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The Figures of Rhetoric in Spenser's Colin Clout

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Sam Meyer
Sam Meyer*
Affiliation:
J. Sterling Morton Junior College Cicero, Ill.
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Extract

Modern criticism has given increasing recognition to the functional, as distinguished from the decorative, aspect of rhetorical figures in the poetry of the English Renaissance. The continuance of this emphasis is particularly appropriate to Spenser's pastoral, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), where the relevance of the figures to the larger considerations of style—indeed, to the total discourse—is so cardinal. The importance of the figures is enhanced by the natural use of rhetorical arts by characters, set in a kind of mise en scène, whose suasory speeches largely comprise the poem. Stress of the functional side of the rhetorical elements in the poem need not deny or denigrate the role of the figures in conferring upon the verse an aura of conspicuous beauty. The office of the figures in this respect is simply another manifestation of the same taste for elegance which reflected itself in Renaissance dress, manners, ceremonial processions, and décor. The beautifying characteristics of the numerous word orders, comprised of tropes and schemes, were recognized and frankly accepted by literati of the Tudor period. In their eyes, figures possessed value as ornament by reason of their constituting departures from everyday speech patterns. The idea is conventionally phrased by Abraham Fraunce, whom many believe to be the Corydon praised in lines 383–384 of the poem: “A figure is a certeine decking of speach, whereby the vsual and simple fashion thereof is altered and changed to that which is more elegant and conceipted.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , June 1964 , pp. 206 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago, 1947), maintains that all elements in figures of comparison assist in conveying meaning; and that classification of figures of any time would be clearer if similarities in logical nature (e.g., images of “quality” or “manner of doing”) were observed. Herbert David Rix, Rhetoric in Spenser's Poetry, Penn. State Coll. Studies, No. 7 (State College, 1940), applies the teleological concept of the figures and other rhetorical formulae to the poetry of Spenser.

2 Daphnaïda and Other Poems, ed. W. L. Renwick, An Elizabethan Gallery, No. 4 (London, 1929), p. 186; Kathrine Koller, “Abraham Fraunce and Edmund Spenser,” ELH, vii (1940), 108.

3 The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Ethel Seaton, Luttrell Society Reprints, No. 9 (Oxford, 1950), p. 26.

4 See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), ii, 721–724, for Daniello's view of the similarity between oratory and poetry in having for their object pleasurable teaching of exemplary morality; also pp. 737, 748, for emphasis on the same point by Minturno and Scalinger, whose De Poeta (1559) and Poetices Libri Septem (1561) respectively were prime sources for Sir Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (c. 1583, printed in 1595). G. Gregory Smith's notes to the Apologie in Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), i, 382–403, reveal how closely Sidney, in numerous passages, echoes his Italian models.

5 The writer of the Argument to the October eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender refers to a book of the author's called the English Poete, which had just recently come into his hands. In A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), William Webbe expresses the wish that he might see the English Poet, which E. K., the author's friend, had promised to publish (Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 232).

6 Father Ong's reminder that the first meaning of ornamentum in Latin rhetorical terminology is “equipment or accoutrements, which the ‘naked causes’ of dialectic, like naked persons, would need rather more than pretty clothing to get along in this world,” is pertinent here. He recalls that Miss Tuve (in Ch. iv of Elizabethan and Metaphysical

Imagery) and others have shown that the Renaissance notion of ornament “does not necessarily mean appliqué work in the way the English term ornament suggests today” (Rev. Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, p. 277).

7 Rhetorica ad Herennium iv.10.15, Loeb Classical Library, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), p. 264.

8 Cicero, De Oratore iii.25.100, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 80.

9 Apologie for Poetrie, in Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 201–202. Another less familiar but equally zestful contemporary diatribe against rhetorical affectation (which borrows its imagery directly from Cicero) is contained in a commencement oration delivered at Oxford University in 1572 by John Rainolds, a candidate for the M. A. (Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae, ed. William Ringler; trans. Walter Allen, Jr., Princeton Univ. Studies in English, No. 20, Princeton, 1940, p. 48).

10 For a selective list of references detailing the teaching of composition through the media of the trivium in English educational institutions of the Renaissance, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1956), n. 1, p. 64. To this list should be added Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul's School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948).

11 See William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style (New York, 1937), p. 5, for a summary of the vital connection between the figures and the places. Also see p. 55 for a brief statement on the effects of the Ramist reorganization of logic and rhetoric in relation to figures. For an expanded account of the whole movement for the reform of the Aristotelian and Ciceronian system of logic and rhetoric, see Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, Ch. iv. According to Howell, by the fifteen-seventies the struggle to keep Aristotle and Cicero supreme in logic and rhetoric respectively was beginning to be lost (p. 178). The supremacy of Cicero was challenged at Cambridge University as early as 1574, the year Spenser received his B.A. degree from Pembroke College. In this year Spenser's best friend, Gabriel Harvey (Hobbinol in the poem), as praelector in rhetoric at Cambridge, began preparation of the lectures delivered in 1575–76 and published in 1577 (pp. 247–248).

Whether Spenser came to adopt the Ramist reorganization is not known, although his acquaintance with the Cambridge and Sidney circles which advocated it would make his familiarity with the reformed disciplines virtually certain. Some details concerning Spenser's place in these circles is given in Miss Roller's article on “Edmund Spenser and Abraham Fraunce.” The Lawiers Logicke and The Arcadian Rhetoricke, which Fraunce, a confirmed Ramist, published at London in 1588, are liberally interspersed with illustrative passages of poetry, including some one hundred from Spenser in the former and three in the latter work. These works of Fraunce serve to demonstrate not only the extent to which Ramist books in England point up places and figures with quotations from poetry but also to show how closely proponents of the reformed program of liberal arts continue to

associate rhetoric and poetry. (See also Father Ong, Ramus, pp. 282–283, on Ramist conceptions of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric.) If Spenser can be counted among those who embraced the new approaches, his adoption in whole or in part of the revised system would not have required any basic readjustment of ingrained habit patterns as regards composition through logical and rhetorical modes. In Ch. xii of Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, Miss Tuve treats, under the title “Ramist Logic: Certain General Conceptions Affecting Imagery,” the possible effects of the redirection of peripatetic logic on the creation of poetic images during the latter part of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries in England. She holds the influence of Ramus to have been inescapable on the part of writers of this era (p. 339). (This conclusion is strongly fortified by Father Ong in his recent book on Ramus.) However, Miss Tuve believes this influence, whether direct or indirect, resulted, not in images with new qualities, but in images with old qualities highlighted (p. 351). The change of emphasis fostered by the Ramists would, in her view, operate to produce images more notable for logical toughness and intellectual fineness (p. 353).

12 Howell, p. 4.

13 Rix, Rhetoric in Spenser's Poetry, p. 62.

14 Veré L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance from Skelton through Spenser (New York, 1941), p. 258.

15 All citations from Spenser follow the text of The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, eds. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 10 vols. in 11 (Baltimore, 1932–57). Line citations only will be given for Colin Clout, which appears in Minor Poems, Vol. i (Works, vii), edited by C. G. Osgood and H. G. Lotspeich, assisted by D. E. Malone. Except that the editors have corrected misprints and made a few relatively minor emendations, the Variorum version reproduces the text of the poem as contained in the revised issue of the 1595 Quarto, a collection titled from the pastoral under consideration. For a detailed study of the genesis and transmission of the text, see my “Colin Clout: The Poem and the Book,” PBSA, lvi (fourth quarter, 1962), 397–413.

16 I assume as standard for the Elizabethan period the meanings ascribed to the figures by Rix, pp. 22–61. These meanings are made clear by definitions and specimens. The definitions quoted by Rix in this section are nearly all from Joannes Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum (1563). The English translations of the Latin definitions are mostly from Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577). A great many of the specimens are from Alexander Gill, Logonomia Anglica (1619, rev. 1621). Gill devotes four chapters of his work to the various figures and illustrates many of them by quotations from The Faerie Queene, The Ruines of Time, and The Shepheardes Calender. On pp. 19–20 of Rhetoric in Spenser's Poetry, Rix explains his division of the figures into tropes (words employed in other than their literal meanings, as in metaphor and metonymy) and schemes (words or longer units arranged or repeated according to a definite pattern, as in alliteration and simile). Rix refines the category of schemes by subdividing them into schemes of words and schemes of thought and amplification. His system of classification is an adaptation of one of the commonly accepted groupings in Spenser's period, although no two Renaissance sources agree in toto on precise classifications of different figures. In the ensuing discussion of the wide variety of stylistic devices which appear in Colin Clout and which are encompassed by the term figures in its Renaissance acceptation, I have found no need to maintain these distinctions in categories. I have profited much from the way in which Rix treats Spenser's use of rhetorical figures. For Colin Clout, however, Rix's coverage is negligible, since he includes only ten illustrative figures from the poem in his Table of Figures (pp. 21–61) and mentions in passing another figure (p. 71).

17 Rix, p. 48.

18 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, Eng., 1938), p. 223.

19 Rix, p. 31.

20 King James VI of Scotland, in Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 219; Puttenham, pp. 176–177.

21 Merritt Y. Hughes, “Spenser and the Greek Pastoral Triad,” SP, xx (1929), 208–209, cited in Works, vii, 410.

22 Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England's Eliza, Harvard Studies in English, xx (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 302.

23 Thomas Wilson, Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, 1560, ed. George Herbert Mair (Oxford, 1909), p. 169.

24 Il Libro del Cortegiano de Conte Baldesar Castiglione (Venice, 1528), sig. biiiir.

25 The comparison would now be called a metaphor, but Renaissance criticism normally has metaphora denote a single word “translated from the proper and natural signification, to another not proper, yet nie and/likely” (Peacham, in Rix, p. 22).

26 Daphnaïda and Other Poems, ed. Renwick, p. 187.

27 See Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1940), p. v.

28 The Apophthegmes of Erasmus, trans. Nicolas Udall, from the edition of 1564, ed. Robert Roberts (Boston, 1877), p. xxii.

29 See Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Chs. ii and iii, for a discussion of commonplace books and the way in which they were utilized by men of the Renaissance as helps to composition.

30 In Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 196–197.

31 Discourses upon Seneca the Tragedian, ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1952), pp. iv-ix. For a full account of Seneca's influence on English letters, which, in opposition to Ciceronianism, was on the rise during the latter part of the sixteenth century, see George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951).

32 Quotations from Ane Schort Treatise in Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 219.

33 Cf. Tilley, p. 28, B50, citations from Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure (1576): “he bit so greedily at the bait of her beauty, that he swallowed down the hook of hateful hurt”; also from Lyly, Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit (1578): “Beautie . . . was a deceiptfull bayte with a deadly hooke.”

34 Cf. ibid., p. 398, L527, citations from Wilmot et al., Gismond (1566–68): “Loue rules the world, Loue onely is the Lorde”; and from Wilmot, Tancred and Gismond (1591–92): “I . . . am that great God of loue, who with high might Ruleth the wast wide world, and liuing things.”

35 Rudolph B. Gottfried, “Spenser and the Italian Myth of Locality,” SP, xxxiv (1937), 111–114, 117–124.

36 Puttenham, p. 154. See Tuve, Ch. ix, for a valuable discussion concerning the way in which Renaissance notions of decorum and the styles affected the fashioning of figurative devices in poetic writing.

37 Dedication to Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis, in Eliz. Critical Essays, i, 137.

38 Cicero, Orator, 67–70, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. M. Hubbell, (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), pp. 354, 356.

39 Ibid., 20–22, pp. 318, 320; 79–82, pp. 364, 366.

40 Institutio Oratoria xii.10.58–65, iv. 482, 484, 486.

41 P. 197. See Tuve, pp. 166–175, 396–402, for a succinct discussion of Renaissance psychological theories, with particular reference to tropical language in poetry. Her note on p. 396 lists a few selected references on the mental operations as conceived by learned Elizabethans and Jacobeans.

42 Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson, Princeton Studies in English, No. 12 (Princeton, 1935), p. 13.

43 An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 11. 90–91, Works, vii, 206, and 1. 132, p. 207.

This essay was in part written while I was a Newberry Library Resident Fellow.