Cockcroft 2003

Rhetorical Affect in
Early Modern Writing

Renaissance Passions Reconsidered
Robert Cockcroft
Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing
Also by the same author
PERSUADING PEOPLE: An Introduction to Rhetoric (with Susan M. Cockcroft)

Rhetorical Affect in Early
Modern Writing
Renaissance Passions Reconsidered
Robert Cockcroft
Former Lecturer in English
University of Nottingham
© Robert Cockcroft 2003
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Cockcroft, Robert, 1939–
Rhetorical affect in early modern writing: renaissance passions
reconsidered/Robert Cockcroft.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–333–80252–7
1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism.
2. Emotions in literature. 3. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History
– 16th century. 4. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History – 17th
century. 5. English language – Early modern, 1500–1700 – Rhetoric. 6.
Renaissance – England. 7. Affect (Psychology) I. Title.
PR428.E56 C63 2002
820.9′353–dc21
2002074895
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
To my partner in persuasion
Susan Cockcroft
Contents
Preface viii
1 Introduction: Reconsidered Passions 1
1.1 From perception to persuasion 1
1.2 Renaissance passions reconsidered 2
1.3 Emotion, now – and then 6
1.4 Introducing the new rhetoric 10
1.5 Empowering the reader? 30
1.6 A ‘double analysis’ – with a difference 34
2 Sable Clouds and Silver Linings 38
2.1 A pathetic muddle? 38
2.2 Ideas of pathos from Plato to Milton 40
2.3 The applications of pathos 73
2.4 Milton’s A Masque: the progression of pathos 77
3 Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised 83
3.1 Reconsidering: how and why? 83
3.2 Baldwin and Marlowe: talent and the spotlight 85
3.3 Hutchinson and Cavendish: writer and audience 93
3.4 Shakespeare: about the Bard’s business 103
3.5 Milton: perspectives on power 110
4 Going to Extremes 117
4.1 The extremes of love and hate 117
4.2 Passionate to a purpose 131
5 Adjusting the Mirrors 140
5.1 The emotional laser 140
5.2 Marlowe and Baldwin: designs on the audience 143
5.3 Hutchinson and Cavendish: rival reflections 157
5.4 Shakespeare: back to the audience? 167
5.5 Paradise Lost: engaging the reader 173
5.6 A case in point: Courtship in Wyatt and Gascoigne 179
5.7 Conclusion 184
Notes 186
Bibliography 197
Index 204
vii
Preface
This is the outcome of a long-standing wish to bring several things

together: the close reading which I learned at Cambridge; the interest
in Renaissance rhetoric and logic which I pursued at King’s College
London, and the British Library (then housed in the British
Museum); the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts taught for
35 years at Nottingham, especially Milton; and the exploration of
Rhetoric in which I and my students have brought together ancient
insights into persuasive language and modern analytical techniques.
The book is centred upon the moving of emotion, but it is driven by
the wish to pursue the pleasure of reading from the perspectives
already implied, especially the imaginative delight and the challenge
which, after one term of history at St John’s College Cambridge,
lured me into English and has kept me there.
I wish to thank the colleagues and friends on both sides of the
‘great divide’ between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ rhetorics. Among the
former, four stand out: Peter Stockwell for his steady encouragement
of my attempts to adapt schema theory; Margaret Berry for her
invitation to teach rhetoric according to the rigorous standards of
Modern English Language as applied at Nottingham; Katie Wales for
her encouragement to the cause of rhetoric in the context of linguis-
tics; and Ron Carter for the benefit of his insights, eager curiosity
about affectivity, and vast knowledge of who does what, and how. I
have gained too from membership of the Poetics and Linguistics
Association (PALA), especially the new kind of excitement and
friendliness found at its conferences. The same, in its own way, is
true of ISHR (the International Society for the History of Rhetoric).
The benefits I have drawn from Jameela Lares’s knowledge and
distinction as a scholar of pulpit rhetoric, renewed in enthusiastic
discussion in a variety of locations from Scottish boat-trips to
Spanish bus-rides, have been especially valued as this book neared
completion. So has Lynette Hunter’s wonderful grasp of the whole
picture of rhetoric and the original line she traces through it, so
eloquently shared. I also owe particular debts to Peter Mack and
Lawrence Green for timely help at several stages, and many others
who continue to inspire, encourage, and happily exchange ideas,
such as Peter France and Christine Sutherland.
viii
Preface ix
Lastly I must thank two scholars whose humanity, wisdom and

learning bestride the gap: Walter Nash (Bill to all his colleagues),
and Peter Verdonk of whom the least I can say is, that I wish I had met
him earlier and more often. I am also very grateful to David Norbrook
for putting me in touch with his work on Lucy Hutchinson; as her
stature grows steadily clearer, thanks to his efforts, the passage
discussed here will inevitably be viewed in a different light. Hinrich
Siefkind and Lis Leslie, who came to my help when I was floored by
my lack of German, are owed much, for their work, sound judgement,
and advice. To my wife and fellow-worker in the field of language,
whose imperfectly internalised voice presides permanently over my
writing of prose, and who is my resident expert in grammar, Susan
Cockcroft, my debt is incalculable in this as in everything else.
ROBERT COCKCROFT
1
Introduction: Reconsidered Passions
1.1 From perception to persuasion
One important test for writing, drama, and all other art-forms, is the
degree of connection between what we see in something, what we
sense behind it, how strange or familiar it is, what it prompts us
to – and our emotional engagement with it. Anybody committed to the
long-term study of language and literature is likely to recall several
different ways in which new texts have struck them, or in which well-
known ones have suddenly come back to life or revealed new qualities,
new issues, or new aspects deepening or contradicting our earlier
understanding; but almost always these will involve an inextricable
blend of perception, participation and emotion. Some of these
moments are all the more rewarding through being unanticipated,
whether they start from a chance encounter or a programmed meeting.
Some are sparked off while we are working alone, trying to anticipate
the testing of our arguments by those best qualified to judge them.
Some arise quite awkwardly as, seeking to persuade others of the
importance of a text, or the value of our approach to it, we are
finishing some writing or delivering a scripted lecture or paper.
Talking to a friend or colleague about a text often precipitates fresh
perception, filling some gaps, opening others, corroborating or unset-
tling old convictions – or provoking us with sheer indifference to what
has moved or challenged us! Such exchanges often precipitate the
sharpest insights and keenest feeling. Responding, we may surprise
ourselves with insights which don’t seem to be ours and in which we
have no ego-involvement, as we suddenly see things from another per-
spective (whether we adopt this permanently, or not). The rewards of
rigorous, solitary reasoning may also be great, testing the consistency
1
2 Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing
and probability of our own contentions, and helping us to anticipate

counter-arguments. In the first case our interaction with other people
seems quite non-committal, unconstrained and spontaneous, the
accidental spin-off of a common interest; but we benefit enormously.
In the second case, weighing up the opposed arguments thoroughly in
advance, and assessing their appeal to other parties, we necessarily to
some degree empathise with them (even internalise them), however
reluctant we might be emotionally or intellectually to admit that they
have any force. This might lead to a permanent change, weakening our
previous inhibitions and heightening our susceptibility to new feeling,
new influences. If we are fortunate, spontaneous interaction and
solitary discipline (affectivity with its interplay of subjectivities, includ-
ing emotion, and a more objective reasoning) will reinforce each other
– one opening us to feeling, one driving us to think. Much harder, is
the public promotion of our convictions, justifying the way we think,
projecting our emotions. Here, if not before, rhetoric makes an
undisguised entrance, with or without the eleventh-hour eruption of
fresh thinking. Can it preserve the candour and clarity, or the conflicts
of emotion and perception, in our spontaneous responses to texts, or
to other peoples’ readings? How much of this can survive transplanta-
tion into a persuasive argument? Can the affective quality of spontane-
ity be mirrored in that of deliberate utterance?
Sooner or later we have to take up a position, whether we are raising
an issue for academic debate, presenting it to a wider ‘literate’ audience
or explaining it to readers who are less well-informed, but perhaps
more open-minded. Our rhetoric varies accordingly; and at the end of
this Introduction I will examine one instance addressed to the last
category (typically, students). In doing so, I will myself deploy a
rhetoric, reflective of the spirit, and the way of going to work, to be
displayed throughout the book.
1.2 Renaissance passions reconsidered
The second phrase in my title has a multiple reference. Primarily, it

signals a reappraisal of the affective bond which the dominant
critical voices of the last three decades seek to establish with their
readers. Where early modern writing is concerned, this may often
entail an emotional response widely remote from the writer’s own
emotive designs. Secondly, it also acknowledges an inevitable
distance between the past and present, recalling (without its negative
implication) that phrase in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (l. 41), which it
Introduction: Reconsidered Passions 3
echoes. There, the ‘supple confusions’ inflicted on ‘passion’ implicate

rhetoric in the compulsive (indeed, lustful) tendency of human
beings towards the endless tantalisation and deception of themselves
and each other. Personified as ‘History’ (a sinister, strength-sapping
compound of harlot, military architect and orator), this power ‘Gives
too late / What’s not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory
only, reconsidered passion’. 1 In context, Gerontion’s phrase is
ambiguous; it could mean a passion only recoverable through
reversion to a former self or state of consciousness which can’t be
rationally sustained, or a past conviction justified by the outcome of
events but now emptied of feeling – a dilemma which echoes the
poem’s epigraph, from Measure for Measure (‘Thou hast nor youth nor
age / But as it were an after dinner sleep / Dreaming of both’).
Though this did not determine my choice of title, it is easy enough
in Eliot’s phrase to ‘contrive’ a ‘corridor’ to it, as one of the ‘issues’
to be addressed by way of my approach.
That approach is, primarily, to the question of rhetorical emotion
itself, pathos. Recognised by Aristotle (Rhetoric, I.ii.5), as one of the
three modes of proof – the one that works by putting the hearers into
‘a certain frame of mind’ (I.ii.3) – can emotion, viewed primarily as a
subjective experience rather than as a phenomenon to be studied and
interpreted, possess some kind of truth-value?
And in the case of Renaissance texts, remote as they are from us
culturally (in other words, religiously, philosophically, politically,
socially, economically, artistically, morally, and in every other
respect), how are we to distinguish between the emotional response
which heightens our perception – and the kind which limits it?
When is it right for a critical or scholarly reappraisal to convert
long–established sympathies with particular characters, poetic
voices, or persuasive stances, into antipathies (a change of emotional
polarity which involves earlier modes of reading – and those who
uphold them – as well as the texts themselves)? By what criteria
should we assess the validity of modern attempts to empathise with
early modern pathos, whether by quasi-archaeological reconstruction
and re-enactment, or by analogy (as when Macbeth combines the
hostile take-over bids of third-millennium capitalism with Mafia-
style violence, or when Ophelia is confined in a nineteenth century
straitjacket)? Or when might we properly persist not merely in
empathy but in sympathy, as I might (say) with George Herbert? It
might be argued that emotion inhibits critical judgement. Passionate
writing can be, and often is, viewed dispassionately – but for how
long? To convince ourselves of the objective truth of our position

must entail some emotion (satisfaction); and anybody challenging
that certainty, especially if they are still in thrall to feelings which
we have put behind us (or beneath us) might well excite our pity,
contempt, irritation, amusement or anger, according to circum-
stances. My personal conviction is that we cannot exclude emotion,
or emotional persuasion, from critical judgement. Contemporary
practice amongst the most prominent critics, to be illustrated here,
repeatedly demonstrates this. We should not try to exclude feeling;
rather, we should – subject to defined principles – alternate between
objective perception and emotional response, or overlay one with
the other, both in analysis and in persuasive communication.
Accordingly, my aim here is to clarify the principle, or principles,
concerned. When is judgement in the use of emotive language, or in
its appraisal, skewed by preconceptions of its appeal to a particular
audience or critical constituency – and at what point does the
distortion mount from the enlivening to the deadening, or to the
mendacious? How can we distinguish between legitimate emotional
aversion or partisanship, and reactions founded on misreading? In
Chapter 3 I will explore a range of critical readings showing how
critical passion enlivens, directs and motivates the common activity
of reading and judging – and in doing so, how it ranges from mildness
to outrageousness, broadness to narrowness, blindness to insight. In
doing so I will apply the same principles of analysis to the affectivity of
modern critical writing, its fusion of critical stance and critical feeling,
as I will use in the two following chapters – though there I will try to
achieve a sharper focus on the affectivity of the Renaissance texts
themselves (with respect, climactically, to those very passages which
sparked off the comment looked at in Chapter 3). My aim here will be
to achieve an exacter sense of what was being addressed in the minds
of the original audiences, whether by design or in despite of authorial
or polemical intention, and of how emotion was moved (whether by
conscious rhetorical means or less deliberate linguistic felicity). This
offers at once a standard by which to ‘reconsider’ current critical pas-
sions, and an additional resource to criticism itself in its future work
on texts and its engagement with the work of colleagues. Chapter 4
will illustrate the range of feeling in early modern texts between the
two commonly acknowledged extremes of universal emotion – love,
and hate. We will see these expressed in a variety of relationships and
cultural contexts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the aim being both to locate the effects studied in the preceding and
following chapters, within a wider context of pathos, and to illustrate

the method of work without reference to the individual critical issues
raised or implied in Chapter 3. Chapter 5, on the other hand, will
return to those issues and suggest ways of resolving them – whether
that amounts to confirming, qualifying or refuting our critics’
contentions.
Our primary examples of pathos will be provided by a range
of Renaissance authors, male and female, including Milton,
Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Marlowe, and
the less well-known but intriguing figure of William Baldwin (besides
other poets and prose writers – some major – to be touched on in the
intermediate Chapter 4 and elsewhere). In Chapter 3, these will be
approached by way of the ‘reconsidered’ passion of modern readings
and interpretative agendas, typified by critics such as Stephen
Greenblatt, David Norbrook, Germaine Greer, Lisa Jardine, Terry
Eagleton, Harold Bloom and Kate Belsey. My final chapter will, as
already indicated, take a detailed independent look at original expres-
sions of pathos from the ultimate despair of Macbeth to the curious,
complex but warm emotions expressed by Margaret Cavendish
towards her husband. Here, as in Chapter 3, I shall make a double or
coordinated use of two techniques of rhetorical analysis centring on
pathos – techniques whose method and theoretical basis will be
outlined and initially exemplified in the remainder of this
Introduction and in the following chapter.
It will be appropriate – despite my inversion of historical order in
doing so – to look first (following a brief preview of the ‘old’) at what I
call ‘the new rhetoric’, and then in more detail and in the next
chapter, at the tradition of classical rhetoric, which has much to tell
us, however incoherent and contradictory, about pathos. This will be
the best way to order my material, because readers not familiar with
the ‘old’ rhetoric will grasp most of the essentials of persuasion more
easily by way of the concepts underlying the ‘new’ approach, while
those more attuned to the traditional ‘art’ will have the stimulus of a
new approach first, before judging how well it links to older accounts
and evaluations of pathos, to be reviewed in the next chapter. The
coordination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ methods of analysis – most clearly
demonstrable in Chapters 4 and 5 with their ‘control’ readings of
pathetic texts, but also powerfully relevant in Chapter 3 – will then be
explained, and illustrated in the last section of this introduction with
reference to a passage from Gary Waller’s English Poetry of the Sixteenth
Century.
1.3 Emotion, now – and then
We have already glanced at the problem of putting spontaneous

emotional experience to deliberate rhetorical use, without demeaning
it. This implied difficulty is compounded when emotion is less sponta-
neous: whenever a persuader seeks to activate his or her own emotion,
to match the estimated emotional propensities of an audience; and the
problem may be more apparent when we consider self-confessedly
rhetorical texts or readings, than it is (typically) in our reading or
viewing of the most familiar practical forms of rhetoric, journalism and
advertising. Here we are exposed to the persuasive use of emotion,
without any admission that rhetoric is being employed. In journalism,
this is typified by articles and reviews about the challenging of received
opinion or established practice in any field from politics to the arts. As
the protagonists of these pieces are introduced, emotion will tend to be
used as a positive signifier both of their concern for others and of their
self-expressive vitality. Witness (for example) how the broadsheet press
– at least in Britain – uses the term ‘angry’. Since the emergence of the
‘angry young man’ in the 1950s, ‘angry’ has been a convenient
metonym, for moral or political rectitude and moral or physical
courage, in the face of injustice or absurdity. The word invites admira-
tion and signals an uncommon degree of perception and persistence
on the part of the ‘angry’ person, despite the fact that being angry
proves nothing. Any decent person confronted with injustice is rightly
angry (or indignant); but self-evidently, those who are angry are not in
every given case reacting to injustice. The journalistic rhetoric of
emotion is no less problematic than the older rhetoric of pathos to be
examined in the next chapter.
Despite this reservation, those who uphold the positive rhetorical
use of emotion need not now be troubled by the endemic distrust of it
within the classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. As we
will see, emotion was often viewed negatively, and was associated with
the shallowness and delusiveness of rhetoric. Plato plays brilliantly and
poetically on the pathos of homosexual love, spiritual longing and
philosophic fervour while dismissing emotive rhetoric as a mere
‘knack’. Aristotle at some points seems to make pathos extraneous to
true rhetoric, at others to integrate it with the trustworthy persuasive
voice – while elsewhere he purposefully dissects the emotional suscep-
tibilities of a typical, male, Athenian audience. Both Cicero and
Quintilian make pathos the true mark of an orator (who, they claim,
must of necessity be a good man), while admitting that emotion is
often used to sidestep reason. And closer to our own times, Milton
illustrates the comparable complexity of Renaissance views. He ensures
that the baser modes of passion will be represented in his work in
contrast to the higher modes, which are characteristic of virtue, or
reflective of divine inspiration. Both modes, and their interrelation-
ship, will be investigated in the next chapter. More immediately, we
may note how he foreshadows current insights, by reflecting their
difference in the physical reactions integral to each mode. In Paradise
Lost Book IX, we may compare Adam’s traumatised response to Eve’s
fall, with the turbulence and duplicity of Satan. Adam ‘Astonied stood
and blank, while horror chill / Ran through his veins, and all his joints
relaxed’ (IX.890–1),2 an effect which is spontaneous and innocent,
though its mixture of shock and grief at what Eve has done is the raw
material of his forthcoming deliberation, foreshadowing the choice
which he will shortly make between Eve and God. Compare this to
Satan’s oratorical performance as the Serpent as he ‘New part puts on,
and as to passion moved, / Fluctuates disturbed, yet comely …’
(IX.667–8), or to his gamut of emotions in the great soliloquy which
begins Book IV, as summarised by the narrator: ‘Thus while he spake,
each passion dimmed his face / Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy and
despair,’ followed by the observation that ‘heavenly minds from such
distempers foul / Are ever clear’ (IV.114–15, 118–19). In the first case
Satan feigns emotion – or more precisely stimulates himself to feel it
according to the plan conceived earlier – and manifests it bodily
through the swaying movement of his upright serpentine form. His
‘disturbance’ foreshadows the clouding of Eve’s reason, while his
carefully-modulated ‘comeliness’ in movement expresses a seductive
and flattering empathy with her oppressed condition. In the second
case the storms of feeling ‘dimm[ing]’ the dissembled radiance of
Satan’s face in his disguise of ‘stripling cherub’ are entirely sponta-
neous, further emphasised by ‘gestures fierce’; and (as the narrator
indicates) they betray his fallen and degenerated condition. This may
surprise readers so recently spellbound by his apparent hovering on the
brink of repentance (42–8, 79–80). But passion which cannot stimulate
the will and reason to act rightly, is a mere ‘distemper’, however
moving in expression.
Today, by contrast, those who uphold rhetorical emotion no longer
have to plead that they are making good use of suspect materials.
Current research into the problems of consciousness, self-awareness,
and personal identity is attracting much attention by way of fiction
and highly-profiled television programming – witness David Lodge’s
Thinks … (2001)3 and Professor Susan Greenfield’s series on brain

research (2000). In this, emotion is not being overlooked. Witness
Professor Antonio Damasio’s view of its essential role in the emergence
of consciousness. Certain patterns of emotional response and interac-
tion may be innate to our species; and some of these may link back to
the primitive forms of snail and sea anemone. Far from opposing
reason, emotion should be recognised as its foundation. In an inter-
view linked to the publication of his The Feeling of What Happens
(2000),4 Damasio explains the results of damage to the frontal-lobe of
the brain: ‘You don’t feel embarrassment, you don’t feel guilt – you
don’t feel pride for that matter – and so your ability to reason properly
has been lost, together with your ability to feel properly’.5 This recalls
the traditional mode of linking emotion to reason syllogistically
through the ‘common places’ of perception, which are at once moral
and emotional – that is, affective – as seen in Cicero (see below), and
which are echoed in recent work on the relationship of emotion, and
other modes of perception, to language. In his article ‘The language of
felt experience’ (2000),6 William Downes links the three categories of
‘felt experience’ to three types of mental and/or physical activity. The
resulting account is closely analogous to Aristotle’s concept of three
interrelated ‘proofs’ – his linking of proof through character or ethos
(Rhetoric I.ii.4),7 and proof through reasoning or logos (I.ii.6), to the
pathos proof already noted. It coincides even more markedly, in its
account of three distinct but interdependent processes, with Cicero’s
formulation of the officia oratoris – teaching, pleasing and moving – to
be noted later in this Introduction. If we follow Downes’s view, emotion
is the specific bodily ‘arousal’ which we feel, given our cultural
conditioning, in particular situations, invariably accompanied by its
mental identification. It is related to two other categories of ‘felt
experience’: evaluation and intuition. The first of these involves
‘construals of experience on various scales of positive and negative’,
while the second entails a ‘felt urge’ to apply, in any given situation,
‘the meaning potentials which come from properties and problems
intrinsic to our semiotic systems themselves and the reality they
presuppose’ (pp. 102, 105). Emotion is inevitably accompanied by
some form of evaluation – for example, of good against bad, desire
against repulsion, beauty against ugliness, truth against falsehood,
obligation against inclination (pp. 102, 104). This implies that at least
two rational processes will – with or without conscious reflection –
always accompany emotion, namely, categorisation and the perception
of cause. Thus, in very short order, we will ‘construe’ the bodily
symptoms of an emotion (tightening chest, clenching fists), identify it

mentally (jealousy, anger), and link it quasi-logically to a source (a
threatened gratification, an offensive word or presence). By inference,
such ‘felt experience’ might occur outside or inside the context of dis-
course. The individual or the group involved will either be in direct
sensory contact with the source of an emotion, or exposed to a word or
phrase which evokes it. As already suggested, what is felt will usually
reflect a particular cultural context, and thus constitute a ‘secondary
emotion’ as characterised by Downes (p. 103). He summarises two
accounts of what happens, of which Damasio’s is the more vivid:
For Damasio, three aspects are involved in a secondary emotion: a

triggering situation, a mental evaluation and a massive bodily
response. In his analysis, the bodily response is to the ‘image’ or
mental evaluation of the situation and depends on a disposition
formed from previous experiences.
In such contexts as conversation, storytelling, and rhetorical

monologue, the ‘triggering situation’ will be constituted by words
alone, or by a combination of spoken words, expression and ‘body
language’ including gesture. The verbal medium will lead, instanta-
neously or by intermediate stages, to the ‘bodily arousal’ characteristic
of emotion. This may happen without thought in the form of ‘felt
experience’, as when single words expressive of the sympathies or
antipathies common to a group, dropped into a conversation, trigger
positive or negative feeling. But in one common rhetorical technique
for stirring pathos (see p. 49 below), discursive thought and premise-
based argument is used to evaluate the morality, competence or
motivation of some type of human behaviour – a process ‘not
necessarily [in itself] expressing an emotion’ (Downes, p. 104) – before
proceeding to the identification of one or more individuals so
behaving. This personifies the previously abstract evaluation, making
the persuadee experience the physical sensation of emotional arousal,
with or without the accompaniment of non-discursive ‘intuitions’ (as
when a speaker uses figurative language to intensify pathos).
We are now in a position to see how older and newer insights
correlate. A modern account of emotion, evaluation and intuition
suggests how the mental and linguistic capacities of human beings
interface with an emotional ‘bodily arousal’ akin to that of animals, in
a pre-verbal and in some respects non-rational manner – though in
Downes’s account language is progressively more involved in each of
his three categories of felt experience: identifying the emotion being

felt, particularly where it is culturally conditioned (cp. Cicero’s
‘moving’); providing scales of positive and negative evaluation which
do not exist in nature (cp. ‘pleasing’, at least where positive evaluations
are concerned); and making it possible through the very structure of
language, with its drive to unify conceptions and its capacity for
paradox, to intuit entities – such as God and the Self – for which there
is no verifiable evidence (compare ‘teaching’ – at least in the context of
traditional, premise-based structures of argument). Similarly, Aristotle’s
scheme of three ‘proofs’ seems to be built on some such a foundation.
Thus, ethos, the proof through character, works by projecting the
image of a reliable evaluator, who reflects emotion appropriate and ade-
quate to the situation (pathos), and who reasons in accordance with the
audience’s various intuitions regarding that situation (logos).
In the next extended section I shall show how ‘new’ rhetorical
techniques can trace pathos in writing, as well as explore its interaction
with ethos and logos. In doing this I shall suggest how to identify the
factors which combine to produce the ‘secondary emotions’ character-
istic of each culture, constructed as these are from the ‘primary
emotions’ which might be variously identified, but which are listed by
Damasio as ‘happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust’. We should
however be prepared to consider the possibility that primary emotion
might be directly reflected – either in the form of ‘raw emotion’
(as instanced by Lisa Jardine in her discussion of King Lear – see
Chapter 3), or from a matrix of human relationship which transcends
cultural differences.8
1.4 Introducing the new rhetoric
In this context, ‘new rhetoric’ does not refer back to the work of
C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca,9 despite echoing the magisterial
title of their book. Rather it denotes a development of applied
stylistics, bringing together recent developments in theory, as tested in
practice, in the attempt to discover what makes language at once clear,
vivid and convincing – or in one word, persuasive. Whether it results
from the steady determination of one person, random interaction
between several people, sudden inspiration, or any other cause;
whether it reflects acute, untutored observation or systematic study,
and however it occurs – as it does when people simultaneously perceive
what unites or divides them, and express it in a fresh, forceful and
innovative way – the language that changes minds or precipitates
action should now be susceptible to far more detailed demonstration

than was previously possible.
Thus, in applying modern analytical methods to early modern texts,
we should be better placed to understand their persuasiveness than the
authors themselves. This should not however induce us to downplay
the authors’ intelligent choice of means. Some of these may reflect
intuitive preference, the happy conviction that A works better than B.
Some will be less precisely explicable in terms of traditional logic or
rhetoric. Some, like the refined sense of ethos to be considered below,
with its strong emotive potential, may reflect both theory and
intuition. And the same will be true of pathos as realised stylistically:
for example, any number of past speakers or writers will have followed
the lead of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in seeking to give graphic
quality to emotive language, without any conscious awareness of deictic
language as one means of achieving this (that is, language dependent
for its meaning on the frame of time, space and social awareness
common to persuader and persuadee). But in lending immediacy to
their language, they will inevitably use words in a way which we now
recognise as deictic. Consider the very last words uttered by Lear in the
Folio text : ‘Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there,
look there.’ (V.iii.285–6, deictic words italicised).10
Here, I shall be considering those areas of recent theory which shed
most light on the effective use of pathos and which in doing so link it
both to the interpersonal and the logical functions of language. On the
face of it, flexibility in the use of emotive language – rendering it applic-
able to a wide range of situations real and imagined and to all the
major literary, dramatic and rhetorical genres – is likely to entail those
features which we are now able to isolate and describe for the first
time, as the factor which made particular choices feel right, and which
enabled authors to apply general rhetorical principles effectively, in
particular instances. My application of the ‘new rhetoric’ to pathos will
draw on the most relevant areas of theory and developing practice.
These will enable us: (a) to examine with new precision the persuader’s
likely estimate, in any given instance, of an audience’s receptivity; (b)
to refine our sense of the ethos informing any persuasive voice and
determining the emotional pressures which it exerts; (c) to appreciate
how syntactical order affects the comprehension, freshness and force
of words and phrases, as each sentence unfolds; (d) to be alert to the
emotive potential of the language which locates readers or listeners
within real or imaginary worlds; and (e) to detect any echoes within
persuasive writing – whether it takes the form of dialogue or
monologue – of that heightening of language which tends to occur

spontaneously in actual conversation, as an index of emotional (and
imaginative) engagement. The observation, theory and practice
productive of each of these benefits will be outlined successively in the
following subsections. The cumulative effect of all these ‘new rhetori-
cal’ insights will be demonstrated by constant reference back to a
single major example, though some particular points will be reinforced
by the citation of other passages.
1.4.1 Schema theory: memory structures and their persuasive

potential
If modern memories, as guides to the processing of information and
consequent action, are organised differently from early modern ones
(either structurally or in detail or both), this will be reflected in the
sharpness or fuzziness, fullness or meagreness of our emotional
reactions to Renaissance texts. Cultural change may have covered
the clues to feeling, disarmed the fuses, blanked out the association
of ideas. This is of course hardly surprising: if we think back over our
own lives – 10, 20 or 50 years – we will soon realise how much our
daily routines, the settings to which we were accustomed, and our
habitual actions in pursuit of short-term or longer-term objectives,
at earlier periods in our lives, differ from our current circumstances,
our present priorities and the steps we take to achieve them. This
difference will be due as much to the technological, cultural and
economic change affecting everyone, as to the fact that we individu-
ally are now at a later stage of our lives; and we only need to
compare the daily activities of today’s ten-year-olds with our own, at
the same age, to appreciate the point. If in this respect we differ so
much from our own earlier selves, how must we differ from our
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears? However, if we can
take steps to recollect or reconstruct what people lived for in the
past, and how they made one thing instrumental to another, we
may recover something of how their imaginations worked, how they
felt, and how – whether deliberately or intuitively – they played
upon each other’s emotions.
Cognitive theory depends on the belief that we do not interpret new
appeals to our attention, or newly realised needs, by reference to our
particular memories of similar things, but to general mental constructs
or schemata, each consisting of an interconnected set of elements, all of
which are subject to variation. Schemata are based on past experience
actual or imagined, and are susceptible to constant modification in
response to fresh experience. This principle is of course best

understood in terms of the particulars through which any given
schema is realised or instantiated: for instance, by considering what
interlinked ideas and expectations underlie our recognition of the
religious ceremonial and overbearing behaviour anticipated in the
following lines, and the valediction enacted there, as Milton’s Samson
takes leave of the chorus:
Brethren farewell, your company along

I will not wish, lest it perhaps offend them
To see me girt with friends: and how the sight
Of me as of a common enemy,
So dreaded once, may now exasperate them
I know not. Lords are lordliest in their wine;
And the well-feasted priest then soonest fired
With zeal, if aught religion seem concerned:
No less the people in their holydays
Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable;
Happen what will, of me expect to hear
Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy
Our God, our law, my nation, or myself,
The last of me or no I cannot warrant.
Samson Agonistes, 1413–26
To show how schema theory explains the process of cognition in our

response to this passage, I shall be employing the approach and
terminology developed by R.C. Schank, at first in collaboration with
R. Abelson (1977) and later in his Dynamic Memory (1982).11 The theory
is lucidly and conveniently summarised by Elena Semino in her
Language and World Creation (1997),12 p. 138 ff.
Semino does not address the issue of persuasion, but her account of
how language is understood, in relation to schemata as generally defined
above, has strong implications for rhetoric. Indeed, some of the schemata
as typified by her have close kinship with the perennial concepts of Logic
and Rhetoric, for example, with three out of the four Aristotelean vari-
eties of cause (formal, final and efficient),13 and with figuration (especially
metaphor), while others lend themselves readily to persuasive exploita-
tion, overt or covert. I refer the reader to Semino’s full account, confining
myself to brief explanations of the main subvarieties of schemata as
applicable to rhetoric, in the most convenient order.
Plans (which persuaders will inevitably seek to transform or

influence) ‘contain information about the sets of actions that someone
may perform in order to accomplish a certain objective’ (Semino,
p. 138). Samson in setting out for the Temple of Dagon intuits a plan
on the part of Israel’s God, to which his seeming compliance with the
Philistines will be essential – though this contravenes the more regular
scripts (see below) with which he preserves his religious purity as a
Hebrew and his additional obligations as a Nazarite (see ll. 1319–21,
1354–62).
Goals ‘are schemata that contain knowledge about the aims and
objectives that people are likely to have’. Schank and Abelson (Semino,
p. 139) propose seven of these: three representing desired states
(Satisfaction, Enjoyment and Achievement), two seeking to avoid
undesirable states (Preservation and Crisis). Samson, struck by ‘Some
rousing motions’ (1382), has abandoned the Crisis goal of avoiding
pollution, and aims again at the Achievement goal of Israel’s
deliverance. He is also involved with two other goals which further the
first five: the Instrumental goal, ‘enabling the achievement of another
goal’ as Samson seeks the unimpeded use of whatever opportunity is to
be presented; and the Delta goal, ‘like an instrumental goal, but
realised by general plans rather than scripts’ , and as such, allowing for
many more options in the achievement of instrumentality. Thus,
Samson awaits the undisclosed option – which will take the form of
two conveniently positioned roof-supports – for a final, devastating
assault on the Philistines. In the meantime, in furtherance of the Delta
goal of effective persuasion, he takes the opportunity for a final sharing
of thought and feeling with the chorus, to reconcile them to separa-
tion. As an example of how goals are overtly recognised and inter-
preted in Renaissance texts, in this case with a negative persuasive
intent, consider the First Citizen’s reading, in Coriolanus I.i.32–3 of the
disdainful hero’s motivation. As one of the despised plebeians, he
offers an explanation of that hero’s military achievement which (on
the face of it, oddly) represents him as at once infantile and arrogant:
‘he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud’. The truth
underlying this blend of gossip and belittling class resentment is
destined to be proved by the play; and the fact that it can be true
despite its lack of consistency (betrayed by the awkward insertion of
‘partly’) is more rapidly explicable by way of schema theory – the
diverse goals being pursued by Coriolanus – than through logic.
The pride of Coriolanus reflects his conscious accomplishment of one
or more ‘achievement goals’, including the ‘skill’ which for Schank and
Abelson (Semino, p. 139) typifies this type of goal, but not including
the ‘social relationships’ which also typify it, since he is inept even with
his fellow patricians. Moreover, as the First Citizen intuits, his
Preservation goals include (besides the safety of Rome itself) a very
particular interpretation of ‘family’ as typified by Schank and Abelson
(ibid.) – namely, the revalidation of his emotional dependence on his
mother, Volumnia. Indeed, the maintenance of this is a Crisis goal
whenever his valour is tested in battle, to avoid rejection at her hands
as a consequence of falling short. But the recognition and selection of
goals are determined by further, deeper and (probably) more durable
schemata, as Samson’s words will once more demonstrate. Themes
‘provide background information about the origin of people’s goals’
(Semino, p. 140). Role themes relate to occupations within society (very
much different in the early modern period); interpersonal themes reflect
the likely character of closer one-to-one relationships (again very
different either in conception, as with children and parents, wives and
husbands, or in their actual basis – as with individual master-servant
relationships). Life themes ‘are to do with the general position that a
person aspires to in life’ (Semino, p. 140), which in the early modern
period would almost invariably include the salvation of one’s soul, and
the general vindication of one’s religious principles, Catholic or
Protestant, besides other widely divergent aspirations, such as the
service of one’s Prince or the advancement (as with Milton) of a republi-
can ideal. Samson’s life themes are encapsulated in the line ‘Our God,
our law, my nation, or myself’; but the Instrumental goal most readily
conducive to this – demolishing the vault of Dagon’s temple – has yet
to be revealed to him.
Inevitably, persuaders will seek to change the plans with which their
persuadees normally meet the exigencies of life. Goals will be achieved
(and themes maintained) by proceeding through a sequence of actions;
and each action typically takes place within a familiar setting – both
the sequence and the setting necessitating two further terms, scene and
script. Here we refer specifically to Schank’s further, individual, and
more flexible development of schema theory in his Dynamic Memory
(1982), which seems particularly applicable to rhetoric (see Semino,
p. 141 ff.).
A scene might be a physical setting large or small, or a familiar kind
of personal or social encounter. Semino summarises: ‘Scenes are
general schemata containing information about different types of
situations and what happens in them’ (p. 142), and in explanation she
quotes Dynamic Memory, p. 86: ‘As long as there is an identifiable
physical setting and a goal being pursued within that setting, we have
a scene’. This depends on ‘information about what the scene looks like’
and ‘about activities that go on in a scene’ – that is, information
recorded, and operative by default if not explicitly referred to or
encountered, in the scene’s particular configuration of memory.
‘Setting’ is broadly interpreted in accordance with the ‘type of scene’
involved. ‘Physical scenes are defined in terms of a particular physical
setting … Social scenes … in terms of a particular social setting … [and]
Personal scenes … in terms of the pursuit of a goal that is private and
idiosyncratic to a particular person’ (Semino, p. 143, my italics). Scenes
are postulated to explain the fact that one setting easily reminds us of
another. The Temple of Dagon towards which Samson is mysteriously
beckoned, combines a capacious structure with the goal of ritual
sacrifice. For Milton’s readers, in their familiarity with the Bible, its
twin pillars might well have recalled those of Solomon’s Temple, a
place of true worship (II. Chronicles 3.15–17). But, with its idolatrous
pomp and hierarchical seating arrangements, it might also have been
meant to echo a Catholic cathedral interior (or even a large urban
Anglican church with its numerous private pews and galleries). It
might moreover progressively bring other settings to mind: a theatre
(1605), an amphitheatre (1609–10), a banqueting house, a slaughter-
house (1611–12). In addition, Samson envisages two ‘social scenes’:
‘lords … lordliest in their wine’ and ‘well-feasted priests … fired with
zeal’, two groups asserting their goals against his, were he to take his
Danite fellow-tribesmen with him to the Temple in a gesture of politi-
cal and religious solidarity. Moreover, Samson is already beginning to
intuit a highly ‘idiosyncratic … personal scene’ (see Semino, p. 143) to
take place in the Temple, something to be done on God’s behalf possi-
bly entailing his own death, completely private where the unsuspect-
ing Philistines are concerned and, once revealed, destined to remain
unappreciated in its full emotional complexity even by his fellow
Hebrews (though it is instrumental to their freedom and achieves the
service of a vengeful deity).
But the realisation of particular scenes – or, to use Semino’s term,
their instantiation (ibid.) – depends upon sequences of actions in
furtherance of one or more goals, called scripts. In effect, Samson antic-
ipates two of these as likely to embroil him, and potentially the
Chorus, with the Philistine oligarchs in their frontrow seats, and with
the gross unanimity of Dagon’s clergy as figured by ‘the well-feasted
priest’: an ‘exasperated’ response in the assertion of privilege and
perquisites might harm his friends and limit his own opportunities. It
is the multifarious non-spiritual goals pursued in the Temple – martial

and sexual pride and vanity, gluttony, cruelty, furtherance of social
privilege, puerile excitement, repression of conscience – each with its
own script – that redefine it, scenically, as a ‘place of false worship’. This
associates it in the minds of Milton and his implied readership, with
most ostensibly Christian churches, including the post-Restoration
Church of England with its manifest political function, as expressed in
its buildings and liturgy.
Scenes and scripts must inevitably be organised into larger and even
more flexible sequential and parallel schemata, making possible both
the play of figurative language, analogy, comparison and contrast, and
the memorisation and modification of all the practical directions
which we need for the business of living in the longer and shorter
term. Semino (p. 143) notes that shorter sequences of scenes and
scripts, for example, those required for air travel, are called Memory
Organisation Packets (MOPS). She quotes Schank: ‘A MOP consists of a
set of scenes directed towards the achievement of a goal’. More
extended sequences (for example, a holiday – or even the stages of a
spiritual journey like Samson’s) require the assembly of further
‘packets’, that is, meta-MOPS, which ‘organise sequences of MOPS in
the same way as MOPs organise sequences of scenes’ (Semino, p. 144).
It is important to note that Schank’s categorisation of scenes as ‘physi-
cal, societal and personal’ is paralleled in these larger-scale structures of
memory and expectation. The whole concluding episode of Samson
Agonistes as it moves to a climax, from the summons to the Temple to
its demolition and Samson’s death, will be both more intelligible and
more distinctive – for readers of the Bible or of Milton – because of its
similarity to a whole range of stories in which a hero enters an enemy’s
stronghold and subverts it, from Odysseus in the Cyclops’s cave, to the
hi-tech fantasies of a Bond film. Its resemblance to other stories, where
its physical settings and its material events are concerned, serves to
highlight the distinctiveness of Samson’s agon: his intense pursuit of
social and personal goals, from the scene of his reception as anticipated
in the quoted lines, to the final scene – physically annihilating, but
(perhaps) personally vindicating.
And if we turn from one particular drama to the general characteris-
tics of rhetoric, noting the distinctive instrumental goal of each stage
in the persuasive process, most people will recognise rhetorical
discourse as, in effect, a series of social scenes, possibly though not
inevitably linked to one or more physical scenes (consider for example
how a television news item typically proceeds from the studio to the
reporter at the scene of an event, and then perhaps to a round-

the-table discussion with ‘experts’ or a dialogue between newscaster
and reporter). Such a sequence will have the complexity of a MOP
from the persuadee’s perspective, while for the persuader – aware of
what must be included in the detailed, purposive structure of each
section – it will reflect the characteristics of a meta-MOP. For our pur-
poses, as we seek to judge the actual or potential position within a
larger persuasive sequence, of any passage under scrutiny, it will be
convenient to think of the normative order of persuasive discourse as
six – or at the most seven – scenes characterising Arrangement or
Dispositio, as the second stage of rhetorical composition: namely,
Introduction, Narrative, Proposition and Division (if these two are in
fact separable elements), Proof, Disproof, and Conclusion. See Richard
Lanham’s succinct discussion, in the book which is to be our ‘first call’
for all technical and terminological reference, his A Handlist of
Rhetorical Terms (pp. 171–4).14 Viewed as a scene in this sense, Samson’s
quoted speech most obviously exhibits the goals proper to a
Conclusion, heartening and reassuring his fellow-tribesmen as he parts
from them physically (and this despite the fact that the speech also
contains a disproof of the proposition, not advanced by the Chorus
though anticipated by Samson, that they should accompany him).
The last kind of ‘high-level memory structure’ postulated by Schank
(see Semino, p. 146) is the Thematic Organisation Point (TOP). This
‘highlights similarities and parallels between different areas of knowl-
edge’, making a marked use – whether playful or serious – of the
‘reminding’ that was noted earlier. Such TOPS (most obviously similes
or metaphors) may occur on the spur of the moment, often in lively
and relaxed conversation between intimates, as is evident in the
recorded corpora of spoken English (see below); and it is possible that
in certain contexts within a consciously persuasive interaction, figura-
tive language may be used not so much for the value of individual
images, as to stimulate (or simulate) the mental process attested by
TOPS, because this will strengthen any tendency to a convergence of
thinking, feeling and perceiving between the parties to persuasion.
Metaphor itself, long acknowledged as a major resource for persuasive
style, as my next chapter will recall, has been extensively reappraised
in the light of cognitive theory. It is a primary manifestation of the
TOP; and in Chapter 8 of her book, Elena Semino notes how the
interaction of schemata in the ‘“source” (or “vehicle”) domain’ with
those in the “target” (or “tenor”) domain’ has, in M. Black’s15 account,
‘a very powerful cognitive function, since it can produce new
knowledge by establishing new connections and attributing new

properties to concepts’. This Interaction View of metaphor, which
Semino traces back to I.A. Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936),16
powerfully challenges the traditional Similarity View, according to
which the two ideas, or the idea and the image, brought together in
the metaphor remain essentially separate. But the distinctively
Cognitive view, which Semino goes on to expound, proposes a cline or
scale between ‘schema reinforcement’ (where a metaphor essentially
confirms some established habit of thinking of A in terms of B), and
‘schema refreshment’, where ‘the mapping of one whole cognitive
domain onto another’, in Levinson’s words,17 serves (in Semino’s) to
‘make us see new correspondences or indeed attribute new structures
or properties to objects, concepts and situations’ (p. 203). Thus
metaphor can transform the way in which a target cognitive domain ‘is
viewed, structured and experienced’ (ibid.).
When the persuasive voice initiates this process, but convinces its
audience or its readership that they are involved in the restructuring,
and jointly achieving the new experience, rhetorical pathos will be at
its most intense. Paul Ricoeur’s claims for the ‘ontological vehemence’
entailed in the poetic experience of metaphor, involving ‘the ecstatic
moment of language – language going beyond itself’,18 may extend
beyond what is possible in rhetoric, or (indeed) desirable. This would
be true if he was right to suggest, as noted by Lana Cable in her
concern for the ‘carnality’ of Milton’s rhetoric,19 that metaphor exists
in a second order of reality detached from the physical world and its
‘literal emotions’ – though this seems inconsistent with his view (little
different from the cognitive account) that imagination projects ‘new
possibilities of redescribing the world’.20 But as we will see, not only
metaphor, but other modes of linguistic innovation and variation can
be used to build the affective bond between persuader and persuadee,
which is innately pleasurable even as it confronts and conveys pain (as
in tragic mimesis), and which not only reshapes experience (as when
Samson goes willingly to a ‘place abominable’[1359]) but equips people
to face it. How this interaction and unanimity is achieved (and
conceived) will be a constant preoccupation throughout this book and
especially in the next chapter.
So, taking a broader view of Samson Agonistes, how does the Chorus’s
own use, elsewhere, of metaphor (or simile) compare with Samson’s?
Consider his sardonic one-word metaphor ‘fired with zeal’, alongside
the elaboration of their subsequent, choric ode. Samson’s target domain
is the ‘well-feasted priest’s’ pursuit of a preservation goal – maintaining
his pampered lifestyle – and its associated script. This is manifest in a

‘zeal’ which is nothing but indigestion and professional pique. It thus
interacts with, and reduces, the source domain of fire, to a physical scene
of smouldering heat and smoke, not light. Moreover a further
metaphor, that of eating, is hidden under the comparison – ‘For the
zeal of thy house hath eaten me up’ (Psalm 69.9 [AV]). For Dagon’s
priest, this dinner is not where he is eaten, but where he eats. Samson’s
undercover wit invites the Chorus to share the perception and relish
the irony.
But how adequately, for their part, do the Chorus empathise with
Samson? Appropriating the triumph snatched from the Philistines
through the hero’s sacrificial death, they compare him to a firedrake in
a hen-roost (1692–5),21 a striking image but one which effaces both the
anguished, mixed motivation of the avenger and the solidly-human
mixed-bag of the ‘lordly … lords’ as anticipated by Samson himself
(see above) and encountered by his father (1458–71). Similar things
might be said of the ‘eagle’, the ‘cloudless thunder’ and the ‘self-begot-
ten’ phoenix (1695–707). The when and why of such figures as
metaphor may prove to be important, besides the question of what
specific figures are used.
I will use the phrase ‘cognitive engagement’ to denote the efforts of a
persuader to work with maximal effect – deliberately or intuitively – on
the whole range of resources represented by these schemata.
1.4.2 Counting out and counting in: roles in discourse and

emotional pressure
It will probably not require much reflection to realise that how we
respond emotionally to any persuasive voice is going to depend on
how it relates to us, whether for example it speaks for values and a
group identity which we share, and thus includes us convincingly
within a rhetorical ‘we’, or excludes us – temporarily or permanently –
under the more distant forms of the second or third person, or at
another extreme offers us the personal bond once signified in English
by ‘thou’. In the following chapters we should constantly ask our-
selves, for whom (or for what) the persuasive voice, critical or author-
ial, is speaking, and when less directly persuasive, what shared
experience and sensibility it reflects. Whom are the persuaders includ-
ing in the persuasion – just the readers or audience whose response is
most plainly anticipated or implied in the writing, or somebody else
(for example, somebody whose position is analogous to that of an
overhearer, from whatever standpoint – or somebody not part of the
immediate audience or readership, to whom the persuasion will be

relayed?)? With long-dead authors, can we avoid hearing our own
voice, or a dominant critical voice, behind that of the author – what
we want to hear, or think we should hear?
Stephen Levinson’s essay ‘Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing’
(1988)22 provides a model for what he calls ‘production and reception
roles’. He is refining Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘footing’ in dis-
course. This implies that, for every act of communication, we should
consider who is involved, in whatever role. Levinson’s analysis relates
to single acts of communication or ‘messages’ – a term which if it does
not exclude either ethical stance or emotional import, does tend to
imply one-way transmission. From a rhetorical perspective and in the
context of Levinson’s exposition, this is odd, since he includes what he
calls the ghostors of another person’s speech or writing amongst those
who determine the form of a message; and a lengthy message without
any evident sense of its audience’s likely response, will seem lifeless.
But if we qualify ‘message’ to imply two-way transmission – easier, if we
understand each section of an extended ‘message’ to be open to imme-
diate (if unspoken) response from the audience, which may affect its
overall expression or direction – Levinson’s analysis will be of great
value in relation not to ethos only but to logos and pathos.
With the aid of two tables (pp. 172–3), and columns of plus and
minus symbols, Levinson invites thought about the kinds of footing
which people, interests, or other entities (for example, God) might
have in any given ‘message’. Note that such participation may be
understood in terms of the goals discussed above. Is the speaker speak-
ing for him/herself or for somebody else? Does he/she identify with the
message ethically and/or emotionally and/or intellectually? Is that
somebody a person or a group, or a less tangible entity like a nation? Is
the speaker responsible for the form of the message, by getting some-
body to do it for him/her or writing it her/himself? Is somebody else
involved in transmitting the message? Who is in a position to receive
the message, whether or not it is addressed to them? Amongst those so
positioned, who is being addressed directly and who indirectly; who is
ostensibly excluded but intentionally included; who is excluded by a
real or apparent oversight, but concerned in the outcome – and who is
deliberately excluded and (perhaps) even more concerned? Levinson
categorises these modes of ‘footing’ as Roles in the Production and
Reception of the message.
In seeking to apply Levinson’s approach to our reading, we must aim
firstly to appreciate the persuasive force or potential in the ‘roles’ he
identifies and, secondly, to be alert to all cases in which those are

activated, in criticism or in original texts. The developed conception of
‘footing’ and discourse ‘roles’ can be used to sharpen our appreciation
of how a persuader reveals or conceals the forces behind him/her, and
of how he/she embraces or excludes sections of the actual or potential
audience. Enhanced awareness in these areas will deepen our insight
into the functioning of all three Aristotelean ‘proofs’ by showing how,
whether intuitively or by design – through unconscious schemata, or
conscious tactics – persuaders exploit the effects of Inclusion, Exclusion
and Inadvertence. I shall treat these as ‘models’ for the deployment of
ethos.
A clear sense of the ‘roles’ on either side of the persuasive interaction
makes it possible to highlight some roles and downplay others, to
unmask hidden factors in an opponent’s persuasion, and to exploit the
fact that people will want to be included in a good thing, and fear
exclusion from it. Similarly, the impression that we have been inadver-
tently placed in a position to receive a message seemingly not meant
for us, may be made use of. From the perspective of rhetoric every
‘message’ is a persuasive message. We may choose to distinguish
between those we expect to persuade, and who are in that sense
included in our message, and those whom we do not – or who are not
in a position to act on the persuasion. Persuaders might deploy one or
more of these models at once, as Milton does in our ongoing example
(see below). Alternatively, they might progress from one to the other.
They might also use them to stir pathos through the vivid depiction of
situations.
The inclusion model: proactive use: those using this model to further
their own persuasion project a positive image of the highlighted roles
on both sides of the inclusion – as, in the lines we have studied,
Samson makes his Danite brethren judges of his service to the objects
of their inclusive allegiance, ‘Our God, our law’ (1426), before present-
ing himself as one who must, by his action, prove himself a worthy
member of ‘my nation’ (ibid.) and thus be included in it for all time.
(Finally, however, he evokes what seems to be an exclusive category:
‘myself’.)
Inclusion models in refutation: here, a contemporary persuader will
typically bring to light the interests behind an opponent’s persuasion or
proposed course of action, including the motives and promoters which
the opponent might be downplaying or concealing – or belittle
the form of the message with respect to the person composing it, or the
conventions used in it (for example, declaring them bloodless, or
expressive of a reactionary or outmoded ideology). The persuader

might also invite the persuadee to consider whom the opponent’s
message is really aimed at, or whom it might ultimately reach or affect.
The Division developed towards the end of the fifth paragraph of
Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) shows him eager to create just such a sense
of who is involved in the ‘message’ of censorship:
[F]irst, the inventors of it [i.e. the practice of ‘licensing books’] to be

those whom ye will be loath to own; … Lastly that it will be primely
to the discouragement of all learning, not only by disexercising and
blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering
and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in
religious and civil wisdom.
Milton extends his reactive Inclusion in two directions. He is going to

show where censorship comes from, namely, from the Catholic
hierarchies and autocracies of Europe – something the Parliament will
be unwilling to acknowledge. He is also going to point out how many
of ‘us’ (including those who are being addressed, those reading the
pamphlet, and those who in future might have considered writing on
‘religious and civil’ issues), will be adversely affected by this regulation.
Inclusion and pathos. This will be seen typically as the first part of the
classical lament structure, where past happiness in which the strong
upheld the weak (parents/children; hero/community; husband/wife)
arose from a fulfilling relationship, prior to the event which has
transformed the situation. For an example, see Lucy Hutchinson’s
image of a former unity embracing God, herself and her husband, as
contrasted with the ‘dark mist’ of her widowhood (pp. 158–62 below).
The exclusion model: proactive use: perhaps the most striking example
of this in this present book, is Terry Eagleton’s retroactive exclusion of
Shakespeare from the judgement of his own play, Macbeth (see
pp. 104–5 below), together with all others – including most critics –
who cannot rise to an ‘unprejudiced’ view of it. As in many instances,
Eagleton’s exclusion works in conjunction with a narrower inclusion
model – in contrast to Shakespeare’s own sharply pointed example in
Hamlet, in which the Prince redoubles his verbal assault on the
concealed Claudius as ‘targeted overhearer’ (to use Levinson’s phrase
[p. 173]): ‘Those that are married already – all but one – shall live’
(Hamlet III.i.147–8). Hamlet includes Claudius as hearer but excludes
him, by implication, from reassurance. He is a category of one,
excluded from the general amnesty on existing marriages, whose
shortcomings have led the ‘mad’ Hamlet to include himself in a further

exclusion. A broader category – all prospective spouses now and in the
future – shall be debarred from the long-established nucleus of all
emotional relationship, the all-inclusive bond of wedlock (‘the rest
shall keep as they are’).
Exclusion models in refutation: here the opponent questions the valid-
ity of a persuader’s links with what he/she claims to have as backing,
or denies the basis of the appeal being made, with respect to one or
more sections of the audience. A familiar if brusque conversational
example is the phrase we use when somebody presumes to know our
opinion, without prior consultation: ‘Speak for yourself’. This is pat-
terned by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine towards the end of an electrifying
passage (see below) in which he urges his followers to attack the
Persian king, Cosroe – whose fratricidal seizure of power they have just
assisted. When one of them demurs at the idea that it will be ‘A jest to
charge on twenty thousand men’, Tamburlaine retorts ‘Judge for
yourself, Theridamas, not me’ (I. Tamb. II.v.91–3).23
Exclusion and inclusion – combining logos and pathos: an example of
this which will be familiar from the idiom of policy discussion or ‘pep
talk’, is the ‘opener’ Those of us who … This may be used positively or
negatively (as in ‘ … believe passionately in social justice’, ‘… haven’t
bothered to turn up for training’). Positively, it includes all the hearers
as members of a larger group, us, while intimating the prevalence of
some opinion (or some predicament) amongst some of the people
included in the whole. Those who don’t share the opinion or predica-
ment are pressured to adopt it or to empathise with it, under the tacit
ethical or emotional threat of exclusion. Negatively (and typically in
the ‘pep talk’ context), the phrase calls attention to a lack, inadequacy
or defective attitude amongst some of the people present, who are sim-
ilarly pressured to reposition themselves and avoid exclusion. When
Milton’s Samson promises to do ‘Nothing dishonourable, impure,
unworthy’ (1424) he makes an exact metrical balance between what is
excluded (exemplified by the Philistines) and what is inclusive of himself
and his hearers, in the following line. Logically, the Chorus is invited
both to imagine and rule out certain actions on his part (bowing before
Dagon’s idol, eating unclean food, etc.). These are implicitly excluded
through what are, in effect, his sonorous, summary major premises
(action x would be impure, action y unworthy). The intended effect is
emotional reassurance.
The inadvertence model: this may be less important, but is still worth
looking out for in any investigation of modern critical rhetoric and
early modern texts. In conventional rhetoric, it is proactively

employed (under the terms Praeteritio, Occultatio or Paralepsis) when-
ever a persuader affects to pass over a point as irrelevant to the issue
being addressed – while in effect calling attention to it and including it,
emotionally or logically, in the persuasion. Richard Lanham offers an
amusing made-up example (p. 104). The intended effect comes across
‘accidentally on purpose’. Its reactive use is superbly demonstrated by
Marlowe, as the spark to that passage of mutually-persuasive dialogue
between Tamburlaine and his henchmen, from which I have already
quoted. Having dismissed Tamburlaine to the chores of his high office,
Cosroe turns to the perks of his own still higher one. He is told that he
‘shall shortly have (his) wish / And ride in triumph through Persepolis’
(II.v.49). As accidental overhearer, Tamburlaine repeats the line twice,
relishes it, and uses it to fire the imagination of his followers with the
seductive image of ‘kingly joys’ (ibid., 50, 54, 59). Gradually but
inevitably all his followers count themselves in – and it is even possible
to read one line, ‘And so would you my masters, would you not?’ (70)
as addressed, brazenly, to the theatre audience: wouldn’t we all seize
power, given the chance?
1.4.3 The dynamics of pathos: functional sentence perspective

The theory set out briefly by the Czech linguist Jan Firbas in his
contribution to Cooper and Greenbaum’s Studying Writing (1986),24
and subsequently in a full-length book,25 is an important guide to the
stylistic realisation of pathos. What Firbas concentrates on,
Communicative Dynamism (CD), calls to mind Aristotle’s concept of
energeia – that is, the maximally effective realisation of persuasive
intent. According to Firbas, ‘Context Dependent’ language has less
dynamism than that which introduces new information (and by impli-
cation, feeling) into the ‘flow’. As we will see later, with reference to
deixis, this context might include or imply a spatial, temporal or social
frame of reference, as well as that of the communication itself – the
clauses still held in the reader’s or listener’s short-term memory as the
current sentence makes its impact. The most arresting type of
dynamism is found in the basic ‘Semantic Structure’ of sentences
which are wholly independent of context (for example, the opening
sentences of stories), and is irrespective of word-order. When part of a
sentence is context-dependent, this becomes crucial. In an effectively-
constructed syntax the dynamism rises progressively along a scale.
Firbas distinguishes two such scales which may work singly or in
combination. What he calls the Existential Scale entails, in rising order
of dynamism, a setting, a verb denoting appearance or existence, and a

phenomenon expressed by the subject (p. 48). Firbas expresses this
formulaically as Set = App/Ex = Ph. In the Quality Scale, dynamism
coincides far more closely with normal English word-order. When the
subject is context-dependent and the adverbial element independent
of context, the sentence is oriented towards the latter:
The verb ascribes a characteristic to a notion that has already been

introduced into the flow of communication; it performs the
dynamic function of expressing a quality (Q). Consequently, the
subject performs the dynamic function of expressing a quality bearer
(B), and the adverbial element performs the dynamic function of
expressing a specification (Sp).
This may be followed by a further specification [Fsp], often the ‘sting in

the tail’ of the sentence. Here, the formula for rising dynamism reads B
= Q = Sp = Fsp. Very often, however, the two ‘scales’ are combined in a
single sentence. Firbas examplifies this through a typical Fairy Tale
opening: ‘Years ago (Set) there was (App/Ex) a young king (Ph) who
(B) ruled (Q) his country (Sp) capriciously and despotically (Fsp)’. As
Firbas shows (pp. 49–50) it is also possible for one sentence con-
stituent, if context-independent, to exercise the Ph-function and the B-
function simultaneously, as ‘a young king’ does in another form of the
opening just quoted, i.e.: ‘Years ago a young king ruled his country
capriciously and despotically’. Both versions of the sentence introduce,
via the noun ‘king’, a familiar fairy-tale ‘phenomenon’ and a set of
expectations for the reader or listener.
How might this theory be exploited to enhance the emotional force
and clarity, and the substance, of sentences? Several general principles
might be derived from it. Firstly: since the mind’s capacity to link new
‘context-independent’ matter to the immediate context (that is, words
and ideas in the short-term memory) is limited to about seven preced-
ing clauses (Studying Writing, p. 55), writers or speakers may revert to
an idea which they wish to ‘underline by repetition’ once every eight
clauses, without impairing its impact – that is, its dynamism. Secondly:
when emotive words or images are used to characterise people, things
or actions, they may often gain maximum impact by being placed as
‘further specifications’ at the ends of sentences or clauses. Thirdly: the
sense, not the word as such, is decisive in this respect. When in reply to
Faustus’s pert question ‘And what are you that live with Lucifer?’
Mephostophilis repeatedly and sarcastically underlines the point,
telling him that they are: ‘Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer /
Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer / And are for ever damn’d with
Lucifer’ (Doctor Faustus, [I.iii.298–300]), he makes a single subject serve
as both Phenomenon and Quality Bearer through three clauses, each
ending with the same phrase with Lucifer as either Specification (298)
or Further Specification (299, 300), but each time expressing a different
idea (falling, guilt, punishment, and suffering). The repeated words in
terminal position (antistrophe) accumulate force through a constant
addition of meaning. Fourthly: as this example shows, concentrated
effects are achieved through the combination of Firbas’s two ‘scales’.
Sentences or clauses may begin with vivid ‘phenomena’ (adjective +
noun), and end even more powerfully via ‘specification’, whether in
the adverbial element or in the object (direct or indirect) of the verb.
In the Samson extract, Sentence Perspective demonstrably enriches
the effect. Each of the three cumulative clauses on the Philistine lords,
priests and people (1418–22) vividly combines the Existential and
Qualitative Scales, in the first two instances employing the superlatives
‘lordliest’ and ‘soonest’ to imply the normal ‘specifications’ proper to
those categories – haughty insolence, idolatrous ‘zeal’ – as well as the
‘further specifications’ occasioned by Dagon’s gargantuan feast (for
example, ‘lordliest in their wine’). The third clause characterising ‘the
people’ varies the dynamic order (together with the word-order) by
placing a ‘further specification’ – ‘on their holy-days’ – before the
crowd’s more broadly ‘specified’ mob-characteristics (‘Impetuous, inso-
lent, unquenchable’). Balancing this mixture of scorn and apprehen-
sion, Samson’s assurances on his own conduct are harder to locate on a
clear dynamic ‘scale’. The fact that, as we have seen,’myself’ comes last
in his list (1424) may betray a fundamental egoism (and an implied
condition of self-destructive despair). As they first strike us, ‘dishon-
ourable, impure (and) unworthy’ all have the form, grammatically, of
‘specifications’. They seem to be complete in themselves. Only ‘unwor-
thy’ links them syntactically to the following line. ‘Unworthy’ (as in
‘unworthy / Our God’) may extend the first level of ‘specification’ to
cover God, Law, nation, and self as objects of Samson’s own scrupulous
and zealous care. But ‘unworthy’ may also be understood as a more
general moral concept, which could stand alone but, here, introduces
the following line as a ‘further specification’. Moreover ‘honour’ may be
linked specifically to ‘God’, and ‘pur[ity]’ to the Mosaic Law, making l.
1421 a correlated completion of the earlier ‘specification’. We cannot
quite determine how the scale works or how far it extends, or assess the
relative importance of ‘Our God’ and ‘myself’ in their squared-off posi-
tions, initial and terminal – or judge finally whether ‘my’ (as in ‘my
nation’) denotes responsibility and identification with a larger whole as
suggested above, or insidious egoism. The ambiguity and suggestive
power of poetry finally transcends rhetoric.
1.4.4 Deixis: pathos and presence

Broadly speaking, deictic26 language points to or reflects a context not
expressed verbally, but present in the shared awareness of speaker and
hearer (or writer and reader). It may also refer to the process of
communication itself (as in ‘earlier I discussed A’, later I’ll deal with Z’).
This shared awareness may be of physical space or time, or of a social
or cultural context. Indication of closeness or distance may also be
involved in empathetic deixis, as in ‘I would be really pleased to meet
this new friend of yours’ (as in Semino’s example, p. 34). Here moral
and/or emotional judgement is reflected deictically in the demonstra-
tive pronoun.
The emotional representation of real things, events or actions will be
sharper, given real bearings of time and space, and pointers to the
social or conceptual ambience. Persuaders may use the ‘here and now’
common to speaker and listener, or even the spaces linking reader and
writer – or they may use deictic language in recreating real or
imaginary happenings (for example, in Quintilian’s evocation of a
roadside killing – see pp. 52–3, below).
For example, the Samson passage begins with a deictic usage (‘your
company along’), connecting the space within which Samson’s mind
has laboured (1298), to that of his ultimate physical labour (and
unreadable spiritual crisis?).
As an example of the use of deictic language at the absolute summit of
tragic emotion we may take Lear’s last words, quoted above. If Lisa
Jardine is right in her account of the pathos in Lear, if it is ‘raw’, deprived
of its normal cultural conditioning (pp. 107–10, 172–3, below), this phys-
ical and spatial immediacy will be even more significant.
1.4.5 Pathos and convergence: echoes of spontaneity

Professor R.A. Carter has demonstrated the creativity of ‘ordinary’
language, as instanced in the CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham)
corpus of (mainly) spoken English. Speakers who are in rapport with
each other tend to converge linguistically, ‘producing parallel structures
in the form of lexical and syntactic echoes’.27
Literary or dramatic language may exploit this pattern in its
representation of persuasive speech, either in dialogue (see the passage
from Part One of Tamburlaine, already cited), or even in the monologic

form of rhetoric (e.g. in imaginary conversation between the speaker
and some real or symbolic person). In our main ongoing example,
Samson poises an anxiety, shared with his audience, against a
corresponding and counterbalancing reassurance. As in the conversa-
tional examples provided by Carter, we see a parallel structure and a
form of ‘convergence’. This balance may take the form of reassurance
counterpoised against expressed anxiety, as it does in a doorstep sales
encounter quoted by Susan Cockcroft in her Investigating Talk (1999).28
The Philistine state is an aristocracy or oligarchy comprising three
‘orders’: lords, pagan priests, and common people. Each of these orders
is briefly represented as both contemptible and dangerous, likely to be
‘exasperated’ (i.e. made harsher in their behaviour towards Samson –
and, potentially, his companions) by their memory of his own terrorist
tactics towards them. Balancing this fear, is Samson’s own fear of
sinking to the same level (as so many of Milton’s compatriots had done
following the restoration of King Charles II); but his words also reflect
a likely physical threat to the Chorus, in the event of its appearance as
an escort ‘girt’ about him. This threat is symbolically integrated
through the balanced and convergent positioning of the two Firbasian
Fsp’s29 ‘in their wine’ and ‘well-feasted’. Against this anxiety, Samson
ranges two sets of stalwart emotive abstractions – the three positive
qualities of honour, purity and worthiness, here defined by their
opposites (l. 1424) ‘dishonourable, impure, unworthy’, and four inter-
linked entities – spiritual, moral, social and personal – God, Law,
Nation and Self (‘Self’ being – possibly, but not certainly – centred in
his individual conscience as variously or unanimously informed by,
and responsible to, the preceding three). God, Law, and Nation
embody the three elements of sovereignty, religion and community so
grotesquely debased by the Philistines. A complex, artful rhetoric
(with, as we have seen, some ambivalent structural features) may thus
possess the same basic structure and impulse as a spontaneous,
ephemeral doorstep conversation.
Summing up Samson
Taken as a whole and in the light of every analytical technique applied
to it above, the Samson passage demonstrates how a persuader simulta-
neously builds an ethos, expresses pathos (gratitude, solicitation, scorn,
caution, zeal, national and personal pride) and draws in his listeners.
Both his expressed concern and his concealed or half-conceived inten-
tions are also underpinned by reasoning (logos). He already knows he
must be free to act unencumbered, though his valid concern for the
Chorus’s safety excuses his final self-isolation. The structure, stresses,
rhythms, vocabulary and images, appealing to the inferred experience
of his fellow-tribesmen as subjects of the Philistine oligarchy (just as
Milton’s implied reader would recollect the courtiers and priesthood of
Restoration England), mirror their feelings and perceptions as well as
his own. The passage serves to illustrate Eugene Garver’s account, in
his seminal study of the Rhetoric,30 of how Aristotle seeks to square
ethos and pathos by suggesting that they should, with the assistance of
enthymemic argument, authenticate each other. But Samson cannot
draw his fellow-tribesmen into the revelation he has not yet fully
received – if indeed it is a revelation, and not a sublimation of anger
and despair. They are left to read the sign of God’s action and of
Samson’s regeneration, without his guidance. So what benefit do they
derive from his words? We will pursue the question of rhetoric’s
efficacy, and of the relationship between perceived truth, pleasure and
action, into the next chapter – only noting here that the Chorus’s
main emotional interest is in Samson himself as hero, not in what he
stands for or indeed in what he personally experiences. They respond
emotionally to his distinctive ethos without comprehending it. He
moves and delights them, without teaching them.
1.5 Empowering the reader?
Let us examine an instance of the kind of critical rhetoric that aims to

make a point or place a marker, and which (furthermore) links the
priorities of a teacher to pleasure and emotional excitation. Gary
Waller’s student-oriented book in the Longman Literature in English
Series, English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century (1986),31 begins by recalling
how he introduced his pupils to sixteenth-century court culture. They
read Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ and wrote ‘response statements’:
The results were fascinating. All the men in the class felt immediate
identification with the wounded male ego that is articulated in the
poem – he has been rejected by a woman with whom he has
unexpectedly fallen in love only to he told by her that it was all
enjoyable but superficial flirtation. All the women in the class were
amusedly derisive of the attitude: what, they said, about the
woman’s viewpoint? In such a society, and within such a philoso-
phy of love, both so male-centred, why should a woman not get
what she could out of the game of sex? Girls just want to have fun.
In creating our ‘readings’ of the poem as a kind of amusing public

argument, we were, without knowing it fully, creating something of
the atmosphere of the original sixteenth-century Court itself
and how such poetry might have been read. It should be added,
perhaps, that this course on sixteenth-century poetry traditionally
culminates in a banquet using Elizabethan recipes prepared by the
students themselves, and accompanied by music and poetry
readings. If we want the sixteenth-century poets to come alive, what
better way than to combine poetry, music, and food!
More seriously, the students in the course were being introduced
to a method of reading sixteenth-century poetry that this study will
employ. The intention was to create strong readers of the poetry –
readers who would bring their own most intense, often personal,
questions to bear on their reading of Wyatt, or Sidney, or
Shakespeare, or Donne. In particular, they were asked to read
Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse … Barthes gave these student
readers a powerful, contemporary vocabulary with which to articu-
late their questions about the text. As so often happens, the greatest
enjoyment and the best criticism occur when a powerful reader
encounters a powerful work. (pp. 2–3)
As the teacher, Waller both includes himself in the ‘we’ which is

responding to Wyatt and recreating his cultural context, and stands
respectfully outside the groups of ‘men’ and ‘women’ involved. The
loosely colloquial but (in context) positive word ‘fascinating’ is
ambiguous in its reference, empathising with the students’ sense,
willing or reluctant, of a double perspective as they divided according
to gender. Its suggestion of simultaneous objectivity and involvement
– observing oneself feeling – already foreshadows the ambiguity of terms
in Wyatt’s poem, as characterised here and at greater length later in
Waller’s book (pp. 116–18), for example the word ‘kyndely’ in its
last-but-one line.
With surprising neatness, ‘all the men’ share one perception of the
poem and ‘all the women’ the other. It seems that what constituted
the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ of Wyatt’s poem, the male presupposition of power
and initiative in relation to women as to everything else (at least in
stories told to other men), is still recognisable by the men amongst
today’s student readers as a position to be occupied perceptually and
emotionally – especially perhaps when the ‘ego’ is ‘wounded. On the
other side, Waller endorses the view that, now as then, the women in
their more or less constrained position ‘get what they can’ in terms of
transient pleasure and retaliatory power. He claims a degree of sympa-

thy and insight entitling him to use the word, eschewed earlier, which
young women of the 1980s continued to use amongst themselves: ‘Girls
just want to have fun’. This seems to express the cultural and psychologi-
cal consequences of socially-constructed femininity so perfectly that
Warner repeats it in the course of his later and fuller discussion of the
poem (p. 117). He might also defend the usage as ironic, implying that
bright young women are still infantilised by their conventional status
as objects of male desire, their continuing disempowerment. But how
valid is this reliance on a continuity between sixteenth century and
late twentieth century constructions of feeling? It exhibits one charac-
teristic of new historicism as noted by Terry Eagleton in his review of
Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (The Guardian, Saturday 9
June 2001): ‘new historicism doubts that we can know the past at all
except in terms of the present’. Hence perhaps Waller’s recourse to
‘Elizabethan recipes, prepared by the students themselves’ as a way of
recreating the sensory and social ambience of a Tudor household – or
at the very least, fostering a positive attitude to study through pleasure
and good fellowship. This in fact foreshadows the question shortly to
be raised about Gary Waller’s rhetorical method. He provides our first
example of the persuasive re-presentations of Renaissance passions by
modern critics, which typify the rhetorical engagement at the centre of
this book. His ‘banquet’ recalls the ancient linkage between teaching (or
proving) and pleasure. In Cicero’s concept of the officia oratoris –
already referred to – these two ‘duties’, roles, or functions of the ideal
speaker are linked to a third, moving. In each of his two late treatments
of oratory, Cicero states the formula slightly differently. In the De
Optimo Genere Oratorum, he claims that ‘The supreme orator, … is the
one whose speech instructs, delights and moves (et docet et delectat et
permovet) the minds of his audience’;32 and in the Orator he restates the
point: ‘The man of eloquence … will be one who is able to speak in
court or in deliberative bodies so as to prove, to please and to sway or
persuade (ut probet, ut delectet, ut flectat).33 Waller for his part is seeking
to teach or prove to his students something distinctive about sixteenth-
century poetry, and at the same time to demonstrate the similarity
between their ‘amusing’ altercation and the demandes d’amour of
medieval and Renaissance courtly culture. Pleasure and ‘fascination’ are
in some respects as integral to this process as Cicero implies in the
Orator – and partly superadded to reinforce the point, in the form of
the ‘banquet’. This corresponds to one reading of the term honorarium,
used by Cicero in the De Optimo Genere to characterise the pleasure
imparted to the audience. It might be ‘a free gift’ to the audience,

something beyond what they have the right to expect; or it might be a
means of winning their favour.34 As we will see, repeatedly, the rela-
tionship of pleasure to persuasion – its role in the interaction of per-
suader, topic and audience – is at once vital and problematic. For
Waller’s students, however, pleasure and proof point to a single end,
both emotive and ethical: a prospect of empowerment strong enough
to move them – and likewise (with the aid of his book) his less privi-
leged student readers – to conform with the proffered role. The full per-
suasiveness of this will be better explicated by extending our reference
further back: from Cicero, to Aristotle, whose authority is cited in the
Orator. In conformity with Aristotle’s scheme for the persuasive presen-
tation of ethos or character, as analysed by Garver (pp. 110–11,
118–19), Gary Waller’s self-portrayal as a university teacher shows arete
(virtue), in its respect for the students, eunoia (goodwill) in its generos-
ity, empathy, and concern for their betterment, and phronesis (con-
structive competence) in its challenges, its rewards, and its enlistment
of Roland Barthes as a source of further ideas and insights. The stu-
dents are to be creatively infected with this ethos of ‘powerful’ reading;
they are to be ‘men’ and ‘women’ enough to confront the emotions it
will entail. To achieve this, Waller uses the resource or ‘proof’ of pathos
(as outlined by Aristotle, together with ethos and logos, in Rhetoric,
1.2.3–6). His fusion of an ethical, empowering stance with a deliberate
stimulation of feeling, working through intuitive or discursive thought,
constitutes the affectivity that we will follow though this book, and
which is one of most challenging topics of modern linguistic study – as
evidenced by Downes’s article (above). It is also a major aspect of the
interpersonal function of language as postulated by M.A.K. Halliday and
other researchers in the field of systemic functional linguistics.35 Waller
reflects Aristotle’s contention ‘that the judgements we deliver are not
the same when we are influenced by joy or sorrow, love or hate’. As a
teacher he plays emotionally on his students’ ‘disposition’ or ‘frame of
mind’ (the word in Greek is pos); and he subsequently uses his repre-
sentation of that process to work a comparable change in his readers.
Where Wyatt’s poem is concerned, the students’ involvement in the
protagonist’s past joy, present sorrow, lost lust, and nascent hatred –
and their replay, however approximate, of the debate which the poem
might have occasioned amongst the poem’s original readers, will
influence their judgement of Waller’s argument about the ‘conflicting
discursive systems’ in the poem (p. 117), and about the broader ‘inabil-
ity’ of court poetry such as Wyatt’s ‘to formulate any more creative
alternative to that permitted by the Court, either on the erotic or the

political level’ (p. 118). At best they would look for the differences
between the ‘conflicting discursive systems’ of their own time (for
example, Barthes’s structuralism, 1980’s feminism, ‘boy talk’, ‘girl
talk’, parental morality) and those of Wyatt’s day, as well as for the
apparent similarities. But would they inevitably do this? Having
fostered their emotional engagement with the text and embroilment
with each other, Waller presents another emotive image, that of
their prospective achievement. He seeks to stir a feeling recognised
by Aristotle as appropriate to the male citizenry of his polis –
emulation (see Rhetoric, II. xi). The ‘powerful reader’ is to be
matched to the ‘powerful work’; can Waller’s reader claim that role
for him/herself, as Waller’s students evidently did? Besides a
capacity to make texts ‘come alive’, ‘power’ in this sense ought to
include acuity and subtlety. But (in this case) would it do so? That
question serves to re-introduce the main issue to be explored in this
book. To make the passions of the past ‘come alive’, must we distort
the echo of T.S. Eliot in my title and not so much ‘reconsider’ them
within the frame of memory (as in the disenchanted voice of Eliot’s
Gerontion) as reconfigure them into the terms of our own time? We
will return to ‘They flee from me’ at the end of my final chapter, in a
last attempt to view a text in terms of its own time – aided by the
parallels and contrasts between it and a less well-known work of
prose fiction, though written by a remarkable poet: George
Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J.
1.6 A ‘double analysis’ – with a difference
Returning to an even earlier question, is our emotional response

integral and essential to our perception; or does the emotion follow the
perception (if not distorting it or distracting us from it, as in the case –
maybe – of Samson and the Chorus)? Investigation of this point will
start from the next chapter, with its pursuit of pathos as debated over
the centuries, before proceeding to specific texts in the following chap-
ters. Once we have reviewed that material, and positioned the ‘Old’
rhetoric in relation to the ‘New’ as already presented, both perspectives
can be brought to bear in practice. It would be tedious and space-
consuming to apply every technique of analysis, ‘Old’ and ‘New’, to
every one of the early modern, and modern critical, texts selected here
– though where the ‘new rhetorical perspective is concerned, it was
appropriate just for once to try out all my new tools on a single text. At
the same time I have already begun to identify and to highlight the old
techniques, perceptions and preoccupations of rhetoric. What I am
offering is a form of double analysis. I want readers to ask themselves, in
each case, what other techniques might usefully have been applied,
and what other texts I (or they) might have chosen. The term ‘double
analysis’ recalls – though the premises, and the method, are fundamen-
tally different – a much older application of that term. It was perhaps
inevitable that Peter Ramus (Pierre de La Ramée, 1515–1572) and his
followers should have chosen it, given their famous conviction that
two distinct disciplines, Dialectic and Rhetoric, must be applied to
persuasive speech and writing whether in composition or in analysis.
Following Ramus himself in his Paris lectures on Cicero, a notable
English exponent, Gabriel Harvey, proclaims his allegiance to Ramistic
method (my translation):
And because copiousness of matter, as the soul the body, sustains

elegance of diction, therefore let us always employ … the double
analysis we have used before – analysis rhetorical and dialectical,
the former expounding oratorical ornaments and the craft which
is proper to this school, the latter explaining invention and
arrangement. (Ciceronianus, Eiiv)36
This must have complicated his brief as University Praelector of

Rhetoric, if not made it strictly impossible: what must the Praelector
of Dialectic have thought about Harvey’s duplication of his role
(Ramus himself, in Paris, having avoided the problem by being
appointed to a regius professorship of ‘Philosophy and Eloquence’)?37
Fortunately, I anticipate no such difficulty. ‘New’ (linguistic) Rhetoric
and the ‘Old’ (Aristotelian) Rhetoric, in conjunction, will be applied
both to ‘copiousness of matter’ and ‘elegance of diction’ – or in other
words to both substance and expression, so far as the two can be sepa-
rated. Unlike Harvey, I shall treat dialectic and rhetoric as an integral
phenomenon, rather than the product of two distinct mental faculties
and the subject of two separate discursive ‘arts’.
Thus, old insights will be brought to bear on modern material
(as with Gary Waller, above), quite as emphatically as modern
techniques will be employed on early modern texts. In both areas, a
wide range of perceptions, attitudes and emotions will be encountered,
with a corresponding set of affinities and aversions between early
modern writers and modern critics as variously positioned in both
ranges. My choice of material aims to be representative with respect to
the diversity and development of sixteenth and seventeenth century

England, to the variety of modern criticism – and to those ‘affinities
and aversions’ themselves, bearing in mind how they might be
encountered in practice. For example, a modern academic who was
also a Christian within the nonconformist tradition might well feel
closer emotionally, and in terms of his/her world view, to Bunyan (see
Chapter 4) than to the colleague in the adjacent office – who may in
turn feel closer to Margaret Cavendish, with her Hobbesian interest in
atoms (see Chapter 5) than to his/her neighbour).
I have aimed for a careful balance in selection, and scrutiny, of these
‘passionate’ texts – including some, incidentally, in which the feeling
is milder. Though not seeking to exemplify every recognised species of
emotion (much less the subspecies) these will represent the whole
spectrum of feeling: positive and negative, every point in that
spectrum being overlaid or underlain by tiers of empathy, sympathy
and antipathy – depending on whether we look back from the modern
response to the early modern text which occasions it, or in the other
direction. Furthermore, both Renaissance writers and modern critics –
whether designedly or intuitively – relate their emotional appeals to
the anticipated response of their audience (though sometimes, as in
the case of Donne’s ‘Apparition’ as discussed on pp. 129–31, below,
they seek to divide or even to confuse that response).
But our study of the process through which the emotions of the past
are now submitted to cool analysis, or re-presented so as to stir new
feeling, is further complicated. We have to consider two orders of
‘inner’ and ‘outer’ relationships. The first of these is what we try to
reconstruct: the outer relationships between writers and readers,
playwrights and audiences etc, and all the inner relationships or lone
voices represented in the texts38 – those engaged in dramatic dialogue;
those who make oratorical appeals on stage or in fiction, and those
who respond to them; those shown in harmony, in discord, converg-
ing or diverging. The second ‘order’ of ‘outer relationship’ is that of
today’s critics and their readers, engaged are they are with the first
order in its entirety: that is, with both the outer and the inner relation-
ships manifest in early modern writing. Pathos pervades both orders,
figuring as much in antipathetic resistance to persuasion as in its
acceptance.
And where the ‘outer relationship’ of ongoing critical debate is
concerned, there are further complications. Here, the ‘inner-outer’
analogy might be variously presented. Differing critical approaches
having bearings on the early modern text might be imagined
surrounding the first-order set of relationships like points of the

compass – as my new rhetorical techniques have been applied, from
various angles but with equal validity, to the passage from Samson
Agonistes. Alternatively, and especially when an earlier critical reading
is under challenge, there might be a further outer/inner distinction
between an older ‘framework of debate’ and a newer one. This will be
typified here by the way Terry Eagleton characterises earlier criticism,
and the way Brian Vickers characterises his (see pp. 104–5, below). But
before we tour any critical battlefields, it is important to move on
from our synoptic view of modern linguistic angles on rhetoric, to a
chronological survey of pathos.
2
Sable Clouds and Silver Linings
2.1. A pathetic muddle?
The title of this chapter points forward to the passage from Milton’s A
Masque, to be explored in its final section, as summarised in the lines
echoed here (A Masque, 221–5). But it also implies a successful
resolution, or exploitation, of the problem which dogs every attempt to
locate pathos satisfactorily within rhetoric – or to accommodate rhetoric
itself to the conscious and careful use of language as a tool for investiga-
tion and decision. How does emotion stand in relation to clear percep-
tion, right choice and enacted purpose? The Lady’s vision (perhaps
reinforced for Milton’s Ludlow audience by a piece of primitive stage
machinery, a visible rhetoric) illustrates a general principle about the
use of pathos by Milton and other writers: the progression away from
the kind of emotion which darkens and confuses – the perturbatio of the
Stoics – to that which enlightens and directs, from sable clouds to silver
linings. But to reflect the dynamic of emotion and perception, the
movement from outward deception or misconstruction to inward sub-
stance, good or bad – a movement figured by Plato, and subsequently
by Erasmus, as the opening of a Silenus (see below), and one which
makes the pleasure of discovery integral to truth – will involve a con-
stant stress on the connections between pathos and its two associated
principles, ethos and logos (whatever period we survey and whatever
terms, then current, approximate to these Aristotelean concepts).
To place each of our examples of early modern pathos within its
distinctive rhetorical context, determining whether the writer was
touched by controversy about the role of emotion – or embroiled in it
– might well in every case call for a book-length study. The right place
for such research, with these and with other texts, would be after an
38
Sable Clouds and Silver Linings 39
application of the double analysis recommended here – to explain,

challenge or modify the impression created. I am, rather, setting out to
represent those features of the overall growth and change in rhetorical
concepts and rhetorical teaching on pathos which are most relevant to
my approach. It is more important to show the general climate of ideas
about rhetoric and related subjects such as dialectic, poetry and
preaching, at the times our texts were written.
I also want to stimulate our current perceptions about how
persuasive pathos works, irrespective of any specific influences of which
past writers might have been conscious. The gifted persuader’s practice
will always tend to outgo his or her theoretical understanding,
however intensively pursued – as it was, for example, by Cicero. It
follows that some books which were relatively little known during this
period (for example, Aristotle’s Rhetoric) will still serve to deepen our
insight into the persuasive process, and help us to pinpoint the
peculiarities and intensities displayed in our examples, whether
modern or early modern. They will also assist us in the application of
those ‘new rhetorical’ techniques which I outlined in the Introduction.
As inheritors of the rich and many-stranded legacy of classical
rhetorical theory, the Renaissance lacked one major advantage which
we now enjoy. Without today’s more scientifically based – if incom-
plete – understanding of emotion to act as an objective marker, they
struggled to achieve an intellectually coherent account of pathos which
would not sacrifice any of the major insights bequeathed to them,
despite the derivation of these insights from widely divergent historical
contexts and ways of thinking, over two millennia. Current opinion
amongst scholars of the history of Rhetoric is strongly represented by
Lawrence D. Green, who in a recent biennial conference paper
(Warsaw, 2001),1 cast serious doubt on the consistency and clarity of
early modern ideas on this topic. There was agreement on techniques
for moving emotion, but no clear notion as to what was being moved,
or to what effect. Theorists and practitioners attached different
meanings to the same words, and as they tried to make positive use of
negative Stoic concepts like perturbatio, failed to exploit Aristotle’s
insights linking pathos to reason. Another vital factor was the perceived
relation of pathos to spirituality and volition in the rhetoric of preach-
ing, reflecting Christ’s own manifestations of passion. But attempts
such as Melanchthon’s (see below) to relate the moving of the Spirit to
the preacher’s emotive language, the soul to the bodily organism,
could not achieve general acceptance while ideas of the relationship
between soul, mind and body were so various and so shifting.
These inconsistencies should not be overlooked as we seek to

articulate our own perceptions of pathos, and to understand what
individual Renaissance persuaders achieved with it (and thought they
were achieving). We have to follow the history of that split between
thinking and feeling which in Green’s view became so much worse
after the Renaissance’s conspicuous failure to reconcile the difference.
As we will be reminded, it began much earlier. We must also consider
the various contexts and modes of relationship in which feeling is
developed between persuader and persuadee, from spoken to written
language, from the interaction of speaker and audience to philosophic
dialogue, and from conversation into letter-writing in furtherance of
the one-to-one transactions of friendship. Moreover, the representation
of emotional interaction between characters (whether furthering
persuasion or resisting it, and whether involving real people as in
Plato’s dialogues, or fictional ones as in drama), might serve both to
generate emotion in a larger audience or readership, and to make that
emotion more discriminating, more intrinsically rational, by placing it
in perspective, subjecting it to deliberate reversal or refinement. In the
sections that follow, I shall try to carry forward, stage by stage, a
developing understanding. This will aim to suggest what ideas and
techniques were most readily available for exploitation at particular
times and places. It will also I hope indicate how the Old Rhetoric –
however incoherent, philosophically – still sheds light on our current
uses, and readings, of pathos (whether or not it also provides
hypotheses for the New Rhetoric to validate or disprove).
2.2 Ideas of pathos from Plato to Milton
Plato: in contrast to the Gorgias, which dismissed rhetoric as a mere

‘knack’, a species of pandering,2 ignorant and unprincipled, the
Phaedrus (referred to here through Walter Hamilton’s 1973 transla-
tion)3 seems to offer a model of philosophic rhetoric grounded in truth
and dialectical logic, which addresses the emotional components of
the soul and which, in the speeches of the Platonic Socrates, makes
eloquent use of pathos. But what is envisaged, though it furnishes
invaluable insights and has a marked influence on later theory and on
rhetorical practice from Erasmus to Milton, is hardly a rhetoric in the
conventional sense of that word – not being applicable to the commu-
nal contexts of legal trials or political debates. According to Socrates’s
final prescription (pp. 71–103), the only valid persuasion is that
entered into dialogically between the lover of wisdom and individual
souls, in relation to facts proved dialectically and concepts properly

defined through the distinction of genus and species – all of this being
directed towards some ‘particular type of man’, and guided by a
knowledge of ‘how and upon what (the soul) naturally acts, and how
and by what it is acted upon, and to what effect’ (p. 91). This rational
analysis of persuasive cause and effect foreshadows Aristotle’s broader
distinction, in Book II of the Rhetoric, into groups whose emotions and
moral traits reflect their time of life: the young, the old, and those in
their prime. In contrast, Plato’s true art of speaking is aimed, not at a
group decision, but an individual’s enlightenment. It depends on the
exact ‘pairing’ of types of speech, studied in advance, and types of
souls4 similarly studied (though harder to recognise in particular cases
– p. 92). This pairing evidently entails a sense of timeliness (compare
Aristotle’s Kairos, below) since it tells a counsellor ‘when to speak and
when to refrain’, and also a sense of stylistic fitness: ‘when to employ
and when to eschew the various rhetorical devices of conciseness and
pathos and exaggeration and so on’ (ibid.). All of this is aimed
consistently at the securing of divine, not human approval (p. 94).
Finally, Socrates (p. 95 ff.) compares the written communication of
ideas very unfavourably to philosophic dialogue. It is like the forced,
sterile growth of flowers in a garden of Adonis, when compared with
the interactive contact of minds through the spoken word (p. 98),
reflecting the fact that it ‘cannot distinguish between suitable and
unsuitable readers’, or defend itself (p. 97). It is however a pleasant
pastime and an aid to failing memory (p. 99).
This introduces what is to be an ongoing factor in our consideration
of the affective bond through which thoughts and feelings are commu-
nicated, shared and propagated. For all his distrust of rhetoric, whether
written or spoken, Socrates seems to value the two characteristics
common to sustained oratory and to philosophic dialogue, that is, the
presence of two or more consciousnesses to each other, and the power
of spoken language to reflect this, far above mere writing, even by men
of ‘real knowledge’ (p. 98). Yet, paradoxically, Plato’s own writing has
not only preserved a version of Socrates in responsive dialogue with
others, reflective of their individuality, but inspired commentators to
speak for him (if in their own terms), and provided models for further
such discussion – whether spoken or written, reported or imagined.
Moreover, he has, in the Phaedrus, already demonstrated how to draw a
specific category of listeners into a sustained persuasive speech, by
simultaneously representing their likely response to a given situation,
as it develops, and their likely judgement of that response – while at
the same time creating, and shaping, their ability to imagine both.
Phaedrus himself, the indirect addressee of the written speech as
purportedly addressed by Socrates to some ‘handsome lad’ (p. 46),
represents its original Athenian audience, and with his obvious interest
in the topic prepares that reader for the emotional engagement which
will ensue.
Plato’s famous picture of the aspiring soul is based on its earlier
(already metaphorical?)5 division into three parts: Reason, Appetite and
Spirit (Thymos). Reason is a charioteer struggling with two ill-matched
horses, instilling all three ‘parts’ with the pathetic power of vivid
imagery, and exemplifying the ‘schema refreshment’ which Elena
Semino attributes to metaphor at its most powerful (see pp. 19–20,
above). Within the target cognitive domain, the Greek culture of love
between man and youth,6 the Enjoyment goal of sex and the
Achievement goal of enlightenment (the vision of heavenly beauty)
necessitate two alternative MOPS for the vicious and virtuous pursuit
of love. This would be difficult to conceive or recollect clearly without
the complex interplay of forward and backward movement, rearing,
plunging and startling, which the chariot image provides. From the
charioteer’s perspective, ‘mapped’ upon that of the lover, the
Instrumental goal of controlling the team, restraining the evil, black
horse’s tendency to bolt (whilst not, by implication, harming or
discouraging the good, tractable white horse) comes uppermost. The
source domain of charioteering is immeasurably enlarged and infused
with drama, seeing that the most unpromising equipage, properly
handled, promises the highest prize: a ride with the gods round the
outside of the vault of heaven; and for the implied reader the horses
take on the best and worst qualities of man as an embodied being.
Philosophy thus appropriates both love and athleticism to its own
purposes within the merged domains of the metaphor, while at the
same time Socrates is made to illustrate the right use of rhetorical
pathos, energising pride, self-respect and the fear of shame against the
violence of desire. The imagery depends for its full force on the reader’s
empathetic response to both horses – something Plato probably felt he
could count on amongst his readers. He shows how he expects them to
react, representing overbearing and selfish desire as the ugly,
dim-sighted, deaf black horse, and thus stirring antipathy against that
all-too-recognisable part of themselves, together with sympathy for the
good horse whose ‘shame and dread’ at his companion’s behaviour
‘makes the whole soul break into a sweat’ (p. 62). The rightness and
nobility of this bodily response is reflected in the beauty of the white
horse – a pleasing image of the reader’s better self. Combined with the
equally vivid body-image of the charioteer, already inculcated (p. 58),
whose ecstatic sense of mingled pleasure and pain, of awakening
powers and mutating substance is figured in the ‘pricking and irritation
and itching’ of the soul’s ‘embryo feathers’ (and almost impossible to
imagine without them), pathos is wrested from the lower to the higher,
from the pleasure of present possession to the strenuous recovery of a
remembered mode of vision: ‘absolute beauty … enthroned in her holy
place attended by chastity’ (p. 62). Thus, the passage combines two
types of emotive and perceptual transition which we will trace through
many variants: from a fair exterior which reflects its substance, to the
fair substance itself; and from the outward appearance belying its
substance to the opposed inner reality (whether from outward ugliness
to inner beauty, as with Socrates himself – see below – or vice versa).
The beloved reflects the first of these, and the lover himself the second,
as he progresses from bloodied and wrenching conflict with his own
sensual nature towards philosophic fulfilment. In doing so, he may
retain the outward appearance of sensuality, as Socrates himself
did – his snub nose comically echoing that of the headstrong horse
(see p. 61, below). We will see a comparable progression at the end of
this chapter, in Milton’s A Masque.
We should also carry forward Socrates’s insistence on the unerring
application of reason, both to the topic and to an assessment of the
soul being persuaded, including its emotional propensities. Trouble
will arise when these two applications of reason become dissociated.
We should also bear in mind the one-to-one character of this model of
rhetoric, with its stress on philosophic ascent. It foreshadows later
ideas of friendship and of persuasive letter-writing (including ideas on
the use of pathos in letters). However Plato, with his rejection of
probability as the basis of rhetorical argument (p. 93), and his sidelin-
ing of the problem of how to use rhetoric responsibly and effectively in
the persuasion of larger or smaller groups of people, left a legacy of
doubt as to whether rhetoric in its most pressing uses could ever be a
true art (or science).
Aristotle: the Art of Rhetoric has provided my own primary framework
for thinking about practical persuasion, for writing about it and teach-
ing it, for many years. Just to be reminded that we must accord equal
attention to our own perceived character, our persuadee, and our topic,
is almost as important as the associated perception of three modes of
proof, three interlinked structural principles of rhetoric. Aristotle lays
these down as a foundation (I.ii.3–6). The first principle is ethos: that is,
our character, including our goodwill, our morality, our competence

and our emotional authenticity, as perceived by the persuadee. The
second is pathos: the emotions which we encounter, stimulate or seek
to change in our audience. The third is logos: argument about the topic
according to the capacities and condition – moral, emotional, and
intellectual – of the persuadee. The Rhetoric has attracted much
attention in recent years, from books such as Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s
Rhetoric: an Art of Character (1994), cited earlier, through collections of
essays like that edited by A.O. Rorty (1996),7 to single articles, for
example, that by James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin on ‘Kairos
in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’ (2000).8
As noted in the previous chapter, Garver is an invaluable guide to
Aristotle: his ethical and political contexts, his contradictions, his
salient concepts. Garver shows the supremacy of ethos amongst the
three proofs, the qualities on which it depends, and the power (energeia)
through which it concentrates all available means of persuasion
whatever the prospect of success. This understanding of ethos is already
implied in Aristotle’s supremely pragmatic early definition of rhetoric
(I.ii.1), which we might use to focus our attention every time we
confront a persuasive text. J.H. Freese renders it as follows: ‘Rhetoric
then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of
persuasion in relation to any subject whatever (peri hekaston)’.9 Garver
encourages us to consider how this reflects Aristotle’s sense of rhetoric’s
role within his own very distinctive society, the polis of Athens, which
gave specific form to his argumentation, and to his treatment of the
emotions addressed in political and legal rhetoric – two of the three
rhetorical genres distinguished I.ii.3–6 (the third of these, the epideictic,
being concerned with praise or blame). These clear signs of a specific
cultural context prompt us to make all the necessary adjustments,
should we ever seek to adapt Aristotle’s approach to current conditions.
Where pathos is concerned, Garver shows how Aristotle almost
reconciles his incompatible views of it (that is, that persuasion derives
from enthymemic10 argument, discounting emotion; and that in
practice emotion is one effective source of ‘proof’). The solution might
rest in ethos, in that the emotions communicated to the audience by the
persuader, moderating and motivating their pre-existent feelings, are
those of a man who feels rightly, according to reason and virtue. This
foreshadows Quintilian’s later linkage of true eloquence and moral
character (see below). It also reflects Aristotle’s conviction (Garver,
p. 113) that a free and rational form of government depends on thymos
or manly emotion, known to us already as Plato’s white horse.
In their article on Kairos (see above), Kinneavy and Eskin shed

further light on the meaning of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, and
its implications for pathos. An audience’s response to the behaviour of
others as portrayed by the speaker will be linked precisely to his and
their sense of occasion or timeliness: to the representation of action
(or inaction) within clearly evoked circumstances. This formulaic rela-
tionship is first stated at II.i.9. To paraphrase: pathos rises from three
factors, the disposition of mind inclining men to a particular emotion,
its most likely human objects, and its most likely occasions. Kinneavy
and Eskin point out (p. 428) that the same formula is repeated no
fewer than sixteen times – once in the introduction, and twice in five
out of the ten chapters (II.ii–xi). The word just translated as ‘occasions’
(poiois) can also mean ‘cause’ (p. 439). Kairos (with its verbal variants),
denoting ‘time’ and ‘circumstance’, appears at points of particular
emphasis in the sequence as a whole. Together, the two words ‘give a
situational grounding to the notion of an emotional argument’
(p. 438). This is important for our understanding of pathos as well as
for the historical tradition of rhetoric, for two reasons.
Firstly, bearing in mind that in modern English ‘occasion’ as a noun
denotes a particular time, and as a verb a complex causal process (that
is, the ‘occasioning’ or production of an effect through a combination
of circumstances and reactions to them), it follows: (a) that the trigger
of an emotion might be touched by one speaker through his/her
representation of a person’s presence, action, inaction or attitude on a
particular occasion; and (b) that a re-categorisation of the person, denial
of their presence, or re-presentation of their behaviour on the same
occasion by another speaker, might annul or transform the emotion
(might, for example, turn anger to mildness or pity). This shows the
link between reasoning and emotion. The cause of an emotion can in
effect be controlled through reasoning about aspects of its occasion –
including the frame of mind of those made subject to the emotion.
Aristotle’s chapter on mildness (2.3) shows for example how to counter
anger: ‘If then men are angry with those who slight them, and slight is
voluntary, it is evident that they are mild towards those who do none
of these things, or do them involuntarily’ (II.iii.3).
For our purposes, the second main point emerging from Kinneavy
and Eskin’s stress on Kairos is its link to the broader concept of fitness
or decorum. They interpret Aristotle’s warning (I.ii.4) that ethos must
be revalidated in every new communication, whatever the prior
reputation of the persuader, as rising from the absolute necessity of
engagement with the specific occasion – the concurrence of people,
circumstances, topic and issue. Despite their emphasis on time, this

attests the need for a more all-round alertness, to be reflected in
everything from the elements and proportion of the speech to its
expressive style. They also link kairos to reasoning (pp. 440–1), and to
the preoccupation with propriety of style (to prepon), which they see not
only in the chapter devoted to it (III.vii), but throughout Aristotle’s
treatment of persuasive language, with its stress upon metaphoric
language that will set things pro ommaton or ‘before the eyes’ (III.x.6).
This extends the concept of timeliness from the overall occasion of
communication, to the particular times and stages within the speech
itself, the topics, things and people referred to, and the ways of refer-
ring to them. From our perspective, looking back from a context in
which the persuasive writing or recorded speech of the past is
inevitably read by those to whom it was not addressed, while the mass
communication of the our own time doesn’t directly address the
particular circumstances of its consumers (though it seeks to typify
them), this stress on timeliness is valuable because it challenges the
stiffness of older stereotypes of decorum and the blandness of our
current, far less obvious assumptions about how people ‘characteristi-
cally’ behave and speak. It encourages us to look for traces of the
original or implied audience within the older work, and the moment at
which they were addressed; and in today’s culture it helps us to
evaluate the individual scripted interactions between ‘realistically’
represented people, the comic climaxes, fracturing relationships, family
tragedies, the treatment of topical issues or ‘moments of high drama’
in which persuasion or emotive appeals are prominent, within soap
episodes, sitcoms or Hollywood movies.
But, whatever his value for us, how well was Aristotle known to the
English Renaissance? According to George Kennedy’s summary of his
own extensive scholarship in Rorty, pp. 422–4, the Rhetoric became
outmoded with respect to the invention of arguments, as the elaborated
treatment of issues11 assumed more importance than the older
Aristotelean topics, and with respect to style following the Stoics’
reclassification of stylistic features into ‘tropes and figures of speech’.
However, Cicero knew Aristotle, and effectively preserved the vital
distinction of ethos, pathos and logos. The three ‘proofs’ are reflected,
though transmuted, in his concept of the officia oratoris (see below);
and in Kennedy’s words (p. 422) they are ‘then associated with the
three kinds of style: plain, middle and grand’. Translation and publica-
tion of the Rhetoric in the Middle Ages and Renaissance seems to have
been relatively late and limited (p. 423), and to have stressed the
work’s political and ethical value in preference to its rhetorical theory

as such.12 Kennedy summarises: ‘Although the Rhetoric was much read
in the later Renaissance …, real appreciation of the significance of the
treatise is a phenomenon of twentieth-century interest in speech
communication and critical theory’.
What I carry forward from Aristotle is the three ‘proofs’ and the
balanced attention to persuader, audience and topic required for
maximum persuasive efficacy (energeia) – this being typified by the
linkage of pathos to the persuader’s perceived ethos, and by the role of
logos in the formation or alteration of those perceptions from which
pathos rises. The clear reflection of Aristotle’s own polis, in his selection
of arguments and characterisation of emotions, prompts us to pay
similar attention to the various patterns of thought and feeling
amongst the groups making up our society. We should also note his
insistence on fitness and timeliness, and (reinforcing the effect of Plato’s
example) his stress on metaphor as a source of emotive vividness
(enargeia), setting things ‘before the eyes’.
Cicero: the massive influence of Cicero from antiquity onwards,
however deplored by C.S. Lewis,13 is based even more on his philoso-
phy and oratory and his status as a stylistic model – inculcated by
translation into and out of English – than on his rhetorical theory. For
those who had received grammar school teaching or private tuition
(see below), the cumulative impact of his words and rhythms, sharp-
ened by the technical appreciation and detailed analytic vocabulary
taught by their masters,14 would be an instinctive influence on their
own persuasive efforts even without reference to outlines of his theory,
or to his writing on oratory. In common with those other texts (for
example, epic and historical poems) to which rhetorical criteria were
applied, and whose structural and stylistic features were expounded
through marginal commentary,15 or teased out in school lessons, the
range of Cicero’s rhetorical practice would instil a sense of flexibility
and variety.
Here, I pass over his early work on the finding of arguments, De
Inventione, and his late treatment, in the Topica, of seventeen standard
loci or places for dialectical argument (though this was often employed
as a school text in sixteenth century England). Another work once
attributed to him, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 84 BC [Kennedy,
page 97]), probably represents the rhetorical teaching Cicero himself
received. Influential in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is still
valuable for its compendious coverage, the liveliness of its examples,
and its accessible account of the issues. It is available in a single handy,
well-translated Loeb volume.16 For our purposes, the most important

general influence on Cicero must have been Stoicism (as noted by
Kennedy, above), not only for its probable foundation of the stylistic
distinction between figurative and non-figurative style (tropes and
schemes), but for its view of emotion as an essentially morbid
‘perturbation’ of the mind.17
In the dialogue De Oratore, his most extended treatment of rhetoric,
Cicero touches on many topics and issues, which I will follow through
his later and shorter work, the Orator, and through subsequent writers
from Quintilian onwards. He begins by making Scaevola and Crassus
debate what is included within the art of rhetoric (I.ix.35 ff.), Crassus
insisting on its all-embracing nature and on the use made of it by every
discipline (as when Plato, ‘making fun of orators’ in the Gorgias
‘himself seemed … to be the consummate orator’ – and we have seen
how true this is of the Phaedrus!). He applies to Rhetoric what seemed,
to Roscius the actor (I.xxix.132), to apply to all arts including his own:
‘I often hear [him] affirming that the chief thing in art is to observe
good taste’ (‘quem saepe audio dicere, caput esse artis, decere’). In the
Second Book (II.vii.30 ff.), Antonius, uncertain whether Rhetoric is a
distinct and major art founded on facts – as Socrates had insisted it
should be and as Cicero, knowing the Phaedrus, would recall – still
affirms that it ‘wears the likeness of an art’. As such, it is all-pervasive.
Chiming in with my concern for rhetorical pathos as something that
works across generic boundaries, Antonius notes that, just as the fluent
exponents of other disciplines ‘gain something’ from oratory even
‘without any regular training’ (II.ix.38), so, reciprocally, much of value
to the orator is drawn from the distinctive expression of other arts. He
compares the effect of purely recreational reading in the works of his-
torians trained in rhetoric or philosophy, to the accidental acquisition
of a tan while walking in the sunshine (II.xiv.60): his discourse ‘gets
coloured’. De Oratore also addresses the question of how to arouse
pathos. As Quintilian was to do (see below), but without his succinct
formula for feeling, Cicero’s protagonists Antonius and Crassus are
shown to have moved audiences to emotion, mainly through their own
emotion. We see a vivid action-shot of Crassus, instinct with ardour
down to his fingertips and every newly-coined exactitude of expression
(II.xlv.188). Cicero relates this self-arousal (II.xlvi.191) to the use of
powerful moral and emotional ‘commonplaces’ (‘locorum’) and the
‘quality of diction’ (‘natura orationis’). This is exemplified in the story
(II.xlvii.197 ff.) of Antonius’s own triumphant defence of Norbanus
before a jury of Roman Knights (95 BC): a turn-around foreshadowing
his grandson’s reversal of the sentiments of the Roman people follow-

ing Caesar’s assassination, as represented by Shakespeare.18 Here (in
effect) the ‘commonplace’ asserts that ‘resistance to patrician power is
acceptable in a just cause’; and Antonius uses it to present the motives
of Norbanus’s action in an entirely new light (clearly showing the
linkage between enthymemic argument and pathos as represented by
Aristotle). But this work evidently did not satisfy Cicero’s curiosity
about oratory, or fully express his concern for it.
Orator, addressed to Caesar’s future assassin, Marcus Junius Brutus,
was written in 46 BC during Cicero’s last great period of literary
activity (before the series of orations against Caesar’s avenger, which
precipitated his own death). In response to the advocacy by Brutus and
other younger contemporaries of the plainer ‘Attic’ mode of oratory, it
shifts the emphasis in the discussion of rhetoric strongly towards style.
Here, as already indicated, Cicero identifies what he terms the officia
oratoris, linking them immediately to the ‘genera dicendi (xx.69) and
thus to the full range of resources which were in his view threatened
by Atticism: the plain style was to be used in proof, the middle style to
afford pleasure, and the high or vehement style to sway the audience
(‘subtile in probando, modicum in delectando, vehemens in
flectendo’). The use of these was to be guided, as ever, by ‘decorum’,
perceived as an equivalent of the Greeks’ to prepon (xx.70 ff.). In the
Orator (xxxii.113 ff.) he also seems to provide (without evidently
intending to do so, but more markedly than in the De Oratore) some
grounds for Ramus’s later separation of dialectic and rhetoric. Hubbell
translates the opening of the passage as follows (p. 389):
The man of perfect eloquence should, then, in my opinion possess

not only the faculty of fluent and copious speech which is his
proper province, but should also acquire that neighbouring border-
land science of logic; although a speech is one thing and a debate
another, and disputing is not the same as speaking, and yet both are
concerned with discourse – debate and dispute are the function of
the logicians; the orator’s function is to speak ornately. Zeno, the
founder of the Stoic school, used to give an object lesson of the
difference between the two arts; clenching his fist he said logic was
like that; relaxing and extending his hand, he said eloquence was
like the open palm.
To me, the most likely interpretation of this is that though the orator
should study dialectic with the logicians, as dialectic, he should
employ it in a distinctive form while ‘speaking ornately’19 and prepar-

ing to do so – as the muscles and sinews of the fist, in Zeno’s famous
comparison, are the same as those in the open palm, in their ‘relaxed’
and expansive mode (which also implies openness to the attitudes and
emotions of an audience). Cicero continues with a very brief treatment
(xxxiv.122 ff.) of arrangement and the style appropriate to each part
(to be developed variously according to the nature of the subject); he
provides a clearer indication of the amplificatory treatment of com-
monplaces and of the ‘general principle’ (Greek thesis) which will often
be linked to the point at issue – and thus, implicitly, to logos. He then
addresses (xxxvii.128 ff.) ‘two matters’ of major importance to us
(‘duae res’ – Hubbell translates as ‘two topics’): in effect, ethos and
pathos. They appear here as qualities: ethicon which ‘is related to men’s
nature and character, their habits and all the intercourse of life’
(Hubbell); and patheticon which ‘arouses and excites the emotions’.
With or without intermediaries this foreshadows the comment which
Marlowe’s Theridamas makes on the seductive power-fantasy spun for
him by the rising star, Tamburlaine: ‘Not Hermes Prolocutor to the
Gods, / Could use perswasions more patheticall’ (I.Tamburlaine,
I.ii.210–11). Cicero proceeds with a brief, tight-packed instancing of
oratorically significant passions before moving on into an increasingly
detailed treatment of figures of words (xxxix.134–5), figures of thought
as the key to feeling (xxxix.136–xl.139), and of the structure and
rhythm of prose (xli.140 ff.). As he reels off the figures of thought they
seem to burgeon in the orator’s mind. There is a sense of elation and
urgency about the way in which he piles up, one upon the other, the
most compact possible expression of how each figure works, not
naming it but evoking it; and a sense of infinite resourcefulness in the
reiterated form of ‘ut’ followed by the subjunctive (‘let him … let him
… let him’). Here the sense of fitness and the imminence of effective
pathos are located in the moment of perception: how to move this audi-
ence, here, now. How to verbalise the perception is then treated at
much greater length in line with the inspiring purpose of Cicero’s
letter – that is, the defence of a full and varied rhetorical style against
the Atticists. Two things are to be noted, finally. Firstly, there is an
encouragement here, despite all Cicero has written elsewhere, to asso-
ciate the two officia of pleasing and moving, primarily with the ‘treat-
ment of subject matter’ (xxxiv.122). This ‘tractatio rerum’ is to work
through the figuration, syntax and rhythm of prose style – though in
the longer term this association will have nearly disastrous conse-
quences for rhetoric as a discipline. Secondly, it is clear despite the
earlier linkage of pleasure with the middle style and moving with the
high or vehement style, that the latter is pleasurable in direct propor-
tion to its effectiveness in moving – as the thrusts and parries of a
gladiator are ‘also attractive to look upon’ (lxviii.228).
Quintilian: in the Epilogue to his Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1974)
James Murphy20 symbolises the transition from medieval to
Renaissance concepts of Rhetoric, by retelling the story of how, in
September 1416, the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria
was discovered by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini in a ‘dark dungeon’,
under the abbey of St Gall in German Switzerland. Though parts of the
text had been known in the interim, chiefly as a source on ‘elementary
education and grammar’ (Kennedy, p. 188), the monks’ slovenly
neglect reflects the loss of classical rhetoric’s cultural and political
context, before the recovery of something akin to it, in the city states
and centralised monarchies of early modern Europe. As a record of
educational practice, rhetorical training, forensic speaking and habits
of reading throughout the Roman empire, Quintilian’s whole work was
to be an invaluable guide or touchstone for the linguistic, literary and
rhetorical aspects that later recovery – vastly expanding the cultural
context already seen in Cicero’s dialogue. For us, it is important both
for its scope and for its vivid formulations, not least on pathos. In
greater detail than Cicero’s, twelve books take you stage by stage
through the cultivation of oratorical skill: every grade of rhetorical
composition, and every successive part of a speech. The overlap and
interplay between imaginative writing and the more functional use of
language in the schools, in trials and in public ceremonial (following
the effective demise of political oratory with the eclipse of the Roman
republic), foreshadows the contribution which a more widely-
disseminated and reinvigorated rhetorical education was to make to
the technique of early modern writing, whatever the genre – besides
showing how literary writing shaped oratorical style (at X.v.4
Quintilian recommends the exercise of paraphrasing the ‘lofty inspira-
tion’ of verse into prose). Cicero’s authority is continually reinforced:
when he comes to discuss the figures, Quintilian quotes verbatim a
longish passage from De Oratore (III.lii.201 ff.), which moves from the
most graphic and emotive figures of thought towards more purely
verbal devices, before going on to include the impassioned summary
which I have already noted in Orator xxxix.134 ff. (see above).
But in one seminal passage Quintilian articulates a perception whose
general validity extends beyond the orator’s figures of thought, to
include the affective power of imagination and observation, as encoun-
tered in drama and literary texts. Appropriately, he places it in a

broader cultural context, as part of a contrast between ethos and pathos,
which serves to link how the persuader is perceived, to what he himself
sees. From VI.ii.20 onwards, Quintilian begins his discussion of pathos
(Latin adfectus) by likening the milder emotions associated with ethos,
to comedy, while pathos resembles tragedy. What we now call ethics is
more central to Aristotle’s view of ethos than to Quintilian’s. For
Aristotle, the emotive responsiveness that characterises the man of
virtue, competence and goodwill will range over the whole scale of
feeling, as against the equable, mild benevolence of Quintilian’s ethos.
It is as if Aristotle’s ethos starts from a moral perception of the case in
hand (people, topic, circumstances), and works outward to the impres-
sion it wishes to make and the emotions it needs to move, while
Quintilian’s is more preoccupied with how it will be viewed, and with
when its calm urbanity will be most appropriate – though he is con-
cerned that the orator should be perceived as a good man (VI.ii.18–19).
Skill in portraying one’s own oratorical character would be enhanced
by the exercises set for rhetoric students, in which they portrayed such
characters as ‘rustics, misers, cowards and superstitious persons’
(VI.ii.17). This type of ethopoeia would later be included by Aphthonius
in his Progymnasmata (see below), and as such would be perpetuated in
English grammar schools. By implication, to act out a character quite
unlike your own, would help you to see yourself as others saw you, as
well as helping you to deploy irony or ‘feigned emotion’ when
required (VI.ii.15). But a more vital point has yet to emerge.
Where pathos is concerned, Quintilian (like Cicero) insists that to
move others we must first be moved ourselves (VI.ii.27–8). To do this
the persuader must employ the phantasiai or visiones through which
‘things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme
vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes’ (VI.ii.29),
a faculty familiar to everyone in the form of daydreaming (VI.ii.30).
Quintilian shows how a pleader would stir up horror, pity and detesta-
tion through a detailed mental recreation of events on which the mind
would dwell in turn, moving itself to feel those emotions so acutely
that every aspect of voice, expression, gesture and attitude would impel
the audience to share them. It might be worth the attempt to translate
this into a more contemporary idiom than that of Butler in the Loeb
edition:
I’m protesting at somebody’s murder. Won’t my eyes scroll through

everything likely to have happened? The hit-man – suddenly there,
coming at him? He – cornered, scared out of his mind? Stuck

between yelling for help, buying time, trying to dodge clear? Don’t I
see the hand stabbing, the body folding, going down? Won’t the
blood, the paleness, the groan of indescribable pain; the mouth
gaping; the last breath wheezing out, be etched on my mind,
undeletable? (VI.ii.31)21
Compare this with the death of Abel, which Adam is impelled to witness
in a vision (PL, XI.444–7), and which seems to echo Quintilian. Like
Aristotle’s prescription for effective style, it ‘sets things before the eyes’;
but contrary to his preference it is a literal and sensory evocation, not
metaphorical. Where Aristotle wishes the metaphors used in persuasion
to display ‘actuality’ (energeia), that is, a degree of sensory or animate life
comparable to that in poetic metaphor, Quintilian attributes ‘clarity’ or
‘vividness’ (enargeia) to passages such as the one translated above. Beth
Innocenti22 sees this preference for the literal as characteristic of
Ciceronian rhetoric: the direct and forthright presentation of actual
things ‘taken into the mind’ having greater clarity and impact than
figurative language. It will, moreover, contribute to the overall quality –
already indicated – which Quintilian (II.xv.34) requires of the effective
speaker, and which is directly linked to his definition of rhetoric as ‘the
science of speaking well’ (‘bene dicendi scientia[m]’): he goes on to claim
that ‘this definition includes all the virtues of oratory and the character
of the orator … since no man can speak well who is not good himself’ (‘cum
bene dicere non possit nisi bonus’). This link, differently expressed and
perhaps differently conceived in the later definition of the orator which
Quintilian (XII.i.1) draws from Marcus Cato, that is, ‘a good man, skilled
in speaking’ (‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’), remains a valuable focus for
discussion.
From Aphthonius (and Hermogenes) to Augustine: the virtue expressed
in rhetoric, and conveyed through pathos, came into question in later
antiquity following Rome’s conversion to Christianity. The kind of
false fictitious emotion which was to seduce the younger St. Augustine
and appal the older one, is exemplified by the ethopoeia which (as
already mentioned) was included in Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata. This
text, written around the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries was the
most popular and widely commented upon of all its kind. In his
Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition (1980),23 George
Kennedy attributes its popularity to the fact that it provides examples
of each exercise (pp. 163–4). Its value in fostering rhetorical skills and
furnishing techniques for drama, poetry and prose writing also derives
from the range of its compositional types. There are 14: fable, narra-
tion, chreia (that is, amplification of some famous word or deed),
moral saying, disproof, proof, commonplace, praise, blame, compari-
son, ethopoeia (i.e. feigning of a personality, ethical or passionate),
description (or ecphrasis), thesis (that is, argument on a general propo-
sition), and legislation. The rhetorical orientation of this material was
stressed both by the Byzantine commentators (Kennedy, p. 164), and
by Reinhard Lorich, a Renaissance commentator on the Latin version
attributed in part to Rudolph Agricola, whose edition was widely used
in England.24 Exercises are variously assigned to the three principal
rhetorical genera, Lorich listing fable, narration, chreia, sententia and
thesis under the Deliberative; proof, disproof, and commonplace under
the Judicial; and praise, blame, ethopoeia and comparison under the
Demonstrative – legislation and description being left unclassified. The
second of these, description or ecphrasis, is for Kennedy (p. 164) espe-
cially prone to the endemic (and fruitful) phenomenon of letteraturiz-
zatione, that is, the tendency of rhetorical forms to evolve into literary
ones. Most of the early modern texts discussed in this book reflect this
process, though almost always retaining their persuasive characteris-
tics. Vivid description, sometimes standing out like a distinct framed
picture within the text, if not actually describing a picture, a building,
and so on (as in the more specific usage of the term ecphrasis), might
embody pathos, furthering a larger persuasive design; or it might
display self-contained aesthetic qualities; or simultaneously achieve
two or more of the officia oratoris, such as moving and delighting. It
might be part of an extended work, like Menaphon’s description of
Tamburlaine to be considered in Chapters 3 and 5 (pp. 90–3, 151–6,
below), or serve an immediate persuasive purpose, or both. The same is
true of the other exercises, such as commonplace (that is, ‘speech
expounding the good or evil qualities manifest in a particular
person’).25 All these compositional types can be selected, adapted, and
combined like building blocks to form the distinctive structures of
widely diverse genres. The liveliest is probably ethopoeia, inviting
empathy with extreme emotional states (for example, Hecuba’s, at the
fall of Troy) or distinctive mindsets, as with the ‘dweller far inland’
(‘mediterraneus’) dumbfounded by a glimpse of the sea (Lorich, Sig.Zr).
The importance of this text, for us, lies in its use in English grammar
schools, being specified for Durham in 1593,26 and criticised for its
difficulty by John Brinsley in his Ludus Literarius.27 He deplores the
complexity of some of the exercises with their very specific topics, and
suggests recourse to the simplified inventive procedure associated with
Ramus (see below). But how much would be lost by reducing the dis-
tinctiveness of the various tasks? Lorich (Sig.Z5r) comments on the
ethopoeia mixta, in which the student has to feign both a particular
passion and a characterising choice of action (for example, Achilles
mourning Patroclus and vowing to avenge him): ‘For the purpose of
this particular exercise is, that you should try to adapt to your material
the most appropriate forms of sensory description, thoughts, and
words’. If a careful teacher could induce pupils to do this, real benefits
would result, broadening their minds and extending the range and
flexibility of written style. Other more refined distinctions of style
came down to the Renaissance from later antiquity, for example,
Hermogenes’s seven ‘ideas’ or characteristics of the grand style,28 two
of which are fitted to forensic oratory, that is, asperity and vehemence,
and two to epideictic, that is, solemnity and splendour. The ‘ideas’ are
listed on pp. 259–60 of Debora Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric (1988),29 and
their influence traced throughout her book.
Around the time when Aphthonius was first in use, St Augustine in
his Confessions was rebuking his younger self for lamenting Dido’s
fictitious suicide (that is, Virgil’s mixed ethopoeia of passion and choice),
and not his own spiritual death.30 But while rejecting all forms of
emotional deception, typical of the rhetoric he had once taught,
Augustine indicates the role of pathos in making the Confessions
effective for its readers. In his Retractions, written about 426–8, he states
that ‘[M]y Confessions, … do prayse God, who is both just, and good;
and do excite, both the affection, and understanding of man towards
him … [T]hey wrought this effect, when I wrote them; and so they yet
do, when now, I read them’.31 Since he also writes here of the pleasure
which the book had continued to afford to his ‘brethren’, it is clear
that it fulfils the three official oratoris, teaching, pleasing and moving,
both for others and for Augustine himself. This impression is borne out
by a fuller study of Augustine’s pronouncements on rhetoric, and on
the relationship of emotion to will. Shuger (pp. 41–50) gives a clear
account of these, as they appear in De Doctrina Christiana and De
Civitate Dei. Coming to these books from the Confessions, I was more
alert both to the personal overtones of Augustine’s treatment, and to
his social and cultural awareness – his continuing fascination with
eloquence, the echoes of his own sexually-distracted youth, and the
need to use words to transform lives, in a society still more inclined to
applaud eloquence as a performance art, than to act on it.
As an inheritor of the Christian eloquence of St Paul and the earlier
patristic writers, Augustine provides lengthy quotation and a detailed,
almost mathematical demonstration of Paul’s stylistic qualities – both

pleasurable and persuasive. In De Doctrina IV.xx.39–44,32 he illustrates
Paul’s mastery of all three levels of style: the plain or restrained
(submissa dictio), the middle or mixed (dictio temperata), and the grand
(grande dicendi genus). Since all subjects are of equal importance with
respect to the spiritual life, the levels of style now relate primarily to
purpose, not to subject: the plain style is for teaching; the middle style,
in Shuger’s words, ‘delights the hearer and by praising God and the
saints draws its audience to love what is truly good’ (Shuger, p. 43),
while the grand style – which can range from elaborate structures of
repetition, cola, and periods, to an impassioned plainness – is not
necessarily more ornamented but more ‘inflamed by heartfelt emotion’
(‘violentum animi affectibus’ – IV.xx.42). As Augustine puts it: ‘When
one needs to move and sway one’s listeners – this is necessary at the
point when they acknowledge that a speech is both true and delightful
but are unwilling to do what it recommends – one must certainly speak
in the grand style’ (IV.xxvi.58). But the two ‘acknowledged’ qualities
are instrumental to this. Augustine goes on to repeat a point made pre-
viously at IV.xii.27: ‘But who can be moved if he does not understand
what is said? Or who can be engrossed and made to listen, if he is not
delighted?’ This chain of instrumentality (pleasing → teaching →
moving), will be echoed later by Sidney and others.
In De Civitate Dei however, Augustine maintains that the four basic
emotions of desire, fear, joy and sorrow are acts of the will, arising not
from the body but from the soul (XIV.v). They may therefore be good
or bad, taking their quality from their objects and the conformity or
nonconformity of these with God’s will. As the Everyman edition (a
corrected version of John Healey’s early seventeenth century transla-
tion),33 puts it: ‘according to the variety of the things desired and
avoided, as the will consents or dislikes, so are our diversity of
passions’ (XIV.vi). Consequently, passions need no longer be mere
perturbations as they were to Cicero (Discussions at Tusculum, IV.vi.11);
nor need they conform to rectified Stoic feeling, which like an aloof
gated community shuts out sorrow and confines itself to ‘will, joy and
wariness’ (De Civ. XIV.viii). Rather, ‘the citizens of God, as long as they
are pilgrims, and in the way of God, do fear, desire, rejoice, and sorrow.
But their love, being right, straightens all these emotions’. Moreover,
‘they do not feel … for themselves only, but for others also’ (XIV.ix).
The outcome, according to Shuger, is that ‘[a]ffectivity … moves into
the center of spiritual experience’ (p. 46). How it is for pilgrims
through the fallen world, is related in the later chapters of Book XIV to
how it would have been in Eden, where even the joy of sex would not
have distracted Adam and Eve from the joy of conformity to God’s
will. Though Augustine does not draw out the full implications for
rhetoric of this purified pathos, specifying the grand style for ‘praxis
and reproof’ only (Shuger, p. 49), his reconnection of emotion to truth
recollects the Plato of Phaedrus, and anticipates Erasmus in its readiness
to invert pagan or secular values. We will also see a link to
Melanchthon’s Lutheran concept of the Holy Spirit at work within the
believer, unifying will and feeling through the infusion of faith.
Late antiquity thus carries forward three reinforced and redirected
traditions towards the Renaissance: a teaching method which
stimulates imagination, variously applied to people and things as
represented in appropriate language, reflecting and generating pathos; a
broadened sense of stylistic possibilities, and the potential for a radical
redirection of pathos.
Medieval rhetoric: on this I refer the reader to major studies such as
James Murphy’s (see above), and the ongoing results of research as
published regularly in the ISHR’s journal, Rhetorica. This is not to
downplay the importance of medieval theory and practice in rhetoric,
but to confine myself to statements and suggestions about its legacy.
Several major points emerge: the repeated demonstration of rhetoric’s
culture-specific character; its reflection of changing conditions, politi-
cal, economic and administrative, as older rhetorical texts, often frag-
mentary in their transmission, acquired new uses and (effectively) new
meanings, and as new specialised rhetorics were written;34 the rhetoric
of allegory as applied to classical literary texts which (as, famously,
with Ovid)35 could change the passive victims of pathos to moral
agents, and empathy to antipathy, and which in inverse form fore-
shadows modern criticism in its restructuring of perception and
emotion; the blending of rhetorical and literary techniques in the
writing of poetry; and finally the emergence of new or revived compo-
sitional techniques, such as realistic description and portraiture36
applied to historical or hagiographic writing, and new rhetorical
genres, most notably the ars dictaminis which reflected and enabled the
growing practical use of rhetoric in all kinds of correspondence. Where
pathos is concerned, we only need to consider such a text as Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale, with its chilling ecphrasis of the frescos in the Temple
of Mars, enhanced by deixis as in ‘The smiler with the knife under the
cloak’ (III.1999, spelling modernised), and the touching exclamatio of
Arcite’s dying lamentation (IV.2765–97), to appreciate its skilled evoca-
tion in this period. But two main legacies of ‘Middle Ages’ to
‘Renaissance’ should be emphasised here: firstly, a broadened range of

genres demanding greater flexibility in the use of pathos, and secondly
a huge reinforcement of the tendency deplored by Socrates, for
persuasion to assume a written form. Of course, written texts and
spoken dialogue and discourse formed part of an integrated culture,
extending from the Church – with its paradigmatic use of Paul’s
written letters and the other scriptures, going back to Paul’s time and
endlessly replicated in monasteries, universities and pulpits – into the
secular culture of the court with its readings of poetry and its debates.
But writing itself in the form of letters applied to all purposes –
administrative, commercial and personal – increasingly served a
persuasive function without public exposure – whether its form was
governed by the rules of dictamen, of humanism, or of mere literacy.
And with this development new modes of relationship would evolve,
typified by the enigmatic figure of the Secretary, training himself to
think, speak and feel like his master and perhaps tempted to assume
his master’s role.37 But what new tendencies marked the ‘waning’ of
medieval culture and its characteristic rhetorical forms?
Rudolph Agricola: some such tendencies are reflected in the two logic
textbooks most likely to have been taught to Marlowe at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge (though he may well have read Ramus
whose murder he dramatises in The Massacre at Paris [vii.361–416], and
whose argumentative procedures are pilloried there, in terms probably
echoing the controversy at Cambridge) were John Seton’s Dialectica,38
an introduction to formal argumentation and the judgement of
arguments, and Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica (written in 1479).39
Seton’s text presupposes a prior study of Agricola. The significance of
this is that Agricola includes emotion within the scope of dialectical
invention, linking it to the logical sources of argument. Although (like
Erasmus and Melanchthon) he foreshadows Ramus in the practice of
double analysis, demonstrating the logical structure under the style of
a text as Peter Mack indicates in his Renaissance Argument (1993)40 and
elsewhere, the implication that pathos is part of invention, that ‘the
method of arousing emotions is little different from that of teaching’
(Mack, p. 203), differentiates him sharply from Ramus. Broadening
‘argumentation’ to embrace ‘everything by which we consider what is
doubtful and uncertain’, Agricola concludes:
[N]ot only that it is necessary for arousing emotions, but that it

ought to be very dense and even thickly packed. For strength is
necessary for the intellect to be seized and for the mind itself to be
carried away from itself and as it were placed outside itself. This
technique of argument is so much imitated by creative writers that
if they are short of different arguments, they pile on the same point,
changing the words, as if they were making several points. (DID,
p. 199, as translated by Mack, pp. 203–4)
He goes on to quote the very passage from Aeneid IV that so

captivated the young Augustine. According to Mack, Agricola’s
treatment of emotion is an ‘original extrapolation and simplification
from’ Aristotle and Cicero, paying ‘proper regard to the theory of
emotions from Aristotle’s Rhetoric’ (Mack, pp. 208–9). The concept of
fitness, identified by Mack as ‘The key idea’ (ibid.), implies a
syllogistic connection between ‘the thing which happens and the
person to whom it happens’. Marlowe’s own dramatic practice
reflects this. At the crisis of his encounter with Theridamas,
Tamburlaine at once observes an effect and projects contemptuous
and indignant emotion, giving maximal impact to his ‘pathetical’
wooing of this kindred spirit:
In thee (thou valiant man of Persea)

I see the folly of thy Emperour:
Art thou but Captaine of a thousand horse,
That by Characters graven in thy browes,
And by thy martiall face and stout aspect,
Deserv’st to have the leading of an hoste?
(I.Tamb., I.ii.166–71)
Mycetes’ ‘folly’ is at once the cause of Theridamas’s lowly appoint-

ment, and of Tamburlaine’s indignation at its unfitness. Moreover,
reasoning from adjuncts41 (the qualities of Mycetes and Theridamas,
and the signs of them), is also ‘thickly packed’ into these few lines.
Mack presents other elements in Agricola’s insightful treatment: that
audiences don’t need to be reminded of their own deserts (though
Theridamas is an exception); that the choice of words should reflect
the particular emotion aimed at; that emotion can be generated by
representing the emotional state of somebody other than the
persuader (as when Virgil moves his reader with an image of the
distraught Dido); and that emotional effects should be built up
progressively through amplification, especially through comparison
from the lesser to the greater degree. Here again, enargeia (vividness,
clarity) is paramount (Mack, pp. 209–12).
From Agricola we draw an increased stress on fitness, pointing to

later practice, and a demonstration that Aristotle’s integrated logos and
pathos could be maintained despite the growing tendency, in teaching,
to separate logic and rhetoric (that this was already evident in Agricola
will become clearer during the discussion of Ramus).
Erasmus and the rhetoric of friendship: of all Erasmus’s contributions to
Rhetoric and rhetorical teaching, perhaps the most illuminating, where
pathos is concerned, is his treatment of letter writing, and of the nature
and basis of friendship. Professor Lynette Hunter’s recent work on the
rhetoric of friendship42 has added further pieces to the jigsaw of pathos,
the whole picture of ideas and practice – which, if Laurence Green
was right (see above), the Renaissance itself could not achieve.
Complementary to this are the texts brought together in Lisa Jardine’s
Reading Shakespeare Historically43 (to which I am much indebted,
though in Chapters 3 and 5, I will question the ‘reading’ concerned).
Jardine demonstrates that pathos had a distinctive role in epistolary
rhetoric as exemplified by Erasmus and his correspondents, making
absent friends present to each other through the representation of
mutual feeling.
For her part, Lynette Hunter raises the issue of sameness and differ-
ence. Earlier accounts of friendship (such as Erasmus’s own in the De
Ratione Studii of 1511) stress the close affinity involved. De Ratione
claims that ‘friendship can exist only among similar people, for simi-
larity promotes mutual good will, while dissimilarity … is the parent of
hatred and distrust; moreover, the greater, the truer, the more deeply
rooted the similarity, the firmer and closer will be the friendship’
(Collected Works, 24, 683–5).44 But in two essays originally added to the
1515 edition of Erasmus’s Adagia, ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’ (now avail-
able in David Wootton’s vivid translation)45 and ‘Sweet is War’,
Erasmus progressively broadens and deepens his concept of similarity,
extending it from a personal bond towards the acknowledgement of
common humanity and spiritual values. This might make it possible,
not only for people from different countries to achieve a form of
friendship, but even adherents of different religions. For this to be
achieved, we have to be able to see similarity – in essentials – beneath
any outwardly alienating dissimilarity. The Sileni makes no reference to
friendship, but has vital implications for it. The point of its sustained
metaphor of the Silenus, drawn from Plato’s Symposium46 in which the
drunken Alcibiades applies it to the outwardly unprepossessing (but
apparently very attractive) Socrates, is not so much the ugliness of the
figure, as the fact that one must look inside it. Socrates is said to
resemble the figures of Silenus sold in Athens, holding pipes or flutes,

hollow inside, and containing little figures of Gods. The essay itself
exhibits highly persuasive enargeia, both positive and negative,
through multiple and highly-wrought examples of ecphrasis, which one
by one enact the opening of a Silenus. Erasmus’s first example is
Socrates himself, as elaborated from Plato, with ‘the face of a country
bumpkin, a bit like that of an ox, and a snub nose running with snot’,
homely in speech and (apparently) sensually-inclined – but inwardly
‘closer to being a god than a man’ (Wootton, pp. 169–70). Then there
are Christ’s apostles: ‘poor, unsophisticated, uneducated, base-born,
powerless, rejected, spared no insult, ridiculed, hated, cursed, the
public laughingstock, and the abomination of the world’ – while to
those who ‘open the silenus … by the touch of a shadow they make
healthy the sick, and by the touch of a hand they impart the Holy
Spirit. Even Aristotle would seem stupid, … compared with them’
(p. 172). On the other side (amongst the ‘inside-out Sileni’) are some
rulers, each with ‘the sceptre, the badge of office, the bodyguards’, but
inwardly ‘a tyrant, even an enemy of his people, a thief’ (p. 175); and
‘some bishops – if you saw their solemn consecrations, if you caught
sight of their new vestments, … you would think they were heavenly
beings’, while in essentials, opening the Silenus, each is ‘nothing but a
man of war, a man of business, even a tyrant. … [A]ll those splendid
symbols of holiness were props for a theatrical effect’ (pp. 175–6).
Once this inner scrutiny has become habitual, friendship between
those who seem dissimilar can – by inference – be achieved. Erasmus
indicates, by reference to St Paul (I. Thessalonians 5.23), the basis of
any true inward similarity. To ‘divide human beings into three parts,
the body, the soul, and the spirit’ will be to perceive the true scale of
values – a perception signified by the opening of a Silenus. And the
same perception, will, in any given instance, establish the basis of the
bond of friendship, when it exists: is it a common attraction to the
flesh, which includes every worldly impulse, or a shared spirit deriving
from God? This last, or something comparable to it, will be required
for the ultimate broadening of friendship. Wootton in his introduction
(p. 10) quotes from the other essay mentioned above, ‘Sweet is war’,
with its praise of friendship: ‘First of all, what is there, … better and
sweeter than friendship? Absolutely nothing. But what is peace, except
friendship among many?’ Peace will require, in Christian terms,
charity, enabling people to live in ‘the unity of the Spirit and in the
bond of peace’ (Ephesians, 4.3), as patterned by Christ. This will
become the focus of all positive pathos, and the source of ultimate
emotional satisfaction, enjoyment and achievement. All ‘bodily’

desires, sexual, violent, acquisitive, assertive, and so on, will either be
perceived as negative and threatening, or as the raw materials of virtue,
to be achieved through grace. In this scheme, as with Augustine
(above), human will is asserted through the constant attempt to
discern the divine will, and conform to it.
But when we look as Lynette Hunter does down the perspective of
history, Erasmus points in the direction of modern democratic con-
sensus, established through a secular process of reasoning, of law-
making, and of imaginative and emotional empathy – all dependent
on determination to continue looking inside the Sileni of cultural,
racial, religious, ideological, orientational and gender differences.
That Erasmus was impelled by repeated discoveries in the Silenus
mode, seeing through the contemporary apparatus of power in
church and state, and through the obfuscation of the language used
to justify it, is implied by the Sileni itself. It is also clear that he was
moved to broaden his idea of the basis upon which bonds could be
discovered and maintained, by the dissent resulting from Luther’s
decisive step beyond Erasmus’s own critical stance on religion.
Wootton (p. 32) quotes the opinion expressed in a passage which he
added to ‘Sweet is War’ in 1523: ‘It will be easier to reach agreement
on a few things, and concord will be more easily maintained if on
most questions each is free to understand things in his own way, so
long as it is without contention’. Contention, indeed, resulted
within three decades in a complete split, manifest in the coarse if
clever brutality of Baldwin, diabolising Catholicism (as we will see in
Chapters 3 and 5). Entrenched positions forced new meanings on
words, as extreme as the distortions imposed on them by the mag-
nates of Erasmus’s own day (‘They call a man a traitor …if he thinks
the ruler should be prevented from acting outside the law’ –
Wootton, p. 178). Witness Spenser’s Envy, invoking the Protestant
doctrine of Justification by Faith: ‘And who with gracious bread the
hungry feeds, / His almes for want of faith he doth accuse’ (FQ
I.iv.32).47 Compassion is now suspect and subject to anxiety, typify-
ing the reordering of emotions which followed adoption of a new
ideology and a concomitant change in the connotations of words.
But this makes possible new patterns of subversion, new secular
ways of appealing to repressed emotions. As we have seen, Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine goes his own way, showing what bond of similarity
underlies the friendship between his henchmen and himself, and
inducing a complete reordering of values and emotions. In Part One
of the play, this begins with the warrior discovered inside the shep-
herd (I.ii.41–3: an odd echo of Erasmus’s ‘inside-out Silenus’, the
fighting bishop), and ends with the rejection of remorse for his own
genocidal assault on Damascus. Pity would be nothing more than an
‘effeminate and faint’ association with the picturesque distress of
Zenocrate – the bond of love for humanity being linked not to the
Spirit as it is by Erasmus, but to something subversive of honour,
however soothing to the mind: something to be ‘conceiv[ed] and
subdu[ed]’ (see the whole soliloquy, V.i.135–90). It is not surprising
in view of these ironies that there has been such a conflict between
religious and secular (indeed, irreligious) readings of Marlowe!
But, of course, Marlowe is not alone in achieving such a duality of
response. In other cases, what Erasmus opposes as inner and outer, bad
and good, might both be viewed positively by the reader of a text – or
an observer of life – if not on the same grounds or within the same
scale of reference. Throughout the early modern period, the imagina-
tive enjoyment of readers, and their empathy with errant characters
such as Aeneas and Dido, or Sidney’s Pyrocles and Musidorus, or
Shakespeare’s Falstaff, would co-exist happily with their moral
condemnation. The ease with which this happens (though not
whether it should be allowed to happen), becomes more readily
comprehensible once we detect the reader’s cognitive engagement with
the incompatible goals of enjoyment and achievement, in pursuit of
opposed life themes, personal and social, and different and incompati-
ble roles. Wootton (pp. 24–5) draws a further conclusion: ‘The Silenus
statue implies that every text participates in a debate about how to
interpret the world, and that the language in which texts are written is
slippery, with the meanings of words (such as ‘glorious’ or ‘wealthy’)
constantly likely to turn into their opposites. Descriptions are not only
partisan; they are unstable’. But despite this instability, Erasmus still
conveys a far more urgent message: our continuing need to maintain
the bonds of peace and friendship, personal and social, however that is
to be achieved within the ‘slipperiness’ of language’. Later, I will draw
some further implications with regard both to the heightening of
emergent pathos (the ‘laser’), and the activation of repressed pathos
(‘reversed bias’). But the desire for inward truth, or for the conformity
of inward and outward realities, persists alongside this ‘slipperiness’.
The Reformation reinforces it – as is seen in the case of our next major
source of insight into pathos.
Philipp Melanchthon: the thoroughness and radical originality of
Melanchthon’s rhetorical theory – and the supreme role it accords to
pathos – are clear from Lawrence Green’s contribution to the 2001

Melanchthon Symposium, held at Bretten.48 Green demonstrates the
combined psychology and physiology of this sacred emotion in its
progress through the ears to the intellect, and from the soul’s judge-
ment and volition to heartfelt passion and bodily action. Its source
is the voice of God, heard through the preacher. Debora Shuger
points out (p. 68) that, for Melanchthon, faith is an emotion. How it
works may be inferred from his short treatise on preaching, Ratio
brevis sacrarum concionum tractandarum: faith is a dynamic of
emotion, founded on a prior terror of sin and judgement, stirred by
the Spirit, which then creates a passionate and overmastering belief
that God’s promises are true, and that they apply to us (p. 9). 49
Green’s account, and the passages he quotes, indicate that for
Melanchthon, a unitary soul works through multiple organs: reason
and will, seated in the brain, examine and evaluate the motion of
the senses according to the promptings of the heart, which in fallen
man may well be those of the lower appetites. But given God’s pres-
ence there through grace, illuminating every choice, the will is
moved to seek what leads to bliss, and avoid its opposite, sending an
intellective motion, pleasant or unpleasant, back to the heart which
expands or contracts accordingly. Once the intellective and physical
motions match each other, conscious emotion results – together
with an impulse to act or to refrain. Thus the promises and threats
transmitted by a preacher, entering through the ears in words and
structured phrases paralleling and reinforcing his physical gestures,
transmit a motion which is more than metaphorical. Green’s note
24 quotes the Liber de anima, (CR 13, 74) where Melanchthon seems
spontaneously to perceive one tiny anatomical detail as at once a
metaphor and a synecdoche for the bond between preacher and con-
gregation within the body of Christ, the Church. He suddenly sees,
in the malleolus (which, as the eardrum vibrates, beats on the anvil
within the ear, and thus excites the spiritus in the auditory nerve), ‘a
wonderful image (that is, icon) … of those who teach’. He explains:
‘The preacher receives his voice by inspiration, and like the
malleolus in the ear, hammers on the anvil – namely, the breasts of
his listeners – and at once the spirit is aroused’ (my translation). 50
The whole process is simultaneously spiritual and physical, and the
‘beating’ necessarily entails a rhythmic resonance in which percep-
tion and emotion chime together. That this principle might be more
broadly applicable, and that a similar interplay between mind, heart,
and bodily response, might be generated inwardly, not aroused
through the ears, is suggested by one particular echo of

Melanchthon’s ‘image’ – Marlowe’s distraught Edward II:
My heart is as an anvill unto sorrow,

Which beates upon it like the Cyclops hammers,
And with the noise turnes up my giddie braine,
And makes me frantick for my Gaveston …
Edward II, I.iv.312–5
And for Melanchthon, as for Marlowe, the unimpeded momentum of

such effects will depend on an apt style. As the Ratio brevis puts it: ‘A
style of speech which is both idiomatic and abundant (popularius ac
copiosus) must be used here; and as sails blown by the wind carry a ship
forward without any effort, so to deal effectively with these matters,
such a kind of address is called for, as will sweep them irresistibly, as if
before a steady wind, into the listeners’ souls’.51 Melanchthon goes on
indicate the wealth of amplification that this process will require:
similtudes, contraries, maxims, examples (compare Edward’s ‘harping’
as noted by Isabella at I.iv.311); and a summary of Laurence Green’s
very full account will show why these are needed. Emotion must be
dwelt on to make its impact, and must arise from the mind’s
intellective grasp of the general principles (loci communes) governing
the issue. Each particular perception linked to these through the
process of amplification, as a minor to a major premise, provides a
pulse of emotion to move the appetitive faculty (bearing in mind that
Melanchthon assigns ‘appetition’ to the heart) towards good and away
from evil. This depends on figures of speech, including the orderly
structures of schematic language which act like gestures in the mind,
controlling and shaping attention. Thus, emotion and logic interpene-
trate at every point, and Melanchthon foreshadows Ramus in seeing
the arrangement of language from its large-scale to its small-scale
effects, as governed by dialectic, rather than by the traditional concepts
of rhetorical arrangement. But Melanchthon never incurs the risk of
marginalizing emotion.
Ramus and pathos: it is important where Peter Ramus (1515–72) is
concerned, not to confuse his understanding of the roles of dialectic
and rhetoric, which to him were quite distinct, methodologically and
purposively, with his appreciation of the whole process of persuasion.
He knew that the two ‘arts’ should work in combination, as reflected in
his royal appointment to a chair of ‘Philosophy (that is, principally
Dialectic) and Eloquence’. There is however strong evidence, thanks to
the work of Peter Mack52 and others, that in his practice of this
professorship, his attention tended to be distracted from pathos to
logos, from the total impact of a text on its audience (or on its reader)
to the arguments underpinning it, and to its detailed use of figuration.
But whether, overall, his concern for clear concepts and practicable
teaching methods did more good by spreading education, or more
harm by inhibiting the beneficial influence of a more integrated
rhetoric, the power, purposiveness and subtlety with which writers
influenced by him, such as Milton, developed pathos is evident – as is
the contribution of Ramism to the rhetorical appreciation of
contemporary writing such as Sidney’s Arcadia.
But here, as demonstrated by Heinrich Plett in his Rhetorik der Affekte
(1975)53 another factor comes into play. If developments in the most
radical and aggressive strain of rhetorical teaching were effectively
sidelining pathos, concomitant developments in poetical theory were
finding a new place for it. Within this broadened context of ideas, it is
possible that certain major insights about pathos and its uses were
made more, not less accessible to writers following their displacement –
in part at least, as a consequence of Ramism – from rhetoric to poetics.
As we saw earlier, Plato’s Socrates had insisted that a true
philosophic rhetoric should seek the truth through careful categorisa-
tion, before it sought to persuade (but a truth applied through a
process of cause and effect, to the emotional and spiritual needs of its
audience). Later, Cicero had advised orators to ‘acquire that neighbour-
ing borderland science of logic’ (see p. 49, above), but had implied that
the acquisition was to be employed in a distinctively rhetorical way.
Much later, Agricola had conceived of pathos as part of the process of
invention – one which was fused with reasoning in the perception of
fitness. Finally, we have just considered Melanchthon’s full integration
of logos and pathos.
In his effective refusal to draw a distinction between dialectic and
rhetorical invention (though he reflects the needs of audiences by
allowing for a ‘prudent’ method of arranging material in some cases,
and draws freely on poetry as a source of logical illustrations), it has
been argued that Ramus takes a decisive step in the direction of
scientific objectivity.54 Whatever the truth of that, there is an innate
paradox in the move: it is done to make teaching easier and less
confusing; it confines itself to methods for determining truth and thus
to teaching (docere) as first of the three officia oratoris; but as the
discipline of dialectic, teaching students to teach through a concentra-
tion on logical topics and argumentation, it discourages consideration
of the audiences to be taught, except as purely reasoning beings. In so

doing, it runs counter to earlier and later insights on the linkage of
emotion, perception and reasoning, from Aristotle to Antonio Damasio
– though Augustine points out that some minds will be both delighted
and moved to action, simply by the demonstration of truth
(De Doctrina, IV.xii.28).
Plett notes a similar perception on the part of Ascham in his
Scholemaster. A properly taught pupil, seeing the point of what he is
doing, ‘shall do it alwayes with pleasure: and pleasure allureth loue:
loue hath lust to labor: labor always obteineth his purpose’.55 The
pathos of ‘loue’ (though here it is primarily a love of learning itself, and
grows out of pleasure) is an inseparable part of the benign upward
spiral of the mind, figured here in what Plett describes as a ‘charming
anadiplosis’. For Ascham this pleasure rose from repeated exercises in
double translation, out of Latin into English and back again, which
would deepen the student’s sense of the distinctiveness of each lan-
guage in its stylistic potentialities; including (inevitably at this period)
its incorporation of rhetorical figures. That function on which Ramistic
rhetoric was now centred, delectare – reflected in its definition by the
Ramist Charles Butler as ‘ars ornate dicendi’ – thus carried the potential
to move, through its revelation of language’s power to please, and by
inference, of its fitness. Indeed as any Latin dictionary shows and as
Lawrence Green observes, in relation to Melanchthon’s conviction of
the innate emotiveness of certain words, ornatus originally meant ‘fur-
nished’; the test of a word’s fitness might be the pathos it brings with it;
and the same will be true of the ‘ornate’ figure. Moreover, Plett traces a
process of assimilation between the famous diadic injunction of Horace
in his Ars Poetica, 343, to blend profit and pleasure (‘Omne punctum
tulit, qui miscuit utile dulci’), and the threefold officia oratoris.
But the relation of moving to teaching and delighting cannot be
considered without reference to the kinds of truth being taught. Ramus
draws his logical examples from poetry as readily as from prose; and in
monarchical societies (in which, according to W.A. Rebhorn in the
Introduction to his selection of Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric),56
rhetors tended to emulate the authority of rulers, there was an outlet
for magisterial aspirations as much in poetry as in oratory (if not
more), and a powerful inducement to claim moral and educational
benefit from it. Those who sought to validate this claim, that is, teach-
ers wishing to justify the study of poetry, poetic theorists (most memo-
rably Sidney), and rhetoricians like Hoskins57 who retained Aristotle’s
sense of the power and function of pathos (Plett, p. 88), explained the
‘profit’ of poetry in terms of its power to move the reader with images
of virtue and vice, irrespective of any basis in day-to-day reality.
Another element in the interplay of ideas was that of admiration, or
wonder. Plett (p. 113) quotes Minturno’s De Poeta (1559): ‘I don’t want
it to escape you, that poets ought so to speak, that whether they teach,
or please, or stir emotion, the wonder of the reader, or hearer, will at
once ensue’ (my translation), and explains the generation of tragic
feeling: ‘Without delectare the movere (is) unthinkable; its function (i.e.
that of pleasing) is merely to induce by the power of words and the
force of thoughts both passion and admiration which then produce
compassion and fear’ (Plett, p. 115). Scaliger’s role is also explained,
principally his claim that the interaction of poetry and rhetoric began
very much earlier, almost at the beginning: ‘Originally rhetoric served
practical purposes (utilitas), and poetry aesthetic pleasure (delectatio).
But later rhetoric acquired the rhythm and thus the delectare of poetry
… which first showed itself with Gorgias … And the poets took from
rhetoric the docere, which meant they could now fulfil the demands of
Horace’s ideal’ (Plett, pp. 115–16). Sidney (writing about 1582) makes
the most memorable summary of this poetic ‘rhetoric of affect’, as he
conceives and practises it:
For these third [that is, neither divinely-inspired nor philosophical

poets] be they which most properly do imitate to teach and delight,
and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but
range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consider-
ation of what may be and should be. These be they that, as the first
and most noble sort may justly be termed vates, so these are waited
on in the excellentest languages and best understandings, with the
foredescribed name of poets; for these indeed do merely make to
imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach: and delight to move
men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they
would fly as from a stranger, and teach, to make them know that
goodness whereunto they are moved … Apology, ed. G. Shepherd,
pp. 102–358
As Plett notes (p. 143) ‘Movere, in this alliance with delectare, takes on
the dual task of activating cognition and will’. Plainly, this does not
relate directly to such emotive effects as Quintilian’s graphic murder
scene, or even to Aristotle’s shrewd linkages between predisposition
and perception (pathos via logos). But it does recall, in a more complex
branched form, the chain of instrumentality seen in Augustine’s
treatment of the officia (see above) – and also, perhaps, an even more
elaborate chain explaining the process of creativity itself, by allegoris-
ing the Nine Muses.59
Heinrich Plett shows how the English Ramist rhetoricians, Fenner,
Fraunce and Butler, and their successors John Smith and Thomas
Blount (perhaps owing to some kind of beneficial backlash from
poetry’s growing concern for affectivity?), progressively reaffirmed the
importance of movere, even though in some cases their definition of
rhetoric continued to confine it to delectare. This tendency is seen even
in English editions of the rhetoric ascribed to Ramus’s associate Talaeus
(Omer Talon), but thought to be Ramus’s own work in its original
definitive form, reflecting the strict methodological divorce of dialectic
and rhetoric. The London edition of 1584 defines Rhetoric as ‘the Art
of speaking well, whose power prudently applied has wonderful power
over the emotions’ (quoted by Plett, p. 92). The same edition empha-
sises the figures of thought (figurae sententiae) as much Cicero did in his
Orator, to which it refers (see above). They are ‘the sinews and muscles
of speech’; there are ‘no fiercer flames’ available with which to ‘ignite
the thunderbolts of Demosthenes’; nor ‘can eloquence exert more force
with any of its other machines for the flexing of souls’. Furthermore,
‘just as that earlier repertoire of tropes and figures of words was of great
value for teaching and pleasing, so this last class (that is, the figures of
thought) is of foremost efficacy for moving and convincing’ (quoted by
Plett, p. 93, my translation). Together with this reaffirmation of the
substantial efficacy of rhetorical language, there went a tendency to
expound the detailed psychological effects of figures, seen in Hoskins
as influenced by Aristotle, in Fraunce60 who in a ‘particularly uncom-
mon’ way ‘applies the psychology of the presentation of speech to the
various literatures, English Literature among them’ (Plett, p. 91), and in
George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589),61 with its detailed
exposition of the use of figures in the context of court culture.
(Interestingly, this reconnection of figuration to thought and feeling is
now being surpassed. Recent work by International Society for the
History of Rhetoric [ISHR] members62 has stressed the value of figures,
of all kinds, both in the intricate structuring of poetic language, and
even as media for the formation of scientific concepts and generation
of scientific insights.) It has also been argued that the demand for
wonder as an integral part of the poetic effect was met by the rough
rhythms and obscure imagery of metaphysical poetry, in the belief that
this matched the prescription of later Greek rhetoricians and writers on
style, such as Demetrius, ‘Longinus’, and Hermogenes (as noted above),
with their demands that style should have the quality of deinos –
exciting wonder either by its ‘terribleness’ or its ‘cleverness’ (and other
linked qualities on both sides).63 Meanwhile, Ramus’s own practice as a
teacher has been shown, despite the blind spots entailed in his
method, to have maintained the ideal of ‘the good man skilled in
speaking’, even if he discarded the term ‘orator’ in favour of ‘the
perfect citizen’, who like Cicero himself drew on all the humane arts,
and who might consequently, to use Ramus’s preferred term, be called
‘the Ciceronian’.64 Such a speaker will certainly be skilled in moving
pathos, even if according to Ramus’s prescription (Plett, p. 93) he has
drawn his knowledge of its nature, and of how and when to incite it,
from medicine and moral philosophy rather than rhetoric. The affectiv-
ity of his language will be a reflection of his total culture, and of every
aspect of his training. The developments outlined above would encour-
age this process of integration, and ensure that an understanding of
persuasive pathos in all genres, literary and functional, would be
reinforced from many directions.
There is ample evidence that the controversy about Ramistic logic
and its role, is reflected in writing – as in the sardonic argumentation
of Ramus’s own death scene in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris.65
Marlowe makes a powerful dramatic use of syllogistic reasoning, espe-
cially in Doctor Faustus. But as we have seen this may owe more to
Seton than to Ramus; and emotion is always integral to it as it was
when Faustus first triumphantly ‘Gravel’d the Pastors of the Germane
Church’ (Doctor Faustus, I.i.140). Nothing has impaired Marlowe’s skill
with pathos. He has a complete mastery of the repertoire of emotive
rhetoric – tropes, figures of words, and figures of thought such as
ecphrasis – but, as we have seen, it is intimately linked to reasoning as
in Tamburlaine’s wooing of Theridamas.
Another major consequence of the interplay between rhetoric, logic,
poetics and the other arts was an increasingly informed receptivity
amongst potential readers. Those books which sought to propagate the
manners, culture and ethos of the educated gentry, such as Henry
Peacham jnr.’s The Complete Gentleman (1622),66 Richard Brathwait’s A
Survey of History, or a Nursery for Gentry (1638),67 and Franciscus Junius’s
The Painting of the Ancients (1638),68 would ensure this. Junius (alias
Francois Du Jon) demonstrated the parallel between rhetorical pathos
and painting, not only by modelling his approach on Quintilian’s dis-
cussion of style, but by refining Quintilian’s concepts of phantasia and
enargeia, and encouraging his readers to acquire the skill of responding
emotionally and morally to the imagery of painting. They should
observe ‘what care the well-willers of Art use to take about the exercis-
ing and preparing of their phantasie, seeing they do by a most accurate
Imagination designe and make up in their mindes the compleat pic-
tures of all kind of naturall things’ (p. 72). Pleasure and passion, as
with Sidney, will begin from the recognition of ‘accurate’ imitation –
but in the higher kinds of painting imitation will not centre on natural
objects so much as on imaginary objects ‘naturally’ represented in their
distinctive qualities (again, as with Sidney). Peacham’s survey and rec-
ommendation of poetry (pp. 90–108), stresses the moral efficacy of
poetic pathos which can ‘… turn hatred to love, cowardice to valour,
and, in brief, like a queen command over all affections’ (p. 92).
Rhetorics of preaching: having touched previously on Augustine and
Malanchthon, we should also be alert to the influence of later develop-
ments in the theory and practice of preaching, on writers – particularly
Milton. Jameela Lares69 has conclusively demonstrated the dominance
in England of that taxonomy of sermon-types initiated by the
Lutheran Andreas Gerardus Hyperius, whose De formandis concionibus
sacris was published in 1553, and translated into English by 1577.
From a key text at 2 Timothy 3.16–17, and another at Romans 15.4,
Hyperius claimed St Paul’s authority for distinguishing five basic types
of confirmatio, or validatory argument, as standard parts of the sermon.
Two were related to doctrine (teaching the correct and reproving the
false); two treated behaviour (instilling the good, correcting the bad);
and one (derived from the Romans text) offered consolation (Lares, pp.
61–2). That this classification was accepted in England, resting as it
does on the Bible rather than the traditional rhetorical genres, reflects a
more general tendency to reject or marginalise the persuasive art
evolved in pagan antiquity, including its style. Lares (pp. 64–5) cites
the view of John Preston (a Puritan who, untypically, preached at
court), that ‘human learning’ should be used ‘to prepare the under-
standing to deliver divine truth’ – melted down and recast for God’s
service like the Egyptian gold taken by the Israelites. Milton’s recasting
of pagan materials such as Achilles’ shield, might be owed to this
impulse, as much as to any ‘anxiety of influence’ (see my discussion of
Harold Bloom’s analysis, and my own, pp. 111–13 and 174–7, below).
Even so, Hyperius’s categories were linked to inherited rhetorical con-
cepts in a way which would help preachers to focus their persuasive
effects. Doctrine and reproof served to teach, instruction and the cor-
rection of behaviour to move, and consolation to please. This paralleled
the divine virtues being inculcated as faith was taught, charity moved,
and the pleasure of hope conferred (Lares, pp. 62, 82). But consolation
would maintain this pleasure (bred by assurance of salvation following

conviction of sin), in the face of conflicting emotions, for example,
fear of worldly rejection, which would be addressed by the preacher.
Consolation involved steadying conscience and stilling anxiety, as
reflected in the many books devoted to this topic (Lares, pp. 83–4).
Where Milton is concerned, this points forward to the serene con-
science of his Lady, as portrayed in A Masque, the postlapsarian
anguish of Samson, and Adam’s prior to consolation.
Moreover, the recurrent progression in Milton’s work between two of
Hyperius’s categories, correction and consolation, probably reflects the
influence of his first tutor at Christ’s College, Cambridge, William
Chappell – a strong Ramist in his discursive practice. Lares (p. 86)
quotes Chappell’s manual, The Preacher (pp. 20–1), on the need for this
pairing, implying two correlated uses for pathos, in the moving of hope
and fear:
The heart of man may be irregular, or straying from the right and its
rule two ways. Namely, by being exalted above the rule, or by being
dejected beneath it, and therefore … it may want rectifying, in the
first by Reprehension or Reproof, in the latter by Consolation or
Comfort.
Arrogance will be reproved by fear, and dejection comforted by hope.

The sense of absolute dependence on God’s grace evidently required
that things be kept in balance, as if hope was latent in fear, and fear in
hope (compare Melanchthon’s account of faith, as an emotion).
Having shown how Milton’s prose reproves false doctrine in the
martial spirit recommended by the manuals, with their assumption of
a learned and judicious audience for this type of discourse, Lares goes
on to show his balanced use of correction and consolation in Paradise
Lost – from the opening lines onward, but with particular intensity in
the last two books. This is linked to a demonstration (pp. 164–6) of the
pathos proper to correction (that is, the visionary force of enargeia), and
to consolation (that is, the ‘verbal, not visual’ promptings of faith,
their importance magnified by the preacher by all appropriate rhetori-
cal means – though faith may be exercised in the construing of
metaphor or parable, as with the promise that the woman’s seed will
bruise the serpent’s head). Having argued that the angel visitants of
Paradise Lost parallel the faithful minister (or ‘angel’) visiting his
parishioners at home (pp. 151–8), Jameela Lares recalls how Michael
uses not only enargeia but actual visions of the future to correct the
fallen but repentant Adam, and a rhetoric of faith to console him. I

will suggest shortly how a similar progression, appropriate to the
almost perfect innocence of its heroine, is achieved through the
imagery of Milton’s earlier work, the Ludlow Masque.
Rhetoric and revolutionary change: the impact of the Civil War period
in all areas of thought and culture, is examined by Nigel Smith in his
Literature and Revolution (1994).70 What could happen to rhetorical
pathos at such a time appears in the violent imagery of Ranter prose,
notably in the writings of Abiezer Coppe (see, again, Nigel Smith, for
his collection of Ranter Writings).71 More gradual, but similarly revolu-
tionary in its implications, was the development of a consciously
gender-based or feminist perspective on persuasion which continued
through our period both in the skilled rhetorical practice and argu-
mentation of women pamphleteers (see Chapter 4 below, pp. 136–8)
and in the expressed opinions of women such as Lady Mary Wroth,
and Mary Astell,72 on Rhetoric and persuasive writing. When examin-
ing the emotional effects of writing produced later in our period, we
should be alert to its possible reflection of the changes within all kinds
of relationship, from the political to the personal, occasioned by such a
major upheaval.
Postscript: involuntary sympathy: outside our period, but at once a
symbol of the development in observational natural science, associated
with the later seventeenth century, and a pointer to the more
instinctive aspects of emotional enargeia, is Adam Smith’s theory of
involuntary sympathy. In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments,73 Smith
observes that ‘Persons of delicate fibres … complain, that in looking on
the sores and ulcers … exposed by beggars … they are apt to feel an
itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own
bodies’ (Part I, Section 1.1.3, p. 10). Moreover, in the following Section
2.1.5, he claims that this sympathy for bodily sensations is surpassed
by the readiness with which our imaginations ‘mould themselves’
upon those of others. Such involuntary responses will contribute the
gifted persuader’s use of ‘the emotional laser’ (see below).
2.3 The applications of pathos
Drawing together the ideas and insights about pathos, which persisted,
evolved, resurfaced, diverged, or converged over two thousand years,
we can see the possibilities and expectations in the minds of writers
and audiences over our period, and we have a better sense of what to
look for in our current readings – whatever the lack of overall intellec-
tual coherence. Several major distinctions have emerged: between

pathos as roused in the individual, and in the community (and, at least
by implication, in the crowd); between pathos as irrational perturbation
arising from the concupiscent and irascible faculties, and pathos as
integral to the will and reason in their assent to truth; between pathos
as a practical resource for the conduct of social or personal relations on
the secular level, and pathos as a spur to philosophic idealism or ulti-
mate spiritual communion, within the Church and between the
Church and God; between the pathos generated orally in face-to-face
encounter, and the pathos communicated less directly through writing,
with or without interpretation or commentary, and whether read by an
individual or by a group (with whatever sympathetic or antipathetic
reaction, amongst the group or within the individual). We have also
seen the diffusion of the concept of pathos in its various Platonic,
Aristotelean, Ciceronian and Augustinian strains, and through its
various combinations with ethos and logos, with teaching and delighting,
both through proliferating rhetorical genres (for example, preaching)
and through the neighbouring disciplines of philosophy and poetry
(we will shortly follow it into the evolving genre of fiction).
We have already glimpsed how writers can play across these opposi-
tions, from Plato in his written representations of spoken dialogue and
oral comment on written speeches, to Marlowe’s probing inversions of
the ideal of spiritual ascent in the person of Tamburlaine. We must
now see how these perceptions of pathos, sharper for the oppositional
patterns in which they are variously placed, can inform our reading of
pathetic texts – in which we will find the stimuli to emotion combined
and stratified in any number of ways, and subject to as many kinds of
instability, alternation and transformation.
But there are three specific indicators of the effective deployment of
pathos, whether it is represented in impassioned characters, or stirred
directly in readers or audiences, which involve at least three basic
kinds of interaction between persuader and persuadee, and which we
must look out for. I also want to identify certain modes of relationship
between the topic of the persuasion, the persuader, and the persuadee,
which will recur in the texts, and the contexts, to be studied in the
following chapters. The first two kinds of interaction were originally
proposed in Persuading People (1992).74
2.3.1 The emotional laser

This is a simple technical analogy (though it has more complex vari-
ants – see, for example, the opening of Chapter 4). The energy built up
between mirrors in a laser tube, patterns the progressive intensification

of emotion between persuader and persuadee (more easily imagined
face to face, but quite capable of development between writer and
reader). On the model proposed by Quintilian, the emotion generated
in the persuader’s own mind by the mental contemplation of some
object, is projected to the audience. Once the audience’s emotion is
sensed by the speaker, the audience’s involvement becomes in its turn
an image to be reflected back to them, which moves and involves them
further and draws the speaker his/her self further into their feeling, and
so on. This progression can be expressed through argument, and
through further reflections of the situation faced, and of the action
urged. Success depends on a precise alignment of stances and values on
both sides, and thus the phenomenon of affect, in its intensity, is a
combination of pathos, the power that sways an audience, and the per-
ception of ethos. Such an interchange may involve a shared emotion,
for example, common detestation of a murder as in Quintilian’s
example above, or an increasingly strong oppositional emotion. If a
speaker catches her/his audience on the raw, interaction will intensify
between two correlated but opposed emotions (for example, detesta-
tion of the sin of pride, and anger at an affront to pride, as in Latimer’s
sermon, pp. 131–4, below. But being caught on the raw will usually
indicate a level of repressed feeling, for example, an uneasy conscience
too painful to attend to, making anger far more tolerable. This fact
makes practicable the second kind of controlled interaction.
2.3.2 Reversal of bias

As indicated in Persuading People (p. 50) this might occur involuntarily,
as when a grossly prejudiced speaker pushes a mildly prejudiced audi-
ence to the point when they feel ‘That’s going too far’, and start con-
templating the human rights of those attacked. The perception and
feeling repressed by prejudice may become permanently dominant,
reversing the bias. Speakers or writers may use irony to achieve the
same effect (for example, Swift in A Modest Proposal), or they may
reverse an audience’s emotional bias towards something by recategoris-
ing it, as in Aristotle’s account of pathos, for example, when an action
previously regarded as deliberate comes to be seen as involuntary. Or
the reversal may be based on an unchanged perception, as when
repressed guilt underlies anger, played on by the laser. The guilt can be
brought the surface, changing the persuadee’s emotional predisposi-
tion. Chappell’s correlated correction and consolation (see above) involve
alternating reversals of bias towards fear and hope. The reversal may be
achieved through the laser technique, as when anger at its peak is sud-
denly transformed, by the persuader’s instancing of some shameful
and undeniable fact about the persuadee, into equally intense shame.
2.3.3 The RPER factor

In his/her engagement with an audience or readership, the persuader
may consider the range of predictable emotional response. Many situa-
tions will entail this, from speeches in Parliament, Congress or
Assembly to opposed political parties (typically moving triumph on
one side, derision on the other), to a mixed congregation attending a
sermon, to the reading of a poem designed to stir debate as with
Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ (see p. 31, above). Dissent in the audience
may advance an immediate persuasive purpose – for example, convinc-
ing one part of the audience with the aid of the other’s intransigence,
or pressuring those susceptible to change. The concept of RPER is also
useful in estimating what would have been beyond the prediction of a
persuader, at the moment of communication.
To find these kinds of interaction in early modern texts should help
us to evaluate modern critical responses to them; but we will also
detect some of them in the critical writing itself (for example, in the
passage from Terry Eagleton’s William Shakespeare to be considered in
Chapter 2).
2.3.4 Persuader, topic and persuadee – various combinations

But interaction cannot be fully judged without a further distinction,
prompted by the ‘Old Rhetoric’s’ various ideas of pathos, with respect
to the main referents of rhetorical emotion – persuader, topic,
persuadee – and their relative importance at any given phase of feeling.
As already indicated, we might expect to find four basic kinds occur-
ring in different sequences and combinations:
(a) Emotion in response to sensory objects or physical actions, as

presented to the mind through graphic imagery and reflected in
the emotion of a persuader (simple sensory enargeia).
(b) The progressive intensification of feeling, not primarily with
reference to external objects, but to the interaction of persuader
and persuadee (the laser).
(c) The emotion occurring in a dialogic context, when the persuader
surpasses the persuadee’s promptings, showing a radically individ-
ual intellect or inspiration (for example, Adam in dialogue with
God demonstrating his need for a companion – PL, VIII.412–33).
(d) A development of perception about the topic of persuasion, result-

ing from the interaction between the persuader and the persuadee,
and creating insight into the topic through new thinking, in new
language – together with positive emotional change and the sense
of empowerment. This innovation is typified by the coining of
metaphor, when it seems integral to the common situation of per-
suader and persuadee, and supplied by the audience if not spoken by
them. Thus it fulfils the three Aristotelean criteria of virtue, compe-
tence and goodwill, and the three Ciceronian duties of teaching,
pleasing and moving. Pathos is linked to the growing sense of a
shared ethos in a powerfully affective engagement.
Alertness to these should make possible a more discriminating analysis

of pathos at the various stages of its development in any given passage,
and a confirmation of those effects by a closer scrutiny of the detail of
language.
2.4 Milton’s A Masque: the progression of pathos
The conclusion of this chapter points the way to what follows in the
next chapter. What will we find in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle
(later known as Comus), staged in 1634 and revised for publication in
1645, which reflects the rhetorical ideas current at that time, and the
particular ones most likely to have been taught to Milton at School or
University? And what will we also find that seems more amenable to a
third-millenium reading than to the perceptions of the original reader,
or of the poet himself satisfied with his own designs and sense of a
finished work?
Milton illustrates, repeatedly, two modes of spiritual progress: from
sin, through repentance to regeneration, and from temptations of
body, mind and soul all successfully resisted, to physical or spiritual
sustenance and further enlightenment. It may be inferred from what
Jameela Lares has argued (Lares, pp. 83–4), that this second kind of
progression shared its underlying assumptions with the sermon-type of
consolation, as it directed the conscience in discriminatory judgement,
steadied it against assault and rejection, and assured it of salvation. The
fallen Adam and Eve, and Samson, represent the first mode of progres-
sion, Christ (as in Paradise Regained), Abdiel, and the three children of
A Masque, the second mode. Where the first mode is concerned, the
way to repentance and confirmed forgiveness seems to be reflected in a
second series of temptations, successfully resisted (as with Samson), or
in a convinced response to preaching as a the channel of divine grace,

progressing from threat and admonition to consolation (as with
Adam).
In contrast, the second mode progresses through the sequence sug-
gested above: from sensual fantasy and/or diffidence resisted through
reason and the exercise of memory, to a redoubling of reassurance –
inwardly conceived, and externally confirmed. This progress highlights
the emotional aspects of resisted temptation as dramatised in A
Masque: the vivid and protracted fantasies of fear, desire, and false rea-
soning, bravely and rationally outfaced; the scorn and anger directed at
the unmasked tempter; the imagery of residual weakness requiring
rescue; and the visions of future reassurance and reward. A brief look at
what the Lady achieves will serve to demonstrate how useful the older
rhetorical ideas still are – and also, what we can gain from today’s
range of critical approaches, whose use of pathos we are shortly to
examine.
When the Lady enters (170), heading into danger, arming herself
with virtue, the audience knows that she is overheard by the Spirit and
by Comus, who have both hidden themselves – one representing the
‘immortal mind’ (as it is called in ‘Il Penseroso’, 91), and the other, the
flesh. But here, colouring our first impression of her, is one of those
points in the text where we glimpse what deconstructive criticism
would call an ‘incoherence,’75 an unguarded gap in the ‘complete steel’
which protects her (420). This may be signalled to us by a fleeting
sense of revulsion, even if we follow Christopher Hill’s76 prompting
and detect a patrician puritan’s distaste for the ‘riot, and ill-managed
merriment [of] loose unlettered hinds’ (172, 174) likely to result from
the government’s devious, crowd-pleasing encouragement of country
sports. The Lady’s words may still sound snobbish – besides betraying a
raw note of insecurity, a fear of insult or worse. She is reluctant ‘[t]o
meet the rudeness, and swilled insolence / Of such late wassailers’
(178–9), though she bravely accepts that she must do so if she is to ask
the way. No such note is heard in her distrust of ‘tap’stry halls’ (324),
they being part of her familiar environment, while her fear of violence
and insult in the wild wood implies the possibility of something far
harder to cope with in a place frequented by real, and restive, peas-
antry. The Ludlow performance took place in a ‘hall’ that was almost
certainly ‘tap’stried’ (324), both in itself and as the scene for Comus’s
attempted seduction, reversing her anticipation of a ‘lowly shed’ (323)
in a manner both ironic and reassuring. She is equipped to face
anybody, however corrupt, who belongs in such a setting. His
blandishment will be couched in her language, that of the logically

and rhetorically trained elite – and his shamefaced defeat will make
any attempt at force more hesitant (as Comus is to prove). Similarly,
she is prepared to face enchantment. It is significant that when she did
confront her fear (205–9), she had already been distracted towards the
more manageable threat of supernatural evil.
There is, in short, an incoherence between the Elder Brother’s
subsequent claim that ‘No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer / Will
dare to soil her virgin purity’ (426–7), his own previous hedging
admission that she might be in danger (406–13), and her own very real
nervousness. She is loath, in meeting the merrymakers, to provoke a
mood-swing from gratitude to some ‘ill-managing’ landlord to violent,
opportunistic class-resentment. Her ability to ‘[dash] brute violence’
(451) seems to apply only to those potential threateners who are
prepared to debate with her. However distant morally, they inhabit the
same rhetorical world of persuasion and rejoinder.
Their violence, as the Spirit represents it in his later situation-report
to the two brothers, is more figuratively conveyed (and more
suggestive of spiritual evil). Comus ‘and his monstrous rout are heard
to howl / Like stabled wolves, or tigers at their prey’ (533–4). ‘Stabled’
as a metonymy is itself unstable: it may mean that the wolves are loose
in the stable, or (more shockingly) that they are installed authorita-
tively in parishes, prebends or fellowships; or they may be pampered
courtiers (like Comus?).
Nevertheless, Milton has given to the Lady, as played by Alice
Egerton, whom he must compliment, what he is later to deny to Eve.
She is beguiled by the cunning of a false pastor (clerical or otherwise),
but she is endowed with a vision of good, and abides by it. The enargeia
of fear is met by that of faith, which ensures that her memory serves her
better than Eve’s is to do – even though her fear has now taken on the
vaguer, less socially-specific form of ‘fantasies … calling shapes, and
beckoning shadows dire’ (205–7). As we have seen, Quintilian uses the
term phantasia to account for the controlled generation of pathos, and
the Lady’s sacred rhetoric checks the incipient movement of fear with
the admonitory memory of conscience, by calling up a counter-fantasy.
The vision of Faith, Hope … and chastity (214–15) which she conjures
inwardly, gives outward form to the virtuous adjuncts of her soul: the
‘straightening’ of her ‘emotion’ (in Augustine’s phrase) means that, in
place of the chaotic and delusive world of sense, she clearly discerns
the intellectual good, whether this recalls Quintilian’s claim that, for
the rhetorically-gifted, the images of absent things are so represented
to the mind, that we seem to perceive them with our eyes as present
realities (IO, VI.ii.29); or implies that she can ‘see’ grace ‘visibly’, like
the Platonic Forms; or both. If this passage is consistent with the pre-
scriptions for consolatory preaching referred to above, with their stress
on the word rather than sensory imagery, the descending trio of
figures, both in their movement and in their appearance – Hope,
perhaps significantly, being the most developed – must be metaphors
figuring the movement of grace in the soul as sensed by the Lady.
The strange substitution of ‘chastity’ for ‘charity’ points metaleptically
to that higher adjunct of the soul, the ‘excellent gift’ of charity whose
descent it makes possible. Here the Lady does not, as later, use reason
(beyond a simple citation of final cause in her assurance of protection
at ‘need’). Her disciplined memory of what has been instilled into her
‘Conscience’ (the very faculty tended by consolatory preaching) takes
her straight to the higher strength of contemplation. And what she
visualises inwardly is immediately endorsed by a divinely-vouchsafed
outward sign, marked by emphatic repetition (221–5):
Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err, there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.
However, the cloud’s dark exterior connotes a more immediate danger

– still concealed in the ‘tufts’ of the ‘grove’ over which it broods. In the
context of consolatory preaching as explicated by Lares, her earlier
fears of physical harm, and of her own terror, have been controlled by
a rational trust in God’s protection, and her assurance has been
renewed; and as a result she is ready for a further trial of conscience,
discovering strength in danger as though the ‘sable cloud’ were yet
another of Erasmus’s Sileni. The song she sings to summon help (and
which, invoking Echo as ‘daughter of the sphere’,77 reflects her own
echoing of Charity with Chastity), both carries her in contemplation
up through the ‘silver lining’, and in the short term, proves a hin-
drance. This is signalled by the absence of a further sign – a lack of that
responsive voice which is normally integral to the Echo song.78 Having
shown how to discipline inward weakness, she must now face trial by
external evil.
Comus’s overhearing of the Lady’s song may seem to involve Milton
in another ‘incoherence’, weakening the overall persuasive distinction
between good and evil. Comus responds with amazingly perceptive

empathy to ‘such a sacred, and home-felt delight, / Such sober certainty
of waking bliss’ (262–3, my italics). He perceives that very pleasure of
Hope, which the manuals assigned to Consolation. But his precipitate
resolution – ‘I’ll speak to her / And she shall be my queen’ – betrays the
perversity of his response: he is viciously drawn to the Lady through
those very adjuncts – virtue and joyous assurance – which confer such
beauty on her.79 The ‘home-felt’ quality of her ecstatic song (felt, that
is, to the depths of her capacity), moves him sexually because despite
its intuition to the contrary his ‘soul’ is perversely ‘imbrute[d]’ (see the
Elder Brother’s speech, 467–8).
But the Lady is to declare categorically that he has ‘nor ear, nor soul’
(784): how can I, speaking personally, square this with the fact that
(for me) the single italicised line shows in itself, not a blunted, vitiated,
‘imbruted’ response, but a more human comprehension of what the
Lady is about than all her brother’s Spenserian hyperboles?
Nevertheless, the brothers’ debate about their sister’s safety is
worth noting here, at the end of the chapter, for its echoes of Plato
and Erasmus. In the Enchiridion Militis Christiani,80 Erasmus amplifies
Paul’s picture of the struggle between the bodily ‘affections’ and
reason, describing how the soul ‘stryueth and wrastleth with the
heuy burden of the erthly body’ (p. 61). It will be ‘vtterly drowned
in the fylth of the body’ (ibid.) unless the second Adam, ‘the ymage
of the celestyall man’ (p. 72) ultimately dependent on grace (p. 75)
defeats the first Adam. This foreshadows the Elder Brother’s poising
of the carnalised soul (as seen in Comus) against a spiritualized flesh
(418–75).
For the rest of her encounter with Comus, the Lady continues to
exemplify the preachers’ model of a wayfaring Christian in need of
comfort, and Milton’s own view of the endowments of a Christian
fortified by learning and confirmed in virtue. Milton’s good woman, is
in Lares’s words (p. 133), like ‘Milton’s good man … a regenerate
Protestant, depending on [her] works to validate [her] faith’. Her
eloquence in rebutting Comus’s misrepresentation of nature, in the
masque’s central debate (659–813), shows all the militancy expected of
a ‘redargutive’ reproving of false doctrine (Lares, pp. 98–9), and rises
from what Milton in his rebuttal of Hall calls ‘regenerate reason’. Lares
(p. 133) quotes An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642):
For doubtlesse that indeed according to art is most eloquent, which

returnes and approaches nearest to nature from whence it came;
and they expresse nature best, who in their lives least wander from
her safe leading, which may be call’d regenerate reason. [YP 1;874]
In the next chapter we will be looking at writing which makes no such

assumptions about the links of nature to language, or about the regen-
erative power of belief, but which continues to look under surface
appearances – even if this sometimes involves turning our familiar
emotions inside out.
3
Old Passions, New Purposes:
Rhetoric Rhetoricised
3.1 Reconsidering: how and why?
This chapter will explore the use of pathos in modern critical writing
– as acute as any to be found in early modern texts – besides antici-
pating and (later) interacting with Chapter 5, which tries to trace the
emotional appeals made by the authors or by their characters (or by
the authors through the characters) to the original audiences in their
particular contexts. But I do not intend, in that chapter, to supersede
the judgements which will be sampled here. I wish, rather, to
highlight the way in which today’s critics exploit pathos for their
own persuasive purposes, often laudable, always interesting. They
tend to put their own emotional ‘spin’ on the pathos of early modern
writing, and to develop distinct modes of pathos in relation to the
topics treated. My aim ultimately is to distinguish the spin which
twists the original meaning, from that which (quite properly)
presents it from a different angle.
‘New purposes’, in my chapter title, is a conveniently loose
expression. Today’s commentators might have a mixture of purposes
in singling out particular instances of pathos from the mass of
sixteenth and seventeenth century texts, literary or dramatic. I shall be
exploring the practicability of one such motive, in Chapters 4 and 5.
This is the intention (or dream) already referred to, of reviving the ‘old
passions’ of a text. Even here, ‘old passion’ will be evoked with a ‘new
purpose’: to recover feelings which were once habitual, or at least latent.
But, especially where a text is canonical, famed among other things for
the strength or subtlety of its passion, the more common tendency
amongst critics and scholars will be to re-assess and reinterpret that
feeling and thus challenge the whole prior estimate of the work – often
83
with a further end in view. This might be to justify a theoretical

approach, further an ideological position, express solidarity or claim
leadership, secure publication, advance or maintain the critic’s own
standing, or several of these, some being more avowable than others.
One benefit of my approach should be, that its understanding of the
processes through which pathos is generated, will be applied to the play
of emotion on emotion – the feelings aroused in critics by the
emotions which they detect in (or under) the texts which they are
reading. In at least one case, it will also be applied to the critic’s
understanding of creativity itself, the interaction of poets and their
precursors, and the very indirect or occluded modes of reflected feeling
which this is said to involve.
And it is not perhaps simply a matter of calculation. Those of us who
investigate former feeling may do so in widely differing frames of mind
(often related to the current standing of the author – and the passage –
under scrutiny). The emotion latent in such texts might in many cases
be quite dispassionately analysed and explained by today’s critic or
scholar, with no marks of feeling beyond (perhaps) enthusiasm for the
job itself. Sometimes, though, such texts may still surprise their
modern interpreter with so sharp an emotional reaction, that s/he is
impelled to communicate that urgency, or convinced of the need to do
so on the grounds that the urgency itself is critically significant.
In other cases perhaps, the commentator might (less justifiably) find
fuel in a text for the emotion he/she is already determined to feel,
relying on it as a way of authenticating some critical position In either
case, the ‘old passions’ of a text, noticed for the first time or newly
interpreted, may become symptoms of some cultural and ideological
condition, still contentious; or they may be read as evidence – in itself
highly emotive – of some previously unsuspected fact about the writer.
They may even give rise to a critical ‘epiphany’, as the old passion
precipitates some new realisation, carrying its own very different
emotional charge.
Two earlier studies, by Richard Levin (1979) and more recently by
Brian Vickers (1993)1 have both examined the various re-interpretative
procedures of twentieth century criticism, from Christian allegorising
to Marxism, feminism and new historicism. In Appropriating
Shakespeare, Vickers instances Howard Felperin’s attempt to
deconstruct the sustained antithesis between good faith and courtesy,
and corrupt imagination, in The Winter’s Tale. As Vickers notes
(p. 203), Felperin detects in Polixenes’ initial speech of thanks and
farewell, ‘a sniggering phallic allusion to his ‘standing in’ for Leontes’
Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised 85
with Hermione (WT, i.2.6 ff). Here, a previously unsuspected emotion

of contemptuous and cynical sexual triumph is detected in the speech
of this royal guest, and becomes in its turn the object of Felperin’s own
distaste. Snigger is essentially an observer’s word, registering a negative
emotional response to another person’s prurience or malice. According
to Vickers this exemplifies ‘the standard deconstructionist ploy of
generalising a specific feature [that is, an instance of ‘conceited’ courtly
language] into a thematic comment’ (ibid.). What might be regarded as
an even more extreme step – i.e. the direct inversion of traditional
moral and emotional responses – will be exemplified later, as Terry
Eagleton tests his readership with his view of Macbeth. Here, however, I
am not so much concerned with the logic and methodology of such
procedures, as with their transmutation and revaluation of earlier
feeling.
In each of the examples to follow, I shall consider where the
commentator stands (or is ‘coming from’) critically; how they interact
and argue with the reader; and how they use emotion, from the mild
to the vehement, to validate the whole process of engagement. This
will often involve a reappraisal of the ‘inner’ emotive relationships in
the texts under discussion by the critic, as they re-present these to the
reader, challenging earlier perceptions. I shall consider in each case the
apparent relationship of writer, topic, issue and audience. What range
of response is anticipated from the projected readership, or sections of
it? When there is an evident intention to stir feeling, whether by
engaging with the readers’ existing emotional investment in the text
under discussion, or by a more direct address to their opinions, their
attitudes or their self-esteem, does the writer expect to enhance the
persuasive effect – for the minority whose views they really expect to
influence – by dividing the whole actual and potential readership
against itself? I shall seek to apply the two criteria of energeia and
enargeia, looking out for forcefulness, focus, clarity and vividness; and
in doing so I will make selective use of the analytic methods already
outlined and demonstrated: cognitive engagement, inclusion/exclu-
sion, sentence perspective, deixis and other factors.
3.2 Baldwin and Marlowe: talent and the spotlight
3.2.1 Building up Baldwin

However little attention it seems to have excited (judging, that is, by
the sparseness of subsequent publication), Ringler and Flachmann’s
claim on behalf of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (written in 1553)
is cogently argued. In the title of their 19882 edition they call this text
The First English Novel. To substantiate the claim, their introduction
(pp. xxi–iv) points to Baldwin’s original storyline, to his acute local
and temporal verisimilitude (involving the printing-house of John Day,
the Reformation printer, and a court and city in the throes of
Reformation), to a ‘narrative … structured like inter-nesting boxes’,
and to a ‘characterization [which] is quite extraordinary’, especially
that of the principal comic butt of the story, Gregory Streamer, who is
individualised ‘by the rhythm of his clauses and by his unique,
pompous style’. His exposure is aided by a device ‘not available to
present-day authors … the marginal note’. Thanks to this, Baldwin
‘can, while maintaining his pose of impartial reporter, comment amus-
ingly or satirically upon the action’. This process will be further
assisted, for all readers properly sensitive to the context, by the fact
that Streamer tells his fantastic story to a small group of three highly
judicious men, lying awake in the lodgings at Court which were – as a
matter of historical fact – assigned to one of them, George Ferrers (who
was Master of the King’s Pastimes under Edward VI). We will look
shortly at their likely response as mediated by the editors, who sum up
Baldwin’s achievement as follows:
So, in Beware the Cat we have a fantastic fiction set realistically in

the London of Baldwin’s own time; a very original handling of
point of view – a first-person narrative with authorial comment;
an enveloping action; and satirical characterization, in which the
narrator by his speech produces an effect quite the opposite of
that which he intends. Baldwin also presents us with a novel of
ideas – ideas of pressing contemporary importance reflecting the
religious struggles of the Protestant Reformation. In Beware the
Cat, the author is playing a very complex fictional game: he uses
an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illusion. The
general thrust of his fictional argument is that only a person
gullible enough to believe a character as outrageous as Gregory
Streamer would believe in the ‘unwritten verities’ handed down
by the ‘traditions’ of the Church. In literature, contrary to what
one expects in other disciplines, more complex productions are
sometimes created before more simple ones. This is certainly
the case in the history of English prose fiction, for Baldwin’s nar-
rative techniques were more sophisticated than those of most
writers of fiction before the nineteenth century. (Introduction,
pp. xxiv–xxv)
Here we have a benchmark for the milder degrees of emotion, both

empathetic (on behalf of Baldwin’s readership) and pathetic – as
transmitted to today’s academic enquirer in the field of early fiction.
Baldwin’s editors use the amplificatory device of listing (synathroesmus
or congeries) to enforce their point, further emphasised by the crispest
form of oppositional argument – the contrary – to demonstrate their
author’s satirical intention, and its realisation. The phrase ‘novel of
ideas’ engages with the cognitive schemata of today’s specialist reader.
It activates a script (or longer-term MOP) for construing Baldwin’s text.
The goal of such reading will be to detect the stimulation of thought,
through narrated events. Then, immediately, through the reiterative,
bridging device of anadiplosis (‘ideas – ideas of pressing contemporary
importance’) modern interpretation is linked to a mildly expressed
reminder of the urgency and contentiousness of the ideas (and the
concomitant feeling) to be detected here. Ringler and Flachmann have
previously called the reader’s attention (p. xxii) to the very specific
contemporaneousness of Beware the Cat, the short time-scale of events
to which it refers, from the onset of preaching against the Mass early in
1549 to the Christmas season of 1552 (as narrow a span of time –
say – as that referred to by a modern political journalist, commenting
on a government’s performance since a previous election). Baldwin’s
readers might be exhilarated by the pace of change, reconciled to it, or
reluctant to accept it and still effectively traumatised by it. They would
be aware, too, of its impact on their neighbours, and familiar with the
tensions within families, between neighbours, and in other larger
groupings such as parishes, colleges and corporations. Such a specific
and recoverable sense of anticipated engagement with the emotions of
an audience might serve as a paradigm for my explorations in Chapter 5,
in which (again) we will begin with Baldwin. It will be interesting to
see whether the more vehement critical engagement shortly to be
encountered will be so precisely linked to particular places and times.
Ringler and Flachmann place their most arresting statement last, just
before their summary estimate of ‘Baldwin’s narrative art’. The ‘novel
of ideas’ works through ‘a very complex fictional game’. This, we are to
infer, entails an implied parallel between the folly, slackness, prurience
and self-deception of Streamer in his magical practice, and the mingled
delusion, greed and hypocrisy attributed to Catholicism. Baldwin, we
are told, ‘uses an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illu-
sion’. In broader terms, the reader is invited to compare two social and
personal scripts, each involving a blend of chicanery and self-
deception, and perhaps diabolical deception too. Logos, then, has a
vital role in the conveyance of Baldwin’s message, prompting readers

to compare such things as the vividly evoked ‘illusion’ of comprehensi-
ble animal language – supposedly made accessible through a process of
natural magic as nauseous as it is garbled – and another ‘illusion’: the
sacramental worship of Catholicism. This is founded in the doctrine of
transubstantiation, a doctrine which, it is inferred, can only be upheld
by a comparable confusion of thought.
The very strong case being made for Baldwin’s talent, as a propagan-
dist in the medium of fiction, is not however helped by his editors’
concluding argument – a loosely syllogistic linkage of formal complex-
ity (by implication, characterising the novel), and some early modern
texts, of which Baldwin’s is one. If we reverse the terms in the proposi-
tion ‘all novels are complex texts’,3 we will see the dubiousness of
Ringler’s and Flachmann’s inference. But they have nevertheless made
a strong case for their author – strengthened, despite the generally mild
level of feeling, by their use of pathos, as they engage with the likely
response of Baldwin’s original readers. This is seen most clearly in an
earlier section:
Streamer begins his oration with a Mistress Quickly-like perfor-

mance of complete recall and free association, but in his attempt to
impress his listeners he unconsciously reveals himself as a pedantic
fool. He spews forth Latin quotations and esoteric bits of learning
that are often ludicrously incorrect. He pretends to be adept in all
sciences and solemnly asserts that the astronomers are wrong in
supposing that the changes of the moon cause the variation of the
tides; on the contrary, he claims that the tides cause the changes of
the moon[.] He is a coiner of bizarre terms, … and he delights in a
virtuoso parade of rhyming terms in enumerating the ‘barking of
dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, tumbling of rats,’ etc. He
praises his friend Thomas by saying that no others could have done
so well, ‘except myself, and a few more of the best learned alive’.
(Ringler and Flachmann, pp. xxiii–iv [with omissions])
Thanks to the ‘inter-nesting boxes’ of Baldwin’s narrative, modern

readers will be aware, like the implied reader, that Streamer’s original
audience (three real men, though in a fictional situation) was select,
learned and judicious. Whether belated or contemporary, we, as
readers, can imagine their distaste or embarrassment as listeners (made
easier to conceal and harder to detect by the fact that they are to be
pictured lying in bed, in the shadows!). Baldwin’s structuring of the
narrative has a similar effect to that produced by Quintilian’s reading

of Cicero’s Verrines, V.xxxiii.86. Given Cicero’s image of the debauched
Praetor with his mistress, Quintilian fills it out, not just with further
details but with attendant emotions – ‘the silent loathing and
frightened shame [that is, embarrassment] of those who viewed the
scene’ (IO, VIII.iii.65). Similarly, Baldwin’s editors help us empathise
with Streamer’s original audience. Words and phrases such as ‘pedantic
fool’, ‘spews’, ‘ludicrously incorrect’, ‘solemnly asserts’, ‘bizarre’, and
‘virtuoso parade’, serve (allowing for changes in vocabulary) to register
the imagined perceptions of immediate listeners, and the actual
response of informed modern readers, with equal accuracy. Of course,
we as readers are further removed emotionally. We are unlikely to
empathise so far, as to squirm on behalf of Ferrers and his two
companions, forced to listen to Streamer’s rigmarole. But, conceptu-
ally, we’re better placed to understand him. The editors enlist an idea
and a comic paradigm unknown to Baldwin – our memory of Mistress
Quickly’s rambling narrative (for example, II HenryIV, 2.1.78–94) – and
the concept of free association, to help us appreciate the quality of
Streamer’s speech and its likely impact on men of sense. A strong con-
viction of Baldwin’s talent in creating such a comic monstrosity is also
reflected in the editors’ emphatic use of anaphora or initial repetition
(‘He …He …He’) throughout the lines quoted. The editors’ intention is
straightforward: to demonstrate Baldwin’s importance, recommending
him to the reader as skilful and imaginatively engaging (pleasing to
read, at least in those respects), acutely reflective and symptomatic of
the growing emotional and cultural alienation between Protestants and
Catholics (teaching new insights on a topic of major importance, now
as then), and worthy of promotion to the rank of pioneer novelist
(moving the reader to a real mental adjustment, and perhaps to action –
in the form of committed study).
3.2.2 Remaking Marlowe

In turning from Baldwin to Marlowe, we come out of shadows into a
spotlighted area – the lights now distinct and now merging, picking
out a writer of iconic status, and a critic who has been much emulated
and much attacked. Whatever we think of Stephen Greenblatt’s New
Historicism as a critical method, his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)4
will remain a highly invigorating book. The heroic stature and
significance which it accords to Thomas More and William Tyndale,
despite representing them as men whose identities were in many
respects contingent on their times, tends to refashion, in a very salutary
way, the common reader’s sense of the overall shape, balance, progres-
sion and tradition of sixteenth century writing. But Baldwin merits no
mention at all from Greenblatt. Perhaps, indeed, this is deserved:
Baldwin was more malleable. He did not stake all on his sense of iden-
tity as a Protestant, but lay low during Mary’s reign, offering a play to
be presented at court – only to emerge after her death as an ordinand,
a vicar, and a preacher calling for revenge on the Marian bishops,
shortly before he died of the plague (see Ringler and Flachmann, pp.
xviii–xx). Time-serving, timidity and vindictiveness make an unattrac-
tive combination; but perhaps Baldwin’s remarkable skill in logical
insinuation owes something to them. If so, Marlowe’s comparable skill
was differently fostered, just as it was differently applied; but in this
respect at least the progression from Baldwin to Marlowe is as interest-
ing as that which leads from the courageously confrontational figure of
William Tyndale.5
Greenblatt’s vivid imaginative response to Tamburlaine combines
logical forcefulness with a strong repetitive emphasis, and a striking
metaphorical inventiveness (restless hero as unremitting machine), but
its primary impact is emotional. I will reflect back on its questionable
aspects – its overriding of some crucial moments in the text of both
Parts of Tamburlaine’s career – in Chapter 5. Let us in this instance
consider what emotion it seeks to generate and transmit, from the late
twentieth century critic to his academic audience, and by what means:
Tamburlaine almost ceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is

not actually on the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing
reports of gruelling marches. The obvious effect is to enact the
hero’s vision of a nature that ‘Doth teach us all to have aspiring
minds’ and of the soul that ‘Wills us to wear ourselves and never
rest’ (I Tam 2.6.871, 877). But as always in Marlowe, this enactment,
this realisation on the level of the body in time and space, compli-
cates, qualifies, exposes and even mocks the abstract conception.
For the cumulative effect of this restlessness is not so much heroic
as grotesquely comic, if we accept Bergson’s classic definition of the
comic as the mechanical imposed upon the living. Tambulaine is a
machine, a desiring machine that produces violence and death.
Menaphon’s admiring description begins by making him sound like
Leonardo’s Vitruvian man or Michaelangelo’s David and ends by
making him sound like an expensive mechanical device, one of
those curious inventions that courtiers gave to the queen at New
Year’s: a huge, straight, strongly jointed creature with a costly pearl
placed between his shoulders, the pearl inscribed with celestial

symbols. Once set in motion, this thing cannot slow down or
change course; it moves at the same frenzied pace until it finally
stops. (Greenblatt, pp. 194–5)
The enargeia of Greenblatt’s response to Tamburlaine in action, has

mechanistic qualities itself, from its evocation of the hero’s ‘almost
ceaseless’ motion, to its ponderous repetition of the verbal group
‘making him sound’ in the climactic sentence of the passage, underly-
ing the progression from the human to the mechanical image, and
leading into the string of specifications that ends the sentence, phrases
in apposition marked by three passive verbs (‘jointed’, ‘placed’,
‘inscribed’) and culminating with a dying fall on ‘celestial symbols’ –
their significance seemingly overlooked. But having paused, Greenblatt
snaps back with yet another passive construction, ‘set in motion’, and
a single dehumanised word as subject to sum up the whole: ‘this thing’.
To me this seems less ‘grotesquely comic’ than horrific. It recalls
Cominius’ description of Coriolanus in action: ‘from face to foot / He
was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying
cries’ (Coriolanus, II.ii.104–6).
But ‘thing’ is not a word applied to Tamburlaine by any of Marlowe’s
characters – and we will enquire later about any possible ‘slowing
down’ on his part (and about the broader appropriateness of the
automaton or ‘iron man’ image). Greenblatt’s word-choice seems to
shift the bias of the passage, voicing what was repressed under the
claim to find this all comic, however grotesquely. ‘Desiring machine’ is
a similarly fearsome combination of the feeling and the unfeeling. This
perception of Tamburlaine – swaying between incredulous or hilarious
detachment, and piteous or appalled involvement, each alternately
and uneasily concealing the other – extends to the whole action. It
embraces the Tamburlaine of Part Two, at the end of which the ‘thing
… finally stops’. In fact, despite the extraordinary crisis of Zenocrate’s
death (II.Tamb.,II.iv), revealing as this does a strained dependence on
wilful illusion, Greenblatt’s impression may well match the hero’s later
manifestations better than his earlier ones. Despite the overtones of
mechanism and artifice in Menaphon’s perception – pearl-like face,
stellar (or planetary) eyes – we might pause to wonder whether
Greenblatt has fully considered the whole to which these parts con-
tribute. What is at the centre, structurally and intentionally, of
Menaphon’s elaborate effictio (or blazoning) of this herculean figure?
Obviously Marlowe’s perceptions will extend further than Menaphon’s
(if the playwright is, in fact, empathising to any degree with this very
minor character), just as our perceptions, our intertextuality, extend
further than Marlowe’s.
The restlessness to which Greenblatt refers does indeed run through
both plays, dynamically linked to the physical symbolism of crowns
and thrones, and abstract perceptions such as honour, virtue, beauty,
pity and cruelty. But Marlowe has a strange ability to imagine states of
mind and dispositions of body that have no part in this restlessness, or
can only parrot it: Mycetes in Part One and Calyphas in Part Two –
where we also meet the restless hero’s doggedly dutiful, irredeemably
second-rate sons Amyras and Celebinus. Applying Greenblatt’s own
principle, the very failures and inadequacies of these characters, in
conceiving or realising heroic abstractions, contrast dramatically with
Tamburlaine in his drive towards ‘realisation’ of them, ‘on the level of
the body in time and space’ – Calyphas, for one (see II.Tamb.,
IV.i.49–73), parodies the ‘effeminate and faint’ self-image which
Tamburlaine has formerly disowned (I.Tamb., V.ii.114). Especially at
the beginning of Part One, Marlowe displays a paradoxical empathy
with characters he despises and discards – the ludicrous, inadequate
Mycetes, and his brother Cosroe, adequacy personified and born to
lose. And does Greenblatt consider the speaker’s perspective? For
Menaphon, the token intellectual of Cosroe’s court (as Meander is for
Mycetes), it is important as Cosroe’s struggle for power approaches its
climax to perceive Tamburlaine as a symbol of resurgent empire, the
mainstay of a military monarchy and an index of royal prestige. Great
kings require great generals. How far, then, is it possible to read
Menaphon’s speech (itself a response to an enquiry from Cosroe which
is premised on the ‘miracle’ of Tamburlaine’s bond with Fortune), as
an attempt to construe his most obviously alarming characteristics into
reassurances? And how does the emotion of the speech reflect this:
does Greenblatt’s sense of spiritual restlessness, ‘mocked’ by its bodily
realisation, truly have a correlative here – or does Menaphon, however
briefly, bury fear under admiration to create an alternative
Tamburlaine, an image of honour and idealised humanity? Which
(here) comes uppermost: the David, or the Cyborg? We will consider
this question fully in Chapter 5.
But for now, what of Greenblatt’s deducible intentions? He wants to
recommend his thesis about how historical conditions shape the roles
taken up by historical figures in life and in the arts from More to
Shakespeare, and move us to accept it. In doing so, he exposes at once
the pleasure and the perils of a strong persuasive ethos, involving the
reader in his sudden sideways leap into Elizabeth’s court, and thus into
the conception of a metaphor whose source domain merges so readily
with its target domain that the automaton expands to more than
human size, and takes on emotions as well as motions, fusing with
recollections of the role of ‘Tamburlaine’ as played by the immense
striding figure of Edward Alleyn.6 The movement, and the industrious
propagation of ‘violence and death’ also endows him with all the imag-
ined energy of his gigantic off-stage war-machine. The notion that
‘desire’ walks away with the role as new social and economic
conditions walk away with desire becomes almost irresistible, almost
inconceivable in any other way. But perhaps we should resist it.
3.3 Hutchinson and Cavendish: writer and audience
The great effort to recover women’s writing in English, from the whole
early modern period, which marked the last two decades of the twenti-
eth century, is of obvious relevance to our enquiry. How will the emo-
tions characterising women in relationship with men, God, family and
society, and reflected in the engagement of women writers with their
readerships, be re-presented to the modern reader by the academic
feminist? As already indicated, I have chosen to look first at writing
about, and secondly at writing by, two eminently comparable women,
with respect both to their similarities and their differences: Lucy
Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish. Attention has recently been
drawn to the evidence for Hutchinson’s wider literary ambitions and
achievement, her translation of Lucretius and the poem Order and
Disorder which has now been convincingly attributed to her.7 For us,
though, intent on contrasts in the handling of pathos, her Memoirs of
the Life of Colonel Hutchinson,8 written in 1664 and a long-established
minor classic, must still be chosen. The obvious comparison on
Cavendish’s side would be her life of her husband, the Duke of
Newcastle: but her Utopian fantasy The Blazing World (1666)9 provides
a livelier, more inventive reflection of their relationship. In Chapter 5,
I will compare extracts from these two works, each distinctively locat-
ing wifely love within a larger context of relationship and emotion. I
will also, in view of Cavendish’s reputation for eccentricity and self-
publicising, reflect her wide (some would say wild) variety of output
with a representative poem. Here, I am going to look at discussions of
Hutchinson’s wifely emotion, one by a man and two by a woman,
before sampling a feminist comment on Cavendish’s cooler representa-
tion of happy marriage, and finishing with something more exuberant.
3.3.1 Lucy Hutchinson: creativity and Calvinism

In his recent contribution to The Blackwell Guide (2000)10, David
Norbrook outlines the view that will be more fully developed in his
forthcoming book on Lucy Hutchinson. The following paragraph –
slightly abbreviated – stands in relation to the passage from her
Memoirs of her husband, which I will examine in Chapter 5 (see
pp. 158–62, below), much as a Ciceronian commonplace stands in rela-
tion to the person or topic towards whom pathos is being directed. As
we will see, the imagery of light and reflection is a powerful element in
the passage in question; here perhaps its emotional overtones are less
obvious:
Lucy Hutchinson establishes a powerful tension … between her

desire as artist to ‘image’ her husband and a strong religious
awareness that images carry the danger of idolatry. In recounting
her courtship, she has allowed nostalgia to push her to the brink of
blasphemy. She and her husband were strict Calvinists, committed
to the belief that even before humanity’s creation, God had decided
on the minority who were to be saved and the vast majority who
were to be damned. … This world-view makes virtue in this world a
precarious matter: neither high social status nor careful ethical
training is any guarantee of ultimate worth. There is thus a kind of
spiritual egalitarianism: if the wife images the husband, the
husband’s virtues too are no more than an image. To write the life
of a saint is to try to render a miracle that is ultimately beyond
representation, the light beyond the reflection. When describing a
battle she writes that if this were a romance she would celebrate the
heroes’ gallantry, but heroic exploits ‘are but the beams of
the Almighty’ (p. 147). The difficulty for the writer is to hold the
worldly action and those transcendental beams in some kind of
difficult suspension. The imagery of light and sunshine that
pervades the book does some of this work. (Blackwell Guide, p. 184)
Norbrook begins here by placing two words which, for religious believ-
ers belonging to the three great monotheistic traditions of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam still carry a strong and complex emotional
charge: ‘idolatry’ and ‘blasphemy’ – but which, for those subscribing to
the secular mentality which is now dominant in the English language
media, reflect a faint effort towards empathy with Lucy, countered by a
more marked sense of distance and distaste: these are alien emotions,
still perceived (in the second instance) as potentially threatening to
freedom of expression. The ‘powerful tension’ detected by Norbrook

depends on this sense, but generates a more positive overall response
to Lucy, who as ‘Quality Bearer’ in the Firbasian sense stands ‘between’
the two shorter and longer arms of the ‘Further Specification’ that
explains the tension. An adjectival noun phrase forms the first arm,
positive in feeling: ‘her desire as artist to ‘image’ her husband’ – all
expressive of commitment, personal aspiration and vision, personal
warmth and commitment. Then the second, longer arm is linked to
the first by the traductio (i.e. the word-class variation), of ‘image’/
‘images’, the noun being the subject of a noun clause which has an
Fsp of its own and constitutes a threatening major premise: ‘images
carry the danger of idolatry’. This powerful Protestant ‘commonplace’
(to be seen again in my discussion of William Baldwin in Chapter 5),
is the logical basis for Lucy’s anxiety and the modern reader’s sympa-
thetic concern. As an ‘Achievement Goal’, artistic achievement is in
secular eyes more ‘real’ and more pressing than religious obedience.
We want her artistic freedom and fulfilment to be untrammelled. Two
sentences later, however, we are advised by implication of what Lucy
would feel, and expect, with regard to us (since our lives and beliefs
would in all probability, not satisfy her of our elect status): ‘God had
decided on the minority who were to be saved and the vast majority
who were to be damned’. We see her and her husband ‘committed’ –
in most contexts a positive word – to a view which is even more
appalling for most modern believers than for secularists shocked by
such a low valuation of humanity – and one professed here by such
admirable people.
Norbrook does nothing to prompt an emotion besides alerting us to
our putative predicament by putting the ‘majority’ second; he lets the
fact of such a belief speak for itself. A negative response is however
inferred by a staged movement back towards a positive one: firstly a
sentence which shows how ‘precarious’ it must have been to walk the
emotional tight-rope of such a belief, for the more privileged, socially
and educationally, amongst those who were anxious for evidence of
their elect status. The reader is prompted to empathy by use of the
present tense. The next sentence introduces the more positive, though
perhaps accidental benefit of ‘a kind of spiritual egalitarianism’
between man and woman – though I will have more to say in Chapter
4 on the point it makes about images. It would be hard to estimate the
average reader’s response to ‘spiritual’ in this collocation; for some it
might denote egalitarianism (that is, behaviour reflecting a belief in
equality) at the level that really counts; for others something only
fleetingly perceived and carrying little practical or emotional weight in

the conduct of day-to-day relations between wife and husband. But
David Norbrook goes further in the next sentence to sway feeling one
way, to arouse at least empathetically a glimmer of imaginative wonder
and awe: the secular reader might catch the ghost, the inkling, of what
a Calvinist believer might feel – ‘the light beyond the reflection’.
At the beginning of his article, Norbrook notes the tendency of some
feminist commentators to deprecate Hutchinson’s wifely fervour. This
response is not so much typified as sidelined in Elaine Hobby’s single
mention and quotation, in her Virtue of Necessity (1988)11 of what she
calls, with a hint of irony, ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s celebrated Memoirs’
(p. 179). In this, ‘we find there are two “Lucy Hutchinsons” …: a “she”
who is a devoted wife, dutiful to her husband in all things and pleased
to be so; and an “I” who is the author, the creating artist who stands
outside the relationship. In an extensive passage, the author stands
back and describes this “she”’. Elaine Hobby goes on to quote part of a
sentence from an early section of the Memoirs, ‘His Virtues’: ‘she only
reflected his own glories upon him: all that she was, was him, while he
was here, and all that she is now is at best but his pale shade …’
(Memoirs, p. 25) combining this with material drawn (with omissions)
from Lucy’s later summation of the marriage relationship as it grows
out of her account of the courtship (pp. 50–1). That later passage is
quoted in my Chapter 5 (pp. 158–9, below). But is this a description of a
‘she’, or an evocation – for all its third-person form – of that ‘she’s’
experience? We will look later at the force and complexity of feeling in
the passage as a whole; here I will simply recall the old insight demon-
strated by Quintilian: to move others, be moved yourself; to be moved
yourself, evoke the emotive image. May one not acquire a perspective on
an emotion while reliving it, without being detached from it as implied
by Hobby’s ‘stands outside’ and ‘stands back’? Viewed as a persuader –
or a ‘creating artist’ who is also a persuader – might not Lucy be
seeking to evoke the empathy of her primary readers, with that ‘she’s’
bereavement, and link it to a broader emotional engagement with the
image of their male ancestor as a figure poised between her and God,
between time and eternity? Does her use of the third person primarily
reflect detachment from herself as represented, or the most appropriate
way of referring to herself in a narrative centring on another person?
Without playing down the paradox that the woman who refers to
herself as a ‘Pygmalion’s image’ of her husband’s ‘making’, is herself
fashioning his image for posterity, Hobby’s summary presentation of
the wifely ‘she’ who is ‘dutiful to her husband in all things and pleased
to be so’ rules out of account the possibility of erotic passion on the

one side, and of a religious awe integral to the relationship on the
other, as suggested by David Norbrook in the passage quoted above.
Hobby’s primly-rounded phrase in itself suggests nothing beyond limp
and lukewarm conformity to the ‘necessity’ of patriarchal order. Over
against that the ‘creating artist’ stands out in all the strength of (her)
‘Virtue’.
In contrast, Susan Cook’s article on Hutchinson’s narrative style
(1993),12 looks more closely at the biographer’s emotional and artistic
problems, and at her rhetorical purpose – while maintaining the
ongoing critical distinction between Lucy the author and Lucy the
literary character (common as we have seen to Hobby before her and
Norbrook after her). She examines the problematic relationship
between the various expressions and projections of self visible in
Hutchinson’s writing, and finds that while sternly restraining any
tendency towards ‘celebrating, not censoring, her life before salvation’
(p. 275), she nevertheless maintains a ‘covert assertion of her presence
in the Memoirs’ (ibid.). In considering how this is achieved, Cook
wrestles rather untidily with the complexity of Lucy’s creative means:
The ‘real’ self and the self of authorial convention are issues that
raise problems in the two works here discussed, for it is not easy to
say how much Lucy uses the techniques of different styles to con-
sciously fashion the woman with which we are presented. (p. 275)
It is hard, it seems, to discriminate between the involuntary indication

and the deliberate construction of self in Hutchinson’s writing. Cook
juggles Lucy’s ‘real’ self against ‘the self of authorial convention’, both
of which are, evidently, ‘issues’ in themselves, as factors giving rise to
further ‘problems’. How, ‘consciously… us[ing], the techniques of dif-
ferent styles’ (for example, romance, history, hagiography?) does
Hutchinson ‘fashion the woman with which we are presented’? This
locates a ‘real’ woman, the author whose creative impulses will find
expression despite all constraint, and with whom Suzanne Cook
empathises, behind the neutered literary character ‘which’ is presented
as narrator. This seems to imply that unconscious expression merits an
emotional response from the modern reader, while conscious design
does not. But this distinction between author and character might not
always be maintained, as Cook concedes – though interestingly
enough she links their elision to a concept of rhetorical purpose,
looking within the inner frame at Lucy’s envisaged readership, and
quoting a passage in which ‘the two personae of author and character

… merge’. This, as John Hutchinson faces parliamentary indictment,
comes to a climax as ‘God, to show us that not friends, nor diligence,
preserved our estates, stirred up the hearts of strangers to do us justice,
and the bill was thrown out when we had scarce one of those friends
we relied on in the house’ (pp. 332–3). Cook comments (p. 276):
Very personal anger comes to the surface here as Lucy breaks out
into an invective against her betrayers, forgetting the voice of
commentator for a moment. However, there is the consideration
that this might be deliberate, and that Lucy intends the reader
(presumably one of her family) to empathise more closely with the
extremity of her situation. If she expects future generations of
Hutchinsons to take up her volume, it will be through simple
curiosity, perhaps an interest in history in general, or genealogy in
particular. Her strategy is to catch the attention of people with
whom she has some sort of a common tie by bringing those of her
own generation to life … Lucy uses an assumed familiarity and
sympathy in her readers to make partisan and caustic comments.
Susan Cook is making an interesting point here; but her comment pro-
ceeds through a fairly standardised phraseology, as in ‘very personal
anger’ and ‘breaks out into an invective’. She overlooks the way in
which a single word, ‘friends’, repeated five times in the whole para-
graph from which I quoted, more bitterly on every repetition, attains a
sarcastic negativity complementing the open scorn of another word,
‘creature’, applied to a time-serving ‘kinsman’ whom she accosts in the
street, and who in effect tells her to ‘get real’, assuring her that ‘It is not
now as God will, but as we will’. Cook is right to note a particular vehe-
mence here, and a diminished distance between what Lucy reveals of
herself as author, and herself as represented in the story; but she
perhaps underestimates the degree of engagement likely to have been
achieved by the reader at this stage in the narrative (whether that
reader was seen exclusively as a family member, or – at least potentially
– as representative of a far larger group of political and religious radi-
cals, as Norbrook suggests in his first paragraph). A family member
would by this time be far past a lukewarm interest, and a noncon-
formist reader strongly confirmed is his or her commitment. It seems
more likely that Lucy is cranking up the feeling, that she is using the
‘emotional laser’ referred to in the last chapter, constantly reinforcing
the reader’s growing indignation, and progressively emphasising the
emotional and spiritual positioning of herself and her reader within an

exclusive group – one which is opposed inveterately to the blasphe-
mous exclusion of God’s will by her cynical relative and the worldly
values he represents. It may seem ungracious to point out where, in my
view, Susan Cook does not fully pursue her valuable insights; but it
does help to show what my approach can add.
3.3.2 Characterising (or caricaturing?) Cavendish

In her Introduction to The Blazing World & Other Writings (1992),13
selected from Margaret Cavendish’s writings in prose, Kate Lilley’s
concentration on the Duchess’s artistic fulfilment reflects the same
preoccupation as Elaine Hobby’s and Susan Cook’s, in their treatment
of Hutchinson. And in her own appraisal of Cavendish, Hobby
(pp. 107–9) cites telling evidence from her plays suggesting that this
was a conscious preoccupation. The plays explore varying female roles,
pursued in monologue, dialogue and reported action, often fantastic in
character – as when one heroine goes to war at the head of an army of
Amazons. Does Cavendish’s use of pathos, whether mild or vehement
in expression, shed a useful light on the way she accommodated her
role as a wife, to her activity as writer, a creator of alternative selves?
Lilley summarises her view of the linkage:
The Blazing World turns out to be a utopia compulsively interested

in the erotics of female doubling and collaboration. The conven-
tionally labyrinthine geography of the Blazing World is matched by
the intricately recursive plotting of its narrative of mutually
beneficial platonic love between women in the context of their
enabling and prestigious marriages to largely absent husbands.
Embedded within the romance plot of The Blazing World is a
mirror-narrative of fortunate female-female abduction, of which
none other than the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is the beneficiary.
Through the introduction of ‘Margaret Cavendish’ as the Empress’s
scribe, Margaret Cavendish as author-scribe of The Blazing World
stages a self-confirming dialogue on the production of fictional
worlds as an immensely pleasurable compensatory activity for
women[.] (Lilley, Introduction, p. xxvii)
In Chapter 5 we will examine Cavendish’s principal representation,

within the text of The Blazing World, of the marriage and marital role
for which Lilley sees her seeking ‘compensatory activity’. I will also
raise the old question of whom she is seeking to persuade and what
emotions she is seeking to move. The ‘erotics’ of interplay between

images of herself, of alternation and intensification, is well observed by
Lilley. She detects a correspondence between Cavendish’s metaphorical
presentation of herself in her Preface ‘To the Reader’, as ‘Margaret the
First’ (presumably including amongst those readers her husband, who
is to have a role in the story), and the literal representation of her
heroine as Empress of the Blazing World, newly invested with her
bejewelled regalia:
The self-coronation of ‘Margaret the First’ in the preface, partly

authorized by the Duke of Newcastle’s commendatory poem which
precedes it, is displaced into another more extravagant story of
husbandly permission which Cavendish herself calls ‘romancical’.
The function of the blazon in this narrative subverts its customary
role in the patriarchal coding of a figure of woman. Here, the
catalogue dwells on the account and itemization of costume,
materials, colours and the emblematic accessories of power. It
functions iconographically to ratify a seduction which has already
occurred within the narrative – the seduction of the Blazing World
by the young lady – and which is now extended to the reader. The
blazon also serves to externalize and further materalize a blazing
virtue … . (Lilley, Introduction, p. xxvi)
Lilley has already referred to ‘the rhetorical centrality of the aristocratic

figure of the blazon’ (my italics – this being another term for the figure
referred to elsewhere as effictio, that is, the graphic description of a
figure, often producing an emotive effect through its enargeia). Lilley’s
own critical rhetoric, defining a vital difference, dynamises a mode of
feminist pathos, relieving the oppression of patriarchy. This is seen in
the second sentence quoted above, where the nominal group compris-
ing the subject, ‘The function … narrative’, acts as Quality Bearer (B) to
the dynamic Verb of Quality, ‘subverts’ (Q), whose release of repressed
energy is progressively revealed through a chain of increasing
Specification (Sp = FSp) with at least three stages, culminating in
‘woman’. The oppressive impersonality of ‘patriarchal’, ‘coding’, and
‘figure’ – and of ‘woman’, similarly and most offensively depersonal-
ized prior to its release from male definition – is tacitly confirmed in
the next sentence with its silent reminder of what the blazon has
normally ‘catalogued’: the itemised sensual attractions and docile
virtues of women under the male gaze. In the following
sentence, another dynamic structure of progressive specification,
beginning with ‘iconographically’ as the first key item of information

and thus highlighting the fact that this visual rhetoric teaches as well as
moves, links Lilley’s interpretation of the earlier narrative – including
the emotional impact of the young lady’s arrival in the Blazing World
– to whatever the reader feels about her new appearance. The word
‘seduction’ denotes emotion without at once evoking it; but it is now
reflected in an image of imperial power which must, by inference,
express Cavendish’s own ‘erotic’ attraction to the ‘doubling’ of her
earlier self-image as ‘Margaret the First’.
Having created a real curiosity about ‘husbandly permission’ and
‘seduction’, Kate Lilley explains them (p. xxviiff.). Both Cavendish and
her creation, the young lady, have exploited ‘the authorizing gaze of
men’ (including the Duke’s reading of this work?), in order for her to
obtain ‘absolute power over her new male subjects’. This entails a dis-
tinctive form of pathos, blending admiration and empathetic triumph.
Her blazoning (that is, the jewelled brilliance of her dress) figures ‘a
second moment of wonder and the point at which the young lady,
now reconstructed as Empress, exceeds masculine ratification’. It is also
significant in what it conceals, the ‘body of female virtue … never
made available for representation’ (another tacit contrast with what
the blazon normally represents). Finally (though in rather loose terms)
Lilley explains what happens in the passage we will examine in
Chapter 5, telling us that ‘it is through the miraculous abandonment
of corporeality that the souls of women are able to commune with
each other as platonic lovers, and move freely and invisibly from one
world and one body to another’ (but as we will see, they are also
enabled to enter a male body, the Duke’s). Overall, Lilley, with her
emphatic cadences, presents the emotional satisfaction afforded to
Cavendish by her writing, in a very persuasive way. But a question
remains: is she simplifying the emotion by discounting the importance
of one major participant?
By contrast, Germaine Greer’s enthusiastic presentation of the oddity
of Margaret Cavendish combines admiration of her energy and
originality with amusement at her slipshod aristocratic eccentricity.
Whether this extract from her Slip-Shod Sybils (1995), page 40, reflects
Cavendish’s texts as accurately as Kate Lilley does, may be another
matter:14
The Duchess was blessed with an extraordinarily concrete visual

imagination and a power of concentration on her object that was not
even sought after by her contemporaries. In her armoury of imagery
human bodies are kitchens, boiling, basting, frying and stewing away
in filth and steamy heat, and human beings are bisques or custards,
according to their temperament. Within this frame of homely
reference beats a great heart, begging that even if ‘we are inferior to
men, let us shew ourselves a degree above beasts; and not eat and
drink and sleep away our time as they do …’. The great lady dashed
about her great house, packing books off to the press before she had
time to re-read them and discover that one of her dictated sentences
was twelve pages long. The result was that even people who found her
interesting and sympathetic decided that she was mad.
The first sentence quoted, with its balanced adverbial phrases (the first
preceded, and the second followed, by qualifications – ‘extraordinar-
ily’, ‘not even sought’ – which exalt Cavendish to a category of one) is
a form of prozeugma, with all the vigour normally projected by that
syntactical figure as it duplicates or triplicates the dynamism of its
phrases or clauses. This sentence launches the passage into the lusty
trajectory which it will maintain; though some of the phrasing is
rather approximate. ‘Concrete visual imagination’ recalls the vocabu-
lary of what was once called ‘the New Criticism’; but it does not match
the brisk piling up (that is, the synathroesmus) of sensory impressions
in the following sentence, which rather suggest a tactile, olfactory and
gustatory imagination – though we will test the accuracy of this, with
respect to three poems, in Chapter 5. Another comfortable formula,
with its echo of Erasmus’s Silenus, begins the next sentence: the initial
adverbial phrase displaced from its usual order in English, followed by
the inverted verb (‘Within this … beats a … ’) introduces a lively piece
of metonymy, as the Duchess’s ‘great heart’ ‘ beats’ in her ‘homely’
language. There is also a submerged play on the more familiar patriar-
chal association of ‘woman’ and ‘home’, repeated with a difference in
the next sentence to sustain the woman’s momentum in her escape
from bestial torpor: ‘The great lady dashed about her great house’. This
renews and amplifies the metonymical, double-ended correspondence
(or subject-adjunct relationship) of ‘great lady’ and ‘great house’, under-
lined by the ploche of the repeated adjective, and introducing a tacit
parallel between the lengths of seigneurial corridors and dictated sen-
tences which is very pleasing – as is the rambling of Cavendish’s sen-
tence to the end of Germaine Greer’s. The passage then slows down
out of enthusiastic empathy into regretful objectivity as the inevitable
consequence is observed: ‘people … decided that she was mad’. Greer
goes on to instance these people, naming Pepys and Dorothy Osborne.
The ease and fun of this passage, and the foundation of its subtler
effects arises from our ready cognitive engagement with the contrasted
MOPS (that is, the sequences of scripts, associated with housekeeping in
smaller and larger houses, and with writing for publication), and with
the other related schemata of the passage such as the characteristic and
contrasted achievement and enjoyment goals of authors and housewives,
on whatever scale.
Five critics – Norbrook, Hobby, Cook, Lilley, Greer – commenting on
two women writers, use pathos for different though related purposes and
with varying degrees of discrimination. David Norbrook – in the appro-
priate spirit of a reader’s guide – poises empathy and sympathy with Lucy
Hutchinson precisely, against a mildly expressed antipathetic response to
the world-view she shared with her husband. The sense of historical con-
tingency and the objective logos, which it fosters, is tempered with an
older style of literary humanism. The reader is left free to choose between
the alternatives which Hutchinson held in ‘difficult suspension’: the pre-
sumption that they will accept the central rhetorical commonplace of the
passage (that is, that human fulfilment is the supreme value), is not so
stressed as not to permit further enquiry into ‘the light beyond the
reflection’ – an enquiry to be pursued in Chapter 5. In contrast, Elaine
Hobby’s feminism seems to limit its empathy, while Susan Cook develops
it to a point of effective engagement with the reader, urging a further
prosecution of her insight than Cook herself achieves. But what she does
achieve owes much to her acute sense of Hutchinson’s anger, and of the
way she uses it. Kate Lilley succeeds both in expanding the reader’s sense
of Cavendish’s artistic resourcefulness (and of the emotional and sexual
energy which drives it), and in stimulating perception – teaching, pleas-
ing, subverting associations – with her own subtly emotive rhetoric. Her
‘husbandly permission’ has a much richer irony than Hobby’s comment
on Hutchinson’s wifely obedience. Germaine Greer’s blend of affection
and respect for Cavendish as she portrays her, mixed as this is with
amusement at how such a figure forestalls being taken seriously, is psy-
chologically and emotionally plausible and fits the thesis of her book. But
does it match the facts about this female hero and how she wrote?
3.4 Shakespeare: about the Bard’s business
3.4.1 Terry Eagleton: shock tactics

In his William Shakespeare (1986),15 Terry Eagleton begins the book and
his comment on Macbeth with a bold exclusion tactic, palpably outra-
geous, though underpinned by syllogistic reasoning. It signals his
intention to create and commandeer a new readership. Brian Vickers’s

severe judgement on the passage, comparing it to ‘a high-speed food
blender … a glib and opportunistic recycling of current [critical]
cliches’ (p. 410) seems justified; but there is more to be said about
Eagleton’s rhetorical technique, his whipping up of ethos and pathos
into affect. He expects his readers to admire his cheek – while realign-
ing their values, perceptions and emotions. In this account, ‘foul’ is
indeed ‘fair’:
To any unprejudiced reader – which would seem to exclude

Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all
literary critics – it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies
with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece,
however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much
the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by
releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, expose a reverence for
hierarchial social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a
society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. ‘[he
witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their sisterly
community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its
tribal bickerings and military honours’. (pp. 1–2)
‘Unprejudiced’ here functions rhetorically as – at once – an emotive

abstraction and a characterisation of stance or ethos. It seems at first to
denote a very broad category, embodying a universally valid, and
binding, moral or humanistic value of the kind whose ideological basis
Eagleton would normally seek to expose. However, it is clear from the
context that in this case ‘almost all the critics’ (all the humanists
among them?) won’t qualify. ‘Unprejudiced’ has a narrower, histori-
cally-conditioned sense. It means ‘possessed of political insight’ (that
is, alert to the social structures of feudalism and early capitalism).
Exclusion from this category, and all its attendant excitement – the
thrill of following a charismatic leader while at the same time thinking
for yourself and subverting the status quo – hangs threateningly over
any hesitation in concluding that Eagleton is ‘surely’ right. If, more-
over, we consider the dynamics of the statement, this impression is
confirmed in all its ironic force. Being ‘unprejudiced’, unlike the play-
wright, his targeted audience and generations of critics, is the mental
precondition – in Firbasian terms, the ‘setting’ – for perceiving the star-
tling ‘phenomenon’ of the noun clause which is the extraposed gram-
matical subject of the sentence, and which (following the parenthesis
which shuts Shakespeare out), finally gives the witches their due: ‘that
positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches’. Those who
cannot happily soar aloft on the uprush of this idea – its release of
inhibition as exciting, though less murderous, than the witches’
uncaging of Macbeth’s ‘ambitious thoughts’ – will be in a category that
no aspiring student reader would wish to belong to: those who cannot
or will not see ‘a reverence for hierarchal social order for what it is’.
This plain idiomatic monosyllabic formula for fearless objectivity,
including the brave and clear-sighted, excluding the timid hankerers
after ‘order’ and ‘pi[ety]’, introduces a string of negative emotive terms
poised against the positive feminist ideal of ‘sisterly community’. These
terms adeptly bestride the gap between dark-age Scotland and the
monetarist administration of 1980s Britain under Mrs Thatcher:
‘routine oppression’ (as in the capitalist treatment of labour) is poised
against ‘incessant warfare’, ‘tribal bickerings’ against ‘military honours’
(a continuing mark of status for the armed forces of capitalist
countries). The broader and narrower bands of historical reference help
the proselyte reader empathise with the witches in their prototype
‘community’: the reader and they are up against the world, excluding
the insensate majority. The witches
subvert this structure: their teasing word-play infiltrates and under-

mines Macbeth from within, revealing in him a lack which hollows
his being into desire. [T]he witches signify a realm of non-meaning
and poetic play which hovers at the work’s margins, one which has
its own kind of truth; and their words to Macbeth catalyse this
region of otherness and desire within himself, so that by the end of
the play it has flooded up from within him to shatter and engulf his
previously assured identity. In this sense the witches figure as the
‘unconscious’ of the drama, that which must be exiled and
repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a
vengeance. That unconscious is a discourse in which meaning
falters and slides, in which firm definitions are dissolved and binary
oppositions eroded: fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing is but what
is not. … Macbeth ends up chasing an identity which continually
eludes him; he becomes a floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed
pursuit of an anchoring signified[.] (pp. 2–3)
He goes on to quote the bitter nihilism of Macbeth’s speech on hearing

of his wife’s death (which we will consider later), beginning with his
comparison of life to ‘a poor player’, and ending after ‘Signifying
nothing’ with the comment ‘ He is reduced to a ham actor, unable to

identify with his role’. Eagleton’s own account of what happens to
Macbeth to bring him to this state opens a metaphorical void which is
itself powerfully emotive and empathetic. It is quite possible to
imagine having your being ‘hollow[ed] into desire’ without fathoming
Eagleton’s meaning. The existential bleakness and exposure which (it is
claimed) result from this process are then figured powerfully through
topothesia (description of an imaginary place): a castle exposed to
flooding, a political territory vainly protected by the attempted exile of
dangerous subjects and the repression of a restive peasantry. But are
there no clearer points of reference for visitants to this symbolic space?
3.4.2 Jardine’s level look at Shakespeare’s cliff-top

In her Reading Shakespeare Historically (1996), which I referred to in the
last chapter for its valuable discussion of epistolary pathos as
expounded and practised by Erasmus, Lisa Jardine rests her argument
about King Lear on a premise which itself confirms the validity of
Aristotle’s primary insight into rhetoric and its workings – the EPL dis-
tinction. There is, indeed, a distinction to be made between the
emotion tempered by ethos, characterising the persuasive voice by
reflecting virtue, competence and good will, and the ‘raw emotion’ (as
Jardine calls it) of a pathos which is totally untempered. For Jardine,
Lear demonstrates the breakdown of the one means of communication,
persuasion, and negotiation proper to the political elite represented in
the play – culturally similar, despite its location in the pre-Christian
Britain chronicled by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the courtly society of
Renaissance England. This breakdown has appalling consequences,
both for the characters and the audience. Certainly when Lear, bearing
Cordelia’s lifeless body, utters his tragic cry ‘Howl, howl, howl …’ he is
with his own example drawing his listeners into a world beyond words,
into an emotion as ‘raw’ as exists anywhere. But it does not follow that
Lear as a whole illustrates the failure of language as a constructive
resource. There may be other modes of persuasion than the one singled
out by Jardine as both vital to this society, and fatally vitiated – not
least the use by Edgar (in particular) of resources resembling those of
the playwright or actor. In Chapter 5 we will examine the validity of
Jardine’s claims about Edgar’s treatment of his father the blinded
Gloucester (and, previously, of Lear). She states (p. 96) that he ‘utters
not one word of comfort or consolation to either’, but conveys ‘a sense
of surreal dislocation of speech and action’. I will test the validity of
the claim that Edgar’s words are at odds with his actions (and thus that
his response to the situation is ‘emotionally meaningless’, ‘intolerably’

so) with respect to his attempt to ‘cure’ his father’s suicidal despair by
‘trifling’ with it. Is this, indeed, futile – as a consequence of being, in
Jardine’s words, ‘technically out of control’ (ibid.)?
If she is right, nothing in the world of this play can replace the role
of the familiar letter, as the persuasive medium appropriate to equals
and founded in virtuous friendship. Jardine cites the authority of
Erasmus, who credited such letters with the power of ‘structuring and
controlling emotional transactions, so that their moral value is
enhanced. By contrast, ‘[i]n Lear such controlled expression of feeling
… has been … replaced by a version of epistolary artifice which distorts
and misleads’ (that is, the emotive letter as written by Edmund,
Goneril, and Regan). But because Shakespeare demonstrates the abuse
of letters, must all rhetorical pathos now be reduced to ‘emotional
dyslexia’ – destructive and disorienting, however sincere in source and
intention? According to Jardine (pp. 96–7):
Lear and his party on the Heath, and Gloucester and the disguised
Edgar at Dover Cliffs, are offered as appalling manifestations of
helplessly uncontrolled feeling, damagingly circulating without
motive or purpose, its moral efficacy terribly out of focus. … Once
we historicise the networks of feeling which form and reform the
bonds of duty and friendship in Lear around the persuasive technol-
ogy of letter writing and reading, we are bound, I think, to recognise
that the ‘natural’ and uncontained versions of passionate emotion
in the play are not available as a solution to the problems raised by
Lear misconstruing his daughters’ declarations of love. Raw emotion
is not an attractive prospect for an audience which had placed its
trust in Erasmus’s promise that mastery of the familiar letter would
enable humane individuals to persuade one another affectivelv to
collaborate for a better, more Christian Europe. The spectacle of
such ‘civilised’ technical skill working successfully on the side of
deception and self-interest is disturbing and deeply pessimistic. Yet
it is to precisely this vividly dramatised scenario that we, the
modern audience, respond positively and intensely emotionally,
because it is, of its essence a representation of emotion unmediated
by historicised social forms. The combination of horror and embar-
rassment with which we experience the spectacle of Edgar deluding
the desperate Gloucester into casting himself down from a nonexis-
tent cliff owes nothing to Erasmus, or to humanist rhetoric or to
Renaissance philosophy. Like Gloucester and Edgar, we experience
with immediacy that raw emotional intensity in a moral, social and

historical void.
Jardine’s language is itself insistently emotional, even in this selective

quotation. In the first quoted sentence, alone, we have ‘appalling’,
‘helplessly uncontrolled’, ‘damagingly’, and ‘terribly’. The critic’s con-
viction that ‘raw emotion’, unmediated by what had become the only
available ‘technology’ for the focusing of pathos, must be at once
shattering in its impact and futile as a means of persuasion, is under-
pinned far more strongly by her own emotional responses than by her
argument. She makes exactly the distinction that I am concerned to
make throughout, between the estimated response of an original audi-
ence – her account purporting to be ‘historicised’ – and the response of
today’s readers and audiences, with or without critical guidance.
Accordingly, Shakespeare’s audience, furnished as it allegedly was with
a habitual trust in the power of emotive, epistolary language to
confront ‘problems’ and concert action, must have experienced a far
stronger sense of shock and disorientation than we can possibly feel,
not having any such expectations. Jardine’s logos is supported by a
strongly projected ethos – pre-empting the reader’s judgement (‘we are
bound, I think, to recognise’), enhancing the inferred emotional
impact of ‘raw’ feeling by echoing the old, tight-lipped, ever-so-British
litotes ‘not a pretty sight’ (‘raw emotion is not an attractive prospect’),
premising her argument on the view that the audience envisioned by
Shakespeare would recognise the defeat of Erasmian optimism, and
repeating with variation her key concept ‘technology … technical’ and
its associated terms – for example, ‘uncontrolled’, ‘focus’, and ‘skill’.
This further persuades us to accept the inevitability of Jardine’s conclu-
sion. For all the significance in Aristotelean theory of the word techne, I
am not sure whether our current concept of ‘technology’, with its
impersonal connotations, really matches the more interactive idea of
persuasion likely to be entertained by Shakespeare’s audience; but the
word as used here tacitly confirms the truth of Jardine’s enargeia of
helplessness. It implies panic at the failure of a one-way method, and
precludes any possibility of successful improvisation. This makes it
plausible that Edgar (for one) is merely flailing about, grasping at
straws.
In contrast to this, Jardine’s explanation of the play’s renowned
emotional intensity presses on to a strong rhetorical conclusion, pre-
emptively including us (her readers) in an Inclusion Model, the ‘we’ of
‘the modern audience’, and thus characterising ‘our’ response to
Edgar’s homoeopathic operation on his suicidal father, as ‘The (my

italics) combination of horror and embarrassment’. Another level (or
another element?) is to be added to that tragic suffering built up
steadily through the dialogue of the great scenes, as ‘raw emotion’ is
lasered back and forth between the sufferers, often bypassing both
reason and mutual recognition, and compulsively involving the audi-
ence. Helpless (it seems) before the cruelty, hypocrisy and self-serving
of others, the kind children Cordelia and Edgar are themselves
reduced in Jardine’s view either to impotence or cruelty, through
their failure to console (and – by implication – their progressive col-
lapse from a loss of confidence in civilizing language to a despair of
civilisation itself); and this desolate impotence both of silence and
speech is the ultimate horror – and embarrassment. A deictic use of
‘the’ establishes the reality of this ‘combination’ of feelings as a pre-
existent thing, already familiar to us – whether or not we as individ-
ual readers have ‘experienced’ it. By implication, if we haven’t, we
should have. But I am inclined to recognise both ‘motive and
purpose’ in that very action on Edgar’s part, which in Jardine’s view
so clearly typifies their absence – the creation in Gloucester’s mind of
an illusory precipice. In the meantime, however, we are being hustled
to a similarly precipitate conclusion. We are shamefaced and horror-
struck by Edgar’s callous ineptitude (as it seems to Jardine – though
since we in our time have not been conditioned by Erasmus to expect
the exercise of his kind of ‘civilised affectivity’, it’s hard to see why
we should be so embarrassed at the lack of it, unless we apply our own
humane standards). Our ‘raw emotion’ attests, in its very intensity, a
lack of mediation and loss of bearings, whether Erasmian, rhetorical, or
philosophic (despite the vivid topographia and the parallel with Robert
Burton which I will point out in Chapter 5); presumably we sense that
something is missing. As it metaphorises the audience’s empathy with
Gloucester’s literal though illusory leap, the final sentence of the
chapter has a strong if untidy ‘functional perspective’, on Firbas’s:
Quality Scale: the adverbial phrase ‘Like Gloucester and Edgar’ precedes
the ‘Quality-bearing’ verb ‘experience’ to link it and its subject (‘we’) to
the preceding context; the Specification combines words from the prior
context (‘emotion’, ‘emotionally’, and ‘intensely’ have all occurred
within the previous four clauses) in a newly varied emotive and
sensory phrase, ‘raw emotional intensity’ – already preceded by a
Further Specification, ‘with immediacy’, and followed by the most
dynamic and emotive, most contextually independent phrase of all, in
the Final Specification, ‘a moral, social and historical void’. The sen-
tence throws us into this ‘void’ – but like Gloucester’s (and

Shakespeare’s) Cliff, is it really there?
Eagleton and Jardine are both strong critical rhetoricians, each
pressing a historical thesis, one about power structures and the uncon-
scious, the other about a dominant cultural form, the humanist epistle.
They both use the exclusion model (overt and repeated in Eagleton,
quietly inferred in Jardine – ‘aren’t you embarrassed?’), and the affec-
tive blending of masterful ethos and purposeful pathos through what
seems in the context of presumed interaction with the reader to be
brand new metaphor, the only valid way of articulating the necessary
judgement.
3.5 Milton: perspectives on power
Whether he is construed politically, or theologically, or with respect to

gender – or as a poet of such overwhelming originality and authority as
to hamstring his successors for two centuries – Milton still generates
intense and illuminating debate, having recovered both from his
Tennysonian status as ‘God-gifted organ-voice of England’),16 and from
the discordia concors of Eliot and Leavis17 in their efforts to deny moral
or sensory substance to that very same ‘voice’. Having included
political and historicised approaches in my sampling of Shakespearian
criticism, I will look here at one notable example of criticism still
centred on the creative act, and on authorial originality, and one
which addresses the interlinked subjects of ‘language, gender, power’.
3.5.1 Harold Bloom: the ‘strong poet’ as supreme hero

For Harold Bloom, the critical reading of texts by ‘strong poets’ is a
supreme human activity,18 transcending the familiar dichotomy
between sacred and secular19 in its quest to understand the creative
impulse and the means or ‘ratios’ through which it works, fusing
Freudian psychology with linguistic insights expressed in rhetorical
terms – with respect (especially) to the major classes of trope. With the
quintessentially ‘strong poet’ Milton, the centre of Bloom’s critical
attention shifts accordingly from the values of heroism explored in
Paradise Lost, to the poet’s own creative titanism, his wrestle with his
great poetic precursors. As we already seen repeatedly, the renewing of
language to meet new situations, and new perceptions, involves pathos
in full integration with ethos Whether the text concerned is viewed for-
mally as oratory or poetry, it will involve both poetic orientation,
according to Jakobson’s conception,20 and the persuasive function. But
the major poet will carry the figurative transformation of language far
further than the orator’s (or even the critic’s) characteristic metaphor,
in accordance with his or her far profounder persuasive purpose. If
emotion in the poet’s reader is stirred by the poet’s own emotion, and
if that is roused through the now-familiar phantasia or visio, the sharp-
ness of that vision will depend not merely by what the poet sees or is
shown, but by how it is seen or shown (with what use of language), and
from what position.
When Milton looks at Satan, the potent though unacknowledged
attraction – in Bloom’s view – of such a poetic personality, so like his
own, will be disguised from himself and the reader through the
‘revisionary ratios’ of trope. The pathos of Satan’s ruined grandeur (all the
grander for its ruin) mounts steadily through Book I up to the great
climax of his speech at the military review. First of all we sense the narra-
tor’s compulsive wincing at Satan’s facial disfigurement (I.600–01), recall-
ing Adam Smith’s involuntary sympathy. This is conveyed to the reader
through the syntactical inversion and the momentary, end-
of-the-line pause whereby the grammatical object ‘his face’ becomes the
Firbasian ‘setting’ for ‘deep scars of thunder’. Then we see reflected in his
‘cruel … eye’ the pitiful spectacle of his followers, blended simultaneously
with Satan’s thoughts, at once ‘remorse[ful]’ and vainglorious – ‘Millions
of spirits for his fault amerced / Of heaven’ (ll. 604–12). Through this
process, which culminates in what seems like free indirect speech (‘yet
faithful how they stood / Their glory withered’) we see Satan already
reflecting the dogged passion of his cohorts, similarly compounded of
loyalty and egoism. Once he begins to speak, he continues to reflect his
perception of this ‘united force of gods’ (l. 629) back upon them. The
burst of energy produced by this emotional lasering culminates in the
raising, firstly of the ‘din of war’ (l. 668) and then of Pandemonium itself
(ll. 670–730).
A comparable but more complex process, of poetry rather than
oratory, is seen in the earlier passage (I.283–313), extensively analysed
by Bloom in his A Map of Misreading (1975),21 pp. 130–8. Here, the nar-
rator watches Satan, revived following his own prostration, going to
rescue his ‘faithful friends’. Milton’s gigantic imagery at once presents
Satan, and represents the precursor poets’ ways of handling such
imagery. The trope of metalepsis or transumption, a form of remote
metonymy working through intermediate and unstated associations, is
identified by Bloom as the major structuring device (Map, p. 129 ff.).
Here, the mutual reflection characteristic of pathos is that of imagina-
tion within imagination. As Satan refigures the Son and the Spirit of
God in his own cerebral conception of Sin, and his sexual engendering
of Death the rapist (life to God, in Keats’s words,22 being death to his
own power of imaginative conception), so Milton wrests the satanic
impulse back towards God. He does this – or so we must infer – by
linking the ongoing effects of Satan’s promethean intelligence, the
ancient and modern means of warfare and repression (represented here
by hundred-gun warships, spears, shields and the Inquisition), to the
heroic vision of ‘precursor’ poets as tainted by them, and as prefigured
by Satan himself. In contrast, Milton and ‘the Tuscan artist’ persecuted
by the Inquisition set things in their true perspective. Bloom is dis-
cussing the series of similes (Book I, 283–313) in which Satan’s shield,
like that of Achilles in Homer, is compared to the moon, his spear to
the mast of ‘some great ammiral’ (that is, a flagship); and his fallen fol-
lowers to autumnal leaves. But here, the moon-shield first seen on the
arm of Achilles is viewed with a clarity unimaginable by Homer,
through Galileo’s telescope:
Milton’s aim is to make his own belatedness into an earliness, and

his tradition’s priority over him into a lateness. The critical question
to be asked of this passage is: why is Johnson’s ‘adventitious image’,
Galileo and the telescope, present at all? Johnson, despite his
judgment that the image is extrinsic, implies the right answer:
because the expansion of this apparently extrinsic image crowds the
reader’s imagination, by giving Milton the true priority of interpreta-
tion, the powerful reading that insists upon its own uniqueness and
its own accuracy. Troping upon his forerunners’ tropes, Milton
compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision
as our origin, his time as true time. His allusiveness introjects the
past, and projects the future, but at the paradoxical cost of the
present, which is not voided but is yielded up to an experiential
darkness, as we will see, to a mingling of wonder (discovery) and
woe (the fallen Church’s imprisonment of the discoverer). As Frank
Kermode remarks, Paradise Lost is a wholly contemporary poem, yet
surely its sense of the present is necessarily more of loss than of
delight. (A Map of Misreading, pp. 131–2)
Given Bloom’s constant stress on the creative generation of successor

poets by their precursors, and on their compulsive repudiation of the
relationship to which they owe their very existence as poets, it is
appropriate that the style of this passage is built up of binary pairings,
relative oppositions and antitheses. But it also conveys a process of
assimilation, as our critical reading, like Bloom’s, Johnson’s and

Kermode’s, is induced to merge with the Strong Poet’s creative misread-
ing of precursor poets (or his extension and transformation of their
meaning). Bloom presents Milton’s series of images as jamming
themselves into the space that readers have cleared in their minds for
attention to the poem, and the scripts they have ready as a way of
understanding it, and forcing a complete rearrangement, or a rewrite.
This is figured by a personified presence, insisting (twice) on the
adoption of ‘its own’ practice.
At this point, I (for once) am tempted to a critical metaphor, or
personification. The sense of ‘crowding’ caught by Bloom from
Johnson might be compared to that induced in his colleagues by a
whiz-kid gallery director, storming in on his first day’s work, with a
huge new bequest of paintings all to be accommodated, and backed by
a team of interpreters ready to re-caption everything. Not only Homer,
but ‘Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso, Spenser, [and] the Bible’ (referred to
immediately before our quoted passage) are belated by Milton’s
‘priority of interpretation’ – and on the other side the great interpreters
of Milton, whether favourable or otherwise cannot but respond to and
validate his ‘crowd[ing] of the imagination’, induced ‘to read as he
reads’. The object of our emotion becomes not only what Milton
sees – Satan, his shield, his spear, and his fallen followers – but the way
of seeing which he evolves in order to be able to see them. But, as with
the other gallery employees on the morning just imagined, Bloom’s
Milton leaves the reader dumbfounded – groping towards the creative
power so overwhelmingly amplified, so disconcerting, so infinitely
removed. This is not like the common ethos sparked by Tamburlaine
and his henchmen grasping at power, or like Keats drawing us into the
antithetical feeling of his ‘Ode on Melancholy’. At the end of my
extract, Bloom’s own professed emotion, reflected from the heart of
Milton’s own critical engagement with the divided heart of Satan
himself, emerges as ‘wonder’ and ‘woe’.
3.5.2 Kate Belsey: God and gender – re-engineering love

In her book on Language, Gender, and Power in the work of Milton,
Catherine Belsey23 makes striking use of one of the most intriguing
exchanges in the sequence of conversations between Adam and his
angel guest, Raphael, which occupy the poem from l. 361 of Book V to
the end of Book VIII. It is placed almost as an afterthought. But it
confirms Raphael’s biblical, or apocryphal reputation as a ‘sociable
spirit’ (V.221), friendly towards human beings, who obeys God’s
instruction to converse with Adam ‘as friend with friend’ (V.229), by

willingly exchanging the most intimate confidences (see text and
comment, pp. 177–9, below). Catherine Belsey finds this a refreshing
contrast to God’s perverse reinstatement, after the Fall, of the ‘same
patriarchal relations which brought it about’. Whether or not this is a
plausible explanation of the Fall, it still motivates Belsey to find in
Book VIII, 618–29, her model for a less oppressive ordering of the dif-
ference that sparks erotic desire – one not involving a fixity, or
hierarchal difference validated by power:
At the end of their discussion Raphael tells Adam with a disarming

blush that there is love in heaven, and there the angels simply mix
freely in perfect union, without all these difficulties (VIII, 618–29).
In the heaven he speaks of, however, there are, of course, no women
(X, 889–90).
This arrangement might not do for us. But Paradise Lost also offers
the basis of a more utopian vision. Though the angels are identified
by masculine pronouns throughout, and are thus presented as
essentially male, the text none the less draws attention to the
fluidity of heavenly gender: ‘For spirits when they please! Can either
sex assume, or both …’ (I, 423–4). Either … or both: not simply a
sexual duality, a bisexual ability to move between antithetical poles,
nor a uniform androgyny, but an internalization of difference itself,
of sexual otherness within the self-same. (John Milton: Language,
Gender and Power, p. 66)
The logos of this passage is a little tenuous, as we will see in our assess-
ment of that principle in the passage to which it refers (Chapter 5). Its
pathos and ethos (that is, its affect) are however more appealing, from
the wry humour of ‘This might not do for us’24 to the rhythmical con-
trast within the following sentence. There we progress through the
grindingly emphatic structure by which the angels, in Milton’s patriar-
chal vision, are ‘identified by masculine pronouns throughout, and are
thus presented as essentially male’ (a structure balanced around the
chiastic arrangement of ‘masculine’ and ‘male’) to the sudden quicken-
ing and rippling of rhythm as the text itself, as always at odds with
Milton’s conscious design, ‘draws attention to the fluidity of heavenly
gender’. In a variation on the Silenus, the patriarchal is opened from
inside to disclose a ‘fluidity’ which is itself opposed to rigid opposition
and the oppressive power against which Belsey’s own pathos is directed.
She points out the repressed warmth and variety, the positive pathos,
sympathetic and empathetic, under the repellent official voice,

reversing the reader’s bias towards the angels. This is confirmed by the
further quickening of the following long, conversational, but excitedly
rhetorical sentence – a verbless minor sentence where ‘not’ and ‘nor’
oppose constraining ‘duality’, and blank ‘androgyny’, to a fuller
unfolding of the new ideal sexuality through two uneven structures of
noun phrases. The effect recalls that kind of spontaneous lasering of
feelings and perceptions which arises between unconstrained speakers
in conversation, and which I recalled at the very opening of this book.
But the argument fits human sexuality better than angelic eroticism.
As she moves up to the end of her chapter (whose overall subject has
been ‘Gender’), Catherine Belsey places Milton in a tradition of angelic
representation, introducing the social and physical scene of looking at
Renaissance art. To the implied observer, ‘Annunciating angels, … are
commonly placed in a relationship of spatial and pictorial symmetry
with the Virgin, their physical characteristics resembling hers to a
surprising degree’. The final three paragraphs, including a short sting
in the tail, further amplify the liberating vision:
The effect in the paintings is the divorce of sexual difference from

its alliance with power. Neither Gabriel nor the Virgin lays claim to
mastery. And in Milton’s heaven there are no gender stereotypes, no
antithetical voices, masculine and feminine, no opposition affirmed
as privilege. There can be, in consequence, no sexual rule and no
submission, no authority grounded in anatomy.
The text goes no further than this. But in separating gender from
anatomy, and in glimpsing the possibility of a difference within sexual
identity, Paradise Lost allows its reader a momentary vision of a world
beyond essences. The result is imaginable as sexual plurality for each
individual, and the consequent release of sexual being from power.
God ought to have thought of that. It would have made all the
difference in the world. (Ibid., p. 67)
Paralleling the effect of the paintings with Raphael’s hint about

heaven, Belsey again counterpoises two sets of positives and negatives
– the repeated releases from constraint (‘no gender stereotypes, no
antithetical voices …’), at the level of cause, followed by another set at
the level of effect, culminating with release from the self-evident
absurdity and oppression of ‘authority grounded in anatomy’. The
following paragraph qualifies and inhibits the sense of relief, while (in
the tradition of extended amplification or expolitio) restating the point.
The final sentence, from its secular, feminist perspective snipes at the
eternal (perhaps not so eternal) Man behind the mask of the patriar-
chal God, and at Milton his upholder – as ever, ignoring his subversive
imagination. The implication ‘When will they ever learn?’ carries the
slight qualification that they might, sometime.
In contrast to Eagleton and Jardine, Bloom and Belsey do not rely
heavily on metaphor to involve the reader. Bloom’s theory plays down
its importance and power amongst the tropes;25 though the way Milton
‘crowds the imagination’, in Johnson’s words, prompted me to make a
metaphor of the crowding – while what interests Bloom is the process
indicated by the metaphor. Accordingly, he implicitly contrasts the
cultural script for reading other epic poets, to which the imagination is
habituated, with that imposed by Milton: one crowds out the other. But
the sense of Milton’s mastery still entails a sense of loss. Bloom’s style,
like his proclaimed critical method, is antithetical: his linguistic innova-
tion is to fuse relative terms (like the poetic father and the poetic son)
with contraries – so that opposed entities at once seek to annul each
other, and sustain each other. In contrast to this, Belsey’s rhetoric attacks
fixed antitheses as the destructive basis of gender, replacing them with
fluid, erotic, willed antitheses. Her language conveys the moment of
insight into Milton’s marginalized utopian vision; it is spontaneous and
quasi-interactive, without itself being innovative.
3.5.3 Conclusion
I have sought here to demonstrate, selectively, the reflection of distinct
critical purposes in distinct developments of pathos, through the later
twentieth century. In doing so I have drawn more or less equally on
‘old’ and ‘new’ methods of rhetorical analysis, using them both to
point to the processes of emotional heightening (for example, lasering
and the conception of metaphor), which seek to unite persuader and
persuadee, ethos, pathos and logos, in a common affectivity. I hope this
has habituated the reader to my own analytic technique, and shown a
constructive and positive spirit towards the texts discussed which will
further recommend its application, by the reader, to other texts of the
reader’s choosing, both modern and early modern. Where the latter are
concerned, the next chapter seeks to reflect the wider area of possible
exploration, and the extremes of feeling that might be encountered
there within the widely differing kinds, or levels, of relationship
represented in the texts concerned. In this next chapter and the one to
follow, ‘new’ rhetorical techniques will be more predominant, in the
attempt to locate objective indices of feeling.
4
Going to Extremes
4.1 The extremes of love and hate
In this shorter chapter I want to indicate the range of pathos to be

found in early modern writing. Focusing, initially, on extreme
expressions of emotion, and specifically on the crucial opposition of
love and hate, should provide co-ordinates for the investigation of
intermediate degrees. As a further system of reference, and an
additional pointer to the possible combinations of feeling (for
example, of personal and political emotion), I have chosen to look at
expressions of love or hate on four different ‘levels’ – religion, politics,
family, sexuality – within contexts which are either literary in their use
of pathos, or addressed functionally to specific topics, audiences and
occasions. A further purpose is to foster precision in the reading of
such texts, without the additional complication of reference to the
critical texts studied in the last chapter, or to the texts to which they
refer, which we will look at in the next chapter. It will also be helpful,
in a second section, to represent the widely different purposes and
occasions to which emotive persuasion was applied, in this case
instancing the relationship of preacher and congregation, subject and
prince, feminine and masculine. Here extremes of feeling may be
combined in a single text to serve its manifest persuasive design.
‘The extremes of love and hate’ are of course relative. Extreme malice,
for example, might in the judgement of some readers be something the
mind can intuit but never realise (see the article by Downes cited on
p. 8, above), and in any case any such realisation might be deeply har-
rowing to read! Let’s say that I want to look at the visible ends of the
range. But even within those undefined limits, we may find a fairly
clear structural opposition in every enactment of love and hate from
117
the religious to the erotic. Taking our cue from Aristotle’s perception of
the desire at the heart of hatred, that its object ‘should perish’ (Rhetoric,
II.iv.32), we should find at one extreme the negation of another’s
being (either the life, or the identity of that being), and at the other
extreme, affirmation of it.
Any attempt to communicate such feelings depends on the capacity
and susceptibility of those who are being invited to share them, or to
empathise with them. Those who go the whole way will quite probably
sense their difference from those who do not. Whenever teaching and
moving are to be integrated, any writer representing the extreme
emotions of a character, or any speaker trying to stir them in a
companion or in an audience, will predict and seek to exploit this
range of response, which I have termed the RPER. We have already
seen how it may be deliberately stimulated through the use of
Inclusion and Exclusion models (see pp. 20–5, above). Here we will
consider several examples from outside the central group of authors
figured in the two main chapters (besides some passages in their work,
not referred to elsewhere). I will use varying degrees of direct quotation
and analysis to suggest how the intensity of feeling expressed in each
passage might reflect a sense of the original audience, whether reading
or listening. Most of the passages will be briefly characterised, while
two (the speech of Bunyan’s Mr. Stand-fast at his crossing of the
Jordan, and Donne’s ‘Apparition’) will be examined in detail with
some use of linguistic analysis.
4.1.1 Bunyan: the glowing coal

As I have just indicated, the first kind of emotion to be considered has
God as its object, which in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth
century England must mean the God of Christianity. But the humanity
of the feeling expressed in the following passage will I hope render it
accessible and acceptable to secular readers and to those of other faiths.
Today the passage will elicit a range of reaction far outside anything
predictable by Bunyan, all the more so as a consequence both of its
subject, and the complex layering and interconnection of its emotive
imagery. Towards the conclusion of the Second Part of his The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1684),1 Bunyan’s Mr. Stand-fast, like several of his compan-
ions, is summoned to cross the River; in other words he becomes aware
that he is about to die. This whole extended passage of allegory –
triumphantly completing Bunyan’s account of a Christian
community’s journey towards Heaven, and analogous to the emotive
conclusion of a speech or sermon – worked so memorably, for so long,
Going to Extremes 119
that parts of it became proverbial. ‘Passing over’ is still a euphemism

for death, and ‘the other side’ a location for some kind of surviving
consciousness, in a culture which has commonly divorced its wish for
an afterlife (when it has any) from any sense or idea of the love of God.
That love, voiced in a peculiarly Christian, and Puritan way, and in an
idiom blending biblical sublimity and plain English speech, is
outstandingly expressed here. In his verse Conclusion to the First Part
(1678), Bunyan had invited readers to ‘interpret …my metaphors’ and
to ‘see … the substance of my matter’, that is, to ‘construe’ it ‘verbally’,
like a consolatory sermon (Lares, p. 165). What would he wish them to
see (and to feel) in the following? Mr. Stand-fast is speaking to his
‘companions’ from ‘half way in’:
This river has been a terror to many, yea the thoughts of it also have
often frighted me. But now methinks I stand easy, my foot is fixed
upon that upon which the feet of the priests that bare the Ark of the
Covenant stood when Israel went over this Jordan. The waters
indeed are to the palate bitter, and to the stomach cold; yet the
thoughts of what I am going to, and of the conduct that waits for
me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing coal at my heart.
I see myself now at the end of my journey, my toilsome days are
ended. I am going now to see that head that was crowned with
thorns, and that face that was spit upon, for me.
I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith, but now I go where I
shall live by sight, and shall be with him, in whose company
I delight myself.
I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen
the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my
foot too.
His name has been to me as a civet-box, yea, sweeter than all
perfumes. His voice to me has been most sweet, and his counte-
nance I have more desired than they that have most desired the
light of the sun. His word I did use to gather for my food, and for
antidotes against my faintings. He has held me, and I have kept
me from mine iniquities: yea, my steps hath he strengthened in
his way. (p. 372)
The invisible substance towards which hope was to be directed, and joy
stirred, by the consolatory sermon, ‘looking’ (in Bunyan’s words)
‘within the veil’ of any figurative speech or symbolic action, is in the
story itself now on the verge of realisation. But in looking beyond the
river, Stand-fast also looks back to the unrepeatable redemptive act of

Christ. What made the object of his dawning joy available to him, was
an act of willed annihilation directed towards ‘that head’ and ‘that
face’, and borne on his behalf in order to affirm him. Such rejection
was one of the things against which (as we saw in Chapter 1) consola-
tion steadied the believer; but even in the anticipated face-to-face
meeting, Stand-fast points to something he does not name, Christ’s
actual death, just as he does not name what the river signifies. Hope is
still reaching through the ‘veil’ of words, not stopping at the literal or
the sensory. Yet the sensory is a vital part of this passage.
We should consider who is speaking and who is listening – who has
a part in this message from the river – linking Mr. Stand-fast’s firm
footing in the Jordan to the reader’s own place in the discourse, then
and now. The reader knows that Mr. Stand-fast is addressing his fellow-
pilgrims, whose desires, fears and experiences (of the tribulations of
life, and of divine guidance) are closely akin to his. Moreover, having
undertaken the role of reader – however much one differs from the
reader implied by Bunyan’s address – one is in effect listening with
heightened attention to the happy ending of Bunyan’s story, of which
this speech and those preceding it (spoken by earlier pilgrims on
entering the River) constitute the chief substance. And since the reader
is human, he or she also recognises the imminence of death in the
passage and is reminded of his or her own apprehensions of that event
– however conceived. Thus, the reader is at the very least an interested
overhearer, who may reject the vision with a range of feeling from
wistfulness to indignation, but who will never be indifferent. And
irrespective of our own stance, we will probably be convinced that Mr.
Stand-fast’s emotions are shared by his immediate audience. This
increases the emotional pressure on us.
Bunyan’s cognitive engagement with the original reader is probably
quite deliberate, though many of its overtones may be unconscious.
The scene of death, here, is physical, social and personal. Physically, the
setting of a serene deathbed surrounded by Stand-fast’s companions is
presented, through the ‘continued metaphor’ of allegory (in schematic
terms, through the correspondences of a TOP), as a placement in the
River’s ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’ waters. The metaphor throws emphasis upon
the subjective experience of death, its potential fearfulness even for the
firm believer, the invasion and extinction of bodily life despite the
ongoing spiritual substance. What differentiates this scene, whose
archetypal imagery links it back to pagan antiquity, is its biblical and
confessional context, its intimate and pervasive connection with the
scripts of Calvinist belief and (more specifically) of Baptist practice.

Biblically it is a scene expressive of the covenant between God and
Israel, the land of Promise reached across Jordan representing at once
Heaven and the godly life lived in this world. Bunyan inverts the
physical particulars of the scene. Stand-fast, up to his waist in water (if
not deeper, since he seems to taste it), stands fast where the dry-shod
priests, carrying the Ark, ‘stood firm’ (Joshua 4.3); but, as the stones
taken from where the priests stood were matched by twelve others set
up in their place in the riverbed and ‘there to this day’ (Joshua 4.8–9),
so Bunyan’s spiritual hero, not exempted as Israel was from the deathly
water, stands on the immaterial foundation of his faith, as entrusted by
Christ to the twelve apostles, and on his assurance of salvation (‘the
thoughts of what I am going to’). ‘This Jordan’, the river in which he
stands, is the medium both of death and rebirth, the resurrection
prefigured in the baptism of Christ which took place in it and which is
re-enacted by every Baptist believer. For some readers it will also be the
river over which an army, very realistically represented, proceeded to a
genocide much less selective than even Samson’s was to be (see the
Introduction, pp. 13–30). Bunyan’s readers, intent on the spiritual and
moral sense, would, like Erasmus, turn this appalling Silenus inside-out
and find in it the divinely commanded extirpation of vice within
themselves. (Though for those who like Bunyan himself had fought in
the civil wars, this must have involved a considerable complication or
repression of feeling.) We will look later at the dynamic and deictic
features of the problematic sentence, which makes matters worse with
its stylistic awkwardness (at least on a first reading).
However, focused as we are upon pathos, we must keep things in
perspective. For Bunyan’s Baptist congregation the scene would, first
and foremost, recall their own rite of reception into the church,2
through the total immersion of adult baptism (and the physical fears
and reassurances which that might have occasioned, or recalled), and
the comparable security and emotional strength which it offered for
the subsequent crossing. The personal and social goals of preservation,
crisis and enjoyment – and less avowably of achievement, since for the
Calvinist salvation is through grace alone – which were reflected in
adult baptism, were also closely connected in the more general stress
that Puritan congregations placed upon testimony. The whole group
drew regularly upon accounts of individual experience.3 Here, a
testimony at the crisis of death is all the more effective (and affecting)
through its intensely individual presentation of a solitary pilgrimage,
alternating between the scripts of Stand-fast’s earlier life of ‘hear-say
and faith’, patterned out by the life of Christ, and the current script,
with its movement towards the imminent union with him. Three
temporal planes – Christ’s past sufferings, the present sense of a ‘toil-
some’ life finally fading, and the happiness to come – constitute the
enargeia of the passage, and it is not merely visual. Seeing expresses
Stand-fast’s certitude (‘I see myself now at the end of my journey’); but
the other senses convey his love, the bodily empathy with Christ who
is identified not by name (though his name is linked to one of the
senses, smell) but by the indices of common humanity as registered by
all five senses and fused in the bodily response of emotion. The nouns
‘head’, ‘face’, ‘company’, ‘shoe’, ‘name’, ‘voice’, ‘countenance’, and
‘word’ move into a sensual litany like those in the Song of Songs,
which begins with the perfume of ‘His name’ and culminates in the
masterly touch of Christ: ‘He has held me, and I have kept me from
mine iniquities: yea, my steps hath he strengthened in his way’.
Bunyan’s total progression, over the four paragraphs which transfer
the ‘glowing coal’ of assurance to the reader, has begun by linking
ecstatic sight to painful touch, ultimate acceptance and recognition to
ultimate blindness and rejection (‘I am going now to see that head that
was crowned with thorns …’). The reader’s empathic shrinking from
thorns and sputum, patiently endured in evidence of love, will be
oddly balanced in my selection of passages by something which
purports to express hatred: the ‘shrink[ing]’ lover of Donne’s ‘The
Apparition’ (see below). Here, Stand-fast’s memory of Christ’s
constancy through pain and insult underlies the final presentation of
his own bodily response, an empowerment felt outwardly as restraint
(‘held’) and inwardly as heroic resolution (‘strengthened’). Love is
authenticated through the ultimate achievement of a self fully capable
of loving, and enduring.
Whether Bunyan had absorbed his rhetorical skills through the
preaching he had listened to and the devotional books he had read, or
consciously cultivated them, his persuasive voice is informed by the
structural principles and functions of rhetoric as understood
successively by Aristotle and Cicero. In the passage we are considering,
this voice is engaged in the logical activity of comparison, in the
contemplation of mental images which both generate emotion in the
speaker and convey it to the listener or reader, and in the projection of
a particularly firm stance (signalled by the speaker’s name, which itself
reflects the famous passage from Ephesians, 6.11–17). As we have seen,
the enargeia of the passage, its use of sensory imagery to rouse emotion,
is very complex.
Before we leave it, I want to give a partial demonstration of how the

dynamism or energeia of Sentence Perspective helps to enforce its
emotive impact, confining myself to the first quoted paragraph. Here
the second ‘problematic’ sentence already addressed, with its paratactic
structure, explains its simple first clause with a second – far longer (and
clumsier?): ‘my foot is fixed upon that upon which the feet of the
priests that bare the Ark of the Covenant stood while Israel went over
this Jordan’. The dynamism here is in Firbasian terms quite peculiar:
much emphasis is thrown on the settings, spatial and temporal.
The main clause, and two subordinate clauses, are all on the
Appearance/Existence scale; only the inset relative clause linking
the ‘priests’ as Quality Bearers to the Ark as Specified burden is on the
Quality Scale. The comprehension (and the rhythm) of the clause
requires that emphasis be thrown on the pronoun ‘that’, as a setting for
the phenomena, both of Stand-fast’s ‘fixed … foot’, and (through the
relative pronoun ‘which’) ‘the feet of the priests’. The dynamism then
rises again through the context-dependence of ‘upon which’ to the
earlier phenomenon of firm standing, that of the priests. ‘Stood’ here,
as the Ap/Ex verb, carries more dynamism than ‘feet’, and is linked
rhythmically and emphatically to ‘the Ark of the Covenant’ preceding
it and the temporal setting (Israel’s crossing) which follows it – the
movement enabled by its stillness. But the pronoun, ‘that’, as the
obvious though unidentified source of emotional reassurance, points
deictically into the intellectual and spiritual space of the Bible and its
interpretation, and within that to Joshua 4:9 (AV): ‘And Joshua set up
twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the place where the feet of the
priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood: and they are there to
this day’. Amongst the responses anticipated by Bunyan might be a
general sense that scripture is being quoted (signalled by the sudden
syntactic complication), a prompt recognition of the direct quotation
with its inset relative clauses, and a profounder, warmer response to
some specific understanding of the spiritual sense linking Joshua to
Jesus and the twelve stones to the foundations of faith. Bunyan wants
empathy and admiration to be tinged for some readers with fear: do I
have what it takes to feel like this on my deathbed? He plays on a pre-
dictable variation within the RPER. The culture-specific emotion of this
sentence accordingly yields to a far less specific one in the following,
with its expression of the inevitable fear of death and dying. A subject,
‘The waters’ (context-independent though related semantically to ‘This
river’) is linked to two balanced subject complements, with their adver-
bial modifiers: ‘to the palate bitter and to the stomach cold’. As ‘figures
of words’ these constitute isocolon (that is, two phrases, balanced

syntactically and rhythmically). Where FSP is concerned, they appear
to embody both a ‘Quality Scale’ and an ‘Existential Scale’. The latter
shows the fullest co-ordination between increasing communicative
dynamism and actual word-order. From the subject, at first expressed
as a very generalised phenomenon (‘waters’, which though context-
independent, is linked semantically to ‘this river’), we are led through
the verb of state (‘are’), and the adverbial settings (‘to the palate … to
the stomach’), to a full realisation of the subject as a phenomenon, in
its modifiers ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’. As registered by ‘palate’ and ‘stomach’,
this achieves the vivid reality of enargeia as the fearful, irresistible chill
spreads down the main tract of the body.
These symbols of present experience are counterbalanced by the
‘thoughts’ evoked and shared in the next clause, where warmth at the
very centre of being outweighs all invasive pressures on the hollow
places, from mouth to abdomen, as the bitterness and coldness of
death extinguish the pleasure and energy of physical life. We are
reminded of the emotional – and moral – senses of ‘having no
stomach’ for something. Turning to the ‘Quality Scale’, we again find
the dynamism increasing markedly – though in a manner less directly
related to word order. The Scale rises from the Quality bearer (‘the
waters’), through the Verb of quality (‘are’), which with its double
predication (the figure of words, prozeugma) sets up the two sensory
Specifications ‘bitter’ and ‘cold’. In the word order, these follow the two
linked Further specifications ‘to the palate’ and ‘to the stomach’.
The two scales play off our emotional and logical perceptions against
each other, locating sensation both to set up a logical contrast, and to
focus our empathic emotion and our own fear of death. But,
subsequently, these perceptions converge in the inverse word-order of
the following clause, where the further specification ‘at my heart’,
coming last and completing the pattern of contrast, unifies doctrinal
teaching with moving admonition – at the same time, delighting readers
with the rock-like spiritual heroism of Stand-fast (and it may be
significant – in the context of Calvinist belief such as Bunyan’s – that
the cleansing Grace symbolised in Isaiah 6:6 by ‘a coal’ touching the
lips has now passed inward to the heart, as the Word of God, warming
and reassuring the reader as it warms and steadies the hero).
As a whole, the passage seems to transcend the Puritan ethos while
perfectly expressing it. There is a full reflection of Calvinist belief in the
absolute dependence of humanity on divine grace, with its concomi-
tant sense of weakness in humanity – especially in the body. But on
the other hand, Mr. Stand-fast is a figure of massive dignity and heroic
energy.
4.1.2 Playing the scale

In this phase I intend to move very succinctly through the extremes,
from divine love to erotic hated, with minimum quotation and
contextualisation, starting with an emotion which, while it may
undoubtedly be felt, is hard to conceive fully (or to explain), from any
perspective religious or secular.
The hatred of God is rarer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(at least, as expressed in the surviving writing) than in later centuries,
with the further qualification that in more modern times this emotion
is more likely to be directed towards other people’s ideas of God (as it
often has been since 11 September 2001) than towards any
apprehended reality. In contrast, Milton’s Satan always knows that
God exists; but only once in Paradise Lost does he admit that God is
God, and not merely a cosmic power enabled to impose on his equals
through the accident of superior strength. But even when, in Book
IV.32–104, he acknowledges God’s goodness, he can neither name him
directly (41) – he could, after all, barely name the ‘sun’, which he
‘hates’ (37) – nor profit by his attributes. The beauty of Creation briefly
re-inculcates, or teaches God’s goodness but it cannot move or sway
Satan’s stubborn will (moreover, Milton’s own idea of God’s justice
forestalls the possibility of mercy – see PL III.129–32). It helps here to
recollect that this soliloquy was originally begun as part of a tragedy,
Adam Unparadised.4 Though this would have been a closet drama, it is
still instructive to imagine an actor giving full emotional weight to the
following (48–53):
Yet all his good proved ill in me,

And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I ’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude
So burdensome still paying, still to owe …
‘Endless gratitude’ might be expressed, as Satan relives his dawning

‘malice’ against God, as a mingled expression of agony, outrage and
boredom, all adding up to hatred – about to be intensified through
another irretrievable act of will with the appalling ‘Evil be thou my
good’ (110). If God cannot be annihilated, that by which he is
recognised can be endlessly denied. I will leave this example with a

question: does this show hatred to be a defective form of love? See
54–7: it seems that Satan had a theoretical grasp of the reciprocity of
love but (never, or no longer) ‘understood’ it as something emotionally
and experientially given.
Political passion: turning to the extremes of political passion, love for
a monarch might be typified by Spenser’s various tributes to Elizabeth,
as in the lyricism of the Aprill Eclogue (just as the reciprocal love of
monarch for people is represented in Elizabeth’s own speeches – the
Tilbury address of 1588 with its masterly use of the laser, and her
‘golden speech’ to Parliament near the end of her reign);5 while Lucy
Hutchinson’s comprehensive picture of James I (Memoirs, pp. 64–5) as a
mean-spirited oppressor of truth and justice who would not ‘assert his
resentment like a prince’ but debased language and logic by demonis-
ing the Puritans, expresses contempt, if not hatred. Hutchinson drives
home the detraction inflicted on any person who for any honest
motive, secular or religious (and there were many such motives),
opposed the King. Every such action like a divine rebuke elicits the
same comment from the King, as though the words of Melanchthon’s
preacher (see p. 64, above) found no faith in James’s heart to illumi-
nate them, but ‘hammered’ instead on his dull and bullying obduracy.
Antistrophe echoes the King’s knee-jerk response to every remonstrant
in turn: ‘he was a puritan’.
Similarly, the younger Mortimer’s portrayal of Gaveston in
Marlowe’s Edward II reflects a personal loathing, extended to the King
and his conduct. The degree to which such feeling reflects the actual
power-relationship between the monarch and other constituents of the
political order, or disguises it through distortion and repression, should
also be considered. Do these extremes indicate that, in this sphere of
relations, negative feeling is more directly and accurately reflective
than positive feeling? Even a hint here, however narrowly based, might
be useful to us in other contexts in which political feeling is involved.
At a time of temporary truce between the nobles, the king, and his
favourite, and in response to Mortimer Senior’s plea that ‘The mighti-
est kings have had their minions’ (I.iv.391),6 Mortimer Junior explains
his hatred of this one:
He weares a lord’s revenewe on his back,

And Midas like he jets it in the court,
With base outlandish cullions at his heeles,
Whose proud fantastick liveries make such show,
As if that Proteus god of shapes appearde.

I have not seen a dapper jack so briske,
He weares a short Italian hooded cloake,
Larded with pearle, and in his tuskan cap
A jewell of more value then the crowne.
Edward II, I.iv.407–15
He goes on to express his rage at being spied on ‘From out a window’

by ‘the king and he’, and laughed at (ibid., 416–18). Indignation at the
waste of resources; resentment of the low-born foreign followers who
obtrude on the court, bringing Gaveston’s (and the King’s) private
fantasies into public; aristocratic disdain; and homophobic nausea, all
combine here. The physical and symbolic space7 round the seat of
power, which the peers consider theirs by right of birth, is being
denied them. Wealth no longer affirms conventional order and rank,
but negates it. The social scene and scripts mediating the hierarchical
exercise of power by the King and his magnates have been replaced by
a personal love scene and script; and Mortimer Junior expresses his
resultant sense of exclusion by invoking the commonplaces of political
responsibility and financial prudence, and implying how the King
transgresses them. This is at once logical and compulsively emotional.
The fashionable ‘cloak / Larded with pearl’, like a side of beef prepared
for roasting, brings the passage to the peak of revulsion and shock,
with a retching lurch of the stomach – the choriambic rhythm created
by the reversed initial stress almost compelling a sympathetic response.
Hatred’s wish that its object should perish is implied here: not just that
the favourite should do so, but the whole perversion of early modern
political order which he symbolises – including the incorrigible King.
The political grounds of this hatred are very clear (though homophobia
is also evident despite Mortimer Junior’s disclaimer at I.iv.402).
Love of children (and hatred): the briefest reminders might be enough
here. Ben Jonson’s twelve-line epigram ‘On my first son’8 is so precise
in its conscious, anguished communication of all the strands of
relationship: the father’s wish to live through the child thwarted, and
(as he perceives it) punished; the struggle to accept death on behalf of
the seven-year-old who has ‘so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage’;
the tender and humbled description of the boy as ‘Ben Jonson his best
piece of poetry’; and the last line shrinking back from the joy of life,
put this picture of paternal love into a very broad frame of other
relationships. When he writes of ‘pay(ing)’ the child back to God ‘on
the just day’, bitterly replacing the language which belonged to the
personal plan of his life, and to its projected enjoyment goal, with the
social and instrumental language of finance, there is a strong ironic hint
of resentment in that direction, if not of hatred. Indeed, the power of
the poem is in the constant shifting of its bias between the pathos of
clinging to the child, and the kind involved in letting go. Perhaps the
child as a ‘piece of poetry’ (since a poem’s power to live is only
apparent once it is out of the poet’s hands) reconciles the two.
Where hatred is concerned, we need only consider the maddened
Lear’s slippage half in and half out of what has become his role theme
of injured father – from reflection on his daughters’ cruelty, to a hallu-
cinatory vision of ‘simpering’ court ladies transformed to ‘centaurs’
(King Lear, Folio Text IV.v.105–24). The instinctive satisfaction goals of
animals efface the human life theme, and consequent preservation goal,
of ‘mincing’ sexual ‘virtue’, poised as that is between heaven and hell,
the snow peak (the face seemingly relocated between the legs) and the
volcano. ‘Burning, scalding, stench, consumption’ seem to be invading
his senses; but perhaps they are more bearable than what was con-
cealed by Goneril’s and Regan’s flattering outward conformity with his
demands, when he had power – their frozen egoism. Here, certainly,
with the loss of a stable ethos for the child-parent relationship, and
with nothing to regulate its attendant pathos, we are in the world of
‘raw emotions’ of which Jardine writes (pp. 106–10, above). But this is
to discount the possibility that there are restorative forces in the play,
working intelligently through pathos and restoring love, even if power-
less to avert the ultimate tragedy.
Erotic emotion: to represent the ultimate erotic expression of love,
take the image of Scudamour and Amoret’s embrace from the ending
of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book III as originally published in 1590 and
subsequently cancelled, comparing the lovers to a ‘faire Hermaphrodite’
(stanza 45).9 Here we see complete and pure mutual desire, purged of
the male triumphalism and cruelty that has been so powerfully figured
in the House and Masque of Busyrane (Cantos xi–xii). The pathos
communicated by this image reaches the reader through its immediate
observer, Britomart, and who now adds a component to the emotive
image held up to the reader. Sympathy with her conflict of feeling
counteracts any vicarious thrill, on the reader’s part, at the lovers’
ecstasy. Though she does not speak, her role in Levinson’s terms (see
p. 2, above) is reduced from ghostor of the script which brought the
lovers together, to bystander. As such, she is excluded further by her
own unfulfilled longing for Artegall, but simultaneously included by
her empathy with all other virtuous lovers, especially these – seeing
them ‘as growne together quite’ and ‘half-enuying their blesse’ (stanza
46, 5–6). Thus, erotic love – already balanced against what had so
pitilessly negated it in the earlier scene – now forms part of a larger
chord of positive feeling. Erotic desire is established as one mode of
expression for a love which endures longer and reaches further.
3.4.3 Donne’s ‘The Apparition’: an extremity of hate?

In contrast, to exemplify hatred as expressed through eroticism
(robbing it of generosity and joy, and reducing it at the conscious level
to an obsessive awareness of bodily appetites and revulsions), I take
Donne’s ‘The Apparition’:10
When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,

And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink,
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I;
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
Here we have a likely instance of those Inner and Outer relationships

referred to in the Introduction. Studies such as Arthur Marotti’s11
George Parfitt’s (1989)12 have suggested the intensity and particularity
of John Donne’s sense of audience, and its expression through the
medium of manuscript poetry. Circulated amongst the members of a
small group, initially at the Inns of Court, poems such as ‘The
Apparition’ and ‘The Flea’ were not meant for women to read, though
they depended on the sense of a woman being addressed within the
Inner relationship, constituted by a dramatically-presented speaker and
listener. Even amongst an exclusively male readership, habituated to
poems about the seduction of citizens’ wives and daughters, this poem
seems to reflect an RPER. Donne pushes so far with the jealousy,

mortification, malice and lubricity of his persona, that he seems to be
teasing the reader: should he carry on sharing the speaker’s perspective
as his guide to the three characters and the situation depicted, or yield
to feelings of scorn and revulsion again him? The liveliness of dissent
amongst its male readers would be a main index of the poem’s success
(though whatever he thought of the vengeful bedside phantom, the
reader would probably go on enjoying the comic-grotesque picture of
an even baser lover, mercilessly exposed alongside his tormented mis-
tress). In cognitive terms this is a very familiar scene: physically, per-
sonally and socially, in which the reader will know precisely what the
deictic ‘more’ of l9 refers to, in its sneeringly emphatic position; and in
this instance especially schema theory will yield interesting insights.
The ‘bed’ and the secluded space enclosing it are a setting for sexual
activity, though its other associations – night, sleep and bedside tapers
– link it back to the nocturnal terrors and reassurances of childhood.
Both before and after the ghost’s intervention, a variety of discrepant
personal goals are being pursued there, their full range being detectable
only by the poem’s reader. As imagined by Donne’s embittered
speaker, the satisfaction goal of sexual release is pursued by both part-
ners (so compulsively on the woman’s part as to breed misunderstand-
ing in the ‘tired’ man); the enjoyment and achievement goals of bedding
the woman and boasting about it are in this milieu attributable to the
man, in furtherance of his role theme as a fashionable rake and rival of
the speaker; the woman is faced with the crisis goal of protection
against the ghost; and the ghost’s enjoyment goal is revenge. The scripts
as recognised by the reader make it possible to pursue several separate
strands of response simultaneously, including a compulsive physical
sympathy both for the ‘shrinking’ lover (perhaps echoing the reader’s
own fears of sexual inadequacy and of his partners’ needs), and for the
‘feigned vestal’ in her chilly sweat – this, despite the ongoing malice
and contempt. But the acute identification with the woman (imagining
how the apparition will terrify and humiliate her, how the threat of
total darkness will amplify her terror, and how her skin will prickle,
suggests a repressed erotic love under the hatred, a continuing physical
affinity to that body which he wishes to mortify in the same degree to
which it has mortified him. ‘Poor aspen wretch’ hides the empathy
which enables pity, under its reductive contempt. This ongoing contra-
diction makes sense of the apparent absurdity of dying for the love of
somebody for whom, allegedly, his ‘love is spent’; but the speaker still
uses his malign sympathy with her to express, as conveyed through the
two short lines (9 and 13), two peaks of gratified vengefulness – though
the first, more sexual, has a hint of loathing not present in the second.
The final lines with their emphatic triplet of rhymes are a puzzle. If the
ghost really wishes the ‘vestal’ to ‘repent’, however ‘painfully’, it
cannot be as purely malicious as it claims, though wishing complete
erotic humiliation on the woman who humiliated it in life. Again, is
the wish to share humiliation a form of love? And perhaps, projecting
himself into the ‘ghost’, the vengeful lover suspects that her terror
would move him to words of comfort, which spoken then, might leave
her more ‘innocent’ than she is now, because less of a hypocrite?
Recalling the Silenus, the extremities of love and hate seem in this
instance to be constantly discovering themselves inside each other.
4.2 Passionate to a purpose
This section will demonstrate how a range of emotions can be used in

any given instance, for the furtherance of a single purpose – sometimes
combining violent extremes in a single text. Three examples will be
used, mindful of the average modem reader’s unfamiliarity with the
frames of reference evident in the first two – and with some aspects of
the vehement feminism expressed in the third. Where Latimer and
Sidney are concerned, the disparity between the two parties to persua-
sion is in each case extreme, and inverted from one passage to the next
– from the prophetic voice of reformed Christianity, speaking with the
authority of God to the recalcitrant sinner, to the subject daring his
sovereign’s wrath and placing himself at her mercy. In the third extract
the alleged superiority of male reason over female passion is subverted.
Where should modem readers place themselves in relation to such
texts – as empathic addressees, as overhearers, as dispassionate cultural
analysts?
4.2.1 Bishop Hugh Latimer, sermon ‘of the plough’

This places us in 1548, five years before Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat,
at the very beginning of the state-supported programme of religious
reform presided over by Thomas Cranmer, which saw the transition
from Mass to Holy Communion, and which lasted as long as Edward
VI lived. Here, extreme emotions – anger and shame – are pitted
against each other for a very immediate pastoral purpose:
Now what shall we say of these rich citizens of London? What shall
I say of them? Shall I call them proud men of London, malicious
men of London, merciless men of London? No, no, I may not say
so; they will be offended with me then. Yet must I speak. For is
there not reigning in London as much pride, as much covetousness,
as much cruelty, as much oppression, and as much superstition, as
was in Nebo? Yes, I think, and much more too. Therefore I say,
repent, O London; repent, repent. Thou hearest thy faults told thee,
amend them, amend them. I think, if Nebo had had the preaching
that thou hast, they would have converted. And, you rulers and
officers, be wise and circumspect, look to your charge, and see you
do your duties; and rather be glad to amend your ill living than to
be angry when you are warned or told of your fault. What ado was
there made in London at a certain man, because he said, (and
indeed at that time on a just cause,) ‘Burgesses!’ quoth he, ‘nay,
Butterflies.’ Lord, what ado there was for that word! And yet would
God they were no worse than butterflies! Butterflies do but their
nature: the butterfly is not covetous, is not greedy of other men’s
goods; is not full of envy and hatred, is not malicious, is not cruel, is
not merciless. The butterfly glorieth not in her own deeds, nor pre-
ferreth the traditions of men before God’s word; it committeth not
idolatry, nor worshippeth false gods. But London cannot abide to be
rebuked; such is the nature of man, If they be pricked, they will
kick; if they be rubbed on the gall, they will wince; but yet they will
not amend their faults, they will not be ill spoken of. But how shall
I speak well of them? If you could be content to receive and follow
the word of God, and favour good preachers, if you could bear to be
told of your faults, if you could amend when you hear of them, if
you would he glad to reform that is amiss; if I might see any such
inclination in you, that you would leave to be merciless, and begin
to be charitable, I would then hope well of you, I would then speak
well of you. But London was never so ill as it is now. (The Sermons
(ed. A. Pollard), pp. 36–7)13
Latimer seems repeatedly to goad the Londoners within his congrega-

tion into rage, anticipating it and making those listeners share his con-
clusion that they must inevitably be angered, by pretending to draw
back (‘no I may not say so, they will be offended with me’), and by the
distancing device of referring to them in the third person. This, of
course, applies the exclusion model. He is plainly speaking to a mixed
audience, including clergy, who have come under the lash immedi-
ately before the passage quoted (pp. 35–6), and he has already warned
them that they must ‘not … be offended without cause’ (p. 33). He
knows the ‘rich citizens’ will be more angered for being shamed in
public, in their own city, and, accordingly, pretends not to have said
the words he has said with powerful isocolon and antistrophe (‘proud
men of London, malicious men of London …’). This of course is a
blatant use of praeteritio (or occultatio in Lanham’s preferred term).
‘Offended’ suggests that they will become too angry to attend; but it in
fact just gives them time to realise that they are indeed angry, before
Latimer’s laser reflects the image of their anger back at them to enrage
them more – before breaking down their rage with a stronger sense of
shame (much deeper than the shame of being publicly attacked). This
shame also touches their pride as citizens of a free city under their own
government, where the King ‘reigns’ less prominently; instead, their
besetting vices ‘reign’ there, enslaving them and damaging others.
Latimer builds the shame progressively, with the prophetic instant
repetition (epizeuxis) of ‘repent, O London; repent, repent’, and ‘amend
them, amend them’, the apostrophe addressed to London’s civic rulers
and officers, again confronting their anger, and the climactic
‘Burgesses! Nay, Butterflies’ comparison, renewing old anger at an
intolerable instance of contempt. This is used to drive the listeners into
shame – and not just the citizens amongst them. Reason, working
through the model or topic of contraries (or, more precisely, contradic-
tories), gives a touch of objective coolness and prompts the congrega-
tion to draw its own conclusions. Undoing a metaphor – instead of
making one – stresses not the unity, but the temporary alienation of
persuader and persuadee. By listing all the benighted goals pursued by
fallen wills, in distinction from merely animal drives, Latimer presses
anger to the point where his own unrelenting severity can batter
through it and its ‘kick[ing]’, ‘winc[ing]’ animal expression, into
shame. Here is a cap which while less plausibly insulting, actually fits
the ‘burgesses’ better. The butterfly’s showiness – ‘but its nature’ – is a
vice when incident to men, but less severe than the others which
Latimer piles up (synathroesmus) through his repeated commas or short
clauses (‘is not … , is not …’). Confronted with these vices, and realis-
ing that they include those of the conservative clergy (which like them
‘preferreth the traditions of men before God’s word’), the citizens will
gradually realise that they have graver matters to attend to than
wounded pride, in common with everybody else present. But Latimer
does not yet relent in his particular attack on London, graphically
depicting the signs of repentance which he does not yet see.
Before Hyperius enumerated the five basic sermon-types (see Jameela
Lares as cited in Chapter 1, pp. 71–3, above), here is Latimer already
applying correctio, rebuking vice. This corresponds to the key text, 2

Timothy 3.16–17, but in accordance with that text Latimer exercises
other functions, including the reproof (elenchos) of false doctrine. He
works gradually on his hearers’ repressed sense of their own wrongdo-
ing, aiming to switch pathos from one extreme to the other, as bias is
reversed and shame brought to the surface.
4.2.2 Advice to a Prince: Sidney’s letter to Elizabeth

In the ‘argument’ prefixed to this letter (Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip
Sidney, pp. 44–5)14 Katherine Duncan-Jones identifies the following
passage as the second section of Sidney’s ‘Reasons against the marriage’
projected between Queen Elizabeth and Monsieur (that is, Alençon, the
French King’s brother). This section presents ‘dangers to the Queen’s
person’. Accordingly, the argumentation is tightly packed; but the
letter has to continue managing the difficult and dangerous ethos
factor, the stance of a subject offering unsolicited advice to his Queen
on a highly sensitive subject; and it will be interesting to see how
pathos, here, subserves the other two Aristotelean ‘proofs’:
And as to your person, indeed seal of our happiness, what good

there may come by it to balance with the loss of so honourable a
constancy, truly yet I perceive not.
I will not show so much malice as to object the universal doubt of
all that race’s unhealthfulness; neither will I lay to his charge his
ague-like manner of proceeding, sometimes hot and sometimes cold
in the time of pursuit, which always likely is most fervent; and I will
temper my speeches from any other unreverent disgracings of him
in particular, though they might be never so true. This only will I
say: if he do come hither, he must live here in far meaner reputation
than his mind will well brook, having no other royalty to counte-
nance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your
kingdom, and live at his discretion; or, lastly, he must separate
himself, with more dishonour and further discontentment of heart
than ever before.
Often have I heard you with protestation say, ‘No private pleasure
nor self affection could lead you unto it’. But if it be both
unprofitable for your kingdom and unpleasant to you, certainly it
were a dear purchase of repentance. Nothing can it add unto you,
but only the bliss of children: which, I confess, were a most
unspeakable comfort, but yet no more appertaining to him, than to
any other to whom the height of all good haps were allotted, to be
your husband. And therefore I may assuredly affirm that what good
soever can follow marriage is no more his, than anybody’s; but the
evils and dangers are particularly annexed to his person and condi-
tion. For as for the enriching of your country with treasure, which
either he hath not, or hath otherwise to bestow it; or the staying of
your servants’ minds with new expectations and liberalities (which
is more dangerous than fruitful); or the easing your Majesty of your
cares (which is as much to say, as the easing you of being a queen
and sovereign); I think everybody perceives this way to be either full
of hurt, or void of help. (Miscellaneous Prose (1973), pp. 50–1)
In the tradition of that distinction between ‘The King’s Two bodies’15

through which monarchy was conceptualised, Sidney turns to the
personal honour, happiness and safety of the Queen, with an appeal to
the reputation she has already established as a steadfast unmarried
monarch. The first two lines quoted are in effect the proposition for this
section of the argument, and they reinforce the pathos of an appeal to
the Queen to preserve her subjects’ ‘happiness’, with an implied plea to
preserve her own as a monarch universally honoured.
In the following paragraph Sidney presents arguments of lesser
importance which will nonetheless be marked by the Queen, because
they impinge closely, physically (even sexually) and emotionally,
presenting a sickly, unclean and lukewarm lover – before ostensibly
withdrawing them under the cover of occultatio/ praeteritio and showing
why: the indecorous, ‘unreverent’ denigration, even of a foreign
royalty, threatens the proper distance between subjects and monarchs
which must be preserved (even while writing a letter which
transgresses it!). Sidney then presents a powerful dilemma turning on
what is of paramount importance to the Queen from all three
perspectives (honour, pleasure, safety): her sovereignty. The first ‘horn’
of the dilemma is split around the second. Alençon must either defer
to the Queen’s supremacy, but become discontented and depart, to her
great humiliation; or he must be gratified with the title of King, but
deprive her of power. Both ‘horns’ carry their particular pathos – felt
more distinctly where the first is concerned because its first division
images a restless and wearing companion, and its second a standing
mark of failure, following the Queen’s anticipated desertion.
The next paragraph links the most bold emotive appeal – an
empathetic approach, by a man and a subject, to a woman’s (and a
queen’s) wish for children. ‘Unspeakable’ represents both the intensity
of that gratification and Sidney’s necessary inability to imagine it, as a
man. He then proceeds to unmask the per accidens16 fallacy in the

argument that she should marry Alençon in order to have children;
any more suitable husband could do that for her. Having dismissed the
invalid positive argument, Sidney concludes this section with all the
negative ones ‘particularly annexed to his (Alençon’s) person and con-
dition’. This series of adjuncts, all in the form of participial transitive
verbs (‘enriching … staying … easing’) ends by effacing the pathos of
royal stress and fatigue with an ironia that rouses the stronger pathos of
indignation, showing the exclusion concealed under the inclusion
model, ‘the mutual society, help, and comfort’ of marriage: in effect
‘easing you of being a queen and sovereign’. Sidney expresses his love
(and his political concern) by figuring, not hatred for the Queen on
Alençon’s part, but his hatred of her sovereignty and effective willing-
ness to annihilate that.
Amongst the ‘extremes’ studied in this chapter, this one represents
the ultimate extremity of distance across which, in one particular set of
historical conditions, persuasion could be attempted. Sidney is helped
by his familiarity with the Queen as a courtier, his memory of her own
words, and the moral, political and religious assumptions which he
shares with her. But an impression of the political interests behind
Sidney, whose language-choices he must inevitably share (as in ‘the
keys of your kingdom’), makes it clear that he is pushing his luck. The
social scene of reasoned argument between intelligent, well-acquainted
and well-informed parties, is countered by the very different goals and
life-themes of monarch and subject.
4.2.3 Feminist pathos: Jane Anger

In his collection of pamphlets, The Women’s Sharp Revenge, Simon
Shepherd claims good grounds for believing that Jane Anger her
Protection for Women (1589) was indeed written by a woman. Since
‘Anger’ was an authentic contemporary surname,17 it should not be
concluded that this is a pseudonym conveniently chosen by a male
writer. The Protection replies to a pamphlet now lost, or never printed
(Shepherd, p. 30), Book: his Surfeit in Love, which may have been partly
plagiarised from John Lyly’s Euphues his Censure to Philautus. But for
our purposes the first priority is to confirm a distinctive female ethos,
pathos and (possibly) logos in the writing. Consider the following
passage:
The creation of man and woman at the first (he being formed in
principio of dross and filthy clay) did so remain until God saw that in
him his workmanship was good, and therefore, by the transforma-

tion of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purified.
Then, lacking a help for him, God making woman of man’s flesh –
that she might be purer than he – doth evidently show how far we
women are more excellent than men. Our bodies are fruitful,
whereby the world increaseth, and our care wonderful, by which
man is preserved. From woman sprang man’s salvation. A woman
was the first that believed, and a woman likewise the first that
repented of sin. In women is only true fidelity: except in her, there
be [no] constancy, and without her no huswifery. In the time of
their sickness we cannot be wanted, and when they are in health we
for them are most necessary. They are comforted by our means; they
are nourished by the meats we dress; their bodies freed from diseases
by our cleanliness, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably
through their own noisomeness. Without our care they lie in their
beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the
heat of summer. They love to go handsomely in their apparel and
rejoice in the pride thereof, yet who is the cause of it, but our care-
fulness to see that everything about them be curious? Our virginity
makes us virtuous, our conditions courteous and our chastity
maketh our trueness of love manifest. They confess we are neces-
sary, but they would have us likewise evil. That they cannot want us
I grant, yet evil I deny (except only in the respect of man who,
hating all good things, is only desirous of that which is ill – through
whose desire, in estimation of conceit, we are made ill). But lest
some should snarl on me, barking out this reason, that ‘none is
good but God, and therefore women are ill’, I must yield that in that
respect we are ill – and affirm that men are no better, seeing we are
so necessary unto them. (The Women’s Sharp Revenge, p. 39)
Whether or not there is anger here, there is certainly contempt –

increased in the central section of the passage by the repeated deictic
use of ‘their’ and ‘them’, implying disdainful distance. The initial
argument from material cause, contrasting the ‘dross and filthy clay’ of
the earth, as purified into man, with the greater necessary purity
of woman as proportionally purified from ‘man’s flesh’ seems indeed to
be distinctively feminine. It is closely paralleled in Christine de Pizan’s
The Book of the City of Ladies, I.9.2,18 a text written nearly two hundred
years earlier. The combination of reasoning with biblical citation,
meeting male arrogance head on, parallels what God did with ‘man’s
flesh’. Like the rib, male argument is transformed. The demonstration
of men’s dependence on women, for all the outward ‘adjuncts’ of their

masculinity, their public and domestic comfort and prestige, generates
the pamphlet’s most memorable expression, most vivid enargeia and
sharpest pathos: ‘Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter
and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer’. Men’s
stance of superiority, the cleanliness and finery that gives them
confidence to maintain it, depends on women’s willingness, work, and
indulgence – they are, unwittingly, the creatures of the women they
despise. Men do not recognise where they are standing (unless that
awareness is disguised under their will to ‘have us evil’), while women’s
position is defined by their sense of ingratitude and their contempt of
men’s irrational inability to recognise their dependence. Of course the
stance rules out acknowledgement of what men, at that period, did for
women – but that is dictated by the specific script of this kind of
controversial writing within the larger social scene of argument. The
reader expects all the argument to be categorical and extreme, and
wants it that way. Despite this, one thing denied by the writer may be
apparent to the reader. Men are accused of being willing to see nothing
but evil in women, whereas the whole passage has maintained the
same extreme stance towards them. And as that is overlooked, so are
the women’s reasons for continuing to care for men. Unlike hate,
anger implies the possibility of a restored, or rectified relationship.
4.2.4 Conclusion
This chapter has sought to the broaden the reader’s horizons with
regard to pathos, as brought to bear within very diverse relationships,
from the extremes of unmixed feeling (or the nearest we can get to
them) to the interlocking of contrary passions, and through a wide
variation in the relative statuses of persuader and persuadee. I hope
that one result will be a heightened sense of the specific character of
each example of pathos to be looked at in the next chapter. This should
help us in reappraising the critical comment on those texts which
display it, whose own emotional interaction with it has already been
studied, leaving quite a few questions open. Other points should also
have emerged, some in relation to the material and some to the
method of analysis.
In its primary preoccupation with love and hate, the material has
incidentally confirmed the relation of pathos to will (as affirmed by
Augustine): primarily the will to affirm, or deny, others – as threatening
to the self, or as means to its enlargement and transformation. Such
affirmation and denial operates at many levels. Besides demonstrating a
wider application of ‘new’ rhetorical techniques, and representing the

larger framework within which early modern persuasion took place,
these readings should help us in assessing the motivation, and the
direction, of those texts we are about to revisit.
5
Adjusting the Mirrors
5.1 The emotional laser
In the two preceding chapters, we have sampled the persuasiveness of

modern criticism in its learning, its intuitiveness, its theoretical
agendas and its pathos, and we have also looked at the extremes of
feeling in some early modern texts without reference to any critical
comment. In Chapter 3 we considered Greenblatt’s persuasive
presentation of Tamburlaine as a killing machine, and Lisa Jardine’s
emotive account of ‘raw emotions’ as unleashed in Lear. We saw pathos
being aroused to challenge conservative readings of Shakespeare, and
to bring home the oddity of Margaret Cavendish – and, by contrast, we
saw it being evoked in more muted but subtly engaging ways by
Ringler and Flachmann, Baldwin’s editors, and by David Norbrook in
his appraisal of Lucy Hutchinson. We looked, too, at Milton’s creativity
in Paradise Lost as expounded by Harold Bloom; and at God’s
shortcomings as Creator, viewed from Catherine Belsey’s feminist
perspective.
In the last chapter, I explored the ‘extremes’ of early modern pathos
and suggested that it works distinctively in the verbal expression of
every specific form of relationship – as in pulpit oratory or epistolary
rhetoric – or in literary or dramatic texts. In addition I continued to
demonstrate the specific value of my kind of rhetorical ‘double analy-
sis’ as a way of revealing new things about texts, including some more
or less familiar ones like ‘The Apparition’ and The Pilgrim’s Progress.
As I have already indicated, this chapter will seek to get as close as
possible to an unattainable goal – unattainable because we cannot fully
reconstruct the physical, psychological and social circumstances in
which the pathos once stirred by our texts, in reading or performance,
140
Adjusting the Mirrors 141
was experienced. Nevertheless, in some cases we might be able, with

the aid of the texts themselves, to reconstruct some of the mental
schemata presupposed (with all their emotional connotations) in the
minds of a reader, or of listeners to a book or poem being read aloud,
or a theatre audience. We might as a consequence detect some
approximation – some shades of feeling new to us, and distinct from
those presupposed in the critical extracts looked at in Chapter 3. In
other cases I will try to locate the co-ordinates in a text, and in its
putative audience of an emotion that most readers today could not
(or would not wish to) feel.
The chapter title expresses the relationship between the purposive
stirring up of pathos, and the range of response which it anticipates.
That mutual reflection and intensification of feeling between speaker
and audience which was described, some years ago, as an ‘emotional
laser’ and which I explained and exemplified in Chapter 1, may work
in sharply contrasted ways – to be demonstrated towards the end of
this chapter with reference to two passages from Paradise Lost. The
‘laser’ in this context is really a shorthand symbol or mnemonic for the
dynamism of pathos, comprising three sequential factors: orientation
→ reflection → intensification. There can be no reflection without ori-
entation: without adjustment or perhaps in some cases accidental
alignment of the laser mirrors, so that the persuader’s feelings reflects
the susceptibilities of the audience positively or negatively, as an image
of what they love or what they hate. If, at one extreme, we try to
accommodate the laser analogy to Harold Bloom’s account of the
‘anxiety of influence’, the idea of inter-reflecting mirrors must be very
guardedly developed: the interplay will not be between simple emotive
images, but between the creative process of one mind (its thinking,
feeling, ‘conceiving’, ‘subduing’ and shaping) as apprehended perceptu-
ally and emotionally in another. On this reading of the analogy, there is
no single persuader, moved, progressively more and more, by the
reflection of his or her emotion in the minds of an audience – but a
sequence of reflections between creative minds (which might where
Milton is concerned include the mind of Satan reacting and rebelling
against God, against which rebellion Milton himself reacts – after
which the mind of Harold Bloom responds antithetically to Milton).
In more usual rhetorical contexts, this mutual reflection is intuitively
grasped by the persuader, sensing sympathy in one part of an audi-
ence, and antipathy in the other. Think of the rhetoric of political
assemblies where speakers seek simultaneously to hearten their own
party and goad their opponents. But persuaders are moved as much by
their conception of what an audience might feel, and might become, as

they are by its present state of feeling, and the qualities or capacities it
already possesses. Marlowe provides an example here. What we know
of him suggests that, in all probability, he expected one part of his
audience to be drawn to Tamburlaine and Faustus – either because they
would be consciously receptive to the subversive implications of those
two characters, or despite themselves. He would expect another section
to be steady in their detestation of ambition, folly, and perversity
personified, as it would seem to them. This varying reaction seems to
be envisaged in the Prologue to I Tamburlaine, with its invitation to
‘applaud’ the hero’s ‘fortunes if you please’ (italics as in text). Like
modern playwrights, he probably wanted to attract audiences this way,
the stimulus of debate being (as we were reminded) one of the proper-
ties inherited by early modern texts from their medieval precursors.
Persuaders will not, then, always assume homogeneity in the audi-
ence addressed. This will require a further variant of our orientation →
reflection → intensification analogy, to work alongside the others.
Once we posit an RPER, we will have to model a more complex range
of laser-like interchanges. If it is possible for a persuader to mirror and
intensify all the conflicting emotions of a divided audience – or all the
exploitable ones – a further elaboration of the laser analogy might indi-
cate how. It can provide us with at least two hypothetical accounts, to
be applied in our study of the more complex forms of literary and dra-
matic pathos. We might call these the oscillation model and the pris-
matic model. In the first, the stance and personality projected, logically
and emotionally, by the persuader, alternately reflect different sections
of the audience, or different impulses within it, as though tilting the
‘mirror’ in two or more directions through a recurrent cycle or oscilla-
tion. In the second, it is as if some form of prismatic reflector transmits
and receives the emotive energy through several facets simultaneously.
Applying these analogies to the actual practice of pathos across the
range of response, we might – if our model works – find some passages
mainly of the first kind (as when, in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, IV.i.
48–113,1 Barabas plays alternately on the greed and the religious emu-
lation of two friars he is setting out to dupe and destroy), and some of
the second kind, as when a single complex or ambivalent image is
arrestingly deployed – see Barabas’s succinct but memorable assertion,
or admission, at that he loves his daughter Abigail ‘As Agamemnon did
his Iphigen’ (I.i.138). The simile simultaneously transmits love, its limits
and a cynical challenge to the audience: ‘If you don’t know what
Agamemnon did to his daughter, enjoy your sentimental ignorance; if
you do know, share my bleak conviction that all love is expendable’.

We must also bear in mind that an author’s or playwright’s representa-
tion of mutual feeling (for example, between lovers, or enemies) might
itself arouse emotion – on both sides of the ‘laser’ interaction between
the literary or dramatic persuader and the audience or reader, the
persuader being moved by the image of others’ interaction, as a
precondition of moving the persuadee. Think of the interaction
between the Chorus in Henry V, representing the persuasive stance of
the Chamberlain’s Company (if not Shakespeare himself) towards a
heroic king and his enemies, and the assumed audience. The relation-
ships figured in the play (for example, ‘a little touch of Harry in the
night’ [V, Prologue, 47]), are presented to the audience more emotively
than the passions of individuals – with the possible exception of the
King himself and his internal struggles.
5.2 Marlowe and Baldwin: designs on the audience
For their very different purposes, Marlowe and Baldwin show compara-
ble degrees of formal inventiveness. They both presuppose the pres-
ence amongst their readers (or auditors) of people who are ready to put
two and two together. True, there are obvious differences between the
genres which they exploit. Baldwin’s Beware the Cat belongs to the
comic-grotesque world of the Jest Book, akin to those ‘conceits (that)
clownage keepes in pay’, so scorned by Marlowe, since it uses the inner
frame of half-serious imaginative involvement solicited by such writing
(another point in the range of persuasive engagement sampled in the
last chapter) to interact with an outer frame of serious religious propa-
ganda. There is a tension in both writers between the emotional,
ethical and rational responses which are anticipated in the reader, or
the audience – and an insinuating persuasive presence which chal-
lenges them, pre-eminently with its rationality. If we were to place the
kind of passage in which Marlowe, in Greene’s2 much-quoted accusa-
tion, was said to be ‘daring God out of heauen with that Atheist
Tamburlan’, alongside Baldwin’s wholesale subversion of Catholic doc-
trine and Catholic priesthood, we will see not only a similar incite-
ment to think, but a similar implied invitation to discuss (safer for
Protestants under Edward VI than for free-thinkers under Elizabeth).3
Where Marlowe is concerned, we will take a closer look at the
passage cited by Greenblatt, to whom Tamburlaine appears as an
automaton (see pp. 90–93, above), and study the impression he makes
on those caught up in his rise to power. Do they see him as an
automaton or as a responsible being? Following up my emphasis on

the logos aspects of the original, dramatic eruption of Tamburlaine, we
will compare it with those more blatantly subversive passages in II
Tamburlaine, which enliven the heroics of that play – by then, stale
and second-hand. But first, let us consider Baldwin’s likely design on
his readers.
5.2.1 Baldwin: reason and superstition

It’s true that his immediate designs were upset. As he wrote Beware the
Cat, Edward VI’s death was about to bring the process of officially-
sanctioned Protestant propaganda to a halt. Mary’s five-year reign, and
the martyrdoms of men and women of far greater courage and spiritual
stature than Baldwin (who kept his head down and survived without
recourse to exile), probably did more to speed the growth of
protestantism from the small base which it had established by 1553 –
mainly in London – than anything achieved by the best earlier writing
and preaching; and alongside Tyndale’s potent underground polemics,
Latimer’s sermons, and Cranmer’s liturgy, Baldwin’s satire seems very
small fry.
As such, however, it furnishes a very interesting and useful point of
reference and contrast for the writing that was to emerge over the next
one and a half centuries. Beware the Cat is by turns attractive and
repellent – it does not achieve that overall sense of disruptive
ebullience which Bakhtin called the carnivalesque, through which the
reader is at once disorientated, disturbed and exhilarated – siding with
subversive emotion, thinking from a new perspective (or from a new
one alongside the old). But the reader might well be surprised by the
freshness of perception in some passages, with respect both to the
comparisons employed and to the sharpness of sensory detail. As an
example of this is the opening of ‘The Second Part of Master Streamer’s
Oration’, in which the cats who (like the devil) observe so much nor-
mally hidden human behaviour, are congregating on the leaden roof
of Aldgate under the quartered bodies of executed traitors, exhibited
there on poles: Streamer has already protested against this ‘loathely
and abhominable sight’ (ed. cit., p. 10); but the stimulus which those
words afford to our sense of disgust and revulsion should not lead us to
credit Streamer with a humane sensibility. He is not protesting against
the hideous cruelty of this punishment, but against infraction of the
mosaic law forbidding such exposure (Deuteronomy 21, 22–3).
Baldwin probably intends the reader to fault him for at least three
things: (a) for regarding the mosaic laws against defilement as binding
on Christians; (b) for missing the point that the displayed quarters of
traitors were designed to deter other possible rebels; and (c) for
overlooking a far graver implication of his own reasoning: if the setting
up of quarters was ‘abhominable’, what about the elevation – during
the Mass, of the consecrated Host, as the true body of Christ (and
exposure in monstrances of the reserved Sacrament)? If I am right in
detecting this last implication, it rests on a commonplace of the kind
associated by Cicero with the raising of emotion (see p. 49, above), that
is, ‘all public exposure of dead bodies is an abomination’ – combined
with a comparative argument from the lesser to the greater degree.
From a Protestant perspective Streamer strains out the gnat and misses
the camel; his advice to bury or burn executed bodies attracts a sarcas-
tic marginal comment, ‘Good ghostly counsel of Master Streamer’, from
Baldwin (ibid.) who a few lines earlier has glossed the reference to
Deuteronomy with a plain, confirmatory ‘God plagueth abhomination’.
Further, the passage’s association of demons ‘who lived on the savor of
man’s blood’ with the sacrifices of antiquity, links Catholic priesthood
to the Devil – a hint which is to be further reinforced (see below).
In the shadow of this horror (likely to have touched the original
Protestant reader in a way now inaccessible to us), Streamer spies on
the assembled cats:
[A]fter the same sort as they did the night before, one sang in one
tune, another in another, even such another service as my Lord’s
chapel upon the scaffold sang before the King. They observed no
musical chords, neither diatesseron, diapente, nor diapason; and yet
I ween I lie, for one cat, groaning as a bear doth when dogs be let
slip to him, trolled out so low and so loud a bass that, in
comparison of another cat which, crying like a young child,
squealed out the shrieking treble, it might be well counted a double
diapason. Wherefore, to the intent I might perceive the better the
cause of their assembly, and by their gestures perceive part of their
meaning, I went softly and fair into a chamber which hath a
window into the same leads, and in the dark standing closely, I
viewed through the trellis, as well as I could, all their gestures and
behavior. (Beware the Cat, p. 23)
Interestingly, Baldwin’s vivid evocation of the simultaneous shrieking

and droning that accompanies cats’ territorial disputes makes it clear,
through the image of the ‘double diapason’ (that is, notes sounded
simultaneously, two octaves apart), not only that he has listened with
acute attention to the noises cats make, but that he is involving

Streamer in a contradiction. As narrator, the latter goes on to represent
the sounds just described as alternating with each other, in what pur-
ports to be a formal dialogue between the animals. The earlier imagery
of choral harmonies (or disharmonies) subverts this. The chaotic range
of similes (contrapuntal choral singing, groaning bear, squalling child)
suggests a disorder of values in Streamer, or in what he observes and is
reminded of. We must compare the elevated physical scenes and associ-
ated, goal-related scripts of choirs posted on scaffolding during some
unspecified state ceremonial, the scaffolds of public execution, and the
sites of public, charnel display (the tarred quarters of traitors displayed
above gateways) with these slightly less exalted singing cats. We sense
the imagery of political ambition and ostentation collapsing into that
of treachery and disgrace, before going on to link this to the inarticu-
lacy of the bear and the child; but the deictic aspect is more revealing.
Streamer’s immediate auditors will know which ‘lord’, and which occa-
sion, he is referring to (presumably with a satirical fling at the style of
the music), but his deictic use of ‘the scaffold’ as location for ‘my lord’s
chapel’ (that is, for his household choir), forces the general reader to
recast this as any such ostentatious ceremonial, alongside all the other
exhibitions of worldly vanity, superstition and chicanery through
which, like Mouse-slayer the cat, the Devil penetrates – that particular
instance of demonic priestly deception observed by her (see below)
being typical of the Roman church as represented in Protestant propa-
ganda.
The book is frequently repulsive, both inside and outside the range of
emotional responses intended by Baldwin. Its nauseously vivid imagery
was plainly designed to evoke disgust in the reader or listener, with
respect both to the obsessive folly of Baldwin’s principal narrator, and
to the chicanery which – from his point of view, quite accidentally – it
brings to light. Amongst the responses predicted by Baldwin might well
have been the struggle of perception and inclination in readers still sen-
timentally attached to Catholicism, and the renewed vigour with which
those members of families who had embraced Protestantism, might use
it to pressure those who had not (this process being referred to on pp.
37–8 of the Ringler and Flachmann edition). But the means adopted for
this purpose are bound to alienate most modern readers in ways
unimaginable by the author, as he invites them to share his bigoted
hatred and contempt for the Mass-priests and their gullible victims
(mostly women). This despite its more attractive aspects, which, accord-
ing to Baldwin’s modern editors (whose persuasive advocacy we have
already considered), include a complex layered narrative, a precisely

evoked physical setting, an impressive capacity for detailed observation,
and (as already noted) an admirably well-contrived appeal to the
reader’s powers of logical inference. The designed effect of this, which
may still cause offence or distress to anybody who accepts the Real
Presence in the Christian Eucharist, is to demolish the pre-existing emo-
tional aura of Catholicism, centred on the celebration of Mass and the
doctrine of transubstantiation. Baldwin’s fantastic story is represented
as having been told to him and his companions by Gregory Streamer,
chaplain to George Ferrers, the Master of the King’s Pastimes. It involves
the supposed use of natural magic for the deciphering of animal lan-
guage (especially the speech of that privileged domestic spy, the cat),
and its ultimate aim is to expose priestly trickery, with a further and
darker implication. In what purports to be the first-hand report of
Mouse-slayer, whom we glimpsed above at her trial on the tower roof, a
woman is ‘cured’ of blindness at the climax of a private celebration of
Mass:
And when he came to the elevation, he lifted up the cake and said
to my dame (which in two days afore saw nothing), ‘Wipe thine
eyes thou sinful woman and look upon thy Maker.’ With that she
lifted up herself and saw the cake, and had her sight and her health
as well as ever she had before. (Beware the Cat, p. 39)
Baldwin’s marginal gloss reads ‘A young knave made an old woman’s

maker’. His intention is to encapsulate a false revelation. He positions
the reader to perceive what the duped woman hears and sees, and to
infer her emotion, without possibly sharing it. The sneering epigram-
matic comment of the gloss, with its verbal antithesis and traductio
(‘young’/’old’; ‘made’/’maker’), presents one ‘laser’ interaction inside
another: the reflected emotions both of priest and parishioner, seen
directly in the text, and of the propagandist and his Protestant prose-
lyte, united in indignation. Baldwin mocks and belittles the woman’s
induced belief. She thinks and feels that she ‘looks upon her maker’ in
the very instant of miraculously restored vision. In her delusion, she
presumably experiences some measure of wonder, relief, penitence and
gratitude – though the tone of the priest’s injunction (at best patronis-
ing, at worst contemptuous) seems to debar any possibility of a purely
ecstatic experience, any sense of irradiating charity working from a
divine source through a human agent. But after over five years of
Protestant preaching, Baldwin expects the reader to see, in the mind’s
eye, nothing but an idolised object – the consecrated host being

reduced, through the use of meiosis, to a mere ‘cake’. Already in his
‘Sermon of the Plough’ of 1548 (see above), Latimer had denounced
the devilish inspiration of the Mass: ‘And this way the devil used to
evacuate the death of Christ, that we might have affiance in other
things, as in the daily sacrifice of the priest: whereas Christ would have
us to trust in his only sacrifice’ (p. 45). From a Protestant perspective
the woman’s eyes open at once into physical sight and spiritual
blindness: her heart is centred not on the passion of Christ, but on a
mere wafer, enmeshed in a mystifying ritual. It is a short further step
(which Baldwin takes, as Spenser was to, subsequently)4 to infer some-
thing worse than a shared delusion: deliberate malice and diabolism on
the priest’s part. That the woman’s blindness is induced by some form
of magic is implied in the cat’s earlier narrative. We are told that the
woman and her husband were on the point of conversion to the
Protestant doctrine, at the instigation of their grown-up sons, when
‘I cannot tell how it chanced, but my dame’s sight failed her’ (p. 38).
The cat’s bafflement prompts us to seek an explanation, which Baldwin
suggests without directly stating. Might this be because it would strain
credulity – just as the woman’s religious emotion (if too sharply evoked
and taken to be sincere) might raise problems? At this period of
transition (as for many years afterwards), readers might be reminded of
Catholic priests and laity who were well-known to them, quite
probably their own older relatives, and who though they might well be
thought deluded, could never be plausibly represented as diabolic. The
psychological tensions generated by the pressure to abandon age-old
traditions of belief and practice might well induce hysterical
symptoms, and Baldwin would seek by any possible means to turn
them to his advantage. But he relies more on implicit comparison than
on causal inference, making one of Catholicism’s major strengths, its
authority, look much more like a clearly suspicious weakness. If trust is
founded upon tradition, and if that possesses no more innate reliability
than popular tales, amusing tall stories and anecdotes passed on by
word of mouth, what worth has authority?
At some points in the text, we might ask whether we are being
repelled by Streamer’s folly and vanity, or by Baldwin’s own
meanness and negativity. It will be illuminating to compare the
colour and rhythmical vitality of Skelton in the procession of birds
mourning Phyllyp Sparowe (c. 1505), where we find ‘The bitter with
his bumpe, / The crane with his trumpe, / The swan of Menander, /
The gose and the gander’ (ll.432–5),5 with the following. Streamer is
describing his heightened hearing following the application of his

nauseous potions, pillows and pills – beginning with part of a
marital quarrel (p. 32):
I heard that plain; and would fain have heard the rest, but could not
by no means for barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats,
rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of
bucks, gaggling of ducks, singing of swans, ringing of pans, crowing
of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens,
peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs, and toads in the
bogs, chirking of crickets, shutting of wickets, shriking of owls,
flittering of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves, farting of
churls, fizzling of girls, with many things else – as ringing of bells,
counting of coins, mounting of groins, whispering of lovers,
springling of plovers, groaning and spewing, baking and brewing,
scratching and rubbing, …
Baldwin’s marginal note comments drily, ‘Here the poetical fury came
upon him’. But the mechanical rhythm and enumeration of items, the
obvious lexical pairings of sound and source and the coarse, humour-
less detail indicate no poetical spirit whatever, unless in Streamer’s
conceit. The passage has far less vitality than the cats’ chorus studied
earlier, although that too expressed the ostensible aural experience of
Streamer. The superiority of this, compared with the later account
might hint that these were sounds Streamer had really heard (like any
London householder); the sound-panorama might be intended to
insinuate that his whole retailing of Mouse-slayer’s testimony is a
preposterous pretence, inducing the reader to set it aside and
concentrate on the inherent probability, from a Protestant perspective,
of the abuses it purports to expose. But even if this is Baldwin’s design,
there is a flatness and a weariness about his means. The joke against
Streamer runs out of steam.
5.2.2 Marlowe, Menaphon and Tamburlaine – whose reflection?

What feelings and expectations were addressed in Marlowe’s envisaged
audience by those lines which, for Stephen Geenblatt, represent
Tamburlaine as an automaton, a ‘thing’? We have examined the
persuasive means with which he seeks to enforce this reading (see pp.
91–3, above). In itself, and in the mode of its conveyance, the
interpretation is arresting, a memorable image in its own right. But has
the ‘thing’ any real home in Marlowe’s text?
By this stage in I Tamburlaine, the audience’s expectations regarding

Scythian shepherds (little, beyond something remote, exotic and prim-
itive?), would have been sharply challenged by Tamburlaine’s rhetori-
cal triumph in winning over Theridamas, which forges a relationship
out of the mutual consciousness of two men, and an induced moment
of choice on Theridamas’s part – drawing us into the Tamburlaine ethos
rather than placing us outside it to appraise its gathering momentum.
One way to counter Greenblatt’s denial of choice or potential change
of direction to the alleged automaton, might be to review his part in
the whole pattern of choice and compulsion presented through the
persuasive rhetoric of Part One, as it works on the characters and ulti-
mately on the audience. There is a comparable pattern in Part Two –
including, most notably, that moment when Tamburlaine, so accus-
tomed to destroying the illusions of others through his own apparent
mastery of fortune, is forced himself to have recourse to illusion fol-
lowing the death of Zenocrate: ‘Though she be dead, yet let me think
she lives’ (II.Tamb., II.iv.127), and the point – to be discussed later – at
which the audience is tacitly invited to make an interpretative choice.
In Part One the dramatic focus alternates between the persuader and
the persuadee – with Tamburlaine, more than once, combining the
two roles in a single soliloquy or dialogue. Let us take a general survey
of the whole pattern of persuasive interaction in Part One.
From the imbecile king Mycetes – a mixture of self-confessed verbal
inadequacy and feeble self-assertion – the scale of eloquence mounts to
his brother Cosroe, who at first mocks him, then briefly supplants him,
to the superb assurance of Tamburlaine succeeding against all the odds
in seducing Theridamas, and thence through the repressed sense of
danger in Menaphon’s verbal portrait of the hero, to that electrifying
dialogue through which, beginning with a single repeated line of verse
(‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’), Tamburlaine works up the
wills and emotions of his henchmen for a fling at absolute power. Next
(as that is achieved) comes his superbly insolent justification of
Cosroe’s removal. Already we see an alternation between those who are
powerless to persuade, and those whose eloquence surpasses others’
expectation – and also between those who are willingly persuaded by
words in advance of facts, and those who are finally compelled to
admit the facts behind the words. This is then repeated with further
variations and stronger extremes. From Zenocrate’s chamberlain
Agydas, who bravely chooses to kill himself before he is killed – in
tribute to the persuasive power of absolute silence and a single wrath-
ful glance from Tamburlaine – we proceed to the wordy combat of
boast and counter-boast, threat and counter-threat between

Tamburlaine and the Soldan Bajazeth and (following their departure
for the battlefield) Zenocrate and Zabina. Here the spirited language of
Tamburlaine impresses more than the complacent big statistics of
Bajazeth, and the dramatic ‘fact’ of the battle’s outcome sets the seal
on it. How power lends validity to arbitrary symbolism is then
perceived as we are introduced to Tamburlaine’s pseudo-chivalric
‘custom’ of proceeding from grace to genocide in three days flat, via
the three emblematic colours of white, red and black. His iron will and
infinite power of constraint is then further outlined in the bars of
Bajazeth’s travelling cage – in itself an irrefutably persuasive
demonstration of the prisoner’s absolute powerlessness, and shortly to
become an even more terrifying symbol of Bajazeth’s and Zabina’s
inveterate, frustrated sense of self, as they brain themselves gruesomely
against it. Tamburlaine, the self-proclaimed ‘scourge of God’, chooses
to impose Hell on earth (‘A hell, as hoplesse, and as full of feare / As are
the blasted banks of Erebus’), making it worse by forcing his victims to
view his own fulfilments, and his rewards to those in his favour (for
example, the banquet of crowns). A similar powerlessness towards
Tamburlaine is manifest in the virgins of Damascus, as they seek to
make him question the wilful absoluteness of his ‘custom’ – though
where the audience is concerned this is an effective plea for pity (all
the more pitiful for its futility).6 Here again Tamburlaine’s enemies,
and the audience, encounter his steeled resolution – first in ‘the slicing
edge’ of his sword brandished on stage, then in the points of his ‘hors-
mens speares’ off stage. However, we are to believe that this crisis
brings Tamburlaine very close to the brink of pity, contrition and self-
doubt as the distraught, dishevelled image of Zenocrate (‘in [her]
passion for [her] countries love / And feare to see [her] kingly Fathers
harme’) lodges in his mind.
Greenblatt locates his ‘thing’ in Menaphon’s speech (I Tamburlaine,
1.2.7–30), lines in which Marlowe both builds up his audience’s expec-
tations regarding his hero, and conveys the henchman’s unwitting
delusion of his master, Cosroe, both of whom wish to find a place for
Tamburlaine on their own bandwagon – not suspecting how short a
ride they are themselves to take on his own very much sturdier vehicle.
Menaphon represents Cosroe’s brilliant new subordinate as a
portent, not only of imminent victory over his imbecile elder brother,
but also of the consequent military expansion of Persia. The audience
on the other hand, having heard and seen much more of Tamburlaine,
have grown attuned to very different ‘achievement goals’ on his part,
and will be ready to dissent as soon as Menaphon raises the issue of his
motivation. Is it likely that his ‘thirst’ will be slaked by high office
under Cosroe? In response to the question ‘What stature wields he, and
what personage?’ any visual memory of his stage presence is overlaid
by a verbal effictio, of one who is (II.i.7–30):
Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned,

Like his desire, lift upwards and divine,
So large of lims, his joints so strongly knit,
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainely beare 10
Old Atlas burthen. Twixt his manly pitch,
A pearle more worth, then all the world is plaste:
Wherein by curious soveraintie of Art,
Are fixt his piercing instruments of sight:
Whose fiery cyrcles beare encompassed
A heaven of heavenly bodies in their Spheares
That guides his steps and actions to the throne,
Where honor sits invested royally:
Pale of complexion: wrought in him with passion,
Thirsting with soverainty, with love of armes: 20
His lofty browes in foldes, do figure death,
And in their smoothnesse, amitie and life:
About them hangs a knot of Amber heire,
Wrapped in curles, as fierce Achilles was,
On which the breath of heaven delights to play,
Making it daunce with wanton majestie:
His armes and fingers long and sinowy,
Betokening valour and excesse of strength:
In every part proportioned like the man,
Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. 30
This image of the hero hovers between massive physical reality and the
mind’s inner, metaphorical musing on it and what it ‘betokens’.
Formally, this is a blend of effictio (description of a real person), and
prosopopoeia (the personification of a quality). But is it the image of
honour, ambition or insensate violence? There are complications in
our sense of this ‘wondrous man’ (as Cosroe, responding to
Menaphon’s description, is still happy to think him). Wonder, the
dominant emotion reflected between speaker and on-stage audience,
and (with a difference) between playwright and audience proper, is the
more persuasive because fresh perception is integral to it, authenticat-
ing its object. Moreover, listeners are compelled into physical empathy
with the ‘tall’ presence – immediately denoted in the third word of
Menaphon’s eager response, and then progressively evoked.
Tamburlaine is ‘Like his desire, lift upwards and divine’. There is the
impression of a force, exerted on the vertical plane, moulding the
whole physique. But the sensation is inexplicable: does ‘desire’ denote,
metonymically, the exalted object of desire, or the emotion itself – in its
elevating force? Does that force work internally or externally, from
below, or above? Is desire exalting the will, or the will exalting desire?
Does ‘lift upwards’ suggest an upturned face and gaze? Or does it
suggest something resonant with distant childhood memory – the
sensation of being lifted off one’s feet by ‘desire’, as though by a
‘divine’ power stooping from overhead? Two familiar cognitive ‘goals’
might underlie our reception of the words – the ‘satisfaction’ of union
with an external source of being, or the drive towards ‘achievement’ of
something internally conceived but externally reflected. This
ambiguous division between self-fashioning and exterior fashioning
continues throughout the speech.
Moreover, the functional perspective of Menaphon’s opening
sentence shifts as two possible constructions of its syntax alternate in
the mind. Does ‘like his desire’ modify the preceding, or the following
elements of this verb-less sentence – or both? Is Tamburlaine’s tall
stature ‘like his desire’ with respect to its loftiness only – or (also) to his
longing for the highest things, however derived? Is it the hero’s
‘stature’ or his ‘desire’ – which, as Firbasian Quality Bearer, progressively
admits Further Specifications – culminating with maximum dynamism
(at the sentence’s end, and the line’s) in the suggestive word ‘divine’.
This could be mere hyperbole, suggesting a god-like human form
(Alleyn?), or it could stress the nature and origin of his ‘desire’. Within
the audience at the Theatre or the Rose, during Alleyn’s performances,
the goals apparently attributed to Tamburlaine by Menaphon might be
variously identified. To those for whom the Preservation goals of
religious salvation and political conformity were paramount,
Tamburlaine might already appear both presumptuous and ambitious –
unlike the penitent publican of Luke, 18.13, he ‘lifts’ not only his eyes
but his whole person towards heaven; and ‘divine’ might recall the
usurping upward mobility of Lucifer (Isaiah, 14:14) or Nimrod. For
those in the higher rooms who had been exposed to humanist learn-
ing, and who were better placed to seek advancement, the portrait
might have caused a conflict of feeling, or a more positive overall
response, reflecting as it does another set of ‘goals’ – those of
Achievement. For these people, the rewards promised to the hero by his
prospective monarch would represent the very height of legitimate
aspiration, though undercut by a hint of unrestrained ambition.
Cosroe and his followers are blind to this, persuading themselves that
Tamburlaine will remain loyal; his drive to ‘achievement’ will conform
to their (somewhat inconsistent!) notions of moral virtue and social
stability – content with honourable subordination, gratefully anticipat-
ing future favours.7
As the speech develops, the ambiguity persists, and becomes plainer
as we investigate the metaphor which links the physical presence of
the hero to his intuited motivation. Over the course of 24 lines the
description mounts to Tamburlaine’s face, eyes, forehead and forelock
before descending again towards the grasp of his fingers. What
Greenblatt perceives as a Renaissance automaton is – as we have seen
– framed with more emotional force, suggestiveness, and human
empathy, than is allowed for by that striking (if limited) perception,
centring as it does on the ‘pearl’ of Tamburlaine’s head and neck (l.
12). Even that detail which most admits a mechanistic implication,
the ‘heaven of heavenly bodies’ within the ‘fiery circles’ of
Tamburlaine’s eyes, also admits stray notes of human warmth or celes-
tial desire. His eyes are singled out through a cool periphrasis (mecha-
nistic enough in itself) as ‘instruments of sight’; but they are then in
rapid succession filled with fire, as they were earlier (1.2.158) – and
softened by more ecstatic overtones in the traductio ‘heaven / heav-
enly’. Retrospectively, this image will be reflected in the ‘christal
armours’ of ‘angels’ seen in Zenocrate’s eyes – distraught at the specta-
cle of Tamburlaine’s Damascus massacre (V.ii.88). What is meant by
‘A heaven of heavenly bodies’? Are the planets and zodiacal signs, the
sources of celestial influence, enamoured of their own reflections in
his eyes, or is Tamburlaine the virtuous master of his fortune –
paralleling in his own mind the ninefold order of angels beyond the
heavens (as Dante sees them reflected in Beatrice’s eyes at the opening
of Paradiso XXVIII)? At the very centre of the description, as the goal
towards which his eyes ‘guide’ him, ‘honour sits invested royally’. In
the minds of Marlowe’s original audience, there would have been an
established metaphoric connection – tending to suggest instability or
contradiction within Menaphon’s position. What would be identified
in Schank’s terms as a Thematic Organisation Packet (TOP), links the
authority of virtue, through a majestic seated personification of
Honour, to the power of monarchs as symbolised by their thrones.
The language here is as ‘slippery’ (see my quotation from Wootton re
Erasmus, p. 63, above), as the perceived relationships. Menaphon

wants to believe that Tamburlaine, ‘guid[ed]’ by the stellar influences
which he has internalised, or impelled by the star-like philosophic
virtue which he has forged for himself, will come for reward to
Cosroe’s throne – the new king metonymically represented by the
adjunct of honour dubiously attributed to him. Alternatively, since the
kingly attribute of honour has its own majesty, Tamburlaine will
come to share its metaphorical throne, such virtue being its own
reward. But Marlowe has already reminded us how concepts of virtue
and vice can be made relative to the realities of power. Witness the
coup de grâce delivered earlier to Theridamas’s wavering loyalty – ‘A[h]
these resolved noble Scythians[! ]8 / But shall I prove a traitor to my
king?’ – by Tamburlaine’s rejoinder: ‘No, but the trusty friend of
Tamburlaine’ (I.ii.225–7). Tamburlaine ‘opens the Silenus’ of outward
fealty and responsibility, to reveal the friend ready to pit ‘resolute’
ambition against everything.
As Menaphon’s description proceeds, the peril and fascination of
Tamburlaine unfolds further. The word ‘Thirsting’ elides Schank’s goals
of satisfaction, enjoyment and achievement. Ominously but unre-
markedly Tamburlaine ‘thirsts with’9 the things he has already enjoyed
and achieved to a spectacular degree, which from Erasmus’s perspective
would be ambition and butchery, but which appear to Menaphon,
himself ambitious for Cosroe and seeking to reinforce his faction, as a
pledge of power and the means to maintain it: ‘sovereignty’ and ‘love
of arms’. Here certainly we glimpse the relentless drive singled out in
Greenblatt’s image of the unstoppable ‘thing’; but we move progres-
sively into a more varied and ambiguous portrayal of Tamburlaine as
friend and (even) love-object. His folded brows prefigure the angry God
(Christ, in his role as Judge) whose ‘irefull Browes’ will appear at the
end of Doctor Faustus (V.ii.149), and his arbitrary role as ‘Scourge of
God’, while their ‘smoothnesse’ reflects the submission of the weak
and the collusion of the strong (that is, his three henchmen). He thus
parodies two alternate and equally truthful appearances of Christ
towards Man, as Judge, and Friend (John 15.15). From Menaphon’s
perspective, the echoes suggest not so much an automaton, as a living
‘figure’ of the things which Menaphon’s principal auditor, Cosroe,
wishes to see in those closest to him in government, reflections of his
own royal power like the alternate positions of the laser mirror imag-
ined earlier. But the linked image of ‘Amber heire’ is warmer and more
distinctly human, leading into the overtones of Achilles’s story, as the
thwarted and angry lover of Briseis (and distraught lover of Patroclus?).
With its ‘wanton majestie’ (‘majesty’ being a word which in Marlowe

carries a strongly sexual connotation) it also affords a hint of
Tamburlaine’s own coming conflicts in his role as Zenocrate’s lover – a
role in which, unlike a ‘thing’, he makes choices. The last distinct
images, ‘arms and fingers’, move him back towards violence.
Having suggested how Marlowe distinguishes what Cosroe wants to
hear, from his pointers towards Tamburlaine’s actual dramatic future, I
will finish my excursion into Marlowe by showing how logos underpins
pathos in II Tamburlaine. Interestingly, this episode does not involve
the hero himself. It follows from the truce agreed in an earlier scene
(II.Tamb., I.ii) between Sigismund of Hungary and Orcanes of Natolia,
and sealed with solemn oaths in the names of Christ and ‘Mahomet’
(Marlowe’s name for the Prophet who is, perhaps, less travestied in his
work than in medieval drama). In three scenes from the beginning of
Act II, Sigismund is induced to break the truce, and treacherously
attacks the much-weakened army of Orcanes. A highly ambiguous
series of events begins with Orcanes’ shock at this perjury, bearing out
Erasmus’s contention that ‘Those whom we call Turks are to a great
extent half-Christian, and probably nearer true Christianity than most
of our own people’ (quoted by Wootton, p. 32), and that they believe
seriously in the soul’s immortality and its accountability to God’s
justice. He calls on Christ to vindicate himself:
Can there be such deceit in Christians,

Or treason in the fleshly heart of man,
Whose shape is figure of the highest God?
Then if there be a Christ, as Christians say,
But in their deeds deny him for their Christ:
If he be son to everliving Jove,
And hath the power of his outstretched arme. …
(II.Tamb., II.ii.36–42)
The pathos seemingly aimed at the audience here is that of shame or

mortification, moved by the spectacle of a non-Christian’s indignation
– though perhaps dissipated by the reflection that those responsible
were merely Catholics, notorious by the later sixteenth century for the
mental reservation with which they swore oaths to heretics. Having
used the Turks’ perspective to make his Protestant audience concede
that Catholics are Christians, he confirms the concession by incensing
them against those who have let the side down. And that Protestants
and Catholics showed the same understanding of Scripture – and to
that extent a common belief – in killing each other, is implied by the

texts alluded to by Frederick in the previous scene, condemning those
in the Old Testament ‘That would not kill and curse at Gods
command’ (II.i.55). The ‘outstretched arm’ (again foreshadowing that
of the angry God at the end of Faustus), is a gestural reminder of the
words of Christ as judge, condemning those whose deeds did not
match their words and who showed no mercy (‘Depart from me ye
cursed’). But this engagement with their belief, heightened by an
outsider’s seeming openness to its truths, is punctured the next
moment by Orcanes’s use of ‘Mahomet’’s concern for his ‘name and
honor’ (II.ii.43) as a touchstone for Christ’s. How reliable is somebody
who thinks both religions might be equally true, as a judge of the truth
of either of them, since they both claim a unique revelation? The
emotional effect is that of a carpet swept from under one’s feet – an
effect redoubled in the following scene when, after winning against all
the odds and killing Sigismund who dies (unavailingly?) penitent,
Orcanes acclaims the apparent vindication of Christ. Gazellus
comments: ‘Tis but the fortune of the wars my Lord, / Whose power is
often proov’d a myracle’ (II.iii.31–2). Marlowe poises the rational
awareness that improbable events do happen, against the (for the time
being, rather battered) certainties of faith.
Looking back finally at Stephen Greenblatt’s characterisation of
Tamburlaine, we may conclude in the light of the options Marlowe
offers to the audience, not just as to how they feel but as to how they
reason about the course of events represented, that he is more
interested in choice than in compulsion – and that this might extend
to his characters. The ‘thing’ is near enough to Tamburlaine to
represent his (almost) unremitting violence and inhumanity, the
‘desire’ of conquest which still haunts him as he dies (II Tamb.,
V.iii.123–60); but it does not figure his moments of emotional vulnera-
bility (pre-eminently at Zenocrate’s death (II Tamb., II.iv), his choices,
or – even – the caprice and inventiveness of his cruelty, or his
rhetorical skill and the powers of empathy which are integral to it.
5.3 Hutchinson and Cavendish: rival reflections
There is a very illuminating comparison to be drawn between the

metaphorical modes of pathos used to evoke conjugal love by Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Lucy Hutchinson, respectively.
Rather than directly contrasting their two biographical tributes, I have
chosen, as seen already in Chapter 3, to place the light-hearted fantasy
of Cavendish’s The Blazing World alongside the far more sombre

Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. It is impossible here to
compare like with like, since Cavendish predeceased her husband; and
we cannot consequently match Hutchinson’s passionate grief with any
such experience on the Duchess’s part. One is a fanciful, sequential
narrative, and the other an anticipatory reflection of later feeling,
evoked in the widowed Lucy Hutchinson as she recounts her courtship
and marriage. As I take my own look at the reflective structures of
pathos, I shall, as in Chapter 3, look first at Hutchinson (will the
relatively uneducated Margaret Cavendish prove simpler or more
complex in her handling of reflection?).
5.3.1 Lucy Hutchinson: looking in the ‘faithful mirror’

Lucy Hutchinson makes explicit use of the mirror image. Indeed, she
pushes it to the point of destruction: the reflective surfaces begin to
dissolve. The passage quoted here is introduced through a praeteritio:10
‘I shall pass by (my italics) all the little amorous relations, which …
would make a true history of a more handsome management of love
than the best romances describe’. ‘Passing by’ is the precise English
sense of praeteritio; but despite her protestation the full pathos of
romance is carried over into what she does profess to ‘record’. The
phraseology of romance is interwoven with that of encomium, as she
previews the whole course of their marriage and her eventual bereave-
ment. Today’s reader may well be divided between emotional aversion
from the self-subordination of woman to man, and a compulsive
empathy. I am reminded of Milton’s Eve in her original love of ‘manly
grace / And wisdom’ (PL, IV.490–1) eagerly fulfilling the end of her cre-
ation as Adam fulfilled his – ‘He for God only, she for God in him’
(IV.299). Here, we find the range of emotion specific to a woman who
is fully committed to the role of Wife as delineated by St Paul in I
Corinthians :
There is this only to be recorded, that never was there a passion

more ardent and less idolatrous; he loved her better than his life,
with inexpressible tenderness and kindness, had a most high oblig-
ing esteem of her, yet still considered honour, religion, and duty
above her, nor ever suffered the intrusion of such a dotage as should
blind him from marking her imperfections; these he looked upon
with such an indulgent eye as did not abate his love and esteem of
her, while it augmented his care to blot out all those spots which
might make her appear less worthy of that respect he paid her; and
thus indeed he soon made her more equal to him than he found
her; for she was a very faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but
dimly, his own glories upon him, so long as he was present; but she,
that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when
he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could
again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining represen-
tation. The greatest excellency she had was the power of apprehend-
ing and the virtue of loving his; so as his shadow she waited on him
everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits
of none, and then she vanished into nothing. It was not her face he
loved, her honour and her virtue were his mistresses; and these (like
Pygmalion’s) images of his own making, for he polished and gave
form to what he found with all the roughness of the quarry about it;
but meeting with a compliant subject for his own wise government,
he found as much satisfaction as he gave, and never had occasion to
number his marriage among his infelicities. (Memoirs, pp. 50–1)
Whether or not she is playing on her own name, with its connotations
of light, light and its absence permeate the passage and in due course
provide an acute emotional shock for the reader. Light is both a subjec-
tive index of Lucy’s emotion (who, here, never directly states than she
loved her husband), and an objective measure of the colonel’s virtue.
Reader and author contemplate that virtue together, as displayed
through the relationship of husband and wife. Lucy Hutchinson bears
witness to his extreme delicacy of feeling, to the fact that she was cred-
ited with virtues before she possessed them, rather than rebuked for
lacking them. We might be more inclined to suspect her, in her turn,
of over-generosity – to wonder whether he might not, in reality, have
been more narrowly prescriptive and overbearing than she is prepared
to admit – were it not for the desolation she expresses at his absence.
We are in effect being invited to admire John Hutchinson’s rhetorical
skill in the handling of reflective emotion, as he held up – before her –
her own image (the image of ‘her honour and her virtue’), to which he
addressed himself, and of which she felt herself to fall short. She would
indeed be ‘obliged’ for such esteem (that is, in the Latin sense bound to
her husband with respect to it), bound both by gratitude and by fear;
and the ‘indulgence’ of his softened emotion – in response – would
oblige her further. Until the ‘mirror’ image becomes overt half-way
through our quoted passage, this implied interchange of feeling under-
pins the dominant emotion, admiration. This is aroused by the
colonel’s manly grace and wisdom, by his manifest moral excellence in
the restraint and subordination of romantic passion – his calm tran-

scendence of that which is, in the transcendent vocabulary of
romance, ‘inexpressible’. Like Tamburlaine wordlessly rebuked by
Zenocrate (I.Tamb.,V.ii.120) he ‘conceives and subdues’ beauty; but in
this case the beauty is that of Lucy’s responsive love, and (unlike
Tamburlaine) his fosters it, does not destroy it. There is no room to
look in detail at the communicative dynamism conveying this perception
to the reader, but it may be noted that the first four sentences of the
extract (delimited here by semicolons) which precede the shift of
attention towards Lucy’s perspective, consistently produce new
specifications, or further specifications of the colonel’s admirable virtue,
at the end of every clause, with their impact often sharpened by con-
trast. This is seen in the first sentence in its combination of the appear-
ance/existence and quality scales: ‘never was there a passion more ardent
and less idolatrous’, where the antithetical adverbs, and the opposed
attributes ‘ardent’ and ‘idolatrous’, reflect the two interpersonal life-
themes of love and religion in the minds of the implied audience –
these, with their distinctive vocabularies, being intertwined through-
out the passage. (Moreover, that both life-themes are reflected, and
made compatible with each other, implies the refutation of two inter-
linked universal premises, that is, ‘all ardour is idolatrous’, and ‘no
lover is religious’.) Many of the clauses introducing context-independent
material (‘high obliging esteem’, ‘honour, religion and duty’, ‘respect’)
end with the often-repeated, inconspicuously insistent pronoun, ‘her’.
Its various cases (‘of her’, ‘above her’, ‘her’ [dative], ‘her’ [accusative])
amount to an extended polyptoton. Thus varied in its links, ‘her’ (too) is
context-independent, as are many other memorable cases of antistrophe,
for all their repetitiveness.11 We feel the varied pressure of this relation-
ship, however loving in its intention, upon the wife.
The shift to Lucy’s own perspective is introduced by way of a causal
explanation of the fact referred to, through the one-word further
specification ‘soon’, in the previous sentence. The speed of Lucy’s
change to a ‘more equal’ condition is explained in ambiguous and
therefore doubly emotive terms – ‘for she was a very faithful mirror,
reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him’. As
properties of a person, ‘faith’ and ‘truth’ (words which echo the oath of
homage to a monarch, and thus befit the ‘compliant subject’ of a
monarchal husband) primarily convey a steadiness of will and inten-
tion. As properties of an object (that is, the mirror, as metaphoric
vehicle) the words denote accurate alignment and clear reflection –
both, as we have repeatedly seen, preconditions of the ‘emotional laser’
effect. The praise due to her for constancy and alertness (easier to
express through the third-person form of her narrative), and her pride
in having kept the faith, are mixed with her sense of inadequacy. She
longs for an unattainable state, since she reflects him ‘truly’ in her
unanimity with him, but not in his full brightness. The dynamism of
her sentence might be expressed as B = Q = Sp[=Fsp]Sp. In this case,
the further specification, ‘though but dimly’, lacks the overall force of
the specification in which it is embedded, and which culminates in the
noun-complement ‘his own glories upon him’. At this point, the
vocabularies of romance and religion coalesce. Underlying her
yearning to apprehend, in their fullness, the ‘glories’ of her husband, is
St Paul’s image in his great discourse on charity (I Corinthians 13:12),
‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’. Of
necessity, she must have believed her husband to stand in a similar
relationship to Christ, as she stood in, in relation to him.
Two chapters earlier, Paul had written that ‘the head of every man is
Christ; and the head of the woman is the man’ (I Corinthians 11:3),
and that the man ‘indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he
is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man’.
Modern translations (for example, the Jerusalem Bible) make clear that
this ‘glory’ is a reflection: thus Lucy’s reflection of her husband’s ‘glory’
– ‘dim’, or otherwise – is itself a reflection of a reflection. What she sees
in her husband must, on Paul’s authority, be the image of Christ
‘through a glass, darkly’ (that is, a dim reflection in a mirror): but
despite that he shines with plural ‘glories’. He is physically beautiful to
her, especially in that very feature which, Paul insists, men are to keep
uncovered in church: we have already been told that ‘she was surprised
with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman,
who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in
any one at the first’ (p. 48).
Moreover, to Lucy, writing after his death, the godliness witnessed
by his whole life and manner of dying, is a further ‘glory’ and sign of
his elected state – his complete humility as one absolutely dependent
on God. Finally there will be a ‘glory’ in each of his higher commit-
ments so resolutely maintained: ‘honour, religion, and duty’. From this
point onwards the emotive charge increases, through a continuing
(though complicated) process of reflection. David Norbrook com-
ments12 that ‘the Pygmalion figure carries on the reflexivity in a way
that verges on attributing a risky degree of subjectivity to the Colonel’s
opinions’; unless it is quite transformed by its context, the image will
suggest that John Hutchinson was at least partially pleasing himself,
and to that extent isolating himself. The tantalising incompleteness

and continued yearning of married love between those who are equal
neither to each other nor to God, imposing an absence in love’s very
presence, is replaced by a presence in absence – a pain which, whatever
the degree of distance between them, suggests the reality of what was
lost through the husband’s death.
The most potent point may be briefly noted: the sense of mutual and
intensifying reflection which has validated, imaginatively, the ultimate
source of light and seemed – more completely than Plato’s philosophic
lover – to fuse body with soul, becomes even more compelling when
the light is suddenly switched off. The ‘dark mist’ in Lucy’s mirror
seems to spread below its surface with a physical chill and sense of
dissolution.
Looking closer at this passage has in my judgement strongly
confirmed the paradox pointed out by Susan Cook and David
Norbrook – the successful imaging both of her husband and of their
marriage by a woman who so seriously distrusted images. But to my
mind, the dissolving of her own reflected image – the ‘woman with
which we are presented’ (in Cook’s words) – is so conveyed as to
convince us that Lucy had lived, and experienced, and felt, even
created, through that image. In a real sense, there is ‘a woman whom we
meet’ in the passage – as palpable in her suffering as in her anger.
5.3.2 Cavendish: complications of presence and absence

As we were reminded in Chapter 3, Cavendish’s utopian narrative takes
an abducted ‘young Lady’ into another world, in which, besides being
exalted to power and wealth, she is able as Cavendish’s surrogate to
regulate scientific and philosophical enquiry. Richard Nate, who notes
that The Blazing World ‘is now often regarded as Cavendish’s most
significant work’,13 thinks it shows her approval of the Royal Society’s
project for plain language distrustful of figuration, but that she uses it
to demonstrate the continued value of fancy as a means of recreation,
not bound by the dictates of reason – as indicated in her Preface. Put
briefly, ‘Of the Horatian prodesse et delectare, Cavendish retained only
the latter’ (Nate, p. 415). But what of Cicero’s movere? How pathos
might function given this release from conformity to material truth,
and this sole alliance with pleasure, will be worth pursuing.
Having introduced herself into her own story as ‘scribe’ to her
heroine, the Empress of the Blazing World, she conducts her to the
family estate of Welbeck. On arrival, she introduces the house’s
principal inhabitant – her husband – to the implied reader (who is
understood to be following the fortunes of her heroine, the Empress).

Simultaneously, she positions the Duke as the unique reader, by invok-
ing what were in all probability daily topics of conversation between
them. In her imaginary encounter with him, she has redoubled or
trebled her advantage: she is furnished with an imaginary female ally;
she holds her husband in ignorance of her presence while reflecting
her own habitual pleasure at his appearance in the surprised admira-
tion of her companion; and by the time that (eventually) all three
‘souls’ become mutually aware, the Duke’s soul has itself been, if not
feminised, deprived of its usual means of male dominance (text from
Lilley, pp. 194–5):
[A]s they were thus discoursing, the Duke came out of the house
into the court, to see his horses of manage; whom when the
Duchess’s soul perceived, she was so overjoyed, that her aerial
vehicle became so splendorous, as if it had been enlightened by the
sun; by which we may perceive, that the passions of souls or spirits
can alter their bodily vehicles. Then these two ladies’ spirits went
close to him, but he could not perceive them; and after the Empress
had observed the art of manage, she was much pleased with it, and
commended it as a noble pastime, and an exercise fit and proper for
noble and heroic persons; but when the Duke was gone into the
house again, those two souls followed him; where the Empress
observing, that he went to the exercise of the sword, and was such
an excellent and unparallelled master thereof, she was as much
pleased with that exercise, as she was with the former: but the
Duchess’s soul being troubled, that her dear lord and husband used
such a violent exercise before meat, for fear of overheating himself,
without any consideration of the Empress’s soul, left her aerial
vehicle, and entered into her lord. The Empress’s soul perceiving
this, did the like: and then the Duke had three souls in one body;
and had there been but some such souls more, the Duke would have
been like the Grand Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been
a platonic seraglio.3 But the Duke’s soul being wise, honest, witty,
complaisant and noble, afforded such delight and pleasure to the
Empress’s soul by her conversation, that these two souls became
enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew
jealous at first, but then considering that no adultery could be
committed amongst Platonic lovers, and that Platonism was divine,
as being derived from divine Plato, cast forth of her mind that Idea
of jealousy. Then the conversation of these three souls was so
pleasant, that it cannot be expressed; for the Duke’s soul entertained

the Empress’s soul with scenes, songs, music, witty discourses,
pleasant recreations, and all kinds of harmless sports [.]
Cavendish’s presentation of her husband is alternately flattering and

teasing. It engages with one schema (or one indicator of the true
aristocratic ethos) for her implied reader, and with another for her
husband himself. This change reflects a change in narrative viewpoint.
The judgement of Cavendish’s fanciful alter ego, the Empress, is linked
to an aristocratic role-theme, identifying the Duke’s equestrianism as ‘an
exercise fit and proper for noble and heroic persons’. In contrast, the
Duchess’s concern (‘troubled, that her dear lord and husband used
such a violent exercise’), refers to a more intimate domestic script – the
Duke’s daily routine. I suspect that this alludes to points of daily
dispute: whether the ageing husband took too much exercise, and the
wife too little.14 The shift in viewpoint entails a change in pathos from
admiration to solicitude, though both these are already implied in the
Duchess’s reaction to the Duke’s mere appearance, with its ‘splen-
dorous’ transformation of her ‘aerial vehicle’. Here, in visible form, we
see the state of inner emotion which Quintilian makes prerequisite to
pathos, and which wordlessly persuades the reader of the strength and
spontaneity of conjugal affection. But as she goes on to elaborate the
whimsical picture of ‘a platonic seraglio’ – a self-deconstructing image,
in that it rules out male autocracy and sexual jealousy – she seems to
allude to a more painful aspect of their relationship, his continued gal-
lantry towards other women.15 To me this reads like an old joke with a
new twist. The viability of platonic love is, however, immediately
called in question by the oddly circular subject/adjunct argument
involved in her claim ‘that Platonism was divine, as being derived from
divine Plato’. If Plato is distinctively ‘divine’, he is so metonymically, by
association with the divine truth and virtue which have refined his
contemplative soul, along the lines set out in his dialogues. But the
‘divine’ doctrine, or discerned truth, of ‘Platonism’ would be derived
from the same source and not from Plato. Fancy happily leaves the
word without a referent; but going through the motions of argument
has something of the character of a routine or script, to give substance
to the daily scene of witty discourse at table or elsewhere. What really
tilts the balance of the passage is the move back from semi-reassuring,
wistful whimsy to a more ebullient and affectionate celebration of the
Duke’s ‘scenes, songs, music, witty discourses, pleasant recreations, and
all kinds of harmless sports’ – something which, in its amplificatory
heaping up (synathroesmus) of items, seems to echo the warmth, vitality,

curiosity and inventiveness of the Duke. That these should be internal-
ized, and enjoyed through the intuitive (wordless?) intercourse of soul
with soul, seems specially appropriate in the light of Newcastle’s
reduced fortunes and marginalized position relative to the Court in
London.
In contrast to the abstract and fanciful medium of observation and
encounter represented by the previous passage, it will be interesting
and invigorating to look at an earlier piece by Margaret Cavendish, one
which – whether or not it is characteristic of her writing or her way of
engaging with the world – does seem to correspond to Germaine
Greer’s lively representation of her qualities as examined in Chapter 3.
The passage quoted there (see pp. 101–2), evokes Cavendish’s alleged
blending of corporal and culinary imagery, including the claim that ‘In
her armoury of imagery human bodies are kitchens, boiling, basting,
frying and stewing away in filth and steamy heat, and human beings
are bisques or custards’. Does the following poem substantiate such an
impression? The text follows the spelling and punctuation of
Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653), p. 128:
A Posset for Nature’s Breakfast:
L Ife scummes the Cream of Beauty with Time’s Spoon

And drawes the Claret Wine of Blushes soon,
There boiles it in a Skillet cleane of Youth,
Then thicks it well with crumbl’d Bread of Truth.
And sets it on the Fire of Life, which growes
The clearer, if the Bellowes of Health blowes.
Then takes the Eggs of Faire, and Bashfull Eyes,
And puts them in a Countenance that’s wise,
And cuts a Lemmon in of sharpest Wit,
By Discretion’s Knife, as he thinkes fit.
A handfull of chast Thoughts double refin’d,
Six spoonfuls of a Noble, and Gentle Mind.
A Graine of Mirth, to give’t a little Tast,
Then takes it off for feare the substance waft.
And puts it in a Bason of Rich Wealth,
And in this Meat doth Nature please her felfe.
A curious cognitive process is entailed in reading this poem, which,

like several other poems in the series of ‘Fancies’ of which it forms a
part (Poems and Fancies, pp. 126–54), is a fanciful account of cookery

(compare the two following poems, ‘Meat drest for Natures Dinner’,
and ‘A Bisk for Natures Table’ – pp. 129–30). Here, the reader seems
prompted to recognise two distinct scripts for the realisation of two
social scenes: narrative and description. The first is instantiated as the
‘method’ section of a recipe, and the second as a kind of effictio, the
description of a young gentlewoman’s face, attractive and spirited. As a
sustained metaphor, paralleling the stage by stage heating and mixing
of the posset’s ingredients with the progressive perfection of a
marriageable woman, culminating in her timely introduction to
society at the peak of her beauty and social accomplishment, the poem
gradually breaks down, as the required Thematic Organisation Points
fail to materialise. Though the sense of bodily warmth and health,
modest sexual awareness, and unaffected honesty centres quite pleas-
ingly on ‘the Fire of Life’, the mind resists the imagery of eyes being
beaten up like eggs (unless in this case it proves possible, imagina-
tively, to make something akin to an omelette, that is, a posset,
without breaking eggs); and indeed the ‘countenance’ reforms itself as
something containing the eyes as distinct features. Moreover the final
elements, ‘Chast Thoughts’, ‘a Noble, and Gentle Mind’, and ‘Mirth’,
though handled like ingredients, have no direct culinary equivalents –
though perhaps corresponding to the spice, sugar and salt content of
the posset. The poem parallels, and perhaps parodies, one concern and
area of competence conventionally assigned to women at this period,
cookery. But if I am right in maintaining that the tenor and the vehicle
of the metaphor fall apart – and it will be noted that in the following
poem, though the figurative cookery continues, none of the
ingredients are compared to real foodstuffs, while in the third poem
the metaphor is seen only in the title and the last four lines – what
does the cookery signify emotionally in contrast to the literal content,
the listing, ordering and admixture of human features and qualities? I
would suggest a rare species of pathos in poetry if not in life, boredom.
Margaret Cavendish is rejecting, not the actual task of cookery, which
she would never have undertaken as a gentlewoman, especially after
her marriage to the exiled Earl of Newcastle had raised her to the
nobility, but the domestic responsibilities and preoccupations which it
typifies. This is not however pathos in the primary rhetorical sense; it
betrays Margaret’s feelings rather than seeking to move those of a
reader. Nevertheless, the few points of correspondence between
cookery and a young gentlewoman’s formation – the constituents, the
proportions, the timing and the sequence – do help to present that
achievement with which a feminised and gentrified Nature ‘pleases

herself’. In a far more relaxed fashion than Lucy Hutchinson, ‘Nature’
(alias Margaret Cavendish the published poet) is also pleased to view
herself, or other women with whom she empathises, who have
wealthier ‘basons’ to be served up in, as she would be viewed by a male
suitor – despite the fact that the next poem rejects extravagant male
devotion, while the following one tends towards Narcissism. We
already glimpse here the ‘erotics of female doubling’ which Kate Lilley
detects in the later prose passage. But the poem does not really reflect
Germaine Greer’s picture of Cavendish’s imagination, as some kind of
stewpot.
The prose passage seems to substantiate Richard Nate’s view, in that
pathos works independently even of the logos of verisimilitude, but
according to a logos or arithmetic of its own, amplifying both the
emotion and the moral engagement, and thus the affectivity, through
multiple reflection on the female side of the exchange with the Duke.
The Duke as reader sees himself in two feminine mirrors expressing
different but consonant emotions of admiration and solicitude; and
the reader sees the Duke’s vivacity and courtesy detached from their
usual association with male power. In the ‘Posset’ poem we can use
schema theory to acquire a sharper sense of the poem’s feminist
sentiment, which does not quite match Germaine Greer’s impression
of a world reconceived and repossessed in culinary (and thus domestic
terms), but undercuts its ostensible picture of a woman being reared
and readied for marriage and the duties that will go with it.
5.4 Shakespeare: back to the audience?
I have not the space to provide a summarised context for those

passages from Shakespeare which are involved in the critical and
interpretative writing of Terry Eagleton and Lisa Jardine, as discussed
earlier. But the plays concerned, Macbeth and King Lear, will almost
certainly be better known to the reader than either part of Tamburlaine.
How does our sense of either passage’s context, or our memory of its
impact in performance, shape our response to its language now – and
how far can a closer approach to the language illuminate context and
performance?
5.4.1 Macbeth: desolation revisited

Faced by the extreme depth and power of the lines which, towards the
end of Macbeth, express its protagonist’s despairing nihilism, and
which might well be thought to provide an unsurpassable example of

T.S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’, how far might interpretations like
Eagleton’s modify our emotion? A Brechtian perception of Macbeth as
duped by the power structures of feudalism and destroyed by the
release of his inhibitions would certainly re-orient our emotions (if any
survived); but in any case should we, will we, simply be empathising
with the villain-hero? How compulsively are we drawn into his
situation? Do the lines confirm Eagleton’s claim that ‘Macbeth ends up
chasing an identity which continually eludes him’; that ‘he becomes a
floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed pursuit of an anchoring
signified’?
Macbeth. …
Wherefore was that cry?
Seyton. The Queen, my Lord, is dead.
Macbeth. She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, V.v.15–27
Death, whatever grammatical form its signifier takes, ‘dead’ or ‘died’, is

reduced to just a word, with no emotional charge. Was Shakespeare
recollecting that other great homicide at the death of his queen: ‘For
she is dead? Thy words do pierce my soul’ (II.Tamb., II.iv.125), and
demonstrating the ultimate contrast? And as emotion is displaced from
death, so the following lines effectively displace the unspoken word
‘today’, the awareness of life as it is lived and enjoyed ‘upon this bank
and shoal of time’ from its position between ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yester-
day’. Eagleton is certainly right about the ‘chase’, grown automatic and
repetitive, after what cannot be achieved today but might be achieved
‘tomorrow’ – all of which is conveyed by a threefold repetition of the
word, linked by the repeated conjunction ‘and’ (polysyndeton), which
seems protracted into an infinite series like a recurrent decimal despite

being repeated only once. Infinite that is, until the end of time. As
Kenneth Muir16 and numerous other commentators have shown, the
passage is haunted by biblical echoes, including Revelation’s vision of
an angel, holding a book and announcing ‘that there should be time
no longer’ (Revelation 10.6). Even if they were so caught up in the
rhythm and emphasis upon ‘creeping’ time as to be clutched by
Macbeth’s despair (never going fast enough towards tomorrow, never
leaving time for anything to be achieved between one ‘pace’ of the
clock and the next), the original audience would be aware that by
every indication known to them, Macbeth was a damned soul hasten-
ing towards Judgement. Anybody who was impelled to feel as he feels,
accepting the inclusion model through which he purports to reflect the
general experience of ‘all our yesterdays’, would as a consequence
either pity the predicament they had been induced to imagine, or
recoil in horror from their own yielding – this being the shadow of
their own fallen selves, however repressed in their own progress ‘from
day to day’. The dominant trope of the lines, however, must be
metonymy – conspicuous by its non-functioning, because time is being
emptied not of the things desired in it, which can always be referred to
‘tomorrow’, but of the things done in it. In cognitive terms it is a com-
plete wipe-out; all themes, goals, plans, roles, scripts and scenes
become redundant when nothing is done to enact them. The impossi-
bility of cognitive engagement with an empty world explains the pecu-
liarly blank emotionless emotion of the passage, the absence in it of
the positive memory of an object now lost, that normally underlies
lament. The displacement of today as the locus of action, as insisted on
by Christ in his injunction to ‘take no thought for the morrow’
(Matthew 6:34), is further emphasised by the mere semblances of
action in the successive images of a walking shadow, a player and an
idiot which conclude the soliloquy. Yet Macbeth still implies that time
has content; why else is it ‘recorded’ (if not taken to heart in the root
sense of that word), like an echo of his lost conscience? Similarly,
‘shadow’ implies substance, ‘a poor player’ a role, and wordless ‘fury’
some kind of suffering subject. A willingness to see nothing but undif-
ferentiated fooling, unexplained gestures of pride and anxiety, and the
idiot’s frustrated urge to give voice to the turmoil within him, make
recording effectively impossible and frustrate its purpose: to learn, and
to confront actions with their consequences. What is so appalling in
the benumbed Macbeth, reduced to disappointment and weary indig-
nation at the cheat put upon him, is the final exhaustion of that strug-
gle between desire and guilt so evident in his earlier soliloquies, and in
dialogue with his ‘fiend-like queen’, an exhaustion brought about not
by an unavailing quest for identity, but by the terrible deeds in which
he took time by the forelock, but which by now seem too trivial to
record. Where once only he and his wife knew what kind of ‘inside-out
Silenus’ they comprised, the serpent under the flower, now everybody
knows what was inside Macbeth except Macbeth himself, who has for-
gotten (at least, where his emotions are concerned). What is more
dominant here: that Macbeth pursued desires forced on him by a sick
social order (as Eagleton suggests), or that he behaved so ruthlessly in
pursuit of them that he lost all ruth – all pity – even for himself?
5.4.2 Edmund and Gloucester on Shakespeare’s Cliff:

homoeopathic pathos?
Now we will take our own look into the ‘existential void’ within which
(according to Lisa Jardine) Gloucester jumps off a non-existent cliff (King
Lear, IV.v). Having noted that his guide is speaking ‘In better phrase and
matter than thou didst’, he is brought mentally to the brink:
Edgar. Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring barque
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
(Folio Text as in The Norton Shakespeare, IV.v.11–24)
Before we examine the reason that Edgar gives for his action, let us
consider the impression that this topogaphia (enargeia representing a
real place though not the locale of the action), might create within the
despairing Gloucester. Obviously of primary emotional importance to
Edgar as he ‘trifles’ with his father’s ‘despair’, is the construction in the
blinded man’s mind, distracted as he is by his ‘eyes’ anguish’, of

enough physical fear and sympathetic vertigo to be thoroughly
convinced that he is on the brink of a six or seven hundred foot sheer
drop. He is not so distracted that he cannot recognise the change in his
son’s voice; and without falling into the old error of thinking of a
dramatic character as a real person whose psychological make-up is
exactly portrayed by the writer, Shakespeare’s concern with fathers and
children, and his urge as a tragic dramatist to move towards the
ultimate moment of recognition at which Gloucester’s heart, unlike
Lear’s, will ‘burst smilingly’ (V.iii.189) ensures that he will represent
Gloucester’s repressed awareness of Edgar’s presence. This is evident
enough in the fact that his ‘last words’, apart from telling his guide to
stand back, are a blessing on his son. The means which Edgar uses to
create the cliff, a barrier of fear against which Gloucester must hurl
himself if he is to achieve his death, also create an extraordinary
impression of life. They recall the great outer world which is to be
evoked so memorably in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, in which
ordinary life just goes on around the extraordinary event, or one
person’s subjective crisis. The ‘fearsomeness’ of the huge frame of space
in front of him is communicated at the beginning and end of Edgar’s
topographia by his instinctive bodily reaction of dizziness, evocative of
the most basic kind of physical sympathy in his listener, and aided by
the deictic adverb, ‘so low!’ In its marked Fsp position, this constructs
the acute angle at the apex of a right angled triangle comprising the
cliff, the beach and Edgar’s line of vision, projecting Gloucester upward
to the required height, before confirming that with a progressive
proportioning of the things observed. The ‘crows and choughs’ (the
cries of ‘gulls’ or ‘seamews’ would be more conspicuous in their
absence) represent animal life; and the samphire-gatherer who gets his
living in routine danger of death (whether he ‘hangs’ with two feet and
one hand, or dangles from a rope), measures the urgency of his own
need to go on living. The fishermen too (who near Dover probably fish
off the beach in their boats, as they still do at Hastings), in their
relaxed but purposeful movement represent what makes a dangerous
life bearable, as they move from or towards their own confrontations
with death. In a further contrast, the ‘tall anchoring bark’ suggests an
enforced pause in the business of getting a living, while the
movements of inanimate water and stone, in their ‘murmuring’ and
‘idleness’, metaphorically reflect the political discontents fostered by
the disproportion between effort, danger and reward. The majesty of
nature (including its ‘mice’ and ‘beetles’), and of human life as part
of it, has to be there if Gloucester is to believe in the cliff; and the great
picture of endurance contructed by Edgar counterweighs other
moments in the play when its exact sense of proportion fails, when ‘a
dog, a horse, a rat’, live while Cordelia dies. As an undertow to his
precipitation towards death Gloucester does not attend to this
presentation of life, but from the audience’s perspective, enjoying the
momentary relaxation of stress as the description unfolds, its
emotional counter-pressure against their imaginative empathy with
him, as he ‘patiently’ confronts a fearsome death in the face of a more
unbearable ‘affliction’ (see l. 36, following), will be stronger.
And what of the leap itself, and Jardine’s ‘horror and embarrassment’
(see above)? Whether Edgar is adrift in a world of ‘raw emotion’, and is
clutching at straws in his talk of a ‘cure’ for despair, or whether he
would have been perceived as so doing by Shakespeare’s contempo-
raries, would depend partly on whether a precipitate fall resulting in
no harm, but in a ‘cure’, rang any bells with them – whether some
such personal and physical scene, and a script to go with it, could be pre-
supposed in any of their memories. Coincidentally or otherwise,
Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 3, 227,17 following other
instances of homoeopathic cures, quotes from Ovid’s Heroides XV,18 in
which Sappho, ‘Cupidinis oestro percita … [stung with love-frenzy …],
comes to the summit of the Leucadian Rock, overlooking the sea, to
throw herself down. Hoping ‘to be freed of her love-pangs’, she is reas-
sured by a Naiad that (in the lines as quoted in translation by Burton):
Hither Deucalion came, when Pyrrha’s love

Tormented him, and leapt down to the sea
And had no harm at all, but by and by
His love was gone and chased quite away.
Burton cites several other instances of this particular, precipitous cure.

The story of Sappho’s passion was probably well enough known for
this echo of the love-epistle to be caught, and even if it was not, I (for
one) am resistant to Jardine’s contention that ‘Lear severs affect from
its epistolary setting where it could be controlled’ (p. 94), by not
actually presenting the audience with instance of this controlled
emotion. I see effective pathos in two letters which in her view are just
‘banally instructive’ (p. 94), that is, the forged letter from Edgar
contrived by Edmund to incense his father (I.ii.45–52), and the
‘ungracious’ letter from Goneril which Edgar obtains on the death of
Oswald (IV.vi.254–62). This reminder of the persuasive power of letters
might help catch the echo of a more positive though possibly delusive
message retailed by a letter; and if Shakespeare’s audience knew the
pathos of Ovid’s love-epistles as well as they knew its more tempered
use in Erasmian letters, they might recognise the script (or the more
general scene) of a passion cured by a harmless fall. What Edgar
contrives for his father, by implication a homoeopathic cure of despair
through a desperate act, would fit into that frame; and although
despair dominates Gloucester, not love-melancholy as in Burton, it can
be linked to the cynical lechery that led to Edmund’s begetting, to his
betrayal by an indulged love-child, his agony, and his sense of
enlightenment come too late (‘The dark and vicious place where thee
he got / Cost him his eyes’ – V.iii.171–2). And why does Lear, later,
address him as ‘blind Cupid’ (IV.v.131)? Burton’s own explanatory
gloss is ‘vehement fear expels love’. Why not the love component in
the love-induced despair? Meanwhile, the ultimate cure of passion by
endurance has been quietly insinuated by our cognitive engagement
with the human and animal life pursuing its goals of survival, below
the cliff.
5.5 Paradise Lost: engaging the reader
5.5.1 Satan newly fallen: pathos in perspective

Without analysis (since, uniquely, this has already been done in
Chapter II) we should remind ourselves of Satan the orator, as the
narrator slides from wincing sympathy with his disfigurement, to
empathy with him, as he contemplates his faithful followers who
have suffered so much on his behalf, paying for a rebellion which he
conceived before involving them, and who are still with him,
despite being
condemned
Forever now to have their lot in pain,
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of heaven, and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered.
Paradise Lost I.607–12
We are inside his mind with the narrator as he conceives the emotion
which will impel his followers into a new burst of activity and a new
confirmation of his supremacy.
In other passages the empathetic engagement may be less, and the

reader’s inward assessment of Satan more insistent, as he is measured
against earlier and later heroes (earlier than the ‘belated’ poem, later
than the hero in ‘real’ time). How far, if at all, do the deictic features,
the sentence perspective and the cognitive engagement through which
Milton energises that major sequence of similes marking Satan’s
resurgence in Paradise Lost, I.283–313, and subjected to intense
scrutiny by Harold Bloom in his A Map of Misreading (pp. 112–13,
above), confirm that critic’s detection in them of acute revisionary
anxiety, defended against by the master-trope of metalepsis? It should
help us, in considering this, to look for the evidence of Milton’s
conscious emotional engagement with the discerning reader. Is his
supposed struggle with his poetic forebears essential to the task of
opening the reader’s eyes to the all-pervasive cultural and religious
contamination stemming from Satan’s rebellion (and from the human
rebellion so nearly resembling it)? Or is it a distraction – or a fiction?
Here I omit the final biblical parallel with the Red Sea and the drowned
Egyptians (ll.304–13):
He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend

Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round 285
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fesole
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, 290
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.
His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great admiral, were but a wand,
He walked with to support uneasy steps 295
Over the burning marl, not like those steps
On heaven’s azure, and the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire;
Natheless he so endured, till on the beach
Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called 300
His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High overarched imbower …
Deictically, certain demonstrative pronouns and definite articles (‘those’,

‘that’, ‘the’) imply that the reader already has his or her imaginative
bearings within the earthly and infernal spaces evoked by Milton – and
within the wide European intellectual sphere, which is conveyed allu-
sively through antonomasia: ‘The Tuscan artist’. His intellectual emi-
nence releases Galileo from the constraints of time – he had lost his
eyesight by 1637 and died in 1642 – as well as from the Inquisition, but
he still ‘views’ the moon from a narrowly defined area with its topogra-
phy of hill and vale. By contrast, the odd kind of anti-simile which is
applied to Satan’s spear, to tell us what it is not like (by inference, it
must be some six or seven hundred feet long!), has one specific geo-
graphical, non-deictic coordinate, ‘Norwegian’, to mark the mast’s
northerly source, and one adjective, ‘some’, to indicate a particular
though unidentified flagship, unknown by nation, dockyard, comman-
der or deployment. The reader is free to imagine it anywhere from the
Baltic to the Canary Islands. This instance clearly illustrates the useful-
ness of ‘some’ as a poetic adjective, however well-worn: it is analogous
to a deictic reference in that it points the reader’s attention to a particular
object; but it does so within a cognitive frame of reference rather than a
spatial or sensory one. It combines particularization and generalization,
pointing the reader back to the individual sources or recent reinforce-
ments of his or her general ideas. But where the spear’s actual use is con-
cerned, the deictic bearings are immediately restored, placing the reader,
empathetically, between ‘the burning marl’ and ‘the torrid clime’.
However, this particular spar is descending, not into the solid keelson of
a warship but into the ‘burning marl’ or lava of Hell – while the final
quoted simile again links the infernal frame of reference, with bearings
taken from a position behind Satan as he heads away towards ‘that
inflamed sea’, to those of an Italian landscape.
Within these bearings, with their implied contrasts of heat and
coolness, parching and moisture, barren and fertile, the dynamics of
Milton’s verse sharpens the pathos further. In Firbasian terms the first
sentence combines the Phenomenon Scale with the Quality Scale as fresh
perceptions strike the reader: the collocation ‘superior fiend’ reflects
the judicious ethos of Milton’s narrator. It paradoxically couples an
acknowledgement of Satan’s exalted status with a sense of his baseness
and malice, and thus it constitutes an emotional and moral phenome-
non. This rapid alternation of positive and negative is to continue
throughout the passage. ‘Superior fiend’ is ‘contextually independent’
in its temporal ‘setting’ (‘He scarce had ceased when …’) though it
plays on the idea of ‘pernicious height’ in Beelzebub’s preceding
remark (l. 282). But it promptly becomes a ‘quality bearer’ for the
movement of Satan, progressively ‘specified’, firstly in its direction and
then in its encumbered condition. The ‘ponderous shield’ which seems
at first to be the subject of a further sentence on the Ph Scale, expands
into a ‘massy’ phenomenon, developed through a phrase in apposition
(‘Ethereal temper’) and multiple modifiers (‘massy, large and round’),
before being contained in an absolute construction and revealed
retrospectively as a ‘further specification’ about Satan’s progress. ‘[C]ast
… behind’ its owner – both physically and temporally – it is now more
of a hindrance than a help; the time for ‘open war’ (II.41) is almost
past. But its ‘broad circumference’ – that is, its vast enclosed area (see
OED, sense 2, citing this passage) – seeming momentarily to margin-
alise everything else, starts the next sentence as a new phenomenon,
one of sheer size. This is inferred from its width and weight, before the
expanding sentence repositions it as a quality bearer, removed to a dis-
tance both in time and space through its comparison to the moon as
viewed through Galileo’s ‘optic glass’. The viewing is progressively
specified with respect to instrument, time, place and purpose (or
effect).19 The final, infinitive clause (‘to descry …’) achieves the pathos
of wonder, as noted by Harold Bloom: the hills and river valleys of
Tuscany are mirrored in reverse order, and thus in an emotive, conver-
gent structure,20 by the lunar landscape with its mind-expanding, tan-
talising ‘new lands, rivers and mountains’ – the ultimate and most
dynamic specification, though it precedes the adverbial phrase ‘in her
spotty globe’. With this, the sentence lapses into, and ends, on a note
of ambiguity which will be discussed below – the mode of pathos being
linked with especial closeness to a shift in cognition. The ‘scaling’ of
the next sentence leads ultimately to a contrasted idea. Satan’s spear
does have its use – concealed for three lines by a proportional compari-
son with the tallest imaginable tree. Again, it appears to be the ‘contex-
tually independent’ subject of a Ph Scale sentence, an awesome symbol
of strength – before proving to be a mere specification for Satan’s
unsteady progress, an index of weakness, instrumental to his tottering,
blistering feet. But the reader is led to this very deviously.
S.E. Fish has offered an account of the process in his Surprised by Sin
(1967),21 pp. 23–7; but in my view this lacks the benefit of the kind of
focus Firbas can provide: it seems to discount the full interplay
between the impact of fresh ‘information’ in a sentence, and the sense
of resolving syntax. Fish starts very fairly; l. 292 does indeed create the
impression that ‘spear’ and ‘pine’ are to be equated. We expect the
verb, when it comes, to confirm this. But we register the movement
into a relative clause, midway through the line (‘to equal which’), and
thus begin to expect a more complex resolution – at least two verbs
before the end of the sentence. However, even the first of these is
delayed as the tree (already implied to be taller than anything in
Homer) is linked to an elaborate structure of post-modification: adjecti-
val participial phrase, adverbial phrase. It is ‘the tallest pine / Hewn on
Norwegian hills to be the mast / Of some great admiral’ and combines
the Ph and Quality Scales, moving on from the specification of origin to
the further specification of purpose, and compelling our involvement
with the scripts, scenes and planning needed to create that vast, sea-
borne engine of destruction; but then the titanic symbol of seven-
teenth century sea power is shrunk to Lilliputian size – ‘the mast’ being
reduced to a ‘wand’ as the first of the anticipated verbs, modal in form,
finally appears. And immediately after that, the main verb appears,
complete with its prepositional link back to ‘His spear’ – revealing the
latter as a mere ‘specification’, not nominative but ablative, reduced to
an accidental function as the nearest thing to hand. I cannot see how a
reader fully alert to the syntax, and the dynamics, would gain even a
fleeting impression that the spear ‘were but a wand / He walked with’,
in the hand of a miniature Satan, as Fish claims (p. 25). It is in my
mind far more impressively reductive as a colossal third leg – though as
the sentence develops into a ‘further specification’ of his need for
support, empathetic engagement (and almost pity) for Satan develops,
through the appositional comparison with ‘those steps / On heaven’s
azure’.
To attend steadily to the dynamics, deixis and other patterning of
Milton’s sentences, and to benefit discriminatingly from Fish’s
ebullient analysis, does nothing in my view to question Bloom’s
reading. Rather it seems to confirm it, by demonstrating just how like
Galileo we see further, and see through the gigantic Satan – and all the
powers from Achilles to De Ruyter – of which he is the precursor.
5.5.2 Love: the alternative model

It seems appropriate while reading the lines so intriguingly applied by
Catherine Belsey to human sexuality (see pp. 113–16, above), to
enquire whether their logos quite matches her reading. Do the
‘difficulties’ not encountered in angelic lovemaking derive from the
alleged inequality between man and woman, or from a ‘transporting’
degree of beauty in the ‘inferior’, or do they simply refer to animal and
sexual anatomy (‘membrane, joint, and limb’ – 625)? The exclusive
masculinity of heaven’s population is cited by Adam after the Fall at
the height of his resentment against Eve, and is irrelevant to the

difference Raphael alludes to. To have written that in Heaven ‘There
are of course no men’ would no more irrelevant; it’s not a question of
gender but of physicality:
Let it suffice thee that thou know’st

Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.
VIII.618–29
Having just cautioned Adam for tracing an experienced effect – the

‘commotion’ of his feelings for Eve – back to its possible cause in some
failure of nature in his own creation, or some disproportion in hers,
Raphael replies to his final question. This serves to smooth over
Adam’s ‘half-abashed’ sense of self-exposure (595 ff.), by probing
Raphael’s own capacity for embarrassment. There is a delicate
impression here of the dynamics of friendship, the way that trust in a
friend’s values and judgement can tempt a person into confidences not
improper in themselves – when there is a real need for advice or
reassurance – but likely to get garbled in the rush of released feeling.
Even Raphael doesn’t quite keep his cool when appealed to for a
reciprocal confidence, replying ‘with a smile that glowed / Celestial
rosy red, love’s proper hue’ (ll.618–9). This blush, endorsed by the
further specification within the relative clause, does not, as once
suggested, show that Raphael enjoys lovemaking more than serving
God, but simply reflects a distinction between types of relationship, a
private joy in another setting. Tactfully enough, he mirrors Adam’s
own contentious argument from cause (that is, love as cause).
In doing so, he goes as far as he can in trusting Adam with some
sense of what is peculiar to angelic love, while signalling a willingness
to give Adam the benefit of his corresponding lack of direct knowledge
about human love. In a brief version of the progression from memory,
reason, and moral resolve, to further enlightenment, which is so often
repeated in Milton, he appeals to the commonplace already proved in
Adam’s experience and validated in debate with God himself: ‘without

love no happiness’. That Raphael is as happy as he claims to be is
evident from the blush, and from his lack of constraint despite the
severity of his previous speech; but Adam is invited to draw the infer-
ence, to use both memory and reason, before he hears more – indeed
in itself the sentence suggests that he won’t hear any more. Encouraged
to think, as well as to feel (or merely to indulge curiosity), he is
perhaps steadied, and Raphael perhaps more inclined to confide. What
he says is of his own choice, a personal not a divine revelation, but one
expressing the purity of that ‘mysterious reverence’ which Adam senses
in human sexuality. ‘Pure’ is the key word, linking back to the ‘kisses
pure’ of IV.502, and the ‘sanctitude severe and pure’ (IV.293) of
humanity’s first appearance. ‘Whatever pure’ concedes a latitude to
Adam and his judgement, in interpretation of the ‘weakness’ (V3.532)
and ‘awe’ (558) he feels in approaching Eve, since Raphael cannot
directly experience purity in that form. ‘Pure’ floats between the purity
of Adam in enjoying and the purity of Eve’s reciprocal love; but in
assuring Adam that the delight of angelic love has the same quality ‘in
eminence’, Raphael treads a fine line between the implication that he
can’t imagine / couldn’t fancy Adam’s mode of lovemaking, and a
salutary reminder that his way is not the only way. The convergent,
balanced structure uniting desire with fulfilment (‘union of pure with
pure / desiring’), and the impetus given to ‘Desiring’ by its initial
position in the line, sound the one unmistakably authentic erotic note
– and also the affirmation, in each such act, of another unique created
being in all its ‘purity’ – a purity paradoxically increased through the
very process of ‘mixing’. Without having to force the sense, there is a
link here with Catherine Belsey’s icon of sexual liberation: we glimpse
the kind of ‘difference’ which non-corporeal beings unable to ground
difference (or found power) upon sexual anatomy, would love in each
other.
5.6 A case in point: Courtship in Wyatt and Gascoigne
I am going to conclude by returning to the beginning, to the text

chosen by Gary Waller to introduce early modern writing, and courtly
culture, to his students. I will view this one text within a more
developed physical and social setting, and in relation to a more
sustained literary parallel.
Has Wyatt no words for his ‘pain’ in ‘They flee from me’ – for the
‘emergent “structures of feeling”’ which Waller, quoting Raymond
Williams, detects within his poetry, with no ‘cultural forms’ through

which to express them (Waller, p. 118)? Is he bound ‘to be the
aggressor or to be the victim’? To remind ourselves, let us look at
Wyatt’s text, printed by Muir and Thomson from the Egerton
Manuscript.22 Can we characterise the emotions and social context of
the poem more sharply than Waller did?
THEY fle from me that sometyme did me seke

With naked fote stalking in my chambre.
I have sene theim gentill tame and meke
That nowe are wyld …
(Stanza 1, 1–4)
For me, Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573)23 is as valuable for

the sidelight it sheds on Wyatt, as is Thomas Whythorne’s curious
Autobiography, quoted by Waller on p. 110, claiming that it yields an
important clue to the generic roles of lover and poet, and the poet’s
problematic sense of audience. In both cases we must not discount
differences in attitude and experience between any other writer and
Wyatt. Gascoigne is, firstly, interesting for the topographical aspects of
his account of love-intrigues within a great household, for the
unconstrained informality with which male and female members visit,
and congregate, in each others’ lodgings – and for the ease with which
they spy on each other, as when Lady Frances sees F.J. returning from
his assignation with Elinor, ‘he having a large base court (that is, an
outer courtyard) to pass over before he could recover his stair-foot
door’. Bearing in mind that many of the rooms assigned to residents
and guests, male and female, opened off common staircases as
indicated here, it is not surprising that those surreptitiously visiting
Wyatt’s protagonist – whether for business or pleasure – would go
barefoot. The erotic visitation remembered with such relish in the
second stanza might require a less exposed route than F.J.’s, and more
like that taken on a later occasion ‘by his mistress in her nightgown
who, knowing all privy ways in that house very perfectly, had
conveyed herself into F.J.’s chamber unseen and unperceived’ (though
by this time F.J. is in anguish, torn between desire, jealousy and guilty
suspicion, and the episode culminates in a virtual rape – shameful to
the modern reader, though underplayed by Gascoigne’s narrator, G.T.).
In Wyatt’s poem, a similar risk and caution is reflected in the woman’s
thrilling whisper, which seems calculated to reduce the protagonist’s
previous lordly insouciance to a desperate craving:
… In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse

When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her armes long and small;
Therewithall swetely did my kysse,
And softely said ‘dere hert, how like you this?’
(Stanza 2, 10–14)
This, then, is a night-time visit. The nightgown falls away like

Corinna’s robe in Ovid’s Amores I.v. The similarity in this detail,
besides the paralleled groupings (man in bed, woman bending over
him), and the broken-off narrative, is noted in the commentaries, for
example, Muir and Thomson, p. 299. But the differences from Ovid
help to specify the feeling: this is darker and more dangerous than
Ovid’s sultry siesta-time, as the parallels with Gascoigne suggest. The
woman is more seductive (her gown falling before it is grasped, as it is
in Ovid) and the man so enraptured that, later, it seems half a dream
(l. 15). And nothing akin to Ovid’s terse ‘Who can’t guess what
followed’ (‘Caetera quis nescit?’)24 points to subsequent lovemaking.
Anyway, the dream turns sour:
… all is torned thorough my gentilnes

Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;
And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
And she also to vse new fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely ame serued,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserued.
(Stanza 3, 16–21)
Gascoigne reinforces Waller’s perception of the poem (pp. 116–17) ‘as

a fictional dramatisation of erotic anguish, or … within the
Renaissance tradition of debating questions about love, … raising
specifically the question of fickleness (‘new fangleness’) and desert
(‘what she hath deserved’)’. Wyatt’s readers would recognise the formal
social scene in which a lady’s ‘servant’ begs leave of absence – here
distorted by the lady’s enjoyment goal of cruelty or ‘fun’ (to quote
Waller). They would also see a personal script of ‘new-fangleness’ never
socially endorsed, at least not by men. This might well sound the
strongest note of empathy in the poem, at least where the stress of
relationships is concerned. In The Adventures of Master F.J., discussions
on the rights and wrongs of love are held by daylight, in those very
‘chambers’ furnished with beds in which (at night), acts of love, lust,
or rape, occur. The stories offered for discussion, like Mistress Frances’s
tale of the husband who, discovering his wife’s infidelity, silently paid
her for sex until she repented, without confronting her lover
(pp. 67–73), might have obvious bearings on the conduct of one or
more listeners. Indeed, Frances’s story is aimed directly at the
‘governor’ appointed to pronounce on the question it raises, F.J.
himself. There is thus a continuity between the spheres of public and
private feeling, between desire, anxiety, self-consciousness and
shamelessness, secret triumph and the threat of public humiliation.
In effect, the courtly25 ambience reflected and addressed in
Gascoigne’s novel points to the probable cognitive structures in the
minds of Wyatt’s original readers as habitués of the royal court, and
thus to their predictable range of emotional response to lyrics such as
‘They flee from me’. The physical scene of the bed/chamber provides a
setting for the social scene of courtly love, with its debates, professions
of ‘service’ (F.J. being publicly acknowledged as Lady Elinor’s ‘servant’),
its adoption of coterie names (F.J. is ‘Trust’ to Lady Frances’s ‘Hope’),
and its displays of favour or neglect. The identical setting, by night,
witnesses the personal scene of sex. This is painfully heightened in The
Adventures when the perfumed linen publicly provided by Elinor for
F.J. during the day, to solace his languishing condition, accommodates
her rape during the following night (Salzman, pp. 52–3, 58–9, 61). For
the participants, individually, each scene has its distinctive script in fur-
therance of its goal – on the one side, social advancement within the
group as a man or woman of style, discernment and influence: on the
other, sexual pleasure heightened by various contradictory factors such
as the peril of exposure and (for both parties) the sense of power occa-
sioned by the disempowerment of a husband, father or rival lover. But
the vital point is that whoever participates in both scenes, will while
involved with one, remember, hint at, or anticipate the other, but will
never acknowledge it – in the social scene, because the sex must be
secret; in the sexual scene, because objectivity is fatal to passion. These
conditions are tantamount to rules, which can only be broken with
disastrous consequences as they are when F.J., pressed beyond
endurance by Elinor in her anxiety at his distracted state, confronts her
in bed with the facts of her own inconstancy. The rape follows. In both
scenes, the power and attractiveness of each participant will be derived
largely from their unvoiced awareness – and from the emotion which
accompanies it (provided that this remains under control). But does
this substantiate Waller’s view that participants are confined to the
roles of ‘victim’ or ‘aggressor’? Certainly F.J. slips atrociously from one

to the other at the crisis of his story, as Wyatt’s tantalised lover heads
the other way from arrogance to abjection; but The Adventures suggests
other models for conduct, such as the patient, perceptive friendship
offered by Frances to F.J. (far beyond his deserts), in the apparent trust
that he will at last reconsider his passion for Elinor and grow to
appreciate true female virtue. Gascoigne also provides an object lesson
in the healing of relationships, through Frances’s story of the wronged
husband, whose repentant wife finally tricks her lover into renouncing
her. Unfortunately for Frances, F.J. never acknowledges his own
egoism, vice and folly, or validates the coterie name, ‘Hope’, which he
conferred on her at an early stage – and a darker impression is left by
Gascoigne’s revised version, where she dies ‘galled with the grief of his
great ingratitude’ and he, still blaming women for his own failings,
pursues ‘a dissolute kind of life’ (Salzman, p. 80).
Frances vainly prompts F.J. to distance himself, intellectually and
emotionally, from the double bind of aggression and passivity into
which he has fallen. This same situation is also faced by Wyatt’s
protagonist; but the poem hints at a more positive outcome. Whether
or not rendered incapable by Court culture of imagining better gender
relations, as Waller maintained, the protagonist might at least be
blaming himself in the way that was to be recommended so fruitlessly
to F.J. Or, alternatively, the poet invites the reader to blame the lover
(compare Donne’s ‘Apparition’?). Two words, ‘straunge’ (l. 17) and
‘kyndely’ (l. 20) resonate with bitter irony. Only a fool would think it
unpredictable or surprising (‘straunge’) that a woman who had sought
him in secret and endured his lazy arrogance (‘to take bread at my
hand’ – l. 6) should turn the tables, reducing him to sexual
dependency and then resorting to distant (‘straunge’) behaviour.
Similarly, despite the misogyny of the charge that women seeking new
lovers do so according to nature (‘kyndely’), the man’s own psychologi-
cal and sexual instability, his shift from laid-back love-object to sexual
leper, might seem similarly natural. At the same time, the antiphrasis of
‘kyndely’ in its other more familiar sense, here sneering in a directly
oppositional sense at the woman’s cruelty, betrays its own irrationality
(what’s merely instinctive can’t be reprehensible) and again reflects
scorn on the man. Even if Waller is right about the Court, to reject
both it and women (as Wyatt does in other poems) is to express
neither aggression nor passivity, but to expose both responses – as
characteristic of men – to reactions ranging from self-reproach to
weariness and contempt. Placing a negative presentation of men
alongside that of women might be a start. Perhaps both parties should

accept that behaving according to ‘kind’, whether with blind male
arrogance and self-pity or with opportunistic female frivolity, is no
excuse. Waller’s approach to the poem comes to rest on the pathos of
an emotionally crippled condition; but Wyatt’s exposure of the lover
points to the possibility of a change, then and there.
5.7 Conclusion
In this chapter, Schema theory has again, repeatedly, shown its value
as a way of directing readers to link the details of a text to what they
know, or can reconstruct, of the contexts which existed in the minds
of original audiences and readerships. This has perhaps been most
apparent in our return to Wyatt’s poem. This process would always be
involved in producing a distinctive sense of emotional engagement, or
a particular kind of expectation and uncertainty (as with the possible
echo, in King Lear, of the Leucadian Rock and its lovelorn, epistolary
context). Cognitive engagement with the original sources of feeling,
within the text, might on reflection enable the reader to perceive
powerful contrasts between some of the passages examined above – for
example, between Baldwin’s sound-panorama which seems primarily
to enact a social scene of arid verbal display, and Edgar’s visual
panorama from Dover cliff, where the scripts, scenes, goals, and plans of
enduring life, are present in abundance. The chapter has also instanced
the value of some of the less constant phenomena noted by the ‘New’
Rhetoric, such as echo and convergence – crucial in one instance to the
effective pathos of a speech.
In the book as a whole, I have attempted to demonstrate that the
pathos of a text should be read as carefully as its vocabulary, its
allusions and its indices of the society and the time which produced it,
and that this reading depends both on our sense of the reader’s or
listeners’ receptivity, and on every emotive aspect of the text’s style
and structure, from the overtones of imagery to the placing of words
within a sentence. With this end in view, it would be a serious
self-deprivation to use only one mode of rhetorical analysis, rather
than both of those characterised here as ‘Old’ and ‘New’. Rhetoric is
the interface between literature and language, both as they are written
and spoken, and as they are studied, and it should draw its resources
from both sides of that zone of interaction. The modern critical
rhetoric looked at here has taught, pleased and moved me, variously;
besides proving conclusively that ‘pathetical’ rhetoric is alive and well.
Is it possible to recover the force and colour of pathos within the

original, inner frame of writer and audience, to further enliven debate
in the outer frame? This will mean adjusting the reconstructed,
inter-reflecting ‘mirrors’ of those persuaders, those audiences, very
carefully, before deciding whether we can be caught into their
inter-reflection, or whether we must stand aside from it. The examples
of critical engagement which we have studied all have value; but some
seem vindicated, and reinforced by this approach, more than others.
Notes
1 Introduction: Reconsidered Passions

1 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963),
p. 40.
2 All quotations of Milton’s verse are from Stephen Orgel and Jonathan
Goldberg (eds), John Milton. The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990).
3 David Lodge, Thinks … (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001).
4 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness (London: Heinemann, 2000).
5 The Guardian, G2 15, Thursday 20 January 2000.
6 William Downes, ‘The Language of Felt Experience: Emotional, Evaluative
and Intuitive’, Language and Literature, IX (2000) 99–121.
7 Aristotle’s Rhetoric exists in two convenient English translations: J.H. Freese
(ed. and trans.) Aristotle: The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, Loeb Classical Library
(London: Heinemann, 1959); and H.C. Lawson-Tancred (ed. and trans.),
Aristotle: the Art of Rhetoric, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1991). Quotations are from Freese unless otherwise stated.
8 As recently implied by Ian McEwan, in a lecture printed in the The
Guardian, Saturday 9 June 2001 (Saturday Review, pp. 1, 3).
9 C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on
Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame and London:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
10 All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from Stephen Greenblatt
et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1997).
11 R.C. Schank and R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977); R.C. Schank, Dynamic
Memory: a Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
12 Elena Semino, Language & World Creation (London: Longman, 1997).
13 See G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: the Growth and Structure of his Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 57–62.
14 Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1991). For Arrangement, see pp. 171–4.
15 Semino cites M. Black, ‘More about metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.),
Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
pp. 37–41.
16 See I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936, repr. Galaxy Books (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1965), Lectures V and VI on metaphor
(pp. 89–138).
17 See S.C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), pp. 159–60).
186
Notes 187
18 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and

Feeling’, in Sheldon Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 141–57, quoted by Lana Cable in her Carnal
Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1995), p. 24.
19 See Cable, as above, pp. 25–30.
20 Ricoeur, loc. cit., p. 152, quoted by Cable, p. 25.
21 See Edward W. Tayler, ‘Milton’s Firedrake’, Milton Quarterly, VI (1972), 7–10.
22 Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations
in Goffman’s Concepts of Participation’, in P. Drew and A. Wootton (eds),
Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interactive Order (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1988), pp. 161–227.
23 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). All citations of Marlowe’s
plays are from this edition.
24 Jan Firbas, ‘On the Dynamics of Written Communication in the Light of
the Theory of Functional Sentence Perspective’, in C.R. Cooper and
S. Greenbaum (eds), Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches (London: Sage
Publications, 1986), pp. 40–71.
25 Jan Firbas, Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken
Communication, Studies in English Language Series (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
26 For Deixis, see Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983) and (for a critique of Levinson’s ‘standard’
approach) Peter Jones’s essay in New Essays in Deixis edited by K. Green
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).
27 R.A. Carter, ‘Common Language: Corpus, Creativity and Cognition’,
Language and Literature, VIII (1999), 199.
28 Susan M. Cockcroft, Investigating Talk (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1999), pp. 55–6.
29 If ‘well-feasted priest’ is not a Phenomenon in Firbasian terms.
30 Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: an Art of Character (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
31 Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman,
1986).
32 Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, trans. H.M. Hubbell (with De Inventione
and Topica), Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1959), I.3,
pp. 356–7.
33 Cicero, Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell (with Brutus, trans. G.L. Hendrickson),
Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1988), xxi.69, pp. 356–7.
34 See Hubbell’s note in the 1959 edition (see above), p. 356.
35 See for example M.A.K. Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar
(London: Edward Arnold, 1985), and Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to
Systemic Functional Linguistics (London: Pinter Publishers, 1994).
36 See Gabriel Harvey, Ciceronianus, ed. and trans. C.A. Forbes and H.S. Wilson
(Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1945).
37 For a review of Ramus’s own practice see Peter Sharratt, ‘Ramus 2000’,
Rhetorica XVIII (2000), 422–4, 425–6. Sharratt cites Peter Mack’s 1998 article
(see Chapter 2, n. 51), in which Mack notes (as paraphrased by Sharratt,
188 Notes
p. 426) that ‘on occasion Ramus misses the full emotional force of the work
on which he is commenting’.
38 See W. Nash, Rhetoric: the Wit of Persuasion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 3.
2 Sable Clouds and Silver Linings

1 Laurence D. Green, ‘The Pathetic Renaissance’, Biennial Conference of the
ISHR, Warsaw, 25 July 2001.
2 See Plato, Gorgias, trans. and introd. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1960), p. 44 ff.
3 Plato, Phaedrus and The Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. and introd.
W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973).
4 See Hamilton, p. 54 for Plato’s categorisation of souls as first incarnated –
nine kinds, from the philosopher to the tyrant.
5 See the related passage in Plato, The Republic, trans. and introd. H.D.P. Lee
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 184. Lee comments that Plato ‘is …
probably always conscious that in speaking of “parts” … of the soul he is
using a metaphor’.
6 The earlier tradition of commentary on these relationships is typified by
A.E. Taylor, Plato (1926), University Paperbacks (London: Methuen, 1960),
pp. 302–09.
7 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1996).
8 James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, ‘Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’,
Written Communication, XVII (2000), 432–44.
9 In contrast with Lawson-Tancred’s (‘Let rhetoric be the power to observe
the persuasiveness of which any particular matter admits’ – p. 74), this
translation stresses active intelligence and imagination.
10 On the enthymeme (i.e. syllogistic argument from probable premises, at
least one of them often left implicit), see Garver, pp. 162–8.
11 For issue theory, culminating in Hermogenes (AD c. 160–225), see the
Prolegomena, Translation and Commentary in Hermogenes, On Issues, ed.
and trans. Malcolm Heath (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
12 In The Complete Gentleman, 1622 (see below) Henry Peacham the Younger
quotes the view that ‘Aristotle’s rhetorics’ were ‘sufficient … to make both a
scholar and an honest man’ (p. 57).
13 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1954), p. 61.
14 See for example John Brinsley, Ludus Litterarius: or, the Grammar Schoole
(London: Thomas Man, 1612).
15 See for example Millar Maclure’s Introduction to Christopher Marlowe, The
Poems (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. xxxv–vi. Marlowe drew on marginalia
by Ioannes Sulpitius and others to Lucan’s Pharsalia as printed at Frankfurt,
for certain phrases in his translation.
16 Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library
(London: Heinemann, 1954).
17 See Marcia A. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle
Ages: 1. Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985); and J.M.
Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Notes 189
18 The use Shakespeare’s Antony makes of Caesar’s bloodstained toga is

foreshadowed by its display at his funeral, recalled in Quintilian’s
discussion of pathos (IO, VI.i.31).
19 See the Loeb edn, p. 388: ‘Quanquam aliud videtur oratio esse aliud
disputatio nec idem loqui esse quod dicere ac tamen utrumque in
disserendo est; disputandi ratio et loquendi dialecticorum sit, oratorum
autem dicendi et ornandi’. Note that this distinguishes the familiar
‘loquendi’ from the more formal and emphatic ‘dicendi’.
20 James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: a History of Rhetorical Theory
from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1974), pp. 357–60.
21 At hominum occisum queror; non omnia, quae in re praesenti accidisse
credibile est, in oculis habebo? non percussor ille subitus erumpet? non
expavescet circumventus? exclamabit vel rogabit vel fugiet? non ferientem,
non concidentem videbo? non animo sanguis et pallor et gemitus
extremus, denique expirantis hiatus insidet? (Loeb edn [Butler], II, 434).
22 Beth Innocenti, ‘Towards a Theory of Vivid Description as Practiced in
Cicero’s Verrine Orations’, Rhetorica, XII (1994) 355–81.
23 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition
from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
24 For example, Aphthonii Sophistae Progymnasmata, partim a Rodolpho Agricola
… Latinitate donata: Cum luculentis & utilibus in eadem Scholiis Reinhardi
Lorichii Hadamarii (London: Henry Middleton, 1572).
25 ‘Oratio bona, aut mala, quae alicui insunt, argumentans’ (Lorich, ed. cit.,
SigM4r).
26 See T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944), I, 412.
27 See J. Brinsley, op. cit., pp. 182–3.
28 This transmission is typified in the fifth book of George of Trebizond, whose
Rhetoricorum Libri Quinque brought the Byzantine rhetorical tradition to Italy
in the fifteenth century. In the Paris edition of 1538 the seven Ideas are listed
and explicated on pp. 496–7. The currency of one idea – deinotes, rendered by
Trebizond as gravitas – is traced by James Biester (see note 63, below).
29 Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: the Christian Grand Style in the English
Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
30 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Sir Tobie Matthew, introd. Roger
Hudleston, Fontana Books (London: Collins, 1957), p. 46.
31 Quoted in Hudleston’s Introduction to The Confessions (above), p. 28.
32 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995). Quotations from Green’s translation.
33 Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey, ed. R.V.G. Tasker,
2 vols (London: Dent, 1945).
34 See for example John O. Ward, ‘Rhetorical Theory and the Rise and Decline
of Dictamen in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, Rhetorica, XIX
(2001) 175–23.
35 See for example the allegorisation of Orpheus and Euridyce in the Ovide
Moralisé, 5 vols (Amsterdam: J. Muller, 1915–1938), X.220–557 (Vol. IV,
16–25). The first four lines read: ‘Par Orpheüs puis droitement / Noter
regnable entendement, / Et par Euridice sa fame / La sensualité de l’ame’.
190 Notes
36 See Antonia Gransden, ‘Realistic Observation in Twelfth-Century England’,

Speculum, XLVII (1972) 29–51.
37 See Richard Rambuss, ‘The secretary’s study: the secret designs of “The
Shepheardes Calender”’, ELH, LIX (1992) 313–35. Rambuss shows the
popularity and significance of Angel Day’s The English Secretary. The 1599
edition ends with a treatise ‘Of the partes, place and office of a Secretorie’.
Day sees the bond between employer and secretary as a true friendship
between unequals, since one confides his secrets, while the other thinks,
feels, speaks and writes like his employer.
38 The text known to Marlowe might have been Dialectica Ioannis Setoni, with
Peter Carter’s commentary (London: Thomas Marsh, 1574).
39 The text referred to in Peter Mack’s discussion (see below) is De Inventione
Dialectica, with Alardus’s commentary (Cologne, 1539), repr. Nieuwkoop,
1967, Frankfurt, 1967, abbrev. DID.
40 Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of
Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993). Mack (p. 233) sees Agricola’s
dialectical analysis of Cicero’s Pro Lege Manilia, as ‘the model for the
dialectical analyses published by Ramus, his opponent Piscator, and their
respective followers’.
41 The term ‘adjunct’, denoting a class of associations between things,
qualities or conditions, originates in Cicero’s Topica, and is one of the ten
topics recognised by Ramus (see below), that is, Cause, Effect, Subject,
Adjunct, Opposition, Comparison, Notation, Distribution, Definition,
and Testimony. For versions of this dialectic in English, see M.R.
MacIlmaine (trans.), The Logicke of the Most Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus
Martyr, 1574, facs. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1968), and John Milton,
A Fuller Institution of the Art of Logic, Arranged after the Method of Peter
Ramus, The Works of John Milton, XI (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1935).
42 Represented both in her inaugural lecture as Gresham Professor of Rhetoric
(2000), and in her paper for the ISHR Conference at Warsaw, ‘A rhetoric of
“The Friend” in early sixteenth century England’ (26 July 2001).
43 See Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996).
44 Erasmus, De Copia and De Ratione Studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson, Collected
Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978).
45 See David Wootton (ed. and trans.) Thomas More, Utopia. With Erasmus’s
‘The Sileni of Alcibiades (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999). The
Introduction traces the interaction and divergence of More and Erasmus.
46 See Plato, The Symposium, trans. and introd. W. Hamilton, Penguin Classics
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), pp. 100–11 (the speech of Alcibiades).
47 See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London:
Longman, 1977), p. 71 (‘gracious’ indicates that such charity is a sign of
God’s grace – not a cause of it).
48 Lawrence D. Green, ‘Melanchthon, Rhetoric, and the Soul’, in G. Frank and
K. Meerhoff (eds), Melanchthon und Europa, vol. 2, Teilbrand Westeuropa, in
Melanchthon-Schrifen der Stadt Bretten (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag,
2002), pp. 11–27. I am indebted to the author for sight of this paper prior to
publication.
49 See Ratio brevis sacrarum concionum tractandarum, in the Opera (Wittenberg:
Simon Gronenberg, 1601), Vol II: ‘Fides igitur est affectus, qui certo assenti-
Notes 191
tur promissionibus Dei, & comminationibus … Fidei iam causa est Spiritus
sanctus, qui primo mentes cognitione peccati, & iudicio Dei terret. Postea
affectum in nobis creat, ut credamus & quod vera sint quae promittit Deus,
& quod ad nos pertinet’ (p. 9).
50 Green’s reference is to Corpus Reformatorum 13, ed. C. Bretschneider (Halle:
C.A. Schwetschke, 1913), 74.
51 Adferendum ad haec est iam dicendi genus popularius ac copiosus, & que-
madmodum impulsa vela ventis, nauem sine negoicio ferunt, sic ad haec
commode proponenda tale orationis genus requiruntur, quo ceu vento
aliquo inspiratae res, sine negocio ullo in auditorum animos ferantnr (sic).
Ratio brevis, ed. cit., p. 11.
52 Peter Mack, ‘Ramus Reading; the Commentaries on Cicero’s Consular
Orations and Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, LXI (1998) 111–41.
53 Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affeckte: Englische Wirkungsasthetik im Zeitalter
der Renaissance. Studien zur Englischen Philologie, XVII (Tubingen: Max
Niemeyer, 1975). I am deeply grateful to my former colleague at
Nottingham, Professor Hinrich Siefken, for his translations, and to Lis Leslie
for further help.
54 See Peter Sharratt, ‘Ramus 2000’, Rhetorica, XVIII (2000), 409.
55 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster [1570], ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 79. The quoted anadiplosis echoes an earlier
one, untraceably ascribed to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: ‘Liberty kindleth love; love
refuseth no labour; and labor obteineth whatsoever it seeketh’ (p. 30).
56 See W.A. Rebhorn (ed. and trans.), Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), Introduction, p. 4.
57 John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. from Harleian MS. 4604 by
Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935). For
Aristotle as ‘the directest means of skill’, see p. 41.
58 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Old and
Middle English Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973).
59 See Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients 1638, facs. (Farnborough:
Gregg International Publishers, 1972), pp. 16–17. Junius refers his account of
the moving, delight, perception and discipline required for creativity – from
Fame, as figured by Clio, through all the Muses, to Calliope signifying per-
fected utterance – to Book I of Fulgentius’s Mythologiae (late 5th Century AD).
60 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetoricke, ed. Ethel Seaton (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1950). Fraunce looks at French and Spanish examples
alongside Sidney’s English.
61 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie 1589, ed. G.D. Willcock and
A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); facs. (Menston:
Scolar Press, 1968).
62 For example by Jeanne Fahnestock on schemes in seventeenth century
science, and Nancy L. Christian on figures as integral to thought.
63 See James Biester, ‘Admirable Wit: Deinotes and the Rise and Fall of Lyric
Wonder’, Rhetorica, XIV (1996) 289–31.
64 See Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Must a Good Orator be a Good Man? Ramus in
the Ciceronian Controversy’, in P.L. Oesterreich and T.O. Sloane (eds),
Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich
F. Plett (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), pp. 43–56.
192 Notes
65 See Tamara A. Goeglein, ‘“Wherein hath Ramus been so offensious?”: Poetic

Examples in the English Ramist Logic Manuals (1574–1672)’, Rhetorica, XIV
(1996) 73–101.
66 Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The
Art of Living in London, ed. V.B. Heltzel, Folger Shakespeare Library (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1962).
67 Richard Brathwait (or Brathwayte), A Survey of history or a nursey for
gentry, 1638. See especially his discussion of stage plays, of ‘feigned
relations or poeticall histories’, and ‘A ladies love-lecture’.
68 See note 54, above.
69 Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001).
70 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
71 Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century
(London: Junction Books, 1983).
72 See Christine M. Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe (eds), The Changing
Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary
Press, 1999), for essays by Victor Skretkowicz on Wroth (pp. 133–45), and
by Erin Herberg on Astell (pp. 147–57).
73 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edn, ed. D.D. Raphael and
A.L. MacFie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
74 Robert Cockcroft and Susan M. Cockcroft, Persuading People: an Intoduction
to Rhetoric (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), pp. 49–51.
75 See for example Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980),
pp. 103–24 (Ch. 5: ‘Deconstructing the Text’).
76 See C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber,
1977), p. 80 on the Puritan reaction to Charles I’s Book of Sports.
77 John Carey’s note to l. 230 (Longman edn, 1968, p. 188) refers the reader to
Starnes and Talbert’s citation of Stephanus, who identifies Echo as ‘Amicam
… Moderatoris omnium corporum coelestium’.
78 See for example George Herbert’s ‘Heaven’, the penultimate poem in the
Temple sequence.
79 The response of Comus recalls Plato’s Phaedrus, 250: ‘Now the man … who
has been corrupted does not quickly make the transition from beauty on
earth to absolute beauty; so when he sees its namesake here he … surren-
ders himself to sensuality’ (tr. W. Hamilton [Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973], p. 57). However, the signs of religious assurance in the Lady’s voice
and appearance perhaps betray Comus’s response as that of a reprobate –
See Calvin, Institutes, III.xxiv.2.
80 Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: an English Version, ed. Anne
M. O’Donnell, Early English Texts Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press:
1981).
3 Old Passions, New Purposes: Rhetoric Rhetoricised

1 See Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); and Richard Levin,
New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1979).
Notes 193
2 Ringler, W.A. and Flachmann, M. (eds) Beware the Cat [b]y William Baldwin:
The First English Novel (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 1988),
Introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv.
3 Compare Rachel Speght, refuting Joseph Swetnam’s assertion that women
resent criticism because they know it’s true – ‘Rub a galled horse and he will
kick’. In A Mouzell for Melastomus (1618), she retorts, ‘that though every
galled horse being touched doth kick, yet everyone that kicks is not galled’
(The Women’s Sharp Revenge, ed. S. Shepherd (London: The Fourth Estate,
1985), p. 62.
4 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
5 WilliamTyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. and introd. David
Damiell, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000).
6 For Alleyn’s career, physique (described as seven feet tall) and acting
abilities, see Alexander Leggatt, ‘The Companies and the Actors’, in
C. Leech and T.W. Craik (eds), The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume
III, 1576–1613 (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 102–3. See also the Dulwich
College portrait (Plate 6).
7 See David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder: the
Manuscript Evidence’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, IX (2000),
257–91; and his edition: Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
8 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. The Rev. Julius
Hutchinson; introd. Margaret Bottrall (London: Dent, 1908, repr. 1968).
9 See Kate Lilley’s edition (note 13 below), pp. 119–202.
10 David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs’, in David Wormersley (ed.),
The Blackwell Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000), pp. 182–7. I am very grateful to the author for a chance
to study a draft of this passage.
11 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1646–1688
(London: Virago Press, 1988).
12 Susan Cook, ‘The story I most particularly intend’: the narrative style of
Lucy Hutchinson, Critical Survey, V (1993), 271–7.
13 Kate Lilley (ed.), Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World & Other Writings
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
14 Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 40. In
The Guardian G2 for 5 April 2001, Greer linked Cavendish to a current
stereotype of female self-assertion: ‘Only an Essex girl would have referred
to her husband’s penis as “nature’s posset maker”. The other courtiers
advised Newcastle to shut her up in a dark room’. The quoted phrase,
parodying Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653) – or alluding to a
reported remark (?) – appears in ‘The Session of the Poets’, one manuscript
of which is in the Portland Miscellany (Ms Pw v 40) at the University of
Nottingham, under the title ‘A convention of the poets’, and which is
printed from Bod. Ms. Don b. 8 as the copy text, in G. de F. Lord (ed.),
Poems on Affairs of State, 1: 1660–1678 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1963).
15 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986),
pp. 1–3.
194 Notes
16 ‘Milton: Alcaics’, see C. Ricks (ed.) The Poems of Tennyson, Longmans

Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 1154–5.
17 See T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1953), pp. 123–48, and F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and
Development in English Poetry, Peregrine Books (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1964), pp. 42–61.
18 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973).
19 See Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to
the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
20 See Cockcroft and Cockcroft, Persuading People, pp. 10–11, for a summary,
and pp. 48–9 for an application in analysis.
21 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
22 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 17–27 Sept, 1819. See John Keats, The
Letters, ed. M.B. Forman, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952),
p. 425.
23 Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Rereading Literature
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
24 With a distant echo of Bunthorne’s song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience
(‘If he’s content with a vegetable love, which would certainly not suit me
…’).
25 ‘What the Romantics called creative Imagination is akin, not to sublimation
and metaphor, but to repression and hyperbole, which represent rather
than limit’ (Map, p. 99). In the sequence of Bloom’s Revisionary Ratios, ‘we
move into the tricky limitations of askesis – the perspectivising confusions
of metaphor, at once the most-praised and the most-failing of Western
tropes’ (ibid., p. 100).
4 Going to Extremes
1 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. and introd. Roger Sharrock
2 Sharrock notes (p. 377) that the Bath Sanctification (p. 255) ‘symbolizes adult
baptism by immersion. Though Bunyan’s Church practised this, their
principle of open communion prevented them from making it a … condi-
tion of church membership’.
3 See William Haller’s chapter ‘The Calling of the Saints’, in his The Rise of
Puritanism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), pp. 83–127.
4 See for example the headnote in Orgel and Goldberg’s edition, pp. 852–3,
citing the account by Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips of being shown
some lines of Satan’s soliloquy in Book 4 (i.e. 32–41) years before the poem
was begun, when the speech was the beginning of a tragedy.
5 Both speeches are included in Brian MacArthur (ed.), The Penguin Book of
Historic Speeches (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), pp. 40–4.
6 Mortimer senior then uses an Aristotelean induction (see Rhetoric, I.ii.13,
19), listing those royal (and philosophical) ‘minions’ who did not vitiate
greatness (I.iv.392–400).
7 Compare the barons’ outrage at I.iv.8–34 when Gaveston usurps the
Queen’s Chair Royal, next to the King’s.
Notes 195
8 See I. Donaldson (ed.), Ben Jonson: a Critical Edition of the Major Works, The
Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 236–7.
9 See A.C. Hamilton’s edition (cited previously), p. 421.
10 See John Carey (ed.), John Donne, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 118–19.
11 Arthur Marotti, John Donne Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1986).
12 George Parfitt, John Donne: a Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1989).
13 Hugh Latimer, The Sermons, ed. and introd. Arthur Pollard. Fyfield Books
(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000).
14 Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir
Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). For the text of A Letter
Written by Sir Philip Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, touching her Marriage with
Monsieur (1579), with its editorial introduction and ‘argument’, see pp. 33–57.
15 See E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political
Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
16 Compare Doctor Faustus, I.iii.46: ‘That was the cause, but yet per accidens’.
As conjuration was incidental to the blasphemy calling up Mephostophilis,
so the particular identity of any suitable royal consort is incidental to his
begetting of children.
17 Simon Shepherd (ed. and introd.), The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s
Pamphlets from the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), pp. 30–1.
18 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J. Richards
(New York: Persea Books, 1982), pp. 23–4.
5 Adjusting the Mirrors

1 The alternating emotional appeals to greed and jealous rivalry work both
within longer speeches (e.g. ll. 48–76) and single lines (for example, the
inflammatory asides – 81, 86).
2 Preface to Perimedes, 1588. See A.B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works of
Robert Greene (1881–6), VII, 7–8.
3 See the investigations into Marlowe’s notorious freethinking, and its conse-
quences, typified by P.H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: a Study of his Thought,
Learning and Character (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1946), and Muriel Bradbrook’s The School of Night (Cambridge: Cambridge
4 For example, Archimago’s progression from pious-seeming talk to black
magic in FQ, I.i. 35–6 (ed. cit., p. 39).
5 See J. Scattergood (ed.), John Skelton: the Complete English Poems
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 82.
6 In Aristotelean terms (see Garver, pp. 33–40), it is a superb example of
successful energia without effective kinesis.
7 Tamburlaine seems, here, to resemble the ordered, upright philosophic man
of Plato’s Timaeus 48.90: ‘We should think of the most authoritative part of
our soul as a guardian spirit (daemon) given by god, living in the summit of
the body, which can properly be said to lift us from the earth towards our
home in heaven’.
196 Notes
8 In my chosen text (Bowers), this line reads ‘Are these resolved noble
Scythians?’ Most editors amend the line to an exclamation, as here.
9 Compare Guise’s extraordinary use of thirst as a foundation: ‘my quenchles
thirst whereon I builde’ (The Massacre at Paris, ii.107).
10 See Lanham, Handlist, pp. 104, 118. Lanham prefers the term Occultatio.
11 Compare the Mephostophilian antistrophe noted in Chapter 1, and
Lincoln’s ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.
12 I am indebted for this insight, expressed in correspondence (28/04/01).
13 Richard Nate, ‘“Plain and Vulgarly Express’d”: Margaret Cavendish and the
Discourse of the New Science’, Rhetorica, XIX (2001), 403–17.
14 See Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: the Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess
of Newcastle (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), pp. 169, 173–4.
15 Towards the end of her life of the Duke, she alludes to his amorousness as a
matter for public knowledge and (almost) for praise. See The Life of William
Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, to which is added the True Relation of my Birth,
Breeding and Life, ed. C.H. Firth, 2nd edn (London: George Routledge and
Sons, [1906]), p. 111.
16 See Muir’s comment in the Arden Shakespeare, 8th edn (London: Methuen,
1953), pp. 159–60.
17 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and introd. H. Jackson,
3 vols. Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1932 repr. 1964).
18 Numbered as in modern editions (Burton’s note reads ‘Ovid. Ep. 21.’). For a
modern translation see Ovid, Heroides, tr. and introd. H. Isbell, Penguin
Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 133–41. The passage about
the Leucadian Rock begins at p. 139. Sappho doubts that she will survive
the leap but swears to renounce poetry (summarised by the shell of her lyre)
if she does.
19 See Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: a Drama of Science, Faith and Love
(London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 31. Milton echoes Galileo’s words: ‘[I]t
(the moon) is like the face of the Earth itself, which is marked here and
there with chains of mountains and depths of valleys’.
20 See Introduction (p. 29, above), and compare the convergent (or echoic)
structure as Eve encounters her reflected image (IV.460–5).
21 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley, CA:
22 See Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (eds), Collected Poems of Sir Thomas
Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), p. 27.
23 See for example the complete text in P. Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of
Elizabethan Prose Fiction, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987). This is the original text as published in Gascoigne’s A Hundreth
Sundrie Flowres, 1573 and generally accessible in facsimile (Aldershot: Scolar
Press, 1970).
24 Or as Marlowe translates it in his accomplished version, ‘Judge you the rest’
(l. 25). See Millar Maclure (ed.) The Poems: Christopher Marlowe, Revels Plays
(London: Methuen, 1968), p. 116.
25 Note that the word ‘court’ is used in F.J. (Salzman, p. 66) to mean an
informal gathering of gentry belonging to the household, without
indication that the word is used in a quasi-legal sense (as it might be if
some question of love was being debated). This implies that ‘court’ culture
was replicated in provincial surroundings.
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Index
Abelson, R., 13, 14, 186 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of

affect/affectiveness/affectivity, 2, 4, 8, Newcastle, 5, 36, 93, 99–103
19, 33, 51, 75, 77, 104, 109, 114, passim, 162–7, 196
121, 167, 172 Chappell, William, 72, 75
Agricola, Rudolph, 54, 58–60, 190 Christian, Nancy L., 191
Alleyn, Edward, 93, 153, 193 Cicero, 6–7, 8, 32, 47–51, 59, 187
Anger, Jane, 136–8, 195 De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 32
Aphthonius, 52, 189 De Oratore, 48–9
Aristotle, 13, 67, 195 Orator, 32, 49–51
Rhetoric, 3, 6, 8, 10, 33, 34, 39, Cockcroft, Robert, 192, 194
43–7, 59, 68, 186 Cockcroft, Susan Mary, 29, 187, 192,
arrangement (dispositio), 18, 50 194
conclusion (peroratio), 18, (Belsey) cognitive engagement, see schema
115 theory
introduction (Eagleton), 103 Colish, Marcia A., 188
proposition and division, 135 commonplaces (loci communes), 8,
refutation, 18, 134 48–9, 50, 65, 94, 95, 145, 178–9
ars dictaminis, 57–8 convergence and echo, 28–9, 176, 179
Ascham, Roger, 67, 191 Cook, Susan, 97–9, 193
Astell, Mary, 73 Coppe, Abiezer, 73
Augustine of Hippo, St, 53, 55–7, 67, Craik, T.W., 193
79, 138, 189
Damasio, Antonio, 8–9, 67, 186
Bakhtin, M., 144 Dante, Paradiso, 154
Baldwin, T.W., 189 Day, Angel, 190
Baldwin, William, 5, 62, 85–9, 144–9, decorum, see under fitness
193 deixis, 28, 85, 175
Belsey, Kate, 5, 113–16, 192, 194 empathetic, 28, 137
Biester, James, 191 social, 28, 57, 109, 123, 130, 146
Black, M. (on metaphor), 18, 186 spatial, 11, 28, 57, 123, 171, 175
Bloom, Harold, 5, 110–13, 141, temporal, 28, 123
194 textual, 28
Bradbrook, Muriel C., 195 dialectic, 35, 49, 58, 65–6
Brathwait, Richard, 70, 192 dilemma, see syllogism
Brinsley, John, 54, 188, 189 Donne, John, 36, 129–30, 195
Bunyan, John, 36, 118–25, 194 ‘The Apparition’, 129–31
Burton, Robert, 172, 196 ‘The Flea’, 129
Downes, William, 8–10, 186
Cable, Lana, 19, 187 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 195
Calvin, John, 192
Carey, John, 192, 195 Eagleton, Terry, 5, 32, 37, 76, 85,
Carter, Ronald A., 28, 187 103–6, 168, 193
204
Index 205
elenchos (reproof), 134 Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 81, 192

Eliot, T.S., 110, 168, 186, 194 ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’, 60–3, 121,
‘Gerontion’, 2–3, 34 190
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 126, ‘Sweet is war’, 60, 61
194 see also Sileni (after Erasmus)
‘emotional laser’, the, 63, 74–5, 76, Eskin, Catherine R., 44, 45–6, 188
98, 109, 111, 115, 126, 133, ethos, 8, 11, 22, 29, 33, 43–4, 47, 50,
141–3, 147, 155, 159, 160–2, 185 52, 75, 77, 92, 104, 106–8, 128,
emotions 136, 164
admiration, or wonder (linked with and comedy, 52
deinotes), 68, 69–70, 92, 101, and the speaker’s character, 52, 53
113, 147, 152, 159, 163–4, 176 stance, 104, 120, 122, 134, 138
anger, or indignation, 6, 9, 30, 45, ethopoeia, 52, 55
74, 76, 78, 98, 133, 137, 147, evaluation, 8–10
156 exclusion models, 23–4, 85, 103, 110,
boredom, 125, 166 128, 132, 136
contempt, 137
despair, 172–3 Fahnstock, Jeanne, 191
disgust, 146 fancy, 162, 164
emulation, 34 Felperin, Howard, 84–5
faith (as emotion), 64, 79 figures of rhetoric (in texts and
fear (or horror), 29, 56, 64, 72, 78, citation)
79, 92, 107, 109, 169, 171, 173 allegory (as extended metaphor),
hatred, 71, 118, 122, 124–31 119–25
passim, 136 anadiplosis, 67, 87
hope, 71, 72, 81 anaphora (initial repetition), 89
jealousy, 8–9, 130, 164, 180 antiphrasis, 183
joy, 56, 57 antistrophe (terminal repetition),
love/desire (all kinds), 6, 56, 67, 71, 126, 133, 160
74, 78, 91, 93, 97, 101, 122–31 antithesis, 115, 116, 147, 160
passim, 153, 159, 178, 180 antonomasia, 175
mildness, 45 apostrophe, 133
pity or solicitude, 130, 164, 169, 177 chiasmus, 114
reassurance, 29 comma (short clause), 133
shame (or embarrassment), 76, 89, ecphrasis, 54, 57, 61, 70
107, 109–10, 131–4, 156, 178 effictio or blazon, 91, 100, 152, 166
sorrow (or woe), 56, 113 epizeuxis, 133
zeal, 19–20 expolitio, 115
enargeia (clarity or vividness), 53, 59, hyperbole, 153
61, 70–1, 76, 85, 91, 100, 108, irony (trope), 75, 136
122, 124, 138, 170 isocolon, 124, 133
energeia (actuality or efficacy), 44, 47, litotes, 108
53, 85, 123, 195 meiosis, 148
enthymeme, 30, 44, 49, 160, 188 metalepsis, 80, 111, 174
epistolary rhetoric, 57–8, 106–9, metaphor, 64, 93, 110, 113, 116,
134–6 119, 154, 155, 171
Erasmus, Desiderius, 38, 57, 58, 60–3, metonymy, 6, 79, 102, 153, 155,
106–9, 156, 190 164, 169
206 Index
figures of rhetoric (in texts and satisfaction, 128, 130, 133, 153,
citation) – continued 155, 182
occultatio (or praeteritio), 133, 135, Goeglein, Tamara A., 192
158 Gransden, Antonia, 190
periphrasis, 154 Green, Lawrence D., 39, 64, 67, 188,
personification (or prosopopoeia), 113, 190, 191
152 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5, 32, 89–93,
ploche, 102 143–4, 149–50, 151, 193
polyptoton, 160 Greene, Robert, 143, 195
polysyndeton, 168–9 Greenfield, Susan, 8
prozeugma, 102, 124 Greer, Germaine, 5, 101–3, 165, 167,
synathroesmus (or congeries), 87, 193
102, 133, 164–5
synecdoche, 64 Haller, William, 194
topographia or topothesia, 106, 109, Halliday, M.A.K., 33, 187
170–1 Henderson, Judith R., 191
traductio (word-class variation), 95, Harvey, Gabriel, 35, 187
147, 154 Herbert, George, 3, 192
Firbas, Jan, 25–7, 187 Hermogenes of Tarsus, 55, 188
Fish, Stanley E., 176–7, 196 Hill, Christopher, 78, 192
fitness (decorum, kairos, timeliness), Hobby, Elaine, 96–7, 193
41, 45–7, 48, 49, 50, 59, 67 Horace, Ars Poetica, 67, 162
Flachmann, M., 85–9, 193 Hoskins, John, 67, 69, 191
footing in discourse, 21–2, 120 Hunter, Lynette, 60, 62, 190
Fraunce, Abraham, 69, 191 Hutchinson, Lucy, 5, 93–9, 126,
friendship, rhetoric of, 60–3, 107 158–62, 193
Functional sentence perspective (FSP Hyperius, Andreas Gerardus, 71–2,
[Firbas]), 25–8, 85, 160, 176 133
Combined Scales, 26–7, 160,
175–7 inadvertence models, 24–5
Existential Scales, 25–6, 104–5, 111, inclusion models, 22–3, 24, 85,
123, 124 108–10, 128, 136, 169
Quality Scales, 26, 91, 95, 100–1, induction (argumentative mode),
109, 123, 124, 153, 160, 161, 194
171, 178 Innocenti, Beth, 53, 189
interpersonal function of language,
Garver, Eugene, 30, 33, 44, 187, 195 33, 187
Gascoigne, George, 34, 179–84, 196 intuition, 8–10
goals (schemata: personal, physical invention or heurisis (compositional
and social), 14–15, 17, 133, 136 process)
achievement, 14, 42, 63, 95, 103, and dialectic (Cicero and Ramus),
130, 151, 153, 154, 155, 182 49–50, 66
crisis, 14, 15, 121, 130 and pathos (Agricola), 58–9
delta goals, 14 see also models of argument
enjoyment, 42, 63, 103, 121, 128, issue (stasis), 46, 47, 50
130, 155, 181, 182
instrumental goals, 14, 87, 128 Jakobson, Roman, 110, 194
preservation, 15, 19, 121, 153, 173, James I of England, VI of Scotland,
182 King, 126
Index 207
Jardine, Lisa, 5, 28, 60, 106–10, The Jew of Malta, 142–3, 195 (n. 1)
172–3, 190 The Massacre at Paris, 70, 196
Jones, Kathleen, 196 Marotti, Arthur, 129, 195
Jones, Peter, 187 Melanchthon, Philipp, 57, 58, 63–5,
Jonson, Ben, 127–8, 195 126, 190, 191
Junius, Franciscus (François du Jon), metaphor, theories of, 19
70–1, 191 cognitive functioning of, 19–20,
42–3, 77
Kairo, see fitness undoing a metaphor, 133, 166
Kantorowicz, E.H., 195 see also figures of rhetoric
Keats, John, 112, 113, 194 Milton, John, 5, 7, 72, 77–8, 141, 186,
Kennedy, George A., 46, 51, 53–4, 189 194
Kinneavy, James L., 44, 45–6, 188 A Masque (Comus), 38, 77–81 passim
Kocher, Paul H., 195 Areopagitica, 23
Paradise Lost, I, 71, 111–13, 173–7;
Lanham, Richard, 18, 186, 196 IV, 7, 125–6, 158, 196; VIII,
Lares, Jameela, 71–3, 77, 80–1, 119, 76, 114–16, 177–9; IX, 7; XI,
133, 192 53
Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, Samson Agonistes, 13–20, 22–24,
131–4, 144, 148, 195 27–30 passim
Lawson-Tancred, H.C., 186, 188 Minturno, Antonio, 68
Leavis, F.R., 110, 194 models of argument (topoi, loci,
Lee, H.P.D., 188 places), 47, 190
Leech, Clifford, 193 cause and effect, 59, 80, 115, 137,
Leggatt, Alexander, 193 176, 178
letteraturizatione, 54 comparison, 145, 148
Levin, Richard, 84 opposition (contraries,
Levinson, Stephen C., 21, 128, 186, contradictories, etc.), 133
187 subjects and adjuncts, 59, 80, 81,
Lewis, C.S., 47, 188 102, 136, 138, 155, 164
Lilley, Kate, 99–101, 167, 193 More, Sir Thomas, 89, 190
Lloyd, G.E.R., 186 Muir, Kenneth, 169, 196
Lodge, David, 7–8, 186 Murphy, James, 51, 57, 189
logos, 8, 10, 29, 44, 45–7, 66, 87–8,
108, 114, 136, 143, 145, 148, Nash, Walter, 188
156–7, 167 Nate, Richard, 162, 167, 196
Lorich, Reinhard, 54, 55 ‘new rhetoric’, 5, 10–29, 34–7
Luther, Martin, 62 Norbrook, David, 5, 94–6, 97, 193,
196
Mack, Peter, 58–9, 66, 190, 191
Maclure, Millar, 188 Oesterreich, P.L., 191
Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 5, officia oratoris (Cicero), 8–10, 30, 32,
58, 70, 89–93 passim, 143–4, 187, 46, 49, 54, 55, 67, 71, 74, 77, 89,
196 101, 118, 124, 125
Doctor Faustus, 155, 157, 195 Ortony, A., 186
Edward II, 65, 126–7 Ovid, 57
Tamburlaine (both Parts), 24, 25, Amores, 181, 196
28–9, 54, 59, 62–3, 89–93, Heroides, 172–3, 196
149–57, 160, 168, 195 Ovid Moralisé, 189
208 Index
Parfitt, George A.E., 129, 195 reversal of bias, 63, 75–6, 91, 115
pathos (emotion), 3, 5, 6, 11, 29, 36, Rhetorica ad Herennium, 47–8, 188
38–82 passim, 75, 77, 78, 83–4, rhetoric as an ‘art’ (scope, method,
87, 88, 93, 100, 104, 111, 128, conceptual basis), 2, 6, 32, 35, 38,
135–6 65, 67
antipathy, 3, 9, 42, 57, 141, 158 rhetorical genera (secular and sacred),
and convergence, 28–9 71
and deixis, 11 consolation (sermon type), 71, 77,
empathy, 3, 7, 20, 31, 42, 57, 63, 80, 81, 119–20
81, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95–6, 97–8, deliberative or political, 44, 54
101, 102, 106, 114, 115, 122–4, demonstrative or epideictic, 44, 54,
130, 135, 136, 153, 154, 158, 55
172, 173, 177, 181 doctrine and reproof (sermon
and ‘felt experience’, 9 types), 71
generation of, 48, 52–3, 58–9, 64–5, instruction and correction (sermon
164, 111, 173 types), 71, 134
as perturbation or ‘distemper’, 7, 38, judicial or forensic, 44, 54, 55
39, 48, 56, 74 rhetorical process (steps in
primary or ‘raw’ emotion, 10, composition), see invention,
106–9 arrangement, style
secondary emotions, 10 Richards, I.A. (interaction view of
and spirituality, 38, 43, 179 metaphor), 19, 186
sympathy, 3, 9, 42, 73, 95, 115, Ricoeur, Paul, 19, 187
127, 130, 141, 171 Ringler, W.A., 85–9 passim, 193
and tragedy, 52 Rist, J.M. 188
and will, 7, 55, 56, 64, 74, 138, 153 roles in discourse, 20–5, 120, 128
see also emotions Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, 44, 188
Paul the apostle, St, 55–6, 61, 71, 122, RPER (range of predictable emotional
134, 161 response), 76, 85, 118, 123, 130,
Peacham, Henry, jnr., 70, 71, 188, 142, 182
192
Perelman, C. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 68
L., 10, 186 scenes (schemata), 15–17
phantasiai or visiones underlying personal scenes, 16, 120, 127, 130,
pathos, 52, 70–1, 79, 111 172, 182
Pizan, Christine de, 137, 195 physical scenes, 16, 17–18, 20, 115,
Plato, 6, 38, 188, 195 120–1, 130, 146, 172, 173, 182
Phaedrus, 40–3, 48, 57, 188, 192 social scenes, 16, 115, 120, 127, 130,
Symposium, 60–1, 190 136, 138, 166, 181, 182, 184
Plett, Heinrich, 66–70 passim, 191 stages of persuasion as social scenes,
Puttenham, George, 69, 191 17–18
Schank, R.C., 14, 15, 186
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6–7, schema theory and classes of
51–3, 68, 70, 75, 79–80 , 89 schemata, 12–20, 85, 141, 169
meta-MOPs, 17, 18
Rambuss, R., 190 MOPs, 17, 18, 42, 103
Ramus, Peter (Pierre de la Ramée), 35, plans, 14, 15, 128
58, 65–71 passim TOPs and metaphor, 18, 120, 154,
Rebhorn, W.A., 67, 191 166
Index 209
see also goals, scripts, scenes and middle (or urbane) style, 46, 49,
themes 50–1, 56
scripts (schemata: ‘cultural’ combines plain (or low) style, 46, 49, 56
personal and social), 16–17, 130 schemes (i.e. ‘figures’ of words or
personal, 87, 113, 116, 121, 172, thought, as distinguished from
181, 182 tropes), 46, 50, 65, 69
physical, 103, 130, 164, 172, 173 trope, 46, 110
social, 87, 103, 116, 121, 138, 146, see also figures of rhetoric
164, 182 Sutcliffe, Rebecca, 192
secretarial role, the, 58 Sutherland, Christine M., 192
Semino, Elena, 13–19, 186 Swift, Jonathan, 75
Seton, John, 58, 38 syllogism, 59, 70, 88, 95, 103
Shakespeare, William, 5, 63, 89, 186 dilemma, 135
Coriolanus, 14–15, 91 per accidens fallacy, 136
Hamlet, 3, 23–4
Henry V, 143 Tayler, Edward W., 187
King Lear, 11, 28, 106–10, 170–3 Taylor, A.E., 188
Macbeth, 3, 103–6, 167–70 Tennyson, Alfred, 110, 194
Sharratt, Peter, 187–8, 191 themes (schemata), 15
Shepherd, Simon, 136, 193, 195 life themes, 15, 63, 128, 136, 160
Shuger, Debora, 55–7, 64, 189 role themes, 63, 128, 130, 164
Sidney, Sir Philip, 63, 66, 67, 131, 195 thymos (spiritedness), 42, 44
‘A letter … to Queen Elizabeth’, Trebizond, George of, 189
134–6 Tyndale, William, 89, 90, 144, 193
Apology for Poetry, 68, 191
Sileni (after Erasmus), 80, 102, 114, Van Dorsten, Jan, 195
121, 131, 155, 170 Vickers, Brian, 37, 84–5, 104, 192
Skelton, John, 148, 195 Virgil, Aeneid IV, 59, 63
Sloane, T.O., 191
Smith, Adam, 73, 111, 192 Waller, Gary, 5, 30–4, 179–80, 181,
Smith, Nigel, 73, 192 183–4, 187
Sobel, Dava, 196 Ward, John O., 189
Speght, Rachel, 193 Whythorne, Thomas, 180
Spenser, Edmund, 62, 126, 128–9, will, see pathos
148, 190, 195 Wilson, Thomas
spontaneity, 2, 10, 12, 115 Wootton, David, 60–3, 154–5, 156,
style (or elocutio), in rhetoric and its 190
function, 41, 46, 47, 48, 50, 56 Wroth, Lady Mary, 73
high (or grand) style, 46, 49, 51, 56, Wyatt, Sir Thomas (‘They flee from
57 me’), 30–4, 179–84, 196
‘ideas’ of style (Hermogenes,
Trebizond), 55 Zeno, 50

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Rhetorical Affect in

Early Modern Writing

PERSUADING PEOPLE: An Introduction to Rhetoric (with Susan M. Cockcroft)

This is the outcome of a long-standing wish to bring several things

Lastly I must thank two scholars whose humanity, wisdom and

1.1 From perception to persuasion

and probability of our own contentions, and helping us to anticipate

1.2 Renaissance passions reconsidered

The second phrase in my title has a multiple reference. Primarily, it

echoes. There, the ‘supple confusions’ inﬂicted on ‘passion’ implicate

long? To convince ourselves of the objective truth of our position

following chapters, within a wider context of pathos, and to illustrate

1.3 Emotion, now – and then

We have already glanced at the problem of putting spontaneous

Thinks … (2001)3 and Professor Susan Greenﬁeld’s series on brain

symptoms of an emotion (tightening chest, clenching ﬁsts), identify it

For Damasio, three aspects are involved in a secondary emotion: a

In such contexts as conversation, storytelling, and rhetorical

his three categories of felt experience: identifying the emotion being

1.4 Introducing the new rhetoric

action should now be susceptible to far more detailed demonstration

monologue – of that heightening of language which tends to occur

1.4.1 Schema theory: memory structures and their persuasive

response to fresh experience. This principle is of course best

Brethren farewell, your company along

Samson Agonistes, 1413–26

To show how schema theory explains the process of cognition in our

Plans (which persuaders will inevitably seek to transform or

is the multifarious non-spiritual goals pursued in the Temple – martial

reporter at the scene of an event, and then perhaps to a round-

knowledge by establishing new connections and attributing new

his pampered lifestyle – and its associated script. This is manifest in a

1.4.2 Counting out and counting in: roles in discourse and

immediate audience or readership, to whom the persuasion will be

identiﬁes and, secondly, to be alert to all cases in which those are

expressive of a reactionary or outmoded ideology). The persuader

[F]irst, the inventors of it [i.e. the practice of ‘licensing books’] to be

Milton extends his reactive Inclusion in two directions. He is going to

shortcomings have led the ‘mad’ Hamlet to include himself in a further

early modern texts. In conventional rhetoric, it is proactively

1.4.3 The dynamics of pathos: functional sentence perspective

of dynamism, a setting, a verb denoting appearance or existence, and a

The verb ascribes a characteristic to a notion that has already been

This may be followed by a further speciﬁcation [Fsp], often the ‘sting in

1.4.4 Deixis: pathos and presence

1.4.5 Pathos and convergence: echoes of spontaneity

from Part One of Tamburlaine, already cited), or even in the monologic

1.5 Empowering the reader?

Let us examine an instance of the kind of critical rhetoric that aims to

In creating our ‘readings’ of the poem as a kind of amusing public

As the teacher, Waller both includes himself in the ‘we’ which is

transient pleasure and retaliatory power. He claims a degree of sympa-

imparted to the audience. It might be ‘a free gift’ to the audience,

alternative to that permitted by the Court, either on the erotic or the

1.6 A ‘double analysis’ – with a difference

Returning to an even earlier question, is our emotional response

And because copiousness of matter, as the soul the body, sustains

This must have complicated his brief as University Praelector of

the diversity and development of sixteenth and seventeenth century

surrounding the ﬁrst-order set of relationships like points of the

2.1. A pathetic muddle?

application of the double analysis recommended here – to explain,

These inconsistencies should not be overlooked as we seek to

2.2 Ideas of pathos from Plato to Milton