Filostratoy eikonew [etc.] Venetiis: Apud P. & I.M. Nicolinos, 1550; “FL. FILOSTRATOY / EIKONES . / […] / FLAVII PHILOSTRATI IMAGINES; / EODEM STEPHANO NIGRO INTERPRETE,” in: PHILOSTRATI / LEMNII OPERA / QVAE EXSTANT. / […]. / FED. MORELLVS PROFESSOR ET INTERPRES / REGIVS CVM MNSS. CONTVLIT, RECENSVIT : ET / hactenus nondum Latinitate donata, vertit. / […] / PARISIIS. M.DC.VIII. / Apud MARCVM ORRY, via Iacobaea, sub insigni / Leonis salientis. / NON SINE REGIS PRIVILEGIO, pp. 732863. - For an interpretation in the classical context, see Otto Schönberger, “Die ‘Bilder’ des Philostratos,” in: Boehm / Pfotenhauer (eds.), Beschreibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung, pp. 157-173.

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This prologue to the collection of verbal icons is followed by descriptions and interpretations of the literary inventiones of a long series of mythological pictures, beginning with Scamander, Comus (possibly a source of Milton’s masque of the same name), and Menoeceus. In a scenery reminiscent of Pompeii and its refined culture the narrator assumes the functions of a descriptivist and an iconologist in the manner of Erwin Panofsky and the Warburg School, explaining the literary (mythological) sources of these word pictures, which can often be traced back to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By expressly attributing not only an aesthetic but also a learned character both to poetry and painting, he reconciles the two sister arts with each other. In the Renaissance this idea, quite understandably, met with the approval of the humanists, above all the painters and poets educated under the influence of humanism. In the line of ekphrastic genres the first place is occupied by a text-type that transmutes pictorial into verbal iconicity: (1) iconographia: the description of pictures. While icon often has the meaning “description of a person,” this term that rarely occurs in rhetorical treatises is used here to refer to the representation of graphic pictures by verbal ones in the tradition of Philostratos’ Eikones. Descriptions of images had been customary since Antiquity and were used by art historians from the Vite (1550) of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and the Vite (1642) of Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613-1696) through the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) 106 by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). 107 Apart from such manifestations iconographies found their way into travel guides and, as digressions, into romances of the Classical and the Early Modern Age. A very popular poetic text-type that established itself in the course of the seventeenth century is the advice-to-a-painter (or engraver) poem 108 which, first devised by Anacreon of Teos, can be illustrated by the following sample composed by Robert Herrick (1591-1674):

106 107

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Reprint: Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1972. Literature: Svetlana L. Alpers, “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives,” JWCI 23 (1960), 190-215; Oskar Bätschmann, “Giovanni Pietro Belloris Bildbeschreibungen,” in: Boehm / Pfotenhauer (eds.), Bescheibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung, pp. 279-311; Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Winckelmann und Heinse,” in Boehm / Pfotenhauer (eds.), Beschreibungskunst - Kunstbeschreibung, pp. 313-340. For a bibliography cf. Advice-to-a-Painter-Poems, 1633-1856: An Annotated Finding List. With an Introduction by Mary Tom Osborne and a Foreword by Reginald Harvey Griffith. University of Texas, 1949.

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To the Painter, to draw him a Picture. Come, skilfull Lupo, now, and take Thy Bice, thy Umber, Pink, and Lake; And let it be thy Pensils strife, To paint a Bridgeman to the life: Draw him as like too, as you can, An old, poore, lying, flatt’ring man: His cheeks be-pimpled, red and blue; His nose and lips a mulbrie hiew. Then for an easie fansie; place A Burling iron for his face: Next, make his cheeks with breath so swell, And for to speak, if possible: But do not so; for feare, lest he Sho’d by his breathing, poyson thee. 109

In directly addressing Lupo, to judge from his name probably an Italian painter, the speaker creates an atmosphere of immediacy which is upheld by such imperatives as “come,” “take,” “let,” and “draw.” His instructions to the painter prove fairly meticulous; for they refer to individual colours to be used for painting the details of a portrait which should render the person painted “to the life.” The realism demanded of this portrait commissioned by the speaker is so prominent in this description that it even ignores traits of ugliness and is far from the idealistic portraiture of a Petrarchan blazon. Another pictorial text-type makes use of the cernas formula (H. Lausberg) in order to initiate the reader’s imaginary visualization of a painted scene, as is performed by Shakespeare’s imperative “look” in his portrait of a horse in Venus and Adonis (1593): Look when a painter would surpass the life In limning out a well-proportion’d steed, His art with nature’s workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living should exceed: So did this horse excel a common one, In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone. (vv. 289-294) 110 109

110

Robert Herrick, The Poetical Works. Ed. F.W. Moorman. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1921, rpt. 1947, p. 39. This poem and its context are analysed by Norman K. Farmer, Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England. Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, 1984, chap 6: “Herrick’s Hesperidean Garden: Ut pictura poesis Applied” (pp. 66-76.) - On a topically related poem by Andrew Marvell, see Earl Miner, “The ‘Poetic Picture, Painted Poetry’ of The Last Instructions to a Painter,” Modern Philology 63 (1966), 288-294 and David Farley-Hills, The Benevolence of Laughter: Comic Poetry of the Commonwealth and Restoration. London / Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974, chap. 4. William Shakespeare, Poems. Ed. F.T. Prince. London: Methuen / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 18.

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These lines are permeated by the central topos of (dead) art surpassing (living) nature with regard to liveliness and naturalness. The same topos is repeatedly found in Shakespeare’s poems and plays, which teem with descriptions of art. His word-picture of what he calls “a piece / Of skilful painting made for Priam’s Troy” (vv. 1366-1367) in The Rape of Lucrece (1594), perhaps an arras or tapestry, declares: A thousand lamentable objects there, In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life (1373-1374). 111

This is exemplified in the description of two Trojan heroes: In Ajax and Ulysses, O what art Of physiognomy might one behold! The face of either cipher’d either’s heart; Their face their manners most expressly told. In Ajax’ eyes blunt rage and rigour roll’d, But the mild glance that sly Ulysses lent Show’d deep regard and smiling government. (1394-1400) 112

These lines read as if Shakespeare had consulted a contemporary art theory of, say, Leonardo da Vinci. An extended iconography occurs in the description of a picture gallery. This pictorial text-type is represented by several specimens in the Renaissance. In Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral novel Arcadia (1590) Mucidorus is led by Kalander to “a house of pleasure,” where “he found a square roome full of delightfull pictures made by the most excellent workeman of Greece,” such as the following ones: There was Diana when Actæon sawe her bathing, in whose cheekes the painter had set such a colour, as was mixt betweene shame & disdaine: & one of her foolish Nymphes, who weeping, and withal lowring, one might see the workman meant to set forth teares of anger. In another table was Atalanta, the posture of whose lims was so livelie expressed, that if the eyes were the only judges, as they

111

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Shakespeare, Poems, p. 128. Interpretations: Arthur H.R. Fairchild, “Shakespeare and the Arts of Design,” University of Missouri Studies 12/1 (1937), 1-198, here: 139-147: “XI. The ‘Lucrece’ Painting;” Heffernan, The Museum of Words, pp. 74-88; David Rosand, “‘Troyes Painted Woes’: Shakespeare and the Pictorial Imagination,” in: Shakespeare and the Arts. Ed. S. Orgel & S. Keilen. New York / London: Garland, 1999, pp. 215-243. Cf. also William S. Heckscher, “Shakespeare in his Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox” (1973), in: W.S. Heckscher, Art and Literature: Studies in Relationship. Ed. E. Verheyen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press / Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1985, pp. 367-433; Stephen Orgel, “‘Counterfeit Presentments’: Shakespeare’s Ekphrasis,” in: Shakespeare and the Arts, pp. 253-260. Shakespeare, Poems, p. 129.

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be the onely seers, one would have sworne the very picture had runne. Besides many mo, as of Helena, Omphale, Iole […]. 113

This gallery exhibits mythological pictures painted in such an energetic manner that the figures seem to live and even to display their inmost sensations. They can be regarded as iconographically rendered “speaking pictures” that exert a persuasive influence on the viewer. 114 In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the emblematic picture gallery of The House of the Interpreter serves a mnemonic purpose and a religious telos. Other picture galleries are the ekphrastic poems contained in La galeria (1620) by Giovanni Battista Marino (1569-1625); inspired by the pictorial epigrams of the Anthologia Graeca, they present a compendium of famous Italian Renaissance painters such as Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio, and many others that are almost forgotten today. 115 The poem “The Gallery” by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) adopts the fashion of ekphrastic galleries as a pretext for a love poem beginning with the cernas formula: “Clora come view my Soul. […].” 116 (2) Prosopographia: an ekphrastic figure which Henry Peacham defines as follows: a forme of spe´ech by which as well the very person of a man as of a fained, is by his form, stature, maners, studies, doings, affections, and such other circumstances, seruing to the purpose so described, that it may appeare a plaine and liuely picture painted in tables, and set before the eies of the hearer. 117

Such a description normally belongs to the epideictic genre and is implemented by the use of “circumstances” that are expected to effect a fictitious visualization comparable to the optical presence of a painting. A poetic genre 113

114

115

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Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Ed. A. Feuillerat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, p. 18. Cf. Lothar Cerny, “Beautie and the use thereof ”: Eine Interpretation von Sir Philip Sidneys “Arcadia.” Köln / Wien: Böhlau, 1984, p. 140 ff.; Mario Klarer, Ekphrasis, Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001, chap. 3 (pp. 73107.) - On the ekphrasis of architecture, see Christine Smith, Architecture and the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400-1470. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Edition: Gian Battista Marino, La Galeria. Ed. M. Pieri. 2 vols. Padova: Liviana, 1979. On Marino cf. Linda Nemerow, The Concept of Ut Pictura Poesis in Giambattista Marino’s “Galeria” and the “Dicerie Sacre” with a Translation of “La Pittura” and “La Musica.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980 and Marianne Albrecht-Bott, Die bildende Kunst in der italienischen Lyrik der Renaissance und des Barock: Studie zur Beschreibung von Portraits und anderen Bildwerken unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von G.B. Marinos “Galleria.” Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1976. Andrew Marvell, The Poems. Ed. H. MacDonald. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 25-27. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 133.

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that makes use of this procedure is the idealizing blazon, which often runs the risk of losing the individuality of representation on account of its stereotypic physiological details. A famous example that neglects the “painting” of biographical circumstances is Ben Jonson’s memorial poem of praise “To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: AND what he hath left vs,” 118 which is prefixed to the First Folio (1623) of his great rival’s collected works. The ekphrastic portraits of his beloved Clorida belong to the same category of prosopographies, as do the countless stereotyped descriptive Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan blazons in Renaissance sonnets. (3) Topographia: “an euident and true description of a place, like as Cicero describeth Syracusæ a Citie in Cicilia, and that excellently.” 119 The number of illustrations can be augmented by topographic descriptions in travel books, epics and romances, where they serve as ekphrastic places of rest in the narrative flow of events. A specific poetic genre of topographia that goes back to Antiquity and begins to flourish in England in the 17th century is the country house poem. An early example of this genre was written by Ben Jonson on the family seat of the Pembrokes, of whom the most famous scion was Sir Philip Sidney. It bears the title To Penshurst 120 and consists of a series of descriptive episodes referring to the architecture and surrounding scenery of Penshurst as well as the character of its inhabitants. Stressing the plain elegance of the estate, the pleasantness of its rural ambiance, and the affability of the proprietors, the poem presents a sequence of pictorial genre scenes and appears not only as topographical poetry but at the same time as variations on the pastoral interspersed with eulogies on the Pembroke family. 118 119

120

Ben Jonson, [Works]. Vol. VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. 390-392. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 139. - George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock / A. Walker, p. 239 translates Topographia with “counterfait place” and illustrates it with allegorical places such as “heauen, hell, paradise, the house of fame, the pallace of the sunne, the denne of sleepe, and such like which you shall see in Poetes” (p. 239) which can more correctly be attributed to Topothesia not mentioned by Puttenham. Edition: Ben Jonson, [Works]. Ed C.H. Herford and P. & E. Simpson. Vol. VIII. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 93-100. - On the poem and its context cf. Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History. Madison, Wis.: University of Madison Press, 1984. On the history of the English country-house poem, see, among others, G.R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” JWCI 19 (1956), 150-174; William Alexander McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1977; Douglas Carl Mantz, From Emblem to Enargeia: A Study of “Cooper’s Hill” and Seventeenth-Century ‘Topographical Poetry.’ PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1971.

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The result is a genus mixtum of poetic ekphrasis and epideixis. That these features are not confined to Jonson’s Penshurst poem but extend to other country house poems as well can be demonstrated by Andrew Marvell’s long poem Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax, which is likewise episodically structured and equally praises the modesty and “lowness” (57) 121 of the architectural style of the estate, which mirrors the noble character of generations of its inhabitants, in contrast to the bombastic appearance of a “hollow Palace” (19). Both Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst and Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House evidently testify to a quality that Nikolaus Pevsner called “The Englishness of English Art.” 122 Both To Penshurst and Upon Appleton House close on a similar note, the former: Now, PENSHVRST, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say, their lords haue built, but thy lord dwells. 123

the latter: But now the Salmon-Fisher’s moist Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in Shoes, Have shod their Heads in their Canoos. How Tortoise like, but not so slow, These rational Amphibii go? Let’s in: for the dark Hemisphere Does now like one of them appear. 124

While Ben Jonson sticks closer to the tradition of literary pictorialism in its variant of an architectural ekphrasis, Andrew Marvell, in the manner of Virgil, creates a mood of dusk in the context of a piscatory eclogue. Aristocratic country houses continue to exist up to the present and so do visual and verbal renderings in various forms. 125 121

122

123 124 125

Edition: Andrew Marvell, Poems. Ed. H. MacDonald, pp. 79-107. - Interpretations: Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968 (1960), chap. 11: “‘Andrew Marvell. ‘Upon Appleton House’” (pp. 187-225); Raymond William, The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973, chap 6: “Their Destiny their Choice” (pp. 55-59); R.I.V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and Seventeenth Century Revolutions. Cambridge: Brewer / Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978, chap. 5: “Appleton House” (pp. 132-158, 167-168). Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art. An expanded and annotated version of the Reith lectures 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Ben Jonson, [Works]. Vol. VIII, p. 96 (vv. 99-102). Andrew Marvell, Poems, p. 107 (vv. 769-776). Cf. the anthology edited by Barbara & Rene´ Stoeltie, Country Houses of England /Landhäuser in England. Köln / London: Taschen, 1999.

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On a larger scale topographia is realized in Poly-Olbion, or a chorographical Description of Great Britain (1612/1622) by Michael Drayton (1563-1631), who constructed his huge epic poem as a tour of the kingdom county by county, describing the interesting features of each and interspersing ekphrastic passages with legends and historical anecdotes. The topographical representation is illustrated with a wide range of illustrations that provide visual renderings of geographical and narrative details. The title-page of the book (Figure 50) displays an elaborate architectural framework in the form of an emblematic triumphal arch; enthroned inside the arch is the personification of Albion in the shape of a beautiful and majestic maiden with a sceptre in her right hand terminating in a fleur-de-lis and flanked by Julius Caesar and Brutus, Hengist and William the Conqueror. 126 (4) Topothesia is defined by Henry Peacham as a fained description of a place, that is, when the Orator describeth a place, and yet no such place: As is the house of enuy, in the 6. booke of Metamorphosis, the house of sle´epe in the eleuenth booke, or else whe[n] the place is not such a one as is fained to be, as is heauen and hell: In the fourth booke of Aeneidos. This figure is proper to Poets, and is seldom vsed of Orators. 127

The feigned places of classical poetry mentioned here can be supplemented by those of Renaissance literature, especially in utopian fiction such as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666), which she characterizes as follows: I chose such a fiction as would be agreeable to the subject treated in the former parts; it is a description of a new world, not such as Lucian’s, or the French-man’s world in the moon; but a world of my own creating, which I call the Blazing World: the first part whereof is romancical, the second philosophical, and the third merely fancy, or (as I may call it) fantastical, which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall account my self a happy creatoress; if not, I must live a melancholy life in my own world […]. 128

Other topothesias of necessity occur in didactic epics such as Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man (1633), which under the veil of topo126

127 128

For an iconographical interpretation of this illustrated title-page, see Margery Corbett & Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550-1660. London / Henley / Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 153-161. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 139. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Blazing World & Other Writings. Ed. K. Lilley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, p. 124. - On this work cf. Richard Nate, “‘Plain and Vulgarly Express’d’: Margaret Cavendish and the Discourse of the New Science,” Rhetorica 19 (2001), 403-417.

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Figure 50: Michael Drayton (1563-1631): Poly-Olbion, or a chorographical Description of Great Britain (1612/1622), title-page.

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graphical allegory gives a description of human physiology, and religious epics such as Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in which the descriptions of such localities as Heaven, Hell and Paradise are entirely fictitious and require the ekphrastic imagination of the writer to bestow on them the persuasive verisimilitude that renders them graphically plausible. In a similar way invisible theological entities such as God, Christ, Satan, the angels, the saints require both the painter’s and the poet’s fantasy to design for them a visible appearance and an expressive physiognomy, often of a topical nature, that exerts a persuasive effect on the recipient. 129 (5) Chronographia is the description of time: of the times of a day, as in epic and bucolic poetry in the classical tradition, or of the seasons, which mark the beginnings of epic poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer’s general prologue to The Canterbury Tales (1387 ff.) to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Such descriptions also exist as complex works of their own, however, from the poetic basis of Antonio Vivaldi’s musical cycle The Seasons through James Thompson’s lengthy pastoral poem The Seasons (1725-1730), published in four books with a final hymn; immensely popular in its day; its German adaptation by Baron Gottfried van Swieten (1734-1803) served as a libretto to Joseph Haydn’s oratorio Die Jahreszeiten (1801). 130 (6) Pragmatographia, according to Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1593), is the description of things whereby [the] Orator by gathering together all circumstances belo[n]ging to them, doth as plainly portray their image, as if they were most liuely painted out in colours, & set forth to be se´ene: If one should say the citie was ouercome by an assault: he hath (saith Fabius) comprehended all in a summe, but if thou wilt open and set abroad all things, and euerie particuler effect included within that summe, there shall appeare many fires and scattered flames vpon houses and Temples, […]. 131

Peacham cites here, of course, a locus classicus of ekphrasis and enargeia, Quintilian’s Intitutio Oratoria VIII.iii.67-70. 132 He presents several examples of this 129

130

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On the rhetorical problem of rendering the invisible visible and the absent present in religious art, see the fundamental study of Moshe Barasch, Das Gottesbild: Studien zur Darstellung des Unsichtbaren. München: Fink, 1998. Cf. Ralph Cohen, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s “Seasons” and the Language of Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964, esp. pp. 188-247. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 137. Koll assumes an intermediate source in Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborvm ac rerum (1573). Cf. Bernhard F. Scholz, “Ekphrasis and enargeia in Quintilian’s Institutionis Oratoriae Libri XII,” in: “Rhetorica Movet”: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett. Leiden / Boston / Köln, 1999, pp. 3-24. - The same passage from Quintilian is referred to in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 355 f.

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“rhetoric of presence,” 133 from classical literature, among them the description of “a great and cruell pestilence” and of “the hunting of the wilde bore” in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (VII & VIII). It is evident that in epic poetry especially this kind of ekphrasis is customary. Other forms of ekphrasis / descriptio are anemographia, astrothesia, characterismus, chorographia, dendrographia, hydrographia, and mimesis, but these partly exceed the boundaries of the general category and partly are so unusual that they can be considered a quantite´ ne´gligeable.

8. Symmediality: The Fusion of Image and Word in Complex Pictograms While hitherto picture and word were considered separately, the picture as striving to achieve the quality of “speaking,” the word competing with the picture by creating an imaginary visualization by means of pictorial rhetoric, an integrative view focuses on such synthetic phenomena as combine word and image in one generic entity. Beginning with the word, one first encounters the so-called pattern poem (Greek: technopaignion, Latin: carmen figuratum), which by the varying length of its lines forms a picture or design in such a way that its visual shape provides an expressive rendering of its semantic content. Proceeding from the image to the word, we then encounter a number of symmedial genres, beginning with the entirely pictorial hieroglyph and continuing with the bi- and tripartite structures of imprese and emblem, of which the latter may entirely lack a picture. An author of an emblem theory like the Jesuit Claude-FrancX ois Menestrier (1631-1705) in L’Art des Embleˆmes (1684) sees poetry and painting quite in the ut pictura poesis tradition: La Poe¨sie ne fut plus qu’une espece de peinture, les Idiles de Theocrite, les Odes d’Anacreon, & tous les Poe¨mes Epiques ne furent plus que des Embleˆmes de´crits en chants & en recits. Ce fut ce qui obligea Barthelemy Aneau, Principal de l’ancien College de Lion, de donner le nom de Poe¨sie peinte a´ un recueil d’Embleˆmes et de Vers, qu’il publia quelque temps avant sa mort malheureuse. 134

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FrancX ois Rigolot, “The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion,” in: Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. III. The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 161-167. Claude-FrancX ois Menestrier, L’Art des Embleˆmes. Paris: R.J.B. de la Caille, 1684. FacsimileReprint: Ed. Karl Möseneder (introd.). Mittenwald, Germany: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1981, p. 10. - Cf. also Menestrier’s La philosophie des images. Introd. S. Orgel. New York: Garland, 1979.

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Thus symmedial pictorialism is nothing but painted poetry or poetic picture, the one enforcing the other. Among its representatives number hierogplyph, imprese (devise), emblem and pattern poem (technopaignion / carmen figuratum), with their variety of manifestations.

8.1. Pattern Poetry: The Technopaignion In the Renaissance numerous pattern poems of diverse kinds and intentions are published, 135 but they rarely receive a critical comment in theories of poetry and art. A positive exception is to be found in Chapter 25 of Book II of Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices Libri Septem, where the constitution of poetry is defined as consisting of lineaments and dispositions of words (in lineamentis ac dispositionibus dictionum); 136 but this definition does not serve as a starting-point for a theory of pattern poetry. Instead Scaliger is content with presenting two illustrations of pattern poetry, namely a little egg (ovum pusillum) and a larger egg (ovum grandius). 137 Egg poems stand in a long tradition extending from Simmias of Rhodos (c. 300 B.C.) to Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), which presents an illustrative structure of “The egge or figure ouall” as well as a brief concept of “Proportion in figure,” which states: Your last proportion is that of figure, so called for that it yelds an ocular representation, your meeters being by good symmetrie reduced into certaine Geometricall figures, whereby the maker is restrained to keepe him within his bounds, and sheweth not onely more art, but serueth also much better for briefenesse and subtiltie of deuice. […]. I find not of this proportion vsed by any of the Greeke or Latine Poets, or in any vulgar writer, sauing of that one forme which they cal Anacreons egge. But being in Italie conuersant with a certaine gentleman, who had long trauailed the Orientall parts of the world, and seene the Courts of 135

136

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Cf. Jeremy Adler & Ulrich Ernst (eds.), Text als Figur: Visuelle Poesie von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Weinheim: VCH, 31990, chap. III: “Rezeption antiker Gedichtformen in der frühen Neuzeit” (pp. 44-72); Dick Higgins, George Herbert’s Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition. West Glover / Vermont / New York: Unpublished Editions, 1977; Margaret Church, “The First English Pattern Poems,” PMLA 61 (1946), 636-650; Elizabeth Cook, Seeing through Words: The Scope of Late Renaissance Poetry. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1986; Bernhard F. Scholz, “Konstruktionen des Sichtbaren: Frühmoderne Regeln der Bedeutung, am Beispiel der Darstellung des Figurengedichts in den Poetiken Julius Caesar Scaligers und George Puttenhams,” in: Regeln der Bedeutung: Zur Theorie der Bedeutung literarischer Texte. Ed. F. Jannidis et al. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 2003, pp. 628-643. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem / Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst. Ed., trans. & comm. Luc Deitz. Vol. I: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994, pp. 446/ 447. Ibid., pp. 558/559.

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Figure 51: George Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie (1589), table of geometrical pattern poems.

the great Princes of China and Tartarie. I being very inquisitiue to know of the subtillities of those countreyes, and especially in matter of learning and of their vulgar Poesie, he told me that they are in all their inuentions most wittie, and haue the vse of Poesie or riming, but do not delight so much as we do in long tedious descriptions, and therefore when they will vtter any pretie conceit, they reduce it into metricall feet, and put it in the forme of a Lozange or square, or such other figure, and so engrauen in gold, siluer or iuorie, and sometimes with letters of ametist, rubie, emeralde or topas curiousely cemented and peeced together, they sende them in chaines, bracelets, collars and girdles to their mis-

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tresses to weare for a remembrance. Some fewe measures composed in this sort this gentleman gaue me, which I translated word for word and as neere as I could followed both the phrase and the figure, which is somewhat hard to performe, because of the restraint of the figure from which ye may not digresse. 138

This autobiographically tinged structural description of the pattern poem is followed by a typology of geometrical forms of the pattern poem without any words (Figure 51). Puttenham professes to have acquired a knowledge of oriental pattern poetry 139 that serves decorative cultural purposes different from those of Western cultures, where it stands out by its epigrammatic conciseness and sophisticated conceits. Such remain the basic features of pattern poems until the Calligrammes (1914/1918) of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) and the concrete poetry of E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) and Velimir Xlebnikov (1885-1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism. 140 Irrespective of its cultural time and space, the “ocular representation” of this poetry synthesizes the intermediality of word and image and creates a visual aesthetics of its own. 141

8.2. From Pictorial to Intermedial Visuality: Hierogplyphs and Imprese / Emblems In the Renaissance visuality could serve as a meaningful alternative to written words when appearing in the form of hieroglyphs, which were regarded as the language of the ancient Egyptians. Before FrancX ois Champollion (17901832) deciphered their true meaning from the clue of the Rosetta stone (1821-1822), they were regarded as a symbolic language in “speaking pictures” which gave a direct epistemological access to the nature of things. Of particular importance for the reception history of this visible sign language

138

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141

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock / A. Walker, pp. 91-92, Puttenham’s concept of “proportion” which is based on mathematical foundations and applied to a musical interpretation of prosody (p. 64) is here extended to visual phenomena. Cf. A.L. Korn, “Puttenham and the Oriental Pattern-Poem,” Comparative Literature 6 (1954), 289-303. On the often overlooked tradition of Russian visual poetry, see Tatiana Nazarenko, “The East Slavic Visual Writing: The Inception of Tradition,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 43/2 (2001), 209-225 - in excerpts available through internet. - On early modern visual poetry, see Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914-1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. On the basic subject cf. J.J. de Lucio-Mayer, Visual Aesthetics. New York: Icon Editions Harper & Row, 1973.

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are the Hieroglyphica for Horapollo, the work of a cultivated Hellenist of the fifth century A.D. which contributed to the outbreak of Renaissance Egyptomania 142 among artists and intellectuals. In an age that displayed an obsessive interest in the “wisdom of the ancients” this “Bilderschrift” 143 won immediate acclaim and was adapted by such artists as Andrea Mantegna (14311506) in his Triumph of Caesar and Francesco Colonna (d. 1527) in his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 144 as well as by the Nuremberg scholar Willibald Pirkheimer (1470-1530), 145 who provided Emperor Maximilian with a manuscript translation of Horapollo illustrated by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Dürer, in turn, used these hieroglyphs in the design of his magnificent Ehrenpforte (1515), a large woodcut with a hieroglyphic message about kingship, cobbled together, image by image, from Horapollo, in order to propagate the ruler’s authority to a wide public. 146 The hieroglyphic collection of Horapollo consists of images rendered by ekphrastic verbalizations which present fixed meanings, as in the case of Eternity, where we read: “When they wish to symbolize Eternity, they draw the sun and the moon, because they are eternal elements. But when they wish to represent Eternity differently, they draw a serpent with its tail concealed by the rest of its body. This the Egyptians call Ouraion, but the Greeks a Basilisk.” 147 Taken as a whole, these hieroglyphs represent a semantic topics of (relatively) fixed meanings. In that respect they are similar to the picture collection of the medieval Physiologus, a tradition that continued in the culture of Renaissance Europe. In contrast to hieroglyphs, imprese and emblems are constituted by a bior tripartite intermediality of word-image combinations. The verbal component or “soul” (anima) of imprese or emblem is formed by a short sentence (inscriptio, motto) presenting a riddle and a poem or prose discourse (subscriptio) presenting the solution to the enigmatic combination of the motto and the picture (pictura), which constitutes the “body” (corpo) of this intermedial hy142

143

144 145

146

147

Cf. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Cf. Ludwig Volkmann, Bilderschriften der Renaissance: Hieroglyphik und Emblematik in ihren Beziehungen und Fortwirkungen. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1969 (Leipzig, 11923). Edition: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Ed. M. Adriani & M. Gabriele. Milano: Adelphi, 1998. Cf. Willibald Pirkheimer, Opera politica, philologica et epistolica. Ed. M. Genast. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 1969. Reproduction in: Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition, plate XV. - A detailed explanation is in the excellent Nuremberg exhibition catalogue Albrecht Dürer 1471-1771. München: Prestel, 31971, no. 261 (pp. 144-145 [with bibl.]) with an enlarged reproduction of a detail on p. 146. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, Trans. & introd. George Boas. New Foreword by A.T. Grafton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 43.

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brid. 148 In some cases, when no graphic designer was available or the (re)production of woodcuts or copperplate engravings proved too expensive, pictures could be substituted by descriptions of their significant particulars. According to Henri Estienne, Sieur de Fossez, in L’Art de faire des devises (Paris, 1645) Devises and Emblemes have this common resemblance with each other, that they may be indifferently used with or without words; And their difference is taken from this, that the words of the Embleme may demonstrate things universall, and hold the rank of morall precepts, which may as wel serve for all the word, as for the proper author of the Emblem. 149

As for the emblem, Henri Estienne gives it the following definition: Though an Embleme hath some affinity with the Ænigma, it differs notwithstanding in this, that drawing (as it were) the Curtaine from before the Ænigma, it declares the matter more plainly: For the Embleme is properly a sweet and morall Symbol which consists of picture and words, by which some weighty sentence is declared. […]. Emblemes are reduced unto three principall kinds, viz. of Manners, of Nature, of History or Fable. The chiefe aime of the Embleme is, to instruct us, by subjecting the figure to our view, and the sense to our understanding: therefore they must be something covert, subtile, pleasant and significative. So that, if the pictures of it be too common, it ought to have a mysticall sense; if they be something obscure, they must more clearly informe us by the words, provided they be analogick and correspondent. Thus much for the Ænigma may suffice, since Alciat, and many other Authors have entreated thereof more at large. 150

By identifying the emblem with a kind of enigmatic metaphor of which the sense should be revealed in the manner of initiating a theatrical performance, the author subsumes it under rhetorical elocutio, and by describing its effect as “sweet and morall” and “to instruct us,” he uses categories of rhetorical and poetical effect, Horace’s dulce and utile and Cicero’s delectare and docere, of which the former seems to be a means to the effect of the latter. 151 Estienne’s 148

149

150 151

Cf. Paolo Giovio: The worthy tract of Paulus Iovius (1585) translated by Samuel Daniel; together with Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorose. Facsimile Reproductions. Introd. Norman K. Farmer. Delmar, N.Y: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976. Quoted from the English translation: The Art of Making Devises: Treating of Hieroglyphicks, Symboles, Emblemes, Ænigma’s, Sentences, Parables, Reverses of Medalls […]. First Written in French by Henry Estienne, Lord of Fossez […] and translated into English by Tho: Blount of the Inner Temple, Gent. London, Printed by W.E. and J.G. and are to be sold by Richard Royston, at the Angel in Ivie-lane. 1646, pp 25-26. On the differences between emblem and device, see also the modern study by Daniel S. Russell, The Emblem and Device in France. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, Publishers, 1985, chap. 3 (pp. 142-160). Henri Estienne, The Art of Making Devises, pp. 7-8. Similarly the English emblematist George Wither (1588-1667) in his address “To the Reader” of his Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) emphasizes the moral pur-

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compatriot Claude-FrancX ois Menestrier is more clearly outspoken as to the persuasive function of emblems, which he defines as (moral) instruction (docere): Les Embleˆmes ne sont faits que pour enseigner. Ainsi tout ce qui sert a` les tourner en maniere d’instruction, en est comme la forme. Deux choses contribuent a` leur donner ce tour, la disposition des figures, & les paroles qui les accompagnent. 152

Thus the bimediality of picture and poetry cooperates in order to attain this persuasive aim successfully. For this reason emblems are classified according to their functional domains into six genres: “Sacrez, Moraux, Doctrinaux, Politiques, Heroiques, Satyriques.” 153 Estienne in his turn alludes to the concept of pictorial enargeia in his phrase “subjecting the figure to our view,” which comprehends a wide compass of qualities of the emblem’s constitution ranging from the mannerist and hermetic to the common and openly meaningful, as in Sir Thomas Browne’s “common hieroglyphics.” Rhetoric is directly referred to in his explanation of the words in the devise, as in the following outline: The words are inserted in the Devise either by Prosopopœia (w[hich] is a certain manner of speech used by Rhetoritians, very efficacious to move and strike the mind, by supposing that the words come from the very mouth of the things figured) or by introducing a third person to utter the words in forme of a Sentence, discovering with acuteness of wit, the quality of the figure, which composeth the body of the Devise. And as for the use of the Prosopopœia, you need not feare, to cause all kind of beasts, all mechanicall instruments and other things as well naturall as artificiall to speak, though they have no Principle, faculty or organs proper to forme words; And it is in respect that Devises ought in some sort to imitate Poetry, which doth not onely introduce brute beasts, but also frequently causeth inanimate things to speak, for greater delight, to expresse the fancy better, and to perswade more powerfully. 154

Thus the aim of emblems as well as devises is persuasion, and this is effected by the use of prosopopoeias personifying both inanimate and animate beings,

152 153 154

pose of his publication (as well as that of other authors): “Therefore, though I can say no more to disswade from Vice, or to incourage men to Vertue, than hath already beene said in many learned Authors; yet I may be an occasion by these Endeavours, to bring that, the oftner into remembrance, which they have, more learnedly, expressed and perhaps, by such circumstances, as they would not descend unto, may insinuate further also with some Capacities, than more applauded Meanes.” (George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635). Introd. R. Freeman. Bibl. notes C.S. Hensley. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1975, sig. A1r). Claude-FrancX ois Menestrier, L’Art des Embleˆmes, p. 33. Claude-FrancX ois Menestrier, L’Art des Embleˆmes, p. 61. Henri Estienne, The Art of Making Devises, p. 54.

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Figure 52: Franciscus Lang (1645-1725): Dissertatio de actione scenica (1717), representation of sorrow.

thus rendering this employment of such hybrid combinations of word and image as a kind of theatrical performance. This is not surprising; for Estienne’s theory of symbols, emblems and devises was published in the Baroque Age, and emblems were often used in the theatre of that time, particularly in the Counter-Reformation theatre of the Jesuits. 155 A further rhetorical ingredient in emblematic literature is the sententia or commonplace. 156 Most 155

156

Cf. Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock. München: Beck, 21968; Jean-Marie Valentin, Les Je´suites et le the´aˆtre (1554-1680): Contribution a` l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique. Paris: Desjonque`res, 2001. An example from G. Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (1635/1975), p. 80: When Mars, and Pallas, doe agree, Great workes, by them, effected bee.

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emblem books, beginning with the Emblemata (editio princeps 1531) of Andrea Alciato (1492-1550) and continuing to the emblem books of Thomas Jenner (fl. 1631-1656), 157 can indeed be regarded as collections of (moral) commonplaces or, in other words, a topica universalis. 158 They serve as repositories for the verbal and visual arts but also for the libretti of the baroque masque and opera and the acting and scenography as well as stage costumes of performances far into the 18th century, as in the illustrated Dissertatio de actione scenica of the Jesuit Franciscus (Franz) Lang (Figure 52). 159

9. Iconomachia From the Renaissance to Romanticism painting was the paragon to be strived after by poetry under the aegis of Horace’s misunderstood dictum ut pictura poesis. Numerous authors wrote their works under the impact of this tenet, trying to rival the visual arts by ekphrasis and enargeia (evidentia, ´evidence, Anschauung) 160. But this predominance of the visual ideal did not go un-

157

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Like other commonplace books, Wither’s emblematic commonplace book is furnished with an index: “A Table for the better finding out of the principall things and matters, mentioned in these Foure Bookes.” Cf. The Emblem Books of Thomas Jenner. Photoreproductions. Introd. Sidney Gottlieb. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1983, including such works as “The Soules Solace,” “ The Path of Life,” and “ The Ages of Sin.” On this idea cf. especially the magisterial study of Bernhard F. Scholz, Emblem und Emblempoetik: Historische und systematische Studien. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2002 and Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture. London / New York: Longman, 1994, chap. 2. “Rhetoric Commonplace-Books and Emblems” (pp. 31-35). Bath writes (p. 31): “[…] we know that emblem books were used in the classroom in England, alongside the rhetorical florilegia, and there is evidence in the emblem books themselves that they were recognised, among other things, as collections of illustrated commonplaces.” Franciscus Lang, Dissertatio de actione scenica, cum figuris eandem explicantibus, et observationibus quibusdam de arte comica.[…] Accesserunt imagines symbolicæ pro exhibitione et vestitu theatrali. Monachii: Riedlin, 1717. - Modern edition with German translation: Franz Lang, Abhandlung über die Schauspielkunst. (Facsimile reprint of the edition München 1717). Ed. & trans. Alexander Rudin. Bern / München: Francke, 1975. The figure (Figura VII ) rendered here represents the passion of sorrow which is treated in § VIII: “De aliis quibusdam observationibus Actionis Scenicæ, & potissimu`m circa Affectus.” (pp. 45-53). - Cf. Barbara Bauer, “Das Bild als Argument: Emblematische Kulissen in den Bühnenmeditationen Franciscus Langs,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 64 (1982), 79-170; ead., “Multimediales Theater: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Synästhesie bei den Jesuiten,” in: H.F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance-Poetik / Renaissance Poetics. Berlin /New York: W. de Gruyter, 1994, pp. 197-238, esp. pp. 228-233. On this term and its national variants in cultural history, see Carlos Le´vy & Laurent Pernot (eds.), Dire l’e´vidence: Philosophie et rhe´torique antiques. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997; Andreas Solbach, Evidentia und Erzähltheorie. München: Fink, 1994; Gottfried Willems, Anschaulichkeit:

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contested. It was questioned by representatives of a less sensuous concept of representation in the arts such as some stricter currents of the Protestant belief (Calvinism, Puritanism). But in spite of such revilements and condemnations that mounted to a pitch of hysterical iconophobia and iconoclasm, pictorial and verbal visuality remained alive, along with theoretical designs that offered new ideas for developing and promoting visual culture in its manifold facets: paintings, imprese and emblems, literary pictorialism, architecture, scenography, and even fashion.

9.1. From Iconophobia to Iconoclasm In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the Anglican Church was by no means tolerant on the use of images in churches but warned expressly against them. Thus the official doctrine of government and church manifests itself in Certaine Sermons appointed by the Queens Maiestie, to be declared and read, by all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, euerie Sunday and Holy day in their Churches (1595) containing a “Homily against the perill of Idolatrie” in several parts, where we read in part II: You haue heard (welbeloued) in the first part of this Homilie, the doctrine of the word of God against idols and images, agaynst idolatrie, and worshipping of images, taken out of the scriptures of the olde testament and the newe, and confirmed by the examples aswell of the Apostles as of our sauiour Christ himselfe. 161

What follows is a string of testimonies “of the olde holy fathers, and most aucient learned Doctors, and receiued in the olde primitiue Church which was most vncorrupt and pure” arguing against the religious use of images. A more radical attitude against images finds expression in their destruction. This iconoclasm has surfaced several times in cultural history in connection with revolutionary religious or political events. 162 A notorious religious iconoclasm took place in Renaissance Florence in 1497 and 1498 under the terrorist regime of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), who had ordered that all kinds of “vanities” be burnt in the Piazza della

161 162

Zu Theorie und Geschichte der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen und des literarischen Darstellungsstils. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989. Certaine Sermons appointed by the Queens Maiestie. London: Edward Allde, 1595, n.p. Cf. Martin Warnke (ed.), Bildersturm: Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks. Frankfurt/M.: Syndikat, 1977: Andre´ Grabar, L’iconoclasme byzantin: Le dossier arche´ologique. Paris: Flammarion, 21984; Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

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Signoria, among them precious works of art. This proceeding had a predecessor in the Byzantine Empire and several successors in Reformation Europe, where radical Protestants demanded and carried out the destruction of images. Martin Luther early declared that “images contrary to God’s Word” should be “despised and destroyed” but later modified this radical attitude to arrive at a more moderate stance, tolerating illustrated Bibles for imprinting the Scriptural events on the readers’ minds; for him pictures on walls and in books were not essentially different from outward material signs such as the sacraments themselves. 163 The anti-pictorial attitude of radical Protestants resulted from the belief that in religion the primacy belongs to the Word of God. The authority on which this attitude is based is the initial paragraph of the gospel of St. John, which proclaims God the logos as the origin of the creation. The logos argument was used by Puritans not only as a reason for proscribing pictures in churches but also for reviling the visual culture of stage plays, as for instance in Philip Stubbes’ s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), which stresses the priority of the word: In the first of Iohn we are taught, that the word is God, and God is the word. Wherefore, whosoeuer abuseth this Word of our God on Stages, in Playes and Enterludes, abuseth the Maiesty of God in the same, maketh a mocking stocke of him, and purchaseth to himselfe eternall damnation. 164

This anti-pictorial stance led to the destruction of pictures and sculptures in churches, to the closing of the theatres by the Cromwell government in 1642, and to the enforcement of the theatrical censorship, which was abolished in Britain as late as 1968. 165 163

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Argument and quotations taken from Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1986, chap. 2: “At the Crossroads: The Poetics of Reformation Iconoclasm” (pp. 31-59), here: pp. 34-35. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses. Ed. M.J. Kidnie. Tempe, Az.: Renaissance English Text Society, 2002, p. 199 [emphasis in the original]. For the general topic cf. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1967. On Protestant iconoclasm, see Hans v. Campenhausen, “Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 68 (1957), 96-128; Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War. Woodbridge, Suffolk / Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2003; John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1973. - Cf. also David Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1566-1609. New York: Garland, 1988; Robert W. Scribner (ed.), Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990; Helmut Feld, Der Ikonoklasmus des Westens. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1990.

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In the quarrel for and against religious imagery use was even made of the ut pictura poesis theorem, as by Thomas Harding (1516-1572), who asserted: “[I]n old time the work of excellent poets was called a speaking picture, and the work of painters a still poetry,” and by the Anglican bishop John Jewel who countered: But the comparison that M. Harding useth between images and poetry seemeth nearest to express the truth. For painters and poets, for liberty of lying, have of long time been coupled together. … And therefore, like as Plato commanded all poets for their lying to be banished out of his commonwealth, so likewise Almighty God, for like liberty, banished all painters out of Israel. 166

About a generation later the Nonconformist divine and scholar Henry Ainsworth (1571-1622) in An Arrow against Idolatrie (1624) gives expression to the same anti-pictorial attitude by these arguments: For every man is forbidden to make unto himself, any forme, shape, or resemblance, of things in the heavens earth or waters; of any similitude, shew, or likeness, any frame, figure, edifice, or structure, of man or beast, fowl or fish or any creeping thing, any image, type, or shadowed representation; any imagined-picture, fabrick, or shape. […] So that it is not possible for the wit or hand of man to make any image or representation whatsoever, which cometh not within compasse of the words and things forewarned of God. 167

The same uncompromising stance was taken by George Salteren in his pamphlet A Treatise against Images and Pictures in Churches (1641), which includes a paragraph that begins “Cursed are the worshippers of Images”: And againe, Deut.27. Cursed is he that maketh the blinde go out of the way. This curse is read and repeated in our Churches yearly, Martii 6. and upon every Ashwednesday, by the Canon of our Common prayerbook, and is thus applied by our Church in her Homily. Hom. 3. against Idols pag. 55. I will out of Gods word make this generall argument against all such makers, maintainers, and setters up of images in publick places. […]. But Images in Churches and Temples have been, bee, and ever will bee offences and stumbling blocks, especially to the weak, simple, and blinde common people, deceiving their hearts by the cunning of the Artificer (as the Scriptures expressly in sundry places doe testifie) and so bringing them to Idolatry; therefore woe be to the erecter, setter up, and maintainer of Images in Churches and Temples. 168

166

167 168

John Jewel, Works. Ed. J. Ayre. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18451850, vol. IV, p. 660. Jewel’s text includes that of Harding’s reply. Quotations from Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation, p. 43. Henry Ainsworth, An Arrow against Idolatrie. [Amsterdam?] 1624, pp. 9-10. George Salteren, A Treatise against Images and Pictures in Churches. London: Printed for William Lee, and are to be sold at the signe of the Turks head in Fleet-street, 1641, pp. 23-24.

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The attitudes expressed in Ainsworth’s and Salteren’s words by far exceed the positions taken by Anglicans or Lutherans against the religious use of the visual arts and prove decidedly more radical. For now not only painted images of any kind, especially the biblia pauperum, but also all sorts of verbal imagery fall under a negative verdict, including the time-honoured typological practice of some of the most famous medieval and Renaissance authors, either of religious or secular provenance: Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, and the contemporary mannerist poets. Ainsworth even goes one step further by prohibiting “imagined-picture,” that is mental imagery, the source of enargeia, and any kind of ekphrastic representation, and hereby finds himself in the company of William Perkins, who will not admit mnemonic images, since they may serve as tools of the devil for seducing mankind to evil thoughts and deeds. 169 9.2. Apologies, Apogee, and Decline of Visual Aesthetics Despite the strong iconoclastic tendencies in Renaissance Europe, the supporters of a visual culture proved stronger in the end, with the result that not only the visual arts but also literary pictorialism flourished as never before or after. Strong apologetic counter-currents set up self-conscious barriers against the passing tides of anti-pictorial outbreaks. Thus in England Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) restores the imaginative faculty of creating mental images by stating “that the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself.” 170 And John Bunyan (1628-1688) in “The Authors Apology for his Book” prefacing his immensely popular spiritual novel The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) defended his allegorical and typological compositional method against a fictitious interlocutor: But they [sc. your words] want solidness: Speak man thy mind: They drown’d the weak; Metaphors make us blind. Solidity, indeed becomes the Pen Of him that writeth things Divine to men: But must I needs want solidness, because By Metaphors I speak; was not Gods Laws, His Gospel-laws in olden time held forth By Types, Shadows and Metaphors? Yet loth

169 170

See the chapter on Memoria Poetica. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 101.

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Will any sober man be to find fault With them, lest he be found for to assault The highest Wisdom. No, he rather stoops, And seeks to find out what by pins and loops, By Calves, and Sheep; by Heifers, and by Rams; By Birds and Herbs, and by the blood of Lambs; God speaketh to him: And happy is he That finds the light, and grace that in them be. 171

In these words John Bunyan refers to the authority of the Bible with its allegories, parables, and types as justification for his own writing. 172 After a period of attack and defence which mainly affected Protestant countries, pictorialism both in painting and poetry regained its former selfconsciousness and reputation. In Germany the baroque poet Georg-Philipp Harsdörffer (1607-1658) published an extensive collection of FrauenzimmerGesprächsspiele (1641-1649) in eight parts, consisting of female conversations and poems and sumptuously decorated with artful engravings. Here the discussion of the ut pictura poesis theorem and, by reference to it, of the close relationship of poetry and painting occupies ample space. The bimedial perspective is even widened by the inclusion of music and opera so that Harsdörffer’s work can be regarded as the first German publication on multimediality. In France the rise of Classicism not only produced magnificent paintings on mythical and historical subjects by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), concomitant with a generous sponsorship by such Maecenases as Richelieu and Louis XIV, but also such poetologists as Carel de Sainte-Garde, 173 who closed his comparison of poetry and painting with the assertion of the superiority of poetry; Charles Coypel, 174 who wrote on rhetoricized painting and on vivid and figurative description; and Andre´ Fe´libien (1619-1695), who as the historiographer of the Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture wrote in the famous preface to his edition of the “Confe´rences”: Il est vray que pour […] disposer dans son esprit un ouvrage qu’on veut executer, it faut d’avoir une conoissance parfaite de la chose qu’on veut repre´senter, de quelles parties elle doit estre compose´e, & de quelle sorte l’on y doit proceder.

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John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. J.B. Wharey & R. Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, p. 4. For Scriptural and theological allegory cf. Jon Whitman (ed.), Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 2000, esp. Part Two. Cf. Aron Kibe´di Varga (ed.), Les Poe´tiques du Classicisme. Paris: Aux Amateurs des Livres, 1990, p. 57. Cf. Aron Kibe´di Varga (ed.), Les Poe´tiques du Classicisme, pp. 65, 71.

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Et cette conoissance que l’on acquiert, & dont l’on fait des regles, est a` mon avis ce que l’on peut nommer Art. 175

In England the visual arts began flourishing again in the Restoration period and reached a new culmination in the subsequent Augustan Age. In the preface to his translation of De arte graphica, John Dryden directed the attention of English authors again to the concept of the “sister arts.” 176 The new interest in painting, sculpture, and architecture received support from the philosophical works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, which attached importance to sensation. In consequence, the “fine arts” became a fashionable subject of salon conversations and popular writings like the essays of Joseph Addison (1672-1719). 177 Sir Joshua Reynolds (17231792), who was the most successful portrait painter of his age and also a distinguished man of letters, became the first president of the Royal Academy of Art. In the Discourses on Art 178 delivered to his students (1769-1790) he showed himself as a highly competent writer on the visual arts. The faculties of artist and scholar were also joined in the person of Jonathan Richardson (1665-1745), who was equally successful as a portrait painter and an art theorist in eighteenth-century Britain. In An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725) 179 he takes up some subjects which had already caused debates and even battles among Renaissance writers. He still adopts a partly rhetorical division of the “art of painting,” by using such technical terms as “invention,” “expression,” “composition,” and “colouring.” 180 But he also draws a comparison between painting and poetry: Words paint to the Imagination, but every Man forms the thing to himself in his Own way: Language is very Imperfect: There are innumerable Colours, and Figures 175

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Andre´ Fe´libien, Confe´rences del’Acade´mie Royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’anne´e 1667. Reprint: Gene`ve: Minkoff Reprint, 1973, Pre´face. On author and context, see Martina Dobbe, Querelle des Anciens, des Modernes et des Postmodernes. München: Fink, 1999, esp. p. 25 ff. Cf. Dean Tolle Mace, “Ut pictura poesis: Dryden, Poussin and the Parallel of Poetry and Painting in the Seventeenth Century,” in: John Dixon Hunt (ed.), Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. London: Studio Vista, 1971, pp. 58-81. Cf. William K. Wimsatt & Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Knopf, 1959, chap. 13: “Addison and Lessing: Poetry as Pictures” (pp. 252-282) and Niklaus Rudolf Schweizer, The Ut pictura poesis Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany. Bern / Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1972. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art. Ed. R.E. Wark. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting ( 21725). Facsimile-Reprint: Menston, Yorkshire, England: Scolar Press, 1971. - Cf. Carol Gibson-Wood, An Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 2000. Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, p. 37 ff. “Colouring” is handled in accordance with rhetorical principles (e. g., decorum).

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for which we have no name, and an infinity of other Ideas which have no certain Words universally agreed upon as denoting them; whereas the Painter can convey his Ideas of these Things Clearly, and without Ambiguity; and what he says every one understands in the Sense he intends it. And this is a Language that is Universal; Men of all Nations hear the Poet, Moralist, Historian, Divine, or whatever Character the Painter assumes, speaking to them in their own Mother Tongue. Painting has another Advantage over Words, and that is, it Pours Ideas into our Minds, Words only Drop ‘em. The whole Scene opens as one View, whereas the other way lifts up the Curtain by little, and little: We see (for Example) the fine Prospect at Constantinople, an Eruption of Mount Ætna, the Death of Socrates, the Battel of Blenheim, the Person of King Charles the First, &c. in an instant. 181

This passage in a way summarizes the topics of this chapter. It presents a number of ideas that have become topoi since the Renaissance: painting as a language, even a universal one whose message can be grasped by everybody, and that in an instant, as compared to that of poetic configurations which through evidentia appeal to imagination. Both sister arts are constituted by figurae or colores rhetorici, which exist as phenomena in verbal and visual texts but often can not be exactly named. This, however, is of no importance to painting, as it is immediately accessible to visual perception irrespective of the pictorial genre or the recipient. Hence painting is to be ranked as the superior art. Such is the conclusion drawn by an artist who also worked as a literary philologist by publishing Explanatory Notes and Remarks on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. 182 The ut pictura poesis debate found an official end with the fundamental essay Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) 183 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), who by following some suggestions of Richardson, among others, allocated painting to the spatial arts and poetry to the temporal ones. But visual culture and with it pictorialism continued to exist and even developed further in the following centuries: in poetic pictures as well as pictorial poems.

181 182 183

Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, pp. 3-4. Modern edition: New York: Galand, 1970. Edition: Laokoon. Ed. with an afterword by I. Kreuzer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964, etc. Translation by E. Allen as Laokoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. - On the shift from Classicism to Romanticism, which is in a way marked by the separation of the sister arts, see the classical study of M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Norton, 1958.

Musica Rhetorica The Rhetorical Conceptualization of Music and Musical Poetry

Figure 53: Hans Burgkmair (1473-1531): Emperor Maximilian I amidst the musicians of his Hofkapelle.

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I. Mathematical and Rhetorical Concepts of Music In a letter of 13 September 1492 the great Florentine humanist and philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who was also a musician, wrote: No one who considers the outstanding discoveries of our time can have the slightest doubt that we are living in a golden age. Indeed, this period has seen the rediscovery of arts and sciences that once had disappeared: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, music, old songs in harmony with the lyre of Orpheus […]. Knowledge now goes hand in hand with the art of public speaking. 1

The optimism of this leading humanist concerns not only the flourishing of the traditional artes liberales but also such sciences and arts that played a minor role in the traditional canon of disciplines. Thus music was raised in rank and directly linked to the mythical hero Orpheus. But the discipline overtowering all others in splendour and respectability was rhetoric, and it was in conjunction with rhetoric that the other arts and sciences gained in importance and reputation. During the Renaissance two concepts of music coexisted which are very different in origin and constitution. The older one, which reaches back to Pythagoras, may be characterized as arithmetical-symbolical. 2 It views music as a conceptual sound pattern which can be described in arithmetical terms and pervades the whole universe. Thus the seventeenth-century encyclopedist Johann-Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638) gives the following definition in his Templum Musicum: Or The Musical Synopsis (1664): “Musick is a Mathematical Science, subalternate to Arithmetick.” 3 At the waning of the Middle Ages 1

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Marsilio Ficino, Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Translated from the Latin by members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1996. Cf. H. Hüschen, “Harmonie”, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 5 (1956), 1588-1614 (incl. bibliography); P.J. Ammann, “The Musical Theory and Philosophy of Robert Fludd”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 198-227; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961, rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1993; Rolf Dammann, Der Musikbegriff im deutschen Barock. Köln: A. Volk Verlag, 1967, rpt. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 31995, chap. 1; S.K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics. San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1974; Daniel P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute / Leiden: Brill, 1978; Dorothy Koenigsberger, Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Concepts of Harmony, 1400-1700. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979; Willem Elders, Symbolic Scores: Studies in the Music of the Renaissance. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1994. Johann-Heinrich Alsted, Templum Musicum: Or the Musical Synopsis of the Learned and Famous Johannes-Henricus-Alstedius, Being a Compendium of the Rudiments both of the Mathematical and Practical Part of Musick: […]. Faithfully translated out of Latin by John Birchensha. Philomath. London: W. Godbid for P. Dring, 1664, p. 2.

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John Gower (1330?-1408), in a digression on the trivium and quadrivium in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis (c. 1390), informs the reader about The seconde of Mathematique, Which is the science of Musique, That techeth upon Armonie A man to make melodie Be vois and soun of instrument Thurgh notes of acordement, The which men pronounce alofte, Nou scharpe notes and nou softe, Nou hihe notes and nou lowe, As be the gamme a man mai knowe, Which techeth the prolacion Of note and the condicion. 4

Central to this theory is a doctrine of proportions based on mathematical principles as well as a hierarchical and idealistic concept of ordo, according to which each musical expression is a representation of the non-sensual music of the spheres. 5 The second concept may be characterized as rhetorical-affective. 6 In contrast to the former (noetical) one it assumes that the purpose of music is to

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John Gower, “Confessio Amantis,” in: Complete Works. 4 vols. Ed. G.C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899-1902, vol. II, pp. 237-238 (VII. 163-174). Cf. Daniel Pickering Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute / Leiden: Brill, 1978, chap. 1: “The Harmony of the Spheres” (pp. 1-13). Cf. Arnold Schering, “Die Lehre von den musikalischen Figuren,” Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 21 (1908), 106-114; Heinz Brandes, Studien zur musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Triltsch & Huther, 1935; Hans-Heinrich Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im 16.-18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Triltsch, 1941, rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1969, rpt. 2003; Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht, Heinrich Schütz: Poeta Musicus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959, Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 32000; Daniel P. Walker, Der musikalische Humanismus im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert. Kassel/Basel: Bärenreiter, 1949; Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. London: Warburg, 1947, rpt. London / New York: Routledge, 1988, chaps. 3, 4, 12; A. Schmitz, “Figuren, musikalisch-rhetorische,” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4 (1955), 176-183; Jean Colville Betts, The Marriage of Music and Rhetoric: A Study of the Use of Classical Rhetoric as a Rationale for Musical Innovation During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1972; Gerard LeCoat, The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550-1650. Bern / Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1975; Rolf Dammann, Der Musikbegriff im deutschen Barock, esp. chaps. 2, 4; Maria Rika Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979; George J. Buelow, “Rhetoric and Music,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. XV. London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 793-803; Gregory G. Butler, “Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources,” Musical Quarterly 66 (1980), 53-

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reflect nature and also to elicit emotions. Thus the French philosopher Rene´ Descartes (1596-1650) writes at the beginning of his Musicae Compendium (1666): Finis [sc. soni] ut delectet, variosque in nobis moveat affectus, fieri autem possunt cantilenæ simul tristes & delectabiles, nec mirum tam diversa. Ita enim elegeiographi & tragoedi eo magis placent, quo majorem in nobis luctum excitant. 7

Accordingly, rhetorical procedures and concepts, such as invention, the doctrine of figures, and the psychology of affections, are transferred to the realm of music. As a result music becomes a kind of “harmonic language,” as Caccini put it, 8 and the musician becomes a musicus poeticus. 9 The following remarks take up Descartes’ utterance in that they focus on both areas of rhetorical aesthetics addressed: musical as well as musicopoetic concepts and practices; for the two prove interdependent in Renaissance and Baroque culture. The first chapter therefore deals with the question of how and to what extent rhetorical concepts were employed in musical theory and practice, while the second is concerned with the employment of musical concepts in manuals of rhetoric and poetics as well as in musical poetry. This leads to the more general question about the role that music as a medium of self-articulation played in Renaissance culture.

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64; James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1981; Maria R. Maniates, “Music and Rhetoric: Facets of Cultural History in the Renaissance and the Baroque,” Israel Studies in Musicology 3 (1981-1982), 44-69; Ferruccio Civra, Musica Poetica: Introduzione alla retorica ´ lvarez, “El movere come punto de enmusicale. Torino: UTET Libreria, 1991; Myriam A cuentro entre mu´sica y reto´rica,” in: Reto´rica, Polı´tica e Ideologı´a: Desde la Antigüedad hasta nuestras dı´as. Vol. II. Ed. Juan M. Labio Ilundain et al. Salamanca: Logo Asociacio´n de Estudios sobre Lengua, Pensamiento y Cultura Cla´sica, 1998, pp. 231-237; Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller, “Die musikalische Rhetorik und ihre Genese in Musik und Musikanschauung der Renaissance,” in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 285-315 (with bibliography); Warren Kirkendale, “On the Rhetorical Interpretation of the Ricercar and J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering,” Studi Musicali 26 (1997), 331-376. Rene´ Descartes, Musicae Compendium / Leitfaden der Musik. Ed. & trans. J. Brockt. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 21992, p. 2. English translation: “ The end [of the sound] is to please and to move affections in us. The cantilenas can be both sad and delightful. And it is no wonder that they are so heterogeneous. For the poets of elegies and tragedies please us the more, the greater the sorrow is which they engender in ourselves.” Quoted in Rudolf Schäfke, Geschichte der Musikästhetik in Umrissen. Ed. with a preface by W. Korte, Tutzing: H. Schneider, 21964, p. 279. Cf. Joachim Burmeister, Musica Poetica. Facsimile-Reprint of the ed. Rostock 1606. Ed. M. Ruhnke. Kassel / Basel: Bärenreiter, 1955.

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II. The Rhetoricization of Musical Theory and Practice Since music by itself, even without a text, has always been understood as conveying a message, it has often been treated as a kind of language. This is the contrary position to the title of Antonio Salieri’s (1750-1825) opera Prima la Musica e poi le Parole (1786), which assigns priority to music and a secondary status to the word. In Renaissance opera the word is given absolute priority; even instrumental music is interpreted as a verbal composition. 10 In the Renaissance and Baroque Age the opera was considered the rebirth of classical tragedy and hence was regularly named favola per musica or dramma per musica. 11 Therefore the text would have had to be comprehensible for the audience. Marco da Gagliano (1582-1643), who after Jacopo Peri set Ottavio Rinuccini’s (1562-1621) libretto Dafne to music a second time in 1608, admonished the singer to realize that the real pleasure arose from the comprehension of the words (“persuadasi pur che’l vero diletto nasca dalla intelligenza delle parole”). 12 Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), the composer of the “favola in musica” L’Orfeo (Figure 54), also embraced the maxim that language should be the mistress of harmony and not its servant (“L’orazione sia padrona del armonia e non serva”). 13 A contemporary announced the performance of this “comedy” as a singular spectacle, because all the dramatis personae would speak musically (“una [Comedia] che sara` singolare posciache tutti gli interlocutori parleranno musicalmente”). 14 This supposed predomi10

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Claudio Merulo (1533-1604) writes about his Toccate per l’Organo: “E’ veramente questo meraviglioso instrumento che Organo e` per Eccellenza chiamato, come corpo humano governato dall’ Anima, poiche come s’e` detto, il primo aspetto d’esso, grandemente diletta l’occhio e’l suono che arriva all’ orecchie come parole che significano gl’affetti del cuore, rappresenta l’interna dispositione de lo spirito, che lo governa, havendo i mantici correspondenti al polmone, le canne alla gola, i tasti a’ denti e’l Sonatore in vece di lingua, che con leggiadri movimenti della mano lo fa soavemente sonare, & quasi con dolci maniere parlare.” (Cit. in: Francesco Tasini, Toccate d’intavolatura d’organo. Ermitage recording, 1997, p. 4). This may be the generic musical name for masques, and therefore Gretchen Ludke Finney rightly terms John Milton’s masque Comus a “dramma per musica” (Musical Backgrounds for English Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962, rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976, chap. IX: “Comus: dramma per musica” [pp. 175-194]). - Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantata Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan (“Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde” [BWV 201]), which depicts a musical competition between two pagan gods, is also termed a Dramma per Musica. Cited from Angelo Solerti (ed.), Gli albori del melodramma. Milano: R. Sandron, 1904, rpt. Hildesheim: Olms,1969, vol. II, I. Ottavio Rinuccini, p. 67. Ce´cile Prinzbach (ed.), “Gehorsame Tochter der Musik”: Das Libretto: Dichter und Dichtung der Oper. München: Prinzbach, 2003 [catalogue], p. 27. Cited from Andrea Della Corte (ed.), Drammi per musica dal Rinuccini allo Zeno. Torino: UTET, 1926, vol. I, p. 170.

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Figure 54: Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): L’Orfeo (1609).

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nance of the word secured such later poets as Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) or Pietro Antonio Bonaventuro Patrassi, alias Metastasio (1698-1782), their outstanding cultural and social positions.

1. Affections The most evident common feature shared by music and rhetoric is their intended efficacy, and it is this effect that is common to concepts of music and poetry in Renaissance Europe. Thus it is small wonder that music theory adopts the Horatian doctrine of his Epistola ad Pisones (vv. 333-334): Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare poetae Aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.

One example of this can be found in the third book of the Istituzioni armoniche (1558) by Gioseffe Zarlino (1517-1590), maestro di capella at San Marco, Venice; the subject here is a composition which the musician “adorns with various modulations and various harmonies in such a way that he offers welcome pleasure to his hearers.” 15 But of greater importance to musical theory and practice are the affections (affetti ) that are borrowed from rhetoric. Jacopo Peri (1561-1643), the composer and singer, whose Euridice (1600) is the first complete surviving opera, emphasizes this aspect of musical eloquence in the following words: Et avuto riguardo a que’ modi et a quegli accenti che nel dolerci, nel rallegrarci et in somiglianti cose ci servono, feci muovere il basso al tempo di quegli, or piu` or meno, secondo gli affetti. 16

Giulio Caccini (1545-1618), prominent member of the Florentine Camerata, inventor of the stile rappresentativo, which was to be fundamental to the development of the opera, and composer of numerous madrigals and particularly Nuove Musiche e Nuova Maniera di Scriverle (1602), writes in the preface to that work: It being plain, then, as I say, that such music and musicians gave no other delight than what harmony could give the ear, for, unless the words were understood, they could not move the understanding, I have endeavored in those my late 15

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Gioseffe Zarlino, “Istituzioni armoniche” (1558), in: Source Readings in Music History. II: The Renaissance. Ed. O. Strunk. London / Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981 (1952), p. 39. - Cf. Hermann Zenck, “Zarlinos Istitutioni harmoniche als Quelle zur Musikanschauung der italienischen Renaissance,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 12 (1930), 540-578. Cited from A. Solerti (ed.), Gli albori del melodramma, vol. II, p. 109. Translation: “Having paid attention to those modes and accents which are available to us in grief, in joy and in similar situations I moved the basso now more and then less, according to these affections.”

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compositions to bring in a kind of music by which men might, as it were, talk in harmony, using in that kind of singing, as I have said at other times, a certain noble neglect of the song, passing now and then through certain dissonances, holding the bass note firm, except when I did not wish to observe the common practice, and playing the inner voices on an instrument for the expression of some passion, these being of no use for any other purpose. […] So then, if this be the greatest part of that grace in singing which is apt to move the affection of the mind in those conceits, certainly where there is most use of such affections or passions, and if it be demonstrated with such lively reasons, a new consequence is hence inferred: that from writings of men likewise may be learned that most necessary grace which cannot be described in better manner and more clearly for the understanding thereof, and yet it may be perfectly attained thereunto. So that after the study of the theory and after these rules, they may be put in practice, by which a man grows more perfect in all arts, especially in the profession of the perfect singer, be it man or woman. 17

This statement discloses several details characteristic of the ut rhetorica musica concept of music: the analogy of music and word, the priority of the latter, the celare artem of a “certain noble neglect of the song,” and, finally, the passions which an excellent singer should be able to express. Alsted likewise emphasizes the affective aspect which he describes in his Templum Musicum (1664) as follows: The subject of Explication in Musick is a Song, whose chief Force lieth in this, that it is accommodated to the Text and Affections. But if the same Sound may be accommodated to divers and contrary things and Affections, then the Musick is inept and irrational; because it is contrary to the Scope and Principle of that most laudable Discipline, which will, That Melodie be applied both to Things and Affections. If therefore v.g. in any Psalm of David, three Parts do occur, viz. Lamentation, Consolation, and giving of Thanks: there, three Tones ought to be. 18

While this German philosopher and encyclopedist argues from a theoretical position by demanding a strict observation of decorum in creating an exact correspondence between subject, affection and musical expression, a contemporary musicologist like Wolfgang Schonsleder (1570-1651) presents musical examples of ten different affections expressed by music in his treatise Architectonices musices universalis (Ingolstadt, 1631). 19 17

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Giulio Caccini. “Le nuove musiche” (1602), in: Source Readings in Music History. III: The Baroque Era. Ed. O. Strunk. New York / London: Norton, 1965, pp. 18, 23. In the preface there are also many explanations of vocal technique, and Caccini was the first to notate the ornaments in his score; but these aspects shall be neglected here. A broad range of affections is also expressed in the Musicali Concenti a una, due, quattro voci opera II (1623) by the Italian composer Filippo Albini da Moncalieri (1587-1631/2). Alsted, Templum Musicum (1664), p. 3. Cf. Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 37 ff.

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Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is more interested in the practical implementation of rhetorical (affective) concepts in his works, as may be gathered from the foreword to his Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (1638): I have reflected that the principal passions or affections of our mind are three, namely anger, moderation, and humility or supplication; so the best philosophers declare, and the very nature of our voice indicates this in having high, low, and middle registers. The art of music also points clearly to these three in its terms “agitated,” “soft,” and “moderate” (concitato, molle, and temperato). In all the works of former composers I have indeed found examples of the “soft” and the “moderate,” but never of the “agitated,” a genus nevertheless described by Plato in the third book of his Republic [399A] in these words: “Take that harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare.” And since I was aware that it is contraries which greatly move our mind, and that this is the purpose which all good music should have - as Boethius asserts, saying, “Music is related to us, and either ennobles or corrupts the character” - for this reason I have applied myself with no small diligence and toil to rediscover this genus. 20

The subdivision of affections may have been influenced by Aristotle’s treatment in his Rhetoric II.ii-xi. Monteverdi himself transferred his theoretical statements into practice with his madrigals and operas, where a multitude of affections - love-hate, anger-softness, joy-sorrow, etc. - find musical expression. In the “Prologo” to L’Orfeo (1607) La Musica introduces herself accordingly: Io la Musica son, ch’ai dolci accenti so far tranquillo ogni turbato core, ed or di nobil ira ed or d’amore posso infiammarle piu` gelate menti. 21

Thus music claims to be able both to soothe and stir affections in the human soul. Perhaps the most famous musical expression of a passion is the Lamento of Arianna which has survived as the only musical piece from an opera of the same title now lost. At its performance in 1607, the audience is reported to have been moved to tears; so strong evidently was its emotional potential that it engendered an overwhelming effect.

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Claudio Monteverdi, “Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi” (1638), in: Source Readings in Music History. III: The Baroque. Ed. O. Strunk, p. 53. - The Boethius reference is to his De institutione musica I.i. Translation: “I am Music who, through sweet sounds, knows how to calm every troubled heart, and can kindle the most icy souls now to noble anger, now to love.”

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In his celebrated cycle of lute pieces Lachrimae or Seven Teares (1604) 22 John Dowland (1563-1626) composed a series of “passionate” pavans centred around the affect of melancholy. This is emphasized once more in the titles of the individual pieces of the cycle, such as Lacrimae Gementes (sighing), Lachrimae Tristes (sad), Lachrimae Coactae (forced or “crocodile” tears), Lachrimae Verae (true), Lachrimae Amantis (lover’s), and especially in the composer’s paronomastic self-irony in Semper Dowland semper Dolens (always Dowland always weeping). In his dedication of Lachrimae (1604) to Queen Anne John Dowland writes: […] and though the title doth promise teares, vnfit guests in these ioyfull times, jet no doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weepes, neither are teares shed alwayes in sorrowe, but sometime in ioy and gladnesse. Vouchsafe then (worthy Goddesse) your Gracious protection to these showers of Harmonie, least if you frowne on them, they bee metamorphosed into true teares. 23

By representing some of the states of melancholy later to be described by Robert Burton (1577-1640) in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Dowland paid his tribute to a fashionable mood that haunted the minds of courtiers and intellectuals of the fin de sie`cle and found its most spectacular expression in the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which appeared three years (1601) before the Lachrimae. It had been iconicized in pictures representing the mel22

An earlier poem of praise was written by Richard Barnfield: If music and sweet poetry agree, As they must needs, the sister and the brother, Then must love be great ‘twixt thee and me, Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other. Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch Upon the lute doth ravish human sense; Spenser, to me, whose deep conceit is such, As passing all conceit, needs no defence. Thou lov’st to hear the sweet melodious sound That Phoebus’ lute, the queen of music, makes; And I in deep delight am chiefly drown’d When as himself to singing he betakes: One god is god of both, as poets feign; One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.

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(Cited from the internet article by John Fazli, “Lachrimae of John Dowland,” 30 January 1998, 2 [http://members.iquest.net/⬃jfazli/dowland.htm]). Cited by John Fazli in his internet article “Lachrimae of John Dowland,” 30 January 1998, 5. - Christian Kelnberger, Text und Musik bei John Dowland. Passau: Stutz, 1999, pp. 99190 performs a musical analysis of the Lachrimae and finds references to them in the dramatic literature of the Renaissance, though, to his surprise, none occurs in Shakespeare’s plays. He also deals with the texts of Dowland’s Airs which were written a.o. by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Michael Drayton.

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Figure 55: Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533): Young David playing on a harp before King Saul in order to cure him of melancholy.

ancholic King Saul, whom young David tried to heal by playing on a harp; a remarkable example (Figure 55) is the painting by Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533). 24 Melancholy is also made the subject of an early poem by John Milton (1608-1674) with the title Il Penseroso, but this time in combination with its 24

On the topic, see the study by Günter Bandmann, Melancholie und Musik: Ikonographische Studien. Köln / Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960, esp. chap. I.1. “David und Saul” (pp. 11-21).

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contrary affection, cheerfulness, in the poem L’Allegro (1632-1634?). 25 It is these two complementary poems that George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) set to music not successively, however, but in an arrangement of lines interwoven from both poems. The idea of such a collage was proposed by the philosopher James Harris (1709-1780) and executed in cooperation with Charles Jennens (1700-1773), later the librettist of Messiah, who added a third part Il Moderato, which suggested a reconciliation of the two opposite Miltonic affections under the guidance of reason - a typical Enlightenment idea that nevertheless realized Monteverdi’s old triadic concept of concitato, molle, and moderato. The first performance of Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato took place on 27 February 1740.

2. Invention, Elocution, Pronunciation Of the Five Great Arts the most important ones for musical rhetoric are Invention, Elocution, and Pronunciation. As for Invention, the theories regard the words as the basis from which the composer is to proceed for his musical creation. In order to facilitate the compositional work they contain extensive charts of such words as “are to be expressed and painted” (sunt exprimenda et pingenda). The author of this postulate, Johannes Nucius (1556-1620), a German composer and theorist of Upper Silesia, published a treatise Musicae poeticae; sive, de compositione cantus (1613) which contains a chart of words that determine the kind of mood, key, and pace to be observed in a musical work of art: Hug [sic] inferenda sunt alia Harmoniae quoque decora, ut sunt primum verba affectuum, Laetari, Gaudere, lacrymari, timere, ejulare, flere, lugere, irasci, ridere, Miserere et: quae ipso sono et notarum varietate sunt exprimenda et pingenda. Secundo verba motus et locorum, ut sunt stare, currere, saltare, quiescere, salire, extollere, dejicere, ascendere, descendere, Coelum, Abissus, montes, profundum, altum et similia, etc. Tertio, Adverbia temporis, Numeri, ut Celeriter, Velociter, Cito, Tarde, mane, sero, bis, semel, quater, Item, quae numerum indefinitum significant, ut rursus, iterum, saepe, raro.

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For analyses cf. Don Cameron Allen, The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton’s Poetry. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970, chap. 1: “The Search for the Prophetic Strain: ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’” (pp. 3-23); Sandra Corse “Old Music and New in ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso,’” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980), 109-113; Stella P. Revard, “‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’: Classical Tradition and Renaissance Mythography,” PLMA 101 (1986), 338-350.

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Huc referuntur etiam haec vocabula, lux, dies, nox, tenebrae, quae vel notarum repletione vel albedine apte exprimi possunt. 26

In a similar manner Georg Daniel Speer (1636-1707) offers a word chart in his Vierfaches musikalisches Kleeblatt (1697), from which the future composer may choose his musical inventions. 27 The Swiss humanist Heinrich Glarean (1488-1563) in his Dodecachordon (1547) furthermore developed a richly inclusive theory on how composers can access useful ideas. Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) outlined a comprehensive theory of inventio; enumerating 17 sources of invention, such as locus notationis, descriptionis, generis & speciei, totius & partium, etc. which he analysed successively. 28 Thus, in analogy to rhetorical topics, a topica musicalis offering inspiration for compositions, improvisations, and interpretations was at the disposal of Renaissance and Baroque musical theorists and practitioners. As for Elocution or style, musicologists could adopt the three classical genera dicendi consisting of the high, middle, and low styles of diction (genus grande, medium, tenue) for the composition and interpretation of musical works. This analogy was made as late as 1739 by Johann Mattheson in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, where he writes in Chapter X.6: However, as concerns the so-called high, middle and low styles of writing, such is taken to mean common, when this word means Commun not when it means General: since such qualities certainly belong to each of the mentioned principal styles in musical composition, namely, to the ecclesiastical, secular and chamber, as categories of their species. These are only secondary things and incidental terms which indicate high, middle, and low; one must consider them as merely subdivisions which in and of themselves cannot amount to a religious, theatrical or chamber style: For all terms, though they may comprehend something noble, moderate or trifling, must inevitably and without exception conform in all respects to the above-mentioned three most important species of writing style with all thoughts, inventions and strengths, as a servant to this master. 29

Thus an aptum between subject, text, music, and occasion is to be observed, and it is this harmonious relationship that is a prerequisite to a successful musical composition. In practice many subtle nuances must be considered. For an elevated style in the theatre is different from one in the church: a despot’s wrath on stage requires a different kind of expression than the representation of divine majesty, heavenly splendour, or holy ardour in 26 27 28

29

Cited in Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 38. Ibid. Johann Mattheson’ s “Der vollkommene Capellmeister.” A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary by E.C. Harriss. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981, p. 285. Cited from Johann Mattheson’s “Der vollkommene Capellmeister,” p. 190.

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church. A comparative analysis of the secular (theatrical) works of Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel can easily find this Mattheson postulate verified. On a smaller scale the figures of speech play a part in Renaissance music as well. 30 One important representative of the musicologists who converted the figurae rhetoricae into figurae musicae was Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629), whose Musica Poetica (Rostock, 1606) is the first musical theory to systematically explore the connection between rhetoric and music. It includes definitions of musical figures, such as the following: Pathopœia pauopoii¬a est figura apta ad affectus creandos, quod fit, quando Semitonia carmini inseruntur, quæ nec ad Modum carminis, nec ad Genus pertinent, sed unius beneficioˆ in aliud introducuntur: Tum quando semitonia carminis Modo congruentia sæpius extra morem attinguntur. […] Hypotyposis est illud ornamentum, quoˆ textus significatio ita deumbratur ut ea, quæ textui subsunt & animam vitamq; non habent, vita esse prædita, videantur. Hoc ornamentum usitatißimum est apud authenticos Artifices. […] Hyperbole y«perbolh¡ est Melodiæ supra supremum ejus terminum superlatio. Exemplum est in Orlandi Benedicam ad textum: Semper laus ejus. Consideretur ejus Harmoniæ vox Bassus. 31

The figure Pathopoeia is extremely important for the musical expression of vehement affections. Hypotyposis, as in the verbal and visual arts, makes a significant contribution to a lively representation. Many figures provided decorative as well as content-related clarifications, which explains why Burmeister and other theorists made no attempt to classify them, but rather sorted the figures according to their phenomenology into harmonic, melodic, and melodic-harmonic ornaments. Joachim Burmeister divides the ornamenta sive figurae musicae into two main classes: harmonia (16

30

31

Cf. Dietrich Bartel, Handbuch der musikalischen Figurenlehre. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1985, rev. ed. 31997. Joachim Burmeister, Musica poetica (Rostock, 1606). Ed. M. Ruhnke, pp. 61, 62, 64. A translation, with Introduction and Notes, is provided by Benito V. Rivera: Joachim Burmeister, Musical Poetics. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 175: “Pathopoeia. Pathopoeia (pathopoiia) is a figure suited for arousing the affections, which occurs when semitones that belong neither to the mode nor to the genus of the piece are employed and introduced in order to apply the resources of one class to another. […]. Hypotyposis. Hypotyposis is that ornament whereby the sense of the text is so depicted that those matters contained in the text that are inanimate or lifeless seem to be brought to life. This ornament is very much in evidence among truly master composers. […].” p. 183: “Hyperbole. Hyperbole is pushing a melody up beyond its upper boundary [of the mode]. There is an example in Orlando’s Benedicam, at the words “semper laus eius” [app. B.66]. The bass voice of the harmony should be studied.”

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figures) and melodia (6 figures). 32 An important class of figures is that of repetition figures or figures of equivalence (R. Jakobson). Melodic repetition figures are epizeuxis (repetitions at the beginning of a phrase), replica (a fugal repetition of a theme), palillogia (immediate repetition of the same melody), epanalepsis (repetition of an open thought at the end of a period: formation of a frame), and anadiplosis (repetition of the ending tones of a phrase [motive] at the beginning of the next section). A varied repetition is the traductio, one with a new, special, and emphatic ingredient. Harmonic figures employ the “givens” of the techniques of movements or contrapuntal techniques for the clarification of a text. “Pictorial” or demonstrative signposts contain noe¨ma (“thought,” a clarifying chordally homophonic movement); analepsis (immediate repetition of a noe¨ma); anaploce (“choral” repetition); and mimesis (immediate repetition of a noe¨ma on another step) - these four possess a “pictorial” or demonstratively indicative character. 33 Pronuntiatio 34 plays an important part in the performance of musical works, as the text has to be sung distinctly in order to be understood by the audience. But a feeling for expression on the part of the singer is also needed in order to move its emotions. To achieve this goal the musician has to move himself with the same emotion he wants to express and engender. The dictum of Horace: “si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi.” (AP 102103) 35 is still alive in what Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), the most illustrious offspring of Johann Sebastian Bach, requires of the musician: Indem ein Musicus nicht anders rühren kann, er sey dann selbst gerührt; so muß er nothwendig sich selbst in alle Affecten setzen können, welche er bey seinen Zuhörern erregen will; er giebt ihnen seine Empfindungen zu verstehen und bewegt sie solchergestalt am besten zur Mit-Empfindung. Bey matten und traurigen Stellen wird er matt und traurig. Man sieht und hört es ihm an. Dieses geschicht ebenfalls bey heftigen, lustigen und anderen Arten von Gedancken, wo er sich alsdann in diese Affecten setzet. 36

In other musical theories, such as the Versuch einer Anweisung, die Flöte traversie`re zu spielen (1751) by Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773), the analogy be32

33

34

35

36

Burmeister, Musica poetica (Rostock, 1606). Ed. M. Ruhnke, p. 55: “Id [sc. ornamentum] duplex est; alterum Harmoniae, alterum Melodiae.” Adopted from the informative article on “Music” by Hartmut Krones in: Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. T.O. Sloane. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 512-513. Cf. F.A. Gallo, “Pronuntiatio: Ricerche sulla storia di un termine retorico-musicale,” Acta Musicologica 35 (1963), 38-46. Translation: “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself ” (H.R. Fairclough). Cited from Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 118. (Source: C.P.E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen [1753-1763]).

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tween musician and orator is referred to directly: “Der musikalische Vortrag kann mit dem Vortrage eines Redner[s] verglichen werden.” 37 As for detailed instructions about pronuntiatio and actio, some music theorists, like Joachim Burmeister, took over the respective sections in classical rhetorics almost verbatim. 38 The principal source for musical delivery is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (XI.iii.), which in an earlier book (I.x.17) states “that the art of letters and that of music were once united” (quod grammatice quondam ac musice iunctae fuerunt). Johann Mattheson coined the term Klangrede (“musical eloquence”) for the rhetoricization of music, a term that with the rediscovery of the historical practice of performing Renaissance and Baroque music has gained a new actuality in recent times (Nikolaus Harnoncourt). 39 Mattheson not only dedicates a large chapter to the “Art of Gesticulation” but also transfers the six parts of oration to music: The ways and means of style and practice are not nearly so diverse and varying in rhetoric as in music, where one can more frequently vary things, though the theme has to remain to some degree. Musical rhetoric has a great deal of liberty and more compatible surroundings by comparison: hence in melody there might be something similar in the exordium, in the narration and in the discourse, so long as they are made different from one another by keys, being higher, lower, and similar marks of distinction (of which normal rhetoric is ignorant). I myself acknowledge, in Kern, that the narration in our arias sounds almost the same as the exordium; yet the former is in a higher key, and has intelligible words underlaid which are worked out to full meaning up to a cadence: which indeed the exordium did not do; it is played, the narration is sung; the former in the bass, and the latter in the soprano; again a twofold distinction: it, the exordium, differs in five ways from the narration, in pitch, in words, in realization, in instruments and voices, and thus is not at all one and the same statement, nor one and the same thing. Similarity is indeed not identity. Even if two do the same thing, identity is as little achieved. The actual discourse which follows the narration is differentiated even more from the latter and from the exordium, since it gains new vitality through sensitive transposition, not only from a lower to a higher key but also from a minor to a major one, and besides it is done in the continuo alone; though the theme is always retained. For here such a main theme is so to speak the text or substance of the melody; it is the sole subject from which one does not really tend to deviate far, even in common rhetoric, in its style. I only ask: are the subject and 37 38

39

Cited from Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 115. Cf. Martin Ruhnke, Joachim Burmeister: Ein Beitrag zur Musiklehre um 1600. Kassel / Basel: Bärenreiter, 1955, pp. 94-97, 99 ff. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Musik als Klangrede: Wege zu einem neuen Musikverständnis: Essays und Vorträge. New ed. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002.

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the answer in a fugue (which is even more limited than an aria) one and the same thing because they look the same? For a thinking person this is quite sufficient. One might perhaps with more propriety state: the peroration is precisely the same as the exordium. For that is actually the case. One finds the very same thing there, one and the same theme in one and the same voice. But, why then? Did David not make it so in the eighth and in the 103rd Psalm? and are there not people who prefer by far the truth of the noble poets Demosthenes and Cicero, especially when they direct their eyes to the musical writings of the prophets? 40

By drawing an analogy between the dispositio of an oration and the dispositio of a musical composition Mattheson finds himself in a musicological tradition that includes Burmeister with his structuring of a carmen musicum into exordium, ipsum corpus carminis, and finis (epilogus). Modern musicologists have made use of the rhetorical techniques provided by the rhetorical theories of music in order to analyse Renaissance and Baroque music. 41 Burmeister himself illustrates his musical poetics with interpretations of vocal works of the Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594), whose prodigious musical production during the late Renaissance comprised more than 2,000 works. Thus the rhetoricization of music created a musical culture that was firmly embedded in the context of the Seven Liberal Arts. Music was no longer simply one discipline of the quadrivium but participated in the trivium as well. The consequence of this process was that music now became part of the studia humanitatis and could be taught at the university faculties of the Humanities, a process which placed it beside painting, which moved up from an ars mechanica to an ars liberalis in the Renaissance. But like painting, the professional performance of music continues to require the technical skills of a mechanical art and is equally subject to a mathematical investigation. Marin Marais (1656-1728), French instrumentalist, composer, and theorist, rightly observes on these relations in his Harmonie universelle (Paris, 16271636): “Le parfait Musicien a besoin des autre sciences, des arts libe´reaux et de quelques uns des Me´chanique […]. La Rhetorique insigne comme il faut disposer le sujet pour le mettre en Musique.” 42 40 41

42

Cited from: Johann Matheson’s “Der vollkommene Capellmeister,” pp. 63-64. Cf. e. g. Arnold Schmitz, Die Bildlichkeit der wortgebundenen Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1980 (11950); Ursula Kirkendale, “The Source of Bach’s Musical Offering: The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33 (1980), 88-141; Lucinda Heck Sloan, The Influence of Rhetoric on Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Solo Vocal Cantatas and the Treatise of 1722. New York: Lang, 1990; Elmar Budde, “Musikalische Form und rhetorische dispositio im ersten Satz des dritten Brandenburgischen Konzertes von Johann Sebastian Bach,” in: Rhetorik zwischen den Wissenschaften. Ed. G. Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991, pp. 161-174. Cit. from Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 48.

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3. A Case Study: Denis Gaultier, “La Re´thoriqve des Dievx” (1652) Denis Gaultier (1597 or 1603-1672), also named ‘Gaultier le jeune’ to distinguish him from his cousin Ennemond, was a French lutenist and composer who held no official court position but gained fame through salon playing. Anne de Chambre´, one of his patrons, compiled in a sumptuous manuscript the lute pieces considered to be his finest compositions and employed the best artists of the time - Le Sueur, Abraham Bosse, and Robert des Nanteuil - to illustrate the manuscript with elaborate engravings. The illustration rendered here (Figure 56) shows a female lute player on the right looking at the score of La Re´thoriqve des Dievx (c. 1652) held by another female figure on the left, while the middle position is evidently taken by the personification of Musica pointing with her right hand to the sky and holding in her left arm the Hermean caduceus as a symbol of the power of musical rhetoric. The commentaries on this music appear in a language which borrowed its images from Classical Antiquity. Anne de Chambre´ wrote comments on the lute pieces of La Re´thoriqve des Dievx, of which a selection will be reproduced here: La De´dicace. Par ce discours celeste l’Illustre Gaultier exprime tres parfaitement sa Reconnoissance envers les Dieux; pour la science dont ils l’ont doüe´, et leur de´die avec tout le respect possible, et sa personne et ses œuvres. Phae¨ton foudroye´. Cette piece rend te´moignage de ce que Phae¨ton par son imprudence et par son ambition fut cause de l’embrasement de la moitie´ des hommes; De la punition que fit Iupiter de ce te´meraire: Et des douleurs que son pe`re Appolon souffrit de sa perte. Le Panegirique. Ce Panegirique a la loüange de Mercure exprime parfaitement l’E´loquence que ce Dieu met en usage lors quil fait ses harangues, et fait connoistre a ses Esleues que les arts luy sont redeuables de leur naissance. Minerve. Cette Deesse qui possede toutes les Sciences ensemble, fait icy connoistre par Gaultier son Interprette, ce qu’elle scX ait de la Musique : et que par cet art divin, elle fait naistre dans les hommes les passions sans violence, et les vertus dans leur purete´. Ulisse. L’E´loquence de ce Grec se fait icy mieux entendre, que dans la harangue dont il se seruit pour auoir les armes d’Achilles. […]. Diane. Cette chaste Deesse en ce discours plein d’energie conuie toutes les Belles d’acquerir les vertus, et particulierement de conseruer inuiolablement leur Virginite´. La Coquette virtuosa. Cette Belle qui se fait autant d’Amans d’hommes qui l’entendent, temoigne par son precieux discours les douceurs qu’elle trouue dans lamour de la Vertu, l’estat qu’elle fait de ceux qui en sont les adorateurs, et qu’elle sera la possession de celuy qui aura plustost acquis le titre de Magnanime. […].

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Figure 56: Denis Gaultier (1597/1603-1672): La Re´thoriqve des Dievx (c. 1652).

Narcisse. Narcisse se voyant dans le cristal liquide d’vne fontaine que la Nature auoit de´core´e des plus belles fleurs du Printemps: fut tellement e´pris de sa beaute´ que le feu de son amour le desse´cha sur le bord de cette eau fatale, En se plaignant de ne se pouuoir posseder soymesme. La Pastorale. Icy une trouppe innocente de Bergers et de Bergeres chantans et dancX ans a l’ombre d’un Ormeau sont troublez par vn loup affame´ qui leur enleuoit vn de leurs Agneaux. Mais estant accourus apres, ils luy font quitter sa proye puis continuent leurs resjoüissances. […]. Tombeau de Monsieur de L’Enclos. Par le commandement d’Apollon les doctes Pucelles s’estant assemble´es sur le Mont sacre´ pour dresser le Tombeau de Lenclos, l’un des Favoris de ce Dieu, tiennent conseil entr’elles de quelle matiere et de quelle forme elles le doivent construire: en fin leur re´solution prise, Elles font abattre un grand If, qui depuis deux cens ans tiroit sa nourriture des tributs d’un cimetiere, ou il faisoit sa residence. Elles en font un Luth, pour luy seruir de Monument, et dans ce bois lugubre elles mettent reposer ses cendres. Mais comme elles reconnoissent que leur science n’est pas assez haulte et assez releve´e pour prononcer son Oraison funebre, Elles font adroitement mettre ce Tombeau entre les mains du grand Gaultier le meilleur amy du deffunct seul capable de rendre ce dernier office; Cet homme diuin ayant ce depost, en tire par la puis-

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sance de son Art des parolles qui expriment si fortement la douleur de cette perte, que tous ses Auditeurs prennent la nature de cette Passion. 43

This commentary summarizes in concreto the musical theories analysed in the course of this chapter. These can be recapitulated in the following statements: 1. A musical composition is generated in analogy to a rhetorical or poetical discourse and may even be regarded as its substitute, as in the case of the panegyric, the pastoral, the ekphrasis (hypotyposis), and the funeral oration. 2. Hence a musical composition of such origin may be termed musica poetica, musica reservata, or Klangrede. 3. Therefore such pagan gods and mythical heroes as are patrons or practitioners of music (Apollo), rhetoric (Mercury, Ulysses), and the arts and sciences in general (Minerva) are apt to illustrate this kind of musical rhetoric and poetics. 4. Because of his divine art of lute playing Denis Gaultier himself may be mythicized as a modern cultural hero comparable to the classical deities. 5. The primary goal of musical rhetoric is to express and rouse passions. 6. Another important aim of musical rhetoric is to improve and fortify the morals of men (Phae¨ton, Diane, La Coquette virtuosa, Narcisse). 7. The ability to rouse men’s affections and improve their morals testifies to the musician’s rhetorical power and his enormous sociocultural significance. The Re´thoriqve’s fifty-six pieces that make up its eleven sections of lute tabulature include several contemporary dance forms: pavanne, allemande, sarabande, gigue, and canarie. They are composed in the traditional modes: mode Dorien, mode Ionien, mode Lydien, mode Myxolydien, etc. Endeavouring to achieve a formal and stylistic unity of the pieces within the suites contained in the Re´thoriqve, Gaultier composes them in the same key and employs recurrent motifs. He regrets that his lute compositions are often presented with so much “confusion” in regard to metre (mesure) and other prescriptions for their performance that one does not hear them played with the “true rhythm” and beautiful sound that constitute the lute’s “charm and harmony.” In order to prevent such faults and abuses, he sets forth those items concerning metre, rhythm, and even striking the strings that are to be “observed exactly”: 43

Cited from the booklet of the recording of La Re´thoriqve des Dievx (Astre´e Avdivis E 7778 (1976/1989) With an excellent introduction by Marie Madeleine Krynen and Hopkinson Smith (lute) as performer. Editions: David J. Buch. Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1990; Monique Rollin & F.-P Goy. Oeuvres de Denis Gautier. Paris, 1996.

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Pour eviter touts ces defauts ou l’on tombe souvent et pour empecher qu’on ne soit plus abuse´ je me suis persuase´ qu’on seroit bien aise de voir ce qu’il faut observer avec juste`ce tant au regard de la mesure que des Tenues. 44

Nevertheless, he concedes enough liberty for variation in performance to render it truly “rhetorical” in accordance with the title of the collection. An important means of achieving this is what modern authors have called the style brise´ - the “breaking” of the linear aspects of a piece at various textural levels. 45

III. The Musicalization of Rhetoric and Poetics The following argument reverses the subject of the preceding chapter by asking to what extent Renaissance music can serve as a constitutive paradigm of rhetoric and poetics as well as of the poetry created under their influence. In order to answer that question the following topics will be examined: rhetorical figures, prosodic structures, and the ideology of the poeta musicus. Pertinent chapters of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) will serve as an important source text. 46 Puttenham’s Arte is a rhetorical poetics constructed according to the scheme of inventio, dispositio and elocutio. It addresses the aristocracy and the court. Three aspects of Puttenham’s voluminous treatise will be discussed in greater detail: a) the musical quality of rhetorical figures, b) the harmony of metrical patterns, c) the poeta musicus as a mythical culture hero. In the following discussion Puttenham’s original order of presentation will be inverted for the sake of a gradual unfolding of the argument. Supplementary references will be made to other Renaissance texts in order to consider the results within a more general perspective. 1. The Musicality of Rhetorical Figures The third part of Puttenham’s poetics includes a theory of style and thereby adheres to a tradition of theoretical works which, like those by Minturno and 44

45

46

Citation from Gaultier in the edition by David J. Buch, La Rhe´torique des Dieux. Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1990, p. xvi, n. 28. Cf. David J. Buch, “Style brise´, style luthe, and the choses luthe´es,” Musical Quarterly 71 (1985), 52-67, 220-221. Edition: George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, rpt. 1970.

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Scaliger, employed elocutio, the third part of the rhetorical model, for the purposes of literary theory. Puttenham, however, differs from most stylistic theorists of his time, because he follows neither the ancient triadic division into tropes, figures of words, and figures of sentences, nor one of its humanistic variants or further developments. 47 Instead he takes a direction of his own. He does not concentrate so much on a formal definition of figures but on the ways they are recognized by the recipient. Other aspects (e. g. linguistic operations or extensions) are subordinated to this. Criteria for Puttenham’s classification are the “eare”, the “mynde” (or “conceit”) or a combination of both. Taken together they lead to a classification of three types of figures: a) “auricular figures” directed to the ear; b) “sensable figures” directed to the mind; c) “sententious figures” directed to both ear and mind. 48 The first class is associated with the stylistic concept of enargeia (“because it geueth a glorious lustre and light”), the second with energeia (“because it wrought with a strong and vertuous operation”), the third with both of these. In addition, each class is linked to a different type of author: the first relates to the poet, the third to the orator, the second both to poet and orator. The fact that Puttenham conceives of his system as an innovation indicates that he was aware of the boldness of his undertaking, which in Renaissance poetics and rhetoric is without parallel. Although his sharp distinction between audio-sensuous and cognitive perceptions and his correlation of authors and styles with different types of figures may appear fairly academic if viewed in the light of modern standards, yet it must be granted that Puttenham created a stylistic paradigm of high coherence. Within this paradigm the “auditory figures” hold a strong position. By means of articulation and in accordance with the rules of secondary grammar they may alter receptional 47

48

Cf. Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik. München: Beck, 1974, pp. 270-315; Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, pp. 243246; Warren Taylor, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric. Whitewater, Wisc.: Language Press, 1972, pp. 135-143. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 142-143, 159-161. Classes of figures are dealt with on pp. 161-185 (‘auricular figures’), 186-196 (‘sensable figures’), 196-249 (‘sententious figures’). The ‘auricular figures’ are again divided into six subcategories: those a) “apperteining to single wordes and working by their diuers soundes and audible tunes alteration to the eare onely and not to the mynde” (pp. 161-162), b) “perteining to clauses of speech and by them working no little alteration to the eare” (pp. 163-168), c) “working by disorder” (pp. 168-170), d) “that worke by Surplusage” (p. 171), e) “working by exchange” (pp. 171-172) and f) those which “make the meeters tunable and melodious, and affect not the minde but very little” (pp. 173-178).

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patterns (“alter th’eare”) on the levels of words, syntagmas, sentences and texts. In this way they create aesthetic delight: And not onely the whole body of a tale in poeme or historie may be made in such sort pleasant and agreable to the eare, but also euery clause by it selfe, and euery single word carried in a clause, may haue their pleasant sweetenesse apart. 49

Here, as well as in other contexts, expressions such as “pleasant and agreable to the eare” or “pleasant sweetenesse” point to the fact that the principle of delectare is isolated from other possible functions. 50 This illustrates the importance that the author ascribes to the hearer’s perception of stylistic phenomena. Under these circumstances it seems appropriate to characterize his stylistics as perceptional. Within the context of this auditive concept of stylistic attitude, music functions as a tonal analogue of the spoken word: […] our speech is made melodious or harmonicall, not onely by strayned tunes, as those of Musick, but also by choise of smoothe words. 51

In the stylistic theories of the times a statement like this is no rare phenomenon. In the year preceding the publication of Puttenham’s poetics, Abraham Fraunce, a follower of Ramus, had demanded: In figures of words which altogether consist in sweete repetitions and dimensions, is chiefly conuersant that pleasant and delicate tuning of the voyce, which resembleth the consent and harmonie of some well ordred song. 52

And a few years later Henry Peacham, in his Garden of Eloquence (1593), not only characterized the same category of figures as “effeminate, and musical,” but also related rhetorical categories of style to musical phenomena: epizeuxis to “quaver”, traductio to “division”, and articulus to “sembreefe” (semibrevis). 53 49

50

51

52

53

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 160. For an explication of the concept of secondary grammar cf. H.F. Plett, “Die Rhetorik der Figuren: Zur Systematik, Pragmatik und Ästhetik der ‘Elocutio,’” in: H.F. Plett (ed.), Rhetorik. Kritische Positionen zum Stand der Forschung. München: Fink, 1977, pp. 125-165. Cf. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 162: “sometimes it is done for pleasure to giue a better sound”; p. 163: “as the eare may receiue a certaine recreation”; p. 169: “no disgrace but rather a bewtie.” Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 197. Cf. p. 163: “to make the meetre or verse more tunable and melodious”; p. 171: “the harmonicall speaches of oratours among the figures rhetoricall”; p. 174: “the Poeticall harmonie”; p. 196: “tunable to the eare”; p. 197: “a certaine sweet and melodious manner of speech”. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike. Ed. E. Seaton, Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, rpt. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979, p. 107; cf. p. 35 ff. - For the figures of musical repetition cf. Schmitz, “Figuren, musikalisch-rhetorische”, p. 179. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / New York: Lang, 1996, p. 65: “[…] the figures of wordes are as it were effeminate, and musicall, the figures of sentences are manly, and martiall”; p. 52: “[…] in respect of pleasant

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In these instances an influence of the concept of musica poetica is highly probable, and we may therefore inquire into the reasons why the musical analogues were employed. Besides the concept of order, which will be considered later, rhetoricians and literary theorists were mostly interested in the phonaesthetic aspect of spoken oratory. The comparison between the auditive component of rhetorical delivery, pronunciatio, and musical instruments had already been popular in classical rhetoric, and humanistic scholars adhered to this tradition. Wilson characterizes the tongue as a “swete soundynge Lute” and as a “good instrument” which captivates the hearer. 54 As regards the mutual influence of music and rhetoric, it is also telling that William Byrd (c.1543-1623), the outstanding Elizabethan composer of madrigals, lists the following as one of eight reasons why everybody should learn the art of singing: “It is the best means to procure a perfect pronunciation, and to make a good orator.” 55 As far as Puttenham is concerned, it is highly probable that the courtly efforts to cultivate the varieties of oral expression, either in conversation or in the several kinds of song, were making themselves felt. 56 The term enarg(e)ia which the English author uses in characterizing his “auricular figures” may be taken as a keyword in this context. It has often been confused with the term energ(e)ia, and, as Johannes Susenbrotus’ rhetorical stylistics makes clear, there are several synonyms for it in Greek and Latin:

54

55

56

affections it [sc. Epizeuxis] may be compared to the quauer in Musicke”; p. 54: “This exornation [sc. Traductio] is compared to pleasant repetitions and diuisions in Musicke”; p. 62: “[…] in peaceable and quiet causes it [sc. Articulus] may be compared to a sembre´efe in Musicke”. - For further musical analogies in Peacham see pp. AB.iij.r, 49, 58, 59, 65, 85, 121. - A musico-rhetorical analysis of Peacham’s analogies is given in Butler, “Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources,” Musical Quarterly 66 (1980), 53-64, here: 54-56. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 431. - The classical models are: Cicero, De Or. III.lvii.216 (lyre); Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.20 (flute), 41-42 (strings). - Walter J. Ong points to the role of the spoken word in humanist rhetoric in “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style (1965),” in: W. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca, N.Y. / London: Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 23-47. Quoted in Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660. Clifton, N.J.: A.M. Kelly, 1973 (11908), p. 220. - For a similar view cf. Henry Peacham (the Younger): “[…] it is a most ready help for a bad pronunciation and distinct speaking, which I have heard confirmed by many great divines” (The Complete Gentleman [et al.]. Ed. V.B. Heltzel, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 110). Cf. William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937, rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964, chap. IX; Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance. London: Methuen, 21970; John E. Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. London: Methuen, 1961.

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evidentia, hypotyposis, illustratio, descriptio, effictio, subiectio sub oculos. 57 In classical rhetoric enargeia is connected with a pictorial and affective concept of text: it stands for a vivid portrayal of persons and things with the aim of creating emotions in the recipient. The specific form of mimesis constituted by enargeia also explains why poetry became involved in a contest with the visual arts. 58 In the rhetorical conception of music we find the same principle of presentation: Hypotyposis est illud ornamentum, quoˆ textus significatio ita deumbratur, ut ea, quæ textui subsunt & animam vitamq; non habent, vita esse prædita, videantur. 59

In the visual arts the situation is similar. The consequence of enargeia is that the different forms of art approximate each other and finally begin to merge. This follows from a statement by Francis Bacon who, in his Sylva Sylvarum, not only draws a parallel between musical and rhetorical figuring, but also suggests a synthesis between auditory and visual perceptions (seeing sounds) on the one hand and auditory and gustatory perceptions (tasting sounds) on the other. 60 A similar synaesthetic tendency can be detected in Puttenham’s identification of “auricular figures” with enargeia as a giver of “brightness” and “light.” Although, like Bacon, he ascribes an intellectual and even ethical capacity to auditory perceptions, he pleads for a unification of word and meaning, of sound quality and semantic value, in order to create

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Joannes Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporvm ac Schematvm et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum. Londini 1562, p. 86. - For the concept of enargeia cf. H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975, passim, in particular L. Galyon, “Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia: New Twists for Old Terms,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981), 29-40. Cf. e. g. W.G. Howard, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” PMLA 24 (1909), 40-123; Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1965, vol. I, pp. 179, 183 ff., 217-218, 238-242; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago / London: Chicago University Press, 1958, rpt. 1968, Index s. v. ‘Enargeia’; Ernst Robert Curtius, “Caldero´n und die Malerei,” in: E.R. Curtius, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie. Bern / München: Francke, 1960, pp. 376-411, esp. p. 378. Burmeister, Musica Poetica, p. 62. Cf. Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 81; Walker, Der musikalische Humanismus, p. 41 (Mersenne quotation); Schmitz, “Figuren, musikalisch-rhetorische,” pp. 178-179; Betts, The Marriage of Music and Rhetoric, pp. 110, 122, 161. Francis Bacon, “Sylva Sylvarum,” in: Bacon, Works. Facsimile reprint of the edition by Spedding, Ellis and Heath (London 1857-1874). 14 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1963, vol. II, pp. 388-389: “There be in music certain figures or tropes; almost agreeing with the figures of rhetoric, and with the affections of the mind, and other senses. […]”. - Cf. also Butler, “Music and Rhetoric”, pp. 60-62.

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a message which is aesthetic and informative at the same time. 61 “Sententious figures” are therefore more effective than “auricular figures.”

2. The Harmony of Prosodic Patterns Puttenham does not introduce his second book “Of Proportion” with an enumeration of technical details, but with a description of the mathematical principles of the universe (measure, weight, number) and the concept of proportion. This concept is not only to be found in each discipline of the quadrivium (including music) but also in poetry, because the latter is defined as “[…] a skill to speake & write harmonically.” 62 The idea of poetical harmony is particularly discernible in verses and rhymes, because these form “a kind of Musicall vtterance” which pleases the ear. According to Puttenham, a verse is made of five structural components: Staffe (stanza), Measure (metre), Concord or Symphonie (rhyme), Scituation (scheme of composition) and Figure (graphic form, pattern poem). Other aspects like Cesure, Cadence, Accent, Time and Stir are added. It is interesting to note that some of these terms have their origin in musical terminology, or can at least be found there, too. (A 61

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Bacon, “Sylva Sylvarum”, in: Works, vol. II, p. 389: “It hath been anciently held and observed, that the sense of hearing and the kinds of music have most operation upon manners; as to encourage men and make them warlike; […]. The cause is, for that the sense of hearing striketh the spirits more immediately than the other senses, and more incorporeally than the smelling. […]”. - Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 197: “For the eare is properly but an instrument of conueyance for the minde, to apprehend the sense by the sound. […]”. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 64. - For the concept of harmony cf. note 1 as well as Leo Spitzer, “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’),” Traditio 2 (1944), 409-464, 3 (1945), 307-364, rpt. A.G. Hatcher (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963. - For the concepts of harmony and proportion cf. John Care’s statement: “MVSICA […] a` Theophrasto definitur numerosa & harmonica rerum omnium in theatro totius mundi proportio, quaˆ motus, ordo, vires, naturae, formae, quasi fides ac nerui suauiter inter se consonant, dulciq; primae causae veluti ictu percussa, chorum cantumq; coelestem fundunt. Est proportio, quia in numeris omnis concentus & symphonia constat; est rerum omnium, quia […] melodica in omnibus naturae effectis […] inest quaedam modulatio & harmonia” (Apologia Mvsices tam Vocalis qvam Instrvmentalis et Mixtae. Oxoniae 1588, pp. 6-7). - In the light of these results it seems almost natural that Thomas Wilson’s description of dispositio, which represents the rhetorical doctrine of proportion, is preceded by a discussion of the ontological concept of order: “And the rather I am earnest in this behaulfe, because I knowe that al thynges stande by order, and without order nothyng can be. For by an order wee are borne, by an order wee lyve, and by an order wee make our end” (The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 315).

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contemporary dictionary defines Cadence as “the falling of the voice” and Symphony as “harmony or consent in Musick” 63) These and other statements show that Puttenham intends the prosody of a poetical creation to be viewed in terms of a musical structure. As a consequence, metre, caesura, stanza, and cadence form phonomorphic patterns which are composed by the poeta musicus in accordance with the laws of harmony. In the pattern poems annexed to the discussion of prosodic categories the poeta musicus turns into a poeta pictor. Here, the fusion of sound and picture results in a synaesthesia of sensual stimuli. According to Puttenham the poet has to make music his guide. This applies especially to scituation, which is concerned with the distribution of rhymes and prosodic elements within a verse. Here, it is necessary that our maker by his measures and concordes of sundry proportions doth counterfait the harmonicall tunes of the vocall and instrumentall Musickes. 64

As regards the selection and structuring of metre and rhyme, the poet may proceed according to the modes of music, e. g. the Phrygian, the Aeolic, Mixolydian or Ionic. It is important, however, that the metrical harmony is diversified as well as rare. Only then it is possible to captivate the hearer and to create in him affections of diverse sorts. The fact that the French psalter of 1562 uses a hundred and ten kinds of metre, and Sidney in his poetry even a hundred and twenty-two, shows that there was also a practice corresponding to this theory. 65 The musician-poet Thomas Campion pushes the analogy with scituation even further. In the preface to his Booke of Ayres (1601), he draws a parallel between literary and vocal genres: on the one side he 63

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John Bullokar, An English Expositor: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Vsed in our Language. London: J. Leggatt, 1616, rpt. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969, s.vv. ‘Cadence,’ ‘Symphonie.’ Cf. also C.T. Onions’s “Glossary of Musical Terms,” in: Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of his Age. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912, rpt. 1966, vol. II, pp. 32-49. For Puttenham’s theory of metre cf. Catherine Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics: A Study in the Development of English Metres and Their Relation to Poetic Effect. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951, rpt. 1971, pp. 42-55, 89-96; Gisela Schliebs, Die Funktion der Strophenformen in George Herberts “The Temple” im Rahmen des literarhistorischen sowie des musik- und dichtungstheoretischen Kontextes. PhD diss., University of Giessen, Germany, 1970, pp. 244-266; Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, pp. 217-219. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 84. - For English discussions on modes cf. Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik, in singing and setting. London: J. Haviland, 1636, pp. 1-9 and the anonymous treatise The Praise of Musick (after 1600, MS: B. M. Roy 18 B XIX) which is dealt with in Schliebs, Die Funktion der Strophenformen in George Herberts “The Temple”, pp. 170-173. Vgl. Waldo S. Pratt, The Music of the French Psalter of 1562. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, p. 25 ff.

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places the epigram and the air, on the other the heroic poem and the motet. The former of these are ranked on a lower level, the latter on a higher. 66 In his Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), the same Thomas Campion takes up the theme of order: The world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry: for Terence saith, speaking of Poets, artem qui tractant musicam, confounding musick and Poesy together. 67

Here we are no longer confronted with a rhetorical and affective but with a mathematico-symbolical idea of music, similar to the one which Puttenham had developed at the beginning of his book “Of Proportion.” In both cases music functions as a parable of order. As such it illuminates the structure of two pieces of art: the macrocosm of divine creation and the microcosm of poetic creation. As regards poetry, this structure is above all represented through metre. Accordingly, we read in Richard Wills’ published disputation De Re Poetica (1573), which was possibly one of Puttenham’s sources, under the heading “Metri origo”: Metri origo a Deo opt. max. est, quippe qui hunc mundum & quæcunq; eius ambitu contine¯tur, certa ratione, quasi metro composuit, vsq; adeo vt harmoniam in cœlestibus terrenisq; rebus Pythagoras confirmarit. quo enim pacto mundus consisteret, nisi certa ratione ac definitis numeris ageretur? omnia quoque instrumenta, quibus vtimur, mensura quadam .i. metro fiunt. quod si hoc cæteris in rebus accidit, quanto magis in oratione, quæ res omnes interpretatur? 68

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Thomas Campion, The Works. Ed. P. Vivian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, rpt. 1967, p. 4. For English musical theory and Renaissance musical genres cf. Morrison C. Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 21962 (1940), esp. chaps. II, IV, V, IX. Campion, Works, p. 35. - The quotation by Terence is taken from the Phormio, Prol. 18. References to this can be found in William Webbe’s “Discourse of English Poetrie” (1586), in: Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904, rpt. 1959, vol. I, p. 230 and also in E. K.’s commentary on E. Spenser’s December eclogue, v. 40: “Musick that is Poetry as Terence sayth Qui artem tractant Musicam, speking of Poetes.” Richard Wills, De Re Poetica (1573). Ed. A.D.S. Fowler. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, pp. 6264. Translation: “The origin of metrical form is from God the Almighty Creator, in that He created this universe and whatever is contained in its sphere with a fixed design, as it were by measure; to such an extent that Pythagoras has asserted that there is a harmony in celestial and in earthly things. For how could the universe exist, unless it were governed by a fixed order and established harmony? Again, all the instruments we use are made with certain proportions - that is, by measure. If this happens with other things, how much more so with language, which gives expression to all things?” - According to Fowler (p. 28) the source is Polydore Vergil: Polydori Vergilii vrbinatis de rerum inventoribus lib. VIII. Lyons 1561, I.ix.

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It is metre, then, through which divine creation and poetry are united. Viewed in the light of the concept of order it seems natural that in Elizabethan literary theory poetical speech is placed above rhetorical speech and verse is preferred to prose. 69 The most perfect poetry is that which is set to a musical accompaniment. In its manifold varieties, of which the opera is an important one, musical poetry puts into practice an idea hinted at in Sidney’s dictum of the “planet-like music of Poetry”: 70 the reflection of the musica mundana and its ‘metrical’ harmony. Finally, a theory needs to be mentioned which lies at the heart of the concept of order outlined above and is almost a commonplace. Taken in its simplest form it holds that each part of a whole has been given a fixed and ‘natural’ place. If only one part breaks away from it, the whole will be destroyed completely. Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca’s El Divino Orfeo (1663) formulates this doctrine in the following verses: Y ma´s si atiendo en la Sabidurı´a que debajo de me´trica armonia todo ha de estar, constando en cierto modo de nu´mero, medida y regla todo, tanto que disonaria si faltara una silaba. 71

In the Neo-Platonic ontology this principle holds for all spheres of being, stretching from the stars and the elements to human society and even to inanimate matter, in short: all the parts described in Homer’s aurea catena. 72 Because art is an imitation of the divine order, it has to obey its laws. In his 69

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Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 8: “For speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man, and the more pleasing it is, the more it preuaileth to such purpose as it is intended for: but speech by meeter is a kind of vtterance, more cleanly couched and more delicate to the eare then prose is, because it is more currant and slipper vpon the tongue, and withal tunable and melodious, as a kind of Musicke, and therfore may be tearmed a musicall speech or vtterance, which cannot but please the hearer very well.” - Cf. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 121-122. - Such arguments play a specific role in the controversy over metre and rhyme found in Thomas Campion’s “Observations in the Art of English Poesie,” in: Works, pp. 31-56 and in Samuel Daniel’s “A Defence of Rhyme,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. II, pp. 356-384. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 142. Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca, Obras Completas. Vol. III. Ed. A. Valbuena Prat. Madrid: Aguilar, 2 1992, p. 1840. See the comprehensive description in Inge Leimberg, “‘Kein Wort darf fehlen’: Das Thema und seine Variationen in der elisabethanischen Dichtungstheorie,” in: Studien zur englischen und amerikanischen Sprache und Literatur. Ed. P.G. Buchloh et al. Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1974, pp. 267-293. - On the aurea catena Homeri cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936 (1970).

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epic poem Orchestra (1596), in which the metaphor of music is replaced by the concept of dancing, Sir John Davies (1569-1626) writes of poetry: For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray In looser numbers teacheth her to range, With twentie tropes, and turnings every way, And various figures, and licentious change: But Poetry with rule and order strange So curiously doth move each single pace, As all is mard if she one foote misplace. 73

The “dance” of poetry follows a strict set of rules. If only one foot is misplaced, the dance will lose its grace and beauty - the work of art will fall apart. As the word “foot” involves a pun with metrical “foot,” Davies’ verses also express the idea that an unstructured prosody will lead to a poetic failure. The poem fails because it is no longer a mirror of the cosmic order in the Neoplatonic sense. In its rigour, this attitude goes far beyond the precedents of an organic aesthetics in classical rhetoric and poetics. 74 In a comparison between rhetoric and poetry the latter proves to be by far the stronger, according to Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) in his epic poem Musophilus: Containing a generall defence of learning (1599): And as for Poesie (mother of this force) That breeds, brings forth, and nourishes this might, Teaching it in a loose, yet measured course, With comely motions how to go vpright: And forstring it with bountifull discourse Adorns it thus in fashions of delight, What should I say? since it is well approu’d The speech of heauen, with who˜ they haue co˜merce That only seeme out of themselues remou’d, And do with more then humane skils conuerse: Those nu˜bers wherewith heauen & earth are mou’d, Shew, weakenes speaks in prose, but powre in verse. 75

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Sir John Davies, “Orchestra Or a Poeme of Dauncing,” in: The Poems of Sir John Davies. Ed. R. Krueger. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 115. - For a parallel treatment of dancing and poetry cf. also Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in: Works, vol. III, p. 401: “[…] for a dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.” - The idea of dance as a parable of cosmic order is documented in A.L. Wagner, The Significance of Dance in Sixteenth Century Courtesy Literature. PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1980, esp. chap. 3: “Dance, Order and Reason.” Cf. the collection of data in Leimberg, “Kein Wort darf fehlen,” pp. 270-272. Samuel Daniel, “Musophilus,” in: S. Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme. Ed. A.C. Sprague. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 97 (vv. 969-980).

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The beauty and efficacy of poetry are based on its “measured course” which is interpreted as the mirror of the macrocosmic creation. The movement of heaven and earth is per analogiam reflected in the measured and graceful movement of the verse-lines in a poem. For this reason poetry is a heavenly art that can be celebrated in the manner of John Milton in his poem At a Solemn Music (1633): Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heavn’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce, And to our high-rais’d fantasy present That undisturbed Song of pure concent, Aye sung before the sapphire-color’d throne To him that sits thereon, With Saintly shout and solemn Jubilee, Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow, And the Cherubic host in thousand choirs Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms, Hymns devout and holy Psalms Singing everlastingly; That we on Earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against nature’s chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d, In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience and their state of good. O may we soon again renew that Song, And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light. 76

This poem considers poetry and music as sister arts, as Voice and Verse that when joined are extremely powerful in the praise of God. While in this case of panegyric they fulfil the function of a sensuous musica rhetorica, which Milton describes in a vivid hypotyposis, they also point to a spiritual music 76

John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. M.Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957, pp. 81-82. For an extensive commentary upon this poem, see A Variorum Commentary on The Poems of John Milton. Vol. II. Ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse & D. Bush. Part One. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 175-191.

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that is unheard and existed before the Fall. Although he was a great lover of instrumental and vocal music, as is evident from his masque Comus, it is this musica coelestis, also termed music of the spheres, which Milton wishes to have restored to humanity. It is therefore with a prayer-like exclamatio that he closes his poem.

3. Orpheus as “poeta musicus” and Originator of Culture Many humanist works on rhetoric and poetics begin with a myth of origin. Usually this does not follow from a specific interest in history but from the need for a socio-ethical legitimation of the discipline in question. Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553, 81585) is only one of several treatises which begin with a narration of how man developed from a beast-like creature into a sociable and rational being in primordial times. Wise men used the power of eloquence in teaching their lessons and thereby persuaded mankind to adopt a way of living of which man was worthy. 77 According to this view, civilization results from the fusion of reason and speech, of ratio and oratio. The locus classicus of this idea can be found in the first paragraphs of Cicero’s De Inventione (I.i.1.-ii.3.). Cicero’s mythical and symbolic character is Hercules Gallicus who refuses to use his club and binds the barbaric Gauls with the golden chains of his eloquence. 78 Passages like these reveal an optimistic view of culture in which the use of oratory is equated with power and the use of power with moral behaviour. What is not mentioned in the myth of origin, however, is the potential weakness of oratory or its possible abuse. In poetics, matters are different. In the wake of Horace’s Ars Poetica (391-399), there are attempts to establish a list of original poets representing the ideal not only of orator and philosopher but also of musician and vocalist. Thomas Lodge, who translated Horace’s verses in his Defence of Poetry (1579), names Orpheus and Amphion as the most important mythical originators of culture. 79 In the first book of his poetics (I.iii-iv), Puttenham goes one step 77

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Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 16: “Eloquence first geven by God, after loste by man, and laste repayred by God agayne.” - Cf. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, pp. 6-10. For the ratio-oratio-topos cf. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. R. Trask. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. - For the mythologem of Hercules Gallicus cf. Section E of this book. Thomas Lodge, “Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays,” in: Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, p. 74; Webbe, “Discourse of English Poetrie,” ibid., vol. I, pp. 234, 297; Wills, De Re Poetica, pp. 88-90; Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, p. 96; John Rainolds, Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae (c. 1572). Ed. W. Ringler / Trans. W. Allen, Jr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

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further when he characterizes these and other original poets (Linus, Musaeus, Hesiod) - according to the ideal of an uomo universale - as the first priests, prophets, lawgivers, politicians, philosophers, astronomers, historiographers, orators, and musicians. Orpheus 80 as the founder of culture par excellence is given preeminence. What Puttenham says of the original poet in general applies to Orpheus in particular: Finally, because they did altogether endeuor theˆselues to reduce the life of man to a certaine method of good maners, and made the first differences betweene vertue and vice, and then tempered all these knowledges and skilles with the exercise of a delectable Musicke by melodious instruments, which withall serued them to delight their hearers, & to call the people together by admiration, to a plausible and vertuous conuersation, therefore were they the first Philosophers Ethick, & the first artificial Musiciens of the world. 81

In this passage human civilization is described as the result of a powerful union of morality and aesthetics. The latter is symbolized by the musical element. Orpheus who tamed the wild beasts, i. e. the barbarians, with his songs and lyre, is the ultimate expression of such a synthesis. He is the mythical prototype to which poets and musicians appeal in the attempt to legitimize their artistry. As a kind of second Orpheus the artist is placed on equal footing with the statesman. Of the many existing mythologems related to the figure of Orpheus there is one to which recent scholarship has paid relatively little attention. It is concerned with political and social aspects and may be summarized under

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Press, 1940, p. 44 (cf. commentary ad loc.); Gabriel Harvey. Rhetor. Londini 1577, sig. I.iij.v-iv.v (Hercules Gallicus, Orpheus, Amphion). Many more examples could be mentioned. The account in Antonio Sebastiano Minturno’s De Poeta. Venetiis 1559, rpt. München: Fink, 1970, p. 15 is to be mentioned in particular: “Nec uero` temere decantatum illud censendum est, quo`d cantu, & fidibus Anphion Thebis mœnia circumdidisset, feras, syluas, montes Orpheus deduxisset; fluuiorum cursus repressisset. Videlicet hac diuina canendi ratione illi pollebant, qua rudes eorum temporum homines, ueluti saxa duros & horridos, ut feræ immites, in societatem humanioris uitæ conuocarunt, ut amnes animorum impetu, & ferocia concitatos compresserunt, eosq´; docuerunt, ille quomodo se ipsi muro ab hostibus defenderent, hic uti consuetudinem illam uiuendi inconditam & agrestem ad ornatiorem, mitioremq´; cultum traducerent.” The quintessence of the humanist concept of culture is formulated in these words. - In view of the many existing studies a list of titles need not be given here. On the manifold facets of the Orpheus myth in cultural history cf. a. o. the recent publications: John Warden, Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1985; Hannelore Sammelrath, Der Orpheus-Mythos in der Kunst der italienischen Renaissance: Eine Studie zur Interpretationsgeschichte und zur Ikonologie. PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1994; Christine Mundt-Espin (ed.), Blick auf Orpheus: 2500 Jahre europäischer Rezeptionsgeschichte eines antiken Mythos. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 9.

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the heading: Orpheus as statesman. In order to understand its historical significance, the humanistic and the courtly interpretations of Orpheus will be considered first. It is not by chance that this myth became popular during the rise of humanism. Humanists strongly believed in the moral functions of oratory, poetry, and music. In order to put their ethical concept of a homo humanus into practice, they took up public professions and became educators of princes, jurists, university teachers, and diplomats. 82 Within this context, the myth of Orpheus was not only used for the purpose of legitimization, but there was also an optimistic appeal attached to it. What was at stake was the renewal of society in the spirit of the studia humanitatis. The situation in England, however, was changing towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. We now find that the humanist conception is more and more interpreted in aesthetic terms and that it is gradually absorbed by an aristocratic ideal of culture. This is the background of Puttenham’s ideas of proportion, art, ornament, decorum, and the musical character of poetry, which were partly modelled on Castiglione. 83 In the context of a courtly poetics, the aesthetic aspects of the myth of Orpheus come to the fore. The audience is expected to listen to the words of the mythical poet with “delight” and “admiration” - functional categories which belong to epideictic oratory. 84 The epideictic poet is affirmative; he supports the political system in power - that of the Tudors in the present case. The fact that Puttenham on the one hand defines the poet in epideictic terms and on the other identifies him with the original poet, as A.L. DeNeef 85 has shown, suggests that his interpretation of the Orpheus myth has an ideological function. In other words: within the sphere of the court the myth loses the call for reform which it had in humanism and 82

83

84

85

Cf. Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England. New York: Teachers College Press, 1954, 21968; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966; O.B. Hardison, “The Orator and the Poet: The Dilemma of Humanist Literature,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1971), 33-44; Jill Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. The relationship between Puttenham and Castiglione is dealt with in Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; the history of the aristocracy is outlined by John E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935, and by Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965; for an account of the ideology of the court cf. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, cf. O.B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962, rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973. A.L. DeNeef, “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1973), 203-231, here: 223-228.

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becomes an instrument for confirming and stabilizing the existing political structure. The same tendency is responsible for Puttenham’s employment of a mathematical and symbolic concept of music and its underlying idea of order. The political and social reality of the times stood in sharp contrast to the idealistic claims connected to such theories. During the period, in which the myth of Orpheus was propagated, English society was confronted with a number of threats, from the inside as well as from the outside. 86 To a certain extent, this was because the Tudors’ and the Stuarts’ claim to the throne was far from secure. Each succeeding sovereign, therefore, was the more eager to confirm it. Besides other provisions, one means was the propagation of an ideology which celebrated the king as a mythical guarantor of the existing order. The figure of Orpheus forms a part of such a mythical view of order. Within the functional framework of the epideictic literature of the court the idea of ordo was presented to the sovereign in terms of a plea or in a compliment. Evidence for this can be found in a political emblem in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612), in which the picture of a Gaelic harp is headed by the motto “Hibernica Respub: ad Iacobum Regem.” The epigram annexed to it reads as follows: While I lay bathed in my natiue blood, And yeelded nought saue harsh, & hellish soundes: And saue from Heauen, I had no hope of good, Thou pittiedst (Dread Soveraigne) my woundes, Repair’dst my ruine, and with Ivorie key, Didst tune my stringes, that slackt or broken lay. Now since I breathed by thy Roiall hand, And found my concord, by so smooth a tuch, I giue the world abroade to vnderstand, Ne’re was the musick of old Orpheus such, As that I make, by meane (Deare Lord) of thee, From discord drawne, to sweetest vnitie. 87 86

87

Cf. a. o. Edward P. Cheney, A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth. 2 vols. London: Longmans & Co., 1914; Lawrence Stone, Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540-1640. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1965; Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld. London: Dent, 1977; Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981 (1979); Anthony J. Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions. London: Longman, 1997 (1983). Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna. London: Wa: Dight, 1612, rpt. Leeds: Scolar Press, 1966, p. 45. - At the bottom of the emblem a Latin quotation from James I’s Basilicon Doron is attached as its source: Cum mea nativo squallerent sceptra cruore, Edoq´ue lugubres vndiq´ue fracta modos:

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In these panegyrical verses Scotland is compared to a harp which is out of tune. It had only produced sounds of dissonance (i. e. discord) until James, who figures as Orpheus in this case, restored its original harmony (i. e. concord). Musical allegory and the myth of Orpheus similarly glorify the monarch and his government as guardians of peace and quietude. Pageants and masques that include the figure of Orpheus in their stock of characters fulfill a similar task. A masque illustrating this is Thomas Campion’s The Lords’ Masque (1613), which was performed on the occasion of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with Frederick, Elector Palatine. Here “the sweet enchanter heav’nly” Orpheus appears as stage manager in order to release Entheus (Poetic Inspiration) from the Cave of Mania (Frenzy) and by Jove’s command requires of him “to create / Inventions rare, this night to celebrate / Such as become a nuptial by his will / Begun and ended.” (vv.8992) 88 In this context Orpheus appears in the role and function of Apollo, the god of the Muses, but he is subordinate to Jove, as whose messenger he acts. Just as Jove in Daniel’s masque can most likely be equated with King James I, Orpheus is not simply a mythological masque figure but can also be interpreted as propagator of the idea of ordo both in the realm of poetry and politics. Thus a marriage celebration with poetry, music, and dance is not a mere festive event but also seeks to convey an ideological message. The poeta musicus is also a propagandist whose rhetoric is the more effective because it combines teaching (docere) with delight (delectare). Royal entries, which were usually accompanied by allegorical representations and musical performances, could also have political intentions, as for instance the reception of King Philip of Spain in his wife Mary’s capital city on the occasion of their marriage on 22 May, 1554. John Elders, an eyewitness, gives the following description in a letter addressed to Robert Stuart, Bishop of Caithness: This pageante with the stories therein contayned liking the kinges highnes and the quene wonderous well, they passed towardes Chepeside, & at the Easte end thereof, the conduite there also being finely paynted and trimed, they made the fourth staye, where the thirde pagente was made. In ye heigth wherof, was one playing on a harpe, who signified the most Excellente musician Orpheus, of whom, and of Amphio˜, we reade in the fables of old Poetis. Where also were

88

Ipse redux nervos distendis (Phœbe) rebelles, Et stupet ad nostros Orpheus ipse sonos. Thomas Campion, “The Lords’ Masque,” in: The Book of Masques. In Honour of Allardyce Nicoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 95-123, here: p. 107.

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nyne faire ladyes playing and singing on divers swete instrumentes, signifying the nine muses. 89

As the intention of this pageant is not clearly expressed, we must assume that its primary purpose was the entertainment of King and Queen and with it the declaration of the citizens’ approval of this dynastic marriage of England and Spain. Thomas Middleton’s Lord Mayor’s Show The Triumph of Love and Antiquity (1619) is more clearly outspoken about its message, as it points to “fair example” and “musical grace” as a precondition for a “harmonious government” and concludes: “Every wise magistrate that governs thus, / May well be call’d a powerful Orpheus.” 90 Thus a pageant of this kind may be considered an emblematic mirror for magistrates. Thomas Heywood’s allegorical pageant Londini Status Pacatus, or Londons Peaceable Estate (1639) shows the extent to which the Orpheus mythologem was exploited as an epideictic topos and developed into a quotable formula. During the third “show,” a mythical Orpheus appears and utters the following words: May it your grave Pretorian wisedome please, You are that Orpheus who can do all these: If any streame beyond its bounds shall swell, You beare the Trident that such rage can quell. When beasts of Rapine (trusting to their power) Would any of your harmelesse flocks devoure: Yours is the sword that can such violence stay, To keepe the Rich from rigour, Poore from prey; Neither from any harsh ill-boading beake, Least discord shall be heard, when you but speake; Whilst in Harmonious quire the rest contend, Which in your praise each other shall transcend. 91 89

90

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Cited from Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline. 2 vols. New York / London: Benjamin Blom, 1963 (11918), vol. I, p. 192. The work registers many more occurrences of Orpheus in public shows. One occasion, a Lord Mayor’s show, is described as follows: “The banquet and these interludes took all the afternoon. Dinner over, the procession of the morning marched by torchlight to the Skinners’ Hall, where the pageant called the Wilderness made a stand, and Orpheus wished the Lord Mayor joy. Especial care was taken to lodge the silk-works and triumphs in some secure place, until they could be removed to Skinners’ Hall ‘in regard they are of some weight, and the burthen of the day was heavy to the undertakers.’” (vol. II, p. 52). Cited from The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. A.H. Bullen. 8 vols. London: J.C. Nimmo, 1885, rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1964, vol. VII, p. 320. The emblematic influence is analysed by D.M. Bergeron, “The Emblematic Nature of English Civic Pageantry,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 1 (1968), 167-198, here: 190-192. Th. Heywood, “Londini Status Pacatus, or Londons Peaceable Estate” (1639), in: The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood. Ed. R.H. Shepherd, 6 vols., London: J. Parson, 1874, rpt.

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During the time that these eulogistic verses were directed to the Lord Mayor of London, signs of political unrest were already noticeable. But these did not prevent the author from placing the following comment before Orpheus’ speech: “This show hath reference to the title of the whole Triumph, Status pacatus, A peacable and blest estate, in which our Soveraigns Royalty hath a correspondence with Saturnes Reigne, which was cald the golden world.” 92 The years following Heywood’s allegorical festival performance increasingly revealed the hollowness of a mythologem which did not stand the test of political reality. The validity of the Orpheus myth had been questioned even earlier, in the anonymous play Mucedorus (1598) and in Bacon’s works. 93 Another form of myth criticism is travesty. Ben Jonson employs this device in his comedy Bartholomew Fair, in which Lantern Leatherhead, the “hobbyhorseseller,” is called an “Orpheus among the beasts, with his fiddle and all” (II.v.7-8) because of his glibness. 94 What is peculiar about this presentation is that the epideictic commonplace is turned upside down. It loses its ideological function as an allegory of order and becomes the object of ridicule. In Spain the figure of Orpheus receives a more serious and even theological interpretation in the “auto sacramental alegorico” El Divino Orfeo (11634, 2 1663) by Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca (1600-1681). Here the divine Orpheus is identical with Jesus Christ, who in this mythological guise appears as the divine orator musicus creating the universe by the harmony of his music. In the first version Euridı´ze says about him: Oficio es el de orador atraher con la energia y afectos de la oracion quantos la escuchan y miran. Llamante Divino Orfeo porque Orfeo significa orador, y tu´ lo eres tanto, que atrahes y cautivas,

92

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94

New York: Russell & Russell, 1964, vol. V, p. 367. See also the misreading by Julius Wirl, Orpheus in der englischen Literatur. Wien / Leipzig: Braumüller, 1913, pp. 56-58, esp. pp. 5758, who does not recognize the ideological function of the myth: “Heywood hätte Bedenken tragen müssen, die Sage in den Dienst seiner Bewerbungen um die Fürstengunst zu stellen, wenn er ihre Schönheit verstanden hätte.” Heywood, “Londini Status Pacatus,” in: Dramatic Works, vol. V, p. 366. On the topos cf. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. London: Faber, 1970. Anon., “Mucedorus” (1598), in: The Shakespeare Apocrypha. Ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967 (11908), p. 120. - Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in: Works, vol. III, p. 302. In Ben Jonson, [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford and P. & E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952, vol. VI , p. 50.

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a tu oracion quanto quierres que te obedezca y se rrinda. Luego, Pastor, y Poeta, Musico, orador y lira heres, en grande misterio de todos ellos la enigma. Y para dezirlo todo Orfeo, es bien que te diga: pues mi amado, y dulze Orfeo a tus pies, estoy rendida. 95

If the etymology of Orpheus is “orator,” then the music he produces is musica poetica or rhetorica in the sense of the Florentine Camerata and musicologists like Joachim Burmeister and composers like Claudio Monteverdi or Denis Gaultier. The creation of the world by a divine musician is a concept that continues far into the following centuries, even in England, where John Dryden (1631-1700) wrote a Song for St Cecilia’s Day (1687), an ode set to music by George Frideric Handel in 1739, beginning with the words: From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay, And cou’d not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And MUSICK’s pow’r obey. From Harmony, from hea’vnly Harmony This universal Frame began: From Harmony to Harmony Through all the compass of the Notes it ran, The Diapason closing full in Man. 96

The “tuneful Voice” resembles Caldero´n’s Divino Orfeo and represents God the Creator as a musicus rhetoricus. The following stanzas deal with the passions “raised and quelled” by the various instruments (Figure 57) in an orchestra, which is in the service of a rhetorically conceived music. 97 The “soft com95 96

97

Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca, Obras Completas. Ed. A.V. Prat, vol. III, p. 1822. John Dryden, Poems and Fables. Ed. J. Kinsley. London: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 422. Cf. on the topic John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, esp. chap. IV. On Handel’s compositions cf. Christopher Hogwood, Handel. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984, esp. chap. 5.

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Figure 57: Townhall of the city of Münster (Germany), Hall of Peace: Allegory of Music with harp and shawm.

plaining Flute” (33), for instance, symbolizes the “woes of hopeless Lovers” (34), while “sharp violins” denote jealous pangs, desperation, and indignation at a disdainful lady who refuses the wooing of a devoted lover. The musical psychology is carried even further in John Dryden’s poem Alexander’s Feast: An Ode, In Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (1597) 98 which was also set to music by Handel, even one year earlier (1738) than Dryden’s other ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, a type of composition that in England has a long tradition which reaches as far as Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia, op. 27 based on a text by Wystan Hugh Auden. John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast is broadly structured in 98

Edition: John Dryden, Poems and Fables. Ed. J. Kinsley, pp. 504-509.

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the following sections: the fable of Zeus and Olympia - the earthly joys of Bacchus - the fall and misfortune of Darius - the confrontation of war and peace - the conjuring up of the Furies - the praise of St. Cecilia. On the basis of an ancient tradition John Dryden introduces the singer Timotheus who, by his singing, succeeds in arousing in Alexander, the conqueror of Persepolis, the most varied passions: pride for his victory over the Persians being acclaimed as “a Sov’raign of the world, A present Deity,” pleasure for the epiphany of Bacchus during the feast, distress because of the “Turns of Chance,” love and desire for Thaı¨s his paramour, revenge for “the Grecian Ghosts, that in Battail were slain” (138), divine enthusiasm for Saint Cecilia sharing the crown with old Timotheus. The pathology of affections is manifestly based on rhetoric - both on the rhetoric of words and that of music. Handel depicts the diversity of passions by employing a diversity of keys and instruments, such as trumpets and drums for the trionfo of Bacchus as well as for the appeal to Revenge, flutes and violins for mourning the dead and enjoying the states of peace and love, and the organ for the final epiphany of St. Cecilia as the culmination of this ode in praise of the Christian saint of church-music who, from a religious point of view, surpasses in form and content the pagan musica rhetorica preceding her. Since Dryden had written his ode with a view to music, it proved an almost perfect libretto for the composer, which meant that Handel’s friend Newburgh could restrict his work to an arrangement of the text into arias, recitatives, and choruses. He concludes his foreword as follows: “With what success I have done this, and whether I have retained that excellent, splendid depiction of the passions by trying to adapt it to present-day musical taste, are matters on which the world must pass judgement.” The result of the cooperation between poet, librettist, and composer is truly a musica poetica in the original sense of the word. Returning to the mythological figure of Orpheus, we can observe that in the history of European culture it played a significant role in poetry, music, and the visual arts. Some notes on this history can conclude the present section of this chapter. In the history of music Orpheus became the protagonist of many operas. Beginning with the already mentioned “favola in musica” L’Orfeo (1607) 99, which would prove the archetype of later Orpheus operas, we can witness a long sequence of examples. The best known is perhaps Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) on the libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi which was first performed in Vienna. But there also exists a neglected opera Orpheus (concert premie`re 1726 in Ham99

For aspects of its interpretation, see a.o. John Wehenham (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: “Orfeo.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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burg, stage premie`re 1728 in Karlsruhe) by Georg Philipp Telemann (16871767) after a trage´die lyrique by Michel de Boullay. The exhaustion of this myth in the opera seria leads to its parody in the opera buffa. This is the case of Orphe´e aux Enfers (1858, 1874), an ope´ra-fe´erie in four acts by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) which satirizes, per allegoriam, the social and political conditions of the Seconde Empire. Apart from Offenbach’s ope´ra bouffe most Orpheus operas have no political message; they simply celebrate the power of music that can even defeat Death, and in this connection praise the marital fidelity motivating this deed. In the nineteenth century Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) composed La Mort d’Orphe´e (1827), a “monologue et bacchanale” on the dismemberment of Orpheus by the Thracian bacchantes, while the symphonic poem Orpheus (1854) by Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was designed as prelude to a performance of Gluck’s opera. The twentieth century witnessed a ballet composition of the same title by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) in three scenes; it was commissioned for the Ballet Society of New York, where it premie`red in the choreography of George Balanchine on 28 April 1948. 100 But the social and political dimensions of the Orpheus myth were not entirely forgotten. The English dramatist Edward Bond wrote a choreographic libretto for a ballet titled Orpheus that was set to music by the German composer Hans Werner Henze and first performed at the Württembergische Staatstheater Stuttgart in 1979. 101 In the visual arts the favourite representation of Orpheus shows him performing on an instrument amidst a crowd of animals either wild or domesticated, either real or fabulous, either in toto or with a selection of these, in order to demonstrate the power of his music. An early humanist example is a woodcut illustration probably of Venetian origin from the 1497 Bonsignori edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Figure 58), then one of the most popular books of classical origin. 102 Orpheus here is evidently not playing a lyre but something like a viola da braccio. All the animals surrounding Orpheus are peacefully listening to his music. A Spanish woodcut of Luis de Milan’s El maestro (Valencia, 1536) portrays “El grande Orpheo” as taming the beasts 100

101

102

On the history of the origin of this ballet and its structure cf. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. S. Sadie. Vol. XXIV. London: Macmillan, 2001, p. 549; Eric W. White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979, pp. 440-446; Wolfgang Burde, Strawinsky: Leben, Werke, Dokumente. Mainz: Schott / München: Piper, 21992, pp. 193-199. Text (English-German) and supplementary material published in Orpheus: Materialien. Ed. Generalintendanz der Württembergischen Staatstheater Stuttgart. Stuttgart: Druckhaus Münster, 1979. Cf. J. Warden (ed.), Orpheus, pp. 130-131 (figure 14); H. Sammelrath, Der Orpheus-Mythos, p. 45 ff. (figure 10).

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Figure 58: Anonymous Venetian: Woodcut from Bonsignori’s edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus playing before the animals.

not with a lyre or viola but with a guitar (Figure 59). 103 The same motif is rendered in an engraving created for the Harmonie universelle from 1636 (Figure 60) 104 by the French theologian, philosopher, and mathematician Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) as a musical praise of God; the biblical authority for this epideixis is psalm 150: “Praise him [sc. the Lord] with the psaltery and the harp. […]. Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.” In another version the Orpheus myth recurs as decoration of a libretto by Aurelio Aurelis for an opera titled L’Orfeo (1673) by Antonio Sartorio. 105 Among the Dutch painters, one who evidently had a predilection for the motif “Orpheus among the beasts” is Roelant Savery (1576-1639), who produced several versions of it. 106 Another classical source for this motif may have been the Eikones by Philostratus, of which a French translation by Blaise de Vigene`re appeared in 1614, with a chapter on Orpheus that begins as follows: 103

104

105 106

Cf. Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies: Studies in Poetry, Drama, and Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Fig. 28. Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, contenant la The´orie et la Pratique de la Musique. Paris, 1636, p. 64. Cf. C. Prinz (ed.), “Gehorsame Tochter der Musik”: Das Libretto, p. 103. Cf. the catalogue Roelant Savery in seiner Zeit (1576-1639). Ed. Wallraff-Richartz-Museum der Stadt Köln. Köln: Greven & Bechtold, 1985, Figures 28, 62, 83 (Gillis Claesz de Hondecoeter), 93 (Jacob Savery).

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Figure 59: Luis de Milan (16th cent.): El maestro (1536), “El grande Orfeo.”

TOVS les Historiens disent assez comme Orphe´e fils de la Muse Calliope´ par sa Musique auroit rauy a` l’escouter les choses mesmes irraisonnables & insensibles; mais ce peintre le met aussi, lequel nous represente icy le Lyon, & le Sanglier comme l’escoutans attentiuement; le Cerf par mesme moyen, & le Licure, qui ne bondissent point deuant l’assaut du Lyon, ny de la plus redoutable beste sauuage

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Figure 60: Marin Mersenne (1588-1648): Harmonie Universelle (1636), “Laudate eum in Psalterio & Cithara. Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum.” Psalm 150.

qui peust estre a` tous les chasseurs, ains s’assemblent icy seurement auec celuy qui se tient coy sans leur meffaire. Or ne pensez pas voir non plus ces oiseaux oisifs; non seulement ceux qui ont accoustume´ par les doux desgoisemens de leurs gorges armonieuses remplir les bois & les forests d’vne plaisante melodie, mais contemplez moy vn peu ce caufeur de lay; & cette babillarde Corneille; &

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Figure 61: Henry Purcell (1659-1695) as Orpheus Britannicus.

cette Aigle de Iuppiter, qui quelque grande qu’elle soit, laisse pancher nonchallamment ses deux aisles de part & d’autre, regardant attentiuement vers Orphe´e sans se soucier de ce Licure qui est tout contre. 107

In the end such illustrations, both classical and early modern, pursue the same goal: to demonstrate the power of music to move (movere). In this context the animals, especially the wild ones, are symbols of the untamed desires of mankind. The matter is different with Henry Purcell (1659-1695), perhaps England’s greatest native composer, who was honoured with the title Orpheus Britannicus because of the enchanting quality of his compositions all magnificent manifestations of a musica rhetorica that were recognized as such by his contemporaries (Figure 61).

107

Philostratus, Les Images (Paris, 1614). Trans. Blaise de Vigene`re. Facsimile-Reprint. New York / London: Garland, 1976, pp. 591-592.

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III. Areas of musica rhetorica: Retrospective and Prospective Aspects In conclusion we may state that substantial traces of the idea of a musica rhetorica can be found throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Three aspects in particular invite close analysis: 1. an affective aspect: music and musical poetry exert a persuasive power on human emotions in order to mitigate or to rouse them, which correspond to the classical categories of ethos and pathos; 108 2. a phonaesthetic aspect which can be subdivided into a stylistic and a metrical component, and which is the expression of an auditory approach to poetry in which the purpose of poetry is to delight the hearer with an aesthetic figuring of sounds and metrical symmetry; 3. a mythological aspect which manifests itself in the figure of Orpheus as poeta musicus and is the expression of a musically defined idea of social order, which in the Renaissance appears in two functional varieties: a humanistic-protreptic and a courtly-epideictic variety. Both aspects are elucidated by the musicological concepts outlined above. Several elements of the rhetorical concept of musicus poeticus can be found in rhetorical and poetical phono-stylistics, whereas the comments on metre are dominated by ideas derived from a mathematical and symbolical understanding of music. Interpretations of the myth of Orpheus include elements of both musicological orientations. All these aspects come together in Puttenham’s poetics and thus make clear that the court is the social area where the poeta musicus has to be localized. It is not by accident that after 1597 a highly effectual synthesis of poetry and music was created in the lute songs of John Dowland, Thomas Campion, and their contemporaries and followers. Viewed within the system of the arts, the musical conception of poetry is a further example of paragone, which in the Renaissance also takes place between poetry and the visual arts. In addition to the ut pictura poesis theorem there was also a rivalling ut musica poesis postulate. In his essay “The Modern System of the Arts” P.O. Kristeller has pointed out that despite the dominance of the controversy between poetry and the visual arts a Collatio Poetices cum pictura, et musica appears in the appendix to the third edition of the poetics 108

This is also a question of the relationship between music and medicine: cf. a. o. Dorothy M. Schullian & Max Schoen (eds.), Music and Medicine. New York: H. Schuman, 1948; Werner F. Kümmel, Musik und Medizin: Ihre Wechselbeziehung in Theorie und Praxis von 800 bis 1800. Freiburg: Alber, 1977.

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(Ingolstadt, 1600) by the Jesuit Jacobus Pontanus (1542-1626). 109 Only towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, will the idea of visual poetry finally be superseded by the idea of a musical poetry. 110 During the Romantic period, when music is viewed as the measure of all things and when lyrical poetry, as the kind of poetry which comes closest to music, is placed at the top of the scale of literary genres, the poeta musicus will celebrate his final triumph. The new ideal of musical expressivity - which now rests on different premises - has never been expressed more concisely than by Walter Pater (1839-1894), who in his famous book on Renaissance art and poetry (11873) categorically states: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” 111

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110

111

Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951/52), in: P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965, pp. 163-227, here: pp. 185186. In his essay “Das Modusproblem in den Künsten: Zur Vorgeschichte und zum Nachleben des ‘Modusbriefes’ von Nicolas Poussin” (1961), in: Jan Białostocki, Stil und Ikonographie, Köln: DuMont, 1981, pp. 12-42, the Polish art historian deals with a remarkable example for ut musica pictura on rhetorical premises. Cf. a.o. J.W. Draper, “Poetry and Music in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics,” Englische Studien 67 (1932-33), 70-85; H.M. Schueller, “Literature and Music as Sister Arts: An Aspect of Aesthetic Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Philological Quarterly 26 (1947), 193-205; Karl H. Darenberg, Studien zur englischen Musikästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, & Co., 1960. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. K. Clark, London: Collins, 1961, p. 129.

D. Poeta Orator Shakespeare as Orator Poet

Figure 62: Elizabethan playhouse.

Shakespeare and the Ars Rhetorica Rhetoric has long failed in Shakespeare criticism to receive the critical attention it justly deserves. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. One of them is that the knowledge of Elizabethan rhetoric was comparatively poor. Though its major representative, Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553), was made accessible again as early as 1909 in G. M. Mair’s thorough, though by present-day standards not entirely satisfactory edition, this was to remain an isolated landmark for several decades. 1 A lack of source-texts did not, however, prove to be the only reason for the lasting disinterest in rhetoric. Of equal, if not greater, importance were the contempt and disrepute into which this discipline had fallen under the sway of idealistic philosophy. Ever since Plato’s criticism of sophistic rhetoric, it was reputed to be a technique of illusion and delusion, a notion that has been transmitted by Kant, Hegel, and their followers up to the present time. But not enough that this technique (techne, ars) was discredited as such; it was also reduced, at first to stylistics and then to the so-called rhetorical figures, the totality of which was regarded as a rather random compilation. Thus in the first half of the 20th century, Shakespeare criticism still tended to be philosophically and psychologically biased, and it generally excluded rhetorical or stylistic perspectives and categories. Even publications on the history of Renaissance criticism like those by Joel E. Spingarn (1899), Charles Sears Baldwin (1939), or J.W.H. Atkins (1947) 2 did not restore rhetoric to its ancient rights but, rather, referred to it incidentally as an antecedent to poetics. Thus it is small wonder that it was only at a fairly advanced stage of historicism that rhetorical criticism entered the scene of Shakespearean schol1

2

Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique 1560. Ed. G.H. Mair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909 [1585 edition]. Joel E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1899; rpt. with a new introd. by B. Weinberg: New York / Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963; Charles Sears Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France, and England 1400-1600. Ed. D. L. Clark. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959; J.W.H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence. London: Methuen, 1947; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968.

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arship. Its first noteworthy contribution is Hardin Craig’s article “Shakespeare and Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique: An Inquiry into the Criteria for Determining Sources” (1931). 3 The very title of this study reveals its methodological perspective. The problem under consideration is whether Shakespeare knew and to what extent he used a specific rhetorical textbook. The dangers inherent in such a positivistic cause-and-effect approach are obvious: the constraint of source-hunting, the difficulty of verifying certain influences, and a total disregard of the aesthetic qualities of the text. In spite of the evident deficiencies of this approach, it is, even from the present-day viewpoint, entitled to claim certain merits, for it opens up historical outlooks and furthermore demonstrates the applicability of rhetorical theories to Renaissance drama. This statement above all holds true for T.W. Baldwin’s erudite two-volume compendium William Shakspere’s “Small Latine & Lesse Greeke” (1944), 4 which not only traces the history of Elizabethan education but also displays the entire range of rhetorical knowledge that was available to cultivated persons in the English Renaissance. In this positivistic stage of methodology, rhetorical interpretations of Shakespeare are exceptions. The second stage of the rhetorical criticism of Shakespeare can be termed encyclopedic as well as systematic. In being encyclopedic, it refers back to positivism; in being systematic, it points ahead to structuralism. This approach is manifested by Sr. Miriam Joseph’s study Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947), in which she draws up a highly complex a-chronic system of rhetoric that she illustrates by as many examples from Shakespeare’s plays as she is able to discover. The result is a reference work that, by means of a carefully elaborated index, guides its reader toward the diversity of Shakespeare’s rhetorical techniques. Cruder successors to this manual are to be found in a number of alphabetical compilations of rhetorical categories, illustrated sometimes by Shakespeare’s plays and sometimes also by the works of others (Taylor, Oyama, Lanham). 5 A methodologically updated version of Joseph’s approach is Keir Elam’s book Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse (1984), which, by employing semiotic, communicational, and linguistic categories,

3

4

5

Hardin Craig, “Shakespeare and Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric: An Inquiry into the Criteria for Determining Sources,” SP 28 (1931), 618-630. Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, William Shakspere’s “Small Latine & Lesse Greeke.” 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944, 21956. W. Taylor, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric. Whitewater, Wis.: Language Press, 1972 (PhD diss. 1937); Toshiko Oyama, English Rhetorics. Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1956; Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

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aims at establishing a taxonomy of Shakespeare’s language games and which includes many rhetorical phenomena as well. 6 Whereas the positivistic and encyclopedic/systematic strains generally refrain from rhetorical interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, the one tracing out sources, the other categorizing and compiling phenomena, a third approach aims at elucidating rhetorical structures and functions in a text. This task is performed partly on a formalist basis (M.B. Kennedy, M. Trousdale, J. Donawerth) and partly on a more functional basis (W. Clemen, B. Vickers). 7 Topics include the analysis of a whole play (e. g., Romeo and Juliet by R.O. Evans); of a particular speech type (e. g., the hero’s dying speech by R. Böhm); and, most of all, of certain stylistic devices such as alliteration (U.K. Goldsmith), ambiguity (J.L. Halio), antithesis (G.I. Duthie), apostrophe (M.R. McKay), wordplay (M.M. Mahood), proverb (H. Weinstock), syllogism and enthymeme (W.G. Müller), as well as synoiceosis and antithesis (P. Mack). 8 A structural analysis on a historical basis is provided by M. Wickert in her interpretation of Brutus’ speech in Julius Caesar. 9 The structuralist concept is broadened, whenever it includes sociopolitical ideas and events as well (e. g., W.G. Müller in his excellent monograph on Shakespeare’ political oratory). 10 6

7

8

9

10

Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Milton B. Kennedy, The Oration in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1942; Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians. London: Scolar Press / Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1982; Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth Century Study of Language. Urbana, Ill. / Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. - Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The Development of Dramatic Speech. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. London: Methuen, 1961, rpt. 1967; Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose. London / New York: Methuen, 1968, rpt. 1979. R. O. Evans, The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in “Romeo and Juliet”. Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1966; Rudolf Böhm, Wesen und Funktion der Sterberede im elisabethanischen Drama. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1964; U. K. Goldsmith, “‘Words out of a Hat’? Alliteration and Assonance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” JEGP 49 (1950), 33-48; J. L. Halio, Rhetorical Ambiguity as a Stylistic Device in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. 2 vols. PhD diss., Yale University, 1956. - DAI 30 (1969), 1135A; G.I. Duthie, “Antithesis in Macbeth,” ShS 19 (1966), 25-33; M.R. McKay, Shakespeare’s Use of the Apostrophe, Popular Rhetorical Device of the Renaissance. PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1969. - DAI 30 (1970), 4459A-4460A; M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen, 1957, rpt. 1965; Horst Weinstock, Die Funktion elisabethanischer Sprichwörter und Pseudosprichwörter bei Shakespeare. Heidelberg: Winter, 1966; Wolfgang G. Müller, “Syllogism and Enthymeme in Shakespeare,” in: “Rhetorica Movet”: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett. Leiden / Boston / Köln: Brill, 1999, pp. 171-185; Peter Mack, “Synoiceosis and Antithesis in The Winter’s Tale,” ibid., pp. 187-197. Maria Wickert, “Antikes Gedankengut in Shakespeares Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 82/83 (1948), 11-24. Wolfgang G. Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare. Tübingen: Narr, 1979.

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As is demonstrated by these studies, rhetorical criticism has by now established itself firmly in the field of Shakespeare scholarship. The following exploration combines the structuralist point of view with that of the history of ideas; for it focuses on Shakespeare’s image of the orator, or, more precisely, on his attitude toward the ars rhetorica. 11 Three possible attitudes can be postulated: (a) demonstrare artem, or the rhetoric of “good order;” (b) celare artem, or the rhetoric of dissimulation; (c) negare artem, or the rhetoric of denial. As the English explications of the Latin formulae suggest, these views of the rhetorical ars allow of aesthetic as well as ethical evaluations. Each can be interpreted in a positive and a negative way. Their various modes of combination result in a fourfold typology of the orator: Type Type Type Type

1: 2: 3: 4:

A A A A

person person person person

who who who who

is is is is

a a a a

good orator and a good character as well. good orator but a bad character. bad orator but a good character. bad orator and a bad character as well.

The first type evidently represents the ideal orator, but an examination of types 2 and 3 seems more rewarding. For these embody a conflict between art and morals that not only gives rise to highly dramatic situations but may also lead to the destruction of individuals and even entire commonwealths. Compared to these types, the last one is, both rhetorically and ethically, of minor interest here and hence is omitted from the ensuing argument. As each of the aforementioned types is realized in communicative situations, some of the factors defining the communicative process must be considered: first, decorum, that is, the appropriateness of the communicative factors (speaker, audience, message, etc.) that warrants the success of the speech act as a whole; second, truth, that is, the conformity of the rhetorical message with the reality it refers to; and, third, the code, that is, the stylistic level (grand, ornate, plain) of the message. Illustrative material is drawn mainly from Shakespeare’s tragedies of state: Richard III, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Coriolanus.

11

On rhetoric as an art, see George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 321-330; Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode. München: Beck, 1974, pp. 4-7; Anton D. Leeman / H. Pinkster, M. Tullius Cicero: De Oratore libri III - Kommentar. Heidelberg: Winter, 1981, vol. I, pp. 190-194; J. Barnes, “Is Rhetoric an Art?”, darg newsletter 2/2 (1986), 2-22. - On the English Renaissance image of the orator, see the essay by Brian Vickers, “‘The Power of Persuasion:’ Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare,” in: Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. J.J. Murphy. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1983, pp. 411-435.

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1. Demonstrare artem, or: The Rhetoric of “Good Order” Classical rhetoric defined the ideal orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus, meaning “a (morally) good man being capable of speaking (well).” This unity of ethical and rhetorical perfection marks the origin of human civilization. Thomas Wilson, middle-class humanist and secretary of state to Elizabeth I, paraphrases in the preface to his Arte of Rhetorique (1553) the locus classicus of this concept, the first chapter of Cicero’s early rhetorical work De Inventione (I.i.l ff.), on the first human beings: And althoughe at firste, the rude coulde hardelie learne, and either for straungenes of the thing, would not gladlye receyue the offer, or els for lacke of knoweledge could not perceyve the goodnes: yet being somewhat drawen and delighted with the pleasauntnes of reason, & the swetenes of vtteraunce: after a certaine space, thei became through nurture and good advisement, of wilde, sober: of cruel, gentle: of foles, wise: and of beastes, men. Suche force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced euen to yelde in that, whiche most standeth against their will. 12

This shows that neither reason nor rhetoric alone can turn men into social beings but only the synthesis of both. The unity of eloquentia and sapientia or, in a paronomasia, of oratio and ratio 13 engenders social harmony - what Wilson calls “good order.” Its mythical ancestor appears in the shape of the Gallic Hercules who did not slay the barbaric aborigines with his club but, rather, bridled their fierce instincts with the golden chains of his persuasive speech. 14 Cultural heroes such as the Gallic Hercules, Orpheus, and Amphion are, to the humanists, optimistic emblems of the ordering, even creative power of the word. They appear as the legendary founders of cities and 12

13

14

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, pp. 18-19. On this concept, see E. Gilson, “Eloquence et sagesse chez Cice´ron,” Phoenix 7 (1953), 1-19; Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 3-30; Alain Michel, “Rhe´torique et philosophie dans les traite´s de Cice´ron,” in: Hildegard Temporini (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1973, vol. I/3, pp. 139-208; Siegmar Döpp, “Weisheit und Beredsamkeit: Gedanken zu ihrer Relation bei Cicero, Quintilian und Augustinus,” in: Information aus der Vergangenheit. Ed. P. Neukam. München: Bayerischer Schulbuchverlag, 1982, pp. 37-63; K.S. Frank, “Augustinus: ‘Sapienter et eloquenter dicere’,” in: Strukturen der Mündlichkeit in der römischen Literatur. Ed. G. Vogt-Spira. Tübingen: Narr, 1990, pp. 257-269. On this mythologeme, see, among others, M.-R. Jung, Hercule dans la litte´rature franc¸aise du XVIe sie`cle: De I’Hercule courtois a` I’Hercule baroque. Gene`ve: Droz, 1966 and John M. Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and Certitude in Milton and His Near-Contemporaries. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 146-163.

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commonwealths and make possible the rise of civilization. Wilson offers a theological interpretation of this concept by entitling the preface to his rhetoric as follows: “Eloquence first geven by God, after loste by man, and laste repayred by God agayne.” 15 Seen in this light, the Fall of Man and his loss of eloquence are identical events. The restitution of oratio and ratio causes the reversal of postlapsarian chaos and anarchy. Supported by God-sent “ministers”, mankind, according to Wilson, finds once more its way back to “good order,” that is, social harmony. Another dimension of the oratio-ratio theorem is the political and ideological one. Rulers such as Henri IV, King of France, loved to be celebrated as a Gallic Hercules or as a second Orpheus and made ample use of this panegyric iconography in order to strengthen their official roles as founders and guardians of social harmony. 16 In England, Henry Peacham explicitly refers to Hercules and Mercury in his exhortation in The Complete Gentleman (1622): Much, therefore, it concerneth princes not only to countenance honest and eloquent orators, but to maintain such near about them as no mean props, if occasion serve, to uphold a state, and the only keys to bring in tune a discordant commonwealth. 17

Here mythology provides maxims for a political praxis. Which kind of rhetoric is required to serve the purpose of establishing “good order”? Certainly not one of Nature, that is, of inborn talent, but one of Nurture or Art. For Art produces an order that reflects, as it were, the order of a commonwealth. To the humanists the orderly character of rhetoric appears, above all, in the dispositio, the art of structure. Thus Wilson, in his chapter on dispositio headed “Of disposicion and apte orderyng of thynges,” justifies the necessity of a well-proportioned oration in the following manner: And the rather I am earnest in this behaulfe, because I knowe that al thynges stande by order, and without order nothyng can be. For by an order wee are borne, by an order wee lyve, and by an order wee make our end. By an order one ruleth as head, and other obey as members. By an order Realmes stande, and lawes take force. Yea by an order the whole worke of nature and the perfite state of al the elementes have their appointed course. 18

15 16

17

18

Wilson, Arte, p.16. See, e. g., Corrado Vivanti, “Henri IV, the Gallic Hercules,” JWCI 30 (1967), 176-197, and his Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1963, pp. 74-131. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman [etc.]. Ed. Virgil B. Heltzel, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 18. Wilson, Arte, pp. 315-316. On the ideology of order, see, among others, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970.

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And he closes with the words: “So an Oration hath litle force with it, and dothe smally profite, whiche is vtterde without all order.” 19 According to the principle of analogia entis, the order of speech is expressive of the order of being. The orator who ensures this verbal and consequently also social order is a second Gallic Hercules. The power of his words can settle disturbances in the social harmony and thereby revitalize the process of civilization. Communicative situations to illustrate such a process can be found in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Othello, and Coriolanus. In the first Roman play, a populace enraged to the utmost presses Brutus to justify the murder of Caesar. The crowd acts like Thomas Wilson’s barbaric man; a relapse into a presocial mode of existence is imminent. Brutus counters this situation like the Gallic Hercules. His speech unites wisdom and eloquence, ethos and logos, moral conviction and rational argumentation. Its structure is so skillfully contrived that it could serve as a schoolbook exemplum of the rhetorical system. It is patterned on the regular dispositio model of exordium, argumentatio, and peroratio; it fulfills the three major requirements for the exordium: to convey information, to procure attentiveness, and to engender a favourable disposition. But above all, it is arranged in elaborate parallelisms, antitheses, and gradations: There is tears, for his love; joy, for his fortune; honour, for his valour; and death, for his ambition. (Julius Caesar III.ii.28-29)

Here plain style and plain character form a convincing unity. Therefore, the plebeians, for the time being, leave off their seditious tumult and return to civilized conduct. In this communicative situation Brutus appears as a type (figura) of Hercules Gallicus restoring Rome to “good order” - indeed, a vir bonus dicendi peritus. Othello’s fate resembles Brutus’ to a certain degree in that he, too, is accused of a crime, the seduction of Brabantino’s daughter by means of magical practices. He, too, has to justify himself, not in front of a “manyheaded multitude” (Cor. II.iii.16-17) but in front of the signoria of the republic of Venice. Due to Iago’s machinations, senate and town are in a state of extreme emotional uproar. Called upon to defend himself against the accusations uttered, Othello delivers a speech that follows strictly the rhetorical 19

Wilson, Arte, pp. 316-317. - Cf. Stephen Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure. Ed. W.E. Mead. EETS, OS, 173. London: Oxford University Press, 1928 (for 1927), vv. 820-903, esp. vv. 862-889.

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precepts for the genus iudiciale. Like Brutus he begins with a very formal address: Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, My very noble and approv’d good masters. (Othello I.iii.76-77)

Like Brutus he structures his defensio according to the classical dispositio rules (I.iii.76-89: exordium; 90-94: propositio; 128-168: argumentatio [narratio]; 169-170: peroratio); like Brutus he prefers the moderate affections of ethos to the vehement emotions of pathos. The straightforwardness of his utterance matches the candid honesty of his character. Thus his promise, “I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver” (I.iii.90), is not an empty topos of sincerity but indicative of, in Iago’s words, “a free and open nature” (I.iii.397). This decorum of speech and speaker convinces the judges to such an extent that they acquit Othello without any further ado. While the content of Brutus’ speech is conveyed by plain logic, the proof of Othello’s innocence is presented in the form of a narration. Here the orator adopts the guise of the historian; his trustworthiness is based not on the power of argument but on the vivid presentation (evidentia) of autobiographical details. Sub specie rhetorica, it is only a small step from the oratorhistorian to the orator-poet, that is, a speaker who strengthens his argument by fictions. This is the role of the senator Menenius Agrippa in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. His narrative fiction is the well-known parable of the insurrection of the parts of the body against the belly, meaning the fight of the plebeians against the senate. This parable had been a favourite exemplum in humanist circles to illustrate irrational and rational behaviour. Thomas Wilson annotates it in a marginal gloss: “Fables how nedeful they are to teache the ignoraunte.” 20 In Shakespeare’s play it is employed as the argumentative part of a speech that is to secure senate rule. Menenius Agrippa adopts the role of the Gallic Hercules who restores social harmony. Each of the three specimens of a rhetoric of “good order” arises from a sociopolitical situation which proves extremely dangerous to the commonwealth. It is the speaker’s obligation to prevent, by means of his oration, a relapse into a state of the homo homini lupus. Congruent with this task, his speech is marked not by (irregular) Nature, but by (regular) Art; not by (stirring) pathos, but by (soothing) ethos; not by the elevated (emotional), but by the plain (rational) style. The oratio-ratio topos undergoes multiple variations, depending on the person of the speaker: Brutus appears as orator-logician, Othello as orator-historian, and Menenius Agrippa as orator-poet. The final 20

Wilson, Arte, p. 393.

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link in this chain is the figure of Prospero who - no longer orator but solely poet - uses the magic of his creative imagination (Ariel) in order to civilize the creatures of chaos (Caliban) and the agents of human barbarity (Antonio, Alonso, Sebastian). Measured in terms of persuasive success, the representatives of the rhetoric of order appear questionable. Brutus and Menenius Agrippa are successful with their defensiones, but only for a short time; then crafty demagogues Antonius, the tribunes - take over. Othello does win his case against Brabantino but loses the one against Iago, for whose rhetoric he is no match. Even the poet-magician Prospero cannot enjoy an untainted success; Caliban resists Nurture (ars) and presumably returns to (mere) Nature. Shakespeare obviously thinks little of the possibilities of the rhetoric of order to consolidate the state of social harmony for an extended period of time. Representatives of a subversive rhetoric - revolutionaries, demagogues, intriguers - are often better adapted to situations of crisis. This superiority results, according to contemporary notions, from the susceptibility of man to the vagaries of moods. In 1619, Samuel Purchas can therefore condemn rhetoric as “poison” for church and state; for it knowes the Arts of Adulation, of Hypocrisie, of malicious Slaundering, of Æquiuocations; of all sorts of Juggling, and Lying; it makes Men see with others Eyes, with strange Glasses, which make things seeme bigger, or lesse, or double, or not at all; it is Master of Mens furious Passions, and leades them (so Hercules was pictured) by the Eare (as Beare-wards their Beares, by the ringed Snowts) to any Out-rage. 21

Here the humanist oratio-ratio ideal is questioned radically. In this new perspective the Gallic Hercules is no civilizing agent but an agitator and revolutionary; he transforms his audience not into rational men but into brutish beings that he can manipulate at will. Representatives of this figure in Shakespeare are Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI (IV.iii-x), the tribunes in Coriolanus, and Iago in Othello (in the scenes of nightly unrest: I.i; II.iii; V.i). Their perverted rhetoric is successful, because the humanist ideal of the orator-philosopher no longer has an equivalent in reality. Brutus in Julius Caesar is the tragic exception.

2. Celare Artem, or: The Rhetoric of Dissimulation To conceal art does not mean its renunciation but, on the contrary, its highest consummation, for in this case, the art is so perfect that one no longer 21

Samuel Purchas, Microcosmus, or The Historic of Man (1619). Facsimile Reprint: Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo, 1969, pp. 537-538.

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perceives its artificiality but can surrender oneself entirely to the illusion of the natural - art as second nature (altera natura). Such a postulate presupposes two things: (a) the art to control art perfectly (difficulte´ vaincue), and (b) a culture based less on an objective rational order than on a personal aesthetic experience. Therefore the cavalier poet Robert Herrick can entitle a poem “Delight in Disorder” and close it with the words: A carelesse shoe-string, in whose tye I see a wilde civility: Doe more bewitch me, then when Art Is too precise in every part. 22

The theoretical foundations of this paradox of an artful artlessness were laid in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano, of which an English translation was published by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. 23 Its theoretical core, the concept of sprezzatura, refines the rhetorical celare artem into a codex of courtly behaviour that was to mould the gentleman, the honneˆte homme, and the dandy. The fair semblance of artistic lightness implies a habitual irony of dissimulation that is manifest in the pretence of an as-if-not, that is, in permanent role fictions. Thus it is not surprising that in his courtly poetic The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham ascribes the same artistry “to dissemble his arte” (III.xxv) to the poet and the courtier alike and prescribes for both, as their “chiefe profession,” “beau semblant.” 24 Perfect courtiers who follow this norm of speech and behaviour can hardly be found in Shakespeare. In the historical reality of the sixteenth century, Sir Philip Sidney was regarded as its ideal embodiment; his works 22

23

24

Robert Herrick, The Poetical Works. Ed. F.W. Moorman, London: Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 28. - An analysis of this poem is made by Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature. Ed. A. Hatcher. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962, chap. 8: “Herrick’s ‘Delight in Disorder’” (pp. 132-138). See, among others, Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1978, Carlo Ossola & Adriano Prosperi (eds.), La Corte e il “Cortegiano.” 2 vols. Roma: Bulzoni, 1980; R. W. Hanning / Da. Rosand (eds.), Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1983; Arthur F. Kinney, Continental Poetics. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, chap. 3. - Further literature in: Lorenz Böninger, “Neuere Forschungen über Castiglione,” Wolfenbütteler Renaissance Mitteilungen 9/ 2 (1985), 85-89. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 (1936), pp. 158, 298-307. - On the courtly contexts of this theorem, see, among others, Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1984.

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the sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella, the pastoral romance Arcadia, the poetological essay An Apology for Poetry - demonstrate the accomplishments as well as the problematic nature of such a norm. In his plays, Shakespeare stresses above all its fragility. Great is his number of affected courtiers who miss the ideal through an overabundance of art. Their range includes Benedick and Beatrice with their sophisticated quarrelling in Much Ado About Nothing, Orlando with his stilted verse in As You Like It, Malvolio with his bombastic affectation in Twelfth Night, and Osrick with his hypertrophy of formal politeness in Hamlet. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the artificiality of speech and behaviour is the central topic of the play. Berowne speaks for the whole courtly society at Navarra, when he renounces “painted rhetoric” (IV.iii.236) at the end of his purification process: Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affection, Figures pedantical; these summer flies Have blown me full of maggot ostentation: I do forswear them. … (Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii.406-410)

Such an ornamental rhetoric which exhausts itself in the “ostentation” of artificial ruses is absurd and ridicules the speaker. The comic catharsis, which redeems from the bonds of a fantastical oath, includes the affectatio (“affection”) in language, too. 25 The ethical problem inherent in a rhetoric of the celare artem is illustrated by Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and by Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. These characters follow the practices of the corrupt Italian courtiers whom Puttenham declares to have witnessed: “to seeme idle when they be earnestly occupied & entend to nothing but mischieuous practizes.” 26 The courtier as dissembler separates res and verba. Therefore Puttenham allows the courtly poet “to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte, […].” 27 Yet he does not ignore the problem of the esthetically disguised lie; an English paraphrase of the trope of allegory (“the Courtly figure”) is: “the figure of [false semblant or dissimulation].” 28 Thus rhetorical role playing can be fair as well as deceptive semblance. The latter lacks substance and essence; it has no identity but is a process of permanent change. Its mythical 25

26 27 28

On the themes of ars and natura, see W.C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976, chap. V: “Living Art” (pp. 167-204, 265-267). Puttenham, Arte, p. 301. Puttenham, Arte, p. 302. Puttenham, Arte, p. 186.

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name - in Shakespeare and elsewhere - is Proteus. 29 In this negative evaluation the courtly rhetoric of dissimulation is in concert with two other traditions. The older one is based on the late medieval morality plays, in which Dissimulation personified, a variant of the Vice figure, tries to seduce Man through clever deceptive speeches. The more recent tradition refers to the 18th chapter in Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Il Principe in which the author advises the politician to act not only the lion but also the fox in order to ensure success: “But it is necessary to know well how to color this nature, and to be a great pretender and dissembler.” 30 In Shakespeare’s plays the three traditions of dissimulatory rhetoric are still discernible. Marc Antony embodies, in his forum speech, the Machiavellian variant. Iago’s successful plots against Roderigo, Cassio, and, above all, Othello are grounded in the Vice tradition. Richard III practises all three facets of a rhetoric of deceit: the courtly one in his courtship scene (I.ii), the theological (Vice-related) one in his feigned religious exercises (III.vii), and the Machiavellian one in several council scenes (I.iii; II.i; III.iv). 31 Each time Richard acts as a plain, ingenuous person who is incapable of rhetoric and deception. A rather neglected instance of this rhetoric is Edmund in King Lear. As in the case of Iago, the Vice figure is one of his literary ancestors, but he acts like a courtier bent on promotion and pursues his Machiavellian aims ruthlessly. His advancement is based on a successful rhetorical feat. It consists in the deft application of negatio, which is a rhetorical figure of dissimulation. Abraham Fraunce defines it in his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) as “a denial or refusall to speake, as, I will not say that which I might, I will not call you, 29

See Richard in 3 Henry VI III.ii.191-193: I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

30

31

On Proteus as an actor (“come´dien”), see Noe¨l le Comte (= Natalis Comes), Mythologie¨. Lyons: Frelon, 1607, pp. 842-848, here: p. 846. (VIII.viii.) Nicolo` Machiavelli, The Prince. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 70. - Italian text: N.M., “Il Principe,” in: Tutte le opere. Ed. Mario Martelli. Firenze: Sansoni, 1971, p. 283: “Ma e` necessario questa natura saperla bene colorire, ed essere gran simulatore e dissimulatore.” See the interpretations by Wolfgang G. Müller, “The Villain as Rhetorician in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” Anglia 102 (1984), 37-59; Russ McDonald, “Richard III and the Tropes of Treachery,” Philological Quarterly 68 (1989), 465-483; Betty A. Schellenberg, “Conflicting Paradigms and the Progress of Persuasion in Richard III,” Cahiers Elisabe´thains 37 (1990), 59-68. - On Richard, Iago, and other representatives of hypocrisy, see Brian Vickers, “Shakespeare’s Hypocrites” (1979), in: B.V., Returning to Shakespeare. London / New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 89-134.

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&c. when neuerthelesse we speake and tell al.” 32 When Edmund meets his father Gloucester, he addresses him in the following way: Glou. Edmund, how now! What news? Edm. So please your Lordship, none. Putting up the letter. Glou. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? Edm. I know no news, my Lord. Glou. What paper were you reading? Edm. Nothing, my Lord. Glou. No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath no such need to hide itself. (King Lear I.ii.26-34)

Such a chain of feigned suppressions of information actually intended to be disclosed presupposes, in order to be effective, a masterly naturalness of rhetorical delivery so that no doubts as to the honesty of the speaker arise. Gloucester believes Edmund, who accuses Edgar of planned parricide. He falls prey to Edmund’s “inventions” (I.ii.20) - a rhetorical term - and commits the fatal error of changing the “nothing” into something. The courtly spectacle of oratorical naturalness here discloses its profound moral and epistemological ambivalence. Everyone who practises the celare artem - courtier, politician, artist - is subject to it. Possibly the most impressive study of the rhetoric of fair/false semblance in Shakespeare is Hamlet - he, too, is courtier, politician, and artist and hence combines in his person the triad of qualities that are fused in Castiglione’s Cortegiano.

3. Negare Artem, or: The Rhetoric of Denial In Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) we can find, as so often in Renaissance literature, a rendering of the myth of Orpheus; but this one, unlike the familiar versions, closes with a significant volta. Here the Greek bard performs his art in a theatre in which animals of all kinds are assembled. As long as they listen to him they manage to bridle their savage instincts; but as soon as he has ended his song, they resort to them without delay, which makes Bacon comment: wherein is aptly described the nature and condition of men; who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires, of profit, of lust, of revenge, which as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched with eloquence 32

Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike. Ed. Ethel Seaton. Luttrell Reprints, 9. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, p. 13.

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and persuasion of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but if these instruments be silent, or that sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion. 33

This mythic exegesis manifests a fundamental skepticism toward the humanistic ideal of a rhetoric of order. Similar apprehensions had already been voiced in Cicero’s early treatise De Inventione (I.iii.4). In it the dissociation of wisdom and eloquence is made responsible for the decline of civilization. As a result, unprincipled orators emerge who, by their unscrupulous conduct, bring eloquence into disrepute and contempt. From the viewpoint of Christian humanism, Thomas Wilson interprets this event as the Fall of Rhetoric and foresees, as an impending danger, mankind’s relapse into a pre-societal existence. Fifty years later, at the turn of the century, Wilson’s worst fears had, at least psychologically, come true. An all-encompassing fin de sie`cle pessimism put everything in doubt: God and man, society and culture - in short, any belief in a preestablished “good order.” It is a time that produced the melancholic, the stoic, and the empiricist. It is the time of Donne’s, Hall’s, and Marston’s satires, which disclaim any positive values for the present. It is also the time of the critics of language and rhetoric, of the shift from the abundance of words and things to linguistic brevity and terseness. Ciceronian copia is superseded by Senecan and Tacitean brevitas. The ornate style gives way to the plain style. The battle-cry is now tot verba quot res - “as many words as there are things,” the future program of the Royal Society. 34 In other words, it is the time of the “Counter-Renaissance” (Hiram Haydn). Shakespeare’s attitude toward the oratio / ratio theorem had been tinged by skepticism early on. This is evident in the eventual failure of those figures who stand for a rhetoric of social harmony - Brutus, Menenius Agrippa, Othello. It becomes even more pronounced in Shakespeare’s new oratorical type: the anti-rhetorician. Anti-rhetoric does not mean here a total renunciation of rhetoric in the sense of an idealistic rejection of all things rhetorical, but instead a specific kind of rhetoric itself. Its distinctive mark is the intentional violation of the decorum, that is, of the prevailing social norm of com33

34

F. Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning”, in: Works. Ed. J. Spedding et al. 14 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1961-1963. Vol. III, p. 302. On this subject, see A.C. Howell, “Res et Verba: Words and Things,” ELH 13 (1946), 131-142; Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968; G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500-1700: The Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Chap. 3: “The Seventeenth Century: Words versus Things” (pp. 111-153); Brian Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment,” in: B. Vickers / N. S. Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1985, pp. 1-76.

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municative behaviour. This kind of indecorum allows for several variations that are reducible to two basic types: the radical code-shift and its ultima ratio, silence. In both cases the anti-rhetorician places himself deliberately outside the current system of communication and hence outside the social order of which it is a part. Shakespeare’s dramatic figures so often violate verbal and nonverbal decorum that one could deduce from them a sociology of conflict. Of the multitude of instances, of which T. McAlindon’s useful study Shakespeare and Decorum 35 examines comparatively few, two plays may serve as illustrations: Coriolanus and King Lear. Coriolanus’ tragedy begins with his refusal to keep to the decorum of political canvassing. In this he opposes the will of his mother Volumnia, who takes a decidedly contrary position. She says about herself: I would dissemble with my nature where My fortunes and my friends at stake requir’d I should do so in honour. (Coriolanus III.ii.62-64)

And she advises her son to talk to the plebeians: […] with such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (III.ii.55-57)

Thus she recommends a rhetoric of dissimulation that only looks for oratorical success. The price for this is the dissociation of word and truth that calls into question the code of honour that Volumnia proclaims. Yet Coriolanus refuses to play the Machiavellian fox. He counters the agitatory speeches of the tribunes with passionate invectives. His anti-rhetoric is founded on the conviction that an eloquence that degenerates into mere spectacle (“only fair speech” [III.ii.96]) no longer has any social legitimation. In contrast to his friends and enemies he knows how to preserve his personal integrity. A more diversified spectrum of anti-rhetoricism is to be found in King Lear. Kent’s use of it is marked by the code-shift from elevated to plain style (and vice versa). In the scene in which Lear divides his empire, Kent at first addresses Lear in the elevated style demanded by the courtly decorum from any subject: Royal Lear, Whom I have ever honour’d as my King, Lov’d as my father, as my master follow’d. (King Lear I.i.138-140) 35

T. McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum. London: Macmillan, 1973.

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But when he finds he is not listened to, he resorts to the plain style to restore the king to his senses after all: […] be Kent unmannerly, When Lear is mad. What would’st thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound When majesty falls to folly. (I.i. 144-148)

Change of style here is equivalent to the violation of decorum. The indecorum amounts to a le`se-majeste´ to be punished in diverse ways according to the courtly code: imprisonment, banishment, execution at worst. The “plainness” of Kent appears in two forms: in his style and in his character. Once the traditional rhetoric of order has lost its validity, only the anti-rhetoric of the plain style can bridge the chasm between oratio and ratio: 36 This anti-rhetoric is practiced by Kent a second time in order to expose the vain courtier Oswald in front of Gloucester’s castle. The Duke of Cornwall, to whom he justifies this indecorum with his “plainness,” demonstrates by his reaction (II.ii.92-101) that courtly rhetoric has degenerated so far that even the professed negation of art is considered an especially subtle form of dissimulation, which is hypocrisy - the more so as Kent’s playful shift into the elevated, though hyperbolically distorted, style demonstrates that he indeed masters the courtly register. What remains, when all rhetorical codes fail? Silence. Silence can indicate several kinds of motivation: linguistic deficiency, prohibition of speech, introversion, overwhelming emotions, stubbornness, discretion, protest. The historical gamut runs from the mystical silence of Harpocrates or Hermes Trismegistos to the speechlessness of Vladimir and Estragon in En attendant Godot. 37 Shakespeare’s plays give evidence of such an abundance of instances that as early as 1929 Alwin Thaler could publish a treatise on Shakespeare’s Silences. 38 What is of particular interest here is silence understood not as 36

37

38

Cf. Emily W. Leider, “Plainness of Style in King Lear,” SQ 21 (1970), 45-53; Sheldon P. Zitner, “King Lear and Its Language,” in: Rosalie L. Colie / F.T. Flahiff (eds.), Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. London: Heinemann, 1974, pp. 3-27; Norman R. Atwood, “Cordelia and Kent: Their Fateful Choice of Style,” Language & Style 9 (1976), 42-54. Recent general studies on this subject are, for example, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980; Christian L. Hart Nibbrig, Rhetorik des Schweigens. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981; Niklas Luhmann / Peter Fuchs, Reden und Schweigen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare’s Silences. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929; see also the studies by Laura C. Keyes, Silence in Shakespeare, PhD diss., State University of New

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passive speechlessness but as “eloquent silence,” signifying protest against “false speech.” The most prominent representative of such an anti-rhetoricism in Shakespeare is Cordelia, who has to enter into speech competition with her sisters, when their father is dividing up his empire. Unwilling to surpass their epideictic rhetoric of excess through hyperbolic expressions of her own, she answers Lear’s question of what she has to say to attain her share of the heritage, simply with: “Nothing, my lord.” (I.i.86). In so doing, she is in no way conforming to typical female role expectations as contemporary conduct books prescribe them. Consider, for example, Thomas Becon (1560-64): Let her kepe silence. For there is nothinge that doth so much commend, avaunce, set forthe, adourne, decke, trim, and garnish a maid, as silence. 39

Barnabe Rich, in The Excellency of Good Women (1613), wrote: The woman of modesty openeth not her mouth but with discretion, neither is there any bitternes in her tongue: shee seemeth in speaking, to hould her peace, and in her silence shee seemeth to speake. 40

And Richard Brathwait wrote, in The English Gentlewoman (1641): “Silence in a Woman is a mouing Rhetoricke, winning most, when in words it wooeth least.” 41 This kind of silence is embodied in Virgilia, who is greeted by Coriolanus as “my gracious silence” (II.i.174). 42 Such is, however, not Cordelia’s attitude (or that of other educated Renaissance women). Her silence signals neither meekness nor submissiveness but, rather a protest against a rhetoric of false semblance: […] I want that glib and oily art To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend, I’ll do’t before I speak […]. (I.i.223-225) 43

39

40 41

42

43

York, Buffalo, 1981; Harvey Rovine, Shakespeare’s Silent Characters. PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1985; Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1985. Cited in Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640. San Marino, CA.: Huntington Library, 1982, p. 220. Barnabe Rich, The Excellency of Good Women. London: Thomas Dawson, 1613, p. 29. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (1631). Facsimile Reprint. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo, 1970, p. 90. - On the context, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London / New York: Methuen, 1985, chap. VI: “Silence and Speech” (pp. 149-191). On Coriolanus’ silence, see Carol M. Sicherman, “Coriolanus: The Failure of Words,” ELH 39 (1972), 189-207. See the provocative remarks by Paolo Valesio, “‘That Glib and Oylie Art.’ Cordelia and the Rhetoric of Antirhetoric,” Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici 16 (1977), 91-117.

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The word is no longer reliable, only the deed. Cordelia’s maxim is: “Love, and be silent” (I.i.61). Only the moral deed can redeem the world from its rhetorical fall. 44 The means of attaining this redemption are suffering and death, as the several tragedies of King Lear demonstrate. The drama of King Lear thus starts with a twofold paradox. The representatives of evil conform to the rules of decorum, practise a rhetoric of “good order” and fair semblance, and are rewarded for it. On the opposite side, the representatives of good violate the decorum, act as anti-rhetoricians, and are punished for it. The resolution of the play repeals this absurdity by revealing the emptiness of “fair” words and of the decorum which validates them, thus radically questioning the prevailing order. Rhetoric is the indicator of this development.

4. Paradigms of the Poet Orator The foregoing remarks sketch roughly, and in an exemplary manner, a rhetorical typology. It rests on three different attitudes to the ars rhetorica: its demonstration, dissimulation, and negation. Typologies are usually marked by a simplification of complex phenomena. This is done with the intention of providing such discovery procedures as can integrate the rather fortuitous observations of an object of inquiry into a prestructured system of relations. There are two ways of developing the suggested typology, one with reference to Shakespeare’s plays and another with reference to Renaissance culture at large. Other dramatic figures than the aforementioned could be assigned to one of the three types. Yet this would only add to the list of illustrations. In a further stage, dramatic configurations and situative interactions could be subjected to a speech-typological examination. The result could be put down 44

Cordelia is by her upbringing not a bad orator. She deliberately changes into one for two reasons. On the one hand she protests against the misuse of rhetoric by her sisters; on the other she wants to preserve a decorum of a different kind, that of her personal integrity. This, not surprisingly, finds its expression in the plain style that is the traditional medium for the statement of facts. Like Brutus she uses parallelisms and gradations for her defence: You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. (King Lear I.i.96-98) Here speaks the orator-logician who has a greater confidence in the force of rational argumentation than in the elaborate devices of courtly rhetoric.

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in a rhetorical score, separately for each drama. This score would notate which element dominates in a speech act and which is suppressed. The same score could also indicate in which way the rhetorical attitude of a character changes in the progress of the drama. 45 To describe such evolutionary processes adequately requires additional methodological (ethical, ontological, epistemological) tools. This is evident from the discussion and illustration of the three types. Rhetoric, after all, is not an abstract technology but a social and cultural factor whose complexity requires a perennial effort of differentiation. The presentation of the three rhetorical concepts of art started with the authors Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, and Francis Bacon. This sequence, which may at first appear fortuitous, proves rather significant on a closer inspection. For the three names not only stand for three kinds of rhetoric but - in a concluding hypothesis - denote three cultural paradigms that follow each other in the Renaissance: the humanist, the courtly, and the rationalistic. This sequence does not mean that the emergence of a new paradigm makes the older one disappear; rather, there exist phases of simultaneity and of retardation. The humanist paradigm dies out in England in the seventeenth century, the rationalistic one reaches its climax as late as the 18th century, and the courtly one survives in manifold forms up to the twentieth century. Rhetoric can thus be regarded as the indicator of those paradigms and their changes.

45

Othello, for instance, participates in all the kinds of rhetoric described in this context. He first introduces himself as a representative of the rhetoric of “good order.” But when he falls victim to the insinuations of Iago, he adopts the dissimulatory rhetoric of his seducer (e. g., in the “brothel scene”). He even changes into an anti-rhetorician who violates decorum (e. g., in the embassy scene). Finally, having recovered from his delusions, he reverts to the rhetoric of “good order” (in his dying speech). Thus the application of the typology is subject to many variations.

Hamlet’s Speech to the Players Rhetorical Delivery (actio) as Dramatic Acting Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwigpated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant, it outHerods Herod. Pray you avoid it. 1st Player: I warrant your honour. Hamlet: Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it makes the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play - and heard others praise, and that highly - not to speak it profanely, that neither having th’accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. Hamlet III.ii.1-35 1

The scenic context of these words is well known. Hamlet’s speech aims at a successful preparation of the actors so that the performance of the Gonzago play in front of Claudius will prove to be effective. Therefore he formulates 1

Quotations are taken from Harold Jenkins’ Arden edition of Hamlet. London / New York: Methuen, 1982, rpt. 2002. Shakespeare’s other plays are quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. C. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.

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his theory of acting as a prescriptive catalogue of rules which comprises three principal topics: 1. the generation and representation of passions, 2. the decorum of articulation and gesture, and 3. the concept of mimesis. Taken together these three concepts form the foundation of a theory of dramatic or fictional acting. This is underlined by the semantics of the word “action” in Shakespeare’s time, which signifies not only action in a general sense but also specific play-acting, as well as scenic representation. 2 Another meaning of the word identifies action with the rhetorical art of delivery, that is gesture and facial expression (Latin: actio), and points to the tradition of classical rhetoric. 3 Although this has been assumed several times, it has, however, never been proved in detail. 4 The following discussion will highlight this connection by analysing and comparing classical and humanist treatises on rhetoric as well as contemporary documents on the theory of acting. 5 Apart from Hamlet’s speech to the players, the rehearsal of Aeneas’ tale to Dido (II.ii.426-548), Hamlet’s monologue on playing (II.ii.543-601), and the play within the play (III.ii.133-258) will be taken into account. These are complemented by literary sources which illustrate the theoretical concepts. Last but not least it will be asked what function is fulfilled by fictitious action in Hamlet. 2

3

4

5

For further references cf. David Klein (ed.), The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970, pp. 211 ff. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike. Ed. E. Seaton, Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, pp. 106, 120 distinguishes two parts of rhetorical delivery: “Of vtterance or pronunciation” and “Of action or gesture of the whole bodie.” - For an early discussion of terminology, see Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.1 and the comments by Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer. Leipzig 21885, rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1963, p. 573 ff. Cf. among others B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21964, pp. 19 ff. and L.-L. Marker, “Nature and Decorum in the Theory of Elizabethan Acting,” in: The Elizabethan Theatre II. Ed. D. Galloway. Toronto: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 87-107. For descriptions of an Elizabethan theory of acting, see Alfred Harbage, “Elizabethan Acting,” PMLA 54 (1939), 685-708; R.H. Bowers, “Gesticulation in Elizabethan Acting,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 12 (1948), 267-277; A. G. H. Bachrach, “The Great Chain of Acting,” Neophilologus 33 (1949), 160-172; R. Foakes, “The Player’s Passion: Some Notes on Elizabethan Psychology and Acting,” Essays and Studies, NS, 7 (1954), 62-77; Marvin Rosenberg, “Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes?” PMLA 69 (1954), 915-927; David Klein, “Elizabethan Acting,” PMLA 71 (1956), 280-282; Andrew J. Gurr, “Who Strutted and Bellowed ?” ShS 16 (1963), 95-102; id., “Elizabethan Action,” SP 63 (1966), 144156; id., The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chap. 3; A.S. Downer, “Prolegomenon to a Study of Elizabethan Acting,” Maske und Kothurn 7 (1964), 625-636; Daniel Seltzer, “The Actors and the Staging,” in: A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. K. Muir / S. Schoenbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 35-54, 263-264; cf. also n. 4. - Most of these studies are engaged in the discussion whether the Elizabethan art of acting has been a more naturalistic or a more formalistic one. The following essay tries to prove that the two positions need not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

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1. In the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of your passion In Hamlet’s view all acting is affective. As the play rehearsal shows, he is not the only one to share this view - his assessment is in fact rather typical for the contemporary opinio communis. In Shakespeare’s case, this is visualized by a carefully executed contemporary ink drawing by Henry Peacham subscribed “Enter Tamora and pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution,” which illustrates a particularly pathetic scene (I.i) in Titus Andronicus (Figure 63). In

Figure 63: Henry Peacham: Drawing of a pathetic performance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (I.i): “Enter Tamora and pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution.”

general terms this means that an actor must never keep a distance between himself and his dramatic role. The only possibility to move his audience lies in the total identification of acting and being. In the Hamlet scene discussed here the First Player is asked by the protagonist to present a sample of his art: “Come, give us a taste of your quality. Come, a passionate speech.” (II.ii.427-428). His prompt realization of the same, the performance of Aeneas’ oration taken from a lost play about Dido, is so successful that even Polonius exclaims in amazement: “Look whe’er he has not turned his colour and has teares in’s eyes. Prithee no more.” (515-516) The principle which is applied to the art of acting here is the same as is provided by the rhetorical art of delivery. It runs thus: Whoever wants to move somebody emotionally, has also to be moved himself. 6 Horace uses the same principle of actio to 6

Cf. Cicero, De Or. II.xlv.189; Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.ii.26-36; Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Ed. T. J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, p. 272: “He that will stirre affeccions to other, muste first be moved hymself.” (marginal gloss).

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describe the procedure of poetical creation: “Si vis me flere, dolendumst / primum ipsi tibi” (Ars Poetica, 102-103). 7 Polonius’ reaction and commentary seems to be the dramatic implementation of the instruction of these verses. The emotional self-affecting of the actor produces the same emotions in the spectator. Polonius is so moved that he asks for the recitation to be stopped. Hamlet tries to achieve a similar effect by the passionate performance of The Murder of Gonzago. He wants to move King Claudius so deeply that the latter is forced to confess his crimes. The rhetorical actio principle of emotional self-affecting plays an important role in the Renaissance. It forms not only an integral part of the theory of acting but comprises all arts: the theory of poetry as well as the theory of music and the fine arts. 8 This is why an artist has constantly to undergo new emotional transformations. He becomes a Proteus who is completely caught up in that very role which promises the most convincing implementation of his concept of the work of art. The model of such a fictitious action is a player who acts rhetorically and who totally identifies with his respective part. An apt illustration of such an actor is given by Richard Flecknoe’s description of the famous Richard Burbage: “He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring-house) assum’d himself again until the play was done.” 9 After the rehearsal has taken place, Hamlet explains why the first player’s performance was so perfect: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! (II.ii.545-552) 7

8

9

Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1455 a 30-32. Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531-1555, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1946 informs us that in humanist commentaries the Horatian and Aristotelian statements are often connected. Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.ii.34 reports that he often had seen actors bathed in tears after having performed a deeply moving role. Cf. e. g. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, De Poeta. Venice 1559, p. 261 and Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. Ed. E.H. Fellowes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937, p.180; Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge. Trans. R[ichard] H[aydocke]. Oxford 1598, sig. Aa.j.r (II.i). Richard Flecknoe, “The Acting of Richard Burbage” (1664), in: Actors On Acting. Ed. T. Cole / H. Krich Chinoy. New York: Crown Publishers, 1949 [21970], p. 91.

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The player performs not a real but a fictitious action. To do this convincingly, he has to design an imaginary picture (“conceit”), a “dream of passion,” for himself, which is the first prerequisite to any acting. In a second step this image of fancy has to be translated into concrete details of action (“forms”) containing facial play (“distraction in his aspect”) as well as articulation (“a broken voice”). Both types of theatrical realization are formulated in the rhetorical theory of delivery (actio / pronuntiatio). Imaginary pictures, which should arouse the actor’s emotions, are already recommended by Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria (VI.ii.29-30): At quo modo fiet, ut adficiamur? neque enim sunt motus in nostra potestate. Temptabo etiam de hoc dicere. Quas ›antasi¬aw Graeci vocant, nos sane visiones appellemus, per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur. Has quisquis bene conceperit, is erit in adfectibus potentissimus. Hunc quidam dicunt eyœ›antasi¬vton, qui sibi res, voces, actus secundum verum optime finget; quod quidem nobis volentibus facile continget. Nisi vero inter otia animorum et spes inanes et velut somnia quaedam vigilantium ita nos hae de quibus loquor imagines prosequuntur, ut peregrinari, navigare, proeliari, populos alloqui, divitiarum, quas non habemus, usum videamur disponere, nec cogitare sed facere: hoc animi vitium ad utilitatem non transferemus? 10

The analogies to Hamlet’s monologue are obvious. Hamlet’s “conceit” corresponds to Quintilian’s ›antasi¬ai, Hamlet’s “dream of passion” to Quintilian’s daydream. The imaginary picture is able to bring into presence that which is past, to put before the inner eye that which is distant and to express imaginations, as it were, as actual events. This blending of fiction and truth results in an illusion of reality caused solely by imagination. Quintilian provides an 10

Translation: “But how are we to generate these emotions in ourselves, since emotion is not in our own power? I will try to explain as best I may. There are certain experiences which the Greeks call ›antasi¬aw [phantasias], and the Romans visions, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions. Some writers describe the possessor of this power of vivid imagination, whereby things, words, and actions are presented in the most realistic manner, by the Greek word eyœ›antasi¬vtow [euphantasiotos]; and it is a power which all may readily acquire if they will. When the mind is unoccupied or is absorbed by fantastic hopes or daydreams, we are haunted by these visions of which I am speaking to such an extent that we imagine that we are travelling abroad, crossing the sea, fighting, addressing the people, or enjoying the use of wealth that we do not actually possess, and seem to ourselves not to be dreaming but acting. Surely, then, it may be possible to turn this form of hallucination to some profit.” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria. With an English translation by H.E. Butler. 4 vols. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966, vol. II, pp. 433-435). Cf. also the English description in: Gerardus Hyperius, The Practise of Preaching. Trans. John Ludham, London, 1577, p. 43r.

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example of the imaginary visualization of a murder; he vividly describes how the assassin ambushes the helpless victim, how this victim trembles, shrieks and eventually heaves his last sigh. The effect of such imaginations is called eœna¬rgeia which Quintilian, modelled on Cicero, translates as illustratio or evidentia. Hereby the orator, as a fictitious spectator, is able to get into the spirit of the imagined action in order to evoke the necessary emotions in himself and others. That same method applies to poets and actors. All of them have to design imaginations and to simulate affections in order to move the audience. This doctrine can be proved by numerous documents that have been published since the Renaissance. 11 Given these premises, Hamlet feels compelled to include in his praise of the First Player’s successful performance of passion its logical prerequisite, the perfect “dream of passion.” In his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney insists that even the best artistic idea is worth nothing without its concrete appearance in a work of art. 12 The same applies to the actor’s imaginary picture. Its conversion into concrete action follows certain rules which form a symbolic grammar of action. Its main structure consists in the assignment of specific emotions to specific signs, either gestural or articulatory. The theoretical basis of this concept is Cicero’s De Oratore (III.lvi.213-lx.226) and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (XI.iii.). In the Renaissance this concept was taken up and extended. John Bulwer’s twin tracts Chirologia and Chironomia, both published in 1644, present a detailed system of a manual rhetoric in which precisely defined positions and movements of the hand correspond to certain emotions. 13 As early as 1588 and 1598, Abraham Fraunce and Charles Butler demonstrate that this grammar of action can be usefully applied to literary interpretation. 14 A quotation from the preface of the anonymous play The Cyprian Conqueror may serve as an example for its transfer to the art of acting. 11

12

13

14

Cf. H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975; Hans Peter Herrmann, Naturnachahmung und Einbildungskraft: Zur Entwicklung der deutschen Poetik von 1670 bis 1740. Bad Homburg v.d.H.: Gehlen, 1970; Klaus Dockhorn, “Affekt, Bild und Vergegenwärtigung in der Poetik des Barock,” GGA 225 (1973), 135-156; Charles O. McDonald, The Rhetoric of Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966, pp. 122-137 already emphasized the significance of enargeia for Hamlet. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defense of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd. London: Nelson, 1965, p. 101. John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Ed. J.W. Cleary. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. An illustration of a rule: “The forehead stricken with the hand is an action of dolor, shame, and admiration” (p. 183). Already in Quintilian’s Inst. Or. XI.iii.85-124 a manual rhetoric can be found. Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, pp. 106-129; Charles Butler, Rhetoricae Libri Dvo. Oxford 1598, sig. F.3.vff., esp. sig. F.7.r: “Cap. V. De voce affectuum singulorum.”

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The other part of action is in the gesture, which must be various as required; as in a sorrowful part the head must hang down, in a proud the head must be lofty; in an amorous, closed eyes, hanging down looks and crossed arms, in a hasty, fumbling and scratching the head, etc. 15

This enumeration clearly shows that the realization of certain dramatic roles, for instance that of a lamenting or a loving person, depends on the actor’s repertoire of action signs and his appropriate selection from it. The same applies to the elements of action which Hamlet emphasizes in the First Player’s performance: a pale face, tears in his eyes, a dismayed complexion and a broken voice. Taken together, they constitute the role of a desperate person. It is because of the optimal concretization of an imaginary picture that the performed piece of action is praised as being perfect and effective. This excellent realization of action in a fictitious role reminds Hamlet that he himself is not doing anything, even though he has every reason to act. In his monologue he contrasts his own inactivity with the actor’s activity and asks himself what the latter’s performance would have looked like if it had been based not on an imaginary picture but on sheer reality: What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (II.ii.554-560)

What Hamlet describes here is known in rhetorical theory as fustian or bombast. 16 Bombast describes that exaggeration of pathos which does not move but amounts to a comical effect. It is the characteristic mark of a bad orator who does not know any moderation in his use of rhetorical means, whereas Hamlet demands in his speech to the players that even in the torrent and tempest of passion temperance is always to be observed. 17 The words of his 15

16

17

Quoted in: Actors on Acting. Ed. Cole / Chinoy, p. 90. Shakespeare likewise assigns detailed signs of action to certain dramatic roles. The pose of a timid man is described in Richard III III.v.1-11 (cf. also IV.ii.27: “The King is angry, see, he gnaws his lip”), that of a man desperately in love in Hamlet (Ophelia’s report II.i.74-97) or in Twelfth Night (Malvolio: II.v., III.ii, III.iv). Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. VIII.iii.56; Pseudo-Longinus, Peri Hypsous, III.iv; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll. Frankfurt/M. 1996, pp. 137, 162; - Sr. Miriam Joseph analyses examples from Shakespeare’s plays in Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949, pp. 70-72. Torrent and tempest serve as rhetorical metaphors for pathos; see Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte, pp. 27, 48, 60, 77, 86, 170.

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own monologue, however, stamp him as an actor without self-control, who cannot tame his emotions. The self-projection of his acting which he works out for himself contains all elements of hyperbolic bombast. Only when returning to a moderate attitude does Hamlet succeed in finding a strategy which could unmask Claudius as a murderer.

2. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action The doctrine of rhetorical delivery, like Hamlet’s theory of acting, is concerned with articulation and gesture. The close relationship between the two is expressed in several pairs of phrases: Speak the speech, I pray you […] Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus […] […] inexplicable dumb-shows and noise […] […] neither having th’accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man […] […] so strutted and bellowed […]. (III.ii.1 ff.)

All these dichotomic structures refer to a rule which Hamlet formulates as a pithy antimetabole: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” The subject-matter of this rule is the appropriateness of text and delivery or of elocutio and actio. Its source is the theory of rhetorical aptum or decorum. 18 Decorum represents the valid norm of the interrelation of all factors involved in the process of communication - first of all the congruence of topic, language and realization on the one hand, and of speaker, recipient and situation on the other. In his Apology for Actors Thomas Heywood expressly refers to rhetoric when writing: It instructs him [sc. the scholler] to fit his phrases to his action and his action to his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both. 19

The similarity to Hamlet’s words is obvious. His description, however, focuses on deviations from decorum, i. e. either understatement or exaggeration. 18

19

For the theory of decorum in the English Renaissance cf. Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961, pp. 192-247; D.A. Richardson, Decorum and Diction in the English Renaissance. PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1972, pp. 1-100. T. McAlindon gives a special analysis of Hamlet under this aspect in Shakespeare and Decorum. London: Macmillan, 1973, pp. 44-79, 218-219. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors. London: Shakespeare Society, 1841, p. 29. Cf. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick. New York / London: Garland, 1982, pp. 435, 436, 437.– Quintilian already stresses the relevance but also the problems of decorum in rhetorical delivery (actio).

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This is why his remarks tend to constitute a catalogue of negative rather than positive prescriptions. Hamlet pays special attention to the indecorum of the actor’s bombast. He disapproves of immoderate shouting as well as of wild gesticulation or affected gait. Thomas Wilson’s list of faults concerning delivery is similar: Some cries out so loude, that they would make a mans eares ake to heare them. […] Some cannot speake, but thei must go up and doune […] [it is meete] the armes [should] not muche cast abrode, but comely set out, as time, and cause shal best require: the handes somtymes opened, and sometimes holden together, the fingers pointyng, the brest laid out, and the whole body stirryng altogether with a seemely moderacion. 20

Wilson’s expression for the actor’s decorum, “seemely moderacion,” corresponds to Hamlet’s demand for “temperance” and “discretion.” 21 Everything which overshoots that mark destroys the impersonation of passion. Hamlet refers to inappropriate impersonations of Termagant and Herodes as well-known negative examples. But shortly afterwards, during the court performance of The Murder of Gonzago, he will discover that his instructions have been of no use. The affected grimaces of the player of Lucianus threaten to destroy the whole dramatic action. In shouting “Leave thy damnable faces and begin.” (III.ii.247) he reminds us of a rule already stated in Cicero’s De Oratore (III.lix.222): “Nam oris non est nimium mutanda species ne aut ineptias aut ad pravitatem aliquam deferamur.” 22 Affected facial play as well as affected gestures or articulations can be subsumed under the verdict of being “overdone.”

20

21

22

Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, pp. 435, 437. - Quintilian already describes loud shouting as “insanum” (Inst. Or. XI.iii.45); he disapproves of the sewing movements (“secanti similis”) of the hands (ibid., 119) and condemns excessive running (ibid., 129); cf. Cicero, De Or. III.lix.222. In his “Oratio contra Rhetoricam,” John Jewel polemizes against nearly all kinds of actio: “Cur non ore, non lingua, non faucibus, sed manu, digitis, articulis, brachio, vultu, corpore denique toto loquuntur?” (Works. 4 vols. Ed. J. Ayre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845-1850, vol. IV, p. 1286). Cf. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, p. 88: “Temperaunce is a measuryng of affeccions, accordyng to the will of reason, and a subduyng of luste unto the Square of honestie.” Translation: “For the appearance of the features is not to be too much varied, lest we fall into some absurdity or distortion” (J.S. Watson). Cf. also Tho. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, p. 29: “[…] to keepe a decorum in his countenance, neither to frowne when he should smile, nor to make unseemely and disguised faces in the delivery of his words.” In The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Tho. Hoby. Ed. H.D. Rouse. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1928, rpt. 1959, p. 142. Baldassare Castiglione, too, warns the courtier against “making faces and antiques.”

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Clinias’ speech in Sidney’s Arcadia provides a good example of exaggerated rhetorical pathos. 23 The author states that he begins his deliberations in close adherence to the rule of attentum parare: as if he had had a prologue to utter, he began with a nice gravitie to demand audience.

When, however, his audience turns a deaf ear to his speech, he takes recourse to bombastic pathos: with vehement gesture, as if he would teare the stars from the skies, he fell to crying out so lowde, that not onely Zelmane, but Basilius might heare him.

In so doing he not only violates the rules already referred to, but also another one which holds that the beginning of a speech should be governed by ethos rather than pathos. 24 Later, when he gives a report before the king, Clinias continues producing mistakes in delivery: Then stretching out his hand, and making vehement countena˜ces the ushers to his speches, in such maner of tearms recounted this accident.

It is certainly not by accident that the omniscient narrator explains this bombastic presentation by mentioning that the orator had worked as an actor of tragedies: “where he had learned […] acquaintance with many passions, and to frame his face to beare the figure of them.” At the same time it is obvious that his presentation is not appreciated. The normative systems of Hamlet and of Sidney’s narrator agree to a large extent, the only difference between them being that one is concerned with acting, and the other with oratory. The second indecorum is that of “too little.” Hamlet warns against it by saying: “Be not too tame neither,” and he summarizes both deficits in the phrase: “now this overdone, or come tardy off.” Violating the norm results in a lack of emotional appeal. Julius Caesar Scaliger describes these extremes in his Poetices Libri Septem: Eius [sc. eœnergei¬aw ] vitia duo extrema. Alterum kakozhli¬a quam affectationeˆ voco. Est autem affectatio conatus supra vires, & supra rem. Alterum, languor. Graece` dicam pa¬resin. Quam vocem intelliget, qui in philosophia est exercitatus. Est enim contraria vegeto, sicut aœtoni¬a. 25 23

24 25

Quotations are taken from Sir Philip Sidney, The Prose Works. Ed. A. Feuillerat. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, vol. I, pp. 319-321. Significantly, Clinias’ performance meets only with Basilius’ approval “that was not the sharpest pearcer into masked minds” (p. 324). Cf. Ad. Her. I.vii.11; Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, p. 106. J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Geneva 1561, p. 116. English translation: “Of it [sc. energeia] there exist two extreme defects. The first is kakozelia which I call affectation. Affectation is an attempt exceeding one’s powers and the subject matter. The other defect is limpness. For this quality I would like to use the Greek term paresis. Its meaning will be grasped by

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The effect of an emotionless presentation is boredom. In Hamlet the protagonist complains about his own inactivity by comparing himself to an unskilful actor who is not capable of showing passion: Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing. (II.ii.560-563)

Like John-a-dreams he stands there and does not speak a word, although the avenger’s part, which is forced on him, should turn him into a tragic actor who will not bore his audience but evoke emotions of pity, terror and admiration. 26 Because Hamlet is not able to bestow an adequate energeia on his imaginary picture, he falls short of the factual possibilities of its representation and thus presents himself as an example of the indecorum of “too little.” In his speech to the players Hamlet sets up a catalogue of rules which minutely regulates fictitious action. This catalogue is supplemented by particular aspects of the stage rehearsal and Hamlet’s monologue. Basic elements of Hamlet’s theory of acting are the emotional self-stimulation of the actor, the imaginary action, the symbolic grammar of acting, and the rousing of the emotions of the audience. Furthermore, this theory includes the decorum of the stage presentation as well as the avoidance of two basic vitia: bombastic affectation and lack of pathos. Applying this concept to the dramatic plot of Hamlet, we find that the rehearsal of the actors perfectly fulfils the demand of the actor’s emotional self-stimulation and the decorum of stage representation. In Hamlet’s monologue, which immediately follows the aforementioned scene, his actions are contrasted with the decorum of a successful stage-play in two different respects. Hamlet’s first indecorum becomes apparent when he accuses himself of presenting his “cause” too sluggishly. As a consequence, he succumbs to a second indecorum, bombastic pathos, which he first projects onto the stage character and then presents by posing as avenger. The last step in Hamlet’s monologue leads to an elimination of both faults and returns

26

one who is an expert in philosophy. For it is the opposite of energy.” - Cf. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 137-138 (energeia in love poetry); Heywood, An Apology for Actors, p. 29 (criticizing the “livelesse image” of the speaker - “without any smooth and formal motion”); Bulwer, Chirologia, p. 227: “To use no action at all in speaking, or a heavy and slow motion of the hand, is the property of one stupid and sluggish.” Pity and terror are reflected in the terms “tears” (II.2.565) and “appal” (567) of Hamlet’s monologue. Sidney’s tragic effect “admiration” (An Apology for Poetry, p. 118) corresponds to Hamlet’s “amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears” (568-569). The hyperbolical indecorum which follows from the intended effect manifests itself in formulations such as “drown the stage” (565), “cleave the general ear with horrid speech” (566), and “confound the ignorant” (568).

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to the decorum of stage action. Although the projected play is characterized by passionate action, this action is fictitious, i. e. rationally controlled. It disposes of the “discretion” which Hamlet demands of actio, as well as of the emotions which move the audience.

3. To hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature The plan of a fictional stage-play alone does not guarantee that its realization will really follow the principle of decorum in every respect. The play of the Murder of Gonzago is in danger of not achieving its intended effect, because the actor who plays Lucianus is too bombastic. The preceding pantomime leaves Ophelia with questions rather than with explanations, and the same holds for the short prologue. The real drama which reveals the murderer, however, is realized neither through the non-verbal pantomime nor through the non-actional prologue. The reason for this is that a drama in performance represents the highest form of theatrical energy. It combines gesture and speech and addresses both eye and ear. In his Index Rhetoricus (1625) the English rhetorician Thomas Farnaby describes the vivifying effect that voice and gesture lend to the written or printed text: Annon languent Affectus, inter-mortua iacet Delectatio, omnis Fidei perit fides, nisi viuae Vocis face animentur, nisi significis Gestus facie figurentur? Illa quippe ad animum per oculos, hic per aures penetrans intellectum expugnat, affectus in vincula abducit. 27

In his stage theory Thomas Heywood formulates the same axiom within a different context: A description is only a shadow, received by the eare, but not perceived by the eye; so lively portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture to moove the spirits of the beholder to admiration: but to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier; to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling upon the bulkes of kinges; a Troilus returning from the field, in the sight of his father Priam […]. Nil ultra, Oh, these were sights to make an Alexander! 28 27

28

Thomas Farnaby, Index Rhetoricus. London: F. Kyngston, 1625. p. 30. Cf. Juan Huarte Navarro, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of mens Wits. Trans. R. C. London: A. Islip, 1594, p. 134: “The fourth propertie wherewith good oratours should be endowed, and the most important of all, is action, wherwith they giue a being and life to the things which they speake, and with the same do moue the hearers, and supple them to beleeue how that is true which they go about to persuade.” Tho. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, pp. 20-21.

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With these words Heywood describes three stages of what Scaliger had called energeia, i. e. an audio-visual enactment of an imaginary concept. The first step includes verbal description, the second the visual image, and the third stage acting, comprising word and image. If we look at the exposition of Hamlet from this perspective, we find all three steps of representational energeia being realized. The pantomime and the dramatic action of the play correspond to Heywood’s second and third step, while the prosopopoeia of the ghost (I.v.4291) corresponds to the first step of “description.” Thomas Farnaby, the rhetorician, and Thomas Heywood, the defender of stage plays, agree by arguing that representational actio alone is capable of appealing to reason and passion in an ideal way. In his fictional stage-play Hamlet makes use of this principle of energeia in order to entice the king to confess his murder. Apart from this Hamlet makes use of another principle which reveals the point on which Heywood and Farnaby differ. This principle is expressed at the end of Hamlet’s monologue: I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. (II.ii.590-592)

This remark refers to dramatic mimesis, 29 which is supposed to stir the emotions of the murderer and to lead him to self-knowledge. Hamlet relies on folk tales according to which offenders, once confronted with their misdeeds through the mirror of dramatic representation, confess their guilt and promise to mend their ways. Heywood cites such anecdotes, and Sidney refers to them in his tale of Alexander Pheraeus. 30 The success of a play is dependent on its skilful realization, circumscribed by Sidney as “well made and represented.” Hamlet refers to “the very cunning of the scene” (II.ii.586). In order to be perfectly realized, mimesis has to be modelled on nature. Nature is the core concept of Hamlet’s speech to the actors. The concept of nature plays a significant part in Renaissance philosophy, pedagogy, art and poetics. Hamlet’s speech provides merely one instance of Shakespeare’s concern with nature’s multifarious meanings. 31 First he refers 29

30

31

In rhetoric the use of mimesis is restricted. Cicero in De Or. II.lix.241-242, as well as Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier, p. 142 f., recommend it for facetiae. Examples in Shakespeare are Feste’s imitation of the priest Sir Topaz in Twelfth Night IV.ii and the imitations of social roles by Falstaff and Prince Hal in the first part of Henry IV II.4.376481. As Castiglione puts it, this is the “counterfeiting or imitating […] of a mans manners” which belongs to courtly “jeast” (p. 141). Heywood, An Apology for Actors, pp. 57-70; Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd, p. 118. Cf. John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of “King Lear.” London: Faber & Faber, 1951; E.W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York / London:

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to nature in order to illustrate the rhetorical and theatrical concepts of role play. This is the idea behind the postulate of “modesty of nature,” which refers to the decorum of a role presented on stage. Hamlet defines it negatively by distinguishing it from affective exaggerations and understatements. In “An excellent Actor,” a character which is commonly attributed to John Webster, we find something very similar: Whatsoever is commendable in the grave Orator, is most exquisitly perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body, he charmes our attention: sit in a full Theater, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the Actor is the Center. He doth not strive to make nature monstrous, she is often seen in the same Scæne with him, but neither on Stilts nor Crutches; and for his voice, tis not lower then the prompter, nor lowder then the Foile and Target. By his action he fortifies morall precepts with example; for what we see him personate, we thinke truely done before us: a man of deepe thought might apprehend the Ghosts of the ancient Heroes walk’t againe, take him (at severall times) for many of them. 32

What is striking in this passage is not only the equation of orator and actor, of rostrum and stage, but also of nature and decorum, together with an allusion to Hercules Gallicus, who persuaded the natives of barbarous Gaul to lead a civilized life by tying the golden chains of eloquence to their ears. The equation of nature and decorum is even more obvious in the induction scene of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which includes the praise of a wellmade stage play: “[…] that part / Was aptly fitted and naturally perform’d” (Ind.i.86-87). A natural way of acting is achieved when an actor adequately applies the rules of theatrical action to the specific facets of his part. Contemporaries would often use expressions such as “acted to the life” or “lively action.” 33 The audience reacted with an increasing in-lusion or empathy, until in the end dramatic role and personal identity, or, in other words, art and nature, could no longer be distinguished from each other. This attitude is aptly illustrated in the play Iphis and Anaxarete, which was performed as a play within a play in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. 34 In

32

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34

Columbia University Press, 1964, rpt. 1966; C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21967, chap. 2: “Nature (with Phusis, Kind, Physical, etc.).” John Webster, The Complete Works. Ed. F.L. Lucas. 4 vols., New York: Gordian Press, 1966, vol. IV, p. 42. Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology, p. 136 states that unnaturalness or affectation may cause no “delight” but “[…] laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.” In Hamlet’s opinion this reaction characterizes the “unskilful” (III.ii.26). Sources in Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, p. 1 ff.; Downer, “Prolegomenon to a Study of Elizabethan Acting,” pp. 627-629; Klein (ed.), The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics, pp. 211213, 217-218. Quotations are based on Five Stuart Tragedies. Ed. A. K. McIlwraith London: Oxford University Press, 1953, rpt. 1964, pp. 319-416. Cf. Domitia’s and Paris’ debate on the reality of

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this piece, Paris, who is loved by the Empress Domitia, plays a lover named Iphis, whereas Domitilla who is hated by her as a rival, plays his cruel lover Anaxarete. At the beginning of the performance, Domitia appears as a distanced spectator who observes the decorum of role play and the details of action in Paris’ appearance, but at the same time emphasizes the artificial (“seeming,” “counterfeited”) quality of such an assignment: How do you like That shape? methinks it is most suitable To the aspect of a despairing lover. The seeming late-fallen, counterfeited tears That hang upon his cheeks, was my device.

(III.ii.148-152)

Eventually, however, her distance to the fictional plot of the play is diminished, and as a result she emphatically reacts to the emotional self-stimulation of the player: - Does he not act it rarely? Observe with what a feeling he delivers His orisons to Cupid; I am rapt with’t. -

(175-177)

Soon it becomes clear that Domitia has turned into an empathic witness: - By Caesar’s life he weeps! and I forbear Hardly to keep him company. -

(196-197)

The pathos, which is achieved through tears, is so intensive that nature and art in this case are blended. Although the Emperor seeks to restore the difference between the two spheres (210: “’Tis in jest, Domitia”; 214: “’Tis his part […]”), Domitia finds herself more and more entangled in the illusion. It begins to take possession of her when Iphis-Paris declares he will hang himself at the gate of his lover. Domitia’s reaction to this announcement: - Not for the world! Restrain him, as you love your lives!

(282-283)

shows that her change from distanced director and empathic spectator to an actor of passions has been completed. To her the mimesis of reality has become the true reality itself. In this way Domitia’s reaction resembles that of the guilty observers in Heywood’s anecdotes or that of Sidney’s Pheraeus or that of Shakespeare’s Claudius, the difference, of course, being that she experiences no catharsis at all. Catharsis, however, does appear in Hamlet’s second interpretation of the concept of nature. According to his interpretation, the drama represents a actional mimesis in IV.ii.30 ff. with the scene discussed here, especially the lines: “Thou must be really, in some degree, / The thing thou dost present” (37-38).

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copy of nature which will lead to knowledge. The entire image can be traced back to a definition of comedy which the Roman grammarian Donatus ascribed to Cicero in his commentary on Terence: “Comoediam esse Cicero ait imitationem uitae, speculum consuetudinis, imaginem ueritatis.” 35 Hamlet reinterprets this principle by extending it to every kind of play and by giving it a moral meaning. This is demonstrated by his moralistic use of the mirror image, 36 which illustrates that plays may represent that which is good or that which is evil. The representation of good things is carried out in order to lead the viewer into imitative acts. More important with respect to tragedy, however, is the presentation of evil. It aims at moving the guilty and leading him or her to repentance. Of such sort is the mirror that Hamlet holds up to Claudius and his mother. As in Sidney’s narrative of Alexander Pheraeus, however, an enduring success is not achieved. There is yet a further quality of Hamlet’s concept of imitatio naturae which is to be taken into account, namely its function as a trope. The protagonist himself uses the term ‘tropic’ when responding to Claudius’ enquiry: “What do you call the play?”: “The Mousetrap - marry, how tropically! This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna” (III.ii.231-233). This image elucidates the difference between reality and its imitation in poetic fiction. The play within the play does not represent reality but potential reality. The Gonzago plot does not duplicate the exposition, i. e. the murder of old Hamlet, but depicts it as a trope or parable. There are two reasons for this tropical quality of representation: on the one hand Claudius is offered an opportunity to repent; on the other hand, and this function is the dominant one, it is used by Hamlet for plotting and scheming. The drama within the drama, however, is only an isolated episode in the interplay of plot and counterplot. More often than not, Machiavellism 37 has been identified as the intellectual source of this intrigue, but this has led to an underestimate of a second source: the ideology of courtly conduct as developed by Baldassare Castigli35

36

37

Quotation from Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954, rpt. 1964, p. 417, n. 8a; cf. p. 72. This definition has been adopted by Thomas Lodge, “Defence of Poetry” (1579), in: Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G.G. Smith. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904, rpt. 1959, vol. I, p. 81; cf. pp. 369-370. Cf. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Trans. G. Collier. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. On Machiavelli’s reception in England, see Mario Praz, “The Politic Brain: Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” in: M. Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, pp. 90-145.

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one and his successors. This can explain the fictitious actions of the schemers by referring to their own social context. According to Castiglione, a courtier is a man who does not succumb to his natural instincts (natura), but domesticates them through artificial rules (ars). However, he does this by presenting his actions as natural, i. e. as an altera natura. 38 In order to achieve the objective of celare artem, which dates back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (III.ii.1404b) and Cicero’s De Oratore (II.xli.177), the courtier practises dissimulation. In other words, he becomes an actor. The more successful his role-playing is, the more he will succeed within the complex courtly interplay of forces. Within this interplay the tropical diction has a social function. Consisting of metaphors, metonymies, ironies, and allegories, it represents an ideal way of indirect speaking in which the actual intentions are concealed. George Puttenham, who takes up Castiglione’s point, characterizes the allegorical trope as a “Courtly figure” or as the “figure of [ false semblant or dissimulation],” justifying his terminology by pointing out how courtiers and politicians use this trope in order to deceive interlocutors. 39 For this reason, tropical diction is the essential instrument of courtly communication. The same holds for its negative counterpart, the intrigue. The plot of Hamlet is characterized by a multitude of courtly intrigues. Scarcely anything seems to be “natural;” an atmosphere of artificiality and dissimulation predominates. By declaring theatrical pseudo-action to be a valid behavioural norm, the court establishes a code which is defined aesthetically rather than morally. 40 Shakespeare’s drama, however, proves that the very opposite is true. It demonstrates how aesthetic values are corrupted in the interest of corrupt morals. In this way Hamlet’s term “tropically” symbol-

38

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40

Cf. B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, pp. 46, 100, 130, 142; cf. Joseph Mazzeo, “Castiglione’s Courtier: The Self as Work of Art,” in: J. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965, pp. 131-160; Wayne A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s ‘Book of the Courtier.’ Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1970 (1936), p. 186; cf. pp. 299-300. For the historical context cf. H.F. Plett, “Konzepte des Allegorischen in der englischen Renaissance,” in: W. Haug (ed.), Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979, pp. 310-335, esp. 324329. After describing the deplorable state of affairs at court, George Puttenham writes in his Arte of English Poesie, p. 302: “Which parts, neuerthelesse, we allow not now in our English maker, because we haue geuen him the name of an honest man, and not of an hypocrite: and therefore leauing these manner of dissimulations to all base-minded men, & of vile nature or misterie, we doe allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtilties of his arte […].”

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ically refers to many scenes of the drama. “Tropical” in the sense of deception is Claudius’ throne speech, as is the nunnery scene conducted with Polonius’ help. Above all, Polonius’ plot against his own son has a tropical quality. The advice that he gives Reynaldo: “By indirections find directions out” (II.i.66) and which explicitly mentions the tropical improprie-speech, might as well serve as a motto for the entire play. 41 Even Hamlet’s actions are increasingly shaped by tropical dissimulation. His poses of rejected lover, of ambitious successor to the throne, or of a philosopher of weltschmerz, are fictionalizations of an actor-rhetorician and culminate in the aesthetic objectivity of the Gonzago play. His courtly role-playing surpasses that of his enemies in technical skill. He shares with them a moral depravity, however, which he overcomes only in the last act when he achieves a new world view. Until that moment arrives, however, the same criticism which applies to his antagonists also applies to Hamlet. It can be formulated thus: the courtly play is not an imitation of nature but of its moral distortion. 42 Referring to unskilled actors, Hamlet describes it correctly with the words: “They imitated humanity so abominably.” Reviewing the discussion of the concept of imitatio naturae, we conclude that Shakespeare’s Hamlet illustrates three aspects of fictional action: an emotional or illusory one, an epistemological or moral one, and a courtly or dissimulatory one. While the second aspect is rooted in poetological and philosophical traditions, the other two date back to a common rhetorical tradition. The emotional or illusory concept of action constitutes the basis of a theory of acting in Hamlet, a play which is also a reflection upon the dramatic medium and thus functions as a metadrama. 43 The courtier’s rhetoric of dissimulation, however, is distinguished from the actor’s art in that the fictitious action is not restricted to the aesthetic sphere but is tied to the 41

42

43

For role-play in Hamlet cf. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1962, rpt. 1967, pp. 142-147; C.R. Forker, “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Symbolism and its Function in Hamlet,” ShQ 14 (1963), 215-229; Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play and Duel: A Study in ‘Hamlet.’ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, esp. chaps. 1, 4, 7; Anthony B. Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1978, chap. 3. For courtly criticism cf. Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der europäischen Moralistik. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1973; M.C. Miller, Courtliness in the English Renaissance. PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 1978. The term is inspired by Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, New York: Hill & Wang, 1963. In his essay “Kommentar, Metasprache und Metakommunikation im Hamlet,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch West (1978/1979), 132-151, Manfred Pfister analyses many metastructures in Shakespeare’s play.

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realm of social interaction. Shakespeare’s drama reveals the link between the two fictional forms of action. It turns out that politicians are the better actors. Hamlet is a tragic figure, because his whole thinking is concerned with taking the right action, although fictional actions repeatedly prevent him from taking it. Only the reality of death puts an end to the play-acting.

The Rhetoric of Othello 1. Constituents of Rhetorical Action The concept of rhetorical action implies a complex set of conditions. Among these are the following: 1 a. at least two interlocutors, partaking in an interaction which is partly verbal and partly non-verbal and which is directed at effecting an emotional change of attitude in at least one of them; b. a communicative situation in which this change of attitude occurs - according to classical rhetoric this would be a judicial, a deliberative or an epideictic one; c. a differentiated code, including the means of persuasion which will produce the change of attitude - i. e. non-verbal signs, such as “inartificial” proofs (e. g. real objects or witnesses), gestures and facial expressions, as well as verbal signs such as “artificial” proofs of argumentation (inventio) and the stylistic devices of language (elocutio). An act of persuasion is initiated if particular means of persuasion are used in a concrete situation by an interlocutor who has a specific intention. It is successful if a change of attitude is produced in the recipient. The time span between the beginning and the end of an act of persuasion is marked by a development. Elizabethan authors specified the behaviour of speakers and recipients during a process of persuasion. 2 According to their view, an orator must adhere to a certain set of rules: (1) He must feign emotions, i. e. he must be 1

2

The basic terminology is given in Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. M.T. Bliss et al. Foreword G.A. Kennedy. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 1998. Cf. a.o. Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956, rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961; Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature. New York / London / Toronto etc.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992; Thomas O. Sloane, On the Contrary. The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997.

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emotionally affected himself in order to move (movere) a recipient; (2) he must hide his persuasive skills behind a studied mask of plain naturalness and sincerity (celare artem); (3) he must select an illustrative and emotionally effective strategy of presentation (enargeia, evidentia) which will turn the recipient into a fictitious spectator; (4) he must become an actor who slips into diverse linguistic and behavioural roles in order to persuade his recipients; (5) he must be a creative poet whose imaginations are so convincing that they will appear as realities; (6) he must be an eiron, or a master of dissimulation, who deliberately conceals his true self as well as his knowledge and who is permanently aware of his “dramaturgie de la parole” (Barthes) as well as of factual reality. All in all, he can be described as an actor-poet who, by means of verbal and non-verbal evidence, creates a rhetorical performance in order to enthral even the most reluctant recipient. The reaction of the latter may be described as follows: (1) If he does not critically check the truth value of the persuasive act, he will be captured more and more by the rhetorical display. (2) If this happens to be the case, his thinking will no longer be governed by reason, but by pathos. (3) In yet a further step pathos and passive acceptance will give way to action. Summing up, we may say that, as far as the persuaded person is concerned, rhetorical action will not end when the persuasive act itself is finished. Functioning as a source of instruction it will also extend into the future. A rhetorical theory of action, such as the one outlined here, was widely known among people of the sixteenth century. Every Elizabethan student was familiar with it, because he was required to comment on fictitious objects, to write feigned judicial orations or to slip into a historical, or even mythological, role after the fashion of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata or one of its successors. 3 Within the conceptual framework of a courtly culture, in which the ideal of sprezzatura represented the highest form of behaviour, the

3

Cf. e. g. Aphtonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, partim a Rodolpho Agricola, partim a Ioanne Maria Catanaeo Latinitate donata: Cum luculentis & vtilibus in eadem scholijs Reinhardi Lorichij Hadamarij. London: H. Middleton, 1572, 1583; Richard Reynolde, A Booke Called the Foundation of Rhetoricke. London: J. Kingston, 1563, rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum / New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. - Secondary works: Donald Lemen Clark, “The Rise and Fall of Progymnasmata in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Grammar Schools,” Speech Monographs 19 (1952), 259-263; Francis R. Johnson, “Two Renaissance Textbooks of Rhetoric: Aphtonius’ Progymnasmata and Rainolde’s A Book Called the Froundation of Rhetoric,” Huntington Library Quarterly 6 (1943), 427-444; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, pp. 138-145; D. L. Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in Renaissance Education. New York / London: Columbia University Press, 1948, rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964, pp. 230-249.

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fictional character of such verbal behaviour was further intensified. According to the ideal of sprezzatura, which was related to the rhetorical celare artem, the courtier was the perfect eiron. His entire behaviour was modelled on the rules of dissimulation. 4 Through Baldassare Castiglione’s tract on the courtier, which established the principles of courtly behaviour, this view was transmitted to Elizabethan poetics, as can be seen in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1689). 5 Puttenham’s tract is not only remarkable, because it links the rhetorical celare artem to the courtly tradition but also because it applies the principle of celare artem to the analysis of rhetorical figures. This can be seen in the functional analysis of certain tropes which are seen as instruments of disguise, and it is also demonstrated in the translation of Greek and Latin terms by means of nomina agentis, in which tropes are seen as forms of verbal action and role play. The ambiguity inherent in these verbal (and non-verbal) forms of role play is demonstrated by the fact that Puttenham describes allegory as “the figure of [false semblant or dissimulation]” as well as “the Courtier or figure of faire semblant.” 6 A rhetorical performance may thus be either truthful or deceptive. In case of the latter it will eventually lead the recipient into blindness and ruin.

2. The Dissimulatory Type of Action: Iago’s Rhetoric of “celare artem” The sixteenth-century conceptions discussed here may be applied to an analysis of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. There is scarcely any play which would seem more appropriate for such a task than Othello. This is particularly true of those scenes in which Iago entices Othello to evil. Even Thomas Rymer,

4

5

6

Cf. Baldassare Castiglione, The Booke of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1928, rpt. 1959, p. 46: “Therefore that may bee saide to be a verie arte, that appeareth not to be arte, neither ought a man to put more diligence in any thing than in covering it: for in case it be open, it looseth credite cleane and maketh a man litle set by.” - Page 100: “And for all hee be skilfull and doth well understand it, yet will I have him to dissemble the studie and paines that a man must needes take in all thinges that are well done.” - On irony cf. Dilwyn Knox, Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony. Leiden / New York / Köln: Brill, 1989. On the relationship between the two tracts cf. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978, passim; on Puttenham’s poetics cf. Dorothee Rölli-Alkemper, Höfische Poetik in der englischen Renaissance: George Puttenhams “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589). München: Fink, 1996. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 (1936), pp. 168, 299 f.

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who harshly criticized the play for different reasons, appreciated the dramatic relevance of scene III.iii, although he rejected the cause on which it rested: Whence comes it, then, that this is the top scene, the Scene that raises Othello above all other Tragedies on our Theatres? It is purely from Action: from the Mops and the Mows, the Grimace, the Grins and Gesticulation. 7

To Rymer the effectiveness of the scene is its “action,” i. e. role play by means of facial expressions and gestures. However, it did not occur to Rymer to investigate the rhetorical foundation of this role play, even though that “action” formed a substantial part of rhetorical theory and was closely tied to theatrical theory during the Renaissance. 8 Even more striking is the fact that Othello’s entire temptation is presented by Shakespeare as an act of persuasion. It is the success of this persuasion which produces the tragedy. Iago’s rhetoric belongs to the genus iudiciale: he acts as the accuser while Desdemona represents the accused. Othello is first her defender, afterwards her judge and executioner. 9 An analysis of the way in which Iago conducts the trial shows that it is modelled on the classical oration, even if it is distributed over several scenes and acts. If one takes into account the familiarity of the rhetorical system during Shakespeare’s age, it is not surprising that the Renaissance writer made use of it. The rhetorical method of analysis was also employed by humanist commentators, who interpreted the scenes and acts of the comedies of the widely-known Roman dramatist Terence according to the categories of the classical oration. 10 Given that Desdemona has been blameless so far, Iago has to try hard to incriminate her. He does so in a loosely structured judicial oration, which is interrupted by dialogues and monologues and, in one instance, even by an entire scene (III.iv).

7

8

9

10

Thomas Rymer, “A Short View of Tragedy” (1693), in: Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. Ed. J.E. Spingarn. 3 vols. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957 (11908-1909), vol. II, p. 238. Cf. B.L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, chap. 1: “Acting and Rhetoric,” and passim. Cf. Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web. Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1956, chap. 5: “Action and Language” (pp. 137 ff.). Cf. Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1964 (11950), p. 6 ff.; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Five-Act Structure. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 21963, pp. 54-56; Edwin W. Robbins, Dramatic Characterization in Printed Commentaries on Terence, 1473-1600. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1951. - Wolfgang G. Müller refers to a similar phenomenon in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in his essay “A Hidden Oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Sprachkunst 6 (1975), 104-114.

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2.1. Iago’s exordium: The Art of Insinuation The first words of Iago’s indictment are: “Ha, I like not that” (III.iii.34). 11 When Othello asks him: “What dost thou say?”, he responds: “Nothing, my lord, or if - I know not what” (35-36). With this remark he is referring to Cassio who has just won Desdemona as a supporter for his rehabilitation and who departs as he sees the general approaching. Iago’s words seem spontaneous on two accounts: he refers to a concrete situation, and he uses a specific type of language: the emotional interjection “Ha,” the equally emotional verb “like,” the aposiopesis “if ” and the claim not to know anything. According to Puttenham, Iago’s aporia presents him as “the Doubtful,” his remark “Cassio, my lord?” (39) shows him as a “Questioner.” 12 Judging from Iago’s preceding monologues and conversations with Roderigo, however, the spectator has already come to know that this action is well planned (cf. II.iii.372-377). Therefore, his spontaneous remarks seem artificial, his emotions feigned and his role play a mere disguise. Iago is an actor-poet, who knows how to conceal his art - a fact which is revealed by his dissimulatory remark: “I know not what.” He has learned from the orators that a person has to be moved himself, if he wants to move others, and that in the exordium a seemingly spontaneous and natural speech (extemporalis oratio) will create a lasting effect. 13 A look at a later conversation between Iago and Othello reveals a further characteristic of Iago’s exordium. When Othello discloses to Iago that Cassio acted as an agent in his marriage with Desdemona, his reaction is: Iago. Indeed? Oth. Indeed? Ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? Iago. Honest, my lord? Oth. Honest? Ay, honest. Iago. My lord, for aught I know. Oth. What dost thou think? Iago. Think, my lord? Oth. Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me, As if there were some monster in thy thought,

11

12

13

Quotations follow the Arden edition by E.A.J. Honigman. London: Nelson, 1997, rpt. 2002. Quotations from Shakespeare’s other plays follow the Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Cf. Puttenham, Arte, p. 226: “Aporia, or the Doubtfull,” p. 211: “Erotema, or the Questioner.” Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. II.v.7; IV.i.8-9, 54, 56-58.

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Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something, […] (III.iii.102-112)

Again, Iago is the “Questioner,” if only in a slightly different way. He imitates Othello and acts as his echo. His behaviour thus corresponds to the figure of mimesis, the function of which Henry Peacham describes as follows: The vse hereof serueth properly to commend and depraue, butt most specially to reprehend and deride […] it may be compared […] to a glasse and an eccho the one representing the gesture and countenance, the other resounding the imitation of voice and speech. 14

Peacham’s “depraue” may be applied to Iago’s use of the adjective “honest,” with which he questions Cassio’s sincerity. By employing mimesis, however, he further achieves what contemporary rhetorical tracts regarded as the most important task an orator had to fulfil in the exordium, namely attentum parare. 15 Iago’s facial expressions are also subordinated to this task. What Othello observes among them are the “stops” (124). His reaction shows that he is familiar with the rhetorical quality of these devices of actio: For such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom; […] (124-125).

In fact, Thomas Wilson translated the rhetorical device praecisio (aposiopesis) as: “A stop, of half tellyng of a tale.” 16 The implication was that it was possible to deceive by hiding something, a fact which Abraham Fraunce described with the word “concealing.” 17 Shakespeare himself referred to the dramatic qualities of this rhetorical figure in Richard III, where he had Gloucester address Buckingham with the words: Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour, Murder thy breath in middle of a word, And then again begin, and stop again, As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror? (III.v.1-4)

The dissimulatory “as if ” in this quotation may as well be applied to Iago, who acts as if “distraught” for the purpose of arousing Othello’s attention. 14

15

16

17

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll. Frankfurt/M. / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1996, p. 137. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, p. 137: “The perfect Orator by this figure […] causeth great attention.” Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. T.J. Derrick, p. 359: “A Stoppe is, when we breake of our tale before we have told it.” - Quintilian, Inst. Or. XI.iii.173, mentions this figure while dealing with actio. Cf. also Lausberg, Handbook, § 887 ff.: “Reticentia.” Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). Ed. E. Seaton, Oxford: Blackwell 1950, p. 80.

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Once he has achieved this, he is prepared to lead Othello into a (rhetorical) nightmare world. Iago has to be an actor-poet, because Desdemona and Cassio enjoy a reputation as respectable persons. Owing to this circumstance any accuser is unlikely to get a hearing. In rhetorical theory, such a case would be described as causa turpis. As Wilson stated in his Arte of Rhetorique, a causa turpis requires an extraordinarily skilful exordium: If the cause be lothsome, or suche as will not be well borne withall, but nedeth muche helpe, and favour of the hearers: it shalbe the speakers parte, prively to get fauour […]. A privy begynnyng, or crepyng in, otherwyse called Insinuation must then, and not els be used, when the judge is greaved with us, and our cause hated of the hearers. 18

Thus it stands to reason that Iago rejects the “plaine beginning,” which would be appropriate in a causa honesta, and uses insinuatio instead. A bit later, his wife Emilia will utter the truth unwillingly by calling her mistress’s libeller a “busy and insinuating rogue” (IV.ii.133). The rhetoric of insinuation is characterized by concealment. In order to be successful, it requires a skilful orator. By using the rhetoric of insinuation, Iago aims to stylize his criminal acts as a rhetorical piece of art. Apart from the attentum parare, two further tasks await the orator in an exordium: benevolum parare and docilem parare. An orator has to create a sympathetic mood in his audience, and he has to inform them about the case in question. Iago chooses the former alternative when he proclaims: “My lord, you know I love you” (III.iii.119). Iago argues a sua persona 19 and relies on something which is beyond rhetorical communication, the ethos of “honest Iago.” With this “inartificial” evidence he is able to persuade Othello that his “stops” are no mere “tricks of custom,” but rather “close delations, working from the heart, / That passion cannot rule” (126-127). The ethos of “honest Iago” also functions as a proof in the argumentation that follows. It helps to make the lies which are uttered appear to be the truth. 18

19

Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, pp. 210, 216. Cf. also the relevant passages in Thomas Vicars, Xeiragvgi¬a: Manvdvctio ad Artem Rhetoricam. London: A. Matthew, 1621, p. 7: “quid est Insinuatio? In qua ea omnia quae diximus peraguntur, sed obscure` & et cum quada˜ dissimulatione atq; circuitione, proinde hoc exordiendi genus non adhibetur nisi quando res, de qua agitur turpis est, aut animus auditoris jam antea de ea persuasus, aut per quando eos, qui prius dixerint, audieˆdo fatigatus sit.” - For causa turpis cf. Lausberg, Handbook, § 265. - Iago mentions in III.iii.417 “this cause.” For further instances and the juridical meaning of this term cf. J. Money, “Othello’s ‘It is the cause … ’: An analysis,” Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953), 94-105. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. IV.i.44: “Si causa laborabimus, persona subveniat.” Cf. Ad Her. I.iv.8.

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The docilem parare, however, is of greater importance in an exordium, where it is created by means of insinuation. In Iago’s first remarks about Cassio, the accuser’s charge of guilt can already be heard, even if it is still embedded in a comparison: Cassio, my lord? no, sure, I cannot think it That he would steal away so guilty-like Seeing you coming. (III.iii.39-41)

Rhetorically speaking, this remark may be characterized as a negatio: […] a denial or refusall to speake, as, I will not say that which I might, I will not call you, &c. when neuerthelesse we speake and tell al. 20

According to Abraham Fraunce, the negatio belongs to irony, which means that the actor-poet again comes into play. In fact, Iago’s following remarks (III.iii.136-157) do not give any concrete information. By means of general circumscriptions and commonplace sayings (“abuses,” “faults”), however, they succeed in permanently arousing Othello’s curiosity. Furthermore, Iago secures his superior’s benevolence by presenting himself in an unfavourable light, thus playing the part of Puttenham’s “Disabler.” 21 He does not even hesitate to utter a fictitious confession (confessio) 22: “Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false” (139). The accuser appears under the guise of the accused. A more perfect concealment of the eiron’s art seems hardly imaginable.

2.2. Iago’s propositio and narratio: From the Abstract to the Particular Next in Iago’s oration comes the propositio, the naming of the topic: “O, beware of jealousy” (168). This is very general, but at the same time bears emotional qualities. The context shows corresponding characteristics, as Iago speaks in aphorisms: “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, / Is the immediate jewel of their souls: […]” (159 ff.), “That cuckold lives in bliss / Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger […]” (169 ff.), “Poor and content is rich […]” (174 ff.). To use Puttenham’s term, he appears as a 20 21

22

Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, p. 13. Puttenham, Arte, p. 185: “Meiosis, or the Disabler.” Cf. Puttenham’s explanation: “But if you diminish and abbase a thing by way of spight or mallice, as it were to depraue it, such speach is by the figure Meiosis or the disabler […].” The confessio is a “remedy” of the causa turpis: “confessio criminis […] prima medicina est” (Grill. p. 602,5, quoted in Lausberg, Handbook, § 273; cf. § 856, which makes reference to the irony of this figure in Quintilian, Inst. Or. IX.ii.51).

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“Sage Sayer.” 23 Because his aphorisms are antitheta, which involve a negative second part, he also poses as a “Quarreller”: 24 Poor and content is rich, and rich enough, But riches fineless is as poor as winter To him that ever fears he shall be poor. Good God, the souls of all my tribe defend From jealousy. (III.iii.174-178)

The antithesis “But…” in the last two verses refers to “jealousy” in the form of a dramatic exclamation (exclamatio). Through this means the generality of the aphorism is endowed with an energetic force. At the same time, however, Iago’s speech does not get personal in the sense that it would lose the quality of an insinuation. It seems that Iago’s words do not so much address Othello as Iago himself, or to be more precise, “the souls of all my tribe.” Since Othello demands a proof from Iago (180-196), the latter has to specify his assertions. However, he does not arrive at a confirmatio immediately (199: “I speak not yet of proof ”), but begins, as prescribed by the rhetorical system, with a narratio in which “the matter must bee opened, and euery thyng liuely tolde, that the hearers may fully perceaue what we goe about.” 25 A narratio is generally defined by brevity, clarity and probability, and Iago’s account possesses the first two of these characteristics. It comprises only one line: “Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio” (200). The probability of this implicit claim is gained through a reference to the typical Venetian “country forms” (241); Iago appeals to the aptum of a national set of role types. 26 He specifies his claim by alluding to Desdemona’s play-acting (213: “seeming”) before her wedding, thus stamping her as an actress. His advice 23

24

25

26

Puttenham, Arte, p. 236: “Sententia. Or the Sage sayer.” The role of the “Sage sayer” was familiar to Elizabethans. In George Gascoigne’s The Glass of Government (1575) there is a character called Gnomaticus, in Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (c. 1598) there is a Nicholas Proverbs. Puttenham, Arte, p. 210 on the antitheton: “[…] we may call him the Quarreller, for so be al such persons as delight in taking the contrary part of whatsoeuer shalbe spoken.” Wilson, Arte, p. 222. Quintilian (Inst. Or. IV.ii.63-64) gives an account of the quarrel between orators concerning the question, whether a narratio should contain eœna¬rgeia or not; he refers to Cicero on this point, Topica XXVI.97: “[…] itemque narrationes ut ad suos fines spectent, id est ut planae sint, ut breves, ut evidentes, ut credibiles, ut moderatae, ut cum dignitate”. Cf. Wilson, Arte, p. 355 ff., who suggests several typologies in his treatment of the illustris explanatio or “an evident declaration of a thyng.” One is built on nationalities. - On national steretypes in the Early Modern Age cf. Joep Leerssen, “Volksaard en mensenkennis in de zeventiende eeuw: Van bijgeloof tot kennissysteem,” in: Vreemd volk: Beeldvorming over buitenlanders in de vroegmoderne tijd. Ed. H. Hendrix & T. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998, pp. 121-136.

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to Othello (248-259) has the aim to turn the latter into an actor. Later, before meeting Desdemona, he will utter the words: “O, hardness to dissemble!” (III.iv.33) Indeed, Othello plays his part badly. It is not only for Iago, the actor-poet, that the world is inhabited by actors; his interlocutors are turned into actors as well.

2.3. Iago’s confirmatio: From “Artificial” to “Inartificial” Evidence As early as in the first “seduction” scene, Iago says to Othello: “I see you’re moved” (228), an assertion which Othello rejects. In the second scene Othello’s emotional excitement is increased, and it is at this point that the evidence is presented. The presentation of the evidence is introduced by Othello’s demand that Iago should offer either an “ocular proof ” (363) or a full “probation” (367 f.). These terms represent “inartificial” and “artificial” proofs which may be a part of the probatio or confirmatio. Before meeting Othello’s demand, however, Iago seeks to restore the latter’s benevolence. He achieves this by an appeal to “honesty,” which means that now his ethos is at stake against Desdemona’s. Othello’s words illustrate this confrontation: By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. […] (386-388)

The antitheses in each of these lines indicate that Iago’s persuasive acts have been successfully carried out. The causa turpis has become a causa dubia. According to the Rhetorica ad Herennium (I.iii.5) this is given, “cum habet in se causa et honestatis et turpitudinis partem.” The “either - or” in this explanation shows that a fixed set of moral values can no longer be presupposed. At this point the deceitful rhetorical appearance may be set to work easily. Iago proceeds by proving Othello’s demand for “ocular proof ” to be absurd: Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? Behold her topped? (398-399)

He achieves his aim by creating an obscene scenario in which Othello acts as a fictitious eyewitness. This results in Othello’s vehement emotional outburst. Spurred on by his own “success,” Iago creates a further scenario. Viewed linguistically, it represents the rhetorical ekphrasis of an action (descriptio actionis / rei). 27 It is introduced by the topoi of self-diminution, typical of Iago’s 27

Cf. Joannes Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum. London: G. Dewes, 1562, p. 87: “Pragmatographia pragmatvgra›i¬a, rei descriptio est quum id quod fit aut factum est, omni-

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persuasive technique (413: “I do not like the office”), as well as a propria persona (415: “foolish honesty and love”). The description acquires a graphic nature through the use of verbs, the emotional effect of which is increased by a polysyndetic sequence (427: “And sigh, and kiss, and […]”). Direct speech is used three times, each time furnished with pompous apostrophes - two by Desdemona, and one by fate - which express the contrastive emotions of love and hate. These energetic devices produce the impression in Othello that the action described takes place before his very eyes. Othello, accordingly, bursts into the vehement exclamatio: “O monstrous! monstrous!” (428) This example proves that Puttenham’s translation of the figure pragmatographia (descriptio rei) as “the Counterfait action” 28 was well chosen. Iago’s description is insincere (“counterfait”). It does not represent an imitatio vitae but its distortion. As an actor-poet Iago is not a euphantasiotos but a phantasticus. The mirror which he holds up to Othello shows nothing but “figures very monstruous & illfauored.” 29 Othello’s reaction fits well into this picture. By trying to convince his interlocutor of the truth of a “counterfait action” through rhetorical evidence, Iago represents a perversion of the Orphic poeta orator. Puttenham described the latter as follows: […] the Poet is of all other the most auncient Orator, as he that by good & pleasant perswasions first reduced the wilde and beastly people into publicke societies and ciuilitie of life, insinuating vnto them, vnder fictions with sweete and coloured speeches, many wholesome lessons and doctrines […]. 30

Iago’s doctrine is not salutary but corrupting. His speech is “tinged,” but it is not pleasing. It does not introduce Othello into civilized society but serves to alienate him from it. Iago’s aim is the restoration of a chaos, which was unconsciously anticipated in Othello’s address to Desdemona: “[…] and

28 29

30

bus fucatum coloribus ob oculos ponimus, vt auditorem siue lectorem, iam extra se positum, velut in theatro, auocet.” This is followed by a summary of Quintilian’s well-known description of a conquered and destroyed town (Inst. Or. VIII.iii.67-69). After that we read: “Huiusmodi exemplorum nusquam non magna copia, praesertim apud Poetas, & Historicos Poetis proximos.” (p. 88) - Cf. also Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, pp. 137-138: Pragmatographia. Puttenham, Arte, p. 239. Puttenham, Arte, p. 19. One source is Quintilian’s Inst. Or. VI.ii.29 ff., where mental images (visiones) of an object are postulated as a precondition for its descriptive eœna¬rgeia (illustratio, evidentia). What is needed, is an eyœ›antasi¬vtow, “qui sibi res, voces, actus secundum verum optime finget” (30). - For the ›antastiko¬w, who does not proceed “secundum verum”, cf. Rainer Lengeler, Tragische Wirklichkeit als groteske Verfremdung bei Shakespeare. Köln / Graz: Böhlau, 1964, p. 36 ff., where an interpretation of Puttenham’s account is given, together with an analysis of the “temptation scenes” in Othello (p. 120 ff.). Puttenham, Arte, p. 196.

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when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (III.iii.91-92). Iago’s insinuation does not only rest on rhetorical irony; it is also shaped by the deceitful pretence of Satan, whose aim is the destruction of the God-given order of things. Iago continues the tradition of the Dissimulation figure in the morality play The Three Ladies of London (1584), a character ultimately modelled on the medieval Vice figure. 31 Iago seeks to enforce the strength of his “proofs” (363) by multiplying them. First he confronts Othello with a further image: Cassio cleans his beard with Desdemona’s handkerchief which Othello had given her as a wedding gift. This time Othello believes Iago’s account to be true and does not question it (447). He sentences Desdemona with a solemn oath of revenge. Since Desdemona refrains from refuting the accusations against her in III.v., Iago is able to proceed with his presentation of evidence in IV.i. Again, he acts as an “insinuating rogue” by offering a hypothetical example (10: “But if I give my wife a handkerchief - ”), thus linking it implicitly to the case in question. He himself is speaking in general terms, while it is Othello who specifies the problem and enquires about Cassio, who is the present owner of the handkerchief. Here, we are confronted with a contrast between the quaestio infinita, which has a general, philosophical quality and which has no particular intention, and the quaestio finita, which is related to a specific location, time, and person, and a particular aim. 32 The general aspects function as a kind of disguise through which something particular is indicated. Again, Iago delays the evidence for his suggestions and thereby creates suspense. His devices are a general parenthesis (25-29), an aposiopesis (32), and a negation (32). In the end he acts as a witness conveying Cassio’s “confession of guilt.” 33 In a paroxysm of grief and rage Othello falls to the ground. While he is unconscious, Iago gives up his play-acting and takes on the role of a distant observer: “Work on, / My medicine, work” (44-45). The catharsis which he produces in Othello is the therapeutic catharsis of the Orphic actor-orator in a perverted form. It does not aim to cleanse the spectator from his passions, but makes sure that these will overrule his reason.

31

32 33

Cf. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, and Stanley E. Hyman, Iago: Some Approaches to the Illusion of His Motivation. New York: Atheneum, 1970. - For an analysis of Iago’s action as an intrigue cf. Ernst Theodor Sehrt, “Handlungsprobleme in Othello: Die Intrige,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch West (1981), 178-200. Wilson, Arte, pp. 1 ff. The homonymic pun “lie” (IV.i.34) reveals the ambiguity of rhetorical semblance.

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After Othello has regained his consciousness, Iago prepares for the “ocular proof ” that his master had asked for in the beginning. This will finally drive Othello into madness (100). At the same time, the orator replaces the imaginary evidence of his descriptio actionis by the visual evidence of the actio: it is not merely the report of the culprit’s confession which is put before Othello’s eyes, but the confession itself. That “inartificial” evidence is restricted to visual aspects according to the remarks which Iago directs at Othello: And mark the fleers, the gibes and notable scorns, That dwell in every region of his face; […] I say, but mark his gesture; […]. (IV.i.83-84, 88)

as well as to himself: […] his [sc. Othello’s] unbookish jealousy must construe Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures and light behaviour, Quite in the wrong. (101-103)

It is further proven by Othello’s reactions, which indicate that he has not grasped the meaning of Cassio’s words at all: Iago beckons me: now begins the story. (131) Crying ‘O dear Cassio!’ as it were: his gesture imports it. (136-137)

Othello interprets actio as a kind of “dumb show” in which Iago functions as a presenter who inserts the missing words. He had already played a similar part before, when he interpreted Cassio’s parting from Desdemona in his own specific way: “I cannot think it / That he would steal away so guilty-like” (III.iii.38-39). It becomes obvious that visual signs possess an ambiguity as long as their semantic quality is not clearly determined. By creating a coherent semantic context which supports a particular interpretation of the dramatic actio, Iago acts as poet and actor while it is to Othello that the part of the spectator is ascribed. This spectator, however, is not entirely passive but, guided by Iago’s assistance, also has his share in the construction of meaning. Othello’s jealousy may be compared to the spectator’s imagination in the prologue to Henry V: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prol. 23). In a work of art such as Henry V, however, an artificial quality is presupposed, while Othello mistakes the products of the imagination for reality. The handkerchief, which has come to serve Iago as “ocular proof ” by mere accident, shows the weakness of “inartificial” proofs. That Othello does not even recognize it fully, is revealed by the potentialis in his aside: By heaven, that should be my handkerchief! (IV.i.156),

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as well as by the question he raises: Was that mine? (171).

The only thing that matters for Othello is the fact that “honest Iago” has witnessed the scene. Only through Iago’s testimony is the handkerchief turned into the final and most convincing piece of evidence. If Iago’s proofs are “artificial” according to his own perspective, to Othello they appear “inartificial.” What seems real in Othello’s view is nothing but the semblance which Iago has created through his rhetorical art of persuasion. Desdemona’s handkerchief becomes a piece of evidence, which is associated with pathos and which, according to Quintilian (Inst. Or. VI.i.36), is qualified to “move tragedies” (tragoedias movere).

2.4. Digression: the Evidence of confirmatio in “Cymbeline” II.iv A particularly revealing play in the present context is Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. In the fourth scene of its second act a villain tries to persuade a man of his wife’s infidelity in the same manner as Iago does in Othello. Like Iago, Iachimo succeeds in gradually increasing the credibility of his argument. First he merely uses words, but then he inserts “inartificial” signa into his confirmatio. 34 He begins by vividly describing Imogen’s sleeping chamber and the paintings with which it is decorated (66-91). This rhetorical description is constructed from the point of view of a fictitious spectator who seems to be personally involved. This is not only demonstrated by the emotional quality of the reporter’s comments, but also by the metaphors through which the images are brought to life. 35 Posthumus tries to object to this kind of proof, although he must acknowledge its emotional effect. The cause for this effect is the imaginary picture produced by the rhetorical description. Under its influence the recipient is turned into an empathic spectator. 36 Seen from the perspec34 35

36

Cf. II.iv.61 ff. In contrast to Othello, exordium and peroratio are omitted in this case. For rhetorical descriptions of pictures cf. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press, 1958, rpt. 1974, and Gerard LeCoat, The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550-1650. Bern / Franfurt/M.: Lang, 1975. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.ii.32: “Insequitur eœna¬rgeia, quae a Cicerone inlustratio et evidentia nominatur, quae non tam dicere videtur quam ostendere, et adfectus non aliter, quam si rebus ipsis intersimus, sequentur.” Cf. also n. 28, 30. - A contemporary source, Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architectvre (London 1624) characterizes the enargeia of a picture by means of the actio-metaphor: “Affection is the Liuely Representment, of any passion whatsoever, as if the Figures stood not vpon a Cloth or Boorde, but as if they were acting vpon a Stage; […]” (p. 88).

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tive of the communicator, it may be regarded as an imaginative form of evidence. The sensual level of evidence is achieved when Iachimo confronts Posthumus with a bangle which he pretends to have received from Imogen: She stripp’d it from her arm. I see her yet: Her pretty action did outsell her gift, And yet enrich’d it too. She gave it me, and said She priz’d it once. (101-104)

Here it is even more evident that he appears as an eye-witness who relives a former experience in bodily presence. This is explained by the qualifying expressions “pretty”, “outsell”, and “prize”. Iachimo makes use of the same rhetorical strategy when at the end of his reasoning he fulfils Posthumus’ demand for more evidence by describing a physical trait of Imogen: […] under her breast (Worthy her pressing) lies a mole, right proud Of that most delicate lodging. By my life, I kiss’d it, and it gave me present hunger To feed again, though full. (134-138)

Again, a lofty signum, in this case a verbally described birthmark, is integrated into a descriptio actionis. This itself is enhanced by animistic metaphors, by emotional parenthesis, by verbs of action and an emphatic exclamation. The evidence of this image so convinces Posthumus that he refrains from demanding a second “inartificial” proof, namely a confirmation of Iachimo’s statement with an oath. 37 Rhetorical semblance has overwhelmed his fantasy entirely. Iachimo’s aim to win a bet is achieved by the emotional defeat of his opponent. Posthumus’ response to Iachimo’s actio is an actio itself: “I’ll do something -” (149). Here, the rhetorical performance is a cause for real action. After Iago’s presentation of the evidence, Othello appears equally determined: “How shall I murder him [sc. Cassio], Iago?” (167).

2.5. Iago’s peroratio: From Rhetorical actio to Real Action Shakespeare does not allow Othello to take action at once, he rather lets him waver between feeling an indignation about Desdemona’s adultery (IV.i.178: “Ay, let her rot and perish) and pitying her (192: “But yet the pity of it, Iago”). Indignatio and commiseratio are typical emotions of a peroratio, the end 37

In rhetoric an oath is regarded as an “inartificial” proof, cf. Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer. Leipzig: Teubner, 21885, pp. 184-186.

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of a speech. By showing pity, Othello plays the role of a defendant, by being angry he plays the role of a judge who succumbs to Iago’s plea. Iago, however, has meanwhile changed his initial causa turpis into a causa honesta and persuades him into a recapitulation of the alleged case. According to the rules of rhetoric, such a recapitulation must be governed by brevitas: “Cuckold me! … With mine officer!” (196-198). Iago’s comments on these words (197: “O, ’tis foul in her”; 199: “That’s fouler!”) show him to be an “Auancer,” who intends “to vrge and enforce the matter we speake of.” 38 His rhetorical actio ends with an instruction how to act: “[…] strangle her in her bed even the bed she hath contaminated” (IV.i.204-205). Othello, who is judge and executioner at the same time, is going to execute the judgement.

3. A Typology of Rhetorical Action in Shakespeare The preceding paragraphs have shown Iago as a representative of a specific type of rhetorical action. He typifies the insinuator, who gradually worms his way into the listener’s consciousness; the poeta phantasticus, who invents monstrous situations and actions; the protean actor, who permanently changes his linguistic and behavioural roles; and the eiron, whose characteristic feature is disguise. His rhetoric is not defined by intellectual, but by emotional persuasion. It succeeds on two grounds: on the one hand through the evidence of imaginary action, which is created by rhetorical descriptions, on the other hand through the visual evidence of signs and actions which are either emotional themselves or are interpreted as emotional. In the first instance Othello becomes a fictitious, in the second a (supposedly) real witness of a spectacle of passions, which rests merely on rhetorical semblance. In contrast to the eiron, who is actor and viewer at the same time, Othello is not able to distinguish between fictitious and real actions. Therefore he does not experience any catharsis from emotions, but falls victim to them. In those cases where Othello appears as an orator, his rhetorical action is different from Iago’s. This is evident in his verbal self-projection before the senate of Venice, where he has to defend himself against the charges of sorcery and seduction (I.iii.76-170). As in Iago’s persuasion of Othello, the communicative situation is juridical - except for the fact that Othello defends himself (defensio) and Iago accuses Desdemona (accusatio). The two speeches also differ in several other respects. Othello’s speech is not shaped 38

Puttenham, Arte, p. 218: “Auxesis, or the Auancer”.

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by pathos, but by ethos, i. e. it aims at arousing moderate rather than passionate emotions. 39 Its objective is to convince, not to persuade the listener. Therefore, it does not need an insinuative structure and can make use of rhetorical rules in an almost textbook-like fashion. 40 The reason for such a rhetorical exhibition, which makes no use of celare artem, can be found in the speaker’s belief that the plain truth is the only piece of evidence which needs to be presented. On such grounds the phrase “I will a round unvarnished tale deliver” (I.iii.91) loses its character as an exordial commonplace - just as Othello generally refuses to play any theatrical roles. This does not prevent him, however, from arranging his descriptio actionis, which focuses on his way of courting Desdemona, 41 in so lively a manner that the senators are inclined to take his description as sufficient proof of his innocence. At the end of his speech Othello offers an “inartificial” proof (as Iago will do later on): Desdemona’s testimony. In contrast to the analogous evidence offered by Iago, however, this sensory evidence is unequivocal. It rests on a plain avowal of marital fidelity. Desdemona represents a third type of rhetorical action. The adjective “rhetorical” may seem misleading in this instance, because Desdemona has decided to waive her personal self-interest and rhetorical calculation - characteristics which in other respects are typical of acts of persuasion. Whenever she appears as a defendant - for this is her central rhetorical office -, she does not care for her own safety and fulfils her task with utmost honesty and plainness. This happens for the first time before the senate of Venice, where she confirms Othello’s defence through her ethos (I.iii.180-191). While defending Cassio, she displays a readiness for self-sacrifice which does not falter even in the face of her own death: “[…] therefore be merry, Cassio, / For thy solicitor shall rather die / Than give thy cause away” (III.iii.26-28). 39

40

41

For rhetorical ethos cf. Wilhelm Süss, Ethos: Studien zur älteren griechischen Rhetorik. Leipzig / Berlin: Teubner, 1910, and Klaus Dockhorn, Macht und Wirkung der Rhetorik. Bad Homburg v.d.H.: Gehlen, 1968, passim. The structure of Othello’s speech in I.iii. is 77-90: exordium; 90-94: propositio / narratio; 125-167: argumentatio (narratio); 168-170: peroratio. - Substructure of exordium: 77-78: attentum parare; 79-82: docilem parare; 82-90: benevolum parare. This textbook analysis could be continued. Cf. the comments in T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s ‘Small Latin & Lesse Greek,’ vol. 2, pp. 198-200. The subject of this description is itself a description, thus forming a “speech within a speech”. Its effect on Desdemona is that of a drama, because it produces the typical emotions of a tragedy: admiratio (“strange”) and commiseratio (“pitiful”). For these effects of catharsis cf. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. Ed. G. Shepherd. London: Nelson, 1965, p. 118 (“stirring the effects of admiration and commiseration”) and the commentary ad loc., p. 189-190. In Othello the description even has an effect on the doge: “I think this tale would win my daughter, too, […].” (171)

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That this statement is no mere pose, is proven in III.iv.44-97 and in IV.i.220-228, where Desdemona defends her client, even though she has been accused herself in the meantime, and exposes herself to danger. Her one and only dishonesty she commits for the sake of another person. By accusing herself of having attempted suicide (V.ii.122, 125), she tries to free Othello from the accusation of murder. The unrhetorical, if not antirhetorical, inartificiality of Desdemona’s actions is demonstrated by the plainness of her style and the simplicity of her argumentation in the scenes IV.iii and V.ii. Even more typical than her linguistic behaviour, however, is her silence in IV.i., where she departs from the scene without defending herself: “I will not stay to offend you” (246). In this “rhetoric of silence” she resembles Cordelia, who in King Lear responds to the hyperbolic rhetoric of her sisters with the aside: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (I.i.62). Shortly afterwards, when Lear asks her what she has to say, she merely responds: “Nothing, my lord” (87). The motivation behind this refusal to act rhetorically is similar in both cases. Cordelia characterizes this as “love,” in Othello it is called “obedience” (IV.i.247). Thus we may distinguish between three types of rhetorical action, which are represented by Iago, Othello, and Desdemona respectively: I: dissimulatory rhetoric (celare artem), II: displayed rhetoric (demonstrare artem), III: “negative” rhetoric or anti-rhetoric (negare artem). 42 These types represent three different attitudes towards the art of rhetoric. The most complex one is the first, because dissimulatory rhetoric usually attempts to make the best possible use of persuasive techniques, but at the same time tries to hide them from the listener. The impression of “naturalness” which results from such a strategy is different from the “spontaneity” which is achieved by rejecting any rhetorical means whatsoever. Curiously enough, this latter strategy also has its place in the rhetorical tradition, namely in the plain-style programme revived around 1600. 43 Together with displayed 42

43

The phrases demonstrare artem and negare artem are framed in analogy to celare artem. For celare artem as a cause for altera natura cf. Harry Caplan’s commentary on the rhetoric Ad Herennium IV.vii.10. London: Heinemann / Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; Christoff Neumeister, Grundsätze der forensischen Rhetorik: Gezeigt an Gerichtsreden Ciceros. München: Hueber, 1964, chap. IV: ‘‘Das Verbergen der rhetorischen Kunst“ (pp. 130155), and E.W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York / London: Columbia University Press, 1964. Cf. the summary in Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style. Cambridge, Mass. / London: M.I.T. Press, 1968.

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rhetoric these two types constitute a descending series on a scale of the will to be artful. 44 Owing to the specific nature of these types, they scarcely ever appear in their pure form in Shakespeare’s plays, but often in mixed forms. In the latter case, the dominance of a specific type of action is responsible for the dramatic function of a character. Thus, Iago is characterized through his behaviour fairly clearly, but Othello, who represents the second type, bears traces of the first type as well, as in the so-called “brothel-scene” (IV.ii), the murderscene (V.ii), and in his final monologue, where he hides behind the double masks of a Turk and his former self: Set you down this And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him - thus! He stabs himself. (V.ii.349-354)

Although this role-play is an effect of Othello’s self-estrangement and thus part of his tragedy, it does not represent an essential trace of his character. The type which dominates his rhetoric in other cases is displayed rhetoric. Regarding the third type of rhetorical action the case is similar. As is shown from the further development of King Lear, Cordelia not only makes use of anti-rhetoric, but also employs a ceremonial diction (type II). Such is the case, for instance, when she departs from Lear and her sisters (I.i.223 ff.) as well as in her reappearance in IV.iv. It may therefore be concluded (1) that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters are characterized by dominating rather than pure types of rhetorical action, and (2) that these may either be restricted to certain situational contexts or realized throughout the whole play. A problem closely linked to the types of rhetorical action is the relationship between rhetoric and ethics. As is known, classical and humanist rhetoric postulated the ideal of the vir bonus dicendi peritus, i. e. a unity of verbal and moral behaviour. It seems that Shakespeare intended to question the possibility of realizing this ideal by presenting dissimulatory rhetoricians and antirhetoricians. The former may embody rhetorical perfection, but also moral corruption. The latter fail in their verbal task, but succeed in remaining sincere. Iago prototypically represents the first type; his dissimulatory rhetoric 44

This typology, which is based on the concept of ars, does not exclude other possible typologies. They may be based, for instance, on situational aspects and thus produce a triad of judicial, deliberative and demonstrative actions. In the present discussion, however, the relation to ars is preferred to that of situation.

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proves him to be a villain. The other type is realized through characters such as Desdemona or Cordelia, the imperturbable defenders of goodness. The ethical groundwork of the second type of rhetorical action is less evident, although its representative Othello seems to indicate a positive evaluation on Shakespeare’s part. This question can only be solved by a thorough investigation of a much bigger text corpus, one which includes Shakespeare’s comedies. 45 The following remarks may at least hint at some possible results. They deal with the speeches of Brutus, Mark Antony, and Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. 46 Among Shakespeare scholars, Brutus’ speech is generally acknowledged to represent a systematic application of rhetorical rules. It is shaped by ethos, it avoids role-play and seeks to convince rather than persuade the audience. The speaker is an idealist and an advocate of the republican case. His speech is different from that of Antony, who is an opportunist and a crafty demagogue and who seeks, first of all, to arouse the emotions of his listeners. In so doing he makes use of all the devices that a rhetorical actor has at hand: insinuation, simulatory and dissimulatory irony, imaginary and visual evidence in a pathos-governed display of signa, as well as the rhetorical roles from which he distinguishes himself as Iago does: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou, what course thou wilt!” (J.C. III.ii.260-261). 47 Shakespeare’s third Roman character, Coriolanus, is a devoted anti-rhetorician. 48 Applying for the position of consul, he first refuses to play the traditional 45

46

47

48

It seems that in comedies dissimulatory rhetoric often takes on a different moral value. Here, the interplay of verbal roles of action has the function of producing humour. The first encounter between Viola and Olivia in Twelth Night (I.v.169-292) is an inconspicuous, if characteristic, example of a comical confrontation of the types I and II. As regards disguise in Shakespeare, cf. A.B. Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Dawson deals with the comedies, but omits rhetorical aspects. On the role of rhetoric in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus cf. Wolfgang G. Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare. Tübingen: Narr, 1979. Already Schirmer noted the “formal” character of Brutus’ speech, cf. W.F. Schirmer, “Shakespeare und die Rhetorik [1935]”, in: Kleine Schriften. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1950, pp. 83-108, here: p. 108: “[…] weil er die Rhetorik nur wie ein Regelbuch und also schülerhaft verwertete.” Interpretations can be found in Maria Wickert, “Antikes Gedankengut in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar,’” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 82/83 (1948), 11-33, and H.F. Plett, Systematische Rhetorik: Konzepte und Analysen. München: Fink, 2000, pp. 166-171. For analyses of Antony’s speech see M.B. Kennedy, The Oration in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1942, pp. 138-139 (structure), and Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare, pp. 127-132. Cf. Müller, Die politische Rede bei Shakespeare, pp. 175-181. The fact that Coriolanus’ second speech (III.i.) is structured along the lines of the classical model does not detract from the point that Coriolanus’ attitude is basically anti-rhetorical.

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role of the petitioner. When he finally agrees to do so, he keeps an ironical distance: “[…] I will practise the insinuating nod” (II.iii.98-99). Later on, he completely forgets himself and is sanctioned with exile. In his case, rhetoric has failed because of a consistent moral behaviour. These examples demonstrate that the three types of rhetorical action, together with their moral evaluation, are a constant feature in Shakespeare’s plays, even if there may be variations in certain cases. Dissimulatory rhetoric seems to be the most promising type for drama, not only because of its many possible realizations, but also because of the dialectic relationship it creates between truth and falsehood, and between reality and semblance. It exemplifies a problem which all of Shakespeare’s tragic figures have to face: Richard III., Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus. Volumnia formulates this problem in a pun, when she reminds her son: “[…] for in such business / Action is eloquence” (Cor. III.ii.75-76). These words define “real action” and “(rhetorical) acting” as a unity. 49 Shakespeare, however, uses his protagonist Coriolanus to prove the incompatibility of these aspects, an incompatibility which leads to disaster.

49

In the Arden edition of Coriolanus. London: Methuen, 1976, Philip Brockbank quotes ad loc. (p. 233) Bacon’s Essay Of Boldnesse: “Question was asked of Demosthenes: What was the Chiefe Part of an Oratour? He answered, Action; what next? Action; what next again? Action. He said it, that knew it best; […]”. Bacon characterizes this part of rhetoric as superficial and ascribes it to the professional actor. The moral conclusion which he draws from this anecdote is based on the insight that human beings always cherish most what will turn them into fools. Bacon’s example shows that Shakespeare’s criticism on rhetorical “action” is not unique.

Intertextual Rhetoric The Comic Interlude in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Depending on the perspective chosen, the play of the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream can be classified as burlesque, 1 parody, 2 metadrama 3 or simply interlude. Perhaps it is a combination of all these aspects. A further perspective that has hitherto received only limited attention is intertextuality. Discussions of intertextuality have focused almost exclusively on the reception and reworking of the subject matter. As is well known, the story of the play-within-the-play is based on the mythological tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (Figure 64) as handed down in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, either in its Latin original or in Richard Aldington’s Elizabethan translation of 1566. 4 This kind of material intertextuality is common in Renaissance culture, which propagated and implemented the classical doctrine of imitatio. 5 1

2

3

4

5

Cf. J.W. Robinson, “Palpable Hot Ice: Dramatic Burlesque in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964), 192-204; Robert F. Wilson, “Golding’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s Burlesque Method in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” English Language Notes 7 (1969), 18-25. Cf. Hans Walter Gabler, Zur Funktion dramatischer und literarischer Parodie im elisabethanischen Drama. PhD diss., München 1965, pp. 141-148; Jörg Hasler, Shakespeare’s Theatrical Notation: The Comedies. Bern: Francke, 1974, chap. 4: “Parody and Self-Parody in the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ Interlude” (pp. 78-95). Cf. Stephen L. Smith, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare, Play and Metaplay,” The Centennial Review 21 (1977), 194-209; James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, chap. 5: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Art’s Illusory Sacrifice” (pp. 120-148). Cf. Franz Schmitt von Mühlenfels, Pyramus und Thisbe: Rezeptionstypen eines Ovidischen Stoffes in Literatur, Kunst und Musik. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1972; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 (rpt.); Charles & Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity. London / New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 64-76, esp. pp. 69-71; A.S.T. Fisher, “The Source of Shakespeare’s Interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe: A Neglected Poem,” Notes & Queries 194 (1949), 376-379; Kenneth Muir, “Pyramus and Thisbe: A Study in Shakespeare’s Method,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954), 141-153; Madeleine Doran, “Pyramus and Thisbe Once More,” in: Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. In Honour of Hardin Craig. Ed. R. Hosley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 149-161. Cf. T. Greene, The Light of Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1982; Richard J. Schoeck, Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts.

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Figure 64: David Kandel (16th cent.): Pyramus and Thisbe.

This doctrine also includes the theory and practice of structural or conceptual intertextuality, which means the concrete embodiment of principles and rules of rhetorical and poetical theories in literary texts. Such is the concept underlying the following investigation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which analyses the structures of intertextual rhetoric in the play-within-the-play of the mechanics. The progress of this mise en abıˆme can be structured into three phases: 1. Allocation of the parts, 2. Rehearsal, 3. Performance. Taken together these three phases constitute the conceptual intertextuality of the mechanics’ play. Bamberg: Kaiser, 1984; H.F. Plett (ed.), Intertextuality. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1991. - The collection of critical essays on A Midsummer Nights Dream by Dorothea Kehler. New York / London: Routledge, 1998, rpt. 2001, does not contain a contribution to the topic of intertextuality.

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1. Assignment of the Actors’ Parts (I.ii.) When the artisans appear on stage for the first time, they are at once instructed about the title and genre of the play to be performed and then discuss the question of who shall perform which part. Peter Quince, who fulfils the function of a theatrical impresario or stage manager, informs his fellow-artisans that they are to perform a play bearing the title The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe (I.ii.11-12) At first sight, the dramatic genre of the play under consideration is a comedy; but the semantic distinctness of this classification is suspended by the attribute “lamentable” and its further explication “most cruel death,” usually attributed to the opposite dramatic genre of tragedy, which possesses a higher rank on the scale of poetic genres. Thus the title formulates a semantic contradictio in se, or a paradox resulting in an ontological nothingness; for both cannot coexist simultaneously. The same paradox reappears in the announcement of the play in Act V which, as read by Theseus, runs as follows: ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth’?

and is commented upon by him in this way: Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief ? That is hot ice, and wondrous strange snow! How shall we find the concord of this discord? (V.i.56-60)

The concordia discors of this paradox announces an unheard-of play full of rare inventions. What from the ontological point of view denotes an impossibility, appears in the recipient’s view as something unexpected (inopinatum), as Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (IX.ii.22) describes it. The play of the artisans is nevertheless originally conceived as a tragedy, more precisely a love tragedy, itself an innovative mixed genre of topics and events chosen from the two traditional dramatic genres 6 from which Shakespeare had created a masterpiece in his almost simultaneously performed Romeo and Juliet, a work based in part on the classical foil of the Pyramus and Thisbe story. The actors performing in this tragedy are nominated by Quince and Bottom. The latter offers to play either lover or tyrant. The style appropriate to this dramatic genre is the genus grande, mentioned as “lofty” (35) by Bottom, who presents an intertextual sample by way of recitation. The further progress of scene I.ii demonstrates the inadequacy of roles and role-players with regard to their 6

Cf. Leonora Leet Brown, Elizabethan Love Tragedy. New York: New York University Press / London: University of London Press, 1971.

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deficient understanding resulting from an insufficient education. The effect is a series of malapropisms in the field of mythology, such as “Phibbus” (instead of Phoebus [31]) and “Thisne” (instead of Thisbe [48]), but also in such hard words as “obscenely,” where the original word remains unclear. In rhetorical theory this stylistic vice is called barbarismus. It is here deliberately and consistently employed for producing comic effects. Rhetorical intertextuality is thus engendered by the phonetic distortion of correct lexemes.

2. The Rehearsal (III.i.1-100) When the artisans reassemble, it is to rehearse the play to be performed at Duke Theseus’ court. But they run into the same problems and mishaps that have befallen them at their first meeting. Their initial fear that a stage-death may be mistaken for real death seems to be removed by Bottom’s suggestion of an additional prologue which will explain the difference. The same procedure is planned with regard to uncovering the fictionality of the lion. The assumed “realism” of representational items such as swords, lion, and moon proceeds from a misconception of the parts of the actors, which in its turn produces a comic reaction on the side of a sophisticated audience. Puck ironically refers to the simple-mindedness of these lay-actors by referring to them as “hempen homespuns” (III.i.73). Nevertheless they practise professional competence by their improvisations; for they substitute unavailabilities by availabilities: in their situation an animal, the lion, and inanimate things like a wall or the moon by human beings. In terms of rhetoric such a procedure is called prosopopoeia, a rhetorical figure of impersonation which Henry Peacham defines as “the feigning of a person, that is, whe[n] to a thing sencelesse and dumbe we feine a fit person. This figure Orators do vse as wel as Poets.” 7 Quince knows the practice of personification but lacks the correct terminology. Thus he commits the fault of a half-educated man whose ambition to appear educated makes him use “disfigure” instead of “impersonate,” an instance of the lexical error of a malapropism: [An actor] must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine (III.i.55-57).

The same mistake recurs with another hard word, when Bottom in the role of Pyramus confounds “odorous” with “odious” in his spoken line: Thisbe, the flowers of odious savours sweet - (78). 7

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593). Ed. B.-M. Koll, Frankfurt/M / Berlin / Bern / New York: Lang, 1996, p. 134.

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In both linguistic faults the result is a semantic inversion, because these barbarisms contain hidden ironies. Their interrhetorical character results from the fact that their faulty surface structures also point to their grammatically correct readings, which are either supplied by another speaker, as by Quince in the latter case, or by the reader or text commentator in the former. The semantic clash of this rhetorical intertextuality produces a comic effect. Another comic situation arises from the blurring of the caesuras of a dialogue. This is about to happen in Flute’s reciting of the text of Thisbe, on which Quince comments with his words: “You speak all your part at once, cues and all.” (94-95). The mistake, which without this remark would certainly have passed unobserved by actor and audience, results in the conversion of a dialogue into a monologue. In this case the dramaturgy of the play is turned upside down and produces a further comic effect.

3. The Performance (V.i.109-348) The performance proper of the “tedious, brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe” (V.i.56-57) begins according to the pattern of a classical oration, with an exordium that aims to render the audience attentive, benevolent and informed (aliquem attentum, benevolum, docilem parare). The theatrical implementation of these three exordial functions belongs to the normal duties of the Prologue, which here, as spoken by Quince the carpenter, entirely misses its intended purpose: If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, But with good will. To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end. Consider then, we come but in despite. We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is. All for your delight, We are not here. That you should here repent you, The actors are at hand; and by their show, You shall know all, that you are like to know. (V.i.108-117)

Lysander rightly remarks on this realization of the text: “He has rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop. A true moral, my lord: it is not enough to speak, but to speak true” (119-121), meaning thereby that the phonetic caesuras have been put in the wrong places. The correct reading of the text is graphically restored in the following way:

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If we offend, it is with our good will That you should think we come not to offend; But with good will to show our simple skill. That is the true beginning of our end. Consider then. We come: but in despite We do not come. As, minding to content you, Our true intent is all for your delight. We are not here that you should here repent you. The actors are at hand; and by their show, You shall know all that you are like to know. 8

The restoration of the correct graphophonological realization of the text makes it clear that Quince’s faulty performance turns the conventional captatio benevolentiae into a captatio malevolentiae and the decorum which is required by the exordium into the inappropriateness of an indecorum. This is not only an effect of faulty prosodic breaks or caesuras (“stops”), but also, concomitant with these, of faulty rhythms and intonations. Prosodic deviations are thus not isolated phenomena but causes of semantic inversions. They are not the result of an actor’s performative inadequacy but deliberate comic devices to evoke the audience’s laughter. Whereas the correct prosodic delivery (pronuntiatio) of the text warrants its “truth” or semantic adequacy, Quince’s faulty delivery creates a distortion of “truth” which is described by Hippolita as playing “on a recorder; a sound, but not in government” (123). But this distortion exists only on the surface structure. The deep structure, however, reverses this judgment and reveals a truth of another kind, namely comic truth. This comic truth is maintained in Quince’s continuation of his prologue, but in a different way. The introduction of the actors and the roles they are going to perform (126-150), which fulfils the rhetorical officium of docilem parare, reveals not a syntagmatic but a referential indecorum: the inadequacy of human beings representing inanimate beings: a wall and moonshine or a lion. In the further course of the performance these representers of unaccustomed parts are held to give life (energeia) to them, either in voice or in gesture or both. In rhetoric this is termed prosopopoeia: “If we will feign any person with such features, qualities and conditions, or if we will attribute any human quality, as reason or speech, to dumb creatures or other insensible things and 8

The correct version was reestablished by Knight, as rendered in Howard Furness’s New Variorum Edition of the play. New York: Dover, 1963, p. 213, n. on vv. 116-125. - A phonetic restoration of the text is to be found in H.F. Plett, Systematische Rhetorik: Konzepte und Analysen. München: Fink, 2000, p. 97.

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do study to give them a human person […]. All these beings are always invented.” 9 In the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe the comic character does not arise from the fictive animations as such but primarily from the fact that they actually receive a bodily presence, as in the self-introduction of the Wall: In this same interlude it doth befall That I, one Snout by name, present a wall; And such a wall as I would have you think That had in it a crannied hole, or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, Did whisper often, very secretly. (154-159)

The pathopoeia or “pathetic fallacy” of the presentation of an inanimate object by a human actor involves the discrepancy between the pompous mode of representation and the low object referred to. Apart from the possibly coarse obscenity of the “crannied whole” 10 a more sophisticated comic effect is derived from the reference to the pathetic diction of Senecan tragedy, which abounds in such pathetic set speeches, the difference being that the actor does not represent an inanimate object. When the protagonist Pyramus enters the stage, he also adopts a Senecan rhetorical strategy 11 in addressing the night: O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black! O night, which ever art when day is not! O night, O night, alack, alack, alack, I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot! And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall, That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine; Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne. [Wall stretches out his fingers.] Thanks, courteous wall: Jove shield thee well for this! (V.i.168-176)

The basic intertextual rhetorical strategy is the apostrophe, 12 which is used here for addressing two different stage factors: the time of day and an inanimate object. Both are traditional rhetorical features of Senecan tragedy. The 9

10

11

12

Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (III.xlviii) - translated by Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, p. 55. Cf. Thomas Clayton, “‘Fie What a Question! That If Thou Wert Near a Lewd Interpreter’: The Wall Scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974), 101-113. The rhetoric of Seneca’s tragedies is classified by Howard Vernon Canter, Rhetorical Elements in the Tragedies of Seneca. New York / London: Johnson, 1970 (rpt. of 1925 ed.). - Seneca’s influence on Shakespeare is described, among others, by Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Cf. Canter, Rhetorical Elements, pp. 143-149: “Apostrophe & Exclamation.”

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ridiculing of this convention is achieved by unnecessary and hence superfluous repetitions of the addressees in self-evident pleonasms: “night with hue so black,” “night, which ever art when day is not,” the personifying attributes “sweet” and “lovely” of “wall,” and the interposed interiectio “alack.” These apostrophic repetitions are intended as heightening the emotional expression and pathos of the speaker, but they contribute to the very contrary effect because of the obvious discrepancy between res and verba. Thus tragic pathos turns into comic bathos. The hyperbolic style of these words is underscored by the actor’s mispronunciation and gesture, which add to their comic effect. The latter is continued by another stylistic device which is a special mannerism of Bottom’s language-use: I see a voice; now will I to the chink, To spy and I can hear my Thisbe’s face. (190-191).

This twofold synaesthesia is a trope that first appeared when Bottom woke up from his dream: 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. (IV.i.209-212),

which is a travesty of St. Paul’s Epistle I Corinthians ii.10. The prosopopoeias of a speaking wall and a speaking lion reveal their identities as human actors and thus provide anti-illusionistic comic effects. In the following lines (193-201) the lovers mutually testify to their love for each other in a series of Euphuistic comparisons in which Bottom as Pyramus is again given the opportunity to repeat his favourite error of using mythological malapropisms: “Linander” (for Leander), “Shafalus” (for Cephalus), and “Pocrus” (for Pocris), in which he is joined by Flute as Thisbe in his use of “Helen” instead of Hero. After the disappearance of the Wall the personifications of Moonshine and Lion enter the stage, where Lion recites a prologue of his own with the usual exordial topoi, the emphasis being laid on informing the ladies that the actor is not identical with a real lion, which in turn elicits ironic commentaries from the aristocratic audience. Then Pyramus reappears on stage with words of thanks directed to Moon: Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams; I thank thee, Moon, for shining me so bright; For by thy gracious, golden, glittering gleams, I trust to take of truest Thisbe sight. (V.i.261-264)

Besides a twofold polite apostrophe these words contain neat anaphoras, parallelisms, and alliterations, as well as a faulty synaesthesia. Pyramus then continues in the Senecan manner:

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But stay! O spite! But mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here? Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck! O dear! Thy mantle good, What! Stain’d with blood? Approach, ye Furies fell! O Fates, come, come! Cut thread and thrum: Quail, crush, conclude, and quell. (V.i.265-276),

which is commented upon by Theseus: This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad. (277-278).

Theseus, who mentions the passion inherent in Pyramus’s words and the reason for its origin, does not, however, mention the rhetorical devices used to express such an outburst of passion: interrogatio, exclamatio, apostrophe (of eyes, Fates), alliteration, rhyme, asyndeton, and congeries, a heaping of affective verbs which concludes this passage. Bottom/Pyramus continues his affective speech by joining apostrophe and interrogation 13 of Nature: O, wherefore, Nature, didst thou lions frame, Since lion vile hath here deflower’d my dear? Which is - no, no - which was the fairest dame That liv’d, that lov’d, that look’d with cheer. Come tears, confound! Out sword, and wound The pap of Pyramus; Ay, that left pap, Where heart doth hop: [Stabs himself.] Thus die I, thus, thus, thus! Now am I dead, Now am I fled; My soul is in the sky. Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight! [Exit Moonshine.] Now die, die, die, die, die. [Dies.]

(V.i.280-295)

The rhetoric of Senecan tragedy practised here comprises apostrophes of inanimate objects such as “tears” and “sword,” “tongue” and “moon,” a 13

Cf. Canter, Rhetorical Elements, pp. 140-143: “Interrogation.”

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fictive self-correction (epanorthosis) in v.281, emphatic repetitions of “thus” and “die,” and the four asyndeta 14 of the four alliterative verbs “liv’d, lov’d, lik’d, look’d” (282). But the same passage also contains verbal and non-verbal inadequacies that provoke hilarity and laughter from the courtly audience: the noun “pap,” which is normally rather used for the female breast, and its pleonastic periphrasis “where heart doth hop,” and furthermore the faulty synaesthesia in “Tongue, lose thy light,” where “Moon” should have been the proper noun. The climax of the series of these comic faux-pas certainly is a dead man’s information: “Now am I dead” which is followed by a logically inconclusive “Now die, die, die, die, die,” prompted by Bottom’s vanity to perform once more a spectacular stage death. Most of the comic effects of the whole passage are not, however, set down in stage directions but left to the comedian’s performative skill. When Flute/Thisbe enters the stage again, s/he finds her lover apparently dead. This elicits from her a passionate lament: 15 Asleep, my love? What, dead, my dove? O Pyramus, arise! Speak, speak! Quite dumb? Dead, dead? A tomb Must cover thy sweet eyes. These lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks, Are gone, are gone! Lovers, make moan; His eyes were green as leeks. O Sisters Three, Come, come to me, With hands as pale as milk; Lay them in gore, Since you have shore With shears his thread of silk. Tongue, not a word: Come, trusty sword, Come, blade, my breast imbrue! And farewell, friends; Thus Thisbe ends: Adieu, adieu, adieu! 14 15

[Stabs herself.] [Dies.]

(V.i.311-334)

Cf. Canter, Rhetorical Elements, pp. 169-172: “Asyndeton.” On the tradition and topoi of the dramatic lament, see Wolfgang Clemen, English Tragedy before Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1967, Chap. 14: “The Dramatic Lament and Its Forms” (pp. 211-252).

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The pathetic elements of this speech are almost identical with those of Bottom/Pyramus: repeated interrogatio, apostrophe of Pyramus, the Fates, and the sword. Most striking, however, are several entirely inappropriate Petrarchan epithets attributed to bodily parts of Pyramus, which are meant to form an epideictic blazon but result in an anti-blazon. These, as well as performative insufficiencies of the actor induce the audience not to see the epilogue but to prefer a Bergomask dance as a conclusion to the performance. To sum up the details of the preceding examination we can state that in a comparatively early stage of his development Shakespeare makes masterly use of the conventions of Senecan tragedy for his comic interlude in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The success of this generic inversion must be largely attributed to intertextual rhetoric or, in brief, to interrhetoric; which is primarily responsible for this comic metamorphosis - by the strategies of inventio, elocutio, and above all of actio/pronuntiatio. In the following centuries Shakespeare’s “comic interlude” of Pyramus and Thisbe continued to exert a fascination of its own on dramatists and, in conjunction with librettists, on composers. Thus the German baroque author Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) wrote a burlesque play under the title Absurda Comica oder Herr Peter Squenz (1657), “ein Schimpfspiel,” as he called it, in which one of the satirical targets was the allegedly simplistic poetry of the Nuremberg Meistersinger. In this three-act play Shakespeare’s weaver Bottom is replaced by a schoolmaster named Squenz. While Gryphius may have been influenced indirectly by Shakespeare’s play through travelling English comedians, some eighteenth-century librettists and composers, such as FrancX ois Rebel (1726), Johann Adolf Hasse (1768), and Venanzio Rauzzini (1775), went directly back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and composed tragic operas. In contrast to these the composer John Frederick Lampe (1702/3-1751), like George Frideric Handel of Saxon descent, retained most of the text of Shakespeare’s “comic interlude” and thus its parodic texture in his “Mock Opera” Pyramus and Thisbe (1745) 16 but turned the satire from playwrights and actors to Italian opera and opera singers. The stage-audience was changed from Theseus, Hippolyta and the Athenian court to Mr. Semibrief (referring to semibrevis), the supposed composer, and two unnamed gentlemen, one of whom has returned from the Grand Tour and is critical of “homespun English entertainments.” Lampe’s operatic version of Pyramus and Thisbe shares 16

John Frederick Lampe, Pyramus and Thisbe. A mock opera adapted from William Shakespeare. Introd. Roger Fiske. London: Stainer & Bell, 1988. Recording by Opera Restor’d in Hyperion Records CDA 66759 (1994).

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many features with John Gay’s and John Christopher Pepusch’s earlier Beggar’s Opera (1728), inserting a spoken introduction in the form of a conversation between Master, Prompter, the composer Mr. Semibrief and the two unnamed gentlemen on the problems of staging an English opera. Thus John Frederick Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe is founded on two intertextualities: the parodic rhetoric of Shakespeare’s “comic interlude” and contemporary mockheroic literature as well as the intermedial rhetoric of musical parody.

Immediacy The Rhetoric of Presence in Renaissance Drama Theatre is essentially constituted by presence. Every dramatic action takes place in the here and now of a present moment. As a single event this “now” is continuously moving forward. Its limits are defined by the beginning and the end of a theatrical performance. Although past or future events may intrude into the dramatic action by means of flashbacks or foreshadowings, the dramatic fiction itself is always defined by the present. 1 It integrates everything past or future into the present moment which is visualized on stage. This visualization may be achieved by either real or imaginative perceptions. The former mode corresponds to images of reality which are constituted by dramatic characters, actions, and objects, the latter corresponds to those images which are produced through language. These modes are characterized by different degrees of intensity with respect to presence and receptive evidence. The present essay seeks to explore the possibilities of ascending from lower to higher levels of evidence, to point out their theoretical foundations and to illustrate their structural patterns by several examples. Two modes of creating presence will be highlighted in particular: a change of tense and a change of person. Both lead to an increase of theatrical presence. Their theoretical foundation can be found in rhetoric; their application in Renaissance drama.

1. Translatio Temporum or Tense Metaphors as Instruments of Dramatization In the second act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet a totally distracted Ophelia reports her lover’s strange conduct to her father Polonius: 1

Cf. Thornton Wilder: “A play is what takes place.[….] On the stage it is always now.” Quoted in Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. München: Fink, 1977, p. 359.

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Ophelia: My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d, No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d, Ungarter’d and down-gyved to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors - he comes before me. Polonius: Mad for thy love? Ophelia: My lord, I do not know, But truly I do fear it. Polonius: What said he? Ophelia: He took me by the wrist and held me hard. Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As ‘a would draw it. Long stay’d he so. At last, a little shaking of mine arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He rais’d a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And with his head over his shoulder turn’d, He seem’d to find his way without his eyes, For out o’ doors he went without their helps, And to the last bended their light on me. Haml.II.i.77-100. 2

Regarding the use of tense in these lines, it can be observed that in four instances the narrative past tense is replaced by the present tense. This results from the fact that Ophelia is so much moved by the events which she reports that she is going through them a second time. She changes from a distanced narrator into an empathic spectator in whose mind the physical laws of time are suspended. By beginning her sentence in the past tense (“I was sewing in my closet…”) she is still able to keep a certain distance to her own report. Disturbed by her own empathic description of Hamlet, however, she ends her sentence in the present tense (“he comes before me”). Here, the reported event is no longer in the past, but takes place in the immediacy of the here

2

The quotation is taken from Harold Jenkins’ Arden edition of Hamlet. London / New York: Methuen, 1982, rpt. 2002. - All other Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Emphases in italics by the author.

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and now: Hamlet is literally standing in front of her. In grammatical textbooks this is known as the historical present. 3 In his Latin work De emendata structura latini sermonis (1550), Thomas Linacre concentrates on the linguistic operation of a change of tenses (temporum enallage) rather than on the grammatical tense itself: Tempvs vero pro tempore positum frequentissime inuenias. Nam & praesens pro imperfecto & perfecto, tam in prosa, qua`m in uersu positum legas, maxime quum rem quasi geri, & sub oculis poni studemus. Vnde Energia grammaticis dicitur. 4

According to Linacre the substitution of the past tense or the present perfect by the present tense creates the impression that the objects represented are acting and so put before the inner eye. This vivifying of presence may be regarded as dramatization. With respect to Ophelia’s narration this means that the related events emerge from the remoteness of the past and assume the quality of present events. The narration turns into a play, albeit one which is imaginary rather than real. In this play Hamlet acts as a fictitious actor and Ophelia as a fictitious spectator; Polonius and the audience are fictitious spectators of a second and third degree. The poetic method, on which this dramaturgy of presence rests, is called energeia - a rhetorical category which has often been confused with the onomastically related enargeia in the Renaissance. 5 What has been said so far is clearly outlined in an anonymous tract of late antiquity, the Schemata Dianoeas, which begins as follows: ÅEna¬rgeia est imaginatio, quae actum incorporeis oculis subicit et fit modis tribus: persona, loco, tempore. Persona, cum absentem alloquimur quasi praesentem. […]

3

4

5

For the development of the praesens historicum, see Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax. Part I: Parts of Speech, Helsinki: Socie´te´ Ne´ophilologique de Helsinki, 1960, pp. 485 ff.; Karl Brunner, Die englische Sprache: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 21962, vol. II, pp. 302 ff. On the aesthetic dimension of this grammatico-rhetorical feature cf. FrancX ois Rigolot, “The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion,” in: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol III: The Renaissance. Ed. Glyn P. Norton. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 161-167. Thomas Linacre, De emendata structura latini sermonis libri sex, emendatiores. Paris 1550, p. 381. The Latin grammarian Donatus calls the change from past to present tense enargeia (on the occasion of Terence, Eunuchus, pp. 574 ff.). Cf. Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1964, p. 200. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno regards the temporum translatio as a means of evidence: De poeta. Venetiis: Apud F. Rampazetum, 1559, p. 529. Cf. H.F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975, esp. chap. 8. Appendix: “Humanistische Kommentare zur Aristotelischen energeia (Rhetorik 1410b33-36, 1411b221412a10).”

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Loco, cum eum, quae non est in conspectu nostro tanquam videntes demonstramus […]. Tempore, cum praeterito utimur quasi praesenti […]. 6

Thus enargeia is classified according to person, space, and time. What is separated in these analytical categories, however, appears as a unity in actual narrative situations. Just as a visualization of persons necessarily includes that of time and place, so a visualization of time cannot do without one of person and place. This fact, however, does not exclude the possibility of various degrees of dominance. Ophelia’s narration, for instance, is not characterized by an enargeia of person, because it lacks an immediate address to an absent person (e. g. Hamlet). Its specific evidence rather consists in a substitution of tense by which the past is transformed into the present. The ultimate source of such a process is imagination (imaginatio). The classical terms for this shift of tenses are translatio temporum, metastasis, and imaginatio. 7 The term translatio is particularly interesting, because it is also the Latin word for metaphor. It clearly shows that the historical present only exists as an intended tropical deviation of the past tense, i. e. the narrative tense form. It has no grammatical independence. This is why Harald Weinrich describes the historical present as a “metaphor of tense.” 8 There are some linguists who speak of a “dramatic” or “scenic” present, a denomination which comes close to the rhetorical definition. 9 Apart from such terminological differences, however, the fact remains that in the historical present the distance between the related events and the audience is diminished; the reality of the past appears, as it were, in actu on stage. Thus the auditor is turned into a fictitious spectator, who empathically follows the description. Equally, Ophelia’s narration does not miss its effect on Polonius. At first he interrupts his daughter by asking various questions, but finally he hurries to the king in extreme excitement.

6

7

8 9

Anon., “Schemata Dianoeas, quae ad rhetores pertinent,” §1, in: C. Halm (ed.), Rhetores Latini Minores. Leipzig: Teubner, 1863, rpt. Frankfurt/M.: Minerva, 1964, p. 71. Translation: Enargeia is an imagination that subjects an action to incorporeal eyes, and that happens in three modes, with regard to person, space, time. With regard to person, when we address an absent person, as if he were present […]. With regard to space, when we regard somebody who is not in our eyesight, as being visible to us. With regard to time, when we use the past (tense) as for the present (tense) […]. Cf. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. M.T. Bliss et al. Introd. G. Kennedy. Leiden: Brill, 1998, § 814. Harald Weinrich, Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 41985, p. 191. Cf. e. g. Suzanne Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp. 75-81.

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The historical present is needed in those cases where dramatic mimesis is superseded by epic narration. In these cases the translatio temporis simulates the physical presence of that which is narrated. The report of a messenger is the prototypical text type of this kind of description. It has the function to recapitulate that which is past by means of language. Ophelia’s narration is a case in point. Her metaphors of tense are intended to simulate the physical presence of Hamlet’s pantomimic art. In contrast to this instance, Benvolio’s eyewitness report in Romeo and Juliet (III.i.152-175) shows what the spectator has already seen: the duel between Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo. This verbal duplication of a complex action, however, is not tautological, but serves a persuasive function. Supported by specific techniques of visualization, such as the historical present and direct speech, it focuses on those aspects which support the Montagues’ case, with the aim to evoke mercy in Prince Escalus. That such a re-establishment of stage scenes can also produce comic effects is demonstrated in the boastful account in which Falstaff describes his amorous adventures to the fooled Ford (The Merry Wives of Windsor III.v.64-122). Several other instances of the historical present in messengers’ reports could be mentioned here. What is remarkable is the variety of its perspectives and functions, which may well surpass the requirements of verisimile and decorum.

2. Translatio Personarum or: Role Metaphors as an Instrument of Dramatization When in the first scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet Barnardo starts to recapitulate how a ghost appeared the night before, he is suddenly interrupted: Bernardo: Last night of all, When yond same star that’s westward from the pole, Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one Enter Ghost. Marcellus: Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. Hamlet I.i.38-43

The talk about the ghost is here replaced by the ghost itself. Mediating narration is superseded by immediate action. The past becomes the present, verbal recapitulation is turned into manifest physical presence. As in the case of shifting tenses we may speak again of a sudden visualization. Speaking in formal terms, it is signified by a change of persons. Thus, as an analogous

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term to translatio temporum, the term translatio personarum may be used to denote this form of visualization. In the rhetorical doctrine of status this process is known as status translationis; meaning that the competence of a specific person (e. g. an orator who leads a defence) is questioned and transferred to another person. 10 This may also be regarded as a metaphorical process. The result is a role metaphor. Drama is characterized by a multitude of these shifts or role metaphors. A well-known example in Elizabethan drama is the “discovery.” It can be found, for instance, in a tableau vivant: He draws the arras, and discovers Albovine, Rhodalinda, Valdaura, dead in chairs. 11

The sudden shift from linguistic to physical presence creates an effect of shock and surprise which is the more intensive the more horrible the sight is. In a theatre of objects the evidence is much greater than in a theatre of words. In the former, things speak for themselves, as it were. 12 In contrast to the tableau of death, the ghost in Hamlet, who interrupts the narrative of the opening scene and continues in propria persona, represents an alert, if silent, actor. Rhetoricians as well as actors point to the relevance of actio: action, wherwith they giue a being and life to the things which they speake, and with the same do moue the hearers, and supple them to beleeue how that is true which they go about to persuade. 13

According to this view, it is the scenic presentation which lends actuality (being) and energy (life) to a theme so that an audience may be convinced. It goes without saying that the most effective presentation is one in which speech and action form a synthesis. The same holds for the corresponding role metaphor. George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale provides a good example of how roles can be transferred to other persons. In this comedy the forgetful Madge is 10 11

12

13

Cf. Lausberg, Handbook. §§ 85, 90, 131-133, 197, 237, 254. Taken from the drama The King of Lombardy, quoted in George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944, p. 146; cf. also Lily B. Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960, chap. 17: “Discoveries.” Quintilian, Inst. Or. VI.i.30 mentions pathetic signa (e. g. blood-stained swords, blood-stains on a garment, bodily wounds) as effective instruments in speech and explains their effect as follows: “Quarum rerum ingens plerumque vis est velut in rem praesentem animos hominum ducentium” (31). Translation: “The impression produced by such exhibitions is generally enormous, since they seem to bring the spectators face to face with the cruel facts” (H.E. Butler). Juan Huarte Navarro, The Examination of Mens Wits. London A. Islip, 1594, p. 134.

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telling an old wives’ tale, when all of a sudden the persons in her story become real characters: Madge: […] and he made his lady run mad - Gods me bones, who comes here? Enter the Two Brothers. Frol[ic]: Soft gammer, here some come to tell your tale for you. Fantast[ic]: Let them alone, let us hear what they will say. 14

The two princes, who are searching for their sister who has been kidnapped by a sorcerer, step out of the narrative past tense, as it were, and replace Madge. The change of roles indicates a change from narration to mimesis and, at the same time, a shift from imaginative to sensory evidence. The increased immediacy achieved by this technique enhances the effectiveness of the presentation. No longer do events merely seem to happen before the spectator’s eyes; instead they become real and can be seen by the audience. Conceived in structural terms, the translatio personarum produces a play within a play. Its effects are manifold. In Peele’s comedy it is done for mere pastime. In Hamlet, where the murder is being performed anew by dramatis personae who are interrupted several times by the protagonist’s commentary, the case is different. Here, the objective of the translatio is anagnorisis. In Shakespeare’s Pericles metaphorical roles may be regarded as a structural principle. Each act of this romance is introduced by a narrative presented by a chronicler who appears as a prosopopoeia of the medieval poet John Gower. Each time the scenic action, i. e. the actual drama, emerges from a narrative. Some scenes are also preceded by a pantomime, which is commented on by Gower: “What’s dumb in show I’ll plain with speech.” (III.Cho.14). The drama itself either begins immediately after Gower’s chorus words, or it is explicitly announced by him. The role metaphor can be indicated in various ways. One is the explicit hint that a change of persons is taking place: And here he comes. What shall be next, Pardon old Gower - this long’s the text. Per. II. Cho. 39-40

Another variant is a change from narrative to action: And what ensues in this fell storm Shall for itself itself perform. I nill relate, action may Conveniently the rest convey. Per. III. Cho. 53-56 14

George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale. VV.134-138. In: Five Elizabethan Comedies. Ed. A.K. McIlwraith. London: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 67.

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With these words the chronicler John Gower finishes a part which is afterwards continued on a higher level of evidence. Now actors perform what hitherto has only been narrated. The change of roles therefore involves a change of genres. Epic is replaced by drama, recitation by stage action.

3. Metaphors of Tense and Roles: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe’s famous play Doctor Faustus is a drama in which the two types of metaphors can easily be discerned. It is worthwhile, therefore, to take a closer look at it. The prologue consists of a negative preamble, in which other dramatic themes are first rejected, then a brief propositio of the subject matter is presented: “The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad.” These reports are followed by an extensive account of the protagonist’s past life: Now he is born, of parents base of stock, In Germany, within a town call’d Rhode; At riper years to Wittenberg he went, Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up. So much he profits in divinity, The fruitful plot of scholarism grac’d, That shortly he was grac’d with doctor’s name, Excelling all, and sweetly can dispute In th’ heavenly matters of theology. 15

The past tense, which is used here throughout, indicates that Faustus’ biography is complete, at least in the eyes of the presenter. This conflicts, however, with the use of the present tense at the beginning of the narratio, which is emphatically marked by the temporal adverb “now” as well as by syntactic inversion. In the subsequent passages the tense changes seven times, while participles are used to ensure a smooth transition. 16 A change in tense also means a change in perspective. The scenic present creates a fiction of immediacy. It breaks down the barriers of epic distance and changes the listeners into imaginary eyewitnesses, even before the actual play begins. In Doctor Faustus a higher level of evidence is reached when in the final words of the prologue the chorus removes the curtain from the inner stage of the Elizabethan theatre: “And this the man that in his study sits” (28). This 15

16

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus. Ed. John D. Jump. London: Methuen, 1965, p. 4 f. (Prol. 11-19). Marlowe, Doctor Faustus. Prol. 11-12 present, 13-14 past, 15(-16) present, (16-)17 past, 18-19 present, 20-22 past, 23(25)-28 present.

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“discovery” presents the protagonist himself instead of his verbal counterfeit. Imaginary presence is replaced by immediate visual presence. The drama begins. Christopher Marlowe’s Faust tragedy is, first of all, a psychological drama, that is a psychomachia in the tradition of the morality play. Its centre is constituted by the protagonist’s monologues which are, in fact, dialogismoi, i. e. dialogues revealing a psychic conflict. 17 Although this creates dramatic tension, sensory presence is achieved only through impersonations of Good and Evil. No less than five times are the protagonist’s monologues interrupted by appearances of the Good Angel and the Bad Angel. 18 While apostrophizing Faustus, they continue his own dialogismoi. In their physical shapes and their utterances they are but visualizations of his inner conflicts. Every time that Faustus’ conflict increases, they appear on stage. They have no existence independent of Faustus and may thus be regarded as role metaphors. Without their presence, Marlowe’s tragedy would be a monodrama or a prosopopoeia after the fashion of the “tragedies” in A Mirror for Magistrates. The translatio personarum functions as a technique of dramatization. It creates physical immediacy and affects both the eye and the ear. Taken as a whole, it represents a rhetoric of presence. We may conclude that, if a drama is essentially defined by presence, then this presence is achieved, first of all, through tense and role metaphors. Tense metaphors, which result from a change from the past (perfect, …) tense to the present tense (praesens historicum), create imaginative presence; role metaphors, which rest on a change from narrative (argumentative, …) roles to actual performances, create visual immediacy. While the former metaphors 17

18

Cf. John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d. London: E. Cotes, 1657, p. 254 f.: “dialogismus, dialogismow, Sermocinatio, a Dialogue or conference between two […]. When the person feigned speaks all himself, then it is Prosopopoeia; but when the speaker answers now and then to the question, or objection, which the feigned person makes unto him, it is called Dialogismus.” Marlowe, Doctor Faustus. I. 69-76, V. 15-22, VI. 12-17, 81-84, XIX. 99-115. - In Faustus’ monologue in scene V the elocutionary prosopopoeia: O, something soundeth in mine ears, ‘Abjure this magic, turn to God again!’ (7-8) anticipates the actional one of the Good Angel: Sweet Faustus, leave that execrable art (16). On the other hand, it must be asked, whether characters such as Valdes and Cornelius, the olde man, and Helena should be regarded as metaphorical roles of the two angels and, ultimately, of the protagonist. Viewed in this light, the entire drama is a continued translatio personarum or, to put it in other words, an allegory of roles, which illustrates Faustus’ psychic disposition on different levels of actual presence.

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constitute an imaginary pseudo-theatre, the latter lead to an actual play. In rhetoric, these changes have commonly been regarded as instances of translatio, i. e. as tropical substitutions aimed at the replacement of a lower level of evidence by a higher one. The ultimate objective of this process is theatrical immediacy. On the other hand, a re-translation of a higher level of evidence (e. g., historical present, presentation) into a lower one (e. g., epic past tense, argumentation) reveals which kinds of energetic artistry constitute the structure of a specific drama. The grammar of visualization presented here is still being employed by today’s playwrights. The fact that it was used in so many different ways during the English Renaissance can be explained, on the one hand, by the existing dramatic traditions which strove to teach (docere), to delight (delectare), and to move (movere) the audience, and, on the other hand, by the influence of rhetoric which, in its theories and tracts, was concerned with effective communication. In the sixteenth century, the categories copia and varietas, 19 which had been in use at least since Erasmus, are governed by the principle of evidentia - that is, by the rhetoric of immediacy.

19

Cf., among others, Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature. New York / London / Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

In the visual culture of the Renaissance, rhetoric and eloquence did not remain abstract entities denoting the discipline and practice of persuasive speech but they obtained a symbolic presence in pictorial representations. These appeared in manifold forms and in manifold places: as reliefs in wall panels, as paintings in art collections, and above all as engravings serving the purpose of book-illustrations. Often they exerted a persuasive function themselves by praising or advertising, for instance, the social and artistic usefulness of the art of speaking well. In many cases their primary function is decorative. The visual representations of rhetoric and eloquence can be allegorical icons or mythological figures in the classical tradition. Many are static in appearance, others belong to the category of moving images engaged in some kind of action. Whatever their individual quality, they represent “speaking pictures,” carrying with them a specific message that demands to be decoded. Some of these icons, both of graphic and verbal nature, will be analysed in the following paragraphs.

I. Allegorical Representations The Hall of Peace inside the town hall of the West German town of Münster, where the peace treaty was signed that marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War, is decorated with a series of allegorical wood reliefs from 1577 manifesting the Seven Liberal Arts, 1 the individual arts identified by their Latin terms as subscriptions to female figures impersonating them. The female icon of Rhetorica (frontispiece) that is turning her back on the beholder is equipped, like the other representatives, with symbolic tools: her left hand holds an open book into which she is looking, her right hand wields a staff in an upright position. As there is no explanation given as to the meaning of these tools, one can surmise that the book symbolizes rhetorical theory, while the staff may indicate the teaching of it to an audience of students. The most important humanist illustration of personified Rhetorica is to be found in Margarita Philosophica, a learned encyclopedia that served as a

1

An icon of Rhetoric is often represented in the context of the Seven Liberal Arts; cf. Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life. New Haven / London: Yale University Press, 1962, pp. 195-201; Emile Maˆle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. Trans. D. Nussey. London / Glasgow: Collins, 1961 (11913), pp. 75-90; Donald Lemen Clark, “Iconography of the Seven Liberal Arts,” Stained Glass 23/1 (Spring, 1933).

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text-book for students and was first published at Freiburg, Germany, in 1503 with numerous subsequent editions. 2 It was compiled by Gregor Reisch (1467-1535), a humanist scholar of the Carthusian Order who associated with some of the most celebrated humanists of his time, such as Erasmus, Wimpheling, Beatus Rhenanus, and Uldaricus Zasius. The illustration (Figure 65) shows Rethorica as regina artium being decorated with a necklace of “margarita,” a chain of pearls, girded with “iustitia,” and dressed in a magnificent robe displaying “colores, enthymema, exemplum.” She sits enthroned amidst prominent representatives of the studia humanitatis, such as Aristotle as a representative of natural philosophy (“naturalia”) on her right and Seneca as a representative of moral philosophy (“moralia”) on her left. With her right hand she hands a book inscribed “poesis” to Virgil, with her left a book inscribed “historia” to Sallust. In the foreground a lawsuit is taking place, with Cicero delivering his famous speech of defence for Milo in front of the senate and people of Rome. Towering above her in the background, Emperor Justinanus appears in full regalia with a book incribed “leges,” symbolizing the achievement of his corpus iuris civilis. From Rethorica’s mouth issue both a sword and a lily, a reference to rhetoric’s power to cause both war and peace. 3 In the wake of this iconographic model the Dutchman Matthijs de Castelein (1485-1550) inserted a simplified version of it in his vernacular rhe´torique seconde titled De Const van Rhetoriken (Ghendt, 1555), 4 which again shows Rhetorica enthroned on a dais, holding a sword and a lily in her hands and surrounded by famous orators / actors of Classical Antiquity: Demosthenes, Cicero, Gracchus, Roscius the tragedian, and Quintilian (Figure 66). It is structured as an emblem, with “Rhetorica” inscribed on a (theatrical) curtain as the inscriptio and with the aphorism “Wacht wel Tslot” (“Wait until the end”) underneath the depicted scenery as the didactic subscriptio. The

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Facsimile Reprint: Margarita Philosophica. Ed. with introd. by L. Geldsetzer. Düsseldorf: Stern Verlag Janssen & Co, 1973. The illustration of the figure of Rethorica is found on p. 123 (modern pagination). In her book Wortkampf: Frühneuhochdeutsche Beispiele zur rhetorischen Praxis. Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1974, pp. 78 ff. Birgit Stolt traces the source of this kind of representation back to medieval hagiography. The rhetorical icon takes the place of a frontispiece in this edition: p. *4v. Castelein’s Dutch rhetoric is treated by Sara A.P.J.H. Iansen, Verkenningen in Matthijs de Casteleins Const van Rhetoriken. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1968 and by Marijke Spies in the context of her essay “Developments in Sixteenth-Century Dutch Poetics: From ‘Rhetoric’ to ‘Renaissance’ ”, in: Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. H.F. Plett. Berlin / New York: W. de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 72-91.

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entire arrangement of figures resembles that on a Rederijker stage, to which Matthijs de Castelein was a frequent contributor. 5 Early Renaissance fictional encyclopedias pursue educational aims similar to Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica, for instance the didactic verse narrative The Pastime of Pleasure (11509) by Stephen Hawes (c. 1475-1511), a poet of the school of Chaucer and Lydgate, who described the learning process of the student Graunde Amoure by having him pass through the stages of the Seven Liberal Arts curriculum. Leaving the chamber of Logic, Graunde Amoure reports his arrival at the chamber of Rhetoric: Than aboue Logyke / vp we went a stayre In to a chambre / gayly gloryfyed Strowed with floures / of all goodly ayre Where sate a lady / gretely magnyfyed And her trewe vesture / clerely puryfyed And ouer her heed / that was bryght and shene, She hadde a garlande / of the laurell grene Her goodly chambre / was set all about With depured myrrours / of speculacyon The fragraunt fumes / dyde well encense out All mysty vapours / of perturbacyon More lyker was / her habytacyon Vnto a place / whiche is celestyall Than to a terrayne /mancyon fatall Before whome / than I dyde knele a downe Sayenge o sterre / of famous eloquence O gylted goddesse / of the hygh renowne Enspyred / with the heuenly influence Of the doulcet well / of complacence Vpon my mynde / with dewe aromatyke Dystyll adowne / thy lusty Rethoryke And depaynt my tonge / with thy ryall floures Of delycate odoures / that I maye ensue In my purpose / to glade myne audytoures And with thy power / that thou me endue To moralyse / thy lytterall censes trewe And clense awaye / the myst of ygnoraunce With depured beames / of goodly ordynaunce. 6 5

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Cf. Matthijs de Castelein, Piramus en Thisbe. Twee Rederijkersspelen uit de zestiende eeuw. Ed. GA. van Es. Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1965. Stephen Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure (1517). EETS, OS, 173. Ed. W.E. Mead. London: Oxford University Press, 1928 (for 1927), p. 31. An important source of Hawes’ book is Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica.

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This verbal icon presents an elegant Lady Rhetoric crowned with laurel, sitting in a chamber decorated with flores & colores rhetorici and distilling pleasant odours for the visitors. As can be gathered from the woodcut (Figure 67) accompanying the verbal ekphrasis, her social position is that of a teacher of the discipline; for this reason she is not seated on a throne but on a cathedra, with her pupils sitting or kneeling at her feet. The primary aim of her teachings is delight (“lusty Rethoryke”) but in addition also enlightenment and instruction of the ignorant, which is exemplified by a reference to the senses of Holy Scripture. In order to acquire a competent knowledge of rhetoric the student is admonished to learn the Five Great Arts of the discipline: inuencyon, dysposycyon, elocucyon, pronuncyacyon, and memoratyfe, which are dealt with successively after the introductory passage. In a similar vein a late medieval English didactic poem by an anonymous author titled The Court of Sapience deals with rhetoric by representing it as an elegant courtly lady: Incipit brevis tractatus de rethorica. 271 Dame Rethoryke, modre of eloquence, Moost elegaunt, moost pure and gloryous, Wyth lust, delyte, blysse, honour and reverence, Within her parlour, fresshe and precyous, Was set as quene, whoos speche delycyous Her audytours gan to al joye converte Eche word of hyr myght ravysshe every herte! 272 And many clerk had lust her for to here, Her speche to theym was parfyte sustenaunce; Eche word of her depured was so clere And illumyned with so parfyte plesaunce That heven it was to here her beauperlaunce; Her termes gay of facund soverayne Cacephaton in no poynt myght distayn. 273 She taught them all the craft of endyting: Whiche vyces ben that shold avoyded be, Whiche ben the colours gay of that connyng, Theyr dyfference, and eke theyr properte, Eche thyng endyte how it shold poynted be Dystynctyion’ she gan clare and dyscusse Whiche is coma, colym, periodus. 7 7

The Court of Sapience. Ed. E.R. Harvey. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 64-65 (vv. 1891-1911).

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The attributes of this allegorical figure evoking pleasure and delight point to a concept of rhetoric that rests mainly on the aesthetics of stylistic figures and tropes typical of courtly conversation and poetry. This was quite different from the figure’s famous medieval predecessor in De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by Martianus Capella (5th c.), where Rhetorica appears among the Seven Liberal Arts in a martial guise: But while a great group of the earth-gods was disturbed by such thoughts, in strode a woman of the tallest stature and abounding self-confidence, a woman of outstanding beauty; she wore a helmet, and her head was wreathed with royal grandeur; in her hands the arms with which she used either to defend herself or to wound her enemies, shone with the brightness of lightning. The garment under her arms was covered by a robe wound about her shoulders in the Latin fashion; this robe was adorned with the light of all kinds of devices and showed the figures of them all, while she had a belt under her breast adorned with the rarest colors of jewels. When she clashed her weapons on entering, you would say that the broken booming of thunder was rolling forth with the shattering clash of a lightning cloud; indeed it was thought that she could hurl thunderbolts like Jove. For like a queen with power over everything, she could drive any host of people where she wanted and draw them back from where she wanted; she could sway them to tears and whip them to a frenzy, and change the countenance and senses not only of cities but of armies in battle. She was said to have brought under her control, amongst the people of Romulus, the senate, the public platforms, and the law courts, and in Athens had at will swayed the legislative assembly, the schools, and the theaters, and had caused the utmost confusion throughout Greece. 8

Thus Capella’s verbal icon of Rhetoric seems to be the source of the armed representations of Rhetorica in Gregor Reisch and Matthijs de Castelein, her weapons defining the use of eloquence as verbal battles taking place in the public sphere of political controversies (genus deliberativum) and law suits (genus iudiciale), with historical examples of Rome and Greece. But Martianus Capella also anticipates the late medieval icons of Lady Rhetoric as a teacher of the discipline and even her courtly variant of medieval and Renaissance representations adorned with a precious garment decorated with the flowers of rhetoric. In a famous medieval collection of coloured miniatures, the Hortus Deliciarum (c. 1180) of Herrad von Landsberg, abbess of Hohenburg in Alsace

8

Citation from: Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Vol. II: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. Trans. William H. Stahl & Richard Johnson with E.L. Burge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 156.

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(c. 1130-1195), Rethorica appears as a teacher of the discipline (Figure 68). 9 Dressed in a blue garment she holds a stilus in her right and a tabula in her left hand which could signify that the object of her instruction is limited to the ars dictaminis, the written variant of the ars rhetorica. In a woodcut sequence of pictures illustrating the Seven Liberal Arts and Theology published at Nuremberg by Peter Wagner about 1493/94 Rethorica (in medieval orthography) is represented as an elegant courtly woman with a costly head-dress chopping wood, while an equally elegant man named Tullius (Cicero) who holds a manuscript scroll in his right hand raises his left hand in a didactic gesture towards Rethorica (Figure 69). The banderole on the right margin of the picture displays an aphorism reading: “Grun ist ein farb mit lust / an rethorica sein all kumnst vmb sunst,” which means:” “Green is a pleasant colour / without rhetoric are all arts in vain.” 10 The collocation of the personification of Rhetoric and Tullius (Cicero) is not new but goes back to the Middle Ages, where illuminated manuscripts of the long didactic poem Der welsche Gast (c. 1215) by Thomasin von Zerklære (1185/6-1235) contain a depiction of Tullius drawing a sword out of a sheath held by a female seated figure (Figure 70). The Latin superscription of this action is “age & defende.” The Seven Liberal Arts or Sciences, and with these rhetoric, not only form the subject of medieval and Renaissance encyclopaedias but also of mural friezes in libraries of monasteries, universities and other educational institutions. A remarkable specimen of a rhetoric icon in this context can be seen in the library of the Spanish Monastery of San Lorenzo, also called El Escorial, which is described as follows: The art of eloquence is represented by an elegantly dressed matron who holds in one of her hands Mercury’s wand, symbol of pagan eloquence. On one side we see a somewhat disproportioned lion which, according to Father Sigüenza, means that “the power of good speech tames even the most ferocious of beasts”. In the lunettes we find, on the right, two great Greek orators: Isocrates and Demosthenes, and opposite them, creating a clear parallel, two Roman rhetoricians: Cicero and Quintilian.

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J. Walther (ed.), Herrade de Landsberg, abbesse de Mont Sainte-Odile, Hortus deliciarum. Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1952; another edition: R. Green (ed.), with contributions by J.T. Brown & K. Levy, Hortus deliciarum. London: Warburg Institute, 1979. - Cf. Otto Gillen, Ikonographische Studien zum “Hortus deliciarum” der Herrad von Landsberg. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1931; J. Tezmen-Siegel, Die Darstellungen der “septem artes liberales” in der Bildenden Kunst. München: tuduv, 1984, pp. 109-111. For an extensive explication of this illustration cf. Michael Stolz, Arte-Liberales-Zyklen: Formationen des Wissens im Mittelalter. 2 vols. Tübingen / Basel: Francke, 2004.

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The friezes contain scenes relative to the power of the word. On the one hand we have Cicero Defending Cayus Rabirius before the Senate. Opposite we see the representation of the Gallic Hercules with Chains of Gold and Silver Emerging from his Mouth. The scene follows a text by Lucian which tells how Hercules, the God of Eloquence for the Gauls, moved multitudes by virtue of the force of his eloquence, symbolised by the chains. The protruding arch is used to depict four major poets from Classical Antiquity: Homer and Pindar from the Greek tradition, and Virgil and Horace from the Latin world. 11

Thus rhetoric not only appears as symbolizing the beauty of the spoken or written word but also as a powerful civilizing force enabling mankind to live in a society dominated by the culture of the word. An early representation of Rhetoric as a majestic figure occurs as a woodcut frontispiece to Friedrich Riederer’s Spiegel der waren Rhetoric (1493), where Rhetoric is depicted as an elegantly dressed lady (Figure 71) holding a radiant sun in her left hand and approaching a figure seated on a royal throne who points at the sun, thus emphasizing the significance of the ars rhetorica for statesmanship. It is possible that the person standing modestly behind her is the author of this early German vernacular rhetoric, a kind of self-portrait manifesting the pride and self-awareness of the early humanists in the Upper Rhine region. The picture is signed by “Mathes der Maler,” evidently the famous Matthias Grünewald (c. 1475-1528) 12 to whom the twentieth-century composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) erected a magnificent musical monument with his opera Mathis der Maler (1938). One of the most prominent icons of Rhetorica is a Tarot card said to have been designed by, among others, the Italian painter and engraver Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), who is otherwise best known for his works created for the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The playing card bearing the number XXIII is Rhetorica (Figure 72). 13 Looking at the viewer with a serene mien, 11

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Citation from: Juan Martı´nez Cuesta, Servicio de Conservacio´n Patrimonio Nacional, Guide to the Monastery of Lorenzo el Real also Called El Escorial. Madrid: Editorial Patrimonio Nacional, 1992, pp. 128-129. The iconographic program was designed by Benito Arias Montano. Matthias Grünewald is mainly known for his masterpiece, the splendid Isenheim Altar (presently preserved at the Muse´e Colmar) of which some panels, above all the Crucifixion scene, can be interpreted sub specie rhetorica as manifesting diverse passions in the persons to the left and right side of the cross: St. Mary swooning and Mary Magdalene wringing her hands in despair as well as John the Evangelist holding in his left hand a book, the gospel written by him, and pointing with the finger of his right hand at the crucified as if saying: “Ecce homo.” Cf. Arthur M. Hind (ed.), Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue with all the Prints Described. 7 vols. Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprints, 1978, vol. 2/4, pt. 1: Florentine engravings and anonymous prints of other schools. Plate 342 “Rhetorica.” It is doubtful, however, whether Mantegna was their author.

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the female impersonation wears a crowned helmet and a jewelled breastplate, and carries a sword in her right hand, perhaps a symbol of the penetrating sharpness of judicial oratory. 14 With her left hand she elegantly gathers the hem of her robe. Two trumpet-blowing putti on her left and right bestow an epideictic tinge on this representation that takes on the quality of a religious icon. In the Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae (1626, 21628), a work designed by Christophoro Giarda (1595-1649) 15 for the famous library of the Barnabite Institute of San Alessandro in Milan, believed by the author to be a true successor to the magnificent ancient library at Alexandria, Rhetorica (Figure 73) appears as a crowned queen wearing a precious garment with a flowery design visualizing the flores rhetorici, the tropes and figures of elocutio. Her left hand is extended, signifying the richness of words (laeva exporrecta verborum liberalitatem). 16 The icon of Rhetorica is preceded by an epideictic Latin motto which in the first edition reads as follows: CÆLI DONVM; NATVRÆ BLANDIMENTVM DELICIVM GENII; OBLECTAMENTVM INGENII EFFICTRIX RERVM OMNIVM ÆMVLATRIX PERSONARVM DOMITRIX FERARVM MORA FLVMINUM ANIMA LAPIDVM ET PRODESSE POTES, ET DELECTARE SOLEAS QAMVIS NON FACERE, SED FINGERE 17

In the second edition (1628) this laudatio assumes a slightly different form: SAPIENTIÆ, ET FILIA, ET SOROR ELOQVENTIA DOMINA CORDIVM, ANIMORVM REGINA DICENDI ARTIFEX, OPIFEX DICENDI 14

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Some of these attributes appear already in the representation of Rhetoric in Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (c. 410-429). The symbolic images announced by the title of the book are identical with the figures of the sixteen Liberal Disciplines with which the library was decorated, and according to which the books were categorized on the shelves. - On the symbolist concepts of Giarda, Ripa, and their contemporaries, see Ernest G. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: Philosophies of Symbolism and their Bearing on Art,” in: Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1972, pp. 123-195. Christophoro Giarda, Icones Symbolicae. Apud Io: Bidellinin, 1626, p. 86. Christophoro Giarda, Icones Symbolicae (1626), p. 91. - Translation: “Heaven’s present, Nature’s blandishment / Joy of genius / Delight of spirit / Cause of all things / Emulator of people / Tamer of animals / Barricade against rivers / Soul of stones / You can both profit and delight / even if you are not wont to make, yet you can feign.”

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OTII COMES AVCTRIX NEGOTII; ALVMNA PACIS BELLI ADMINISTRA FLVMEN AMORIS; TERRORIS FVLMEN LVMEN POLITICÆ SVADÆ NVMEN 18

The female representative of Rhetorica is equipped both with the caduceus of Mercury, messenger of the pagan gods and god of eloquence, and with the golden chains of the Hercules Gallicus emerging from her mouth; tying and taming the three-headed hell-hound Cerberus, she thus signifies “an incredible force of speaking (vim quandam dicendi incredibilem).” 19 The burning cauldron standing beside this hybrid icon of Rhetorica visualizes the rhetorical theorem of the self-affection of the orator as necessary prerequisite for moving the passions of the audience: “[…] ardeat orator primum necesse est. Quamobrem sapienter olla feruens apposita est.” 20 The Five Great Arts of rhetoric are furthermore visualized by means of classical mythological figures, such as elocutio by the goddess Flora. Giarda’s mnemonic iconography of rhetoric encompasses the two basic manifestations of persuasive speech, decorative style and the power of pathos. Icons of Rhetoric and Eloquence are also the pictorial subjects of Cesare Ripa, perhaps a pseudonym for Giovanni Campana (1560?-1625), in his work Iconologia (1593), of which the 1603 edition supplies a wealth of illustrations. 21 This handbook explains how to visualize such abstract entities as virtues, vices, temperaments, and also disciplines of the Liberal Arts. Ripa’s interest in both rhetoric and painting may be gathered from a statement in the introduction to the Iconologia which compares the two arts: Omitting then the figures which the Orator uses, and of which Aristotle treats in the 3rd book of the Art of Eloquence, I will only speak of those which belong to the Art of painting; or of those which by colors, or any other visible thing may be represented; or who differ in something, and yet have some likeness with 18

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Giarda, Icones Symbolicae (1628). Facsimile Reprint. Introd. S. Orgel. New York / London: Garland, 1979, p. 73. Translation: “Of wisdom both daughter and sister, / ELOQUENCE / Mistress of hearts, Queen of intellects / Mistress of teaching, wealth of speaking / Companion of leisure, enlarger of business / Offspring of peace, assistant of war / River of love, flash of terror / Light of politics, goddess of persuasion.” Giarda, Icones Symbolicae (1628), pp. 86, 87, 89. Giarda, Icones Symbolicae (1628), p. 90. Translation: “The orator must first burn himself. For this reason a glowing bowl is sensibly placed beside her.” Facsimile Reprint: Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’antichita`, e di propria inventione (Roma, M.DC.III). Introd. E. Mandowsky. Hildesheim / New York: Olms, 21984. The title-page asserts that the book will be a necessity for orators, preachers, poets, artists, and devisors of emblems and imprese. On Ripa’s reception history, see D.J. Gordon, “Ripa’s Fate” (1967), in: Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination. Ed. S. Orgel. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1980, pp. 51-74.

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the other; for as painted figures by the eye persuade something, also moves the art of eloquence the mind by words. 22

Thus there exists a twofold rhetoric, one of words and another of pictures; the latter which persuades through the eye is Ripa’s primary focus of attention. His Iconologia is nevertheless composed as a compendium of verbal icons presenting ekphrastic portraits of such abstract concepts as Allegrezza, Ambizione, Humilta`, or Penitentia, to which later visual illustrations were added. One of the ekphrastic representations of abstract concepts is dedicated to Rettorica, which is described as follows: Donna bella, vestita riccamente, con nobile acconciatura di testa, mostrandosi allegra, & piacevole, terra` la destra mano alta, & aperta, & nella sinistra uno scettro, & un libro portando nel lembo della veste scritte queste parole. Ornatus persuasio: & il color del viso sara` rubicondo, & alli piedi vi sara` una chimera. 23

Ripa’s work also contains various entries on Eloquenza 24 and Persuasione. About the latter, which is also illustrated by a woodcut (Figure 74), we read: Una Matrona in habito honesto, con bella acconciatura di capo, sopra alla quale vi sia una lingua, sara` stretta con molte corde, & ligaccie d’oro, terra` con ambe le mani una corda, alla quale sia legato un’animale con tre teste, l’una di Cane, l’altra di Gatto, la terza di Scimia. 25

Persuasione appears as an honest matron, that is, an experienced woman of whom the tongue over her head indicates the orality of oratorical practice and the tying of the three-headed monster composed of dog, cat, and monkey (a variant of Horace’s chimera) symbolizes not the civilizing force of eloquence, but, as Ripa intends, the three introductory effects required by an oration: benevolum, attentum, docilem parare.

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Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, “Introduction,” an extract transcribed by Rawn Clark from a manuscript in the British Library Ms. Add 23195, accessible by internet: www.levity.com/ alchemy/iconol_i.html. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia. Ed. Buscaroli. Pref. Mario Praz. Milano: TEA, 1992, p. 381. Translation: “A beautiful dame, richly clad, with a noble head-dress, in appearance serene and benevolent, raising her right hand and holding in her left a sceptre and a book, carrying in the hem of her vesture written these words: ornatus persuasio. The colour of her visage will be red, and at her feet will be seen a chimera.” According to Raymond B. Waddington, “two descriptions of ‘Eloquenza’ present myths, Orpheus and Amphion; the remaining four are female personifications” (“Iconography,” in: Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. T.O. Sloane. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 372). Ripa, Iconologia, p. 349. Translation: “A matron in decent vesture, with a beautiful headdress, above which a tongue appears, and bound with many cords and ligatures of gold, holding with both hands a cord with which is bound an animal with three heads, one of a dog, another of a cat, and the third of a monkey.”

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Ripa’s iconographic representations of Rhetoric and Eloquence were very influential in the Early Modern Age, as the Iconologia went through numerous editions: nine Italian and eight non-Italian, an English translation being published as late as 1779. The influence of Ripa’s emblems is visible in Ben Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s works and extends as far as Goethe’s literary production. The elegantly dressed Ladies Rhetoric of Giarda and Ripa have a verbal counterpart in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589). The beginning of the third book, dealing with Ornament, presents the following allegory: And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise neuer so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and ciuilitie haue ordained to couer their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselues more amiable in euery mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes & costly embroderies, then when they go in cloth or in any other plaine and simple apparell. Euen so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and coulours, such as may conuey them somwhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must needes yeld it much more bewtie and commendation. 26

On the one hand the passage cited exemplifies the classical topos “style as the dress of thought.” 27 On the other hand it presents a certain type of rhetoric that is transferred to the concept of poetry and poetic style: the rhetoric of figures, which is also a rhetoric of embellishment, its aim being the delight of the recipient. By consequence, a figureless poem is regarded as unattractive, i. e. bare and naked. The sister art serving as a similitudo is painting; for traditionally the rhetorical figures are metaphorically labelled colours of rhetoric (colores rhetorici). The social context of such a poetics of ornamentation is the aristocratic court. 28 It is governed by a stern sociorhetorical principle, the decorum of style, content, and audience that guarantees the social harmony of the courtly society and its cultural manifestations. 26

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28

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 (1936), pp. 137-138. Cf. Wolfgang G. Müller, Topik des Stilbegriffs: Zur Geschichte des Stilverständnisses von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1981. Cf. Dorothee Rölli-Alkemper, Höfische Poetik in der Renaissance: George Puttenhams “The Arte of English Poesie” (1589). München: Fink, 1996.

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Prominent among them is poetry, to which Cesare Ripa’s and Christophoro Giarda’s icons Poesia (Figures 75 & 76) show striking visual similarities. The poetical adaptation of figurative rhetoric is a wide-spread phenomenon in the Renaissance. Small wonder, then, that it also occurs in Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595), but this time in an inversion of the conventional allegory: So is that honey-flowing matron eloquence apparelled, or rather disguised, in a courtesan-like painted affectation: one time with so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem strangers, to any poor Englishman; another time with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a dictionary; another time with figures and flowers extremely winter-starved. 29

In this argumentative context Cesare Ripa’s “Matrona in habito honesto” and George Puttenham’s courtly “Madames of honour” have degenerated into despicable courtesans that can no longer command respect and veneration from their admirers or, rather, customers. This is due to their affective behaviour and bombast of diction which lacks the energy (energeia) and evidence (enargeia) 30 of speaking and writing that testifies to the true passion felt by the author. Such an inappropriate (indecorum), because exaggerated, manner of representation makes the colores rhetorici look pale and, as it were, “extremely winter-starved.” 31 From the viewpoint of the visual arts the result may be mannerist painting. The same icon of Rhetoric appears somewhat earlier in John Rainolds’s [i. e. Henry Dethick’s] Oratio in laudem artis poeticae (c. 1572), which can be regarded as a Sidneyan source: Quasi vero` Rhetorica, vt ignoscamus Grammaticae, doctrinae solidae quicquam habeat, quae calamistris meretricijs inusta, fluentibus vnguentis delibuta, pigmentis madentibus effoeminata, inanissima prudentiae, loquacitatis plenissima, non incorrupto sanguine sed ascititio colore, non naturali succo sed accersito fuco fallaciter enitescit. Mihi quidem videtur arboribus illis esse qua`m simillima, quae juxta mare mortuum in Palaestina crescere traduntur, quae magnam aspectu

29 30

31

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Ed. G. Shepherd. London: Nelson, 1965, p. 138. In his encyclopedia Anticlaudianus (PL 210 [1855], 514A) the medieval author Alanus ab Insulis (Alain de Lille [c. 1120-1202]) stresses the importance of an ene(a)rgetic style: Et quamvis ferrum soleat torpere rigore Frigoris, et brumae soleat redolere pruinam; Hoc hiemem nescit, frigus natale relinquens, Usurpatque sibi risus et gaudia veris, Et faciem prati praetendit imagine florum. Quintilian, Inst. Or. IX.iii.74 calls the excessive application of Gorgianic figures of speech “frigida et inanis adfectatio.”

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prae se ferunt pulchritudinem, earum fructus si quis decerpat, fauilla & cinere plenos reperiret. 32

In these words Rhetoric is described as a phenomenon of decadence: not as a stately regina artium but as a sapless and effeminate figure resembling more a harlot painted with gaudy colours in her face and smelling of heavy perfumes, concealing the hollow ostentatiousness of her appearance behind an artificial and insubstantial masquerade. Such a kind of rhetoric is expected from Prince Paradox and his contemporaries, the dandies of the Yellow Nineties. The end of the Renaissance witnesses a mythological syncretism in the iconographical representation of rhetoric (Figure 77) on the title-page of the second edition of Marius d’Assigny’s (1643-1717) treatise The Art of Memory (1699). Here the reader is confronted with an Hercules Gallicus on a pedestal tying his audience by their ears with thin golden chains issuing from his mouth. He is flanked on his right by Minerva, goddess of wisdom, and on his left by the three Graces (Gratiae) dancing with their arms entwined, all of them likewise standing on pedestals. Mercury, with his winged hat and feet and holding in his hands both his traditional caduceus and a signboard with the inscription ARS MEMORIÆ, is flying above their heads.

II. Mythological Representations 1. Hercules Gallicus In his mythographic iconology Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1556) Vincenzo Cartari (b.c. 1500) presents an icon of Hercules that emphasizes an unusual aspect of the classical hero: Imagine di Hercole appo Francesi da loro tenuto Dio della eloquenza, & dell’essercitio, qual fu` da alcuni tenuto anco per Mercurio, & questa imagine dinota a forza, & disciplina militare, massime in vecchi Capitani, & consumati oratori. 33 32

33

John Rainolds [i. e. Henry Dethick], Oratio in laudem artis poeticae [circa 1572]. Ed. W. Ringler. Trans. W. Allen, Jr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940, p. 48. Translation: “If we grant pardon to Grammar, could we suppose Rhetoric to have any particle of sound learning, Rhetoric which, singed with harlots’ curling-irons, smeared with dripping perfumes, daubed with oily pigments, completely devoid of good sense and full of empty talk, puts up a deceptive and gleaming front, not with a glow of healthy blood but with foreign pigmentation, not with natural strength but with artificial disguise? To me, indeed, Rhetoric seems to resemble most closely those trees which are said to grow beside the Dead Sea in Palestine which exhibit great beauty to the sight, but if anyone plucks their fruit, he finds it full of ashes and cinders” (p. 49). Vincenzo Cartari, Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1647). Facsimile Reprint. Introd. W. Koschatzky. Graz, Austria: Akad. Druck- & Verlagsanstalt, 1963, p. 181. - Cf. Robert E.

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The illustration added to this ekphrastic motto (Figure 78) shows an old, bald-headed man with a club in his left hand and a bow in his right, martial weapons both; but an extraordinary feature is a number of chains issuing out of his mouth which are tied to the ears of aggressive soldiers who are thus evidently held in check. As can be gathered in greater detail from the verbal exegesis of this emblematic representation, the scene denotes the force of eloquence that is even available to elderly men who can no longer rely on their physical strength. The image of Hercules as an orator turns up in Ben Jonson’s satirical comedy Volpone (1605), when Mosca wishes the lawyer Voltore the Herculean power of eloquence with these words: worshipful sir, MERCVRY sit vpon your thundring tongue, Or the French HERCVLES, and make your language As conquering as his club, to beate along, (as with a tempest) flat, our aduersaries: But, much more, yours, sir. 34

An important function as champion of true justice is attributed to Hercules in Book V of Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene subtitled “Contayning, The Legend of Artegall or of Justice.” 35 In the classical tradition the mythical half-god Hercules is not regarded as an orator who defeats his enemies with the power of his words but rather, allegorically, as the great civilizer who liberates the world from monstrous creatures with the force of his club. The image of Hercules as orator originated with the late Greek sophist Lucian of

34

35

Hallowell, “Ronsard and the Gallic Hercules Myth,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 242255; Marc-Rene´ Jung, Hercule dans la litte´rature franc¸aise du XVI e sie`cle: De l’Hercule courtois a` l’Hercule baroque. Gene`ve: Droz, 1966; Corrado Vivanti, “Henri IV, the Gallic Hercules,” JWCI 30 (1967), 176-197, Dietmar Till, “Der ‘Hercules Gallicus’ als Symbol der Eloquenz,” in: Artibus: Kunstwissenschaft und deutsche Philologie des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. FS Dieter Wuttke. Ed. S. Füssel & J. Knape. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1994, pp. 249-265; Freyr Roland Varwig, “Raffaels Herakles ‘Ogmios’- Ein Paradigma zur Ikonologie des sprachlichen Wohlklanges,” in: AINIGMA. FS Helmut Rahn. Ed. F.R. Varwig. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987, pp. 35-75; Egon Verheyen, “Alciato’s Hercules Emblem (No. 138) and Related Scenes: Questions of Interpretations,” in: Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition. Ed. P.M. Daly. New York: AMS Press, 1989, pp. 47-57. Ben Jonson, [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford / P. & E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-152. Vol. V, p. 98 (IV.iv.20-25). - On Hercules in English Renaissance drama, see Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. Cf. Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography & Thematic Imagery in Book V of “The Faerie Queene.” New York / London: Columbia University Press, 1969, esp. chaps. 10-12: “Hercules” (pp. 153-214) - with many illustrations.

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Samosata (c. 125-c. 200) in his work bearing this hero’s name 36 and from thence found its way into the verbal and pictorial iconography of Renaissance culture, as in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589): At least waies, I finde this opinion, confirmed by a pretie deuise or embleme that Lucianus alleageth he saw in the pourtrait of Hercules within the Citie of Marseills in Prouence: where they had figured a lustie old man with a long chayne tyed by one end at his tong, by the other end at the peoples eares, who stood a farre of and seemed to be drawen to him by the force of that chayne fastned to his tong, as who would say, by force of his perswasions. 37

This mythical iconography, which in Puttenham illustrates the maxim “eloquence is of great force,” occurs in numerous variants in Renaissance art and literature, as in Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (Figure 79) or the mythical iconography of rulers such as the French King Henri IV (Figure 80), mentioned above in section A. In France the political implementation of the Hercules mythologeme seems to have been an established tradition ever since. Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), for instance, enjoyed being celebrated by Claude Vignon (1593-1670) as Hercules triumphant, this time not equipped with the golden chains of eloquence but with the traditional club and crowned with laurel, standing in a luscious landscape and triumphing over the monsters he has defeated lying at his feet. 38 In the earlier Renaissance Emperor Maximilian I was celebrated as Hercules Germanicus. Returning to the Gallic Hercules we read in Henry Peacham’s conduct book The Complete Gentleman (1621) an explanation that he represents “the pomp of eloquence.” 39 The idea of “pomp” fits well with the pictorial trionfo of Richelieu as Hercules but even better with the trionfo of Hercules Gallicus as depicted by Achille Bocchi (1488-1562) in his Symbolicae Quaestiones (1555), 40 who represents him as sitting on a chariot drawn by two bullocks 36

37 38

39

40

Lucian, “Heracles,” in: Works. Ed. A.H. Harmon et al. 8 vols. London: Heinemann, 1953 ff., vol. I, p. 62 ff. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 141-142. Cf. the exegesis in the exhibition catalogue Richelieu (1585-1642): Kunst, Macht und Politik / Art, Power, and Politics. Ed. Hilliard T. Weinfarb. Snoeck-Ducaja & Zoon, Belgium: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts & Wallraff-Richartz Museum / Fondation Courbaud (Cologne), 2003, pp. 305-307. Henry Peacham (the Younger), The Complete Gentleman [et al.]. Ed. Virgil B. Heltzel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 18, n. 24. The complete title reads: Simbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere, quas seri ludebat, libri quinque. Bononiae, in aedib. Novae academiae Bocchianae, 1555, Lib. II, Symb. XLIIII. - A modern facsimile reprint exists of the 1574 edition with introductory notes by Stephen Orgel. New York / London, 1979. On Bocchi cf. Elizabeth S. Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, esp. chap. II.7: “The Mythographic Union of Eloquence and Wisdom” (pp. 131-152).

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ridden by putti and accompanied by a crowd of youth tied with golden chains to his tongue (Figure 81). Another emblem by the same author bearing the motto Vis Eloquentiæ potest vna omnia (Figure 82) depicts the orator Pericles, seated next to Jove and his eagle in a cloudy abode, hurling bolts of lightning onto a fortified town, whose towers are thus brought down to ruin. The author comments in his moralizing subscriptio: “Sic oratoris summi admiranda facultas” (Such is the admirable faculty of the very best orator). 41 Later, in the Baroque Age, a rhetoric by Balthasar Kindermann (1636-1706) was published in Germany under the title Teutscher Wolredner (The Perfect German Orator [1688]) 42 proclaiming its usefulness on its title-page for all kinds of speech-making, be it in politics or on domestic occasions such as marriages, baptisms, funerals, glorifications, celebrations, congratulations, recommendations, etc. An illustrated page displays a seated lady holding in her left hand a number of chains tied to the ears of several persons of various estates and both genders standing about her (Figure 83). She is represented in the tradition of the medieval Lady Rhetoric while at the same time blending with the mythical Gallic Hercules, of whom she represents a female variant.

2. Mercury and Amphion Whereas a medieval manuscript depicts Mercury, the well-known messenger of the gods, as a scribe (Figure 84) 43 and thus as a representative of written rhetoric, perhaps the ars dictaminis, Vincenzo Cartari’s Renaissance emblem book Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi displays an icon of Mercury (Figure 85), equipped with caduceus and winged hat and accompanied by an elegant seated lady holding an olive branch in her hands. The motto reads: Imagine di Mercurio inuentore delle Lettere, della Musica, della Geometria, & delle buone arti, & imagine di Palestra sua figliuola Dea della lotta, che tiene in grembo vn ramo ai vliuo, essendo uso de lottatori di vngersi con olio. 44 41

42

43

44

Bocchi, Symbolicarum quaestionum, Lib. IIII, Symb. CCIIII. - Quintilian, Inst.Or. XII.x.65 reports: “Hanc vim et celeritatem in Pericle miratur Eupolis, hanc fulminibus Aristophanes comparat, haec est vere dicendi facultas.” (It is this force and impetuosity that Eupolis admires in Pericles, this that Aristophanes [Ach.530] compares to the thunderbolt, this that is the power of true eloquence [H.E. Butler]). First edition: Wittenberg / Jena, 1680. The edition of 1688 is the second edition. - Cf. Heimo Haupt (ed.), Balthasar Kindermann, “Der deutsche Redner”: Text und Untersuchung. Frankfurt/M. / Cirencester: Lang, 1981. Cf. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Trans. B.F. Sessions. New York: Harper & Bros., 1961, p. 159, fig. 52. Cartari, Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1647), p. 170.

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While Mercury is here represented as the patron god of Arts and Sciences, the art obviously missing is rhetoric. Cartari, however, fills that lacuna by creating a synthetic person uniting both Hercules and Mercury (Figure 86). 45 Hercules is now equipped with Mercury’s wings at his feet, holding in his right hand the caduceus and in his left hand a palm frond, a symbol of victorious Eloquence (“segno d’Eloquenza vittoriosa”). 46 This hybrid composition of Mercury with Hercules Gallicus has a predecessor, however, in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 drawing of an elegant god Mercury rising up into the air and drawing a number of earth-bound figures after him by means of thin chains (Figure 87). The same hybrid figure combining both Mercury and Hercules can be found in the Mythologiae (1561) 47 of the Italian mythographer Natalis Comes (i. e. Natale Conti [c. 1520-c. 1580]), who in the French translation of his monumental work writes under the entry “Pourquoy Mercure est le Dieu d’eloque˜ce, des lancions et fraudes”: Quant a` moy i’ay bien opinion que les anciens nous voulans exhorter a` l’estude de sapience, ont forge´ en leurs cerueaux les contes susdits touchant Mercure. car voulans monstrer co˜bien grande estoit la force d’eloquence & du bien-dire, ils ont dict que Mercure estoit messager & porte-parole des Dieux & des hommes. Et de faict c’est par le discours qu’on exprime la volonte´ des Dieux, & le sens des loix diuines, & l’intentio˜ de nos bonnes conceptions & conseils, qui ne peuue˜t proceder d’autre que de Dieu. Voila pourquoy l’on faisoit courir le bruit qu’il trainoit les hommes ou` il vouloit, les attachant par l’oreille a` vne chaine d’or. On luy a donne´ la reputation d’estre le Dieu des larrons, imposteurs, & de toutes fraudes; syndic & patro˜ des marcha˜ds, banquiers, traffiqueurs, courretiers; non seulement pource que si l’eloquence & beau-parler est coniointe auec vn mauuais & malicieux esprit, il peult faire beaucoup de maux aux autres hommes: mais aussi dauta˜t que ceux sur la naissance desquels la planete de Mercure seigneurie, sont volontiers enclins au larcin & a` toutes sortes de ruses & cauteles. 48

Mercury is Janus-faced in his outward appearance, because he is fused with Hercules Gallicus, but also in his moral being, as he can use his eloquence to convey both good and evil messages. 45

46 47

48

On Dürer’s emphasis on the affinity of Hercules Gallicus and Mercury cf. Edgar Wind, “‘Hercules’ and ‘Orpheus’: Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer,” JWCI 2 (1938-1939), 206-218. Cartari, Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1647), p. 310. Natalis Comes is known to have published on rhetoric, as in De terminis rhetoricis libri quinque. Basileae, 1560. [Natalis Comes], Mythologie, c’est a` dire, explication des fables, co˜tenant les gn˜alogies des Dieux…. Extraite du Latin de Noel le Comte, & augmentee de plusieurs choses qui facilitent l’intelligence du sujet. Par I.D.M. A Lyons. chez Paul Frelon, auec Priuil. du Roy. M.DC.VII p. 420.

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In the late Renaissance Mercury often decorates the title-pages of books on rhetoric - as Edward Phillips’ The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence (1658), with Mercury and Eros (Figure 88) symbolizing the “Arts of Wooing and Complementing” - but also, in accordance with Cartari’s symbolic interpretation, of books on music. The title-page of the English version of Johann-Heinrich Alsted’s Templum Musicum (1664), 49 for example shows the Templum Musicum flanked by the figures of Mercury playing the lyre and Orpheus playing the cittern (Figure 89). The title-page of Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) shows Mercury as a seated old man, perhaps under the influence of the traditional Hercules Gallicus icon but at the same time referring to Vincenzo Cartari’s interpretation of him as the inventor of music and the other Arts and Sciences (Figure 90). On the engraved title-page of Samuel Shepherd’s Epigrams (1651) Mercury hands a poet a laurel wreath. The concept of Mercury as the patron of eloquence recurs in encyclopedic and literary works throughout the period of the Renaissance. Thus Bartholomaeus Anglicus writes in Batman vppon Bartholome, his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (1582): He [sc. Mercurius] was counted God of eloquence, Merchandise, feates of actiuitie, and thefte also. […] Also Poets call him, God of faire speaking and of wisedome. 50

In contrast to the “faire speaking” that rather befits the lover in wooing a beautiful lady in songs and sonnets 51 and the conjunction of oratio and ratio which in the Ciceronian tradition marks the founder of civilization, Mercury also symbolizes the overwhelming force of a highly emotional rhetoric. In Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlain the Great (1590), for example, the Prologue announces the protagonist as powerful both in word and deed: … you shall heare the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatning the world with high astounding tearms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword 52

49

50 51

52

The full title is: Templum musicum: or the Musical Synopsis … being a compendium of the rudiments both of the mathematical and practical part of musick … Translated out of Latin by John Birchensha. London: Will. Godbid for Peter Dring, 1664. Batman vppon Bartholome, his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum. London, 1582, p. 131r. According to Ben Jonson it is Mercury “who giues all louers their true and masculine eloquence” (Works. Vol. VII, p. 393). In English Renaissance sonnets Mercury often makes his appearance; for testimonies, see Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte, p. 168. Christopher Marlowe, Works. Ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke. Oxford: Clarendon, 1910, p. 9 (Part I, Prol. 4-6).

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and Theridamas praises the forceful speech of Tamburlaine, who has conquered him with words instead of weapons: Not Hermes Prolocutor to the Gods, Could vse perswasions more patheticall. 53

Tamburlaine is here acknowledged as a second Hermes (Mercurius secundus) in his use of pathetic speech. Pathos is indeed an energetic quality in the battle of words and a mighty weapon to overcome the opponent. Mercury is described as being related to Amphion in the Eikones by Philostratus, which were translated in Paris by Blaise de Vigene`re in 1614 under the title Les Images, where we read: MERCVRE (a` ce que l’on dict) fut le premier qui assembla vne lyre (inuention certes tres-que belle) de deux cornes seruans de branches, d’vn cheuallet faict de bois, & d’vn fons auec sa table, de l’escaille d’vne tortue¨ & apres l’auoir communique´e a` Apollon & aux Muses, en fit present a` Amphion le Thebain. Cettuy-cy faisant sa demeure a` Thebes, qu’elles n’estoient encores ceintes de murailles, addressa ses chansons aux pierres & rochers; & les pierres & rochers l’escoutans attentiuement, accoururent vers luy: car tout cecy est en la peinture. Courez doncques de l’œil cette premiere lyre, si elle est portraitte comme elle doit estre. Car les Poe¨tes disent que c’est la corne d’vne bondissante chicure, dont le musicien se sert a` la lyre; & l’archer en ce qui luy est propre. […]. Mais quant a` ce qui concerne les pierres & en quel estat elles sont; toutes accourent a` sa musique, & l’escoutans attentiuement, s’arrangent & deuiennent muraille: dont ce pan cy est desia tout hausse´; cest autre monte encore, celuy la est piecX a arriue´ a` sa perfection. Ambitieuses a` la verite´, & fort plaisantes sont ces pierres, & merueilleusement promptes & seruiables. En fin la muraille a sept portes, tout autant qu’il y a de tons en la lyre. 54

In these words Amphion is regarded as a city-builder at whose music the stones joined together by themselves and formed a walled place for human beings to live. In the picture attached to this description (Figure 91) Amphion is sitting on the foundation of the city walls, with in the background an open prospect surrounded by regularly constructed buildings in the classical style. The same myth is already reported in the Middle Ages and in connection with the synthesis of music and eloquence that erected the city walls of Thebes. As stated by John Lydgate in The Fall of Princes (VI.3491-3493): Amphioun with song & elloquence Bilte the wallis of Thebes the cite, Pleasaunt obiectis to a mannys siht. 55 53 54

55

Marlowe, Works, p. 19 (vv. 405-406). Philostratus, Les Images. Trans. Blaise de Vigene`re (Paris, 1614). Facsimile-Reprint: New York & London: Garland, 1976, pp. 78-79. John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes. Ed. H. Bergen. 4 vols. London, 1824-1827, VI.34913493; cf. VI. 637-43.

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In Renaissance documents Amphion is aligned with Orpheus as one of the first poetae musici and founders of civilization, as George Puttenham declared: For it is written, that Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant 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 litle diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field. Whereupon it is fayned that Amphion and Orpheus, two Poets of the first ages, one of them, to wit Amphion, builded vp cities, and reared walles with the stones that came in heapes to the sound of his harpe, figuring thereby the mollifying of hard and stonie hearts by his sweete and eloquent perswasion. 56

Besides being a founder of an ideal city, as Renaissance architects tried to project, Amphion is also interpreted as establishing a civilized society in which people could live peacefully and harmoniously together. All this is effected by musical eloquence which combines the beautiful and the moral, or, in other terms, aesthetics and ethics.

III. Logomachiai: Verbal Combats in the Humanities Visualized In the Renaissance the allegorical spiritual combat in the Psychomachia of Prudentius assumes the form of quarrels in the humanities fought out with fierce armies of words. The subjects of such verbal fights are questions of grammar or style leading up to the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, parodied by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) in his mock-heroic epic The Battle of the Books (1697). An interesting, though minor, contribution to this intellectual quarrelling in allegorical terms is the dialogue Words Made Visible: or Grammar and Rhetorick Accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men (1679) by Samuel Shaw (16351696), originally written for the boys at Ash-de-la-Zouch school, where Shaw was headmaster from 1668 to 1696. The ancient colloquium method of teaching grammar and rhetoric, which in England dates back to Aelfric, is here, according to the subtitle, “Represented in a Country School for the Entertainment and Edification of the Spectators.” In the first part of the scenic dialogue Mercurius Basilicus, “Messenger of King Syntaxis,” delivers a letter from His Majesty appointing a committee that shall settle all grievances amongst “the eight Parts of Speech.” The Gymnasiarches and others are commanded to assemble before the four judges appointed by the King and set 56

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G.D. Willcock & A. Walker, p. 6.

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forth their problems, which are then subjects of committed debates ending with “a happy civil union” being established among the Eight Parts of Speech. 57 The second part of the book, which is dedicated to rhetoric, begins with the resolution of Ellogus, Eclogus, Invention, and Affection to debate the assignment of their “father, of blessed memory, Prince Eulogus, […] to propagate the Rhetorical Dominions.” 58 This is done not in an eristic manner but in civil conversations and debates, in the course of which the rhetorical categories introduce themselves and reveal their affiliations with other categories, thus making evident categorial dependencies and relationships. The purpose of Shaw’s short work is therefore didactic. As for its rhetorical substance, its concept of rhetoric based on irony seems to be of particular interest. The dramatis persona termed Irony makes the following remarkable statement: Yes, Sir, they [sc.Voice and Gesture] borrow of me; for certainly there can be no Oratory without dissimulation. The lively representations which either Orators or Poets do make, whereby they so wonderfully affect the minds of men; what are they but purely Ironical ? If I did not spirit them, Voice would be a pittiful Babble, and Gesture a miserable Gesticulation. But what do I speak of them two? The whole World would be a rude lump if I did not form it. The precious Youth that goes by the plausible title of Honesty, Plain dealing, and I know not what, would soon make a Fool of his work, and reduce the World to a pittiful beggarly pass, if I should suffer him. But, I think, that I have matcht him pretty well: for I will undertake that I have got an hundred Subjects to his one. All that write not as they speak, all that speak not as they think, all that think not according to truth, all that intend not as they pretend, all that practise not as they profess, all that look one way and row another, are my Subjects. 59

This amazing utterance is expressive not only of sixteenth-century courtly and Machiavellian rhetoric of dissimulation but even more of the rhetorical scepticism and even anti-rhetoric of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless it also manifests the esprit and wit of the virtuoso culture of the Restoration, pointing ahead to the Augustan Age with its sophisticated poetic ironies in the satires and parodies of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Compared to Shaw’s work, the book of Justus Georg Schottelius (16121676), a scholar and educator at the ducal court of Wolfenbüttel, Germany, pursued a similarly didactic purpose but was exclusively occupied with problems of grammar. Under the title Der schreckliche Sprachkrieg / Horrendum Bellum 57

58 59

Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible (1679). Facsimile Reprint. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1972, p. 91. Shaw, Words Made Visible (1679), pp. 101-102. Shaw, Words Made Visible (1679), p. 117.

522

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Grammaticale (1673), 60 it describes the allegorical battle between King Noun (“Nennwort”) and King Verb (“Zeitwort”) for priority in the realm of words. The idea of a logomachia or war of words was not, however, entirely new at that time but went back to Andrea Guarna’s (c. 1470-c. 1517) Grammaticale bellum Nominis et Verbi regum (1512 etc.). 61 The translation of his work by one W. H(ayward) as Bellum Grammaticale: A discourse of a great war and dissention betwene two worthy princes, the noune and the verbe, contending for the chefe place … in oration (London, H. Bynneman) appeared in a new edition in 1635. 62 Towards the end of the seventeenth century a rhetorical word combat appeared in England by Patrick Ker bearing the title: LOGOMAXIAÅ:

/ OR, / The Conquest of / Eloquence: / Containing Two Witty / ORATIONS, / The First Spoke by Ajax: The Second / by Ulisses, when they Contested for Achilles’s / Armour, before the Nobles of Greece; a lit-/tle before the Overthrow of Troy: As they / may be Read, Ovid Metamorph. Lib.13. […]. London, Printed for Tho. Howkins in George-Yard, / in Lombard-street. 1690. (Wing K 342). 63

This publication therefore does not contain an allegorical contest but two fictitious orations delivered by two Greek heroes who were participants in the Trojan War. They are addressed to statesmen, magistrates, and others, teaching them to “know how wrong Informa-/tion guided with Eloquence, may per-/vert Justice, and so learn to avoid the giving of rash Sentence.” Thus this didactic impetus is again rooted in the century’s sceptical attitude towards rhetoric. Some decades earlier there appeared in France Nouvelle alle´gorique ou l’His´ loquence (1658) by Antoine Furetoire des derniers troubles arrive´s au royaume d’E tie`re (1619-1688), member of the Acade´mie FrancX aise since 1662, author of the famous Roman bourgeois (1666), a parody of the heroic romance, and compiler of the even more significant Dictionnaire universel (1690) that preceded the Acade´mie’s dictionary. The Nouvelle Alle´gorique begins with the following report: La se´re´nissime Princesse Rhe´torique re´gnoit paisiblement depuis plusieurs sie`cles et son gouvernement e´toit si dous qu’on luy obe´issoit sans contrainte. Elle ne faisoit point d’autre violence a` ses sujets que de leur envoyer son grand pre´vost 60

61

62

63

Edition: Justus Georg Schottelius, Der schreckliche Sprachkrieg / Horrendum Bellum Grammaticale (1673). Introd. F. Kittler. Leipzig: Reclam, 1992. Text edition and reception history by Johannes Bolte, Andrea Guarnas “Bellum Grammaticale” und seine Nachahmungen. Berlin: A. Hofmann & Comp., 1908. The title is: THE / GRAMMAR WARRE / OR / The eight Parts of SPEACH […]. LONDON, Printed by Robert Raworth, for Thomas Spencer. 1635. Transcription of the title-page of the copy of the Folger Shakespeare Library: F: K 342.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

523

nomme´ Persuasion, avec une compagnie de belles paroles, ses archers, qui les amenoient enchaıˆnez par les oreilles avec des chaıˆnes d’or et de soye. Son premier ministre s’appeloit Bon Sens et, quoy qu’elle gouvernaˆt plustost par adresse que par force, elle avoit pourtant sur pied quantite´ de re´gimens de figures et d’argumens qu’elle distribuoit par toutes les places. Elle avoit aussi beaucoup de bons officiers, tant pour la guerre que pour la police, qui contenoient les peuples dans l’obe´issance. Son conseil souverain re´sidoit dans Acade´mie, sa ville capitale, et e´toit compose´ de quarante Barons, confidens de la Reine, qui avoient presque toute l’authorite´ en main. Ils tenoient conseil deux fois la semaine pour les affaires de l’Estat et principalement ils travailloient a` faire un de´nombrement et un roˆle exacte des habitans de ce grand empire qui, en langue du paı¨s, s’appelloit dictionnaire, ou` ils ne comprenoient que ceux qui avoient droit de bourgeoisie par lettres patentes. […] La domination de ce royaume a e´te´ usurpe´e par le Capitaine Galimatias, homme obscur et ne´ de la lie du peuple, mais qui par la mauvaise intelligence qu’il a trouve´e dans l’esprit des magistrats, s’est rendu en peu de temps maistre de tout le paı¨s. 64

Thus a battle arises between the two antagonists, Rhe´torique and Galimatias. 65 The troops are arranged in battle formation (Figure 92) and consist mainly of rhetorical tropes and figures, such as antithe`ses, “troupes nouvellement sorties du colle`ge,” alle´gories, “de grande taille” and equipped with long-bows, me´taphores of a smaller stature and armed with simple javelins, comparaisons forming the vanguard, prosopope´es “extreˆmement puissantes” and representing “un corps de re´serve,” furthermore two grand corps of cavalry consisting of hyperboles and de´scriptions, and finally another such corps accompanying Prince Galimatias himself, composed of the musketeers acrostiches and anagrammes. Finally the changing fortunes of the war are ended by a peace treaty. “Depuis ce temps tout a este´ assez calme dans le royaume.” 66 We conclude this chapter and with it the entire book with a reference to Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704), which renders a parodistic and satiric version of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Figure 93) that originated in France and in its final stage crossed the Channel to cause an uproar in the humanities at the end of the Renaissance. It does not deal with rhetoric at all and even does not include among its fighters a Demosthenes to defend the position of classical against modern rhetoric, but it makes evident that 64

65

66

´ loAntoine Furetie`re, Nouvelle Alle´gorique ou Histoire des derniers troubles arrive´s au royaume d’E quence. Ed. Eva van Ginneken. Gene`ve: Droz, 1967, pp. 7-8, 11. The first part of this citation includes a noteworthy reference to the mythological topos of Hercules Gallicus, which here serves as an ekphrastic characterization of the reign of Princess Rhe´torique. Galimatias is defined by the O.E.D. as “confused language, meaningless talk, nonsense” with reference to, among others, Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais i.ii.: “A Galimatia of extravagant conceits” (1653). Furetie`re, Nouvelle Alle´gorique, p. 103.

524

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

the contest between Ancients and Moderns is a perennial one. The entire Renaissance is marked by this contest, which in the case of rhetoric resulted in a series of transformations. It is these metamorphoses that prove the true index of an evolution in rhetoric and the humanities then and now. The final word on rhetoric will be pronounced by a representative of humanist and visual culture in the Renaissance. Matthias Holtzwart (c. 1530/ 40-c. 1590), author of a bilingual emblem-book with the title Emblematum tyrocinia: sive picta poesis Latino-Germanica (Strassburg, 1581), is referring to the Ciceronian oratio-ratio topos when he declares in the motto to emblem no. 7 that both the intellect and eloquence require exercise: “ingenium et eloquentiam colendam.” This is illustrated by a pictura (Figure 94) and explicated by a Latin epigram, the translation of which reads as follows: “You see here that man and brute beasts differ in nothing, when language and right judgment are absent. Therefore exercise your intellect and your eloquence in your youth that you do not entirely resemble animals. Take away from man the use of his tongue and the power of his intellect and he will differ in nothing from brute beasts.” 67 This epigram summarizes the ideological foundation of rhetoric in Renaissance culture: the unity of wisdom and eloquence. Without it social life is impossible.

67

Modern edition: Matthias Holtzwart, Emblematum Tyrocinia. With a preface by Johann Fischart and 72 woodcuts by Tobias Stimmer. Ed. P. von Düffel & K. Schmidt. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968, pp. 32-33 (Latin & German originals), p. 172 (modern German trans.).

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 65: Gregor Reisch (c. 1467-1525): Margarita Philosophica (1583), allegory of Rethorica as regina artium.

525

526

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 66: Matthijs de Castelein (1485-1550): De Const van Rhetoriken (1555), allegory of Rhetorica.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 67: Stephen Hawes (c. 1475-1511): The Pastime of Pleasure (1509), the School of Rethoryke.

Figure 68: Herrad von Landsberg (c. 1130-1195): Hortus Deliciarum, Rethorica as a teacher of the discipline.

527

528

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 69: Peter Wagner: The Seven Liberal Arts and Theology (Nuremberg, 1493/94).

Figure 70: Thomasin von Zerklaere (1185/86-1235): Der welsche Gast (c. 1215).

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 71: Friedrich Riederer (c. 1450-1508): Spiegel der waren Rethoric (1493), Rhetoric as an elegant and powerful lady.

529

530

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 72: Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506): Rhetorica.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 73: Christophoro Giarda (1595-1649): Icones Symbolicae (1626, 21628), Rhetorica.

531

532

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 74: Cesare Ripa (1560?-1625): Iconologia (1603), Persuasione.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 75: Cesare Ripa (1560?-1624): Iconologia (1603), Poesia.

533

534

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 76: Christophoro Giarda (1595-1649): Icones Symbolicae (1626, 21628), Poesia.

Figure 77: Marius d’Assigny (1643-1717): The Art of Memory (1699), Hercules Gallicus.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

535

536

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 78: Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini de gli dei de gli antichi (1624), Hercules Gallicus.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 79: Andrea Alciato (1492-1530): Emblemata (1542), emblematic representation of Hercules Gallicus.

537

538

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 80: King Henri IV of France as Hercules Gallicus.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 81: Achille Bocchi (1488-1562): Symbolicae Quaestiones (1555), trionfo of Hercules Gallicus.

539

540

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 82: Achille Bocchi (1488-1562): Symbolicae Quaestiones (1555), Pericles as representative of vis eloquentiae.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 83: Balthasar Kindermann (1636-1706): Teutscher Wolredner (1688), female Hercules Gallicus.

541

542

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 84: Medieval manuscript: Mercury as a scribe.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

543

Figure 85: Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini delli dei de gl’antichi (1647), Mercury as inventor of Letters, Music, Geometry, and other arts.

544

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 86: Vincenzo Cartari: Imagini de gli dei de gli antichi (1624), a hybrid figure composed of Mercury and Hercules Gallicus.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 87: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528): Drawing of Mercury as Hercules Gallicus.

545

Figure 88: Edward Phillips: The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), Mercury and Eros symbolizing the “Arts of Wooing and Complementing.”

546 E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 89: Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638): Templum Musicum (1664), Mercury and Orpheus.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

547

548

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 90: Thomas Morley (1557-1603?) A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), Mercury as a seated old man.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

549

Figure 91: Flavius Philostratus: Les Images. Trans. Blaise de Vigene`re (1614), Amphion.

550

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 92: Antoine Furetie`re (1619-1688): Nouvelle Alle´gorique (1658), the battle of the troops of Rhe´torique and Galimatias.

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 93: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): The Battle of the Books (1704).

551

552

E. Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence

Figure 94: Matthias Holtzwart (c. 1530-1590): Emblematum tyrocinia sive picta poesis Latino-Germanica (1581), picture of Eloquentia.

F. Indices

I. Names A Santa Clara, Abraham 30 Addison, Joseph 363 Aelfric 520 Agricola, Rudolph 8, 52, 53, 54, 278, 283, 456 Agrippa of Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius 69, 243 Ainsworth, Henry 360, 361 Alabaster, William 231, 236, 239, 240 Alanus ab Insulis 512 Alberich of Montecassino 31 Alberti, Leon Battista 43, 259, 311, 318, 321 Alciato, Andrea XII, XV, 75, 76, 142, 211, 248, 288, 291, 354, 357, 514, 537 Alcinous 201 Alcuin 13 Aldington, Richard 477 Alexander Pheraeus 266, 267, 447, 449, 450 Alexander the Great 254, 305-307, 405, 446 Allot, Robert XII, 137, 138 Alsted, Johann Heinrich XI, 44, 45, 137, 366, 372, 518, 547 Ambrose, Saint 304, 305 Ambrosius Calepinus 257 Amphion XV, 80, 81, 174, 175, 319, 396, 397, 419, 510, 516, 519, 520, 549 Amyot, Jacques 76 Anacreon of Teos 155, 340, 350 Aneau, Barthelemy 156, 349 Anne, Queen of Britain 374 Apelles 306, 307, 318, 319 Aphthonius 17, 456 Apollinaire, Guillaume 352 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe XI, 15 Ariosto, Ludovico 100, 101, 126, 153, 312, 326, 338, 361 Ariston 71, 72 Aristotle 3, 14, 17, 18, 30, 46, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 98, 102, 104, 106, 130, 133, 137,

155, 158, 162, 171, 179, 183, 187, 275277, 282, 335, 373, 438, 451, 502, 509 Armenini, Giambattista 308, 317 Ascham, Roger 32, 33, 50, 158 Auden, Wystan Hugh 404 Augustinus, Aurelius, Saint 13, 27, 28, 104, 207, 232 Aurelis, Aurelio 407 Austin, Gilbert 43, 265 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 379 Bach, Johann Sebastian 44, 141, 379, 381 Bacon, Francis 4, 58, 59, 139, 145, 211, 212, 251, 255, 258, 262, 346, 389, 390, 394, 402, 427, 428, 433, 475 Balanchine, George 406 Baldwin, William 285-287 Bale, John 176 Barbaro, Ermolao 68 Baron Buckhurst 176 Basil, Saint, Bishop of Caesarea 329 Bassus, Caesius 153 Bebel, Heinrich 49, 50 Becon, Thomas 431 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 340 Bense, Max 145 Berlioz, Hector 406 Bernardi, Giovanni Battista 46 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 229 Beza, Theodorus 28, 211 Blair, Hugh 13 Blundeville, Thomas 49, 64 Boccaccio, Giovanni 94, 95, 171, 285 Bocchi, Achille XV, 515, 516, 539, 540 Bodin, Jean 64 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 53, 160, 373 Boileau, Nicholas Despreaux 148 Bonciani, Francesco 284, 285, 286 Bond, Edward 406 Bonifacio, Giovanni 326

556

Indices

Borges, Jorge Luis 201 Borghini, Raffaello 317 Boscan, Garcilasso 40 Bosse, Abraham 382 Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne 30, 102 Botticelli, Sandro 306, 309, 318 Bracciolini, Poggio 16, 48 Brahms, Johannes 143 Brandolinus, Aurelius Lippus 33 Brathwait, Richard 431 Breughel, Jan 40, 140 Breughel, Pieter 140, 313 Bright, Timothy 124 Brinsley, John 50, 211 Britten, Benjamin 404 Browne, Sir Thomas 238, 355 Bruni, Leonardo 53 Bruno, Giordano 206, 207 Büchner, Georg 292 Bulwer, John XI, XIII, 41-43, 140, 258260, 440, 445 Buno, Johannes XIII, 245-248 Bunyan, John 219, 224, 225, 244, 245, 343, 361, 362 Burbage, Richard 260, 264, 438 Burckhardt, Jacob 3, 8 Burgkmair, Hans XIII, 365 Burmeister, Joachim 43, 368, 378-381, 389, 403 Burton, Robert 111, 124, 202, 206, 374 Buschius, Hermannus 243 Butler, Charles 51, 254, 255, 258, 284, 391, 440 Byrd, William 388 Caccini, Giulio 368, 371, 372 Caesar, Gaius Julius 253, 336, 346, 353, 421 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro 393, 402, 403 Camden, William 66 Camilli, Giulio 208 Campana, Giovanni 509 Campbell, George 13, 98 Campion, Thomas 279, 391-393, 400, 411 Cˇapek, Karel 145 Capella, Martianus 192, 505, 508 Caravaggio 343 Care, John 390 Caro, Annibal 18 Cartari, Vincenzo XV, 513, 516-518, 536, 543, 544

Castelvetro, Lodovico 158, 277 Castiglione, Baldassare 78, 189, 193-195, 197, 271, 272, 289, 398, 424, 427, 443, 447, 451, 457 Cato, Marcus Porcius 174, 312 Caussinus, Nicolaus 25, 48, 105 Caxton, William 209, 210 Celtis, Konrad (Celtes, Conradus) 8, 33, 330, 332 Cerio´l, Federico Furio´ 49 Chaloner, Thomas 176 Champollion, FrancX ois 352 Chantelou, Paul Fre´art de 322 Chapman, George 77, 137, 336, 514 Charlemagne 13 Charles I, King of Britain 2, 29, 292, 313 Charron, Pierre 118, 123, Chaucer, Geoffrey 4, 48, 176, 285, 348, 450, 503 Che´nier, Andre´ 149 Chytraeus, David XI, 21, 22 Chytraeus, Nathan 104 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 3, 6, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 31, 36, 46, 48, 51, 53-55, 72, 74, 78, 80, 81, 104, 113, 133, 147, 163, 180, 193, 202, 206, 208, 243, 248, 254, 255-258, 261, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272, 276, 289, 315, 316, 325, 329, 332, 344, 354, 381, 388, 396, 418, 419, 428, 437, 440, 443, 447, 450, 451, 463, 472, 502, 506, 507 Coignet, Matthieu 298 Coke, John 176 Colet, John 36 Colman, Henry XIII, 245, 246 Colombo, John Robert 139, 145 Colonna, Francesco 353 Comenius, Johann Amos 137, 245 Comes, Natalis (Conti, Natale) 248, 259, 426, 517 Corax 69 Corneille, Pierre 409 Correggio, Antonio Allegri 343 Cowley, Abraham 135 Cox, Leonard 24, 25 Coypel, Charles 362 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder XIII, 330-332, 334 Crashaw, Richard 229 Cromwell, Thomas 37, 359 Cummings, E.E. 352

I. Names D’Assigny, Marius XV, 513, 535 D’Este, Ercole 77 Da Gagliano, Marco 369 Da Messina, Tommaso 80 Da Moncalieri, Filippo Albini 372 Da Vinci, Leonardo XIII, 43, 143, 162, 299-301, 309, 325, 342 Daedalus 201 Dante Alighieri 71, 115, 180, 214, 215, 285, 361 Davenant, William 115, 239, 240 Davenish, William 59 Davies, Sir John 115, 394 Day, Angel 33, 305 De Boullay, Michel 406 De Calzabigi, Ranieri 405 De Castelein, Matthijs XIV, 502, 503, 505, 526 De Chambre´, Anne 382 De Cressolles, Louis 258, 265 De Deimier, Pierre 89, 90, 146-149 De Dios Huarte Navarro, Juan 255, 257, 446, 494 De Fre´art, Roland 317, 318, 323, 324 De la Puente, Luis 230, 232 De Milan, Luis XIV, 406, 408 De Molina, Antonio 235 De Piles, Roger 319-321 De Saint-Garde, Carel 362 De Thou, Jacques-Auguste 66 De Ulloa, Alfonso 49 De Vienne, Philibert 290 De Vigene`re, Blaise 407, 410, 519, 549 Deborah 174 Defoe, Daniel 101 Della Casa, Giovanni 197 Demosthenes 18, 51, 254, 255, 260, 315, 381, 475, 502, 506, 523 Denisov, Edison 141 Denores, Giason 161 Des Nanteuil, Robert 382 Descartes, Rene´ 57, 368 Despauterius, Johannes 37 Di Lasso, Orlando 381 Döbelius, Johann-Heinrich XII, 204 Dolce, Ludovico 313, 315, 325 Donne, John 219, 220, 234, 235, 292, 374, 428 Dowland, John 374, 411 Drant, Thomas 275, 279, 280 Drayton, Michael XIII, 137, 346, 347, 374

557

Dryden, John 77, 117, 118, 164, 261, 278, 280, 281, 309, 317, 363, 389, 403-405, 468, 514 Du Bartas, Guillaume Saluste XII, 40, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123, 129, 282 Du Bellay, Joachim 89, 90, 94, 156 Du Fresnoy, Charles 317 Ducci, Lorenzo 290 Duchamp, Marcel 143 Dugard, William 51 Dumarsais, Ce´sar Chesneau 40 Dürer, Albrecht XI, XIII, XV, 19, 23, 128, 326, 327, 353, 517, 545 Dyer, Sir Edward 176 E.K. 96, 288, 392 Eco, Umberto 143, 249 Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford 176 Edwards, Richard 176 Eliot, T.S. 348 Elizabeth I, Queen of England XII, 66, 102, 103, 165, 166, 176, 188, 189, 302, 358 Elyot, Sir Thomas 48, 49, 418 Erasmus of Rotterdam XI, XII, 6, 8, 9, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 50, 51, 58, 67, 69, 71, 78, 98, 128, 131, 134, 135, 142, 278, 281, 283, 284, 348, 359, 498, 502 Estienne, Henri 288, 354, 355, 356 Euripides 147 Fabricius, Georgius 274, 275, 276, 280 Farnaby, Thomas 25, 165, 254, 256, 283, 446, 447 Fe´libien, Andre´ 362, 363 Feltham, Owen 139 Fenner, William 244 Ferrarius, Joannes 254 Ferrys, Edward [ Ferrars, George] 176 Ficino, Marsilio 68, 124, 125, 366 Field, Richard 189 Flecknoe, Richard 260, 264, 438 Fletcher, John 161 Fletcher, Phineas 116, 346 Florio, John 72 Fludd, Robert 44, 137, 206, 366 Fontanier, Pierre 40 Fracastoro, Girolamo 105 Francis of Sales, Saint 230, 232 Fraunce, Abraham 39, 264, 284, 387, 426, 427, 436, 440, 444, 460, 462

558

Indices

Frederick, Elector Palatine 400 Fries, Lorenz (of Colmar) 216-218 Fulwood, William 212 Furetie`re, Antoine XV, 522, 523, 550 Gainsford, Thomas 34, 137 Gascoigne, George 160, 190, 463 Gaultier, Denis XIV, 382-385, 403 Gay, John 143, 488 Giarda, Christophoro XIV, XV, 508, 509, 511, 512, 531, 534 Giotto di Bondone 315 Giovio, Paolo, the Elder 176, 354 Glarean, Heinrich 377 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 405, 406 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 133, 335, 511 Golding, Arthur 176 Gorgias 61, 69 Gottfried Baron van Swieten 348 Gower, John 176, 367, 495, 496 Gratarolus, Guilelmus 206, 212, 248 Greene, John 254, 265 Greene, Robert 144 Grünewald, Matthias 507 Gryphius, Andreas 487 Guarini, Giambattista 161 Guarna, Andrea 522 Guazzo, Stefano 197 Gutenberg, Johannes 134, 136, 202, 205, 273 Hall, Joseph 428 Hamlin, M. Ægidius 56, 112 Handel, George Frideric 44, 102, 144, 376, 378, 403-405, 487 Harding, Thomas 176, 360 Harington, Sir John 100, 101, 153, 156, 157, 170 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus 380 Harris, James 376 Harsdörffer, Georg-Philipp 362 Harvey, Christopher 219-222, 224, 228 Harvey, Gabriel 16, 52, 115, 397 Hasse, Johann Adolf 487 Hawes, Stephen XIV, 268, 421, 503, 527 Hawkins, Henry XIII, 236-238 Haydn, Joseph 146, 348 Haydocke, Richard 310 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 415

Heinsius, Daniel 135 Hemingius 28 Henley, John 43 Henri III, King of France 76 Henri IV, King of France XV, 77, 420, 514, 515, 538 Henry VIII, King of England 286 Henze, Hans Werner 406 Herbert, George 29, 52, 135, 219, 222224, 245, 350, 391 Hercules 253, 515 Hercules Gallicus XV, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 264, 396, 397, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 448, 507, 509, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 523, 535-539, 541, 544, 545 Hercules Germanicus 77, 515 Herdson, Henry 248 Hermes Trismegistos 430 Hermogenes 17, 46 Herrad von Landsberg XIV, 505, 506, 527 Herrick, Robert 135, 277, 340, 341, 424 Hesiod 147, 175, 397 Heywood, Thomas 253, 254, 265, 266, 268, 269, 401, 402, 442-447, 449 Hindemith, Paul 507 Hirschvelder, Bernhard 31 Hobbes, Thomas 59, 60, 61, 115, 116, 363 Hoby, Sir Thomas 78, 195, 271, 272, 289, 298, 424, 443, 457 Hollar, Wenzel XIII, 320 Holtzwart, Matthias XV, 524, 552 Homer 129, 147, 157, 169, 173-175, 181, 281, 338, 340, 393, 507 Hoole, Charles 51 Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) 7, 93, 97, 105, 126, 129, 142, 153, 155, 156, 163, 183, 184, 187, 197, 256, 274-276, 279, 280, 316, 325, 334, 335, 354, 357, 371, 379, 396, 437, 438, 507, 510 Hoskins, John 120, 282, Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 176 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel XIII, 313, 314, 316 Hume, David 363 Hyperius, Andreas Gerhard 27, 28, 255, 256, 439 Ignatius of Loyola 234, 235, 240

105, 228, 229, 230, 231,

I. Names Illyricus, Matthias Flacius (Vlacich, Frankowitz) 28 Isocrates 16, 506 James I, King of Britain 288, 292, 399 Jennens, Charles 376 Jenner, Thomas 357 Jerome, Saint 225 Jewel, John 70, 71, 360 Joannes Austriacus 248 Jones, Inigo 162, 196, 302, Jonson, Ben 6, 17, 135, 156, 162, 189, 196, 199, 261, 275, 279, 280, 282, 292, 302304, 335, 344, 345, 402, 511, 514, 518 Junius, Franciscus XIII, 28, 316, 317, 319322, 329 Justinianus, Emperor 14, 248, 502 Juvenal (Iuvenalis, D. Iunius) 7 Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 13 Kandel, David XIV, 478 Kant, Immanuel 415 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus 137, Kempe, William 77, 268 Kindermann, Balthasar XV, 516, 541 Kircher, Athanasius 137 Lady Drury XII, 232, 233 Lampe, John Frederick 487, 488 Lamy, Bernard 40, 60 Lancilotti, Francesco 309 Landriani, Gerardo 16 Lang, Franciscus XIII, 140, 356, 357 Lang, Fritz 201 Langland, John 176 Laud, William 29 Laudun d’Aigaliers, Pierre de 89 Le Gobien, Charles 66 Le Maistre, Antoine 102 Le Sueur, Eustache 382 Leo X, Pope 306 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 364 Lichtenstein, Roy 143 Lily, George 176 Lily, William 37, 176 Linacre, Thomas 176, 491 Linos 147, 175, 397 Lionardi, Alessandro 105 Lipsius, Justus 33 Liszt, Franz 406

559

Livius, Titus 63, 66, 147 Locke, John 62, 363 Lockwood, Richard 30, 102 Lodge, Thomas 137, 288, 396, 450 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 122, 310, 316, 324-326, 438 Lorrain, Claude 362 Louis XIII, King of France 25 Louis XIV, King of France 362 Lucanus, M. Annaeus 7, 174, 175, 336 Lucian of Samosata 63, 64, 259, 318, 346, 507, 514, 515 Lucretius Carus 174 Ludham, John 27, 28, 255, 256, 439 Lullus, Raimundus 248 Luther, Martin 29, 359 Lydgate, John 176, 267, 285, 503, 519 Lyly, John 160, 199, 306, 307, 343 Machiavelli, Niccolo` 48, 64, 65, 79, 290, 426, 429, 450, 521 MacIlmaine, Roland 55 Mahler, Gustav 141 Malraux, Andre´ 133 Manilius 174 Mantegna, Andrea XIV, 353, 507, 530 Mantuanus ( Johannes Baptista Spagnoli) 172 Manutius, Aldus 17 Mareolus of Verona 243 Marias, Marin 381 Marino, Giovanni Battista 343 Marlowe, Christopher 56, 496, 497, 518 Marston, John 307, 428 Martialis, M. Valerius 7, 156 Marvell, Andrew 341, 343, 345 Mary (Tudor), Queen of England 400 Masen, Jacob 140 Mason, John 43 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste 102 Massinger, Philip 266, 448 Mattheson, Johann 44, 377, 378, 380, 381 Matthias, Iacobus 28 Maximilian I, Emperor XIII, 77, 332, 353, 365, 515 Mazzoni, Jacopo 158 Melanchthon, Philipp XI, 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 71 Menander Rhetor 102, 165 Menedemos of Eretria 69

560

Indices

Menestrier, Claude-FrancX ois 349, 355 Mercurius (Hermes) Trismegistos 147 Meres, Francis 152-155, 157 Mersenne, Marin XIV, 389, 407, 409 Merulo, Claudio 369 Metrodorus Scepsius 207 Michelangelo Buonarroti 308, 310, 322 Mico, Edward [M., E.] XII, 226-228 Middleton, Thomas 401 Milton, John 2, 6, 7, 48, 62, 94, 101, 135, 158, 160, 177, 282, 338, 340, 348, 361, 364, 369, 375, 376, 395-397, 419, 456 Minturno, Antonio Sebastiano 105, 276, 309, 385, 438, 491 Mirabellius, Dominicus Nanus 36 Molie`re 79 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, Sieur de 71, 72, 139 Montano, Benito Arias 507 Monteverdi, Claudio XIII, 369, 370, 373, 376, 403, 405 Mor(y)sine, R[ichard] 58 More, Sir Thomas 32, 33, 58, 64, 65, 66, 69, 71, 346 Morhof, Daniel Georg 138 Morley, Thomas XV, 438, 518, 548 Mosellanus, Petrus (Schade, Peter) 22, 36 Moses 59, 174, 309, Musaios 147, 175 ,397 Mytens, Daniel XIII, 313, 314 Nashe, Thomas 272, 273, 282 Nucius, Johannes 376 Offenbach, Jacques 406 Opitz, Martin XI, 91, 92 Orpheus XIV, XV, 76, 77, 80, 81, 147, 174, 175, 366, 393, 396-403, 405-407, 408, 410, 411, 419, 420, 427, 510, 517, 518, 520, 547 Ovid XIV, 7, 113, 147, 156, 307, 308, 309, 336, 349, 406, 407, 477, 487, 522 Paepp, Johannes 206 Paleotti, Gabriele 140 Parrhasios 306 Pater, Walter 412 Patrassi, Pietro Antonio Bonaventuro (Metastasio) 371 Patrizi, Francesco 279

Paul III, Pope 306 Paulus, Saint 29, 72 Peacham, Henry XI, XIV, 37, 38, 51, 122, 211, 218, 219, 271, 272, 278, 281, 284, 337, 338, 343, 344, 346, 348, 387, 388, 396, 399, 420, 437, 441, 460, 465, 480, 515 Peele, George 494, 495 Peletier du Mans, Jacques 87-89, 113 Pepusch, John Christopher 488 Peri, Jacopo 369, 371 Perkins, William 28-30, 41, 243, 244, 361 Perrault, Charles 148 Persius, Aulus Flaccus 7 Petrarca, Francesco XIII, 9, 14, 16, 18, 52, 64, 80, 81, 101, 180, 181, 139, 243, 244, 285, 304, 315, 341, 344, 487 Phaer, Thomas 176 Philip II, King of Spain 188, 306, 400 Phillips, Edward XV, 139, 518, 546 Philostratus, Flavius XV, 339, 407, 410, 519, 549 Phocylides 174 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio 314 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 68, 111 Pilet de la Mesnardie`re, Hippolyte-Jules XII, 106, 107 Pindar 147, 155, 157, 507 Pino, Paolo 310, 311, 317, 321 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 201 Pirkheimer, Willibald 353 Pius II, Pope see Piccolomini Plato 30, 60, 61, 68-72, 102, 111, 124126, 147, 164, 219, 281, 309, 310, 321, 360, 373, 415 Plautus, Titus Maccius 157 Pliny (C. Plinius Secundus) 136, 305, 310, 319 Plutarch 76, 101, 127, 136, 147, 263, 266, 298, 322 Polybius 329 Pontanus, Jacobus 412 Pope, Alexander 521 Poussin, Nicolas XIII, 322, 323, 330, 333, 334, 362, 363, 412 Priscianus, Theodorus P. 284, 336 Propertius, Sextus 156 Protagoras 61 Prudentius 520 Purcell, Henry XIV, 378, 410 Purchas, Samuel 72, 73, 423

I. Names Puttenham, George XII, XIII, 40, 78, 79, 92, 103, 125, 128, 153-156, 160, 162, 164-176, 181, 187-200, 275-277, 279, 286, 288, 289, 290, 293, 344, 350-352, 385-393, 396-399, 411, 424, 425, 433, 451, 457, 459, 462, 463, 465, 470, 511, 512, 515, 520 Pythagoras 366, 392 Quantz, Johann Joachim 379 Quarles, Francis XIII, 273, 274 Quintilianus, M. Fabius 3, 6, 16, 24, 46, 55, 98, 121, 122, 125, 129, 139, 144, 163, 170, 193, 202, 206, 243, 248, 249, 254258, 263, 265, 267, 271, 275, 281, 283, 284, 305, 316, 325, 329, 334, 348, 380, 381, 388, 419, 436-443, 459-463, 465, 468, 479, 494, 502, 506, 512, 516 Rabirius, Gaius 507 Rainolde, John 18 Rainolde, Richard 50, 139, 278, 283, 284, 336, 396, 456 Rainolds, John 396, 512, 513 Raleigh, Sir Walter 101, 103, 176 Ramus, Petrus (Pierre de la Rame´e) XI, 39, 40, 41, 45, 54-56, 59, 60, 83, 96, 112, 113, 131, 137, 154, 180, 220, 243, 335, 387 Randolph, Thomas 260, 261 Raphael ( Raffaello Santi) 299, 306, 309, 313, 343 Rauschenberg, Robert 143 Rauzzini, Venanzio 487 Ravennas, Petrus 202, 206, 207, 222, 248 Rebel, FrancX ois 487 Reisch, Gregor XII, XIV, 14, 118-120, 203, 217, 502, 503, 505, 525 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 363 Rhenanus, Beatus 502 Riccoboni, Antonio 104 Rich, Barnaby 431 Richard II, King of England 287 Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III of England) 64, 286 Richard, Duke of York 287 Richardson, Jonathan 363, 364 Richelieu 362, 515 Riederer, Friedrich XI, XIV, 31, 32, 507, 529

561

Rinuccini, Ottavio 369 Ripa, Cesare XIV, 508-512, 532, 533 Robinson, Robert 255 Rogers, Thomas 287, 288 Romano, Giulio 308 Romberch, Johannes (of Kierspe) XII, 41, 205, 216-218 Ronsard, Pierre de 89, 102, 111, 112, 126-129, 147, 148, 514 Roscius 502 Rossellius, Cosmas XII, 41, 202, 205-208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 220, 248 Röttgen, Christian 247 Rubens, Peter Paul 313, 322 Rymer, Thomas 457, 458 Sackville, Thomas 176 Salieri, Antonio 369 Sallustius Crispus 14, 63, 147, 502 Salteren, George 360, 361 Salutati, Coluccio 14, 48, 53, 101 Sannazzaro, Pietro 160 Sarpi, Paolo 66 Sartorio, Antonio 407 Savery, Roelant 407 Savonarola, Girolamo 358 Scaliger, Julius Caesar XII, 40, 162, 170175, 181-187, 195, 197-199, 259, 267, 284, 309, 350, 386, 444, 447, 483 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 304 Schenckel, Lambert Thomas 202, 206 Schiller, Friedrich 249 Schnittke, Alfred 141 Schonsleder, Wolfgang 372 Schottelius, Justus Georg 162, 521, 522 Se´billet, Thomas XI, 88, 89, 112, 113, 156 Segni, Bernardo 17 Seneca, L. Annaeus 14, 136, 147, 157, 243, 288, 428, 483-485, 487, 502 Shadwell, Thomas 102 Shakespeare, William VII, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 48, 49, 51, 65, 77, 79, 94, 113-115, 120, 122-131, 148, 152, 157, 158, 160, 171, 177, 197, 251-255, 257, 258, 261263, 266-268, 271, 279-281, 290, 292, 293, 297, 298, 301, 303, 305, 307, 308, 309, 324, 341-344, 374, 391, 402, 415419, 421-432, 435-437, 441, 442, 447, 448, 449, 451-453, 457-461, 465, 466, 468-470, 473-475, 477-479, 483, 486488, 490, 493, 495, 511, 514, 522

562

Indices

Shaw, Samuel 51, 261, 290, 520, 521 Shepherd, Samuel 518 Sheridan, Thomas 43, 265 Sherley, Anthony 213 Sherry, Richard 37, 278, 283, 284, 286 Shirley, James 116 Sidney, Sir Philip XI, 40, 94-96, 106, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 129, 130, 137, 144, 145, 153-157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 170, 173-176, 179, 180, 194, 195, 199, 200, 222, 225, 266, 269, 272, 273, 277, 282, 284, 309, 335, 336, 342-344, 357, 361, 391, 393, 396, 424, 440, 444, 445, 447-450, 471, 512 Simmias of Rhodos 350 Simonides of Ceos 142, 201, 202, 243, 298, 299, 304, 332, 334, 335 Skelton, John 176 Smith, John 39, 261, 284, 497 Socrates 69, 71, 72, 147, 364 Solomon, King XIII, 59, 174, 225, 330, 333, 334 Southwell, Robert 231, 232, 233 Speer, Georg Daniel 377 Spenser, Edmund 40, 96, 101, 103, 116, 137, 157, 165, 172, 176, 214, 288, 338, 343, 361, 374, 392, 514 Sprat, Thomas 62, 180 Stoppard, Tom 143 Stravinsky, Igor 141, 406 Stuart, Robert, Bishop of Caithness 400 Stubbes, Philip 359 Sturm, Johann XI, 31, 47, 54 Suetonius, C. 136 Susenbrotus, Joannes 6, 37, 275, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 388, 389, 464 Swift, Jonathan XV, 149, 157, 520, 521, 523, 551 Sylvester, Joshua XII, 116, 117, 129, 137, 281, 282 Tacitus, P. Cornelius 63 Talaeus, Audomarus (Talon, Omer) 39, 45, 51, 55, 56 Tasso, Torquato 40, 158 Taverner, Richard 134 Taylor, Jeremy 29, 30, 416 Telemann, Georg Philipp 406 Temple, Sir William 96, 148, 149, 154, 335, 336

Terence (P. Terentius Afer) 94, 104, 392, 450, 458, 491 Tertullianus, Q. Septimius Florens 72 Themistocles 243 Theocrit of Syracuse 172, 349 Theophrast 282, 390 Thomas, Baron Vaux 176 Thomasin von Zerklaere XIV, 506, 528 Thompson, James 348 Thucydides 63, 172 Thynne, Francis 259 Tibullus, Albius 156 Tinctoris, Johannes 141 Tisias 69 Titian (Tiziano Veccellio) 306, 313, 343 Traherne, Thomas 232, 242 Trapezuntius, Georgius 17, 24, 67 Tuke, Thomas 28, Tyrtaios 174 Ulrich von Hutten 34 Vadianus, Joachim 155 Valla, Lorenzo 9, 52-54, 56, 68 Van Dyck, Anthony XIII, 313, 320 Van Eyck, Jan 313 Van Leyden, Lucas XIII, 313, 375 Vasari, Giorgio 299, 300, 319, 340 Vaughan, Henry 238, 239, 240, 241, 242 Veltkirchius, M. 36 Vergil, Polydore 392 Veronese, Paolo 313 Vicars, Thomas 165, 461 Vida, Marco Girolamo XI, 90, 91, 93, 183, 190, 199 Vignon, Claude 515 Virgil 7, 14, 18, 103, 104, 113, 129, 157, 169, 172-174, 181, 187, 288, 323, 338, 345, 502, 507 Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus 303, 304 Vives, Juan Luis 31, 50, 57, 58, 81, 82, 136, 251, 304 Vossius, Gerardus Joannes 44, 45, 47, 254, 255, 257 Wagner, Peter XIV, 506, 528 Walker, John 43, 265 Walker, Obadiah 43, 51, 211 Warner, William 157 Watson, Thomas 206, 218

I. Names Webbe, William 164, 168, 172, 176, 274, 275, 276, 280, 392, 396 Webster, John 264, 267, 327, 328, 448 Weidlitz, Hans XIII, 244 Weinberg, Bernard 97, 105, 161, 183, 184, 187, 190, 285, 415 Whately, Richard 43, 98 Whitman, Walt 249 Whitney, Geoffrey 292 Wigandus 28 William the Conqueror 346 Willichius, Iodocus 94 Willis, John XII, 41, 206, 207, 209-212, 225 Wills, Richard 174, 175, 392, 396 Wilson, Thomas XI, 7, 18, 25, 26, 48, 74, 75, 111, 118, 119, 120, 165, 205, 206, 207, 212, 222, 254-257, 263, 267, 271, 285, 286, 289, 338, 348, 388, 390, 396,

563

415, 416, 419-422, 428, 433, 437, 442, 443, 460, 461, 463, 466 Wimpheling, Jakob 502 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 340 Wither, George 226, 354-357 Wordsworth, William 249 Wotton, Sir Henry 328, 329, 468 Wotton, William 148 Wright, Thomas 106, 257, 264 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 176 Xenophon 172 Xlebnikov, Velimir 352 Zarlino, Gioseffe 323, 371 Zasius, Uldaricus 502 Zeno, Apostolo 371 Zeuxis 305

II. Subjects abatia/abbey 217, 249 Abstract 136, 143 Acade´mie FrancX aise 522 Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture 362 Academy 312 Accent 390 accusatio 470 acrostichon 523 Acting 96, 264, 328, 435-453, 466 Acting-as-if 252 Acting-as-if-not 252, 261, 262 actio 10, 20, 22, 25, 45, 55, 82, 91, 98, 106, 121, 131, 140, 202, 206, 212, 224, 262, 278, 323-328, 332, 333, 380, 435-453, 487, 494 - deformis 212 - poetica 251-294 Action 317, 446, 457, 493 - rhetorical 455-457 Actor 66, 158, 170, 171, 194, 212, 233, 234, 251-257, 264-272, 277, 279, 281, 289, 293, 302, 327-328, 445, 448, 451, 463, 479-480, 487, 491, 496 - poet 272, 276, 283, 286-288, 293, 459, 461, 464 - rhetorician 452 Actuality 494 adagia 35, 134, 190 Adaptation 141 admiratio 43, 105, 106, 124, 163-165, 212, 253, 300, 309, 398, 445, 446, 471 Advice-to-a-painter poem 340 aemulatio 157 Aesthetics 146, 397, 416, 451, 452, 505, 520 affectatio 195, 425, 444 Affectation 443 Affections 27-30, 40, 41, 43, 60, 65, 96, 98, 103-107, 121, 124, 140, 163, 164, 173, 180, 184, 186, 212, 239, 244, 249,

252, 256, 258, 265, 268, 275, 276, 284, 286, 309, 313, 325, 328-329, 332, 333, 334, 368, 371-376, 384, 405, 411, 437, 440, 443, 445, 446, 455, 465, 470, 474, 485, 518, 521 affetti 309, 371 Age, Electronic 136 Air 392 Allegory 37, 51, 72, 79, 90, 96, 100, 101, 169, 172, 173, 185, 194, 195, 198, 224, 233, 279, 290, 348, 362, 400, 401, 404, 451, 457, 501-513, 514, 522, 523 allemande 384 Alliteration 65, 417, 484, 486 Allusion 143 altera natura 194, 277, 424, 451 Ambiguity 195, 293, 417, 467 amor 104, 124-125 amphibolia 293 Amphitheatre 236 Amplification 5, 27, 62, 68, 131, 138, 185, 196, 210, 281, 337 anadiplosis 185, 379 anagnorisis 309, 495 Anagram 523 analepsis 379 analoga 190 analogia entis 420 anaphora 484 anaploce 379 Anarchy 428 Anatomy 300 Anecdote 305, 313, 346, 449 anemographia 349 Animation 280 Ankunftsschema 220 Anschaulichkeit 99 Anschauung 99, 357 Anthology 35, 92, 134, 180 anthropopatheia 284 antimetabole 442

566

Indices

antiphrasis 290 Anti-pictorialism 359, 360 Antiqui 133, 149, 158, 524 Antiquity 3, 4, 7, 18, 27, 59, 63, 68, 80, 92, 102, 142, 157, 169, 202, 277, 284, 298, 305, 313, 338, 349, 382, 507 & passim Anti-rhetoric 62, 66, 70-71, 429, 431, 472, 521 Anti-rhetorician 428, 432, 474 Anti-scholasticism 199 Antithesis 63, 185, 332, 417, 421, 523 antitheton 194, 463 Aphorism 34, 57, 146, 462, 463, 502 Apology 94, 95, 190, 244, 264, 266, 311, 361 apophthegma 35, 136, 146 aporia 194, 459 aposiopesis 460, 466 Apostles 100 Apostrophe 229, 238, 417, 465, 483, 484, 485, 487, 497 Appropriateness 442 see aptum & decorum aptum 186, 209, 268, 269, 286, 377, 442, 448, 463 arbor Porphyriana 45-46, 56, 137 Architecture 3, 41, 110, 151, 162, 202, 205, 207, 215, 216-226, 245, 249, 297, 301304, 310, 343-346, 358, 363, 520 Argument(ation) 56, 94, 98, 118, 133, 144, 161, 273, 332, 421, 422, 455, 461, 468, 471, 472 Aria 380, 381, 405 Aristocracy 79, 101, 171, 183, 273, 312, 345, 398, 484, 511 Arithmetic 310, 311 ars 22, 67, 69, 78, 95, 121, 197, 261, 309, 415, 423 - combinatoria 160 - multiplicata 140, 202 - pictoria 301 Art 3, 9, 10, 13, 60, 145, 181, 194, 289, 309, 312, 398, 412, 447, 448 - gallery 307, 313 - history 310 - theory 142, 146 Artefact 307 artes - concionandi 27-30 - dictaminis 31, 506, 516 - epistolicae 31-34

- liberales 43, 52, 55, 56, 67-69, 202, 216, 265, 304-305, 309-312, 328, 366, 381, 501, 503, 506 - mechanicae 43, 305, 309, 381 Artfulness 262, 473 Articulation 440, 442 articulus 387 Artificiality 252, 424, 425, 451 Artlessness 79, 194 Arts 384, 517 - spatial 364 - temporal 364 - visual 201, 209, 232, 297-364, 405, 406, 512 Asianism 180 Astronomer 397 Astronomy 175, 311 astrothesia 349 a sua persona 461 asyndeton 485 attentum parare 444, 460, 461, 471, 481, 510 Atticism 180 attitudini 317 Augustan Age 363, 521 Aula 216, 217 aurea catena Homeri 393 Ballad 156, 168, 176 Ballet 406 barbarismus 480 barbarolexis 195 Baroque 27, 36, 82, 107, 141, 162, 180, 183, 215, 322, 356, 357, 362, 368, 369, 377, 380, 381, 487, 516 Beatitudes 226-228 Beauty 317 benevolum parare 471, 481, 510 Bestiary 136 Bible 36, 59, 100, 138, 142, 160, 207, 219, 220, 227, 229, 233, 234, 238, 244, 312, 330, 333, 359, 361, 362, 407, 504 - pictorial 245 biblia pauperum 205, 215, 361 Bibliography 7, 173 biblioteca 216 Bimediality 355, 362 Blazon 102, 156, 341, 344, 487 Body 303, 353 Bombast 441, 442, 443, 444 Book illustration 312

II. Subjects Book trade 136 Boredom 445 brevitas 428, 463, 470 Brightness 316 Burlesque 170, 477 Byzantine Empire 359 Cabinet 238 cacozelon 96 Cadence 380, 390, 391 Caesura 269, 390, 391, 481 Calligrammes 352 Calumny 328 Calvinism 29, 56 campus memoriae 232 canarie 384 Canon 133, 153 Canonization 152-162 capella 216 captatio benevolentiae 269, 482 carmen - figuratum 142, 162, 196, 349, 350 - musicum 381 Carnivalesque 71 Castle 202 Catharsis 162, 163, 266, 424, 449, 470, 471 Cathedral 216, 224 Catholic 27 causa - dubia 464 - efficiens 112-113, 127, 128 - honesta 461, 470 - turpis 461, 464, 470 causae rhetoricae 22, 28, 316 celare artem 78, 94, 193, 194, 197, 198, 222, 261, 276, 277, 329, 372, 418, 423-427, 451, 456, 457, 471, 472 Celebration 102, 516 Cento 143 cernas formula 223, 227, 232, 341 Chanson 156 chantz royaulx 156 Chaos 423, 465 Chapel 216 character 5, 38, 69 characterismus 349 charientismus 290 Chimera 124, 510 Chirogram 259 Chirogrammatic plates 42, 43, 140

567

Chorus 405 Christian(ity) 4, 8, 27, 28, 29, 48, 58, 66, 74-75, 80, 95, 100, 104, 169, 215, 223, 224, 238, 262, 390, 405, 428, 435, 442 chorographia 346, 347, 349, 405 chronographia 338 Church 202, 215, 221-222, 224, 249, 358, 377 Church Fathers 100 Ciceronianism 16, 18, 61, 62, 180 circumstantiae 130, 191, 235, 238, 281, 337, 338, 343 Civility 195 Civilization 198 claritas 463 Classicism 97, 160, 199, 281, 300, 362 Collage 143 Collegium Mnemonicum 204 Collocation 317 colloquium 51, 520 Colloquy 235, 238 colores rhetorici 69, 142, 193, 279, 316, 321322, 364, 502, 504, 511, 512 colori 317, 321-322 colorito 317, 321-322 Colour 209, 210, 279, 316, 465, 513 Colouring 315, 317, 363 Comedy 18, 79, 96, 113, 114, 124, 152154, 157-158, 159, 161, 164, 167-172, 175, 176, 251, 254, 259, 279, 281, 284, 306, 317, 369, 402, 441, 450, 479, 483, 484, 486, 487, 488, 493, 494, 495, 514 - of manners 170 Commentary 96, 134, 136, 457, 484, 495 Commiseration 8, 106, 163, 469, 471 Commonplace 35, 36, 118, 133, 326, 356, 357, 462, 471 - book 5, 34, 153, 157, 248 Communication 8, 58, 59, 90, 131, 143, 146, 165, 255, 258, 326, 416, 418, 428429 Comparison 51, 90, 96, 137, 484 Compilation 135 Complaint 156 compositio loci 228-229, 234 Composition 363 - musical 384 compositione 317, 319-321 Computer 145 Conceit 386 concord 390

568

Indices

concordia discors 177 Concretization 99 Conduct book 51 confessio 462 confirmatio 94, 332, 463, 464-469 Conflict 429 confutatio 51 congeries 485 controversiae 22 Controversy 505 Conversation 8, 16, 195, 197, 362, 363, 388, 459, 505, 521 copia 6, 37, 90, 129, 131, 137, 159, 180, 196, 498 Copula 223 Corpus Iuris Civilis 502 cortegiano 292 Council, Tridentine 105 Counterfeit 335, 449, 465 Counterpoint 379 Counter-Reformation 4, 25, 30, 356 Counter-Renaissance 82, 428 Country house poem 344 Courtesy book 192 Court(ier) / Courtly 5, 40, 49, 78, 79, 102, 103, 164-168, 171, 173, 176, 181, 187200, 252, 271, 277, 289-293, 302, 303, 313, 349, 374, 382, 385, 388, 398, 399, 411, 424-427, 429, 430, 432, 433, 443, 447, 450-452, 456, 457, 480, 486, 487, 504-507, 511 creatio - ex chao 123, 129 - ex nihilo 123, 144 Creation 249, 391, 392, 393 Credibility 130 Criticism, rhetorical 415-417 Dance 289, 293, 394 Dandy 424, 513 Dark Ages 68 Darkness 316 Database, electronic 136 de´bat 285 Debate 101, 521 Decadence 79, 82, 293, 513 Deceit 72, 79 Declamation 5, 16, 69, 71, 129, 265 Deconstruction 143, 146 Decoration 90, 185, 193, 195, 378, 505, 511

decorum 43, 63, 89, 92, 97, 142, 143, 161, 190-193, 197, 263, 267-269, 272, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 300, 317, 321, 324, 363, 372, 398, 418, 422, 428-430, 432, 433, 436, 442, 443, 445, 446, 448, 449, 482, 493, 509, 511 defensio 94, 422, 423, 470 Deixis 263 delectare 28, 103, 105, 137, 142, 145, 163, 184, 186, 193, 195-198, 311, 318, 335, 336, 354, 368, 371, 387, 397, 400, 405, 411, 446, 498, 504, 505, 508, 511 Delight see delectare Delivery 33, 39, 41-43, 82, 253-272, 332, 427, 435-453, 482 Demagogue 423, 474 demonstrare artem 78, 197, 198, 418, 419423, 472 demonstratio 120, 121, 275 Demonstration 432 dendrographia 349 descriptio - actionis 464, 469, 471 - rei 464, 465 Description 22, 51, 65, 96, 129, 130, 137, 176, 275, 277, 278, 280, 281, 287 Design 315, 319-321 Despair 300, 404, 449 Devise 238, 288, 354, 355 Diaeresis 130 Dialectic 20, 29, 52, 53, 54, 55 dialogismos 497 Dialogue 7, 8, 51, 67, 235, 284, 332, 457, 497 Diction 473 see Style difficulte´ vaincue 329, 424 Digital 146 Digression 66 Diplomat 398 Dirae 167, 168 Discord 400, 401, 420 Discourse 380, 394 Discovery 494, 497 disegno 122, 315, 317, 319-321, 336-349, 362, 389, 446, 447, 468, 470, 492, 523 Disguise 170, 172, 457, 470 dispositio 10, 20, 25, 28, 39, 55, 87-91, 94, 98, 103, 113, 127, 128, 129, 136, 146, 179, 190, 202, 206, 212, 316, 317, 319-321, 350, 355, 381, 385, 390, 420, 421, 422, 504

II. Subjects - poetica 151-177, 190 disputatio 336 Dissembling 255, 258, 277, 424, 426, 429, 464 Dissimulation 78, 79, 194, 195, 198, 199, 252, 255, 260-262, 276, 277, 289, 290, 293, 418, 423-427, 429, 430, 432, 451, 452, 456, 457, 461, 466, 472, 474, 475, 521 Dissonance 400 divisio 130, 214, 220 Division 387, 388 docere 29, 103, 105, 106, 142, 163, 170, 184, 335, 354, 400, 498, 504 docilem parare 462, 471, 481, 482, 510 dormitorium 216 doxa 59, 145 Drama 157, 158, 167, 169, 234, 251, 252, 253, 273, 277, 278, 286, 293, 435-453, 496 Dramatization 491, 493, 497 dramma per musica 369 Drawing 312 Drum 405 dulce 105, 198, 354 eclipsis 185, 198 Eclogue 168, 172, 345 Eclogus 521 Education 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 14, 22, 35, 37, 46, 49-52, 55, 58, 71, 80, 137, 183, 211, 245, 416, 480, 503, 506 efficacia 121, 186, 187, 195, 196, 214, 275, 395 Efficacy 122, 214, 220 effictio 389 eglogue see Eclogue Egyptomania 353 Eikastic 131 Eikones 338, 519 eikos 63 eiron 69, 260, 456, 457, 462, 470 Ekphrasis 98, 142, 218, 219, 223, 225, 277, 278, 336-349, 357, 361, 384, 464, 504, 510 Elegy 102, 152, 154, 168, 176 elocutio 10, 20, 25, 28, 36-40, 43, 45, 51, 54, 55, 63, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 98, 113, 127-129, 131, 146, 179-200, 202, 206, 212, 217, 252, 255, 271, 272, 278, 281,

569

288, 316, 354, 376, 377, 385, 386, 442, 455, 487, 497, 504, 508, 509 - poetica 179-200 elocution 43, 83 eloquentia 74, 77, 418 see sapientia Emblem 36, 37, 41, 110, 134, 139, 140, 142, 162, 176, 196, 205, 209, 211, 214, 215, 225, 226-242, 248, 273, 288, 291, 292, 303, 343, 346, 349, 350, 352-358, 399, 401, 419, 502, 509, 511, 514-516, 524, 537 Emotions see Affections Empathy 145, 252, 448, 449, 468, 490, 492 Emphasis 486 enallage temporum 491 enargeia 66, 96, 98-99, 120, 121, 127, 131, 143, 195, 198, 218, 222, 223, 225, 227230, 235, 242, 271, 278-283, 285, 308, 321, 323, 328-329, 330, 336, 348, 355, 357, 361, 386, 388, 389, 440, 447, 456, 468, 491, 492, 512 Encomium 166, 168 Encyclopedia 41, 44, 82, 138, 177, 248, 503, 506, 518 energ(e)ia 98, 121, 186, 195, 222, 257, 275, 308, 319, 322, 323, 328, 329, 386, 388, 402, 444, 445, 447, 465, 466, 482, 491, 512 Energy 90, 98, 131, 273, 494, 512 Engraving 205, 209, 362 enigma 156, 194, 290, 354 Enlightenment 248, 376 Entertainment 401, 520 Enthymeme 417, 502 epanalepsis 379 epanorthosis 96, 486 epicedium 168 Epicureism 53, 163 Epideixis 30, 92, 94, 98, 101-103, 106, 131, 166, 172, 173, 190, 199, 337, 343, 345, 398, 399, 401, 431, 508 Epigram 139, 142, 153, 154, 155, 169, 176, 227-228, 338, 399, 524 Epilogue 273, 280, 487 Epistemology 433, 452 Epistle 6 epistola familiaris 32, 33, 34 Epistolography 3, 34, 255 Epitaph 136, 166, 168, Epithalamium 102, 166, 168 epizeuxis 387, 388

570

Indices

Epyllion 273 Equivocation 72, 423 Essay 6, 176 Estates 191 estuarium 216 Eternity 353 Ethics 418, 433, 520 ethopoeia 284 Ethos 104, 311, 321, 332, 411, 421, 422, 444, 461, 470, 471, 474 Etymology 72 Euhemerism 169 Eulogus 521 Eulogy 163 euphantasiotos/-toi 121, 125, 257, 439, 465 Euphuism 484 Evaluation 181, 182 evidentia 96, 98-99, 120, 121, 130, 195, 214, 219, 220, 227, 228, 242, 275, 278, 321, 328-329, 336, 338, 357, 364, 389, 422, 440, 456, 466, 467, 474, 489, 495, 498, 512 see enargeia exclamatio 96, 285, 463, 465, 469, 485 exemplum 23, 34, 36, 39, 132, 133, 173, 281, 318, 502 exordium 93, 96, 326, 330, 380, 381, 421, 422, 459-462, 471, 484 Expression 305, 324, 363, 372, 436, 457, 460, 484 Eyewitness 464, 469, 496 Fable 96 Face 256, 267, 436, 441, 455, 460 facetiae 139 Fall of Man 420 falsitas 118 Fancy 115, 118, 120 Fantastic 131, 439 Fantasy 41, 115, 124, 125, 126, 232, 239, 240, 256, 287, 439, 469 Farce 307 Fashion 289, 358 favola per / in musica 369, 370, 405 Fear 124 Festival 401 Festivity 195 fictio 96, 336 - personae 283-288 Fiction 422, 436 Fictionality 66, 328, 480

Fictionalization 121, 194, 273, 452 figura 100 - musica 378 - poetica 378 Figure 363, 390 Figures of speech 1, 33, 36-40, 63, 69, 71, 79, 90, 92, 96, 100, 127, 131, 179, 185, 197, 268, 279, 368, 378, 385-390, 394, 415, 457, 505, 508, 511, 523 - auditory 386 - auricular 196, 198, 386, 388, 390 - enargetic 196, 198 - energetic 196, 198, 266 - pragmatic 197, 198 - semantic 185, 197 - sensable 196, 198, 386 - sententious 196, 198, 386, 390 - of sentences 386 - of thought 127 - of words 386, 387 fin de sie`cle 374, 428 Five Great Arts (quinque partes artis) 10, 20, 24-27, 33, 55, 82, 87, 89, 91, 97, 206, 211, 376, 504, 509 Flattery 68, 69, 71, 211, 290, 316, 317, 376-381, 504, 509 flores rhetorici 193, 504, 505, 508 Flute 404 Force 127, 328, 507, 514, 519 Formulae 136 Fortuna 170, 285 Frenzy 123, 131, 400 Fugue 379, 381 Furies 405 furor 131 - poeticus 115 Fustian 441 Futurism 352 Garden 236-237 Gemeinplatz 132 genera dicendi 179, 322 Generic - classification 152 - syncretism 162, 173-177 genethliacum 166, 168 Genres, poetic 91, 92, 103, 412 - classical 152 - medieval 152 - mnemonic 210-211

II. Subjects Gentleman 292 genus - deliberativum 22, 33, 67, 163, 455, 505 - demonstrativum 17, 22, 27, 33, 67, 101, 102, 163, 166, 173, 337, 379, 473 - doctrinale 22, 25, 101 - grande 322, 479 - humile 322 - iudiciale 22, 33, 94, 163, 455, 457, 470, 505, 508 - mediocre 193, 322 - medium 322 - mixtum 177, 345 - pingue 187 - siccum 187 - sublime 322 - tenue 322 Geometry 310, 311, 351, 352 Gesamtkunstwerk 142, 196 Gesticulation 258, 267, 380, 521 Gesture 106, 255, 256, 257, 261, 268, 278, 324, 325, 327, 332, 333, 334, 440, 441, 442, 455, 457, 521 gigue 384 Globalization 136 gnome 40 gnosis 130 Grace(fulness) 10, 49, 90, 191, 193, 195, 289, 316, 317, 324, 372, 513 gradatio 63, 264, 421 Grammar 37, 72, 203, 248, 264, 320, 333 - secondary rhetorical 143, 321, 386 - symbolic 440, 445 Grammarian 320 Grammar-school 51 Graphaesthetic 196 Graphic 465 Gratiae 513 gravita` 78 grazia 78 Grimace 443 Grotesque 212, 281 Guitar 407 Harangue 428 Harmony 193, 256, 368, 369, 378, 385, 387, 390, 401, 420, 423, 428, 511, 520 Harp 520 Heaven 208, 215 Hedonism 193

571

Hell 208, 214 Hellenism 338 Hermeneutics 20, 313, 330 Hermetism 355 Heuresis 112, 116, 122 - cultural 81, 384, 385, 396-410 - epic 317 Hieroglyph 209, 242, 248, 349, 352-353, 355 hipallage 40 Historiographer 397, 408 Historiography 3, 63-67, 183, 279, 362 History 5, 6, 7, 8, 46, 49, 132, 137, 158, 159, 167, 171, 175, 183, 300, 316, 358, 422, 456 histrio 251 Homiletics 3, 27, 208, 219-220 homoeoptoton 185 honneˆte homme 292, 424 Humanism 3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 17-29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50-53, 57-59, 64, 67-69, 71, 73, 74, 76-78, 94, 98, 104, 107, 136, 145, 151, 181, 183, 187, 190, 196-200, 207, 242, 243, 264, 275, 276, 284, 293, 304, 311, 312, 313, 314, 330, 340, 366, 377, 386, 388, 396-398, 406, 419, 420, 422, 423, 428, 433, 436, 438, 458, 473, 501, 502, 507, 524 Humanities 51, 57, 523 Humour 324 Hybrid(ization) 176, 353-354, 356, 517 hydrographia 349 Hymn 102, 167, 168, 169, 171, 175 Hyperbaton 185 Hyperbole 127, 185, 194, 198, 271, 290, 378, 431, 442, 472, 484, 523 Hypocrisy 65, 72, 195, 255, 290, 423 Hypothesis 69 hypotyposis 96, 121, 275, 278, 378, 384, 389 see enargeia icon(ic) 96, 140, 225, 254, 273, 333, 338, 501 Iconoclasm 29, 30, 358-361 Iconography 340-344, 420, 499-552 - mnemonic 509 - of rhetoric 9, 14, 192, 499-552 Iconologist 340 iconomachia 357-358 iconophobia 358-361 Idea 120, 122, 146, 209, 364

572

Indices

- direct 211 - relative 211, 225 - scriptile 211, 225 - subdititial 211 Ideology 46, 73-80, 164, 198, 398, 400, 401, 524 Idol 59, 145 Idolatry 358 Illusion 124, 194, 252, 266, 289, 290, 293, 308, 449, 452 illustratio 121, 275, 389, 440 Illustration 99, 277, 346 Imagery, religious 360 Images 30, 131, 146, 184 - eikastic 123, 126 - fantastic 120, 121, 123, 126 - mental 120, 121, 201, 280, 361, 439 - mnemonic 134, 205 - visual 447 imaginatio 491, 492 Imagination 87, 98, 111-150, 230, 235, 242, 256, 276, 279, 280, 286, 287, 316, 361, 363, 423, 439, 450, 456, 467, 469, 495, 498 - embodiments of 117-118, 121 imagines 202-249 - agentes 211, 212, 224, 232, 244 Imitatio Christi 241 Imitation 5, 18-22, 23, 34, 35, 46, 47, 112, 133, 140, 141, 142, 145, 148, 151, 163, 166, 177, 186, 266, 267, 270-272, 285, 298, 304-306, 308, 313, 317, 335, 336, 339, 393, 450, 452, 465, 477 Immediacy 341, 489-498 Impersonation 283-288 Imprese 349, 353 improprie 452 Inappropriateness 443, 482, 487, 512 see indecorum incrementum 63 indecorum 160, 192, 267-269, 271, 429, 430, 443-445, 482, 512 indignatio 469 Indirection 293, 451, 452 ingenium 137 inge´nu 262 In-lusion 448 inopinatum 479 inscriptio 142, 292, 502 Insinuation 69, 459-462, 466, 471, 474, 475

Inspiration 137, 298 Instrument, musical 380, 388 Interjection 459, 484 Interlude 477, 487, 488 Intermediality 9, 10, 98, 140, 142, 143, 146, 245, 488 Interpictoriality 140 Interrhetoric 481, 487 interrogatio 65, 485, 487 Intertext 134, 151 Intertextuality 136, 146, 151, 155, 159, 176, 478, 488 - conceptual 112-131 - material 112, 131-146 Intertonality 141-143 Intrigue 451 Invective 419 inventio(n) 10, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28, 35, 39, 43, 51, 53-56, 63, 64-66, 82, 87-92, 94, 97-99, 105, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 126-129, 131, 134, 140-142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 156, 165, 170, 172, 179, 186, 190, 191, 202, 206, 211-212, 235, 239, 240, 300, 303, 315-319, 330, 336, 340, 363, 368, 376, 377, 385, 400, 427, 455, 487, 504, 521 - poetica 111-150 Inventory 137, 146, 185, 259 ira 104 Ironist 261, 262 see eiron Irony 37, 40, 69, 96, 131, 143, 185, 194, 198, 261, 262, 273, 275, 290, 424, 451, 462, 474, 475, 484, 521 istorie 318 iudicium 55 jest 71, 139 see facetiae Judgment 51, 118, 125, 127, 524 kakozelia 444 Key 380 Kinesics 140, 326 Klangrede (“musical eloquence”) 44, 380, 384 Kunst, künstliche 145 Kunstbuch 140, 141 Kunstkamer 313 lacrimae 374 lai 156 Lamentation 173, 372

II. Subjects lamento 373 landjuweel 108, 110 l’art pour l’art 193 Last Judgment 234 Latin 197, 210 laudatio 68, 508 Laughter 269 Lawgiver 397 Law suit 505 leggiadria 78 lenitas 104 Letters 16, 31, 34, 67, 136 lex - iustitiae 56 - sapientiae 56 - veritatis 56 liber naturae 239 Library 249, 506, 508 Librettist 302, 487 Libretto 357, 405 Light 316, 317, 321 Linguistics 13 Literature 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 46, 57, 79, 133, 134, 138, 139, 145, 157, 181, 201, 277, 289, 309, 311, 340, 412 - classical 181 - vernacular 181 loca - communia 207, 220 - particularia 207, 220 loci 118, 201-249 see topoi - communes 132 Logic 4-6, 53-55, 57, 59, 60, 113, 114, 118-120, 130, 155, 220, 222, 422, 432, 503 logomachia 520-524 logos 59, 104, 359 Lute 382, 384, 388 Lutheran 361 Lyre 397, 518 Macrocosm 392, 395 Madness 125 Madrigal 162, 371, 373 Magic 306, 309 Magistrate 522 makers, courtly 193 Malapropism 480, 484 Mannerism 82, 245, 246, 355, 361, 512 Mask 170, 251, 257, 290, 444, 456

573

Masque 116, 162, 176, 196, 239, 279, 302, 340, 357, 396, 400 Masquerade 262 Mathematics 407 Maxim 138 Measure 390 Media 323 Mediality 139-141 Mediation 145, 215, 248 Medicine 111, 137, 206 Meditation 134, 226-242 meiosis 40, 194 Meistersinger 108 Melancholy 111, 125, 126, 131, 202, 325327, 374, 375 memoria 10, 20, 28, 29, 33, 41, 51, 69, 90, 91, 98, 112, 118, 131, 134, 145, 172, 326, 361, 504, 513 - poetica 201-249 Memory architect 224 - architecture 205, 208, 215, 216-227, 245 - artist 243-244 - House 201-249 - metaphor 214 mesure 384 Metadrama 452, 477 metanoia 290 Metaphor 37, 61, 63, 72, 90, 96, 107, 114, 116-118, 122, 132, 142, 179, 211, 214, 223, 225, 227, 232, 237, 239, 244, 251, 267, 280-282, 284, 354, 361, 394, 441, 451, 468, 469, 489, 492-497, 511, 523 - role 493, 494 - tense 489 Metaphorology 114 Metaphysical 82 Metapoetic 92, 121, 128, 231 Metarhetoric 67-80, 87, 128 metastasis 492 methodus 56, 60, 137 Metonymy 37, 63, 72, 127, 128, 130, 140, 451 Metre / Metrics 384, 385, 390-396, 411 see Prosody Mezzotint 329 Microcosm 392 micterismus 290 Middle classes 79, 171, 312, 419 mimesis 112, 122, 126, 130, 131, 174, 175, 266, 267, 270-272, 298, 299, 322, 335,

574

Indices

338, 349, 379, 389, 436, 447, 449, 460, 493, 495 Minster 216 Mirror 450 Miscellany 134 mise en abıˆme 478 Mock-heroic 488, 520 Mode - Aeolic 391 - Dorian 323, 384 - Hypolidian 323 - Ionic 323, 384 - Lydian 323, 384 - Mixolydian 384, 391 - Phrygian 323 Moderni 133, 149, 158, 524 Modernism 141, 249 Monastery 202, 215, 506 Monodrama 497 Monologue 67, 406, 436, 442, 445, 457, 497 - dramatic 283-288 Monster /monstrous 127, 212, 267, 448, 465, 510, 514 Moral 238 Motet 392 Motion 316, 317, 323-328, 395, 446 Motto 142, 227, 353 Movement 308 movere 29, 103, 105, 163, 225, 256, 265, 266, 275, 281, 287, 379, 410, 411, 431, 437, 440, 441, 446, 447, 450, 468, 498, 510 Multimediality 140, 362 mundus symbolicus 238, 242 Muses 400 Music 3, 9, 10, 43, 81, 102, 106, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 196, 289, 309, 311, 322-323, 325, 362, 518, 519 - mathematical concept of 366-368, 381, 392 - rhetorical concept of 366-368 - of the spheres 396 Musica 382 musica coelestis 396 musica mundana 393 musica poetica 43, 378, 384, 388 musica reservata 384 musica rhetorica 190, 365-412 musicus poeticus 368 Mysticism 238, 239 Mythography 517

Mythology 4, 73-80, 248, 283, 300, 340, 384, 396-410, 411, 456, 477, 513-520, 513 narratio 94, 332, 380, 422, 462-464, 471, 496 - probabilis 332 Narration / Narrative 5, 6, 69, 96, 270, 280, 285, 312, 318, 330, 491, 493 Naturalness 99, 194, 252, 258, 263, 268, 299, 342, 427, 456, 472 Nature 69, 78, 191, 194, 239, 242, 267, 299, 308, 420, 423, 447, 448, 450, 451, 452, 485 negare artem 418, 427-432, 472 negatio 426, 462, 466 Negation 432 Neoclassicism 338 Neo-Latin 181 Neoplatonism 4, 68, 111, 115, 122, 193, 313, 315, 319, 393, 394 New Criticism 37 Nonconformism 360 noe¨ma 379 Notebook 134, 135 Novel 176, 245 Ocular 352 Ode 102, 176, 403-405 odium 104 Ontology 433 Opera 162, 357, 362, 369, 371, 373, 405, 488 - buffa 406 - mock 487 - seria 406 ope´ra-fe´erie 406 Optics 311 Orality 134, 145, 202, 255, 273, 388, 510 oratio 74, 78, 81, 396, 419, 420, 422, 423, 428, 430, 518, 524 see ratio - extemporalis 459 - ligata 89 Oration(s) 4, 5, 6, 16, 50-51, 61, 64-65, 66, 67, 71, 139, 238, 380, 456 - classical 92, 457 - funeral 383 Orator 397 - historian 422 - logician 422

II. Subjects - philosopher 423 - poet 422 Order see ordo ordo 367, 392, 393, 394, 399, 400, 411, 418, 419-423, 428, 429 - artificialis 321 - naturalis 321 Originality 144 Ornament(ation) 34, 79, 90, 129, 137, 190, 193, 197, 389, 398 ornatus 186, 510 Ostentatiousness 513 oxymoron 277 Pageant 199, 400, 401 Painter 145, 259, 265, 297-301, 303, 305, 306, 308, 310-313, 315, 316, 318, 320-324, 328-330, 336, 337, 339-343, 348, 360, 363, 364, 407, 507 Painting 3, 41, 99, 102, 106, 140, 142, 145, 151, 162, 209, 230, 242, 259, 278, 297-301, 303, 305-330, 332-336, 339-344, 349, 357, 358, 362-364, 366, 375, 381, 468, 501, 509, 511, 512 - landscape 99, 100 - mannerist 512 - and / as oratory 314 - portrait 99, 102, 199, 224, 297, 298, 363, 446 - still life 99, 100 Palace 238 Palimpsest 144 Palladianism 302 pallilogia 379 panegyrica 96, 102, 168, 264, 266, 383, 384, 400, 420 Pantomime 212, 495 pantomimi 154 Parable 157, 233, 362, 392, 394, 422, 450 Paradigm - cultural 433 - functional 162-173 - hierarchical 152-162 - historical 174 - mimetic 174 Paradise 215 Paradox 272, 290, 332, 479, 513 paragone 262, 298, 299, 301, 309, 334-336, 411-412 Parallelism 421, 484

575

Paraphrase 141 parimia 290 parison 185 Parody 132, 272, 477, 488, 520, 521 Particularity 130 Passion 52, 60-62, 72, 74, 104-107, 114, 122, 124, 125, 163, 173, 212, 224, 234, 253, 289, 309, 316, 317, 323-325, 328, 329, 337, 357, 372, 373, 382, 384, 403, 405, 423, 435, 436-441, 443-447, 449, 461, 466, 468, 470, 485, 507, 509, 512 see Affection Pastoral 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 172, 175, 176, 322, 384 pathetic fallacy 98, 127, 483 Pathography 124 Pathology 495 pathopoeia 284, 338, 378 Pathos 96, 104, 105, 107, 235, 252, 287, 332, 411, 422, 437, 441, 444, 445, 449, 456, 468, 471, 474, 483, 484, 487, 509, 519 Pattern poem 245, 349, 350-352, 390, 391 see carmen figuratum Pavane 374, 384 Pedagogy 447 Performance 478, 481-487, 489 Perfume 513 Peripatos 163 peripeteia 309 Periphrasis 185, 194, 290, 486 peroratio 94, 332, 421, 422, 469-470 persona 103 Personification 480, 484 Perspective 310, 311 perspicuitas 62, 98, 186 phantasiai 121, 257, 439 Phantastes 116 Philology 181 Philosopher 397 Philosophy 35, 44, 52-61, 71, 80, 81, 111, 132, 137, 173, 175, 181, 183, 214, 310, 315, 407, 415, 447, 452, 502 Phonaesthetic 196, 388, 411 Physiologus 238, 353 Physiology 300, 321 Pictogram 349 pictor doctus 312 pictor literatus 312 Pictorialism 99, 358, 362, 364 Pictoriality 99

576

Indices

pictura 75, 142, 291, 353, 411, 412, 524 - loquens 142, 298, 335 - rhetorica 162, 297-364, 330-334 Picture gallery 342, 343 picture, speaking 225, 226, 273, 298-299, 332, 335, 343, 352, 501 Pity 281, 445, 470 see Commiseration Places see loci & topoi - mnemonic 134 Plasticity 321, 330 Platonic 95, 126 Play 106, 108, 110, 223, 234, 262, 293, 359, 491, 498 - acting 453, 463 see Acting - within-the play 477, 478, 495 Player 328 Pleonasm 484, 486 Poem, symphonic 406 poema 92 Poesie, konkrete 143 poesis 92 - muta 298-299, 304 - picta 524 poeta 92 - inventor 148 - laureatus 49 - mnemonicus 242 - musicus 175, 391, 400, 411, 520 - orator 9, 163, 173, 288, 413-498 - phantasticus 465, 470 - philosophus 174 - pictor 391 - theologus 174 poetica rhetorica 9, 85-294 Poetics 5, 6, 142 - Aristotelian 54, 97, 104, 130, 155, 163, 171, 179, 183, 187 - Classical 187 - courtly 171, 187-197, 197-200 - genre 151-177 - Horatian 97, 105, 125, 142, 183, 187, 197, 280, 325, 379, 396, 437-438 - Humanistic 181-187, 197-200 - of ornamentation 511 - of representation 187 - rhetorical 9, 10, 40, 179, 187, 274 - stylistic 37 Poet-magician 423 poetria nova 36 Poetry 41, 108, 110, 136, 183, 297, 311, 502, 505

- bucolic see Poetry, pastoral - didactic 167, 168, 175 - epic 102, 103, 158, 171, 173, 273, 279, 344, 496, 520 - expressive 167 - found 139, 145 - graphemic 92 - heroic 144, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 169, 172, 176, 392, 522 - historical 168, 172-173, 175 - iambic 152 - lyric 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 176, 273 - musical 368 - pastoral 96, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 172, 175 - pictorial 364 - satiric 152, 153 Politician 397, 453 Politics 180, 400, 515 Polystylistics 141 Polysyndetic 465 Posies / Posy 168 Position 317 Postmodernism 133, 141, 249 praecisio 460 praelector rhetoricae 52, 69, 70 praesens historicum 491, 497 pragmatographia 277, 338, 465 pragmatography 278-282, 355 Praise 22, 30, 49, 61, 63, 67, 71, 94, 96, 101-103, 106, 131, 132, 163, 165-169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 301, 305, 306, 318, 319, 339, 405, 406, 407 praxis 130, 238 Preaching 27-30, 41 pre´pon 192 Presence 274, 280, 493 Present - dramatic 492 - historical 491 - scenic 492, 496 Presenter 496 Priest 397 Print 17, 22, 35, 41, 46, 134, 135-136, 145, 202 Probability 463 probatio 464 prodesse 105, 335, 371 progymnasmata 50, 283, 336 Prologue 273, 280, 480, 481, 484, 496 prontezza 321

II. Subjects pronuntiatio 25, 45, 55, 69, 82, 90, 224, 254, 267, 268, 325, 379, 380, 388, 439, 482, 487, 504 Proof 466 - artificial 455, 464 - inartificial 455, 464, 457, 468, 471 - ocular 464, 467 Prophet 397 Proportion 193, 316, 317, 319, 350, 367, 390, 392 propositio 93, 131, 238, 281, 422, 462-464, 471, 496 proprieta` 321 Prose 173, 228 Prosody 91, 92, 185, 189, 385, 390-396, 482 prosopographia 338 prosopopoeia 277, 283-288, 344, 447, 480, 484, 495, 497, 523 Protestantism 22, 28, 29, 39, 44, 56, 235, 256, 330, 358, 359, 362 Proverb 34, 134, 136, 140, 417 prudentia 186 Psalter 391 Pseudo-theatre 498 Psychagogue 252 Psychology 59, 116, 300, 302, 305, 321, 368, 404, 415, 497 Punctuation 269 Puritanism 242, 243, 358, 359 puritas 186 Quadrivium 305, 311, 367, 381, 390 quaestio - finita 466 - infinita 466 Quaver 387, 388 Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes 148, 157, 520 Quest 241 Quotation 35, 118, 138, 141, 143, 227 Ramism 39, 54-57, 60, 83, 137, 180, 324 ratio 74, 78, 81, 396, 419, 420, 422, 423, 428, 430, 518, 524 see oratio Rationalism 433 Rationality 248 Realism 127, 266, 303, 305, 308, 328, 490 Reason 124 recapitulatio 221-222, 228

577

Recitation 496 Recitative 405 recollectio 249 recordatio 249 Rederijkers 107-110, 503 Reformation 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 20, 29, 34, 39, 359 refutatio 94, 95, 332 Rehearsal 478, 480-481 Religion 219, 358 Repetition 379, 387 replica 379 Repository 238, 338 Representation 300, 301, 308, 321, 328, 332, 335, 338, 352, 358, 379, 447, 450, 480, 505, 512 - pictorial 499-552 - scenic 436 res 180, 184, 185, 268, 400, 425, 428, 484 - absens 252 - praesens 252 respublica literaria 198 Restoration 363, 521 retraite spirituelle 239 Retrospectivity 198 Revolutionary 423 Rhetoric - and communication 8 - and diplomacy 3, 24, 48 - and education 3, 4, 9, 14, 22, 35, 45, 55, 80 - and grammar 9 - and historiography 3, 6 - and homiletics 3 - and jurisprudence 9 - and law 16, 24, 25, 46 - and music 81 - and philosophy 46, 52-61, 81 - and poetry 85-293 - and politics 2, 3, 16, 25, 45, 46, 47-49, 61 - and psychology 59 - and religion 3, 25, 30 - and society 2, 7 - and theology 4, 30, 35, 56 - as a weapon 1 - of denial 418, 427-432 - of dissimulation 418, 423, 472 - of “good order” 418, 419-423 - of presence 98, 489-498 - Academic 14-18, 139

578

Indices

- Annotated 19, 196 - Anthologies of 19, 24 - Calvinist 29 - Catholic 27, 30 - Chambers of 107-110 - Classical 3, 6, 27, 28, 33, 139-140 - Colours of 142 - Commentaries of 18, 46, 82 - Commonplace 131-146 - Comparative 2 - Displayed 472 - Ecclesiastical 28, 105 - Editions of 16-17, 19 - Electronic 136 - Encyclopedic 35, 44-46 - Epistolary 31-34 - Epitomes of 19, 22 - European 2 - Female 430-432 - Figurative 512 - Formulary 34-36 - Genres of 9, 11, 22-46 - Humanist 14-18 - Hyperbolic 472 - Iconography of 9, 14, 499-552 - Intercultural 7 - Interdisciplinary 7 - Intermedial 9, 10, 43-44, 295-412 - Intertextual 136, 487, 488 - Jesuit 25, 30, 66, 105, 140, 356 - Manual 41-43, 140, 258, 260, 440 - Manuscripts of 14-16, 134 - Multicultural 2 - Neo-Latin 22, 25, 33 - Non-European 2 - Oral 33, 134 - Parliamentary 101 - Protestant 22, 27, 29, 39, 44 - Puritan 29 - Sacred 105 - Translations of 17-18 - Vernacular 6 - Western 2, 13 rhe´torique ge´ne´rale 40, 44 rhe´torique restreinte 39 rhe´torique seconde 502 Rhe´toriqueurs 9, 108 Rhyme 390, 391, 485 Rhythm 384 Role play 194, 195, 198, 232, 259, 261, 262, 265, 270, 271, 283-288, 424, 425, 448, 449, 451, 452, 457-459, 473, 474, 479

Role type 463 Romance 173, 176, 344, 522 Romanticism 357 rondeau 156 Royal Academy of Art 363 Royal Art Collection 313 Royal Society 61, 428 Salon 363 sapientia 74, 77, 419 see eloquentia sarabande 384 Sarcasm 96, 290 Satire 152, 153, 154, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 195, 290, 303, 521 Satyr 168, 170, 171 Scenography 357, 358 Scepticism 60, 428, 521, 522 Schemes 6, 33, 37 Schilderung 99 Scholarship 46-47, 197, 415-416 Scholasticism 52, 55, 198 Science 3, 4, 9, 46, 61-63, 69, 138, 517 scituation 390, 391 Sculptor 320 Sculpture 310 Self-affection 509 Self-diminution 464 Self-representation 302 Semblance, fair 432 semblant - beau 79, 194, 197, 424 - faire 79, 194, 290, 451, 457 - false 79, 194, 195, 290, 425, 431, 451, 457 sembreefe 387, 388 semibrevis 387, 388, 487 Semiotics 13, 416 Senecanism 180, 288, 483, 485, 487 Senses of the Scriptures 100 Sensualism / Sensuality / Sensualization 195, 196, 197, 209, 214, 302, 329, 338, 358, 495 sensus - anagogicus 101 - historicus 101 - moralis 101 - philosophicus 101 - theologicus 101 sententia 35, 40, 66, 136, 194, 356

II. Subjects sermo - corporis 257 - humilis 29 sermocinatio 338 Sermon 20, 27, 102, 219, 243 Shadow 253, 255, 316, 317, 446 Shield (of Achilles) 338 Shop 238 Show 302, 401 Sight 115, 125 significant rooms 224 Silence 430-431, 472 simia naturae 308 similitudo 511 Simulation 251, 252, 255, 260, 261-263, 276, 289, 290, 293, 426, 474 Sincerity 456 Singing 289, 388 Situation 324 Society 191, 520 Socio-aesthetics 189 Song 372, 387, 397 Sonnet 136, 144, 153, 155, 156, 176, 235, 236, 273 Sophist(icated) 61, 68, 172, 192, 480, 514 Sorrow 326, 356, 441 Soul 303 Spectacle 233, 302, 369, 429, 470 Speech act 433 Spirit 308, 324 Spiritual 298 Spiritual Exercises 228 Spontaneity 472 sprezzatura 78, 190, 193, 194, 195, 198, 289, 424, 456, 457 staffe 390 Stage 210, 212, 273, 283, 328 - action 446, 496 - costumes 357 - design 302 - play 359 Stagecraft 196 Ständeklausel 187 Stanza 390, 391 Statesman 397, 398, 507, 522 status translationis 494 stereotype 133 stile rappresentativo 371 stilus 128 Stimmung 390 stir 390

579

Stoa 28, 57, 163 studia humanitatis 50, 51, 381, 398, 502 Style 5, 13, 16, 31, 33, 34, 36-40, 58, 62, 67, 79, 82, 89, 94, 98, 129, 137, 141, 197, 199, 268, 271, 282, 290, 302, 308, 322, 323, 336, 345, 377, 380, 384, 385, 386, 387, 411, 415, 429, 430, 455, 472, 479, 484, 505, 509, 511, 512, 519, 520 - brise´ 385 - ceremonial 473 - copious 183 - elevated 377, 422, 429 - functional 181 - grand 30 - hyperbolic 484 - levels of 184, 192, 377, 418 - lofty 171, 479 - ornamental 190 - ornate 428 - plain 29, 62, 80, 82, 180, 421, 428, 429, 430, 432, 472 - poetic 179-200, 511 suavitas 186 subiectio sub oculos 275, 389, 491 subscriptio 142, 291, 502, 516 suffiguratio 275 Sweetness 387 Syllogism 417 Symbol 356 Symmediality 349-357 Symmetry 316, 317, 392, 411 symphonie 390 Synaesthesia 140, 196, 245, 323, 389, 391, 484, 486 Synagogue 216, 220, 228 Syncretism 275, 315, 513 Synecdoche 37, 290 Synoiceosis 417 Table 134 - book 134 tableau vivant 110, 224, 262 tabula 19, 22, 36, 214, 506 teach see docere technopaignion 142, 349, 350-352 Teichoscopy 280 temperantia 289, 443 Temple 202, 216, 222-223

580

Indices

Tense - past 490 - present 490 Terminology 5 Terror 445 Text 330 Theatre 59, 96, 106, 108, 114, 131, 140, 203, 208, 238, 239, 251, 254, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 282, 289, 293, 356, 377, 451, 457, 489, 494, 496 - anecdotes 266-267 - multimedial 140 - of objects 494 - of words 494 Theatricality 278 theatrum - actionis 253-272 - aulicum 289-293 - elocutionis 272-288 - mundi 251-252 - rhetoricum 252 Theme 380 Theology 35, 137, 174, 181, 214, 225, 243, 426 thesaurus 112, 207, 238 Theses 69 Time 390 Topicality 198 Topics 53, 326, 338 topographia 217, 338, 344-346 topoi 35, 53, 65, 131, 142, 144, 227, 300, 326, 364, 464 - koinoi 132 Toposforschung 132 topothesia 218-219, 222, 223, 338, 346-348 Tower 249 - of Babel 201 - of Wisdom 203 traductio 379, 387, 388 trage´die lyrique 406 Tragedy 106, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170-171, 172, 175, 176, 266, 273, 281, 287, 309, 369, 445, 450, 453, 468, 471, 473, 479, 483, 485, 487, 497, 502 - De casibus 171 Tragicomedy 161, 273 Transcription 141

translatio - personarum 493-496, 496-498 - temporum 489-493, 496-498 Translation 134 Transmedialization 330 Travel books 344 Travesty 132, 272, 484 Treasure-house 202 trionfo 162, 168, 405, 515 Trivium 144, 305, 367, 381 Trope 28, 36, 37, 39, 61, 79, 92, 96, 127, 131, 132, 185, 194, 197, 198, 210, 268, 279, 290, 293, 386, 389, 394, 425, 450, 451, 457, 484, 492, 498, 504, 505, 508, 523 Tropicity 98, 100, 127, 525 Trumpet 405 Truth 429 Type 244, 300, 362, 421 Typology 361, 432-433 Understanding 235 Understatement 78 University 4, 6, 52, 398 - plays 167 uomo universale 328, 397 utile 105, 198 Utopia 176, 346 ut musica poesis 411-412 ut pictura poesis 43, 142, 162, 310, 334-336, 349, 360, 362, 411 ut poesis pictura 330 ut rhetorica musica 162, 372 ut rhetorica pictura 162, 312-329 variatio /varietas 131, 137, 143, 186, 222, 259, 276, 385, 498 verba 180, 184, 185, 268, 425, 428, 484 verisimile 280, 285, 493 verisimilitudo 53, 66 veritas 53, 118 Verse 173, 395 versificator 175 Vice 426, 466 Villa 202, 208 Viola 407 Violin 404 virelai 156

581

II. Subjects virtuoso 521 virtutes elocutionis 179 vis 121, 124, 186 Visibility 231 visiones 257, 439 Visualization 127, 140, 142, 220, 224, 273, 330, 358, 440, 492, 493, 498, 520 vita - activa 128 - contemplativa 128 vitiosae formae 187 vitium 192, 267, 445 vituperatio 171, 172 Vivacity 98, 130, 231 Vividness 127, 195, 278, 279, 330, 362, 389, 491

Voice (vox) 1, 106, 255, 256, 258, 261, 264, 267, 304, 324, 380, 387, 395, 441, 446, 448, 521 Warehouse 238 weltschmerz 452 Wit 5, 35, 69, 115, 137, 146, 239-240, 521 Witness 344 Woodcut 205, 209, 245, 312, 406 Word, hard 480 Word picture 340 Wordplay 417 Yellow Nineties 513 Zodiac

204