of learning Latin in order to access eloquence where it is most readily found, he insists that eloquence transcends disciplinary and linguistic boundaries, enfolding all other intellectual and cultural achievements. “They be moche abused, that suppose eloquence to be only in wordes or coulours of Rhetorike,” he declares, “for … in an oratour is required to be a heape of all maner of lernyng: whiche of some is called the worlde of science, of other the circle of doctrine, whiche is in one worde of greke Encyclopedia” (48v). Such a vast, indeed global, competence necessarily extends far beyond “the elegant speking of latin”: “latine,” Elyot observes, “is but a naturall speche, and the frute of speche is wyse sentence, whiche is gathered and made of sondry lernynges” (47v). Precisely because it transcends the boundaries of any particular language, eloquence is—paradoxically—accessible to all, inherent “in euery tonge … whereof sentences be so aptly compact that they by a vertue inexplicable do drawe unto them the mindes and consent of the herers” (47v–48r). It is this generous perception of linguistic potential and rhetorical efficacy, of the sameness of eloquence whenever and wherever it is heard—as much as any hopefulness about the hitherto untapped linguistic talents of nursemaids—that sustains Elyot’s vision of an otherwise impossible intimacy with classical antiquity. To read Virgil is to escape the infelicitous constraints of time and country: to traverse a world of learning but to experience it as inexplicably familiar, aptly compact.
However, that is not exactly the lesson one takes away from Virgil’s great poem of civilization building and travel, which takes a rather darker view of the satisfactions afforded by nurses. The Aeneid is all about generative displacements—Troy is rubble 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
