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Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, & Katrin Ettenhuber (eds.):
Renaissance Figures of Speech
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007
306 pages (bibliography; index)
ISBN: 978-0-521-86640-8
Price: $99; £57
Renaissance Figures of Speech explores the relationship between rhetoric and literature in the
English Renaissance, especially during the Tudor period, by presenting case studies of, as far as this
reviewer can tell, quite arbitrarily selected rhetorical devices. The explicit and ambitious aim of the
book is to provide “a new method for approaching the figures of speech” (p. 14), a method, which is
then carried out by exploring the wider cultural significance of rhetoric and rhetorical reading
practices during the period in question. The book originated in two series of lectures arranged by
Sylvia Adamson and the late Jeremy Maule at Cambridge University in 1995 and 1996. The con-
tributors also exchanged their ideas at a symposium ten years later, in 2005; these earlier collab-
orations add to the book’s overall cohesion. The book consists of thirteen “chapters” by thirteen
scholars, and is well organized, though there could have been more cross-references between the
various contributions.
The chapters focus on the following rhetorical devices:
synonymia,
compar or
parison,
periodos,
puns,
prosopopoeia,
ekphrasis,
hysteron proteron,
paradiastole,
syncrisis, testimony,
hyperbole,
metalepsis, and ‘vices’ of style. Some of these are figures of speech, but others, like
periodos and
testimony, are definitely not. Furthermore, in rhetorical theory
prosopopoeia is often classified as a
figure of thought, and
hyperbole and
metalepsis as tropes. Thus, the title of the book is somewhat
imprecise. However, as stated in the “Introduction” (“Introduction: the figures in Renaissance
theory and practice”, pp. 1-14), the division between tropes and figures, on the one hand, and the
classification of figures as the figures of speech and the figures of thought, on the other, vary
considerably in rhetorical handbooks. The editors also suggest some causes for this “taxonomic
confusion”, such as “a recurrently felt need to discriminate between figurative operations that
represent thought and those that actively
provoke it” (p. 8). This statement refers to one of the illu-
minating ideas of the book, namely that rhetoric not only represents but also inspires thoughts,
because writers provoke thoughts both with
res and with the figurative use of
verba.
The book has been prepared with care, and the imprecise title of the book can be forgiven
because each writer successfully and firmly places her or his rhetorical device in the context of
English Renaissance rhetorical terminology and often in the wider context of the history of rhetoric.
Each article is introduced by a definition quoted from an early modern English rhetorical manual
along with an example of the use of the figure in English Renaissance literature. The contributors
most commonly refer to Shakespeare’s plays, which appeal, of course, to a wide audience.
The “Introduction” presents the contributions in five groups, the first of which contains four
chapters on four figures –
synonymia,
compar,
periodos, and puns – that “pose particular challenges
for modern reading practices” (p. 12). Thus, in “Synonymia: or, in other words” (pp. 17-35), Sylvia
Adamson notes that modern readers often share the Coleridgean ideal of finding the exact ex-
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pression for any given thought, and therefore feel impatient with the Renaissance idea of
synonymia
with its emphasis on lists of variant expressions. Adamson first discusses
synonymia as a peda-
gogical practice exemplified by Erasmus’s influential
De copia (1512), and then provides examples
of
synonymia in different literary genres (oratory, drama, essays), arguing that the excessive use of
synonyms sometimes highlighted the most important parts of the text – a circumstance that
resonates well with what is known of the Renaissance culture of public display: as Adamson points
out, the most essential subject matter was adorned with synonyms just as the noble classes showed
off fine garments.
The following two chapters deal with the syntactical aspect of rhetoric, the structuring of sen-
tences. In “Compar or parison: measure for measure” (pp. 38-58), Russ McDonald shows how the
figure of parallel syntax (
isokolon in Greek) reflected the taste for syntactical equivalence and sym-
metry, characteristic of Tudor literature as well as of the architecture of that period: there had to be
correspondence not only between the parts of a sentence but also between the parts of a building.
Thus, an analogy was seen between sentence composition and architecture. McDonald also provides
examples of architectural metaphors from the early modern manuals and from Roman rhetoric.
However, he does not mention that these kinds of metaphors are also described in classical Greek
rhetoric (e.g., in Dionysius of Halicarnassus).
Janel Mueller’s contribution (“Periodos: squaring the circle”, pp. 60-77) is interesting because,
in modern scholarship,
periodos is usually discussed in philological rather than in rhetorical con-
texts. Mueller presents Juan Louis Vives’s treatment of
periodos, which combines, according to
Mueller, Quintilian’s theory and Cicero’s practice. Giving some examples of periodic style from
early modern English historiography and John Donne, and analyzing these long and well-rounded
sentences and their balanced antitheses, Mueller argues that periodicity was used in sixteenth-
century English historiography, for instance, to reveal the internal disorder of a person. Most strik-
ingly, periodic sentences combined with simple sentence units could even have had aphoristic ef-
fects, as she shows with examples from a sermon by Donne.
The contribution by Sophie Read (“Puns: serious wordplay”, pp. 80-94) is a search for classical
theoretical counterparts to a literary device that ancient grammarians and rhetoricians did not re-
cognize as such. Puns were common figurative tools in Tudor literature and were often mentioned
in contemporary manuals. Read suggests that such classical figures as
syllepsis (a word or sound
having two meanings, e.g., for ironic effect),
antanaclasis (a word repeated in a different sense),
and
paronomasia (the similarity of sound between two words) may be interpreted as punning de-
vices. According to Read, the wider context for Renaissance puns is the idea of language as some-
thing magical or sacramental; it was thought that, by wordplay, one was able to reveal hidden and
even sacred connotations of a word. These hidden meanings often related to the etymology of the
word; however, Read does not refer to the Renaissance idea of Pre-Adamite language(s) before
Babel, which established etymology as an esteemed field of study.
The rhetorical figures of
prosopopoeia and
ekphrasis appeal especially to the imagination and
have been in vogue in recent studies in the history of rhetoric.1 Gavin Alexander’s contribution on
“Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure” (pp. 96-112) offers many examples of this entertaining device,
also in combination with the related figure
apostrophe, i.e., the direct address of, especially, in-
1 Cf., e.g., Bettine Menke,
Prosopopoiia. Stimme und Text bei Brentano, Hoffmann, Kleist und Kafka
(München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000); Ruth Webb “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a
Genre”,
Word and Image 15 (1999), pp. 7-18; and ead.,
Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient
Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
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animate things. Alexander presents
prosopopoeia in the context of Renaissance ideas of charac-
terization and also refers to the ancient notion of identity as a mask (
persona).
In her contribution on “Ekphrasis: painting in words” (pp. 114-129), Claire Preston briefly intro-
duces some Neoplatonic ideas about the force of language. Although Neoplatonism certainly in-
fluenced English Renaissance literary theory, this issue is not brought up elsewhere in the book. (In
passing: Greek rhetoric is sometimes treated in a casual manner in this book; for example, no one
notes the problematic identity of Demetrius, the writer of
On Style.) It is well known that
ekphrasis
was most often used in the descriptions of objects (especially of paintings). Preston defines it as an
interruptive and suspending device, which attempts “to make the temporal do the work of the spa-
tial” (p. 119). She analyzes particularly the
ekphraseis in the third book of
The Faerie Queene and
shows how
ekphrasis challenges the readers – along with Spencer’s characters – to be art critics and
interpret the bas-reliefs and tapestries in the house of the enchanter Busirane.
Patricia Parker’s “Hysteron proteron: or the preposterous” (pp. 132-145), and Quentin Skinner’s
“Paradiastole: redescribing the vices as virtues” (pp. 148-163) succeed in linking these lesser-
known figures to the wider cultural, and particularly morally-oriented, context. The figure of
hys-
teron proteron also denoted logical fallacy (effect coming before cause), but in English usage it be-
gan to refer to the preposterous. Parker shows with enlightening examples (some of them from the
seventeenth century) how the figure was used in descriptions of alternative, even devilish, worlds
turned upside down. Thus,
hysteron proteron also served to define ‘the other’.
Unlike Parker, Skinner presents a valuable historical outline of the figure of
paradiastole and its
first occurrences in Roman rhetoric.
Paradiastole was a tool used especially in moral descriptions:
the seeming virtue could be unmasked as a vice (Rutilius), and vice versa; hence the use of
paradia-
stole in exculpation (Quintilian). Furthermore, by redescribing vices as virtues, the figure became
common in satirical contexts and comedy. Skinner shows how Renaissance handbooks were full of
paradiastolic pairs (e.g., frugal/avaricious, careful/niggardly), and justifiably combines this obser-
vation with Aristotle’s concepts of the
mesotes, the Golden Mean (between two opposed vices), and
its further interpretations (i.e., virtue as the mean between two related vices). However, it could be
that Skinner emphasizes rhetoric too strongly – and at the expense of philosophy – as a method of
examining an issue from different perspectives, even though he does mention Plato’s discussion
about the redescription of moral terms in the
Republic.
The two following contributions focus on figures often used for amplification. Ian Donaldson’s
study on
syncrisis (“Syncrisis: the figure of contestation”, pp. 166-177) covers a wide area. It starts
with the rhetorical exercise of comparing, which provides a tool for analysis and differentiation, and
ends with the art of literary criticism. In its most common ancient and early modern usage,
synkrisis
was the comparing of literary texts (the
Iliad with the
Odyssey) and writers (Homer with Virgil) and
other famous people with each other, as Plutarch had done in his parallel biographies. This suggests
competition, for example between nations (Greece vs. Rome) and between the ancients and
moderns (“The Battle of Books”). R. W. Serjeantson’s article on testimony (“Testimony: the artless
proof”, pp. 180-194) presents the theory of topics (
loci communes), in which testimonies served as
the ‘commonplaces’ of argumentation. Many rhetorical figures can be used as argumentative tools,
like proverbs and moral sentences (
sententiae). In this context, Serjeantson mentions the
cento. His-
torically, however, this term is used about a literary form – and not a learned treatise – woven from
quotations from ancient and contemporary works. Serjeantson also compares testimonies with quo-
tations but omits an interesting issue, namely the development of the scholarly practice of using
quotations to give authority to academic work.
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The three final chapters deal with the boundaries of good style, represented by two transgressive
figures,
hyperbole and
metalepsis, and by a set of elocutionary vices. (Here the satirical
Epistolae
obscurorum virorum (“Letters of Obscure Men”, 1515-17), in which the elocutionary vices are put
into practice, might well have been mentioned.) According to Katrin Ettenhuber,
hyperbole was a
mark of high style and used mostly in epideictic rhetoric, but the use of it could be antithetical to
Christian ideas of self-abasement. In her contribution (“Hyperbole: exceeding similitude”, pp. 196-
213), Ettenhuber argues that just as
hyperbole could be a sign of youthful arrogance, it might also
offer us glimpses of “a higher order” (p. 210), by way of challenging the boundaries of language
and thereby providing the dynamic of moral edification. She also links this figure of exaggeration to
the discussion of poets as liars (but does not refer to Hesiod’s
Theogony 27 or Aristotle’s
Poetics
24.1460a19).
According to Brian Cummings, the Renaissance theory of
metalepsis (‘transumption’) differs
quite radically from the recent theoretical reformulation of this difficult figure by such well-known
critics as Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Gérard Genette. In his contribution (“Metalepsis: the
boundaries of metaphor, pp. 216-233), Cummings offers a succinct survey of the history of the
figure and notes that it was often discussed along with the metaphor –
metalepsis as a mixed meta-
phor, a failed figure – and sometimes treated interchangeably with metonymy. Concentrating on
Erasmus, who defined
metalepsis as the gradual movement toward a final meaning, Cummings
points to an interesting view of sameness and difference in Erasmus’s
De copia: to Erasmus, the
metaphor and related figures such as
metalepsis represented a rescue from the endless tautology of
synonyms. Thus, even if there is no escape from the figurality of language and its ambiguities, at
least the use of figures such as
metalepsis serves as a way to say something truly meaningful – and
not merely tautological or truistic – by means of natural language. Cummings cites the use of the
figure in several passages from
Macbeth and states that Shakespeare is the most ‘metaleptic’ writer.
William Poole’s article on “The vices of style” (pp. 236-251) is justly placed at the end of the
book, and serves as a kind of summary. The great question is if rhetoric is a deviation from natural
speech and, as such, condemnable, or if rhetoric does, in fact, systematize our natural eloquence.
Poole recapitulates the vices of style presented by George Puttenham in his
Arte of English Poesie
(1589). According to Poole, it was not only a masterly writer who could change elocutionary vices
into virtues: the set of vices slightly changed over time. Thus, some vices condemned by ancient
rhetoricians were more mildly treated by early modern scholars, and even ‘rehabilitated’, as was the
case with
aenigma, because “it exercised the intelligence” (p. 249). One reason for these changes
was, of course, the differences between the vernacular (English) and the Latin languages.
For a Nordic scholar, the fact that most Renaissance English rhetorical manuals were written in the
vernacular is surprising. In Finland, for example, H. G. Porthan wrote about rhetoric in Latin as late
as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because
Renaissance Figures of Speech is aimed at
scholars of rhetoric of all nationalities, it would have been useful if it had included a short pre-
sentation of the basic Tudor rhetorical handbooks. It does contain, however, a chronological list of
the main English treatises on the rhetorical figures of the period (pp. 293-294), but the list does not
include Susenbrotus’s treatise, despite the many references to this work all through the book.
A book like this, so full of insight, deserves a more complete bibliography than the included
“Suggestions for further reading” (pp. 291-294). All the treatises mentioned in the endnotes could
have been listed in the bibliography, which now seems to promote only Anglophone scholarship –
even Heinrich Lausberg’s
Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (1960) is quoted only in English
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translation (1998). However, a good index completes this useful and most welcome publication
(NB: Index, s.v. Puttenham: there is no reference to an
apostrophe, but to an
anastrophe on p. 134).
The overall picture one gets from
Renaissance Figures of Speech is that of quality and relia-
bility. It can be warmly recommended to those interested in rhetoric and English Renaissance liter-
ature. Early modern texts, which employ complex figures in a creative way, demand active reading.
Renaissance Figures of Speech gives scholars a tool to read these texts more attentively.
Tua Korhonen
Department of World Cultures (Classical Philology)
P. O. Box 59
00014 University of Helsinki
FINLAND
tua.korhonen@helsinki.fi
Tua Korhonen, who holds a Ph.D. in Classical Greek, is a Research Fellow in Classics and a member of the
Nordic Epideictic Research Group <http://www.nnrh.dk/EPIDEICTIC/index.html>). She co-authored the first
critical edition of Johan Paulinus’s seventeenth-century Greek oration,
Magnus Principatus Finlandia
(Helsinki: SKS, 2000); and her articles include “Apostrophe and Subjectivity in Johan Paulinus Lillienstedt’s
Magnus Principatus Finlandia (1678), in Pernille Harsting and Jon Viklund (eds.),
Rhetoric and Literature in
Finland and Sweden, 1600-1900, Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: The Nordic
Network for the History of Rhetoric, 2008), pp. 27-65 (<http://www.nnrh.dk/NSHR/nshr2/index.html>). The
current focus of her research is the human-animal bond in antiquity.
