Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
and must be rebuilt in Rome—but Aeneas’s encounter with Dido makes clear that the logic of substitution is not infallible: some forms of intimacy only increase the hunger they are meant to satisfy. Indeed, as J. S. C. Eidinow has suggested, book 4 of Virgil’s poem—and in particular Dido’s fantasy of fostering Ascanius as a parvulus Aeneas—can be read as a historically topical meditation on the limits of cross-cultural and extrafamilial intimacy.20 Dido may romanticize herself as the wet nurse of Aeneas’s ambitions, but Virgil ironizes the image, recasting the nurse or foster mother as an emblem of mutually unsatisfactory exchanges and unfulfilled yearning, of losses that cannot be made good.21 The Boke named the Governour remains defensive about the implications of this lesson for its own nursemaidlike endeavors: that is, both the substitution of Virgilian nutriments for easier and more natural bodies of knowledge—the exchanges on which Elyot’s pedagogy depends—and the translation of classical learning and culture into English—the exchanges on which Elyot’s prose depends. What must be displaced? What will get left behind? For much of book 1, Elyot’s anxiety is clearly on behalf of the classics. “I am (as god iuge me),” he writes in the opening lines of the dedicatory epistle to King Henry VIII, “violently stered to devulgate or sette fourth some part of my studie, trustynge therby tacquite me of my dueties to god, your hyghnesse, and this my contray” (aiir). This declaration, David Baker writes, “marks one of the first significant attempts by English humanists to make their learning accessible to a vernacular reading public,” but, as Baker observes, even the violent steering to which Elyot has been subjected persuades him only to publish “some part” of his own wide reading.22 Baker attributes this incompleteness to reticence: wary of the heretical and revolutionary potential of classical learning, Elyot provides only a partial account of his study, insisting on maintaining the boundaries between the learned and the unlearned. But while diplomacy and piety may help to define The Governour’s boundaries, Elyot tends to attribute its defects to the constraints of vernacularity.
Repeatedly throughout book 1 he interrupts the flow of his argument to redirect our attention to his labored, at times frustrated, efforts to put it into English. The very “name” of the Governour, he confesses early in book 1, is not quite apt as a descriptor for the sort of educated nobleman his text is designed to produce, as governance properly speaking belongs to the sovereign alone: “herafter,” he explains, “I intende to call them Magistratis, lackynge a more conuenient worde in englisshe” (14r). But then, reminding himself that his subject in book 1 is not governance but the education and virtue necessary to produce good government, which learning and virtue noblemen “haue in commune with princes,” Elyot reconsiders, concluding that he might “without anoyance of any man, name them gouernours at this tyme,” trusting readers to maintain the necessary distinction between this general term and the “higher preeminence” reserved to kings and princes. Other lexical impasses prove absolute: Elyot recommends Aristotle’s Ethicae and Cicero’s De Officiis as indispensable sources of moral instruction, revealing the “propre significations of euery vertue,” but insists that the former is “to be lerned in greke; for the translations that we yet haue be but a rude and grosse shadowe of the eloquence and wisedome of Aristotell.” As for the latter, he confesses, even the title must remain obscure to English readers, since there “yet is no propre englisshe worde to be gyuen” for the Latin “officium” (41r–v).
He writes enthusiastically of the learning to be attained by the reading of classical poetry too, boasting that he “coulde recite a great nombre of semblable good sentences” out of Ovid and other “wantone poets” but then declining to do so, for they “in the latine do expresse them incomparably with more grace and delectation to the reder than our englisshe tonge may yet comprehende” (51v). Even when he turns from the study of literature to more practical ethical and political matters, Elyot often finds himself thrown back on the classical tongues in order to describe virtues that have no precise vernacular analogue: “constrained to usurpe a latine worde” such as “maturitie” for “the necessary augmentation of our langage” (85r–v), or to clarify the meaning of a term such as “modestie,” “nat … knowen in the englisshe tonge, ne of al them which under stode latin, except they had radde good authors” (94r), or to invent words altogether, hoping that they, “being … before this time unknowen in our tonge, may be by the sufferaunce of wise men nowe receiued by custome … [and] made familiare” (94v).
Elyot’s success in expanding the boundaries of the language is rather remarkable, it must be said,23 and his strategies can be quite subtle. Philologists have long cited Elyot as a devotee of the “neologistic couplet,” a syntactical unit that pairs a new or strange term with a more familiar vernacular counterpart.24 Thus, in the opening lines of the Governour, the phrase “to devulgate or sette fourth” facilitates the introduction of the Latinate coinage “devulgate” by yoking it to the homely Anglo-Saxon “sette fourth.” Elyot was proud of his couplets: in 1533, in the preface to Of the Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man, he writes that, although in the Governour he “intended to augment our Englyshe tongue,” nonetheless “through out the boke there was no terme newe made by me of a latine or frenche worde, but it is there declared so playnly by one mene or other to a diligent reder that therby no sentence is made derke or harde to be understande.”25 From Elyot’s perspective, then, the phrase “to devulgate or sette fourth” gracefully performs what it promises.26 But as Stephen Merriam Foley points out, the neologistic couplet also highlights the author’s anxiety that he will not be understood: Elyot’s compulsive pairings are, Foley argues, “the traces of a mind insecurely poised between competing discourses of intellectual authority.”27
In this regard the neologistic couplet is yet another rhetorical counterpart for the Latin-speaking nursemaid; it simultaneously exposes and disguises a cultural defect by drawing together two unlike and perhaps incompatible terms. Like any wet nurse, the neologistic couplet risks the charge of redundancy: if the familiar term is adequate to express the meaning of the borrowed or invented term, why borrow or invent? If it is not, how useful is it as a guide to the unfamiliar word? What is forestalled (but also registered) by such a compound is the vexed question of linguistic and cultural parity. That question—as much or more than any political or religious fears—accounts for the violence and the coercion attendant upon Elyot’s admittedly partial devulgation of learning: if the approximations attendant upon the work of translation necessarily entail a loss of meaning or value, how, nonetheless, is meaning or value to be transferred without such fudged equations, such compromised and compromising resemblances? Because he understands eloquence as a quality that speaks across linguistic, cultural, geographic, and temporal divides—as the most mobile of linguistic effects—Elyot can conceive of the study of remote, long-dead tongues as an experience of profound, near-perfect intimacy, and he can write prose that effaces lexical difference even as it testifies to persistent gaps in expressive capability. In addition he can dream of a time when such education and such prose produce an English home, and perhaps even a mother tongue, whose walls enclose the “encyclopedia” of eloquence.
But would such a home, and such a tongue, remain English? In his 1533 preface to Knowledge, Elyot scoffs at the question, berating for their ingratitude those readers who are “offended (as they say) with my strange terms.”28 But in The Governour he seems—briefly and obliquely—to wonder. In the final chapter of book 1, having just urged the Governour’s readers to set themselves vigorously to the work of translating classical wisdom into England, he departs conspicuously from that wisdom. Citing, but then disavowing, Cicero’s injunction against sports and games, he proceeds to make a rather plaintive case for the merits of the dying art of English longbow shooting, a skill that “is, and always hath ben” England’s security “from outwarde hostilitie” and the source of its fame throughout the world, “as ferre as Hierusalem” (99v–100r). Elyot attributes the decline of longbow shooting to an encroaching cosmopolitanism, as foreign and new-fangled modes of defense—crossbows and handguns—have eroded a skill that “continuell use” made “so perfecte and exacte amonge englisshe men” (102r). “O what cause of reproche shall the decaye of archers be to us nowe liuyng?” he demands. “Ye what irrecuperable