D. M. Frances Batycki

The University of Calgary

For: Classical Leanings at Simon Fraser University, Feb. 2002

Just Rhetoric: Using Rhetoric to Teach Early Modern Literature

The first phrase of my title in one sense reflects my lament for the general abuse and cavalier dismissal of the word “rhetoric.” How often do you hear “Oh, that’s just rhetoric” or, especially with regards to controversial political events, “the rhetoric is really heating up”? Journalists and politicians alike use the word to refer to anything from empty language to energetic verbal posturing, and too often, at the beginning of a course, when I ask my students what “rhetoric” means, their answers tend to reflect that popular understanding. Rhetoric, they say, means “using fancy talk to say nothing; lots of style and no content – just rhetoric,” and ironically, when they say “just rhetoric,” they come so close to the “just” use of the word and the early modern understanding of the personal, social, and political value of rhetoric. It is, after all, a just rhetoric that appealed to the early modern writer.

My task here is to explain briefly why and how I use rhetoric to teach early modern texts: early modern as the new term for literature of the 16^th and early 17^th centuries. We once used even more precise designations, referring to a text as Henrician, Elizabethan, and Jacobean, but these designations even more than the larger century labels seem to be passé. Alas, I miss them, and I miss them in part because of my interest in rhetoric. Rhetoric was (and is) always political and idea that a literature belonged to a political period strikes me as significant. However, “early modern” it is, and “early modern” it will be, until our own tastes change again. I return to the task of explaining why I turn to Latin rhetoric when I teach early modern texts, especially when New Historicism, cultural materialism, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, performance theory, and so on have far more curb-appeal, but before I do, I must explain three things: first, I do not discount the theoretical positions I have listed (I try to integrate various theories as we examine the rhetorical foundations of the text); second, my “conversion” to rhetoric is quite recent; and third, I am not a classicist. My “Cicero” still comes to me by way of early modern and contemporary rhetorical texts.

The whole thing began about the time I read Brian Vickers’ Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry which, besides legitimately bemoaning the loss of rhetorical studies in our own time, points out that rhetoric “shaped the intellectual life of Greece and Rome for nine centuries” and “continued to dominate education and literature in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, and indeed exerted its shaping forces into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (15). If rhetoric so “shaped” early modern intellectual life, I asked, was it possible to teach early modern literature by getting closer to the way early modern writers and thinkers wrote and thought about rhetoric itself? And so, my dabbling began, and like Vickers, I think the key to the early moderns lies in understanding what they understood about Latin rhetoric.

Rhetoric, simply defined, is the “art of persuasion”; for the early moderns it was also the “art of speaking well,” the “art of eloquence,” and the “art of writing well” – the “art of communicating effectively” – nothing new here. Even those who use the word disparaging or dismissively know rhetoric has something to do with writing and speaking and persuasion. However, the early moderns put the emphasis on “art” and that is what we tend to forget; the “art” – the means – must deal justly with subject. In other words, that the way something is said should represent what is said is key to early modern rhetoric; syntax as much as diction constructs the trope – and this idea becomes difficult to teach when basic grammar seems to have no place in junior curricula. But, back to how basic rhetorical analysis can work. A short example from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) might suffice here. Early in the play, shortly after his first encounter with the witches and their tantalizing prophecy, our eponymous hero soliloquizes that “My thought, whose [in which] murther yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (I. iv. 139 - 142). Alliteration draws our ear to the main site of Macbeth’s distress (Shakes so my single state); the eliding “s” sound of “is smother’d” (is smothered and is mothered) creates a paronomasia that adumbrates the hideous feminine power Lady Macbeth brings to the play, even suggesting the terrible sin of feminized political power. The ornate syntax, ending in the negatives of “nothing” and “what is not,” figures forth, re-presents, and becomes a speaking picture of the dangers and frustrations of even thinking about circumventing established polity; one can only come to “nothing” if one disfigures the legitimate hegemony. The figures of speech are not accidental here, but they are “just” rhetoric. That is, they justly represent ideas, and ideas related to justice, that will play out accordingly or justly.

Using rhetoric in teaching Shakespeare is particularly rewarding, precisely because the connection between the figurings of language and the ideas are so just and fitting – and the early moderns worshiped rhetorical decorum: every kind of text from pastoral to heroic found a rhetorical style to suit its needs. However, I always face the inevitable questions: did Shakespeare consciously apply these rhetorical figures and did he know what their effects would be? We cannot enter the realm of intentionality, but we can say that moments such as Macbeth’s are not isolated moments of writerly brilliance. We can also say that if Shakespeare experienced the typical early modern schoolboy’s day (according to Vickers, a “remorseless process of repetition and memorization” (48), then he learned rhetoric. And, other than studying the Ad Herennium – attributed to Cicero, if he did not read Cicero and Quintilian themselves, he would have studied their ideas and their definitions of tropes and schemes in one or more of the many rhetorical handbooks of the day: Susenbrotus (Epitome troporum ac schematum et grammaticorum et rhetoricorum; 1540); Richard Sherry (A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes; 1550); Richard Rainolde (A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike; 1563); Henry Peacham (The Garden of Eloquence; 1577 – revised and enlarged, 1593), Day, Puttenham, and so on and so on and so on; the early modern adoration of the Latin age, the desire to improve the state of vernacular writing, and the rediscovery of Cicero and Quintilian opened the floodgates for a pedagogy focused on rhetoric. According to Walter Nash (Rhetoric: the Wit of Persuasion), Vickers, and others, any early modern schoolboy would have had to learn “a goodly proportion of Susenbrotus’s 132 figures and tropes” (Vickers 49), and they would learn what effects these tropes and figures would have on an audience. In a sense, the early moderns treated rhetorical studies as a kind of psychological science. Add to rhetorical knowledge an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and we have Shakespeare (or Earl of Oxford or whoever).

Studying the early moderns rhetorically also become a means to understanding the connections between humanism and language. For the humanist, language was intimately connected with the self – creating, concealing, revealing – and that self was, of course, connected to the state. The rhetorically fit man was a socially and politically fit man, although this is not to say he was necessarily a good man. The passage from Macbeth, for example, contains the speech of a man who will fail, but his rhetoric is fit or suitable because it also tells us why he must fail. Macbeth may fail, but Shakespeare’s rhetoric succeeds in its humanist lesson; it is Shakespeare’s rhetoric that is the “just” rhetoric. In his “Letter to Tomasso da Messina, Concerning the Study of Eloquence,” Petrarch (1304 - 1374), writes that “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” (Rebhorn 15). Such is one definition of the humanist. So, while Macbeth himself errs or wanders off the humanist path, he still becomes part of the humanist statement in Shakespeare’s figuring forth of the psychology of political power.

But why study the early modern period through the lens of classical rhetoric? Because, as scholars remind us “rhetoric was the keystone of Renaissance education and the central discipline for literary criticism and creation” (Donker and Muldrow 168). The early modern humanist came to depend on rhetorical for his very sense of self and for survival in a politically charged and dangerous world. The early modern consciousness of the connection between rhetoric and self might again benefit from an example. I turn to Sir Philip Sidney, humanist and Renaissance man extra ordinaire, revered in his own time for his rhetorical wit and his service to England, and while I would prefer to use his Apology for Poetry here, I will, for the sake of blessed brevity, take my examples from the first sonnet of his Petrarchan sequence Astrophil and Stella.

Sonnet # 1 Astrophil and Stella Sir Philip Sidney 1554 - 1586

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;

Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;

And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

This opening sonnet is quite simply a rhetorical masterpiece. As the poet-figure struggles to find a suitable or decorous voice, to find the “fit words” to “paint” his speaking picture (which must be that of the pathetically sad unrequited lover) (5), the poem itself figures forth or imitates the very struggles of writing rhetorically. The poet-figure admits he has done his reading and his research, but still he seems frustrated and “helpless in [his] throes” (12). Tropes of birth and progeny abound, but it is the rhetorical figures or schemes in this particular sonnet that establish the relationship between the poet-figure as speaking subject and Sidney, the writing subject and product of a rhetorical culture, that is, the relationship between language and self. The speaking subject and his birth into language quite literally come out of Sidney’s own rhetorical eloquence and the power of his humanist beliefs. The new “Muse” – more powerful than any the Golden Age could offer – is within the moral, strong thinking, and politically sound self.

Sidney’s opening sonnet pretends to fail; that is it successfully imitates the failures of a poet who cannot yet speak rhetorically. Its six-foot lines (instead of the standard pentameter) and its awkward trochaic thumps signal the sonnet’s awkwardness, and while prosody is not the issue here, our recognizing the metrical and formal problems puts the rhetorical figuring into context and helps us to interpret the rhetorical patterning of the poem. We can only look at a couple of figures, but that should be enough to paint the outline of the picture (hopefully not the “blackest face of woe”).

Most obvious is the repetition in the first quatrain of the sonnet. “Pleasure,” “read” and “reading,” “know” and “knowledge,” and “pity.” The syntax tries to paint a humanist process, linking – as a first step -- education and language to change and improvement in the lot of the individual. Polyptoton (repetition of root words in various cases) reflects the instability of language at this stage in the poet-figure’s developing articulation. It also qualifies as a type of internal rhyme, an internalizing that becomes part of the sonnet’s overall irony. The speaker searches within the formal qualities of the sonnet and Petrarchan conventions, but he has yet to learn to speak as an individual.

Also within this quatrain, anadiplosis (repetition of a closing word or phrase as the beginning of the next syntactical unit) appears, but it too appears in an unstable condition. Anadiplosis should work like the links of a chain, enclosing a logical sequence and refusing the separation of units of thought. Here, the links of the chain are weak: pleasure of my pain, / Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, / Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain (2-4). What should be pure repetitions are askew, altered; intervening words or phrases and polyptoton’s distortion of verbal purity weaken the chaining, and the lines thus imitate a writer on the cusp of success but still in distress, a poet-errant.

That the poet-figure errs in looking for his pattern in the “others’ leaves” (7) and “others’ feet” (11) is key to understanding Sidney’s idea of language and the self. Copying or turning to others’ texts is not wrong, not by any means; it is a first step, but subsequent steps will be “halting” or impeded if the “self” does not turn the lessons of the masters to one’s own use. The poet-figure also errs in hoping his beloved’s “wits to entertain,” when he leaves the key idea of knowledge behind (literally); poetry, according to Sidney (who repeats the wisdom of the ancients), must teach and delight, but the frustrated poet-figure cannot put his rhetorical training to good work, as his Muse reminds him, until he opens his heart to the light of self-knowledge.

Finally, the sonnet itself is ironic: a rhetorical display of the problem that results if humanist motives do not accompany rhetorical skill. The humanist sees the self as key to the development of a strong state. Thus, Sidney paints a verbal picture of the birth of the humanist rhetorician: education, self-knowledge, and consequent expression in the service of a higher ideal. The struggling sonneteer, once he recognizes the proper place of inspiration, can go on to complete his virtuoso sonnet sequence to his beloved. The sequence, of course, contains the ultimate irony, that all is futile. Words cannot gain only contain the beloved, and she must, according to design, embody and represent the rejecting, non-persuaded and silent object of affection. Sidney thus captures the essence of the sonnet sequence’s rhetoric in reifying failure in his opening sonnet.

Sidney and Shakespeare were students of Latin rhetoric, of what we often call the Ciceronian style. The attractions of Ciceronian style lay in “fullness of expression, syntactical symmetry, and rhetorical devices of repetition,” in “expansive flow,” “aural emphasis,” “polish,” “balance,” and the “amplifications of ideas” or copia (Donker and Muldrow 33). In Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy (1595), Cicero embodies eloquence; Tully – as Sidney and others fondly call the fellow – has been known to hurl many “a thunderbolt of eloquence” in his political rhetoric (623). For Thomas Elyot, in The Governor (1531), a text deserving of deeper study in its linking of rhetoric to political rule, Cicero is “the father of the latin eloquence” (44-45), in whom “it semeth that Eloquence hath sette her glorious Throne, most richely and preciousely adourned for all men to wonder at” (67). For Thomas Wilson, another early modern English pedagogue, Cicero not only defines but embodies the principles of rhetorical studies (The Art of Rhetorique) (1553). In praising the work of John Lyly, William Webbe (1586) writes that he will offer the “verdict” that “Quintilian giveth of both the best orators, Demonsthenes and Tully [Cicero], that from the one nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added” (632).

Clearly, the early moderns recognized in Cicero’s work a treasure trove of vast delights and endless possibilities for verbal expression generally and poetry specifically. They also recognize the enormous mimetic potential for a political language that needed to conceal as much as it revealed (a deeply coded rhetorical style); the copiousness and stylistic flourishes of Ciceronian rhetoric suited perfectly the needs of early modern culture. In short, the Latin rhetoricians, especially Cicero, provided all that was needed for “just rhetoric”; early modern culture believed what the Spanish humanist, Vives said when he wrote that “in the whole kingdom of man, speech holds in its possession a mighty strength which it continually manifests” (qtd. from Vives’ On Education in Vickers 38). For poets, politicians, priests, pastors, and kings, queens, and courtiers, Latin rhetoric offered more than a science of speech; Cicero’s work in particular embodied the connections among statesmanship, law, language, and philosophy. In his teachings, the early moderns found the codes that could connect self and state, that could conceal as they revealed, that could teach, move, and delight.

Works Cited

Donker, Marjorie, and George M. Muldrow. Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Elyot, Thomas. The Boke Named the Governour. 1531. London: J. M. Dent, n.d.

Nash, Walter. Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Petrarch, Francis. “Letter to Tomasso da Messina, Concerning the Study of Eloquence.” Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Ed. and Trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 15-17.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. 1306-1342.

Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings. Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson. Everyman. London: J. M. Dent, 1977. 23.

Vickers, Brian. Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry. With a New Preface and Annotated Bibliography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Webbe, William. From A Discourse of English Poetry. 1586. The Renaissance in England. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1954. 628-633.

Wilson, Thomas. From The Art of Rhetorique. 1553. The Renaissance in England. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1954. 589-595.