Uncommon Tongues - Catherine Nicholson

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wits are cultivated—in the Merchant Taylors’ School and in schoolrooms throughout the nation where Mulcaster’s grammatical precepts are applied—then England need no longer choose between exile from the mother tongue or isolation in a rude vernacular: the homely island tongue may play host to a world of learning.

      This vision of an England (and an English) whose relationship to the outside world is one of mutual increase offers those invested in the vernacular—and Mulcaster encourages the mercantile metaphor—an alternative to slavish dependency and close-minded insularity. Destiny, he writes, elects some particular age in the history of each tongue and culture to bless it with perfection: “Such a period in the Greke tung was that time, when Demosthenes liued, and that learned race of the father philosophers: such a period in the Latin tung, was that time, when Tullie liued, and those of that age: Such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”39 “[T]he question,” he concludes, “is wherein finenesse standeth.” When it comes to Latin, he is no different than any other well-read sixteenth-century Englishman, making Cicero his standard and Sallust his cautionary tale: “So was Salust deceiued among the Romans, liuing with eloquent Tullie, and writing like ancient Cato” (160). The consequences of that deceived attachment to a past provide the motive for Mulcaster’s own career and his passionate advocacy for the embrace of English on its own terms and merits. If eloquence is to be found, he argues, it will be found here and now, and if patterns of that eloquence are required, they too must be local ones: “it must nedes be, that our English tung hath matter enough in hir own writing, which maie direct her own right, if it be reduced to certain precept, and rule of Art, tho it haue not as yet bene thoroughlie perceaued” (77).

      However, in seeking to avoid the fate of Sallust for a generation of English schoolboys, Mulcaster may well help to bring it about. For a native speaker, after all, nothing is more alienating than the effort of relearning one’s mother tongue in the form of precepts and rules of art; what was easy and instinctive threatens to become, in Mulcaster’s schoolroom, laborious and artificial. As Ascham might point out, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The internalized sense of strangeness for which Mulcaster blames his humanist colleagues is, in some sense, the essential precondition for a full-fledged art of English eloquence. Answering what Mulcaster calls the question of “finenesse”—“thoroughly perceiving” what one has learned at the breast—demands a certain strategic distance. The late sixteenth century bears witness to a revolution on what can seem, at first, like Mulcaster’s terms: in rhetorical handbooks and literary texts alike, the English tongue begins to “direct her own right.” But direction comes, as ever, from afar: within the new vernacular rhetorics and poetics, the distance between English and antiquity becomes, if anything, an even more pressing concern. At the same time strangeness emerges as an essential aspect of eloquence in any tongue, the element that distinguishes artful from ordinary speech and gives rhetoric and poetry their power. Shaped by their long detour in the classical tongues, English writers reconstitute their mother tongue as a second language, self-consciously belated and usefully eccentric. Errancy and exoticism, the instruments of Sallust’s corruption as a writer, are promoted as the master tropes of rhetorical and poetic fineness.

       Chapter 2

      The Commonplace and the Far-Fetched: Mapping Eloquence in the English Art of Rhetoric

      As Thomas Elyot reminds readers of The Boke named the Governour, rhetoric was the foundation of the earliest commonwealths: “[I]n the firste infancie of the worlde, men, wandring like beastes in woddes and on mountaines, regardinge neither the religion due unto god, nor the office pertaining unto man, ordred all thing by bodily strength: untill Mercurius (as Plato supposeth) or some other man holpen by sapience and eloquence, by some apt or propre oration, assembled them to geder and perswaded to them what commodite was in mutual conuersation and honest maners.”1 When Elyot surveys sixteenth-century England, he is therefore dismayed to find in it only “a maner, a shadowe, or figure of the auncient rhetorike”: the stunted ritual of “motes,” or moot courts, observed by students at the law schools. Such mock trials insured that educated men were acquainted with the rudiments of invention and arrangement, but they failed to produce anything like the eloquence of Mercury, Orpheus, or Amphion. On the contrary, Elyot laments, far from fostering “mutual conversation,” the speech of most English lawyers verges on unintelligibility: “voyde of all eloquence,” it “serveth no commoditie or necessary purpose, no man understanding it but they whiche haue studied the lawes” (53v). He attributes this defect to ignorance of eloquence’s higher purpose: “the tonge wherin it is spoken is barberouse, and the sterynge of affections of the mynde in this realme was neuer used,” he observes, “and so there lacketh Eloquution and Pronunciation, the two principall partes of rhetorike” (56r–v). Only if educated Englishmen address themselves to the cultivation of style, marrying “the sharpe wittes of logicians” and “the graue sentences of philosophers” to “the elegancie of the poetes,” will England possess “perfect orators” and “a publike weale equiualent to the grekes or Romanes” (57v, 59v).

      In 1531, when The Governour first appeared in print, “elegancie” was literally absent from the English art of rhetoric. The only existing rhetorical handbook in the vernacular, Leonard Cox’s Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke (c. 1524–30), sets elocution and pronunciation pointedly to the side. “[M]any thynges be left out of this treatyse that ought to be spoken of,” Cox allows in his preface, but not, he insists, in a handbook to be read only by “suche as haue by negligence or els fals persuacions” failed to “attayne any meane knowlege of the Latin tongue.” For an audience defined by linguistic incompetence, he reasons, the rudiments of invention and arrangement “shall be sufficyent”—what Roger Ascham calls “good utterance” is no plausible object.2 Some twenty years later, however, a pioneering English rhetorician cited Elyot as proof of the elegancy of the mother tongue. The title page of Richard Sherry’s 1550 Treatise of Schemes and Tropes advertises it as an aid to “the better vnderstanding of good authors,” and those who picked it up probably assumed that the authors in question were classical writers: here, presumably, was a handbook to help schoolboys recognize and reproduce a Ciceronian paraphrasis or a Virgilian metalepsis. The Treatise’s preface initially reinforces this assumption, as Sherry apologizes for the conspicuous classicism of his title, which must sound “all straunge unto our Englyshe eares” and may cause “some men at the fyrst syghte to marvayle what the matter of it should meane.” He urges readers to consider that “use maketh straunge thinges familier”: with time, alien terms such as “scheme” and “trope” may become as common “as if they had bene of oure owne natiue broode.”3

      But as Sherry soon reveals, the strange things his treatise seeks to domesticate are not strictly the property of the classical tongues: on the contrary, what is foreign to English readers is the virtue of their own native speech. “It is not vnknowen that oure language for the barbarousnes and lacke of eloquence hathe bene complayned of,” he writes,

      and yet not trewely, for anye defaut in the toungue it selfe, but rather for slackenes of our countrimen, whiche haue alwayes set lyght by searchyng out the elegance and proper speaches that be ful many in it: as plainly doth appere not only by the most excellent monumentes of our auncient forewriters, Gower, Chawcer and Lydgate, but also by the famous workes of many other later: inespeciall of ye ryght worshipful knyght syr Thomas Eliot, … [who] as it were generallye searchinge oute the copye of oure language in all kynde of wordes and phrases, [and] after that setting abrode goodlye monumentes of hys wytte, lernynge and industrye, aswell in historycall knowledge, as of eyther the Philosophies, hathe herebi declared the plentyfulnes of our mother tounge. (A2v–[A3]r)

      The “good authors” of the title page thus include not simply Cicero and Virgil but also Thomas Elyot and the “manye other … yet lyuyng” (sig. [A3]v) whose very familiarity—whose Englishness—has obscured the “copye” or riches of their speech.

      In truth, it is hard to imagine any reader consulting the litany of arcane tropes and figures that ensues and finding Elyot’s prose easier to read as a consequence,

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