with a rich fund of metaphors for their linguistic predicament. Like England in the sixteenth century, English seemed poised to embark on a potentially enriching, potentially ruinous venture beyond its native plot. Indeed the ambivalence with which many authors allude to England’s geographic circumstances—its long-standing marginality, its burgeoning global reach—turns out to be a useful guide for articulating their ambivalence about eloquence. If geographic insularity was both an asset and an impediment to England’s cultural, moral, and intellectual development, so too was confining oneself to the strict limits of common usage both an aid and an obstacle to rhetorical success. If travel, trade, and other foreign engagements were either the key to the nation’s growth and enrichment or the fastest route to degradation and decline, so too was the allure of strange terms either the vernacular’s greatest hope or its most persistent source of error.
Compounding this ambivalence was the fact that, as Paula Blank has shown, it proved impossible to position oneself as a defender of linguistic commonality without exacerbating the problem of linguistic diversity.44 Language reformers who appealed to the notion of a common tongue invariably also highlighted divisions within the language: the alternative to banishing rhetoric is, as Cawdrey writes, “mak[ing] a difference of English,” dismembering the vernacular in order to distinguish good uses from bad, proper from improper, usual from eccentric. Harrison’s account works at just such cross-purposes of consolidation and differentiation, and his repeated invocations of the phrase “our tongue” jar with a tendency to characterize the vernacular’s virtues in terms of narrowness and exclusivity. English is, he acknowledges, just one of “the languages spoken in this Iland”; its “excellency” is found only “in one, and the south part of this Iland,” and strangers to that part find its sounds and syntax near impossible to master.45 Instead of producing English as the locus of “deep, horizontal community,” then, the promotion of the vernacular depended on discriminatory judgments that threatened to undo the pretense of a common tongue. The terms of that adjudication exerted further stress on the ideal of commonality: even Harrison’s mistrust of eloquence’s “externall termes” does not preclude him from reaching for a neo-Latinate loan-word—“ornature”—to characterize the achievements of the vernacular’s truly English stylists, the “learned and excellent” writers whose style he distinguishes from that of their fondly affected rivals.46
We might point out in Harrison’s defense that the identification of eloquence with the classical tongues makes “externall termes” nearly impossible to avoid. As Wayne Rebhorn has observed, like the Roman rhetoricians before them, who depended on a theoretical lexicon borrowed from Greece, English rhetoricians and language reformers had “almost no choice but to use literally outlandish words from foreign languages.”47 However firmly he might wish to draw the boundaries of vernacularity, then, Harrison, like any Renaissance critic, had to look elsewhere for a language to describe its literary virtues. That necessity yields a minor dissonance in Harrison’s prose, but it resonated in a far more consequential way through the literature and literary theories of his time. That is to say, the tension between insularity and externality in sixteenth-century debates about eloquence is not exclusively, or even primarily, a function of the vernacular’s “real-world” contexts; it is also the residue of its immersion in the classical tradition. The efforts of pedagogues and rhetoricians to fix rules and examples by which the best English might be recognized and perpetuated had the disorienting effect of embedding norms of vernacularity in the emulation of frankly alien tongues, the “peculiar languages” of ancient Athens and Rome. To speak English eloquently was, by definition, to speak it strangely.
Indeed, although modern historians and literary critics have characterized sixteenth-century rhetorical culture as “unequivocally and resolutely social in outlook,” its rituals of argument aimed at producing “a community of individuals sharing a common language,”48 the translation of this culture into England and into English pushed Renaissance writers up against the limits of the assumed virtues of community and commonality. To begin with, as Sean Keilen has emphasized, English scholars and writers working to augment their notoriously deficient tongue were repeatedly confronted with reminders of their insularity and marginality; looking for models in the classical past, they discovered a legacy of barbarous exclusion, remedied only through submission to conquest.49 As Jenny Mann’s work on figures of speech reveals, even small-scale transactions between antiquity and the present could trigger a jarring sense of dislocation and devaluation: vernacular rhetoricians may have fantasized the nation as “an ideally united community of native English speakers,” but in ferrying schemes and tropes out of classical prose and poetry and into English, they upset that native unity, “threaten[ing] to overwhelm their vernacular with foreign devices.”50 All too often, then, as Carla Mazzio demonstrates, vernacular texts that modeled themselves on classical literature became sites of “language trouble,” marred by stammering, mumbling, lexical confusion, and other forms of inarticulacy.51
Like these critics, I am interested in the distorting, even disabling pressure that classical antiquity exerts on the theory and practice of vernacular eloquence—in particular in the impossibility of validating modern native practice without resorting to the definitively ancient and nonnative. But this paradoxical conflation of eloquence and alienation, although it speaks in seemingly direct ways to the belated and marginal predicament of English writers, is by no means particular to the sixteenth century; it is a legacy of the classical tradition’s unresolved attitude toward linguistic difference. In this sense the very incommensurability of the classical past and the vernacular present could prove enabling for English writers, for even as their study of ancient rhetoric and poetry taught them to recognize their estrangement from antiquity, it also taught them to perceive in that estrangement—or any estrangement of language—the essence of literary value. Thus within any number of sixteenth-century English texts, the expressed desire to domesticate eloquence, reconciling antique precepts to the rhetorical imperatives of the here and now, clashes with an equally pervasive tendency to privilege distance and difference as the ideal attributes of eloquent speech. This willful embrace of strangeness is not, as William Harrison assumes, the purview of the unlearned, those self-alienated “other[s]” whose perversity threatens the ideal course of linguistic progress. On the contrary, it is a learned technique, cultivated in deference to the very texts and theories that made English seem so strange.
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That learning is the first subject of this study. However radically innovative they appeared, the stylistic experiments of the late 1570s and early 1580s are rooted in theoretical ground prepared by an earlier humanism, as two seemingly antagonistic strains of linguistic reform worked to alter the nature and status of the English language. The earlier decades of the sixteenth century bear witness, on the one hand, to the concerted effort to imbue a generation of English schoolboys with perfect Latinity and, on the other hand, to the equally concerted effort to define rhetorical and poetic standards for the vernacular, achieving parity with antiquity by giving English an eloquence of its own. Although they aim at distinct, even rivalrous, visions of linguistic achievement, in practice the two movements shared significant overlap: those who sought to inculcate Latinity necessarily wrote in English and, in consequence, valued the vernacular more highly and altered its course more definitively than is often allowed; meanwhile the authors of vernacular arts of rhetoric and poetics served as conduits for conspicuously foreign terms, concepts, and writerly practices—for an ideal of Englishness that remains in constant, jostling contact with tongues elsewhere. In a more basic sense, both Latin pedagogues and vernacular rhetoricians presented readers with an essentially paradoxical vision of what it might mean for England, as a whole, to lay claim to eloquence. Although each movement addresses itself to a broad audience, invoking a self-justifying rhetoric of intimacy and domesticity—proper instruction will make Latin “familiar” and “easy” to any learner; the vernacular merits development because it is the “common” and “mother” tongue—each ends by accepting, and even valorizing, estrangement and exile as the necessary conditions of a properly English eloquence.
Conventional narratives of vernacularization and nation-building tend to obscure both the sympathies between
