of the elegancy of the mother tongue. The title page of Richard Sherry’s 1550 Treatise of Schemes and Tropes advertises it as an aid to “the better vnderstanding of good authors,” and those who picked it up probably assumed that the authors in question were classical writers: here, presumably, was a handbook to help schoolboys recognize and reproduce a Ciceronian paraphrasis or a Virgilian metalepsis. The Treatise’s preface initially reinforces this assumption, as Sherry apologizes for the conspicuous classicism of his title, which must sound “all straunge unto our Englyshe eares” and may cause “some men at the fyrst syghte to marvayle what the matter of it should meane.” He urges readers to consider that “use maketh straunge thinges familier”: with time, alien terms such as “scheme” and “trope” may become as common “as if they had bene of oure owne natiue broode.”3
But as Sherry soon reveals, the strange things his treatise seeks to domesticate are not strictly the property of the classical tongues: on the contrary, what is foreign to English readers is the virtue of their own native speech. “It is not vnknowen that oure language for the barbarousnes and lacke of eloquence hathe bene complayned of,” he writes,
and yet not trewely, for anye defaut in the toungue it selfe, but rather for slackenes of our countrimen, whiche haue alwayes set lyght by searchyng out the elegance and proper speaches that be ful many in it: as plainly doth appere not only by the most excellent monumentes of our auncient forewriters, Gower, Chawcer and Lydgate, but also by the famous workes of many other later: inespeciall of ye ryght worshipful knyght syr Thomas Eliot, … [who] as it were generallye searchinge oute the copye of oure language in all kynde of wordes and phrases, [and] after that setting abrode goodlye monumentes of hys wytte, lernynge and industrye, aswell in historycall knowledge, as of eyther the Philosophies, hathe herebi declared the plentyfulnes of our mother tounge. (A2v–[A3]r)
The “good authors” of the title page thus include not simply Cicero and Virgil but also Thomas Elyot and the “manye other … yet lyuyng” (sig. [A3]v) whose very familiarity—whose Englishness—has obscured the “copye” or riches of their speech.
In truth, it is hard to imagine any reader consulting the litany of arcane tropes and figures that ensues and finding Elyot’s prose easier to read as a consequence, but that perhaps is the point. English schoolboys were accustomed to the notion that understanding a classical text meant retreating from the immediate perception of meaning to a more remote appreciation of artifice: “surely,” writes Ascham, “the minde by dailie marking, first, the cause and matter: than, the words and phrases: next, the order and composition: after the reason and arguments: than the forms and figures … [and] lastelie, the measure and compass of euerie sentence, must nedes, by litle and little, draw vnto it the like shape of eloquence, as the author doth vse, which is red.”4 When Sherry promises his readers “better understanding” of a writer such as Elyot, he therefore offers them a mode of access to their mother tongue that is also a process of alienation from it—the strange things made familiar are also familiar things made enticingly strange. We—and presumably sixteenth-century readers—do not need Sherry’s definition of the figure he calls “Metaphora” or “translacion”—“a worde translated from the thynge that it properlye signifieth, vnto another whych may agre with it by a similitude” (C4v)—to understand what Elyot means when he describes moot-court exercises as the “shadow or figure” of an ancient rhetoric, but the label and the definition call our attention to the artfulness of the phrase, its capacity to suggest the way time has attenuated and flattened a once substantive art. In this sense the domestication of classical rhetorical precepts and practices brings with it a deliberate and profitable remove from the mother tongue, whose own shadows and figures come into fresh relief.
In its foregrounding of the vernacular’s capacity for figuration, Sherry’s Treatise marks the beginning of a decisive shift in the discipline of English rhetoric. Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, a rapidly proliferating corpus of vernacular arts redefines eloquence almost exclusively in terms of elocution, and elocution itself in terms of an ever-burgeoning catalog of figures of speech.5 Historians of rhetoric have tended to look askance at this metastasis of style, naming “attention to ornament alone” as the “chief Renaissance abuse of the classical system” and dismissing the ubiquitous catalogs of rhetorical figures, with their elaborate taxonomies of scheme and trope, as “derivative … patchworks” of more comprehensive classical and continental treatises.6 More recently, however, critics have recovered a sense of what elocution (or its absence) signified to Thomas Elyot and his successors in sixteenth-century England, recuperating the style-obsessed English art of rhetoric as a crucial instrument in the fashioning of a self-consciously literate mother tongue. Far from signaling the decline of a robust art of public discourse into a scholarly fetish, Wolfgang G. Müller argues, its investment in elocution constitutes “the most original part” of the English rhetorical treatise: a singular space of linguistic and national self-assertion.7 By making the “elegancie” of English speech and writing their concern, the authors of sixteenth-century vernacular arts of rhetoric and poesy display a novel kind of interest and confidence in the vernacular, expecting it to serve not simply their commodity but their pleasure. As the editors of a recent collection of essays on Renaissance figures of speech point out, “it was in the area of elocution—and specifically the theory and description of the figures—that Renaissance rhetoric managed actually to take classical theory forwards,” adding to the stock of ancient devices and doing “something new with them.”8 No longer merely ornamental, schemes and tropes become “flowers” and “colours” whose multiplication in the pages of vernacular treatises proves, as Jenny Mann argues, England’s fitness “as a garden or field where rhetoric can grow and thrive.”9
But in doing something new with figuration, ensconcing it at the center of rhetorical theory and practice and asking it to shore up their claim to eloquence as a common good, English rhetoricians run up against a very old dilemma. In an almost literal sense, as rhetorical theorists from Aristotle onward discover, style reorients rhetoric, transforming its defining investments in commodity and commonality into a fascination with exoticism and excess. In this sense elocution and pronunciation are not so much ancient rhetoric’s “principal partes” as its most problematic: even in ancient Athens and Rome, style remains stubbornly unassimilated to accounts of eloquence as civic discourse, retaining dangerous and enticing associations with the uncivilized beyond. Elyot allows that the attractions of eloquence are not necessarily identical to the imperatives of the common good: “divers men … will say,” he admits, “that the swetnesse that is contayned in eloquence … shulde utterly withdrawe the myndes of yonge men from the more necessary studie of the lawes of this realme” (55v). He dismisses this suspicion rather glibly, first by urging that legal doctrine be made eloquent, recast “either in englisshe, latine, or good French, written in a more clene and elegant stile,” and second by insisting that greed and ambition guarantee that the law will always have its devotees (55v–56r), but it unsettles the sturdily civic-minded foundation of his pedagogical program, hinting at a potentially prodigal future for English eloquence.10 And indeed, as they proceed through invention, arrangement, and memory into the alien precincts of style, sixteenth-century rhetoricians find themselves promoting the vernacular in radically altered guise: not as the necessary and commodious instrument of social communion but as a medium of transfiguration and transport—most potently attractive when it is most conspicuously far-fetched.
“Neither Cesar, nor Brutus, Builded the Same”: England as Topos
Leonard Cox and Richard Sherry may have written the first English arts of rhetoric, but Thomas Wilson wrote the first art of English rhetoric: a work that takes for granted its interest and value as an account of the mother tongue and that establishes England as the necessary measure of eloquence in the vernacular. Cox justifies his vulgarization of classical rhetoric on the principle that “euery goode thynge, … the more commune that it is the better it is,” but to his mind commonness is all English has to
