Droeshout as Figure. Rhetorical Disfigurement through Vices/Deformities of Style - A Disarticulate/Disjoined Shakespeare:
Disarticulating Fantasies: Figures of Speech, Vices, and
the Blazon in Renaissance English Rhetoric
Grant Williams
...In his section on ornament, Puttenham suggests the
process by which figures permit the subject to gain an illusory ascendancy over
the self: they equip the writer or speaker with the means to burnish and
fashion his language into a “style” (119), which amounts to nothing less than
“the image of man [mentus character] for man is but his mind” (124). This
argument about style being the image of the speaker/writer is a popular topos
in Renaissance writing and finds its most lucid expression in Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, a text, like Puttenham’s, which conjoins rhetoric with poetry.
Quoting in the margin Vives’s terse expression “Oratio imago animi,” that is,
“speech is the image of the soul,” Jonson asserts,
No glasse renders a mans forme or
likeness, so true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man: and as we
consider feature, and composition in a man; so words in Language: in the
greatness, aptnesse, sound, structure, and HARMONY of it. (78)
The implications of this Renaissance
topos are obvious: since style is the self, the instruments for shaping,
controlling and beautifying that style – the figures – empower the individual
to fashion his own identity.
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Or have it fashioned for him:
Or have it fashioned for him:
To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face ; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face ; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
********************************
Seneca
Letter 114. On style as a mirror of character
CXIV. On Style as a Mirror of Character1. You have been asking me why, during certain periods, a degenerate style of speech comes to the fore, and how it is that men's wits have gone downhill into certain vices – in such a way that exposition at one time has taken on a kind of puffed-up strength, and at another has become mincing and modulated like the music of a concert piece. You wonder why sometimes bold ideas – bolder than one could believe – have been held in favour, and why at other times one meets with phrases that are disconnected and full of innuendo, into which one must read more meaning than was intended to meet the ear. Or why there have been epochs which maintained the right to a shameless use of metaphor. For answer, here is a phrase which you are wont to notice in the popular speech – one which the Greeks have made into a proverb: "Man's speech is just like his life."[1] 2. Exactly as each individual man's actions seem to speak, so people's style of speaking often reproduces the general character of the time, if the morale of the public has relaxed and has given itself over to effeminacy. Wantonness in speech is proof of public luxury, if it is popular and fashionable, and not confined to one or two individual instances. 3. A man's ability[2] cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be wholesome, well-ordered, serious, and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is also contaminated. Do you not see that if a man's soul has become sluggish, his limbs drag and his feet move indolently? If it is womanish, that one can detect the effeminacy by his very gait? That a keen and confident soul quickens the step? That madness in the soul, or anger (which resembles madness), hastens our bodily movements from walking to rushing?
Letter 114. On style as a mirror of character
CXIV. On Style as a Mirror of Character1. You have been asking me why, during certain periods, a degenerate style of speech comes to the fore, and how it is that men's wits have gone downhill into certain vices – in such a way that exposition at one time has taken on a kind of puffed-up strength, and at another has become mincing and modulated like the music of a concert piece. You wonder why sometimes bold ideas – bolder than one could believe – have been held in favour, and why at other times one meets with phrases that are disconnected and full of innuendo, into which one must read more meaning than was intended to meet the ear. Or why there have been epochs which maintained the right to a shameless use of metaphor. For answer, here is a phrase which you are wont to notice in the popular speech – one which the Greeks have made into a proverb: "Man's speech is just like his life."[1] 2. Exactly as each individual man's actions seem to speak, so people's style of speaking often reproduces the general character of the time, if the morale of the public has relaxed and has given itself over to effeminacy. Wantonness in speech is proof of public luxury, if it is popular and fashionable, and not confined to one or two individual instances. 3. A man's ability[2] cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be wholesome, well-ordered, serious, and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is also contaminated. Do you not see that if a man's soul has become sluggish, his limbs drag and his feet move indolently? If it is womanish, that one can detect the effeminacy by his very gait? That a keen and confident soul quickens the step? That madness in the soul, or anger (which resembles madness), hastens our bodily movements from walking to rushing?
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The Magnetick Lady - Jonson
Pro. The Boy is
too hard for you. Brother Damplay,
best mark the Play, and let him alone.
Dam. I care not for marking the Play: I'll damn it,
talk, and do that I come for. I will not have Gentle-
men lose their Privilege, nor I my self my Prerogative,
for ne'er an over-grown or superannuated Poet of 'em
all. He shall not give me the Law: I will censure,
and be witty, and take my Tabacco, and enjoy my
Magna Charta of Reprehension, as my Predecessors have
done before me.
Boy. Even to licence, and absurdity.
best mark the Play, and let him alone.
Dam. I care not for marking the Play: I'll damn it,
talk, and do that I come for. I will not have Gentle-
men lose their Privilege, nor I my self my Prerogative,
for ne'er an over-grown or superannuated Poet of 'em
all. He shall not give me the Law: I will censure,
and be witty, and take my Tabacco, and enjoy my
Magna Charta of Reprehension, as my Predecessors have
done before me.
Boy. Even to licence, and absurdity.
********************************
Absurd - Musically, inharmonious, jarring,
out-of-tune; adaptation of Latin surdus,
inharmonious, tasteless, foolish, [and]
surdus, deaf, inaudible, insufferable to the ear. also dull, silent, mute
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Anagrammata in Nomina Illustrissimorum Heroum (1603) By Francis Davison
********************************
Anagrammata in Nomina Illustrissimorum Heroum (1603) By Francis Davison
EDWARD VERE by an anagram AURE SURDUS VIDEO (“DEAF Dull (?) IN MY
EAR, I SEE”)
1350-1400;
Middle English armonye < Middle French < Latin harmonia < Greek
harmonía joint, framework, agreement, harmony, akin to hárma chariot, harmós
joint, ararískein to join together
**********************************
Out of joint Figure:
Notes to Horace, Art of Poetry:
The word PRODIGIALITER apparently refers to that fictitious monster, under which the poet allusively shadows out the idea of absurd and inconsistent composition. The application, however, differs in this, that, whereas the monster, there painted, was intended to expose the extravagance of putting together incongruous parts, without any reference to a whole, this prodigy is designed to characterize a whole, but deformed by the ill-judged position of its parts. The former is like a monster, whose several members as of right belonging to different animals, could by no disposition be made to constitute one consistent animal. The other, like a landscape which hath no objects absolutely irrelative, or irreducible to a whole, but which a wrong position of the parts only renders prodigious. Send the boar to the woods, and the dolphin to the waves; and the painter might show them both on the same canvas.
Each is a violation of the law of unity, and a real monster: the one, because it contains an assemblage of natural incoherent parts; the other, because its parts, though in themselves coherent, are misplaced and disjointed.
The word PRODIGIALITER apparently refers to that fictitious monster, under which the poet allusively shadows out the idea of absurd and inconsistent composition. The application, however, differs in this, that, whereas the monster, there painted, was intended to expose the extravagance of putting together incongruous parts, without any reference to a whole, this prodigy is designed to characterize a whole, but deformed by the ill-judged position of its parts. The former is like a monster, whose several members as of right belonging to different animals, could by no disposition be made to constitute one consistent animal. The other, like a landscape which hath no objects absolutely irrelative, or irreducible to a whole, but which a wrong position of the parts only renders prodigious. Send the boar to the woods, and the dolphin to the waves; and the painter might show them both on the same canvas.
Each is a violation of the law of unity, and a real monster: the one, because it contains an assemblage of natural incoherent parts; the other, because its parts, though in themselves coherent, are misplaced and disjointed.
***********************************
Disarticulating Fantasies: Figures of Speech, Vices, and
the Blazon in Renaissance English Rhetoric
Grant Williams
In English Renaissance rhetoric
manuals, the figure personifies language through a devious imaginary process. A
common Renaissance appellation for figure, ornament, signals rhetorics sartorial capacity to dress language
up as a desirable body. English rhetoricians regularly conceptualize the figure
in terms of an ornament beautifying clothing; for example, in Henry Peacham,
figures garnish speech just as perarls adorn “a gorfious Garment “ (f, A#); and
in George Puttenham, the poet is like an embroiderer who sets a “stone and
perle” or “passement of gold” upon “a Princely garment: (115). According to
this logic, ornaments are inessential embellishments by which an already
precious garment acquires an aesthetic enhancement, without threatening the
garment’s originary autonomy. Yet, upon further inspection, the ornaments
adorning these passages on ornaments betray their foundational, rather than
subordinate, relationship to the ornamented speech. It is precisely the
ornamented garement that permits speech to have an identity above and beyond
the ornament.(…)The speech as a desirable object is likewise the imaginary
effect of the figure as ornament.
However, ornament, congruent with
Renaissance usage, may signify not only the embellishment on the garment but
also the garment itself. For example, in Thomas Wilson, figures dress the
actual speech in appropriate or inappropriate clothes (195). The slippage from
“ornament on the clothing” to “ornament as clothing” suggests once more the
figure’s constitutive function in conceptualizing speech. The figure can become
anything the speech is, simply because the speech has been nothing but a figure.
Language folded back onto itself, the sartorial figure quite literally echoes a famous fashion statement: “the
clothes make the man.” By dressing up in fancy attire, the speech becomes a
desirable body.
(snip)
In the Renaissance discourse of
rhetoric, the figure involves itself in identity formation in two fundamental
ways: it may reflect or project the writer/reader’s ego. With respect to an
egocentric reflection, figures treat language as a site where the subject can
master himself. Attempts at mastering language correspond to attempts at
self-mastery, since “English rhetoricians are profoundly cognizant of the fact
that language constitutes the domain of identity, although, as mentioned, they
tend to domesticate the symbolic order, failing to move beyond the imaginary
dialectic of self and other. In his section on ornament, Puttenham suggests the
process by which figures permit the subject to gain an illusory ascendancy over
the self: they equip the writer or speaker with the means to burnish and
fashion his language into a “style” (119), which amounts to nothing less than
“the image of man [mentus character] for man is but his mind” (124). This
argument about style being the image of the speaker/writer is a popular topos
in Renaissance writing and finds its most lucid expression in Jonson’s Timber
or Discoveries, a text, like Puttenham’s , which conjoins rhetoric with poetry.
Quoting in the margin Vives’s terse expression “Oratio imago animi,” that is,
“speech is the image of the soul,” Jonson asserts,
No glasse renders a mans forme or
likeness, so true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man: and as we
consider feature, and composition in a man; so words in Language: in the
greatness, aptnesse, sound, structure, and harmony of it. (78)
The implications of this Renaissance
topos are obvious: since style is the self, the instruments for shaping,
controlling and beautifying that style – the figures – empower the individual
to fashion his own identity.
***********************************
This Shadow is renowned
Shakespear's? Soule of th' age
The applause? Delight? The wonder of the Stage.
Nature her selfe, was proud of his designs
And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines,
The learned will confess his works as such
As neither man, nor Muse can praise to much
For ever live thy fame, the world to tell,
Thy like, no age, shall ever paralell (1641 Folio)
The applause? Delight? The wonder of the Stage.
Nature her selfe, was proud of his designs
And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines,
The learned will confess his works as such
As neither man, nor Muse can praise to much
For ever live thy fame, the world to tell,
Thy like, no age, shall ever paralell (1641 Folio)
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Face/Facade
Facade is thought to have
come to English from the Vulgar Latin facia, meaning “face.” Along the
way it passed through both Italian, as faccia, and French, as _façade.
The earliest meaning of the word in English was in reference to the front
portion of a building, it’s “face,” so to speak (and face itself is
sometimes used to describe this part of a structure as well). Somewhere along
the way _ facade_ took on a figurative sense, referring to a way of behaving or
appearing that gives other people a false idea of your true feelings or
situation. This is similar the figurative use of veneer, which
originally had the simple meaning of a thin layer of wood that was used to
cover something, and now may also refer to a sort of deceptive behavior that
masks one’s actual feelings (as in, “he had a thin veneer of politeness”).
Origin and Etymology of face
Middle
English, from Anglo-French, from Vulgar Latin *facia, from Latin facies
make, form, face, from facere to
make, do — more at do
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Disarticulating Fantasies: Figures of Speech, Vices, and
the Blazon in Renaissance English Rhetoric
Grant Williams
...As
with all imaginary constructions, the fantasy engineered by figures proves
fascinating
less for those moments when it succeeds in seducing subjects than
for
those moments when it decomposes, disorienting and unsettling subjectiv-
ity.
Because figures, far from being repressed in Renaissance writing, play a
prominent
role in aestheticizing language, scholars informed by poststructuralism
should
not confuse them with unconscious structures, but consider them as mecha-
nisms
of repression. Consequently, when such mechanisms do not work, fantasy
fails
to crystallize in language, forbidding any (mis)recognition of a unified de-
sire.
What then decomposes fantasy, constituting the return of the repressed within
Renaissance
writing? Anxieties over the breakdown of style center on a group
of
figures excluded from rhetoric proper, figures that on their own comprise a
heterological
rhetoric. The voiding of heterological rhetoric systematically oc-
curs
in Quintilian's Institutes, which significantly influenced English rhetori-
cians.
Before discussing ornament, Quintilian announces, "I must first touch
upon
its opposite, since the first of all virtues is the avoidance of faults".
These
opposing faults are the vices: the vitiated figures. In order to warn stu-
dents,
Quntilian enumerates and defines the vices as though he were surveying a
vast,
alternative oratorical field. Indeed, he refers students to an entire work he
has
written on the malaise: De causis corruptae eloquentia-now lost. Although
the
vices are purged from rhetoric, they still haunt the authorized figures, be-
cause
style, susceptible to corruption in the same number of ways as it may be
adorned, may confound the two types: "where ornament is concerned,
vice
and virtue are never far apart." At once repudiating and acknowledge-
ing
a heterological rhetoric, Sherry, Puttenham, and Peacham reserve separate
sections
for the vices in their treatises too.' Though Sherry and Peacham pardon
their
sparing use in poetry, both deem vices insufferable in prose or oratory;
Puttenham,
taking a slightly less generous view, warns, "all which partes are
generally
to be banished out of every language, unless it may appeare that the
maker
or Poet do it for the nonce". Officially abjected from rhetorical
practice
yet always threatening to return to speech and writing, the vices are the
unconscious
correlatives to the familiar figures.
Disarticulate
(1830) first use – synonym disjoint
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De Shakespeare nostrat. I remember, the Players have
often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing,
(whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene,
would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent
speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who
choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most
faulted. And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov'd the man, and doe
honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was
(indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent
Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: *wherein hee flow'd with
that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd*:
Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his
owne power; *would the rule of it had beene so too*. Many times hee fell
into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the
person of Cæsar, one speaking to him; Cæsar thou dost me wrong. Hee
replyed: Cæsar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like;
which were ridiculous. *But hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues*.
There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned.
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Letter 114. On style as a mirror of character
CXIV. On Style as a Mirror of Character
Letter 114. On style as a mirror of character
CXIV. On Style as a Mirror of Character
...Just as luxurious banquets and
elaborate dress are indications of disease in the state, similarly a lax style,
if it be popular, shows that the mind (which is the source of the word) has
lost its balance. Indeed you ought not to wonder that corrupt speech is
welcomed not merely by the more squalid mob but also by our more cultured
throng; for it is only in their dress and not in their judgments that they
differ. You may rather wonder that not only the effects of vices, but even
vices themselves, meet with approval. For it has ever been thus: no man's
ability has ever been approved without something being pardoned. Show me any
man, however famous; I can tell you what it was that his age forgave in him,
and what it was that his age purposely overlooked. I can show you many men
whose vices have caused them no harm, and not a few who have been even helped
by these vices. Yes, I will show you persons of the highest reputation, set up
as models for our admiration; and yet if you seek to correct their errors, you
destroy them; for vices are so intertwined with virtues that they drag the
virtues along with them. Moreover, style has no fixed laws; it is changed
by the usage of the people, never the same for any length of time. Many orators
hark back to earlier epochs for their vocabulary, speaking in the language of
the Twelve Tables. Gracchus, Crassus, and Curio, in their eyes, are too
refined and too modern; so back to Appius and Coruncanius! Conversely,
certain men, in their endeavour to maintain nothing but well-worn and common
usages, fall into a humdrum style. These two classes, each in its own way,
are degenerate; and it is no less degenerate to use no words except those which
are conspicuous, high-sounding, and poetical, avoiding what is familiar and in
ordinary usage. One is, I believe, as faulty as the other: the one class are
unreasonably elaborate, the other are unreasonably negligent; the former
depilate the leg, the latter not even the armpit.
(snip)
17. Some individual makes these
vices fashionable – some person who controls the eloquence of the day; the rest
follow his lead and communicate the habit to each other. Thus when Sallust[15]
was in his glory, phrases were lopped off, words came to a close unexpectedly,
and obscure conciseness was equivalent to elegance.
[His art doth give the fashion - Jonson on Shakespeare]
**************************************
Ruling/Restraining
Shakespeare's Quill:
From 'To the Deceased Author of these Poems' (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
... For thou to Nature had'st JOYN’D Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
From 'To the Deceased Author of these Poems' (William Cartwright)
by Jasper Mayne
... For thou to Nature had'st JOYN’D Art, and skill.
In Thee Ben Johnson still HELD SHAKESPEARE'S QUILL:
A QUILL, RUL'D by sharp Judgement, and such Laws,
As a well studied Mind, and Reason draws.
Thy Lamp was cherish'd with suppolied of Oyle,
Fetch'd from the Romane and the Graecian soyle. (snip)
************************************
Shakespeare's Open and Free Nature
licentiosus - full of freedom
liberal (adj.)
mid-14c., "generous," also, late 14c.,
"selfless; noble, nobly born; abundant," and, early 15c., in a bad
sense "extravagant, unrestrained," from Old French liberal "befitting
free men, noble, generous, willing, zealous" (12c.), from Latin liberalis "noble,
gracious, munificent, generous," literally "of freedom, pertaining to
or befitting a free man," from liber "free,
unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious," from PIE *leudh-ero-,
probably originally "belonging to the people" (though the precise
semantic development is obscure; compare frank (adj.)),
and a suffixed form of the base *leudh- "people"
(cognates: Old Church Slavonic ljudu, Lithuanianliaudis, Old
English leod, German Leute "nation,
people;" Old High German liut "person,
people").
With the meaning "free from restraint in speech or action," liberal was used 16c.-17c. as a term of reproach. It revived in a positive sense in the Enlightenment, with a meaning "free from prejudice, tolerant," which emerged 1776-88.
With the meaning "free from restraint in speech or action," liberal was used 16c.-17c. as a term of reproach. It revived in a positive sense in the Enlightenment, with a meaning "free from prejudice, tolerant," which emerged 1776-88.
**************************************
Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries
No glasse renders a mans forme or
likeness, so true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man: and as we
consider feature, and composition in a man; so words in Language: in the
greatness, aptnesse, sound, structure, and harmony of it. (78)
*************************************
Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina,
Masculo, Grazia
Fredrika H. Jacobs
Non so che, that indefinable something associated with aesthetic grace (grazia) and charming elegance (leggiadria), was the acknowledged essence of love and beauty. In I libri della famiglia Alberti describes non so che as a "certain something... which attracts men and makes them love one person more than another." Many later critics and theorists, including Lodovico Dolce, agreed. As Cropper, Sohm and other scholars have noted, Dolce's use of non so che may be understood as the ineffable beauty of Petrarch's Laura. Indeed, the indeterminate and unbounded nature of sensible beauty that is part and parcel of non so che is implicit in the term vaghezza, which is related to vagare, meaning to wander or move about without a specific destination. Equicola captures the essence of the allusive indeterminacy in his discussion of the visual apprehension of grazia.
He begins by repeating the often noted observation that perfect beauty cannot be found in one place: "la singular grazia in una non ritrovarse." It is scattered and, therefore, must be collected and combined or reconstituted.
(snip)
Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverst parts. Danti explained the preferred compositional method advocated by Renaissance writers. Seeking the assistance of nature, the artist should "make use of various men, in each of whom some particular beauty is to be seen. And having taken this and that from this and from that man, they have composed their figures with more perfection than is possible in [nature].
Fredrika H. Jacobs
Non so che, that indefinable something associated with aesthetic grace (grazia) and charming elegance (leggiadria), was the acknowledged essence of love and beauty. In I libri della famiglia Alberti describes non so che as a "certain something... which attracts men and makes them love one person more than another." Many later critics and theorists, including Lodovico Dolce, agreed. As Cropper, Sohm and other scholars have noted, Dolce's use of non so che may be understood as the ineffable beauty of Petrarch's Laura. Indeed, the indeterminate and unbounded nature of sensible beauty that is part and parcel of non so che is implicit in the term vaghezza, which is related to vagare, meaning to wander or move about without a specific destination. Equicola captures the essence of the allusive indeterminacy in his discussion of the visual apprehension of grazia.
He begins by repeating the often noted observation that perfect beauty cannot be found in one place: "la singular grazia in una non ritrovarse." It is scattered and, therefore, must be collected and combined or reconstituted.
(snip)
Because la perfetta bellezza cannot be found in one place, a man of total perfection ("uomo in tutta perfezzione") is a composite whole made of diverst parts. Danti explained the preferred compositional method advocated by Renaissance writers. Seeking the assistance of nature, the artist should "make use of various men, in each of whom some particular beauty is to be seen. And having taken this and that from this and from that man, they have composed their figures with more perfection than is possible in [nature].
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‘Master of Courtship’ Edward De Vere - Intro, Castiglione's Courtier:
For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the FIGURE and MODEL of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although NATURE herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet THE MANNERS OF MEN exceed in dignity that with which NATURE has endowed them; and he who SURPASSES others has here SURPASSED himself and has even OUT-DONE nature, which by no one has ever been SURPASSED.
For what more difficult, more noble, or more magnificent task has anyone ever undertaken than our author Castiglione, who has drawn for us the FIGURE and MODEL of a courtier, a work to which nothing can be added, in which there is no redundant word, a portrait which we shall recognize as that of a highest and most perfect type of man. And so, although NATURE herself has made nothing perfect in every detail, yet THE MANNERS OF MEN exceed in dignity that with which NATURE has endowed them; and he who SURPASSES others has here SURPASSED himself and has even OUT-DONE nature, which by no one has ever been SURPASSED.
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Greville, An Inquisition vpon Fame and Honour.
Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,
Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,
Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,
By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,
Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,
(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things.
Who worship Fame, commit Idolatry,
Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,
Forme, but reforme not, meer hypocrisie,
By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth,
Which must, as blossomes, fade ere true fruit springs,
(Like voice, and eccho) ioyn'd; yet diuers things.
That I not MIX thee so, my brain excuses:
(see Speculum Tuscanismi for Oxford's 'bad body' - Harvey
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Shakespeare - Sonnet 121
Style and Gender in Public Performance
Amy Richlin
in Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature
(ed. William J Dominik)
If one major source of anxiety about style was the danger of effeminacy, another - and related - source was the danger of resembling an actor. The sexuality of actors was itself suspect and actors (partly on that account) suffered a diminished status as infames - much like men marked as MOLLES. William Fitzgerald has suggested that poetry, as a public performance, might have been seen as itself akin to acting, hence tending to cast a shadow on the sexual integrity of poets. Certainly this was the case for oratory; the handbooks are full of insistent disclaimers explaining how orators, though as talented as actors, though very like actors, are really not like actors at all.
(snip)
Comments on the theatre by other writers explain what underlies these [caveats]. Columella, who wrote on the quintessentially Roman and manly art of agriculture in the mid-first dentury CE, begins his book with a classic locus de saeculo that includes the following comment on the theatre (1 pr. 15): 'Astonished, we marvel at the gestures of effeminates (effeminatorum), that, by womanish movement, they counterfeit a sex denied to men by nature, and deceive the eyes of the spectators.' But both dancing and the theatre were extremely popular in Roman culture, even that hero of Roman conservatism, Scipio Aemilianus, 'moved that triumphal and military body of his to a rhythmical beat' (Sen. Tranq.17.4).
If Scipio was a manly dancer, this oxymoronic state seems to have been the precarious goal of the Roman orator. Quintilian's treatment of actio ('movement') is full of cautions about lapses in masculinity. Effeminate actio repels him (Inst. 4.2.390: 'They bend their voices and incline their necks and flail their arms against their sides and act sext (lasciviunt) in their whole style of subject matter, words and composition; finally, what is like a monstrosity (monstro), the actio pleases, while the case is not intelligible.'
Amy Richlin
in Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature
(ed. William J Dominik)
If one major source of anxiety about style was the danger of effeminacy, another - and related - source was the danger of resembling an actor. The sexuality of actors was itself suspect and actors (partly on that account) suffered a diminished status as infames - much like men marked as MOLLES. William Fitzgerald has suggested that poetry, as a public performance, might have been seen as itself akin to acting, hence tending to cast a shadow on the sexual integrity of poets. Certainly this was the case for oratory; the handbooks are full of insistent disclaimers explaining how orators, though as talented as actors, though very like actors, are really not like actors at all.
(snip)
Comments on the theatre by other writers explain what underlies these [caveats]. Columella, who wrote on the quintessentially Roman and manly art of agriculture in the mid-first dentury CE, begins his book with a classic locus de saeculo that includes the following comment on the theatre (1 pr. 15): 'Astonished, we marvel at the gestures of effeminates (effeminatorum), that, by womanish movement, they counterfeit a sex denied to men by nature, and deceive the eyes of the spectators.' But both dancing and the theatre were extremely popular in Roman culture, even that hero of Roman conservatism, Scipio Aemilianus, 'moved that triumphal and military body of his to a rhythmical beat' (Sen. Tranq.17.4).
If Scipio was a manly dancer, this oxymoronic state seems to have been the precarious goal of the Roman orator. Quintilian's treatment of actio ('movement') is full of cautions about lapses in masculinity. Effeminate actio repels him (Inst. 4.2.390: 'They bend their voices and incline their necks and flail their arms against their sides and act sext (lasciviunt) in their whole style of subject matter, words and composition; finally, what is like a monstrosity (monstro), the actio pleases, while the case is not intelligible.'
(snip)
Amy Richlin con't - In an extended
passage (2.5.10-12), he [Quintilian] complains that 'corrupt and
vice-filled ways of speaking' (corruptas et vitiosas orationes) find
popular favour out of the moral degradation of their audience; they are full of
what is 'improper, obscure, swollen, vulgar, dirty, sext, effeminate' (impropria,
obscura, tumida, huilis, sordida, lasciva, effeminate). And they are
praised precisely because they are 'perverse' (prava). Instead of speech
that is 'straight' (rectus) and 'natural' (secundum naturam),
people like what is 'bent' (deflexa). He concludes with a lengthy
analogy between the taste for such speech and admiration for bodies that are
'twisted' (distortis) and 'monstrous' (prodigiosis) - even those
that have been 'depilated and smoothed', adorned with curled hair and cosmetic,
rather than deriving their beauty from 'uncorrupted nature' (incorrupta
natura). 'The result is that is seems that beauty of the body comes from
bad morals.'
(snip)
The bad body, in Quintilian's book, is that elsewhere associated with the cinaedus [catamite]; bad speech is effeminata, good speech is 'straight' and natural, tallying with the common assertion that the actions of the cinaedus are 'against nature'. The effeminate body stands both by metonymy and synecdoche for the kind of speech that Quintilian rejects; bad speech is both like such bodies and produced by such bodies.
(see Speculum Tuscanismi for Oxford's 'bad body' - Harvey
************************************
Shakespeare - Sonnet 121
'Tis better to be vile than vile
esteemed,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing:
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign.
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing:
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign.
*************************************
Jonson, Ode to Shakespeare First Folio
Look
how the father's face
Lives
in his issue, even so the race
Of
Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In
his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In
each of which he *seems* to shake a lance,
As
brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
************************************
Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
MY Shakespeare, RISE!************************************
Sweepings and Heaps:
Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson
By Richard S. Peterson
...Men should, Crites says [Jonson-type character in Cynthia’s
Revels], ”Studie…/An inward comelinesse…that may conforme them…/To Gods high
figures, which they have in power: (V.iv.643-6; IV, 158), and this is the goal
the poet holds out to his living subjects in the poems. The moral outline or
shape Jonson produces is an ideal one, charged with a sense of potential,
movement, and change, to which the subject ought actively to conform his soul
or mind – or simply continue to conform it, in the most admirable cases – by his
own efforts and with the poet’s educative help. What Jonson says in Timber of
the poet’s effect on his readers – adapting Quintilian on the orator’s effect
on his listeners (Inst. Orat. II.5.8) – ideally applies to praised subjects as
well: he “makes their minds like the thing he writes” (ll. 792-3; VIII, 588).
His Platonic (or Socratic) and stoic strategy in this respect is perhaps
clearest in instances where the collaboration between the poet and the owner of
the soul proves an unequal one. If he has occasionally praised his subjects too
much, Jonson declares in his epistle to Selden (according to the rhetorical
mode of laudando praecipere, “praising
to teach”) It was “with purpose to
have MADE them such” (Und. 14, l.22)
Even more revealing is Jonson’s sharp complaint “To my Muse”:
Away, a leave me, thou thing most abhord,
That hast betray’d me to a worthlesse lord;
Made me commit most fierce idolatrie
To a great image through thy luxurie.
… … …
But I repent me: Stay. Who e’re is rais’d,
For woth he has not, He is tax’d, not prais’d.
[Epig. 65 1-4, 15-16]
This description recalls not only Sir Epicure Mammon’s “most
fierce idolatrie” in wooing Dol Common, as he “talke[s] to her, all in gold”
(Alchemist IV. i.25-39; V, 360), but the “great image” of gold, Nebuchadnezzar’s
symbol, which he dreams about and sets up to be worshiped (Dan. 2:31-8, 3:1-15)
Failing a response, the noble shape raised by Jonson becomes merely a “great
image” hollow or inert at its core [Rise! My Shakespeare}, and his worship of
its potential, mere tribute paid to an idol – a strong contrast, as we shall
see, to Jonson’s justifiable near-idolatry of the “full” and animated inner
shapes that inhabit the cabinet which is Uvedale.
The sense of potential, of conduct as raw material from
wish a shapely life of soul should be fashioned and raises like a statue, is
forcefully conveyed in Jonson’s epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile (Und. 13). There
the poet shows an accumulated “heape” of virtuous manners being effortfully
raised to “stand” as a triumphal arch, which is then metamorphosed, as we
watch, into the implied human figure of a colossus, a “wonder” of the world
and a landmark (“marke”) or “note” of virtue:
‘Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad
Profit in ought; each day some little adde,
In time ‘twill be a heape; This is not true
Alone in money, but in manners too.
Yet we must more than move still, or goe on,
We must accomplish; ‘Tis the last Key-stone
That makes the Arch. The rest that there were put
Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.
Then stands it a triumphal marke! Then Men
Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,
It was erected; and still walking under
Meet some new matter to looke up and wonder!
Such Notes are virtuous men.
The parallel we have traced earlier between the need to
gather in and transform in conduct as in literary activity holds true here. In
describing how the individual soul fashions its heaped stock of manners into a
towering form of virtue, the poet himself accumulates a generous heap of
material from Plutarch (and from Hesiod, whose heap of money Plutarch has
turned to a heap of virtue) and transforms the whole by adding a keystone from
Seneca (Epist. 118, secs. 16-17): “one stone makes an archway – the stone which
wedges the leaning sides and hold the arch together by its position in the
middle. … Some things, through development, put off their former shape and are
altered into a new figure” (quaedam processu priorem exuunt formam et in novam
transeunt).
Indeed, Jonson’s works abound with “heapes.” These are
admirable enough when they indicate bounty or a plentiful supply of raw
material to be shaped. This in Jonson’s masque TheGypsies Metmorphos’d (1621),
King James, on approaching the country house
of the Duke of Buckingham, is invited to “enter here/ The house your
bountie hath built, and still doth reare/ With those highe favors, and those
heapd increases: (ll. 11-13; VII, 565). And in a brief later elegy (Und. 63)
Jonson consoles King Charles and his Queen for the loss of their firstborn by a
reminder that “God, whose essence is so infinite, /Cannot but heape that grace,
he will requite.” But on most occasions, heaps serve as symbols of inert
material which is unable to stand or empty of animating, shaping spirit – the very
antithesis of Jonson’s ideal. [Men stand, heaps ‘rise’?) A nameless, vicious
courtier is “A parcel of Court-durt, a heape, and masse/ Of all vice hurld
together” Und. 21), hardly distinguishable from the excrement in Fleet Ditch, “heap’d
like a usurers masse” (“On the Famous Voyage,” Epig. 133, l.139); whole a lord
fond of flatter is “follow’d with that heape/ That watch, and catch, at what
they may applaud” (Und. 15, ll. 156-7). The healthy gathering instinct Jonson
describes in the epistle to Sacvile is in sharp contrast to the hoarding of
substance, unanimated by any generous impulse, described in the epistle to Sir
Robert Wroth: “ Let that goe heape a masse of wretched wealth,/……/And brooding
o’re it sit, with broades eyes,/Not doing good, scarce when he dyes: (For. 3,
ll. 81-4). A house, too, lacking an indwelling owner, like a body without a
soul, becomes a mere heap…(snip)
If the repugnance of the inert “heap” lies in its resistance
to shaping, its lack of any inner impulse that could raise it to stand,
conversely it is possible to stand and yet be hollow. Consider Jonson’s
startling picrue (Und.44) of the ruined form of virtue, unhoused and
dispossessed, beseechingly holding up her broken “Armes” (in an evocation of a
defaced antique statue combined with a deft pun on the military target of the
satire, the refusal of contemporary nobility to bear arms) to the empty “moulds”
which have cast her out:
I may no longer on these picture stay,
These Carkasses of honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover’d with Tissue, whose prosperitie mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter’d virtue holds
Her broken Armes up, to the emptie moulds. [ll. 98-102]
Other forms, empty yet nevertheless ambulatory, are seen
moving woodenly through the world of the Epigrammes. Of “English Mounsieur”
(Epig. 88), with his Frenchified attire, the poet remarks: “is it some french
statue? No: ‘T doth move,/ And stoupe, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove/
The new French tailors motion [puppet], monthly made, /Daily to turned in
PAULS, and helpe the trade”(…)
*************************************
Vituperation: My Shakespeare-Heap, Rise!
There the poet shows an accumulated “heape” of
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one TO SHOW
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!***********************************
Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit” or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).-- Brumley, Mark Elliott
**********************************
BRUMLEY, MARK ELLIOTT, Ph.D.
Declamation And Dismemberment: Rhetoric, The
Body, And Disarticulation In Four Victorian Horror Novels.
(2015).
...Declamation, therefore, was originally a rhetorical training
exercise that engaged students’ imaginations and asked them to adopt personas to
deliver formal speeches. This training, Thomas Habinek writes, taught students
to “impersonate a wide variety of characters, from slaves to gods, foreigners
to Roman heroes, male and female, young and old, indiscriminately” (68).
Some of these characters and situations were disturbing, if not
horrifying. In this way, rhetorical training exercises helped forge an enduring
link between declamation and monstrosity.
Fully understanding this link requires readers to momentarily
set aside associations of monstrosity with something frightening, freakish, unnatural,
or large. The word monster has had multiple definitions throughout the years, and
many of those definitions found their way into nineteenth-century culture. A forerunner
of the modern word monster in the Old French of the twelfth century was mostre,
which meant a “prodigy”or “marvel,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
One correspondence found in the OED is an obsolete early modern definition of monster
as a verb meaning “to assume the appearance of greatness.” Here is a clear connection
to declamationas the act of assuming the persona or a great historical figure to
deliver a formal speech. The links, however, do not end with one possible
meaning. Another archaic definition of monster found in the OED is “to exhibit”
or “to point out as something remarkable.” This usage is true to the Latin
origin monstrāre, meaning “to show” or “point” (“monster”).
The same word is the origin for the French montrer, and the
English “demonstrate” (“demonstrate”). As Michel Foucault points out in Madness
and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, “monsters” are “etymologically,
beings or things to be shown” (68).
Foucault refers specifically to the practice of publically
exhibiting insane people, a practice that continued in England until the early
nineteenth century. Foucault writes that accordingto a House of Commons report,
“lunatics” at the hospital in Bethlehem were being exhibited on Sundays, with spectators
being charged a penny. The annual revenue from the displays totaled nearly 400
pounds, indicating 96,000 visits per year (66). The insane people in these
shows come closer to the modern sense of the word monster as something abnormal
or deformed, something freakish. Yet another meaning for the word monster is
suggested by the Latin word monēre, which means “to warn”(“monster”).
The meaning of monster as a warning is explained by Chris
Baldick: “In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must
have a purpose: to reveal visibly the results of vice, folly, and
unreason, as a warning” (10). So,
both “declamation” and “monstrosity” can be construed generally as a display
involving the body intended to send some sort of message. In this sense,
“declamation” and “monstrosity” approximate the meaning of epideixis, the root
of epideictic, whose “nearest equivalents in English are ‘display’‘show’‘demonstration’”
(Carey 237).
Hawhee writes that “epidexis primarily meant a material or
bodily display...,” one that “becomes manifest via discourse” (175).This link
to epidexis adds another consideration, which is that no display is possible
without an audience and its reaction. Hawhee cites Simon Goldhill’s point that
“‘epidexis requires an audience’’” (qtd. in 175). She also states that “viewers
... are not passive recipients of the display and the knowledge it produces....”
(176). Drawing on other scholarship, Hawhee writes that epideictic requires
observation and judgment: “...epideictic discourse demands an active evaluation
and response” (176).This is an important concept for this study, which claims that
nineteenth-century horror fiction uses epideictic to produce fear in audiences
by depicting characters’ encounters with monstrosities such as Frankenstein’s
creature, Dracula, Edward Hyde, the Beast People, and Dorian Gray. Epideictic
is evident in the characters’ negative reaction to the monstrosities, their
inability to express it effectively in speech, and their transformations after
the encounters.
The epideictic oratory, also
called ceremonial oratory, or praise-and-BLAME rhetoric, is one of the
three branches, or "species" (eidē), of rhetoric as outlined in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, to be used to praise or blame during ceremonies. (Wikipedia)
*********************************
Conceits, Clinches, Flashes and Whimzies (1639)
170
A foolish Gentleman, deformed likewise in his person, was
called by one a monster. Nay, surely, said another, the Gentleman is merely
naturall.
********************************
Jonson, on Shakespeare:
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
********************************
Horace Of the Art of Poetry - transl. Ben Jonson
...Most writers, noble sire and either son,
Are, with the likeness of the truth, undone.
Myself for shortness labour, and I grow
Obscure. This, striving to run smooth,
and flow,
Hath neither soul nor sinews. Lofty he
Professing greatness, swells; that, low by lee,
Creeps on the ground; too safe, afraid of storm.
This seeking, in a various kind, to form
One thing PRODIGIOUSLY, paints in the woods
A dolphin, and a boar amid the floods.
So shunning faults to greater fault doth lead,
When in a WRONG AND ARTLESS WAY WE TREAD.
...Most writers, noble sire and either son,
Are, with the likeness of the truth, undone.
Myself for shortness labour, and I grow
Obscure. This, striving to run smooth,
and flow,
Hath neither soul nor sinews. Lofty he
Professing greatness, swells; that, low by lee,
Creeps on the ground; too safe, afraid of storm.
This seeking, in a various kind, to form
One thing PRODIGIOUSLY, paints in the woods
A dolphin, and a boar amid the floods.
So shunning faults to greater fault doth lead,
When in a WRONG AND ARTLESS WAY WE TREAD.
******************************
Ovid
Video meliora, proboque,
deteriora sequor. I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse. Book
VII, 20
******************************
Hamlet - Strict Jonsonian in taste. Anti-Shakespearean in spirit. 'Scholar' Prince with his Horatio/Horace.
Hamlet - Strict Jonsonian in taste. Anti-Shakespearean in spirit. 'Scholar' Prince with his Horatio/Horace.
SCENE II. A hall in the castle.
Enter HAMLET and Players
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it
to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
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 o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing 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.
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing 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.
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.
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.
Exeunt Players
************************************
Jonson, Magnetick Lady
CHORuS changed into an
E P I L O G u E
to the K I N G.
to the K I N G.
W
|
Ell, Gentlemen, I now must under
Seal,
And th' Author's charge, waive you, and make my
Appeal,
To the Supremest Power, my Lord, the King;
Who best can judge of what we humbly bring.
He knows our weakness, and the Poets faults;
Where he doth stand upright, go firm, or halts;
And he will doom him. To which Voice he stands,
And prefers that, 'fore all the Peoples Hands.
And th' Author's charge, waive you, and make my
Appeal,
To the Supremest Power, my Lord, the King;
Who best can judge of what we humbly bring.
He knows our weakness, and the Poets faults;
Where he doth stand upright, go firm, or halts;
And he will doom him. To which Voice he stands,
And prefers that, 'fore all the Peoples Hands.
******************************
The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern
Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century,
Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by
An affectionate study of
eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily
to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more
after the choiceness of the hrase, and the round and clean composition of the
sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and
illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of
matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of
judgement…Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and
writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that
were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the
whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but
the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse.
Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate
all other discursive functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own
language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in
the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the
clauses.” This sudden access of eloquence is not a return of the repressed,
however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which
Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.
In assailing what one critic
has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century,
Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself.
Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but more than any other
it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously
described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a
recovering alcoholic:
…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the
one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred
the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and
mathematicians; I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability
to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into
order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.
(snip)
It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin
around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De
civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil
behaviour as a natural complement to the achievements of “lyberall science”;
social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well
fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of
a good Latin style now appears as part of a larger process of “fashioning”
subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress,
and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that
stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is equally certain that
discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty
of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social
behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil subject is
an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range
of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of
manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that
is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through
the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a
juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours
– with an imaginary logic. (snip) p32
Light
and ornament
Light
– lumina
Great
brilliance – lumina magnum
Shake-speare
