Bvt as it hath bene alwayes reputed a great fault to vse figuratiue speaches foolishly and indiscretly --Puttenham
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Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of rhetoric. By: Hillman, David, Studies in English Literature (Rice), 00393657, Winter96, Vol. 36, Issue 1
Around the turn of the seventeenth century the English language saw a remarkable proliferation of words denoting the idea of separation: "discontinuity," "segment," "disjunct" and "disjunctive," "dissect," "analysis" and "analyse," "disparate," "distinctive," "distinguishable," "dividable" and "dividual," "discretive," "split," "separative" and "separator," "disunion," and "dichotomy," among others, are all cited by the OED as first occurring in the language between 1570 and 1610.[ 1] The surplus of terms manifested by this list is to some extent simply a part of the huge expansion of English vocabulary during this period; it may also be attributed to the radical epistemological changes taking place in Western Europe at the time. Ernst Cassirer has argued that "the fundamental drive of the age . . . is the impulse to clear delimitation and articulation, to distinction and individuation"; and Michel Foucault points to the turn of the seventeenth century as the period when the main "activity of the mind" ceased to "consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction, or secretly shared nature within them, but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities."[ 2] Such "discriminating," of course, holds the potential to be practiced with a more or less overt ideological intent. In what follows I want to examine some specific ideologically inflected uses of the term "discretion," a term that came to mean "separation or disjunction" only toward the last decade of the sixteenth century, and one that became during this period, to use V. N. Volosinov's phrase, "a little arena for the clash and crisscrossing of differently oriented social accents."[ 3]
The way in which this criss-crossing shaped the uses of the word "discretion" in early modern England is the subject of this essay.
(snip)
The term came into prominence in a wide range of texts and acquired a new range of meanings during the early modern period. According to the OED, the word had, prior to 1590, denoted personal 'judgement," "discernment," or "prudence," as well as juridical "power of disposal" (in addition to being an honorific title, in such phrases as "your high and wise discretion").[ 6] But early modern discourse saw a burgeoning of overlapping meanings in a variety of cultural spheres. These included personal attributes (tact, propriety of behavior, or secrecy--in explicit contrast to madness, impertinence, and rashness); a social classification (the separation of those who possess these attributes--the "discreet"--from those who do not, and of those who have reached the "age of discretion" from those who have not); the legal power to enforce this stratification (the authority or "discretion of the law"); and the ostensibly purely aesthetic separations of literary decorum (the discrezione or "discernment" of Italian neoclassical literary theory; the Indo-European base of the word--[*][s]ker, to cut--is in fact the same as that of "critic"). The Latin root of "discretion"--cernere, to sift out--was reunited with the word only at the end of the sixteenth century, when it again began to mean, quite simply, "separation"; and it is this meaning, separation as such, that underlies the potential of the word to be used, in all these diverse contexts, to ground a hierarchical ideology.[ 7] The word was almost invariably used in Elizabethan England as a means of constructing social, cultural, or aesthetic difference.[ 8]
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XI. -- ON THE PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE.
TO THE READER.
This Figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle SHAKSPEARE CUT,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With Nature, to OUT-DOO the life :
O could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His FACE ; the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass :
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.
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Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of rhetoric. By: Hillman, David, Studies in English Literature (Rice), 00393657, Winter96, Vol. 36, Issue 1
I want first to look at George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589), a text in which the word appears numerous times, most prominently in the third-to-last chapter of the book, entitled "What it is that generally makes our speach well pleasing and commendable, and of that which the Latines call Decorum."[ 14] The adverb "generally" (and compare Hoskyns's "generall figure of figures") points to the importance of the moment in the argument. It implies the universality of the rule Puttenham is trying to depict, while at the same time suggesting the vagueness or elusiveness of this rule. It is no less significant that Puttenham has left this discussion to so near the end of his book: as Puttenham undoubtedly knew, normative rhetorical theory dictated that in the organization of discourse the "generall," the "source of ordered and reasoned argument," was to be placed first in the disposition of discourse, the order then "descending" to the particular or "special."[ 15] Puttenham reverses the trajectory, "preposterously" putting the rule of "generalitie" (p. 269) after the plethora of examples that make up the main text of The Arte of English Poesie. If the tortured logic of this chapter is anything to go by, we might guess that he would have preferred to leave out this discussion entirely.
Puttenham uses a string of terms to signify the "Decorum" that is "the line and leuell for al good makers to do their busines by" (p. 268), the proliferation pointing, as Derek Attridge has suggested, to the elusiveness of the standard Puttenham is attempting to evoke: "good grace," "decencie," "seemelynesse," "comelynesse," "aptnesse," "proportion," "conformitie," "conueniencie," "decorum" (pp. 268-9).[ 16] It might be helpful here to point out an analogy between Puttenham's procedure and the procedure Michel Foucault adopts in his theorization of cultural practices. As his contemporary Michel de Certeau describes it, "Foucault offers a variety of synonyms, words that dance about and successively approach an impossible proper name: 'apparatuses' ('dispositifs'), 'instrumentalities,' 'techniques,' 'mechanisms,' 'machineries,' etc." Foucault, according to de Certeau, tries to create a discourse for a set of "rites, customs or reflexes, kinds of knowledge which are no longer (or not yet) articulated in discourse."[ 17] Puttenham tries (somewhat less successfully) to do the same for Elizabethan poetic practices. This, and the attempt to reduce a diverse set of practices to a totalizing (or "generall") theory, are precisely Puttenham's "difficultie," as he himself puts it:
But herein resteth the difficultie, to know what this good grace is, and wherein it consisteth, for peraduenture it be easier to conceaue then to expresse, we wil therfore examine it to the bottome and say: that euery thing which pleaseth the mind or sences, and the mind by the sences as by means instrumentall, doth it for some amiable point or qualitie that is in it, which draweth them to a good liking and contentment with their proper obiects . . . the mynde for the things that be his mentall obiectes hath his good graces and his bad, whereof th'one contents him wonderous well, th'other displeaseth him continually, no more nor no lesse then ye see the discordes of musicke do to a well tuned eare.
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Puttenham, George . The Arte of English Poesie
Of Ornament Poeticall.
As no doubt the good proportion of any thing doth greatly adorne and commend it and right so our late remembred proportions doe to our vulgar Poesie: so is there yet requisite to the perfection of this arte, another maner of exornation, which resteth in the fashioning of our makers language and stile, to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mynde as the eare of the hearers with a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, disguising it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed: neuerthelesse making it nothing the more vnseemely or misbecomming, but rather decenter and more agreable to any ciuill eare and vnderstanding. And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise neuer so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and ciuilitie haue ordained to couer their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselues more amiable in euery mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes & costly embroderies, then when they go in cloth or in any other plaine and simple apparell. Euen so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and colours, such as my conuey them somwhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary
speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must needes yeld it much more bewtie and commendation. This ornament we speake of is giuen to it by figures and figuratiue speaches, which be the flowers as it were and coulours that a Poet setteth vpon his language by arte, as the embroderer doth his stone and perle, or passements of gold vpon the stuffe of a Princely garment, or as th'excellent painter bestoweth the rich Orient coulours vpon his table of pourtraite: so neuerthelesse as if the same coulours in our arte of Poesie (as well as in those other mechanicall artes) be not well tempered, or not well layd, or be vsed in excesse, or neuer so litle disordered or misplaced, they not onely giue it no maner of grace at all, but rather do disfigure the stuffe and spill the whole workmanship taking away all bewtie and good liking from it, no lesse then if the crimson tainte, which should be laid vpon a Ladies lips, or right in the center of her cheekes should by some ouersight or mishap be applied to her forhead or chinne, it would make (ye would say) but a very ridiculous bewtie, wherfore the chief prayse and cunning of our Poet is in the discreet vsing of his figures, as the skilfull painters is in the good conueyance of his coulours and shadowing traits of his pensill, with a delectable varietie, by all measure and iust proportion, and in places most aptly to be bestowed.
How our writing and speaches publike ought to be figuratiue, and if they be not doe greatly disgrace the cause and purpose of the speaker and writer.
Bvt as it hath bene alwayes reputed a great fault to vse figuratiue speaches FOOLISHLY and INDISCRETLY, so is it esteemed no lesse an imperfection in mans vtterance, to haue none vse of figure at all,
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Sidney, Defence of Poesie
But I have lavished out too many words of this Play matter; I do it, because as they are excelling parts of Poesie, so isthere none so much used in England, and none can be more pitifully abused: which like an unmannerly daughter, shewing a bad education, causeth her mother Poesies honestie to be called in question. Other sort of Poetrie, almost have we none, but that Lyricall kind of Songs and Sonets; which Lord, if he gave us so good mindes, how well it might be employed, and with how heavenly fruites, both private and publike, in singing the praises of the immortall bewtie, the immortall goodnes of that God, who giveth us hands to write, and wits to conceive: of which we might wel want words, but never matter, of which we could turne our eyes to nothing, but we should ever have new budding occassions. But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a mistresse, would never perswade mee they were in love: so coldly they applie firie speeches, as men that had rather redde lovers writings, and so caught up certaine swelling Phrases, which hang togither like a man that once tolde me the winde was at Northwest and by South, because he would be sure to name winds inough, then that in truth they feele those passions, which easily as I thinke, may be bewraied by that same forciblenesse or Energia, (as the Greeks call it of the writer). But let this be a sufficient, though short note, that we misse the right use of the material point of Poesie. Now for the outside of it, which is words, or (as I may tearme it) Diction, it is even well worse: so is it that hony-flowing Matrone Eloquence, apparrelled, or rather disguised, in a Courtisanlike painted affectation. One time with so farre fet words, that many seeme monsters, but must seeme straungers to anie poore Englishman: an other time with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary: an other time with figures and flowers, extreemely winter-starved. But I would this fault were onely peculiar to Versefiers, and had not as large possession among Prose- Printers: and which is to be mervailed among many Schollers, & which is to be pitied among some Preachers. Truly I could wish, if at I might be so bold to wish, in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent Imitators of Tully & Demosthenes, most worthie to be imitated, did not so much keepe Nizolian paper bookes{169}, of their figures and phrase, as by attentive translation, as it were, devoure them whole, and make them wholly theirs. For now they cast Sugar and spice uppon everie dish that is served to the table: like those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but they will thrust Jewels throughtheir nose and lippes, because they will be sure to be fine.
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with neither DECENCIE nor DISCRETION
Sidney, Defence of Poesie
But besides these grosse absurdities, howe all their Playes bee neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kinges and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by head and shoulders to play a part in majesticall matters, with neither DECENCIE nor DISCRETION: so as neither the admiration and Commiseration, nor the the right sportfulnesse is by their mongrell Tragicomedie obtained. I know Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment: and I knowe the Auncients have one or two examples of Tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we marke them well, wee shall finde that they never or verie daintily matche horne Pipes and Funeralls. So falleth it out, that having indeed no right Comedie in that Comicall part of our Tragidie, wee have nothing but scurrilitie unwoorthie of anie chaste eares, or some extreame shewe of doltishnesse, indeede fit to lift up a loude laughter and nothing else: where the whole tract of a Comedie should bee full of delight, as the Tragidie should bee still maintained in a well raised admiration.
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Hamlet, the Gravedigger, and Indecorous Decorum
Maurice Hunt
...Hamlet's and Horatio's reactions to the gravedigger's little song are revealing. Hamlet is a true Sidneyan in his insistence upon DECORUM. "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, the 'a sings at gravemaking?" Gravediggers, in Hamlet's opinion, should be consistently grave, especially when they are about their mystery. Hornpipes and funerals should not be mixed in Hamlet's tragic world. His neoclassical attitude perhaps derives from his profound disappointment over his mother's unseemly and hasty remarriage. He has heard Clausius, with oily art, exclaim:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife:
It was the marriage mirth disturbing the solemnity of his father's funeral that partly alienated Hamlet and helped solidify his philosophy of decorum, which is succinctly phrased in his advice to the Player about suiting "the action to the word, the word to the action". Hearing the gravedigger happily sing of love in the midst of death, Hamlet assumes that the Clown, like Claudius, has "no feeling of his business." The word "feeling" in this context is ironic. Hamlet of course means "Has this fellow no proper understanding of his somber role in society?" The gravedigger does have a "feeling" here - an affection for a beloved that Hamlet overlooks in his judgment. Like Sir Philip Sidney, Hamlet will not admit the tragicomic view of life.
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Enter Hamlet and three of the Players.
* Hamlet. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our
players do, I had as live the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do
1885
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 your 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 cars of the groundlings, who
(for the most part) are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb
shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp'd for
o'erdoing
Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.
* First Player. I warrant your honour. 1895
* Hamlet. 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. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though
it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the JUDICIOUS
GRIEVE; *the censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others*. O, there be players that I
have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to
speak it profanely), that, neither having the accent of
Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's
journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated
humanity so abominably.
* First Player. I hope we have reform'd that indifferently with
us, sir.
* Hamlet. O, REFORM it altogether! And let those that play your
clowns
speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them
that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren
spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered. That's villanous
and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go
make you ready.
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And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie, [ 15 ]
That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.
(Defacement/disfigurement of Earl of Oxford prefigures 'defacement/decapitation' of
King Charles)
Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary culture, 1649-1689
By Steven N. Zwicker
…In (Eikon Basilike) the king compounds social and aesthetic
elevation through style; Charles’s poise and moderation as a perfect
gentleman are echoed in the balance and elevation of his manner. The
verbal art of the Eikon Basilike allows prose to make the man: the
rhetoric of moderation and the balance of carefully weighted periods
argue refinement of manner, and more purposefully, they express the
king’s deliberative intelligence. Charles’s moderation is a bulwark
against faction and partiality (EB, 3), his prose a hedge against
intolerance, zeal and popular heats. More, however, was at stake; for
social rebellion and political betrayal – the “exquisite methods of
cunning and cruelty” (EB, 131) – are also conceived as cultural
barbarism. The destruction of monarchy spelled the decay of learning
and the demise of the verbal and visual arts. Milton countered the
politics of such an argument by deploring the foolish imagery, the
aesthetic confusions, and the plagiaries of the king’s book. But the
aesthetic case was too important to Milton’s work in Eikonoklastes for
him to rely solely on abuse. The dialectic that he proposes is not
between sublime and trivial are but between truth and lies, reason and
deceit. Milton would tear the veil from the king’s shows and pretenses
as he “speaks home the plain truth” (E, 341). The political suspicion
of art has, of course, ancient roots, but it is given an urgent
contemporary turn in Eikonoklastes because of the associations between
courtliness and poetry and because of the reception of the king’s book
in the months following his execution. The association of visual
imagery with superstition was long-standing in a country where
religious reform had more than once inspired iconoclastic violence (E,
343). Yet despite popular iconoclasm this was a nation, Keith Thomas
reminds us, where segments of the populace were still addicted to such
images and to the nostalgic lore associated with the power of images.
The attack on the theatre had been given recent legislative authority;
but the generic arguments that Milton launched against the Eikon
Basilike, his ridicule of the impropriety of lyric and romance forms,
and the charge of aesthetic disproportion and triviality lend a
particular urgency to his work as literary critic. Just as the king
denounces oppositional language by dismissing it as railing and
cursing, and condemns nonconformity for the modes of its piety – its
“affectations, emptiness, impertinency, rudeness, confusions,
flatness, levity, obscurity, vain and ridiculous repetitions” (EB, 97)
– so Milton has urgent work to perform as literary critic in
Eikonoklastes.
That work has two main foundations: the genres, literary sources,
and decorum of the king’s book, and its literary integrity. In
Milton’s exposition of these issues, he frequently mixes questions of
decorum and originality, but I want to begin with the more purely
aesthetic matters that Milton trails before his reader in the preface.
Here he first raises the matter of the book’s patchwork mixture of
genres and devices when he glosses the aim of those who published the
Eikon Basilike. By those devices they intended “stirring up the people
to bring him that honour, that affection, and by consequence, that
revenge to his dead Corps, which hee himself living could never gain
to his Person” (E, 342). The “conceited portraiture” (E, 342) of the
frontispiece and the Latin motto that closes the book are devices
intended to “befool the people” (E, 343) and transform the king into a
martyr and saint. They reveal, however, not the king’s saintliness but
the “loose and negligent curiosity of those who took upon them to
adorn the setting out of this Book, “ loose and negligent because
“quaint Emblems” and “devices begg’d from …some Twelf-nights
entertainment at Whitehall” are inappropriate materials with which “to
make a Saint or Martyr” of the king (E, 343) The pagan and polluted
sources of such materials, their trivial and secular character, the
failure of DISCRETION and DECORUM in their display – the self-
conscious affecting of “a civil kinde of Idolatry” (E,343) – argue
generic and aesthetic indiscretion as moral corruption, variations on
the “Court-fucus” with which the king “washes over…the worst and
foulest of his actions” (E, 247). It was surely Milton’s conviction
that politics, aesthetics and morals are always bound together, it was
also, at least in part, to his argumentative advantage in
Eikonoklastes to make that case. He had to dispute the king’s handling
of history and politics, but it was aesthetics to which Milton brought
his most familiar, his most intimate, and in some ways his most
authoritative hand. Aesthetics offered him not only familiar territory
but a way to strike at moral probity and undermine the powerful
affective charge that the Eikon Basilike so clearly carried. Decorum
and decency as aesthetic matters allowed Milton to ridicule Anglican
claims to spiritual propriety and decorum; but most important, the
issue of aesthetic propriety allowed his repeatedly to locate the
king’s book within those damaging environs of the aesthetic, the
realms of fancy and fiction.
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Samuel Daniel, Cleopatra dedication to Mary Herbert
...Now when so many pennes (like SPEARES) are charg'd,
To chace away this Tyrant of the North:
GROSS BARBARISM, whose power growne far inlarg'd.,
*Was lately by thy valiant Brothers WORTH,
First found, encountred, and provoked FORTH...
Wherby great Sydney & our Spencer might,
With those Po-fingers being equaled,
Enchaunt the world with such a sweet delight,
That theyr eternall songs (for ever read,)
May shew what great Eliza's raigne hath bred.
What musique in the kingdome of her peace.
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Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the abuse of rhetoric. By: Hillman, David, Studies in English Literature (Rice), 00393657, Winter96, Vol. 36, Issue 1
A similar transformation occurs toward the end of Hamlet, another play heavily involved in the problem of the contested nature of a reality caught between objective and subjective structures of thought. The play, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, heavily exploits the language of rhetorical ordering; Parker contrasts the rhetorical "disposition"--the elaborately ordered speeches of Claudius and his court--with Hamlet's language of mad puns and "impertinent" comments.[ 39] Thus, Claudius can evoke "discretion" as a justification for the brevity of the mourning for Old Hamlet--a fine instance, this, of the abusive potential of the term:
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him.
(I.ii.5-6)
The clash with "nature" reveals the artificiality of Claudius's "discretion," its highly constructed quality. The limitations of the term are hinted at, too, by Polonius's "it is common for the younger sort / To lack discretion" (II.i.113-4) in his (mistaken) ascription of Hamlet's madness to his love for Ophelia. Hamlet's understanding of the term seems to move in a trajectory from something like an acceptance of such standards to a perception of just how constructed, and worthless, they may be. His advice to the players closely follows the precepts of neoclassical representational theory, as he instructs them to "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 any thing so o'erdone 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" (III.ii.16-22). Hamlet demands an adherence to a Sidneian conception of mimesis; in his formulation, however, "discretion" and "nature" are hardly opposed. And Claudius's absolute, abstract use of the former term is further modified by Hamlet's stress on "your own discretion." The term is still used, though, to "suit"--to create a hard-to-define correspondence--between language and action. (The Merchant of Venice similarly ties the two words: "O dear discretion, how his words are suited!" [III.v. 65].) Hamlet's own performance as an actor, in the role of Aeneas, is praised by Polonius for its "good accent and good discretion" (II.ii.466-7); this is still the performance of the controlled Prince, "the glass of fashion" (III.i.153) who can "hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature."
As Hamlet's "antic disposition" (I.v.172) reveals, however, he himself does not always abide by his own dramatic precepts. As Robert Weimann has shown, "there is over and beyond this brief performance an extended dimension of antic role-playing which is only partially consonant with the privileged representativity (and neoclassical verisimilitude) of his own mimetic theory."[ 40] Through this transformation, it seems to me, we may discern a rejection of the very possibility of "a perfit discretion." Hamlet's highly subjective internal world cannot begin to be comprehended by the ordered and prescribed social and rhetorical structures of the Danish court. With his change from "perfit" courtier to antic prince comes a new apprehension of the uses of "indiscretion." Hamlet's earlier rejection of "any thing so o'erdone" accords ill with his praise of "rashness" in the final scene of the play (V.ii.6-9), just before his turn to "a divinity that shapes our ends" (V.ii.10). What Hamlet eventually learns is to embrace such things "o'erdone": "let us know," he says to Horatio, "Our indiscretion sometime serves us well" (V.ii.7-8).[ 41]
