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Critical Comment in Response to T. McAlindon's “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Mark Sacharoff  and
T. Mcalindon
Mark Sacharoff
Affiliation:
Temple University
T. Mcalindon
Affiliation:
University of Hull, England
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Extract

THE RECENT ARTICLE, “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida,” by T. McAlindon,1 is indeed a formidable one, because Mr. McAlindon brings to bear upon the play a knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric that is all too often neglected in discussions of Shakespeare's work. The author also gives us substantial new insights into the pervasive interest Shakespeare showed, in Troilus and Cressida, in nuances of language and decorum.

Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 90 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 PMLA, 84 (Jan. 1969), 29–43.

2 A History of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), pp. 257–82, esp. pp. 265–66, 280.

3 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), p. 147.

4 To locate and verify these words and other Shakespearean words discussed later in this article, I have used : C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1911); the Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James A. H. Murray et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933); Marvin Spevack, A Shakespeare Concordance: The Histories (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968); and Baugh's A History. All references to Shakespeare's plays are to the edition, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1936).

5 Endeavors of Art (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 46–52.

6 “On Literary Excellence,” in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dry den, ed. Allan Gilbert (New York: American Book, 1940), p. 162.

7 Doran, p. 46.

8 Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1909), p. 115. See also pp. 114, 194–95. Quoted by Doran.

9 “Shakespeare and Rhetoric,” English Association Essays, 29 (1943), 57–59.

10 The Oration in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 107.

11 Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), p. 302.

12 Puttenham, p. 257.

13 Gilbert, p. 149.

14 Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), i, 67.

15 Of Dramatic Poesy, i, 257.

1 Cicero, Orator, ed. and trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann, 1939), pars. 70–74, 101, 123; De Oratore, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. W. Rackham, LCL (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann, 1942), m, 210–12; De Officiis, ed. and trans. W. Miller (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1947), i, 93–146; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, LCL (London and New York: Heinemann, 1920), ix, iii, 102, xi, i, 1–93 ; Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby [1561], Everyman ed., pp. 50, 57, 85, 92 ff.; Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, vi (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), 620–21, Discoveries [1641]). For the influence of Cicero and Quintilian on Elizabethan education, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana : Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), Chs. xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvii, xlviii. Cicero's most ambitious account of decorum occurs in the De Officiis, which (as Baldwin has shown) was by far the most important text in the study of moral philosophy in the Elizabethan upper grammar school.

2 See, e.g., the procedure of school criticism described by Vives in his De Tradendis Disciplinis, trans. F. Watson as Vives on Education (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1913), p. 187.

3 Quintilian, i, vi, 1, 39–40; viii, iii, 23–37; Cicero, De Oratore, iii, 98–100, 152–54, 170, 201. Cf. Castiglione, pp. 11–13, 49–60; Ben Jonson, vi, 622.

4 Consider, e.g., the following sentences from a royal proclamation of 1604 (drafted by Bacon for King James) on the decision to use the new term “Great Britany” in the King's “style” or full title: “Wherein by the example of Almighty God, who is accustomed to begin all his great works and designations by alterations or impositions of names, as the fittest means to imprint in the hearts of the people a character and expectation of that which is to follow … we have thought good to use in place of them [i.e., the names of England and Scotland] the common and contracted name of Great Britany: not upon any vainglory, whereof we persuade ourselves our actions do sufficiently free us in the judgement of the world . . . but only as a fit signification of that which is already done, and a significant préfiguration of that which we further intend . . . especially considering the name of Britany was no coined or new-devised or affected name at our pleasure, but the true and ancient name which God and time hath imposed, extant and received in histories, in cards, and in ordinary speech and writing, where the whole island is meant to be denominate; so as it is not accompanied with so much as any strangeness in common speech [earlier draft : ”a strangeness or jar to the ear“]” (James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, Including All His Occasional Works, London: Longmans, 1868, iii, 237–38). Compare my comments on the recurrence of the word “strange” in Troilus and Cressida, as well as on the imagery of jarring speech (article, p. 38 and pp. 30, 34–35,40). “Strange” (Quintilian's peregrinus and Holofernes' “peregrinate”—“too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate”) was the term commonly applied to words not “proper” or natural to the language: see, e.g., Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. E. Arber (London: Constable, 1897), pp. 111–12; Castiglione, p. 8; Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (London: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 3, 162.

5 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1904), i, 335.

6 Arte of English Poesie, iii, vii.

1 For a detailed discussion of tone, see Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1958), pp. 350–82.

2 He proposes withdrawal from the war and a return to Greece on three separate occasions. See Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (New York: Pantheon, 1956), i, ii.94–180, ix.15–28, and xiv.52–64. Richmond Lattimore, in his The Iliad of Homer (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 49, says of Agamemnon: “In all moods of despair, he must be rallied and propped up by Odysseus, Nestor, and Diomedes, who are tougher than he.”

3 For Shakespeare's use of Chapman's Homer, see the detailed and firm evidence of Robert Presson, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1953).

4 In Iliad vii.242–47, the heralds Ideaus and Talythybios bring the combat to an end, claiming that night is approaching and should be obeyed. Apollo has already decided that the combat shall not be a mortal one. In Lydgate, Hector stops fighting “Whan he of Aiax sawe the worthines.” See John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, E.E.T.S., Extra Series (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1906–35), ciii, ii.2077–95.

5 “Tragic vs. Satiric: Hector's Conduct in ii.ii of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in Philology, 67 (Oct. 1970), 517–31.

6 See Robert Greene, Euphues His Censure to Philautus, in The Life and Complete Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), vi, 161; Lydgate, iii.3655–57; William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (London: D. Nutt, 1894), ii, 601.

7 An article by Hyder Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA, 25 (1917), 383–429, has long been cited as evidence that Shakespeare was required by the debased tradition of Criseyde to make Cressida into a wanton or a whore. However, Rollins himself nowhere follows this line of reasoning. In fact, he remarks, “Shakespeare deserves our thanks for pulling Cressida partly out of the mire in which Henryson's followers had placed her” (p. 409). But in any event, Chaucer's great reputation and the continued popularity of his poem would far outweigh Henryson's followers in establishing the nature of Cressida, even though Henryson's poem was included in some Elizabethan editions of Chaucer.

8 Oscar James Campbell, Cornwall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif. : Huntington Library, 1938), pp. 214–15.

9 See Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Its Setting (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 80; Troilus and Cressida, ed. Alice Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), xv; Alice Shalvi, “ ‘Honor’ in Troilus and Cressida,” SEL, 5 (1965), 293–94.

10 Shakespeare and His Comedies (London: Methuen, Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 44–45, 197.

11 The Wheel of Fire (London: 1930), p. 63.

12 Peter Ure, Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), p. 36; R. A. Foakes, “Troilus and Cressida Reconsidered,” UTQ, 32 (Jan. 1963), 143; Hamill Kenny, “Shakespeare's Cressida,” Anglia, 61 (1937), 166.

13 Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1926), p. 194.