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Jonson and the Neo-Latin Authorities for the Plain Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
Extract
Probably at no point during the English Renaissance did the influence of neo-Latin writers upon English vernacular prose and poetry become so predominant as during the emergence of the rhetorical principles and practice of the plain style. The comprehensive descriptive treatises of classical poetic theory, such as those of Minturno and J. C. Scaliger, which were used extensively by the writers of English rhetoric books like George Puttenham and Henry Peacham the elder, did not recommend and defend so much as enumerate specific principles. Since the English rhetoric books were primarily concerned with methods of amplification and the more ornate stylistic conventions of the Continental literary movements, they were directed mainly at the courtly Petrarchan imitators and borrowed little from discussions of the plain style. This meant, of course, that one would have had to return to the Latin text of such general reference works as Scaliger's Poetices for information about the genus tenue or the genres which employed it, and even then such works often did little more than transpose their classical sources. The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting against the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson's Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style, since it describes a rhetorical position which he consistently practised in his own writing. Since he borrowed accurate descriptions of the style and its intentions from treatises of the men just mentioned, as well as from the famous works on the classical genres which employed the sermo by such scholars as Daniel Heinsius and Isaac Casaubon, the Discoveries can be described as a handbook of the new authorities on matters of style. Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson's stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590's on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962
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Notes
1 This paper was read at the Neo-Latin Conference of the annual meeting of the MLA in 1958. It is in no sense intended as an inclusive description of Jonson's rhetorical position, his stylistic authorities, or the epistolary tradition. I have treated these matters at greater length in my manuscript on Jonson's poems, from which these observations have been taken and which the Stanford University Press will publish in 1962. I have tried here to isolate within a given tradition a possible description in rhetorical terms of an important change in attitudes concerning the relation between subject matter and style in poetic practice. Modern scholarship on the emergence of the various types of plain style in the classical and Renaissance periods is too extensive to cite. Of studies more directly related to the epistolary style the most helpful is Morris Croll's “Juste Lipse et le mouvement anti-cicéronien à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle,” Revue du Seizième Siècle, ii (1914), to which I am indebted throughout. L. B. Osborn's The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns (1566-1638), New Haven, 1937, and George Williamson's The Senecan Amble, Chicago, 1951, offer a good deal of additional material. Such particular studies as Jean Robertson's The Art of Letter Writing, Liverpool, 1942, K. G. Hornbeck's Complete Letter-Writer in English 1568-1800, Northampton, Mass., 1934, and E. C. Dunn's “Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing,” Studies in the Renaissance, iii, 1956, pp. 145-156, are helpful descriptive summaries. None of these, however, is concerned with the particular type of problem treated in this paper.
2 English Poetry (New York, 1952), p. 57.
3 Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), p. 243n.
4 For a detailed analysis of this relationship, see M. S. Grant and G. C. Fiske, “Cicero's ‘Orator’ and Horace's ‘Ars Poetica’,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xxxv (1924).
5 “ ‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” SP, xviii (1921), 88-89.
6 De Ratione Dicendi, ii, xi; Opera Omnia (Valentia, 1782), ii, 154-155.
7 De Causis Corruptarum Artium, iv, ii; Opera Omnia, vi, 162: “aliam formam orationis infimae epistola, aliud res rustica, aliud libri de philosophia postulant.”
8 The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 152.
9 The Arte of English Poesie, p. 150.
10 Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri Poetices libri septem (In Bibliopolio Commenliniano, 1607), p. 401. Translating Vives, Jonson remarks briefly on the general decorum to be observed between the style and subject matter and then adds that “There is a certaine latitude in these things, by which wee find the degrees,” Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-52), viii, 626.
11 Demetrius, On Style, 223-323, Loeb ed., trans. W. R. Roberts (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
12 De Ratione Conscribendi Epistolas, i and xxxi; Opera Omnia (Leyden, 1703), i, 345, 379.
13 Ibid., Opera Omnia, i, 379.
14 The Epistles of Erasmus, ed. F. M. Nichols (London, 1901), i, lxxx.
15 Jvsti Lipsi Epistolarvm Selectarvm (Antwerp, 1605).
16 Isaaci Casauboni De Satyrica Graecorum Poesi et Romanorum Satira, ed. J. J. Rambach (Halae, 1774), p. 229.
17 M. Antonii Mureti Opera Omnia, ed. C. H. Frotsher (Lipsiae, 1834), i, 403-404.
18 The Advancement of Learning, ii, iii, 4, ed. W. A. Wright (Oxford, 1926), p. 100.
19 Institutio Epistolica, appended to Epistolarvm Selectarvm (Antwerp, 1605), p. 8.
20 De Conscribendis Epistolis, ii; Opera Omnia, ii, 269.
21 Opera Philippi Melanthonis, ed. C. G. Bretschneider (Halis Saxonum, 1834), i, fol. 5.
22 Les Œuvres (Amsterdam, 1723), ii, fol. 4.
23 The Familiar Letters, ed. J. Jacobs (London, 1892), i. i. 1.
24 The Advancement of Learning, ii. iii. 4.
25 Lipsius states the relationship between the unlimited epistolary subject matter and both the sermo of comedy and the qualities of Atticism most clearly in his Epistolicarum Quaestionum Libri V:
Epistolas scio me scribere, non Orationes: quas cum vsus feret, inueniam fortasse qui non minus commode scribat quamipsi. At Epistolae familiares, siue verba, siue iocos spectes, quid alius sunt quam exemplar Comici sermonis? Inter Comicos autem quis melior Plauto? . . . Ille enim scriptor est qui puritatem, qui proprietatem sermonis suppeditet: ille qui vrbanitatem, iocos, sales, & earn Atticorum Venerem sufficiat, quam frustra in reliquo Latio quaeras. An vocant me at illorum exemplum, qui omnes Epistolas suas vno modo scribunt? Rideant, doleant; ioca, seria tractent, doctos, indoctos compellent: idem vbiq. tenor est, eadem lentitudo? Non sequor. Meae vero Epistolae & facetum aliquid habeant, & eruditum, & remotum a captu vulgi, & quod saepius repetitum placeat. In quo omine, mi, Lector, defino (p. 192).
This work is one of two published together in Ivsti Lipsi Opera Omnia quae ad criticam proprie spectant (Antwerpiae, 1585).
26 Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto (Heaut., 77). Vives, defending the letter from abroad against the insular point of view of those who “consider everything foreign to them outside of their own society and community of friends,” cites the same line in favor of international correspondence, De Conscrib. Epist., ii; Opera Omnia, ii, 270-271.