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Chapter 2

The Commonplace and the Far-Fetched: Mapping Eloquence in the English Art of Rhetoric

As Thomas Elyot reminds readers of The Boke named the Governour, rhetoric was the foundation of the earliest commonwealths: “[I]n the firste infancie of the worlde, men, wandring like beastes in woddes and on mountaines, regardinge neither the religion due unto god, nor the office pertaining unto man, ordred all thing by bodily strength: untill Mercurius (as Plato supposeth) or some other man holpen by sapience and eloquence, by some apt or propre oration, assembled them to geder and perswaded to them what commodite was in mutual conuersation and honest maners.”¹ When Elyot surveys sixteenth-century England, he is therefore dismayed to find in it only “a maner, a shadowe, or figure of the auncient rhetorike”: the stunted ritual of “motes,” or moot courts, observed by students at the law schools. Such mock trials insured that educated men were acquainted with the rudiments of invention and arrangement, but they failed to produce anything like the eloquence of Mercury, Orpheus, or Amphion. On the contrary, Elyot laments, far from fostering “mutual conversation,” the speech of most English lawyers verges on unintelligibility: “voyde of all eloquence,” it “serveth no commoditie or necessary purpose, no man understanding it but they whiche haue studied the lawes” (53_v). He attributes this defect to ignorance of eloquence’s higher purpose: “the tonge wherin it is spoken is barberouse, and the sterynge of affections of the mynde in this realme was neuer used,” he observes, “and so there lacketh Eloquution and Pronunciation, the two principall partes of rhetorike” (56_r–v). Only if educated Englishmen address themselves to the cultivation of style, marrying “the sharpe wittes of logicians” and “the graue sentences of philosophers” to “the elegancie of the poetes,” will England possess “perfect orators” and “a publike weale equiualent to the grekes or Romanes” (57_v, 59_v).

In 1531, when The Governour first appeared in print, “elegancie” was literally absent from the English art of rhetoric. The only existing rhetorical handbook in the vernacular, Leonard Cox’s Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (c. 1524–30), sets elocution and pronunciation pointedly to the side. “[M]any thynges be left out of this treatyse that ought to be spoken of,” Cox allows in his preface, but not, he insists, in a handbook to be read only by “suche as haue by negligence or els fals persuacions” failed to “attayne any meane knowlege of the Latin tongue.” For an audience defined by linguistic incompetence, he reasons, the rudiments of invention and arrangement “shall be sufficyent”—what Roger Ascham calls “good utterance” is no plausible object.² Some twenty years later, however, a pioneering English rhetorician cited Elyot as proof of the elegancy of the mother tongue. The title page of Richard Sherry’s 1550 Treatise of Schemes and Tropes advertises it as an aid to “the better vnderstanding of good authors,” and those who picked it up probably assumed that the authors in question were classical writers: here, presumably, was a handbook to help schoolboys recognize and reproduce a Ciceronian paraphrasis or a Virgilian metalepsis. The Treatise’s preface initially reinforces this assumption, as Sherry apologizes for the conspicuous classicism of his title, which must sound “all straunge unto our Englyshe eares” and may cause “some men at the fyrst syghte to marvayle what the matter of it should meane.” He urges readers to consider that “use maketh straunge thinges familier”: with time, alien terms such as “scheme” and “trope” may become as common “as if they had bene of oure owne natiue broode.”³

But as Sherry soon reveals, the strange things his treatise seeks to domesticate are not strictly the property of the classical tongues: on the contrary, what is foreign to English readers is the virtue of their own native speech. “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 y^e 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. (A2_v–[A3]_r)

The “good authors” of the title page thus include not simply Cicero and Virgil but also Thomas Elyot 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 easier to read as a consequence, but that perhaps is the point. English schoolboys were accustomed to the notion that understanding a classical text meant retreating from the immediate perception of meaning to a more remote appreciation of artifice: “surely,” writes Ascham, “the minde by dailie marking, first, the cause and matter: than, the words and phrases: next, the order and composition: after the reason and arguments: than the forms and figures … [and] lastelie, the measure and compass of euerie sentence, must nedes, by litle and little, draw vnto it the like shape of eloquence, as the author doth vse, which is red.”⁴ When Sherry promises his readers “better understanding” of a writer such as Elyot, he therefore offers them a mode of access to their mother tongue that is also a process of alienation from it—the strange things made familiar are also familiar things made enticingly strange. 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” (C4_v)—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. In this sense the domestication of classical rhetorical precepts and practices brings with it a deliberate and profitable remove from the mother tongue, whose own shadows and figures come into fresh relief.

In its foregrounding of the vernacular’s capacity for figuration, Sherry’s Treatise marks the beginning of a decisive shift in the discipline of English rhetoric. Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, a rapidly proliferating corpus of vernacular arts redefines eloquence almost exclusively in terms of elocution, and elocution itself in terms of an ever-burgeoning catalog of figures of speech.⁵ Historians of rhetoric have tended to look askance at this metastasis of style, naming “attention to ornament alone” as the “chief Renaissance abuse of the classical system” and dismissing the ubiquitous catalogs of rhetorical figures, with their elaborate taxonomies of scheme and trope, as “derivative … patchworks” of more comprehensive classical and continental treatises.⁶ More recently, however, critics have recovered a sense of what elocution (or its absence) signified to Thomas Elyot and his successors in sixteenth-century England, recuperating the style-obsessed English art of rhetoric as a crucial instrument in the fashioning of a self-consciously literate mother tongue. Far from signaling the decline of a robust art of public discourse into a scholarly fetish, Wolfgang G. Müller argues, its investment in elocution constitutes “the most original part” of the English rhetorical treatise: a singular space of linguistic and national self-assertion.⁷ By making the “elegancie” of English speech and writing their concern, the authors of sixteenth-century vernacular arts of rhetoric and poesy display a novel kind of interest and confidence in the vernacular, expecting it to serve not simply their commodity but their pleasure. As the editors of a recent collection of essays on Renaissance figures of speech point out, “it was in the area of elocution—and specifically the theory and description of the figures—that Renaissance rhetoric managed actually to take classical theory forwards,” adding to the stock of ancient devices and doing “something new with them.”⁸ No longer merely ornamental, schemes and tropes become “flowers” and “colours” whose multiplication in the pages of vernacular treatises proves, as Jenny Mann argues, England’s fitness “as a garden or field where rhetoric can grow and thrive.”⁹

But in doing something new with figuration, ensconcing it at the center of rhetorical theory and practice and asking it to shore up their claim to eloquence as a common good, English rhetoricians run up against a very old dilemma. In an almost literal sense, as rhetorical theorists from Aristotle onward discover, style reorients rhetoric, transforming its defining investments in commodity and commonality into a fascination with exoticism and excess. In this sense elocution and pronunciation are not so much ancient rhetoric’s “principal partes” as its most problematic: even in ancient Athens and Rome, style remains stubbornly unassimilated to accounts of eloquence as civic discourse, retaining dangerous and enticing associations with the uncivilized beyond. Elyot allows that the attractions of eloquence are not necessarily identical to the imperatives of the common good: “divers men … will say,” he admits, “that the swetnesse that is contayned in eloquence … shulde utterly withdrawe the myndes of yonge men from the more necessary studie of the lawes of this realme” (55_v). He dismisses this suspicion rather glibly, first by urging that legal doctrine be made eloquent, recast “either in englisshe, latine, or good French, written in a more clene and elegant stile,” and second by insisting that greed and ambition guarantee that the law will always have its devotees (55_v–56_r), but it unsettles the sturdily civic-minded foundation of his pedagogical program, hinting at a potentially prodigal future for English eloquence.¹⁰ And indeed, as they proceed through invention, arrangement, and memory into the alien precincts of style, sixteenth-century rhetoricians find themselves promoting the vernacular in radically altered guise: not as the necessary and commodious instrument of social communion but as a medium of transfiguration and transport—most potently attractive when it is most conspicuously far-fetched.

“Neither Cesar, nor Brutus, Builded the Same”: England as Topos

Leonard Cox and Richard Sherry may have written the first English arts of rhetoric, but Thomas Wilson wrote the first art of English rhetoric: a work that takes for granted its interest and value as an account of the mother tongue and that establishes England as the necessary measure of eloquence in the vernacular. Cox justifies his vulgarization of classical rhetoric on the principle that “euery goode thynge, … the more commune that it is the better it is,” but to his mind commonness is all English has to recommend it: he assumes that an educated readership will greet his vernacular rhetoric as “a thyng that is very rude and skant worthe the lokynge on.”¹¹ For Wilson, by contrast, commonness is at the heart of “the orator’s profession,” which is fulfilled when he “speake[s] only of all such matters, as may largely be expounded … for all men to heare them”: what is intelligible to all Englishmen is thus neither rude nor scant but the very fullness of rhetorical decorum.¹² He therefore conjures for his 1553 Arte of Rhetorique a readership not of poor Latinists but “of 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,” he announces in his prologue to the revised and expanded edition of 1560 (Aiv_r). He dedicates both the 1553 and 1560 editions to his patron John Dudley, 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” (Aii_v). 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”—for men learn best, he concludes, by following “their neyghbours deuice” (Aiii_v).

The fancy that eloquence might be schooled by an Englishman’s “daylie talke” or patterned on one’s “neyghbours deuice” upends Elyot’s fantasy of the English home as a nursery for Latinity and issues a bracing challenge to Ascham’s conviction that the “trewe Paterne of Eloquence” must be sought not “in common taulke, but in priuate bookes.”¹³ Indeed, although for Ascham the imitation of foreign eloquence recommends itself as a more profitable, less perilous alternative to actual travel abroad, in Wilson’s view the two pursuits are dangerously kin. Having forsaken their mother country and mother tongue, he observes, “some farre iorneid ientlemen at their returne home, like as thei loue to goe in forraine apparel, so thei will pouder their talke with oversea language,” but no less foolish are those would-be eloquent speakers who “seeke 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 “if some of their mothers were aliue, they were not able to tell what they say.” The hybrid tongues that result from such excursions, whether literal or rhetorical, are invariably ludicrous and ineffective, “as if an Oratour that professeth to vtter his mind in plaine Latin, would needes speake Poetrie, and farre fetched colours of straunge antiquitie” (86_r). Actual foreign loan-words, Wilson implies, are merely the most obvious sign of linguistic corruption: the enticements of “straunge antiquitie”—excessive ornamentation, pseudo-archaisms, and pretentious classicisms—lure even educated speakers beyond the bounds of rhetorical community. “But thou saiest, the olde antiquitee doeth like thee best, because it is good, sobre, & modest,” he jibes. “Ah, liue man as thei did before thee, and speake thy mynde now, as menne do at this daie.” Instead of fretting over England’s infelicitous isolation or the distinctions between its speech and the language of classical authors, he urges readers to learn from the classics precisely the integrity of their own native speech: “[R]emember that, whiche Cesar saith, beware as long as thou liuest, of straunge woordes, as thou wouldest take hede and eschewe greate rockes in the Sea” (2_r).