The ethos of drama: rhetorical theory and dramatic worth

2. Syntax, Style, and Ethos

30 C h a p t e r 2 Syntax, Style, and Ethos The sentences that a dramatic artist shapes provide an actor, dramaturg, and director the fundamental units for appreciating and realizing a character. When sentence structure is an artistic choice, its syntax is part of a rhetorical strategy. Indeed, rhetorical critics from ancient times to the Renaissance often assume a direct relationship between style and personal values, but no critic examines the creative or simply persuasive implications of “I” in the grammar basic to any style that asserts the character of its speaker. Criticism has, accordingly, bypassed a fundamental stage in determining the ethical proof, fundamental because anyone fashioning a personal ethos must, as a necessary preliminary to studied speech, choose whether and how forcefully to assert the self. In many instances, a dominant “I” as grammatical subject informs a syntactic pattern that frequently makes the speaker an agent responsible for the consequences of an active verb. In passive constructions that turn action back upon the speaker, a self-exculpatory ethos often is insinuated, for the “I” controls the grammar even as the speaker would suggest that circumstances condone questionable behavior . In both grammatical voices, we can discover a strategy V Syntax, Style, & Ethos   31 designed to project a positive character apparently in control of circumstances much as the pronoun governs the verb and other words of a sentence. Shakespeare’s Richard II and other speakers caught in an ambivalent position find that they must speak forcefully but that they have no real political power; the result is that Richard’s style has the form of unconscious self-betrayal, for its attractive figures and other rhetorical flights are grounded in a syntax that reveals a fundamentally weak or dependent character. In general, studies of Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespearean style concentrate on the figures and tropes of a style or on the dominant patterns of sentence structure; some identify figures and see them as characteristic of a Romeo or Hamlet, while others argue from frequency of a pattern or usage to an inference about an Antony or Richard.1 At a more basic level of style, syntax locates the maker of eloquence in the stylistic field where ornament can be created; there can be no such ornament without a ground, and the subject-verb combination is the essential component of that ground, however attractive or highly wrought other stylistic features may be. While English insists that the pronoun be articulated, the classical languages can relegate it to a verb ending; nonetheless , critics have occasionally seen a connection between sentence structure and personal ethos. For example, Hermogenes claims “the figure that is most characteristic of Purity is the use of a straightforward construction with the noun in the nominative case,” and he directly connects this quality with ethos later: “I think that there is more need for Purity in those [private ] speeches [of Demosthenes] because most of them involve an argument from Character.”2 Annabel Patterson briefly treats a related point when in paraphrasing Hermogenes, she suggests 1. Studies of Shakespeare’s style are numerous; for a full treatment based on frequency of usage, see Dolores M. Burton’s Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Richard II and Antony and Cleopatra (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). 2. Hermogenes’ On Types of Style, trans. Cecil W. Wooten (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 49. 32   Syntax, Style, & Ethos that suppressing the “I” creates an acceptable persona: “The modest speaker is frequently heard to say, ‘It seems to me.’”3 Similarly, Aldo Scaglione’s comments on a tenth-century Latin treatise interpret the style’s “drastic inversions and disjunctions ” as “expressive of the author’s moral ordeal and dialectic emotional tension,” but his summary of centuries of thought reveals that critical theories of grammar never focused sharply on ethos: “The scholastic reasons given for the principle whereby noun and pronoun should precede the verb are in keeping with the Aristotelian metaphysics ... because the substance is naturally prior to the act.”4 R. H. Robins notes similar assumptions in medieval grammars : “It is...apparent on this theory of language how complete is the interdependence of language structure with both the structure of things and the operations of the human mind.”5 Such metaphysical premises, however, finally could not account for the diversity of usage. As Scaglione observes in a summary that encloses Shakespeare’s productive years, theories...