Hidden Persuaders as a Means of Literary Grace: Sixteenth-Century Poetics and Rhetoric in England
- Hidden Persuaders as a Means of Literary GraceSixteenth-Century Poetics and Rhetoric in England¹
Assistant Professor of English, University of Alberta
notes
1. This paper was read at a meeting of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, in Montreal, June 1961. On that occasion the remarks on Davies’ Orchestra were omitted so as to trim the paper down to its allotted time.
2. Modern Philology, 54 (1957), 158–64. Some other useful articles on various aspects of Renaissance rhetoric are: A. L. Bennett, “The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy,” SP, 51(1954), 107–26; R. J. Schoeck, “Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth Century England,” SP, 50(1953), 110–27; Walter King, “John Lyly and Elizabethan Rhetoric,” SP, 52 (1955), 149–61; and D. L. Clark, “Ancient Rhetoric and English Renaissance Literature,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 2(1951), 195–204. Clark says that “we might as well try Renaissance poets by the laws of their own country and age…[which] were largely rhetorical.” This is the method of the present paper.
3. What Aristotle calls respectively forensic, political, and epideictic oratory. See Rhetoric, I, 1358b (tr. by W. Rhys Roberts, Modern Library ed.).
4. The Arte of Rhetorique. Ed. with an Introduction by G. H. Mair (Oxford at the Clarendon Press), 2. Hereafter referred to as Wilson.
5. Wilson, 160.
6. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, 86–7.
7. Ibid. Cf. also William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586). Webbe concludes with an appendix of fifty-four “observations to be marked of all Poets” culled from “Georgius Fabricius Chemnicensis.” A number of the observations are straight out of the traditional textbooks on rhetoric.
8. E.g. Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Sappho.
9. Wilson, 195. The suspicion comes later, strong in Bacon, that the ancient authors are perhaps less allegorical, that is, less open to systematic moral and illustrative commentary, than the rhetoricians, teachers, and commentators were wont to assume. See Advancement of Learning, Bk. II (Everyman ed., 1952), 84.
10. See Rhetoric, III, 1404a and 1408b.
11. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Schuckburgh (Cambridge, 1951), 12.
12. Advancement of Learning, II, 82.
13. Erasmus, the good rhetor, uses the figure of irony to show precisely how important are the matters which may be brought in under praise of the trivial and defence of the indefensible.
14. Wilson, 160–1.
15. An Apologie for Poetrie, 59. Incidentally, the Apologie can itself be read as a classical oration in form and intent. See K. O. Myrick, Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935).
16. Ibid., 12.
17. Wilson, 99.
18. The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke, ed. Carpenter (Chicago, 1899), 53.
19. Rhetoric in Spenser’s Poetry (Pennsylvania State College Studies, no. 7, 1940).
20. Wilson, 113.
21. I am assuming that the Fowre Hymnes can be read as a continuous unit in spite of the difficulties raised by Spenser himself in his prefatory letter. The text used here is that of Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1910).
22. Plato’s suspicion of rhetoric docs not necessarily inhibit a rhetorical criticism of this platonic poem. Spenser is employing the “higher rhetoric” outlined in the Phaedrus. See W. Rhys Roberts, Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism (London, 1928), 6.
23. Wilson, Preface to The Arte of Rhetorique.
24. Wilson, 5.
25. Especially the figure of Antithesis, which Spenser uses so regularly, neatly, and fluently as to remind one of the effects of the heroic couplet at its best.
26. Wilson, 120.
27. Ibid., 121.
28. See stanzas 99 and 100, where the key words are “Love taught”; or stanzas 104–7, where they are “Love,” “dance,” “danceth.” I say rudimentary because as Davies uses them they are pretty obviously the argument’s decoration and not so cunningly its structure. References that follow are to the stanza numbers in E. M. W. Tillyard’s edition of Orchestra (London, 1947).
29. Wilson, 11.
30. Ibid., 90.
31. For that matter the real judge is Queen Elizabeth, though only by implication and allegorical intent.
32. This, and the quotation following, are from Wilson, 29.
33. Wilson, 63.
