IN 1531, when Sir Thomas Elyot surveys England’s linguistic landscape, he discerns in its contours only ‘a maner, a shadowe, or figure of the auncient rhetorike’. That shadow or figure inheres in the law school ritual of ‘motes’ or moot courts, mock trials at which students debated ‘some doubtfull controversie’ before a court of their faculty and peers. As Elyot notes in The Boke named the Governour, the moot courts required students to generate a set of plausible arguments, arrange them persuasively for a judge or jury, and present them in a public setting, and so they trained young lawyers in the rudiments of invention, disposition, and memory, the first three parts of the classical art of rhetoric. But according to Elyot, the moot courts did not, and could not, revive the whole of the ancient art: because ‘the tonge wherin it is spoken is barberouse, and the sterynge of affections of the mynde in this realme was neuer used, there lacketh Eloquution and Pronunciation, the two principall partes of rhetorike’.1 In other words, it isn’t simply the English language to which eloquence is foreign, it is England itself, identified here as a realm where persuasion—the stirring of the affections through language—was never used.
Elyot’s critique of English legal discourse highlights a more pervasive dilemma for sixteenth-century vernacular writers. The eloquence enshrined in ancient Greek and Latin oratory was revered as the epitome of linguistic achievement: as Roger Ascham writes in The Scholemaster (1570), ‘in the rudest contrie, and most barbarous mother language, many be found [that] can speake verie wiselie, but in the Greeke and Latin tong, the two onelie learned tonges, we finde always wisdome and eloquence, good matter and good vtterance, neuer or seldom asunder’.2 But the gap between these tongues and English was vast, perhaps insuperably so: as Ascham bluntly observed in 1545, ‘in the Englysh tonge contrary, euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse’.3 Given this extreme disparity, eloquence itself could seem a hopelessly alien quality, even a threat to the integrity of what Thomas Nashe dubs ‘our homely Iland tongue’.4 Thus, in 1578, when Richard Harrison takes stock of the linguistic refinements of the past several decades, he describes English as a tongue simultaneously ‘perfect[ed]’ by the efforts of ‘sundry learned and excellent writers’ and ‘corrupted with external terms of eloquence’.5
How to craft an English language that is eloquent without ceasing, in the process, to be English: this is the challenge taken up by many poets, playwrights, and prose writers of what we now call the English Renaissance, but it is a challenge that is confronted most directly in the pages of vernacular treatises on rhetoric and poetics, practical guides to the domestication of a theoretical discourse identified powerfully and often exclusively with what was written and spoken elsewhere. As Elyot’s comments in The Governour suggest, early Tudor England laid claim to only a very partial remnant of that ancient discourse. Indeed, the sole printed vernacular text on rhetoric, Leonard Cox’s Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (c. 1524–30), begins with the author’s explanation that he has taken a deliberately truncated approach to the material in his Latin source texts, devoting the bulk of his attention to invention, some to disposition and arrangement, and none at all to elocution and pronunciation. Those who have read Cicero or Quintilian will, he acknowledges, perceive that ‘many thynges be left out of this treatyse that ought to be spoken of’—but not, he insists, in an English handbook. For his intended audience, defined by its linguistic incompetence, he writes for ‘yonge beginners’ and ‘suche as haue by negligence or els fals persuacions’ failed to ‘attayne any meane knowlege of the Latin tongue’—what Ascham calls ‘good utterance’ is no plausible object.6 In the decades following the publication of The Boke named the Governour, however, an increasing number of English authors challenged this assumption: in texts that attempt to translate the precepts of classical rhetoric and poetics into principles meaningful for a vernacular audience, they represent eloquence as a refinement rather than a repudiation or transcendence of Englishness.
In this regard, it is Thomas Wilson rather than Leonard Cox who deserves the title of the first English rhetorician. Cox may write the first English art of rhetoric, but Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553, 1560) is the first art of English rhetoric: a treatise that takes for granted its interest and value as an analysis of vernacular norms and practices. Where Cox envisions an audience of schoolboys or poor Latinists, Wilson’s treatise addresses itself on its title page to ‘all suche as are studious of Eloquence’. ‘Boldly … may I aduenture, and without feare step forth to offer that … which for the dignitie is so excellent, and for the use so necessarie’, Wilson proclaims in his Prologue to the revised and expanded edition of 1560.7 This boldness has much to do with Wilson’s ability to imagine a mutually enriching relationship between eloquence and Englishness. Cox expects that an educated readership will greet his English rhetoric as ‘a thyng that is very rude and skant worthe the lokynge on’ and reassures himself with the thought that his partial accounting of the art ‘shall be sufficyent for an introduction to yonge beginners, for whome all onely this booke is made’ (sigs. F6v–F7r). Wilson, by contrast, courts an educated readership, prefacing the first edition of his Arte with Latin poems by university men. He dedicates both editions to his patron John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, whose ‘earnest … wish’ that he ‘might one day see the precepts of Rhetorique set forth … in English’ Wilson attributes not to his defects as a Latinist, but to the ‘speciall desire and Affection’ he ‘beare[s] to Eloquence’. Indeed, for Wilson, Dudley’s Englishness is a rhetorical asset: he anticipates a time when the ‘perfect experience, of manifolde and weightie matters of the Commonweale, shall haue encreased the Eloquence, which alreadie doth naturally flowe’ in Dudley to such an extent that his own Arte will be ‘set … to Schoole’ in Dudley’s home, ‘that it may learn Rhetorique of … daylie talke’.8
This fancy, that eloquence might be schooled by an English nobleman’s ‘daylie talke’, upends Thomas Elyot’s conception of England as a realm where persuasion was never used, and it offers a radical challenge to Roger Ascham’s conviction that the ‘trewe Paterne of Eloquence’ must be sought not in ‘plaine naturall English’, but in ‘the unspotted proprietie of the Latin tong … at the hiest pitch of all perfitness’—that is, ‘not in common taulke, but in priuate bookes’ (The Scholemaster, 146). Like Elyot and Ascham (whose friend and peer he was), Wilson identified with the cause of English humanism, but in The Arte of Rhetorique, he is at pains to expose what he sees as the unintended cost of that movement’s lack of faith and interest in the mother tongue: a slavish devotion to Latin and Greek that has prevented English from fulfilling its own potential for eloquence.
Indeed, the chief objects of concern in Wilson’s Arte are not the unlearned, ineloquent English, but those among them who have forsaken common talk for the pleasures of private books and foreign travel: modish young men so enamoured of foreign literature that they mistake foreignness itself for a linguistic virtue, ‘seek[ing] so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language’. Orphaned and alienated by their own affectations, they ‘will say, they speake in their mother tongue’, but, Wilson remarks, ‘if some of their mothers were aliue, they were not able to tell what they say’. Having forsaken their mother country and mother tongue, these ‘farre jorneid jentlemen at their returne home, like as thei loue to goe in forraine apparel, so thei will pouder their talke with oversea language’. Actual foreign loan-words are merely the most obvious marks of rhetorical error: worse still are the ‘farre fetcht colours of Antiquitie’, the pseudo-archaisms and pretentious classicisms that force the speaker to transgress the bounds of community (162).
Wilson’s sense of the vernacular thus depends on the same equation of geography and language that, for Elyot, condemns England to rhetorical mediocrity: he too treats English as an insular tongue, remote from Latin, Greek, and the modern Romance languages. But Wilson draws a strikingly different conclusion from that equation; for him, English is not the rude speech of a rude country, but the uncorrupted tongue of a nation whose insularity and remoteness have preserved it from moral degradation, political coercion, and ‘oversea language’. Its peculiar geography is not the impediment to England’s literary ambition, but the condition necessary for its fulfilment, the guarantee of its linguistic purity. As Wolfgang Müller observes, ‘Compared to contemporary rhetoric books’—like Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1553), which opens with an extended defence of its author’s reliance on Greek and Latin terms of art—‘Wilson seems to have deliberately made his book look as English as may be’, even as he continues to draw on classical and continental models.9 Not only does he eschew Greek, Latin, and French terminology wherever possible, he populates his treatise with vividly drawn characters from English life: the effete Italianate courtier, the country bumpkin, the pretentious Lincolnshire clergyman. Often these are figures of fun, but they also represent Wilson’s conviction that vernacular eloquence is the stuff of daily talk.
Instead of fretting over England’s infelicitous isolation or the distinctions between its speech and the language of classical authors, then, Wilson worries about preserving that isolation and honouring those distinctions, forestalling the needless contamination of English by alien influences.10 But in his determination to rise to the challenge set by Thomas Elyot, Wilson ends up promoting an ideal of vernacularity whose boundaries are necessarily more fluid. In the final section of his Arte, he identifies elocution as ‘that part of Rhetorique, the which aboue all other is most beautifull’: in its absence reason ‘walk[s] … both bare and naked’. And elocution depends not simply on plainness and commonness of diction, but on ‘delitefull translations, that our speech may seeme as bright and precious, as a rich stone is faire and orient’, on ‘beautifying of the tongue with borowed wordes’, and on ‘change of sentence or speech with much varietie’: such rhetorical values are not easily distinguished from the vices of Wilson’s far-journeyed gentlemen with their oversea language. His Arte therefore marks an important turn in the vernacularization of rhetoric, but it also exposes the contradictory visions of Englishness that underwrite the new vernacular rhetorics. Treatises like Wilson’s testify to the changes wrought upon a classical ideal of eloquence when it is identified with England’s daily talk, but they also testify to the changes wrought upon sixteenth-century ideals of Englishness as they assimilate an alien theory of eloquence.
Wilson’s desire to challenge the exclusively foreign provenance of eloquence is not simply an expression of nationalist fervour. More importantly, his effort to promote a thoroughly English art of eloquence derives from the conviction that any approach to rhetoric that privileges unfamiliar language over ordinary speech violates the essence of the art. ‘I know them that thinke Rhetorique to stande wholie vpon darke wordes, and hee that can catche an ynke horne terme by the taile, him they coumpt to be a fine Englisheman, and a good Rhetorician’, he writes, but such affectation is ‘foly’, for it fails to accomplish the most fundamental purpose of speech. ‘Doeth wit rest in straunge wordes’, Wilson demands, ‘or els standeth it in wholesome matter, and apt declaring of a mans minde? Doe wee not speake because we would haue other to vnderstande vs, or is not the tongue giuen for this ende, that one might know what an other meaneth’ (163–4)?
In his emphasis on shared understanding, Wilson is not so far from his predecessor Cox, who argues that rhetoric teaches men to speak ‘in suche maner as maye be moste sensible and accepte to their audience’ and justifies his own vulgarization of rhetoric on the principle that ‘euery goode thynge, … the more commune that it is the better it is’ (sigs. A.iiv, Aiiir). But for Cox, commonness is all English has to recommend it—eloquence he regards as the sole property of the classical tongues. For Wilson, commonness is at the heart of ‘an Orators profession’, which is fulfilled when he ‘speake[s] only of all such matters, as may largely be expounded … for all men to heare them’ (1). The wanton misuse of foreign terms and ‘darke wordes’ is thus not simply a stylistic or even political concern: to Wilson’s mind, it alienates eloquence from its primary orientation towards understanding and community.
Wilson begins his Arte with a fable designed to illustrate this point, a fable adapted from the myth recounted by Cicero at the beginning of his first treatment of the art of rhetoric, De Inventione.11 The myth credits eloquence with the creation of meaningful bonds between men and the places they inhabit. Before eloquence was known or used, Cicero writes, men were like beasts in their relation to the earth: they ‘wandered at large [vagabantur]’ and ‘were scattered [dispersos] in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats’. This vagabond existence persisted until one man (traditionally identified with the poet and musician Orpheus), by the force of his words, ‘assembled and gathered them in a single place [compulit unum in locum et congregavit]’.12 From this original gathering place, Cicero writes, sprang civilization: homes, cities, nations, and empires founded on the banishment of error, of wandering and unreason. Later accounts of rhetoric often featured versions of the same myth, reiterating the role of eloquence in the foundation of human communities. In the Institutio Oratoriae Quintilian writes, ‘I cannot imagine how the founders of cities would have made a homeless multitude [vaga illa multitudo] come together to form a people, had they not moved [commota] them by their skillful speech.’13 This formulation contrasts the vagrancy of the homeless multitude with the purposeful solidarity of a people ‘moved’ by eloquence. Rhetoric counteracts man’s natural tendency to err with the attractive power of words and ideas.14
For Wilson, reading this myth through the lens of Protestant Christianity, the errant proclivity of man is not only a sign of savagery, but a mark of sin. Aligning the founding myth of eloquence with biblical history, he makes a case for rhetoric as an instrument of salvation. After Adam’s fall, he writes, the ‘eloquence first giuen by God’ was lost, and the immediate consequence was the demise of human community: ‘all things waxed sauage, the earth vntilled, societie neglected’. Lacking a productive relation to the land, or to each other, men ‘grased vpon the ground’ and ‘roomed’ like wild beasts. They ‘liued brutishly in open feeldes, hauing neither house to shroude them in, nor attire to clothe their backes’.15 Thus far, Wilson’s narrative recapitulates the Old Testament history of mankind’s fall, whereby Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden, Cain becomes, in the words of the 1560 Geneva Bible, ‘a vagabond and a runnagate in the earth’ (Gen. 4:12), Noah’s sons are ‘deuided in their lands, euery one after his tongue; [and] after their families, in their nations’ (Gen. 10:5), and, at last, at Babel, God resolves to ‘confound the language of all the earth … [and] scatter them vpon all the earth’ (Gen. 11:9).16 This state of alienation and confusion persists, according to Wilson, until God’s ‘faithfull and elect … called [men] together by vtteraunce of speech’, persuading them ‘to live together in fellowship of life’ and ‘to maintain Cities’. By no ‘other meanes’, he asserts, could men have been brought to submit to the authority of God and his ministers. Man’s natural vagrancy and errancy would lead him to seek to move to a higher station, he writes, ‘were [he] not persuaded, that it behoueth [him] to liue in his owne vocation: and not to seeke any higher roume’ (sig. [A7]r–v).
Eloquence creates community, but it also maintains, according to degree, the natural boundaries between peoples, classes, nations, and all other entities otherwise vulnerable to motion, error, and change. Wilson’s stylistic, syntactic, and formal prescriptions are thus repeatedly cast in geographical terms, as warnings against departure from the space of common knowledge and shared understanding. Orators are urged to avoid ‘straunge woordes, as thou wouldest take hede and eschue greate Rockes in the Sea’, and to guard against ‘roving without reason’ from the plain statement of their arguments (2–3, 87). ‘Would not a man thinke him mad, that hauing an earnest errande from London to Dover, would take it the next way to ride first into Northfolke, next into Essex, and last into Kent?’ Wilson asks. So much the greater, he argues, is the folly of those who treat rhetoric as an art of evasion and circumlocution. He offers the cautionary example of an Anglican preacher who, intending to speak ‘of the generall resurrection’, instead ‘hath made a large matter of our blessed Ladie, praysing her to bee so gentle, so curteous, and so kinde, that it were better a thousand fold, to make sute to her alone, then to Christ her sonne’. Such rhetoric is, Wilson argues, ‘both vngodly, and nothing at all to the purpose’; like the savage men of the pre-rhetorical world, it ‘roomes’. The pun on ‘Rome’ and ‘roaming’, which the text’s orthography invites, emphasizes the conflation of linguistic, moral, and geographic errancy: rhetorical laxity, like the pursuit of strange words, leads to heresy. ‘[A]ssuredly’, Wilson concludes, ‘many an vnlearned and witlesse man, hath straied in his talke much farther a great deale, yea truly as farre as hence to Roome gates’ (87–8).
Wilson’s Rhetorique thus paves the way for a new approach to the vernacular, one founded on the virtues of familiarity, proximity, and even insularity. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, a number of writers follow Wilson in arguing that England’s national integrity—the security of its place in the world—demanded that English be put on equal footing with all other tongues. They adopt both his confidence in the mother tongue and his conviction that insularity makes an ideal landscape for eloquence. One of the most radical attempts to challenge the hegemony of the classical tongues is Ralph Lever’s 1573 vernacular art of logic. Pointedly titled The Arte of Reason, rightly termed Witcraft, Lever’s treatise excludes as many Latinate words as possible, replacing even familiar terms—like ‘logic’ itself—with invented Anglo-Saxon equivalents like ‘witcraft’. ‘We who devise understandable terms, compounded of true and ancient English words’, Lever explains, ‘do rather maintain and continue the antiquitie of our mother tongue.’ By contrast, he argues, ‘they, that with inckhorne termes soe chaunge and corrupt the same, mak[e] a mingle mangle of their natiue speech, … not observing the propertie thereof’.17 That English has an ‘antiquitie’ and ‘propertie’ of its own is precisely what Thomas Elyot does not allow when, in The Boke named the Governour, he attributes England’s rhetorical limitations to its ‘infilicitie of tyme and countray’ (fol. 18r): if English can claim for itself a place worth having, both in history and on the globe, then its alienation from the classical world no longer matters. Indeed, Latin, Greek, and their modern heirs may be regarded not as remote ideals, but as unwanted interlopers, trespassers on the vernacular’s rightful territory.
This is precisely the position taken by Samuel Daniel in his Apologie for Ryme (1603), which likens the importation of foreign words into English to an influx of undesirable immigrants. ‘[W]e alwayes bewray our selues to be bothe vnkinde and vnnaturall to our owne natiue language, in disguising or forging strange or vnusuall wordes, as if it were to make our verse seeme another kind of speech out of the course of our vsuall practice, displacing our wordes’, Daniel declares. The boundaries of English, he implies, are no less fixed than those of England itself and ought to be guarded with as much zeal: the vernacular constitutes a finite territory, in which the presence of foreigners necessarily threatens to ‘displace’ the native inhabitants. ‘I wonder at the strange presumption of some men’, he writes, ‘that dare so audaciously aduenture to introduce any whatsoeuer forraine wordes, be they neuer so strange, and of themselues, as it were, without a Parliament, without any consent or allowance, establish them as Free-denizens in our language.’18
In reality, the borders of the English language could not be sealed any more than the borders of England itself: both the country and its vernacular were heavily dependent on foreign imports. Even the word ‘denizen’, which Daniel uses to scold those who presumptuously introduce foreign terms into English, is a legal term borrowed from Norman French19—a remnant of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England. The presence of such words was a constant reminder of the permeability of England’s geographic borders, its heritage of repeated conquest by foreign nations.20 But however ignominious this history might be, it had made English into a much richer and more diverse tongue than it otherwise might have been. Certainly Thomas Wilson recognizes this fact—unlike Lever, he is no Anglo-Saxon purist. Wilson allows that, when foreign terms are required ‘to set forth our meaning in the English tongue, either for lacke of store, or els because we would enrich the language: it is well doen to vse them’, provided that ‘all other are agreed to followe the same waie’. Such words, ‘being vsed in their place’, should cause no one to be ‘suspected for affectation’, he writes, as long as they are ‘apt and meete … to set out the matter’ (165). Here, as always in Wilson’s Arte, the concern is with place: that words be accommodated to the place in which they are written or spoken, and that they do not displace more familiar and proper terms.
Keeping words ‘in their place’ was not simply a matter of policing the incursion of foreign terms into English; it was also a matter of managing the vernacular’s worrisome internal heterogeneity. To call English an ‘island tongue’ was to ignore the many differences of dialect that divided one region from another.21 This internal heterogeneity represented a serious obstacle to claims for vernacular eloquence: England was understood to be full of places that engendered corrupt or barbarous versions of the mother tongue. George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) precisely enumerates these places in an effort to pinpoint the site of true eloquence. The best speech in any language, Puttenham writes, is not that which is spoken ‘in the marches or frontiers, or in port townes, where straungers haunt for traffike sake, or yet in Vniuersities where Schollers vse much peeuish affectation of wordes out of the primatiue languages, or finally, in any vplandish village or corner of a Realme, where there is no resort but of poore rusticall or vnciuill people’, rather, it is strictly that dialect that is used ‘in the kings Court, or in the good townes and Cities within the land’. This dictum bars ‘any speech vsed beyond the riuer of Trent’, which, although it may reflect more of the pure ‘English Saxon’ is ‘not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English’. According to Puttenham, proper English corresponds to exact geographic coordinates: it is found ‘in London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue’.22
Puttenham’s strict mapping of acceptable vernacular usage echoes in another form Wilson’s warnings against ‘roaming’ language, but Puttenham—writing for an audience of courtiers—disregards Wilson’s sense of the contextual nature of propriety. For Puttenham, the English of the court is inherently preferable to that spoken elsewhere—the burden of barbarous marginality is simply shifted to England’s own periphery, while the privileged centre of learned speech is transferred from Rome to London. Wilson, by contrast, regards courtly speech as proper only to the court; spoken outside of that setting, it is as ludicrous as any other foreign usage. The distinction is crucial, for it highlights the central feature of Wilson’s whole theory of vernacular eloquence: the notion that eloquence is a local rather than a universal quality.
Given his urgent desire to protect English from the strange speech of other nations, we might expect Wilson to share Puttenham’s anxiety about the internal peculiarities of the mother tongue. In fact, however, Wilson regards the variation of speech within England’s borders as an obstacle to eloquence only when the rhetorical proprieties of one social or geographic context come into conflict with those of another. He repeatedly tells stories of low-born men from the provinces whose upper-class pretensions lead them into comic rhetorical errors—the ‘ignorant fellowe’ who calls a flock of sheep ‘an audience’ or the yokel who refers to a house as a ‘phrase of building’. But Wilson makes clear that such abuses of language occur not because the vernacular itself needs reform, but because speakers fail to consider what is proper to a given context: they ‘vs[e] words out of place’. The solution, he argues, is to map the vernacular with as much care for internal divisions as for external boundaries: ‘[W]e must make a difference of English, and say some is learned English, and other some is rude English, or the one is court talke, the other is countrey speech’, he advises, ‘or els we must of necessity banish all such Rhetorique, and vse altogether one maner of language’ (164, 166).
The inability to draw such distinctions deprives rhetoric of its most basic stylistic and persuasive virtues, those of familiarity and clarity. Unless speakers abide by the law of proximity, avoiding that which is strange or far-fetched, they cannot hope to win the assent of their audience. Those who would ‘acquaint themselues with the best kind of speech’, Wilson writes, ‘must seeke from time to time such wordes as are commonly receiued, … what wordes we best vnderstande, and knowe what they meane: the same should soonest be spoken’ (165). Wilson’s respect for the local permutations of style and usage within England’s borders thus derives, as do all his precepts, from the conviction that eloquence is a communal art. Men, he writes in his ‘Preface’, should learn how to speak by following ‘their neighbours deuise’ (sig. [A7]v). Such an assertion is a profound departure from the view that England could only learn eloquence from strangers: Wilson’s Rhetorique not only frees English rhetoric from its thraldom to Latin and Greek, it roots the art of persuasion in the most intimate and familiar of relationships, asserting that ‘the best kind of speech’ is that which is literally closest to hand.
His emphasis on the locally particular character of linguistic decorum allows Thomas Wilson to stake England’s claim to a native art of eloquence, but it leaves readers of The Arte of Rhetorique with an unresolved paradox. As the epitome of rhetorical decorum, eloquence ought to be the form of speech most in accord with local custom and circumstance, but the definition of eloquence depends on the perception of its difference from ordinary or common speech. As Wilson allows, familiarity may be the basis of persuasive power, but the best orator does not blend into the crowd: ‘among all other, I thinke him most worthie fame’, he writes, ‘that is among the reasonable of al most reasonable, and among the wittie, of all most wittie, and among the eloquent, of all most eloquent: him thinke I among all men, not onely to be taken for a singuler man, but rather to be coumpted for halfe a God’ (sig. A7v). The singularity and near divinity of the eloquent man—his reputation or fame as an orator—derives not from his speaking commonly, but extraordinarily. True eloquence not only justifies departures from common usage; it demands them.
Even as Wilson founds his vernacular Arte on an identification of eloquence with proximity to common use, then, that proximity does not dissolve into identity: the persuasive force of rhetoric depends as much on singularity as it does on familiarity. Thus, Wilson turns in the final section of his Arte to ‘exornation’, the practice by which ‘[w]hen wee haue learned apte wordes, and vsuall phrases to set foorth our meaning, and can orderly place them … wee may boldely commende and beautifie our talke’. ‘Apt’ and ‘usual’ terms set in ‘orderly’ places may be the standard for which the novice orator strives, but boldness and beauty are the marks at which the truly expert speaker aims—even if they necessitate violations of aptness, order, and use. That boldness and beauty may require such violations is plain from Wilson’s account of exornation, which he defines as ‘a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed wordes, and change of sentence or speech with much varietie’, so that ‘our speech may seeme as bright and precious, as a rich stone is faire and orient’ (169). This last simile highlights a shift in Wilson’s sense of the relationship between eloquence and familiarity. What, after all, could be more distant and alien, more ‘far-fetched’, than the gem-rich Orient evoked by Wilson’s comparison? The contrast to his earlier prohibitions on strange words grows more marked as Wilson’s discussion of exornation proceeds: ornament, he writes, is most often achieved by figures of speech, which are ‘vsed after some newe or straunge wise, much vnlike to that which men commonly vse to speake’. Without such new and strange figures, Wilson claims, ‘not one can attaine to be coumpted an Oratour, though his learning otherwise be neuer so great’ (170). Among the most skilled speakers, he observes, ‘[m]en coumpt it a point of witte, to passe ouer such words as are at hand, and to vse such as are farre fetcht and translated’—by such diversions from common use, he concludes, ‘[a]n Oration is wounderfully enriched’ (171–2).
This is a striking reversal of the relationship hitherto presumed to exist between place and eloquence: now rhetoric leads away, to the alien and exotic, rather than sustaining the common and usual. The shift points to a tension within the project of vernacular rhetoric. That is, for those who seek to establish guidelines for the eloquent use of English, it is essential either to close the gap between English and Latin or to propose alternative, vernacular standards for rhetorical propriety. However, such efforts at uniformity and standardization must give way to the imperative to distinguish rhetorical speech from its mundane counterparts. Eloquence cannot be so closely tied to common usage that it disappears altogether. Thus, even as Puttenham insists that proper diction must correspond to that of London, he too encourages vernacular authors in the use of ‘the rich Orient coulours’ of ‘figures and figurative speech’ if they hope to attain eloquence (143).
In treatises like Wilson’s and Puttenham’s—often heralded as markers of burgeoning national pride and linguistic self-confidence—Elyot’s perception of rhetoric (and, especially, of style) as an essentially exotic commodity is not so much dispelled as displaced onto a territory internal to the supposedly homely mother tongue: as eloquence is redefined on English terms, the shadows and figures of the native linguistic landscape assume an increasing prominence and value. Here it is worth turning back to a handbook I earlier contrasted to Wilson’s Arte in its self-conscious reliance on classical terminology. The title page of Richard Sherry’s 1550 Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, the first vernacular guide to what Elyot dubbed the ‘principall partes of rhetorike’, advertises it as an aid ‘for the better vnderstanding of good authors’, and those who picked it up probably assumed that the authors in question were classical writers: here was a handbook to help schoolboys recognize a Ciceronian paraphrasis or a Virgilian metalepsis. Sherry’s preface initially reinforces the assumption that his object is the demystification of a foreign discourse. He apologizes for the fact that his title must sound ‘all straunge unto our Englyshe eares’, causing ‘some men at the fyrst syghte to marvayle what the matter of it should meane’, and urges readers to consider that ‘use maketh straunge thinges familier’. With time, he suggests, alien terms like ‘scheme’ and ‘trope’ may become as common ‘as if they had bene of oure owne natiue broode’.23
But as Sherry soon reveals, the strangeness his treatise seeks to make familiar is less a property of Latin and Greek than it is of English itself. ‘It is not vnknowen that oure language for the barbarousnes and lacke of eloquence hathe bene complayned of’, he writes,
and yet not trewely, for anye defaut in the toungue it selfe, but rather for slackenes of our countrimen, whiche haue alwayes set lyght by searchyng out the elegance and proper speaches that be ful many in it: as plainly doth appere not only by the most excellent monumentes of our auncient forewriters, Gower, Chawcer and Lydgate, but also by the famous workes of many other later: inespeciall of ye ryght worshipful knyght syr Thomas Eliot, … [who] as it were generallye searchinge oute the copye of oure language in all kynde of wordes and phrases, [and] after that setting abrode goodlye monumentes of hys wytte, lernynge and industrye, aswell in historycall knowledge, as of eyther the Philosophies, hathe herebi declared the plentyfulnes of our mother tounge. (sigs. A2v–[A3]r)
The ‘good authors’ of the title page thus include not simply Cicero and Virgil, but Elyot, Thomas Wyatt, and the ‘manye other … yet lyuyng’ (sig. [A3]v) whose very familiarity—whose Englishness—has obscured the ‘copye’ or riches of their speech.
In truth, it is hard to imagine any reader consulting the litany of arcane tropes and figures that ensues and finding Elyot’s prose or Wyatt’s verse easier to read as a consequence: the aim is not clarification, but complication. We—and, presumably, sixteenth-century readers—do not need Sherry’s definition of the figure he calls ‘Metaphora’ or ‘translacion’—‘a worde translated from the thynge that it properlye signifieth, vnto another whych may agre with it by a similitude’ (sig. C4v)—to understand what Elyot means when he describes moot court exercises as the ‘shadow or figure’ of an ancient rhetoric, but the label and the definition call our attention to the artfulness of the phrase, its capacity to suggest the way time has attenuated and flattened a once substantive art. When Sherry promises his readers ‘better understanding’ of authors like Elyot, he offers them a mode of access to their mother tongue that is also a process of alienation from it: the domestication of classical rhetoric brings with it a deliberate and profitable estrangement from the mother tongue.
Indeed, Sherry’s Treatise extends to English readers the possibility that the strangeness of eloquence might be its chief asset for the vernacular: although he worries that some readers will scan the title of his book, ‘marvayle’ and cast it aside as ‘some newe fangle’, he imagines ‘other[s], whiche moued with the noueltye thereof, wyll thynke it worthye to be looked vpon, and se what is contained therin’ (sig. A2r). In appropriating wonder as a productive response to the foreign terminology of style—schemes and tropes, metaphors, zeugmas, and antistrophes—Sherry doesn’t simply make good on an inevitable feature of his rhetorical project, the need to reckon with Greek and Latin terms of art and odd linguistic technicalities, he also recovers for the vernacular a central, and often problematic, feature of what Elyot calls ‘the ancient rhetoric’: the counterintuitive premium it placed on the orator’s ability to impress his audience with the unlikelihood of his expressions. For as much as classical rhetoricians urged their pupils to conform their speech to the experiences and expectations of their audience—the orator, writes Quintilian, must discern ‘those things about which there is general agreement, … if not throughout the whole world, at any rate in the nation or state where the case is being pleaded’24—they also remained sensitive to the particular power of language that alters or departs from ordinary usage. ‘To deviate [from prevailing (kyrios) usage] makes language seem more elevated; for people feel in the same way in regard to lexis as they do in regard to strangers compared with citizens’, writes Aristotle in Book Three of the Art of Rhetoric. ‘As a result, one should make the language unfamiliar, for people are admirers of what is far off, and what is marvellous is sweet.’25 The sixteenth-century Englishing of classical rhetoric thus recapitulates a debate that structures the very foundation of classical theories of eloquence: does persuasion inhere in the fashioning of an argument that comes closest to what an audience will recognize as the truth of their own experience, or does it operate most powerfully in those rhetorical shadows and figures that entice us with their strangeness?
Within vernacular treatises on rhetoric and poetics, this ancient uncertainty produces a conspicuous metaphorical volatility: the geographic language of distance and foreignness that is used so often to stigmatize bad rhetoric or affected speech is therefore equally available to positive representations of vernacular eloquence. Metaphor itself, as all of these writers well knew, means ‘to carry across’—as Puttenham says, it might be dubbed ‘the figure of transport’, since it entails ‘a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification, to another not so naturall’ (148). That less ‘naturall’ signification might imply a transgression of decorum—Jonson warns readers that ‘Metaphors farfet hinder to be understood’ and that a speaker should take care not to ‘fetcheth his translations from a wrong place’ (95)—but it also opens language up to exotic delights and strange riches. Thomas Nashe might mock Gabriel Harvey for speaking English like a stranger and insist that true Englishmen are ‘the plainest dealing souls that ever God put life in’, 26 but even plain dealing souls are not immune to the allure of the distant and rare. Indeed, it just this allure that draws writers to the study of rhetoric, as Nashe himself allows: perfecting the art of speech, he jokingly observes, entails a perpetual hunt for ‘a more Indian metaphor’.27 As a character in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) remarks, far-flung travels and exotic adventures may have corrupted Ulysses’s morals, but they refined his skill as an orator: ‘Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses; Ulysses, the long traveler, was not amiable but eloquent’ (343).
Not just rhetorical excess, then, but rhetoric itself continued to be associated with travel and exoticism, even by those early modern English authors who took it upon themselves to counter Elyot’s notion of eloquence as definitively un-English. In part, this association reflected the persistence of the belief that the vernacular as it was commonly spoken was inadequate as a vehicle for eloquence—the ‘homely Iland tongue’ might be too narrowly provincial after all—but it also reflects a belief that eloquence demands liberal bounds: the rusticity of the vernacular might as well be blamed on lack of industry and daring as on any necessary restrictions. This, according to George Puttenham, was the function of all figurative language: ‘As figures be the instruments of ornament in euery language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speech, because they passe the ordinarie limits of common vtterance’, becoming a ‘manner of forraine and coloured talke’ (159–60). Ultimately, Puttenham suggests, the effect of rhetoric on an audience is not to confirm their sense of place in the world, but to provide the illusion of leaving it: figures of speech, he writes, ‘carieth [the listener’s] opinion this way and that, whither soeuer the heart by impression of the eare shalbe most affectionately bent and directed’, ‘drawing [the minde] from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certain doublenesse’ (159–60). This ‘doublenesse’, the ‘inuersion of sense by transport’, serves as yet another response to the relationship understood to exist between English language and England’s place. Here neither the vernacular nor the foreign are shunned, since figuration allows for the coexistence of the two in a single discourse: ‘euery language’ has the capacity to become a ‘manner of forraine … talke’.
In other words, every language is capable of poetry: Puttenham’s treatise begins with the assertion that eloquence is bred only by the influence of poets upon a language. Poetry, he writes
is … a maner of vtterance more eloquent and rhethoricall then the ordinarie prose which we vse in our daily talke, because it is decked and set out with all maner of fresh colours and figures … The vtterance in prose is not of so great efficacie, because … it is dayly vsed, and by that occasion the eare is ouerglutted with it. (9) Whereas Wilson cautioned orators against adopting the extravagant style of the poet, Puttenham offers poetry as the ideal model for rhetorical excellence: ‘the Poets were … from the beginning the best perswaders, and their eloquence the first Rhethoricke of the world’ (9). The division between poetry and ‘ordinarie prose’ thus becomes another boundary to be trespassed in the pursuit of eloquence.28 Indeed, as Paula Blank argues, ‘words usually characterized as examples of Renaissance “poetic diction”’ may be ‘better understood as dialects of early modern English’. Blank cites Alexander Gill’s Latin history of the English language, Logonomia Anglica (1619), which places the ‘Poetic’ alongside ‘the general, the Northern, the Southern, the Eastern, [and] the Western’ as one of the ‘major dialects’. ‘Along with regional languages implicitly defined, geographically and socially, by their relation to the “general” language (i.e., an elite variety of London English)’, Blank writes, we might consider ‘“Poetic” language as a province of the vernacular’.29
For most rhetorical and poetic theorists, however, the place of poetry in relation to the ordinary vernacular is represented not by reference to internal regions, but to more exotic locales: Nashe’s ‘Indian metaphor’, Wilson’s ‘faire and orient’ speech, or Puttenham’s ‘Orient colours’. In the case of poetry, foreignness derives not from the words themselves (although these may be foreign in origin), but primarily from what Chapman calls the ‘beyond sea manner of writing’. How is it that poetic language accomplishes this estrangement of the vernacular from itself? George Gascoigne offers one explanation in ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse’, an essay appended to his 1575 anthology The Posies. Gascoigne begins the essay by urging his fellow vernacular poets not to regard poetic diction as alienated from ordinary speech, encouraging them rather to hew to ‘playne Englishe’ in the composition of their verses.30 Take care, he writes, that ‘you wreste no woorde from his natural and vsuall sounde’ and, when possible, choose simple words, for ‘the more monosyllables that you vse, the truer Englishman you shall seeme’.31 Gascoigne particularly urges vernacular poets to ‘eschew straunge words, or obsoleta et inusitata’, and to ‘use your verse after theenglishe phrase, and not after the maner of other languages’ (52–3).
Nevertheless, it is by no means obvious to Gascoigne that poetic language always can or should adhere to the boundaries of ‘playne Englishe’. Indeed, he quickly qualifies his own ruling, allowing that archaisms and other ‘unnatural’ words are sometimes permitted to verse by ‘poetic licence’:
Therefore even as I have advised you to place all wordes in their naturall or most common and usuall pronunciation, so would I wishe you to frame all sentences in their mother phrase and proper Idioma, and yet sometimes (as I have sayd before) the contraries may be borne, but that is rather where rime enforceth, or per licentiam Poeticam, than it is otherwise lawfull or commendable. (53)
But Gascoigne’s own language at this moment ironically and rather playfully enacts the permeability of that supposedly lawful and commendable boundary between ‘the englishe phrase’ and ‘the maner of other languages’, even in prose: ‘straunge words’ is glossed with the Latin ‘obsoleta et inusitata’, ‘the mother phrase’ is elaborated—gratuitously—by the Greek ‘Idioma’, and ‘per licentiam Poeticam’ substitutes for the perfectly serviceable vernacular equivalent. Recourse to language outside of the common usage, it seems, is not simply a freedom allowed to English verse: prose stylists too may find themselves straying into foreign tongues, either where the paucity of the vernacular ‘enforceth’ such transgressions or simply where the whim of the author makes them desirable.
As Gascoigne unfolds his theory of ‘licentiam poeticam’, he further multiplies the qualifications to his own rule against ‘straunge words’. ‘This poeticall license’, he writes, is ‘a shrewde fellow’, which ‘covereth many faults in a verse’. Poetic licence, he observes, has the procrustean ability to ‘maketh words longer, shorter, of mo syllables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser, and to conclude it turkeneth all things at pleasure’ (53–4). Here, again, Gascoigne’s own language partakes of the licence he describes: ‘turkeneth’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is emphatically a ‘newer’ word in 1575, perhaps even Gascoigne’s own coinage. The twofold connotation of the word preserves a sense of Gascoigne’s ambivalence about poetic licence: on the one hand ‘to turken’ (or, to use an earlier, related form of the word, ‘to turkesse’) means either ‘to transform or alter for the worse; to wrest, twist, distort, pervert’ or—much less negatively—‘to alter the form or appearance of; to change, modify, refashion (not necessarily for the worse)’.32 Which definition applies to the ‘turkening’ of that shrewd fellow, poetic licence, is uncertain in Gascoigne’s account. Are the alterations wrought in the common language by poetic usage ‘perversions’ of that language, or are they simply acts of ‘refashioning’ and ‘modification’? Is poetic licence an invitation to poetic licentiousness?
There is, of course, another ambiguity residing in Gascoigne’s uncommon turn of phrase: its etymological relation to early modern England’s pre-eminent figure for global difference and licentious excess: the Turk. According to the OED, while ‘turken’ and ‘turkesse’ are understood by some as versions of the French ‘torquer’ or the Latin ‘torquere’, meaning ‘to twist’, this etymology presents ‘difficulties both of form and sense’. An alternative derivation is suggested ‘from Turk and Turkeys, [or] Turkish’, since, as the OED observes, ‘they were often associated with these words’. A survey of the citations provided in the OED suggests that these two etymologies converged in the early seventeenth century, when ‘turken’, ‘turkesse’, and ‘turkize’ were used to describe the transformation or conversion of sacred language or objects or individuals from Christian truth to Islamic error. In Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), for instance, Samuel Purchas describes how ‘the Turkes, when they turkeised it [St Sophia], threw downe the Altars, [and] turned the Bells into great Ordinance’, while a citation from 1648 deplores ‘those … which are so audacious as to turcase the revealed, and sealed Standard of our salvation … to the misshapen models of their intoxicated phansies’. Gascoigne’s use of ‘turkeneth’ does not explicitly invoke the presence of Islam, but his witty coinage does invite readers to locate his discussion of poetic licence within a larger conversation about the boundary between the native and the foreign, the natural and the unnatural, the lawful and the unlawful. The link between the foreign and the poetic, Gascoigne suggests, inheres in the (dangerously) transformative power of each.
Insofar as it signifies a potentially illicit ‘turning’ of language, ‘turken’ is also a synonym for ‘trope’, the operation by which words, as Puttenham says, ‘haue their sense and understanding altered and figured … by transport, abuse, crosse-naming, new-naming, change of name’ (189). For all his anxieties about the English spoken outside of London, Puttenham does not regard this tendency to wander from the proper idiom as a defect of tropological language; on the contrary, he understands the appeal of figuration to reside precisely in its ability to ‘delight and allure as well the mynde as the eare of the hearers with a certain noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, disguising it no little from the ordinary and accustomed’ (147). Such conveyance forces both language and listeners from their common uses: when speech is ornamented with ‘figures rhethoricall’, Puttenham writes, it possesses, in addition to the ‘ordinarie vertues’ of ‘sententiousnes, and copious amplification’, an ‘instrument of conueyance for … carrying or transporting [meaning] farther off or nearer’ and for making the mind of the listener ‘yielding and flexible’, susceptible to persuasion in any direction (207). Figuration invests language with the power to transport listeners, while remaining within the confines of the mother tongue. And in texts like Puttenham’s Art, Gascoigne’s Notes, and even Wilson’s emphatically domestic Rhetorique, eloquence finds a place within the vernacular that is as farfetched and extravagant as it is English.
Blank, Paula. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Jones, Richard Foster. The Triumph of the English Language (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953).
Keilen, Sean. Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Kennedy, George. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd edn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
Mann, Jenny. ‘The “Figure of Exchange”: Shakespeare’s “Master Mistress,” Jonson’s Epicoene, and the English Art of Rhetoric’, Renaissance Drama, 38 (2010): 173–98.
—— ‘Sidney’s “Insertour”: Arcadia, Parenthesis, and the Formation of English Eloquence’, English Literary Renaissance, 30.3 (Autumn 2009): 460–98.
Müller, Wolfgang G. ‘Directions for English: Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, and the Search for Vernacular Eloquence’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 307–22.
Rebhorn, Wayne. The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Rhodes, Neil. The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).