Emotions Embodied: The Physicality of Style in Elizabethan Epyllia

Abstract

Abstract:

The key to persuasion, according to classical rhetoricians, was the transfer of the speaker's emotions to the audience, both through body language (actio) and the ornamentation of discourse with tropes and figures of speech (elocutio). In this light, the practice of rhetorical action and the imitation of the elaborate style of Latin authors became two of the pillars of Elizabethan schooling, on the grounds that the cult of words and the mastery of physical eloquence made competent citizens. Humanist poetics thus coined an analogy between style and the human body, based on the idea that words were as efficient as gestures in creating vivid images of emotion (enargeia). This article suggests that the English epyllia convey the Elizabethan poets' interrogation of assumed rhetorical precepts through the dialogue of two of their most prominent discursive features: the excessive attention to the rhetoric of the body and the accumulation of stylistic resources. Focusing on the Ovidian poems of Thomas Lodge, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and John Marston, I argue that it is through the problematic dialogue between these two prominent features of Elizabethan minor epic that their authors satirise the humanist reliance on bodies and words as bearers of eloquence.