Language, Theme, and Character in Twelfth Night

Summary

With the English language’s growth in power and importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came a zest for theorizing about the truth of words. Some writers continued to stress the benefits of eloquence, one of the more recent acquisitions of English. Francis Meres asserts in Palladis Tamia (1598) that ‘though the naked truth be welcome, yet it is more gratefull, if it come attired and adorned with fine figures, and choice phrases’ (fol. 252). Sixteenth-century grammar schools taught moral truth through eloquence, emphasizing authors’ who at the same time polish and teach language and morals’. The compatibility of words and motives was accepted in guides to conduct such as William Martyn’s Youths Instruction (1612) which states that ‘the inward cogitations of a mans hart are publikely revealed by his speech, and outward actions’ (p. 39). But Martyn’s axiom can be juxtaposed with any number of versions of Politeuphuia’s ‘The typ of the tongue soundeth not alwayes the depth of the heart.’ And although rhetoric, the art of eloquence, could be seen as a means for communicating the truth effectively, the new fashionable teachers of logic and rhetoric, Ramus and his school, were inclined to treat rhetoric as the art of dissimulation. ‘Matter’ became more important than words. Bacon writes that words ‘are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture’.