cautioning only that spelling be anglicized: “For if the word it self be english in dede, then is it best in the natural hew, if it be a stranger, & incorporate among vs, let it wear our colors, sith it wil be one of vs” (227). In Mulcaster’s view, England’s relationship to foreign languages ought not to be construed as a choice between alienation and dependence. Instead, he urges, English may partake freely of all other linguistic models while retaining a strong sense of its own local virtues.
Mulcaster admits that England’s geographic insularity and remoteness have contributed to its lack of rhetorical polish; he acknowledges that the vernacular has been treated as if it were “of no compas for ground & autoritie” because “it is of small reatch” and “stretcheth no further then this Iland of ours, naie not there ouer all.” But concerns about England’s isolation and peripherality miss the mark, he argues. The very geography responsible for the vernacular’s modest reach is also the guarantee of its rhetorical sufficiency: “[t]ho it go not beyond sea, it will serue on this side.” In the same way he admits that England’s place in the world is limited—“our state is no Empire to hope to enlarge it by commanding ouer cuntries,” and “no stranger, nor foren nation, bycause of the bounder & shortnesse of our language, wold deal so with vs, as to transport from vs as we do from other”—but this too he regards as a point in its favor: “tho it be neither large in possession, nor in present hope of great encrease, yet where it rules, it can make good lawes, and as fit for our state, as the biggest can for theirs, and oftimes better to, bycause of confusion in greatest gouernments, as most vnwildinesse in grossest bodies” (257).
He concludes by revising England’s history of foreign conquest and colonial subordination, imagining a newly pacific invasion of its borders by strangers who come not to conquer or pillage but to satiate their desire for learning and eloquence. If Latin is the language of England’s colonial past, English is the tongue of its mercantile future: “Why maie not the English wits … in their own tung be in time as well sought to, by foren students for increase of their knowledge,” he wonders, “as our soil is sought to at this same time, by foren merchants, for encrease of their welth?” As yet, he concedes, wisdom and eloquence are not counted among the island’s domestic riches, but that may change: as England’s “soil is fertile, bycause it is applyed,” he remarks, “so the wits be not barren if theie list to brede” (257). If those fertile wits are cultivated—in the Merchant Taylors’ School and in schoolrooms throughout the nation where Mulcaster’s grammatical precepts are applied—then England need no longer choose between exile from the mother tongue or isolation in a rude vernacular: the homely island tongue may play host to a world of learning.
This vision of an England (and an English) whose relationship to the outside world is one of mutual increase offers those invested in the vernacular—and Mulcaster encourages the mercantile metaphor—an alternative to slavish dependency and close-minded insularity. Destiny, he writes, elects some particular age in the history of each tongue and culture to bless it with perfection: “Such a period in the Greke tung was that time, when Demosthenes liued, and that learned race of the father philosophers: such a period in the Latin tung, was that time, when Tullie liued, and those of that age: Such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”39 “[T]he question,” he concludes, “is wherein finenesse standeth.” When it comes to Latin, he is no different than any other well-read sixteenth-century Englishman, making Cicero his standard and Sallust his cautionary tale: “So was Salust deceiued among the Romans, liuing with eloquent Tullie, and writing like ancient Cato” (160). The consequences of that deceived attachment to a past provide the motive for Mulcaster’s own career and his passionate advocacy for the embrace of English on its own terms and merits. If eloquence is to be found, he argues, it will be found here and now, and if patterns of that eloquence are required, they too must be local ones: “it must nedes be, that our English tung hath matter enough in hir own writing, which maie direct her own right, if it be reduced to certain precept, and rule of Art, tho it haue not as yet bene thoroughlie perceaued” (77).
However, in seeking to avoid the fate of Sallust for a generation of English schoolboys, Mulcaster may well help to bring it about. For a native speaker, after all, nothing is more alienating than the effort of relearning one’s mother tongue in the form of precepts and rules of art; what was easy and instinctive threatens to become, in Mulcaster’s schoolroom, laborious and artificial. As Ascham might point out, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The internalized sense of strangeness for which Mulcaster blames his humanist colleagues is, in some sense, the essential precondition for a full-fledged art of English eloquence. Answering what Mulcaster calls the question of “finenesse”—“thoroughly perceiving” what one has learned at the breast—demands a certain strategic distance. The late sixteenth century bears witness to a revolution on what can seem, at first, like Mulcaster’s terms: in rhetorical handbooks and literary texts alike, the English tongue begins to “direct her own right.” But direction comes, as ever, from afar: within the new vernacular rhetorics and poetics, the distance between English and antiquity becomes, if anything, an even more pressing concern. At the same time strangeness emerges as an essential aspect of eloquence in any tongue, the element that distinguishes artful from ordinary speech and gives rhetoric and poetry their power. Shaped by their long detour in the classical tongues, English writers reconstitute their mother tongue as a second language, self-consciously belated and usefully eccentric. Errancy and exoticism, the instruments of Sallust’s corruption as a writer, are promoted as the master tropes of rhetorical and poetic fineness.
Chapter 2
The Commonplace and the Far-Fetched: Mapping Eloquence in the English Art of Rhetoric
As Thomas Elyot reminds readers of The Boke named the Governour, rhetoric was the foundation of the earliest commonwealths: “[I]n the firste infancie of the worlde, men, wandring like beastes in woddes and on mountaines, regardinge neither the religion due unto god, nor the office pertaining unto man, ordred all thing by bodily strength: untill Mercurius (as Plato supposeth) or some other man holpen by sapience and eloquence, by some apt or propre oration, assembled them to geder and perswaded to them what commodite was in mutual conuersation and honest maners.”1 When Elyot surveys sixteenth-century England, he is therefore dismayed to find in it only “a maner, a shadowe, or figure of the auncient rhetorike”: the stunted ritual of “motes,” or moot courts, observed by students at the law schools. Such mock trials insured that educated men were acquainted with the rudiments of invention and arrangement, but they failed to produce anything like the eloquence of Mercury, Orpheus, or Amphion. On the contrary, Elyot laments, far from fostering “mutual conversation,” the speech of most English lawyers verges on unintelligibility: “voyde of all eloquence,” it “serveth no commoditie or necessary purpose, no man understanding it but they whiche haue studied the lawes” (53v). He attributes this defect to ignorance of eloquence’s higher purpose: “the tonge wherin it is spoken is barberouse, and the sterynge of affections of the mynde in this realme was neuer used,” he observes, “and so there lacketh Eloquution and Pronunciation, the two principall partes of rhetorike” (56r–v). Only if educated Englishmen address themselves to the cultivation of style, marrying “the sharpe wittes of logicians” and “the graue sentences of philosophers” to “the elegancie of the poetes,” will England possess “perfect orators” and “a publike weale equiualent to the grekes or Romanes” (57v, 59v).
In 1531, when The Governour first appeared in print, “elegancie” was literally absent from the English art of rhetoric. The only existing rhetorical handbook in the vernacular, Leonard Cox’s Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (c. 1524–30), sets elocution and pronunciation pointedly to the side. “[M]any thynges be left out of this treatyse that ought to be spoken of,” Cox allows in his preface, but not, he insists, in a handbook to be read only by “suche as haue by negligence or els fals persuacions” failed to “attayne any meane knowlege of the Latin tongue.” For an audience defined by linguistic incompetence, he reasons, the rudiments of invention and arrangement
