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Tudor Writings on Rhetoric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Walter J. Ong S.J.
Walter J. Ong S.J.*
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University
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Extract

The literature of the Tudor age, like that of earlier and immediately subsequent ages, has some of its deepest roots in the rhetorical tradition. This tradition is represented by a massive accumulation of writings and patterns of behavior which fed Western education and culture from antiquity well into the eighteenth century, but which until a generation ago had grown increasingly unfamiliar even to most scholars, following the Romantic reluctance to take rhetoric seriously as a conscious art. Recent scholarship, particularly in the United States, has re-explored the tradition, but the results and implications are not always widely known. The theory and practice of rhetoric can still be excluded from consideration in histories of Tudor literature, although by now one meets sometimes with wry acknowledgment of the central importance of what is being excluded.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 15 , 1968 , pp. 39 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1968

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References

This essay is part of a chapter on Tudor prose literature in a History of Tudor Literature now being written under the general editorship of George B. Parks.

1 In his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Vol. III of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. by F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 61, Professor C. S. Lewis, after an excellent statement on the sweep and depth of rhetorical tradition, with curious candor avows, ‘Probably all our literary histories, certainly that on which I am engaged, are vitiated by our lack of sympamy on this point’ (that is, lack of sympathy with sixteenth-century views of rhetoric and poetry).

2 Medieval manuals of rhetoric and their use in the curriculum are well accounted for by Charles S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, Macmillan Co., 1928), which can be supplemented by the brief but extraordinarily comprehensive article by Richard McKeon, ‘Rhetoric in the Middle Ages', Speculum, XVII (1942), 1-32. The Tudor grammar schools and their studies are lavishly described by Thomas W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1944; 2 vols.). The university curricula have been less well studied, but a new beginning has been made by Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959). The books known and used in England have been studied in full detail by Howell, William Samuel, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1956)Google Scholar to which the present treatment is much indebted. Other useful works include: Charles Sears Baldwin, , Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crane, William Garrett, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York, Columbia University Press, 1937)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, still very informative; Sister Miriam Joseph [Rauh], c.s.c, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, Columbia University Press, 1947); Donald Lemen Clark, ‘Ancient Rhetoric and English Renaissance Literature', Shakespeare Quarterly, II (1951), 195-204; The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic, ed. by Joseph Schwartz and John A. Rycenga (New York, Ronald Press Co., 1965), an invaluable collection of historical and theoretical studies; Morris W. Croll (1872-1943), Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. by J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966), a posthumous collection of pioneering studies. On the relationship of English to Latin, see Jones, Richard Foster, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1953).Google Scholar A group of recent works concerned with early oral performance. including Havelock, Eric, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, Robert Scholes and Kellogg, Robert, The Nature qf'Narrative (New York, Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, and the present author's The Presence of the Word (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967), give rhetoric still fuller meaning by relating it to larger cultural and psychological developments concerned with the evolution of the media of communication. In general, references readily traceable through the foregoing works or other basic works to which the foregoing refer are not given in detail here.

3 Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. in facsimile by Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, Ha., Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962), p. 20.

4 C. S. Baldwin gives an abstract of the Candelabrum, a thirteenth-century manual of dictamen. Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, pp. 216-227.

5 T. W. Baldwin, op. at., II, 251.

6 Richard Rainolde, The Foundation of Rhetorike, with an introduction by Francis R. Johnson (New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945), fol. iiij ff. For other recipes, see A. L. Bennett, “The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy', Studies in Philology, II (1954), 107-126.

7 Rainolde, op. at., fol. xxxvij (sic for xxxix)r-xlr (paragraphing and punctuation adjusted to modern usage).

8 See Howell, op. cit., pp. 66 ff.

9 Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. by Lamb, George (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1956), pp. 194–205.Google Scholar

10 Staton, Walter F. Jr., ‘The Characters of Style in Elizabethan Prose', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LVII (1958), 197–207.Google Scholar

11 Lever, Ralph, The Arte of Reason (1573), p. 7.Google Scholar The Greek word kategoria (after which the Latin equivalent, praedicamentum, is modeled) means an accusation or charge, not a class or storehouse; in Aristotle it refers to the predicate in a proposition or assertion, thought of as a ‘charge’ brought against a subject. Hence Lever refers to the ten ‘demaunders'. The loci or topics, on the other hand, are classes, subject to logical quantification. Lever, after referring to the ‘demaunders', proceeds to consider them erroneously as loci. See Sister Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962), pp. 90-91.

12 See T. W. Baldwin, op. tit., II, 198-200, and passim

13 See Hardison, O. B Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1962).Google Scholar

14 See Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite', Studies in Philology, LVI (1959)f 103-124.

15 Daniel D. McGarry, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1955), pp. 67, 102 (Book 1, chap, xxiv; Book II, chap, xii); the Metalogicon is summarized in C. S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, pp. 158-172.

16 The Canterbury Tales, ‘Prologue of the Clerkes Tale', 31-33; ‘The Nun's Priest's Tale', 3207.

17 See the careful and perceptive account in R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, The University Press, 1958), pp. 266-272, etc. Cf. Weiss, Roberto, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century (2d ed.; Oxford, England, Blackwell, 1957).Google Scholar

18 Bolgar, op. cit., p. 434.

19 T. W. Baldwin, op. cit., II, 1-28.

20 I have found Bolgar's lists in Appendix II very useful: “The Translations of the Greek and Roman Classical Authors before 1600', op. cit., pp. 506-541.

21 Richard J. Schoeck, ‘Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England', Studies in Philology, L (1953), 110-127. In ‘Rhetoric and the Law Student in Sixteenth-Century England', Studies in Philology, LIV (1957), 498-508, D. S. Bland concludes that little rhetoric was taught in the Inns of Court, that law students learned by doing. The use of an English-language textbook would seem to fit Bland's conclusion, for it would appear to indicate that the subject had little formal academic standing: the English textbooks were for informal, private use.

22 William G. Crane, op. at., pp. 100-101.

33 Ed. (1593 revision) by William G. Crane (Gainesville, Fla., Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954).

24 Ed. Hudson, Hoyt H. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1935); ed. Louise Brown Osborn in The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskins, 1566-1638 Google Scholar(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1937), pp. 115-166.

25 Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hudson, p. 8.

26 G. K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances', Library, vi (1952), 171-188.

27 The letter-writers are treated in detail in Katherine Gee Hornbeak, The Complete Letter Writer in English, 1568-1800 ('Smith College Studies in Modern Languages', Vol. xv, Nos. 3-4; Northampton, Mass., 1934).

28 For the identity of the author, see T. S. Wilson, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 18.

29 These treatises here mentioned are discussed by Lee S. Hultzen, ‘Aristotle's Rhetoric in England to 1600’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1932), pp. 162-163.

30 See Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966)Google Scholar, for a brilliant historical account of the importance of the mnemonic tradition.

31 See A. E. Malloch, “The Techniques and Functions of Renaissance Paradox', Studies in Philology, LIII (1956), 191-203. Names of a selection of printed commonplace collections can be found in Lechner, op. cit., pp. 239-259.

32 See De Witt Staines and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1955); James Sledd, 'A Note on the Use of Renaissance Dictionaries', Modern Philology, XLIX (1951-1952), 10-15.

33 See the Introduction to England's Helicon, 1600,1614, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins (2 vols.; Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1935), where, however, the commonplace- book pattern of the Bodenham series is somewhat overlooked.

34 The section on literature has been separately edited by Don Cameron Allen, Francis Meres’ Treatise, ‘Poetrie’ ('University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature', XVI, Nos. 3-4; Urbana, University of Illinois, 1933).

35 For a history of the genre in England, see Freeman, Rosemary, English Emblem Books (London, Chatto and Windus, 1948).Google Scholar

36 See the entries for these works in Ong, Walter J., Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an account of Ramism, see the same author's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958﹜, as well as Howell, op. cit. The author is compiling a supplement of editions not in the Inventory.

37 Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, pp. 225-269.

38 Ong, Ramus and Talon Inventory; since the publication of this work, several dozen other editions have come to the attention of the author.

39 British Museum Addit. MS. 34361; now edited by Sister Mary Martin McCormick, P.B.V.M., in a St. Louis University doctoral dissertation (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1968).

40 For problems concerning dating, see Howell, op. at., p. 262.

41 See Maurice B. McNamee, ‘Literary Decorum in Francis Bacon', Saint Louis University Studies, Series A, Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Saint Louis, Saint Louis University Press, March 1950), especially p. 48 and the diagram on p. 9.