In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, his play with the most references to emulation and variations of the word, Ulysses attempts to goad Achilles to action, implying that his past deeds are forgotten and he must act again (and consistently) to accrue honor: “Perseverance, dear my lord, / Keeps honour bright; to have done is to hang / Quite out of fashion” (3.3.151–3).1 Ulysses goes on to explain that the path to honor is narrow and competitive, that only one can lead at a time, and to stumble at all is to be trampled behind by the thousand emulative competitors to come:
Take the instant way,
For honour travels in a strait so narrow
Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path,
For emulation hath a thousand sons,
That one by one pursue. If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entered tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O’er-run and trampled on. Then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours[.] (3.3.154–65)
Ulysses’s bleak ultra-competitive vision of emulation suggests a breakneck race for honor in which the value of action is based more on currency than on magnitude, a society in which the now is valued over any other time, and current emulators trample past models underfoot. Moreover, the sustaining idea in Ulysses’s speech is that only one can lead at any time, that “emulous honour” (4.1.32), by which Diomedes swears to kill Aeneas, is a race that can have only one leader, that everyone else risks the “abject rear.” That this vision fails to inspire Achilles to act is not surprising; this is a race that only a fool would run, for the odds of leading are one in a thousand, and the chance of being trampled almost certain. The trampling reemphasizes that this is not a friendly or chivalrous contest, as Troilus demonstrates elsewhere; rather, this is a brutal (even fatal) competition in which all sense of honor or gain is ground down to destructive mimesis bent more on crushing others than achieving anything productive.
Ulysses’s description of ultra-competitive emulation, however, is a long step from Aristotle’s vision of positive and productive emulation described in his Rhetoric. Aristotle defines emulation as
a kind of distress at the apparent presence among others like him by nature of things honored and possible for a person to acquire, [with the distress arising] not from the fact that another has them but that the emulator does not (thus emulation is a good thing and characteristic of good people, while envy is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former, through emulation, is making an effort to attain the good things for himself, while the latter, through envy, tries to prevent his neighbor from having them).2
Thus, for Aristotle, emulation and envy are opposites within a similar vein, distinguished most in the quite different reaction a comparative sense of lacking promotes. Aristotle continues by describing a positive connection between virtue and emulation and service to others, quite different from Ulysses’s vision of trampling and self-aggrandizement: “if honored goods are the objects of emulation, necessarily the virtues are such things and whatever is a source of advantage and benefit to others; for people honor benefactors and the good.”3 Aristotle specifically links “generals, politicians [rhētores], [and] all having this kind of power” as worthy of emulation because they “can benefit many people.”4 His view of emulation connects the imitation of good things and good values with the ability to serve others, specifically including rhetors among those to be emulated. Aristotle also lists among those who are emulated those “whose praises and encomia are spoken by poets and prose writers,” suggesting a further role of rhetoric within emulation.5 Emulation includes both the desire to be like (or to be) those who hold power through political position and suasory speaking as well as the influence of those that write about the value of others, which includes some power to affect how models of emulation are chosen and which are chosen. Though there is a range of historical and contemporary figures with the potential to be recognized and followed, there can only be a limited range of figures actively and popularly seen as valuable models at a given time (and many notable figures are lost or forgotten or purposely set aside). Within the practices of encomia, then, there also resides some influence over what and who is chosen to be emphasized as exemplary.
Returning to my opening example, perhaps one derivative view of Aristotle’s definition could be the competitive world that Shakespeare’s Troilus depicts, a race to be the one most able to serve others (as Ulysses wishes Achilles to be for the Greeks) and thus accrue the most honor; however, there remains a significant gap between Aristotle’s vision of good people seeking to be better and the violently competitive courtier-style politics and trampling “emulous factions” (2.3.70) that Troilus depicts.6
A review of extant early modern texts indicates that emulation is indeed a conflicted term in the period, one that is much richer than a purely denotative approach reveals, one that in use encompasses a variety of functions and meanings, from its use as a synonym for envy and in lists of social ills threatening individual and social welfare to being used to reflect patterning oneself on Christ to more rhetorical uses related to careful reading and writing, often with an eye to following models in order to construct new texts.7 A few further examples of early modern texts should help illustrate its divergent and varied uses, as well as its cultural significance. Emulation may have multiple uses (sometimes even contradictory ones), but most writers see emulation as a powerful shaping influence in individual lives and within society more broadly.
Robert Allott, whose WITS Theater of the little World (1599) offers a commonplace book of extant sayings and examples, begins his work with a preface to the reader that emphasizes a positive (or “right”) use of emulation as a mode of self-fashioning: “The profit that ariseth by reading thes[e] epitomized histories is, to aemulate tha[t] vvhich thou likest in others, and to mak[e] right vse of theyr examples.”8 Later in his work, as many others do in the period, he lists emulation among other negatives related to jealousy, “obtractation, emulation, enuie, and detraction” in his section entitled “Of Iealousie & Suspition.”9 However, when Allott actually discusses emulation in detail in this section, there is nothing obviously or necessarily negative about the examples discussed: “Alexander did emulate in Lysimachus skilfulnes in vvarre, in Seleucus an inuincible courage, ambition in Antigonus, in Attalus a diuine maiesty, and in Ptolomey, an happy successe of all his enterprises.”10 Allott’s list, in fact, suggests what appears to be a generally positive following of exemplary precedents. His work’s internally contradictory uses of emulation are mirrored in many texts in the period.
Similarly, Richard Braithwaite, an Oxford-educated poet, uses emulation in The English gentleman (1630) to refer to Alexander’s notable education and subsequent success in all he did, while also linking emulation to ambition and the distemperment resulting from an excess of ambition, “the which disquiet proceeds either from emulation towards others, or an ambitious desire of advancement in themselves.”11 This distemperment does not come up in The English gentlevvoman (1631), in which Braithwaite focuses on the “emulation of goodnesse in great persons” as a means to shape a positive character, also arguing for “leauing some memorable examples of your wel-spent life, which may eternize you after this li[v]e. This will make your names flourish; and cause others in a vertuous emulation of your actions, to retaine your memory in thier liues.”12 The idea that emulating ties one’s life to another’s (that one “retaine[s another’s] memory in thier liues”) has fascinating implications for emulation’s place in society and in self-fashioning. Emulation is thus linked to the preservation of memories, values, and patterns—in this case at a private level, but in many Renaissance texts there is a desire for this linking and preservation to occur at a broad level, such as in notions of a translation of empire.13 Further, this example also illustrates the circularity of emulation’s uses, a concept I will return to, as the gentlewoman is instructed to both model herself from others and to set herself up as a model for others.
In a similar later work, Richard Allestree, a prolific writer and preacher, a Royalist and provost of Eton College, discusses emulation in The gentlemans calling (1660) as a social means by which gentlemen can persuade (through moral example) “those of the lower Ranks to embrace Vertue.”14 In his theological works, such as The causes of the decay of Christian piety (1667), Allestree refers to “vertuous emulation” and “noble Emulation,” for the benefit of divine progress.15 However, he also relates “Emulation to the Garlick and Onions, amidst the affluence of Milk and Honey,” thus linking it to the biblical “sins of Canaan, and the Wilderness,” and vilifies religious hypocrisy and conflict in his day by saying: “all our splendid pretence of Sanctity is but an emulation of Gentile Impurity under a better name; and while we damn Heathens for their Moral vertues, We are yet so stupid as to hope our selves to be saved by their worst vices.”16 In this same work he derides the destruction of social distinction through economic mobility, decrying “not only an emulation of pomp and bravery among equals, but those of the most distant qualities, there seeming now no other measure than the utmost extent of their money or credit.”17 In general in these passages, emulation itself does not seem be in question, rather the choice of what is being followed. Nonetheless, Allestree feels the need to modify emulation, labeling it virtuous or noble when he wants it to have a clearly positive meaning. This kind of explicit labeling, almost always used when a writer wants to ensure emulation is seen as positive, shows up in many works in the period.
Despite the often varied uses of emulation—and the frequent internal inconsistencies—some writers maintain a fairly consistent use. Offering a significantly different view of emulation, Angel Day’s The English secretorie (1586), a work on letter writing, a topic often dealt with in the period in relation to ancient rhetorical resources, fairly explicitly links letter writing with emulative practices and ancient culture, explaining how emulation fueled the writing of epistles and the accruing of ancient honors of great Roman families.18 For Day, emulation is largely linked to excellence in writing and in honor. Day’s full title, The English secretorie VVherin is contayned, a perfect method, for the inditing of all manner of epistles and familiar letters, together with their diuersities, enlarged by examples vnder their seuerall tytles. In which is layd forth a path-waye, so apt, plaine and easie, to any learners capacity, as the like wherof hath not at any time heretofore beene deliuered, highlights emulative practices, including Day’s professional rivalry with many similar competing works.
In his The anatomy of melancholy (1621), still reprinted and read today (often, for example, in relation to the study of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), Robert Burton, a lifelong scholar and vicar at Oxford’s St. Thomas Church, also offers a fairly consistent, and usually quite negative, view of emulation. Burton repeatedly relates emulation to envy, factions, political turmoil, hatred, shame, jealousy, and other personal and social ills, often using emulation in negative lists, such as “Whereas the Princes or great men are malitious, enuious, factious, ambitious, emulators, they teare a commonwealth asunder,” and, in speaking of great men such as Alexander, Caesar, and Hannibal, “I will say nothing of their diseases, emulations and such miseries.”19 Burton associates emulation with the most negative of personal and social aspects of life, as this extended example, discussing the causes of melancholy, illustrates:
Often times too, to aggrauate the rest concurre many other inconueniences, vnthankfull friends, bad neighbours, negligent seruants, casualties, taxes, mulcts, losse of stocke, enmities, emulations, losses, suretiship, sicknesse, death of friends, and that which is the gulfe of all, improuidence, ill husbandry, disorder and confusion, by which meanes they are drenched on a sudden in their estates, and at vnawares precipitated insensibly, into an inextricable labyrinth of ca[r]es, woes, want, griefe, discontent, and melancholy it selfe.20
Burton also has an entire section on “Aemulation, Hatred, Faction, Desire of revenge,” which begins, “OVt of this roote of envy, spring those ferall branches of faction, hatred, livor, emulation, which cause the like grievances.”21 While he does concede some value to emulation in this section, it is a brief concession: “Honest emulation in studies, in all callings is not to bee disliked, t’is ingeniorum cos, as one cals it, the whetstone of wits: As Th[e]mistocles was roused vp with the glory of Miltiades, Achilles trophyes moued Alexander: but when it is immoderate, it is a plague, and a miserable paine.”22 Like Allestree, he modifies the term (with “honest”) to mark a positive use of emulation. Within The anatomy, Burton only uses emulation in a positive sense with clear adjectival limitations and within a more academic sense—without a modifier it repeatedly has a clearly negative association.
The problematic nature of emulation appears, though in a different sense from Burton’s, in Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus (1599), subtitled “a generall Defence of all Learning,” in which the titular character speaks of emulation, in a form reminiscent of Ullyses’s notion of hyper-competitive emulation:
For Emulation, that proud nurse of wit,
Scorning to stay below or come behinde,
Labours vpon that narrow top to sit
Of sole Perfection in the highest kinde:
Enuy and Wonder looking after it,
Thrust likewise, on the self same blisse to finde:
And so, long striuing, till they can no more,
Doe stuffe the place, or others hopes shut out,
Who, doubting to ouertake those gone before,
Giue vp their care, and cast no more about:
And so in scorne, leaue all as fore possest,
And will be none, where they may not be best.23
Emulation is again a fraught term, leading to perfection (seemingly even able to attain it, at least for a time), but also occluding the work of others and frustrating those unable to be the best, leaving them (like Achilles) more willing to simply not try at all than to enter the race that seems impossible to win. Daniel also has Musophilus condemn the thoughtless imitation he felt was rampant in his time (and which he sets in opposition to “Reason”): “Well were it with mankind, if what the most / Did like were best, but ignorance will liue / By others square, as by example lost.”24 For Daniel, like Burton, there is room for emulation in educational practices and learning, but there also seems to be a fairly broad concern that emulation too easily becomes about rivalry and contention, fostering questionable practices and leading as often to frustration as to success.
A last example, for now, offers a distinct and prevalent view of emulation, tying it, as it frequently was, to Christian ideals and practices of preaching. After a lengthy, detailed exegesis of all of Paul’s epistles (which includes seeing emulation as synonymous most often with contention and envy, but also sometimes seeing it as a means to invoke others to following Christ), David Dickson argues that one of Paul’s goals in speaking of life as a race is “To advertise us, Both of our Spiritual Adversaries, against whom wee must fight still as wee go on, and of our Compartiners, who run in the Race with us: with whom wee may strive in an holy emulation, who shall go foremost in the course of pleasing God.”25 While, as in Ulysses’s and Musophilus’s speeches, the idea of a contest remains (another agonistic view; in this case, a race), here it shifts to a desire to do better in order to please God more, and not to merely best—or exclude—others.
Taken together, these texts exemplify the wide and diverse use of emulation in the period—and the often polemically emphatic nature of that use, from “holy emulation” to emulation as a “feral branch” of envy. The texts range in their uses of emulation from social commentary to social and cultural ideals of custom, from composing letters to philosophical, literary, and religious studies. Throughout, these texts also suggest the broad belief in emulation’s significant (though quite varied and often problematic) role in the shaping of character and society, a role that links emulation to English Renaissance drama, with its deep investment in imitation and mimetic patterns, its intense rivalries related to the theaters and play companies, and the frequent link of drama to social learning (whether good or ill) through enacted models.
Renaissance drama depicts the substantial range of emulation’s uses, exploring the many meanings and uses of emulation (from brutal rivalry to the following of Christ to the imitation of ancient excellence) in the contextualized, self-aware, and language-focused medium of drama. Renaissance drama also draws on ancient and extant rhetorical models (social, linguistic, aesthetic) to reinvestigate and often redefine language use within concrete contexts. The difference between Aristotle’s broad definitions and Shakespeare’s much more specific uses of emulation exemplifies, though also only scratches the surface of, what drama offers in the depiction of disembodied concepts, ideas, and theories. Jonathan Bate argues that Renaissance playwrights such as Heywood and Shakespeare specifically drew on the ideas and works of the ancients in an effort to breathe life into them on the popular stage: “Performance could evoke the substance (res) of ancient poems, whereas education was locked into analysis of their grammar, syntax, and rhetoric (verba); the drama brought classics to life, whereas the techniques of the schoolroom killed them stone dead.”26 While this statement may be a bit overly hardened in its division—the classroom did allow for many activities and applications of words that certainly tapped into the substance of the texts written—drama does allow for a much more sustained embodiment of texts in action and practice, including contemporary and ancient ideas enacted (and often questioned) on the stage.
Drama’s rampant and active intertextuality, blended with its material need to construct and map characters and culture primarily through words, makes drama an ideal point of entry into contemporary depictions and representations of ideological theory and praxis, especially in relation to language. This book focuses on the many uses and reuses that emulation serves within Renaissance society and drama, attempting to explore a “thousand sons of emulation,” beyond either Aristotle’s or Ulysses’s visions of rhetorics and society, to secure a more nuanced understanding of Renaissance drama’s close relation to rhetoric and of the Renaissance’s more broad use of ancient and contemporary models in order to capture a detailed view of emulation’s many places and roles within the English Renaissance’s volatile cultural world. The depicted conflicts concerning emulation are crucial to understanding Renaissance culture, since rhetorical training was at the core of the humanist education and culture of the period and fostered the imitation of exemplary precedents, which lies at the heart of crucial Renaissance ideas about literature, ethics, politics, psychology, and history. Exploring the ways that dramatists enact, appropriate, and refigure rhetorical and social theory and practice on the English stage, this book examines the divisive uses of rhetorical and social patterning in what is ultimately a culture of emulation.
Within the Renaissance emulation is closely related to imitation, as several of my earlier citations suggest, and these related modes of patterning stand at the core of many activities and beliefs in the period, including educational practices. In his description of the grammar schools in the Renaissance, Don Paul Abbott states simply, “If there is one constant in Renaissance education it is a belief in the necessity, indeed, the inevitability of imitatio as the principal method of learning.”27 Gideon Burton claims, “Imitation was Renaissance literacy. It provided the manner by which language was learned, texts were read, and discourse produced.”28 Rhetorically, imitation was a central praxis, a means of learning from models through observation and practice. As noted in the preface, Greene introduces imitation as “central and pervasive,” adding that the Renaissance might be aptly described as “the era of imitation.”29 The term Renaissance itself, taken for what it is worth, reflects that the emulation of ancient societies, practices, and beliefs has been considered by some central to the English Renaissance culture and society, including its rhetorics and poetics.
As its link to emulation suggests, imitation in the Renaissance was not a rote practice, but a highly creative, even inventive one.30 Imitation within the period’s educational and social practices meant following a pattern or precedent, but it also meant personalizing the newly constructed text. As Jonathan Bate argues, “emulation leaves room for dissimilitude as well as similitude; it ultimately comes down to matter, not mere words. That good imitation involves difference as well as similarity is a cardinal principle of Renaissance poetics.”31 Bate cites Petrarch’s letter from Pavia to Boccaccio (dated October 28, 1366): “The ‘proper imitator should take care that what he writes resembles the original without reproducing it’; the resemblances should be that ‘of a son to his father,’ not that of a portrait to the sitter.”32 There should be difference and adaptation in imitation, the kind of varying that allows for the uniqueness of offspring, though still clearly related to the parent. Emulation, as a word and term, represents well these Renaissance practices (and avoids confusion with modern ideas of imitation, especially the often derogatory notion of something second rate), while also suggesting, as Rene Girard has argued in relation to Shakespeare (though using the related, partial term of envy), that Renaissance writers in the process of imitation often vied with the original model, following it, but in finding ways to personalize the text also attempting to best the original.33
John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius (1612), a treatise on teaching practices in the grammar schools, exemplifies the frequent parallel use of imitation and emulation in the period and offers insight into the significance of emulation within the period’s educational activities and theories.34 In this work Brinsley argues for the centrality of emulation in early modern education, arguing that “all things in Schooles be done by emulation, and honest contention,” and further claiming
That for whatsoeuer exercises they [students] are to learne, they haue the best patternes to follow, which can be procured: as in writing so for all kinde of learning, how to do euery thing; because all learning is principally gotten by a kinde of imitation, and arte doth imitate the most excellent nature. The patternes being singular, so shall their work proue in time, eyther to expresse their patterne very liuely, or happely to go beyond it.35
Later, while describing the need for spoken models in class, Brinsley combines imitation and emulation, again arguing for their pervasive use in the classroom in “propounding such [spoken models] as patternes and markes to all their fellows, for al to emulate and imitate them; as I haue aduised generally.”36 The marginal gloss to this line reads, “To cause sundry to pronounce the very same sentence in emulation,” while the paragraph begins speaking specifically about imitation. For Brinsley, and he is not alone, emulation and imitation stand at the heart of schoolroom practices and are sister arts, closely related and often overlapping, meant to aid in teaching everything from invention and arrangement to usage and style to delivery, judgment, and character. The idea is that repetitive imitation (in writing and in speech) promotes eventual mastery, that following examples and models leads, through appropriate training, to better texts and better character.
Quintilian, the foremost pedagogical source for the Renaissance classroom, clearly states, when describing paraphrase as an aspect of the imitative process, that imitation is not merely the labor of copying or even modifying a text, but is an actual bettering of the original: “I do not want Paraphrase to be a mere passive reproduction, but to rival and vie with the original in expressing the same thoughts.”37 Significantly, Quintilian’s statement contains both an assumption (or perhaps admonition) that this rivalry will remain fixed within “the same thoughts” (which also assumes following accepted ideas of decorum—aesthetic and ethic) and the material reality that imitation can lead to acts of transcendent (potentially transgressive) invention. As I mentioned in the preface, Greene argues the need to understand that imitative practices themselves were under revision and redefinition, stating that understanding the Renaissance as “an era of imitation … would have value only if the concept and praxis were understood to be repeatedly shifting, repeatedly redefined by the writers and artists who believed themselves to be ‘imitating.’”38 This living, changing sense of imitation is what emulation is about and reflects the socially-influenced aspects of emulation, refining and redefining itself through the entwining, shifting processes by which texts and writers relate to one another in often subtle shades of imitation and difference.
Earlier in his work, Quintilian argues fairly specifically for imitation that borders on invention: “It is a disgrace too to be content merely to attain the effect you are imitating. Once again, what would have happened if no one had achieved more than the man he was following?”39 That imitation can provide for powerful invention is significant; it is not incidental that invention is the first of the five canons of rhetoric. As Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee attest to in their work, invention is central to ancient rhetoric, receiving “lavish attention” in ancient works: two of Aristotle’s three books in the Rhetoric are on invention, as are five of Quintilian’s 12 books in the Institutes.40 Quintilian states quite directly, “It cannot be doubted that a large part of art consists of imitation. Invention of course came first and is the main thing, but good inventions are profitable to follow.”41 The linking of imitation to invention elevates the value of understanding imitation and of not merely relegating it (as too often happens) to a question of style. Further, emulation’s tie to invention is another link to its role in influencing and shaping societies and individuals.
Traditionally (and at least theoretically), imitative rivalry extends throughout the practices of imitation, constructing a competitive model of appreciative emulation focused on outdoing the original text or precedent but with respect to the original (not the trampling Ulysses refers to in Troilus). The patterning of imitation is explained by Roger Ascham as “large and wide, for all the works of nature in a manner be examples for art to follow”; he earlier suggests, though in a different context, that one living example to follow is “more valuable, for good and ill, then twenty precepts written in books.”42 As Ascham’s words suggest, while imitation was primarily a textual process, appearing repeatedly throughout the early modern period (and often understood as a universal process), it became a central aim of the Renaissance, spreading to the emulation of texts of all kinds, including reading character and selves as texts, a point I develop further in this work.43
Thus, emulation was not seen as rote repetition but as an act of invention or construction, self-construction in daily life—governed by decorum, though also potentially generative of transgressive invention.44 Working from Quintilian’s writings, James J. Murphy argues that imitation was a “carefully-plotted sequence of interpretative and re-creational activities using pre-existing texts to teach students how to create their own original texts.”45 As Murphy shows, through this process of (self-)construction via imitation schoolboys were thought to “imbibe” the moral qualities of great men in poems, to perform what Aristotle calls “natural to man” in his Poetics, and what St. Augustine refers to in his De Doctrina Christiana as “more important than Precept.”46 Peter Mack offers an example of this, in relation to religious learning:
Through diligent reading and pondering, in what amounts to a form of imitation, the Christian in some sense becomes the book. The one who benefits most from the Bible is “he that is most turned into it, that is most inspired with the Holy Ghost, most in his heart and life altered and changed into that thing which he readeth.”47
This kind of self-fashioning through reading and emulative self-modeling carries over into daily life, creating a kind of competitive pursuit of excellence in character and honor, based on ancient as well as contemporaneous models—texts and people.48
That these beliefs extend beyond the classroom is indicated straightforwardly by George Abbot, professor of divinity and Master of University College at Oxford, later Archbishop of Canterbury, in An exposition vpon the prophet Ionah (1600), which uses emulation and imitation synonymously in discussing shaping personal action using earlier lives as precedents and then makes this significant claim: “It is not in Rhetoricke onely that imitation holdeth, but in all the course of our life.”49 Imitation was not solely a rhetorical process, but an individual and social one—and the link between rhetorical theory and personal practice is evident in this citation. The period saw rhetoric as a relevant discourse to shaping daily practices. Arguably, at a broad level, rhetorics and their various practices always have social and individual implications and impacts.
Three central rhetoricians of the Renaissance, Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir Philip Sidney, offer insights that link emulation to broader social patterns and practices. At the beginning of The Arte of Rhetorique, after describing the breadth and power of rhetoric (in terms of “eloquence”), Thomas Wilson describes “By what meanes Eloquence is attained,” emphasizing the traditional belief in natural talent (Wilson refers to this as “wit”), the need for broad knowledge and learning (Theory/Art, Ars), and the significance of practice—this last item he drives home with particular force, emphasizing practice over all other aspects, “the whiche in all thynges is a sovereigne meane most highly to excel.”50 Though Wilson begins with a traditional emphasis on natural talent—“an eloquent man, must naturally have a wit”—he proceeds to focus repeatedly on the need for practice and imitation, “For though he haue a wit and learning together, yet shal thei bothe litle auaile without much practice,” and “in all faculties, diligent practice, and earnest exercise, are the onely thynges, that make men prove excellent.”51 Wilson then explains that the central means of excelling through practice is through imitation (this section is glossed “Imitacion or folowyng the waies of wise men is nedefull” in the 1562 edition):
Now before we use either to write, or speake eloquently we must dedicate our myndes wholly, to folowe the moste wise and learned menne, and seke to fashion, aswell their speache and gesturing, as their wit or endityng. The whiche when we earnestly mynde to do, we cannot but in time apere somewhat like the[m].52
Wilson’s focus here is on emulating the examples and models of earlier valued writers and speakers to increase one’s own skill and to, in time, become more like those models—a change that Wilson’s work suggests has as much to do with physical and cultural self-fashioning as with intellectual and rhetorical skill.
Understanding the way in which Wilson’s approach to gaining rhetorical skill relates to similar earlier lists helps explain a subtle yet significant difference between many ancient and Renaissance theories of rhetoric and imitation—an emphasis on imitation, practice, and learning/art, over nature and natural ability. From Cicero to Sidney, rhetoricians have emphasized four aspects in gaining eloquence—nature (or wit), art (or theory), practice (or exercise), and imitation—sometimes excluding one or another. For example, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium simply lists “Theory, Imitation, and Practice,” but most ancient writers, such as Plato, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, focus on nature, theory, and practice, with heavy emphasis put on natural ability.53 Quintilian refers to how “the faculty of speech is brought to perfection by Nature, Art, and Practice,” adding “some add a fourth factor, Imitation, but I include this under Art.”54 Wilson, then, follows Quintilian in the order of this list, but does not dismiss imitation as a subsection of art, rather he emphasizes immediately the need for practice, exercise, and imitation, specifically, and sees imitation as an active part of learning eloquence, rather than as a more theoretic aspect of rhetoric.
Cicero and Plato are not as straightforward as Quintilian (or Wilson) in discussing the means to eloquence, but their works still emphasize the primary need for natural ability. Crassus in Cicero’s De Oratore asserts the preeminent need for natural talent in the ideal orator: “In the first place natural talent is the chief contributor to the virtue of oratory.”55 Later he adds, “I do not mean that art cannot in some cases give polish,—for well I know that good abilities may through instruction become better, and that such as are not of the best can nevertheless be, in some measure, quickened and amended.”56 Early in De Inventione, Cicero states, somewhat enigmatically, but aptly as a set up for the work that is to follow:
And if, as it happens, this [eloquence] is not brought about by nature alone nor by practice, but is also acquired from some systematic instruction, it is not out of place to see what those say who have left us some directions for the study of oratory.57
Cicero allows room for growth through practice and knowledge (and emphasizes how much growth is possible, in other parts of this and other writings); after all, why write about rhetoric and oratory if art cannot improve its practice, even just somewhat? However, the assumption also seems quite constant in his work, as Crassus asserts, that natural ability is needed first as a foundation for any significant accomplishment as an orator. Similarly, Plato’s Socrates argues, speaking of how to acquire ability in rhetoric, “If you are naturally rhetorical, you will become a notable orator, when to your natural endowments you have added knowledge and practice; at whatever point you are deficient in these, you will be incomplete.”58 Throughout these lists, natural talent is emphasized and foremost.
In some ways the most at odds with Wilson’s work, Isocrates offers a fuller depiction of the need for natural ability, practical experience, and formal training in fashioning an orator, emphasizing strongly the need for natural aptitude above all other aspects:
For ability, whether in speech or in any other activity, is found in those who are well endowed by nature and have been schooled by practical experience. Formal training makes such men more skilful and more resourceful in discovering the possibilities of a subject; for it teaches them to take from a readier source the topics which they otherwise hit upon in haphazard fashion. But it cannot fully fashion men who are without natural aptitude into good debaters or writers, although it is capable of leading them on to self-improvement and to a greater degree of intelligence on many subjects.59
Isocrates continues to emphasize the need for “the requisite aptitude” in students of rhetoric as well as proper training and varied practice.60 While he does not at this point mention imitation specifically, he does mention the need for students to learn to emulate the example of the teacher:
And the teacher, for his part, must so expound the principles of the art with the utmost possible exactness as to leave out nothing that can be taught, and, for the rest, he must himself set such an example of oratory that the students who have taken form under his instruction and are able to pattern after him will, from the outset, show in their speaking a degree of grace and charm which is not found in others.61
In part, of course, Isocrates is simply emphasizing (boasting) what he offers, which he argues the sophists do not offer, but beyond this, Isocrates’s ideas here make clear that even though he does not overtly espouse imitation the way Wilson does, it is the imitation of the master that allows a student to have a chance of exhibiting the kinds of grace and decorum that practice and knowledge cannot adequately teach.
In his Antidosis, Isocrates clearly emphasizes the absolute need for natural talent as well as excellence in training, stating that teachers cannot make “capable orators out of whomsoever they please. They can contribute in some degree to these results, but these powers are never found in their perfection save in those who excel by virtue both of talent and of training.”62 For Isocrates a balance is needed, but the beginning point is without question found in natural talent. It seems important to add that in part the highly uncertain and highly visible nature of an orator’s work and position in Greek society must have contributed to Isocrates’s desire to emphasize that it was not a teacher’s fault, no matter how thorough his training, if a student failed publicly. Isocrates is in part defending his tutelage of students (given in person), whereas Wilson is offering a broadly applicable rhetoric that needs to convince readers that they can succeed if they purchase and then individually read, study, and apply his book.
Wilson’s early emphasis on practice, and especially imitation, as a needful means to eloquence (and self-fashioning) accentuates a particularly strong belief in many Renaissance conceptions of rhetoric about the power and usefulness of following others in order to learn excellence and eloquence in all matters.63 This belief may relate to the heavy correlation between the study of rhetoric and the desire for social mobility that many have argued characterizes the Renaissance and its uses of rhetoric.64 Frank Whigham, for example, begins with Wilson’s ideological views in the Arte of Rhetorique to argue for the central role of courtesy literature in shaping “the surge of social mobility that occurred at the boundaries between ruling and subject classes in late sixteenth-century England.”65 In his analysis he identifies and explores “a sophisticated rhetoric, indeed an epistemology, of personal social identity—a new understanding of how people tell who they are.”66 Whigham’s work is grounded in the idea that “the received sense of personal identity, seen as founded on God-given attributes such as birth, was slowly giving way to the more modern notion that the individual creates himself by his own actions,” an idea that resonates well with Wilson’s theories.67 Though it discounts God-given attributes, the idea has resonance in extant religious beliefs as well, such as in this claim early in the Homilies about study’s effects on character: “For that thing, which (by continuall vse of reading of holy Scripture, and diligent searching of the same) is deepely printed and grauen in the heart, at length turneth almost into nature.”68 It’s also worth noting that while rhetorical theories, though with differing emphases over the years and centuries, have generally included some sense of self-fashioning through language, some sense of the relation between an individual’s constructed self, character, and language use, the belief seems to have particular force in the Renaissance.
Beyond this, the Renaissance’s emphasis on the duality and yet interpenetration of art and nature, not unique to the period, but explored with particular fervor—such as in Perdita and Polixenes’s well-known discussion in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or Sidney’s discussion in An Apology for Poetry—fueled this focus on social mutability through learning, practice, and imitation. In fact, it partially authorized social change, by indicating that the ability to engender change through human art was itself natural because it was within the natural abilities of humans. While Perdita and Polixenes’s multivalent discussion cannot be boiled down to a single idea or phrase, Polixenes’s claim that “This is an art / Which doth mend nature—change it rather—but / The art itself is nature” points to the kind of interpenetration and interrelation of art and nature that the period explored.69 Webster develops a similar idea, though with greater emphasis on the power of art, in The Duchess of Malfi, such as when the Duchess responds to Bosola’s praise of grafting: “’Tis so: a bettering of nature.”70
Similar to Webster’s Duchess, Wilson claims specifically that art is “a surer guide, then nature, considering we se as lively by the art, what we do, as though we red a thing in writtyng, wheras natures doings are not to open to all men,” adding “those that have good wittes, by nature, shall better encrease theim by arte, and the blunte also shalbe whetted through art, that want nature to help them forward.”71 Rebhorn argues that a lessening of an emphasis on nature, as is clear in Wilson’s rhetoric, is notable in the Renaissance as compared to ancient models, and that it likely relates to the Christian emphasis on man’s fallen nature.72 Sidney focuses on the need for art to thrive on and imitate nature, claiming:
There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of Nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what Nature will have set forth.73
The Renaissance seems to have had a particular emphasis on and development of the use of art to mirror, even improve on, nature and the ways that nature fueled and inspired artistic emulation. Russ McDonald argues for example that, through Ovid’s influence, Shakespeare reinvigorates an “insistence on the indistinguishability of the artificial and the natural, on art’s equivalence and potential superiority to nature.”74 That the idea is a core tenet of Ovid’s work reemphasizes that the belief was not native to the Renaissance, as imitation and emulation were also not native practices to the period. However, the borrowing and use of Ovid’s works reemphasizes Wilson’s insistence on the importance of imitation and art, and the broad Renaissance emphasis on emulation, and highlights the vigorous ways in which the belief in mutability (including social and individual mobility) and the use of art to mimic and sometimes outdo nature were used in the period—and the social breadth to which these ideas were applied. The Renaissance was not unique in believing in imitation, but its focus was unique, as was the breadth of its application and the use of emulation as a central social trope.
None of this is meant to imply that ancient rhetorics did not also emphasize imitation; certainly they did. However, most ancient writers mention imitation much later in their works, as a means to continued excellence, but not as a foundational principle of eloquence, as Wilson emphasizes. Wilson’s discussion on imitation has grounding in ancient sources, though it magnifies its significance. In De Oratore, shortly after Antonius’s extended speech on the need to ascertain a student’s natural ability (the marginal gloss reads “It is natural ability that matters”), Antonius proceeds to claim the incredible difference tutelage under Crassus made to one such natural wit:
Assuredly Nature herself was leading him into the grand and glorious style of Crassus, but could never have made him proficient enough, had he not pressed forward on that same way by careful imitation, and formed the habit of speaking with every thought and all his soul fixed in contemplation of Crassus.75
According to Antonius, this student’s success, while grounded in natural ability, also clearly emphasizes the need for “careful imitation.” In a similar way Quintilian emphasizes imitation as a key concept in gaining facility in Book 10 of his Institutes. Interestingly, Quintilian also mentions imitation in discussing natural ability as the second sign of natural talent and as “a mark of a teachable nature.”76 Isocrates, who so emphatically emphasized natural ability, much later states, “It is well that in all activities, and most of all in the art of speaking, credit is won, not by gifts of fortune, but by efforts and study.”77
Wilson certainly does not represent all Renaissance rhetorics (I specifically hope to avoid constructing a universal theory of Renaissance rhetoric in this book), but his work is well grounded in a pervasive emphasis on imitation within educational practices (practices closely related to self-fashioning and social mobility). I hope to show that it is important to see Renaissance theories (including emulation) as multivalent, even though common ground and beliefs exist within the many theories as well. Wilson’s inclusion of imitation so early in his work—and so emphatically—points to the significance of imitation and emulation in the period, but it does not paint the whole picture of emulation’s role and place.
Roger Ascham, a tutor of Queen Elizabeth, emphasizes the significance of emulation and imitation in a distinctive way. While he follows a fairly traditional pattern in shaping The Schoolmaster, when he comes to imitation, he spends the remainder of the book (unfinished as it is) discussing imitation, its ramifications, its methods, and how and whom to follow, beginning with the sweeping statement I quoted part of earlier: “Imitation is a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example ye go about to follow. And of itself is large and wide, for all the works of nature in a manner be examples for art to follow.”78 Notice that Ascham begins by connecting imitation to clarity, appropriateness, and decorum, emphasizing the ability to not just imitate but to do so lively and perfectly. Emulation, as I will develop throughout this work, is connected to the judgment needed to select and then to recontextualize texts and examples based on current settings and situations. Additionally, to do it well, emulation requires an ability to represent the model within the new text perfectly, which implies a kind of rivalry with the model or at least an internal rivalry to use the model in the most excellent way.
Ascham continues his exposition on imitation by arguing that it is the means by which all languages (natural and studied) are learned, again linking imitation to social status: “therefore if ye would speak as the best and wisest do, ye must be conversant where the best and wisest are.”79 Ascham then proceeds to connect imitation broadly to social order, judgment, and decorum:
For mark all ages, look upon the whole course of both the Greek and Latin tongue, and ye shall surely find that when apt and good words began to be neglected and properties of those two tongues confounded, then also began ill deeds to spring, strange manners to oppress good orders, new and fond opinions to strive with old and true doctrine, first in philosophy and after in religion, right judgment of all things to be perverted, and so virtue with learning is contemned and study left off. Of ill thoughts cometh perverse judgment; of ill deeds springeth lewd talk. Which four misorders, as they mar man’s life, so destroy they good learning withal.80
And good learning, for Ascham, is founded in imitation, wise and judicious, of especially Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, along with the Bible.81 That Ascham connects imitation to social practices is not surprising. Imitative learning rests within complex social codes, and, as I will argue further, also reifies these codes, becoming part of the social patterns that define many aspects of social life.
Discussing the nature of rhetoric as an art (and the social nature of the knowledge that makes up an art), Janet M. Atwill argues that “the rhetorical doctrine of imitation attests to the importance of this social embodiment of art,” adding,
In the classical pedagogical formula of natural talent, practice, imitation, and art, imitation has been art’s primary competitor. The earliest programs of elite education in Greece were grounded in the imitation of performances and exemplary texts; and imitation, in turn, was part of a complex process of socialization.82
The knowledge and theory of rhetorics are thus closely tied to (and, using Atwill’s evocative formulation, in rivalry with) imitative beliefs and practices. Imitation is the social aspect of learning and practices; it is the part of knowledge and learning that is always socially grounded and connected. As such, it is also a part of rhetoric that particularly resists theoretical discussions, that requires a more active and contextualized (and socially-based) examination—an examination that the socially-focused world of drama facilitates. However, as I mentioned earlier, emulation also aids in constructing social knowledge and norms. As the processes of emulation press modeling into use in new contexts, new models of knowledge and practices develop. For all of the emphasis on ancient models in Renaissance England, the period’s practices and society were necessarily (and quite distinctly) different from the models being followed.83 Additionally, within the Renaissance the practices of emulation created new, even startling, innovations in practice and theory.
Sir Philip Sidney’s writings generally fall in line with Wilson’s ideas, though certainly not entirely congruent with them, reflecting the nuances and differences within rhetorical theory in the period. Sidney believes that poets must derive their ability through “a divine gift,” that poets are born, while orators are made, “orator fit, poeta nascitur.”84 The idea has ancient roots, though it is a commonplace actually born in the Renaissance.85 It is a perfect example of the interrelation of art and nature I have discussed, emphasizing the way in which human art has natural origins (which of course are also linked to the divine by many in the period and anciently). However, it does appear at first blush to contradict the emphasis in the period on how art and imitation, through education and learning, can allow for success, advancement, and self-fashioning. Sidney himself, though, goes on to explain specifically that poets can develop their abilities through “Art, Imitation, and Exercise.”86 And, of course, the citation purposely does not include orators—in fact, it emphasizes that orators (which, as a term, can have broad uses) are constructed, made through the kinds of learning that Wilson encourages and exemplifies. Sidney, then, citing a commonplace of the Renaissance, maintains the emphasis on natural talent only for poets (though still encouraging imitation in their learning), and not for orators and other writers. Ben Jonson also famously turns this phrase around, arguing in his verse in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works that “a good Poet’s made, as well as borne.”87 The commonplace may have had currency in the Renaissance, but it was still contested.
This distinction in Sidney’s work between poets and orators, however, comes late in his work. Early in An Apology for Poetry Sidney develops first a relation between poetry and rhetoric/oratory and then grounds poetry within imitation, not just as a means of invention but specifically as a method of instruction and of self-fashioning. Sidney argues, “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight.”88 Thus Sidney connects poetry—this tool of delight and teaching, the manifest aims of rhetoric in earlier works—to
the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only … . So that, the ending of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest.89
Sidney then carefully proves poetry (which he has defined as an art of imitation) to be this prince among all earthly skills and means to knowledge. It is not a far leap to see in this the common Renaissance meta-theatrical assertion that drama was a means of seeing virtue and vice, of learning through imitation and exemplarity not just how to write and speak, but how to know one’s self and be like the wisest of people, how to fashion oneself rhetorically.
Sidney also develops a taxonomy of imitation that includes “imitat[ing] the inconceivable excellencies of God” (including here the ancients as well, “though in a full wrong divinity”), the imitation of “matters philosophical: either moral, … or natural, … or astronomical, … or historical,” and finally the imitation of “right poets.”90 Further, “these third be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, of shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”91 As we’ve seen in other theories of the period, we again see imitation that without question verges on to invention and construction. Earlier he states:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, … so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.92
Sidney continues his taxonomy, emphasizing the relation between this third kind of poets and the moving of auditors to moral action: “these do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and to teach: and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger, and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed.”93 Again, as we have seen in previous examples, emulation for Sidney includes both the imitative construction of texts by authors as well as the emulative moving of the receivers of these texts to changing (and, purportedly, improving) their lives.
Imitation and emulation, then, are processes of (self-)education and invention in the period. On one hand, they are the means to eloquence, a process of following those considered wise and learning from their examples and practices. On the other hand, they include the ability to move from what is in nature or writing to what could or should be—they espouse the ability to extrapolate current actions and choices based on past models.
The end of emulation is generally the construction of something worthy, as Aristotle discussed, something that leads to virtuous action according to Sidney and to eloquence and thus to the ability to delight, instruct, and persuade to action. Repeatedly, emulation is tied up in the moral and the ethical—in the ability to determine the right course of action and to move to virtue—to move rhetors to speak or write appropriately and then to move their audiences to right choices (i.e., knowledge and models are stored up, inspire discourse, and are thus re-deployed to motivate others, in the ideal case of course). And while this kind of imitation is often normative, a conservative move laden with limitations, it also always contains the possibility of constructing something significantly new and potentially transgressive or at the least re-defining. The move to invention (even measured invention based on extant models), to construct, based on what is, a “could be,” in Sidney’s words, allows emulation to be transformative (metamorphic as well as metaphoric), allows for new ways of seeing what exists, new ways of relating to the past. Moreover, since imitation includes exclusion as much as amplification, as Ascham explains, being based on the old includes potentially reversing the old, includes the possibility for radical change.
1 All references to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida are to David Bevington, ed., Troilus and Cressida, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (London: Thomson Learning, 2001).
2 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 2.11.1. Bracketed text appears in Kennedy’s translation. Note that Kennedy introduces this chapter on emulation by stating, “In Hellenistic and late rhetoric, zēlos [emulation] becomes an important aspect of literary imitation, referring to the ‘zeal’ on the part of a writer to equal the quality of the great writers of the past” (2.11fn). This kind of imitation, and its influence in the Renaissance, is the central focus of my work. I will further discuss and analyze Aristotle’s definition (and its relation to envy, including some of his assumptions in differentiating envy and emulation) in Chapter 4.
3 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.11.4.
4 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.11.5. Bracketed text appears in Kennedy’s translation. Other translations of the Rhetoric translates rhētores as “orators”; Kennedy’s translation emphasizes, as Aristotle intends, the need for public power and ability in order to be worthy of emulation (and to be able to do good for others).
5 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.11.7.
6 Compare Eric S. Mallin, “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 145–79, who traces the close parallels between English Renaissance emulation and the factional politics and chivalric imitation of the 1590s. Mallin’s work, however, entirely subsumes emulation to factionalism: “The play defines with precision the social and historical mechanism of this illness: it is ‘pale and bloodless emulation’ (1.3.134). Emulation and its product, factionalism, always flourish together through the loss of degree, the collapses of difference” (151). Mallin’s essay takes little notice of the other theories and practices of emulation extant in the Renaissance, not to mention the classical precursors that underpin these theories and practices.
7 My thanks to the Huntington Library for the opportunity to review critical texts of the period related to emulation.
8 Robert Allott, WITS Theater of the little World (London, 1599), A3v. I will take up some of the problematic issues related to determining “right vse” in later chapters.
9 Allott, WITS, 73.
10 Allott, WITS, 75.
11 Richard Braithwaite, The English gentleman containing sundry excellent rules or exquisite observations, tending to direction of every gentleman, of selecter ranke and qualitie; how to demeane or accommodate himselfe in the manage of publike or private affaires (London, 1630), 95, 323.
12 Richard Braithwaite, The English gentlevvoman, drawne out to the full body expressing, what habilliments doe best attire her, what ornaments doe best adorne her, what complements doe best accomplish her (London, 1631), 181–2, 172. It is possible that Braithwaite’s difference in uses reflects gender norms and biases, though it’s worth noting that there are works that espouse male emulation of models and warn women of the dangers of emulative strife.
13 For more on the link between Renaissance drama (especially Shakespeare) and the translation of empire see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy. I will return to the significance of each of these uses later in this book.
14 Richard Allestree, The gentlemans calling (London, 1660), 134.
15 Richard Allestree, The causes of the decay of Christian piety, or, An impartial survey of the ruines of Christian religion, undermin’d by unchristian practice (London, 1667), 107.
16 Allestree, The causes, 420, 204, 412.
17 Allestree, The causes, 238.
18 Angel Day, The English secretorie VVherin is contayned, a perfect method, for the inditing of all manner of epistles and familiar letters, together with their diuersities, enlarged by examples vnder their seuerall tytles. In which is layd forth a path-waye, so apt, plaine and easie, to any learners capacity, as the like wherof hath not at any time heretofore beene deliuered (London, 1586).
19 Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy vvhat it is. VVith all the kindes, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, and seuerall cures of it. In three maine partitions with their seuerall sections, members, and subsections. Philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut vp (London, 1621), 47, 67.
20 Burton, The anatomy, 63.
21 Burton, The anatomy, 138.
22 Burton, The anatomy, 139.
23 Samuel Daniel, The poeticall essayes of Sam. Danyel (London, 1599), C.
24 Daniel, The poeticall essayes, B2.
25 David Dickson, An expositon of all St. Pauls epistles together with an explanation of those other epistles of the apostles St. James, Peter, John & Jude: wherein the sense of every chapter and verse is analytically unfolded and the text enlightened (London, 1659), 268. The specific reference Dickson makes is to Hebrews 12:1.
26 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 14.
27 Don Paul Abbott, “Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2nd edition, ed. James J. Murphy, 145–72 (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 2001), 157.
28 Gideon Burton, “Imitation in Renaissance Culture and Humanist Pedagogy” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Southern California, 1994), 328.
29 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy, 1. For more on imitation and emulation, especially in terms of Renaissance literature, and on the distinctions that have been made between these terms, see G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33.1 (Spring 1980): 1–32, esp. 16–32; Greene, The Light in Troy, esp. 46, 58–60, 79, and 172–4; and Wayne A. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 75–111.
30 This robust, inventive use has been explored by Greene, The Light in Troy, and in the work dedicated to him by David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds., Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature In Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies: 1992), among other sources.
31 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 87.
32 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 87.
33 Girard, A Theater of Envy. I will return to Girard in more detail in later chapters of this work, particularly Chapter 3, on Hamlet, as his theory of mimetic desire, the desire for what others desire, is related to my discussion of emulation.
34 John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (London, 1612).
35 Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 49, 51.
36 Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 213.
37 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 10.5.5. In laying out the curriculum that Baldwin claims established “the principles upon which the sixteenth-century grammar school was founded in England” (T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Less Greeke, 2 vols. [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944], 1:77), Erasmus defers heavily to Quintilian, “who has left a very thorough treatment of these matters, so that it would seem the height of impertinence to write about a subject he has already dealt with” (Literary and Educational Writings: De copia / De ratione studii, trans. Betty I. Knott, vol. 24 of Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig Thompson [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978], 672). Baldwin asserts: “Along with Cicero, Quintilian was the Rhetorician, at the pinnacle of grammar school” (2:197, emphasis in original). Abbott argues that “So strong is Quintilian’s influence that the methods outlined by Professor Murphy in Chapter 2 [‘Roman Writing Instruction as Described by Quintilian’], could, with slight revision, serve to describe the education of sixteenth-century England” (“Rhetoric and Writing,” 98). I refer to James J. Murphy’s work in the following paragraphs.
38 Greene, The Light in Troy, 1.
39 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 10.2.7. Quintilian’s emphasis on rivalry and vying, along with his use in this line of following others with a desire to improve upon their work, suggests a potential link to Shakespeare’s Ulysses’s emphasis on an emulative race in Troilus.
40 Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, 3rd ed. (New York: Pearson, 2004), xv.
41 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 10.2.1.
42 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), 114, 55.
43 Ascham, however, specifically argues against Quintilian’s urging for rivalry in emulation, citing ancient and Renaissance sources on both sides of the argument in order to downgrade the significance of emulous imitation compared to more exact imitation, directly questioning the ability to claim “to think to say better than that is best.” For Ascham, rhetors do not vie with models, but more properly simply imitate their virtues to the best of their own ability. His credo is “dissimilis materei similis tractatio and also similis materei dissimilis tractatio, as Virgil followed Homer” (The Schoolmaster, 117; “similar treatment of dissimilar material” and “dissimilar treatment of similar materials”).
44 The importance of decorum to my work will also be elaborated on in later sections and chapters, especially Chapter 3. An excellent beginning point to understanding the significance and role of decorum within Renaissance rhetoric and society is Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Renaissance Rhetoric,” Intertexts 4.1 (2000): 3–24.
45 James J. Murphy, “Roman Writing Instruction as Described by Quintilian,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, ed. James J. Murphy (Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1990), 44.
46 Murphy, “Roman Writing,” 45.
47 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 261–2. Mack is citing Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (London, 1833), 3.
48 In explaining applicatio, “the application of a text to action in the world,” Timothy Hampton (Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990]) cites Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis:
Erasmus prescribes a method for study that demonstrates the central function of all types of examples in humanist models of interpretation. Every text, he says, should be read four times: once to seize its sense, once for grammatical structure, once for its rhetorical technique, and a fourth time “seeking out what seems to relate to philosophy, especially ethics, to discover any example that may be applicable to morals.” The assumption of application is that past words and deeds embody a value which the modern reader can appropriate to guide practical action. (10)
Rebhorn, in “The Crisis of Aristocracy,” further develops this kind of appropriative, life-shaping emulation in relation to both real and fictive individuals in Renaissance England.
49 George Abbot, An exposition vpon the prophet Ionah Contained in certaine sermons, preached in S. Maries church in Oxford (London, 1600), 429. Note that in other parts of this work Abbot uses emulation as a negative term (once paired with “malice” and later in a list including “auarice” and “ambition”), as he also does in another work, The reasons vvhich Doctour Hill hath brought, for the vpholding of papistry, which is falselie termed the Catholike religion: vnmasked and shewed to be very weake, and vpon examination most insufficient for that purpose (London, 1604). I will return briefly to Abbot again in the Afterword.
50 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), A2v, A3. Interestingly, this phrase is placed such as to also be applicable to eloquence more generally—certainly valid since many early modern writers saw rhetoric and eloquence as a means to social advancement and excellence in character.
51 Wilson, The Arte, A2v–A3.
52 Wilson, The Arte, A3.
53 Harry Caplan, trans., Ad C. Herennium: De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium) (1954; repr. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964), 1.2.3.
54 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 3.5.1.
55 Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, 2 vols. (1942; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), 1.113–14. In the De Oratore, Sulpicius lists “practice, art, or natural talent,” but more as a summary (and instigator) of the discussion (1.96). Cicero makes a similar list in De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (1949; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 1.2:
Moreover, if we wish to consider the origin of this thing we call eloquence—whether it be an art, a study, a skill, or a gift of nature—we shall find that it arose from honourable causes and continued on its way from the best of reasons.
Cicero’s use of “study” in this list is noted by Hubbell as unusual and many have even questioned the text because of its inclusion. However, Hubbell argues that Cicero’s term derives from the Greek and is like an art though more often used to denote “devotion to and practice of the tenets of a philosophical sect” (fn1.2a).
56 Cicero, De Oratore, 1.115.
57 Cicero, De Inventione, 1.5.
58 Plato, Phaedrus, in Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (1914; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 269d.
59 Isocrates, Against the Sophists, in Isocrates, trans. George Norlin, vol. 2 (1929; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 14–15.
60 Isocrates, Sophists, 17.
61 Isocrates, Sophists, 17–18.
62 Isocrates, Antidosis, in Isocrates, trans. George Norlin, vol. 2 (1929; repr. Cambridge: MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 185. Isocrates after this repeats his emphasis on natural aptitude, training and knowledge, and practice and practical application again:
I say to them [who want to become my pupils] that if they are to excel in oratory or in managing affairs or in any line of work, they must, first of all, have a natural aptitude for that which they have elected to do; secondly, they must submit to training and master the knowledge of their particular subject, whatever it may be in each case; and, finally, they must become versed and practised in the use and application of their art; for only on these conditions can they become fully competent and pre-eminent in any line of endeavor. (187–8)
63 Though he does not mention this distinction regarding imitation, Wayne A. Rebhorn argues against the broad belief that Renaissance rhetoric is simply or largely an appropriation or reiteration of ancient rhetorics in his The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). He quite emphatically, though with appropriate caution, argues for the need to recognize the many historicized differences that Renaissance rhetoric embodies:
it differs, albeit in quite subtle and nuanced ways, from conceptions of the classical writers to whom it nevertheless owes so much. Although the Renaissance is often spoken of as a revival of classical antiquity—a notion contained in the very label for the period—it will become clear in the course of this book that the discourse of rhetoric in the Renaissance is historically distinct from everything that precedes it. (10, emphasis in original)
I believe the centrality (and specific modes of use) of imitation in rhetorical praxis and pedagogy, including the belief in its particular effectiveness in learning and in shaping character, is one of these subtle yet critical differences.
64 For the emphasis on the English Renaissance as a time of social mobility, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) and “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Past & Present 33 (1966); David Cressy, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History 3 (1976); and Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1982) and “The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday), ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson, 177–202 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
65 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), xi. Whigham argues in Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) that the period experienced “an increasingly disturbing sense that status previously constructed as absolute and God-given could in fact be acquired by various kinds of human effort” (10).
66 Whigham, Ambition, xi (emphasis in original).
67 Whigham, Ambition, x. It is important to add that works like Dugan’s Making of a New Man and his reading of Cicero’s own rhetorical self-fashioning suggests that there were of course ancient precedents for much of what is received in the Renaissance. Dugan’s work, mentioned in the preface, will receive more continued analysis in Chapter 4, which examines Cicero’s depiction and use in Jonson’s Catiline.
68 Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches (London, 1547).
69 The Arden edition by J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter’s Tale (1963; repr. London: Methuen, 1986), 4.4.95–7.
70 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, 1749–832 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 2.1.149. Frank Whigham has argued that this play is also directly related to norms and concerns surrounding social (and sexual) mobility and particular concerns of Jacobean England in his chapter on “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi” (Seizures, 188–224).
71 Wilson, The Arte, A3v.
72 Rebhorn, Emperor, 27–8.
73 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. by R. W. Maslen, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 84.41–85.1. As Maslen notes these ideas originate in Aristotle (Physica, 2.2.194) and are comparable to Plato as well (Laws, 10.889). Maslen further develops in his extensive note on these lines the particular emphasis on the interrelation of art and nature in the Renaissance (134).
74 Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 162.
75 Cicero, De Oratore, 1.89.
76 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 1.3.1.
77 Isocrates, Antidosis, 292.
78 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 114.
79 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 114.
80 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 115. I will further develop and complicate Ascham’s ideas here in my discussion of Shakespeare’s Titus, in the following chapter.
81 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 116.
82 Janet M. Atwill, “Bodies and Art,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006): 166.
83 This difference was not at all lost on the writers of the Renaissance. For example, Rebhorn, in The Emperor of Men’s Minds, emphasizes how historically self-aware Renaissance writers and rhetoricians were, citing several authors who directly address the necessary difference and distance that exists between ancient models their Renaissance reiterations. Two examples from Rebhorn should illustrate the point well. Gerard Vossius argues against slavish imitation in his rhetoric text: “Some have taught them [ancient models] too superstitiously, not realizing that they [the teachers] were giving precepts to our century, not to Rome when it was flourishing” (11). M. Le Grand makes similar claims, in what Rebhorn describes as “a profoundly historicist view of rhetoric,” arguing that “The maxims of politics and the mysteries of religion change the rules of rhetoric entirely, and ancient rhetoric has no similarity to its modern counterpart” (11). Now Grand may go a bit far in his statement, but that imitation requires intense contextualization and creates (and is based on) significant innovation should be clear.
84 Sidney, An Apology, 109.35–6, 38–9.
85 Maslen claims, in an extended footnote to Sidney’s use of the phrase, that the citation is “not of classical origin” (228fn38–9). Maslen cites W. Ringler, “Poeta nascitur non fit: On the History of an Aphorism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2.4 (1941): 497–504, who “shows that the phrase appears as early as a third-century commentary on Horace’s Art but came into popular use after it was used by Polydore Vergil in De rerum inventoribus (1499) and by Badius Ascensius in the Preface to his edition of Terence (1502).” Of course, the line still is a commonplace with antique roots and Ringler shows that while the exact phrase did not have ancient origins, aspects of it did (500–502). Further, as Ringler explains, the commonplace goes on to become quite popular in the Renaissance, particularly in works like Sidney’s (499). Ringler also claims that this phrase “exemplifies the close association of rhetoric and poetic in that period [sixteenth-century England]” (504), a point that Rebhorn and others recognize and I develop in this work.
86 Sidney, An Apology, 109.42–3.
87 The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare Based on Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection, ed. Charlton Hinman, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 10. Ringler also cites this example in his discussion of Sidney’s use of this commonplace (504).
88 Sidney, An Apology, 86.17–20.
89 Sidney, An Apology, 88.26–7, 31–3.
90 Sidney, An Apology, 86.21–87.19.
91 Sidney, An Apology, 87.7–11.
92 Sidney, An Apology, 85.17–23.
93 Sidney, An Apology, 87.14–18.