Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics

By Julia Caroline Morris

Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a precondition for rhetoric, civics, and beauty: speaking well meant speaking as if off-the-cuff. Against this ideal, Rosenfeld argues that one of early modern literature's richest contributions to poetics is the idea that indecorous art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands poetry’s range of activities.

Rosenfeld details a lost legacy of humanism that contributes to contemporary debates over literary studies’ singular but deeply ambivalent commitment to form. Form, she argues, must be reexamined through the legacy of figure. Reading poetry by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth alongside pedagogical debates of the period and the emergence of empiricism, with its signature commitment to the plain style, Rosenfeld offers a robust account of the triumphs and embarrassments that attended the conspicuous display of artifice. Drawing widely across the arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics, Indecorous Thinking offers a defense of the epistemological value of form: not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge we might call poetic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823277933

Julia Caroline Morris

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Pomona College.

Book preview

INDECOROUS THINKING

Indecorous Thinking

FIGURES OF SPEECH IN EARLY MODERN POETICS

COLLEEN RUTH ROSENFELD

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2018

This book’s publication was supported by a subvention from Pomona College.

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

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CONTENTS

Introduction. The Spectacle of Care: From Figure to Form

Part I

1. Inventing Figures of Speech

2. Figure Pointing in the Humanist Schoolroom

3. Queenly Fig Trees: Figures of Speech and Decorum

Part II

4. Such as might best be: Simile in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

5. Fighting Words: Antithesis in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

6. Withholding Words: Periphrasis in Mary Wroth’s Urania

Coda. Indecorous Forms

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INDECOROUS THINKING

INTRODUCTION

The Spectacle of Care: From Figure to Form

A dead butterfly, impaled upon a spider’s pincer and trapped in his perilous web—this is the spectacle of care with which Edmund Spenser closes his poem Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie. Envious of the artistic ease with which he associates all butterflies, Spenser’s spider lies in wait until Clarion, flitting from flower to flower, wends his way into the finely spun net. And then, the spider kills him:

Under the left wing stroke his weapon slie

Into his heart, that his deepe groning spright

In bloodie streames foorth fled into the aire,

His bodie left the spectacle of care.¹

Trading in the apparently carefree poetics of sprezzatura, the spectacle of care combines the exquisite wings of the butterfly—Painted with thousand colours, passing farre / All Painters skill—with the spider’s weapon slie.² Clarion’s careless wings meet the studied labor of the arachnid’s industry.³ As what is left at the end of the poem, Clarion’s spiritless carcass is a remainder of the spider’s revenge narrative, but the spectacle of these wings is also an artistic production, a highly wrought display that exerts a centripetal, interpretive pull on the poem that it closes and that provides a reflection of the poet’s own care in making that poem. As an emblem of the vexed alliance between art and labor, Spenser’s spectacle of care raises these questions: What remains of the butterfly after he has expired? What is the value of belabored ornament?

As he stabs the butterfly, Spenser’s spider pins down effortless artifice and turns it into something that we can look at and study, though the price of this knowledge is the butterfly’s life. Muiopotmos revels in indecorum: the asymmetry between its stylistic ambition and its subject matter. Featuring more colors than Iris’s rainbow, more variety than a peacock’s tail, and distinguished with manie a twinckling starre, Clarion’s wings offer a visual distillation of the figures of speech with which Spenser elevates his trifling insect to the status of epic.⁴ With the butterfly’s final expiration, Spenser’s poem doubles down on its commitment to the indecorous: in the end we are left with nothing but pretty wings. But the spectacle of care also suggests an alternative to ease, nonchalance, spontaneity, and the aesthetics of celare artem because its wings remain as beautiful as ever. What is more, if (as the narrator suggests) it is the greatest desire of court ladies to transform Clarion’s wings into handheld fans, those wings have never been more available for such ornamental repurposing.⁵

This is a book about artifice at its most conspicuous: poetry that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation and lays bare the time and effort of poetic labor.⁶ I argue that early modern poetic making, or poiēsis, offers us a model of fiction according to which the conditions of possibility within a poetic world are largely determined by how that world is made.⁷ When a poem points to the poesie out of which it is made, it writes a history of composition that structures its imaginative domain. In Timber: Or, Discoveries (1640), Ben Jonson describes this orientation toward poiēsis as the difference between the doing and the thing done:

A Poeme, as I have told you, is the worke of the Poet; the end, and fruit of his labour, and studye. Poesy is his skill, or Crafte of making; the very Fiction it selfe, the reason, or forme of the worke. And these three voices differ, as the thing done, the doing, and the doer; the thing fain’d, the faining, and the fainer; so the Poeme, the Poesy, and the Poet.⁸

In what follows, I take up the register or, in Jonson’s capacious grammar, the voice of the doing in order to consider the relation of Crafte of making to the very Fiction it selfe. Poesy is the doing because it is a quality of action that shapes how a poem is made and transforms that poem into a model for other makings. My organizing hypothesis states that what is possible within a fiction is fixed by how that world came into being. A poem’s answer to the question of ‘how’ may operate according to a logic of reference and truth-value that is distinct from that belonging to the historian who, as Philip Sidney suggested in his Defence of Poesy (c.1580), is bound to the indicative: the bare ‘was.’⁹ Reading for poesie or the doing permits us to tell a history of composition from the perspective of what Jonson called the forme of the worke.

Figures of speech are the focus of this book because they offered early modern writers a set of forms distinguished by their peculiar concentration of art and study. In the sixteenth century, humanist instruction in the art of rhetoric and the canon of elocutio, or style, prized a student’s ability to recognize figures of speech and call them out by name—zeugma, epanalepsis, polyptoton.¹⁰ This act of figure pointing rendered a piece of artifice, at once eccentric and typical, reproducible: it treated a figure of speech as an instrument of making. The very conspicuousness of figure that guided this pedagogy, however, also threatened to violate the widely circulating imperative that art disguise the artifice out of which it is made. In A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), Richard Sherry lambasts common scholemasters who cultivate conspicuous artifice when they "saye unto their scholers: Hic est figura: and sometime to axe them, Per quam figuram but go no further. Nothyng, he concludes, is more folyshe than to affecte or fondly to laboure to speake darkelye for the nonce."¹¹ Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s field-defining critique of humanist pedagogy in From Humanism to the Humanities (1986) was anticipated by early modern educators themselves: What had figure pointing to do with the fashioning of good subjects, let alone moral citizens?¹² Indecorous Thinking shows how early modern poetic practices activated figures of speech in their capacity to produce a certain kind of knowledge that is not reducible to logical arguments, affirmations, or propositions. This knowledge is, instead, poetic.

At least since Aristotle, the art of rhetoric advised its practitioners to be wary of obvious art: conspicuous figures of speech might give the lie to the rhetorical production of probability.¹³ Forensic oratory taught the orator that his version of events would be most persuasive if it appeared to be the mere representation of what actually happened. Where the orator speaks with obvious art, he exposes the inauthenticity of his emotions and the unnatural construction of the whole thing.¹⁴ Poets learned from rhetoric to align the boundaries of plausibility with the invisibility of their artifice. In the Defence, Sidney describes the field of possibility that underwrites both the reading and writing of poetry as the imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention, thereby locating its authority in the rhetorical canon of inventio: the set of procedures and protocols for determining the logical relations among things and assisting the orator in his construction of a likely version of events.¹⁵ According to this paradigm, a fictional world is at its most plausible when it conforms to what the rhetorical tradition thinks the public thinks is most probable.

In what follows, by contrast, I argue that conspicuous figures of speech are significant to a history of early modern poetics because they were instrumental to determining the parameters of possibility within a fictional world. Drawing on a wide range of archival material from the history of rhetoric, poetics, and dialectic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—from grammar-school exercises to university lectures, from manuscript marginalia and commonplace books to printed textbooks popular in the schoolroom and vernacular handbooks looking to popularize these arts—I show how the very tradition that warned against conspicuous artifice also encouraged practitioners to experiment with the inventive capacities of figure. For early modern poets—especially for Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth—the conspicuousness of figure became not a measure of the degree to which a fiction failed to create its world but, rather, an operating condition of that world.¹⁶ Their poesie reveals that figures of speech, ostentatious and unavoidable, index the organization of poetic worlds and the poet’s privileged claim, as Sidney described it, to knowledge of what may be.¹⁷ What follows is thus a thought experiment in the ontology of poetry according to which technique determines the modality of poetry’s existence. In a revision of Jonson’s definite article, poesie is a doing that is always also capable of doing otherwise.

This book tells the story of figure’s secret capture of poetic invention.¹⁸ I argue that early modern poesie developed a model of the mind in which figures of speech drive thinking and act as the constitutive engines of poetry’s imaginative worlds. From exercises in double translation and metaphrasis to the study of Cicero’s orations and the memorization of Ovid’s exile elegies, early modern humanists routinely described figures of speech as a central focus of the schoolroom.¹⁹ Figures of speech constituted a way into and out of exemplary texts. Both activities in analysis, or what the schoolmaster John Brinsley called in his Ludus Litterarius (1612) the unmaking of a text, and activities in genesis, or the making it againe, turned on figures of speech.²⁰ The canon of elocutio therefore provided a body of forms into which a text could be unmade even as the enumeration of those forms articulated something like a skeletal structure. These same figures of speech also supplied readers with a set of formulas for composition: they could make the exemplary text, as Brinsley would say, againe, and as Roger Ascham feared, anew.²¹

It was figure’s capacity to be abstracted from the exemplary text and transformed into an engine of composition that challenged humanist accounts of reason. Early modern debates over the arts of rhetoric and dialectic cohere around a set of questions: Were figures of speech instrumental to thinking? Did they therefore act as constitutive structures of the mind? Or were figures of speech ornamental to thinking as such? In the final decades of the sixteenth century, the pedagogical reforms proposed by Peter Ramus offered one answer to these questions by redistributing the canons belonging to the arts of rhetoric and dialectic and by inscribing the relative value of elocutio to inventio into a paradigmatic account of the compositional process. Responding to an apparent redundancy in the material belonging to rhetoric and dialectic, the Ramist reforms reduced rhetoric to style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio) while reserving the discovery of arguments (inventio) and the judgment of their validity (dispositio) for the art of dialectic. This seemingly simple redistribution carried a polemic. Stripped of its engagement with res, or things, limited only to the adornment of verba or words, rhetoric became the lesser handmaiden to dialectic.²² According to this paradigm of composition, figures of speech provided, as the Ramist Dudley Fenner put it in The Artes of Logike and Rhetorike (1584), the garnishing of speeche . . . whereby the speach it selfe is beautified and made fine.²³ In the chapters that follow, I examine how early modern poesie challenged humanism’s increasingly dogmatic subordination of elocutio to inventio by treating figures of speech as generative forms of thinking.

Indecorous Thinking enters into a vibrant field of scholarship invested in the value of what Sean Keilin has called vulgar eloquence: the curious manner in which the rich capacities of English poetry in the sixteenth century announce themselves as the virtuosic expression of extreme incapacities.²⁴ Building off of the work of Paula Blank and Margaret Ferguson, recent books by Carla Mazzio, Jenny C. Mann, and Catherine Nicholson have taught us to value vicious, affected, and eccentric language for its role in the formation of the early modern English subject and nation even as the kinds of speech this language made possible—mumbling, halting, unruly, outlaw, outlandish, vagrant, strange, exotic, alienated and alienating—has widened the range of what we recognize as a subject or what constitutes the English nation.²⁵ As Nicholson writes, Eloquence thus finds a place within the vernacular that is as extravagant as it is English.²⁶ Indecorous Thinking extends these studies by turning from problems of subject and nation formation to problems of epistemology.²⁷ I am therefore interested in what Mazzio calls the inarticulate utterance for its capacity to make space for alternative temporalities and directions of thought otherwise eclipsed by the flow of verbal fluency.²⁸ Figures of speech were central to early modern debates about thinking and the style of thought’s fluency—how it happens and what it looks like—as well as the distinctive knowledge claims of the arts of dialectic, rhetoric, and poetics. I offer here a defense of ornament not as the sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of thinking closely aligned in the early modern period with the emergent field of vernacular poesie.²⁹

I call this thinking indecorous. A translation of the Greek propon (or appropriateness) and regularly aligned with English synonyms including apt, decent, seemly, and comely, decorum described that aspect of art and composition which even the most systematic of humanists understood as fundamentally unteachable.³⁰ As Ellen MacKay has so succinctly put it, decorum described an aesthetic judgment that retrospectively affixes its formal justification onto a supposedly intrinsic but in fact unspecified and unspecifiable trait.³¹ This is why Michael Leff (drawing on Ricoeur) has described decorum as the art of rhetoric’s substance: it is the principle according to which one orders the elements of a discourse and rounds them out into a coherent product relative to the occasion.³² If at the global level, decorum is pure process, Leff nonetheless maintains that it helps rhetoric achieve ontological density because decorum continues to reside within the particular artifact as the way such processes congeal.³³ Among the peculiarities of early modern humanism, however, is the persistent sense that decorum might govern not only the orator’s composition or the schoolboy’s letter to his parents but just about everything. In Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian (1549), Ramus wrote that decorum covers such a wide field that it is clearly ridiculous to assign it to rhetoric as if it were its property alone.³⁴ For Ramus, there will never be any separate and distinct precept concerning decorum . . . because decorum is that harmonious perfection which the arts by their precepts, and human reason and wisdom by themselves, reveal.³⁵ Decorum was thus the judgment of what is truly fitting and what is not: from grammar, decorum in purity and elegance of speech is understood; from rhetoric, decorum in style and delivery, but also from arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology, decorum in calculation of numbers, in division of great quantities, in harmonies and sounds in the movement of the stars, and from natural science, decorum in roots, plants, and animals.³⁶ For Ramus, decorum did not belong to the art of rhetoric alone because the judgment of decorum distributed all knowledge among the various arts by determining what lies within and what lies without their respective domains.

Early modern poetic theory therefore treated decorum as the guarantee of plausibility: decorum was the abstraction of reigning ideological commitments into a principle of design. Indecorum, by contrast, provided poetry with a means of distinguishing itself from the world and its dominant ideologies: rather than mediation, indecorum performed the work of disarticulation.³⁷ By reversing the traditional priority of inventio over elocutio, indecorous thinking locates the origin of composition in the figures of speech and therefore permits poetry to define itself in distinction from the world to which both the principle of decorum and the places of inventio would have it bound. It may be, as Demetrius suggested in his treatise On Style, that using figures of speech to describe a wobbling teacup produces an indecorous alignment of words to things, but indecorous thinking also distinguishes imaginative realms and their alternative constructions of possibility through innovative acts of evaluation and the distinctive channels of relation that figures afford.³⁸ In spite of the prefix at its start, the work of indecorum does not amount to a simple inversion or undoing of decorum’s regulation. The indecorous describes, instead, an alternative method of the doing: rather than subordinating figures of speech to a determination of likelihood formed by the places of inventio, an indecorous poesie displays the avenues of thinking opened up by the figures themselves. As this book progresses, I map out a constellation of terms that inform early modern theories of indecorum and allow us to approach its operations from a series of distinct perspectives: those terms include deformity or disformity; vices, vanities, and vanus (vain or empty speech); and affectation. Through readings of Spenser, Sidney, and Wroth, I show how figures of speech organize imaginary worlds along peculiar axes of relation that amount to the physical laws of their universes.³⁹ These axes of relation and the heterocosms that they produce are precisely the kind of thinking that figure performs.

From Figure to Form

From the shape of the human body to a set of converging geometrical lines, from the image or representation of something that is otherwise immaterial to the modeling of the plastic arts, the diagram, the written symbol (a letter in the alphabet), figure encompasses a broad range of forms dedicated to artifice, both as an achievement or a product (the figure) and as an act or a process (to figure).⁴⁰ A translation of the Greek schēma, the early Latin figura described form in its outward appearance. Unlike forma, which was persistently associated with Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of morphē and eidos, the term figura migrated toward material artistic practices (statue, image, portrait).⁴¹ As a result, figura treated outward form, as Erich Auerbach suggested, both in its relation to an inside (an inside that might be empty) and in its orientation toward a process (a process to which it was instrumental). Auerbach’s gloss for figura as a process is dynamic form: this plastic figura was a favorite with Ovid (who was interested in a way of thinking about form in its capacity to change).⁴² It is the peculiar dynamic of figura—a shape that allows you to see something in its capacity to be empty and a shape that allows you to see something in its capacity to be otherwise than it is—that informs the vexed and vibrant history of the uses, abuses, and potentials of the most technical of all of the definitions of figure: the figures of speech.

In recent years, early modern studies—as well as literary studies more broadly—has proclaimed a rededication to form. Variously conceived of in terms of Plato’s idea, Aristotle’s formal cause, in relation to content or in relation to matter, and in opposition to (or as an elaboration of ) romanticism’s organic form and its bequest to the New Criticism, these acts of rededication—or of reading for form, as Susan Wolfson has described it—offer valuable insights into the relation of form to politics and into the history of particular forms while the practice of formalism is at once, as Heather Dubrow has put it, variously and simultaneously an unwelcome and an honored guest.⁴³ Studies of early modern rhetoric plot a unique terrain in this critical field. Building off of the significant insights of Patricia Parker, the recent surge of scholarship on figures of speech, including the important work of Gavin Alexander, the essays collected in Renaissance Figures of Speech (2007), and Mann’s Outlaw Rhetoric (2012), has increased the range of cultural and political practices we understand figures to engage.⁴⁴ These illuminating discussions of rhetorical style, however, tend to deal in the vocabulary of trope, scheme, and figure while generally leaving the category of form alone.⁴⁵ Yet early modern discussions of the canon of elocutio are poised to provide precisely that prehistory of form called for by Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann in The Work of Form (2014).⁴⁶

I argue that figures of speech allow us to approach the problem of form from an oblique but productive angle. At least as early as Plato’s Gorgias, figures of speech were a prime target in philosophy’s denigration of rhetoric as an empty art, one parasitic on knowledge to which it could claim no right and irresponsible in its promotion of persuasion over the advancement of truth.⁴⁷ The powdered sugar on rhetoric’s puff pastry, figures of speech were (at best) useful in the manipulation of the passions and (at worst) windy verbiage. In response to such attacks, rhetoric tended to defend itself on philosophy’s terms: figures of speech worked in the service of persuasion and, therefore, founded and maintained civilizations.⁴⁸ It is from such defenses that Brian Vickers, for example, developed his widely accepted account of the expressive function of figures of speech, an account that highlights figure’s ability to represent the affect of a speaker and to remake his audience in the image of that affect (an account that has been useful to elaborations of the social dimension of rhetoric, work on the history of affect, and a recent resurgence of interest in dramatic character and its formations).⁴⁹ Such a defense, however, pits itself against the uses of figures, which it calls abuses, that stray from the telos of persuasion. According to this defense, the practitioner of such ostentatious eloquence suffers from affectation, fails at the art of rhetoric, and produces bad art.

A historically nuanced account of figures of speech need not, however, reduce them to the affective instruments of ideology. Indecorous Thinking reads artifice at its most conspicuous as an index to the time and labor of poetic production.⁵⁰ Figures of speech offer us a theory of form finely calibrated to early modern poesie: figure turns form from teleology to process.⁵¹ Early modern poesie suggests that form is a noun that is always acting like a verb because it is inseparable from the process in which it is involved.⁵² Form is the thing with which one text is assembled, and form is the thing by virtue of which another text takes shape (but multiplied ad infinitum). In the Defence of Rhyme (1603), Samuel Daniel goes some distance toward outlining the significance of this claim. Rhyme was regularly characterized as the vernacular counterpart to the figures of speech known as homoioptoton and homoioteleuton (or, similiter cadens and similiter desinens). Because figures of speech ought to be used, as Thomas Campion writes in Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), sparingly, rhyme as such was therefore described as an excessive or indecorous use of those figures.⁵³ By this account, the interminable iterations or tedious affectation of rhyme threatened to drive invention off course.⁵⁴ In response to this kind of criticism, Daniel replies:

All excellencies being sold us at the hard price of labour, it follows, where we bestow most thereof we buy the best success; and rhyme, being far more laborious than loose measures (whatsoever is objected), must needs, meeting with wit and industry, breed greater and worthier effects in our language. So that if our labours have wrought out a manumission from bondage and that we go at liberty, notwithstanding these ties, we are no longer the slaves of rhyme, but we make it a most excellent instrument to serve us.⁵⁵

Against the social and aesthetic imperatives of sprezzatura and celare artem, Daniel argues that it is precisely the labor of rhyme that increases the value of the poetic product. Poetic labor or poesie becomes both a measure of the poet’s freedom and the currency in a transaction between poet and poem. The sign of mastery is not nonchalance but a poetic form distinguished by its visibility—the stylistic excess by virtue of which a figure of speech transforms into rhyme. From a certain perspective, poetry (routinely described as rhetoric’s licentious counterpart) comes into being as an indecorous elaboration of elocutio. Diverging from the telos of persuasion, figures of speech point to a particular way of knowing that does not rely on the invisibility of style. And, rather than promoting civilizations through the reproduction of ideology, figures of speech can instead cultivate and gratify desires that diverge from ideals of social harmony.

Unabashed about its labor, indecorous thinking also suggests that figures of speech are precisely the point at which form meets history: figures provide a kaleidoscopic perspective on the literary text and its constitutive pieces such that the text itself opens up as a history of its own composition. Like Simon Jarvis, I want to suggest that poetry is capable of thinking thoughts that are particular to its techniques and that cannot be thought elsewhere and by other means. This book is therefore an exercise in what Jarvis calls philosophical poetics, which is historical insofar as it takes technique to be at once the way in which art thinks and the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience.⁵⁶ In his 1953 entry on form for the Dictionary of World Literature, Craig La Drière defined form by opposing it to style. He wrote:

The concept of style cannot in practise be dissociated from that of some process. This is sufficient to distinguish it from the concept of form, since as we have seen form is a concept relevant only to objects as such, to things and not to processes. But what is a formal element in an object from the point of view of analysis of the constitution of that object may be an element of style from the point of view of analysis of a process in which the object is involved. Some formal elements in things are indeed simply suggestions of process. These may be, like the brushwork in a painting, themselves vestiges of the process that produced the thing. . . . In short, what is form in the object conceived as such is style in the process in which the object is conceived as being involved.⁵⁷

For La Drière, a concept of style accounts for an object’s history of production and a concept of form identifies the element of that history that remains available to empirical observation and might be more or less significant to the interpretation of that object. From the perspective of the painting as a made thing, the brushstroke is a formal element, but from the perspective of the painting as a process of making, the brushstroke is a stylistic element. La Drière goes on to suggest that what is interesting about style in particular is that in order for us to perceive an object as being made in this particular way, we have to be able to imagine that it could have been made in some other way:

To find a style in a literary work is impossible unless we conceive that something is being done in the work or with it, that it is not just an object but an element in or embodiment of a process; and is impossible unless we conceive that the thing done might be done or have been done otherwise.⁵⁸

While La Drière’s intention may have been to pull form and style apart, I want instead to suggest that his discussion defines the dynamic intersection between form and style that is also the work of early modern figures of speech:

1. The point where product meets process: Like the brushstrokes of La Drière’s exemplary painting, figures of speech function both as formal elements of an object and as vestiges of a process that offer an explanation of how that object came to be. The language of vestige suggests that process is a kind of remnant or remainder, with the implication that an ideal product effaces its style. Early modern practices encourage us, however, to consider figures of speech as conspicuous instruments of poetic production.

2. As conspicuous instruments of poetic production, figures of speech render the labor of poesie visible and encode a temporality into the poem that I call its history of composition. This history is not reducible to more familiar organizations of historical time (the period, the life of the author); this history is also not reducible to the temporal organizations of fiction (most notably, plot or narrative).⁵⁹ It is, however, informed by and interacts with both: the history of composition is the way in which a text tells its own story of becoming.

3. The peculiar temporality encoded by figure—its history of composition—entails the idea that things could have been done otherwise. Figure is perpetually conceived of as the deviation from another way of speaking (Puttenham, in the Art of English Poesy, calls the other way the ordinary and accustomed).⁶⁰ Where figures are instruments in histories of composition, they therefore permit us to read form in a way that highlights neither its necessity nor its inevitability (the sign of aesthetic value is therefore not that the text could not have been done in any other way) but instead its dynamism. From the perspective of figure, we are able to free form from the teleology of the poetic product and understand it, instead, as an index of poetic process and an instrument of poetic labor. Where figure is at its most conspicuous, it suggests that form can index the defining modality of poetry: what may be.

In what follows, my history, theory, and interpretation of figures of speech will rotate around these three axes of interpretation. I will suggest that figure is where form and history meet: as a set of techniques, figures open up to specific histories of reading and writing; figures designate a set of linguistic forms, but figures also treat those forms as already historical. As a closed or finite set of forms that are determined, described, and taxonomized within the art of rhetoric, figures are an object of knowledge (Are you trained in the canon of elocutio? Recite to me its ornaments including brief, illustrative examples). Figures are also, however, the engines of knowledge: formally homologous with the places of inventio, figures might double as logical arguments, with the result that their thinking looks a lot like humanist accounts of reason. But the kind of knowledge produced by figures also looks exactly like what humanist accounts of reason were looking to expel—sophistry and fallacies. Finally, figures might produce a particular kind of knowledge that would be increasingly aligned with a distinctively poetic mode. As with the mechanical arts, where making and knowing are intimately intertwined, the method of thinking characteristic of poesie deals in contingencies rather than necessities, models rather than explanations, and concretizations rather than abstractions. Thinking with figures of speech, that is, produced the imaginative worlds of early modern literature.

By detailing the world-making activity of figure, I am also asking that we extend to figures of speech a privilege we have largely, though not exclusively, reserved for tropes. A legacy of philosophy’s charge against the emptiness of rhetorical ornament has been the defense of the trope in distinction to and at the expense of figure.⁶¹ The difficulty the art of rhetoric has in maintaining this division between trope and figure is an index of its conceptual inadequacy to the dynamic forms it treats. I also want to suggest, however, that literary criticism’s focus on what Kenneth Burke called the master tropes is a symptom of the extent to which we have tended to defend style on philosophy’s terms, with the result that we have internalized philosophy’s critique of style to the detriment of our theories of poetic form.⁶² In what follows, I consider what it meant to think with style in early modern England. As figures of speech capture poetic invention, they also inform a method of thinking, and this method of thinking requires us to expand our sense of what was thinkable in the period by redefining what counts as thinking as such. Indecorous Thinking is thus an attempt to excavate the vexed place of figure within English humanism so as to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modern poetry and to consider how the modality of these domains—what may be—guides a modern criticism that seeks to describe its operations.⁶³

Overview

I have organized the book into two parts, each of which contains three chapters. Part One draws on the overlapping histories of rhetoric, dialectic, poetics, and pedagogy in order to articulate a set of approaches to figures of speech that emphasize their instrumentality to the practices of reading and writing in early modern England. Each of the first three chapters approaches the problem of indecorous thinking from a distinct perspective from within the archive: Chapter 1 draws on the history of the Ramist reforms; Chapter 2, the history of the humanist schoolroom; and Chapter 3, the history of poetics. Part Two, by contrast, focuses on a single figure of speech in each of the romances that it reads—Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Arcadia, and Wroth’s Urania—and considers the indecorous thinking afforded by each figure. The governing organization of this book’s argument is therefore not linear but recursive. Later chapters return to the arguments and insights of the earlier ones so as to push them in new directions. The result is, I hope, an anatomy of indecorous thinking.

Chapter 1 argues that debates over the canons of inventio and elocutio, their signature places and figures, informed early modern models of the mind and its thinking—where thinking happens, what it looks like, and what counts as thinking. These specialized debates over the question of the relation of figure to thought provide us with a particular entry point into the problem of fiction: How do style and its constitutive figures of speech set and determine the parameters of possibility for the imaginative worlds of early modern literature? Chapter 2 turns to English grammar schools and the earliest instruction in figures of speech to consider how these figures became formulas for composition and the generative mechanisms of these worlds. What these practices reveal is a cultivation of and interest in pleasure—not, as we might expect (following Horace), an accommodation to the pleasure of the audience but instead an activation of the pleasure that a maker might take in his own poetic productions.⁶⁴ Chapter 3 examines how artifice at its most conspicuous assigns an original set of values to the things of imaginative worlds. Taking up Aristotle’s sense that one should not call a fig tree queenly, I argue that figures of speech invent alternative hierarchies of evaluation. In this way, Part One of the book unfolds its theory of figures of speech across three distinct registers: a model of the mind that assigns primacy of place to the canon of elocutio, the translation of this model of the mind into quotidian habits of reading and writing, and, finally, the kind of poetry these habits produced.

In Part Two, I turn to a set of case studies—attending to the work of simile, antithesis, and periphrasis in the romances of Spenser, Sidney, and Wroth, respectively. Simile, antithesis, and periphrasis occupied a particularly vivid position in the contested intersection between style and invention because of the perceived formal homology between these figures of elocutio and the places of inventio known as comparison, contraries, and definition. It is on account of this formal homology, for example, that Ramus excluded these three figures from the art of rhetoric.⁶⁵ Simile, antithesis, and periphrasis therefore bring problems of classification—place or figure?—into a special kind of focus. Chapter 4 argues that simile was instrumental to Spenser’s signature construction of such as might best be in The Faerie Queene; Chapter 5 argues that antithesis and its relentless commitment to the coexistence of contraries constitutes a first principle in the world of Sidney’s Arcadia; and Chapter 6 argues that periphrasis—a figure that permits a speaker to take hold of precisely that which she does not name—becomes the governing logic of the world of Wroth’s Urania.

While simile, antithesis, and periphrasis offer especially powerful examples of the generative tension between the canons of inventio and elocutio, the set of anxieties that motivated the Ramist reforms were pervasive to humanist instruction at large, where figures of speech are regularly reined in with the same