Tudor Writings on Rhetoric

Abstract

century, but which until a generation ago had grown increasingly unfamiliar even to most scholars, following the Romantic reluctance to take rhetoric seriously as a conscious art. Recent scholarship, particularly in the United States, has re-explored the tradition, but the results and implications are not always widely known. The theory and practice of rhetoric can still be excluded from consideration in histories of Tudor literature, although by now one meets sometimes with wry acknowledgment of the central importance of what is being excluded.l Rhetoric is of prime literary importance. Works on rhetoric flooding Tudor book stalls are often, it is true, too businesslike, too practical in tone, too free ofthe touch of play necessary for aestheic performance to qualify in themselves as belles-lettres. But this does not keep them from exerting massive influence on all genres of writing. And many of the rhetoric works have true literary merit oftheir own. As Louis B. Wright has shown in Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, the collections of emblems, apothegms, and related material fostered by rhetorical tradition formed the staple of the ordinary man's reading. Books built around a rhetorical concern for 'invention' such as Tottel's Songs and