Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
theories and their prose work to remedy the seemingly catastrophic fact of England’s alienation from classical civilization—what Elyot calls the “infelicitie of our tyme and countray.” They arrive, however, at very different conceptions of how that infelicitous gap ought to inform the pursuit of eloquence. For Elyot, both pedagogy and language are sustained by acts of hospitality, inviting strangeness into the home so as to be transformed and enriched by it: classical authors (and foreign loan-words) are akin to the Greek wet nurses who raised Roman infants, foreigners welcomed as intimate familiars. For Ascham, such receptivity to outside influence is morally perilous, pedagogically ineffective, and rhetorically unwise: remoteness and insularity may be obstacles to linguistic sophistication, but they are sure safeguards of virtue. Thus while Elyot’s pedagogy and prose work to reduce the distance between English and Latin, Ascham—more pragmatically and more radically—embraces distance as the engine of linguistic refinement. His pedagogical method and his prose style foreground the necessity and virtue of mediation: for him, classical authors are not wet nurses but sea captains, guides on a necessarily prolonged and difficult journey between tongues. This forced detour, enshrined in the artificially arduous practice of double translation, returned a generation of English writers to their mother tongue as, in effect, a second language—what was once the enforced predicament of the exile and the barbarian becomes the deliberately cultivated pose of the would-be eloquent author.
Estrangement—temporal, geographic, cultural, and linguistic—is urgently and obviously a concern for those who would transplant Latin eloquence to England, those who measure their own language and culture by its distance from antiquity. It is less clearly an issue for the authors of the first vernacular arts of rhetoric and poetics: in these texts, it would seem, the goal is to establish eloquence as an essentially homely value. But as I have suggested above, their acquaintance with classical rhetoric brings English rhetoricians and poetic theorists into conversation with a tradition already divided between allegiance to home and attraction to the remote and alien. Chapter 2 explores the outworkings of that internal division within a corpus of texts that stake their own highly contested value on a myth of linguistic sociability that proves inadequate, or even opposed, to their visions of linguistic transport. As Thomas Wilson emphasizes in the first full-fledged English art of rhetoric, the claims that rhetoric makes to truth are essentially local in character; proximity is the guarantor of plausibility, and ordinary or common speech therefore exerts a particularly strong claim on the attention and commitment of an audience. But persuasion, as Wilson also allows, is not simply a matter of plausibility: style, ornament, and figuration have always been acknowledged to play some part in the achievement of eloquence, and in this regard, rhetorical success depends not on the familiarity of one’s speech but precisely on its novelty and difference. The sense that eloquence resides elsewhere is endemic to rhetoric, however emphatically “Englished.” The archive of rhetorical handbooks and poetic treatises that is often invoked as evidence of literature’s nationalizing force is thus equally available as testimony to literature’s appeal as uncommon speech: especially in the guise of what William Harrison calls “ornature,” eloquence retains persistent associations with foreignness.
Like their predecessors in Athens and Rome, English rhetoricians identify the orator’s and the poet’s power both with the fashioning of community and with the uncircumscribed pleasures of travel, with familiarity and estrangement. Wilson abjures those who affect “outlandish English” in the name of eloquence, but he praises the beauty of “farre fetcht” figures of speech.53 Richard Sherry apologizes that the title of his 1550 Treatise of Schemes and Tropes will sound “all straunge unto our English eares,” but he also imagines that the strangeness of terms such as “scheme” and “trope” may appeal to readers who are “moued with the noueltye thereof.”54 Puttenham defines “the best English” as that used in “London and the shires lying about London within sixty miles, and not much above,” but he urges vernacular poets to ornament their language with “rich Orient colours,” to embrace the “forraine and coloured talke” of figuration, and to risk “trespasses in speech” in order to achieve the “novelty of language evidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinary.”55 Without the cultivation of a certain degree of alienation—without translation and metaphor—eloquence collapses into mere talk; taken too far, the exoticism of eloquence becomes affectation and absurdity. Of course, the distance between evident estrangement and absurdity proves much more difficult to gauge than the sixty miles between London and its outermost suburbs: far from securing the vernacular as the locus of communal identification, sixteenth-century efforts to define eloquence in (and on) native terms make the province of “the best English” increasingly difficult to map.
Decoupling the trajectories of vernacularity and nationhood in this fashion allows us to regain an appreciation of the productive role that affectation—that most maligned of literary strategies—plays in the effort to claim eloquence for the mother tongue. The vernacular rhetorician joins with the Latin schoolmaster in calculating both the hazards and the rewards of linguistic eccentricity; together they fashion the conceptual frame within which Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe enact their self-consciously bold experiments in vernacular style. In other words, the extravagantly strung-on clauses of Euphues, the exaggeratedly “uncouth” terms of The Shepheardes Calender, and Tamburlaine’s savage bombast are not incidental to the bids these texts make on behalf on the vernacular; they are, rather, the means by which English asserts itself in an age that places a premium on the alienating force of artful speech. I have called strangeness a learned achievement, and as I will emphasize in my readings, eccentricity is in many ways a calculated effect of Lyly’s prose, Spenser’s verse, and Marlowe’s drama: these writers and the styles they promote are not quite as strange as they strive to appear. Lyly’s hyperabundant prose arises from utterly conventional compositional practices; the oddity of Spenser’s pseudo-archaic diction is exaggerated by E. K.’s gloss; Marlowe’s blank-verse line has closer antecedents in English than we usually recall, or than Marlowe admits. Their efforts earned them outrage as well as admiration, but in either case they succeeded in fixing their individual achievements within a much larger conversation about the nature and purpose of vernacular eloquence. Commonality might be the premise from which that conversation began, but estrangement was where it invariably tended: thus the writers credited with accomplishing the most in and for the mother tongue were those who underscored its freaks, fissures, and indecorums, transferring it “by a strange maner of conveyance,” as Puttenham might say, into the mouths of errant cosmopolitans, exiled shepherds, and barbarian warlords.
Reading Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe in this light means acknowledging that eccentricity is the ideal that shapes their visions of eloquence. Euphues, Colin Clout, and Tamburlaine articulate new forms of English, and of Englishness, but they also enact the dramas of displacement, alienation, and trespass that make those innovations possible—and, what is perhaps more important, legible as such. The substance of their stylistic eccentricity—Lyly’s assiduously balanced clauses, Spenser’s quasi-medieval diction, Marlowe’s chest-thumping orotundity—is well known, but the motives and mechanisms for announcing that eccentricity to readers are not. For this reason I am less concerned to delineate what is new or distinctive in each style—less, perhaps, than critics have tended to assume—than I am to show how novelty and distinction are promoted, theorized, and critiqued with the texts themselves: how and why familiar words, forms, and literary techniques are burdened or burnished with strangeness.
In Lyly’s case, the romance of estrangement was built into the commonplace tradition. My third chapter highlights the interplay within Erasmus’s rhetorical handbooks—the most influential and prestigious source for Lyly’s style—of the satisfactions of stylistic amplitude and the pleasures of geographic errancy. The De Copia taught a generation of English schoolboys to define eloquence as the ability to speak as expansively as possible on any subject—and to identify that ability with a more literal freedom of movement, a protocosmopolitan approach to being at home in the world. Erasmus demonstrates copia by generating over a hundred versions of a single sentence—“your letter greatly pleased me”—and the link between letter writing and stylistic abundance persists throughout his pedagogical program. In De Conscribendis Epistolis (another staple of the sixteenth-century