Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature

Vulgar Eloquence makes a fresh inquiry into a familiar subject: the extraordinary flourishing of English vernacular literature in the 1580s and 1590s and its shaping by classical example. The period label Renaissance has, of course, long connoted the rebirth of classical languages and learning, but the debt we might expect English writers to acknowledge is an unexpected one. "Englishmen always wanted to be Romans," Keilen remarks at the opening of his book and this desire had long been satisfied by Geoffrey of Monmouth's claim that the British were alternative Romans being descendants of the Trojan Brutus (2). However, the debunking of this view by Reformation antiquaries made such an aspiration increasingly unrealistic, even undesirable, and it became apparent that the English, at least, were rather "the victim of Conquest, the bastard progeny of a brutal rape" perpetuated by the ancient Romans (19).

How this conquest came to be seen as "fortunate" (93), enabling the invention of English literature, is the subject of this ambitious and beautifully written book. It begins with Keilen noting the curious "willingness" of English writers "to emphasize rather than dissimulate England's subaltern" relationship "to ancient Rome" (4). This emphasis led writers to question the distinction between the civil and the barbarous and to value the vulgar eloquence of their own vernacular writing. It is not just that the Romans are discovered to be barbarians after all, but that they too were poor imitators of the exalted Greeks. Paradoxically, it is the vulgarity of the vernacular which brings the English closer to the Romans.

Keilen's study also wants to return to, if not quite to restore, an older understanding of literature as an aesthetic order that transcends its moment of production. Though the current emphasis on literature as discourse has extended the vocabulary and approach of critical reading, it has also made us insensitive to the ways in which the literary was already recognized as different in the Renaissance and even "granted relative autonomy" (9). Keilen reminds us that imitation in the Renaissance also involved exploring the tensions between antiquity and modernity, civility and barbarity. He also considers how eloquence, which denotes the copiousness and forcefulness of the spoken word in antiquity, comes to represent literary writing: specifically, modern English literary writing.

This book has three chapters, each one exploring the adaptation of a different classical fable to create a distinctive legacy for English writing, while also anticipating its promising future. The first fable that Keilen considers is that of Orpheus, the figure who has represented eloquence since antiquity. He traces how this "orator," famous for taming wild animals with his music, came to represent, for Geffrey Whitney at least, modern English writing. Whitney's poem "Orphei Musica" juxtaposes the ancient eloquence of the musical Orpheus with the more excellent "curtesie" of a contemporary "E. P. Esquier," and in so doing, he begins to undo the dichotomies that had long defined English as inferior to Latin, and England to Rome. Here, and elsewhere, Whitney challenges the deep-rooted association of antiquity with civilization and the modern with the uncivil especially by emphasizing the significance of Orpheus's geographical origin, Thrace, long associated with barbarity. This fable is ultimately drawn upon, Keilen suggests, to recall the "vulgar" origins of civilization (77).

The second fable is of the raped and mutilated Philomela, transformed into a nightingale, who represented the "affluence" of ancient literature (88). Keilen explores how, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this figure also represented the promise of a new kind of vernacular writing, which is conceived, paradoxically, as "older than the ancients" (89–90), deriving ultimately from savage nature. This reworking of the myth is made possible by Ovid, for whom Tereus and Philomela are also figures of the Roman writer subjected to Hellenistic influence. The Ovidian telling of this fable informs one familiar reading of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which establishes that violence is the "precondition of writing," as the playwright takes possession of his Roman sources. Keilen argues, however, that this play rather recasts English writers "as the fortunate victims of a Roman conquest" (92–93), and he uncovers in this play and in Shakespeare's Sonnet 23, the reworking of eloquence as silence and writing (129). The third and final fable concerns Circe, and Keilen examines how Milton calls upon this in Comus to reflect on the dangerous seduction of late Elizabethan writing, and then considers how Milton explores the possibility of a new writing for which there is yet no fable.

This is a rich study which repays rereading. Despite his commitment to recovering the literariness of English Renaissance writing, Keilen is not neglectful of the intellectual context from which it emerged, and his conception of what counts as literature is broad. In addition to Shakespeare and Milton, he discusses a range of texts and authors who do not usually appear in the canon, among them Whitney, Peacham, and Camden. This book is full of elegantly posed questions and suggestive leads. The most important of these, I think, is his questioning of whether we might regard the relation of English imitators to their classical sources as "postcolonial" (78). Yet this is a project of literary recovery, and there is a lack of interest in exploring the implications of this perceived relation. A recent study which does so, and which compares with and supplements this book in interesting ways, is Neil Rhodes's, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (2004). Exploring the implications of this matters more than Keilen might allow, since the redefinition of England's relationship with ancient and modern Rome coincides with what is generally recognized as the beginning of the English imperial project. A study a little less interested in establishing the autonomy of the literary text would have a lot more to say about this.