5

The Beginnings of English Prose

King Alfred translated a number of Latin books into Anglo-Saxon, sometimes called Early English. The capacities of Anglo-Saxon will be seen when we compare a Latin passage with his translation of it. Later we will compare Alfred’s translation with one of the same passage made five centuries later by the poet Chaucer, who wrote in a language which is more recognizably English. The Latin passage is from the twelfth section of Book III of Boëthius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Boëthius, the last of the Roman philosophers, was Consul in a.d. 510 under Theodoric the Ostrogoth.

Quae sontes agitant metu

Ultrices scelerum deae

Iam maestae lacrimis madent.

Non Ixionium caput

Velox praecipitat rota

Et longa site perditus

Spernit flumina Tantalus.

Vultur dum satur est modis,

Non traxit Tityi jecur.

Tandem, “Vincimur”, arbiter

Umbrarum miserans ait,

“Donamus comitem viro

Emptam carmine conjugem.

Sed lex dona coerceat,

Ne, dum Tartara liquerit,

Fas sit lumina flectere.”

Quis legem det amantibus?

Major lex amor est sibi.

Heu, noctis prope terminos

Orpheus Eurydicen suam

Vidit, perdidit, occidit.

Vos haec fabula respicit

Quicumque in superum diem

Mentem ducere quaeritis.

Nam qui Tartareum in specus

Victus lumina flexerit,

Quidquid praecipuum trahit

Perdit, dum videt inferos.

In his translation, made about the year 888, Alfred worked under difficulties: Anglo-Saxon was a limited and clumsy language, and the poem was written in a very cultivated style. His object was to convey as much of the matter and moral as his audience, who knew nothing of Classical myth or of philosophy, could take in. He expanded, condensed, added and omitted as he pleased. This is his version:

‘Tha eode he furthur oth he gemette tha graman gydena the folcisce menn hatath Parcas, tha hi secgath thaet on nanum menn nyton nane are, ac aelcum menn wrecen be his gewyrhtum; tha hi secgath thaet walden aelces mannes wyrde. Tha ongonn he biddan heora miltse; tha ongunnon hi wepan mid him. Tha eode he furthur, ond him urnon ealle hellwaran ongean, ond laeddon hine to hiora cininge, ond ongunnon ealle sprecan mid him, ond biddan thaes the he baed. Ond thaet unstille hweol the Ixion waes to gebunden, Levita cyning, for his scylde, thaet othstod for his hearpunga, ond Tantalus se cyning, the on thisse worulde ungemetlice gifre waes, ond him thaer thaet ilce yfel fyligde thaere gifernesse, he gestilde. Ond se vultor sceolde forlaetan thaet he ne slat tha lifre Tyties thaes cyninges, the hine aer mid thy witnode; ond eall hellwara witu gestildon, tha hwile the he beforan tham cyninge hearpode. Tha he tha longe ond longe hearpode, tha cleopode se hellwara cyning, ond cwaeth: “Wuton agifan thaem esne his wif, for thaem he hi haefth geearnad mid his hearpunga.” Bebead him tha thaet he geare wisse, thaet he hine naefre under baec ne besawe, sithan he thonanweard waere, ond saede, gif he hine under baec besawe, thaet he sceolde forlaetan thaet wif. Ac tha lufe mon maeg swithe uneathe othe na forbeodan: wei la wei! hwaet Orpheus tha laedde his wif mid him, oth the he com on thaet gemaere leohtes ond theostro; tha eode thaet wif aefter him. Tha he forth on thaet leoht com, tha beseah he hine under baec with thaes wifes; tha losade hio him sona. Thas leasan spell laerath gehwylcne monn thara the wilnath helle thiostro to flionne, ond to thaes sothan Godes liohte to cumanne, thaet he hine ne besio to his ealdan yflum, swa thaet he hi eft swa fullice fulfremme, swa he hi aer dyde; for thaem swa hwa swa mid fulle willan his mod went to thaem yflum the he aer forlet, ond hi thonne fullfremeth, ond he him thonne fullice liciath, and he hi naefre forlaetan ne thencth, thonne forlyst he eall his aerran good, buton he hit eft gebete.’

Here is the same version modernized by us for readers who cannot make out the Anglo-Saxon; we have not been able to do justice to Alfred’s use of alliteration, which is the principal embellishment of his prose; this was an Anglo-Saxon, not a Latin, device.

‘… Then went he further until he met the grim goddesses that men of this earth call the Parcae who, they say, are not unwitting of any man and requite every man according to his works and, they say, rule every man’s fate. Then began he to ask their mercy; then began they to weep with him. Then went he further and there ran to meet him all the men of Hell and led him to their King and all began to speak with him and pleaded for that which he pleaded. And that unstill wheel to which Ixion was bound, the King of the Levites, for his sin, that stood still at his harping; and Tantalus the King that in this world was boundless greedy and was there beset by the same evil of greed, he was still. And the vulture should cease from tearing the liver of King Tityus, who before pained him therewith; and all pains ceased for the men of Hell the while he harped before their King. Then long and long he harped. Then cried the King of Hell and said: “Let us give back this man his wife, for he has earned her with his harping.” He bade him take good care that he should never look behind him when he was going thence, and said that, if he looked behind him, he should lose his wife. But to Love one may hardly indeed forbid things, or not at all: well-a-day! Orpheus led his wife with him until he came to the bourne of light and dark; then went his wife after him. When he came forth into that light, then did he look behind him at his wife; then they lost themselves forthwith. This untrue story teaches every man of those who wish to escape from the darkness of Hell and come to the true light of God, that he should not look back upon his old evils so as often to enter into them again as fully as he did before; for whoever with full intent turns in desire back to the evils which he once left behind and enters into them again, so that they fully please him and he neither leaves them nor thinks of so doing, then that man loses all his former good, unless he makes atonement often.’

Alfred was the best educated layman in England—he had been to school at Rome—and his translation is very good indeed, considering the difficulties of his task. He introduces a dramatic element into the story that is absent from Boëthius’s version: Orpheus’s steady progress through Hell, the commotion of the shades, their intercession with the Judge, the harping long and long. This is in compensation for the lost lyricism, and he strengthens the effect not only with alliteration but with forceful repetition of key-words. He also does not fail to remedy Boëthius’s chief poetic fault, which is the idiomatic but blank vidit, perdidit (‘he saw, he lost’) at the crisis of the poem instead of respectans ibi perdidit (‘looking back, he lost her there’¹). But nobody could call this graceful prose. It is a bald succession of events linked up with the words ‘then’ and ‘and’.Only at the end is there any attempt to build up a sentence in the Latin style, and even that would have been pronounced barbarous by Latin orators because of the lame and illogical ‘unless he makes atonement often.’ Also, at the point where the men of Hell take Orpheus before their King, it is not clear to whom the ‘him’s refer.

Norman-French had been introduced into England before the Norman Conquest: it was spoken freely at the court of Edward the Confessor. After the Conquest it became the domestic language of the governing class, though Anglo-Saxon was still used by the artisans and peasants. Latin was the language of religion, learning and Canon Law. Both Norman-French and Anglo-Saxon then gradually gave place to English, which (as we point out in Chapter One) was Anglo-Saxon with its rigid grammar loosened and its vocabulary enriched with Norman-French. Very little of the earliest popular work in English is in prose: the common people were illiterate and the only way of getting a wide public for a work of instruction or entertainment was to put it into simple, easily memorized verse. This is why poems as late as the fourteenth century, notably Langland’s revolutionary The Vision of Piers Ploughman, 1362, were written in a distinctly Anglo-Saxon style—the verse unrhymed, alliterative and measured by a count of stresses, not syllables—whereas prose had shed its Anglo-Saxon crudeness and taken on the gentility of Norman-French.

Most early prose-works in English were translations from popular Latin or French books, the reason being that English had lately displaced Norman-French as the national language, so that English textbooks were needed in the schools. The political ties between France and England were still strong and French remained the language of heraldry, feudal law and polite society; but the son of an ordinary well-to-do family learned it at school, not in the home. And now that he had also learned to read and write English, more and more books were written in English prose, the invention of printing in the fifteenth century enormously increasing their circulation.

Chaucer’s translation from Boëthius was made in 1374. He kept closely to the text, and his only additions, apart from the glosses, were points that Boethius had perhaps been wrong to omit: that it was for pity, not rage or any other emotion, that the Furies wept; that the penalty for looking back was that Eurydice should be lost; and that Orpheus (this was also corrected by Alfred) did look back.

‘And the thre goddesses, furiis and vengeresses of felonyes that tormenten and agasten the soules by anoy, woxen sorweful and sory, and wepyn teeris for pite. Tho was nat the heved of Ixion y-tormented by the overthrowynge wheel. And Tantalus, that was destroied by the woodnesse of long thurst, despyseth the floodes to drynken. The foul that hyghte voltor, that etith the stomak (or the gyser) of Tycius, is so fulfild of his song that it nil eten ne tiren no more. At the laste the lord and juge of soules was moevid to misericordes, and cryede: “We ben overcomen,” quod he; “yeve we to Orpheus his wif to beren hym compaignye; he hath wel y-bought hire by his faire song and his ditee. But we wolen putten a lawe in this and covenaunt in the yifte; that is to seyn that, til he be out of helle, yif he loke behynde hym, that his wyf shal comen ageyn unto us”. But what is he that may yeven a lawe to loverys? Love is a grettere lawe and a strengere to hymself thanne any lawe that men mai yyven. Allas! whanne Orpheus and his wyf weren almest at the termes of the nyght (that is to seyn, at the last boundes of helle), Orpheus lokede abakward on Eurudyce his wif, and lost hire, and was deed. This fable apertenith to yow alle, who so evere desireth or seketh to lede his thought into the sovereyn day (that is to seyn, in-to cleernesse of sovereyn good). For who so that evere be so overcomen that he ficche his eien in-to the put of helle (that is to seyn, who so sette his thoughtes in erthly thinges,) al that evere he hath drawen of the noble good celestial he lesith it….’

If the passage is read without the parenthetical glosses (they were for schoolboys and would now be printed as footnotes) it will be found to have a carefully considered rhythm, which is not Latin, through the phrases in the longer sentences are arranged in the logical order of Latin prose; and is not French, though the many French words included, such as ‘vengeresses of felonyes, that tormenten’, give it a Southern grace; and is not Anglo-Saxon, in spite of the simplicity of language and the occasional heavy alliteration—‘And Tantalus, that was destroied by the woodnesse of long thurst, despyseth the floodes to drynken.’ Anglo-Saxon was the language of the belly; Norman-French, that of the heart—the Normans had learned to have hearts since they had settled in France; Latin, that of the brain. English, as Chaucer used it, was a reconciliation of the functions of all these organs. But in Chaucer’s as in all the best English prose, the belly rules: English is a practical language. The main purpose of Chaucer’s writing was entertainment, and in all his prose, which includes two of the Canterbury Tales (1386) and a treatise on the Astrolabe (1391), he shows a more careful consideration for the reader’s ease than any previous writer of English. His contemporaries, the Lollards, a sect headed by John Wyclif, who had gone from legitimate criticism of Church organization to illegitimate criticism of Church doctrine, are important as the first to develop the English vocabulary of theological, ecclesiastical and political arguments; but their style is without grace, and keeps close in its phrasing to monkish Latin.

The Travels of Sir John Maundeville, who is supposed to have lived from 1322 to 1356, was published in England about the year 1400; it may have been translated from the French. The Travels is a very wild geographical treatise, in part a guide book for pilgrims to the Holy Land, filled with descriptions of mythical animals, plants, people; the style returns in naiveness almost to that of King Alfred, and far fewer French words are used than by Chaucer. Maundeville (if he was the author of the travels attributed to him) assembles a great many legendary details and links them together, usually by a series of ‘and’s, without consideration for rhythm or variety of phrasing; and with constant repetitions—‘some men say’, ‘as men say’, ‘And men say’—‘form and likeness of a great dragon’, ‘into the likeness of a dragon’, ‘in that form of a dragon’.

‘And some men say that the Isle of Lango is yet the daughter of Hippocrates, in form and likeness of a great dragon, that is a hundred fathom of length, as men say; for I have not seen her. And they of the Isles call her, Lady of the Land. And she lieth in an old castle, in a cave, and showeth twice or thrice a year. And she doth no harm to no man, but if men do her harm. And she was thus changed and transformed, from a fair damsel, into the likeness of a dragon, by a goddess, that was cleped Diana. And men say, that she shall so endure in that form of a dragon, unto the time that a knight come, that is so hardy, that dare come to her and kiss her on the mouth; and then shall she turn again to her own kind and be a woman again.’

Yet there is an element in Maundeville’s prose not found in Chaucer’s: the Celtic sense of wonder and magic, which appears most purely in the Welsh tales of the Mabinogion and the Gaelic legend-cycles of Finn, Oisin and Cuchulain. Celtic themes had already been introduced to English readers: the twelfth-century Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had put a number of British legends, including those of King Lear and King Arthur, into his much-read Latin Chronicles of Britain; and an Irish legend about Manannan, the God of the Sea, was the original of a fourteenth-century English alliterative poem Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight. But these themes came into England chiefly by way of France. The British legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table had been used in several French romances, and appealed to Western chivalry as worthily combining vigorous action with fine sentiment; the knights of Brittany, where a language akin to Welsh was spoken, had given the Norman-French a taste for them. French romances were extremely popular with the English educated classes; and Sir Thomas Malory’s well-known Morte d’Arthur, 1470, one of the first books printed in English, shows the deep influence of French prose.

Here is an extract from Queen Guenevere’s speech at her last meeting with her lover, Sir Lancelot:

‘Through this man and me hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love and that we loved together is my most noble lord slain. Therefore, Sir Lancelot, wit thou well that I am set in such a plight to get my soul’s health; and yet I trust, through God’s grace, that after my death to have a sight of the blessed face of Christ, and at doomsday to sit on his right side, for as sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven. Therefore, Sir Lancelot, I require thee and beseech thee heartily, for all the love that ever was betwixt us, that thou never see me more in the visage; and I command thee on God’s behalf, that thou foresake my company, and to thy kingdom thou return again and keep well thy realm from war and wrack. For as well as I have loved thee, mine heart will not serve me to see thee; for through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights destroyed. Therefore, Sir Lancelot, go to thy realm, and there take thee a wife, and live with her with joy and bliss, and I pray thee heartily, pray to our Lord, that I may amend my misliving.’

This is an intricate emotional rhythm, the tone rising with each ‘Therefore, Sir Lancelot’ and gradually falling again, a little lower each time. But despite his understanding of the language of the heart, Malory did not renounce the belly. He remained English in his preference for short native words wherever they served as well as long foreign ones; and in his use of alliteration in moments of stress—for example, the bitter ‘to sit on his right side for as sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven’. This is a work intended to be read aloud at the firesides of great houses on cold winter evenings, and is to be judged as oratory rather than prose: an oratory appealing to the sentiments rather than to the intellect. Nothing is known of Sir Thomas Malory, and his personality is unobtrusive: he is free alike of the clerical habit of distorting history to point some adventitious moral, and of the scholastic habit of surfacing it floridly. The story seems to tell itself.

None of the chroniclers and romance-writers who immediately followed Malory introduced any fresh element into English prose or equalled his command of it. But something new was taking place in English intellectual life: this was the revived study of the Greek and Latin classics.

After the expulsion of the Byzantine armies from Italy in the seventh century Greek had been forgotten in Western Europe; and, because of Church schisms, the Latin West lost contact with the Greek East until the time of the later Crusades. Then, as the western fringe of the Byzantine Empire was occupied by the Venetians and the remainder gradually overrun by Turkish armies—its capital, Constantinople, was captured in 1453—Greek scholars migrated into Italy, bringing with them the traditions of classical Greek learning. Greek presently reached the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the Court of London, by way of Paris and the Low Countries. Twenty years after the publication of the Morte d’Arthur the Dutch scholar Erasmus was teaching in London, and his friends Dean Colet, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had become the recognized leaders of English ‘New Learning’.

Latin had been the international language of secular as well as of religious learning. Its style was copied not from the Classical orators and historians but from the Christian theologians of three or four centuries later and from monkish translations of Aristotle’s principles of Greek logic. Mediaeval education consisted largely in learning how to argue logically in Latin. Scholastic textbooks provided students with the exact logical terms in which to develop the themes of their arguments, and it was taken for granted that all arguments were theological. This tradition was broken by the New Learning. Though such scholars as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More continued to write in Latin they put aside scholastic theology, and regarded the Greek and Latin classics from the purely literary and moral point of view known as Humanism. In tracing Latin to its Classical sources, they threw off the burden of mediaeval commentary, and without prejudice studied Plato’s idealism as well as the precepts of the early Church Fathers, and the pagan love-poems of Catullus as well as the Rhythm of St Bernard of Morlaix. A more secular outlook replaced the theological—though one no less Christian and no less concerned with morals; and this freedom from mediaeval habits of thinking gave new scope to writing.

The revival of Greek had in itself little effect on English prose style, Greek not being an eccentric enough language to supply a fashion in novel idioms. The conventions of mediaeval Latin prose remained long after the subject matter of writing had changed. All education, of nobles and courtiers as well as of scholars and clerics, and in Latin as well as in the modern languages, was still based on monastic conventions, though these were reinforced and expanded by a study of the masters of Classical oratory, Cicero and Quinctilian, and continued so until late in the seventeenth century. Out of them grew both the polished and the florid, or ‘conceited’, styles of Elizabethan writing.

The polished style is seen to most advantage in translations from the Latin by university men who hesitated to add verbal embellishments to the original texts, but felt that to be plain was not enough. William Adlington’s translation, 1566, of The Golden Ass, a Latin romance written by Lucius Apuleius, a first-century Roman provincial, is a good example of this polished style. Adlington apologized, in his dedication to the Earl of Sussex, that ‘so pleasant and worthy a work’ was ‘now barbarously and simply framed in English’; but he must have known that he wrote far better English than Apuleius had written Latin. The last sentence of the following passage is admirable for moving in imitation of the magical scene it describes; as the first sentence is for ending with a string of short, jerky words which suggest how the narrator choked. These were still the times when romances were read aloud, and such close suiting of the prose rhythm to the sense must have contributed greatly to the pleasure of the readers:

‘The other night being at supper with a sort of hungry fellows, while I did greedily put a great morsel of meat in my mouth, that was fried with the flour of cheese and barley, it cleaved so fast in the passage of my throat and stopped my wind in such sort, that I was well nigh choked. And yet at Athens before the porch there called Peale, I saw with these eyes a Juggler that swallowed up a two-hand sword, with a very keen edge, and by and by for a little money, that we that looked on gave him, he devoured a chasing spear with the point downward. And after that he had conveyed the whole spear within the closure of his body, and brought it out again behind, there appeared on the top thereof (which caused us all to marvel) a fair boy pleasant and nimble, winding and turning himself in such sort that you would suppose he had neither bone nor gristle, and verily think that he were the natural Serpent, creeping and sliding on the knotted staff, which the god of Medicine is feigned to bear.’

There was also a plain style, which was a revival of the unpretentious Anglo-Saxon Chronicle style; but with its syntax improved by grammar-school and Cathedral-school study of the less stylistic Classical authors, such as Sallust and Caesar, and of the pleasant colloquies of Erasmus. Elizabethan accounts of voyages, travels and adventures, especially when the matter was interesting enough in itself not to require rhetorical improvement, were written in this plain style. Here is a passage from Richard Hakluyt’s collection of Elizabethan voyages as reported to him by the masters of the vessels which had taken part in them: it concerns John Hawkins’ voyage to the West Indies in 1567:

‘The most part of the men that were left alive in the Jesus made shift and followed the Minion in a small boat; the rest, which the little boat was not able to receive, were enforced to abide the mercy of the Spaniards (which I doubt was very little); so with the Minion only, and the Judith (a small barque of fifty tons) we escaped, which barque the same night forsook us in our great misery. We were now removed with the Minion from the Spanish ships two bow-shots, and there rode all that night. The next morning we recovered an island a mile from the Spaniards, where there took us a North wind, and being left only with two anchors and two cables (for in this conflict we lost three cables and two anchors), we thought always upon death which ever was present; but God preserved us to a longer time.’

This plain style was considered suitable for merchants, artisans, seamen, farmers; the florid and polished styles of rhetoric were reserved for the governing classes. This separation of styles by class distinctions did a great disservice to prose. The habit of making a rigmarole out of sentences that could and should be quite simple, or imposing an artificial pattern on them, is one of which educated writers have never for long broken themselves.

The rhetoricians of the New Learning wrote out prescriptions for adorning any theme, serious or humorous, religious or secular, that a priest, scholar, courtier or politician might care to write upon. A ready and appropriate use of the new conceits, or flowers of speech, both in writing and speaking became the sign of good breeding. But most of the textbooks of this rhetorical system were merely expanded editions of those that had been used throughout the Middle Ages for more purely logical studies: they tabulated the stages through which a theme should go. These stages were called ‘topics’² or ‘places’, and known by such logical terms as ‘definition’, ‘division’, ‘etymology’, ‘cause’, ‘effect’, ‘antecedent’, ‘consequence’, ‘comparison’, ‘similitude’, ‘example’, and ‘testament of authority’. In mediaeval literature, rhetoric and logic had become inextricably mixed, but the bias had always been toward logic. The bias of humanistic writers was towards rhetoric.

There was a school convention for filling out a rhetorical frame-work with an accumulation of similes, proverbs and moralistic sayings of all kinds. To provide students and writers with plentiful material, anthologies were compiled of the moralistic sentences of Classical and mediaeval authors. Perhaps the most influential of these were the three which Erasmus issued about 1500, the Adages, the Apothegms, and the Similes: they were frequently adapted and translated into English in the course of the sixteenth century.

Richard Taverner put these compilations to typical use, in 1539. His method was to write a short English commentary on a Latin proverb, thus:

‘Vino vendibili suspensa hedera nihil opus

‘Wine that is saleable and good needeth no bush or garland of ivy to be hanged before. Like as men will seek out good wine, though there be no sign at all to direct and appoint them where it is sold, for all good things need no commendation of any outward badge or token. Good merchandise and also pure and substantial things of what kind so ever they be do praise themselves. The English proverb is thus Good wine needeth no sign.’

Taverner has amplified the proverb by explaining why the wine needs no bush, and by giving a further example (‘good merchandise’), so that it becomes a generalization. He also expands it with ‘doublets’:

‘no bush or garland of ivy’

‘to direct and appoint them’

‘outward badge or token’

This use of doublets was one of the characteristics of the rhetorical style, and is familiar to Anglicans from the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549:

‘Dearly beloved brethren, the scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness … and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them …’

Doublets suggest legal phraseology and so give an air of authority to a sentence.

The essay and the ‘character’ both grew out of this new rhetorical fashion: they dealt at first with single themes, expanded according to the rules of rhetoric and filled out with sententious matter. Bacon’s Essays, the first book of which appeared in 1597, were composed largely of such themes. Many of the essays are linkings together of a dozen or so aphoristic remarks, under such headings as ‘Of Study’, ‘Of Discourse’, ‘Of Regiment and Health’. These read as if Bacon had transcribed them with little further thought directly from his Commonplace Book: it was customary for gentlemen, scholars and writers of his time—and for the next two centuries—to keep Commonplace Books, into which they copied sententious phrases that they came across in the course of their reading. The ‘character’, modelled on the Characters of the Greek Theophrastus, was a pithy summary of some human types: ‘the cuckold’, ‘the pander’, ‘the melancholy man’, ‘the good steward’, ‘the sycophant’, ‘the sanguine man’, ‘the boastful soldier’, ‘the devout widow’, ‘the shrew’.

Many manuals of the new rhetoric were published. One appeared so late as 1660, the year of the Restoration, written by Charles Hoole, a schoolmaster. It describes concisely the methods that schoolboys should follow in amplifying Latin fables:

‘Let them strive (who can best) to turn the Fable into English prose and adorn and amplify it with fit Epithets, choice Phrases, acute Sentences, witty Apothegms, lively Similitudes, pat Examples, and Proverbial speeches; all agreeing to the matter of morality therein couched.’

How closely essayists kept to the prescribed pattern can be seen in this extract from a typical Elizabethan pamphlet, The School of Abuse, written by Stephen Gosson and published in 1579. It is an attack upon the immorality of plays—which were just then becoming popular—and upon the practices of poets in general.

‘I must confess that poets are the whetstones of wit, notwithstanding that wit is dearly bought: where honey and gall are mixed, it will be hard to sever the one from the other. The deceitful Physician giveth sweet Syrups to make his poison go down the smoother: the Juggler casteth a mist to work the closer: the Sirens’ song is the Sailor’s wrack: the Fowler’s whistle, the Bird’s death: the wholesome bait, the Fish’s bane: the Harpies have Virgins’ faces, and vultures’ talents: Hyena speaks like a friend, and devours like a Foe: the Wolf jets in Wether’s fells: many good sentences are spoken by Danus, to shadow his knavery: and written by Poets, as ornaments to beautify their thoughts, and set their trumpery to sale without suspect.’

Much of this passage is written in irregular verse, skilfully cross-alliterated:

The deceitful physician

Giveth sweet Syrups

To make his poison

Go down the smoother:

The Juggler casteth a mist

To work the closer.

The Sirens’ song

Is the Sailor’s wrack:

The Fowler’s whistle,

The Birds’ death:

The wholesome bait

The Fish’s bane….

Gosson’s judgement on poetry was equally applicable to contemporary prose writing: almost any theme in prose, no matter how trite or stupid, could be presented in the ‘trumpery’ disguise that he denounced. His own method of ornamentation was to heap illustrations one upon another, all in proverb form, and all, apparently, gathered from contemporary anthologies. Some of his instances contain Classical allusions—the Harpies, the Sirens, Danus—this use of the ‘testimony of the ancients’ was especially popular. The purpose of introducing so many proverbs and so much other testimony must originally have been to convince readers of the universal truth of an argument; but Gosson and his contemporaries used them simply for the technical pleasure that they gave to the rhetorically trained. Greater admiration for a fertile invention than for a just conclusion was expected from the reader.

Logic had been cultivated in the Christian church so that clerics could readily confute heretics and pagans; and if it had not been for this precaution Christianity might well have gone the way of many other religions that had originated in supernatural revelation. But logic was now being put to frivolous uses: a famous orator would go from university to university showing off his capacity for argument by defending ridiculous paradoxes: for example, James (The Admirable) Crichton of Clunie (1560–1585), a Scottish prodigy, visited the universities of France and Italy, not only challenging the graduates there to contests in horsemanship, fencing and the improvisation of verse, but defending paradoxes against all comers, as many as two thousand at a single session. Such paradoxes were: that the Devil was a woman; that Aaron was a cripple; that mandrakes had immortal souls; that Balaam’s ass spoke French; that Eve and her daughters played with dolls together. This game amused the younger wits at Court, who played it with secular instances and plentiful punning. In Shakespeare’s Two Gentle men of Verona (1591) Speed and Proteus chop logic with each other as follows:

speed. Sir Proteus, save you! Saw you my master?

pro. But now he parted hence, to embark for Milan.

speed. Twenty to one, then, he is shipp’d already, And I have play’d the sheep,³ in losing him.

pro. Indeed, a sheep doth very often stray, An if the shepherd be a while away.

speed. You conclude that my master is a shepherd, then, and I a sheep?

pro. I do.

speed. Why then my horns are his horns,⁴ whether I wake or sleep.

pro. A silly answer, and fitting well a sheep.

speed. This proves me still a sheep.

pro. True, and thy master a shepherd.

speed. Nay, that I can deny by a circumstance.

pro. It shall go hard but I’ll prove it by another.

speed. The shepherd seeks the sheep, and not the sheep the shepherd; but I seek my master, and my master seeks not me: therefore I am no sheep.

pro. The sheep for fodder follow the shepherd, the shepherd for food follows not the sheep; thou for wages followest thy master, thy master for wages follows not thee: therefore thou art a sheep.

speed. Such another proof will make me cry “baa”.

pro. But dost thou hear? gavest thou my letter to Julia?

speed. Ay, sir. I, a lost mutton, gave your letter to her, a laced mutton1; and she, a laced mutton,⁵ gave me, a lost mutton, nothing for my labour.

pro. Here’s too small a pasture for such store of muttons.

speed. If the ground be overcharged, you were best stick her.

pro. Nay, in that you are astray; ’twere best pound you.

speed. Nay, sir, less than a pound shall serve me for carrying your letter.

pro. You mistake: I mean the pound,—a pinfold.

Shakespeare, being a tradesman’s son and neither destined for the priesthood nor the law, had not gone to a university, and was continually satirizing rhetoricians. He wrote no essays or prose trifles himself, but the instructions given by Hamlet to ‘Certain Players’, apparently written for Shakespeare’s own company, are simple, vigorous, and phrased in good grammar-school Latin style.

hamlet. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and—as I may say—whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O! It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you avoid it.

first play. I warrant your honour.

ham. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

A successful university defender of paradoxes was named a ‘wrangler’, a word that long survived at Cambridge in the phrase ‘senior wrangler’, and wrangling naturally led to a cultivation of personal invective, the argumentum ad hominem. Oratorical writers excelled as counsels for the prosecution: defence did not give their talents sufficient scope. They used the same rhetorical apparatus as Gosson used against the poets, to attack rival writers, opposing schools of thought, the prevailing vices of society and the ills of the world in general. Invective naturally made use of crushing words, as fantastical and high-sounding as possible.

Elizabethan writers of courtly romances were similarly bound by the conventions of rhetoric, and reflected in their work the latest fashions of speech from the French and Italian courts. The most popular of these romance-writers was John Lyly, who was also a schoolmaster and a dramatist. His chief prose works were Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, published in 1579, and Euphues, His England, published in 1580. The hero of both is a young Athenian of good family who travels first in Italy and afterwards in England. He meets with few adventures, for there is scarcely any ‘story’; instead, there are moralistic discourses, exchanges of letters and tourneys of elaborate wit between him and his friends. The carefully pointed style in which the books are written, spangled with proverbs and conceits in the Spanish fashion, has given the word ‘Euphuism’ to the English language. The vocabulary and composition of Euphuism are simple enough, but its array of rhetorical devices is formidable. The following passage is a sort of one-sided repartee, a moralizing upon Euphues’s rejection of good advice offered him by one of his elders:

‘Here ye may behold, Gentlemen, how lewdly wit standeth in his own light, how he deemed no penny good silver but his own, preferring the blossom before the fruit, the bud before the flower, the green blade before the ripe ear of corn, his own wit before all men’s wisdom. Neither is that reason, seeing for the most part it is proper to call those of sharp capacity to esteem themselves as most proper: if one be hard in conceiving, they pronounce him a dolt; if given to study, they pronounce him a dunce; if merry, a jester; if sad, a saint; if full of words, a sot; if without speech, a cipher.’

Euphuists, in fact, scorned plain and direct language, because it gave them no opportunity for the display of what in their days passed for wit and would have revealed many of their thoughts as platitudinous.

In only one of many other romances is the florid, rhetorical style used as elegantly as in Euphues: this is Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, which was begun in 1580. Though his style is more flowing than Lyly’s, his conceits are just as far-fetched: for instance, he refers to the evening as ‘About the time that candles begin to inherit the sun’s office’, and to a country retreat as ‘a pleasant refuge from the choleric look of Phoebus’. Such fancifulness was particularly a young man’s fashion: neither Lyly nor Sidney had long left the university.

____________

¹ The word Parcae, a gloss which Alfred has incorporated in the text, is a plain mistake: the Furies, not the Fates, were meant by Boëthius. His making Ixion a King of the Levites (instead of the Lapithae) is deliberate: he is linking the story to popular Biblical knowledge. The death of Orpheus is Boëthius’s mistake; Orpheus continued to live, according to the Classical legend.

² The word ‘topics’ was derived from the title of Cicero’s treatise on oratory, in which he reduced the complicated logic of Aristotle to seventeen main headings, for the benefit of lawyers and politicians who wished to regularize the order of ideas in their speeches.

³ ‘Sheep’ was pronounced ‘ship’.

⁴ A pun on cuckoldry.

⁵ ‘Mutton’ was slang for ‘prostitute’.