Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson

       Introduction

      Antisocial Orpheus

      In the late sixteenth century, just as England began to assert its integrity as a nation and English its value as a literate tongue, vernacular writing took a turn for the eccentric. John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587) loudly announced their authors’ ambitions for the English language, but in their extravagant ornamentation, obscure archaism, and violent bombast they stood at a seemingly deliberate remove from the tongue whose reputation they helped to secure. Indeed to some early critics, the inaugural achievements of what Richard Foster Jones has termed “the triumph of the English language” seemed in their extremity hardly English at all.¹ Edward Blount credited Euphues with inventing a “new English,” but Philip Sidney likened its showy effects to the glittering of a bejeweled “Indian.”² Joseph Hall dismissed Tamburlaine’s blank verse as a “Turkish” concoction of “big-sounding sentences” and “termes Italianate.”³ Ben Jonson carped that Marlowe had taken the poet’s privilege to “differ from the vulgar somewhat” as license to “fly from all humanity,” and he praised the matter of Spenser’s poems but lamented that in them he “writ no language.”⁴ Indian, Turkish, Italianate, inhuman—in laying claim to eloquence, it appears, English became increasingly strange to itself.

      That estrangement is the subject of this book, which situates eccentricity at the paradoxical heart of sixteenth-century pedagogical, rhetorical, and literary culture. In doing so it departs from, or at least qualifies, a fantasy that has shaped both the English Renaissance and our perception of it. According to the founding myth of the classical rhetorical tradition, eloquence is the essence of sociability: mankind’s natural vagrancy yields to the attractive power of language.⁵ “Because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other what we desire … we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts,” Isocrates declares in his defense of rhetoric.⁶ Before the invention of rhetoric, as Cicero writes in the opening chapter of De Inventione, humankind “wandered at large … scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats”; only when men had learned the art of persuasion could this wayward flock be “assembled and gathered … in a single place,” reconciled to domesticity and society.⁷ In the Ars Poetica Horace identifies the eloquence of the aboriginal poets Orpheus and Amphion with the power to “distinguish the public from private weal, things sacred from things profane,” to “plan out cities,” and to “engrave laws on tables of wood.”⁸ “I cannot imagine,” declares Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria, “how the founders of cities would have made a homeless multitude come together to form a people, had they not moved them by their skillful speech.”⁹

      Sixteenth-century English rhetoricians found in this fantasy a potent justification for their efforts on behalf of the vernacular: if eloquence was the original antidote to errancy, more eloquent English would make for a stronger and more cohesive England. According to Thomas Wilson’s 1560 Arte of Rhetorique, the cultivation of the vernacular is thus England’s chief safeguard from the perils of what he punningly terms “roming”—which is to say, both “roaming” speech and “Rome-ing” souls, wayward tongues and Papist hearts.¹⁰ In a similar vein, George Puttenham’s 1589 Arte of English Poesie names Orpheus and Amphion as “the first Legislators and polititians in the world,” cites their verses as “th’originall cause and occasion” of civil society, and interprets poetic precepts as guides to social and political acculturation. When Puttenham hails Queen Elizabeth I as England’s “most excellent Poet,” the compliment redounds to poetry, which is reimagined as a rarefied form of statecraft.¹¹ “Nothing can bee more excellently giuen of Nature then Eloquence,” declares Richard Rainolde in his 1563 Foundacion of Rhetorike, “by the which the florishyng state of commonweales doe consiste [and] kyngdomes vniuersally are gouerned.”¹² Even Henry Peacham, whose 1577 Garden of Eloquence is a barely elaborated listing of tropes and figures, claims a patriotic motive for his text: “My wel meaning,” he declares, “is … to profyte this my country.”¹³

      And profit it did. Indeed we are now likely to credit the flourishing of the vernacular not simply with enriching England but with inventing it. As a large body of recent scholarship attests, the ascendancy of English as a learned and eloquent tongue in Shakespeare’s day fostered a new and durable form of collective identification: an “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s influential formulation, founded on the “deep, horizontal comradeship” of reading and writing in a common tongue. Anderson’s account of the origins of modern nationalism updates the mythology of eloquence for the purposes of modern literary and political history: now poets, playwrights, and pamphleteers play the part of Orpheus, as the once atomized inhabitants of premodern England are, beginning in the sixteenth century, “connected through print, form[ing], in their secular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”¹⁴

      Although critics continue to debate the contours of this emergent nationalism—is