Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (review)

In Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature, Sean Keilen focuses on three interrelated classical figures—Orpheus, Philomela, and Circe—whose reverberations he traces through English literature of the high Renaissance. The book devotes one chapter each to Geffrey Whitney, Shakespeare, and Milton, although its range of reference is broader. Keilen justifies the surprising presence of Whitney in this book alongside Shakespeare and Milton in part on the grounds that the emblematist was an important source in England of continental Renaissance humanism. In a manner typical of this book, the significance of these classical figures is self-reflexive: they are all considered symbols of a nascent English literature’s confrontation with its classical, especially Latin, sources, a confrontation fraught with anxiety of influence. Keilen finds this anxiety’s origins in the humanist recognition that the English were not the inheritors of empire but its Roman subjects. Thus, the writers Keilen studies ask themselves how England—colonized, barbarous, cut off from the European continent—could assume the mantle of imperial learning. The “vulgar eloquence” of Keilen’s title (in addition to its Dantean echoes) refers to a vernacular that is eloquent as classical literature is. It also refers to an always already “vulgar” element within the classical and to the wish of vernacular writers to preserve some distinction from their classical sources, rather than being absorbed by them.

Each of the figures Keilen explores involves song and violence. In the chapter on Geffrey Whitney and his fellow emblematists, Keilen focuses on Orpheus, whose violent end in the woods (a fate he shares with Philomela and Circe’s victims) becomes a touchstone in this book. Keilen shows that the English interest in Orpheus involved more than the flattering image he provided of the poet’s power. Rather, Orpheus serves as a figure for the relationship between the classical and the vernacular, in the Ur-poet’s civilizing function (taming wild beasts) but also, in deconstructive fashion, as a figure for an enabling collapse of binary oppositions, including barbaric / civilized, young / old, original / copy. For Whitney and the other emblem-book writers whose work Keilen examines, the incorporation of Orpheus into their own work not only enacted another collapse—that between us/them—but also meant that such incorporation was already authorized by a self-divided antiquity.

Yet the course of hybridity—a word Keilen repeatedly uses, invoking postcolonial theory, to describe the English / Roman relationship (78)—never did run smooth. Keilen follows this idea in Titus Andronicus and two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (23 and 102) that refer to the figure of Philomela. Keilen reads in this figure a further possibility for the relation of the classical to the vernacular, in which the vernacular must be violently possessed—that is, raped—by the classical in order to sing. At the same time, Philomela’s transformation into a nightingale suggests a more complicated relationship between conqueror and conquered, just as Greek culture was said to have possessed its Roman conquerors. For one thing, the violence at the heart of this classical story implies that eloquence is always already vulgar, a hybridity that Keilen in turn associates with the nightingale, a figure of both Shakespeare’s classicism and his native woodnotes wild. For another, Keilen argues that just as the raped Lavinia points to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, making Ovid’s story hers, so the brutal Titus exceeds the classical violence that it imitates.

Avoidance of rape in the woods forms the subject of Keilen’s last chapter, on Milton. Keilen nicely explores the woods as a figure of generative literary material and a threatening wilderness in which one can be dangerously confined: “The woods represent at least two different ways of losing oneself during the encounter with literature: by having either too many choices or too few” (150). Keilen considers this dilemma first in Milton’s Seventh Prolusion, whose subject was that “learning makes men...