Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England

By Jenny C. Mann

A central feature of English Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. Thus, one of the main cultural projects of Renaissance rhetoricians was that of producing a "common" vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins yet self-consciously English in character. The process of vernacularization began during Henry VIII’s reign and continued, with fits and starts, late into the seventeenth century.

In Outlaw Rhetoric, Jenny C. Mann examines the substantial and largely unexplored archive of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in England between 1500 and 1700. Writers of these guides drew upon classical training as they translated Greek and Latin figures of speech into an everyday English that could serve the ends of literary and national invention. In the process, however, they confronted aspects of rhetoric that run counter to its civilizing impulse. For instance, Mann finds repeated references to Robin Hood, indicating an ongoing concern that vernacular rhetoric is "outlaw" to the classical tradition because it is common, popular, and ephemeral. As this book shows, however, such allusions hint at a growing acceptance of the nonclassical along with a new esteem for literary production that can be identified as native to England. Working across a range of genres, Mann demonstrates the effects of this tension between classical rhetoric and English outlawry in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, and Cavendish. In so doing she reveals the political stakes of the vernacular rhetorical project in the age of Shakespeare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464577

Book preview

For Guy and the Manns

We have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another; tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not.

—Paul de Man, The Epistemology of Metaphor

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Tale of Robin Hood

1. Common Rhetoric: Planting Figures of Speech in the English Shire

2. The Trespasser: Displacing Virgilian

Figures in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

3. The Insertour: Putting the Parenthesis

in Sidney’s Arcadia

4. The Changeling: Mingling Heroes

and Hobgoblins in Shakespeare’s

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

5. The Figure of Exchange: Gender

Exchange in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20

and Jonson’s Epicene

6. The Mingle-Mangle: The Hodgepodge

of Fancy and Philosophy in

Cavendish’s Blazing World

Conclusion: Words Made Visible

and the Turn against Rhetoric

Appendix of English Rhetorical Manuals

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), p. 360v

2. Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), p. 171

3. Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598), sig. A

4. Thomas Blount, The Academy of Eloquence (1654), title page

5. William Shakespeare, Poems (1640), sig. B4

6. Samuel Shaw, Words Made Visible (1679), p. 95

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research and writing of this book have been made possible by the support of family, friends, colleagues, and teachers, and I am glad to have the opportunity to thank them here.

An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as "Sidney’s ‘Insertour’: Arcadia, Parenthesis, and the Formation of English Eloquence," English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 460–98. A version of chapter 5 appeared as "The ‘Figure of Exchange’: Shakespeare’s ‘Master Mistress,’ Jonson’s Epicoene, and the English Art of Rhetoric," Renaissance Drama 38 (2010): 173–98. I would like to acknowledge Arthur Kinney and the editors of English Literary Renaissance at Blackwell Publishing, and Will West and the editors of Renaissance Drama at Northwestern University Press.

For their support of my work I am grateful to the Departments of English at Northwestern University and Cornell University. Financial support has been generously provided by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Weinberg College at Northwestern University, the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University, the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the President’s Council of Cornell Women at Cornell University.

When I was undergraduate at Yale University, Joseph Roach took me on as a thesis advisee, and tolerantly allowed me to spend an entire year sharing my every thought on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Even more important, he encouraged me to pursue graduate work in the English Department at Northwestern University, now one of the finest places in the country to obtain a doctorate in early modern literary studies. I am grateful to the faculty there who read and responded to the manuscript, including Kasey Evans, Jeffrey Masten, Martin Mueller, Wendy Wall, and Will West. I also thank my fellow graduate students, especially the participants in the Northwestern Early Modern Colloquium and my dear friend Coleman Hutchison.

In 2004 I had the good fortune to participate in a Folger Institute seminar on The Fate of Rhetoric in Early Modern England, led by John Guillory. I had long admired John’s work, and through this seminar I learned that he is also a generous teacher. Much of the early conceptualization of this book derives from the conversations of this seminar, and I thank the other participants, especially Cathy Nicholson and Kirsten Tranter. I also thank the archivists at the Folger Shakespeare Library as well as the staff of the Folger Institute for making my time in the archive so productive, both in 2004 and on a subsequent fellowship in 2010.

The arguments of this book have benefited from conversations, suggestions, and insights offered by a generous group of scholars at Cornell University. I am grateful for the contributions of many colleagues, including Rick Bogel, Barbara Correll, Walter Cohen, Stuart Davis, Debby Fried, Philip Lorenz, Bill Kennedy, and Tim Murray. I also thank the participants in the Cornell Society for the Humanities seminar on Historicizing the Global Postmodern, including Matt Hart, Suman Seth, and Philip Stern. I am especially grateful to Rayna Kalas and Bernie Meyler for reading the entire manuscript and providing invaluable direction for revision. Rayna I also thank for her friendship and guidance. Jonathan Culler has been my faculty mentor since I arrived at Cornell, and I thank him in particular for directing me to Cornell University Press. I also want to acknowledge all of the friends who have made living in Ithaca for the last five years such a pleasure.

This book has been greatly improved by the scrutiny of Cornell University Press reviewers, including Wayne Rebhorn and two anonymous readers. I am grateful for their thorough attention and insightful suggestions. I thank Marie Flaherty-Jones for her attentive copyediting, Kate Mertes for compiling the index, and Susan Specter for her thoughtfulness in steering the book through production. I also offer my sincere thanks to Peter Potter, who has generously read multiple versions of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback at every stage. I feel lucky to have completed the manuscript under his careful guidance.

I would like to close by thanking two scholars in particular for helping to bring this book into existence. Wendy Wall has been my most exacting reader, and I always knew a chapter was doing its job when I had finally persuaded her of the logic of its argument. I also owe her a debt of gratitude for discouraging me from specializing in Renaissance tragicomedy. I thank Jeffrey Masten not only for his careful reading of every draft of this book but also for his own work, which brilliantly shows how a historicist engagement with technical aspects of linguistic study can be united with critical methodologies that are attentive to questions of sex, gender, and power. Or, to put it another way, Jeff’s work shows how seemingly antiquarian interests can produce delightfully scandalous scholarship. Jeff and Wendy have taught me how to be a scholar, a colleague, and a mentor, and for that I offer my deepest thanks.

This book is dedicated to my family, Karen Mann, John Mann, Tama Baldwin, Annika Mann, Joseph Rheinhardt, and Guy Ortolano. All of them are scholars and writers, and I’m proud to have entered the family business. Because I had the good fortune to be born into such a clan, I’ve never doubted the seriousness and worth of scholarly inquiry, or of a life dedicated to reading, thinking, and writing. I thank my father, John Mann, for bequeathing a love of reading and a reverence for learning, and for his unconditional support of both his daughters. My mother, Karen Mann, offered insightful readings of every line of this book, and her help was essential to its completion. I must also give her credit for introducing me to Shakespeare in the form of a Betamax videocassette of Much Ado about Nothing, and for parenting under the assumption that Shakespeare is appropriate for grade-schoolers. Last, I thank my husband, Guy Ortolano. Like the rest of us, Guy has chosen the life of an academic—although he would want me to mention that he also possesses a great deal of natural athletic ability. He’s a good reader and a fine husband, and I offer him my love and gratitude.

Introduction

A Tale of Robin Hood

Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), only the second rhetorical manual to be published in the vernacular, begins by imagining its own rejection by English readers. Doubt not but that the title of this treatise all straunge vnto our Englyshe eares, wil cause some men at the fyrst syghte to maruayle what the matter of it should meane: yea, and peraduenture if they be rashe of iudgement, to cal it some newe fangle, and so casting it hastily from them, wil not once vouch safe to reade it: and if they do, yet perceiuynge nothing to be therin that pleaseth their phansy, wyl count it but a tryfle, & a tale of Robynhoode.¹ Sherry’s suspicion that his English readers will find the Greek words scheme and trope straunge seems eminently sensible, but the worry that they will dismiss his text as a tale of Robynhoode is more peculiar, given that the Treatise is entirely without narrative content—indeed, it consists of little more than a catalog of rhetorical figures of speech. How could Sherry’s text seem both straunge and newe fangle and also as familiar as a native English folktale? This passage is all the more perplexing when one considers that this association of English rhetoric with tales of Robin Hood is not merely an idiosyncrasy of Sherry’s text. References to Robin Hood periodically recur in English rhetorics published in the ensuing decades. Why does the English outlaw of medieval legend lurk around these founding attempts to make classical rhetoric an English art? And what can this union of rhetoric and Robin Hood tell us about vernacular literary production in the early modern period?

In Outlaw Rhetoric I take these questions as a starting point for a study of the pursuit of a specifically vernacular eloquence in early modern England, an endeavor that Sherry describes as taking classical figures of speech and making them speak English.² A central feature of Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet despite the cultural authority of classical literature, sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. For generations of literate English speakers who had been taught to read and write using Latin discursive techniques, this project required the elevation of the vernacular to the standards of idealized classical models. Thus the translation of the art of rhetoric into English aimed to create a new vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins but also self-consciously English in character. However, given that many sixteenth-century writers subscribed to the widely held belief that their vernacular language was deficient in comparison to Latin, the formation of an artful English language would prove no easy task. Although we now tend to think of rhetorical techniques as applicable across language cultures—after all, the Romans themselves adapted them from Greek—early modern English writers worried that their barren and barbarous tongue lacked the substance to supply the demands of the ancient art of rhetoric.³

Today, of course, it is commonplace to dwell on the rhetorical accomplishments of celebrated writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare when discussing the development of the English language and literature in the sixteenth century, but it is also important to acknowledge the unease felt by rhetors like Sherry, who feared that English might never overcome its own barbarousness. Rather than focusing exclusively on the triumphs of the process of vernacular self-fashioning in the Renaissance, Outlaw Rhetoric follows the approach of scholars such as Paula Blank and Margaret Ferguson, attending instead to moments of nervousness and failure in English rhetorical handbooks—moments when the vernacular language is found to be incompatible with the demands of Latin art.⁴ In their translation of the stylistic ornaments of classical rhetoric, vernacular rhetorical manuals encounter a number of Latin figures of speech that cannot be easily made to speak English. These figures expose the technical difficulties in enacting the much broader translation of learning and empire (translatio studii et imperii) from classical culture. Yet although such figures frustrate the attempts of their translators to accommodate every aspect of Latin rhetoric in English, I argue that they also provoke the elaboration of a vernacular English poesy born out of the struggle between Latin rule and English material.⁵ Sherry’s reference to a tale of Robin Hood emerges from this very struggle, and it suggests that the inability of English to approximate classical eloquence produces neither silence nor ineloquence, but storytelling.⁶

Although he wants to distance his rhetorical manual from the idea of Robin Hood, Sherry’s allusion to such a tale activates a series of potentially troubling connections between rhetoric and the English outlaw. In addition to associating his rhetorical manual with an act of storytelling, Sherry’s mention of Robin Hood also implicitly locates his vernacular rhetoric in the imagined space of the English countryside, suggesting that the process of linguistic translation is also one of geographic relocation. This geographic movement is reinforced in subsequent allusions to the English outlaw, which likewise affix the idea of vernacular eloquence to a particular place. The story of Robin Hood next appears in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetoric (1553), where, in recommending a strategy whereby an English speaker can win the attention of an indifferent audience, Wilson shares an unlikely anecdote, in which the greatest Athenian orator uses a tale of Robin Hood to capture the goodwill of his auditors. Wilson advises his readers:

If [the audience likes] not to hear weighty affairs, we may promise them strange news and persuade them we will make them laugh, and think you not that they will rather hear a foolish tale than a wise and wholesome counsel? Demosthenes, therefore, seeing at a time the fondness of the people to be such that he could not obtain of them to hear him speak his mind in an earnest cause concerning the wealth of his country, required them to tarry and he would tell them a tale of Robin Hood. Whereat they all stayed and longed to know what that should be. . . . Whereupon Demosthenes, having won them together by this merry toy, rebuked their folly that were so slack to hear good things, and so ready to hear a tale of a tub, and thus having them attentive, persuaded with them to hear him in matters of great importance, the which otherwise he could never have done if he had not taken this way with him [sic].⁷

It is strange news indeed that Demosthenes, who lived in the fourth century BCE, would have on hand a repertoire of stories about a medieval English folk hero. This anachronism can be read as a kind of reverse allegory of Wilson’s text, which transports rhetorical techniques from the classical world to Tudor England. This translation is secured by a firm sense of England as a place, the location that makes vernacular eloquence proper.

As I will show, this spatialization of language itself derives from the rhetorical tradition, especially the formulations of figures of speech, which are said to move and transport words from one place to another. But this spatial logic, to adopt Walter Ong’s term, which might seem to provide a ready model for translating the art of rhetoric to new cultural locales, was not easily applied in an English context.⁸ The imagined geographies of rhetoric resist translation to England because they were constituted precisely so as to exclude vulgar tongues and vulgar nations from the space of eloquence properly defined.⁹ That is, long before the sixteenth century the art of rhetoric had already identified England as a barbarous location, a place where eloquence emphatically does not travel. From the point of view of a humanist committed to this inherited framework, what could be more indecorous than to picture Demosthenes telling merry folktales to a rowdy English audience?

Although the reader never learns the actual content of Demosthenes’ oration, Wilson’s anecdote establishes the wealth of [the] country as the proper subject of rhetorical eloquence. Demosthenes’ foolish tale of Robin Hood has a complicated relationship to this national subject matter: it digresses from the proper subject of rhetoric, but it also constitutes the only way for the orator to lead his listeners to matters of great importance. This sense of discursive errancy is doubly present in the allusion to Robin Hood: not only does the tale of Robin Hood provide the content of the digression, but it also functions as a byword for physical wandering, as in early modern descriptions of a roundabout journey as going round by Robin Hood’s barn and traveling a Robin Hood’s mile.¹⁰ Indeed, Wilson has already established the connection between Robin Hood and spatial digression in an earlier passage of the Arte, where, in warning orators to avoid unnecessary digressions in their speech, he writes,

As for example, if I shall have occasion to speak in open audience of the obedience due to our sovereign king, I ought first to learn what is obedience, and after knowledge attained to direct my reasons to the only proof of this purpose, and wholly to seek confirmation of the same, and not turn my tale to talk of Robin Hood and to show what a goodly archer was he, or to speak wonders of the man in the moon, such as are most needless and farthest from the purpose. For then, the hearer looking to be taught his obedience, and hearing in the mean season mad tales of archery and great marvels of the man in the moon, being half-astonied [sic] at his so great straying, will perhaps say to himself: Now wither the devil wilt thou; come in man again for very shame, and tell me no by-tales such as are to no purpose, but show me that which thou didst promise both to teach and persuade at thy first entry.¹¹

This passage describes an inept speaker who has wandered into talk of Robin Hood as someone who has physically strayed from acceptable territory: he is asked wither the devil wilt thou and told to come in man again to the proper space of eloquent speech. Again, as in Sherry’s text, Robin Hood’s name suggests by-tales, or even byways, a text that strays from its proper route. Wilson’s formulation associates tales of Robin Hood with wandering, unnecessary digression, and social transgression, and the name Robin Hood in turn figures the problem of digression as something peculiarly English. Though Wilson’s manual aims to translate classical rhetoric into the vernacular, the local stuff of English folktales remains as [far] from the purpose of this new vernacular eloquence as the man in the moon.¹²

As my readings have emphasized, what is noteworthy about such references to Robin Hood is the Englishness of the figure as well as his association with popular, oral culture. Unlike King Arthur, who enjoyed a comparable kind of folkloric circulation in England and on the Continent, Robin Hood was a figure of entirely British construction.¹³ By the 1550s the English outlaw had long been a familiar folk hero, a product of late medieval song who figured prominently in popular culture. The story of Robin Hood was transmitted into early modern culture in a range of elusive forms: snatches of song, ballads, proverbs, broadsides, romances, moral tales, and the plays, pageants, and morris dances of May Day celebrations.¹⁴ These modes of delivery were of special concern to Reformation moralists, who disapproved of the minstrels that performed tales of the outlaw hero, accusing them of leading good Christians astray.¹⁵ As such responses suggest, tales of Robin Hood were often constructed out of a series of spatialized social transgressions, especially his frequent trespass into the king’s forest.¹⁶ Indeed, the defining element of the legend is Robin Hood’s status as a masterless figure living outside of the law in the semiwild of the forest. For suspicious readers, tales of Robin Hood thus threaten to produce a double trespass: in narrating the movements of a vagrant hero, they may also lead audiences to abandon their proper place.

The associations evoked by the figure of Robin Hood are simultaneously both enabling and disturbing to the project of English rhetoric. Tales of Robin Hood are emphatically English, yet they are also culturally and socially vulgar. The tales attract a wide audience, yet they may divert that audience’s attention from appropriate subject matter. These potentially negative associations with vulgarity help explain Sherry’s concern that his translated dictionary of rhetorical figures may be rejected as a tale of Robynhoode. In turn, such allusions to the English outlaw in early vernacular rhetorical manuals also remind us that the promise to make classical rhetorical figures speak English is a deceptively straightforward way of portraying a fraught—even dangerous—process of translation and transformation. In a pedagogical context, translation was understood as rescuing the discursive treasure of the classical world and carrying it forward to early modern England (translatio means a carrying across), but outside the schools this practice risked condemnation as trespass and even thievery.¹⁷ The legend of Robin Hood thus emblematizes the worst fears of the English rhetorical manuals: that they will be set aside as an indecorous transgression against the rightful prerogatives of classical art.

Though these brief references to Robin Hood are seemingly marginal to the larger project of vernacular rhetoric, I argue that they encode and disclose the situation of vernacular English rhetoric as an outlaw itself, roaming at the margins of the classical tradition. Like tales of Robin Hood, the translation of rhetoric into English upends the cultural hierarchy, potentially turning an art of the trivium into mere storytelling. It may be taken by its readers as irredeemably common, popular, and ephemeral. In its most idealized form, the figure of Robin Hood, thriving in the English greenwood, provides much fertile ground for the valorization of English rhetoric as a national product. However, when these guides mention Robin Hood it is not to celebrate native traditions, but rather so that they can distance themselves from social inferiority, unnecessary digression, and trifling storytelling. If one were to mistake such by-tales for all of English rhetoric, as Sherry worries, then vernacular rhetoric itself risks dismissal as an indecorous digression, an outlaw.

Despite Sherry’s and Wilson’s attempts to forestall any identification of vernacular rhetoric with stories of Robin Hood, I take the English outlaw as a figure for an outlying vernacular rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, in addition to reading Robin Hood as a trope for an English rhetoric eager to deny its own outlaw status, I also consider the transformation of the art of rhetoric into a collection of stories and tales as a key result of the translation of classical rhetoric in the early modern period. In the chapters that follow, I argue that this correlation of rhetoric, translation, and storytelling moves far beyond the confines of vernacular rhetorical manuals, and that the transformation of classical figures of speech into English stories becomes a characteristic feature of vernacular literary production at the end of the sixteenth century. Outlaw Rhetoric thus follows the by-tales and byways traversed by vernacular rhetoric’s outlaw figures, arguing that this very journeying around the margins of classical rhetoric produces a distinctively English eloquence in the early modern period.

Renaissance Studies and the Empire of Rhetoric

[Rhetoric is] a veritable empire, greater and more tenacious than any political empire in its dimensions and its duration. . . . Rhetoric—whatever the system’s internal variations may have been—has prevailed in the West for two and a half millennia, from Gorgias to Napoleon III; if we consider all that it has seen—watching immutable, impassive, and virtually immortal—come to life, pass, and vanish without itself being moved or changed: Athenian democracy, Egyptian kingdoms, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the great invasions, feudalism, the Renaissance, the monarch, the French Revolution; it has digested regimes, religions, civilizations; moribund since the Renaissance, it has taken three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now.

—Roland Barthes, The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire

Always central to an understanding of Renaissance writing, our understanding of rhetoric’s influence on early modern culture has grown considerably since the middle of the twentieth century, and consequently we have a better sense than ever before of rhetoric’s prominent place in the wider spectrum of learning in the European Renaissance.¹⁸ Whereas once the art of rhetoric was defined in a limited fashion as a pedagogical technique—a means of teaching boys to speak and write eloquently—we now see it not just as a method of schooling but as a defining mode of intellectual inquiry, knowledge production, and social negotiation.¹⁹ Rhetoric provided the gateway to learning in the postmedieval world, the method through which all other subjects were apprehended, and its practices extend far beyond schoolroom exercises. Scholars such as Nancy Struever, Joel Altman, and Victoria Kahn have traced the connections between rhetorical theory and modes of political and religious argument, identifying rhetoric as the practice responsible for generating a humanist culture committed to skepticism and debate.²⁰ In addition to recovering the wide influence of rhetoric’s discursive techniques, literary critics have also exposed the ideological content of rules for rhetorical style, reminding us that standards of eloquent speech can be established only with reference to particular social situations. Because its handbooks make explicit the commonplace assumptions of Renaissance culture, as Wayne Rebhorn argues, the art of rhetoric can be analyzed as an anthropological guide to the early modern world as well as a theory of verbal expression.²¹ As a result of this attention to the social particularity of rhetorical discourse, Renaissance rhetoric is now treated as historically distinct from its classical and medieval forbears, and like the epoch in which it flourished, inflected with absolutist politics.²²

The most prominent Renaissance rhetorics in use in England were written in Latin, but a small number of previously obscure vernacular rhetorical handbooks have gained visibility in literary criticism since the 1980s as scholars have turned to them for evidence of poetry’s function as a medium of political conflict and social mobility within Elizabethan culture.²³ This scholarship reads both poetry and courtly behavior as manifestations of the same rhetorical system, with a common set of tropes yoking the productions of literature and history within a single cultural text. Handbooks of English rhetoric—especially George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), which promises to pull its readers from the carte to the Court—thus enabled the founding arguments of New Historicism, providing critics such as Louis Adrian Montrose, Frank Whigham, and Patricia Parker with one version of what Stephen Greenblatt eventually termed a poetics of culture.²⁴ Through such scholarship, the insights of a cultural history of rhetoric have been used to outline a kind of alternate Elizabethan world picture, with the social cosmologies of the early modern world made visible through the functioning of the discursive techniques of the rhetorical tradition. This influential work on vernacular rhetoric has relied heavily on Wilson’s and Puttenham’s handbooks, with the result that English rhetoric has often been viewed as synonymous with courtly self-presentation.

The identification of the art of rhetoric as a motivated discourse that links rhetorical forms with historically specific ideological frameworks has provided an interpretive opportunity to scholars hoping to unite formalist and historicist approaches to early modern literary studies. Once one acknowledges that the discourse of rhetoric is deeply implicated in the social and political order that produces it, it becomes possible to analyze rhetorical forms such as figures of speech not only as vehicles of local literary effects but also as instruments of wider cultural significance. To quote Parker’s influential formulation, It is precisely such a concern with language and its ordering structures which might lead us to re-pose the question of moving beyond formalism, differently.²⁵ Thus the essays collected in Renaissance Figures of Speech (2007) can plausibly claim that a case study of a dozen rhetorical figures synthesizes formalist and historicist methodologies.²⁶ Most often what is meant by the term historicist in such formulations is not a materialist or sociological analysis, but rather the situation of particular figures of rhetoric in their place in the larger rhetorical system, as well as the situation of the art of rhetoric itself in its place in Renaissance literate culture.²⁷ The term formalist, meanwhile, tends to encompass post-structuralist modes of analysis, which is likely the reason why the figures of speech have attracted more interest than other categories of rhetoric, such as the various parts of an oration (i.e., exordium, narratio, etc.).

Yet despite the now general assent to the proposition that the Renaissance art of rhetoric is inextricably entwined with the culture that produced it, and that to examine the forms of rhetoric is to think historically about the rules for language use in early modern culture, there has been no attempt to isolate and analyze the invention of a specifically English art of rhetoric in the sixteenth century. The most influential scholarship on rhetoric and English literature has considered the discourse of Renaissance rhetoric either in its broadest sense as a humanist, and thus Neo-Latin, European phenomenon, or in a very narrow sense, relying heavily on a few familiar vernacular handbooks.²⁸ As my introductory discussion of Robin Hood suggests, I am interested in the incompatibilities between Latin and vernacular rhetoric, and how English rhetors, poets, and playwrights cope with those incompatibilities, often transforming them into literary opportunities. Outlaw Rhetoric thus responds to previous scholarship by both narrowing its focus (from the discourse of Renaissance rhetoric in its entirety) and expanding it (beyond the handbooks of Wilson and Puttenham), examining the full range of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in the period. This archive reveals a widespread interest in and market for a common English rhetoric, derived from classical art yet yoked to the local countryside. These rhetorical manuals take a variety of disparate forms—including translations of Aristotle and Cicero, letter-writing manuals, collections of orations, and dictionaries of figures of speech—but collectively