Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
like the ideal of copia, defies the usual boundaries governing speech, passing from one rhetorical context to another with the same ease that a well-trained schoolboy might pass from one commonplace to the next. It is no coincidence, then, that vernacular copia finds its limit in a text filled to bursting with both letters and commonplaces. Incorporating similitudes, sententiae, and exempla from an array of classical and contemporary sources, including many from Erasmus, the ornate rhetorical set-pieces of Lyly’s Euphues are as wide ranging—and as hard to pin down, logically speaking—as his eponymous hero. Frequently, however, neither Euphues nor Lyly arrives at his projected end, succumbing to an errant superfluity that overrides the more local demands of narrative and rhetorical coherence. Generations of readers have taxed Euphues with this as an oversight, charging Lyly with allowing his enthusiasm for copia to carry him past the boundaries of stylistic decorum. But Lyly is hardly blind to the eccentricities of his style: on the contrary, his failure to inaugurate a sustainable model of vernacular eloquence is prefigured in the pages of his 1580 sequel, Euphues and His England, which exiles Euphues to the margins of his own plot, branding him as a perpetual outsider. Lyly does not succumb to Erasmian excess so much as he deliberately subjects English to its hidden costs.
A similarly self-marginalizing drive fuels Edmund Spenser’s efforts to invent a poetic diction that redeems the vernacular’s onerous debt to the classical tradition. Chapter 4 argues that The Shepheardes Calender adopts a poetics of deliberate self-estrangement, foregrounding England’s remoteness from antiquity and poetry’s remoteness from ordinary speech. Despite its conventional associations with poetic and even political ambition, pastoral is a singularly inhospitable genre for an English poet: in Virgil’s first eclogue Britain appears as the antithesis of pastoral contentment, a place of exile and colonial abjection. By treating English as a quasi-foreign tongue and adopting the errant and alienated persona of Colin Clout, Spenser repeats this marginalizing gesture, finding in exile a means to reinvigorate vernacular poetry. The pedantic E. K. plays a crucially paradoxical role in this endeavor: positioned as guide to the odd corners and rough edges of Spenser’s verse, he often serves as a means of detaining and dislocating our attention, supplying the poem as a whole with an aura of estrangement in excess of its own peculiarities. Ultimately his insistence on the virtues of this kind of deliberate self-alienation allows Spenser to find a place for pastoral—and for Colin Clout—in England’s own abject colonial sphere, beyond the Irish pale.
Chapter 5 takes up the persistent problem of how to set limits for poetic expression, especially given the lack of a universally accepted system of measuring English verse. Hailed as the source of English verse’s “mighty line”—the iambic pentameter that gives classical shape to unruly rhyme—Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great nevertheless offers an ominous vision of linguistic trespass, in the person of a barbarous yet eloquent Scythian whose disdain for territorial limits is matched by his tendency to rhetorical excess. The violence that attends persuasion in Marlowe’s poetry suggests that abuse is the inevitable counterpart of eloquence—and that cages, bits, and harnesses are the necessary implements of linguistic refinement. However, if we situate Marlowe’s play within the context of debates over rhyme and metrical form, we discover a multiplicity of Tamburlaines: in addition to Marlowe’s famous overreacher, there are the unexpectedly terse—even measured—Timur Cutzclewe of book 2 of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and the Tamburlaine of Daniel’s Defence, who emerges as the unwitting progenitor of a cultural movement—Renaissance humanism—that Daniel indicts precisely for its neglect of so-called barbarian culture. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Puttenham’s Timur Cutzclewe, and Daniel’s Tamburlaine chart very different courses for English verse, but they stand together as figures for a more expansive definition of linguistic excellence, what Daniel calls eloquence “in what Scythian sorte soeuer.”56
As a group, these Scythian warrior-poets remind us that at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the height of what we now call the Renaissance, English writers were far from agreed on the ideal trajectory of the English literary tradition—a tradition whose contours they refused to equate with those of England (or even Britain). Why, then, do we continue to associate their age with the consolidation of English identity under the banner of language? Clearly the answer has something to do with Shakespeare, the Orpheus around whom the idea of an English literary tradition still coheres. But as I remark in a brief coda, Shakespeare is not an obvious candidate for that role. To seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics, the extremity of linguistic experimentation in the late sixteenth century cried out for reform, and no one needed disciplining more than Shakespeare. As those early critics recognized, the poet who is largely hailed today for the universal accessibility of his art thrived in his own time by imitating and even exaggerating the excesses of his most outrageous peers and predecessors. It is no coincidence that, in the sequence of plays that for many modern critics exemplify the “poetics of nationhood,” Falstaff speaks with the voice of Euphues and Pistol in the tones of Tamburlaine. These disreputable companions, figures for the outlandishness that has always haunted eloquence, both aid and impede the articulation of Hal’s (eventually) kingly English; vagabonds and strays can also serve as scouts, marking by their trespasses the boundaries of authorized expression. In the end, of course, they must be banished—but they very nearly take Shakespeare with them. Indeed the poet we continually invoke as a figure for language’s unifying power may have more to teach us about the self-alienating gestures on which our vernacular literary tradition is founded.
Chapter 1
Good Space and Time: Humanist Pedagogy and the Uses of Estrangement
A rich body of criticism attests to the imprint left on Renaissance writers by their grammar-school education in classical literature,1 but a basic feature of this pedagogical program has received little attention: in order to promote their vision of Latinity, sixteenth-century humanist pedagogical theorists first had to reinvent English. As Ardis Butterfield points out, the training bestowed on educated Englishmen from the medieval period through the sixteenth century gave them “much greater eloquence and indeed fluency in [Latin] than they possessed in the vernacular”; far from representing a reversion to a more natural voice, writing in English “was thus a source of strain, a sense that there was a gulf to cross between one form of language and the other.”2 And yet such men were, of necessity, some of the first to publish in the vernacular, eager to disseminate their methods of study to an audience that had not yet achieved perfect Latinity. In pedagogical treatises such as Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour (1531) and Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), the fashioning of English as a literate tongue thus models, in reverse, the fashioning of English schoolboys as literate classicists: the vernacular is advanced, with self-conscious effort, as a means to its own supersession.
For many critics, this ambivalent stance toward the vernacular constitutes an essential difference between humanist writers of the early and mid-sixteenth century and their late Elizabethan successors. If, as Richard Foster Jones argues, the final decades of the sixteenth century were marked by wholehearted faith in the vernacular’s expressive powers, this is a faith that Elyot and Ascham evidently did not share. The fact that such writers “employed the vernacular is no proof that [they] admired it,” Jones observes: Elyot, though he “did not disdain to use the vernacular in The Governour,” treats eloquence as “a quality beyond the abilities of the vernacular,” while Ascham “gives [in The Scholemaster] unmistakable evidence that the language he is using has no claim to eloquence.”3 In a broader sense, Latin-promoting humanists such as Elyot and Ascham are understood to have chosen the wrong side in an unfolding rivalry between the vernacular and the classical tongues: English “triumphs” at the necessary expense of Latin and Greek.4 Or, in Richard Helgerson’s more neutral phrasing, “the sufficiency or insufficiency of the English language … came to matter with a special intensity” only when “other sources of identity and cultural authority mattered less.”5
But such formulations cannot account for the pains both Elyot and Ascham took to shape their prose and the cause that justified