Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered

Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing Renaissance Passions Reconsidered Robert Cockcroft Rhetorical Affect in Ear...

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Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing Renaissance Passions Reconsidered

Robert Cockcroft

Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing

Also by the same author PERSUADING PEOPLE: An Introduction to Rhetoric (with Susan M. Cockcroft)

Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing Renaissance Passions Reconsidered Robert Cockcroft Former Lecturer in English University of Nottingham

© Robert Cockcroft 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–80252–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cockcroft, Robert, 1939– Rhetorical affect in early modern writing: renaissance passions reconsidered/Robert Cockcroft. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80252–7 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Emotions in literature. 3. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History – 16th century. 4. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 5. English language – Early modern, 1500–1700 – Rhetoric. 6. Renaissance – England. 7. Affect (Psychology) I. Title. PR428.E56 C63 2002 820.9′353–dc21 2002074895 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my partner in persuasion Susan Cockcroft

Contents Preface

viii

1

Introduction: Reconsidered Passions 1.1 From perception to persuasion 1.2 Renaissance passions reconsidered 1.3 Emotion, now – and then 1.4 Introducing the new rhetoric 1.5 Empowering the reader? 1.6 A ‘double analysis’ – with a difference

1 1 2 6 10 30 34

2

Sable Clouds and Silver Linings 2.1 A pathetic muddle? 2.2 Ideas of pathos from Plato to Milton 2.3 The applications of pathos 2.4 Milton’s A Masque: the progression of pathos

38 38 40 73 77

3

Old 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

4

Going to Extremes 4.1 The extremes of love and hate 4.2 Passionate to a purpose

117 117 131

5

Adjusting the Mirrors 5.1 The emotional laser 5.2 Marlowe and Baldwin: designs on the audience 5.3 Hutchinson and Cavendish: rival reflections 5.4 Shakespeare: back to the audience? 5.5 Paradise Lost: engaging the reader 5.6 A case in point: Courtship in Wyatt and Gascoigne 5.7 Conclusion

140 140 143 157 167 173 179 184

Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised Reconsidering: how and why? Baldwin and Marlowe: talent and the spotlight Hutchinson and Cavendish: writer and audience Shakespeare: about the Bard’s business Milton: perspectives on power

83 83 85 93 103 110

Notes

186

Bibliography

197

Index

204 vii

Preface This is the outcome of a long-standing wish to bring several things together: the close reading which I learned at Cambridge; the interest in Renaissance rhetoric and logic which I pursued at King’s College London, and the British Library (then housed in the British Museum); the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts taught for 35 years at Nottingham, especially Milton; and the exploration of Rhetoric in which I and my students have brought together ancient insights into persuasive language and modern analytical techniques. The book is centred upon the moving of emotion, but it is driven by the wish to pursue the pleasure of reading from the perspectives already implied, especially the imaginative delight and the challenge which, after one term of history at St John’s College Cambridge, lured me into English and has kept me there. I wish to thank the colleagues and friends on both sides of the ‘great divide’ between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ rhetorics. Among the former, four stand out: Peter Stockwell for his steady encouragement of my attempts to adapt schema theory; Margaret Berry for her invitation to teach rhetoric according to the rigorous standards of Modern English Language as applied at Nottingham; Katie Wales for her encouragement to the cause of rhetoric in the context of linguistics; and Ron Carter for the benefit of his insights, eager curiosity about affectivity, and vast knowledge of who does what, and how. I have gained too from membership of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), especially the new kind of excitement and friendliness found at its conferences. The same, in its own way, is true of ISHR (the International Society for the History of Rhetoric). The benefits I have drawn from Jameela Lares’s knowledge and distinction as a scholar of pulpit rhetoric, renewed in enthusiastic discussion in a variety of locations from Scottish boat-trips to Spanish bus-rides, have been especially valued as this book neared completion. So has Lynette Hunter’s wonderful grasp of the whole picture of rhetoric and the original line she traces through it, so eloquently shared. I also owe particular debts to Peter Mack and Lawrence Green for timely help at several stages, and many others who continue to inspire, encourage, and happily exchange ideas, such as Peter France and Christine Sutherland. viii

Preface ix

Lastly I must thank two scholars whose humanity, wisdom and learning bestride the gap: Walter Nash (Bill to all his colleagues), and Peter Verdonk of whom the least I can say is, that I wish I had met him earlier and more often. I am also very grateful to David Norbrook for putting me in touch with his work on Lucy Hutchinson; as her stature grows steadily clearer, thanks to his efforts, the passage discussed here will inevitably be viewed in a different light. Hinrich Siefkind and Lis Leslie, who came to my help when I was floored by my lack of German, are owed much, for their work, sound judgement, and advice. To my wife and fellow-worker in the field of language, whose imperfectly internalised voice presides permanently over my writing of prose, and who is my resident expert in grammar, Susan Cockcroft, my debt is incalculable in this as in everything else. ROBERT COCKCROFT

1 Introduction: Reconsidered Passions

1.1

From perception to persuasion

One important test for writing, drama, and all other art-forms, is the degree of connection between what we see in something, what we sense behind it, how strange or familiar it is, what it prompts us to – and our emotional engagement with it. Anybody committed to the long-term study of language and literature is likely to recall several different ways in which new texts have struck them, or in which wellknown ones have suddenly come back to life or revealed new qualities, new issues, or new aspects deepening or contradicting our earlier understanding; but almost always these will involve an inextricable blend of perception, participation and emotion. Some of these moments are all the more rewarding through being unanticipated, whether they start from a chance encounter or a programmed meeting. Some are sparked off while we are working alone, trying to anticipate the testing of our arguments by those best qualified to judge them. Some arise quite awkwardly as, seeking to persuade others of the importance of a text, or the value of our approach to it, we are finishing some writing or delivering a scripted lecture or paper. Talking to a friend or colleague about a text often precipitates fresh perception, filling some gaps, opening others, corroborating or unsettling old convictions – or provoking us with sheer indifference to what has moved or challenged us! Such exchanges often precipitate the sharpest insights and keenest feeling. Responding, we may surprise ourselves with insights which don’t seem to be ours and in which we have no ego-involvement, as we suddenly see things from another perspective (whether we adopt this permanently, or not). The rewards of rigorous, solitary reasoning may also be great, testing the consistency 1

2 Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing

and probability of our own contentions, and helping us to anticipate counter-arguments. In the first case our interaction with other people seems quite non-committal, unconstrained and spontaneous, the accidental spin-off of a common interest; but we benefit enormously. In the second case, weighing up the opposed arguments thoroughly in advance, and assessing their appeal to other parties, we necessarily to some degree empathise with them (even internalise them), however reluctant we might be emotionally or intellectually to admit that they have any force. This might lead to a permanent change, weakening our previous inhibitions and heightening our susceptibility to new feeling, new influences. If we are fortunate, spontaneous interaction and solitary discipline (affectivity with its interplay of subjectivities, including emotion, and a more objective reasoning) will reinforce each other – one opening us to feeling, one driving us to think. Much harder, is the public promotion of our convictions, justifying the way we think, projecting our emotions. Here, if not before, rhetoric makes an undisguised entrance, with or without the eleventh-hour eruption of fresh thinking. Can it preserve the candour and clarity, or the conflicts of emotion and perception, in our spontaneous responses to texts, or to other peoples’ readings? How much of this can survive transplantation into a persuasive argument? Can the affective quality of spontaneity be mirrored in that of deliberate utterance? Sooner or later we have to take up a position, whether we are raising an issue for academic debate, presenting it to a wider ‘literate’ audience or explaining it to readers who are less well-informed, but perhaps more open-minded. Our rhetoric varies accordingly; and at the end of this Introduction I will examine one instance addressed to the last category (typically, students). In doing so, I will myself deploy a rhetoric, reflective of the spirit, and the way of going to work, to be displayed throughout the book.

1.2

Renaissance passions reconsidered

The second phrase in my title has a multiple reference. Primarily, it signals a reappraisal of the affective bond which the dominant critical voices of the last three decades seek to establish with their readers. Where early modern writing is concerned, this may often entail an emotional response widely remote from the writer’s own emotive designs. Secondly, it also acknowledges an inevitable distance between the past and present, recalling (without its negative implication) that phrase in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (l. 41), which it

Introduction: Reconsidered Passions 3

echoes. There, the ‘supple confusions’ inflicted on ‘passion’ implicate rhetoric in the compulsive (indeed, lustful) tendency of human beings towards the endless tantalisation and deception of themselves and each other. Personified as ‘History’ (a sinister, strength-sapping compound of harlot, military architect and orator), this power ‘Gives too late / What’s not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered passion’. 1 In context, Gerontion’s phrase is ambiguous; it could mean a passion only recoverable through reversion to a former self or state of consciousness which can’t be rationally sustained, or a past conviction justified by the outcome of events but now emptied of feeling – a dilemma which echoes the poem’s epigraph, from Measure for Measure (‘Thou hast nor youth nor age / But as it were an after dinner sleep / Dreaming of both’). Though this did not determine my choice of title, it is easy enough in Eliot’s phrase to ‘contrive’ a ‘corridor’ to it, as one of the ‘issues’ to be addressed by way of my approach. That approach is, primarily, to the question of rhetorical emotion itself, pathos. Recognised by Aristotle (Rhetoric, I.ii.5), as one of the three modes of proof – the one that works by putting the hearers into ‘a certain frame of mind’ (I.ii.3) – can emotion, viewed primarily as a subjective experience rather than as a phenomenon to be studied and interpreted, possess some kind of truth-value? And in the case of Renaissance texts, remote as they are from us culturally (in other words, religiously, philosophically, politically, socially, economically, artistically, morally, and in every other respect), how are we to distinguish between the emotional response which heightens our perception – and the kind which limits it? When is it right for a critical or scholarly reappraisal to convert long–established sympathies with particular characters, poetic voices, or persuasive stances, into antipathies (a change of emotional polarity which involves earlier modes of reading – and those who uphold them – as well as the texts themselves)? By what criteria should we assess the validity of modern attempts to empathise with early modern pathos, whether by quasi-archaeological reconstruction and re-enactment, or by analogy (as when Macbeth combines the hostile take-over bids of third-millennium capitalism with Mafiastyle violence, or when Ophelia is confined in a nineteenth century straitjacket)? Or when might we properly persist not merely in empathy but in sympathy, as I might (say) with George Herbert? It might be argued that emotion inhibits critical judgement. Passionate writing can be, and often is, viewed dispassionately – but for how


long? To convince ourselves of the objective truth of our position must entail some emotion (satisfaction); and anybody challenging that certainty, especially if they are still in thrall to feelings which we have put behind us (or beneath us) might well excite our pity, contempt, irritation, amusement or anger, according to circumstances. My personal conviction is that we cannot exclude emotion, or emotional persuasion, from critical judgement. Contemporary practice amongst the most prominent critics, to be illustrated here, repeatedly demonstrates this. We should not try to exclude feeling; rather, we should – subject to defined principles – alternate between objective perception and emotional response, or overlay one with the other, both in analysis and in persuasive communication. Accordingly, my aim here is to clarify the principle, or principles, concerned. When is judgement in the use of emotive language, or in its appraisal, skewed by preconceptions of its appeal to a particular audience or critical constituency – and at what point does the distortion mount from the enlivening to the deadening, or to the mendacious? How can we distinguish between legitimate emotional aversion or partisanship, and reactions founded on misreading? In Chapter 3 I will explore a range of critical readings showing how critical passion enlivens, directs and motivates the common activity of reading and judging – and in doing so, how it ranges from mildness to outrageousness, broadness to narrowness, blindness to insight. In doing so I will apply the same principles of analysis to the affectivity of modern critical writing, its fusion of critical stance and critical feeling, as I will use in the two following chapters – though there I will try to achieve a sharper focus on the affectivity of the Renaissance texts themselves (with respect, climactically, to those very passages which sparked off the comment looked at in Chapter 3). My aim here will be to achieve an exacter sense of what was being addressed in the minds of the original audiences, whether by design or in despite of authorial or polemical intention, and of how emotion was moved (whether by conscious rhetorical means or less deliberate linguistic felicity). This offers at once a standard by which to ‘reconsider’ current critical passions, and an additional resource to criticism itself in its future work on texts and its engagement with the work of colleagues. Chapter 4 will illustrate the range of feeling in early modern texts between the two commonly acknowledged extremes of universal emotion – love, and hate. We will see these expressed in a variety of relationships and cultural contexts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aim being both to locate the effects studied in the preceding and


following chapters, within a wider context of pathos, and to illustrate the method of work without reference to the individual critical issues raised or implied in Chapter 3. Chapter 5, on the other hand, will return to those issues and suggest ways of resolving them – whether that amounts to confirming, qualifying or refuting our critics’ contentions. Our primary examples of pathos will be provided by a range of Renaissance authors, male and female, including Milton, Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Marlowe, and the less well-known but intriguing figure of William Baldwin (besides other poets and prose writers – some major – to be touched on in the intermediate Chapter 4 and elsewhere). In Chapter 3, these will be approached by way of the ‘reconsidered’ passion of modern readings and interpretative agendas, typified by critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Norbrook, Germaine Greer, Lisa Jardine, Terry Eagleton, Harold Bloom and Kate Belsey. My final chapter will, as already indicated, take a detailed independent look at original expressions of pathos from the ultimate despair of Macbeth to the curious, complex but warm emotions expressed by Margaret Cavendish towards her husband. Here, as in Chapter 3, I shall make a double or coordinated use of two techniques of rhetorical analysis centring on pathos – techniques whose method and theoretical basis will be outlined and initially exemplified in the remainder of this Introduction and in the following chapter. It will be appropriate – despite my inversion of historical order in doing so – to look first (following a brief preview of the ‘old’) at what I call ‘the new rhetoric’, and then in more detail and in the next chapter, at the tradition of classical rhetoric, which has much to tell us, however incoherent and contradictory, about pathos. This will be the best way to order my material, because readers not familiar with the ‘old’ rhetoric will grasp most of the essentials of persuasion more easily by way of the concepts underlying the ‘new’ approach, while those more attuned to the traditional ‘art’ will have the stimulus of a new approach first, before judging how well it links to older accounts and evaluations of pathos, to be reviewed in the next chapter. The coordination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ methods of analysis – most clearly demonstrable in Chapters 4 and 5 with their ‘control’ readings of pathetic texts, but also powerfully relevant in Chapter 3 – will then be explained, and illustrated in the last section of this introduction with reference to a passage from Gary Waller’s English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century.


1.3

Emotion, now – and then

We have already glanced at the problem of putting spontaneous emotional experience to deliberate rhetorical use, without demeaning it. This implied difficulty is compounded when emotion is less spontaneous: whenever a persuader seeks to activate his or her own emotion, to match the estimated emotional propensities of an audience; and the problem may be more apparent when we consider self-confessedly rhetorical texts or readings, than it is (typically) in our reading or viewing of the most familiar practical forms of rhetoric, journalism and advertising. Here we are exposed to the persuasive use of emotion, without any admission that rhetoric is being employed. In journalism, this is typified by articles and reviews about the challenging of received opinion or established practice in any field from politics to the arts. As the protagonists of these pieces are introduced, emotion will tend to be used as a positive signifier both of their concern for others and of their self-expressive vitality. Witness (for example) how the broadsheet press – at least in Britain – uses the term ‘angry’. Since the emergence of the ‘angry young man’ in the 1950s, ‘angry’ has been a convenient metonym, for moral or political rectitude and moral or physical courage, in the face of injustice or absurdity. The word invites admiration and signals an uncommon degree of perception and persistence on the part of the ‘angry’ person, despite the fact that being angry proves nothing. Any decent person confronted with injustice is rightly angry (or indignant); but self-evidently, those who are angry are not in every given case reacting to injustice. The journalistic rhetoric of emotion is no less problematic than the older rhetoric of pathos to be examined in the next chapter. Despite this reservation, those who uphold the positive rhetorical use of emotion need not now be troubled by the endemic distrust of it within the classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. As we will see, emotion was often viewed negatively, and was associated with the shallowness and delusiveness of rhetoric. Plato plays brilliantly and poetically on the pathos of homosexual love, spiritual longing and philosophic fervour while dismissing emotive rhetoric as a mere ‘knack’. Aristotle at some points seems to make pathos extraneous to true rhetoric, at others to integrate it with the trustworthy persuasive voice – while elsewhere he purposefully dissects the emotional susceptibilities of a typical, male, Athenian audience. Both Cicero and Quintilian make pathos the true mark of an orator (who, they claim, must of necessity be a good man), while admitting that emotion is


often used to sidestep reason. And closer to our own times, Milton illustrates the comparable complexity of Renaissance views. He ensures that the baser modes of passion will be represented in his work in contrast to the higher modes, which are characteristic of virtue, or reflective of divine inspiration. Both modes, and their interrelationship, will be investigated in the next chapter. More immediately, we may note how he foreshadows current insights, by reflecting their difference in the physical reactions integral to each mode. In Paradise Lost Book IX, we may compare Adam’s traumatised response to Eve’s fall, with the turbulence and duplicity of Satan. Adam ‘Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill / Ran through his veins, and all his joints relaxed’ (IX.890–1),2 an effect which is spontaneous and innocent, though its mixture of shock and grief at what Eve has done is the raw material of his forthcoming deliberation, foreshadowing the choice which he will shortly make between Eve and God. Compare this to Satan’s oratorical performance as the Serpent as he ‘New part puts on, and as to passion moved, / Fluctuates disturbed, yet comely …’ (IX.667–8), or to his gamut of emotions in the great soliloquy which begins Book IV, as summarised by the narrator: ‘Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face / Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy and despair,’ followed by the observation that ‘heavenly minds from such distempers foul / Are ever clear’ (IV.114–15, 118–19). In the first case Satan feigns emotion – or more precisely stimulates himself to feel it according to the plan conceived earlier – and manifests it bodily through the swaying movement of his upright serpentine form. His ‘disturbance’ foreshadows the clouding of Eve’s reason, while his carefully-modulated ‘comeliness’ in movement expresses a seductive and flattering empathy with her oppressed condition. In the second case the storms of feeling ‘dimm[ing]’ the dissembled radiance of Satan’s face in his disguise of ‘stripling cherub’ are entirely spontaneous, further emphasised by ‘gestures fierce’; and (as the narrator indicates) they betray his fallen and degenerated condition. This may surprise readers so recently spellbound by his apparent hovering on the brink of repentance (42–8, 79–80). But passion which cannot stimulate the will and reason to act rightly, is a mere ‘distemper’, however moving in expression. Today, by contrast, those who uphold rhetorical emotion no longer have to plead that they are making good use of suspect materials. Current research into the problems of consciousness, self-awareness, and personal identity is attracting much attention by way of fiction and highly-profiled television programming – witness David Lodge’s


Thinks … (2001)3 and Professor Susan Greenfield’s series on brain research (2000). In this, emotion is not being overlooked. Witness Professor Antonio Damasio’s view of its essential role in the emergence of consciousness. Certain patterns of emotional response and interaction may be innate to our species; and some of these may link back to the primitive forms of snail and sea anemone. Far from opposing reason, emotion should be recognised as its foundation. In an interview linked to the publication of his The Feeling of What Happens (2000),4 Damasio explains the results of damage to the frontal-lobe of the brain: ‘You don’t feel embarrassment, you don’t feel guilt – you don’t feel pride for that matter – and so your ability to reason properly has been lost, together with your ability to feel properly’.5 This recalls the traditional mode of linking emotion to reason syllogistically through the ‘common places’ of perception, which are at once moral and emotional – that is, affective – as seen in Cicero (see below), and which are echoed in recent work on the relationship of emotion, and other modes of perception, to language. In his article ‘The language of felt experience’ (2000),6 William Downes links the three categories of ‘felt experience’ to three types of mental and/or physical activity. The resulting account is closely analogous to Aristotle’s concept of three interrelated ‘proofs’ – his linking of proof through character or ethos (Rhetoric I.ii.4),7 and proof through reasoning or logos (I.ii.6), to the pathos proof already noted. It coincides even more markedly, in its account of three distinct but interdependent processes, with Cicero’s formulation of the officia oratoris – teaching, pleasing and moving – to be noted later in this Introduction. If we follow Downes’s view, emotion is the specific bodily ‘arousal’ which we feel, given our cultural conditioning, in particular situations, invariably accompanied by its mental identification. It is related to two other categories of ‘felt experience’: evaluation and intuition. The first of these involves ‘construals of experience on various scales of positive and negative’, while the second entails a ‘felt urge’ to apply, in any given situation, ‘the meaning potentials which come from properties and problems intrinsic to our semiotic systems themselves and the reality they presuppose’ (pp. 102, 105). Emotion is inevitably accompanied by some form of evaluation – for example, of good against bad, desire against repulsion, beauty against ugliness, truth against falsehood, obligation against inclination (pp. 102, 104). This implies that at least two rational processes will – with or without conscious reflection – always accompany emotion, namely, categorisation and the perception of cause. Thus, in very short order, we will ‘construe’ the bodily


symptoms of an emotion (tightening chest, clenching fists), identify it mentally (jealousy, anger), and link it quasi-logically to a source (a threatened gratification, an offensive word or presence). By inference, such ‘felt experience’ might occur outside or inside the context of discourse. The individual or the group involved will either be in direct sensory contact with the source of an emotion, or exposed to a word or phrase which evokes it. As already suggested, what is felt will usually reflect a particular cultural context, and thus constitute a ‘secondary emotion’ as characterised by Downes (p. 103). He summarises two accounts of what happens, of which Damasio’s is the more vivid: For Damasio, three aspects are involved in a secondary emotion: a triggering situation, a mental evaluation and a massive bodily response. In his analysis, the bodily response is to the ‘image’ or mental evaluation of the situation and depends on a disposition formed from previous experiences. In such contexts as conversation, storytelling, and rhetorical monologue, the ‘triggering situation’ will be constituted by words alone, or by a combination of spoken words, expression and ‘body language’ including gesture. The verbal medium will lead, instantaneously or by intermediate stages, to the ‘bodily arousal’ characteristic of emotion. This may happen without thought in the form of ‘felt experience’, as when single words expressive of the sympathies or antipathies common to a group, dropped into a conversation, trigger positive or negative feeling. But in one common rhetorical technique for stirring pathos (see p. 49 below), discursive thought and premisebased argument is used to evaluate the morality, competence or motivation of some type of human behaviour – a process ‘not necessarily [in itself] expressing an emotion’ (Downes, p. 104) – before proceeding to the identification of one or more individuals so behaving. This personifies the previously abstract evaluation, making the persuadee experience the physical sensation of emotional arousal, with or without the accompaniment of non-discursive ‘intuitions’ (as when a speaker uses figurative language to intensify pathos). We are now in a position to see how older and newer insights correlate. A modern account of emotion, evaluation and intuition suggests how the mental and linguistic capacities of human beings interface with an emotional ‘bodily arousal’ akin to that of animals, in a pre-verbal and in some respects non-rational manner – though in Downes’s account language is progressively more involved in each of


his three categories of felt experience: identifying the emotion being felt, particularly where it is culturally conditioned (cp. Cicero’s ‘moving’); providing scales of positive and negative evaluation which do not exist in nature (cp. ‘pleasing’, at least where positive evaluations are concerned); and making it possible through the very structure of language, with its drive to unify conceptions and its capacity for paradox, to intuit entities – such as God and the Self – for which there is no verifiable evidence (compare ‘teaching’ – at least in the context of traditional, premise-based structures of argument). Similarly, Aristotle’s scheme of three ‘proofs’ seems to be built on some such a foundation. Thus, ethos, the proof through character, works by projecting the image of a reliable evaluator, who reflects emotion appropriate and adequate to the situation (pathos), and who reasons in accordance with the audience’s various intuitions regarding that situation (logos). In the next extended section I shall show how ‘new’ rhetorical techniques can trace pathos in writing, as well as explore its interaction with ethos and logos. In doing this I shall suggest how to identify the factors which combine to produce the ‘secondary emotions’ characteristic of each culture, constructed as these are from the ‘primary emotions’ which might be variously identified, but which are listed by Damasio as ‘happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust’. We should however be prepared to consider the possibility that primary emotion might be directly reflected – either in the form of ‘raw emotion’ (as instanced by Lisa Jardine in her discussion of King Lear – see Chapter 3), or from a matrix of human relationship which transcends cultural differences.8

1.4

Introducing the new rhetoric

In this context, ‘new rhetoric’ does not refer back to the work of C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca,9 despite echoing the magisterial title of their book. Rather it denotes a development of applied stylistics, bringing together recent developments in theory, as tested in practice, in the attempt to discover what makes language at once clear, vivid and convincing – or in one word, persuasive. Whether it results from the steady determination of one person, random interaction between several people, sudden inspiration, or any other cause; whether it reflects acute, untutored observation or systematic study, and however it occurs – as it does when people simultaneously perceive what unites or divides them, and express it in a fresh, forceful and innovative way – the language that changes minds or precipitates


action should now be susceptible to far more detailed demonstration than was previously possible. Thus, in applying modern analytical methods to early modern texts, we should be better placed to understand their persuasiveness than the authors themselves. This should not however induce us to downplay the authors’ intelligent choice of means. Some of these may reflect intuitive preference, the happy conviction that A works better than B. Some will be less precisely explicable in terms of traditional logic or rhetoric. Some, like the refined sense of ethos to be considered below, with its strong emotive potential, may reflect both theory and intuition. And the same will be true of pathos as realised stylistically: for example, any number of past speakers or writers will have followed the lead of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in seeking to give graphic quality to emotive language, without any conscious awareness of deictic language as one means of achieving this (that is, language dependent for its meaning on the frame of time, space and social awareness common to persuader and persuadee). But in lending immediacy to their language, they will inevitably use words in a way which we now recognise as deictic. Consider the very last words uttered by Lear in the Folio text : ‘Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there.’ (V.iii.285–6, deictic words italicised).10 Here, I shall be considering those areas of recent theory which shed most light on the effective use of pathos and which in doing so link it both to the interpersonal and the logical functions of language. On the face of it, flexibility in the use of emotive language – rendering it applicable to a wide range of situations real and imagined and to all the major literary, dramatic and rhetorical genres – is likely to entail those features which we are now able to isolate and describe for the first time, as the factor which made particular choices feel right, and which enabled authors to apply general rhetorical principles effectively, in particular instances. My application of the ‘new rhetoric’ to pathos will draw on the most relevant areas of theory and developing practice. These will enable us: (a) to examine with new precision the persuader’s likely estimate, in any given instance, of an audience’s receptivity; (b) to refine our sense of the ethos informing any persuasive voice and determining the emotional pressures which it exerts; (c) to appreciate how syntactical order affects the comprehension, freshness and force of words and phrases, as each sentence unfolds; (d) to be alert to the emotive potential of the language which locates readers or listeners within real or imaginary worlds; and (e) to detect any echoes within persuasive writing – whether it takes the form of dialogue or


monologue – of that heightening of language which tends to occur spontaneously in actual conversation, as an index of emotional (and imaginative) engagement. The observation, theory and practice productive of each of these benefits will be outlined successively in the following subsections. The cumulative effect of all these ‘new rhetorical’ insights will be demonstrated by constant reference back to a single major example, though some particular points will be reinforced by the citation of other passages. 1.4.1 Schema theory: memory structures and their persuasive potential If modern memories, as guides to the processing of information and consequent action, are organised differently from early modern ones (either structurally or in detail or both), this will be reflected in the sharpness or fuzziness, fullness or meagreness of our emotional reactions to Renaissance texts. Cultural change may have covered the clues to feeling, disarmed the fuses, blanked out the association of ideas. This is of course hardly surprising: if we think back over our own lives – 10, 20 or 50 years – we will soon realise how much our daily routines, the settings to which we were accustomed, and our habitual actions in pursuit of short-term or longer-term objectives, at earlier periods in our lives, differ from our current circumstances, our present priorities and the steps we take to achieve them. This difference will be due as much to the technological, cultural and economic change affecting everyone, as to the fact that we individually are now at a later stage of our lives; and we only need to compare the daily activities of today’s ten-year-olds with our own, at the same age, to appreciate the point. If in this respect we differ so much from our own earlier selves, how must we differ from our sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears? However, if we can take steps to recollect or reconstruct what people lived for in the past, and how they made one thing instrumental to another, we may recover something of how their imaginations worked, how they felt, and how – whether deliberately or intuitively – they played upon each other’s emotions. Cognitive theory depends on the belief that we do not interpret new appeals to our attention, or newly realised needs, by reference to our particular memories of similar things, but to general mental constructs or schemata, each consisting of an interconnected set of elements, all of which are subject to variation. Schemata are based on past experience actual or imagined, and are susceptible to constant modification in


response to fresh experience. This principle is of course best understood in terms of the particulars through which any given schema is realised or instantiated: for instance, by considering what interlinked ideas and expectations underlie our recognition of the religious ceremonial and overbearing behaviour anticipated in the following lines, and the valediction enacted there, as Milton’s Samson takes leave of the chorus: Brethren farewell, your company along I will not wish, lest it perhaps offend them To see me girt with friends: and how the sight Of me as of a common enemy, So dreaded once, may now exasperate them I know not. Lords are lordliest in their wine; And the well-feasted priest then soonest fired With zeal, if aught religion seem concerned: No less the people in their holydays Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable; Happen what will, of me expect to hear Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy Our God, our law, my nation, or myself, The last of me or no I cannot warrant. Samson Agonistes, 1413–26 To show how schema theory explains the process of cognition in our response to this passage, I shall be employing the approach and terminology developed by R.C. Schank, at first in collaboration with R. Abelson (1977) and later in his Dynamic Memory (1982).11 The theory is lucidly and conveniently summarised by Elena Semino in her Language and World Creation (1997),12 p. 138 ff. Semino does not address the issue of persuasion, but her account of how language is understood, in relation to schemata as generally defined above, has strong implications for rhetoric. Indeed, some of the schemata as typified by her have close kinship with the perennial concepts of Logic and Rhetoric, for example, with three out of the four Aristotelean varieties of cause (formal, final and efficient),13 and with figuration (especially metaphor), while others lend themselves readily to persuasive exploitation, overt or covert. I refer the reader to Semino’s full account, confining myself to brief explanations of the main subvarieties of schemata as applicable to rhetoric, in the most convenient order.


Plans (which persuaders will inevitably seek to transform or influence) ‘contain information about the sets of actions that someone may perform in order to accomplish a certain objective’ (Semino, p. 138). Samson in setting out for the Temple of Dagon intuits a plan on the part of Israel’s God, to which his seeming compliance with the Philistines will be essential – though this contravenes the more regular scripts (see below) with which he preserves his religious purity as a Hebrew and his additional obligations as a Nazarite (see ll. 1319–21, 1354–62). Goals ‘are schemata that contain knowledge about the aims and objectives that people are likely to have’. Schank and Abelson (Semino, p. 139) propose seven of these: three representing desired states (Satisfaction, Enjoyment and Achievement), two seeking to avoid undesirable states (Preservation and Crisis). Samson, struck by ‘Some rousing motions’ (1382), has abandoned the Crisis goal of avoiding pollution, and aims again at the Achievement goal of Israel’s deliverance. He is also involved with two other goals which further the first five: the Instrumental goal, ‘enabling the achievement of another goal’ as Samson seeks the unimpeded use of whatever opportunity is to be presented; and the Delta goal, ‘like an instrumental goal, but realised by general plans rather than scripts’ , and as such, allowing for many more options in the achievement of instrumentality. Thus, Samson awaits the undisclosed option – which will take the form of two conveniently positioned roof-supports – for a final, devastating assault on the Philistines. In the meantime, in furtherance of the Delta goal of effective persuasion, he takes the opportunity for a final sharing of thought and feeling with the chorus, to reconcile them to separation. As an example of how goals are overtly recognised and interpreted in Renaissance texts, in this case with a negative persuasive intent, consider the First Citizen’s reading, in Coriolanus I.i.32–3 of the disdainful hero’s motivation. As one of the despised plebeians, he offers an explanation of that hero’s military achievement which (on the face of it, oddly) represents him as at once infantile and arrogant: ‘he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud’. The truth underlying this blend of gossip and belittling class resentment is destined to be proved by the play; and the fact that it can be true despite its lack of consistency (betrayed by the awkward insertion of ‘partly’) is more rapidly explicable by way of schema theory – the diverse goals being pursued by Coriolanus – than through logic. The pride of Coriolanus reflects his conscious accomplishment of one or more ‘achievement goals’, including the ‘skill’ which for Schank and


Abelson (Semino, p. 139) typifies this type of goal, but not including the ‘social relationships’ which also typify it, since he is inept even with his fellow patricians. Moreover, as the First Citizen intuits, his Preservation goals include (besides the safety of Rome itself) a very particular interpretation of ‘family’ as typified by Schank and Abelson (ibid.) – namely, the revalidation of his emotional dependence on his mother, Volumnia. Indeed, the maintenance of this is a Crisis goal whenever his valour is tested in battle, to avoid rejection at her hands as a consequence of falling short. But the recognition and selection of goals are determined by further, deeper and (probably) more durable schemata, as Samson’s words will once more demonstrate. Themes ‘provide background information about the origin of people’s goals’ (Semino, p. 140). Role themes relate to occupations within society (very much different in the early modern period); interpersonal themes reflect the likely character of closer one-to-one relationships (again very different either in conception, as with children and parents, wives and husbands, or in their actual basis – as with individual master-servant relationships). Life themes ‘are to do with the general position that a person aspires to in life’ (Semino, p. 140), which in the early modern period would almost invariably include the salvation of one’s soul, and the general vindication of one’s religious principles, Catholic or Protestant, besides other widely divergent aspirations, such as the service of one’s Prince or the advancement (as with Milton) of a republican ideal. Samson’s life themes are encapsulated in the line ‘Our God, our law, my nation, or myself’; but the Instrumental goal most readily conducive to this – demolishing the vault of Dagon’s temple – has yet to be revealed to him. Inevitably, persuaders will seek to change the plans with which their persuadees normally meet the exigencies of life. Goals will be achieved (and themes maintained) by proceeding through a sequence of actions; and each action typically takes place within a familiar setting – both the sequence and the setting necessitating two further terms, scene and script. Here we refer specifically to Schank’s further, individual, and more flexible development of schema theory in his Dynamic Memory (1982), which seems particularly applicable to rhetoric (see Semino, p. 141 ff.). A scene might be a physical setting large or small, or a familiar kind of personal or social encounter. Semino summarises: ‘Scenes are general schemata containing information about different types of situations and what happens in them’ (p. 142), and in explanation she quotes Dynamic Memory, p. 86: ‘As long as there is an identifiable


physical setting and a goal being pursued within that setting, we have a scene’. This depends on ‘information about what the scene looks like’ and ‘about activities that go on in a scene’ – that is, information recorded, and operative by default if not explicitly referred to or encountered, in the scene’s particular configuration of memory. ‘Setting’ is broadly interpreted in accordance with the ‘type of scene’ involved. ‘Physical scenes are defined in terms of a particular physical setting … Social scenes … in terms of a particular social setting … [and] Personal scenes … in terms of the pursuit of a goal that is private and idiosyncratic to a particular person’ (Semino, p. 143, my italics). Scenes are postulated to explain the fact that one setting easily reminds us of another. The Temple of Dagon towards which Samson is mysteriously beckoned, combines a capacious structure with the goal of ritual sacrifice. For Milton’s readers, in their familiarity with the Bible, its twin pillars might well have recalled those of Solomon’s Temple, a place of true worship (II. Chronicles 3.15–17). But, with its idolatrous pomp and hierarchical seating arrangements, it might also have been meant to echo a Catholic cathedral interior (or even a large urban Anglican church with its numerous private pews and galleries). It might moreover progressively bring other settings to mind: a theatre (1605), an amphitheatre (1609–10), a banqueting house, a slaughterhouse (1611–12). In addition, Samson envisages two ‘social scenes’: ‘lords … lordliest in their wine’ and ‘well-feasted priests … fired with zeal’, two groups asserting their goals against his, were he to take his Danite fellow-tribesmen with him to the Temple in a gesture of political and religious solidarity. Moreover, Samson is already beginning to intuit a highly ‘idiosyncratic … personal scene’ (see Semino, p. 143) to take place in the Temple, something to be done on God’s behalf possibly entailing his own death, completely private where the unsuspecting Philistines are concerned and, once revealed, destined to remain unappreciated in its full emotional complexity even by his fellow Hebrews (though it is instrumental to their freedom and achieves the service of a vengeful deity). But the realisation of particular scenes – or, to use Semino’s term, their instantiation (ibid.) – depends upon sequences of actions in furtherance of one or more goals, called scripts. In effect, Samson anticipates two of these as likely to embroil him, and potentially the Chorus, with the Philistine oligarchs in their frontrow seats, and with the gross unanimity of Dagon’s clergy as figured by ‘the well-feasted priest’: an ‘exasperated’ response in the assertion of privilege and perquisites might harm his friends and limit his own opportunities. It


is the multifarious non-spiritual goals pursued in the Temple – martial and sexual pride and vanity, gluttony, cruelty, furtherance of social privilege, puerile excitement, repression of conscience – each with its own script – that redefine it, scenically, as a ‘place of false worship’. This associates it in the minds of Milton and his implied readership, with most ostensibly Christian churches, including the post-Restoration Church of England with its manifest political function, as expressed in its buildings and liturgy. Scenes and scripts must inevitably be organised into larger and even more flexible sequential and parallel schemata, making possible both the play of figurative language, analogy, comparison and contrast, and the memorisation and modification of all the practical directions which we need for the business of living in the longer and shorter term. Semino (p. 143) notes that shorter sequences of scenes and scripts, for example, those required for air travel, are called Memory Organisation Packets (MOPS). She quotes Schank: ‘A MOP consists of a set of scenes directed towards the achievement of a goal’. More extended sequences (for example, a holiday – or even the stages of a spiritual journey like Samson’s) require the assembly of further ‘packets’, that is, meta-MOPS, which ‘organise sequences of MOPS in the same way as MOPs organise sequences of scenes’ (Semino, p. 144). It is important to note that Schank’s categorisation of scenes as ‘physical, societal and personal’ is paralleled in these larger-scale structures of memory and expectation. The whole concluding episode of Samson Agonistes as it moves to a climax, from the summons to the Temple to its demolition and Samson’s death, will be both more intelligible and more distinctive – for readers of the Bible or of Milton – because of its similarity to a whole range of stories in which a hero enters an enemy’s stronghold and subverts it, from Odysseus in the Cyclops’s cave, to the hi-tech fantasies of a Bond film. Its resemblance to other stories, where its physical settings and its material events are concerned, serves to highlight the distinctiveness of Samson’s agon: his intense pursuit of social and personal goals, from the scene of his reception as anticipated in the quoted lines, to the final scene – physically annihilating, but (perhaps) personally vindicating. And if we turn from one particular drama to the general characteristics of rhetoric, noting the distinctive instrumental goal of each stage in the persuasive process, most people will recognise rhetorical discourse as, in effect, a series of social scenes, possibly though not inevitably linked to one or more physical scenes (consider for example how a television news item typically proceeds from the studio to the


reporter at the scene of an event, and then perhaps to a roundthe-table discussion with ‘experts’ or a dialogue between newscaster and reporter). Such a sequence will have the complexity of a MOP from the persuadee’s perspective, while for the persuader – aware of what must be included in the detailed, purposive structure of each section – it will reflect the characteristics of a meta-MOP. For our purposes, as we seek to judge the actual or potential position within a larger persuasive sequence, of any passage under scrutiny, it will be convenient to think of the normative order of persuasive discourse as six – or at the most seven – scenes characterising Arrangement or Dispositio, as the second stage of rhetorical composition: namely, Introduction, Narrative, Proposition and Division (if these two are in fact separable elements), Proof, Disproof, and Conclusion. See Richard Lanham’s succinct discussion, in the book which is to be our ‘first call’ for all technical and terminological reference, his A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (pp. 171–4).14 Viewed as a scene in this sense, Samson’s quoted speech most obviously exhibits the goals proper to a Conclusion, heartening and reassuring his fellow-tribesmen as he parts from them physically (and this despite the fact that the speech also contains a disproof of the proposition, not advanced by the Chorus though anticipated by Samson, that they should accompany him). The last kind of ‘high-level memory structure’ postulated by Schank (see Semino, p. 146) is the Thematic Organisation Point (TOP). This ‘highlights similarities and parallels between different areas of knowledge’, making a marked use – whether playful or serious – of the ‘reminding’ that was noted earlier. Such TOPS (most obviously similes or metaphors) may occur on the spur of the moment, often in lively and relaxed conversation between intimates, as is evident in the recorded corpora of spoken English (see below); and it is possible that in certain contexts within a consciously persuasive interaction, figurative language may be used not so much for the value of individual images, as to stimulate (or simulate) the mental process attested by TOPS, because this will strengthen any tendency to a convergence of thinking, feeling and perceiving between the parties to persuasion. Metaphor itself, long acknowledged as a major resource for persuasive style, as my next chapter will recall, has been extensively reappraised in the light of cognitive theory. It is a primary manifestation of the TOP; and in Chapter 8 of her book, Elena Semino notes how the interaction of schemata in the ‘“source” (or “vehicle”) domain’ with those in the “target” (or “tenor”) domain’ has, in M. Black’s15 account, ‘a very powerful cognitive function, since it can produce new


knowledge by establishing new connections and attributing new properties to concepts’. This Interaction View of metaphor, which Semino traces back to I.A. Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936),16 powerfully challenges the traditional Similarity View, according to which the two ideas, or the idea and the image, brought together in the metaphor remain essentially separate. But the distinctively Cognitive view, which Semino goes on to expound, proposes a cline or scale between ‘schema reinforcement’ (where a metaphor essentially confirms some established habit of thinking of A in terms of B), and ‘schema refreshment’, where ‘the mapping of one whole cognitive domain onto another’, in Levinson’s words,17 serves (in Semino’s) to ‘make us see new correspondences or indeed attribute new structures or properties to objects, concepts and situations’ (p. 203). Thus metaphor can transform the way in which a target cognitive domain ‘is viewed, structured and experienced’ (ibid.). When the persuasive voice initiates this process, but convinces its audience or its readership that they are involved in the restructuring, and jointly achieving the new experience, rhetorical pathos will be at its most intense. Paul Ricoeur’s claims for the ‘ontological vehemence’ entailed in the poetic experience of metaphor, involving ‘the ecstatic moment of language – language going beyond itself’,18 may extend beyond what is possible in rhetoric, or (indeed) desirable. This would be true if he was right to suggest, as noted by Lana Cable in her concern for the ‘carnality’ of Milton’s rhetoric,19 that metaphor exists in a second order of reality detached from the physical world and its ‘literal emotions’ – though this seems inconsistent with his view (little different from the cognitive account) that imagination projects ‘new possibilities of redescribing the world’.20 But as we will see, not only metaphor, but other modes of linguistic innovation and variation can be used to build the affective bond between persuader and persuadee, which is innately pleasurable even as it confronts and conveys pain (as in tragic mimesis), and which not only reshapes experience (as when Samson goes willingly to a ‘place abominable’[1359]) but equips people to face it. How this interaction and unanimity is achieved (and conceived) will be a constant preoccupation throughout this book and especially in the next chapter. So, taking a broader view of Samson Agonistes, how does the Chorus’s own use, elsewhere, of metaphor (or simile) compare with Samson’s? Consider his sardonic one-word metaphor ‘fired with zeal’, alongside the elaboration of their subsequent, choric ode. Samson’s target domain is the ‘well-feasted priest’s’ pursuit of a preservation goal – maintaining


his pampered lifestyle – and its associated script. This is manifest in a ‘zeal’ which is nothing but indigestion and professional pique. It thus interacts with, and reduces, the source domain of fire, to a physical scene of smouldering heat and smoke, not light. Moreover a further metaphor, that of eating, is hidden under the comparison – ‘For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up’ (Psalm 69.9 [AV]). For Dagon’s priest, this dinner is not where he is eaten, but where he eats. Samson’s undercover wit invites the Chorus to share the perception and relish the irony. But how adequately, for their part, do the Chorus empathise with Samson? Appropriating the triumph snatched from the Philistines through the hero’s sacrificial death, they compare him to a firedrake in a hen-roost (1692–5),21 a striking image but one which effaces both the anguished, mixed motivation of the avenger and the solidly-human mixed-bag of the ‘lordly … lords’ as anticipated by Samson himself (see above) and encountered by his father (1458–71). Similar things might be said of the ‘eagle’, the ‘cloudless thunder’ and the ‘self-begotten’ phoenix (1695–707). The when and why of such figures as metaphor may prove to be important, besides the question of what specific figures are used. I will use the phrase ‘cognitive engagement’ to denote the efforts of a persuader to work with maximal effect – deliberately or intuitively – on the whole range of resources represented by these schemata. 1.4.2 Counting out and counting in: roles in discourse and emotional pressure It will probably not require much reflection to realise that how we respond emotionally to any persuasive voice is going to depend on how it relates to us, whether for example it speaks for values and a group identity which we share, and thus includes us convincingly within a rhetorical ‘we’, or excludes us – temporarily or permanently – under the more distant forms of the second or third person, or at another extreme offers us the personal bond once signified in English by ‘thou’. In the following chapters we should constantly ask ourselves, for whom (or for what) the persuasive voice, critical or authorial, is speaking, and when less directly persuasive, what shared experience and sensibility it reflects. Whom are the persuaders including in the persuasion – just the readers or audience whose response is most plainly anticipated or implied in the writing, or somebody else (for example, somebody whose position is analogous to that of an overhearer, from whatever standpoint – or somebody not part of the


immediate audience or readership, to whom the persuasion will be relayed?)? With long-dead authors, can we avoid hearing our own voice, or a dominant critical voice, behind that of the author – what we want to hear, or think we should hear? Stephen Levinson’s essay ‘Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing’ (1988)22 provides a model for what he calls ‘production and reception roles’. He is refining Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘footing’ in discourse. This implies that, for every act of communication, we should consider who is involved, in whatever role. Levinson’s analysis relates to single acts of communication or ‘messages’ – a term which if it does not exclude either ethical stance or emotional import, does tend to imply one-way transmission. From a rhetorical perspective and in the context of Levinson’s exposition, this is odd, since he includes what he calls the ghostors of another person’s speech or writing amongst those who determine the form of a message; and a lengthy message without any evident sense of its audience’s likely response, will seem lifeless. But if we qualify ‘message’ to imply two-way transmission – easier, if we understand each section of an extended ‘message’ to be open to immediate (if unspoken) response from the audience, which may affect its overall expression or direction – Levinson’s analysis will be of great value in relation not to ethos only but to logos and pathos. With the aid of two tables (pp. 172–3), and columns of plus and minus symbols, Levinson invites thought about the kinds of footing which people, interests, or other entities (for example, God) might have in any given ‘message’. Note that such participation may be understood in terms of the goals discussed above. Is the speaker speaking for him/herself or for somebody else? Does he/she identify with the message ethically and/or emotionally and/or intellectually? Is that somebody a person or a group, or a less tangible entity like a nation? Is the speaker responsible for the form of the message, by getting somebody to do it for him/her or writing it her/himself? Is somebody else involved in transmitting the message? Who is in a position to receive the message, whether or not it is addressed to them? Amongst those so positioned, who is being addressed directly and who indirectly; who is ostensibly excluded but intentionally included; who is excluded by a real or apparent oversight, but concerned in the outcome – and who is deliberately excluded and (perhaps) even more concerned? Levinson categorises these modes of ‘footing’ as Roles in the Production and Reception of the message. In seeking to apply Levinson’s approach to our reading, we must aim firstly to appreciate the persuasive force or potential in the ‘roles’ he


identifies and, secondly, to be alert to all cases in which those are activated, in criticism or in original texts. The developed conception of ‘footing’ and discourse ‘roles’ can be used to sharpen our appreciation of how a persuader reveals or conceals the forces behind him/her, and of how he/she embraces or excludes sections of the actual or potential audience. Enhanced awareness in these areas will deepen our insight into the functioning of all three Aristotelean ‘proofs’ by showing how, whether intuitively or by design – through unconscious schemata, or conscious tactics – persuaders exploit the effects of Inclusion, Exclusion and Inadvertence. I shall treat these as ‘models’ for the deployment of ethos. A clear sense of the ‘roles’ on either side of the persuasive interaction makes it possible to highlight some roles and downplay others, to unmask hidden factors in an opponent’s persuasion, and to exploit the fact that people will want to be included in a good thing, and fear exclusion from it. Similarly, the impression that we have been inadvertently placed in a position to receive a message seemingly not meant for us, may be made use of. From the perspective of rhetoric every ‘message’ is a persuasive message. We may choose to distinguish between those we expect to persuade, and who are in that sense included in our message, and those whom we do not – or who are not in a position to act on the persuasion. Persuaders might deploy one or more of these models at once, as Milton does in our ongoing example (see below). Alternatively, they might progress from one to the other. They might also use them to stir pathos through the vivid depiction of situations. The inclusion model: proactive use: those using this model to further their own persuasion project a positive image of the highlighted roles on both sides of the inclusion – as, in the lines we have studied, Samson makes his Danite brethren judges of his service to the objects of their inclusive allegiance, ‘Our God, our law’ (1426), before presenting himself as one who must, by his action, prove himself a worthy member of ‘my nation’ (ibid.) and thus be included in it for all time. (Finally, however, he evokes what seems to be an exclusive category: ‘myself’.) Inclusion models in refutation: here, a contemporary persuader will typically bring to light the interests behind an opponent’s persuasion or proposed course of action, including the motives and promoters which the opponent might be downplaying or concealing – or belittle the form of the message with respect to the person composing it, or the conventions used in it (for example, declaring them bloodless, or


expressive of a reactionary or outmoded ideology). The persuader might also invite the persuadee to consider whom the opponent’s message is really aimed at, or whom it might ultimately reach or affect. The Division developed towards the end of the fifth paragraph of Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) shows him eager to create just such a sense of who is involved in the ‘message’ of censorship: [F]irst, the inventors of it [i.e. the practice of ‘licensing books’] to be those whom ye will be loath to own; … Lastly that it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom. Milton extends his reactive Inclusion in two directions. He is going to show where censorship comes from, namely, from the Catholic hierarchies and autocracies of Europe – something the Parliament will be unwilling to acknowledge. He is also going to point out how many of ‘us’ (including those who are being addressed, those reading the pamphlet, and those who in future might have considered writing on ‘religious and civil’ issues), will be adversely affected by this regulation. Inclusion and pathos. This will be seen typically as the first part of the classical lament structure, where past happiness in which the strong upheld the weak (parents/children; hero/community; husband/wife) arose from a fulfilling relationship, prior to the event which has transformed the situation. For an example, see Lucy Hutchinson’s image of a former unity embracing God, herself and her husband, as contrasted with the ‘dark mist’ of her widowhood (pp. 158–62 below). The exclusion model: proactive use: perhaps the most striking example of this in this present book, is Terry Eagleton’s retroactive exclusion of Shakespeare from the judgement of his own play, Macbeth (see pp. 104–5 below), together with all others – including most critics – who cannot rise to an ‘unprejudiced’ view of it. As in many instances, Eagleton’s exclusion works in conjunction with a narrower inclusion model – in contrast to Shakespeare’s own sharply pointed example in Hamlet, in which the Prince redoubles his verbal assault on the concealed Claudius as ‘targeted overhearer’ (to use Levinson’s phrase [p. 173]): ‘Those that are married already – all but one – shall live’ (Hamlet III.i.147–8). Hamlet includes Claudius as hearer but excludes him, by implication, from reassurance. He is a category of one, excluded from the general amnesty on existing marriages, whose


shortcomings have led the ‘mad’ Hamlet to include himself in a further exclusion. A broader category – all prospective spouses now and in the future – shall be debarred from the long-established nucleus of all emotional relationship, the all-inclusive bond of wedlock (‘the rest shall keep as they are’). Exclusion models in refutation: here the opponent questions the validity of a persuader’s links with what he/she claims to have as backing, or denies the basis of the appeal being made, with respect to one or more sections of the audience. A familiar if brusque conversational example is the phrase we use when somebody presumes to know our opinion, without prior consultation: ‘Speak for yourself’. This is patterned by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine towards the end of an electrifying passage (see below) in which he urges his followers to attack the Persian king, Cosroe – whose fratricidal seizure of power they have just assisted. When one of them demurs at the idea that it will be ‘A jest to charge on twenty thousand men’, Tamburlaine retorts ‘Judge for yourself, Theridamas, not me’ (I. Tamb. II.v.91–3).23 Exclusion and inclusion – combining logos and pathos: an example of this which will be familiar from the idiom of policy discussion or ‘pep talk’, is the ‘opener’ Those of us who … This may be used positively or negatively (as in ‘ … believe passionately in social justice’, ‘… haven’t bothered to turn up for training’). Positively, it includes all the hearers as members of a larger group, us, while intimating the prevalence of some opinion (or some predicament) amongst some of the people included in the whole. Those who don’t share the opinion or predicament are pressured to adopt it or to empathise with it, under the tacit ethical or emotional threat of exclusion. Negatively (and typically in the ‘pep talk’ context), the phrase calls attention to a lack, inadequacy or defective attitude amongst some of the people present, who are similarly pressured to reposition themselves and avoid exclusion. When Milton’s Samson promises to do ‘Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy’ (1424) he makes an exact metrical balance between what is excluded (exemplified by the Philistines) and what is inclusive of himself and his hearers, in the following line. Logically, the Chorus is invited both to imagine and rule out certain actions on his part (bowing before Dagon’s idol, eating unclean food, etc.). These are implicitly excluded through what are, in effect, his sonorous, summary major premises (action x would be impure, action y unworthy). The intended effect is emotional reassurance. The inadvertence model: this may be less important, but is still worth looking out for in any investigation of modern critical rhetoric and


early modern texts. In conventional rhetoric, it is proactively employed (under the terms Praeteritio, Occultatio or Paralepsis) whenever a persuader affects to pass over a point as irrelevant to the issue being addressed – while in effect calling attention to it and including it, emotionally or logically, in the persuasion. Richard Lanham offers an amusing made-up example (p. 104). The intended effect comes across ‘accidentally on purpose’. Its reactive use is superbly demonstrated by Marlowe, as the spark to that passage of mutually-persuasive dialogue between Tamburlaine and his henchmen, from which I have already quoted. Having dismissed Tamburlaine to the chores of his high office, Cosroe turns to the perks of his own still higher one. He is told that he ‘shall shortly have (his) wish / And ride in triumph through Persepolis’ (II.v.49). As accidental overhearer, Tamburlaine repeats the line twice, relishes it, and uses it to fire the imagination of his followers with the seductive image of ‘kingly joys’ (ibid., 50, 54, 59). Gradually but inevitably all his followers count themselves in – and it is even possible to read one line, ‘And so would you my masters, would you not?’ (70) as addressed, brazenly, to the theatre audience: wouldn’t we all seize power, given the chance? 1.4.3

The dynamics of pathos: functional sentence perspective

The theory set out briefly by the Czech linguist Jan Firbas in his contribution to Cooper and Greenbaum’s Studying Writing (1986),24 and subsequently in a full-length book,25 is an important guide to the stylistic realisation of pathos. What Firbas concentrates on, Communicative Dynamism (CD), calls to mind Aristotle’s concept of energeia – that is, the maximally effective realisation of persuasive intent. According to Firbas, ‘Context Dependent’ language has less dynamism than that which introduces new information (and by implication, feeling) into the ‘flow’. As we will see later, with reference to deixis, this context might include or imply a spatial, temporal or social frame of reference, as well as that of the communication itself – the clauses still held in the reader’s or listener’s short-term memory as the current sentence makes its impact. The most arresting type of dynamism is found in the basic ‘Semantic Structure’ of sentences which are wholly independent of context (for example, the opening sentences of stories), and is irrespective of word-order. When part of a sentence is context-dependent, this becomes crucial. In an effectivelyconstructed syntax the dynamism rises progressively along a scale. Firbas distinguishes two such scales which may work singly or in combination. What he calls the Existential Scale entails, in rising order


of dynamism, a setting, a verb denoting appearance or existence, and a phenomenon expressed by the subject (p. 48). Firbas expresses this formulaically as Set = App/Ex = Ph. In the Quality Scale, dynamism coincides far more closely with normal English word-order. When the subject is context-dependent and the adverbial element independent of context, the sentence is oriented towards the latter: The verb ascribes a characteristic to a notion that has already been introduced into the flow of communication; it performs the dynamic function of expressing a quality (Q). Consequently, the subject performs the dynamic function of expressing a quality bearer (B), and the adverbial element performs the dynamic function of expressing a specification (Sp). This may be followed by a further specification [Fsp], often the ‘sting in the tail’ of the sentence. Here, the formula for rising dynamism reads B = Q = Sp = Fsp. Very often, however, the two ‘scales’ are combined in a single sentence. Firbas examplifies this through a typical Fairy Tale opening: ‘Years ago (Set) there was (App/Ex) a young king (Ph) who (B) ruled (Q) his country (Sp) capriciously and despotically (Fsp)’. As Firbas shows (pp. 49–50) it is also possible for one sentence constituent, if context-independent, to exercise the Ph-function and the Bfunction simultaneously, as ‘a young king’ does in another form of the opening just quoted, i.e.: ‘Years ago a young king ruled his country capriciously and despotically’. Both versions of the sentence introduce, via the noun ‘king’, a familiar fairy-tale ‘phenomenon’ and a set of expectations for the reader or listener. How might this theory be exploited to enhance the emotional force and clarity, and the substance, of sentences? Several general principles might be derived from it. Firstly: since the mind’s capacity to link new ‘context-independent’ matter to the immediate context (that is, words and ideas in the short-term memory) is limited to about seven preceding clauses (Studying Writing, p. 55), writers or speakers may revert to an idea which they wish to ‘underline by repetition’ once every eight clauses, without impairing its impact – that is, its dynamism. Secondly: when emotive words or images are used to characterise people, things or actions, they may often gain maximum impact by being placed as ‘further specifications’ at the ends of sentences or clauses. Thirdly: the sense, not the word as such, is decisive in this respect. When in reply to Faustus’s pert question ‘And what are you that live with Lucifer?’ Mephostophilis repeatedly and sarcastically underlines the point,


telling him that they are: ‘Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer / Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer / And are for ever damn’d with Lucifer’ (Doctor Faustus, [I.iii.298–300]), he makes a single subject serve as both Phenomenon and Quality Bearer through three clauses, each ending with the same phrase with Lucifer as either Specification (298) or Further Specification (299, 300), but each time expressing a different idea (falling, guilt, punishment, and suffering). The repeated words in terminal position (antistrophe) accumulate force through a constant addition of meaning. Fourthly: as this example shows, concentrated effects are achieved through the combination of Firbas’s two ‘scales’. Sentences or clauses may begin with vivid ‘phenomena’ (adjective + noun), and end even more powerfully via ‘specification’, whether in the adverbial element or in the object (direct or indirect) of the verb. In the Samson extract, Sentence Perspective demonstrably enriches the effect. Each of the three cumulative clauses on the Philistine lords, priests and people (1418–22) vividly combines the Existential and Qualitative Scales, in the first two instances employing the superlatives ‘lordliest’ and ‘soonest’ to imply the normal ‘specifications’ proper to those categories – haughty insolence, idolatrous ‘zeal’ – as well as the ‘further specifications’ occasioned by Dagon’s gargantuan feast (for example, ‘lordliest in their wine’). The third clause characterising ‘the people’ varies the dynamic order (together with the word-order) by placing a ‘further specification’ – ‘on their holy-days’ – before the crowd’s more broadly ‘specified’ mob-characteristics (‘Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable’). Balancing this mixture of scorn and apprehension, Samson’s assurances on his own conduct are harder to locate on a clear dynamic ‘scale’. The fact that, as we have seen,’myself’ comes last in his list (1424) may betray a fundamental egoism (and an implied condition of self-destructive despair). As they first strike us, ‘dishonourable, impure (and) unworthy’ all have the form, grammatically, of ‘specifications’. They seem to be complete in themselves. Only ‘unworthy’ links them syntactically to the following line. ‘Unworthy’ (as in ‘unworthy / Our God’) may extend the first level of ‘specification’ to cover God, Law, nation, and self as objects of Samson’s own scrupulous and zealous care. But ‘unworthy’ may also be understood as a more general moral concept, which could stand alone but, here, introduces the following line as a ‘further specification’. Moreover ‘honour’ may be linked specifically to ‘God’, and ‘pur[ity]’ to the Mosaic Law, making l. 1421 a correlated completion of the earlier ‘specification’. We cannot quite determine how the scale works or how far it extends, or assess the relative importance of ‘Our God’ and ‘myself’ in their squared-off posi-


tions, initial and terminal – or judge finally whether ‘my’ (as in ‘my nation’) denotes responsibility and identification with a larger whole as suggested above, or insidious egoism. The ambiguity and suggestive power of poetry finally transcends rhetoric. 1.4.4

Deixis: pathos and presence

Broadly speaking, deictic26 language points to or reflects a context not expressed verbally, but present in the shared awareness of speaker and hearer (or writer and reader). It may also refer to the process of communication itself (as in ‘earlier I discussed A’, later I’ll deal with Z’). This shared awareness may be of physical space or time, or of a social or cultural context. Indication of closeness or distance may also be involved in empathetic deixis, as in ‘I would be really pleased to meet this new friend of yours’ (as in Semino’s example, p. 34). Here moral and/or emotional judgement is reflected deictically in the demonstrative pronoun. The emotional representation of real things, events or actions will be sharper, given real bearings of time and space, and pointers to the social or conceptual ambience. Persuaders may use the ‘here and now’ common to speaker and listener, or even the spaces linking reader and writer – or they may use deictic language in recreating real or imaginary happenings (for example, in Quintilian’s evocation of a roadside killing – see pp. 52–3, below). For example, the Samson passage begins with a deictic usage (‘your company along’), connecting the space within which Samson’s mind has laboured (1298), to that of his ultimate physical labour (and unreadable spiritual crisis?). As an example of the use of deictic language at the absolute summit of tragic emotion we may take Lear’s last words, quoted above. If Lisa Jardine is right in her account of the pathos in Lear, if it is ‘raw’, deprived of its normal cultural conditioning (pp. 107–10, 172–3, below), this physical and spatial immediacy will be even more significant. 1.4.5

Pathos and convergence: echoes of spontaneity

Professor R.A. Carter has demonstrated the creativity of ‘ordinary’ language, as instanced in the CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham) corpus of (mainly) spoken English. Speakers who are in rapport with each other tend to converge linguistically, ‘producing parallel structures in the form of lexical and syntactic echoes’.27 Literary or dramatic language may exploit this pattern in its representation of persuasive speech, either in dialogue (see the passage


from Part One of Tamburlaine, already cited), or even in the monologic form of rhetoric (e.g. in imaginary conversation between the speaker and some real or symbolic person). In our main ongoing example, Samson poises an anxiety, shared with his audience, against a corresponding and counterbalancing reassurance. As in the conversational examples provided by Carter, we see a parallel structure and a form of ‘convergence’. This balance may take the form of reassurance counterpoised against expressed anxiety, as it does in a doorstep sales encounter quoted by Susan Cockcroft in her Investigating Talk (1999).28 The Philistine state is an aristocracy or oligarchy comprising three ‘orders’: lords, pagan priests, and common people. Each of these orders is briefly represented as both contemptible and dangerous, likely to be ‘exasperated’ (i.e. made harsher in their behaviour towards Samson – and, potentially, his companions) by their memory of his own terrorist tactics towards them. Balancing this fear, is Samson’s own fear of sinking to the same level (as so many of Milton’s compatriots had done following the restoration of King Charles II); but his words also reflect a likely physical threat to the Chorus, in the event of its appearance as an escort ‘girt’ about him. This threat is symbolically integrated through the balanced and convergent positioning of the two Firbasian Fsp’s29 ‘in their wine’ and ‘well-feasted’. Against this anxiety, Samson ranges two sets of stalwart emotive abstractions – the three positive qualities of honour, purity and worthiness, here defined by their opposites (l. 1424) ‘dishonourable, impure, unworthy’, and four interlinked entities – spiritual, moral, social and personal – God, Law, Nation and Self (‘Self’ being – possibly, but not certainly – centred in his individual conscience as variously or unanimously informed by, and responsible to, the preceding three). God, Law, and Nation embody the three elements of sovereignty, religion and community so grotesquely debased by the Philistines. A complex, artful rhetoric (with, as we have seen, some ambivalent structural features) may thus possess the same basic structure and impulse as a spontaneous, ephemeral doorstep conversation. Summing up Samson Taken as a whole and in the light of every analytical technique applied to it above, the Samson passage demonstrates how a persuader simultaneously builds an ethos, expresses pathos (gratitude, solicitation, scorn, caution, zeal, national and personal pride) and draws in his listeners. Both his expressed concern and his concealed or half-conceived intentions are also underpinned by reasoning (logos). He already knows he


must be free to act unencumbered, though his valid concern for the Chorus’s safety excuses his final self-isolation. The structure, stresses, rhythms, vocabulary and images, appealing to the inferred experience of his fellow-tribesmen as subjects of the Philistine oligarchy (just as Milton’s implied reader would recollect the courtiers and priesthood of Restoration England), mirror their feelings and perceptions as well as his own. The passage serves to illustrate Eugene Garver’s account, in his seminal study of the Rhetoric,30 of how Aristotle seeks to square ethos and pathos by suggesting that they should, with the assistance of enthymemic argument, authenticate each other. But Samson cannot draw his fellow-tribesmen into the revelation he has not yet fully received – if indeed it is a revelation, and not a sublimation of anger and despair. They are left to read the sign of God’s action and of Samson’s regeneration, without his guidance. So what benefit do they derive from his words? We will pursue the question of rhetoric’s efficacy, and of the relationship between perceived truth, pleasure and action, into the next chapter – only noting here that the Chorus’s main emotional interest is in Samson himself as hero, not in what he stands for or indeed in what he personally experiences. They respond emotionally to his distinctive ethos without comprehending it. He moves and delights them, without teaching them.

1.5

Empowering the reader?

Let us examine an instance of the kind of critical rhetoric that aims to make a point or place a marker, and which (furthermore) links the priorities of a teacher to pleasure and emotional excitation. Gary Waller’s student-oriented book in the Longman Literature in English Series, English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century (1986),31 begins by recalling how he introduced his pupils to sixteenth-century court culture. They read Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ and wrote ‘response statements’: The results were fascinating. All the men in the class felt immediate identification with the wounded male ego that is articulated in the poem – he has been rejected by a woman with whom he has unexpectedly fallen in love only to he told by her that it was all enjoyable but superficial flirtation. All the women in the class were amusedly derisive of the attitude: what, they said, about the woman’s viewpoint? In such a society, and within such a philosophy of love, both so male-centred, why should a woman not get what she could out of the game of sex? Girls just want to have fun.


In creating our ‘readings’ of the poem as a kind of amusing public argument, we were, without knowing it fully, creating something of the atmosphere of the original sixteenth-century Court itself and how such poetry might have been read. It should be added, perhaps, that this course on sixteenth-century poetry traditionally culminates in a banquet using Elizabethan recipes prepared by the students themselves, and accompanied by music and poetry readings. If we want the sixteenth-century poets to come alive, what better way than to combine poetry, music, and food! More seriously, the students in the course were being introduced to a method of reading sixteenth-century poetry that this study will employ. The intention was to create strong readers of the poetry – readers who would bring their own most intense, often personal, questions to bear on their reading of Wyatt, or Sidney, or Shakespeare, or Donne. In particular, they were asked to read Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse … Barthes gave these student readers a powerful, contemporary vocabulary with which to articulate their questions about the text. As so often happens, the greatest enjoyment and the best criticism occur when a powerful reader encounters a powerful work. (pp. 2–3) As the teacher, Waller both includes himself in the ‘we’ which is responding to Wyatt and recreating his cultural context, and stands respectfully outside the groups of ‘men’ and ‘women’ involved. The loosely colloquial but (in context) positive word ‘fascinating’ is ambiguous in its reference, empathising with the students’ sense, willing or reluctant, of a double perspective as they divided according to gender. Its suggestion of simultaneous objectivity and involvement – observing oneself feeling – already foreshadows the ambiguity of terms in Wyatt’s poem, as characterised here and at greater length later in Waller’s book (pp. 116–18), for example the word ‘kyndely’ in its last-but-one line. With surprising neatness, ‘all the men’ share one perception of the poem and ‘all the women’ the other. It seems that what constituted the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ of Wyatt’s poem, the male presupposition of power and initiative in relation to women as to everything else (at least in stories told to other men), is still recognisable by the men amongst today’s student readers as a position to be occupied perceptually and emotionally – especially perhaps when the ‘ego’ is ‘wounded. On the other side, Waller endorses the view that, now as then, the women in their more or less constrained position ‘get what they can’ in terms of


transient pleasure and retaliatory power. He claims a degree of sympathy and insight entitling him to use the word, eschewed earlier, which young women of the 1980s continued to use amongst themselves: ‘Girls just want to have fun’. This seems to express the cultural and psychological consequences of socially-constructed femininity so perfectly that Warner repeats it in the course of his later and fuller discussion of the poem (p. 117). He might also defend the usage as ironic, implying that bright young women are still infantilised by their conventional status as objects of male desire, their continuing disempowerment. But how valid is this reliance on a continuity between sixteenth century and late twentieth century constructions of feeling? It exhibits one characteristic of new historicism as noted by Terry Eagleton in his review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (The Guardian, Saturday 9 June 2001): ‘new historicism doubts that we can know the past at all except in terms of the present’. Hence perhaps Waller’s recourse to ‘Elizabethan recipes, prepared by the students themselves’ as a way of recreating the sensory and social ambience of a Tudor household – or at the very least, fostering a positive attitude to study through pleasure and good fellowship. This in fact foreshadows the question shortly to be raised about Gary Waller’s rhetorical method. He provides our first example of the persuasive re-presentations of Renaissance passions by modern critics, which typify the rhetorical engagement at the centre of this book. His ‘banquet’ recalls the ancient linkage between teaching (or proving) and pleasure. In Cicero’s concept of the officia oratoris – already referred to – these two ‘duties’, roles, or functions of the ideal speaker are linked to a third, moving. In each of his two late treatments of oratory, Cicero states the formula slightly differently. In the De Optimo Genere Oratorum, he claims that ‘The supreme orator, … is the one whose speech instructs, delights and moves (et docet et delectat et permovet) the minds of his audience’;32 and in the Orator he restates the point: ‘The man of eloquence … will be one who is able to speak in court or in deliberative bodies so as to prove, to please and to sway or persuade (ut probet, ut delectet, ut flectat).33 Waller for his part is seeking to teach or prove to his students something distinctive about sixteenthcentury poetry, and at the same time to demonstrate the similarity between their ‘amusing’ altercation and the demandes d’amour of medieval and Renaissance courtly culture. Pleasure and ‘fascination’ are in some respects as integral to this process as Cicero implies in the Orator – and partly superadded to reinforce the point, in the form of the ‘banquet’. This corresponds to one reading of the term honorarium, used by Cicero in the De Optimo Genere to characterise the pleasure


imparted to the audience. It might be ‘a free gift’ to the audience, something beyond what they have the right to expect; or it might be a means of winning their favour.34 As we will see, repeatedly, the relationship of pleasure to persuasion – its role in the interaction of persuader, topic and audience – is at once vital and problematic. For Waller’s students, however, pleasure and proof point to a single end, both emotive and ethical: a prospect of empowerment strong enough to move them – and likewise (with the aid of his book) his less privileged student readers – to conform with the proffered role. The full persuasiveness of this will be better explicated by extending our reference further back: from Cicero, to Aristotle, whose authority is cited in the Orator. In conformity with Aristotle’s scheme for the persuasive presentation of ethos or character, as analysed by Garver (pp. 110–11, 118–19), Gary Waller’s self-portrayal as a university teacher shows arete (virtue), in its respect for the students, eunoia (goodwill) in its generosity, empathy, and concern for their betterment, and phronesis (constructive competence) in its challenges, its rewards, and its enlistment of Roland Barthes as a source of further ideas and insights. The students are to be creatively infected with this ethos of ‘powerful’ reading; they are to be ‘men’ and ‘women’ enough to confront the emotions it will entail. To achieve this, Waller uses the resource or ‘proof’ of pathos (as outlined by Aristotle, together with ethos and logos, in Rhetoric, 1.2.3–6). His fusion of an ethical, empowering stance with a deliberate stimulation of feeling, working through intuitive or discursive thought, constitutes the affectivity that we will follow though this book, and which is one of most challenging topics of modern linguistic study – as evidenced by Downes’s article (above). It is also a major aspect of the interpersonal function of language as postulated by M.A.K. Halliday and other researchers in the field of systemic functional linguistics.35 Waller reflects Aristotle’s contention ‘that the judgements we deliver are not the same when we are influenced by joy or sorrow, love or hate’. As a teacher he plays emotionally on his students’ ‘disposition’ or ‘frame of mind’ (the word in Greek is pos); and he subsequently uses his representation of that process to work a comparable change in his readers. Where Wyatt’s poem is concerned, the students’ involvement in the protagonist’s past joy, present sorrow, lost lust, and nascent hatred – and their replay, however approximate, of the debate which the poem might have occasioned amongst the poem’s original readers, will influence their judgement of Waller’s argument about the ‘conflicting discursive systems’ in the poem (p. 117), and about the broader ‘inability’ of court poetry such as Wyatt’s ‘to formulate any more creative


alternative to that permitted by the Court, either on the erotic or the political level’ (p. 118). At best they would look for the differences between the ‘conflicting discursive systems’ of their own time (for example, Barthes’s structuralism, 1980’s feminism, ‘boy talk’, ‘girl talk’, parental morality) and those of Wyatt’s day, as well as for the apparent similarities. But would they inevitably do this? Having fostered their emotional engagement with the text and embroilment with each other, Waller presents another emotive image, that of their prospective achievement. He seeks to stir a feeling recognised by Aristotle as appropriate to the male citizenry of his polis – emulation (see Rhetoric, II. xi). The ‘powerful reader’ is to be matched to the ‘powerful work’; can Waller’s reader claim that role for him/herself, as Waller’s students evidently did? Besides a capacity to make texts ‘come alive’, ‘power’ in this sense ought to include acuity and subtlety. But (in this case) would it do so? That question serves to re-introduce the main issue to be explored in this book. To make the passions of the past ‘come alive’, must we distort the echo of T.S. Eliot in my title and not so much ‘reconsider’ them within the frame of memory (as in the disenchanted voice of Eliot’s Gerontion) as reconfigure them into the terms of our own time? We will return to ‘They flee from me’ at the end of my final chapter, in a last attempt to view a text in terms of its own time – aided by the parallels and contrasts between it and a less well-known work of prose fiction, though written by a remarkable poet: George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J.

1.6

A ‘double analysis’ – with a difference

Returning to an even earlier question, is our emotional response integral and essential to our perception; or does the emotion follow the perception (if not distorting it or distracting us from it, as in the case – maybe – of Samson and the Chorus)? Investigation of this point will start from the next chapter, with its pursuit of pathos as debated over the centuries, before proceeding to specific texts in the following chapters. Once we have reviewed that material, and positioned the ‘Old’ rhetoric in relation to the ‘New’ as already presented, both perspectives can be brought to bear in practice. It would be tedious and spaceconsuming to apply every technique of analysis, ‘Old’ and ‘New’, to every one of the early modern, and modern critical, texts selected here – though where the ‘new rhetorical perspective is concerned, it was appropriate just for once to try out all my new tools on a single text. At


the same time I have already begun to identify and to highlight the old techniques, perceptions and preoccupations of rhetoric. What I am offering is a form of double analysis. I want readers to ask themselves, in each case, what other techniques might usefully have been applied, and what other texts I (or they) might have chosen. The term ‘double analysis’ recalls – though the premises, and the method, are fundamentally different – a much older application of that term. It was perhaps inevitable that Peter Ramus (Pierre de La Ramée, 1515–1572) and his followers should have chosen it, given their famous conviction that two distinct disciplines, Dialectic and Rhetoric, must be applied to persuasive speech and writing whether in composition or in analysis. Following Ramus himself in his Paris lectures on Cicero, a notable English exponent, Gabriel Harvey, proclaims his allegiance to Ramistic method (my translation): And because copiousness of matter, as the soul the body, sustains elegance of diction, therefore let us always employ … the double analysis we have used before – analysis rhetorical and dialectical, the former expounding oratorical ornaments and the craft which is proper to this school, the latter explaining invention and arrangement. (Ciceronianus, Eiiv)36 This must have complicated his brief as University Praelector of Rhetoric, if not made it strictly impossible: what must the Praelector of Dialectic have thought about Harvey’s duplication of his role (Ramus himself, in Paris, having avoided the problem by being appointed to a regius professorship of ‘Philosophy and Eloquence’)?37 Fortunately, I anticipate no such difficulty. ‘New’ (linguistic) Rhetoric and the ‘Old’ (Aristotelian) Rhetoric, in conjunction, will be applied both to ‘copiousness of matter’ and ‘elegance of diction’ – or in other words to both substance and expression, so far as the two can be separated. Unlike Harvey, I shall treat dialectic and rhetoric as an integral phenomenon, rather than the product of two distinct mental faculties and the subject of two separate discursive ‘arts’. Thus, old insights will be brought to bear on modern material (as with Gary Waller, above), quite as emphatically as modern techniques will be employed on early modern texts. In both areas, a wide range of perceptions, attitudes and emotions will be encountered, with a corresponding set of affinities and aversions between early modern writers and modern critics as variously positioned in both ranges. My choice of material aims to be representative with respect to


the diversity and development of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, to the variety of modern criticism – and to those ‘affinities and aversions’ themselves, bearing in mind how they might be encountered in practice. For example, a modern academic who was also a Christian within the nonconformist tradition might well feel closer emotionally, and in terms of his/her world view, to Bunyan (see Chapter 4) than to the colleague in the adjacent office – who may in turn feel closer to Margaret Cavendish, with her Hobbesian interest in atoms (see Chapter 5) than to his/her neighbour). I have aimed for a careful balance in selection, and scrutiny, of these ‘passionate’ texts – including some, incidentally, in which the feeling is milder. Though not seeking to exemplify every recognised species of emotion (much less the subspecies) these will represent the whole spectrum of feeling: positive and negative, every point in that spectrum being overlaid or underlain by tiers of empathy, sympathy and antipathy – depending on whether we look back from the modern response to the early modern text which occasions it, or in the other direction. Furthermore, both Renaissance writers and modern critics – whether designedly or intuitively – relate their emotional appeals to the anticipated response of their audience (though sometimes, as in the case of Donne’s ‘Apparition’ as discussed on pp. 129–31, below, they seek to divide or even to confuse that response). But our study of the process through which the emotions of the past are now submitted to cool analysis, or re-presented so as to stir new feeling, is further complicated. We have to consider two orders of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ relationships. The first of these is what we try to reconstruct: the outer relationships between writers and readers, playwrights and audiences etc, and all the inner relationships or lone voices represented in the texts38 – those engaged in dramatic dialogue; those who make oratorical appeals on stage or in fiction, and those who respond to them; those shown in harmony, in discord, converging or diverging. The second ‘order’ of ‘outer relationship’ is that of today’s critics and their readers, engaged are they are with the first order in its entirety: that is, with both the outer and the inner relationships manifest in early modern writing. Pathos pervades both orders, figuring as much in antipathetic resistance to persuasion as in its acceptance. And where the ‘outer relationship’ of ongoing critical debate is concerned, there are further complications. Here, the ‘inner-outer’ analogy might be variously presented. Differing critical approaches having bearings on the early modern text might be imagined


surrounding the first-order set of relationships like points of the compass – as my new rhetorical techniques have been applied, from various angles but with equal validity, to the passage from Samson Agonistes. Alternatively, and especially when an earlier critical reading is under challenge, there might be a further outer/inner distinction between an older ‘framework of debate’ and a newer one. This will be typified here by the way Terry Eagleton characterises earlier criticism, and the way Brian Vickers characterises his (see pp. 104–5, below). But before we tour any critical battlefields, it is important to move on from our synoptic view of modern linguistic angles on rhetoric, to a chronological survey of pathos.

2 Sable Clouds and Silver Linings

2.1.

A pathetic muddle?

The title of this chapter points forward to the passage from Milton’s A Masque, to be explored in its final section, as summarised in the lines echoed here (A Masque, 221–5). But it also implies a successful resolution, or exploitation, of the problem which dogs every attempt to locate pathos satisfactorily within rhetoric – or to accommodate rhetoric itself to the conscious and careful use of language as a tool for investigation and decision. How does emotion stand in relation to clear perception, right choice and enacted purpose? The Lady’s vision (perhaps reinforced for Milton’s Ludlow audience by a piece of primitive stage machinery, a visible rhetoric) illustrates a general principle about the use of pathos by Milton and other writers: the progression away from the kind of emotion which darkens and confuses – the perturbatio of the Stoics – to that which enlightens and directs, from sable clouds to silver linings. But to reflect the dynamic of emotion and perception, the movement from outward deception or misconstruction to inward substance, good or bad – a movement figured by Plato, and subsequently by Erasmus, as the opening of a Silenus (see below), and one which makes the pleasure of discovery integral to truth – will involve a constant stress on the connections between pathos and its two associated principles, ethos and logos (whatever period we survey and whatever terms, then current, approximate to these Aristotelean concepts). To place each of our examples of early modern pathos within its distinctive rhetorical context, determining whether the writer was touched by controversy about the role of emotion – or embroiled in it – might well in every case call for a book-length study. The right place for such research, with these and with other texts, would be after an 38

Sable Clouds and Silver Linings 39

application of the double analysis recommended here – to explain, challenge or modify the impression created. I am, rather, setting out to represent those features of the overall growth and change in rhetorical concepts and rhetorical teaching on pathos which are most relevant to my approach. It is more important to show the general climate of ideas about rhetoric and related subjects such as dialectic, poetry and preaching, at the times our texts were written. I also want to stimulate our current perceptions about how persuasive pathos works, irrespective of any specific influences of which past writers might have been conscious. The gifted persuader’s practice will always tend to outgo his or her theoretical understanding, however intensively pursued – as it was, for example, by Cicero. It follows that some books which were relatively little known during this period (for example, Aristotle’s Rhetoric) will still serve to deepen our insight into the persuasive process, and help us to pinpoint the peculiarities and intensities displayed in our examples, whether modern or early modern. They will also assist us in the application of those ‘new rhetorical’ techniques which I outlined in the Introduction. As inheritors of the rich and many-stranded legacy of classical rhetorical theory, the Renaissance lacked one major advantage which we now enjoy. Without today’s more scientifically based – if incomplete – understanding of emotion to act as an objective marker, they struggled to achieve an intellectually coherent account of pathos which would not sacrifice any of the major insights bequeathed to them, despite the derivation of these insights from widely divergent historical contexts and ways of thinking, over two millennia. Current opinion amongst scholars of the history of Rhetoric is strongly represented by Lawrence D. Green, who in a recent biennial conference paper (Warsaw, 2001),1 cast serious doubt on the consistency and clarity of early modern ideas on this topic. There was agreement on techniques for moving emotion, but no clear notion as to what was being moved, or to what effect. Theorists and practitioners attached different meanings to the same words, and as they tried to make positive use of negative Stoic concepts like perturbatio, failed to exploit Aristotle’s insights linking pathos to reason. Another vital factor was the perceived relation of pathos to spirituality and volition in the rhetoric of preaching, reflecting Christ’s own manifestations of passion. But attempts such as Melanchthon’s (see below) to relate the moving of the Spirit to the preacher’s emotive language, the soul to the bodily organism, could not achieve general acceptance while ideas of the relationship between soul, mind and body were so various and so shifting.


These inconsistencies should not be overlooked as we seek to articulate our own perceptions of pathos, and to understand what individual Renaissance persuaders achieved with it (and thought they were achieving). We have to follow the history of that split between thinking and feeling which in Green’s view became so much worse after the Renaissance’s conspicuous failure to reconcile the difference. As we will be reminded, it began much earlier. We must also consider the various contexts and modes of relationship in which feeling is developed between persuader and persuadee, from spoken to written language, from the interaction of speaker and audience to philosophic dialogue, and from conversation into letter-writing in furtherance of the one-to-one transactions of friendship. Moreover, the representation of emotional interaction between characters (whether furthering persuasion or resisting it, and whether involving real people as in Plato’s dialogues, or fictional ones as in drama), might serve both to generate emotion in a larger audience or readership, and to make that emotion more discriminating, more intrinsically rational, by placing it in perspective, subjecting it to deliberate reversal or refinement. In the sections that follow, I shall try to carry forward, stage by stage, a developing understanding. This will aim to suggest what ideas and techniques were most readily available for exploitation at particular times and places. It will also I hope indicate how the Old Rhetoric – however incoherent, philosophically – still sheds light on our current uses, and readings, of pathos (whether or not it also provides hypotheses for the New Rhetoric to validate or disprove).

2.2

Ideas of pathos from Plato to Milton

Plato: in contrast to the Gorgias, which dismissed rhetoric as a mere ‘knack’, a species of pandering,2 ignorant and unprincipled, the Phaedrus (referred to here through Walter Hamilton’s 1973 translation)3 seems to offer a model of philosophic rhetoric grounded in truth and dialectical logic, which addresses the emotional components of the soul and which, in the speeches of the Platonic Socrates, makes eloquent use of pathos. But what is envisaged, though it furnishes invaluable insights and has a marked influence on later theory and on rhetorical practice from Erasmus to Milton, is hardly a rhetoric in the conventional sense of that word – not being applicable to the communal contexts of legal trials or political debates. According to Socrates’s final prescription (pp. 71–103), the only valid persuasion is that entered into dialogically between the lover of wisdom and individual


souls, in relation to facts proved dialectically and concepts properly defined through the distinction of genus and species – all of this being directed towards some ‘particular type of man’, and guided by a knowledge of ‘how and upon what (the soul) naturally acts, and how and by what it is acted upon, and to what effect’ (p. 91). This rational analysis of persuasive cause and effect foreshadows Aristotle’s broader distinction, in Book II of the Rhetoric, into groups whose emotions and moral traits reflect their time of life: the young, the old, and those in their prime. In contrast, Plato’s true art of speaking is aimed, not at a group decision, but an individual’s enlightenment. It depends on the exact ‘pairing’ of types of speech, studied in advance, and types of souls4 similarly studied (though harder to recognise in particular cases – p. 92). This pairing evidently entails a sense of timeliness (compare Aristotle’s Kairos, below) since it tells a counsellor ‘when to speak and when to refrain’, and also a sense of stylistic fitness: ‘when to employ and when to eschew the various rhetorical devices of conciseness and pathos and exaggeration and so on’ (ibid.). All of this is aimed consistently at the securing of divine, not human approval (p. 94). Finally, Socrates (p. 95 ff.) compares the written communication of ideas very unfavourably to philosophic dialogue. It is like the forced, sterile growth of flowers in a garden of Adonis, when compared with the interactive contact of minds through the spoken word (p. 98), reflecting the fact that it ‘cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers’, or defend itself (p. 97). It is however a pleasant pastime and an aid to failing memory (p. 99). This introduces what is to be an ongoing factor in our consideration of the affective bond through which thoughts and feelings are communicated, shared and propagated. For all his distrust of rhetoric, whether written or spoken, Socrates seems to value the two characteristics common to sustained oratory and to philosophic dialogue, that is, the presence of two or more consciousnesses to each other, and the power of spoken language to reflect this, far above mere writing, even by men of ‘real knowledge’ (p. 98). Yet, paradoxically, Plato’s own writing has not only preserved a version of Socrates in responsive dialogue with others, reflective of their individuality, but inspired commentators to speak for him (if in their own terms), and provided models for further such discussion – whether spoken or written, reported or imagined. Moreover, he has, in the Phaedrus, already demonstrated how to draw a specific category of listeners into a sustained persuasive speech, by simultaneously representing their likely response to a given situation, as it develops, and their likely judgement of that response – while at


the same time creating, and shaping, their ability to imagine both. Phaedrus himself, the indirect addressee of the written speech as purportedly addressed by Socrates to some ‘handsome lad’ (p. 46), represents its original Athenian audience, and with his obvious interest in the topic prepares that reader for the emotional engagement which will ensue. Plato’s famous picture of the aspiring soul is based on its earlier (already metaphorical?)5 division into three parts: Reason, Appetite and Spirit (Thymos). Reason is a charioteer struggling with two ill-matched horses, instilling all three ‘parts’ with the pathetic power of vivid imagery, and exemplifying the ‘schema refreshment’ which Elena Semino attributes to metaphor at its most powerful (see pp. 19–20, above). Within the target cognitive domain, the Greek culture of love between man and youth,6 the Enjoyment goal of sex and the Achievement goal of enlightenment (the vision of heavenly beauty) necessitate two alternative MOPS for the vicious and virtuous pursuit of love. This would be difficult to conceive or recollect clearly without the complex interplay of forward and backward movement, rearing, plunging and startling, which the chariot image provides. From the charioteer’s perspective, ‘mapped’ upon that of the lover, the Instrumental goal of controlling the team, restraining the evil, black horse’s tendency to bolt (whilst not, by implication, harming or discouraging the good, tractable white horse) comes uppermost. The source domain of charioteering is immeasurably enlarged and infused with drama, seeing that the most unpromising equipage, properly handled, promises the highest prize: a ride with the gods round the outside of the vault of heaven; and for the implied reader the horses take on the best and worst qualities of man as an embodied being. Philosophy thus appropriates both love and athleticism to its own purposes within the merged domains of the metaphor, while at the same time Socrates is made to illustrate the right use of rhetorical pathos, energising pride, self-respect and the fear of shame against the violence of desire. The imagery depends for its full force on the reader’s empathetic response to both horses – something Plato probably felt he could count on amongst his readers. He shows how he expects them to react, representing overbearing and selfish desire as the ugly, dim-sighted, deaf black horse, and thus stirring antipathy against that all-too-recognisable part of themselves, together with sympathy for the good horse whose ‘shame and dread’ at his companion’s behaviour ‘makes the whole soul break into a sweat’ (p. 62). The rightness and nobility of this bodily response is reflected in the beauty of the white


horse – a pleasing image of the reader’s better self. Combined with the equally vivid body-image of the charioteer, already inculcated (p. 58), whose ecstatic sense of mingled pleasure and pain, of awakening powers and mutating substance is figured in the ‘pricking and irritation and itching’ of the soul’s ‘embryo feathers’ (and almost impossible to imagine without them), pathos is wrested from the lower to the higher, from the pleasure of present possession to the strenuous recovery of a remembered mode of vision: ‘absolute beauty … enthroned in her holy place attended by chastity’ (p. 62). Thus, the passage combines two types of emotive and perceptual transition which we will trace through many variants: from a fair exterior which reflects its substance, to the fair substance itself; and from the outward appearance belying its substance to the opposed inner reality (whether from outward ugliness to inner beauty, as with Socrates himself – see below – or vice versa). The beloved reflects the first of these, and the lover himself the second, as he progresses from bloodied and wrenching conflict with his own sensual nature towards philosophic fulfilment. In doing so, he may retain the outward appearance of sensuality, as Socrates himself did – his snub nose comically echoing that of the headstrong horse (see p. 61, below). We will see a comparable progression at the end of this chapter, in Milton’s A Masque. We should also carry forward Socrates’s insistence on the unerring application of reason, both to the topic and to an assessment of the soul being persuaded, including its emotional propensities. Trouble will arise when these two applications of reason become dissociated. We should also bear in mind the one-to-one character of this model of rhetoric, with its stress on philosophic ascent. It foreshadows later ideas of friendship and of persuasive letter-writing (including ideas on the use of pathos in letters). However Plato, with his rejection of probability as the basis of rhetorical argument (p. 93), and his sidelining of the problem of how to use rhetoric responsibly and effectively in the persuasion of larger or smaller groups of people, left a legacy of doubt as to whether rhetoric in its most pressing uses could ever be a true art (or science). Aristotle: the Art of Rhetoric has provided my own primary framework for thinking about practical persuasion, for writing about it and teaching it, for many years. Just to be reminded that we must accord equal attention to our own perceived character, our persuadee, and our topic, is almost as important as the associated perception of three modes of proof, three interlinked structural principles of rhetoric. Aristotle lays these down as a foundation (I.ii.3–6). The first principle is ethos: that is,


our character, including our goodwill, our morality, our competence and our emotional authenticity, as perceived by the persuadee. The second is pathos: the emotions which we encounter, stimulate or seek to change in our audience. The third is logos: argument about the topic according to the capacities and condition – moral, emotional, and intellectual – of the persuadee. The Rhetoric has attracted much attention in recent years, from books such as Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s Rhetoric: an Art of Character (1994), cited earlier, through collections of essays like that edited by A.O. Rorty (1996),7 to single articles, for example, that by James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin on ‘Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’ (2000).8 As noted in the previous chapter, Garver is an invaluable guide to Aristotle: his ethical and political contexts, his contradictions, his salient concepts. Garver shows the supremacy of ethos amongst the three proofs, the qualities on which it depends, and the power (energeia) through which it concentrates all available means of persuasion whatever the prospect of success. This understanding of ethos is already implied in Aristotle’s supremely pragmatic early definition of rhetoric (I.ii.1), which we might use to focus our attention every time we confront a persuasive text. J.H. Freese renders it as follows: ‘Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in relation to any subject whatever (peri hekaston)’.9 Garver encourages us to consider how this reflects Aristotle’s sense of rhetoric’s role within his own very distinctive society, the polis of Athens, which gave specific form to his argumentation, and to his treatment of the emotions addressed in political and legal rhetoric – two of the three rhetorical genres distinguished I.ii.3–6 (the third of these, the epideictic, being concerned with praise or blame). These clear signs of a specific cultural context prompt us to make all the necessary adjustments, should we ever seek to adapt Aristotle’s approach to current conditions. Where pathos is concerned, Garver shows how Aristotle almost reconciles his incompatible views of it (that is, that persuasion derives from enthymemic10 argument, discounting emotion; and that in practice emotion is one effective source of ‘proof’). The solution might rest in ethos, in that the emotions communicated to the audience by the persuader, moderating and motivating their pre-existent feelings, are those of a man who feels rightly, according to reason and virtue. This foreshadows Quintilian’s later linkage of true eloquence and moral character (see below). It also reflects Aristotle’s conviction (Garver, p. 113) that a free and rational form of government depends on thymos or manly emotion, known to us already as Plato’s white horse.


In their article on Kairos (see above), Kinneavy and Eskin shed further light on the meaning of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, and its implications for pathos. An audience’s response to the behaviour of others as portrayed by the speaker will be linked precisely to his and their sense of occasion or timeliness: to the representation of action (or inaction) within clearly evoked circumstances. This formulaic relationship is first stated at II.i.9. To paraphrase: pathos rises from three factors, the disposition of mind inclining men to a particular emotion, its most likely human objects, and its most likely occasions. Kinneavy and Eskin point out (p. 428) that the same formula is repeated no fewer than sixteen times – once in the introduction, and twice in five out of the ten chapters (II.ii–xi). The word just translated as ‘occasions’ (poiois) can also mean ‘cause’ (p. 439). Kairos (with its verbal variants), denoting ‘time’ and ‘circumstance’, appears at points of particular emphasis in the sequence as a whole. Together, the two words ‘give a situational grounding to the notion of an emotional argument’ (p. 438). This is important for our understanding of pathos as well as for the historical tradition of rhetoric, for two reasons. Firstly, bearing in mind that in modern English ‘occasion’ as a noun denotes a particular time, and as a verb a complex causal process (that is, the ‘occasioning’ or production of an effect through a combination of circumstances and reactions to them), it follows: (a) that the trigger of an emotion might be touched by one speaker through his/her representation of a person’s presence, action, inaction or attitude on a particular occasion; and (b) that a re-categorisation of the person, denial of their presence, or re-presentation of their behaviour on the same occasion by another speaker, might annul or transform the emotion (might, for example, turn anger to mildness or pity). This shows the link between reasoning and emotion. The cause of an emotion can in effect be controlled through reasoning about aspects of its occasion – including the frame of mind of those made subject to the emotion. Aristotle’s chapter on mildness (2.3) shows for example how to counter anger: ‘If then men are angry with those who slight them, and slight is voluntary, it is evident that they are mild towards those who do none of these things, or do them involuntarily’ (II.iii.3). For our purposes, the second main point emerging from Kinneavy and Eskin’s stress on Kairos is its link to the broader concept of fitness or decorum. They interpret Aristotle’s warning (I.ii.4) that ethos must be revalidated in every new communication, whatever the prior reputation of the persuader, as rising from the absolute necessity of engagement with the specific occasion – the concurrence of people,


circumstances, topic and issue. Despite their emphasis on time, this attests the need for a more all-round alertness, to be reflected in everything from the elements and proportion of the speech to its expressive style. They also link kairos to reasoning (pp. 440–1), and to the preoccupation with propriety of style (to prepon), which they see not only in the chapter devoted to it (III.vii), but throughout Aristotle’s treatment of persuasive language, with its stress upon metaphoric language that will set things pro ommaton or ‘before the eyes’ (III.x.6). This extends the concept of timeliness from the overall occasion of communication, to the particular times and stages within the speech itself, the topics, things and people referred to, and the ways of referring to them. From our perspective, looking back from a context in which the persuasive writing or recorded speech of the past is inevitably read by those to whom it was not addressed, while the mass communication of the our own time doesn’t directly address the particular circumstances of its consumers (though it seeks to typify them), this stress on timeliness is valuable because it challenges the stiffness of older stereotypes of decorum and the blandness of our current, far less obvious assumptions about how people ‘characteristically’ behave and speak. It encourages us to look for traces of the original or implied audience within the older work, and the moment at which they were addressed; and in today’s culture it helps us to evaluate the individual scripted interactions between ‘realistically’ represented people, the comic climaxes, fracturing relationships, family tragedies, the treatment of topical issues or ‘moments of high drama’ in which persuasion or emotive appeals are prominent, within soap episodes, sitcoms or Hollywood movies. But, whatever his value for us, how well was Aristotle known to the English Renaissance? According to George Kennedy’s summary of his own extensive scholarship in Rorty, pp. 422–4, the Rhetoric became outmoded with respect to the invention of arguments, as the elaborated treatment of issues11 assumed more importance than the older Aristotelean topics, and with respect to style following the Stoics’ reclassification of stylistic features into ‘tropes and figures of speech’. However, Cicero knew Aristotle, and effectively preserved the vital distinction of ethos, pathos and logos. The three ‘proofs’ are reflected, though transmuted, in his concept of the officia oratoris (see below); and in Kennedy’s words (p. 422) they are ‘then associated with the three kinds of style: plain, middle and grand’. Translation and publication of the Rhetoric in the Middle Ages and Renaissance seems to have been relatively late and limited (p. 423), and to have stressed the


work’s political and ethical value in preference to its rhetorical theory as such.12 Kennedy summarises: ‘Although the Rhetoric was much read in the later Renaissance …, real appreciation of the significance of the treatise is a phenomenon of twentieth-century interest in speech communication and critical theory’. What I carry forward from Aristotle is the three ‘proofs’ and the balanced attention to persuader, audience and topic required for maximum persuasive efficacy (energeia) – this being typified by the linkage of pathos to the persuader’s perceived ethos, and by the role of logos in the formation or alteration of those perceptions from which pathos rises. The clear reflection of Aristotle’s own polis, in his selection of arguments and characterisation of emotions, prompts us to pay similar attention to the various patterns of thought and feeling amongst the groups making up our society. We should also note his insistence on fitness and timeliness, and (reinforcing the effect of Plato’s example) his stress on metaphor as a source of emotive vividness (enargeia), setting things ‘before the eyes’. Cicero: the massive influence of Cicero from antiquity onwards, however deplored by C.S. Lewis,13 is based even more on his philosophy and oratory and his status as a stylistic model – inculcated by translation into and out of English – than on his rhetorical theory. For those who had received grammar school teaching or private tuition (see below), the cumulative impact of his words and rhythms, sharpened by the technical appreciation and detailed analytic vocabulary taught by their masters,14 would be an instinctive influence on their own persuasive efforts even without reference to outlines of his theory, or to his writing on oratory. In common with those other texts (for example, epic and historical poems) to which rhetorical criteria were applied, and whose structural and stylistic features were expounded through marginal commentary,15 or teased out in school lessons, the range of Cicero’s rhetorical practice would instil a sense of flexibility and variety. Here, I pass over his early work on the finding of arguments, De Inventione, and his late treatment, in the Topica, of seventeen standard loci or places for dialectical argument (though this was often employed as a school text in sixteenth century England). Another work once attributed to him, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 84 BC [Kennedy, page 97]), probably represents the rhetorical teaching Cicero himself received. Influential in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is still valuable for its compendious coverage, the liveliness of its examples, and its accessible account of the issues. It is available in a single handy,


well-translated Loeb volume.16 For our purposes, the most important general influence on Cicero must have been Stoicism (as noted by Kennedy, above), not only for its probable foundation of the stylistic distinction between figurative and non-figurative style (tropes and schemes), but for its view of emotion as an essentially morbid ‘perturbation’ of the mind.17 In the dialogue De Oratore, his most extended treatment of rhetoric, Cicero touches on many topics and issues, which I will follow through his later and shorter work, the Orator, and through subsequent writers from Quintilian onwards. He begins by making Scaevola and Crassus debate what is included within the art of rhetoric (I.ix.35 ff.), Crassus insisting on its all-embracing nature and on the use made of it by every discipline (as when Plato, ‘making fun of orators’ in the Gorgias ‘himself seemed … to be the consummate orator’ – and we have seen how true this is of the Phaedrus!). He applies to Rhetoric what seemed, to Roscius the actor (I.xxix.132), to apply to all arts including his own: ‘I often hear [him] affirming that the chief thing in art is to observe good taste’ (‘quem saepe audio dicere, caput esse artis, decere’). In the Second Book (II.vii.30 ff.), Antonius, uncertain whether Rhetoric is a distinct and major art founded on facts – as Socrates had insisted it should be and as Cicero, knowing the Phaedrus, would recall – still affirms that it ‘wears the likeness of an art’. As such, it is all-pervasive. Chiming in with my concern for rhetorical pathos as something that works across generic boundaries, Antonius notes that, just as the fluent exponents of other disciplines ‘gain something’ from oratory even ‘without any regular training’ (II.ix.38), so, reciprocally, much of value to the orator is drawn from the distinctive expression of other arts. He compares the effect of purely recreational reading in the works of historians trained in rhetoric or philosophy, to the accidental acquisition of a tan while walking in the sunshine (II.xiv.60): his discourse ‘gets coloured’. De Oratore also addresses the question of how to arouse pathos. As Quintilian was to do (see below), but without his succinct formula for feeling, Cicero’s protagonists Antonius and Crassus are shown to have moved audiences to emotion, mainly through their own emotion. We see a vivid action-shot of Crassus, instinct with ardour down to his fingertips and every newly-coined exactitude of expression (II.xlv.188). Cicero relates this self-arousal (II.xlvi.191) to the use of powerful moral and emotional ‘commonplaces’ (‘locorum’) and the ‘quality of diction’ (‘natura orationis’). This is exemplified in the story (II.xlvii.197 ff.) of Antonius’s own triumphant defence of Norbanus before a jury of Roman Knights (95 BC): a turn-around foreshadowing


his grandson’s reversal of the sentiments of the Roman people following Caesar’s assassination, as represented by Shakespeare.18 Here (in effect) the ‘commonplace’ asserts that ‘resistance to patrician power is acceptable in a just cause’; and Antonius uses it to present the motives of Norbanus’s action in an entirely new light (clearly showing the linkage between enthymemic argument and pathos as represented by Aristotle). But this work evidently did not satisfy Cicero’s curiosity about oratory, or fully express his concern for it. Orator, addressed to Caesar’s future assassin, Marcus Junius Brutus, was written in 46 BC during Cicero’s last great period of literary activity (before the series of orations against Caesar’s avenger, which precipitated his own death). In response to the advocacy by Brutus and other younger contemporaries of the plainer ‘Attic’ mode of oratory, it shifts the emphasis in the discussion of rhetoric strongly towards style. Here, as already indicated, Cicero identifies what he terms the officia oratoris, linking them immediately to the ‘genera dicendi (xx.69) and thus to the full range of resources which were in his view threatened by Atticism: the plain style was to be used in proof, the middle style to afford pleasure, and the high or vehement style to sway the audience (‘subtile in probando, modicum in delectando, vehemens in flectendo’). The use of these was to be guided, as ever, by ‘decorum’, perceived as an equivalent of the Greeks’ to prepon (xx.70 ff.). In the Orator (xxxii.113 ff.) he also seems to provide (without evidently intending to do so, but more markedly than in the De Oratore) some grounds for Ramus’s later separation of dialectic and rhetoric. Hubbell translates the opening of the passage as follows (p. 389): The man of perfect eloquence should, then, in my opinion possess not only the faculty of fluent and copious speech which is his proper province, but should also acquire that neighbouring borderland science of logic; although a speech is one thing and a debate another, and disputing is not the same as speaking, and yet both are concerned with discourse – debate and dispute are the function of the logicians; the orator’s function is to speak ornately. Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, used to give an object lesson of the difference between the two arts; clenching his fist he said logic was like that; relaxing and extending his hand, he said eloquence was like the open palm. To me, the most likely interpretation of this is that though the orator should study dialectic with the logicians, as dialectic, he should


employ it in a distinctive form while ‘speaking ornately’19 and preparing to do so – as the muscles and sinews of the fist, in Zeno’s famous comparison, are the same as those in the open palm, in their ‘relaxed’ and expansive mode (which also implies openness to the attitudes and emotions of an audience). Cicero continues with a very brief treatment (xxxiv.122 ff.) of arrangement and the style appropriate to each part (to be developed variously according to the nature of the subject); he provides a clearer indication of the amplificatory treatment of commonplaces and of the ‘general principle’ (Greek thesis) which will often be linked to the point at issue – and thus, implicitly, to logos. He then addresses (xxxvii.128 ff.) ‘two matters’ of major importance to us (‘duae res’ – Hubbell translates as ‘two topics’): in effect, ethos and pathos. They appear here as qualities: ethicon which ‘is related to men’s nature and character, their habits and all the intercourse of life’ (Hubbell); and patheticon which ‘arouses and excites the emotions’. With or without intermediaries this foreshadows the comment which Marlowe’s Theridamas makes on the seductive power-fantasy spun for him by the rising star, Tamburlaine: ‘Not Hermes Prolocutor to the Gods, / Could use perswasions more patheticall’ (I.Tamburlaine, I.ii.210–11). Cicero proceeds with a brief, tight-packed instancing of oratorically significant passions before moving on into an increasingly detailed treatment of figures of words (xxxix.134–5), figures of thought as the key to feeling (xxxix.136–xl.139), and of the structure and rhythm of prose (xli.140 ff.). As he reels off the figures of thought they seem to burgeon in the orator’s mind. There is a sense of elation and urgency about the way in which he piles up, one upon the other, the most compact possible expression of how each figure works, not naming it but evoking it; and a sense of infinite resourcefulness in the reiterated form of ‘ut’ followed by the subjunctive (‘let him … let him … let him’). Here the sense of fitness and the imminence of effective pathos are located in the moment of perception: how to move this audience, here, now. How to verbalise the perception is then treated at much greater length in line with the inspiring purpose of Cicero’s letter – that is, the defence of a full and varied rhetorical style against the Atticists. Two things are to be noted, finally. Firstly, there is an encouragement here, despite all Cicero has written elsewhere, to associate the two officia of pleasing and moving, primarily with the ‘treatment of subject matter’ (xxxiv.122). This ‘tractatio rerum’ is to work through the figuration, syntax and rhythm of prose style – though in the longer term this association will have nearly disastrous consequences for rhetoric as a discipline. Secondly, it is clear despite the


earlier linkage of pleasure with the middle style and moving with the high or vehement style, that the latter is pleasurable in direct proportion to its effectiveness in moving – as the thrusts and parries of a gladiator are ‘also attractive to look upon’ (lxviii.228). Quintilian: in the Epilogue to his Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1974) James Murphy20 symbolises the transition from medieval to Renaissance concepts of Rhetoric, by retelling the story of how, in September 1416, the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was discovered by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini in a ‘dark dungeon’, under the abbey of St Gall in German Switzerland. Though parts of the text had been known in the interim, chiefly as a source on ‘elementary education and grammar’ (Kennedy, p. 188), the monks’ slovenly neglect reflects the loss of classical rhetoric’s cultural and political context, before the recovery of something akin to it, in the city states and centralised monarchies of early modern Europe. As a record of educational practice, rhetorical training, forensic speaking and habits of reading throughout the Roman empire, Quintilian’s whole work was to be an invaluable guide or touchstone for the linguistic, literary and rhetorical aspects that later recovery – vastly expanding the cultural context already seen in Cicero’s dialogue. For us, it is important both for its scope and for its vivid formulations, not least on pathos. In greater detail than Cicero’s, twelve books take you stage by stage through the cultivation of oratorical skill: every grade of rhetorical composition, and every successive part of a speech. The overlap and interplay between imaginative writing and the more functional use of language in the schools, in trials and in public ceremonial (following the effective demise of political oratory with the eclipse of the Roman republic), foreshadows the contribution which a more widelydisseminated and reinvigorated rhetorical education was to make to the technique of early modern writing, whatever the genre – besides showing how literary writing shaped oratorical style (at X.v.4 Quintilian recommends the exercise of paraphrasing the ‘lofty inspiration’ of verse into prose). Cicero’s authority is continually reinforced: when he comes to discuss the figures, Quintilian quotes verbatim a longish passage from De Oratore (III.lii.201 ff.), which moves from the most graphic and emotive figures of thought towards more purely verbal devices, before going on to include the impassioned summary which I have already noted in Orator xxxix.134 ff. (see above). But in one seminal passage Quintilian articulates a perception whose general validity extends beyond the orator’s figures of thought, to include the affective power of imagination and observation, as encoun-


tered in drama and literary texts. Appropriately, he places it in a broader cultural context, as part of a contrast between ethos and pathos, which serves to link how the persuader is perceived, to what he himself sees. From VI.ii.20 onwards, Quintilian begins his discussion of pathos (Latin adfectus) by likening the milder emotions associated with ethos, to comedy, while pathos resembles tragedy. What we now call ethics is more central to Aristotle’s view of ethos than to Quintilian’s. For Aristotle, the emotive responsiveness that characterises the man of virtue, competence and goodwill will range over the whole scale of feeling, as against the equable, mild benevolence of Quintilian’s ethos. It is as if Aristotle’s ethos starts from a moral perception of the case in hand (people, topic, circumstances), and works outward to the impression it wishes to make and the emotions it needs to move, while Quintilian’s is more preoccupied with how it will be viewed, and with when its calm urbanity will be most appropriate – though he is concerned that the orator should be perceived as a good man (VI.ii.18–19). Skill in portraying one’s own oratorical character would be enhanced by the exercises set for rhetoric students, in which they portrayed such characters as ‘rustics, misers, cowards and superstitious persons’ (VI.ii.17). This type of ethopoeia would later be included by Aphthonius in his Progymnasmata (see below), and as such would be perpetuated in English grammar schools. By implication, to act out a character quite unlike your own, would help you to see yourself as others saw you, as well as helping you to deploy irony or ‘feigned emotion’ when required (VI.ii.15). But a more vital point has yet to emerge. Where pathos is concerned, Quintilian (like Cicero) insists that to move others we must first be moved ourselves (VI.ii.27–8). To do this the persuader must employ the phantasiai or visiones through which ‘things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes’ (VI.ii.29), a faculty familiar to everyone in the form of daydreaming (VI.ii.30). Quintilian shows how a pleader would stir up horror, pity and detestation through a detailed mental recreation of events on which the mind would dwell in turn, moving itself to feel those emotions so acutely that every aspect of voice, expression, gesture and attitude would impel the audience to share them. It might be worth the attempt to translate this into a more contemporary idiom than that of Butler in the Loeb edition: I’m protesting at somebody’s murder. Won’t my eyes scroll through everything likely to have happened? The hit-man – suddenly there,


coming at him? He – cornered, scared out of his mind? Stuck between yelling for help, buying time, trying to dodge clear? Don’t I see the hand stabbing, the body folding, going down? Won’t the blood, the paleness, the groan of indescribable pain; the mouth gaping; the last breath wheezing out, be etched on my mind, undeletable? (VI.ii.31)21 Compare this with the death of Abel, which Adam is impelled to witness in a vision (PL, XI.444–7), and which seems to echo Quintilian. Like Aristotle’s prescription for effective style, it ‘sets things before the eyes’; but contrary to his preference it is a literal and sensory evocation, not metaphorical. Where Aristotle wishes the metaphors used in persuasion to display ‘actuality’ (energeia), that is, a degree of sensory or animate life comparable to that in poetic metaphor, Quintilian attributes ‘clarity’ or ‘vividness’ (enargeia) to passages such as the one translated above. Beth Innocenti22 sees this preference for the literal as characteristic of Ciceronian rhetoric: the direct and forthright presentation of actual things ‘taken into the mind’ having greater clarity and impact than figurative language. It will, moreover, contribute to the overall quality – already indicated – which Quintilian (II.xv.34) requires of the effective speaker, and which is directly linked to his definition of rhetoric as ‘the science of speaking well’ (‘bene dicendi scientia[m]’): he goes on to claim that ‘this definition includes all the virtues of oratory and the character of the orator … since no man can speak well who is not good himself’ (‘cum bene dicere non possit nisi bonus’). This link, differently expressed and perhaps differently conceived in the later definition of the orator which Quintilian (XII.i.1) draws from Marcus Cato, that is, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking’ (‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’), remains a valuable focus for discussion. From Aphthonius (and Hermogenes) to Augustine: the virtue expressed in rhetoric, and conveyed through pathos, came into question in later antiquity following Rome’s conversion to Christianity. The kind of false fictitious emotion which was to seduce the younger St. Augustine and appal the older one, is exemplified by the ethopoeia which (as already mentioned) was included in Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata. This text, written around the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries was the most popular and widely commented upon of all its kind. In his Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition (1980),23 George Kennedy attributes its popularity to the fact that it provides examples of each exercise (pp. 163–4). Its value in fostering rhetorical skills and furnishing techniques for drama, poetry and prose writing also derives


from the range of its compositional types. There are 14: fable, narration, chreia (that is, amplification of some famous word or deed), moral saying, disproof, proof, commonplace, praise, blame, comparison, ethopoeia (i.e. feigning of a personality, ethical or passionate), description (or ecphrasis), thesis (that is, argument on a general proposition), and legislation. The rhetorical orientation of this material was stressed both by the Byzantine commentators (Kennedy, p. 164), and by Reinhard Lorich, a Renaissance commentator on the Latin version attributed in part to Rudolph Agricola, whose edition was widely used in England.24 Exercises are variously assigned to the three principal rhetorical genera, Lorich listing fable, narration, chreia, sententia and thesis under the Deliberative; proof, disproof, and commonplace under the Judicial; and praise, blame, ethopoeia and comparison under the Demonstrative – legislation and description being left unclassified. The second of these, description or ecphrasis, is for Kennedy (p. 164) especially prone to the endemic (and fruitful) phenomenon of letteraturizzatione, that is, the tendency of rhetorical forms to evolve into literary ones. Most of the early modern texts discussed in this book reflect this process, though almost always retaining their persuasive characteristics. Vivid description, sometimes standing out like a distinct framed picture within the text, if not actually describing a picture, a building, and so on (as in the more specific usage of the term ecphrasis), might embody pathos, furthering a larger persuasive design; or it might display self-contained aesthetic qualities; or simultaneously achieve two or more of the officia oratoris, such as moving and delighting. It might be part of an extended work, like Menaphon’s description of Tamburlaine to be considered in Chapters 3 and 5 (pp. 90–3, 151–6, below), or serve an immediate persuasive purpose, or both. The same is true of the other exercises, such as commonplace (that is, ‘speech expounding the good or evil qualities manifest in a particular person’).25 All these compositional types can be selected, adapted, and combined like building blocks to form the distinctive structures of widely diverse genres. The liveliest is probably ethopoeia, inviting empathy with extreme emotional states (for example, Hecuba’s, at the fall of Troy) or distinctive mindsets, as with the ‘dweller far inland’ (‘mediterraneus’) dumbfounded by a glimpse of the sea (Lorich, Sig.Zr). The importance of this text, for us, lies in its use in English grammar schools, being specified for Durham in 1593,26 and criticised for its difficulty by John Brinsley in his Ludus Literarius.27 He deplores the complexity of some of the exercises with their very specific topics, and suggests recourse to the simplified inventive procedure associated with


Ramus (see below). But how much would be lost by reducing the distinctiveness of the various tasks? Lorich (Sig.Z5r) comments on the ethopoeia mixta, in which the student has to feign both a particular passion and a characterising choice of action (for example, Achilles mourning Patroclus and vowing to avenge him): ‘For the purpose of this particular exercise is, that you should try to adapt to your material the most appropriate forms of sensory description, thoughts, and words’. If a careful teacher could induce pupils to do this, real benefits would result, broadening their minds and extending the range and flexibility of written style. Other more refined distinctions of style came down to the Renaissance from later antiquity, for example, Hermogenes’s seven ‘ideas’ or characteristics of the grand style,28 two of which are fitted to forensic oratory, that is, asperity and vehemence, and two to epideictic, that is, solemnity and splendour. The ‘ideas’ are listed on pp. 259–60 of Debora Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric (1988),29 and their influence traced throughout her book. Around the time when Aphthonius was first in use, St Augustine in his Confessions was rebuking his younger self for lamenting Dido’s fictitious suicide (that is, Virgil’s mixed ethopoeia of passion and choice), and not his own spiritual death.30 But while rejecting all forms of emotional deception, typical of the rhetoric he had once taught, Augustine indicates the role of pathos in making the Confessions effective for its readers. In his Retractions, written about 426–8, he states that ‘[M]y Confessions, … do prayse God, who is both just, and good; and do excite, both the affection, and understanding of man towards him … [T]hey wrought this effect, when I wrote them; and so they yet do, when now, I read them’.31 Since he also writes here of the pleasure which the book had continued to afford to his ‘brethren’, it is clear that it fulfils the three official oratoris, teaching, pleasing and moving, both for others and for Augustine himself. This impression is borne out by a fuller study of Augustine’s pronouncements on rhetoric, and on the relationship of emotion to will. Shuger (pp. 41–50) gives a clear account of these, as they appear in De Doctrina Christiana and De Civitate Dei. Coming to these books from the Confessions, I was more alert both to the personal overtones of Augustine’s treatment, and to his social and cultural awareness – his continuing fascination with eloquence, the echoes of his own sexually-distracted youth, and the need to use words to transform lives, in a society still more inclined to applaud eloquence as a performance art, than to act on it. As an inheritor of the Christian eloquence of St Paul and the earlier patristic writers, Augustine provides lengthy quotation and a detailed,


almost mathematical demonstration of Paul’s stylistic qualities – both pleasurable and persuasive. In De Doctrina IV.xx.39–44,32 he illustrates Paul’s mastery of all three levels of style: the plain or restrained (submissa dictio), the middle or mixed (dictio temperata), and the grand (grande dicendi genus). Since all subjects are of equal importance with respect to the spiritual life, the levels of style now relate primarily to purpose, not to subject: the plain style is for teaching; the middle style, in Shuger’s words, ‘delights the hearer and by praising God and the saints draws its audience to love what is truly good’ (Shuger, p. 43), while the grand style – which can range from elaborate structures of repetition, cola, and periods, to an impassioned plainness – is not necessarily more ornamented but more ‘inflamed by heartfelt emotion’ (‘violentum animi affectibus’ – IV.xx.42). As Augustine puts it: ‘When one needs to move and sway one’s listeners – this is necessary at the point when they acknowledge that a speech is both true and delightful but are unwilling to do what it recommends – one must certainly speak in the grand style’ (IV.xxvi.58). But the two ‘acknowledged’ qualities are instrumental to this. Augustine goes on to repeat a point made previously at IV.xii.27: ‘But who can be moved if he does not understand what is said? Or who can be engrossed and made to listen, if he is not delighted?’ This chain of instrumentality (pleasing → teaching → moving), will be echoed later by Sidney and others. In De Civitate Dei however, Augustine maintains that the four basic emotions of desire, fear, joy and sorrow are acts of the will, arising not from the body but from the soul (XIV.v). They may therefore be good or bad, taking their quality from their objects and the conformity or nonconformity of these with God’s will. As the Everyman edition (a corrected version of John Healey’s early seventeenth century translation),33 puts it: ‘according to the variety of the things desired and avoided, as the will consents or dislikes, so are our diversity of passions’ (XIV.vi). Consequently, passions need no longer be mere perturbations as they were to Cicero (Discussions at Tusculum, IV.vi.11); nor need they conform to rectified Stoic feeling, which like an aloof gated community shuts out sorrow and confines itself to ‘will, joy and wariness’ (De Civ. XIV.viii). Rather, ‘the citizens of God, as long as they are pilgrims, and in the way of God, do fear, desire, rejoice, and sorrow. But their love, being right, straightens all these emotions’. Moreover, ‘they do not feel … for themselves only, but for others also’ (XIV.ix). The outcome, according to Shuger, is that ‘[a]ffectivity … moves into the center of spiritual experience’ (p. 46). How it is for pilgrims through the fallen world, is related in the later chapters of Book XIV to


how it would have been in Eden, where even the joy of sex would not have distracted Adam and Eve from the joy of conformity to God’s will. Though Augustine does not draw out the full implications for rhetoric of this purified pathos, specifying the grand style for ‘praxis and reproof’ only (Shuger, p. 49), his reconnection of emotion to truth recollects the Plato of Phaedrus, and anticipates Erasmus in its readiness to invert pagan or secular values. We will also see a link to Melanchthon’s Lutheran concept of the Holy Spirit at work within the believer, unifying will and feeling through the infusion of faith. Late antiquity thus carries forward three reinforced and redirected traditions towards the Renaissance: a teaching method which stimulates imagination, variously applied to people and things as represented in appropriate language, reflecting and generating pathos; a broadened sense of stylistic possibilities, and the potential for a radical redirection of pathos. Medieval rhetoric: on this I refer the reader to major studies such as James Murphy’s (see above), and the ongoing results of research as published regularly in the ISHR’s journal, Rhetorica. This is not to downplay the importance of medieval theory and practice in rhetoric, but to confine myself to statements and suggestions about its legacy. Several major points emerge: the repeated demonstration of rhetoric’s culture-specific character; its reflection of changing conditions, political, economic and administrative, as older rhetorical texts, often fragmentary in their transmission, acquired new uses and (effectively) new meanings, and as new specialised rhetorics were written;34 the rhetoric of allegory as applied to classical literary texts which (as, famously, with Ovid)35 could change the passive victims of pathos to moral agents, and empathy to antipathy, and which in inverse form foreshadows modern criticism in its restructuring of perception and emotion; the blending of rhetorical and literary techniques in the writing of poetry; and finally the emergence of new or revived compositional techniques, such as realistic description and portraiture36 applied to historical or hagiographic writing, and new rhetorical genres, most notably the ars dictaminis which reflected and enabled the growing practical use of rhetoric in all kinds of correspondence. Where pathos is concerned, we only need to consider such a text as Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, with its chilling ecphrasis of the frescos in the Temple of Mars, enhanced by deixis as in ‘The smiler with the knife under the cloak’ (III.1999, spelling modernised), and the touching exclamatio of Arcite’s dying lamentation (IV.2765–97), to appreciate its skilled evocation in this period. But two main legacies of ‘Middle Ages’ to


‘Renaissance’ should be emphasised here: firstly, a broadened range of genres demanding greater flexibility in the use of pathos, and secondly a huge reinforcement of the tendency deplored by Socrates, for persuasion to assume a written form. Of course, written texts and spoken dialogue and discourse formed part of an integrated culture, extending from the Church – with its paradigmatic use of Paul’s written letters and the other scriptures, going back to Paul’s time and endlessly replicated in monasteries, universities and pulpits – into the secular culture of the court with its readings of poetry and its debates. But writing itself in the form of letters applied to all purposes – administrative, commercial and personal – increasingly served a persuasive function without public exposure – whether its form was governed by the rules of dictamen, of humanism, or of mere literacy. And with this development new modes of relationship would evolve, typified by the enigmatic figure of the Secretary, training himself to think, speak and feel like his master and perhaps tempted to assume his master’s role.37 But what new tendencies marked the ‘waning’ of medieval culture and its characteristic rhetorical forms? Rudolph Agricola: some such tendencies are reflected in the two logic textbooks most likely to have been taught to Marlowe at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (though he may well have read Ramus whose murder he dramatises in The Massacre at Paris [vii.361–416], and whose argumentative procedures are pilloried there, in terms probably echoing the controversy at Cambridge) were John Seton’s Dialectica,38 an introduction to formal argumentation and the judgement of arguments, and Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica (written in 1479).39 Seton’s text presupposes a prior study of Agricola. The significance of this is that Agricola includes emotion within the scope of dialectical invention, linking it to the logical sources of argument. Although (like Erasmus and Melanchthon) he foreshadows Ramus in the practice of double analysis, demonstrating the logical structure under the style of a text as Peter Mack indicates in his Renaissance Argument (1993)40 and elsewhere, the implication that pathos is part of invention, that ‘the method of arousing emotions is little different from that of teaching’ (Mack, p. 203), differentiates him sharply from Ramus. Broadening ‘argumentation’ to embrace ‘everything by which we consider what is doubtful and uncertain’, Agricola concludes: [N]ot only that it is necessary for arousing emotions, but that it ought to be very dense and even thickly packed. For strength is necessary for the intellect to be seized and for the mind itself to be


carried away from itself and as it were placed outside itself. This technique of argument is so much imitated by creative writers that if they are short of different arguments, they pile on the same point, changing the words, as if they were making several points. (DID, p. 199, as translated by Mack, pp. 203–4) He goes on to quote the very passage from Aeneid IV that so captivated the young Augustine. According to Mack, Agricola’s treatment of emotion is an ‘original extrapolation and simplification from’ Aristotle and Cicero, paying ‘proper regard to the theory of emotions from Aristotle’s Rhetoric’ (Mack, pp. 208–9). The concept of fitness, identified by Mack as ‘The key idea’ (ibid.), implies a syllogistic connection between ‘the thing which happens and the person to whom it happens’. Marlowe’s own dramatic practice reflects this. At the crisis of his encounter with Theridamas, Tamburlaine at once observes an effect and projects contemptuous and indignant emotion, giving maximal impact to his ‘pathetical’ wooing of this kindred spirit: In thee (thou valiant man of Persea) I see the folly of thy Emperour: Art thou but Captaine of a thousand horse, That by Characters graven in thy browes, And by thy martiall face and stout aspect, Deserv’st to have the leading of an hoste? (I.Tamb., I.ii.166–71) Mycetes’ ‘folly’ is at once the cause of Theridamas’s lowly appointment, and of Tamburlaine’s indignation at its unfitness. Moreover, reasoning from adjuncts41 (the qualities of Mycetes and Theridamas, and the signs of them), is also ‘thickly packed’ into these few lines. Mack presents other elements in Agricola’s insightful treatment: that audiences don’t need to be reminded of their own deserts (though Theridamas is an exception); that the choice of words should reflect the particular emotion aimed at; that emotion can be generated by representing the emotional state of somebody other than the persuader (as when Virgil moves his reader with an image of the distraught Dido); and that emotional effects should be built up progressively through amplification, especially through comparison from the lesser to the greater degree. Here again, enargeia (vividness, clarity) is paramount (Mack, pp. 209–12).


From Agricola we draw an increased stress on fitness, pointing to later practice, and a demonstration that Aristotle’s integrated logos and pathos could be maintained despite the growing tendency, in teaching, to separate logic and rhetoric (that this was already evident in Agricola will become clearer during the discussion of Ramus). Erasmus and the rhetoric of friendship: of all Erasmus’s contributions to Rhetoric and rhetorical teaching, perhaps the most illuminating, where pathos is concerned, is his treatment of letter writing, and of the nature and basis of friendship. Professor Lynette Hunter’s recent work on the rhetoric of friendship42 has added further pieces to the jigsaw of pathos, the whole picture of ideas and practice – which, if Laurence Green was right (see above), the Renaissance itself could not achieve. Complementary to this are the texts brought together in Lisa Jardine’s Reading Shakespeare Historically43 (to which I am much indebted, though in Chapters 3 and 5, I will question the ‘reading’ concerned). Jardine demonstrates that pathos had a distinctive role in epistolary rhetoric as exemplified by Erasmus and his correspondents, making absent friends present to each other through the representation of mutual feeling. For her part, Lynette Hunter raises the issue of sameness and difference. Earlier accounts of friendship (such as Erasmus’s own in the De Ratione Studii of 1511) stress the close affinity involved. De Ratione claims that ‘friendship can exist only among similar people, for similarity promotes mutual good will, while dissimilarity … is the parent of hatred and distrust; moreover, the greater, the truer, the more deeply rooted the similarity, the firmer and closer will be the friendship’ (Collected Works, 24, 683–5).44 But in two essays originally added to the 1515 edition of Erasmus’s Adagia, ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’ (now available in David Wootton’s vivid translation)45 and ‘Sweet is War’, Erasmus progressively broadens and deepens his concept of similarity, extending it from a personal bond towards the acknowledgement of common humanity and spiritual values. This might make it possible, not only for people from different countries to achieve a form of friendship, but even adherents of different religions. For this to be achieved, we have to be able to see similarity – in essentials – beneath any outwardly alienating dissimilarity. The Sileni makes no reference to friendship, but has vital implications for it. The point of its sustained metaphor of the Silenus, drawn from Plato’s Symposium46 in which the drunken Alcibiades applies it to the outwardly unprepossessing (but apparently very attractive) Socrates, is not so much the ugliness of the figure, as the fact that one must look inside it. Socrates is said to


resemble the figures of Silenus sold in Athens, holding pipes or flutes, hollow inside, and containing little figures of Gods. The essay itself exhibits highly persuasive enargeia, both positive and negative, through multiple and highly-wrought examples of ecphrasis, which one by one enact the opening of a Silenus. Erasmus’s first example is Socrates himself, as elaborated from Plato, with ‘the face of a country bumpkin, a bit like that of an ox, and a snub nose running with snot’, homely in speech and (apparently) sensually-inclined – but inwardly ‘closer to being a god than a man’ (Wootton, pp. 169–70). Then there are Christ’s apostles: ‘poor, unsophisticated, uneducated, base-born, powerless, rejected, spared no insult, ridiculed, hated, cursed, the public laughingstock, and the abomination of the world’ – while to those who ‘open the silenus … by the touch of a shadow they make healthy the sick, and by the touch of a hand they impart the Holy Spirit. Even Aristotle would seem stupid, … compared with them’ (p. 172). On the other side (amongst the ‘inside-out Sileni’) are some rulers, each with ‘the sceptre, the badge of office, the bodyguards’, but inwardly ‘a tyrant, even an enemy of his people, a thief’ (p. 175); and ‘some bishops – if you saw their solemn consecrations, if you caught sight of their new vestments, … you would think they were heavenly beings’, while in essentials, opening the Silenus, each is ‘nothing but a man of war, a man of business, even a tyrant. … [A]ll those splendid symbols of holiness were props for a theatrical effect’ (pp. 175–6). Once this inner scrutiny has become habitual, friendship between those who seem dissimilar can – by inference – be achieved. Erasmus indicates, by reference to St Paul (I. Thessalonians 5.23), the basis of any true inward similarity. To ‘divide human beings into three parts, the body, the soul, and the spirit’ will be to perceive the true scale of values – a perception signified by the opening of a Silenus. And the same perception, will, in any given instance, establish the basis of the bond of friendship, when it exists: is it a common attraction to the flesh, which includes every worldly impulse, or a shared spirit deriving from God? This last, or something comparable to it, will be required for the ultimate broadening of friendship. Wootton in his introduction (p. 10) quotes from the other essay mentioned above, ‘Sweet is war’, with its praise of friendship: ‘First of all, what is there, … better and sweeter than friendship? Absolutely nothing. But what is peace, except friendship among many?’ Peace will require, in Christian terms, charity, enabling people to live in ‘the unity of the Spirit and in the bond of peace’ (Ephesians, 4.3), as patterned by Christ. This will become the focus of all positive pathos, and the source of ultimate


emotional satisfaction, enjoyment and achievement. All ‘bodily’ desires, sexual, violent, acquisitive, assertive, and so on, will either be perceived as negative and threatening, or as the raw materials of virtue, to be achieved through grace. In this scheme, as with Augustine (above), human will is asserted through the constant attempt to discern the divine will, and conform to it. But when we look as Lynette Hunter does down the perspective of history, Erasmus points in the direction of modern democratic consensus, established through a secular process of reasoning, of lawmaking, and of imaginative and emotional empathy – all dependent on determination to continue looking inside the Sileni of cultural, racial, religious, ideological, orientational and gender differences. That Erasmus was impelled by repeated discoveries in the Silenus mode, seeing through the contemporary apparatus of power in church and state, and through the obfuscation of the language used to justify it, is implied by the Sileni itself. It is also clear that he was moved to broaden his idea of the basis upon which bonds could be discovered and maintained, by the dissent resulting from Luther’s decisive step beyond Erasmus’s own critical stance on religion. Wootton (p. 32) quotes the opinion expressed in a passage which he added to ‘Sweet is War’ in 1523: ‘It will be easier to reach agreement on a few things, and concord will be more easily maintained if on most questions each is free to understand things in his own way, so long as it is without contention’. Contention, indeed, resulted within three decades in a complete split, manifest in the coarse if clever brutality of Baldwin, diabolising Catholicism (as we will see in Chapters 3 and 5). Entrenched positions forced new meanings on words, as extreme as the distortions imposed on them by the magnates of Erasmus’s own day (‘They call a man a traitor …if he thinks the ruler should be prevented from acting outside the law’ – Wootton, p. 178). Witness Spenser’s Envy, invoking the Protestant doctrine of Justification by Faith: ‘And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds, / His almes for want of faith he doth accuse’ (FQ I.iv.32).47 Compassion is now suspect and subject to anxiety, typifying the reordering of emotions which followed adoption of a new ideology and a concomitant change in the connotations of words. But this makes possible new patterns of subversion, new secular ways of appealing to repressed emotions. As we have seen, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine goes his own way, showing what bond of similarity underlies the friendship between his henchmen and himself, and inducing a complete reordering of values and emotions. In Part One


of the play, this begins with the warrior discovered inside the shepherd (I.ii.41–3: an odd echo of Erasmus’s ‘inside-out Silenus’, the fighting bishop), and ends with the rejection of remorse for his own genocidal assault on Damascus. Pity would be nothing more than an ‘effeminate and faint’ association with the picturesque distress of Zenocrate – the bond of love for humanity being linked not to the Spirit as it is by Erasmus, but to something subversive of honour, however soothing to the mind: something to be ‘conceiv[ed] and subdu[ed]’ (see the whole soliloquy, V.i.135–90). It is not surprising in view of these ironies that there has been such a conflict between religious and secular (indeed, irreligious) readings of Marlowe! But, of course, Marlowe is not alone in achieving such a duality of response. In other cases, what Erasmus opposes as inner and outer, bad and good, might both be viewed positively by the reader of a text – or an observer of life – if not on the same grounds or within the same scale of reference. Throughout the early modern period, the imaginative enjoyment of readers, and their empathy with errant characters such as Aeneas and Dido, or Sidney’s Pyrocles and Musidorus, or Shakespeare’s Falstaff, would co-exist happily with their moral condemnation. The ease with which this happens (though not whether it should be allowed to happen), becomes more readily comprehensible once we detect the reader’s cognitive engagement with the incompatible goals of enjoyment and achievement, in pursuit of opposed life themes, personal and social, and different and incompatible roles. Wootton (pp. 24–5) draws a further conclusion: ‘The Silenus statue implies that every text participates in a debate about how to interpret the world, and that the language in which texts are written is slippery, with the meanings of words (such as ‘glorious’ or ‘wealthy’) constantly likely to turn into their opposites. Descriptions are not only partisan; they are unstable’. But despite this instability, Erasmus still conveys a far more urgent message: our continuing need to maintain the bonds of peace and friendship, personal and social, however that is to be achieved within the ‘slipperiness’ of language’. Later, I will draw some further implications with regard both to the heightening of emergent pathos (the ‘laser’), and the activation of repressed pathos (‘reversed bias’). But the desire for inward truth, or for the conformity of inward and outward realities, persists alongside this ‘slipperiness’. The Reformation reinforces it – as is seen in the case of our next major source of insight into pathos. Philipp Melanchthon: the thoroughness and radical originality of Melanchthon’s rhetorical theory – and the supreme role it accords to


pathos – are clear from Lawrence Green’s contribution to the 2001 Melanchthon Symposium, held at Bretten.48 Green demonstrates the combined psychology and physiology of this sacred emotion in its progress through the ears to the intellect, and from the soul’s judgement and volition to heartfelt passion and bodily action. Its source is the voice of God, heard through the preacher. Debora Shuger points out (p. 68) that, for Melanchthon, faith is an emotion. How it works may be inferred from his short treatise on preaching, Ratio brevis sacrarum concionum tractandarum: faith is a dynamic of emotion, founded on a prior terror of sin and judgement, stirred by the Spirit, which then creates a passionate and overmastering belief that God’s promises are true, and that they apply to us (p. 9). 49 Green’s account, and the passages he quotes, indicate that for Melanchthon, a unitary soul works through multiple organs: reason and will, seated in the brain, examine and evaluate the motion of the senses according to the promptings of the heart, which in fallen man may well be those of the lower appetites. But given God’s presence there through grace, illuminating every choice, the will is moved to seek what leads to bliss, and avoid its opposite, sending an intellective motion, pleasant or unpleasant, back to the heart which expands or contracts accordingly. Once the intellective and physical motions match each other, conscious emotion results – together with an impulse to act or to refrain. Thus the promises and threats transmitted by a preacher, entering through the ears in words and structured phrases paralleling and reinforcing his physical gestures, transmit a motion which is more than metaphorical. Green’s note 24 quotes the Liber de anima, (CR 13, 74) where Melanchthon seems spontaneously to perceive one tiny anatomical detail as at once a metaphor and a synecdoche for the bond between preacher and congregation within the body of Christ, the Church. He suddenly sees, in the malleolus (which, as the eardrum vibrates, beats on the anvil within the ear, and thus excites the spiritus in the auditory nerve), ‘a wonderful image (that is, icon) … of those who teach’. He explains: ‘The preacher receives his voice by inspiration, and like the malleolus in the ear, hammers on the anvil – namely, the breasts of his listeners – and at once the spirit is aroused’ (my translation). 50 The whole process is simultaneously spiritual and physical, and the ‘beating’ necessarily entails a rhythmic resonance in which perception and emotion chime together. That this principle might be more broadly applicable, and that a similar interplay between mind, heart, and bodily response, might be generated inwardly, not aroused


through the ears, is suggested by one particular echo of Melanchthon’s ‘image’ – Marlowe’s distraught Edward II: My heart is as an anvill unto sorrow, Which beates upon it like the Cyclops hammers, And with the noise turnes up my giddie braine, And makes me frantick for my Gaveston … Edward II, I.iv.312–5 And for Melanchthon, as for Marlowe, the unimpeded momentum of such effects will depend on an apt style. As the Ratio brevis puts it: ‘A style of speech which is both idiomatic and abundant (popularius ac copiosus) must be used here; and as sails blown by the wind carry a ship forward without any effort, so to deal effectively with these matters, such a kind of address is called for, as will sweep them irresistibly, as if before a steady wind, into the listeners’ souls’.51 Melanchthon goes on indicate the wealth of amplification that this process will require: similtudes, contraries, maxims, examples (compare Edward’s ‘harping’ as noted by Isabella at I.iv.311); and a summary of Laurence Green’s very full account will show why these are needed. Emotion must be dwelt on to make its impact, and must arise from the mind’s intellective grasp of the general principles (loci communes) governing the issue. Each particular perception linked to these through the process of amplification, as a minor to a major premise, provides a pulse of emotion to move the appetitive faculty (bearing in mind that Melanchthon assigns ‘appetition’ to the heart) towards good and away from evil. This depends on figures of speech, including the orderly structures of schematic language which act like gestures in the mind, controlling and shaping attention. Thus, emotion and logic interpenetrate at every point, and Melanchthon foreshadows Ramus in seeing the arrangement of language from its large-scale to its small-scale effects, as governed by dialectic, rather than by the traditional concepts of rhetorical arrangement. But Melanchthon never incurs the risk of marginalizing emotion. Ramus and pathos: it is important where Peter Ramus (1515–72) is concerned, not to confuse his understanding of the roles of dialectic and rhetoric, which to him were quite distinct, methodologically and purposively, with his appreciation of the whole process of persuasion. He knew that the two ‘arts’ should work in combination, as reflected in his royal appointment to a chair of ‘Philosophy (that is, principally Dialectic) and Eloquence’. There is however strong evidence, thanks to


the work of Peter Mack52 and others, that in his practice of this professorship, his attention tended to be distracted from pathos to logos, from the total impact of a text on its audience (or on its reader) to the arguments underpinning it, and to its detailed use of figuration. But whether, overall, his concern for clear concepts and practicable teaching methods did more good by spreading education, or more harm by inhibiting the beneficial influence of a more integrated rhetoric, the power, purposiveness and subtlety with which writers influenced by him, such as Milton, developed pathos is evident – as is the contribution of Ramism to the rhetorical appreciation of contemporary writing such as Sidney’s Arcadia. But here, as demonstrated by Heinrich Plett in his Rhetorik der Affekte (1975)53 another factor comes into play. If developments in the most radical and aggressive strain of rhetorical teaching were effectively sidelining pathos, concomitant developments in poetical theory were finding a new place for it. Within this broadened context of ideas, it is possible that certain major insights about pathos and its uses were made more, not less accessible to writers following their displacement – in part at least, as a consequence of Ramism – from rhetoric to poetics. As we saw earlier, Plato’s Socrates had insisted that a true philosophic rhetoric should seek the truth through careful categorisation, before it sought to persuade (but a truth applied through a process of cause and effect, to the emotional and spiritual needs of its audience). Later, Cicero had advised orators to ‘acquire that neighbouring borderland science of logic’ (see p. 49, above), but had implied that the acquisition was to be employed in a distinctively rhetorical way. Much later, Agricola had conceived of pathos as part of the process of invention – one which was fused with reasoning in the perception of fitness. Finally, we have just considered Melanchthon’s full integration of logos and pathos. In his effective refusal to draw a distinction between dialectic and rhetorical invention (though he reflects the needs of audiences by allowing for a ‘prudent’ method of arranging material in some cases, and draws freely on poetry as a source of logical illustrations), it has been argued that Ramus takes a decisive step in the direction of scientific objectivity.54 Whatever the truth of that, there is an innate paradox in the move: it is done to make teaching easier and less confusing; it confines itself to methods for determining truth and thus to teaching (docere) as first of the three officia oratoris; but as the discipline of dialectic, teaching students to teach through a concentration on logical topics and argumentation, it discourages consideration


of the audiences to be taught, except as purely reasoning beings. In so doing, it runs counter to earlier and later insights on the linkage of emotion, perception and reasoning, from Aristotle to Antonio Damasio – though Augustine points out that some minds will be both delighted and moved to action, simply by the demonstration of truth (De Doctrina, IV.xii.28). Plett notes a similar perception on the part of Ascham in his Scholemaster. A properly taught pupil, seeing the point of what he is doing, ‘shall do it alwayes with pleasure: and pleasure allureth loue: loue hath lust to labor: labor always obteineth his purpose’.55 The pathos of ‘loue’ (though here it is primarily a love of learning itself, and grows out of pleasure) is an inseparable part of the benign upward spiral of the mind, figured here in what Plett describes as a ‘charming anadiplosis’. For Ascham this pleasure rose from repeated exercises in double translation, out of Latin into English and back again, which would deepen the student’s sense of the distinctiveness of each language in its stylistic potentialities; including (inevitably at this period) its incorporation of rhetorical figures. That function on which Ramistic rhetoric was now centred, delectare – reflected in its definition by the Ramist Charles Butler as ‘ars ornate dicendi’ – thus carried the potential to move, through its revelation of language’s power to please, and by inference, of its fitness. Indeed as any Latin dictionary shows and as Lawrence Green observes, in relation to Melanchthon’s conviction of the innate emotiveness of certain words, ornatus originally meant ‘furnished’; the test of a word’s fitness might be the pathos it brings with it; and the same will be true of the ‘ornate’ figure. Moreover, Plett traces a process of assimilation between the famous diadic injunction of Horace in his Ars Poetica, 343, to blend profit and pleasure (‘Omne punctum tulit, qui miscuit utile dulci’), and the threefold officia oratoris. But the relation of moving to teaching and delighting cannot be considered without reference to the kinds of truth being taught. Ramus draws his logical examples from poetry as readily as from prose; and in monarchical societies (in which, according to W.A. Rebhorn in the Introduction to his selection of Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric),56 rhetors tended to emulate the authority of rulers, there was an outlet for magisterial aspirations as much in poetry as in oratory (if not more), and a powerful inducement to claim moral and educational benefit from it. Those who sought to validate this claim, that is, teachers wishing to justify the study of poetry, poetic theorists (most memorably Sidney), and rhetoricians like Hoskins57 who retained Aristotle’s sense of the power and function of pathos (Plett, p. 88), explained the


‘profit’ of poetry in terms of its power to move the reader with images of virtue and vice, irrespective of any basis in day-to-day reality. Another element in the interplay of ideas was that of admiration, or wonder. Plett (p. 113) quotes Minturno’s De Poeta (1559): ‘I don’t want it to escape you, that poets ought so to speak, that whether they teach, or please, or stir emotion, the wonder of the reader, or hearer, will at once ensue’ (my translation), and explains the generation of tragic feeling: ‘Without delectare the movere (is) unthinkable; its function (i.e. that of pleasing) is merely to induce by the power of words and the force of thoughts both passion and admiration which then produce compassion and fear’ (Plett, p. 115). Scaliger’s role is also explained, principally his claim that the interaction of poetry and rhetoric began very much earlier, almost at the beginning: ‘Originally rhetoric served practical purposes (utilitas), and poetry aesthetic pleasure (delectatio). But later rhetoric acquired the rhythm and thus the delectare of poetry … which first showed itself with Gorgias … And the poets took from rhetoric the docere, which meant they could now fulfil the demands of Horace’s ideal’ (Plett, pp. 115–16). Sidney (writing about 1582) makes the most memorable summary of this poetic ‘rhetoric of affect’, as he conceives and practises it: For these third [that is, neither divinely-inspired nor philosophical poets] be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be. These be they that, as the first and most noble sort may justly be termed vates, so these are waited on in the excellentest languages and best understandings, with the foredescribed name of poets; for these indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach: and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger, and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved … Apology, ed. G. Shepherd, pp. 102–358 As Plett notes (p. 143) ‘Movere, in this alliance with delectare, takes on the dual task of activating cognition and will’. Plainly, this does not relate directly to such emotive effects as Quintilian’s graphic murder scene, or even to Aristotle’s shrewd linkages between predisposition and perception (pathos via logos). But it does recall, in a more complex branched form, the chain of instrumentality seen in Augustine’s


treatment of the officia (see above) – and also, perhaps, an even more elaborate chain explaining the process of creativity itself, by allegorising the Nine Muses.59 Heinrich Plett shows how the English Ramist rhetoricians, Fenner, Fraunce and Butler, and their successors John Smith and Thomas Blount (perhaps owing to some kind of beneficial backlash from poetry’s growing concern for affectivity?), progressively reaffirmed the importance of movere, even though in some cases their definition of rhetoric continued to confine it to delectare. This tendency is seen even in English editions of the rhetoric ascribed to Ramus’s associate Talaeus (Omer Talon), but thought to be Ramus’s own work in its original definitive form, reflecting the strict methodological divorce of dialectic and rhetoric. The London edition of 1584 defines Rhetoric as ‘the Art of speaking well, whose power prudently applied has wonderful power over the emotions’ (quoted by Plett, p. 92). The same edition emphasises the figures of thought (figurae sententiae) as much Cicero did in his Orator, to which it refers (see above). They are ‘the sinews and muscles of speech’; there are ‘no fiercer flames’ available with which to ‘ignite the thunderbolts of Demosthenes’; nor ‘can eloquence exert more force with any of its other machines for the flexing of souls’. Furthermore, ‘just as that earlier repertoire of tropes and figures of words was of great value for teaching and pleasing, so this last class (that is, the figures of thought) is of foremost efficacy for moving and convincing’ (quoted by Plett, p. 93, my translation). Together with this reaffirmation of the substantial efficacy of rhetorical language, there went a tendency to expound the detailed psychological effects of figures, seen in Hoskins as influenced by Aristotle, in Fraunce60 who in a ‘particularly uncommon’ way ‘applies the psychology of the presentation of speech to the various literatures, English Literature among them’ (Plett, p. 91), and in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589),61 with its detailed exposition of the use of figures in the context of court culture. (Interestingly, this reconnection of figuration to thought and feeling is now being surpassed. Recent work by International Society for the History of Rhetoric [ISHR] members62 has stressed the value of figures, of all kinds, both in the intricate structuring of poetic language, and even as media for the formation of scientific concepts and generation of scientific insights.) It has also been argued that the demand for wonder as an integral part of the poetic effect was met by the rough rhythms and obscure imagery of metaphysical poetry, in the belief that this matched the prescription of later Greek rhetoricians and writers on style, such as Demetrius, ‘Longinus’, and Hermogenes (as noted above),


with their demands that style should have the quality of deinos – exciting wonder either by its ‘terribleness’ or its ‘cleverness’ (and other linked qualities on both sides).63 Meanwhile, Ramus’s own practice as a teacher has been shown, despite the blind spots entailed in his method, to have maintained the ideal of ‘the good man skilled in speaking’, even if he discarded the term ‘orator’ in favour of ‘the perfect citizen’, who like Cicero himself drew on all the humane arts, and who might consequently, to use Ramus’s preferred term, be called ‘the Ciceronian’.64 Such a speaker will certainly be skilled in moving pathos, even if according to Ramus’s prescription (Plett, p. 93) he has drawn his knowledge of its nature, and of how and when to incite it, from medicine and moral philosophy rather than rhetoric. The affectivity of his language will be a reflection of his total culture, and of every aspect of his training. The developments outlined above would encourage this process of integration, and ensure that an understanding of persuasive pathos in all genres, literary and functional, would be reinforced from many directions. There is ample evidence that the controversy about Ramistic logic and its role, is reflected in writing – as in the sardonic argumentation of Ramus’s own death scene in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris.65 Marlowe makes a powerful dramatic use of syllogistic reasoning, especially in Doctor Faustus. But as we have seen this may owe more to Seton than to Ramus; and emotion is always integral to it as it was when Faustus first triumphantly ‘Gravel’d the Pastors of the Germane Church’ (Doctor Faustus, I.i.140). Nothing has impaired Marlowe’s skill with pathos. He has a complete mastery of the repertoire of emotive rhetoric – tropes, figures of words, and figures of thought such as ecphrasis – but, as we have seen, it is intimately linked to reasoning as in Tamburlaine’s wooing of Theridamas. Another major consequence of the interplay between rhetoric, logic, poetics and the other arts was an increasingly informed receptivity amongst potential readers. Those books which sought to propagate the manners, culture and ethos of the educated gentry, such as Henry Peacham jnr.’s The Complete Gentleman (1622),66 Richard Brathwait’s A Survey of History, or a Nursery for Gentry (1638),67 and Franciscus Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients (1638),68 would ensure this. Junius (alias Francois Du Jon) demonstrated the parallel between rhetorical pathos and painting, not only by modelling his approach on Quintilian’s discussion of style, but by refining Quintilian’s concepts of phantasia and enargeia, and encouraging his readers to acquire the skill of responding emotionally and morally to the imagery of painting. They should


observe ‘what care the well-willers of Art use to take about the exercising and preparing of their phantasie, seeing they do by a most accurate Imagination designe and make up in their mindes the compleat pictures of all kind of naturall things’ (p. 72). Pleasure and passion, as with Sidney, will begin from the recognition of ‘accurate’ imitation – but in the higher kinds of painting imitation will not centre on natural objects so much as on imaginary objects ‘naturally’ represented in their distinctive qualities (again, as with Sidney). Peacham’s survey and recommendation of poetry (pp. 90–108), stresses the moral efficacy of poetic pathos which can ‘… turn hatred to love, cowardice to valour, and, in brief, like a queen command over all affections’ (p. 92). Rhetorics of preaching: having touched previously on Augustine and Malanchthon, we should also be alert to the influence of later developments in the theory and practice of preaching, on writers – particularly Milton. Jameela Lares69 has conclusively demonstrated the dominance in England of that taxonomy of sermon-types initiated by the Lutheran Andreas Gerardus Hyperius, whose De formandis concionibus sacris was published in 1553, and translated into English by 1577. From a key text at 2 Timothy 3.16–17, and another at Romans 15.4, Hyperius claimed St Paul’s authority for distinguishing five basic types of confirmatio, or validatory argument, as standard parts of the sermon. Two were related to doctrine (teaching the correct and reproving the false); two treated behaviour (instilling the good, correcting the bad); and one (derived from the Romans text) offered consolation (Lares, pp. 61–2). That this classification was accepted in England, resting as it does on the Bible rather than the traditional rhetorical genres, reflects a more general tendency to reject or marginalise the persuasive art evolved in pagan antiquity, including its style. Lares (pp. 64–5) cites the view of John Preston (a Puritan who, untypically, preached at court), that ‘human learning’ should be used ‘to prepare the understanding to deliver divine truth’ – melted down and recast for God’s service like the Egyptian gold taken by the Israelites. Milton’s recasting of pagan materials such as Achilles’ shield, might be owed to this impulse, as much as to any ‘anxiety of influence’ (see my discussion of Harold Bloom’s analysis, and my own, pp. 111–13 and 174–7, below). Even so, Hyperius’s categories were linked to inherited rhetorical concepts in a way which would help preachers to focus their persuasive effects. Doctrine and reproof served to teach, instruction and the correction of behaviour to move, and consolation to please. This paralleled the divine virtues being inculcated as faith was taught, charity moved, and the pleasure of hope conferred (Lares, pp. 62, 82). But consolation


would maintain this pleasure (bred by assurance of salvation following conviction of sin), in the face of conflicting emotions, for example, fear of worldly rejection, which would be addressed by the preacher. Consolation involved steadying conscience and stilling anxiety, as reflected in the many books devoted to this topic (Lares, pp. 83–4). Where Milton is concerned, this points forward to the serene conscience of his Lady, as portrayed in A Masque, the postlapsarian anguish of Samson, and Adam’s prior to consolation. Moreover, the recurrent progression in Milton’s work between two of Hyperius’s categories, correction and consolation, probably reflects the influence of his first tutor at Christ’s College, Cambridge, William Chappell – a strong Ramist in his discursive practice. Lares (p. 86) quotes Chappell’s manual, The Preacher (pp. 20–1), on the need for this pairing, implying two correlated uses for pathos, in the moving of hope and fear: The heart of man may be irregular, or straying from the right and its rule two ways. Namely, by being exalted above the rule, or by being dejected beneath it, and therefore … it may want rectifying, in the first by Reprehension or Reproof, in the latter by Consolation or Comfort. Arrogance will be reproved by fear, and dejection comforted by hope. The sense of absolute dependence on God’s grace evidently required that things be kept in balance, as if hope was latent in fear, and fear in hope (compare Melanchthon’s account of faith, as an emotion). Having shown how Milton’s prose reproves false doctrine in the martial spirit recommended by the manuals, with their assumption of a learned and judicious audience for this type of discourse, Lares goes on to show his balanced use of correction and consolation in Paradise Lost – from the opening lines onward, but with particular intensity in the last two books. This is linked to a demonstration (pp. 164–6) of the pathos proper to correction (that is, the visionary force of enargeia), and to consolation (that is, the ‘verbal, not visual’ promptings of faith, their importance magnified by the preacher by all appropriate rhetorical means – though faith may be exercised in the construing of metaphor or parable, as with the promise that the woman’s seed will bruise the serpent’s head). Having argued that the angel visitants of Paradise Lost parallel the faithful minister (or ‘angel’) visiting his parishioners at home (pp. 151–8), Jameela Lares recalls how Michael uses not only enargeia but actual visions of the future to correct the


fallen but repentant Adam, and a rhetoric of faith to console him. I will suggest shortly how a similar progression, appropriate to the almost perfect innocence of its heroine, is achieved through the imagery of Milton’s earlier work, the Ludlow Masque. Rhetoric and revolutionary change: the impact of the Civil War period in all areas of thought and culture, is examined by Nigel Smith in his Literature and Revolution (1994).70 What could happen to rhetorical pathos at such a time appears in the violent imagery of Ranter prose, notably in the writings of Abiezer Coppe (see, again, Nigel Smith, for his collection of Ranter Writings).71 More gradual, but similarly revolutionary in its implications, was the development of a consciously gender-based or feminist perspective on persuasion which continued through our period both in the skilled rhetorical practice and argumentation of women pamphleteers (see Chapter 4 below, pp. 136–8) and in the expressed opinions of women such as Lady Mary Wroth, and Mary Astell,72 on Rhetoric and persuasive writing. When examining the emotional effects of writing produced later in our period, we should be alert to its possible reflection of the changes within all kinds of relationship, from the political to the personal, occasioned by such a major upheaval. Postscript: involuntary sympathy: outside our period, but at once a symbol of the development in observational natural science, associated with the later seventeenth century, and a pointer to the more instinctive aspects of emotional enargeia, is Adam Smith’s theory of involuntary sympathy. In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments,73 Smith observes that ‘Persons of delicate fibres … complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers … exposed by beggars … they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies’ (Part I, Section 1.1.3, p. 10). Moreover, in the following Section 2.1.5, he claims that this sympathy for bodily sensations is surpassed by the readiness with which our imaginations ‘mould themselves’ upon those of others. Such involuntary responses will contribute the gifted persuader’s use of ‘the emotional laser’ (see below).

2.3

The applications of pathos

Drawing together the ideas and insights about pathos, which persisted, evolved, resurfaced, diverged, or converged over two thousand years, we can see the possibilities and expectations in the minds of writers and audiences over our period, and we have a better sense of what to look for in our current readings – whatever the lack of overall intellec-


tual coherence. Several major distinctions have emerged: between pathos as roused in the individual, and in the community (and, at least by implication, in the crowd); between pathos as irrational perturbation arising from the concupiscent and irascible faculties, and pathos as integral to the will and reason in their assent to truth; between pathos as a practical resource for the conduct of social or personal relations on the secular level, and pathos as a spur to philosophic idealism or ultimate spiritual communion, within the Church and between the Church and God; between the pathos generated orally in face-to-face encounter, and the pathos communicated less directly through writing, with or without interpretation or commentary, and whether read by an individual or by a group (with whatever sympathetic or antipathetic reaction, amongst the group or within the individual). We have also seen the diffusion of the concept of pathos in its various Platonic, Aristotelean, Ciceronian and Augustinian strains, and through its various combinations with ethos and logos, with teaching and delighting, both through proliferating rhetorical genres (for example, preaching) and through the neighbouring disciplines of philosophy and poetry (we will shortly follow it into the evolving genre of fiction). We have already glimpsed how writers can play across these oppositions, from Plato in his written representations of spoken dialogue and oral comment on written speeches, to Marlowe’s probing inversions of the ideal of spiritual ascent in the person of Tamburlaine. We must now see how these perceptions of pathos, sharper for the oppositional patterns in which they are variously placed, can inform our reading of pathetic texts – in which we will find the stimuli to emotion combined and stratified in any number of ways, and subject to as many kinds of instability, alternation and transformation. But there are three specific indicators of the effective deployment of pathos, whether it is represented in impassioned characters, or stirred directly in readers or audiences, which involve at least three basic kinds of interaction between persuader and persuadee, and which we must look out for. I also want to identify certain modes of relationship between the topic of the persuasion, the persuader, and the persuadee, which will recur in the texts, and the contexts, to be studied in the following chapters. The first two kinds of interaction were originally proposed in Persuading People (1992).74 2.3.1

The emotional laser

This is a simple technical analogy (though it has more complex variants – see, for example, the opening of Chapter 4). The energy built up


between mirrors in a laser tube, patterns the progressive intensification of emotion between persuader and persuadee (more easily imagined face to face, but quite capable of development between writer and reader). On the model proposed by Quintilian, the emotion generated in the persuader’s own mind by the mental contemplation of some object, is projected to the audience. Once the audience’s emotion is sensed by the speaker, the audience’s involvement becomes in its turn an image to be reflected back to them, which moves and involves them further and draws the speaker his/her self further into their feeling, and so on. This progression can be expressed through argument, and through further reflections of the situation faced, and of the action urged. Success depends on a precise alignment of stances and values on both sides, and thus the phenomenon of affect, in its intensity, is a combination of pathos, the power that sways an audience, and the perception of ethos. Such an interchange may involve a shared emotion, for example, common detestation of a murder as in Quintilian’s example above, or an increasingly strong oppositional emotion. If a speaker catches her/his audience on the raw, interaction will intensify between two correlated but opposed emotions (for example, detestation of the sin of pride, and anger at an affront to pride, as in Latimer’s sermon, pp. 131–4, below. But being caught on the raw will usually indicate a level of repressed feeling, for example, an uneasy conscience too painful to attend to, making anger far more tolerable. This fact makes practicable the second kind of controlled interaction. 2.3.2

Reversal of bias

As indicated in Persuading People (p. 50) this might occur involuntarily, as when a grossly prejudiced speaker pushes a mildly prejudiced audience to the point when they feel ‘That’s going too far’, and start contemplating the human rights of those attacked. The perception and feeling repressed by prejudice may become permanently dominant, reversing the bias. Speakers or writers may use irony to achieve the same effect (for example, Swift in A Modest Proposal), or they may reverse an audience’s emotional bias towards something by recategorising it, as in Aristotle’s account of pathos, for example, when an action previously regarded as deliberate comes to be seen as involuntary. Or the reversal may be based on an unchanged perception, as when repressed guilt underlies anger, played on by the laser. The guilt can be brought the surface, changing the persuadee’s emotional predisposition. Chappell’s correlated correction and consolation (see above) involve alternating reversals of bias towards fear and hope. The reversal may be


achieved through the laser technique, as when anger at its peak is suddenly transformed, by the persuader’s instancing of some shameful and undeniable fact about the persuadee, into equally intense shame. 2.3.3

The RPER factor

In his/her engagement with an audience or readership, the persuader may consider the range of predictable emotional response. Many situations will entail this, from speeches in Parliament, Congress or Assembly to opposed political parties (typically moving triumph on one side, derision on the other), to a mixed congregation attending a sermon, to the reading of a poem designed to stir debate as with Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ (see p. 31, above). Dissent in the audience may advance an immediate persuasive purpose – for example, convincing one part of the audience with the aid of the other’s intransigence, or pressuring those susceptible to change. The concept of RPER is also useful in estimating what would have been beyond the prediction of a persuader, at the moment of communication. To find these kinds of interaction in early modern texts should help us to evaluate modern critical responses to them; but we will also detect some of them in the critical writing itself (for example, in the passage from Terry Eagleton’s William Shakespeare to be considered in Chapter 2). 2.3.4

Persuader, topic and persuadee – various combinations

But interaction cannot be fully judged without a further distinction, prompted by the ‘Old Rhetoric’s’ various ideas of pathos, with respect to the main referents of rhetorical emotion – persuader, topic, persuadee – and their relative importance at any given phase of feeling. As already indicated, we might expect to find four basic kinds occurring in different sequences and combinations: (a) Emotion in response to sensory objects or physical actions, as presented to the mind through graphic imagery and reflected in the emotion of a persuader (simple sensory enargeia). (b) The progressive intensification of feeling, not primarily with reference to external objects, but to the interaction of persuader and persuadee (the laser). (c) The emotion occurring in a dialogic context, when the persuader surpasses the persuadee’s promptings, showing a radically individual intellect or inspiration (for example, Adam in dialogue with God demonstrating his need for a companion – PL, VIII.412–33).


(d) A development of perception about the topic of persuasion, resulting from the interaction between the persuader and the persuadee, and creating insight into the topic through new thinking, in new language – together with positive emotional change and the sense of empowerment. This innovation is typified by the coining of metaphor, when it seems integral to the common situation of persuader and persuadee, and supplied by the audience if not spoken by them. Thus it fulfils the three Aristotelean criteria of virtue, competence and goodwill, and the three Ciceronian duties of teaching, pleasing and moving. Pathos is linked to the growing sense of a shared ethos in a powerfully affective engagement. Alertness to these should make possible a more discriminating analysis of pathos at the various stages of its development in any given passage, and a confirmation of those effects by a closer scrutiny of the detail of language.

2.4

Milton’s A Masque: the progression of pathos

The conclusion of this chapter points the way to what follows in the next chapter. What will we find in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (later known as Comus), staged in 1634 and revised for publication in 1645, which reflects the rhetorical ideas current at that time, and the particular ones most likely to have been taught to Milton at School or University? And what will we also find that seems more amenable to a third-millenium reading than to the perceptions of the original reader, or of the poet himself satisfied with his own designs and sense of a finished work? Milton illustrates, repeatedly, two modes of spiritual progress: from sin, through repentance to regeneration, and from temptations of body, mind and soul all successfully resisted, to physical or spiritual sustenance and further enlightenment. It may be inferred from what Jameela Lares has argued (Lares, pp. 83–4), that this second kind of progression shared its underlying assumptions with the sermon-type of consolation, as it directed the conscience in discriminatory judgement, steadied it against assault and rejection, and assured it of salvation. The fallen Adam and Eve, and Samson, represent the first mode of progression, Christ (as in Paradise Regained), Abdiel, and the three children of A Masque, the second mode. Where the first mode is concerned, the way to repentance and confirmed forgiveness seems to be reflected in a second series of temptations, successfully resisted (as with Samson), or


in a convinced response to preaching as a the channel of divine grace, progressing from threat and admonition to consolation (as with Adam). In contrast, the second mode progresses through the sequence suggested above: from sensual fantasy and/or diffidence resisted through reason and the exercise of memory, to a redoubling of reassurance – inwardly conceived, and externally confirmed. This progress highlights the emotional aspects of resisted temptation as dramatised in A Masque: the vivid and protracted fantasies of fear, desire, and false reasoning, bravely and rationally outfaced; the scorn and anger directed at the unmasked tempter; the imagery of residual weakness requiring rescue; and the visions of future reassurance and reward. A brief look at what the Lady achieves will serve to demonstrate how useful the older rhetorical ideas still are – and also, what we can gain from today’s range of critical approaches, whose use of pathos we are shortly to examine. When the Lady enters (170), heading into danger, arming herself with virtue, the audience knows that she is overheard by the Spirit and by Comus, who have both hidden themselves – one representing the ‘immortal mind’ (as it is called in ‘Il Penseroso’, 91), and the other, the flesh. But here, colouring our first impression of her, is one of those points in the text where we glimpse what deconstructive criticism would call an ‘incoherence,’75 an unguarded gap in the ‘complete steel’ which protects her (420). This may be signalled to us by a fleeting sense of revulsion, even if we follow Christopher Hill’s76 prompting and detect a patrician puritan’s distaste for the ‘riot, and ill-managed merriment [of] loose unlettered hinds’ (172, 174) likely to result from the government’s devious, crowd-pleasing encouragement of country sports. The Lady’s words may still sound snobbish – besides betraying a raw note of insecurity, a fear of insult or worse. She is reluctant ‘[t]o meet the rudeness, and swilled insolence / Of such late wassailers’ (178–9), though she bravely accepts that she must do so if she is to ask the way. No such note is heard in her distrust of ‘tap’stry halls’ (324), they being part of her familiar environment, while her fear of violence and insult in the wild wood implies the possibility of something far harder to cope with in a place frequented by real, and restive, peasantry. The Ludlow performance took place in a ‘hall’ that was almost certainly ‘tap’stried’ (324), both in itself and as the scene for Comus’s attempted seduction, reversing her anticipation of a ‘lowly shed’ (323) in a manner both ironic and reassuring. She is equipped to face anybody, however corrupt, who belongs in such a setting. His


blandishment will be couched in her language, that of the logically and rhetorically trained elite – and his shamefaced defeat will make any attempt at force more hesitant (as Comus is to prove). Similarly, she is prepared to face enchantment. It is significant that when she did confront her fear (205–9), she had already been distracted towards the more manageable threat of supernatural evil. There is, in short, an incoherence between the Elder Brother’s subsequent claim that ‘No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer / Will dare to soil her virgin purity’ (426–7), his own previous hedging admission that she might be in danger (406–13), and her own very real nervousness. She is loath, in meeting the merrymakers, to provoke a mood-swing from gratitude to some ‘ill-managing’ landlord to violent, opportunistic class-resentment. Her ability to ‘[dash] brute violence’ (451) seems to apply only to those potential threateners who are prepared to debate with her. However distant morally, they inhabit the same rhetorical world of persuasion and rejoinder. Their violence, as the Spirit represents it in his later situation-report to the two brothers, is more figuratively conveyed (and more suggestive of spiritual evil). Comus ‘and his monstrous rout are heard to howl / Like stabled wolves, or tigers at their prey’ (533–4). ‘Stabled’ as a metonymy is itself unstable: it may mean that the wolves are loose in the stable, or (more shockingly) that they are installed authoritatively in parishes, prebends or fellowships; or they may be pampered courtiers (like Comus?). Nevertheless, Milton has given to the Lady, as played by Alice Egerton, whom he must compliment, what he is later to deny to Eve. She is beguiled by the cunning of a false pastor (clerical or otherwise), but she is endowed with a vision of good, and abides by it. The enargeia of fear is met by that of faith, which ensures that her memory serves her better than Eve’s is to do – even though her fear has now taken on the vaguer, less socially-specific form of ‘fantasies … calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire’ (205–7). As we have seen, Quintilian uses the term phantasia to account for the controlled generation of pathos, and the Lady’s sacred rhetoric checks the incipient movement of fear with the admonitory memory of conscience, by calling up a counter-fantasy. The vision of Faith, Hope … and chastity (214–15) which she conjures inwardly, gives outward form to the virtuous adjuncts of her soul: the ‘straightening’ of her ‘emotion’ (in Augustine’s phrase) means that, in place of the chaotic and delusive world of sense, she clearly discerns the intellectual good, whether this recalls Quintilian’s claim that, for the rhetorically-gifted, the images of absent things are so represented


to the mind, that we seem to perceive them with our eyes as present realities (IO, VI.ii.29); or implies that she can ‘see’ grace ‘visibly’, like the Platonic Forms; or both. If this passage is consistent with the prescriptions for consolatory preaching referred to above, with their stress on the word rather than sensory imagery, the descending trio of figures, both in their movement and in their appearance – Hope, perhaps significantly, being the most developed – must be metaphors figuring the movement of grace in the soul as sensed by the Lady. The strange substitution of ‘chastity’ for ‘charity’ points metaleptically to that higher adjunct of the soul, the ‘excellent gift’ of charity whose descent it makes possible. Here the Lady does not, as later, use reason (beyond a simple citation of final cause in her assurance of protection at ‘need’). Her disciplined memory of what has been instilled into her ‘Conscience’ (the very faculty tended by consolatory preaching) takes her straight to the higher strength of contemplation. And what she visualises inwardly is immediately endorsed by a divinely-vouchsafed outward sign, marked by emphatic repetition (221–5): Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night? I did not err, there does a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night, And casts a gleam over this tufted grove. However, the cloud’s dark exterior connotes a more immediate danger – still concealed in the ‘tufts’ of the ‘grove’ over which it broods. In the context of consolatory preaching as explicated by Lares, her earlier fears of physical harm, and of her own terror, have been controlled by a rational trust in God’s protection, and her assurance has been renewed; and as a result she is ready for a further trial of conscience, discovering strength in danger as though the ‘sable cloud’ were yet another of Erasmus’s Sileni. The song she sings to summon help (and which, invoking Echo as ‘daughter of the sphere’,77 reflects her own echoing of Charity with Chastity), both carries her in contemplation up through the ‘silver lining’, and in the short term, proves a hindrance. This is signalled by the absence of a further sign – a lack of that responsive voice which is normally integral to the Echo song.78 Having shown how to discipline inward weakness, she must now face trial by external evil. Comus’s overhearing of the Lady’s song may seem to involve Milton in another ‘incoherence’, weakening the overall persuasive distinction


between good and evil. Comus responds with amazingly perceptive empathy to ‘such a sacred, and home-felt delight, / Such sober certainty of waking bliss’ (262–3, my italics). He perceives that very pleasure of Hope, which the manuals assigned to Consolation. But his precipitate resolution – ‘I’ll speak to her / And she shall be my queen’ – betrays the perversity of his response: he is viciously drawn to the Lady through those very adjuncts – virtue and joyous assurance – which confer such beauty on her.79 The ‘home-felt’ quality of her ecstatic song (felt, that is, to the depths of her capacity), moves him sexually because despite its intuition to the contrary his ‘soul’ is perversely ‘imbrute[d]’ (see the Elder Brother’s speech, 467–8). But the Lady is to declare categorically that he has ‘nor ear, nor soul’ (784): how can I, speaking personally, square this with the fact that (for me) the single italicised line shows in itself, not a blunted, vitiated, ‘imbruted’ response, but a more human comprehension of what the Lady is about than all her brother’s Spenserian hyperboles? Nevertheless, the brothers’ debate about their sister’s safety is worth noting here, at the end of the chapter, for its echoes of Plato and Erasmus. In the Enchiridion Militis Christiani,80 Erasmus amplifies Paul’s picture of the struggle between the bodily ‘affections’ and reason, describing how the soul ‘stryueth and wrastleth with the heuy burden of the erthly body’ (p. 61). It will be ‘vtterly drowned in the fylth of the body’ (ibid.) unless the second Adam, ‘the ymage of the celestyall man’ (p. 72) ultimately dependent on grace (p. 75) defeats the first Adam. This foreshadows the Elder Brother’s poising of the carnalised soul (as seen in Comus) against a spiritualized flesh (418–75). For the rest of her encounter with Comus, the Lady continues to exemplify the preachers’ model of a wayfaring Christian in need of comfort, and Milton’s own view of the endowments of a Christian fortified by learning and confirmed in virtue. Milton’s good woman, is in Lares’s words (p. 133), like ‘Milton’s good man … a regenerate Protestant, depending on [her] works to validate [her] faith’. Her eloquence in rebutting Comus’s misrepresentation of nature, in the masque’s central debate (659–813), shows all the militancy expected of a ‘redargutive’ reproving of false doctrine (Lares, pp. 98–9), and rises from what Milton in his rebuttal of Hall calls ‘regenerate reason’. Lares (p. 133) quotes An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642): For doubtlesse that indeed according to art is most eloquent, which returnes and approaches nearest to nature from whence it came;


and they expresse nature best, who in their lives least wander from her safe leading, which may be call’d regenerate reason. [YP 1;874] In the next chapter we will be looking at writing which makes no such assumptions about the links of nature to language, or about the regenerative power of belief, but which continues to look under surface appearances – even if this sometimes involves turning our familiar emotions inside out.

3 Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised

3.1

Reconsidering: how and why?

This chapter will explore the use of pathos in modern critical writing – as acute as any to be found in early modern texts – besides anticipating and (later) interacting with Chapter 5, which tries to trace the emotional appeals made by the authors or by their characters (or by the authors through the characters) to the original audiences in their particular contexts. But I do not intend, in that chapter, to supersede the judgements which will be sampled here. I wish, rather, to highlight the way in which today’s critics exploit pathos for their own persuasive purposes, often laudable, always interesting. They tend to put their own emotional ‘spin’ on the pathos of early modern writing, and to develop distinct modes of pathos in relation to the topics treated. My aim ultimately is to distinguish the spin which twists the original meaning, from that which (quite properly) presents it from a different angle. ‘New purposes’, in my chapter title, is a conveniently loose expression. Today’s commentators might have a mixture of purposes in singling out particular instances of pathos from the mass of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts, literary or dramatic. I shall be exploring the practicability of one such motive, in Chapters 4 and 5. This is the intention (or dream) already referred to, of reviving the ‘old passions’ of a text. Even here, ‘old passion’ will be evoked with a ‘new purpose’: to recover feelings which were once habitual, or at least latent. But, especially where a text is canonical, famed among other things for the strength or subtlety of its passion, the more common tendency amongst critics and scholars will be to re-assess and reinterpret that feeling and thus challenge the whole prior estimate of the work – often 83


with a further end in view. This might be to justify a theoretical approach, further an ideological position, express solidarity or claim leadership, secure publication, advance or maintain the critic’s own standing, or several of these, some being more avowable than others. One benefit of my approach should be, that its understanding of the processes through which pathos is generated, will be applied to the play of emotion on emotion – the feelings aroused in critics by the emotions which they detect in (or under) the texts which they are reading. In at least one case, it will also be applied to the critic’s understanding of creativity itself, the interaction of poets and their precursors, and the very indirect or occluded modes of reflected feeling which this is said to involve. And it is not perhaps simply a matter of calculation. Those of us who investigate former feeling may do so in widely differing frames of mind (often related to the current standing of the author – and the passage – under scrutiny). The emotion latent in such texts might in many cases be quite dispassionately analysed and explained by today’s critic or scholar, with no marks of feeling beyond (perhaps) enthusiasm for the job itself. Sometimes, though, such texts may still surprise their modern interpreter with so sharp an emotional reaction, that s/he is impelled to communicate that urgency, or convinced of the need to do so on the grounds that the urgency itself is critically significant. In other cases perhaps, the commentator might (less justifiably) find fuel in a text for the emotion he/she is already determined to feel, relying on it as a way of authenticating some critical position In either case, the ‘old passions’ of a text, noticed for the first time or newly interpreted, may become symptoms of some cultural and ideological condition, still contentious; or they may be read as evidence – in itself highly emotive – of some previously unsuspected fact about the writer. They may even give rise to a critical ‘epiphany’, as the old passion precipitates some new realisation, carrying its own very different emotional charge. Two earlier studies, by Richard Levin (1979) and more recently by Brian Vickers (1993)1 have both examined the various re-interpretative procedures of twentieth century criticism, from Christian allegorising to Marxism, feminism and new historicism. In Appropriating Shakespeare, Vickers instances Howard Felperin’s attempt to deconstruct the sustained antithesis between good faith and courtesy, and corrupt imagination, in The Winter’s Tale. As Vickers notes (p. 203), Felperin detects in Polixenes’ initial speech of thanks and farewell, ‘a sniggering phallic allusion to his ‘standing in’ for Leontes’

Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised 85

with Hermione (WT, i.2.6 ff). Here, a previously unsuspected emotion of contemptuous and cynical sexual triumph is detected in the speech of this royal guest, and becomes in its turn the object of Felperin’s own distaste. Snigger is essentially an observer’s word, registering a negative emotional response to another person’s prurience or malice. According to Vickers this exemplifies ‘the standard deconstructionist ploy of generalising a specific feature [that is, an instance of ‘conceited’ courtly language] into a thematic comment’ (ibid.). What might be regarded as an even more extreme step – i.e. the direct inversion of traditional moral and emotional responses – will be exemplified later, as Terry Eagleton tests his readership with his view of Macbeth. Here, however, I am not so much concerned with the logic and methodology of such procedures, as with their transmutation and revaluation of earlier feeling. In each of the examples to follow, I shall consider where the commentator stands (or is ‘coming from’) critically; how they interact and argue with the reader; and how they use emotion, from the mild to the vehement, to validate the whole process of engagement. This will often involve a reappraisal of the ‘inner’ emotive relationships in the texts under discussion by the critic, as they re-present these to the reader, challenging earlier perceptions. I shall consider in each case the apparent relationship of writer, topic, issue and audience. What range of response is anticipated from the projected readership, or sections of it? When there is an evident intention to stir feeling, whether by engaging with the readers’ existing emotional investment in the text under discussion, or by a more direct address to their opinions, their attitudes or their self-esteem, does the writer expect to enhance the persuasive effect – for the minority whose views they really expect to influence – by dividing the whole actual and potential readership against itself? I shall seek to apply the two criteria of energeia and enargeia, looking out for forcefulness, focus, clarity and vividness; and in doing so I will make selective use of the analytic methods already outlined and demonstrated: cognitive engagement, inclusion/exclusion, sentence perspective, deixis and other factors.

3.2 3.2.1

Baldwin and Marlowe: talent and the spotlight Building up Baldwin

However little attention it seems to have excited (judging, that is, by the sparseness of subsequent publication), Ringler and Flachmann’s claim on behalf of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (written in 1553)


is cogently argued. In the title of their 19882 edition they call this text The First English Novel. To substantiate the claim, their introduction (pp. xxi–iv) points to Baldwin’s original storyline, to his acute local and temporal verisimilitude (involving the printing-house of John Day, the Reformation printer, and a court and city in the throes of Reformation), to a ‘narrative … structured like inter-nesting boxes’, and to a ‘characterization [which] is quite extraordinary’, especially that of the principal comic butt of the story, Gregory Streamer, who is individualised ‘by the rhythm of his clauses and by his unique, pompous style’. His exposure is aided by a device ‘not available to present-day authors … the marginal note’. Thanks to this, Baldwin ‘can, while maintaining his pose of impartial reporter, comment amusingly or satirically upon the action’. This process will be further assisted, for all readers properly sensitive to the context, by the fact that Streamer tells his fantastic story to a small group of three highly judicious men, lying awake in the lodgings at Court which were – as a matter of historical fact – assigned to one of them, George Ferrers (who was Master of the King’s Pastimes under Edward VI). We will look shortly at their likely response as mediated by the editors, who sum up Baldwin’s achievement as follows: So, in Beware the Cat we have a fantastic fiction set realistically in the London of Baldwin’s own time; a very original handling of point of view – a first-person narrative with authorial comment; an enveloping action; and satirical characterization, in which the narrator by his speech produces an effect quite the opposite of that which he intends. Baldwin also presents us with a novel of ideas – ideas of pressing contemporary importance reflecting the religious struggles of the Protestant Reformation. In Beware the Cat, the author is playing a very complex fictional game: he uses an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illusion. The general thrust of his fictional argument is that only a person gullible enough to believe a character as outrageous as Gregory Streamer would believe in the ‘unwritten verities’ handed down by the ‘traditions’ of the Church. In literature, contrary to what one expects in other disciplines, more complex productions are sometimes created before more simple ones. This is certainly the case in the history of English prose fiction, for Baldwin’s narrative techniques were more sophisticated than those of most writers of fiction before the nineteenth century. (Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv)


Here we have a benchmark for the milder degrees of emotion, both empathetic (on behalf of Baldwin’s readership) and pathetic – as transmitted to today’s academic enquirer in the field of early fiction. Baldwin’s editors use the amplificatory device of listing (synathroesmus or congeries) to enforce their point, further emphasised by the crispest form of oppositional argument – the contrary – to demonstrate their author’s satirical intention, and its realisation. The phrase ‘novel of ideas’ engages with the cognitive schemata of today’s specialist reader. It activates a script (or longer-term MOP) for construing Baldwin’s text. The goal of such reading will be to detect the stimulation of thought, through narrated events. Then, immediately, through the reiterative, bridging device of anadiplosis (‘ideas – ideas of pressing contemporary importance’) modern interpretation is linked to a mildly expressed reminder of the urgency and contentiousness of the ideas (and the concomitant feeling) to be detected here. Ringler and Flachmann have previously called the reader’s attention (p. xxii) to the very specific contemporaneousness of Beware the Cat, the short time-scale of events to which it refers, from the onset of preaching against the Mass early in 1549 to the Christmas season of 1552 (as narrow a span of time – say – as that referred to by a modern political journalist, commenting on a government’s performance since a previous election). Baldwin’s readers might be exhilarated by the pace of change, reconciled to it, or reluctant to accept it and still effectively traumatised by it. They would be aware, too, of its impact on their neighbours, and familiar with the tensions within families, between neighbours, and in other larger groupings such as parishes, colleges and corporations. Such a specific and recoverable sense of anticipated engagement with the emotions of an audience might serve as a paradigm for my explorations in Chapter 5, in which (again) we will begin with Baldwin. It will be interesting to see whether the more vehement critical engagement shortly to be encountered will be so precisely linked to particular places and times. Ringler and Flachmann place their most arresting statement last, just before their summary estimate of ‘Baldwin’s narrative art’. The ‘novel of ideas’ works through ‘a very complex fictional game’. This, we are to infer, entails an implied parallel between the folly, slackness, prurience and self-deception of Streamer in his magical practice, and the mingled delusion, greed and hypocrisy attributed to Catholicism. Baldwin, we are told, ‘uses an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illusion’. In broader terms, the reader is invited to compare two social and personal scripts, each involving a blend of chicanery and selfdeception, and perhaps diabolical deception too. Logos, then, has a


vital role in the conveyance of Baldwin’s message, prompting readers to compare such things as the vividly evoked ‘illusion’ of comprehensible animal language – supposedly made accessible through a process of natural magic as nauseous as it is garbled – and another ‘illusion’: the sacramental worship of Catholicism. This is founded in the doctrine of transubstantiation, a doctrine which, it is inferred, can only be upheld by a comparable confusion of thought. The very strong case being made for Baldwin’s talent, as a propagandist in the medium of fiction, is not however helped by his editors’ concluding argument – a loosely syllogistic linkage of formal complexity (by implication, characterising the novel), and some early modern texts, of which Baldwin’s is one. If we reverse the terms in the proposition ‘all novels are complex texts’,3 we will see the dubiousness of Ringler’s and Flachmann’s inference. But they have nevertheless made a strong case for their author – strengthened, despite the generally mild level of feeling, by their use of pathos, as they engage with the likely response of Baldwin’s original readers. This is seen most clearly in an earlier section: Streamer begins his oration with a Mistress Quickly-like performance of complete recall and free association, but in his attempt to impress his listeners he unconsciously reveals himself as a pedantic fool. He spews forth Latin quotations and esoteric bits of learning that are often ludicrously incorrect. He pretends to be adept in all sciences and solemnly asserts that the astronomers are wrong in supposing that the changes of the moon cause the variation of the tides; on the contrary, he claims that the tides cause the changes of the moon[.] He is a coiner of bizarre terms, … and he delights in a virtuoso parade of rhyming terms in enumerating the ‘barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, tumbling of rats,’ etc. He praises his friend Thomas by saying that no others could have done so well, ‘except myself, and a few more of the best learned alive’. (Ringler and Flachmann, pp. xxiii–iv [with omissions]) Thanks to the ‘inter-nesting boxes’ of Baldwin’s narrative, modern readers will be aware, like the implied reader, that Streamer’s original audience (three real men, though in a fictional situation) was select, learned and judicious. Whether belated or contemporary, we, as readers, can imagine their distaste or embarrassment as listeners (made easier to conceal and harder to detect by the fact that they are to be pictured lying in bed, in the shadows!). Baldwin’s structuring of the


narrative has a similar effect to that produced by Quintilian’s reading of Cicero’s Verrines, V.xxxiii.86. Given Cicero’s image of the debauched Praetor with his mistress, Quintilian fills it out, not just with further details but with attendant emotions – ‘the silent loathing and frightened shame [that is, embarrassment] of those who viewed the scene’ (IO, VIII.iii.65). Similarly, Baldwin’s editors help us empathise with Streamer’s original audience. Words and phrases such as ‘pedantic fool’, ‘spews’, ‘ludicrously incorrect’, ‘solemnly asserts’, ‘bizarre’, and ‘virtuoso parade’, serve (allowing for changes in vocabulary) to register the imagined perceptions of immediate listeners, and the actual response of informed modern readers, with equal accuracy. Of course, we as readers are further removed emotionally. We are unlikely to empathise so far, as to squirm on behalf of Ferrers and his two companions, forced to listen to Streamer’s rigmarole. But, conceptually, we’re better placed to understand him. The editors enlist an idea and a comic paradigm unknown to Baldwin – our memory of Mistress Quickly’s rambling narrative (for example, II HenryIV, 2.1.78–94) – and the concept of free association, to help us appreciate the quality of Streamer’s speech and its likely impact on men of sense. A strong conviction of Baldwin’s talent in creating such a comic monstrosity is also reflected in the editors’ emphatic use of anaphora or initial repetition (‘He …He …He’) throughout the lines quoted. The editors’ intention is straightforward: to demonstrate Baldwin’s importance, recommending him to the reader as skilful and imaginatively engaging (pleasing to read, at least in those respects), acutely reflective and symptomatic of the growing emotional and cultural alienation between Protestants and Catholics (teaching new insights on a topic of major importance, now as then), and worthy of promotion to the rank of pioneer novelist (moving the reader to a real mental adjustment, and perhaps to action – in the form of committed study). 3.2.2

Remaking Marlowe

In turning from Baldwin to Marlowe, we come out of shadows into a spotlighted area – the lights now distinct and now merging, picking out a writer of iconic status, and a critic who has been much emulated and much attacked. Whatever we think of Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism as a critical method, his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)4 will remain a highly invigorating book. The heroic stature and significance which it accords to Thomas More and William Tyndale, despite representing them as men whose identities were in many respects contingent on their times, tends to refashion, in a very salutary


way, the common reader’s sense of the overall shape, balance, progression and tradition of sixteenth century writing. But Baldwin merits no mention at all from Greenblatt. Perhaps, indeed, this is deserved: Baldwin was more malleable. He did not stake all on his sense of identity as a Protestant, but lay low during Mary’s reign, offering a play to be presented at court – only to emerge after her death as an ordinand, a vicar, and a preacher calling for revenge on the Marian bishops, shortly before he died of the plague (see Ringler and Flachmann, pp. xviii–xx). Time-serving, timidity and vindictiveness make an unattractive combination; but perhaps Baldwin’s remarkable skill in logical insinuation owes something to them. If so, Marlowe’s comparable skill was differently fostered, just as it was differently applied; but in this respect at least the progression from Baldwin to Marlowe is as interesting as that which leads from the courageously confrontational figure of William Tyndale.5 Greenblatt’s vivid imaginative response to Tamburlaine combines logical forcefulness with a strong repetitive emphasis, and a striking metaphorical inventiveness (restless hero as unremitting machine), but its primary impact is emotional. I will reflect back on its questionable aspects – its overriding of some crucial moments in the text of both Parts of Tamburlaine’s career – in Chapter 5. Let us in this instance consider what emotion it seeks to generate and transmit, from the late twentieth century critic to his academic audience, and by what means: Tamburlaine almost ceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is not actually on the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing reports of gruelling marches. The obvious effect is to enact the hero’s vision of a nature that ‘Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds’ and of the soul that ‘Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest’ (I Tam 2.6.871, 877). But as always in Marlowe, this enactment, this realisation on the level of the body in time and space, complicates, qualifies, exposes and even mocks the abstract conception. For the cumulative effect of this restlessness is not so much heroic as grotesquely comic, if we accept Bergson’s classic definition of the comic as the mechanical imposed upon the living. Tambulaine is a machine, a desiring machine that produces violence and death. Menaphon’s admiring description begins by making him sound like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man or Michaelangelo’s David and ends by making him sound like an expensive mechanical device, one of those curious inventions that courtiers gave to the queen at New Year’s: a huge, straight, strongly jointed creature with a costly pearl


placed between his shoulders, the pearl inscribed with celestial symbols. Once set in motion, this thing cannot slow down or change course; it moves at the same frenzied pace until it finally stops. (Greenblatt, pp. 194–5) The enargeia of Greenblatt’s response to Tamburlaine in action, has mechanistic qualities itself, from its evocation of the hero’s ‘almost ceaseless’ motion, to its ponderous repetition of the verbal group ‘making him sound’ in the climactic sentence of the passage, underlying the progression from the human to the mechanical image, and leading into the string of specifications that ends the sentence, phrases in apposition marked by three passive verbs (‘jointed’, ‘placed’, ‘inscribed’) and culminating with a dying fall on ‘celestial symbols’ – their significance seemingly overlooked. But having paused, Greenblatt snaps back with yet another passive construction, ‘set in motion’, and a single dehumanised word as subject to sum up the whole: ‘this thing’. To me this seems less ‘grotesquely comic’ than horrific. It recalls Cominius’ description of Coriolanus in action: ‘from face to foot / He was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries’ (Coriolanus, II.ii.104–6). But ‘thing’ is not a word applied to Tamburlaine by any of Marlowe’s characters – and we will enquire later about any possible ‘slowing down’ on his part (and about the broader appropriateness of the automaton or ‘iron man’ image). Greenblatt’s word-choice seems to shift the bias of the passage, voicing what was repressed under the claim to find this all comic, however grotesquely. ‘Desiring machine’ is a similarly fearsome combination of the feeling and the unfeeling. This perception of Tamburlaine – swaying between incredulous or hilarious detachment, and piteous or appalled involvement, each alternately and uneasily concealing the other – extends to the whole action. It embraces the Tamburlaine of Part Two, at the end of which the ‘thing … finally stops’. In fact, despite the extraordinary crisis of Zenocrate’s death (II.Tamb.,II.iv), revealing as this does a strained dependence on wilful illusion, Greenblatt’s impression may well match the hero’s later manifestations better than his earlier ones. Despite the overtones of mechanism and artifice in Menaphon’s perception – pearl-like face, stellar (or planetary) eyes – we might pause to wonder whether Greenblatt has fully considered the whole to which these parts contribute. What is at the centre, structurally and intentionally, of Menaphon’s elaborate effictio (or blazoning) of this herculean figure? Obviously Marlowe’s perceptions will extend further than Menaphon’s


(if the playwright is, in fact, empathising to any degree with this very minor character), just as our perceptions, our intertextuality, extend further than Marlowe’s. The restlessness to which Greenblatt refers does indeed run through both plays, dynamically linked to the physical symbolism of crowns and thrones, and abstract perceptions such as honour, virtue, beauty, pity and cruelty. But Marlowe has a strange ability to imagine states of mind and dispositions of body that have no part in this restlessness, or can only parrot it: Mycetes in Part One and Calyphas in Part Two – where we also meet the restless hero’s doggedly dutiful, irredeemably second-rate sons Amyras and Celebinus. Applying Greenblatt’s own principle, the very failures and inadequacies of these characters, in conceiving or realising heroic abstractions, contrast dramatically with Tamburlaine in his drive towards ‘realisation’ of them, ‘on the level of the body in time and space’ – Calyphas, for one (see II.Tamb., IV.i.49–73), parodies the ‘effeminate and faint’ self-image which Tamburlaine has formerly disowned (I.Tamb., V.ii.114). Especially at the beginning of Part One, Marlowe displays a paradoxical empathy with characters he despises and discards – the ludicrous, inadequate Mycetes, and his brother Cosroe, adequacy personified and born to lose. And does Greenblatt consider the speaker’s perspective? For Menaphon, the token intellectual of Cosroe’s court (as Meander is for Mycetes), it is important as Cosroe’s struggle for power approaches its climax to perceive Tamburlaine as a symbol of resurgent empire, the mainstay of a military monarchy and an index of royal prestige. Great kings require great generals. How far, then, is it possible to read Menaphon’s speech (itself a response to an enquiry from Cosroe which is premised on the ‘miracle’ of Tamburlaine’s bond with Fortune), as an attempt to construe his most obviously alarming characteristics into reassurances? And how does the emotion of the speech reflect this: does Greenblatt’s sense of spiritual restlessness, ‘mocked’ by its bodily realisation, truly have a correlative here – or does Menaphon, however briefly, bury fear under admiration to create an alternative Tamburlaine, an image of honour and idealised humanity? Which (here) comes uppermost: the David, or the Cyborg? We will consider this question fully in Chapter 5. But for now, what of Greenblatt’s deducible intentions? He wants to recommend his thesis about how historical conditions shape the roles taken up by historical figures in life and in the arts from More to Shakespeare, and move us to accept it. In doing so, he exposes at once the pleasure and the perils of a strong persuasive ethos, involving the


reader in his sudden sideways leap into Elizabeth’s court, and thus into the conception of a metaphor whose source domain merges so readily with its target domain that the automaton expands to more than human size, and takes on emotions as well as motions, fusing with recollections of the role of ‘Tamburlaine’ as played by the immense striding figure of Edward Alleyn.6 The movement, and the industrious propagation of ‘violence and death’ also endows him with all the imagined energy of his gigantic off-stage war-machine. The notion that ‘desire’ walks away with the role as new social and economic conditions walk away with desire becomes almost irresistible, almost inconceivable in any other way. But perhaps we should resist it.

3.3

Hutchinson and Cavendish: writer and audience

The great effort to recover women’s writing in English, from the whole early modern period, which marked the last two decades of the twentieth century, is of obvious relevance to our enquiry. How will the emotions characterising women in relationship with men, God, family and society, and reflected in the engagement of women writers with their readerships, be re-presented to the modern reader by the academic feminist? As already indicated, I have chosen to look first at writing about, and secondly at writing by, two eminently comparable women, with respect both to their similarities and their differences: Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish. Attention has recently been drawn to the evidence for Hutchinson’s wider literary ambitions and achievement, her translation of Lucretius and the poem Order and Disorder which has now been convincingly attributed to her.7 For us, though, intent on contrasts in the handling of pathos, her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson,8 written in 1664 and a long-established minor classic, must still be chosen. The obvious comparison on Cavendish’s side would be her life of her husband, the Duke of Newcastle: but her Utopian fantasy The Blazing World (1666)9 provides a livelier, more inventive reflection of their relationship. In Chapter 5, I will compare extracts from these two works, each distinctively locating wifely love within a larger context of relationship and emotion. I will also, in view of Cavendish’s reputation for eccentricity and selfpublicising, reflect her wide (some would say wild) variety of output with a representative poem. Here, I am going to look at discussions of Hutchinson’s wifely emotion, one by a man and two by a woman, before sampling a feminist comment on Cavendish’s cooler representation of happy marriage, and finishing with something more exuberant.


3.3.1

Lucy Hutchinson: creativity and Calvinism

In his recent contribution to The Blackwell Guide (2000)10, David Norbrook outlines the view that will be more fully developed in his forthcoming book on Lucy Hutchinson. The following paragraph – slightly abbreviated – stands in relation to the passage from her Memoirs of her husband, which I will examine in Chapter 5 (see pp. 158–62, below), much as a Ciceronian commonplace stands in relation to the person or topic towards whom pathos is being directed. As we will see, the imagery of light and reflection is a powerful element in the passage in question; here perhaps its emotional overtones are less obvious: Lucy Hutchinson establishes a powerful tension … between her desire as artist to ‘image’ her husband and a strong religious awareness that images carry the danger of idolatry. In recounting her courtship, she has allowed nostalgia to push her to the brink of blasphemy. She and her husband were strict Calvinists, committed to the belief that even before humanity’s creation, God had decided on the minority who were to be saved and the vast majority who were to be damned. … This world-view makes virtue in this world a precarious matter: neither high social status nor careful ethical training is any guarantee of ultimate worth. There is thus a kind of spiritual egalitarianism: if the wife images the husband, the husband’s virtues too are no more than an image. To write the life of a saint is to try to render a miracle that is ultimately beyond representation, the light beyond the reflection. When describing a battle she writes that if this were a romance she would celebrate the heroes’ gallantry, but heroic exploits ‘are but the beams of the Almighty’ (p. 147). The difficulty for the writer is to hold the worldly action and those transcendental beams in some kind of difficult suspension. The imagery of light and sunshine that pervades the book does some of this work. (Blackwell Guide, p. 184) Norbrook begins here by placing two words which, for religious believers belonging to the three great monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam still carry a strong and complex emotional charge: ‘idolatry’ and ‘blasphemy’ – but which, for those subscribing to the secular mentality which is now dominant in the English language media, reflect a faint effort towards empathy with Lucy, countered by a more marked sense of distance and distaste: these are alien emotions, still perceived (in the second instance) as potentially threatening to


freedom of expression. The ‘powerful tension’ detected by Norbrook depends on this sense, but generates a more positive overall response to Lucy, who as ‘Quality Bearer’ in the Firbasian sense stands ‘between’ the two shorter and longer arms of the ‘Further Specification’ that explains the tension. An adjectival noun phrase forms the first arm, positive in feeling: ‘her desire as artist to ‘image’ her husband’ – all expressive of commitment, personal aspiration and vision, personal warmth and commitment. Then the second, longer arm is linked to the first by the traductio (i.e. the word-class variation), of ‘image’/ ‘images’, the noun being the subject of a noun clause which has an Fsp of its own and constitutes a threatening major premise: ‘images carry the danger of idolatry’. This powerful Protestant ‘commonplace’ (to be seen again in my discussion of William Baldwin in Chapter 5), is the logical basis for Lucy’s anxiety and the modern reader’s sympathetic concern. As an ‘Achievement Goal’, artistic achievement is in secular eyes more ‘real’ and more pressing than religious obedience. We want her artistic freedom and fulfilment to be untrammelled. Two sentences later, however, we are advised by implication of what Lucy would feel, and expect, with regard to us (since our lives and beliefs would in all probability, not satisfy her of our elect status): ‘God had decided on the minority who were to be saved and the vast majority who were to be damned’. We see her and her husband ‘committed’ – in most contexts a positive word – to a view which is even more appalling for most modern believers than for secularists shocked by such a low valuation of humanity – and one professed here by such admirable people. Norbrook does nothing to prompt an emotion besides alerting us to our putative predicament by putting the ‘majority’ second; he lets the fact of such a belief speak for itself. A negative response is however inferred by a staged movement back towards a positive one: firstly a sentence which shows how ‘precarious’ it must have been to walk the emotional tight-rope of such a belief, for the more privileged, socially and educationally, amongst those who were anxious for evidence of their elect status. The reader is prompted to empathy by use of the present tense. The next sentence introduces the more positive, though perhaps accidental benefit of ‘a kind of spiritual egalitarianism’ between man and woman – though I will have more to say in Chapter 4 on the point it makes about images. It would be hard to estimate the average reader’s response to ‘spiritual’ in this collocation; for some it might denote egalitarianism (that is, behaviour reflecting a belief in equality) at the level that really counts; for others something only


fleetingly perceived and carrying little practical or emotional weight in the conduct of day-to-day relations between wife and husband. But David Norbrook goes further in the next sentence to sway feeling one way, to arouse at least empathetically a glimmer of imaginative wonder and awe: the secular reader might catch the ghost, the inkling, of what a Calvinist believer might feel – ‘the light beyond the reflection’. At the beginning of his article, Norbrook notes the tendency of some feminist commentators to deprecate Hutchinson’s wifely fervour. This response is not so much typified as sidelined in Elaine Hobby’s single mention and quotation, in her Virtue of Necessity (1988)11 of what she calls, with a hint of irony, ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s celebrated Memoirs’ (p. 179). In this, ‘we find there are two “Lucy Hutchinsons” …: a “she” who is a devoted wife, dutiful to her husband in all things and pleased to be so; and an “I” who is the author, the creating artist who stands outside the relationship. In an extensive passage, the author stands back and describes this “she”’. Elaine Hobby goes on to quote part of a sentence from an early section of the Memoirs, ‘His Virtues’: ‘she only reflected his own glories upon him: all that she was, was him, while he was here, and all that she is now is at best but his pale shade …’ (Memoirs, p. 25) combining this with material drawn (with omissions) from Lucy’s later summation of the marriage relationship as it grows out of her account of the courtship (pp. 50–1). That later passage is quoted in my Chapter 5 (pp. 158–9, below). But is this a description of a ‘she’, or an evocation – for all its third-person form – of that ‘she’s’ experience? We will look later at the force and complexity of feeling in the passage as a whole; here I will simply recall the old insight demonstrated by Quintilian: to move others, be moved yourself; to be moved yourself, evoke the emotive image. May one not acquire a perspective on an emotion while reliving it, without being detached from it as implied by Hobby’s ‘stands outside’ and ‘stands back’? Viewed as a persuader – or a ‘creating artist’ who is also a persuader – might not Lucy be seeking to evoke the empathy of her primary readers, with that ‘she’s’ bereavement, and link it to a broader emotional engagement with the image of their male ancestor as a figure poised between her and God, between time and eternity? Does her use of the third person primarily reflect detachment from herself as represented, or the most appropriate way of referring to herself in a narrative centring on another person? Without playing down the paradox that the woman who refers to herself as a ‘Pygmalion’s image’ of her husband’s ‘making’, is herself fashioning his image for posterity, Hobby’s summary presentation of the wifely ‘she’ who is ‘dutiful to her husband in all things and pleased


to be so’ rules out of account the possibility of erotic passion on the one side, and of a religious awe integral to the relationship on the other, as suggested by David Norbrook in the passage quoted above. Hobby’s primly-rounded phrase in itself suggests nothing beyond limp and lukewarm conformity to the ‘necessity’ of patriarchal order. Over against that the ‘creating artist’ stands out in all the strength of (her) ‘Virtue’. In contrast, Susan Cook’s article on Hutchinson’s narrative style (1993),12 looks more closely at the biographer’s emotional and artistic problems, and at her rhetorical purpose – while maintaining the ongoing critical distinction between Lucy the author and Lucy the literary character (common as we have seen to Hobby before her and Norbrook after her). She examines the problematic relationship between the various expressions and projections of self visible in Hutchinson’s writing, and finds that while sternly restraining any tendency towards ‘celebrating, not censoring, her life before salvation’ (p. 275), she nevertheless maintains a ‘covert assertion of her presence in the Memoirs’ (ibid.). In considering how this is achieved, Cook wrestles rather untidily with the complexity of Lucy’s creative means: The ‘real’ self and the self of authorial convention are issues that raise problems in the two works here discussed, for it is not easy to say how much Lucy uses the techniques of different styles to consciously fashion the woman with which we are presented. (p. 275) It is hard, it seems, to discriminate between the involuntary indication and the deliberate construction of self in Hutchinson’s writing. Cook juggles Lucy’s ‘real’ self against ‘the self of authorial convention’, both of which are, evidently, ‘issues’ in themselves, as factors giving rise to further ‘problems’. How, ‘consciously… us[ing], the techniques of different styles’ (for example, romance, history, hagiography?) does Hutchinson ‘fashion the woman with which we are presented’? This locates a ‘real’ woman, the author whose creative impulses will find expression despite all constraint, and with whom Suzanne Cook empathises, behind the neutered literary character ‘which’ is presented as narrator. This seems to imply that unconscious expression merits an emotional response from the modern reader, while conscious design does not. But this distinction between author and character might not always be maintained, as Cook concedes – though interestingly enough she links their elision to a concept of rhetorical purpose, looking within the inner frame at Lucy’s envisaged readership, and


quoting a passage in which ‘the two personae of author and character … merge’. This, as John Hutchinson faces parliamentary indictment, comes to a climax as ‘God, to show us that not friends, nor diligence, preserved our estates, stirred up the hearts of strangers to do us justice, and the bill was thrown out when we had scarce one of those friends we relied on in the house’ (pp. 332–3). Cook comments (p. 276): Very personal anger comes to the surface here as Lucy breaks out into an invective against her betrayers, forgetting the voice of commentator for a moment. However, there is the consideration that this might be deliberate, and that Lucy intends the reader (presumably one of her family) to empathise more closely with the extremity of her situation. If she expects future generations of Hutchinsons to take up her volume, it will be through simple curiosity, perhaps an interest in history in general, or genealogy in particular. Her strategy is to catch the attention of people with whom she has some sort of a common tie by bringing those of her own generation to life … Lucy uses an assumed familiarity and sympathy in her readers to make partisan and caustic comments. Susan Cook is making an interesting point here; but her comment proceeds through a fairly standardised phraseology, as in ‘very personal anger’ and ‘breaks out into an invective’. She overlooks the way in which a single word, ‘friends’, repeated five times in the whole paragraph from which I quoted, more bitterly on every repetition, attains a sarcastic negativity complementing the open scorn of another word, ‘creature’, applied to a time-serving ‘kinsman’ whom she accosts in the street, and who in effect tells her to ‘get real’, assuring her that ‘It is not now as God will, but as we will’. Cook is right to note a particular vehemence here, and a diminished distance between what Lucy reveals of herself as author, and herself as represented in the story; but she perhaps underestimates the degree of engagement likely to have been achieved by the reader at this stage in the narrative (whether that reader was seen exclusively as a family member, or – at least potentially – as representative of a far larger group of political and religious radicals, as Norbrook suggests in his first paragraph). A family member would by this time be far past a lukewarm interest, and a nonconformist reader strongly confirmed is his or her commitment. It seems more likely that Lucy is cranking up the feeling, that she is using the ‘emotional laser’ referred to in the last chapter, constantly reinforcing the reader’s growing indignation, and progressively emphasising the


emotional and spiritual positioning of herself and her reader within an exclusive group – one which is opposed inveterately to the blasphemous exclusion of God’s will by her cynical relative and the worldly values he represents. It may seem ungracious to point out where, in my view, Susan Cook does not fully pursue her valuable insights; but it does help to show what my approach can add. 3.3.2

Characterising (or caricaturing?) Cavendish

In her Introduction to The Blazing World & Other Writings (1992),13 selected from Margaret Cavendish’s writings in prose, Kate Lilley’s concentration on the Duchess’s artistic fulfilment reflects the same preoccupation as Elaine Hobby’s and Susan Cook’s, in their treatment of Hutchinson. And in her own appraisal of Cavendish, Hobby (pp. 107–9) cites telling evidence from her plays suggesting that this was a conscious preoccupation. The plays explore varying female roles, pursued in monologue, dialogue and reported action, often fantastic in character – as when one heroine goes to war at the head of an army of Amazons. Does Cavendish’s use of pathos, whether mild or vehement in expression, shed a useful light on the way she accommodated her role as a wife, to her activity as writer, a creator of alternative selves? Lilley summarises her view of the linkage: The Blazing World turns out to be a utopia compulsively interested in the erotics of female doubling and collaboration. The conventionally labyrinthine geography of the Blazing World is matched by the intricately recursive plotting of its narrative of mutually beneficial platonic love between women in the context of their enabling and prestigious marriages to largely absent husbands. Embedded within the romance plot of The Blazing World is a mirror-narrative of fortunate female-female abduction, of which none other than the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is the beneficiary. Through the introduction of ‘Margaret Cavendish’ as the Empress’s scribe, Margaret Cavendish as author-scribe of The Blazing World stages a self-confirming dialogue on the production of fictional worlds as an immensely pleasurable compensatory activity for women[.] (Lilley, Introduction, p. xxvii) In Chapter 5 we will examine Cavendish’s principal representation, within the text of The Blazing World, of the marriage and marital role for which Lilley sees her seeking ‘compensatory activity’. I will also raise the old question of whom she is seeking to persuade and what


emotions she is seeking to move. The ‘erotics’ of interplay between images of herself, of alternation and intensification, is well observed by Lilley. She detects a correspondence between Cavendish’s metaphorical presentation of herself in her Preface ‘To the Reader’, as ‘Margaret the First’ (presumably including amongst those readers her husband, who is to have a role in the story), and the literal representation of her heroine as Empress of the Blazing World, newly invested with her bejewelled regalia: The self-coronation of ‘Margaret the First’ in the preface, partly authorized by the Duke of Newcastle’s commendatory poem which precedes it, is displaced into another more extravagant story of husbandly permission which Cavendish herself calls ‘romancical’. The function of the blazon in this narrative subverts its customary role in the patriarchal coding of a figure of woman. Here, the catalogue dwells on the account and itemization of costume, materials, colours and the emblematic accessories of power. It functions iconographically to ratify a seduction which has already occurred within the narrative – the seduction of the Blazing World by the young lady – and which is now extended to the reader. The blazon also serves to externalize and further materalize a blazing virtue … . (Lilley, Introduction, p. xxvi) Lilley has already referred to ‘the rhetorical centrality of the aristocratic figure of the blazon’ (my italics – this being another term for the figure referred to elsewhere as effictio, that is, the graphic description of a figure, often producing an emotive effect through its enargeia). Lilley’s own critical rhetoric, defining a vital difference, dynamises a mode of feminist pathos, relieving the oppression of patriarchy. This is seen in the second sentence quoted above, where the nominal group comprising the subject, ‘The function … narrative’, acts as Quality Bearer (B) to the dynamic Verb of Quality, ‘subverts’ (Q), whose release of repressed energy is progressively revealed through a chain of increasing Specification (Sp = FSp) with at least three stages, culminating in ‘woman’. The oppressive impersonality of ‘patriarchal’, ‘coding’, and ‘figure’ – and of ‘woman’, similarly and most offensively depersonalized prior to its release from male definition – is tacitly confirmed in the next sentence with its silent reminder of what the blazon has normally ‘catalogued’: the itemised sensual attractions and docile virtues of women under the male gaze. In the following sentence, another dynamic structure of progressive specification,


beginning with ‘iconographically’ as the first key item of information and thus highlighting the fact that this visual rhetoric teaches as well as moves, links Lilley’s interpretation of the earlier narrative – including the emotional impact of the young lady’s arrival in the Blazing World – to whatever the reader feels about her new appearance. The word ‘seduction’ denotes emotion without at once evoking it; but it is now reflected in an image of imperial power which must, by inference, express Cavendish’s own ‘erotic’ attraction to the ‘doubling’ of her earlier self-image as ‘Margaret the First’. Having created a real curiosity about ‘husbandly permission’ and ‘seduction’, Kate Lilley explains them (p. xxviiff.). Both Cavendish and her creation, the young lady, have exploited ‘the authorizing gaze of men’ (including the Duke’s reading of this work?), in order for her to obtain ‘absolute power over her new male subjects’. This entails a distinctive form of pathos, blending admiration and empathetic triumph. Her blazoning (that is, the jewelled brilliance of her dress) figures ‘a second moment of wonder and the point at which the young lady, now reconstructed as Empress, exceeds masculine ratification’. It is also significant in what it conceals, the ‘body of female virtue … never made available for representation’ (another tacit contrast with what the blazon normally represents). Finally (though in rather loose terms) Lilley explains what happens in the passage we will examine in Chapter 5, telling us that ‘it is through the miraculous abandonment of corporeality that the souls of women are able to commune with each other as platonic lovers, and move freely and invisibly from one world and one body to another’ (but as we will see, they are also enabled to enter a male body, the Duke’s). Overall, Lilley, with her emphatic cadences, presents the emotional satisfaction afforded to Cavendish by her writing, in a very persuasive way. But a question remains: is she simplifying the emotion by discounting the importance of one major participant? By contrast, Germaine Greer’s enthusiastic presentation of the oddity of Margaret Cavendish combines admiration of her energy and originality with amusement at her slipshod aristocratic eccentricity. Whether this extract from her Slip-Shod Sybils (1995), page 40, reflects Cavendish’s texts as accurately as Kate Lilley does, may be another matter:14 The Duchess was blessed with an extraordinarily concrete visual imagination and a power of concentration on her object that was not even sought after by her contemporaries. In her armoury of imagery


human bodies are kitchens, boiling, basting, frying and stewing away in filth and steamy heat, and human beings are bisques or custards, according to their temperament. Within this frame of homely reference beats a great heart, begging that even if ‘we are inferior to men, let us shew ourselves a degree above beasts; and not eat and drink and sleep away our time as they do …’. The great lady dashed about her great house, packing books off to the press before she had time to re-read them and discover that one of her dictated sentences was twelve pages long. The result was that even people who found her interesting and sympathetic decided that she was mad. The first sentence quoted, with its balanced adverbial phrases (the first preceded, and the second followed, by qualifications – ‘extraordinarily’, ‘not even sought’ – which exalt Cavendish to a category of one) is a form of prozeugma, with all the vigour normally projected by that syntactical figure as it duplicates or triplicates the dynamism of its phrases or clauses. This sentence launches the passage into the lusty trajectory which it will maintain; though some of the phrasing is rather approximate. ‘Concrete visual imagination’ recalls the vocabulary of what was once called ‘the New Criticism’; but it does not match the brisk piling up (that is, the synathroesmus) of sensory impressions in the following sentence, which rather suggest a tactile, olfactory and gustatory imagination – though we will test the accuracy of this, with respect to three poems, in Chapter 5. Another comfortable formula, with its echo of Erasmus’s Silenus, begins the next sentence: the initial adverbial phrase displaced from its usual order in English, followed by the inverted verb (‘Within this … beats a … ’) introduces a lively piece of metonymy, as the Duchess’s ‘great heart’ ‘ beats’ in her ‘homely’ language. There is also a submerged play on the more familiar patriarchal association of ‘woman’ and ‘home’, repeated with a difference in the next sentence to sustain the woman’s momentum in her escape from bestial torpor: ‘The great lady dashed about her great house’. This renews and amplifies the metonymical, double-ended correspondence (or subject-adjunct relationship) of ‘great lady’ and ‘great house’, underlined by the ploche of the repeated adjective, and introducing a tacit parallel between the lengths of seigneurial corridors and dictated sentences which is very pleasing – as is the rambling of Cavendish’s sentence to the end of Germaine Greer’s. The passage then slows down out of enthusiastic empathy into regretful objectivity as the inevitable consequence is observed: ‘people … decided that she was mad’. Greer goes on to instance these people, naming Pepys and Dorothy Osborne.


The ease and fun of this passage, and the foundation of its subtler effects arises from our ready cognitive engagement with the contrasted MOPS (that is, the sequences of scripts, associated with housekeeping in smaller and larger houses, and with writing for publication), and with the other related schemata of the passage such as the characteristic and contrasted achievement and enjoyment goals of authors and housewives, on whatever scale. Five critics – Norbrook, Hobby, Cook, Lilley, Greer – commenting on two women writers, use pathos for different though related purposes and with varying degrees of discrimination. David Norbrook – in the appropriate spirit of a reader’s guide – poises empathy and sympathy with Lucy Hutchinson precisely, against a mildly expressed antipathetic response to the world-view she shared with her husband. The sense of historical contingency and the objective logos, which it fosters, is tempered with an older style of literary humanism. The reader is left free to choose between the alternatives which Hutchinson held in ‘difficult suspension’: the presumption that they will accept the central rhetorical commonplace of the passage (that is, that human fulfilment is the supreme value), is not so stressed as not to permit further enquiry into ‘the light beyond the reflection’ – an enquiry to be pursued in Chapter 5. In contrast, Elaine Hobby’s feminism seems to limit its empathy, while Susan Cook develops it to a point of effective engagement with the reader, urging a further prosecution of her insight than Cook herself achieves. But what she does achieve owes much to her acute sense of Hutchinson’s anger, and of the way she uses it. Kate Lilley succeeds both in expanding the reader’s sense of Cavendish’s artistic resourcefulness (and of the emotional and sexual energy which drives it), and in stimulating perception – teaching, pleasing, subverting associations – with her own subtly emotive rhetoric. Her ‘husbandly permission’ has a much richer irony than Hobby’s comment on Hutchinson’s wifely obedience. Germaine Greer’s blend of affection and respect for Cavendish as she portrays her, mixed as this is with amusement at how such a figure forestalls being taken seriously, is psychologically and emotionally plausible and fits the thesis of her book. But does it match the facts about this female hero and how she wrote?

3.4 3.4.1

Shakespeare: about the Bard’s business Terry Eagleton: shock tactics

In his William Shakespeare (1986),15 Terry Eagleton begins the book and his comment on Macbeth with a bold exclusion tactic, palpably outrageous, though underpinned by syllogistic reasoning. It signals his


intention to create and commandeer a new readership. Brian Vickers’s severe judgement on the passage, comparing it to ‘a high-speed food blender … a glib and opportunistic recycling of current [critical] cliches’ (p. 410) seems justified; but there is more to be said about Eagleton’s rhetorical technique, his whipping up of ethos and pathos into affect. He expects his readers to admire his cheek – while realigning their values, perceptions and emotions. In this account, ‘foul’ is indeed ‘fair’: To any unprejudiced reader – which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics – it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchial social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. ‘[he witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honours’. (pp. 1–2) ‘Unprejudiced’ here functions rhetorically as – at once – an emotive abstraction and a characterisation of stance or ethos. It seems at first to denote a very broad category, embodying a universally valid, and binding, moral or humanistic value of the kind whose ideological basis Eagleton would normally seek to expose. However, it is clear from the context that in this case ‘almost all the critics’ (all the humanists among them?) won’t qualify. ‘Unprejudiced’ has a narrower, historically-conditioned sense. It means ‘possessed of political insight’ (that is, alert to the social structures of feudalism and early capitalism). Exclusion from this category, and all its attendant excitement – the thrill of following a charismatic leader while at the same time thinking for yourself and subverting the status quo – hangs threateningly over any hesitation in concluding that Eagleton is ‘surely’ right. If, moreover, we consider the dynamics of the statement, this impression is confirmed in all its ironic force. Being ‘unprejudiced’, unlike the playwright, his targeted audience and generations of critics, is the mental precondition – in Firbasian terms, the ‘setting’ – for perceiving the startling ‘phenomenon’ of the noun clause which is the extraposed grammatical subject of the sentence, and which (following the parenthesis


which shuts Shakespeare out), finally gives the witches their due: ‘that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches’. Those who cannot happily soar aloft on the uprush of this idea – its release of inhibition as exciting, though less murderous, than the witches’ uncaging of Macbeth’s ‘ambitious thoughts’ – will be in a category that no aspiring student reader would wish to belong to: those who cannot or will not see ‘a reverence for hierarchal social order for what it is’. This plain idiomatic monosyllabic formula for fearless objectivity, including the brave and clear-sighted, excluding the timid hankerers after ‘order’ and ‘pi[ety]’, introduces a string of negative emotive terms poised against the positive feminist ideal of ‘sisterly community’. These terms adeptly bestride the gap between dark-age Scotland and the monetarist administration of 1980s Britain under Mrs Thatcher: ‘routine oppression’ (as in the capitalist treatment of labour) is poised against ‘incessant warfare’, ‘tribal bickerings’ against ‘military honours’ (a continuing mark of status for the armed forces of capitalist countries). The broader and narrower bands of historical reference help the proselyte reader empathise with the witches in their prototype ‘community’: the reader and they are up against the world, excluding the insensate majority. The witches subvert this structure: their teasing word-play infiltrates and undermines Macbeth from within, revealing in him a lack which hollows his being into desire. [T]he witches signify a realm of non-meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work’s margins, one which has its own kind of truth; and their words to Macbeth catalyse this region of otherness and desire within himself, so that by the end of the play it has flooded up from within him to shatter and engulf his previously assured identity. In this sense the witches figure as the ‘unconscious’ of the drama, that which must be exiled and repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a vengeance. That unconscious is a discourse in which meaning falters and slides, in which firm definitions are dissolved and binary oppositions eroded: fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing is but what is not. … Macbeth ends up chasing an identity which continually eludes him; he becomes a floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed pursuit of an anchoring signified[.] (pp. 2–3) He goes on to quote the bitter nihilism of Macbeth’s speech on hearing of his wife’s death (which we will consider later), beginning with his comparison of life to ‘a poor player’, and ending after ‘Signifying


nothing’ with the comment ‘ He is reduced to a ham actor, unable to identify with his role’. Eagleton’s own account of what happens to Macbeth to bring him to this state opens a metaphorical void which is itself powerfully emotive and empathetic. It is quite possible to imagine having your being ‘hollow[ed] into desire’ without fathoming Eagleton’s meaning. The existential bleakness and exposure which (it is claimed) result from this process are then figured powerfully through topothesia (description of an imaginary place): a castle exposed to flooding, a political territory vainly protected by the attempted exile of dangerous subjects and the repression of a restive peasantry. But are there no clearer points of reference for visitants to this symbolic space? 3.4.2

Jardine’s level look at Shakespeare’s cliff-top

In her Reading Shakespeare Historically (1996), which I referred to in the last chapter for its valuable discussion of epistolary pathos as expounded and practised by Erasmus, Lisa Jardine rests her argument about King Lear on a premise which itself confirms the validity of Aristotle’s primary insight into rhetoric and its workings – the EPL distinction. There is, indeed, a distinction to be made between the emotion tempered by ethos, characterising the persuasive voice by reflecting virtue, competence and good will, and the ‘raw emotion’ (as Jardine calls it) of a pathos which is totally untempered. For Jardine, Lear demonstrates the breakdown of the one means of communication, persuasion, and negotiation proper to the political elite represented in the play – culturally similar, despite its location in the pre-Christian Britain chronicled by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the courtly society of Renaissance England. This breakdown has appalling consequences, both for the characters and the audience. Certainly when Lear, bearing Cordelia’s lifeless body, utters his tragic cry ‘Howl, howl, howl …’ he is with his own example drawing his listeners into a world beyond words, into an emotion as ‘raw’ as exists anywhere. But it does not follow that Lear as a whole illustrates the failure of language as a constructive resource. There may be other modes of persuasion than the one singled out by Jardine as both vital to this society, and fatally vitiated – not least the use by Edgar (in particular) of resources resembling those of the playwright or actor. In Chapter 5 we will examine the validity of Jardine’s claims about Edgar’s treatment of his father the blinded Gloucester (and, previously, of Lear). She states (p. 96) that he ‘utters not one word of comfort or consolation to either’, but conveys ‘a sense of surreal dislocation of speech and action’. I will test the validity of the claim that Edgar’s words are at odds with his actions (and thus that


his response to the situation is ‘emotionally meaningless’, ‘intolerably’ so) with respect to his attempt to ‘cure’ his father’s suicidal despair by ‘trifling’ with it. Is this, indeed, futile – as a consequence of being, in Jardine’s words, ‘technically out of control’ (ibid.)? If she is right, nothing in the world of this play can replace the role of the familiar letter, as the persuasive medium appropriate to equals and founded in virtuous friendship. Jardine cites the authority of Erasmus, who credited such letters with the power of ‘structuring and controlling emotional transactions, so that their moral value is enhanced. By contrast, ‘[i]n Lear such controlled expression of feeling … has been … replaced by a version of epistolary artifice which distorts and misleads’ (that is, the emotive letter as written by Edmund, Goneril, and Regan). But because Shakespeare demonstrates the abuse of letters, must all rhetorical pathos now be reduced to ‘emotional dyslexia’ – destructive and disorienting, however sincere in source and intention? According to Jardine (pp. 96–7): Lear and his party on the Heath, and Gloucester and the disguised Edgar at Dover Cliffs, are offered as appalling manifestations of helplessly uncontrolled feeling, damagingly circulating without motive or purpose, its moral efficacy terribly out of focus. … Once we historicise the networks of feeling which form and reform the bonds of duty and friendship in Lear around the persuasive technology of letter writing and reading, we are bound, I think, to recognise that the ‘natural’ and uncontained versions of passionate emotion in the play are not available as a solution to the problems raised by Lear misconstruing his daughters’ declarations of love. Raw emotion is not an attractive prospect for an audience which had placed its trust in Erasmus’s promise that mastery of the familiar letter would enable humane individuals to persuade one another affectivelv to collaborate for a better, more Christian Europe. The spectacle of such ‘civilised’ technical skill working successfully on the side of deception and self-interest is disturbing and deeply pessimistic. Yet it is to precisely this vividly dramatised scenario that we, the modern audience, respond positively and intensely emotionally, because it is, of its essence a representation of emotion unmediated by historicised social forms. The combination of horror and embarrassment with which we experience the spectacle of Edgar deluding the desperate Gloucester into casting himself down from a nonexistent cliff owes nothing to Erasmus, or to humanist rhetoric or to Renaissance philosophy. Like Gloucester and Edgar, we experience


with immediacy that raw emotional intensity in a moral, social and historical void. Jardine’s language is itself insistently emotional, even in this selective quotation. In the first quoted sentence, alone, we have ‘appalling’, ‘helplessly uncontrolled’, ‘damagingly’, and ‘terribly’. The critic’s conviction that ‘raw emotion’, unmediated by what had become the only available ‘technology’ for the focusing of pathos, must be at once shattering in its impact and futile as a means of persuasion, is underpinned far more strongly by her own emotional responses than by her argument. She makes exactly the distinction that I am concerned to make throughout, between the estimated response of an original audience – her account purporting to be ‘historicised’ – and the response of today’s readers and audiences, with or without critical guidance. Accordingly, Shakespeare’s audience, furnished as it allegedly was with a habitual trust in the power of emotive, epistolary language to confront ‘problems’ and concert action, must have experienced a far stronger sense of shock and disorientation than we can possibly feel, not having any such expectations. Jardine’s logos is supported by a strongly projected ethos – pre-empting the reader’s judgement (‘we are bound, I think, to recognise’), enhancing the inferred emotional impact of ‘raw’ feeling by echoing the old, tight-lipped, ever-so-British litotes ‘not a pretty sight’ (‘raw emotion is not an attractive prospect’), premising her argument on the view that the audience envisioned by Shakespeare would recognise the defeat of Erasmian optimism, and repeating with variation her key concept ‘technology … technical’ and its associated terms – for example, ‘uncontrolled’, ‘focus’, and ‘skill’. This further persuades us to accept the inevitability of Jardine’s conclusion. For all the significance in Aristotelean theory of the word techne, I am not sure whether our current concept of ‘technology’, with its impersonal connotations, really matches the more interactive idea of persuasion likely to be entertained by Shakespeare’s audience; but the word as used here tacitly confirms the truth of Jardine’s enargeia of helplessness. It implies panic at the failure of a one-way method, and precludes any possibility of successful improvisation. This makes it plausible that Edgar (for one) is merely flailing about, grasping at straws. In contrast to this, Jardine’s explanation of the play’s renowned emotional intensity presses on to a strong rhetorical conclusion, preemptively including us (her readers) in an Inclusion Model, the ‘we’ of ‘the modern audience’, and thus characterising ‘our’ response to


Edgar’s homoeopathic operation on his suicidal father, as ‘The (my italics) combination of horror and embarrassment’. Another level (or another element?) is to be added to that tragic suffering built up steadily through the dialogue of the great scenes, as ‘raw emotion’ is lasered back and forth between the sufferers, often bypassing both reason and mutual recognition, and compulsively involving the audience. Helpless (it seems) before the cruelty, hypocrisy and self-serving of others, the kind children Cordelia and Edgar are themselves reduced in Jardine’s view either to impotence or cruelty, through their failure to console (and – by implication – their progressive collapse from a loss of confidence in civilizing language to a despair of civilisation itself); and this desolate impotence both of silence and speech is the ultimate horror – and embarrassment. A deictic use of ‘the’ establishes the reality of this ‘combination’ of feelings as a preexistent thing, already familiar to us – whether or not we as individual readers have ‘experienced’ it. By implication, if we haven’t, we should have. But I am inclined to recognise both ‘motive and purpose’ in that very action on Edgar’s part, which in Jardine’s view so clearly typifies their absence – the creation in Gloucester’s mind of an illusory precipice. In the meantime, however, we are being hustled to a similarly precipitate conclusion. We are shamefaced and horrorstruck by Edgar’s callous ineptitude (as it seems to Jardine – though since we in our time have not been conditioned by Erasmus to expect the exercise of his kind of ‘civilised affectivity’, it’s hard to see why we should be so embarrassed at the lack of it, unless we apply our own humane standards). Our ‘raw emotion’ attests, in its very intensity, a lack of mediation and loss of bearings, whether Erasmian, rhetorical, or philosophic (despite the vivid topographia and the parallel with Robert Burton which I will point out in Chapter 5); presumably we sense that something is missing. As it metaphorises the audience’s empathy with Gloucester’s literal though illusory leap, the final sentence of the chapter has a strong if untidy ‘functional perspective’, on Firbas’s: Quality Scale: the adverbial phrase ‘Like Gloucester and Edgar’ precedes the ‘Quality-bearing’ verb ‘experience’ to link it and its subject (‘we’) to the preceding context; the Specification combines words from the prior context (‘emotion’, ‘emotionally’, and ‘intensely’ have all occurred within the previous four clauses) in a newly varied emotive and sensory phrase, ‘raw emotional intensity’ – already preceded by a Further Specification, ‘with immediacy’, and followed by the most dynamic and emotive, most contextually independent phrase of all, in the Final Specification, ‘a moral, social and historical void’. The sen-


tence throws us into this ‘void’ – but like Gloucester’s (and Shakespeare’s) Cliff, is it really there? Eagleton and Jardine are both strong critical rhetoricians, each pressing a historical thesis, one about power structures and the unconscious, the other about a dominant cultural form, the humanist epistle. They both use the exclusion model (overt and repeated in Eagleton, quietly inferred in Jardine – ‘aren’t you embarrassed?’), and the affective blending of masterful ethos and purposeful pathos through what seems in the context of presumed interaction with the reader to be brand new metaphor, the only valid way of articulating the necessary judgement.

3.5

Milton: perspectives on power

Whether he is construed politically, or theologically, or with respect to gender – or as a poet of such overwhelming originality and authority as to hamstring his successors for two centuries – Milton still generates intense and illuminating debate, having recovered both from his Tennysonian status as ‘God-gifted organ-voice of England’),16 and from the discordia concors of Eliot and Leavis17 in their efforts to deny moral or sensory substance to that very same ‘voice’. Having included political and historicised approaches in my sampling of Shakespearian criticism, I will look here at one notable example of criticism still centred on the creative act, and on authorial originality, and one which addresses the interlinked subjects of ‘language, gender, power’. 3.5.1

Harold Bloom: the ‘strong poet’ as supreme hero

For Harold Bloom, the critical reading of texts by ‘strong poets’ is a supreme human activity,18 transcending the familiar dichotomy between sacred and secular19 in its quest to understand the creative impulse and the means or ‘ratios’ through which it works, fusing Freudian psychology with linguistic insights expressed in rhetorical terms – with respect (especially) to the major classes of trope. With the quintessentially ‘strong poet’ Milton, the centre of Bloom’s critical attention shifts accordingly from the values of heroism explored in Paradise Lost, to the poet’s own creative titanism, his wrestle with his great poetic precursors. As we already seen repeatedly, the renewing of language to meet new situations, and new perceptions, involves pathos in full integration with ethos Whether the text concerned is viewed formally as oratory or poetry, it will involve both poetic orientation, according to Jakobson’s conception,20 and the persuasive function. But


the major poet will carry the figurative transformation of language far further than the orator’s (or even the critic’s) characteristic metaphor, in accordance with his or her far profounder persuasive purpose. If emotion in the poet’s reader is stirred by the poet’s own emotion, and if that is roused through the now-familiar phantasia or visio, the sharpness of that vision will depend not merely by what the poet sees or is shown, but by how it is seen or shown (with what use of language), and from what position. When Milton looks at Satan, the potent though unacknowledged attraction – in Bloom’s view – of such a poetic personality, so like his own, will be disguised from himself and the reader through the ‘revisionary ratios’ of trope. The pathos of Satan’s ruined grandeur (all the grander for its ruin) mounts steadily through Book I up to the great climax of his speech at the military review. First of all we sense the narrator’s compulsive wincing at Satan’s facial disfigurement (I.600–01), recalling Adam Smith’s involuntary sympathy. This is conveyed to the reader through the syntactical inversion and the momentary, endof-the-line pause whereby the grammatical object ‘his face’ becomes the Firbasian ‘setting’ for ‘deep scars of thunder’. Then we see reflected in his ‘cruel … eye’ the pitiful spectacle of his followers, blended simultaneously with Satan’s thoughts, at once ‘remorse[ful]’ and vainglorious – ‘Millions of spirits for his fault amerced / Of heaven’ (ll. 604–12). Through this process, which culminates in what seems like free indirect speech (‘yet faithful how they stood / Their glory withered’) we see Satan already reflecting the dogged passion of his cohorts, similarly compounded of loyalty and egoism. Once he begins to speak, he continues to reflect his perception of this ‘united force of gods’ (l. 629) back upon them. The burst of energy produced by this emotional lasering culminates in the raising, firstly of the ‘din of war’ (l. 668) and then of Pandemonium itself (ll. 670–730). A comparable but more complex process, of poetry rather than oratory, is seen in the earlier passage (I.283–313), extensively analysed by Bloom in his A Map of Misreading (1975),21 pp. 130–8. Here, the narrator watches Satan, revived following his own prostration, going to rescue his ‘faithful friends’. Milton’s gigantic imagery at once presents Satan, and represents the precursor poets’ ways of handling such imagery. The trope of metalepsis or transumption, a form of remote metonymy working through intermediate and unstated associations, is identified by Bloom as the major structuring device (Map, p. 129 ff.). Here, the mutual reflection characteristic of pathos is that of imagination within imagination. As Satan refigures the Son and the Spirit of


God in his own cerebral conception of Sin, and his sexual engendering of Death the rapist (life to God, in Keats’s words,22 being death to his own power of imaginative conception), so Milton wrests the satanic impulse back towards God. He does this – or so we must infer – by linking the ongoing effects of Satan’s promethean intelligence, the ancient and modern means of warfare and repression (represented here by hundred-gun warships, spears, shields and the Inquisition), to the heroic vision of ‘precursor’ poets as tainted by them, and as prefigured by Satan himself. In contrast, Milton and ‘the Tuscan artist’ persecuted by the Inquisition set things in their true perspective. Bloom is discussing the series of similes (Book I, 283–313) in which Satan’s shield, like that of Achilles in Homer, is compared to the moon, his spear to the mast of ‘some great ammiral’ (that is, a flagship); and his fallen followers to autumnal leaves. But here, the moon-shield first seen on the arm of Achilles is viewed with a clarity unimaginable by Homer, through Galileo’s telescope: Milton’s aim is to make his own belatedness into an earliness, and his tradition’s priority over him into a lateness. The critical question to be asked of this passage is: why is Johnson’s ‘adventitious image’, Galileo and the telescope, present at all? Johnson, despite his judgment that the image is extrinsic, implies the right answer: because the expansion of this apparently extrinsic image crowds the reader’s imagination, by giving Milton the true priority of interpretation, the powerful reading that insists upon its own uniqueness and its own accuracy. Troping upon his forerunners’ tropes, Milton compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision as our origin, his time as true time. His allusiveness introjects the past, and projects the future, but at the paradoxical cost of the present, which is not voided but is yielded up to an experiential darkness, as we will see, to a mingling of wonder (discovery) and woe (the fallen Church’s imprisonment of the discoverer). As Frank Kermode remarks, Paradise Lost is a wholly contemporary poem, yet surely its sense of the present is necessarily more of loss than of delight. (A Map of Misreading, pp. 131–2) Given Bloom’s constant stress on the creative generation of successor poets by their precursors, and on their compulsive repudiation of the relationship to which they owe their very existence as poets, it is appropriate that the style of this passage is built up of binary pairings, relative oppositions and antitheses. But it also conveys a process of


assimilation, as our critical reading, like Bloom’s, Johnson’s and Kermode’s, is induced to merge with the Strong Poet’s creative misreading of precursor poets (or his extension and transformation of their meaning). Bloom presents Milton’s series of images as jamming themselves into the space that readers have cleared in their minds for attention to the poem, and the scripts they have ready as a way of understanding it, and forcing a complete rearrangement, or a rewrite. This is figured by a personified presence, insisting (twice) on the adoption of ‘its own’ practice. At this point, I (for once) am tempted to a critical metaphor, or personification. The sense of ‘crowding’ caught by Bloom from Johnson might be compared to that induced in his colleagues by a whiz-kid gallery director, storming in on his first day’s work, with a huge new bequest of paintings all to be accommodated, and backed by a team of interpreters ready to re-caption everything. Not only Homer, but ‘Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso, Spenser, [and] the Bible’ (referred to immediately before our quoted passage) are belated by Milton’s ‘priority of interpretation’ – and on the other side the great interpreters of Milton, whether favourable or otherwise cannot but respond to and validate his ‘crowd[ing] of the imagination’, induced ‘to read as he reads’. The object of our emotion becomes not only what Milton sees – Satan, his shield, his spear, and his fallen followers – but the way of seeing which he evolves in order to be able to see them. But, as with the other gallery employees on the morning just imagined, Bloom’s Milton leaves the reader dumbfounded – groping towards the creative power so overwhelmingly amplified, so disconcerting, so infinitely removed. This is not like the common ethos sparked by Tamburlaine and his henchmen grasping at power, or like Keats drawing us into the antithetical feeling of his ‘Ode on Melancholy’. At the end of my extract, Bloom’s own professed emotion, reflected from the heart of Milton’s own critical engagement with the divided heart of Satan himself, emerges as ‘wonder’ and ‘woe’. 3.5.2

Kate Belsey: God and gender – re-engineering love

In her book on Language, Gender, and Power in the work of Milton, Catherine Belsey23 makes striking use of one of the most intriguing exchanges in the sequence of conversations between Adam and his angel guest, Raphael, which occupy the poem from l. 361 of Book V to the end of Book VIII. It is placed almost as an afterthought. But it confirms Raphael’s biblical, or apocryphal reputation as a ‘sociable spirit’ (V.221), friendly towards human beings, who obeys God’s


instruction to converse with Adam ‘as friend with friend’ (V.229), by willingly exchanging the most intimate confidences (see text and comment, pp. 177–9, below). Catherine Belsey finds this a refreshing contrast to God’s perverse reinstatement, after the Fall, of the ‘same patriarchal relations which brought it about’. Whether or not this is a plausible explanation of the Fall, it still motivates Belsey to find in Book VIII, 618–29, her model for a less oppressive ordering of the difference that sparks erotic desire – one not involving a fixity, or hierarchal difference validated by power: At the end of their discussion Raphael tells Adam with a disarming blush that there is love in heaven, and there the angels simply mix freely in perfect union, without all these difficulties (VIII, 618–29). In the heaven he speaks of, however, there are, of course, no women (X, 889–90). This arrangement might not do for us. But Paradise Lost also offers the basis of a more utopian vision. Though the angels are identified by masculine pronouns throughout, and are thus presented as essentially male, the text none the less draws attention to the fluidity of heavenly gender: ‘For spirits when they please! Can either sex assume, or both …’ (I, 423–4). Either … or both: not simply a sexual duality, a bisexual ability to move between antithetical poles, nor a uniform androgyny, but an internalization of difference itself, of sexual otherness within the self-same. (John Milton: Language, Gender and Power, p. 66) The logos of this passage is a little tenuous, as we will see in our assessment of that principle in the passage to which it refers (Chapter 5). Its pathos and ethos (that is, its affect) are however more appealing, from the wry humour of ‘This might not do for us’24 to the rhythmical contrast within the following sentence. There we progress through the grindingly emphatic structure by which the angels, in Milton’s patriarchal vision, are ‘identified by masculine pronouns throughout, and are thus presented as essentially male’ (a structure balanced around the chiastic arrangement of ‘masculine’ and ‘male’) to the sudden quickening and rippling of rhythm as the text itself, as always at odds with Milton’s conscious design, ‘draws attention to the fluidity of heavenly gender’. In a variation on the Silenus, the patriarchal is opened from inside to disclose a ‘fluidity’ which is itself opposed to rigid opposition and the oppressive power against which Belsey’s own pathos is directed. She points out the repressed warmth and variety, the positive pathos,


sympathetic and empathetic, under the repellent official voice, reversing the reader’s bias towards the angels. This is confirmed by the further quickening of the following long, conversational, but excitedly rhetorical sentence – a verbless minor sentence where ‘not’ and ‘nor’ oppose constraining ‘duality’, and blank ‘androgyny’, to a fuller unfolding of the new ideal sexuality through two uneven structures of noun phrases. The effect recalls that kind of spontaneous lasering of feelings and perceptions which arises between unconstrained speakers in conversation, and which I recalled at the very opening of this book. But the argument fits human sexuality better than angelic eroticism. As she moves up to the end of her chapter (whose overall subject has been ‘Gender’), Catherine Belsey places Milton in a tradition of angelic representation, introducing the social and physical scene of looking at Renaissance art. To the implied observer, ‘Annunciating angels, … are commonly placed in a relationship of spatial and pictorial symmetry with the Virgin, their physical characteristics resembling hers to a surprising degree’. The final three paragraphs, including a short sting in the tail, further amplify the liberating vision: The effect in the paintings is the divorce of sexual difference from its alliance with power. Neither Gabriel nor the Virgin lays claim to mastery. And in Milton’s heaven there are no gender stereotypes, no antithetical voices, masculine and feminine, no opposition affirmed as privilege. There can be, in consequence, no sexual rule and no submission, no authority grounded in anatomy. The text goes no further than this. But in separating gender from anatomy, and in glimpsing the possibility of a difference within sexual identity, Paradise Lost allows its reader a momentary vision of a world beyond essences. The result is imaginable as sexual plurality for each individual, and the consequent release of sexual being from power. God ought to have thought of that. It would have made all the difference in the world. (Ibid., p. 67) Paralleling the effect of the paintings with Raphael’s hint about heaven, Belsey again counterpoises two sets of positives and negatives – the repeated releases from constraint (‘no gender stereotypes, no antithetical voices …’), at the level of cause, followed by another set at the level of effect, culminating with release from the self-evident absurdity and oppression of ‘authority grounded in anatomy’. The following paragraph qualifies and inhibits the sense of relief, while (in the tradition of extended amplification or expolitio) restating the point.


The final sentence, from its secular, feminist perspective snipes at the eternal (perhaps not so eternal) Man behind the mask of the patriarchal God, and at Milton his upholder – as ever, ignoring his subversive imagination. The implication ‘When will they ever learn?’ carries the slight qualification that they might, sometime. In contrast to Eagleton and Jardine, Bloom and Belsey do not rely heavily on metaphor to involve the reader. Bloom’s theory plays down its importance and power amongst the tropes;25 though the way Milton ‘crowds the imagination’, in Johnson’s words, prompted me to make a metaphor of the crowding – while what interests Bloom is the process indicated by the metaphor. Accordingly, he implicitly contrasts the cultural script for reading other epic poets, to which the imagination is habituated, with that imposed by Milton: one crowds out the other. But the sense of Milton’s mastery still entails a sense of loss. Bloom’s style, like his proclaimed critical method, is antithetical: his linguistic innovation is to fuse relative terms (like the poetic father and the poetic son) with contraries – so that opposed entities at once seek to annul each other, and sustain each other. In contrast to this, Belsey’s rhetoric attacks fixed antitheses as the destructive basis of gender, replacing them with fluid, erotic, willed antitheses. Her language conveys the moment of insight into Milton’s marginalized utopian vision; it is spontaneous and quasi-interactive, without itself being innovative. 3.5.3

Conclusion

I have sought here to demonstrate, selectively, the reflection of distinct critical purposes in distinct developments of pathos, through the later twentieth century. In doing so I have drawn more or less equally on ‘old’ and ‘new’ methods of rhetorical analysis, using them both to point to the processes of emotional heightening (for example, lasering and the conception of metaphor), which seek to unite persuader and persuadee, ethos, pathos and logos, in a common affectivity. I hope this has habituated the reader to my own analytic technique, and shown a constructive and positive spirit towards the texts discussed which will further recommend its application, by the reader, to other texts of the reader’s choosing, both modern and early modern. Where the latter are concerned, the next chapter seeks to reflect the wider area of possible exploration, and the extremes of feeling that might be encountered there within the widely differing kinds, or levels, of relationship represented in the texts concerned. In this next chapter and the one to follow, ‘new’ rhetorical techniques will be more predominant, in the attempt to locate objective indices of feeling.

4 Going to Extremes

4.1

The extremes of love and hate

In this shorter chapter I want to indicate the range of pathos to be found in early modern writing. Focusing, initially, on extreme expressions of emotion, and specifically on the crucial opposition of love and hate, should provide co-ordinates for the investigation of intermediate degrees. As a further system of reference, and an additional pointer to the possible combinations of feeling (for example, of personal and political emotion), I have chosen to look at expressions of love or hate on four different ‘levels’ – religion, politics, family, sexuality – within contexts which are either literary in their use of pathos, or addressed functionally to specific topics, audiences and occasions. A further purpose is to foster precision in the reading of such texts, without the additional complication of reference to the critical texts studied in the last chapter, or to the texts to which they refer, which we will look at in the next chapter. It will also be helpful, in a second section, to represent the widely different purposes and occasions to which emotive persuasion was applied, in this case instancing the relationship of preacher and congregation, subject and prince, feminine and masculine. Here extremes of feeling may be combined in a single text to serve its manifest persuasive design. ‘The extremes of love and hate’ are of course relative. Extreme malice, for example, might in the judgement of some readers be something the mind can intuit but never realise (see the article by Downes cited on p. 8, above), and in any case any such realisation might be deeply harrowing to read! Let’s say that I want to look at the visible ends of the range. But even within those undefined limits, we may find a fairly clear structural opposition in every enactment of love and hate from 117


the religious to the erotic. Taking our cue from Aristotle’s perception of the desire at the heart of hatred, that its object ‘should perish’ (Rhetoric, II.iv.32), we should find at one extreme the negation of another’s being (either the life, or the identity of that being), and at the other extreme, affirmation of it. Any attempt to communicate such feelings depends on the capacity and susceptibility of those who are being invited to share them, or to empathise with them. Those who go the whole way will quite probably sense their difference from those who do not. Whenever teaching and moving are to be integrated, any writer representing the extreme emotions of a character, or any speaker trying to stir them in a companion or in an audience, will predict and seek to exploit this range of response, which I have termed the RPER. We have already seen how it may be deliberately stimulated through the use of Inclusion and Exclusion models (see pp. 20–5, above). Here we will consider several examples from outside the central group of authors figured in the two main chapters (besides some passages in their work, not referred to elsewhere). I will use varying degrees of direct quotation and analysis to suggest how the intensity of feeling expressed in each passage might reflect a sense of the original audience, whether reading or listening. Most of the passages will be briefly characterised, while two (the speech of Bunyan’s Mr. Stand-fast at his crossing of the Jordan, and Donne’s ‘Apparition’) will be examined in detail with some use of linguistic analysis. 4.1.1

Bunyan: the glowing coal

As I have just indicated, the first kind of emotion to be considered has God as its object, which in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century England must mean the God of Christianity. But the humanity of the feeling expressed in the following passage will I hope render it accessible and acceptable to secular readers and to those of other faiths. Today the passage will elicit a range of reaction far outside anything predictable by Bunyan, all the more so as a consequence both of its subject, and the complex layering and interconnection of its emotive imagery. Towards the conclusion of the Second Part of his The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684),1 Bunyan’s Mr. Stand-fast, like several of his companions, is summoned to cross the River; in other words he becomes aware that he is about to die. This whole extended passage of allegory – triumphantly completing Bunyan’s account of a Christian community’s journey towards Heaven, and analogous to the emotive conclusion of a speech or sermon – worked so memorably, for so long,

Going to Extremes 119

that parts of it became proverbial. ‘Passing over’ is still a euphemism for death, and ‘the other side’ a location for some kind of surviving consciousness, in a culture which has commonly divorced its wish for an afterlife (when it has any) from any sense or idea of the love of God. That love, voiced in a peculiarly Christian, and Puritan way, and in an idiom blending biblical sublimity and plain English speech, is outstandingly expressed here. In his verse Conclusion to the First Part (1678), Bunyan had invited readers to ‘interpret …my metaphors’ and to ‘see … the substance of my matter’, that is, to ‘construe’ it ‘verbally’, like a consolatory sermon (Lares, p. 165). What would he wish them to see (and to feel) in the following? Mr. Stand-fast is speaking to his ‘companions’ from ‘half way in’: This river has been a terror to many, yea the thoughts of it also have often frighted me. But now methinks I stand easy, my foot is fixed upon that upon which the feet of the priests that bare the Ark of the Covenant stood when Israel went over this Jordan. The waters indeed are to the palate bitter, and to the stomach cold; yet the thoughts of what I am going to, and of the conduct that waits for me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing coal at my heart. I see myself now at the end of my journey, my toilsome days are ended. I am going now to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon, for me. I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him, in whose company I delight myself. I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot too. His name has been to me as a civet-box, yea, sweeter than all perfumes. His voice to me has been most sweet, and his countenance I have more desired than they that have most desired the light of the sun. His word I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings. He has held me, and I have kept me from mine iniquities: yea, my steps hath he strengthened in his way. (p. 372) The invisible substance towards which hope was to be directed, and joy stirred, by the consolatory sermon, ‘looking’ (in Bunyan’s words) ‘within the veil’ of any figurative speech or symbolic action, is in the story itself now on the verge of realisation. But in looking beyond the


river, Stand-fast also looks back to the unrepeatable redemptive act of Christ. What made the object of his dawning joy available to him, was an act of willed annihilation directed towards ‘that head’ and ‘that face’, and borne on his behalf in order to affirm him. Such rejection was one of the things against which (as we saw in Chapter 1) consolation steadied the believer; but even in the anticipated face-to-face meeting, Stand-fast points to something he does not name, Christ’s actual death, just as he does not name what the river signifies. Hope is still reaching through the ‘veil’ of words, not stopping at the literal or the sensory. Yet the sensory is a vital part of this passage. We should consider who is speaking and who is listening – who has a part in this message from the river – linking Mr. Stand-fast’s firm footing in the Jordan to the reader’s own place in the discourse, then and now. The reader knows that Mr. Stand-fast is addressing his fellowpilgrims, whose desires, fears and experiences (of the tribulations of life, and of divine guidance) are closely akin to his. Moreover, having undertaken the role of reader – however much one differs from the reader implied by Bunyan’s address – one is in effect listening with heightened attention to the happy ending of Bunyan’s story, of which this speech and those preceding it (spoken by earlier pilgrims on entering the River) constitute the chief substance. And since the reader is human, he or she also recognises the imminence of death in the passage and is reminded of his or her own apprehensions of that event – however conceived. Thus, the reader is at the very least an interested overhearer, who may reject the vision with a range of feeling from wistfulness to indignation, but who will never be indifferent. And irrespective of our own stance, we will probably be convinced that Mr. Stand-fast’s emotions are shared by his immediate audience. This increases the emotional pressure on us. Bunyan’s cognitive engagement with the original reader is probably quite deliberate, though many of its overtones may be unconscious. The scene of death, here, is physical, social and personal. Physically, the setting of a serene deathbed surrounded by Stand-fast’s companions is presented, through the ‘continued metaphor’ of allegory (in schematic terms, through the correspondences of a TOP), as a placement in the River’s ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’ waters. The metaphor throws emphasis upon the subjective experience of death, its potential fearfulness even for the firm believer, the invasion and extinction of bodily life despite the ongoing spiritual substance. What differentiates this scene, whose archetypal imagery links it back to pagan antiquity, is its biblical and confessional context, its intimate and pervasive connection with the


scripts of Calvinist belief and (more specifically) of Baptist practice. Biblically it is a scene expressive of the covenant between God and Israel, the land of Promise reached across Jordan representing at once Heaven and the godly life lived in this world. Bunyan inverts the physical particulars of the scene. Stand-fast, up to his waist in water (if not deeper, since he seems to taste it), stands fast where the dry-shod priests, carrying the Ark, ‘stood firm’ (Joshua 4.3); but, as the stones taken from where the priests stood were matched by twelve others set up in their place in the riverbed and ‘there to this day’ (Joshua 4.8–9), so Bunyan’s spiritual hero, not exempted as Israel was from the deathly water, stands on the immaterial foundation of his faith, as entrusted by Christ to the twelve apostles, and on his assurance of salvation (‘the thoughts of what I am going to’). ‘This Jordan’, the river in which he stands, is the medium both of death and rebirth, the resurrection prefigured in the baptism of Christ which took place in it and which is re-enacted by every Baptist believer. For some readers it will also be the river over which an army, very realistically represented, proceeded to a genocide much less selective than even Samson’s was to be (see the Introduction, pp. 13–30). Bunyan’s readers, intent on the spiritual and moral sense, would, like Erasmus, turn this appalling Silenus inside-out and find in it the divinely commanded extirpation of vice within themselves. (Though for those who like Bunyan himself had fought in the civil wars, this must have involved a considerable complication or repression of feeling.) We will look later at the dynamic and deictic features of the problematic sentence, which makes matters worse with its stylistic awkwardness (at least on a first reading). However, focused as we are upon pathos, we must keep things in perspective. For Bunyan’s Baptist congregation the scene would, first and foremost, recall their own rite of reception into the church,2 through the total immersion of adult baptism (and the physical fears and reassurances which that might have occasioned, or recalled), and the comparable security and emotional strength which it offered for the subsequent crossing. The personal and social goals of preservation, crisis and enjoyment – and less avowably of achievement, since for the Calvinist salvation is through grace alone – which were reflected in adult baptism, were also closely connected in the more general stress that Puritan congregations placed upon testimony. The whole group drew regularly upon accounts of individual experience.3 Here, a testimony at the crisis of death is all the more effective (and affecting) through its intensely individual presentation of a solitary pilgrimage, alternating between the scripts of Stand-fast’s earlier life of ‘hear-say


and faith’, patterned out by the life of Christ, and the current script, with its movement towards the imminent union with him. Three temporal planes – Christ’s past sufferings, the present sense of a ‘toilsome’ life finally fading, and the happiness to come – constitute the enargeia of the passage, and it is not merely visual. Seeing expresses Stand-fast’s certitude (‘I see myself now at the end of my journey’); but the other senses convey his love, the bodily empathy with Christ who is identified not by name (though his name is linked to one of the senses, smell) but by the indices of common humanity as registered by all five senses and fused in the bodily response of emotion. The nouns ‘head’, ‘face’, ‘company’, ‘shoe’, ‘name’, ‘voice’, ‘countenance’, and ‘word’ move into a sensual litany like those in the Song of Songs, which begins with the perfume of ‘His name’ and culminates in the masterly touch of Christ: ‘He has held me, and I have kept me from mine iniquities: yea, my steps hath he strengthened in his way’. Bunyan’s total progression, over the four paragraphs which transfer the ‘glowing coal’ of assurance to the reader, has begun by linking ecstatic sight to painful touch, ultimate acceptance and recognition to ultimate blindness and rejection (‘I am going now to see that head that was crowned with thorns …’). The reader’s empathic shrinking from thorns and sputum, patiently endured in evidence of love, will be oddly balanced in my selection of passages by something which purports to express hatred: the ‘shrink[ing]’ lover of Donne’s ‘The Apparition’ (see below). Here, Stand-fast’s memory of Christ’s constancy through pain and insult underlies the final presentation of his own bodily response, an empowerment felt outwardly as restraint (‘held’) and inwardly as heroic resolution (‘strengthened’). Love is authenticated through the ultimate achievement of a self fully capable of loving, and enduring. Whether Bunyan had absorbed his rhetorical skills through the preaching he had listened to and the devotional books he had read, or consciously cultivated them, his persuasive voice is informed by the structural principles and functions of rhetoric as understood successively by Aristotle and Cicero. In the passage we are considering, this voice is engaged in the logical activity of comparison, in the contemplation of mental images which both generate emotion in the speaker and convey it to the listener or reader, and in the projection of a particularly firm stance (signalled by the speaker’s name, which itself reflects the famous passage from Ephesians, 6.11–17). As we have seen, the enargeia of the passage, its use of sensory imagery to rouse emotion, is very complex.


Before we leave it, I want to give a partial demonstration of how the dynamism or energeia of Sentence Perspective helps to enforce its emotive impact, confining myself to the first quoted paragraph. Here the second ‘problematic’ sentence already addressed, with its paratactic structure, explains its simple first clause with a second – far longer (and clumsier?): ‘my foot is fixed upon that upon which the feet of the priests that bare the Ark of the Covenant stood while Israel went over this Jordan’. The dynamism here is in Firbasian terms quite peculiar: much emphasis is thrown on the settings, spatial and temporal. The main clause, and two subordinate clauses, are all on the Appearance/Existence scale; only the inset relative clause linking the ‘priests’ as Quality Bearers to the Ark as Specified burden is on the Quality Scale. The comprehension (and the rhythm) of the clause requires that emphasis be thrown on the pronoun ‘that’, as a setting for the phenomena, both of Stand-fast’s ‘fixed … foot’, and (through the relative pronoun ‘which’) ‘the feet of the priests’. The dynamism then rises again through the context-dependence of ‘upon which’ to the earlier phenomenon of firm standing, that of the priests. ‘Stood’ here, as the Ap/Ex verb, carries more dynamism than ‘feet’, and is linked rhythmically and emphatically to ‘the Ark of the Covenant’ preceding it and the temporal setting (Israel’s crossing) which follows it – the movement enabled by its stillness. But the pronoun, ‘that’, as the obvious though unidentified source of emotional reassurance, points deictically into the intellectual and spiritual space of the Bible and its interpretation, and within that to Joshua 4:9 (AV): ‘And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood: and they are there to this day’. Amongst the responses anticipated by Bunyan might be a general sense that scripture is being quoted (signalled by the sudden syntactic complication), a prompt recognition of the direct quotation with its inset relative clauses, and a profounder, warmer response to some specific understanding of the spiritual sense linking Joshua to Jesus and the twelve stones to the foundations of faith. Bunyan wants empathy and admiration to be tinged for some readers with fear: do I have what it takes to feel like this on my deathbed? He plays on a predictable variation within the RPER. The culture-specific emotion of this sentence accordingly yields to a far less specific one in the following, with its expression of the inevitable fear of death and dying. A subject, ‘The waters’ (context-independent though related semantically to ‘This river’) is linked to two balanced subject complements, with their adverbial modifiers: ‘to the palate bitter and to the stomach cold’. As ‘figures


of words’ these constitute isocolon (that is, two phrases, balanced syntactically and rhythmically). Where FSP is concerned, they appear to embody both a ‘Quality Scale’ and an ‘Existential Scale’. The latter shows the fullest co-ordination between increasing communicative dynamism and actual word-order. From the subject, at first expressed as a very generalised phenomenon (‘waters’, which though contextindependent, is linked semantically to ‘this river’), we are led through the verb of state (‘are’), and the adverbial settings (‘to the palate … to the stomach’), to a full realisation of the subject as a phenomenon, in its modifiers ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’. As registered by ‘palate’ and ‘stomach’, this achieves the vivid reality of enargeia as the fearful, irresistible chill spreads down the main tract of the body. These symbols of present experience are counterbalanced by the ‘thoughts’ evoked and shared in the next clause, where warmth at the very centre of being outweighs all invasive pressures on the hollow places, from mouth to abdomen, as the bitterness and coldness of death extinguish the pleasure and energy of physical life. We are reminded of the emotional – and moral – senses of ‘having no stomach’ for something. Turning to the ‘Quality Scale’, we again find the dynamism increasing markedly – though in a manner less directly related to word order. The Scale rises from the Quality bearer (‘the waters’), through the Verb of quality (‘are’), which with its double predication (the figure of words, prozeugma) sets up the two sensory Specifications ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’. In the word order, these follow the two linked Further specifications ‘to the palate’ and ‘to the stomach’. The two scales play off our emotional and logical perceptions against each other, locating sensation both to set up a logical contrast, and to focus our empathic emotion and our own fear of death. But, subsequently, these perceptions converge in the inverse word-order of the following clause, where the further specification ‘at my heart’, coming last and completing the pattern of contrast, unifies doctrinal teaching with moving admonition – at the same time, delighting readers with the rock-like spiritual heroism of Stand-fast (and it may be significant – in the context of Calvinist belief such as Bunyan’s – that the cleansing Grace symbolised in Isaiah 6:6 by ‘a coal’ touching the lips has now passed inward to the heart, as the Word of God, warming and reassuring the reader as it warms and steadies the hero). As a whole, the passage seems to transcend the Puritan ethos while perfectly expressing it. There is a full reflection of Calvinist belief in the absolute dependence of humanity on divine grace, with its concomitant sense of weakness in humanity – especially in the body. But on


the other hand, Mr. Stand-fast is a figure of massive dignity and heroic energy. 4.1.2

Playing the scale

In this phase I intend to move very succinctly through the extremes, from divine love to erotic hated, with minimum quotation and contextualisation, starting with an emotion which, while it may undoubtedly be felt, is hard to conceive fully (or to explain), from any perspective religious or secular. The hatred of God is rarer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at least, as expressed in the surviving writing) than in later centuries, with the further qualification that in more modern times this emotion is more likely to be directed towards other people’s ideas of God (as it often has been since 11 September 2001) than towards any apprehended reality. In contrast, Milton’s Satan always knows that God exists; but only once in Paradise Lost does he admit that God is God, and not merely a cosmic power enabled to impose on his equals through the accident of superior strength. But even when, in Book IV.32–104, he acknowledges God’s goodness, he can neither name him directly (41) – he could, after all, barely name the ‘sun’, which he ‘hates’ (37) – nor profit by his attributes. The beauty of Creation briefly re-inculcates, or teaches God’s goodness but it cannot move or sway Satan’s stubborn will (moreover, Milton’s own idea of God’s justice forestalls the possibility of mercy – see PL III.129–32). It helps here to recollect that this soliloquy was originally begun as part of a tragedy, Adam Unparadised.4 Though this would have been a closet drama, it is still instructive to imagine an actor giving full emotional weight to the following (48–53): Yet all his good proved ill in me, And wrought but malice; lifted up so high I ’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude So burdensome still paying, still to owe … ‘Endless gratitude’ might be expressed, as Satan relives his dawning ‘malice’ against God, as a mingled expression of agony, outrage and boredom, all adding up to hatred – about to be intensified through another irretrievable act of will with the appalling ‘Evil be thou my good’ (110). If God cannot be annihilated, that by which he is


recognised can be endlessly denied. I will leave this example with a question: does this show hatred to be a defective form of love? See 54–7: it seems that Satan had a theoretical grasp of the reciprocity of love but (never, or no longer) ‘understood’ it as something emotionally and experientially given. Political passion: turning to the extremes of political passion, love for a monarch might be typified by Spenser’s various tributes to Elizabeth, as in the lyricism of the Aprill Eclogue (just as the reciprocal love of monarch for people is represented in Elizabeth’s own speeches – the Tilbury address of 1588 with its masterly use of the laser, and her ‘golden speech’ to Parliament near the end of her reign);5 while Lucy Hutchinson’s comprehensive picture of James I (Memoirs, pp. 64–5) as a mean-spirited oppressor of truth and justice who would not ‘assert his resentment like a prince’ but debased language and logic by demonising the Puritans, expresses contempt, if not hatred. Hutchinson drives home the detraction inflicted on any person who for any honest motive, secular or religious (and there were many such motives), opposed the King. Every such action like a divine rebuke elicits the same comment from the King, as though the words of Melanchthon’s preacher (see p. 64, above) found no faith in James’s heart to illuminate them, but ‘hammered’ instead on his dull and bullying obduracy. Antistrophe echoes the King’s knee-jerk response to every remonstrant in turn: ‘he was a puritan’. Similarly, the younger Mortimer’s portrayal of Gaveston in Marlowe’s Edward II reflects a personal loathing, extended to the King and his conduct. The degree to which such feeling reflects the actual power-relationship between the monarch and other constituents of the political order, or disguises it through distortion and repression, should also be considered. Do these extremes indicate that, in this sphere of relations, negative feeling is more directly and accurately reflective than positive feeling? Even a hint here, however narrowly based, might be useful to us in other contexts in which political feeling is involved. At a time of temporary truce between the nobles, the king, and his favourite, and in response to Mortimer Senior’s plea that ‘The mightiest kings have had their minions’ (I.iv.391),6 Mortimer Junior explains his hatred of this one: He weares a lord’s revenewe on his back, And Midas like he jets it in the court, With base outlandish cullions at his heeles, Whose proud fantastick liveries make such show,


As if that Proteus god of shapes appearde. I have not seen a dapper jack so briske, He weares a short Italian hooded cloake, Larded with pearle, and in his tuskan cap A jewell of more value then the crowne. Edward II, I.iv.407–15 He goes on to express his rage at being spied on ‘From out a window’ by ‘the king and he’, and laughed at (ibid., 416–18). Indignation at the waste of resources; resentment of the low-born foreign followers who obtrude on the court, bringing Gaveston’s (and the King’s) private fantasies into public; aristocratic disdain; and homophobic nausea, all combine here. The physical and symbolic space7 round the seat of power, which the peers consider theirs by right of birth, is being denied them. Wealth no longer affirms conventional order and rank, but negates it. The social scene and scripts mediating the hierarchical exercise of power by the King and his magnates have been replaced by a personal love scene and script; and Mortimer Junior expresses his resultant sense of exclusion by invoking the commonplaces of political responsibility and financial prudence, and implying how the King transgresses them. This is at once logical and compulsively emotional. The fashionable ‘cloak / Larded with pearl’, like a side of beef prepared for roasting, brings the passage to the peak of revulsion and shock, with a retching lurch of the stomach – the choriambic rhythm created by the reversed initial stress almost compelling a sympathetic response. Hatred’s wish that its object should perish is implied here: not just that the favourite should do so, but the whole perversion of early modern political order which he symbolises – including the incorrigible King. The political grounds of this hatred are very clear (though homophobia is also evident despite Mortimer Junior’s disclaimer at I.iv.402). Love of children (and hatred): the briefest reminders might be enough here. Ben Jonson’s twelve-line epigram ‘On my first son’8 is so precise in its conscious, anguished communication of all the strands of relationship: the father’s wish to live through the child thwarted, and (as he perceives it) punished; the struggle to accept death on behalf of the seven-year-old who has ‘so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage’; the tender and humbled description of the boy as ‘Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’; and the last line shrinking back from the joy of life, put this picture of paternal love into a very broad frame of other relationships. When he writes of ‘pay(ing)’ the child back to God ‘on the just day’, bitterly replacing the language which belonged to the


personal plan of his life, and to its projected enjoyment goal, with the social and instrumental language of finance, there is a strong ironic hint of resentment in that direction, if not of hatred. Indeed, the power of the poem is in the constant shifting of its bias between the pathos of clinging to the child, and the kind involved in letting go. Perhaps the child as a ‘piece of poetry’ (since a poem’s power to live is only apparent once it is out of the poet’s hands) reconciles the two. Where hatred is concerned, we need only consider the maddened Lear’s slippage half in and half out of what has become his role theme of injured father – from reflection on his daughters’ cruelty, to a hallucinatory vision of ‘simpering’ court ladies transformed to ‘centaurs’ (King Lear, Folio Text IV.v.105–24). The instinctive satisfaction goals of animals efface the human life theme, and consequent preservation goal, of ‘mincing’ sexual ‘virtue’, poised as that is between heaven and hell, the snow peak (the face seemingly relocated between the legs) and the volcano. ‘Burning, scalding, stench, consumption’ seem to be invading his senses; but perhaps they are more bearable than what was concealed by Goneril’s and Regan’s flattering outward conformity with his demands, when he had power – their frozen egoism. Here, certainly, with the loss of a stable ethos for the child-parent relationship, and with nothing to regulate its attendant pathos, we are in the world of ‘raw emotions’ of which Jardine writes (pp. 106–10, above). But this is to discount the possibility that there are restorative forces in the play, working intelligently through pathos and restoring love, even if powerless to avert the ultimate tragedy. Erotic emotion: to represent the ultimate erotic expression of love, take the image of Scudamour and Amoret’s embrace from the ending of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book III as originally published in 1590 and subsequently cancelled, comparing the lovers to a ‘faire Hermaphrodite’ (stanza 45).9 Here we see complete and pure mutual desire, purged of the male triumphalism and cruelty that has been so powerfully figured in the House and Masque of Busyrane (Cantos xi–xii). The pathos communicated by this image reaches the reader through its immediate observer, Britomart, and who now adds a component to the emotive image held up to the reader. Sympathy with her conflict of feeling counteracts any vicarious thrill, on the reader’s part, at the lovers’ ecstasy. Though she does not speak, her role in Levinson’s terms (see p. 2, above) is reduced from ghostor of the script which brought the lovers together, to bystander. As such, she is excluded further by her own unfulfilled longing for Artegall, but simultaneously included by her empathy with all other virtuous lovers, especially these – seeing


them ‘as growne together quite’ and ‘half-enuying their blesse’ (stanza 46, 5–6). Thus, erotic love – already balanced against what had so pitilessly negated it in the earlier scene – now forms part of a larger chord of positive feeling. Erotic desire is established as one mode of expression for a love which endures longer and reaches further. 3.4.3

Donne’s ‘The Apparition’: an extremity of hate?

In contrast, to exemplify hatred as expressed through eroticism (robbing it of generosity and joy, and reducing it at the conscious level to an obsessive awareness of bodily appetites and revulsions), I take Donne’s ‘The Apparition’:10 When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead, And that thou think’st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see; Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call’st for more, And in false sleep will from thee shrink, And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie A verier ghost than I; What I will say, I will not tell thee now, Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent, Than by my threatenings rest still innocent. Here we have a likely instance of those Inner and Outer relationships referred to in the Introduction. Studies such as Arthur Marotti’s11 George Parfitt’s (1989)12 have suggested the intensity and particularity of John Donne’s sense of audience, and its expression through the medium of manuscript poetry. Circulated amongst the members of a small group, initially at the Inns of Court, poems such as ‘The Apparition’ and ‘The Flea’ were not meant for women to read, though they depended on the sense of a woman being addressed within the Inner relationship, constituted by a dramatically-presented speaker and listener. Even amongst an exclusively male readership, habituated to poems about the seduction of citizens’ wives and daughters, this poem


seems to reflect an RPER. Donne pushes so far with the jealousy, mortification, malice and lubricity of his persona, that he seems to be teasing the reader: should he carry on sharing the speaker’s perspective as his guide to the three characters and the situation depicted, or yield to feelings of scorn and revulsion again him? The liveliness of dissent amongst its male readers would be a main index of the poem’s success (though whatever he thought of the vengeful bedside phantom, the reader would probably go on enjoying the comic-grotesque picture of an even baser lover, mercilessly exposed alongside his tormented mistress). In cognitive terms this is a very familiar scene: physically, personally and socially, in which the reader will know precisely what the deictic ‘more’ of l9 refers to, in its sneeringly emphatic position; and in this instance especially schema theory will yield interesting insights. The ‘bed’ and the secluded space enclosing it are a setting for sexual activity, though its other associations – night, sleep and bedside tapers – link it back to the nocturnal terrors and reassurances of childhood. Both before and after the ghost’s intervention, a variety of discrepant personal goals are being pursued there, their full range being detectable only by the poem’s reader. As imagined by Donne’s embittered speaker, the satisfaction goal of sexual release is pursued by both partners (so compulsively on the woman’s part as to breed misunderstanding in the ‘tired’ man); the enjoyment and achievement goals of bedding the woman and boasting about it are in this milieu attributable to the man, in furtherance of his role theme as a fashionable rake and rival of the speaker; the woman is faced with the crisis goal of protection against the ghost; and the ghost’s enjoyment goal is revenge. The scripts as recognised by the reader make it possible to pursue several separate strands of response simultaneously, including a compulsive physical sympathy both for the ‘shrinking’ lover (perhaps echoing the reader’s own fears of sexual inadequacy and of his partners’ needs), and for the ‘feigned vestal’ in her chilly sweat – this, despite the ongoing malice and contempt. But the acute identification with the woman (imagining how the apparition will terrify and humiliate her, how the threat of total darkness will amplify her terror, and how her skin will prickle, suggests a repressed erotic love under the hatred, a continuing physical affinity to that body which he wishes to mortify in the same degree to which it has mortified him. ‘Poor aspen wretch’ hides the empathy which enables pity, under its reductive contempt. This ongoing contradiction makes sense of the apparent absurdity of dying for the love of somebody for whom, allegedly, his ‘love is spent’; but the speaker still uses his malign sympathy with her to express, as conveyed through the


two short lines (9 and 13), two peaks of gratified vengefulness – though the first, more sexual, has a hint of loathing not present in the second. The final lines with their emphatic triplet of rhymes are a puzzle. If the ghost really wishes the ‘vestal’ to ‘repent’, however ‘painfully’, it cannot be as purely malicious as it claims, though wishing complete erotic humiliation on the woman who humiliated it in life. Again, is the wish to share humiliation a form of love? And perhaps, projecting himself into the ‘ghost’, the vengeful lover suspects that her terror would move him to words of comfort, which spoken then, might leave her more ‘innocent’ than she is now, because less of a hypocrite? Recalling the Silenus, the extremities of love and hate seem in this instance to be constantly discovering themselves inside each other.

4.2

Passionate to a purpose

This section will demonstrate how a range of emotions can be used in any given instance, for the furtherance of a single purpose – sometimes combining violent extremes in a single text. Three examples will be used, mindful of the average modem reader’s unfamiliarity with the frames of reference evident in the first two – and with some aspects of the vehement feminism expressed in the third. Where Latimer and Sidney are concerned, the disparity between the two parties to persuasion is in each case extreme, and inverted from one passage to the next – from the prophetic voice of reformed Christianity, speaking with the authority of God to the recalcitrant sinner, to the subject daring his sovereign’s wrath and placing himself at her mercy. In the third extract the alleged superiority of male reason over female passion is subverted. Where should modem readers place themselves in relation to such texts – as empathic addressees, as overhearers, as dispassionate cultural analysts? 4.2.1

Bishop Hugh Latimer, sermon ‘of the plough’

This places us in 1548, five years before Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat, at the very beginning of the state-supported programme of religious reform presided over by Thomas Cranmer, which saw the transition from Mass to Holy Communion, and which lasted as long as Edward VI lived. Here, extreme emotions – anger and shame – are pitted against each other for a very immediate pastoral purpose: Now what shall we say of these rich citizens of London? What shall I say of them? Shall I call them proud men of London, malicious


men of London, merciless men of London? No, no, I may not say so; they will be offended with me then. Yet must I speak. For is there not reigning in London as much pride, as much covetousness, as much cruelty, as much oppression, and as much superstition, as was in Nebo? Yes, I think, and much more too. Therefore I say, repent, O London; repent, repent. Thou hearest thy faults told thee, amend them, amend them. I think, if Nebo had had the preaching that thou hast, they would have converted. And, you rulers and officers, be wise and circumspect, look to your charge, and see you do your duties; and rather be glad to amend your ill living than to be angry when you are warned or told of your fault. What ado was there made in London at a certain man, because he said, (and indeed at that time on a just cause,) ‘Burgesses!’ quoth he, ‘nay, Butterflies.’ Lord, what ado there was for that word! And yet would God they were no worse than butterflies! Butterflies do but their nature: the butterfly is not covetous, is not greedy of other men’s goods; is not full of envy and hatred, is not malicious, is not cruel, is not merciless. The butterfly glorieth not in her own deeds, nor preferreth the traditions of men before God’s word; it committeth not idolatry, nor worshippeth false gods. But London cannot abide to be rebuked; such is the nature of man, If they be pricked, they will kick; if they be rubbed on the gall, they will wince; but yet they will not amend their faults, they will not be ill spoken of. But how shall I speak well of them? If you could be content to receive and follow the word of God, and favour good preachers, if you could bear to be told of your faults, if you could amend when you hear of them, if you would he glad to reform that is amiss; if I might see any such inclination in you, that you would leave to be merciless, and begin to be charitable, I would then hope well of you, I would then speak well of you. But London was never so ill as it is now. (The Sermons (ed. A. Pollard), pp. 36–7)13 Latimer seems repeatedly to goad the Londoners within his congregation into rage, anticipating it and making those listeners share his conclusion that they must inevitably be angered, by pretending to draw back (‘no I may not say so, they will be offended with me’), and by the distancing device of referring to them in the third person. This, of course, applies the exclusion model. He is plainly speaking to a mixed audience, including clergy, who have come under the lash immediately before the passage quoted (pp. 35–6), and he has already warned them that they must ‘not … be offended without cause’ (p. 33). He


knows the ‘rich citizens’ will be more angered for being shamed in public, in their own city, and, accordingly, pretends not to have said the words he has said with powerful isocolon and antistrophe (‘proud men of London, malicious men of London …’). This of course is a blatant use of praeteritio (or occultatio in Lanham’s preferred term). ‘Offended’ suggests that they will become too angry to attend; but it in fact just gives them time to realise that they are indeed angry, before Latimer’s laser reflects the image of their anger back at them to enrage them more – before breaking down their rage with a stronger sense of shame (much deeper than the shame of being publicly attacked). This shame also touches their pride as citizens of a free city under their own government, where the King ‘reigns’ less prominently; instead, their besetting vices ‘reign’ there, enslaving them and damaging others. Latimer builds the shame progressively, with the prophetic instant repetition (epizeuxis) of ‘repent, O London; repent, repent’, and ‘amend them, amend them’, the apostrophe addressed to London’s civic rulers and officers, again confronting their anger, and the climactic ‘Burgesses! Nay, Butterflies’ comparison, renewing old anger at an intolerable instance of contempt. This is used to drive the listeners into shame – and not just the citizens amongst them. Reason, working through the model or topic of contraries (or, more precisely, contradictories), gives a touch of objective coolness and prompts the congregation to draw its own conclusions. Undoing a metaphor – instead of making one – stresses not the unity, but the temporary alienation of persuader and persuadee. By listing all the benighted goals pursued by fallen wills, in distinction from merely animal drives, Latimer presses anger to the point where his own unrelenting severity can batter through it and its ‘kick[ing]’, ‘winc[ing]’ animal expression, into shame. Here is a cap which while less plausibly insulting, actually fits the ‘burgesses’ better. The butterfly’s showiness – ‘but its nature’ – is a vice when incident to men, but less severe than the others which Latimer piles up (synathroesmus) through his repeated commas or short clauses (‘is not … , is not …’). Confronted with these vices, and realising that they include those of the conservative clergy (which like them ‘preferreth the traditions of men before God’s word’), the citizens will gradually realise that they have graver matters to attend to than wounded pride, in common with everybody else present. But Latimer does not yet relent in his particular attack on London, graphically depicting the signs of repentance which he does not yet see. Before Hyperius enumerated the five basic sermon-types (see Jameela Lares as cited in Chapter 1, pp. 71–3, above), here is Latimer already


applying correctio, rebuking vice. This corresponds to the key text, 2 Timothy 3.16–17, but in accordance with that text Latimer exercises other functions, including the reproof (elenchos) of false doctrine. He works gradually on his hearers’ repressed sense of their own wrongdoing, aiming to switch pathos from one extreme to the other, as bias is reversed and shame brought to the surface. 4.2.2

Advice to a Prince: Sidney’s letter to Elizabeth

In the ‘argument’ prefixed to this letter (Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 44–5)14 Katherine Duncan-Jones identifies the following passage as the second section of Sidney’s ‘Reasons against the marriage’ projected between Queen Elizabeth and Monsieur (that is, Alençon, the French King’s brother). This section presents ‘dangers to the Queen’s person’. Accordingly, the argumentation is tightly packed; but the letter has to continue managing the difficult and dangerous ethos factor, the stance of a subject offering unsolicited advice to his Queen on a highly sensitive subject; and it will be interesting to see how pathos, here, subserves the other two Aristotelean ‘proofs’: And as to your person, indeed seal of our happiness, what good there may come by it to balance with the loss of so honourable a constancy, truly yet I perceive not. I will not show so much malice as to object the universal doubt of all that race’s unhealthfulness; neither will I lay to his charge his ague-like manner of proceeding, sometimes hot and sometimes cold in the time of pursuit, which always likely is most fervent; and I will temper my speeches from any other unreverent disgracings of him in particular, though they might be never so true. This only will I say: if he do come hither, he must live here in far meaner reputation than his mind will well brook, having no other royalty to countenance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your kingdom, and live at his discretion; or, lastly, he must separate himself, with more dishonour and further discontentment of heart than ever before. Often have I heard you with protestation say, ‘No private pleasure nor self affection could lead you unto it’. But if it be both unprofitable for your kingdom and unpleasant to you, certainly it were a dear purchase of repentance. Nothing can it add unto you, but only the bliss of children: which, I confess, were a most unspeakable comfort, but yet no more appertaining to him, than to any other to whom the height of all good haps were allotted, to be


your husband. And therefore I may assuredly affirm that what good soever can follow marriage is no more his, than anybody’s; but the evils and dangers are particularly annexed to his person and condition. For as for the enriching of your country with treasure, which either he hath not, or hath otherwise to bestow it; or the staying of your servants’ minds with new expectations and liberalities (which is more dangerous than fruitful); or the easing your Majesty of your cares (which is as much to say, as the easing you of being a queen and sovereign); I think everybody perceives this way to be either full of hurt, or void of help. (Miscellaneous Prose (1973), pp. 50–1) In the tradition of that distinction between ‘The King’s Two bodies’15 through which monarchy was conceptualised, Sidney turns to the personal honour, happiness and safety of the Queen, with an appeal to the reputation she has already established as a steadfast unmarried monarch. The first two lines quoted are in effect the proposition for this section of the argument, and they reinforce the pathos of an appeal to the Queen to preserve her subjects’ ‘happiness’, with an implied plea to preserve her own as a monarch universally honoured. In the following paragraph Sidney presents arguments of lesser importance which will nonetheless be marked by the Queen, because they impinge closely, physically (even sexually) and emotionally, presenting a sickly, unclean and lukewarm lover – before ostensibly withdrawing them under the cover of occultatio/ praeteritio and showing why: the indecorous, ‘unreverent’ denigration, even of a foreign royalty, threatens the proper distance between subjects and monarchs which must be preserved (even while writing a letter which transgresses it!). Sidney then presents a powerful dilemma turning on what is of paramount importance to the Queen from all three perspectives (honour, pleasure, safety): her sovereignty. The first ‘horn’ of the dilemma is split around the second. Alençon must either defer to the Queen’s supremacy, but become discontented and depart, to her great humiliation; or he must be gratified with the title of King, but deprive her of power. Both ‘horns’ carry their particular pathos – felt more distinctly where the first is concerned because its first division images a restless and wearing companion, and its second a standing mark of failure, following the Queen’s anticipated desertion. The next paragraph links the most bold emotive appeal – an empathetic approach, by a man and a subject, to a woman’s (and a queen’s) wish for children. ‘Unspeakable’ represents both the intensity of that gratification and Sidney’s necessary inability to imagine it, as a


man. He then proceeds to unmask the per accidens16 fallacy in the argument that she should marry Alençon in order to have children; any more suitable husband could do that for her. Having dismissed the invalid positive argument, Sidney concludes this section with all the negative ones ‘particularly annexed to his (Alençon’s) person and condition’. This series of adjuncts, all in the form of participial transitive verbs (‘enriching … staying … easing’) ends by effacing the pathos of royal stress and fatigue with an ironia that rouses the stronger pathos of indignation, showing the exclusion concealed under the inclusion model, ‘the mutual society, help, and comfort’ of marriage: in effect ‘easing you of being a queen and sovereign’. Sidney expresses his love (and his political concern) by figuring, not hatred for the Queen on Alençon’s part, but his hatred of her sovereignty and effective willingness to annihilate that. Amongst the ‘extremes’ studied in this chapter, this one represents the ultimate extremity of distance across which, in one particular set of historical conditions, persuasion could be attempted. Sidney is helped by his familiarity with the Queen as a courtier, his memory of her own words, and the moral, political and religious assumptions which he shares with her. But an impression of the political interests behind Sidney, whose language-choices he must inevitably share (as in ‘the keys of your kingdom’), makes it clear that he is pushing his luck. The social scene of reasoned argument between intelligent, well-acquainted and well-informed parties, is countered by the very different goals and life-themes of monarch and subject. 4.2.3

Feminist pathos: Jane Anger

In his collection of pamphlets, The Women’s Sharp Revenge, Simon Shepherd claims good grounds for believing that Jane Anger her Protection for Women (1589) was indeed written by a woman. Since ‘Anger’ was an authentic contemporary surname,17 it should not be concluded that this is a pseudonym conveniently chosen by a male writer. The Protection replies to a pamphlet now lost, or never printed (Shepherd, p. 30), Book: his Surfeit in Love, which may have been partly plagiarised from John Lyly’s Euphues his Censure to Philautus. But for our purposes the first priority is to confirm a distinctive female ethos, pathos and (possibly) logos in the writing. Consider the following passage: The creation of man and woman at the first (he being formed in principio of dross and filthy clay) did so remain until God saw that in


him his workmanship was good, and therefore, by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purified. Then, lacking a help for him, God making woman of man’s flesh – that she might be purer than he – doth evidently show how far we women are more excellent than men. Our bodies are fruitful, whereby the world increaseth, and our care wonderful, by which man is preserved. From woman sprang man’s salvation. A woman was the first that believed, and a woman likewise the first that repented of sin. In women is only true fidelity: except in her, there be [no] constancy, and without her no huswifery. In the time of their sickness we cannot be wanted, and when they are in health we for them are most necessary. They are comforted by our means; they are nourished by the meats we dress; their bodies freed from diseases by our cleanliness, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably through their own noisomeness. Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer. They love to go handsomely in their apparel and rejoice in the pride thereof, yet who is the cause of it, but our carefulness to see that everything about them be curious? Our virginity makes us virtuous, our conditions courteous and our chastity maketh our trueness of love manifest. They confess we are necessary, but they would have us likewise evil. That they cannot want us I grant, yet evil I deny (except only in the respect of man who, hating all good things, is only desirous of that which is ill – through whose desire, in estimation of conceit, we are made ill). But lest some should snarl on me, barking out this reason, that ‘none is good but God, and therefore women are ill’, I must yield that in that respect we are ill – and affirm that men are no better, seeing we are so necessary unto them. (The Women’s Sharp Revenge, p. 39) Whether or not there is anger here, there is certainly contempt – increased in the central section of the passage by the repeated deictic use of ‘their’ and ‘them’, implying disdainful distance. The initial argument from material cause, contrasting the ‘dross and filthy clay’ of the earth, as purified into man, with the greater necessary purity of woman as proportionally purified from ‘man’s flesh’ seems indeed to be distinctively feminine. It is closely paralleled in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, I.9.2,18 a text written nearly two hundred years earlier. The combination of reasoning with biblical citation, meeting male arrogance head on, parallels what God did with ‘man’s flesh’. Like the rib, male argument is transformed. The demonstration


of men’s dependence on women, for all the outward ‘adjuncts’ of their masculinity, their public and domestic comfort and prestige, generates the pamphlet’s most memorable expression, most vivid enargeia and sharpest pathos: ‘Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer’. Men’s stance of superiority, the cleanliness and finery that gives them confidence to maintain it, depends on women’s willingness, work, and indulgence – they are, unwittingly, the creatures of the women they despise. Men do not recognise where they are standing (unless that awareness is disguised under their will to ‘have us evil’), while women’s position is defined by their sense of ingratitude and their contempt of men’s irrational inability to recognise their dependence. Of course the stance rules out acknowledgement of what men, at that period, did for women – but that is dictated by the specific script of this kind of controversial writing within the larger social scene of argument. The reader expects all the argument to be categorical and extreme, and wants it that way. Despite this, one thing denied by the writer may be apparent to the reader. Men are accused of being willing to see nothing but evil in women, whereas the whole passage has maintained the same extreme stance towards them. And as that is overlooked, so are the women’s reasons for continuing to care for men. Unlike hate, anger implies the possibility of a restored, or rectified relationship. 4.2.4

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to the broaden the reader’s horizons with regard to pathos, as brought to bear within very diverse relationships, from the extremes of unmixed feeling (or the nearest we can get to them) to the interlocking of contrary passions, and through a wide variation in the relative statuses of persuader and persuadee. I hope that one result will be a heightened sense of the specific character of each example of pathos to be looked at in the next chapter. This should help us in reappraising the critical comment on those texts which display it, whose own emotional interaction with it has already been studied, leaving quite a few questions open. Other points should also have emerged, some in relation to the material and some to the method of analysis. In its primary preoccupation with love and hate, the material has incidentally confirmed the relation of pathos to will (as affirmed by Augustine): primarily the will to affirm, or deny, others – as threatening to the self, or as means to its enlargement and transformation. Such affirmation and denial operates at many levels. Besides demonstrating a


wider application of ‘new’ rhetorical techniques, and representing the larger framework within which early modern persuasion took place, these readings should help us in assessing the motivation, and the direction, of those texts we are about to revisit.

5 Adjusting the Mirrors

5.1

The emotional laser

In the two preceding chapters, we have sampled the persuasiveness of modern criticism in its learning, its intuitiveness, its theoretical agendas and its pathos, and we have also looked at the extremes of feeling in some early modern texts without reference to any critical comment. In Chapter 3 we considered Greenblatt’s persuasive presentation of Tamburlaine as a killing machine, and Lisa Jardine’s emotive account of ‘raw emotions’ as unleashed in Lear. We saw pathos being aroused to challenge conservative readings of Shakespeare, and to bring home the oddity of Margaret Cavendish – and, by contrast, we saw it being evoked in more muted but subtly engaging ways by Ringler and Flachmann, Baldwin’s editors, and by David Norbrook in his appraisal of Lucy Hutchinson. We looked, too, at Milton’s creativity in Paradise Lost as expounded by Harold Bloom; and at God’s shortcomings as Creator, viewed from Catherine Belsey’s feminist perspective. In the last chapter, I explored the ‘extremes’ of early modern pathos and suggested that it works distinctively in the verbal expression of every specific form of relationship – as in pulpit oratory or epistolary rhetoric – or in literary or dramatic texts. In addition I continued to demonstrate the specific value of my kind of rhetorical ‘double analysis’ as a way of revealing new things about texts, including some more or less familiar ones like ‘The Apparition’ and The Pilgrim’s Progress. As I have already indicated, this chapter will seek to get as close as possible to an unattainable goal – unattainable because we cannot fully reconstruct the physical, psychological and social circumstances in which the pathos once stirred by our texts, in reading or performance, 140

Adjusting the Mirrors 141

was experienced. Nevertheless, in some cases we might be able, with the aid of the texts themselves, to reconstruct some of the mental schemata presupposed (with all their emotional connotations) in the minds of a reader, or of listeners to a book or poem being read aloud, or a theatre audience. We might as a consequence detect some approximation – some shades of feeling new to us, and distinct from those presupposed in the critical extracts looked at in Chapter 3. In other cases I will try to locate the co-ordinates in a text, and in its putative audience of an emotion that most readers today could not (or would not wish to) feel. The chapter title expresses the relationship between the purposive stirring up of pathos, and the range of response which it anticipates. That mutual reflection and intensification of feeling between speaker and audience which was described, some years ago, as an ‘emotional laser’ and which I explained and exemplified in Chapter 1, may work in sharply contrasted ways – to be demonstrated towards the end of this chapter with reference to two passages from Paradise Lost. The ‘laser’ in this context is really a shorthand symbol or mnemonic for the dynamism of pathos, comprising three sequential factors: orientation → reflection → intensification. There can be no reflection without orientation: without adjustment or perhaps in some cases accidental alignment of the laser mirrors, so that the persuader’s feelings reflects the susceptibilities of the audience positively or negatively, as an image of what they love or what they hate. If, at one extreme, we try to accommodate the laser analogy to Harold Bloom’s account of the ‘anxiety of influence’, the idea of inter-reflecting mirrors must be very guardedly developed: the interplay will not be between simple emotive images, but between the creative process of one mind (its thinking, feeling, ‘conceiving’, ‘subduing’ and shaping) as apprehended perceptually and emotionally in another. On this reading of the analogy, there is no single persuader, moved, progressively more and more, by the reflection of his or her emotion in the minds of an audience – but a sequence of reflections between creative minds (which might where Milton is concerned include the mind of Satan reacting and rebelling against God, against which rebellion Milton himself reacts – after which the mind of Harold Bloom responds antithetically to Milton). In more usual rhetorical contexts, this mutual reflection is intuitively grasped by the persuader, sensing sympathy in one part of an audience, and antipathy in the other. Think of the rhetoric of political assemblies where speakers seek simultaneously to hearten their own party and goad their opponents. But persuaders are moved as much by


their conception of what an audience might feel, and might become, as they are by its present state of feeling, and the qualities or capacities it already possesses. Marlowe provides an example here. What we know of him suggests that, in all probability, he expected one part of his audience to be drawn to Tamburlaine and Faustus – either because they would be consciously receptive to the subversive implications of those two characters, or despite themselves. He would expect another section to be steady in their detestation of ambition, folly, and perversity personified, as it would seem to them. This varying reaction seems to be envisaged in the Prologue to I Tamburlaine, with its invitation to ‘applaud’ the hero’s ‘fortunes if you please’ (italics as in text). Like modern playwrights, he probably wanted to attract audiences this way, the stimulus of debate being (as we were reminded) one of the properties inherited by early modern texts from their medieval precursors. Persuaders will not, then, always assume homogeneity in the audience addressed. This will require a further variant of our orientation → reflection → intensification analogy, to work alongside the others. Once we posit an RPER, we will have to model a more complex range of laser-like interchanges. If it is possible for a persuader to mirror and intensify all the conflicting emotions of a divided audience – or all the exploitable ones – a further elaboration of the laser analogy might indicate how. It can provide us with at least two hypothetical accounts, to be applied in our study of the more complex forms of literary and dramatic pathos. We might call these the oscillation model and the prismatic model. In the first, the stance and personality projected, logically and emotionally, by the persuader, alternately reflect different sections of the audience, or different impulses within it, as though tilting the ‘mirror’ in two or more directions through a recurrent cycle or oscillation. In the second, it is as if some form of prismatic reflector transmits and receives the emotive energy through several facets simultaneously. Applying these analogies to the actual practice of pathos across the range of response, we might – if our model works – find some passages mainly of the first kind (as when, in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, IV.i. 48–113,1 Barabas plays alternately on the greed and the religious emulation of two friars he is setting out to dupe and destroy), and some of the second kind, as when a single complex or ambivalent image is arrestingly deployed – see Barabas’s succinct but memorable assertion, or admission, at that he loves his daughter Abigail ‘As Agamemnon did his Iphigen’ (I.i.138). The simile simultaneously transmits love, its limits and a cynical challenge to the audience: ‘If you don’t know what Agamemnon did to his daughter, enjoy your sentimental ignorance; if


you do know, share my bleak conviction that all love is expendable’. We must also bear in mind that an author’s or playwright’s representation of mutual feeling (for example, between lovers, or enemies) might itself arouse emotion – on both sides of the ‘laser’ interaction between the literary or dramatic persuader and the audience or reader, the persuader being moved by the image of others’ interaction, as a precondition of moving the persuadee. Think of the interaction between the Chorus in Henry V, representing the persuasive stance of the Chamberlain’s Company (if not Shakespeare himself) towards a heroic king and his enemies, and the assumed audience. The relationships figured in the play (for example, ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ [V, Prologue, 47]), are presented to the audience more emotively than the passions of individuals – with the possible exception of the King himself and his internal struggles.

5.2

Marlowe and Baldwin: designs on the audience

For their very different purposes, Marlowe and Baldwin show comparable degrees of formal inventiveness. They both presuppose the presence amongst their readers (or auditors) of people who are ready to put two and two together. True, there are obvious differences between the genres which they exploit. Baldwin’s Beware the Cat belongs to the comic-grotesque world of the Jest Book, akin to those ‘conceits (that) clownage keepes in pay’, so scorned by Marlowe, since it uses the inner frame of half-serious imaginative involvement solicited by such writing (another point in the range of persuasive engagement sampled in the last chapter) to interact with an outer frame of serious religious propaganda. There is a tension in both writers between the emotional, ethical and rational responses which are anticipated in the reader, or the audience – and an insinuating persuasive presence which challenges them, pre-eminently with its rationality. If we were to place the kind of passage in which Marlowe, in Greene’s2 much-quoted accusation, was said to be ‘daring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan’, alongside Baldwin’s wholesale subversion of Catholic doctrine and Catholic priesthood, we will see not only a similar incitement to think, but a similar implied invitation to discuss (safer for Protestants under Edward VI than for free-thinkers under Elizabeth).3 Where Marlowe is concerned, we will take a closer look at the passage cited by Greenblatt, to whom Tamburlaine appears as an automaton (see pp. 90–93, above), and study the impression he makes on those caught up in his rise to power. Do they see him as an


automaton or as a responsible being? Following up my emphasis on the logos aspects of the original, dramatic eruption of Tamburlaine, we will compare it with those more blatantly subversive passages in II Tamburlaine, which enliven the heroics of that play – by then, stale and second-hand. But first, let us consider Baldwin’s likely design on his readers. 5.2.1

Baldwin: reason and superstition

It’s true that his immediate designs were upset. As he wrote Beware the Cat, Edward VI’s death was about to bring the process of officiallysanctioned Protestant propaganda to a halt. Mary’s five-year reign, and the martyrdoms of men and women of far greater courage and spiritual stature than Baldwin (who kept his head down and survived without recourse to exile), probably did more to speed the growth of protestantism from the small base which it had established by 1553 – mainly in London – than anything achieved by the best earlier writing and preaching; and alongside Tyndale’s potent underground polemics, Latimer’s sermons, and Cranmer’s liturgy, Baldwin’s satire seems very small fry. As such, however, it furnishes a very interesting and useful point of reference and contrast for the writing that was to emerge over the next one and a half centuries. Beware the Cat is by turns attractive and repellent – it does not achieve that overall sense of disruptive ebullience which Bakhtin called the carnivalesque, through which the reader is at once disorientated, disturbed and exhilarated – siding with subversive emotion, thinking from a new perspective (or from a new one alongside the old). But the reader might well be surprised by the freshness of perception in some passages, with respect both to the comparisons employed and to the sharpness of sensory detail. As an example of this is the opening of ‘The Second Part of Master Streamer’s Oration’, in which the cats who (like the devil) observe so much normally hidden human behaviour, are congregating on the leaden roof of Aldgate under the quartered bodies of executed traitors, exhibited there on poles: Streamer has already protested against this ‘loathely and abhominable sight’ (ed. cit., p. 10); but the stimulus which those words afford to our sense of disgust and revulsion should not lead us to credit Streamer with a humane sensibility. He is not protesting against the hideous cruelty of this punishment, but against infraction of the mosaic law forbidding such exposure (Deuteronomy 21, 22–3). Baldwin probably intends the reader to fault him for at least three things: (a) for regarding the mosaic laws against defilement as binding


on Christians; (b) for missing the point that the displayed quarters of traitors were designed to deter other possible rebels; and (c) for overlooking a far graver implication of his own reasoning: if the setting up of quarters was ‘abhominable’, what about the elevation – during the Mass, of the consecrated Host, as the true body of Christ (and exposure in monstrances of the reserved Sacrament)? If I am right in detecting this last implication, it rests on a commonplace of the kind associated by Cicero with the raising of emotion (see p. 49, above), that is, ‘all public exposure of dead bodies is an abomination’ – combined with a comparative argument from the lesser to the greater degree. From a Protestant perspective Streamer strains out the gnat and misses the camel; his advice to bury or burn executed bodies attracts a sarcastic marginal comment, ‘Good ghostly counsel of Master Streamer’, from Baldwin (ibid.) who a few lines earlier has glossed the reference to Deuteronomy with a plain, confirmatory ‘God plagueth abhomination’. Further, the passage’s association of demons ‘who lived on the savor of man’s blood’ with the sacrifices of antiquity, links Catholic priesthood to the Devil – a hint which is to be further reinforced (see below). In the shadow of this horror (likely to have touched the original Protestant reader in a way now inaccessible to us), Streamer spies on the assembled cats: [A]fter the same sort as they did the night before, one sang in one tune, another in another, even such another service as my Lord’s chapel upon the scaffold sang before the King. They observed no musical chords, neither diatesseron, diapente, nor diapason; and yet I ween I lie, for one cat, groaning as a bear doth when dogs be let slip to him, trolled out so low and so loud a bass that, in comparison of another cat which, crying like a young child, squealed out the shrieking treble, it might be well counted a double diapason. Wherefore, to the intent I might perceive the better the cause of their assembly, and by their gestures perceive part of their meaning, I went softly and fair into a chamber which hath a window into the same leads, and in the dark standing closely, I viewed through the trellis, as well as I could, all their gestures and behavior. (Beware the Cat, p. 23) Interestingly, Baldwin’s vivid evocation of the simultaneous shrieking and droning that accompanies cats’ territorial disputes makes it clear, through the image of the ‘double diapason’ (that is, notes sounded simultaneously, two octaves apart), not only that he has listened with


acute attention to the noises cats make, but that he is involving Streamer in a contradiction. As narrator, the latter goes on to represent the sounds just described as alternating with each other, in what purports to be a formal dialogue between the animals. The earlier imagery of choral harmonies (or disharmonies) subverts this. The chaotic range of similes (contrapuntal choral singing, groaning bear, squalling child) suggests a disorder of values in Streamer, or in what he observes and is reminded of. We must compare the elevated physical scenes and associated, goal-related scripts of choirs posted on scaffolding during some unspecified state ceremonial, the scaffolds of public execution, and the sites of public, charnel display (the tarred quarters of traitors displayed above gateways) with these slightly less exalted singing cats. We sense the imagery of political ambition and ostentation collapsing into that of treachery and disgrace, before going on to link this to the inarticulacy of the bear and the child; but the deictic aspect is more revealing. Streamer’s immediate auditors will know which ‘lord’, and which occasion, he is referring to (presumably with a satirical fling at the style of the music), but his deictic use of ‘the scaffold’ as location for ‘my lord’s chapel’ (that is, for his household choir), forces the general reader to recast this as any such ostentatious ceremonial, alongside all the other exhibitions of worldly vanity, superstition and chicanery through which, like Mouse-slayer the cat, the Devil penetrates – that particular instance of demonic priestly deception observed by her (see below) being typical of the Roman church as represented in Protestant propaganda. The book is frequently repulsive, both inside and outside the range of emotional responses intended by Baldwin. Its nauseously vivid imagery was plainly designed to evoke disgust in the reader or listener, with respect both to the obsessive folly of Baldwin’s principal narrator, and to the chicanery which – from his point of view, quite accidentally – it brings to light. Amongst the responses predicted by Baldwin might well have been the struggle of perception and inclination in readers still sentimentally attached to Catholicism, and the renewed vigour with which those members of families who had embraced Protestantism, might use it to pressure those who had not (this process being referred to on pp. 37–8 of the Ringler and Flachmann edition). But the means adopted for this purpose are bound to alienate most modern readers in ways unimaginable by the author, as he invites them to share his bigoted hatred and contempt for the Mass-priests and their gullible victims (mostly women). This despite its more attractive aspects, which, according to Baldwin’s modern editors (whose persuasive advocacy we have


already considered), include a complex layered narrative, a precisely evoked physical setting, an impressive capacity for detailed observation, and (as already noted) an admirably well-contrived appeal to the reader’s powers of logical inference. The designed effect of this, which may still cause offence or distress to anybody who accepts the Real Presence in the Christian Eucharist, is to demolish the pre-existing emotional aura of Catholicism, centred on the celebration of Mass and the doctrine of transubstantiation. Baldwin’s fantastic story is represented as having been told to him and his companions by Gregory Streamer, chaplain to George Ferrers, the Master of the King’s Pastimes. It involves the supposed use of natural magic for the deciphering of animal language (especially the speech of that privileged domestic spy, the cat), and its ultimate aim is to expose priestly trickery, with a further and darker implication. In what purports to be the first-hand report of Mouse-slayer, whom we glimpsed above at her trial on the tower roof, a woman is ‘cured’ of blindness at the climax of a private celebration of Mass: And when he came to the elevation, he lifted up the cake and said to my dame (which in two days afore saw nothing), ‘Wipe thine eyes thou sinful woman and look upon thy Maker.’ With that she lifted up herself and saw the cake, and had her sight and her health as well as ever she had before. (Beware the Cat, p. 39) Baldwin’s marginal gloss reads ‘A young knave made an old woman’s maker’. His intention is to encapsulate a false revelation. He positions the reader to perceive what the duped woman hears and sees, and to infer her emotion, without possibly sharing it. The sneering epigrammatic comment of the gloss, with its verbal antithesis and traductio (‘young’/’old’; ‘made’/’maker’), presents one ‘laser’ interaction inside another: the reflected emotions both of priest and parishioner, seen directly in the text, and of the propagandist and his Protestant proselyte, united in indignation. Baldwin mocks and belittles the woman’s induced belief. She thinks and feels that she ‘looks upon her maker’ in the very instant of miraculously restored vision. In her delusion, she presumably experiences some measure of wonder, relief, penitence and gratitude – though the tone of the priest’s injunction (at best patronising, at worst contemptuous) seems to debar any possibility of a purely ecstatic experience, any sense of irradiating charity working from a divine source through a human agent. But after over five years of Protestant preaching, Baldwin expects the reader to see, in the mind’s


eye, nothing but an idolised object – the consecrated host being reduced, through the use of meiosis, to a mere ‘cake’. Already in his ‘Sermon of the Plough’ of 1548 (see above), Latimer had denounced the devilish inspiration of the Mass: ‘And this way the devil used to evacuate the death of Christ, that we might have affiance in other things, as in the daily sacrifice of the priest: whereas Christ would have us to trust in his only sacrifice’ (p. 45). From a Protestant perspective the woman’s eyes open at once into physical sight and spiritual blindness: her heart is centred not on the passion of Christ, but on a mere wafer, enmeshed in a mystifying ritual. It is a short further step (which Baldwin takes, as Spenser was to, subsequently)4 to infer something worse than a shared delusion: deliberate malice and diabolism on the priest’s part. That the woman’s blindness is induced by some form of magic is implied in the cat’s earlier narrative. We are told that the woman and her husband were on the point of conversion to the Protestant doctrine, at the instigation of their grown-up sons, when ‘I cannot tell how it chanced, but my dame’s sight failed her’ (p. 38). The cat’s bafflement prompts us to seek an explanation, which Baldwin suggests without directly stating. Might this be because it would strain credulity – just as the woman’s religious emotion (if too sharply evoked and taken to be sincere) might raise problems? At this period of transition (as for many years afterwards), readers might be reminded of Catholic priests and laity who were well-known to them, quite probably their own older relatives, and who though they might well be thought deluded, could never be plausibly represented as diabolic. The psychological tensions generated by the pressure to abandon age-old traditions of belief and practice might well induce hysterical symptoms, and Baldwin would seek by any possible means to turn them to his advantage. But he relies more on implicit comparison than on causal inference, making one of Catholicism’s major strengths, its authority, look much more like a clearly suspicious weakness. If trust is founded upon tradition, and if that possesses no more innate reliability than popular tales, amusing tall stories and anecdotes passed on by word of mouth, what worth has authority? At some points in the text, we might ask whether we are being repelled by Streamer’s folly and vanity, or by Baldwin’s own meanness and negativity. It will be illuminating to compare the colour and rhythmical vitality of Skelton in the procession of birds mourning Phyllyp Sparowe (c. 1505), where we find ‘The bitter with his bumpe, / The crane with his trumpe, / The swan of Menander, / The gose and the gander’ (ll.432–5),5 with the following. Streamer is


describing his heightened hearing following the application of his nauseous potions, pillows and pills – beginning with part of a marital quarrel (p. 32): I heard that plain; and would fain have heard the rest, but could not by no means for barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks, singing of swans, ringing of pans, crowing of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens, peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs, and toads in the bogs, chirking of crickets, shutting of wickets, shriking of owls, flittering of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves, farting of churls, fizzling of girls, with many things else – as ringing of bells, counting of coins, mounting of groins, whispering of lovers, springling of plovers, groaning and spewing, baking and brewing, scratching and rubbing, … Baldwin’s marginal note comments drily, ‘Here the poetical fury came upon him’. But the mechanical rhythm and enumeration of items, the obvious lexical pairings of sound and source and the coarse, humourless detail indicate no poetical spirit whatever, unless in Streamer’s conceit. The passage has far less vitality than the cats’ chorus studied earlier, although that too expressed the ostensible aural experience of Streamer. The superiority of this, compared with the later account might hint that these were sounds Streamer had really heard (like any London householder); the sound-panorama might be intended to insinuate that his whole retailing of Mouse-slayer’s testimony is a preposterous pretence, inducing the reader to set it aside and concentrate on the inherent probability, from a Protestant perspective, of the abuses it purports to expose. But even if this is Baldwin’s design, there is a flatness and a weariness about his means. The joke against Streamer runs out of steam. 5.2.2

Marlowe, Menaphon and Tamburlaine – whose reflection?

What feelings and expectations were addressed in Marlowe’s envisaged audience by those lines which, for Stephen Geenblatt, represent Tamburlaine as an automaton, a ‘thing’? We have examined the persuasive means with which he seeks to enforce this reading (see pp. 91–3, above). In itself, and in the mode of its conveyance, the interpretation is arresting, a memorable image in its own right. But has the ‘thing’ any real home in Marlowe’s text?


By this stage in I Tamburlaine, the audience’s expectations regarding Scythian shepherds (little, beyond something remote, exotic and primitive?), would have been sharply challenged by Tamburlaine’s rhetorical triumph in winning over Theridamas, which forges a relationship out of the mutual consciousness of two men, and an induced moment of choice on Theridamas’s part – drawing us into the Tamburlaine ethos rather than placing us outside it to appraise its gathering momentum. One way to counter Greenblatt’s denial of choice or potential change of direction to the alleged automaton, might be to review his part in the whole pattern of choice and compulsion presented through the persuasive rhetoric of Part One, as it works on the characters and ultimately on the audience. There is a comparable pattern in Part Two – including, most notably, that moment when Tamburlaine, so accustomed to destroying the illusions of others through his own apparent mastery of fortune, is forced himself to have recourse to illusion following the death of Zenocrate: ‘Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives’ (II.Tamb., II.iv.127), and the point – to be discussed later – at which the audience is tacitly invited to make an interpretative choice. In Part One the dramatic focus alternates between the persuader and the persuadee – with Tamburlaine, more than once, combining the two roles in a single soliloquy or dialogue. Let us take a general survey of the whole pattern of persuasive interaction in Part One. From the imbecile king Mycetes – a mixture of self-confessed verbal inadequacy and feeble self-assertion – the scale of eloquence mounts to his brother Cosroe, who at first mocks him, then briefly supplants him, to the superb assurance of Tamburlaine succeeding against all the odds in seducing Theridamas, and thence through the repressed sense of danger in Menaphon’s verbal portrait of the hero, to that electrifying dialogue through which, beginning with a single repeated line of verse (‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’), Tamburlaine works up the wills and emotions of his henchmen for a fling at absolute power. Next (as that is achieved) comes his superbly insolent justification of Cosroe’s removal. Already we see an alternation between those who are powerless to persuade, and those whose eloquence surpasses others’ expectation – and also between those who are willingly persuaded by words in advance of facts, and those who are finally compelled to admit the facts behind the words. This is then repeated with further variations and stronger extremes. From Zenocrate’s chamberlain Agydas, who bravely chooses to kill himself before he is killed – in tribute to the persuasive power of absolute silence and a single wrathful glance from Tamburlaine – we proceed to the wordy combat of


boast and counter-boast, threat and counter-threat between Tamburlaine and the Soldan Bajazeth and (following their departure for the battlefield) Zenocrate and Zabina. Here the spirited language of Tamburlaine impresses more than the complacent big statistics of Bajazeth, and the dramatic ‘fact’ of the battle’s outcome sets the seal on it. How power lends validity to arbitrary symbolism is then perceived as we are introduced to Tamburlaine’s pseudo-chivalric ‘custom’ of proceeding from grace to genocide in three days flat, via the three emblematic colours of white, red and black. His iron will and infinite power of constraint is then further outlined in the bars of Bajazeth’s travelling cage – in itself an irrefutably persuasive demonstration of the prisoner’s absolute powerlessness, and shortly to become an even more terrifying symbol of Bajazeth’s and Zabina’s inveterate, frustrated sense of self, as they brain themselves gruesomely against it. Tamburlaine, the self-proclaimed ‘scourge of God’, chooses to impose Hell on earth (‘A hell, as hoplesse, and as full of feare / As are the blasted banks of Erebus’), making it worse by forcing his victims to view his own fulfilments, and his rewards to those in his favour (for example, the banquet of crowns). A similar powerlessness towards Tamburlaine is manifest in the virgins of Damascus, as they seek to make him question the wilful absoluteness of his ‘custom’ – though where the audience is concerned this is an effective plea for pity (all the more pitiful for its futility).6 Here again Tamburlaine’s enemies, and the audience, encounter his steeled resolution – first in ‘the slicing edge’ of his sword brandished on stage, then in the points of his ‘horsmens speares’ off stage. However, we are to believe that this crisis brings Tamburlaine very close to the brink of pity, contrition and selfdoubt as the distraught, dishevelled image of Zenocrate (‘in [her] passion for [her] countries love / And feare to see [her] kingly Fathers harme’) lodges in his mind. Greenblatt locates his ‘thing’ in Menaphon’s speech (I Tamburlaine, 1.2.7–30), lines in which Marlowe both builds up his audience’s expectations regarding his hero, and conveys the henchman’s unwitting delusion of his master, Cosroe, both of whom wish to find a place for Tamburlaine on their own bandwagon – not suspecting how short a ride they are themselves to take on his own very much sturdier vehicle. Menaphon represents Cosroe’s brilliant new subordinate as a portent, not only of imminent victory over his imbecile elder brother, but also of the consequent military expansion of Persia. The audience on the other hand, having heard and seen much more of Tamburlaine, have grown attuned to very different ‘achievement goals’ on his part,


and will be ready to dissent as soon as Menaphon raises the issue of his motivation. Is it likely that his ‘thirst’ will be slaked by high office under Cosroe? In response to the question ‘What stature wields he, and what personage?’ any visual memory of his stage presence is overlaid by a verbal effictio, of one who is (II.i.7–30): Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned, Like his desire, lift upwards and divine, So large of lims, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainely beare 10 Old Atlas burthen. Twixt his manly pitch, A pearle more worth, then all the world is plaste: Wherein by curious soveraintie of Art, Are fixt his piercing instruments of sight: Whose fiery cyrcles beare encompassed A heaven of heavenly bodies in their Spheares That guides his steps and actions to the throne, Where honor sits invested royally: Pale of complexion: wrought in him with passion, Thirsting with soverainty, with love of armes: 20 His lofty browes in foldes, do figure death, And in their smoothnesse, amitie and life: About them hangs a knot of Amber heire, Wrapped in curles, as fierce Achilles was, On which the breath of heaven delights to play, Making it daunce with wanton majestie: His armes and fingers long and sinowy, Betokening valour and excesse of strength: In every part proportioned like the man, Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. 30 This image of the hero hovers between massive physical reality and the mind’s inner, metaphorical musing on it and what it ‘betokens’. Formally, this is a blend of effictio (description of a real person), and prosopopoeia (the personification of a quality). But is it the image of honour, ambition or insensate violence? There are complications in our sense of this ‘wondrous man’ (as Cosroe, responding to Menaphon’s description, is still happy to think him). Wonder, the dominant emotion reflected between speaker and on-stage audience, and (with a difference) between playwright and audience proper, is the more persuasive because fresh perception is integral to it, authenticat-


ing its object. Moreover, listeners are compelled into physical empathy with the ‘tall’ presence – immediately denoted in the third word of Menaphon’s eager response, and then progressively evoked. Tamburlaine is ‘Like his desire, lift upwards and divine’. There is the impression of a force, exerted on the vertical plane, moulding the whole physique. But the sensation is inexplicable: does ‘desire’ denote, metonymically, the exalted object of desire, or the emotion itself – in its elevating force? Does that force work internally or externally, from below, or above? Is desire exalting the will, or the will exalting desire? Does ‘lift upwards’ suggest an upturned face and gaze? Or does it suggest something resonant with distant childhood memory – the sensation of being lifted off one’s feet by ‘desire’, as though by a ‘divine’ power stooping from overhead? Two familiar cognitive ‘goals’ might underlie our reception of the words – the ‘satisfaction’ of union with an external source of being, or the drive towards ‘achievement’ of something internally conceived but externally reflected. This ambiguous division between self-fashioning and exterior fashioning continues throughout the speech. Moreover, the functional perspective of Menaphon’s opening sentence shifts as two possible constructions of its syntax alternate in the mind. Does ‘like his desire’ modify the preceding, or the following elements of this verb-less sentence – or both? Is Tamburlaine’s tall stature ‘like his desire’ with respect to its loftiness only – or (also) to his longing for the highest things, however derived? Is it the hero’s ‘stature’ or his ‘desire’ – which, as Firbasian Quality Bearer, progressively admits Further Specifications – culminating with maximum dynamism (at the sentence’s end, and the line’s) in the suggestive word ‘divine’. This could be mere hyperbole, suggesting a god-like human form (Alleyn?), or it could stress the nature and origin of his ‘desire’. Within the audience at the Theatre or the Rose, during Alleyn’s performances, the goals apparently attributed to Tamburlaine by Menaphon might be variously identified. To those for whom the Preservation goals of religious salvation and political conformity were paramount, Tamburlaine might already appear both presumptuous and ambitious – unlike the penitent publican of Luke, 18.13, he ‘lifts’ not only his eyes but his whole person towards heaven; and ‘divine’ might recall the usurping upward mobility of Lucifer (Isaiah, 14:14) or Nimrod. For those in the higher rooms who had been exposed to humanist learning, and who were better placed to seek advancement, the portrait might have caused a conflict of feeling, or a more positive overall response, reflecting as it does another set of ‘goals’ – those of


Achievement. For these people, the rewards promised to the hero by his prospective monarch would represent the very height of legitimate aspiration, though undercut by a hint of unrestrained ambition. Cosroe and his followers are blind to this, persuading themselves that Tamburlaine will remain loyal; his drive to ‘achievement’ will conform to their (somewhat inconsistent!) notions of moral virtue and social stability – content with honourable subordination, gratefully anticipating future favours.7 As the speech develops, the ambiguity persists, and becomes plainer as we investigate the metaphor which links the physical presence of the hero to his intuited motivation. Over the course of 24 lines the description mounts to Tamburlaine’s face, eyes, forehead and forelock before descending again towards the grasp of his fingers. What Greenblatt perceives as a Renaissance automaton is – as we have seen – framed with more emotional force, suggestiveness, and human empathy, than is allowed for by that striking (if limited) perception, centring as it does on the ‘pearl’ of Tamburlaine’s head and neck (l. 12). Even that detail which most admits a mechanistic implication, the ‘heaven of heavenly bodies’ within the ‘fiery circles’ of Tamburlaine’s eyes, also admits stray notes of human warmth or celestial desire. His eyes are singled out through a cool periphrasis (mechanistic enough in itself) as ‘instruments of sight’; but they are then in rapid succession filled with fire, as they were earlier (1.2.158) – and softened by more ecstatic overtones in the traductio ‘heaven / heavenly’. Retrospectively, this image will be reflected in the ‘christal armours’ of ‘angels’ seen in Zenocrate’s eyes – distraught at the spectacle of Tamburlaine’s Damascus massacre (V.ii.88). What is meant by ‘A heaven of heavenly bodies’? Are the planets and zodiacal signs, the sources of celestial influence, enamoured of their own reflections in his eyes, or is Tamburlaine the virtuous master of his fortune – paralleling in his own mind the ninefold order of angels beyond the heavens (as Dante sees them reflected in Beatrice’s eyes at the opening of Paradiso XXVIII)? At the very centre of the description, as the goal towards which his eyes ‘guide’ him, ‘honour sits invested royally’. In the minds of Marlowe’s original audience, there would have been an established metaphoric connection – tending to suggest instability or contradiction within Menaphon’s position. What would be identified in Schank’s terms as a Thematic Organisation Packet (TOP), links the authority of virtue, through a majestic seated personification of Honour, to the power of monarchs as symbolised by their thrones. The language here is as ‘slippery’ (see my quotation from Wootton re


Erasmus, p. 63, above), as the perceived relationships. Menaphon wants to believe that Tamburlaine, ‘guid[ed]’ by the stellar influences which he has internalised, or impelled by the star-like philosophic virtue which he has forged for himself, will come for reward to Cosroe’s throne – the new king metonymically represented by the adjunct of honour dubiously attributed to him. Alternatively, since the kingly attribute of honour has its own majesty, Tamburlaine will come to share its metaphorical throne, such virtue being its own reward. But Marlowe has already reminded us how concepts of virtue and vice can be made relative to the realities of power. Witness the coup de grâce delivered earlier to Theridamas’s wavering loyalty – ‘A[h] these resolved noble Scythians[! ]8 / But shall I prove a traitor to my king?’ – by Tamburlaine’s rejoinder: ‘No, but the trusty friend of Tamburlaine’ (I.ii.225–7). Tamburlaine ‘opens the Silenus’ of outward fealty and responsibility, to reveal the friend ready to pit ‘resolute’ ambition against everything. As Menaphon’s description proceeds, the peril and fascination of Tamburlaine unfolds further. The word ‘Thirsting’ elides Schank’s goals of satisfaction, enjoyment and achievement. Ominously but unremarkedly Tamburlaine ‘thirsts with’9 the things he has already enjoyed and achieved to a spectacular degree, which from Erasmus’s perspective would be ambition and butchery, but which appear to Menaphon, himself ambitious for Cosroe and seeking to reinforce his faction, as a pledge of power and the means to maintain it: ‘sovereignty’ and ‘love of arms’. Here certainly we glimpse the relentless drive singled out in Greenblatt’s image of the unstoppable ‘thing’; but we move progressively into a more varied and ambiguous portrayal of Tamburlaine as friend and (even) love-object. His folded brows prefigure the angry God (Christ, in his role as Judge) whose ‘irefull Browes’ will appear at the end of Doctor Faustus (V.ii.149), and his arbitrary role as ‘Scourge of God’, while their ‘smoothnesse’ reflects the submission of the weak and the collusion of the strong (that is, his three henchmen). He thus parodies two alternate and equally truthful appearances of Christ towards Man, as Judge, and Friend (John 15.15). From Menaphon’s perspective, the echoes suggest not so much an automaton, as a living ‘figure’ of the things which Menaphon’s principal auditor, Cosroe, wishes to see in those closest to him in government, reflections of his own royal power like the alternate positions of the laser mirror imagined earlier. But the linked image of ‘Amber heire’ is warmer and more distinctly human, leading into the overtones of Achilles’s story, as the thwarted and angry lover of Briseis (and distraught lover of Patroclus?).


With its ‘wanton majestie’ (‘majesty’ being a word which in Marlowe carries a strongly sexual connotation) it also affords a hint of Tamburlaine’s own coming conflicts in his role as Zenocrate’s lover – a role in which, unlike a ‘thing’, he makes choices. The last distinct images, ‘arms and fingers’, move him back towards violence. Having suggested how Marlowe distinguishes what Cosroe wants to hear, from his pointers towards Tamburlaine’s actual dramatic future, I will finish my excursion into Marlowe by showing how logos underpins pathos in II Tamburlaine. Interestingly, this episode does not involve the hero himself. It follows from the truce agreed in an earlier scene (II.Tamb., I.ii) between Sigismund of Hungary and Orcanes of Natolia, and sealed with solemn oaths in the names of Christ and ‘Mahomet’ (Marlowe’s name for the Prophet who is, perhaps, less travestied in his work than in medieval drama). In three scenes from the beginning of Act II, Sigismund is induced to break the truce, and treacherously attacks the much-weakened army of Orcanes. A highly ambiguous series of events begins with Orcanes’ shock at this perjury, bearing out Erasmus’s contention that ‘Those whom we call Turks are to a great extent half-Christian, and probably nearer true Christianity than most of our own people’ (quoted by Wootton, p. 32), and that they believe seriously in the soul’s immortality and its accountability to God’s justice. He calls on Christ to vindicate himself: Can there be such deceit in Christians, Or treason in the fleshly heart of man, Whose shape is figure of the highest God? Then if there be a Christ, as Christians say, But in their deeds deny him for their Christ: If he be son to everliving Jove, And hath the power of his outstretched arme. … (II.Tamb., II.ii.36–42) The pathos seemingly aimed at the audience here is that of shame or mortification, moved by the spectacle of a non-Christian’s indignation – though perhaps dissipated by the reflection that those responsible were merely Catholics, notorious by the later sixteenth century for the mental reservation with which they swore oaths to heretics. Having used the Turks’ perspective to make his Protestant audience concede that Catholics are Christians, he confirms the concession by incensing them against those who have let the side down. And that Protestants and Catholics showed the same understanding of Scripture – and to


that extent a common belief – in killing each other, is implied by the texts alluded to by Frederick in the previous scene, condemning those in the Old Testament ‘That would not kill and curse at Gods command’ (II.i.55). The ‘outstretched arm’ (again foreshadowing that of the angry God at the end of Faustus), is a gestural reminder of the words of Christ as judge, condemning those whose deeds did not match their words and who showed no mercy (‘Depart from me ye cursed’). But this engagement with their belief, heightened by an outsider’s seeming openness to its truths, is punctured the next moment by Orcanes’s use of ‘Mahomet’’s concern for his ‘name and honor’ (II.ii.43) as a touchstone for Christ’s. How reliable is somebody who thinks both religions might be equally true, as a judge of the truth of either of them, since they both claim a unique revelation? The emotional effect is that of a carpet swept from under one’s feet – an effect redoubled in the following scene when, after winning against all the odds and killing Sigismund who dies (unavailingly?) penitent, Orcanes acclaims the apparent vindication of Christ. Gazellus comments: ‘Tis but the fortune of the wars my Lord, / Whose power is often proov’d a myracle’ (II.iii.31–2). Marlowe poises the rational awareness that improbable events do happen, against the (for the time being, rather battered) certainties of faith. Looking back finally at Stephen Greenblatt’s characterisation of Tamburlaine, we may conclude in the light of the options Marlowe offers to the audience, not just as to how they feel but as to how they reason about the course of events represented, that he is more interested in choice than in compulsion – and that this might extend to his characters. The ‘thing’ is near enough to Tamburlaine to represent his (almost) unremitting violence and inhumanity, the ‘desire’ of conquest which still haunts him as he dies (II Tamb., V.iii.123–60); but it does not figure his moments of emotional vulnerability (pre-eminently at Zenocrate’s death (II Tamb., II.iv), his choices, or – even – the caprice and inventiveness of his cruelty, or his rhetorical skill and the powers of empathy which are integral to it.

5.3

Hutchinson and Cavendish: rival reflections

There is a very illuminating comparison to be drawn between the metaphorical modes of pathos used to evoke conjugal love by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Lucy Hutchinson, respectively. Rather than directly contrasting their two biographical tributes, I have chosen, as seen already in Chapter 3, to place the light-hearted fantasy


of Cavendish’s The Blazing World alongside the far more sombre Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. It is impossible here to compare like with like, since Cavendish predeceased her husband; and we cannot consequently match Hutchinson’s passionate grief with any such experience on the Duchess’s part. One is a fanciful, sequential narrative, and the other an anticipatory reflection of later feeling, evoked in the widowed Lucy Hutchinson as she recounts her courtship and marriage. As I take my own look at the reflective structures of pathos, I shall, as in Chapter 3, look first at Hutchinson (will the relatively uneducated Margaret Cavendish prove simpler or more complex in her handling of reflection?). 5.3.1

Lucy Hutchinson: looking in the ‘faithful mirror’

Lucy Hutchinson makes explicit use of the mirror image. Indeed, she pushes it to the point of destruction: the reflective surfaces begin to dissolve. The passage quoted here is introduced through a praeteritio:10 ‘I shall pass by (my italics) all the little amorous relations, which … would make a true history of a more handsome management of love than the best romances describe’. ‘Passing by’ is the precise English sense of praeteritio; but despite her protestation the full pathos of romance is carried over into what she does profess to ‘record’. The phraseology of romance is interwoven with that of encomium, as she previews the whole course of their marriage and her eventual bereavement. Today’s reader may well be divided between emotional aversion from the self-subordination of woman to man, and a compulsive empathy. I am reminded of Milton’s Eve in her original love of ‘manly grace / And wisdom’ (PL, IV.490–1) eagerly fulfilling the end of her creation as Adam fulfilled his – ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ (IV.299). Here, we find the range of emotion specific to a woman who is fully committed to the role of Wife as delineated by St Paul in I Corinthians : There is this only to be recorded, that never was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous; he loved her better than his life, with inexpressible tenderness and kindness, had a most high obliging esteem of her, yet still considered honour, religion, and duty above her, nor ever suffered the intrusion of such a dotage as should blind him from marking her imperfections; these he looked upon with such an indulgent eye as did not abate his love and esteem of her, while it augmented his care to blot out all those spots which might make her appear less worthy of that respect he paid her; and


thus indeed he soon made her more equal to him than he found her; for she was a very faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him, so long as he was present; but she, that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining representation. The greatest excellency she had was the power of apprehending and the virtue of loving his; so as his shadow she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing. It was not her face he loved, her honour and her virtue were his mistresses; and these (like Pygmalion’s) images of his own making, for he polished and gave form to what he found with all the roughness of the quarry about it; but meeting with a compliant subject for his own wise government, he found as much satisfaction as he gave, and never had occasion to number his marriage among his infelicities. (Memoirs, pp. 50–1) Whether or not she is playing on her own name, with its connotations of light, light and its absence permeate the passage and in due course provide an acute emotional shock for the reader. Light is both a subjective index of Lucy’s emotion (who, here, never directly states than she loved her husband), and an objective measure of the colonel’s virtue. Reader and author contemplate that virtue together, as displayed through the relationship of husband and wife. Lucy Hutchinson bears witness to his extreme delicacy of feeling, to the fact that she was credited with virtues before she possessed them, rather than rebuked for lacking them. We might be more inclined to suspect her, in her turn, of over-generosity – to wonder whether he might not, in reality, have been more narrowly prescriptive and overbearing than she is prepared to admit – were it not for the desolation she expresses at his absence. We are in effect being invited to admire John Hutchinson’s rhetorical skill in the handling of reflective emotion, as he held up – before her – her own image (the image of ‘her honour and her virtue’), to which he addressed himself, and of which she felt herself to fall short. She would indeed be ‘obliged’ for such esteem (that is, in the Latin sense bound to her husband with respect to it), bound both by gratitude and by fear; and the ‘indulgence’ of his softened emotion – in response – would oblige her further. Until the ‘mirror’ image becomes overt half-way through our quoted passage, this implied interchange of feeling underpins the dominant emotion, admiration. This is aroused by the colonel’s manly grace and wisdom, by his manifest moral excellence in


the restraint and subordination of romantic passion – his calm transcendence of that which is, in the transcendent vocabulary of romance, ‘inexpressible’. Like Tamburlaine wordlessly rebuked by Zenocrate (I.Tamb.,V.ii.120) he ‘conceives and subdues’ beauty; but in this case the beauty is that of Lucy’s responsive love, and (unlike Tamburlaine) his fosters it, does not destroy it. There is no room to look in detail at the communicative dynamism conveying this perception to the reader, but it may be noted that the first four sentences of the extract (delimited here by semicolons) which precede the shift of attention towards Lucy’s perspective, consistently produce new specifications, or further specifications of the colonel’s admirable virtue, at the end of every clause, with their impact often sharpened by contrast. This is seen in the first sentence in its combination of the appearance/existence and quality scales: ‘never was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous’, where the antithetical adverbs, and the opposed attributes ‘ardent’ and ‘idolatrous’, reflect the two interpersonal lifethemes of love and religion in the minds of the implied audience – these, with their distinctive vocabularies, being intertwined throughout the passage. (Moreover, that both life-themes are reflected, and made compatible with each other, implies the refutation of two interlinked universal premises, that is, ‘all ardour is idolatrous’, and ‘no lover is religious’.) Many of the clauses introducing context-independent material (‘high obliging esteem’, ‘honour, religion and duty’, ‘respect’) end with the often-repeated, inconspicuously insistent pronoun, ‘her’. Its various cases (‘of her’, ‘above her’, ‘her’ [dative], ‘her’ [accusative]) amount to an extended polyptoton. Thus varied in its links, ‘her’ (too) is context-independent, as are many other memorable cases of antistrophe, for all their repetitiveness.11 We feel the varied pressure of this relationship, however loving in its intention, upon the wife. The shift to Lucy’s own perspective is introduced by way of a causal explanation of the fact referred to, through the one-word further specification ‘soon’, in the previous sentence. The speed of Lucy’s change to a ‘more equal’ condition is explained in ambiguous and therefore doubly emotive terms – ‘for she was a very faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him’. As properties of a person, ‘faith’ and ‘truth’ (words which echo the oath of homage to a monarch, and thus befit the ‘compliant subject’ of a monarchal husband) primarily convey a steadiness of will and intention. As properties of an object (that is, the mirror, as metaphoric vehicle) the words denote accurate alignment and clear reflection – both, as we have repeatedly seen, preconditions of the ‘emotional laser’


effect. The praise due to her for constancy and alertness (easier to express through the third-person form of her narrative), and her pride in having kept the faith, are mixed with her sense of inadequacy. She longs for an unattainable state, since she reflects him ‘truly’ in her unanimity with him, but not in his full brightness. The dynamism of her sentence might be expressed as B = Q = Sp[=Fsp]Sp. In this case, the further specification, ‘though but dimly’, lacks the overall force of the specification in which it is embedded, and which culminates in the noun-complement ‘his own glories upon him’. At this point, the vocabularies of romance and religion coalesce. Underlying her yearning to apprehend, in their fullness, the ‘glories’ of her husband, is St Paul’s image in his great discourse on charity (I Corinthians 13:12), ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’. Of necessity, she must have believed her husband to stand in a similar relationship to Christ, as she stood in, in relation to him. Two chapters earlier, Paul had written that ‘the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man’ (I Corinthians 11:3), and that the man ‘indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man’. Modern translations (for example, the Jerusalem Bible) make clear that this ‘glory’ is a reflection: thus Lucy’s reflection of her husband’s ‘glory’ – ‘dim’, or otherwise – is itself a reflection of a reflection. What she sees in her husband must, on Paul’s authority, be the image of Christ ‘through a glass, darkly’ (that is, a dim reflection in a mirror): but despite that he shines with plural ‘glories’. He is physically beautiful to her, especially in that very feature which, Paul insists, men are to keep uncovered in church: we have already been told that ‘she was surprised with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one at the first’ (p. 48). Moreover, to Lucy, writing after his death, the godliness witnessed by his whole life and manner of dying, is a further ‘glory’ and sign of his elected state – his complete humility as one absolutely dependent on God. Finally there will be a ‘glory’ in each of his higher commitments so resolutely maintained: ‘honour, religion, and duty’. From this point onwards the emotive charge increases, through a continuing (though complicated) process of reflection. David Norbrook comments12 that ‘the Pygmalion figure carries on the reflexivity in a way that verges on attributing a risky degree of subjectivity to the Colonel’s opinions’; unless it is quite transformed by its context, the image will suggest that John Hutchinson was at least partially pleasing himself,


and to that extent isolating himself. The tantalising incompleteness and continued yearning of married love between those who are equal neither to each other nor to God, imposing an absence in love’s very presence, is replaced by a presence in absence – a pain which, whatever the degree of distance between them, suggests the reality of what was lost through the husband’s death. The most potent point may be briefly noted: the sense of mutual and intensifying reflection which has validated, imaginatively, the ultimate source of light and seemed – more completely than Plato’s philosophic lover – to fuse body with soul, becomes even more compelling when the light is suddenly switched off. The ‘dark mist’ in Lucy’s mirror seems to spread below its surface with a physical chill and sense of dissolution. Looking closer at this passage has in my judgement strongly confirmed the paradox pointed out by Susan Cook and David Norbrook – the successful imaging both of her husband and of their marriage by a woman who so seriously distrusted images. But to my mind, the dissolving of her own reflected image – the ‘woman with which we are presented’ (in Cook’s words) – is so conveyed as to convince us that Lucy had lived, and experienced, and felt, even created, through that image. In a real sense, there is ‘a woman whom we meet’ in the passage – as palpable in her suffering as in her anger. 5.3.2

Cavendish: complications of presence and absence

As we were reminded in Chapter 3, Cavendish’s utopian narrative takes an abducted ‘young Lady’ into another world, in which, besides being exalted to power and wealth, she is able as Cavendish’s surrogate to regulate scientific and philosophical enquiry. Richard Nate, who notes that The Blazing World ‘is now often regarded as Cavendish’s most significant work’,13 thinks it shows her approval of the Royal Society’s project for plain language distrustful of figuration, but that she uses it to demonstrate the continued value of fancy as a means of recreation, not bound by the dictates of reason – as indicated in her Preface. Put briefly, ‘Of the Horatian prodesse et delectare, Cavendish retained only the latter’ (Nate, p. 415). But what of Cicero’s movere? How pathos might function given this release from conformity to material truth, and this sole alliance with pleasure, will be worth pursuing. Having introduced herself into her own story as ‘scribe’ to her heroine, the Empress of the Blazing World, she conducts her to the family estate of Welbeck. On arrival, she introduces the house’s principal inhabitant – her husband – to the implied reader (who is


understood to be following the fortunes of her heroine, the Empress). Simultaneously, she positions the Duke as the unique reader, by invoking what were in all probability daily topics of conversation between them. In her imaginary encounter with him, she has redoubled or trebled her advantage: she is furnished with an imaginary female ally; she holds her husband in ignorance of her presence while reflecting her own habitual pleasure at his appearance in the surprised admiration of her companion; and by the time that (eventually) all three ‘souls’ become mutually aware, the Duke’s soul has itself been, if not feminised, deprived of its usual means of male dominance (text from Lilley, pp. 194–5): [A]s they were thus discoursing, the Duke came out of the house into the court, to see his horses of manage; whom when the Duchess’s soul perceived, she was so overjoyed, that her aerial vehicle became so splendorous, as if it had been enlightened by the sun; by which we may perceive, that the passions of souls or spirits can alter their bodily vehicles. Then these two ladies’ spirits went close to him, but he could not perceive them; and after the Empress had observed the art of manage, she was much pleased with it, and commended it as a noble pastime, and an exercise fit and proper for noble and heroic persons; but when the Duke was gone into the house again, those two souls followed him; where the Empress observing, that he went to the exercise of the sword, and was such an excellent and unparallelled master thereof, she was as much pleased with that exercise, as she was with the former: but the Duchess’s soul being troubled, that her dear lord and husband used such a violent exercise before meat, for fear of overheating himself, without any consideration of the Empress’s soul, left her aerial vehicle, and entered into her lord. The Empress’s soul perceiving this, did the like: and then the Duke had three souls in one body; and had there been but some such souls more, the Duke would have been like the Grand Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been a platonic seraglio.3 But the Duke’s soul being wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble, afforded such delight and pleasure to the Empress’s soul by her conversation, that these two souls became enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew jealous at first, but then considering that no adultery could be committed amongst Platonic lovers, and that Platonism was divine, as being derived from divine Plato, cast forth of her mind that Idea of jealousy. Then the conversation of these three souls was so


pleasant, that it cannot be expressed; for the Duke’s soul entertained the Empress’s soul with scenes, songs, music, witty discourses, pleasant recreations, and all kinds of harmless sports [.] Cavendish’s presentation of her husband is alternately flattering and teasing. It engages with one schema (or one indicator of the true aristocratic ethos) for her implied reader, and with another for her husband himself. This change reflects a change in narrative viewpoint. The judgement of Cavendish’s fanciful alter ego, the Empress, is linked to an aristocratic role-theme, identifying the Duke’s equestrianism as ‘an exercise fit and proper for noble and heroic persons’. In contrast, the Duchess’s concern (‘troubled, that her dear lord and husband used such a violent exercise’), refers to a more intimate domestic script – the Duke’s daily routine. I suspect that this alludes to points of daily dispute: whether the ageing husband took too much exercise, and the wife too little.14 The shift in viewpoint entails a change in pathos from admiration to solicitude, though both these are already implied in the Duchess’s reaction to the Duke’s mere appearance, with its ‘splendorous’ transformation of her ‘aerial vehicle’. Here, in visible form, we see the state of inner emotion which Quintilian makes prerequisite to pathos, and which wordlessly persuades the reader of the strength and spontaneity of conjugal affection. But as she goes on to elaborate the whimsical picture of ‘a platonic seraglio’ – a self-deconstructing image, in that it rules out male autocracy and sexual jealousy – she seems to allude to a more painful aspect of their relationship, his continued gallantry towards other women.15 To me this reads like an old joke with a new twist. The viability of platonic love is, however, immediately called in question by the oddly circular subject/adjunct argument involved in her claim ‘that Platonism was divine, as being derived from divine Plato’. If Plato is distinctively ‘divine’, he is so metonymically, by association with the divine truth and virtue which have refined his contemplative soul, along the lines set out in his dialogues. But the ‘divine’ doctrine, or discerned truth, of ‘Platonism’ would be derived from the same source and not from Plato. Fancy happily leaves the word without a referent; but going through the motions of argument has something of the character of a routine or script, to give substance to the daily scene of witty discourse at table or elsewhere. What really tilts the balance of the passage is the move back from semi-reassuring, wistful whimsy to a more ebullient and affectionate celebration of the Duke’s ‘scenes, songs, music, witty discourses, pleasant recreations, and all kinds of harmless sports’ – something which, in its amplificatory


heaping up (synathroesmus) of items, seems to echo the warmth, vitality, curiosity and inventiveness of the Duke. That these should be internalized, and enjoyed through the intuitive (wordless?) intercourse of soul with soul, seems specially appropriate in the light of Newcastle’s reduced fortunes and marginalized position relative to the Court in London. In contrast to the abstract and fanciful medium of observation and encounter represented by the previous passage, it will be interesting and invigorating to look at an earlier piece by Margaret Cavendish, one which – whether or not it is characteristic of her writing or her way of engaging with the world – does seem to correspond to Germaine Greer’s lively representation of her qualities as examined in Chapter 3. The passage quoted there (see pp. 101–2), evokes Cavendish’s alleged blending of corporal and culinary imagery, including the claim that ‘In her armoury of imagery human bodies are kitchens, boiling, basting, frying and stewing away in filth and steamy heat, and human beings are bisques or custards’. Does the following poem substantiate such an impression? The text follows the spelling and punctuation of Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653), p. 128:

A Posset for Nature’s Breakfast:

L

Ife scummes the Cream of Beauty with Time’s Spoon And drawes the Claret Wine of Blushes soon, There boiles it in a Skillet cleane of Youth, Then thicks it well with crumbl’d Bread of Truth. And sets it on the Fire of Life, which growes The clearer, if the Bellowes of Health blowes. Then takes the Eggs of Faire, and Bashfull Eyes, And puts them in a Countenance that’s wise, And cuts a Lemmon in of sharpest Wit, By Discretion’s Knife, as he thinkes fit. A handfull of chast Thoughts double refin’d, Six spoonfuls of a Noble, and Gentle Mind. A Graine of Mirth, to give’t a little Tast, Then takes it off for feare the substance waft. And puts it in a Bason of Rich Wealth, And in this Meat doth Nature please her felfe.

A curious cognitive process is entailed in reading this poem, which, like several other poems in the series of ‘Fancies’ of which it forms a


part (Poems and Fancies, pp. 126–54), is a fanciful account of cookery (compare the two following poems, ‘Meat drest for Natures Dinner’, and ‘A Bisk for Natures Table’ – pp. 129–30). Here, the reader seems prompted to recognise two distinct scripts for the realisation of two social scenes: narrative and description. The first is instantiated as the ‘method’ section of a recipe, and the second as a kind of effictio, the description of a young gentlewoman’s face, attractive and spirited. As a sustained metaphor, paralleling the stage by stage heating and mixing of the posset’s ingredients with the progressive perfection of a marriageable woman, culminating in her timely introduction to society at the peak of her beauty and social accomplishment, the poem gradually breaks down, as the required Thematic Organisation Points fail to materialise. Though the sense of bodily warmth and health, modest sexual awareness, and unaffected honesty centres quite pleasingly on ‘the Fire of Life’, the mind resists the imagery of eyes being beaten up like eggs (unless in this case it proves possible, imaginatively, to make something akin to an omelette, that is, a posset, without breaking eggs); and indeed the ‘countenance’ reforms itself as something containing the eyes as distinct features. Moreover the final elements, ‘Chast Thoughts’, ‘a Noble, and Gentle Mind’, and ‘Mirth’, though handled like ingredients, have no direct culinary equivalents – though perhaps corresponding to the spice, sugar and salt content of the posset. The poem parallels, and perhaps parodies, one concern and area of competence conventionally assigned to women at this period, cookery. But if I am right in maintaining that the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor fall apart – and it will be noted that in the following poem, though the figurative cookery continues, none of the ingredients are compared to real foodstuffs, while in the third poem the metaphor is seen only in the title and the last four lines – what does the cookery signify emotionally in contrast to the literal content, the listing, ordering and admixture of human features and qualities? I would suggest a rare species of pathos in poetry if not in life, boredom. Margaret Cavendish is rejecting, not the actual task of cookery, which she would never have undertaken as a gentlewoman, especially after her marriage to the exiled Earl of Newcastle had raised her to the nobility, but the domestic responsibilities and preoccupations which it typifies. This is not however pathos in the primary rhetorical sense; it betrays Margaret’s feelings rather than seeking to move those of a reader. Nevertheless, the few points of correspondence between cookery and a young gentlewoman’s formation – the constituents, the proportions, the timing and the sequence – do help to present that


achievement with which a feminised and gentrified Nature ‘pleases herself’. In a far more relaxed fashion than Lucy Hutchinson, ‘Nature’ (alias Margaret Cavendish the published poet) is also pleased to view herself, or other women with whom she empathises, who have wealthier ‘basons’ to be served up in, as she would be viewed by a male suitor – despite the fact that the next poem rejects extravagant male devotion, while the following one tends towards Narcissism. We already glimpse here the ‘erotics of female doubling’ which Kate Lilley detects in the later prose passage. But the poem does not really reflect Germaine Greer’s picture of Cavendish’s imagination, as some kind of stewpot. The prose passage seems to substantiate Richard Nate’s view, in that pathos works independently even of the logos of verisimilitude, but according to a logos or arithmetic of its own, amplifying both the emotion and the moral engagement, and thus the affectivity, through multiple reflection on the female side of the exchange with the Duke. The Duke as reader sees himself in two feminine mirrors expressing different but consonant emotions of admiration and solicitude; and the reader sees the Duke’s vivacity and courtesy detached from their usual association with male power. In the ‘Posset’ poem we can use schema theory to acquire a sharper sense of the poem’s feminist sentiment, which does not quite match Germaine Greer’s impression of a world reconceived and repossessed in culinary (and thus domestic terms), but undercuts its ostensible picture of a woman being reared and readied for marriage and the duties that will go with it.

5.4

Shakespeare: back to the audience?

I have not the space to provide a summarised context for those passages from Shakespeare which are involved in the critical and interpretative writing of Terry Eagleton and Lisa Jardine, as discussed earlier. But the plays concerned, Macbeth and King Lear, will almost certainly be better known to the reader than either part of Tamburlaine. How does our sense of either passage’s context, or our memory of its impact in performance, shape our response to its language now – and how far can a closer approach to the language illuminate context and performance? 5.4.1

Macbeth: desolation revisited

Faced by the extreme depth and power of the lines which, towards the end of Macbeth, express its protagonist’s despairing nihilism, and


which might well be thought to provide an unsurpassable example of T.S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’, how far might interpretations like Eagleton’s modify our emotion? A Brechtian perception of Macbeth as duped by the power structures of feudalism and destroyed by the release of his inhibitions would certainly re-orient our emotions (if any survived); but in any case should we, will we, simply be empathising with the villain-hero? How compulsively are we drawn into his situation? Do the lines confirm Eagleton’s claim that ‘Macbeth ends up chasing an identity which continually eludes him’; that ‘he becomes a floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed pursuit of an anchoring signified’? Macbeth. … Wherefore was that cry? Seyton. The Queen, my Lord, is dead. Macbeth. She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, V.v.15–27 Death, whatever grammatical form its signifier takes, ‘dead’ or ‘died’, is reduced to just a word, with no emotional charge. Was Shakespeare recollecting that other great homicide at the death of his queen: ‘For she is dead? Thy words do pierce my soul’ (II.Tamb., II.iv.125), and demonstrating the ultimate contrast? And as emotion is displaced from death, so the following lines effectively displace the unspoken word ‘today’, the awareness of life as it is lived and enjoyed ‘upon this bank and shoal of time’ from its position between ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’. Eagleton is certainly right about the ‘chase’, grown automatic and repetitive, after what cannot be achieved today but might be achieved ‘tomorrow’ – all of which is conveyed by a threefold repetition of the word, linked by the repeated conjunction ‘and’ (polysyndeton), which


seems protracted into an infinite series like a recurrent decimal despite being repeated only once. Infinite that is, until the end of time. As Kenneth Muir16 and numerous other commentators have shown, the passage is haunted by biblical echoes, including Revelation’s vision of an angel, holding a book and announcing ‘that there should be time no longer’ (Revelation 10.6). Even if they were so caught up in the rhythm and emphasis upon ‘creeping’ time as to be clutched by Macbeth’s despair (never going fast enough towards tomorrow, never leaving time for anything to be achieved between one ‘pace’ of the clock and the next), the original audience would be aware that by every indication known to them, Macbeth was a damned soul hastening towards Judgement. Anybody who was impelled to feel as he feels, accepting the inclusion model through which he purports to reflect the general experience of ‘all our yesterdays’, would as a consequence either pity the predicament they had been induced to imagine, or recoil in horror from their own yielding – this being the shadow of their own fallen selves, however repressed in their own progress ‘from day to day’. The dominant trope of the lines, however, must be metonymy – conspicuous by its non-functioning, because time is being emptied not of the things desired in it, which can always be referred to ‘tomorrow’, but of the things done in it. In cognitive terms it is a complete wipe-out; all themes, goals, plans, roles, scripts and scenes become redundant when nothing is done to enact them. The impossibility of cognitive engagement with an empty world explains the peculiarly blank emotionless emotion of the passage, the absence in it of the positive memory of an object now lost, that normally underlies lament. The displacement of today as the locus of action, as insisted on by Christ in his injunction to ‘take no thought for the morrow’ (Matthew 6:34), is further emphasised by the mere semblances of action in the successive images of a walking shadow, a player and an idiot which conclude the soliloquy. Yet Macbeth still implies that time has content; why else is it ‘recorded’ (if not taken to heart in the root sense of that word), like an echo of his lost conscience? Similarly, ‘shadow’ implies substance, ‘a poor player’ a role, and wordless ‘fury’ some kind of suffering subject. A willingness to see nothing but undifferentiated fooling, unexplained gestures of pride and anxiety, and the idiot’s frustrated urge to give voice to the turmoil within him, make recording effectively impossible and frustrate its purpose: to learn, and to confront actions with their consequences. What is so appalling in the benumbed Macbeth, reduced to disappointment and weary indignation at the cheat put upon him, is the final exhaustion of that strug-


gle between desire and guilt so evident in his earlier soliloquies, and in dialogue with his ‘fiend-like queen’, an exhaustion brought about not by an unavailing quest for identity, but by the terrible deeds in which he took time by the forelock, but which by now seem too trivial to record. Where once only he and his wife knew what kind of ‘inside-out Silenus’ they comprised, the serpent under the flower, now everybody knows what was inside Macbeth except Macbeth himself, who has forgotten (at least, where his emotions are concerned). What is more dominant here: that Macbeth pursued desires forced on him by a sick social order (as Eagleton suggests), or that he behaved so ruthlessly in pursuit of them that he lost all ruth – all pity – even for himself? 5.4.2 Edmund and Gloucester on Shakespeare’s Cliff: homoeopathic pathos? Now we will take our own look into the ‘existential void’ within which (according to Lisa Jardine) Gloucester jumps off a non-existent cliff (King Lear, IV.v). Having noted that his guide is speaking ‘In better phrase and matter than thou didst’, he is brought mentally to the brink: Edgar. Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring barque Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (Folio Text as in The Norton Shakespeare, IV.v.11–24) Before we examine the reason that Edgar gives for his action, let us consider the impression that this topogaphia (enargeia representing a real place though not the locale of the action), might create within the despairing Gloucester. Obviously of primary emotional importance to Edgar as he ‘trifles’ with his father’s ‘despair’, is the construction in the


blinded man’s mind, distracted as he is by his ‘eyes’ anguish’, of enough physical fear and sympathetic vertigo to be thoroughly convinced that he is on the brink of a six or seven hundred foot sheer drop. He is not so distracted that he cannot recognise the change in his son’s voice; and without falling into the old error of thinking of a dramatic character as a real person whose psychological make-up is exactly portrayed by the writer, Shakespeare’s concern with fathers and children, and his urge as a tragic dramatist to move towards the ultimate moment of recognition at which Gloucester’s heart, unlike Lear’s, will ‘burst smilingly’ (V.iii.189) ensures that he will represent Gloucester’s repressed awareness of Edgar’s presence. This is evident enough in the fact that his ‘last words’, apart from telling his guide to stand back, are a blessing on his son. The means which Edgar uses to create the cliff, a barrier of fear against which Gloucester must hurl himself if he is to achieve his death, also create an extraordinary impression of life. They recall the great outer world which is to be evoked so memorably in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, in which ordinary life just goes on around the extraordinary event, or one person’s subjective crisis. The ‘fearsomeness’ of the huge frame of space in front of him is communicated at the beginning and end of Edgar’s topographia by his instinctive bodily reaction of dizziness, evocative of the most basic kind of physical sympathy in his listener, and aided by the deictic adverb, ‘so low!’ In its marked Fsp position, this constructs the acute angle at the apex of a right angled triangle comprising the cliff, the beach and Edgar’s line of vision, projecting Gloucester upward to the required height, before confirming that with a progressive proportioning of the things observed. The ‘crows and choughs’ (the cries of ‘gulls’ or ‘seamews’ would be more conspicuous in their absence) represent animal life; and the samphire-gatherer who gets his living in routine danger of death (whether he ‘hangs’ with two feet and one hand, or dangles from a rope), measures the urgency of his own need to go on living. The fishermen too (who near Dover probably fish off the beach in their boats, as they still do at Hastings), in their relaxed but purposeful movement represent what makes a dangerous life bearable, as they move from or towards their own confrontations with death. In a further contrast, the ‘tall anchoring bark’ suggests an enforced pause in the business of getting a living, while the movements of inanimate water and stone, in their ‘murmuring’ and ‘idleness’, metaphorically reflect the political discontents fostered by the disproportion between effort, danger and reward. The majesty of nature (including its ‘mice’ and ‘beetles’), and of human life as part


of it, has to be there if Gloucester is to believe in the cliff; and the great picture of endurance contructed by Edgar counterweighs other moments in the play when its exact sense of proportion fails, when ‘a dog, a horse, a rat’, live while Cordelia dies. As an undertow to his precipitation towards death Gloucester does not attend to this presentation of life, but from the audience’s perspective, enjoying the momentary relaxation of stress as the description unfolds, its emotional counter-pressure against their imaginative empathy with him, as he ‘patiently’ confronts a fearsome death in the face of a more unbearable ‘affliction’ (see l. 36, following), will be stronger. And what of the leap itself, and Jardine’s ‘horror and embarrassment’ (see above)? Whether Edgar is adrift in a world of ‘raw emotion’, and is clutching at straws in his talk of a ‘cure’ for despair, or whether he would have been perceived as so doing by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, would depend partly on whether a precipitate fall resulting in no harm, but in a ‘cure’, rang any bells with them – whether some such personal and physical scene, and a script to go with it, could be presupposed in any of their memories. Coincidentally or otherwise, Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 3, 227,17 following other instances of homoeopathic cures, quotes from Ovid’s Heroides XV,18 in which Sappho, ‘Cupidinis oestro percita … [stung with love-frenzy …], comes to the summit of the Leucadian Rock, overlooking the sea, to throw herself down. Hoping ‘to be freed of her love-pangs’, she is reassured by a Naiad that (in the lines as quoted in translation by Burton): Hither Deucalion came, when Pyrrha’s love Tormented him, and leapt down to the sea And had no harm at all, but by and by His love was gone and chased quite away. Burton cites several other instances of this particular, precipitous cure. The story of Sappho’s passion was probably well enough known for this echo of the love-epistle to be caught, and even if it was not, I (for one) am resistant to Jardine’s contention that ‘Lear severs affect from its epistolary setting where it could be controlled’ (p. 94), by not actually presenting the audience with instance of this controlled emotion. I see effective pathos in two letters which in her view are just ‘banally instructive’ (p. 94), that is, the forged letter from Edgar contrived by Edmund to incense his father (I.ii.45–52), and the ‘ungracious’ letter from Goneril which Edgar obtains on the death of Oswald (IV.vi.254–62). This reminder of the persuasive power of letters


might help catch the echo of a more positive though possibly delusive message retailed by a letter; and if Shakespeare’s audience knew the pathos of Ovid’s love-epistles as well as they knew its more tempered use in Erasmian letters, they might recognise the script (or the more general scene) of a passion cured by a harmless fall. What Edgar contrives for his father, by implication a homoeopathic cure of despair through a desperate act, would fit into that frame; and although despair dominates Gloucester, not love-melancholy as in Burton, it can be linked to the cynical lechery that led to Edmund’s begetting, to his betrayal by an indulged love-child, his agony, and his sense of enlightenment come too late (‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes’ – V.iii.171–2). And why does Lear, later, address him as ‘blind Cupid’ (IV.v.131)? Burton’s own explanatory gloss is ‘vehement fear expels love’. Why not the love component in the love-induced despair? Meanwhile, the ultimate cure of passion by endurance has been quietly insinuated by our cognitive engagement with the human and animal life pursuing its goals of survival, below the cliff.

5.5 5.5.1

Paradise Lost: engaging the reader Satan newly fallen: pathos in perspective

Without analysis (since, uniquely, this has already been done in Chapter II) we should remind ourselves of Satan the orator, as the narrator slides from wincing sympathy with his disfigurement, to empathy with him, as he contemplates his faithful followers who have suffered so much on his behalf, paying for a rebellion which he conceived before involving them, and who are still with him, despite being condemned Forever now to have their lot in pain, Millions of spirits for his fault amerced Of heaven, and from eternal splendours flung For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood, Their glory withered. Paradise Lost I.607–12 We are inside his mind with the narrator as he conceives the emotion which will impel his followers into a new burst of activity and a new confirmation of his supremacy.


In other passages the empathetic engagement may be less, and the reader’s inward assessment of Satan more insistent, as he is measured against earlier and later heroes (earlier than the ‘belated’ poem, later than the hero in ‘real’ time). How far, if at all, do the deictic features, the sentence perspective and the cognitive engagement through which Milton energises that major sequence of similes marking Satan’s resurgence in Paradise Lost, I.283–313, and subjected to intense scrutiny by Harold Bloom in his A Map of Misreading (pp. 112–13, above), confirm that critic’s detection in them of acute revisionary anxiety, defended against by the master-trope of metalepsis? It should help us, in considering this, to look for the evidence of Milton’s conscious emotional engagement with the discerning reader. Is his supposed struggle with his poetic forebears essential to the task of opening the reader’s eyes to the all-pervasive cultural and religious contamination stemming from Satan’s rebellion (and from the human rebellion so nearly resembling it)? Or is it a distraction – or a fiction? Here I omit the final biblical parallel with the Red Sea and the drowned Egyptians (ll.304–13): He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round 285 Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, 290 Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. His spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great admiral, were but a wand, He walked with to support uneasy steps 295 Over the burning marl, not like those steps On heaven’s azure, and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire; Natheless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called 300 His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High overarched imbower …


Deictically, certain demonstrative pronouns and definite articles (‘those’, ‘that’, ‘the’) imply that the reader already has his or her imaginative bearings within the earthly and infernal spaces evoked by Milton – and within the wide European intellectual sphere, which is conveyed allusively through antonomasia: ‘The Tuscan artist’. His intellectual eminence releases Galileo from the constraints of time – he had lost his eyesight by 1637 and died in 1642 – as well as from the Inquisition, but he still ‘views’ the moon from a narrowly defined area with its topography of hill and vale. By contrast, the odd kind of anti-simile which is applied to Satan’s spear, to tell us what it is not like (by inference, it must be some six or seven hundred feet long!), has one specific geographical, non-deictic coordinate, ‘Norwegian’, to mark the mast’s northerly source, and one adjective, ‘some’, to indicate a particular though unidentified flagship, unknown by nation, dockyard, commander or deployment. The reader is free to imagine it anywhere from the Baltic to the Canary Islands. This instance clearly illustrates the usefulness of ‘some’ as a poetic adjective, however well-worn: it is analogous to a deictic reference in that it points the reader’s attention to a particular object; but it does so within a cognitive frame of reference rather than a spatial or sensory one. It combines particularization and generalization, pointing the reader back to the individual sources or recent reinforcements of his or her general ideas. But where the spear’s actual use is concerned, the deictic bearings are immediately restored, placing the reader, empathetically, between ‘the burning marl’ and ‘the torrid clime’. However, this particular spar is descending, not into the solid keelson of a warship but into the ‘burning marl’ or lava of Hell – while the final quoted simile again links the infernal frame of reference, with bearings taken from a position behind Satan as he heads away towards ‘that inflamed sea’, to those of an Italian landscape. Within these bearings, with their implied contrasts of heat and coolness, parching and moisture, barren and fertile, the dynamics of Milton’s verse sharpens the pathos further. In Firbasian terms the first sentence combines the Phenomenon Scale with the Quality Scale as fresh perceptions strike the reader: the collocation ‘superior fiend’ reflects the judicious ethos of Milton’s narrator. It paradoxically couples an acknowledgement of Satan’s exalted status with a sense of his baseness and malice, and thus it constitutes an emotional and moral phenomenon. This rapid alternation of positive and negative is to continue throughout the passage. ‘Superior fiend’ is ‘contextually independent’ in its temporal ‘setting’ (‘He scarce had ceased when …’) though it plays on the idea of ‘pernicious height’ in Beelzebub’s preceding


remark (l. 282). But it promptly becomes a ‘quality bearer’ for the movement of Satan, progressively ‘specified’, firstly in its direction and then in its encumbered condition. The ‘ponderous shield’ which seems at first to be the subject of a further sentence on the Ph Scale, expands into a ‘massy’ phenomenon, developed through a phrase in apposition (‘Ethereal temper’) and multiple modifiers (‘massy, large and round’), before being contained in an absolute construction and revealed retrospectively as a ‘further specification’ about Satan’s progress. ‘[C]ast … behind’ its owner – both physically and temporally – it is now more of a hindrance than a help; the time for ‘open war’ (II.41) is almost past. But its ‘broad circumference’ – that is, its vast enclosed area (see OED, sense 2, citing this passage) – seeming momentarily to marginalise everything else, starts the next sentence as a new phenomenon, one of sheer size. This is inferred from its width and weight, before the expanding sentence repositions it as a quality bearer, removed to a distance both in time and space through its comparison to the moon as viewed through Galileo’s ‘optic glass’. The viewing is progressively specified with respect to instrument, time, place and purpose (or effect).19 The final, infinitive clause (‘to descry …’) achieves the pathos of wonder, as noted by Harold Bloom: the hills and river valleys of Tuscany are mirrored in reverse order, and thus in an emotive, convergent structure,20 by the lunar landscape with its mind-expanding, tantalising ‘new lands, rivers and mountains’ – the ultimate and most dynamic specification, though it precedes the adverbial phrase ‘in her spotty globe’. With this, the sentence lapses into, and ends, on a note of ambiguity which will be discussed below – the mode of pathos being linked with especial closeness to a shift in cognition. The ‘scaling’ of the next sentence leads ultimately to a contrasted idea. Satan’s spear does have its use – concealed for three lines by a proportional comparison with the tallest imaginable tree. Again, it appears to be the ‘contextually independent’ subject of a Ph Scale sentence, an awesome symbol of strength – before proving to be a mere specification for Satan’s unsteady progress, an index of weakness, instrumental to his tottering, blistering feet. But the reader is led to this very deviously. S.E. Fish has offered an account of the process in his Surprised by Sin (1967),21 pp. 23–7; but in my view this lacks the benefit of the kind of focus Firbas can provide: it seems to discount the full interplay between the impact of fresh ‘information’ in a sentence, and the sense of resolving syntax. Fish starts very fairly; l. 292 does indeed create the impression that ‘spear’ and ‘pine’ are to be equated. We expect the verb, when it comes, to confirm this. But we register the movement


into a relative clause, midway through the line (‘to equal which’), and thus begin to expect a more complex resolution – at least two verbs before the end of the sentence. However, even the first of these is delayed as the tree (already implied to be taller than anything in Homer) is linked to an elaborate structure of post-modification: adjectival participial phrase, adverbial phrase. It is ‘the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast / Of some great admiral’ and combines the Ph and Quality Scales, moving on from the specification of origin to the further specification of purpose, and compelling our involvement with the scripts, scenes and planning needed to create that vast, seaborne engine of destruction; but then the titanic symbol of seventeenth century sea power is shrunk to Lilliputian size – ‘the mast’ being reduced to a ‘wand’ as the first of the anticipated verbs, modal in form, finally appears. And immediately after that, the main verb appears, complete with its prepositional link back to ‘His spear’ – revealing the latter as a mere ‘specification’, not nominative but ablative, reduced to an accidental function as the nearest thing to hand. I cannot see how a reader fully alert to the syntax, and the dynamics, would gain even a fleeting impression that the spear ‘were but a wand / He walked with’, in the hand of a miniature Satan, as Fish claims (p. 25). It is in my mind far more impressively reductive as a colossal third leg – though as the sentence develops into a ‘further specification’ of his need for support, empathetic engagement (and almost pity) for Satan develops, through the appositional comparison with ‘those steps / On heaven’s azure’. To attend steadily to the dynamics, deixis and other patterning of Milton’s sentences, and to benefit discriminatingly from Fish’s ebullient analysis, does nothing in my view to question Bloom’s reading. Rather it seems to confirm it, by demonstrating just how like Galileo we see further, and see through the gigantic Satan – and all the powers from Achilles to De Ruyter – of which he is the precursor. 5.5.2

Love: the alternative model

It seems appropriate while reading the lines so intriguingly applied by Catherine Belsey to human sexuality (see pp. 113–16, above), to enquire whether their logos quite matches her reading. Do the ‘difficulties’ not encountered in angelic lovemaking derive from the alleged inequality between man and woman, or from a ‘transporting’ degree of beauty in the ‘inferior’, or do they simply refer to animal and sexual anatomy (‘membrane, joint, and limb’ – 625)? The exclusive masculinity of heaven’s population is cited by Adam after the Fall at


the height of his resentment against Eve, and is irrelevant to the difference Raphael alludes to. To have written that in Heaven ‘There are of course no men’ would no more irrelevant; it’s not a question of gender but of physicality: Let it suffice thee that thou know’st Us happy, and without love no happiness. Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy In eminence, and obstacle find none Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars: Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace, Total they mix, union of pure with pure Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul. VIII.618–29 Having just cautioned Adam for tracing an experienced effect – the ‘commotion’ of his feelings for Eve – back to its possible cause in some failure of nature in his own creation, or some disproportion in hers, Raphael replies to his final question. This serves to smooth over Adam’s ‘half-abashed’ sense of self-exposure (595 ff.), by probing Raphael’s own capacity for embarrassment. There is a delicate impression here of the dynamics of friendship, the way that trust in a friend’s values and judgement can tempt a person into confidences not improper in themselves – when there is a real need for advice or reassurance – but likely to get garbled in the rush of released feeling. Even Raphael doesn’t quite keep his cool when appealed to for a reciprocal confidence, replying ‘with a smile that glowed / Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue’ (ll.618–9). This blush, endorsed by the further specification within the relative clause, does not, as once suggested, show that Raphael enjoys lovemaking more than serving God, but simply reflects a distinction between types of relationship, a private joy in another setting. Tactfully enough, he mirrors Adam’s own contentious argument from cause (that is, love as cause). In doing so, he goes as far as he can in trusting Adam with some sense of what is peculiar to angelic love, while signalling a willingness to give Adam the benefit of his corresponding lack of direct knowledge about human love. In a brief version of the progression from memory, reason, and moral resolve, to further enlightenment, which is so often repeated in Milton, he appeals to the commonplace already proved in


Adam’s experience and validated in debate with God himself: ‘without love no happiness’. That Raphael is as happy as he claims to be is evident from the blush, and from his lack of constraint despite the severity of his previous speech; but Adam is invited to draw the inference, to use both memory and reason, before he hears more – indeed in itself the sentence suggests that he won’t hear any more. Encouraged to think, as well as to feel (or merely to indulge curiosity), he is perhaps steadied, and Raphael perhaps more inclined to confide. What he says is of his own choice, a personal not a divine revelation, but one expressing the purity of that ‘mysterious reverence’ which Adam senses in human sexuality. ‘Pure’ is the key word, linking back to the ‘kisses pure’ of IV.502, and the ‘sanctitude severe and pure’ (IV.293) of humanity’s first appearance. ‘Whatever pure’ concedes a latitude to Adam and his judgement, in interpretation of the ‘weakness’ (V3.532) and ‘awe’ (558) he feels in approaching Eve, since Raphael cannot directly experience purity in that form. ‘Pure’ floats between the purity of Adam in enjoying and the purity of Eve’s reciprocal love; but in assuring Adam that the delight of angelic love has the same quality ‘in eminence’, Raphael treads a fine line between the implication that he can’t imagine / couldn’t fancy Adam’s mode of lovemaking, and a salutary reminder that his way is not the only way. The convergent, balanced structure uniting desire with fulfilment (‘union of pure with pure / desiring’), and the impetus given to ‘Desiring’ by its initial position in the line, sound the one unmistakably authentic erotic note – and also the affirmation, in each such act, of another unique created being in all its ‘purity’ – a purity paradoxically increased through the very process of ‘mixing’. Without having to force the sense, there is a link here with Catherine Belsey’s icon of sexual liberation: we glimpse the kind of ‘difference’ which non-corporeal beings unable to ground difference (or found power) upon sexual anatomy, would love in each other.

5.6

A case in point: Courtship in Wyatt and Gascoigne

I am going to conclude by returning to the beginning, to the text chosen by Gary Waller to introduce early modern writing, and courtly culture, to his students. I will view this one text within a more developed physical and social setting, and in relation to a more sustained literary parallel. Has Wyatt no words for his ‘pain’ in ‘They flee from me’ – for the ‘emergent “structures of feeling”’ which Waller, quoting Raymond


Williams, detects within his poetry, with no ‘cultural forms’ through which to express them (Waller, p. 118)? Is he bound ‘to be the aggressor or to be the victim’? To remind ourselves, let us look at Wyatt’s text, printed by Muir and Thomson from the Egerton Manuscript.22 Can we characterise the emotions and social context of the poem more sharply than Waller did? THEY fle from me that sometyme did me seke With naked fote stalking in my chambre. I have sene theim gentill tame and meke That nowe are wyld …

(Stanza 1, 1–4) For me, Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573)23 is as valuable for the sidelight it sheds on Wyatt, as is Thomas Whythorne’s curious Autobiography, quoted by Waller on p. 110, claiming that it yields an important clue to the generic roles of lover and poet, and the poet’s problematic sense of audience. In both cases we must not discount differences in attitude and experience between any other writer and Wyatt. Gascoigne is, firstly, interesting for the topographical aspects of his account of love-intrigues within a great household, for the unconstrained informality with which male and female members visit, and congregate, in each others’ lodgings – and for the ease with which they spy on each other, as when Lady Frances sees F.J. returning from his assignation with Elinor, ‘he having a large base court (that is, an outer courtyard) to pass over before he could recover his stair-foot door’. Bearing in mind that many of the rooms assigned to residents and guests, male and female, opened off common staircases as indicated here, it is not surprising that those surreptitiously visiting Wyatt’s protagonist – whether for business or pleasure – would go barefoot. The erotic visitation remembered with such relish in the second stanza might require a less exposed route than F.J.’s, and more like that taken on a later occasion ‘by his mistress in her nightgown who, knowing all privy ways in that house very perfectly, had conveyed herself into F.J.’s chamber unseen and unperceived’ (though by this time F.J. is in anguish, torn between desire, jealousy and guilty suspicion, and the episode culminates in a virtual rape – shameful to the modern reader, though underplayed by Gascoigne’s narrator, G.T.). In Wyatt’s poem, a similar risk and caution is reflected in the woman’s thrilling whisper, which seems calculated to reduce the protagonist’s previous lordly insouciance to a desperate craving:


… In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her armes long and small; Therewithall swetely did my kysse, And softely said ‘dere hert, how like you this?’ (Stanza 2, 10–14) This, then, is a night-time visit. The nightgown falls away like Corinna’s robe in Ovid’s Amores I.v. The similarity in this detail, besides the paralleled groupings (man in bed, woman bending over him), and the broken-off narrative, is noted in the commentaries, for example, Muir and Thomson, p. 299. But the differences from Ovid help to specify the feeling: this is darker and more dangerous than Ovid’s sultry siesta-time, as the parallels with Gascoigne suggest. The woman is more seductive (her gown falling before it is grasped, as it is in Ovid) and the man so enraptured that, later, it seems half a dream (l. 15). And nothing akin to Ovid’s terse ‘Who can’t guess what followed’ (‘Caetera quis nescit?’)24 points to subsequent lovemaking. Anyway, the dream turns sour: … all is torned thorough my gentilnes Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking; And I have leve to goo of her goodeness, And she also to vse new fangilnes. But syns that I so kyndely ame serued, I would fain knowe what she hath deserued. (Stanza 3, 16–21) Gascoigne reinforces Waller’s perception of the poem (pp. 116–17) ‘as a fictional dramatisation of erotic anguish, or … within the Renaissance tradition of debating questions about love, … raising specifically the question of fickleness (‘new fangleness’) and desert (‘what she hath deserved’)’. Wyatt’s readers would recognise the formal social scene in which a lady’s ‘servant’ begs leave of absence – here distorted by the lady’s enjoyment goal of cruelty or ‘fun’ (to quote Waller). They would also see a personal script of ‘new-fangleness’ never socially endorsed, at least not by men. This might well sound the strongest note of empathy in the poem, at least where the stress of relationships is concerned. In The Adventures of Master F.J., discussions on the rights and wrongs of love are held by daylight, in those very


‘chambers’ furnished with beds in which (at night), acts of love, lust, or rape, occur. The stories offered for discussion, like Mistress Frances’s tale of the husband who, discovering his wife’s infidelity, silently paid her for sex until she repented, without confronting her lover (pp. 67–73), might have obvious bearings on the conduct of one or more listeners. Indeed, Frances’s story is aimed directly at the ‘governor’ appointed to pronounce on the question it raises, F.J. himself. There is thus a continuity between the spheres of public and private feeling, between desire, anxiety, self-consciousness and shamelessness, secret triumph and the threat of public humiliation. In effect, the courtly25 ambience reflected and addressed in Gascoigne’s novel points to the probable cognitive structures in the minds of Wyatt’s original readers as habitués of the royal court, and thus to their predictable range of emotional response to lyrics such as ‘They flee from me’. The physical scene of the bed/chamber provides a setting for the social scene of courtly love, with its debates, professions of ‘service’ (F.J. being publicly acknowledged as Lady Elinor’s ‘servant’), its adoption of coterie names (F.J. is ‘Trust’ to Lady Frances’s ‘Hope’), and its displays of favour or neglect. The identical setting, by night, witnesses the personal scene of sex. This is painfully heightened in The Adventures when the perfumed linen publicly provided by Elinor for F.J. during the day, to solace his languishing condition, accommodates her rape during the following night (Salzman, pp. 52–3, 58–9, 61). For the participants, individually, each scene has its distinctive script in furtherance of its goal – on the one side, social advancement within the group as a man or woman of style, discernment and influence: on the other, sexual pleasure heightened by various contradictory factors such as the peril of exposure and (for both parties) the sense of power occasioned by the disempowerment of a husband, father or rival lover. But the vital point is that whoever participates in both scenes, will while involved with one, remember, hint at, or anticipate the other, but will never acknowledge it – in the social scene, because the sex must be secret; in the sexual scene, because objectivity is fatal to passion. These conditions are tantamount to rules, which can only be broken with disastrous consequences as they are when F.J., pressed beyond endurance by Elinor in her anxiety at his distracted state, confronts her in bed with the facts of her own inconstancy. The rape follows. In both scenes, the power and attractiveness of each participant will be derived largely from their unvoiced awareness – and from the emotion which accompanies it (provided that this remains under control). But does this substantiate Waller’s view that participants are confined to the


roles of ‘victim’ or ‘aggressor’? Certainly F.J. slips atrociously from one to the other at the crisis of his story, as Wyatt’s tantalised lover heads the other way from arrogance to abjection; but The Adventures suggests other models for conduct, such as the patient, perceptive friendship offered by Frances to F.J. (far beyond his deserts), in the apparent trust that he will at last reconsider his passion for Elinor and grow to appreciate true female virtue. Gascoigne also provides an object lesson in the healing of relationships, through Frances’s story of the wronged husband, whose repentant wife finally tricks her lover into renouncing her. Unfortunately for Frances, F.J. never acknowledges his own egoism, vice and folly, or validates the coterie name, ‘Hope’, which he conferred on her at an early stage – and a darker impression is left by Gascoigne’s revised version, where she dies ‘galled with the grief of his great ingratitude’ and he, still blaming women for his own failings, pursues ‘a dissolute kind of life’ (Salzman, p. 80). Frances vainly prompts F.J. to distance himself, intellectually and emotionally, from the double bind of aggression and passivity into which he has fallen. This same situation is also faced by Wyatt’s protagonist; but the poem hints at a more positive outcome. Whether or not rendered incapable by Court culture of imagining better gender relations, as Waller maintained, the protagonist might at least be blaming himself in the way that was to be recommended so fruitlessly to F.J. Or, alternatively, the poet invites the reader to blame the lover (compare Donne’s ‘Apparition’?). Two words, ‘straunge’ (l. 17) and ‘kyndely’ (l. 20) resonate with bitter irony. Only a fool would think it unpredictable or surprising (‘straunge’) that a woman who had sought him in secret and endured his lazy arrogance (‘to take bread at my hand’ – l. 6) should turn the tables, reducing him to sexual dependency and then resorting to distant (‘straunge’) behaviour. Similarly, despite the misogyny of the charge that women seeking new lovers do so according to nature (‘kyndely’), the man’s own psychological and sexual instability, his shift from laid-back love-object to sexual leper, might seem similarly natural. At the same time, the antiphrasis of ‘kyndely’ in its other more familiar sense, here sneering in a directly oppositional sense at the woman’s cruelty, betrays its own irrationality (what’s merely instinctive can’t be reprehensible) and again reflects scorn on the man. Even if Waller is right about the Court, to reject both it and women (as Wyatt does in other poems) is to express neither aggression nor passivity, but to expose both responses – as characteristic of men – to reactions ranging from self-reproach to weariness and contempt. Placing a negative presentation of men


alongside that of women might be a start. Perhaps both parties should accept that behaving according to ‘kind’, whether with blind male arrogance and self-pity or with opportunistic female frivolity, is no excuse. Waller’s approach to the poem comes to rest on the pathos of an emotionally crippled condition; but Wyatt’s exposure of the lover points to the possibility of a change, then and there.

5.7

Conclusion

In this chapter, Schema theory has again, repeatedly, shown its value as a way of directing readers to link the details of a text to what they know, or can reconstruct, of the contexts which existed in the minds of original audiences and readerships. This has perhaps been most apparent in our return to Wyatt’s poem. This process would always be involved in producing a distinctive sense of emotional engagement, or a particular kind of expectation and uncertainty (as with the possible echo, in King Lear, of the Leucadian Rock and its lovelorn, epistolary context). Cognitive engagement with the original sources of feeling, within the text, might on reflection enable the reader to perceive powerful contrasts between some of the passages examined above – for example, between Baldwin’s sound-panorama which seems primarily to enact a social scene of arid verbal display, and Edgar’s visual panorama from Dover cliff, where the scripts, scenes, goals, and plans of enduring life, are present in abundance. The chapter has also instanced the value of some of the less constant phenomena noted by the ‘New’ Rhetoric, such as echo and convergence – crucial in one instance to the effective pathos of a speech. In the book as a whole, I have attempted to demonstrate that the pathos of a text should be read as carefully as its vocabulary, its allusions and its indices of the society and the time which produced it, and that this reading depends both on our sense of the reader’s or listeners’ receptivity, and on every emotive aspect of the text’s style and structure, from the overtones of imagery to the placing of words within a sentence. With this end in view, it would be a serious self-deprivation to use only one mode of rhetorical analysis, rather than both of those characterised here as ‘Old’ and ‘New’. Rhetoric is the interface between literature and language, both as they are written and spoken, and as they are studied, and it should draw its resources from both sides of that zone of interaction. The modern critical rhetoric looked at here has taught, pleased and moved me, variously; besides proving conclusively that ‘pathetical’ rhetoric is alive and well.


Is it possible to recover the force and colour of pathos within the original, inner frame of writer and audience, to further enliven debate in the outer frame? This will mean adjusting the reconstructed, inter-reflecting ‘mirrors’ of those persuaders, those audiences, very carefully, before deciding whether we can be caught into their inter-reflection, or whether we must stand aside from it. The examples of critical engagement which we have studied all have value; but some seem vindicated, and reinforced by this approach, more than others.

Notes 1

Introduction: Reconsidered Passions

1 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 40. 2 All quotations of Milton’s verse are from Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (eds), John Milton. The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 3 David Lodge, Thinks … (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). 4 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (London: Heinemann, 2000). 5 The Guardian, G2 15, Thursday 20 January 2000. 6 William Downes, ‘The Language of Felt Experience: Emotional, Evaluative and Intuitive’, Language and Literature, IX (2000) 99–121. 7 Aristotle’s Rhetoric exists in two convenient English translations: J.H. Freese (ed. and trans.) Aristotle: The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1959); and H.C. Lawson-Tancred (ed. and trans.), Aristotle: the Art of Rhetoric, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991). Quotations are from Freese unless otherwise stated. 8 As recently implied by Ian McEwan, in a lecture printed in the The Guardian, Saturday 9 June 2001 (Saturday Review, pp. 1, 3). 9 C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). 10 All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997). 11 R.C. Schank and R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977); R.C. Schank, Dynamic Memory: a Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 12 Elena Semino, Language & World Creation (London: Longman, 1997). 13 See G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: the Growth and Structure of his Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 57–62. 14 Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). For Arrangement, see pp. 171–4. 15 Semino cites M. Black, ‘More about metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 37–41. 16 See I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936, repr. Galaxy Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), Lectures V and VI on metaphor (pp. 89–138). 17 See S.C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 159–60). 186

Notes 187 18 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, in Sheldon Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 141–57, quoted by Lana Cable in her Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 24. 19 See Cable, as above, pp. 25–30. 20 Ricoeur, loc. cit., p. 152, quoted by Cable, p. 25. 21 See Edward W. Tayler, ‘Milton’s Firedrake’, Milton Quarterly, VI (1972), 7–10. 22 Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Concepts of Participation’, in P. Drew and A. Wootton (eds), Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interactive Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 161–227. 23 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). All citations of Marlowe’s plays are from this edition. 24 Jan Firbas, ‘On the Dynamics of Written Communication in the Light of the Theory of Functional Sentence Perspective’, in C.R. Cooper and S. Greenbaum (eds), Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches (London: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 40–71. 25 Jan Firbas, Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication, Studies in English Language Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 26 For Deixis, see Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and (for a critique of Levinson’s ‘standard’ approach) Peter Jones’s essay in New Essays in Deixis edited by K. Green (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 27 R.A. Carter, ‘Common Language: Corpus, Creativity and Cognition’, Language and Literature, VIII (1999), 199. 28 Susan M. Cockcroft, Investigating Talk (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), pp. 55–6. 29 If ‘well-feasted priest’ is not a Phenomenon in Firbasian terms. 30 Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: an Art of Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 31 Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, 1986). 32 Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, trans. H.M. Hubbell (with De Inventione and Topica), Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1959), I.3, pp. 356–7. 33 Cicero, Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell (with Brutus, trans. G.L. Hendrickson), Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1988), xxi.69, pp. 356–7. 34 See Hubbell’s note in the 1959 edition (see above), p. 356. 35 See for example M.A.K. Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), and Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (London: Pinter Publishers, 1994). 36 See Gabriel Harvey, Ciceronianus, ed. and trans. C.A. Forbes and H.S. Wilson (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1945). 37 For a review of Ramus’s own practice see Peter Sharratt, ‘Ramus 2000’, Rhetorica XVIII (2000), 422–4, 425–6. Sharratt cites Peter Mack’s 1998 article (see Chapter 2, n. 51), in which Mack notes (as paraphrased by Sharratt,

188 Notes p. 426) that ‘on occasion Ramus misses the full emotional force of the work on which he is commenting’. 38 See W. Nash, Rhetoric: the Wit of Persuasion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 3.

2

Sable Clouds and Silver Linings

1 Laurence D. Green, ‘The Pathetic Renaissance’, Biennial Conference of the ISHR, Warsaw, 25 July 2001. 2 See Plato, Gorgias, trans. and introd. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 44 ff. 3 Plato, Phaedrus and The Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. and introd. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973). 4 See Hamilton, p. 54 for Plato’s categorisation of souls as first incarnated – nine kinds, from the philosopher to the tyrant. 5 See the related passage in Plato, The Republic, trans. and introd. H.D.P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 184. Lee comments that Plato ‘is … probably always conscious that in speaking of “parts” … of the soul he is using a metaphor’. 6 The earlier tradition of commentary on these relationships is typified by A.E. Taylor, Plato (1926), University Paperbacks (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 302–09. 7 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). 8 James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, ‘Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’, Written Communication, XVII (2000), 432–44. 9 In contrast with Lawson-Tancred’s (‘Let rhetoric be the power to observe the persuasiveness of which any particular matter admits’ – p. 74), this translation stresses active intelligence and imagination. 10 On the enthymeme (i.e. syllogistic argument from probable premises, at least one of them often left implicit), see Garver, pp. 162–8. 11 For issue theory, culminating in Hermogenes (AD c. 160–225), see the Prolegomena, Translation and Commentary in Hermogenes, On Issues, ed. and trans. Malcolm Heath (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 12 In The Complete Gentleman, 1622 (see below) Henry Peacham the Younger quotes the view that ‘Aristotle’s rhetorics’ were ‘sufficient … to make both a scholar and an honest man’ (p. 57). 13 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 61. 14 See for example John Brinsley, Ludus Litterarius: or, the Grammar Schoole (London: Thomas Man, 1612). 15 See for example Millar Maclure’s Introduction to Christopher Marlowe, The Poems (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. xxxv–vi. Marlowe drew on marginalia by Ioannes Sulpitius and others to Lucan’s Pharsalia as printed at Frankfurt, for certain phrases in his translation. 16 Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1954). 17 See Marcia A. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: 1. Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985); and J.M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Notes 189 18 The use Shakespeare’s Antony makes of Caesar’s bloodstained toga is foreshadowed by its display at his funeral, recalled in Quintilian’s discussion of pathos (IO, VI.i.31). 19 See the Loeb edn, p. 388: ‘Quanquam aliud videtur oratio esse aliud disputatio nec idem loqui esse quod dicere ac tamen utrumque in disserendo est; disputandi ratio et loquendi dialecticorum sit, oratorum autem dicendi et ornandi’. Note that this distinguishes the familiar ‘loquendi’ from the more formal and emphatic ‘dicendi’. 20 James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: a History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 357–60. 21 At hominum occisum queror; non omnia, quae in re praesenti accidisse credibile est, in oculis habebo? non percussor ille subitus erumpet? non expavescet circumventus? exclamabit vel rogabit vel fugiet? non ferientem, non concidentem videbo? non animo sanguis et pallor et gemitus extremus, denique expirantis hiatus insidet? (Loeb edn [Butler], II, 434). 22 Beth Innocenti, ‘Towards a Theory of Vivid Description as Practiced in Cicero’s Verrine Orations’, Rhetorica, XII (1994) 355–81. 23 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 24 For example, Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, partim a Rodolpho Agricola … Latinitate donata: Cum luculentis & utilibus in eadem Scholiis Reinhardi Lorichii Hadamarii (London: Henry Middleton, 1572). 25 ‘Oratio bona, aut mala, quae alicui insunt, argumentans’ (Lorich, ed. cit., SigM4r). 26 See T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944), I, 412. 27 See J. Brinsley, op. cit., pp. 182–3. 28 This transmission is typified in the fifth book of George of Trebizond, whose Rhetoricorum Libri Quinque brought the Byzantine rhetorical tradition to Italy in the fifteenth century. In the Paris edition of 1538 the seven Ideas are listed and explicated on pp. 496–7. The currency of one idea – deinotes, rendered by Trebizond as gravitas – is traced by James Biester (see note 63, below). 29 Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: the Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 30 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Sir Tobie Matthew, introd. Roger Hudleston, Fontana Books (London: Collins, 1957), p. 46. 31 Quoted in Hudleston’s Introduction to The Confessions (above), p. 28. 32 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Quotations from Green’s translation. 33 Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey, ed. R.V.G. Tasker, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1945). 34 See for example John O. Ward, ‘Rhetorical Theory and the Rise and Decline of Dictamen in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, Rhetorica, XIX (2001) 175–23. 35 See for example the allegorisation of Orpheus and Euridyce in the Ovide Moralisé, 5 vols (Amsterdam: J. Muller, 1915–1938), X.220–557 (Vol. IV, 16–25). The first four lines read: ‘Par Orpheüs puis droitement / Noter regnable entendement, / Et par Euridice sa fame / La sensualité de l’ame’.

190 Notes 36 See Antonia Gransden, ‘Realistic Observation in Twelfth-Century England’, Speculum, XLVII (1972) 29–51. 37 See Richard Rambuss, ‘The secretary’s study: the secret designs of “The Shepheardes Calender”’, ELH, LIX (1992) 313–35. Rambuss shows the popularity and significance of Angel Day’s The English Secretary. The 1599 edition ends with a treatise ‘Of the partes, place and office of a Secretorie’. Day sees the bond between employer and secretary as a true friendship between unequals, since one confides his secrets, while the other thinks, feels, speaks and writes like his employer. 38 The text known to Marlowe might have been Dialectica Ioannis Setoni, with Peter Carter’s commentary (London: Thomas Marsh, 1574). 39 The text referred to in Peter Mack’s discussion (see below) is De Inventione Dialectica, with Alardus’s commentary (Cologne, 1539), repr. Nieuwkoop, 1967, Frankfurt, 1967, abbrev. DID. 40 Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993). Mack (p. 233) sees Agricola’s dialectical analysis of Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilia, as ‘the model for the dialectical analyses published by Ramus, his opponent Piscator, and their respective followers’. 41 The term ‘adjunct’, denoting a class of associations between things, qualities or conditions, originates in Cicero’s Topica, and is one of the ten topics recognised by Ramus (see below), that is, Cause, Effect, Subject, Adjunct, Opposition, Comparison, Notation, Distribution, Definition, and Testimony. For versions of this dialectic in English, see M.R. MacIlmaine (trans.), The Logicke of the Most Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr, 1574, facs. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1968), and John Milton, A Fuller Institution of the Art of Logic, Arranged after the Method of Peter Ramus, The Works of John Milton, XI (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1935). 42 Represented both in her inaugural lecture as Gresham Professor of Rhetoric (2000), and in her paper for the ISHR Conference at Warsaw, ‘A rhetoric of “The Friend” in early sixteenth century England’ (26 July 2001). 43 See Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996). 44 Erasmus, De Copia and De Ratione Studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978). 45 See David Wootton (ed. and trans.) Thomas More, Utopia. With Erasmus’s ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999). The Introduction traces the interaction and divergence of More and Erasmus. 46 See Plato, The Symposium, trans. and introd. W. Hamilton, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), pp. 100–11 (the speech of Alcibiades). 47 See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), p. 71 (‘gracious’ indicates that such charity is a sign of God’s grace – not a cause of it). 48 Lawrence D. Green, ‘Melanchthon, Rhetoric, and the Soul’, in G. Frank and K. Meerhoff (eds), Melanchthon und Europa, vol. 2, Teilbrand Westeuropa, in Melanchthon-Schrifen der Stadt Bretten (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2002), pp. 11–27. I am indebted to the author for sight of this paper prior to publication. 49 See Ratio brevis sacrarum concionum tractandarum, in the Opera (Wittenberg: Simon Gronenberg, 1601), Vol II: ‘Fides igitur est affectus, qui certo assenti-

Notes 191

50 51

52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59

60

61

62 63 64

tur promissionibus Dei, & comminationibus … Fidei iam causa est Spiritus sanctus, qui primo mentes cognitione peccati, & iudicio Dei terret. Postea affectum in nobis creat, ut credamus & quod vera sint quae promittit Deus, & quod ad nos pertinet’ (p. 9). Green’s reference is to Corpus Reformatorum 13, ed. C. Bretschneider (Halle: C.A. Schwetschke, 1913), 74. Adferendum ad haec est iam dicendi genus popularius ac copiosus, & quemadmodum impulsa vela ventis, nauem sine negoicio ferunt, sic ad haec commode proponenda tale orationis genus requiruntur, quo ceu vento aliquo inspiratae res, sine negocio ullo in auditorum animos ferantnr (sic). Ratio brevis, ed. cit., p. 11. Peter Mack, ‘Ramus Reading; the Commentaries on Cicero’s Consular Orations and Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXI (1998) 111–41. Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affeckte: Englische Wirkungsasthetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Studien zur Englischen Philologie, XVII (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1975). I am deeply grateful to my former colleague at Nottingham, Professor Hinrich Siefken, for his translations, and to Lis Leslie for further help. See Peter Sharratt, ‘Ramus 2000’, Rhetorica, XVIII (2000), 409. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster [1570], ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 79. The quoted anadiplosis echoes an earlier one, untraceably ascribed to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: ‘Liberty kindleth love; love refuseth no labour; and labor obteineth whatsoever it seeketh’ (p. 30). See W.A. Rebhorn (ed. and trans.), Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), Introduction, p. 4. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. from Harleian MS. 4604 by Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935). For Aristotle as ‘the directest means of skill’, see p. 41. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Old and Middle English Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973). See Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients 1638, facs. (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers, 1972), pp. 16–17. Junius refers his account of the moving, delight, perception and discipline required for creativity – from Fame, as figured by Clio, through all the Muses, to Calliope signifying perfected utterance – to Book I of Fulgentius’s Mythologiae (late 5th Century AD). Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetoricke, ed. Ethel Seaton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). Fraunce looks at French and Spanish examples alongside Sidney’s English. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie 1589, ed. G.D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); facs. (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968). For example by Jeanne Fahnestock on schemes in seventeenth century science, and Nancy L. Christian on figures as integral to thought. See James Biester, ‘Admirable Wit: Deinotes and the Rise and Fall of Lyric Wonder’, Rhetorica, XIV (1996) 289–31. See Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Must a Good Orator be a Good Man? Ramus in the Ciceronian Controversy’, in P.L. Oesterreich and T.O. Sloane (eds), Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), pp. 43–56.

192 Notes 65 See Tamara A. Goeglein, ‘“Wherein hath Ramus been so offensious?”: Poetic Examples in the English Ramist Logic Manuals (1574–1672)’, Rhetorica, XIV (1996) 73–101. 66 Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. V.B. Heltzel, Folger Shakespeare Library (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962). 67 Richard Brathwait (or Brathwayte), A Survey of history or a nursey for gentry, 1638. See especially his discussion of stage plays, of ‘feigned relations or poeticall histories’, and ‘A ladies love-lecture’. 68 See note 54, above. 69 Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001). 70 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 71 Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London: Junction Books, 1983). 72 See Christine M. Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe (eds), The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), for essays by Victor Skretkowicz on Wroth (pp. 133–45), and by Erin Herberg on Astell (pp. 147–57). 73 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edn, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. MacFie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 74 Robert Cockcroft and Susan M. Cockcroft, Persuading People: an Intoduction to Rhetoric (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), pp. 49–51. 75 See for example Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 103–24 (Ch. 5: ‘Deconstructing the Text’). 76 See C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 80 on the Puritan reaction to Charles I’s Book of Sports. 77 John Carey’s note to l. 230 (Longman edn, 1968, p. 188) refers the reader to Starnes and Talbert’s citation of Stephanus, who identifies Echo as ‘Amicam … Moderatoris omnium corporum coelestium’. 78 See for example George Herbert’s ‘Heaven’, the penultimate poem in the Temple sequence. 79 The response of Comus recalls Plato’s Phaedrus, 250: ‘Now the man … who has been corrupted does not quickly make the transition from beauty on earth to absolute beauty; so when he sees its namesake here he … surrenders himself to sensuality’ (tr. W. Hamilton [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973], p. 57). However, the signs of religious assurance in the Lady’s voice and appearance perhaps betray Comus’s response as that of a reprobate – See Calvin, Institutes, III.xxiv.2. 80 Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: an English Version, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, Early English Texts Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1981).

3

Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised

1 See Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); and Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1979).

Notes 193 2 Ringler, W.A. and Flachmann, M. (eds) Beware the Cat [b]y William Baldwin: The First English Novel (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 1988), Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv. 3 Compare Rachel Speght, refuting Joseph Swetnam’s assertion that women resent criticism because they know it’s true – ‘Rub a galled horse and he will kick’. In A Mouzell for Melastomus (1618), she retorts, ‘that though every galled horse being touched doth kick, yet everyone that kicks is not galled’ (The Women’s Sharp Revenge, ed. S. Shepherd (London: The Fourth Estate, 1985), p. 62. 4 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 5 WilliamTyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. and introd. David Damiell, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000). 6 For Alleyn’s career, physique (described as seven feet tall) and acting abilities, see Alexander Leggatt, ‘The Companies and the Actors’, in C. Leech and T.W. Craik (eds), The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume III, 1576–1613 (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 102–3. See also the Dulwich College portrait (Plate 6). 7 See David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder: the Manuscript Evidence’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, IX (2000), 257–91; and his edition: Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). 8 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. The Rev. Julius Hutchinson; introd. Margaret Bottrall (London: Dent, 1908, repr. 1968). 9 See Kate Lilley’s edition (note 13 below), pp. 119–202. 10 David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs’, in David Wormersley (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 182–7. I am very grateful to the author for a chance to study a draft of this passage. 11 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1646–1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988). 12 Susan Cook, ‘The story I most particularly intend’: the narrative style of Lucy Hutchinson, Critical Survey, V (1993), 271–7. 13 Kate Lilley (ed.), Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World & Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 14 Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 40. In The Guardian G2 for 5 April 2001, Greer linked Cavendish to a current stereotype of female self-assertion: ‘Only an Essex girl would have referred to her husband’s penis as “nature’s posset maker”. The other courtiers advised Newcastle to shut her up in a dark room’. The quoted phrase, parodying Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653) – or alluding to a reported remark (?) – appears in ‘The Session of the Poets’, one manuscript of which is in the Portland Miscellany (Ms Pw v 40) at the University of Nottingham, under the title ‘A convention of the poets’, and which is printed from Bod. Ms. Don b. 8 as the copy text, in G. de F. Lord (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State, 1: 1660–1678 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). 15 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), pp. 1–3.

194 Notes 16 ‘Milton: Alcaics’, see C. Ricks (ed.) The Poems of Tennyson, Longmans Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 1154–5. 17 See T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 123–48, and F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry, Peregrine Books (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 42–61. 18 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 19 See Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 20 See Cockcroft and Cockcroft, Persuading People, pp. 10–11, for a summary, and pp. 48–9 for an application in analysis. 21 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 22 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 17–27 Sept, 1819. See John Keats, The Letters, ed. M.B. Forman, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 425. 23 Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Rereading Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 24 With a distant echo of Bunthorne’s song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (‘If he’s content with a vegetable love, which would certainly not suit me …’). 25 ‘What the Romantics called creative Imagination is akin, not to sublimation and metaphor, but to repression and hyperbole, which represent rather than limit’ (Map, p. 99). In the sequence of Bloom’s Revisionary Ratios, ‘we move into the tricky limitations of askesis – the perspectivising confusions of metaphor, at once the most-praised and the most-failing of Western tropes’ (ibid., p. 100).

4

Going to Extremes

1 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. and introd. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 2 Sharrock notes (p. 377) that the Bath Sanctification (p. 255) ‘symbolizes adult baptism by immersion. Though Bunyan’s Church practised this, their principle of open communion prevented them from making it a … condition of church membership’. 3 See William Haller’s chapter ‘The Calling of the Saints’, in his The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), pp. 83–127. 4 See for example the headnote in Orgel and Goldberg’s edition, pp. 852–3, citing the account by Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips of being shown some lines of Satan’s soliloquy in Book 4 (i.e. 32–41) years before the poem was begun, when the speech was the beginning of a tragedy. 5 Both speeches are included in Brian MacArthur (ed.), The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), pp. 40–4. 6 Mortimer senior then uses an Aristotelean induction (see Rhetoric, I.ii.13, 19), listing those royal (and philosophical) ‘minions’ who did not vitiate greatness (I.iv.392–400). 7 Compare the barons’ outrage at I.iv.8–34 when Gaveston usurps the Queen’s Chair Royal, next to the King’s.

Notes 195 8 See I. Donaldson (ed.), Ben Jonson: a Critical Edition of the Major Works, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 236–7. 9 See A.C. Hamilton’s edition (cited previously), p. 421. 10 See John Carey (ed.), John Donne, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 118–19. 11 Arthur Marotti, John Donne Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 12 George Parfitt, John Donne: a Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). 13 Hugh Latimer, The Sermons, ed. and introd. Arthur Pollard. Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000). 14 Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). For the text of A Letter Written by Sir Philip Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, touching her Marriage with Monsieur (1579), with its editorial introduction and ‘argument’, see pp. 33–57. 15 See E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 16 Compare Doctor Faustus, I.iii.46: ‘That was the cause, but yet per accidens’. As conjuration was incidental to the blasphemy calling up Mephostophilis, so the particular identity of any suitable royal consort is incidental to his begetting of children. 17 Simon Shepherd (ed. and introd.), The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), pp. 30–1. 18 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J. Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), pp. 23–4.

5

Adjusting the Mirrors

1 The alternating emotional appeals to greed and jealous rivalry work both within longer speeches (e.g. ll. 48–76) and single lines (for example, the inflammatory asides – 81, 86). 2 Preface to Perimedes, 1588. See A.B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works of Robert Greene (1881–6), VII, 7–8. 3 See the investigations into Marlowe’s notorious freethinking, and its consequences, typified by P.H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: a Study of his Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), and Muriel Bradbrook’s The School of Night (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). 4 For example, Archimago’s progression from pious-seeming talk to black magic in FQ, I.i. 35–6 (ed. cit., p. 39). 5 See J. Scattergood (ed.), John Skelton: the Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 82. 6 In Aristotelean terms (see Garver, pp. 33–40), it is a superb example of successful energia without effective kinesis. 7 Tamburlaine seems, here, to resemble the ordered, upright philosophic man of Plato’s Timaeus 48.90: ‘We should think of the most authoritative part of our soul as a guardian spirit (daemon) given by god, living in the summit of the body, which can properly be said to lift us from the earth towards our home in heaven’.

196 Notes 8 In my chosen text (Bowers), this line reads ‘Are these resolved noble Scythians?’ Most editors amend the line to an exclamation, as here. 9 Compare Guise’s extraordinary use of thirst as a foundation: ‘my quenchles thirst whereon I builde’ (The Massacre at Paris, ii.107). 10 See Lanham, Handlist, pp. 104, 118. Lanham prefers the term Occultatio. 11 Compare the Mephostophilian antistrophe noted in Chapter 1, and Lincoln’s ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. 12 I am indebted for this insight, expressed in correspondence (28/04/01). 13 Richard Nate, ‘“Plain and Vulgarly Express’d”: Margaret Cavendish and the Discourse of the New Science’, Rhetorica, XIX (2001), 403–17. 14 See Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: the Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), pp. 169, 173–4. 15 Towards the end of her life of the Duke, she alludes to his amorousness as a matter for public knowledge and (almost) for praise. See The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, to which is added the True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, ed. C.H. Firth, 2nd edn (London: George Routledge and Sons, [1906]), p. 111. 16 See Muir’s comment in the Arden Shakespeare, 8th edn (London: Methuen, 1953), pp. 159–60. 17 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and introd. H. Jackson, 3 vols. Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1932 repr. 1964). 18 Numbered as in modern editions (Burton’s note reads ‘Ovid. Ep. 21.’). For a modern translation see Ovid, Heroides, tr. and introd. H. Isbell, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 133–41. The passage about the Leucadian Rock begins at p. 139. Sappho doubts that she will survive the leap but swears to renounce poetry (summarised by the shell of her lyre) if she does. 19 See Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: a Drama of Science, Faith and Love (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 31. Milton echoes Galileo’s words: ‘[I]t (the moon) is like the face of the Earth itself, which is marked here and there with chains of mountains and depths of valleys’. 20 See Introduction (p. 29, above), and compare the convergent (or echoic) structure as Eve encounters her reflected image (IV.460–5). 21 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971). 22 See Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (eds), Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), p. 27. 23 See for example the complete text in P. Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). This is the original text as published in Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, 1573 and generally accessible in facsimile (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1970). 24 Or as Marlowe translates it in his accomplished version, ‘Judge you the rest’ (l. 25). See Millar Maclure (ed.) The Poems: Christopher Marlowe, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 116. 25 Note that the word ‘court’ is used in F.J. (Salzman, p. 66) to mean an informal gathering of gentry belonging to the household, without indication that the word is used in a quasi-legal sense (as it might be if some question of love was being debated). This implies that ‘court’ culture was replicated in provincial surroundings.

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Early modern texts and the modern critical context Baldwin, William. Beware the Cat: the First English Novel, ed. W.A. Ringler and M. Flachmann (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 1988). Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).

202 Bibliography ——– John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Rereading Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). ——– A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). ——– Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Bradbrook, Muriel. The School of Night (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. and introd. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and introd. H. Jackson, 3 vols. Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1932 repr. 1964). Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World & Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Cook, Susan. ‘The story I most particularly intend’: the narrative style of Lucy Hutchinson, Critical Survey, V (1993), 271–7. Donne, John. The Oxford Authors: John Donne, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986). Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). ——– Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). Erasmus, Desiderius. Enchiridion Militis Christiani: an English Version, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, Early English Texts Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1981). Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971). Gascoigne, George. The Adventures of Master F.J., in P. Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Green, Robert. Preface to Perimedes, 1588, in A.B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works of Robert Greene (1881–6), VII, 7–8. Greer, Germaine. Slip-Shod Sibyls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957). Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1646–1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988). Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. The Rev. Julius Hutchinson; introd. Margaret Bottrall (London: Dent, 1908, repr. 1968). Jones, Kathleen. A Glorious Fame: the Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson: a Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. I. Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Kantorowicz, E.H. The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Keats, John. The Letters, ed. M.B. Forman, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). Kocher, P.H. Christopher Marlowe: a study of his Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).

Bibliography 203 Latimer, Hugh. The Sermons, ed. and introd. Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000). Levin, Richard. New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1979). Lodge, David. Thinks … (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). Marlowe, Christopher. Complete Works, ed. F. Bowers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). ——– The Poems, ed. Millar Maclure, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1968). Marotti, Arthur. John Donne Coterie Poet (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). Milton, John. The Poems, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Nate, Richard. ‘“Plain and Vulgarly Express’d”: Margaret Cavendish and the Discourse of the New Science’, Rhetorica, XIX (2001), 403–17. Norbrook, David. ‘Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs’, in David Wormersley (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 182–7. Parfitt, George. John Donne: a Literary Life (London: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). Pizan, Christine de. The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J. Richards with a Foreword by Marina Warner (New York: Persea Books, 1982). Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997). Shepherd, S. (ed.). The Women’s Sharp Revenge (London: The Fourth Estate, 1985). Sidney, Sir Philip. ‘A Letter Written by Sir Philip Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, touching her Marriage with Monsieur’, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems, ed. J. Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 82. Sobel, Dava. Galileo’s Daughter: a Drama of Science, Faith and Love (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 31. Tayler, Edward W. ‘Milton’s Firedrake’, Milton Quarterly, VI (1972), 7–10. Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. C. Ricks (London: Longman, 1969). Tyndale, William. The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. and introd. David Damiell, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000). Vickers, Brian. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, 1986). Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Collected Poems, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969).

Index Abelson, R., 13, 14, 186 affect/affectiveness/affectivity, 2, 4, 8, 19, 33, 51, 75, 77, 104, 109, 114, 121, 167, 172 Agricola, Rudolph, 54, 58–60, 190 Alleyn, Edward, 93, 153, 193 Anger, Jane, 136–8, 195 Aphthonius, 52, 189 Aristotle, 13, 67, 195 Rhetoric, 3, 6, 8, 10, 33, 34, 39, 43–7, 59, 68, 186 arrangement (dispositio), 18, 50 conclusion (peroratio), 18, (Belsey) 115 introduction (Eagleton), 103 proposition and division, 135 refutation, 18, 134 ars dictaminis, 57–8 Ascham, Roger, 67, 191 Astell, Mary, 73 Augustine of Hippo, St, 53, 55–7, 67, 79, 138, 189 Bakhtin, M., 144 Baldwin, T.W., 189 Baldwin, William, 5, 62, 85–9, 144–9, 193 Belsey, Kate, 5, 113–16, 192, 194 Biester, James, 191 Black, M. (on metaphor), 18, 186 Bloom, Harold, 5, 110–13, 141, 194 Bradbrook, Muriel C., 195 Brathwait, Richard, 70, 192 Brinsley, John, 54, 188, 189 Bunyan, John, 36, 118–25, 194 Burton, Robert, 172, 196 Cable, Lana, 19, 187 Calvin, John, 192 Carey, John, 192, 195 Carter, Ronald A., 28, 187

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 5, 36, 93, 99–103 passim, 162–7, 196 Chappell, William, 72, 75 Christian, Nancy L., 191 Cicero, 6–7, 8, 32, 47–51, 59, 187 De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 32 De Oratore, 48–9 Orator, 32, 49–51 Cockcroft, Robert, 192, 194 Cockcroft, Susan Mary, 29, 187, 192, 194 cognitive engagement, see schema theory Colish, Marcia A., 188 commonplaces (loci communes), 8, 48–9, 50, 65, 94, 95, 145, 178–9 convergence and echo, 28–9, 176, 179 Cook, Susan, 97–9, 193 Coppe, Abiezer, 73 Craik, T.W., 193 Damasio, Antonio, 8–9, 67, 186 Dante, Paradiso, 154 Day, Angel, 190 decorum, see under fitness deixis, 28, 85, 175 empathetic, 28, 137 social, 28, 57, 109, 123, 130, 146 spatial, 11, 28, 57, 123, 171, 175 temporal, 28, 123 textual, 28 dialectic, 35, 49, 58, 65–6 dilemma, see syllogism Donne, John, 36, 129–30, 195 ‘The Apparition’, 129–31 ‘The Flea’, 129 Downes, William, 8–10, 186 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 195 Eagleton, Terry, 5, 32, 37, 76, 85, 103–6, 168, 193

204

Index 205 elenchos (reproof), 134 Eliot, T.S., 110, 168, 186, 194 ‘Gerontion’, 2–3, 34 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 126, 194 ‘emotional laser’, the, 63, 74–5, 76, 98, 109, 111, 115, 126, 133, 141–3, 147, 155, 159, 160–2, 185 emotions admiration, or wonder (linked with deinotes), 68, 69–70, 92, 101, 113, 147, 152, 159, 163–4, 176 anger, or indignation, 6, 9, 30, 45, 74, 76, 78, 98, 133, 137, 147, 156 boredom, 125, 166 contempt, 137 despair, 172–3 disgust, 146 emulation, 34 faith (as emotion), 64, 79 fear (or horror), 29, 56, 64, 72, 78, 79, 92, 107, 109, 169, 171, 173 hatred, 71, 118, 122, 124–31 passim, 136 hope, 71, 72, 81 jealousy, 8–9, 130, 164, 180 joy, 56, 57 love/desire (all kinds), 6, 56, 67, 71, 74, 78, 91, 93, 97, 101, 122–31 passim, 153, 159, 178, 180 mildness, 45 pity or solicitude, 130, 164, 169, 177 reassurance, 29 shame (or embarrassment), 76, 89, 107, 109–10, 131–4, 156, 178 sorrow (or woe), 56, 113 zeal, 19–20 enargeia (clarity or vividness), 53, 59, 61, 70–1, 76, 85, 91, 100, 108, 122, 124, 138, 170 energeia (actuality or efficacy), 44, 47, 53, 85, 123, 195 enthymeme, 30, 44, 49, 160, 188 epistolary rhetoric, 57–8, 106–9, 134–6 Erasmus, Desiderius, 38, 57, 58, 60–3, 106–9, 156, 190

Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 81, 192 ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’, 60–3, 121, 190 ‘Sweet is war’, 60, 61 see also Sileni (after Erasmus) Eskin, Catherine R., 44, 45–6, 188 ethos, 8, 11, 22, 29, 33, 43–4, 47, 50, 52, 75, 77, 92, 104, 106–8, 128, 136, 164 and comedy, 52 and the speaker’s character, 52, 53 stance, 104, 120, 122, 134, 138 ethopoeia, 52, 55 evaluation, 8–10 exclusion models, 23–4, 85, 103, 110, 128, 132, 136 Fahnstock, Jeanne, 191 fancy, 162, 164 Felperin, Howard, 84–5 figures of rhetoric (in texts and citation) allegory (as extended metaphor), 119–25 anadiplosis, 67, 87 anaphora (initial repetition), 89 antiphrasis, 183 antistrophe (terminal repetition), 126, 133, 160 antithesis, 115, 116, 147, 160 antonomasia, 175 apostrophe, 133 chiasmus, 114 comma (short clause), 133 ecphrasis, 54, 57, 61, 70 effictio or blazon, 91, 100, 152, 166 epizeuxis, 133 expolitio, 115 hyperbole, 153 irony (trope), 75, 136 isocolon, 124, 133 litotes, 108 meiosis, 148 metalepsis, 80, 111, 174 metaphor, 64, 93, 110, 113, 116, 119, 154, 155, 171 metonymy, 6, 79, 102, 153, 155, 164, 169

206 Index figures of rhetoric (in texts and citation) – continued occultatio (or praeteritio), 133, 135, 158 periphrasis, 154 personification (or prosopopoeia), 113, 152 ploche, 102 polyptoton, 160 polysyndeton, 168–9 prozeugma, 102, 124 synathroesmus (or congeries), 87, 102, 133, 164–5 synecdoche, 64 topographia or topothesia, 106, 109, 170–1 traductio (word-class variation), 95, 147, 154 Firbas, Jan, 25–7, 187 Fish, Stanley E., 176–7, 196 fitness (decorum, kairos, timeliness), 41, 45–7, 48, 49, 50, 59, 67 Flachmann, M., 85–9, 193 footing in discourse, 21–2, 120 Fraunce, Abraham, 69, 191 friendship, rhetoric of, 60–3, 107 Functional sentence perspective (FSP [Firbas]), 25–8, 85, 160, 176 Combined Scales, 26–7, 160, 175–7 Existential Scales, 25–6, 104–5, 111, 123, 124 Quality Scales, 26, 91, 95, 100–1, 109, 123, 124, 153, 160, 161, 171, 178 Garver, Eugene, 30, 33, 44, 187, 195 Gascoigne, George, 34, 179–84, 196 goals (schemata: personal, physical and social), 14–15, 17, 133, 136 achievement, 14, 42, 63, 95, 103, 130, 151, 153, 154, 155, 182 crisis, 14, 15, 121, 130 delta goals, 14 enjoyment, 42, 63, 103, 121, 128, 130, 155, 181, 182 instrumental goals, 14, 87, 128 preservation, 15, 19, 121, 153, 173, 182

satisfaction, 128, 130, 133, 153, 155, 182 Goeglein, Tamara A., 192 Gransden, Antonia, 190 Green, Lawrence D., 39, 64, 67, 188, 190, 191 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5, 32, 89–93, 143–4, 149–50, 151, 193 Greene, Robert, 143, 195 Greenfield, Susan, 8 Greer, Germaine, 5, 101–3, 165, 167, 193 Haller, William, 194 Halliday, M.A.K., 33, 187 Henderson, Judith R., 191 Harvey, Gabriel, 35, 187 Herbert, George, 3, 192 Hermogenes of Tarsus, 55, 188 Hill, Christopher, 78, 192 Hobby, Elaine, 96–7, 193 Horace, Ars Poetica, 67, 162 Hoskins, John, 67, 69, 191 Hunter, Lynette, 60, 62, 190 Hutchinson, Lucy, 5, 93–9, 126, 158–62, 193 Hyperius, Andreas Gerardus, 71–2, 133 inadvertence models, 24–5 inclusion models, 22–3, 24, 85, 108–10, 128, 136, 169 induction (argumentative mode), 194 Innocenti, Beth, 53, 189 interpersonal function of language, 33, 187 intuition, 8–10 invention or heurisis (compositional process) and dialectic (Cicero and Ramus), 49–50, 66 and pathos (Agricola), 58–9 see also models of argument issue (stasis), 46, 47, 50 Jakobson, Roman, 110, 194 James I of England, VI of Scotland, King, 126

Index 207 Jardine, Lisa, 5, 28, 60, 106–10, 172–3, 190 Jones, Kathleen, 196 Jones, Peter, 187 Jonson, Ben, 127–8, 195 Junius, Franciscus (François du Jon), 70–1, 191 Kairo, see fitness Kantorowicz, E.H., 195 Keats, John, 112, 113, 194 Kennedy, George A., 46, 51, 53–4, 189 Kinneavy, James L., 44, 45–6, 188 Kocher, Paul H., 195 Lanham, Richard, 18, 186, 196 Lares, Jameela, 71–3, 77, 80–1, 119, 133, 192 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 131–4, 144, 148, 195 Lawson-Tancred, H.C., 186, 188 Leavis, F.R., 110, 194 Lee, H.P.D., 188 Leech, Clifford, 193 Leggatt, Alexander, 193 letteraturizatione, 54 Levin, Richard, 84 Levinson, Stephen C., 21, 128, 186, 187 Lewis, C.S., 47, 188 Lilley, Kate, 99–101, 167, 193 Lloyd, G.E.R., 186 Lodge, David, 7–8, 186 logos, 8, 10, 29, 44, 45–7, 66, 87–8, 108, 114, 136, 143, 145, 148, 156–7, 167 Lorich, Reinhard, 54, 55 Luther, Martin, 62 Mack, Peter, 58–9, 66, 190, 191 Maclure, Millar, 188 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 5, 58, 70, 89–93 passim, 143–4, 187, 196 Doctor Faustus, 155, 157, 195 Edward II, 65, 126–7 Tamburlaine (both Parts), 24, 25, 28–9, 54, 59, 62–3, 89–93, 149–57, 160, 168, 195

The Jew of Malta, 142–3, 195 (n. 1) The Massacre at Paris, 70, 196 Marotti, Arthur, 129, 195 Melanchthon, Philipp, 57, 58, 63–5, 126, 190, 191 metaphor, theories of, 19 cognitive functioning of, 19–20, 42–3, 77 undoing a metaphor, 133, 166 see also figures of rhetoric Milton, John, 5, 7, 72, 77–8, 141, 186, 194 A Masque (Comus), 38, 77–81 passim Areopagitica, 23 Paradise Lost, I, 71, 111–13, 173–7; IV, 7, 125–6, 158, 196; VIII, 76, 114–16, 177–9; IX, 7; XI, 53 Samson Agonistes, 13–20, 22–24, 27–30 passim Minturno, Antonio, 68 models of argument (topoi, loci, places), 47, 190 cause and effect, 59, 80, 115, 137, 176, 178 comparison, 145, 148 opposition (contraries, contradictories, etc.), 133 subjects and adjuncts, 59, 80, 81, 102, 136, 138, 155, 164 More, Sir Thomas, 89, 190 Muir, Kenneth, 169, 196 Murphy, James, 51, 57, 189 Nash, Walter, 188 Nate, Richard, 162, 167, 196 ‘new rhetoric’, 5, 10–29, 34–7 Norbrook, David, 5, 94–6, 97, 193, 196 Oesterreich, P.L., 191 officia oratoris (Cicero), 8–10, 30, 32, 46, 49, 54, 55, 67, 71, 74, 77, 89, 101, 118, 124, 125 Ortony, A., 186 Ovid, 57 Amores, 181, 196 Heroides, 172–3, 196 Ovid Moralisé, 189

208 Index Parfitt, George A.E., 129, 195 pathos (emotion), 3, 5, 6, 11, 29, 36, 38–82 passim, 75, 77, 78, 83–4, 87, 88, 93, 100, 104, 111, 128, 135–6 antipathy, 3, 9, 42, 57, 141, 158 and convergence, 28–9 and deixis, 11 empathy, 3, 7, 20, 31, 42, 57, 63, 81, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95–6, 97–8, 101, 102, 106, 114, 115, 122–4, 130, 135, 136, 153, 154, 158, 172, 173, 177, 181 and ‘felt experience’, 9 generation of, 48, 52–3, 58–9, 64–5, 164, 111, 173 as perturbation or ‘distemper’, 7, 38, 39, 48, 56, 74 primary or ‘raw’ emotion, 10, 106–9 secondary emotions, 10 and spirituality, 38, 43, 179 sympathy, 3, 9, 42, 73, 95, 115, 127, 130, 141, 171 and tragedy, 52 and will, 7, 55, 56, 64, 74, 138, 153 see also emotions Paul the apostle, St, 55–6, 61, 71, 122, 134, 161 Peacham, Henry, jnr., 70, 71, 188, 192 Perelman, C. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 10, 186 phantasiai or visiones underlying pathos, 52, 70–1, 79, 111 Pizan, Christine de, 137, 195 Plato, 6, 38, 188, 195 Phaedrus, 40–3, 48, 57, 188, 192 Symposium, 60–1, 190 Plett, Heinrich, 66–70 passim, 191 Puttenham, George, 69, 191 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6–7, 51–3, 68, 70, 75, 79–80 , 89 Rambuss, R., 190 Ramus, Peter (Pierre de la Ramée), 35, 58, 65–71 passim Rebhorn, W.A., 67, 191

reversal of bias, 63, 75–6, 91, 115 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 47–8, 188 rhetoric as an ‘art’ (scope, method, conceptual basis), 2, 6, 32, 35, 38, 65, 67 rhetorical genera (secular and sacred), 71 consolation (sermon type), 71, 77, 80, 81, 119–20 deliberative or political, 44, 54 demonstrative or epideictic, 44, 54, 55 doctrine and reproof (sermon types), 71 instruction and correction (sermon types), 71, 134 judicial or forensic, 44, 54, 55 rhetorical process (steps in composition), see invention, arrangement, style Richards, I.A. (interaction view of metaphor), 19, 186 Ricoeur, Paul, 19, 187 Ringler, W.A., 85–9 passim, 193 Rist, J.M. 188 roles in discourse, 20–5, 120, 128 Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, 44, 188 RPER (range of predictable emotional response), 76, 85, 118, 123, 130, 142, 182 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 68 scenes (schemata), 15–17 personal scenes, 16, 120, 127, 130, 172, 182 physical scenes, 16, 17–18, 20, 115, 120–1, 130, 146, 172, 173, 182 social scenes, 16, 115, 120, 127, 130, 136, 138, 166, 181, 182, 184 stages of persuasion as social scenes, 17–18 Schank, R.C., 14, 15, 186 schema theory and classes of schemata, 12–20, 85, 141, 169 meta-MOPs, 17, 18 MOPs, 17, 18, 42, 103 plans, 14, 15, 128 TOPs and metaphor, 18, 120, 154, 166

Index 209 see also goals, scripts, scenes and themes scripts (schemata: ‘cultural’ combines personal and social), 16–17, 130 personal, 87, 113, 116, 121, 172, 181, 182 physical, 103, 130, 164, 172, 173 social, 87, 103, 116, 121, 138, 146, 164, 182 secretarial role, the, 58 Semino, Elena, 13–19, 186 Seton, John, 58, 38 Shakespeare, William, 5, 63, 89, 186 Coriolanus, 14–15, 91 Hamlet, 3, 23–4 Henry V, 143 King Lear, 11, 28, 106–10, 170–3 Macbeth, 3, 103–6, 167–70 Sharratt, Peter, 187–8, 191 Shepherd, Simon, 136, 193, 195 Shuger, Debora, 55–7, 64, 189 Sidney, Sir Philip, 63, 66, 67, 131, 195 ‘A letter … to Queen Elizabeth’, 134–6 Apology for Poetry, 68, 191 Sileni (after Erasmus), 80, 102, 114, 121, 131, 155, 170 Skelton, John, 148, 195 Sloane, T.O., 191 Smith, Adam, 73, 111, 192 Smith, Nigel, 73, 192 Sobel, Dava, 196 Speght, Rachel, 193 Spenser, Edmund, 62, 126, 128–9, 148, 190, 195 spontaneity, 2, 10, 12, 115 style (or elocutio), in rhetoric and its function, 41, 46, 47, 48, 50, 56 high (or grand) style, 46, 49, 51, 56, 57 ‘ideas’ of style (Hermogenes, Trebizond), 55

middle (or urbane) style, 46, 49, 50–1, 56 plain (or low) style, 46, 49, 56 schemes (i.e. ‘figures’ of words or thought, as distinguished from tropes), 46, 50, 65, 69 trope, 46, 110 see also figures of rhetoric Sutcliffe, Rebecca, 192 Sutherland, Christine M., 192 Swift, Jonathan, 75 syllogism, 59, 70, 88, 95, 103 dilemma, 135 per accidens fallacy, 136 Tayler, Edward W., 187 Taylor, A.E., 188 Tennyson, Alfred, 110, 194 themes (schemata), 15 life themes, 15, 63, 128, 136, 160 role themes, 63, 128, 130, 164 thymos (spiritedness), 42, 44 Trebizond, George of, 189 Tyndale, William, 89, 90, 144, 193 Van Dorsten, Jan, 195 Vickers, Brian, 37, 84–5, 104, 192 Virgil, Aeneid IV, 59, 63 Waller, Gary, 5, 30–4, 179–80, 181, 183–4, 187 Ward, John O., 189 Whythorne, Thomas, 180 will, see pathos Wilson, Thomas Wootton, David, 60–3, 154–5, 156, 190 Wroth, Lady Mary, 73 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (‘They flee from me’), 30–4, 179–84, 196 Zeno, 50

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