William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, Wiley and Putnam, 161 Broadway, New York, 1845.

…statesmen, warriors, divines, scholars, poets, and philosophers, Ralegh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and higher and more sounding still, and still more frequent in our mouths, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, men whom fame has eternized in her long and lasting scroll, and who by their words and acts were benefactors of their country, and ornaments of human nature. (1)

…restraining my own admiration within reasonable bounds. (2)

There is not a lower ambition, a poorer way of thought, than that which would confine all excellence, or arrogate its final accomplishment to the present, or modern times. (2-3)

Form thence we date a new era, the dawn of our own intellect, (3)

Because, in a word, the last generation, when tottering off the stage, were not so active, so sprightly, and so promising as we were, we begin to imagine that people formerly must have crawled about in a feeble, torpid state, like flies in winter, in a sort of dim twilight of the understanding; (4)

[English dramatists before Shakespeare] It is the present fashion to speak with veneration of old English literature; but the homage we pay to it is more akin to the rites of superstition than to the worship of true religion. Our faith is doubtful; our love cold; our knowledge little or none. We now and then repeat the names of some of the old writers by rote, but we are shy of looking into their works. Though we seem disposed to think highly of them, and to given them every credit for a masculine and original vein of thought, as a matter of literary courtesy and enlargement of taste, we are afraid of coming to the proof, as too great a trial of our candour and patience. We regard the enthusiastic admiration of these obsolete authors, or a desire to make proselytes to a belief in their extraordinary merits, as an amiable weakness, a pleasing delusion; and prepare to listen to some favourite passage, that may be referred to in support of this singular taste, with in incredulous smile; and are in no small pain for the result of the hazardous experiment; feeling much the same awkward condescending disposition to patronize these first crude attempts at poetry and lispings of the Muse, as when a fond parent brings forward a bashful child to make a display of its wit of learning. (6)

Shakespeare… He was not something sacred and aloof from the vulgar herd of men, but shook hands with nature and the circumstances of the time, and is distinguished from his immediate contemporaries, not in kind, but in degree and greater variety of excellence. (7)

The sweetness of Decker, the thought of Marston, the gravity of Chapman, the grace of Fletcher and his young-eyed wit, Jonson’s learned sock, the flowing vein of Middleton, Heywood’s ease, the pathos of Webster, and Marlowe’s deep designs, (8)

The first cause I shall mention, as contributing to this general effect, was the Reformation, which had just then taken place. This event gave a mighty impulse, and increased activity to thought and inquiry, and agitated the inert mass of accumulated prejudices through Europe. … Liberty was held out to all to think and speak the truth. men’s brains were busy; their spirits stirring; their hearts full; and their hands not idle. … their ears burned with curiosity and zeal to know the truth, that the truth might make them free. The death-blow which had been struck at scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy loosened their tongues, … The translation of the Bible was the chief engine in the great work. It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and morality, which had been there and locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the visions of the prophets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers (such they were thought) to the meanest of the people. (9-10)

What also gave an unusual impetus to the mind of man at this period, was the discovery of the New World, and the reading of voyages and travels. Green islands and golden sands seemed to arise, as by enchantment, out of the bosom of the watery waste, and invite the cupidity, or wing the imagination of the dreaming speculator. Fairy land was realized in the new and unknown worlds. (15)

Man’s life was (as it appears to me) more full of traps and pit-falls; of hair-breadth accidents by flood and field; more way-laid by sudden and startling evils; (17)

The manners and out-of-door amusements were more tinctured with a spirit of adventure and romance. The war with wild beasts, &c., was more strenuously kept up in country sports. I do not think we could get form sedentary poets, who had never mingled in the vicissitudes, the dangers, or excitements of the chase, such descriptions of hunting and other athletic games, as are to be found in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Fletcher’s Noble Kinsmen. (18)

This does not look as if in those days “it snowed of meat and drink,” as a matter of course throughout the year! (19)

We are a nation of islanders, and we cannot help it; nor mend ourselves if we would. We are something in ourselves, nothing when we try to ape others. Music and painting are not our forte: for what we have done in that way has been little, and that borrowed from others with great difficulty. But we may boast of our poets and philosophers. That’s something. (20)

We are not forward to express our feelings, and therefore they do not come from us till they force their way in the most impetuous eloquence. (21)

We may be accused of grossness, but not of flimsiness; of extravagance, but not of affectation; of want of art and refinement, but not of a want of truth and nature. Our literature, in a work, is Gothic and grotesque; unequal and irregular; (21)

The names of Ben Jonson, for instance, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, are almost, though not quite, as familiar to us as that of Shakespeare; and their works still keep regular possession of the stage. Another set of writers included in the same general period (the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century,) who are next, or equal, or sometimes superior to these in power, but whose names are now little known, and their writings nearly obsolete, are Lyly, Marlowe, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, and Rowley, Heywood, Webster, Decker, and Ford. [!!] (23)

Lyly made a more attractive picture of Grecian manners at second-hand, than of English characters from his own observation. (29)

It is singular that the style of this author, which is extremely sweet and flowing, should have been the butt of ridicule to his contemporaries, particularly Drayton, (32)

Marlowe is a name that stands high, and almost the first in this list of dramatic worthies. … There is a lust of power in his writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, un hallowed by any thing but its own energies. … His “Life and Death of Doctor Faustus,” though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. (33)

As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular; and the style halts and staggers under them, “what uneasy steps;”—“ such footing found the sole of unblest feet.” (34)

There is one passage more of this kind, which is so striking and beautiful, so like a rapturous and deeply passionate dream, that I cannot help quoting it here: it is the address to the Apparition of Helen. (36)

Perhaps the finest trait in the whole play, and that which softens and subdues the horror of it, is the interest taken by the two scholars in the fate of their master, and their unavailing attempts to dissuade him from his relentless career. The regard to learning is the ruling passion of this drama, and its indications are as mild and amiable in them as its ungoverned pursuit has been fatal to Faustus. (37)

The immediate comic parts, in which Faustus is not directly concerned, are mean and groveling to the last degree. One of the Clowns says to another, “Snails! What hast got there? A book? Why thouh can’st not tell ne’er a word on’t.” Indeed, the ignorance and barbarism of the time, as here described, might almost justify Faustus’s overstrained admiration of learning, (38)

I cannot find in Marlowe’s play, any proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to him, (38)

Edward II. is, according to the modern standard of composition, Marlowe’s best play. It is written with few offences against the common rules, and in a succession of smooth and flowing lines. The poet however succeeds less in the voluptuous and effeminate descriptions which he here attempts, than in the more dreadful and violent bursts of passion. Edward II. is drawn with historic truth, but without much dramatic effect. The management of the plot is feeble and desultory; little interest is excited in the various turns of fate; the characters are too worthless, have too little energy, and their punishment is, in general, too well deserved to excite our commiseration; so that this play will bear, on the whole, but a distant comparison with Shakespeare’s Richard II. in conduct, power, or effect. But the death of Edward II., in Marlowe’s tragedy, is certainly superior to that of Shakespeare’s King; and in heart-breaking distress, and the sense of human weakness, claiming pity from utter helplessness and conscious misery, is not surpassed by any writer whatever. (43)

As Marlowe’s imagination glows like a furnace, Heywood’s is a gentle, lambent flame, that purifies without consuming. His manner is simplicity itself. There is nothing supernatural, nothing startling, or terrific. He makes use of the commonest circumstances of every-day life, (44)

The dialogue (bating the verse) is such as might be uttered in ordinary conversation. It is beautiful prose put into heroic measure. (44)

The names of Middleton and Rowley, with which I shall conclude this Lecture, generally appear together as two writers who frequently combined their talents in the production of joining pieces. Middleton (judging from their separate works) was “the more potent spirit” of the two; but they were neither of them equal to some others. Rowley appears to have excelled in describing a certain amiable quietness of disposition and disinterested tone of morality, … with a pleasing simplicity and naivete equal to the novelty of the conception. Middleton’s style was not marked by any peculiar quality of his own, but was made up, in equal proportions, of the faults and excellences common to his contemporaries. (47)

Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose to tragedy from the ground of comedy, and whose forte wsa not sympathy, either with the stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient scorn… He was not a favourite with his contemporaries, nor they with him. (57)

Next to Marston, I must put Chapman, whose name is better known as the translator of Homer than as a dramatic writer. He is, like Marston, a philosophic observer, a didactic reasoner: but he has both more gravity in his tragic style, and more levity in his comic vein. (64)

He is too stately for a wit, in his serious writings—too formal for a poet. … Our author aims at the highest things in poetry, and tries in vain, wanting imagination and passion, to fill up the epic moulds of tragedy with sense and reason alone, so that he often runs into bombast and turgidity—is extravagant and pedantic at one and the same time. (65)

It remains for me to say something of Webster and Decker. For these two writers I do not know how to show my regard and admiration sufficiently. Noble-minded Webster, gentle-hearted Decker, (69)

Webster would, I think, be a greater dramatic genius than Decker, if he had the same originality; and perhaps is so, even without it. His ‘White Devil’ and ‘Duchess of Malfy,’ upon the whole, perhaps, come the nearest to Shakespeare of anything we have upon record; the only drawback to them, the only shade of imputation than can be thrown upon them, “by which they lose some colour,” is, that they are too like Shakespeare, and often direct imitations of his, both in general conception and individual expression. (76)

Decker has, I think, more truth of character, more instinctive depth of sentiment, more of the unconscious simplicity of nature; but he does not, out of his own stores, clothe his subject with the same richness of imagination, or the same glowing colours of language. Decker excels in giving expression to habitual, deeply-rooted feelings, which remain pretty much the same in all circumstances, the simple uncompounded elements of nature and passion:—Webster gives more scope to their various combinations and changeable aspects, (76)

Beaumont and Fletcher, with all their prodigious merits, appear to me the first writers who in some measure departed form the genuine tragic style of the age of Shakespeare. They thought less of their subject, and more of themselves, than some others. They had a great and unquestioned command over the stores both of fancy and passion; but they availed themselves too often of common-place extravagances and theatrical trick. (85)

It cannot be denied that they are lyrical and descriptive poets of the highest order; every page of their writings is a florilegium: they are dramatic poets of the second class, in point of knowledge, variety, vivacity, and effect; … (86)

Their fault is a too ostentatious and indiscriminate display of power. Everything seems in a state of fermentation and effervescence, and not to have settled and found its centre in their minds. The ornaments, through neglect or abundance, do not always appear sufficiently appropriate: there is evidently a rich wardrobe of words and images, to set off any sentiments that occur, but not equal felicity in the choice of the sentiments to be expressed; the characters in general do not take a substantial form, or excite a growing interest, or leave a permanent impression; (86)

Besides these more critical objections, there is a too frequent mixture of voluptuous softness or effeminacy of character with horror in the subjects, a conscious weakness (I can hardly think it wantonness) of moral constitution struggling with willful and violent situation, like the tender wings of the moth, attracted to the flame that dazzles and consumes it. In the hey-day of their youthful ardour, and the intoxication of their animal spirits, they take a perverse delight in tearing up some rooted sentiment, to make a mawkish lamentation over it; and fondly and gratuitously cast the seeds of crimes and forbidden grounds, to see how they will shoot up and vegetate into luxuriance, to catch the eye of fancy. They are not safe teachers of morality: they tamper with it, (87)

The tone of Shakespeare’s writing is manly and bracing; there is at once insipid and meretricious, in the comparison. Shakespeare never disturbs the grounds of moral principle; but leaves his characters (after doing them heaped justice on all sides) to be judged of by our common sense and natural feeling. Beaumont and Fletcher constantly bring in equivocal sentiments and characters, as if to set them up to be debated by sophistical casuistry, or varnished over with the colours of poetical ingenuity. (87)

I do not say that this was the character of the men; but it strikes me as the character of their minds. … some of the most unguarded professors of a general license of behaviour, have been the last persons to take the benefit of their own doctrine, form which they reap nothing, but the obloquy, and the pleasure of startling their “wonder-wounded” hearers. (87)

Beaumont and Fletcher were the first, also, who laid the foundation of the artificial diction and tinseled pomp of the next generation of poets, by aiming at a profusion of ambitious ornaments, and by transplanting the commonest circumstances into the language of metaphor and passion. It is this misplaced and inordinate craving after striking effect and continual excitement that had at one time rendered our poetry the most vapid of all things, (88)

Ben Jonson’s serious productions are, in my opinion, superior to his comic ones. What he does, is the result of strong sense and painful industry; but sense and industry agree better with the grave and sever, than with the light and gay productions of the muse. … His fault is, that he sets himself too much on his subject, and cannot let go his hold of an idea, after the insisting on it becomes tiresome or painful to others. But his tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is more praiseworthy than his delight in what is low and disagreeable. (101)

I must hasten to conclude this Lecture with some account of Massinger and Ford, who wrote in the time of Charles I. I am sorry I cannot do it con amore. The writers of whom I have chiefly had to speak were true poets, impassioned, fanciful, “musical as is Apollo’s lute;” but Massinger is harsh and crabbed, Ford finical and fastidious. I find little in the works of these two dramatists, but a display of great strength or subtlety of understanding, inveteracy of purpose, and perversity of will. (105)

Massinger makes an impression by hardness and repulsiveness of manner. … It is in vain to hope to excite much sympathy with convulsive efforts of the will, or intricate contrivances of the understanding, to obtain that which is better left alone, and where the interest arises principally from the conflict between the absurdity of the passion and the obstinacy with which it is persisted in. for the most part, his villains are a sort of lusus naturae; his impassioned characters are like drunkards or madmen. Their conduct is extreme and outrageous, their motives unaccountable and weak; their misfortunes are without necessity, (105)

Ford is not so great a favourite with me as with some others, form whose judgment I dissent with diffidence. It has been lamented that the play of his which has been most admired (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’) had not a less exceptionable subject. I do not know, but I suspect that the exceptionableness of the subject is that which constitutes the chief merit of the play. The repulsiveness of the story is what gives its critical interest; for it is a studiously prosaic statement of facts, and naked declaration of passions. …
I do not deny the power of simple painting and polished style in this tragedy in general, and of a great deal more in some few of the scenes, particularly in the quarrel between Annabella and her husband, which is wrought up to a pitch of demoniac scorn and phrensy with consummate art and knowledge; but I do not find much other power in the author (generally speaking) than that of playing with edged tools, and knowing the use of poisoned weapons. And what confirms me in this opinion is the comparative inefficiency of his other plays. (109)

The name of Drummond of Hawthorden is in a manner entwined in cipher with that of Ben Jonson. He had not done himself or Jonson any credit by his account of their conversation; but his sonnets are in the highest degree elegant, harmonious, and striking. It appears to me that they are more in the manner of Petrarch than any others that we have, with a certain intenseness in the sentiment, an occasional glitter of thought, and uniform terseness of expression. (143)

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond’s sonnets to Spenser’s; and they leave Sydney’s, picking their way through verbal intricacies and “thorny queaches,” at an immeasurable distance behind. (147)

Ben Jonson’s detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by “the laborious foolery” of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than one, in disparagement of Ben Jonson’s comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, (147)

Carew was an elegant court-trifler. Herrick was an amorist, with perhaps more fancy than feeling, though he has been called by some the English Anacreon. Crashaw was a hectic enthusiast in religion and in poetry, and erroneous in both. Marvell deserves to be remembered as a true poet as well as patriot, not in the best of times. (156)

Carew… We may perceive, however, a frequent mixture of superficial and common-place, with far-fetched and improbably conceipts. (157)

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite and thread-bare. But neither is he likely to become so. He is a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. Form his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary instead of a poet. … His poems, from their number and size, are “like the moats that play in the sun’s beams;” that glitter to the eye of fancy, but leave no distinct impression on the memory. (157)

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise as appears to me his due, on another occasion; but the public are deaf, except to proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore given an example of the sweetness and power of his verse. [To His Coy Mistress] (159)

But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after; and every writer than finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made to set up his claim to originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged [161] against the principal characters in ‘Paradise Lost’ (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this we may be able to form some judgment by a comparison with Crashaw’s translation of Marino’s ‘Sospetto d’Herode.’ … This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton’s description: [162] … Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainty, Milton’s mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton’s boldest imagery, though its effect be injured by the incongruous mixture above stated. …
The poet adds— “The while his twisted tail he gnaw’d for spite.”
There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, [163] takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, (163)

Crashaw’s translation of Strada’s description of the contention between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not equal to Ford’s version of the same story in his ‘Lover’s Melancholy.’ One line may serve as a specimen of delicate quaintness, as of Crashaw’s style in general:
“And with a quavering coyness [tastes?] the strings.” (164)

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said, “he could not love the French Republic”—so I may say, that I cannot love ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,’ with all my good-will to it. (164)

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ was written, those middle-men, the critics, were not known. The author and [166] reader came into immediate contact, and seemed never tired of each other’s company. We are more fastidious and dissipated: the effeminacy of modern taste would, I am afraid, shrink back affrighted at the formidable sight of this once popular work, which is about as long (horresco referens!) as all Walter Scott’s novels put together; but besides its size and appearance, it has, I think, other defects of a more intrinsic and insuperable nature. It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time, which are grown poetry, but casuistry; … Out of five hundred folio pages, there are hardly, I conceive, half a dozen sentences expressed simply and directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise the object, instead of displaying in its true colours and real proportions. (166)

His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, far-fetched and frigid. I shall select only one that has been much commended. (172-3)

His ‘Defence of Poesy’ is his most readable performance; there he is quite at home, in a sort of special pleader’s office, where his ingenuity, scholastic subtlety, and tenaciousness in argument stand him in good stead; and he brings off poetry with flying colours; for he was a man of wit, of sense, and learning, though not a poet of true taste or unsophisticated genius. (173)

Sir Thomas Brown [sic] seemed to be of opinion that the only business of life was to think, and that the proper object of speculation was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and “find no end in wandering mazes lost.” (181)

His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of paste-board. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. (182)

For a thing to have ever had a name is sufficient warrant to entitle it to respectful belief, and to invest it with all the rights of a subject and its predicates. He is superstitious, but not bigoted; to him all religions are much the same, and he says that he should not like to have lived in the time of Christ and the Apostles, as it would have rendered his faith too gross and palpable. His gossiping egotism and personal character have been preferred unjustly to Montaigne’s. He had no personal character at all but the peculiarity of resolving all the other elements of his being into thought, … In describing himself he deals only in negatives. He says he has neither prejudices nor antipathies to manners, habits, climate, food, to persons or things; they were alike acceptable to him as they afforded new topics for reflection; and he even professes that he could never bring himself heartily to hate the devil. (183)

…he had a hand in the execution of some old women for witchcraft, I suppose to keep a decorum in absurdity, and to indulge an agreeable horror at his own fantastical reveries on the occasion. (183)

Jeremy Taylor was a writer as different from Sir Thomas Brown [sic] as it was possible for one writer to be from another. He was a dignitary of the church, and except in matters of casuistry and controverted points, could not be supposed to enter upon speculative doubts, or give a loose to a sort of dogmatical sceptisim. He had less thought, less “stuff of the conscience,” less “to give us pause,” in his impetuous oratory, but he had equal fancy—not the same vastness and profundity, but more richness and beauty, more warmth and tenderness. He is as rapid, as flowing, and endless, as the other is stately, abrupt, and concentrated. (190)

Jeremy Taylor… His characteristic is enthusiastic and delightful amplification. (190)

[note] Sir Thomas Brown has it, “The huntsmen are up in America,” but Mr. Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not thingk his account of the Urn-Buriall very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be “wholly in his subject,” only because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the ‘Hydiotaphia’ about “a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tombstone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo,” nor is “a silver nail or a gilt anno domini the gayest thing you shall meet with.” You do not meet with them at all in the text; nor it is possible, either form the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown’s mind, that you should! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, because it was “one of no mark or likelihood,” totally free form the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which Mr. Coleridges has adorned it, and because, being “without form and void,” it gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The motto of this author’s compositions might be—“De apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ralio. He created his own materials: or to speak of him in his own language, “he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing!” (190)

Jeremy Taylor… He puts his heart into his fancy. He does not pretend to annihilate the passions and pursuits of mankind in the pride or philosophic indifference, but treats them as serious and momentous things, warring with conscience and the soul’s health, or furnishing the means of grace and hopes of glory. (191)

His ‘Holy Living and Dying’ is a divine pastoral. He writes to the faithful followers of Christ, as the shepherd pipes to his flock. (191)

His style is prismatic. It unfolds the colours of the rainbow; it floats like the bubble through the air; it is like innumerable dew-drops that glitter on the face of morning, and tremble as they glitter. He does not dig his way underground, but slides upon ice, borne on the winged car of fancy. (191)

His exhortations to piety and virtue are a gay mememto mori. He mixes us death’s-heads and amaranthine flowers; makes life a procession to the grave, but crowns it with gaudy garland, and “rains sacrificial roses” on its path. In a word, his writings are a choral song in praise of virtue, and a hymn to the Spirit of the Universe. (191)

Thomas de Quincey, Essays on Rhetoric, Style, and Language

Thomas de Quincey, Essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language, ed. Fred N. Scott, Ph. D., Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1893.

The De Quincey stock, supposed to be of Norse extraction, had many branches, of which the American family, represented by the elder Josiah Quincy, had alone arrived at any great distinction. (Introduction, ix)

The tasks of the school-room were, as he has recorded in his ‘Confessions of an Opium-Eater,’ far below his capabilities. At thirteen he had mastered Greek, writing it with careless ease. At fifteen, when he entered the Manchester School, his command of the language, he tells us, was so great, that he not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but by extemporaneous translation from the newspapers, had acquired the ability to converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment. “That boy,” said his teacher to a stranger, “could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” (x)

From July to November, 1802, De Quincey tramped about the North of Wales. As long as the weather would permit, he lived in the open air, sleeping at night in a small tent which he carried about with him. Of the many incidents of his outing, the most important was his meeting with one De Haren, of whom we know nothing, save that having a trunkful of German books, he introduced De Quincey to the German language and read with him a good deal of German literature. During this time De Quincey was in contrast fear lest his guardians should send him back to the Grammar School The idea was so hateful to him, that he resolved finally to bury himself in the solitude of London, until, having attained his majority, he should be free to pursue his studies where he chose. (xi)

A delicately organized, highly educated young man of seventeen, he attached himself, much as a lost dog would do, to a disreputable lawyer of the name of Brunell. He ate chance fragments form his patron’s table, and by night slept in the lawyer’s great, empty, rat-haunted house. During the day he walked the street, or sat on the benches in the parks. The Bohemian life endured for some months before he was by accident discovered by his friends, and persuaded to return home. (xi)

His guardians now giving their consent to his attending the University, in 1805 he went to Oxford. His life while there, however, was so little less secluded than it had been in London that he afterward declared he owed nothing to the University. If he owed anything it was his acquaintance with a German named Scwartzburg, with whom he studied Hebrew and read German philosophy. When he came up for his examinations his paper aroused great expectations among his examiners; but, with characteristic timidity, for some slight reason he failed to appear at the oral examination, an din consequence did not obtain his degree. (xi-xii)

Although it was many years before De Quincey called public attention to himself, he began even while yet a resident at Oxford, to form the acquaintance of eminent men of letters. With Wordsworth he had opened correspondence as early as 1803. During a visit to London he called upon Charles Lamb. In 1805, conceiving a violent admiration for Coleridge, who was than in Malta, De Quincey was for starting at once for that island merely to get a glimpse of the poet. This impulse was not followed, but two years later he met Coleridge… (xii)

In Wordsworth’s cottage at Grasmere which he had rented upon the poet’s removal to Allen Bank, he spent his time in reading German philosophy, principally the works of Kant, and planning books which never got themselves written. At one time he meditated coming to America to bury himself in the forest solitudes and there digest the Kantian philosophy. Instead, he married, in 1816, Miss Margaret Simpson, daughter of a neighboring landholder, and cultivated the acquaintance of distinguished neighbors… The was during this period that the opium habit came upon him. He had begun to take opium as a medicine as early as 1803, … From 1813, however, he took the drug for its own sake, and took it in large and rapidly increasing quantities, until in 1817-19, to the great distress of his wife and friends, his subjection to its influence was complete. (xii-xiii)

In that periodical, in September, 1821, appeared the ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,’ and immediately upon its appearance De Quincey’s reputation as a new force in English prose literature, was solidly established. (xiii)

In 1826, through Wilson’s influence, he became a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine. This connection, which brought him frequently to Edinburgh, at length led him to move to that city with his family. (xiii)

De Quincey’s wife died in 1840. Three years later, he rented a small cottage at Lasswade, seven miles distant from Edinburgh, and moved into it with his children, though retaining a room in the city in which to do his work and store his innumerable paper. The remainder of his life was almost barren of events. A few visits to Glasgow, a journey to Scotland to see his married daughter and his grandchildren, an occasional struggle with his old enemy opium—these were the sole interruptions in the quiet current of his life. … he died at his lodgings in Edinburgh, December 8, 1859, in his seventy-fifth year. (xiv)

…a very little man (about five feet three or four inches); his countenance the most remarkable for its intellectual attractiveness that I have ever seen. His features, though not regular, were aristocratically fine, and an air of delicate breeding pervaded the face. (xiv)

De Quincey’s personality was a curious and perplexing compound of timidity, unsophistication, humor, gloominess, sociability, temper, gentleness, and prejudice. He was so shy, that, when passing a London cabstand, “he refrained, with nervous solicitude, form any gesture that might warrant any driver in concluding himself summoned.” In money matters his innocence was such, that he once attempted to exchange a fifty-pound note for a handful of shillings. Most of his writings are pervaded by a humorous spirit, but any direct attempt at the humorous generally results in flat failure. It is not too much to say that he had no fund of moral seriousness, nor any views of politics or social matters in which he earnestly believed. (xv)

De Quincey did not have the philosophic cast of intellect; he never succeeded in getting more than a superficial idea of the Kantian philosophy; but in his time it was something that a man of letters should be able to read Kant at all, and, that he should be able to write about him sympathetically in clear English prose, was, for the future of German ideas in England, an advantage hardly to be overrated. (xvi)

The quality which distinguishes De Quincey as a writer of prose, is his ability to conceive, in language, a constructive whole of a musical order. “The more exquisite passages,” says Leslie Stephen, “are intended to be musical compositions, in which words have to play the part of notes.” (xvi-xvii)

He was passionately fond of Beethoven. (xvii)

“Humbler writers,” … They no more think of weaving whole paragraphs or chapters into complex harmonies, than an ordinary pedestrian of ‘going to church in a galliard and coming home in a coranto.’ Even our great writers generally settle down to a stately, but monotonous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibbon, or, are content with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as possible.” (xvii)

Had De Quincey’s scientific faculty equaled his powers of construction, he might have produced a treatise on style as important for the history of criticism as Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ or ‘Poetics.’ But his learning and his methods of investigation were in no sense scientific. (xviii)

The slightest suggestion sufficed to set him off upon a long digression. (xviii)

‘Essay on Style’ … Like the other essays of this volume, it completes but a part of the originally projected plan. As usual, De Quincey, starting in without any well-defined conception of his subject-matter, allows his ideas to shape themselves as he goes alont. (xviii)

It is certain, for instance, that to the deep sincerity of British nature, and to that shyness or principle of reserve which is inseparable form self-respect, must be traced philosophically the churlishness and unsocial bearing for which, at one time, we were so angrily arraigned by the smooth south of Europe. (1)

…we feel ashamed for the obstinate obtuseness of our country in regard to one and the most effective of the Fine Arts. It will be understood that we speak of Music. In Painting and in Sculpture it is now past disputing that, if we are destined to inferiority at all, it is an inferiority only to the Italians of the fifteenth century—an inferiority which, if it were even sure to be permanent, we share with all the other malicious nations around us. on that head we are safe. And in the most majestic of the Fine Arts,--in Poetry,--we have a clear and vast pre-eminence as regards all nations. … therefore… we cannot be allowed to suppose any general defect of sensibility as a cause of obtuseness with regard to music. (3)

A song, an air, a tune,—that is, a short succession of notes revolving rapidly upon itself,—how could that, by possibility, offer a field of compass sufficient for the development of great musical effects? The preparation pregnant with the future; the remote correspondence; the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense are asked in one passage and answered in another; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving through subtle variations that sometimes disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the blaze of daylight: these and ten thousand forms of self-conflicting musical passion,--what room could they find, what opening, what utterance, in so limited a field as an air or song? … Yet exactly upon this level is the ordinary state of musical feeling throughout Great Britain; and the howling wilderness of the psalmody in most parish churches of the land countersigns the statement. … in the worst case we have the satisfaction of knowing, though Jean Jacques Rousseau, and by later evidences, [5] that, sink as we may below Italy and Germany in the sensibility to this divne art, we cannot go lower than France. (5)

In proportion, therefore, as the English people have been placed for two centuries and a quarter (i.e. since the latter decennium of James the First’s reign) under a constant experience of popular eloquence thrown into all channels of social life, they must have had peculiar occasion to feel the effects of style. But to feel is not to feel consciously. Many a man is charmed by one cause who ascribes the effect to another. Many a man is fascinated by the artifices of composition who fancies that it is the subject which has operated so potently. And even for the subtlest of philosophers who keeps in mind the interpenetration of the style and the matter it would be as difficult to distribute the true proportions (7)

In the senate, and for the same reason in a newspaper, it is a virtue to reiterate your meaning: a tautology becomes a merit: variation of the words, … A man who should content himself with a single condensed enunciation of a perplexed doctrine would be a madman… Like boys who are throwing the sun’s rays into the eyes of mob by means of a mirror, you must shift your lights and vibrate your reflections at every possible angle, if you would agitate [8] the popular mind extensively. (7-8)

But, return being impossible in the case of a spoken harangue, where each sentence perishes as it is born, … It is for the benefit of both that the weightier propositions should be detained before the eye a good deal longer than the chastity of taste or the austerity of logic would tolerate in a book. (8)

Generally and ultimately it is certain that our British disregard or inadequate appreciation of style, though a very lamentable fault, has had its origin in the manliness of the British character; in the sincerity and directness of the British taste; (10)

The next writers of distinction who came forward as rhetoricians were Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy and Milton in many of his prose works. They labour under opposite defects. Burton is too quaint, fantastic, and disjointed; Milton too slow, solemn, and continuous. In the one we see the flutter of a parachute; in the other the stately and voluminous gyrations of an ascending balloon. Agile movement, and a certain degree of fancifulness, are indispensable to rhetoric. But Burton is not so much fanciful as capricious; his motion is not the motion of freedom, but of lawlessness; he does not dance, but caper. Milton, on the other hand, polonaises with a grand Castilian air, in paces too sequacious and processional; even in his passages of merriment, and when stung into a quicker motion by personal disdain for an unworthy antagonist, his thoughts and his imagery still appear to move to the music of the organ. (159)

Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne; who, if not absolutely the foremost in the accomplishments of art, were undoubtedly the richest, the most dazzling, and, with reference to their matter, the most captivating, of all rhetoricians. (161)

Sir Thomas Browne, deep, tranquil, and majestic as Milton, silently premeditating and “disclosing his golden couplets,” as under some genial instinct of incubation; Jeremy Taylor, restless, fervid, aspiring, scattering abroad a prodigality of life, not unfolding but creating, with the energy and the “myriad-mindedness” of Shakespeare. (162)

The only very obvious defects of Taylor were in the mechanical part of his art, in the mere technique. He writes like one who never revises, nor tries the effect upon his ear of his periods as musical wholes, and in the syntax and connexion of the parts seems to have been habitually careless of slight blemishes. (166)

Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language

Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Ph.D., Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2005.

Grammar-school… The method prescribed unremitting exercise in grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Grammar dominated the lower forms, logic and rhetoric the upper. In all forms the order was first to learn precepts, then to employ them as a tool of analysis in reading, and finally to sue them as a guide in composition. (8)

A customary exercise was to compose Latin prose and then turn it into one or more prescribed metrical forms. Accordingly Jonson, whos said that he composed in prose and then turned the prose into verse, merely continued to do in English what he had learned to do in Latin grammar school. (10)

The Greek New Testament, Isocrates and Homer were most often required for reading, (11)

Tudor grammar schools prescribed rising at five; glass from six to nine; breakfast; class from nine-fifteen to eleven; dinner; class from one to five; supper. After supper, from six to seven, the pupils recited to their fellows what they had learned during the day. The lessons drilled on in the morning were regularly recited in the afternoon, and all the work of the week was reviewed in recitation on Fridays and Saturdays. A week devoted to repetitions tested the accomplishments of the thirty-six weeks of the school year. (11)

T. W. Baldwin, upon whose recent work the preceding summary is based, has shown that an Elizabethan would understand Ben Jonson’s ascription to Shakespeare of “small Latine and lesse Greeke” as meaning that Shakespeare had the regular grammar school education of the time. (11)

According to Baldwin an Elizabethan audience would easily have recognized the satirical rogue referred to by Hamlet (2.2.198) as Juvenal, and the book Hamlet was reading (in the first version of the play) just before he began to dispute with himself, “To be or not to be—that is the question” (3.1.56), as Cicero’s Quaestiones Tusculanae, “the first and fundamental text for scholar’s consolation in doubts of death.” [Baldwin, T. W. William Shakespeare’s Small Latin and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana, 1944. II, 607; 601-8] (11)

These English works had in Tudor times a popularity, a vitality, and an importance astonishing to us today, due in part to the use of illustrations form matter of intense interest to the readers for whom the books were designed. … the English books circulated among adults, especially among those of the court and of the upper and middle classes. From 1551 to 1595 there were at least seven editions of Wilson’s Rule of Reason and eight of his Arte of Rhetorique … Puttenham explicitly stated that he wrote his Arte for courtiers, and particularly for ladies, … Fraunce, too, capitalized on the lively interest in the new literature of the vernaculars… (15)

Angel Day’s work, which went through eight editions before 1626, appealed especially to the middle class by adapting the figures of rhetoric to the practical needs of letter writing. (15)

There are among the English authors of the Renaissance, as among the Latin, obvious differences that dispose them into the three groups which in the present study are called the traditionalists, the Ramists, and the figurists. / Thomas Wilson is eminently the traditionalist. His Arte of Rhetorique presents the whole of the classical tradition of rhetoric with its five parts: invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and delivery. (16)

The Ramists—as Ramus and his collaborator Talaeus and their English adapters, Fenner, Fraunce, Butler, and, to some degree, Hoskyns, may be called—depart from the Aristotelian tradition not so much in content as in pedagogical method… For the Ramists the functions of rhetoric are but two: to beautify composition and make it emotionally effective by means of a comparatively few figures of speech, … (17)

The figurists, as Susenbrotus, Sherry, Peacham, Puttenham, and Day may be named, … their concept of figures is so inclusive as to omit little of what has even been included in a theory of composition, for the approximately two hundred figures of speech [17] … One of the conclusions to which the present study leads is that in the works of all three of these groups of Renaissance writers there is a fundamental likeness despite obvious differences, for in all of them are discernible, to a degree not hitherto adequately recognized, the dominant features of Aristotle’s rhetoric. (18)

Aristotle… figures. He did not name many of those which he described, but he favored metaphor, simile, synecdoche, prosopopoeia, antonomasia, periphrasis, all of which tend to promote vividness; likewise antithesis, isocolon, homoioteleuton, anaphora, epistrophe, polysyndeton, and asyndeton, figures which emphasize balance in periodic structure and affect prose rhythm. He counseled the avoidance of zeugma, parenthesis, and in general whatever tends to ambiguity and obscurity, although he liked antanaclasis and paronomasia, which are figures of deliberate ambiguity. (21)

The difference between the Elizabethan cognizance and ours is aptly described by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker in their edition of Puttenham. / ‘A well-educated modern reader may confess without shame to momentary confusion between Hypozeuxis and Hypozeugma, but to his Elizabethan prototype the categories of the figures were, like the multiplication-tables, a part of his foundations. … [Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie [1589]; ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge, 1936. pp. lxxv ff.] (48)

The addition of a syllable at the beginning of a word was called prosthesis, as embolden for bolden, berattle for rattle, ymade for made, adown for down. …
I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted (MM, 1.4.34) (51)

The addition of a syllable or letter in the middle of a word was called epenthesis, as meeterly for meetly. …
I have but with a cursorary eye O’erglanc’d the articles (H5, 5.2.77) (51)

The schemes of subtraction include aphaeresis, syncope, synaloepha, and apocope, ‘Twixt for betwixt is an example of aphaeresis, subtracting a syllable from the beginning. Shakespeare uses this scheme very freely. /
Point against point, rebellious arm ‘gainst arm (Mac., 1.2.56) (52)

Syncope is the removal of a letter or syllable from the middle of the word, as prosprous for prosperous. /
Ignomy and shame Pursue thy life (T&C., 5.10.33)
Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge (Mac, 4.3.214) (52)

When at the juncture of two vowels one is elided, the scheme is called synaloepha, as t’attain for to attain. Perhaps it may have included the elision of the only vowel, as is’t for is it. The latter is very frequent in Shakespeare’s later plays. This scheme gives swiftness to the verse.
Take’t; ‘tis yours. What is’t? (Cor. 1.10.80)
Star…had made his course t’illlume that part (Ham, 1.1.37) (52)

Apocope, the omission of the last syllable of a word, as bet for better, Shakespeare employs with great freedom.
With Clifford and the haughty Northumberland (3H6, 2.1.169)
Season your admiration for awhile With an attent ear (Ham. 1.2.192) (53)

Of the two remaining schemes of words, metathesis, or transposition, was an exchange of letters in a word. Peacham gave as an example brust for burst. (53)

The exchange of one sound for another in a word, as wrang for wrong, usually for the sake of rhyme, was called antisthecon. [rap]
Troilus: But to the sport abroad! Are you bound thither?
Aeneas: In all swift haste.
Troilus: Come, go we then together (T&C, 1.1.118) (53)

In English, where word order exercises an important grammatical function, the various forms of departure from the ordinary order, called in general hyperbaton, frequently confer both emphasis and distinction. The Tudor rhetoricians distinguished various species of hyperbaton: anastrophe, tmesis, hysteron proteron, hypallage. (54)

Shakespeare uses anastrophe, or unusual word order, throughout the plays, but especially in the later ones.
Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow. (Oth., 5.2.3) (54)

When words were put between the parts of a compound word, such as however, the scheme was called tmesis.
How heinous e’er it be,
To win thy after-love I pardon thee (R2, 5.3.34) (55)

hysteron proteron puts first that which occurs later.
With all their sixty, fly and turn the rudder. (A&C, 3.10.2) (55)

In hypallage, the changeling, as Puttenham named it, the application of words is perverted and sometimes made absurd. Waking from the effects of the magic flower-juice, the bewildered Bottom tries to recall his most rare vision.
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. (MND, 4.1.215) [Ula: feel/taste] (55)

Day spoke of a milder form of hypallage, rife in poesy, where the exchange of words is less violent, as “the wicked wound thus given,” wherein it is the giver and not the wound that is wicked. This is equivalent to a transferred epithet. A memorable instance in Shakespeare is Antony’s remark as he holds up Caesar’s mantle before the crowd, showing them the rent through which the well-beloved Brutus stabbed.
This was the most unkindest cut of all. (JC, 3.2.188)
Hypallage of this kind confers vitality and compression. (56)

Similar to parenthesis in interposing explanatory matter is epergesis, or apposition. Sometimes appositive phrases are metaphor.
The thunder, That deep and dreadful organ pipe (Tem, 3.3.97) (57)

The grammatical figures of omission include eclipsis, zeugma, syllepsis, and diazeugma. Eclipsis, or ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, contributes to the compressed character of Shakespeare’s later style, although it appears throughout his work.
And he to England shall along with you (Ham, 3.3.4)
Haply you shall not see me more; or if,
A mangled shadow. (A&C, 4.2.26) (58)

Zeugma, one verb serving a number of clauses, is a favorite with Shakespeare. He places the one verb sometimes first, sometimes last.
But passion lends them power, time means, to meet. (R&J, 2.Prol.13)

Syllepsis differs from zeugma is that a verb, expressed but once, lacks grammatical congruence with at least one subject with which it is understood.
She has deceiv’d her father, and may thee. (Oth. 1.3.294)

The use of one subject with many verbs, called diazeugma, gives cumulative force to Norfolk’s account of Cardinal Wolsey’s strange conduct.
He bites his lip and starts,
Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground,
Then lays his finger on his temple; straight
Springs out into fast gait, then stops again,
Strikes his breast hard, and anon he casts
His eye against the moon. (H8, 3.2.113)

Ariel’s spirit-quality and his swift and ready obedience to Prospero are enhanced by his use of asyndeton, omitting conjunctions between clauses.
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly [or]
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl’d clouds. (Tem, 1.2.189)
In contrast is the measured deliberateness of polysyndeton, the use of a conjunction between each clause.
‘Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your person. (Oth, 3.3.77) (59)

The figure primarily concerned with rhythm is isocolon or parison in which phrases or clauses are of equal length and usually of corresponding structure, as in Nathaniel’s euphuistic comments to Holofernes.
Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. (LLL, 5.1.2) (59)

Often the equal members are marked off by homoioteleuton, or like ending, as –ly in the following.
How churlishly I chid Lucetta hence
When willingly I would have had her here!
How angerly I taught my brow to frown… (TGV, 1.2.60) (60)

In the periodic sentence, called hirmus, the sense is supended until the end.
Tell my friends,
Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree
Form high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither ere my tree hath felt the axe,
And hang himself. (Tim., 5.1.10) (60)

There remain four figures of grammatical exchange: enallage, hendiadys, Graecismus, and anthimeria. Enallage is the deliberate use of one case, person, gender, number, tense, or mood for another. Obviously, if this were done through ignorance, it would be a solecism. …a plural form of the verb may be used with a singular subject.
The posture of your blows are yet unknown (JC, 5.1.33)
more than the scope Of these dialated articles allow (Ham., 1.2.37)

Hendiadys, the use of two nouns for a noun with its modifier, gives increased emphasis.
The heaviness and the guilt within my bosom
Takes off my manhood. (Cym, 5.2.1.)
The singular verb assists in yoking the nouns, and makes it more clear that heavy guilt is meant.

Shakespeare’s nearest approach to Graecismus, the use of a Greek idiom, seems to be by confusion of two constructions, such as:
I do not like the Tower of any place (R3, 3.1.68)
E. A. Abbott, who quotes these examples, remarks with particular reference to the last: “This… is a thoroughly Greek idiom, though independent in English… The line is a confusion of two constructions. … ‘I dislike the tower more than any other place’ and ‘most of all places’ becomes ‘of any place’.” (62)

Of all the schemes of grammar in Elizabethan English, anthimeria, the substitution of one part of speech for another, is perhaps the most exciting. … In the following examples, adjectives are used as adverbs, prepositions as adjectives, adjectives as nouns, nouns as adjectives, nouns as adverbs, verbs as nouns.
Report That I I am sudden sick. Quick and return! (AC 1.3.3)
Shap’d out a man Whom this beneath the world (Tim 1.1.43)
All cruels else subscrib’d (Lear, 3.7.65)
His complexion is perfect gallows (Tem, 1.1.32)
Kingdom’d Achilles in commotion rages (TC 2.3.185)
Betwixt too early and too late (H8. 2.3.84)
Goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too-much (Ham, 4.7.118) (62-3)
Shakespeare uses pronouns, adjectives, and nouns as verbs.
Julius Caesar, Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted (AC, 2.6.12)
The thunder would not peace at my bidding (Lear, 4.6.103)

The Vices of Language… Solecismus, a vice related to the grammatical figure enallage, is the ignorant misuse of cases, genders, tenses. (64)

Soraismus, the mingling of sundry languages ignorantly or affectedly, is a characteristic of the pedant HOlofernes.
Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination. (LLL, 4.2.13) (65)

Amphibology is ambiguity of grammatical structure, often occasioned by mispunctuation. (66)

Tapinosis is the use of a base word to diminish the dignity of a person or thing.
Achilles, A drayman, a porter, a very camel! (TC 1.2.270)
Sir Toby maintains that judgment and reason have been grand-jurymen in disputes “since before Noah was a sailor” (TN, 3.2.18) (67)

Cacemphaton, or aischrologia, is the vice of foul speech. It characterizes a buffoon or railing companion, whom the Latins called scurra. Scurrilous jests are plentifully illustrated in the remarks of Thersites and Lucio. Another form of cacemphaton is an unpleasing combination of sounds such as results form excessive alliteration. It is consciously illustrated in the opening line of the epitaph already quoted, which was composed extemporaneously by Holofernes, who announces that he “will something affect the letter.” (68)

Cacosyntheton is the ill placing of words, as when an adjective improperly follows a nouns or when there is any other unpleasing order of words:
My name is Pistol call’d (H5, 4.1.62) (68)

Tautology, vain repetition of the same idea, is used skillfully by Antony to mock drunken Lepidus.
Lepidus. What manner o’thing is your crocodile?
Antony. It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it has breadth. It is just so high as it is, and movies with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. (A&C, 2.7.46) (68)

Perissologia, or macrologia, is the addition of a superfluous clause which adds nothing to the meaning.
Evans. I do despise a liar as I despise one that is false, or as I despise one that is not true. (MWW, 1.1.68) (69)

Parelcon is the addition of a superfluous word, as of that in the following:
When that I was and a little tiny boy (TN, 5.1.398) (69)

Pleonasmus, the needless telling of what is already understood, …
Juliet’s nurse, reporting Tybalt’s death, insists:
I saw the wound, I saw it with mine eyes. (RJ, 3.2.52) (69)

Homiologia, tedious and inane repetition, is the specific means by which Shakespeare characterizes Justice Shallow.
He hath wrong’d me; indeed he hath; at a word, he hath. Believe me! Robert Shallow, Esquire, saith he is wronged. (MWW, 1.1.107) (69)

Periergia is a vice not so much of superfluity of words as of overlabor to seem fine and eloquent, especially in a slight manner.
Anointed, I implore so much expense of thy royal sweet breath as will utter a brace of words (LLL, 5.2.523)
The princess comments on his pomposity: “’A speaks not like a man God his making” (70)

Bomphiologia or bombastic speech characterizes the braggart. Falstaff, a prolific and incorrigible braggart, … (70)

Affected diction, especially the coining of fine words out of Latin, is a form of the vice cacozelia. Through it Shakespeare satirizes inkhornism.
Armado. There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honour is rewarding my dependents… [exit.]
Costard. Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration—O, that’s the Latin word for three farthings. (LLL, 3.1.132)
Cacozelia is Osric’s characteristic vice. In delivering to Hamlet a message from the king he thus dilates on Laertes. … (5.2.110) Hamlet scornfully travesties Osric’s affectation of “true diction” by answering him in kind. (73)

Another form of the vice cacozelia, which we call malapropism, and which sometimes achieves, as it were unconsciously, a happy hit through the misused word.
Elbow. [to Escalus] My wife, sir, whom I detest before heaven and your honour—(MM, 2.1.69)

The Figures of Repetition. Of all the figures of repetition so highly valued by the Elizabethans alliteration or paroemion, as it was called, is the one which we today think of most readily as an embellishment of style. (79)

Shakespeare’s early schematic use of anaphora, beginning a series of clauses with the same word, and of epistrophe, ending with the same, is illustrated in Margaret’s recital of her woes in Richard III (4.4.92-104; 40-44) … Such a combination of anaphora and epistrophe was called symploce. (79)

Epanalepsis is the repetition at the end of a clause or sentence of the word with which it begins. (80)

Shakespeare shows continuing favor toward three figures of repetition related to logical processes: antimetable, anadiplosis, and climax. Antimetabole is akin to logical conversion in that it turns a sentence around.
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. (Ham., 3.2.209) (81)

Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of one clause or sentence at the beginning of the next. It often expresses the two premises of a syllogism, as where Richard III through its swift, compact logic shows himself a man of action and quick decision.
Come! I have learn’d that fearful commenting
Is leaden servitor to dull delay;
Delay leads impotent and snail-pac’d beggary.
Then fiery expedition be my wing. (R3, 4.3.51) (82)

Climax is a continued anadiplosis, inasmuch as it carries the same kind of repetition through three or more clauses. (83)

Polyptoton is the repetition of words derived from the same root, and as such is related to the logical argument from conjugates, as in the following examples…
Society is no comfort To one not sociable. (Cym. 4.2.12) (83)

Diaphora is the repetition of a common name so as to perform two logical functions: to designate an individual and to signify the qualities connoted by the common name, as when Desdemona remarks to Cassio of Othello’s altered manner.
My advocation is not now in tune.
My lord is not my lord. (Oth. 3.4.123) (84)

The two figures of repetition which Shakespeare uses most persistently throughout his work, diacope and epizeuxis… Diacope, which often expresses deep feeling, is the repetition of a word with one or more between, usually in exclamation, as in these examples from Othello:
Light, I say! Light! (1.1.145)
Even now, now, very now. (1.1.88)
Macbeth, deluded by the witches, disillusioned of his hopes of glory, cynically sees life and times as but a meaningless succession of empty days.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… (5.5.19)

Epizeuxis, the repetition of words with none between, is a figure which Shakespeare uses throughout his plays and songs and his narrative poems, though seldom in his sonnets.
O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee! (Mac 2.3.69)
Out, out, brief candle! (Mac, 5.5.23) (87)

When we speak of a topic sentence today and the methods, such as definition, contrast, or comparison, by which it may be developed into a paragraph, we hardly envision so systematic and objective a procedure as that by which Elizabethans as a matter of course amplified a subject by drawing it through the places of invention. (91)

Diatyposis is a figure whereby one commends to another certain profitable rules and precepts. Polonius’ advice to Laertes (Ham. 1.3.58-80) is an outstanding example. (101)

The figure apomnemonysis is a form of inartificial which quotes for authority the testimony of approved authors. (102)

Chria, a very short exposition of a deed or word, with the name of the author recited, furnishes Britain’s queen with a spirited argument against Rome’s renewed claim to British tribute.
A kind of conquest
Caesar made here; but made not here his brag
Of ‘came, and saw, and overcame.’ With shame
(The first that ever touch’d him) he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten. (Cym. 3.1.22) (103)

Euche is a vow to keep a promise. A dramatically impressive instance of it is the oath which Hamlet, seconded by the ghost speaking from below, exacts from Horatio and Marcellus, when he demands that they solemnly swear on his sword never by word or look to reveal what they have seen and heard that night. (1.5.145-81) (104)

Asphalia, the offer of surety for another, strengthens Miranda’s entreaty that her father be less severe toward Ferdinand.
Sir, have pity.
I’ll be his surety. (Tem, 1.2.474)
A memorable example of asphalia is Antonio’s giving his bond as surety for Bassanio’s loan from Shylock (MV, 3.1) (105)

Euphemismus, the prognostication of good, characterizes the Roman soothsayer’s interpretation of his dream in Cymbeline. (106)

Paraenesis is a warning of impending evil, as when Margaret warns Buckingham against Richard. (106)

Ominatio is a prognostication of evil, as in Priam’s plea to Hector…
Horatio, having seen the ghost, concludes:
…in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state. (1.1.68)

Definition. First in order among artificial arguments, those derived form a subject by the art of topical investigation, is definition, which explains the nature or essence of a subject in terms of its genus and difference. (108)

Systrophe is the heaping together of many definitions of one thing.
Macbeth employs systrophe to heap together the benefits of sleep, appreciated most keenly when he realizes that he himself will no longer enjoy
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. (2.2.37) (108)

Shakespeare makes use of the more profound concepts which enter into logical definition, such as difference, property, essence. (109)

A consideration of essence as opposed to its accidental modifications becomes an important underlying theme in Shakespeare’s historical plays: the distinction between kingship and kings, between the ideal and its embodiment in imperfect men, (111)

Logical division of a genus into its species, known to rhetoricians as at the figure diaeresis, is closely related to definition. The distinction which Jaques makes between his melancholy and other melancholies illustrates this relation, for while dividing he briefly characterizes and so in a measure defines each kind.
‘I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the solider’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. (AYLI, 4.1.10) (111)

Synecdoche is a trope which heightens meaning by substituting genus for species, species for genus, part for whole, whole for part.
Pour down thy weather. (KJ, 4.2.109) (112)

Differing from diaeresis, which divides a genus into its species, merismus, or partitio, divides a whole into its parts, as when Caliban, discussing Prospero’s coming to the island, reminds him:
Then I lov’d thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’th’isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile. (Tem, 1.2.336) (112)

Eutrepismus is a figure of division which numbers and orders the parts under consideration.
I am enjoin’d by oath to observe three things:
First, never to unfold to anyone (MV, 2.9.9)

Enumeratio employs the third kind of division, that of a subject into its adjuncts, a cause into its effects, an antecedent into its consequence. Holofernes anatomizes Armado by listing his adjuncts.
‘His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate. (LLL, 5.1.10)
Hamlet interrupts Osric’s enumeration of the good qualities of Laertes, which threatens to be long drawn out, with
I know, to divide him inventorially would dozy th’arithmetic of memory. (5.2.118)
Speaking to an apparently reluctant Cressida, Pandarus enumerates the merits of Troilus.
Pandarus. Have you any eyes? Do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such-like, the spice and salt that season a man?
Cressida. Ay, a minc’d man! (1.2.274) (115)

The figure propositio is a brief summary of what is to follow (115)

Restrictio is a figure whereby after making a general statement one excepts a part, as the senator does in discussing Timon.
I love and honour him,
But must not break my back to heal his finger. (Tim, 2.1.23) (115)

Prolepsis is a general statement amplified by dividing it into parts, as in Arviragus’ description of life in a cave with his brother and foster-father.
We are beastly: subtle as the fox for prey,
Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat.
Our valour is to chase what flies; our cage
We make a choir, as doth the prison’d bird,
And sing our bondage freely. (Cym, 3.3.40) (116)

Epanodos differs from prolepsis only in repeating the terms of the general proposition in the amplification which particularizes it, as in Sonnet XLVI. (116)

Synathroesmus, on the other hand, first gives details, then gathers them up in recapitulation , as when Scroop informs Richard II of the rebellion led by Bolingbroke.
Synathroesmus in another sense, sometimes called congeries, merely heaps together words of different meaning, without recapitulation, as when Macbeth, having just announced that he was killed Duncan’s grooms, gives this excuse for his impulsiveness:
Who can be wise, amaz’d, temp.rate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man. (2.3.114)
Internet definition: stringing together adjectives, often in invective. (117)

Epiphonema, an epigrammatic summary, gathers into a pithy, sententious utterance what has preceded, (117)

Of greater dramatic significance than the figures of division is the disjunctive proposition, which expresses alternatives that divide the possibilities contemplated.
Othello, convinced of Desdemona’d infidelity, contemplates the alternatives which in consequence rive his tortured soul.
But there where I have garner’d up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in—(4.2.57) (118)

Subjects and Adjuncts. [not in literal, grammatical sense]. Shakespeare reveals in his plays penetrating observations regarding the relation of subject and adjuncts. Horatio demands of the ghost, “What of buried Denmark?” (1.1.46). The identity of the subject beneath the perceptible adjuncts becomes the central problem for Hamlet: is the ghost really his father’s spirit, or is it an evil spirit… (119)

A man’s real adjuncts do not depend on the thoughts and words of another person, as Malcolm assures Macduff.
That which you are, my thoughts cannot transpose. (Mac. 4.3.21)
There can, however, be a change in adjuncts so great as to constitute almost a new subject, a transformation that Oliver claims for himself as a result of his conversion.
‘Twas I. but ‘tis not I! I do not shame
To tell you what I was, since my conversion
So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am. (AYLI, 4.3.136)
A delegation of authority may be regarded as a transfer of adjuncts form one subject to another; consequently after the duke commissioned Angelo and Escalus, they can truly say:
The Duke’s in us, and we will hear you speak. (MM, 5.1.297) (120)

Peristasis, a figure of speech which is amplified by detailing the circumstances affecting a person or a thing, …
Time and place, which are circumstances of a thing.
Thomas Wilson’s summary in verse for ready memorizing as an aid to invention.
Who, what, and where, by what helpe, and by whose:
Why, how, and when, doe many things discolose. (AR, 17) (122)

Encomium is high praise and commendation of a person or thing by extolling the inherent qualities or adjuncts,
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! (2.2.315)

Taxis is a figure which distributes to every subject its proper adjunct. Oppressed with Macbeth’s tyranny, a lord speaks to Lennox of a time he hopes for, when
We may again
Give from our tables meat, sleep to our nights,
Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives,
Do faithful homage and receive free honours—
All which we pine for now. (3.6.33) (123)

Epitheton attributes to a person or thing a quality by way of addition, … Armado explains to his page Moth that he called him
‘tender juvenal as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender. (LLL, 1.2.14)
online definition: figure that uses and adjective or adjectival phrase to characterize a person, thing or attribute or quality; the use of a qualifying word or phrase to further or describe something (e.g. fun ride, bad omen, cheerful giver) (124)

The compound epithet, although not mentioned by the Tudor rhetoricians in their treatment of epitheton, was popular with Elizabethan writers…
Now form head to foot I am marble-constant. (AC, 5.2.239) (124)

Antonomasia is of two forms. The first substitutes a description phrase for a proper name, … The second form on the other hand, substitutes a proper name for a quality associated with it.
Valeria. [to Virgilia] You would be another Penelope. (Cor.1.3.92) (125)

The substitution of subject for adjunct, or adjunct for subject, is a form of metonymy.
[of Duncan] renown and grace is dead (Mac, 2.3.99)
[online definition: a thing is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with it, e.g. Hollywood for American Cinema] (126)

Prosopographia is the name given to the lively description of a person, (126)

Prosopopoeia, the attribution of human qualities to dumb or inanimate creatures, (126)

Characterismus is the description of the body or mind. (127)

Ethopoeia is the description of natural propensities, manners and affections, such as seeking to win favor by flattery. In The Tempest Antonio urges Sebastian to kill Gonzalo while he himself dispatches Alonso. This will be safe, for all the others are mere time-servers.
‘They’ll take suggestions as a cat laps milk;
They’ll tell the clock to any business that
We say befits the hour. (2.1.288) (127)
[Internet definition: putting oneself in the place of another so as both to understand and express his feelings more vividly. Denotes a construction or simulation of character in discourse.]

Mimesis is the imitation of gesture, pronunciation, utterance. Ulysses complains that Patroclus entertains Achilles by derisive mimicry of the Greek leader… (127)

Dialogismus, the framing of speech suitable to the person speaking, is essential to good drama, and is, of course, exemplified throughout Shakespeare’s plays. (128)

Pragmatographia is the vivid description of an action or event… Cleopatra so realistically pictures her place in Caesar’s intended triumph that she gains the help of her women in ending her life and thus escapes humiliation. (5.2.208-21) Pragmatographia is of great value in drama to report events which occur off-stage. (128-9)

Chronographia is the description of times, as of dawn by Romeo.
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. (3.5.7) (129)

Topographia is the description of places. (129)

Topothesia is the description of imaginary places, such as the house of envy in Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the bower of bliss in The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare describes no place such as these. His nearest approach is the fairyland where Oberon and Titania rule. (130)

[note14] Alfred Hart, “Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare and the Homilies, p. 253, asserts that words beginning with the prefix un- amount to nearly 4 percent of Shakespeare’s vocabulary; about a fourth of these are “new” to literature, of Shakespeare’s own coinage. They help us to differentiate his plays from those of his predecessors and contemporaries (p. 229). Shakespeare has coined thirty-two words beginning with dis-; such formation were rarely invented by his predecessors (p. 256) (133)

Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, appreciated the force of privative terms, which express the absence or the loss of a characteristic that ought to be present.
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about (MM, 3.1.124) (134)

Litotes is a figure whereby, instead of affirming a predicate of a subject, one denies its contrary or its contradictory. It may be used to avoid an appearance of boasting or to veil a threat.
Gloucester. [of Edgar] Let him fly far,
Not in this land shall he remain uncaught. (Lear, 2.1.58) (135)

Synoeciosis, a composition of contraries, stimulates attention by the seeming incompatibility of the terms it unites.
Hamlet: They have a plentiful lack of wit. (2.2.201)
Hamlet: I must be cruel, only to be kind. (3.4.178) (136)

Paradox, a figure which excites wonder, often involves apparent self contradiction. (136)

Antithesis sets contraries in opposition to give greater perspicuity by contrast, as when Lord Rivers tries to comfort the widowed queen.
Drown desperate sorrow in dead Edward’s grave
And plant your joys in living Edward’s throne. (R3, 2.2.99) (137)
[internet definition: juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas (often, though not always, in parallel structure).

Very similar is syncrisis which compares contrary things in contrasting clauses.
Caesar. Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once. (JC, 2.2.32) (137)

Antanagoge is the balancing of an unfavorable aspect with a favorable one, as in Phebe’s comments on Ganymede.
‘Tis but a peevish boy; yet he talks well. (AYLI, 3.5.110)

The figure of inter se pugnantia points out discrepancy between theory and practice.
Ophelia. [to Laertes] But, good brother,
Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede. (Ham, 1.3.46) (138)

Antiphrasis, or the broad flout, is irony of one word, … An outstanding instance of antiphrasis is the repetition of “honorable man,” spoken at first with apparent sincerity in Antony’s speech over Caesar, but growing in biting irony… (JC, 3.2.88-219) (139)

Paralipsis is a figure which, while pretending to pass over a matter, tells it most effectively. Antony uses it with consummate skill to sway the crowd.
Let but the commons hear this testament,
Which (pardon me) I do not mean to read,
And they would go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds…
Have patience, gentle friends; I must not read it.
It is not meet you know how Caesar lov’d you…
‘Tis good you know not that you are his heirs. (3.2.136-51) (139)

Epitrope is an ironical permission, such as Cleopatra gives Antony when he is summoned to Rome by great affairs of state:
Antony. Most sweet queen—
Cleopatra. Nay, pray you seek no colour for your going,
But bid farewell, and go. When you su’d staying,
Then was the time for words. No going then!
Eternity was in our lips and eyes. (AC, 1.3.31) (140)
[internet definition: a figure in which one turns things over to one’s hearer, either pathetically or ironically, or in such a way as to suggest a proof of something without having to state it. Epitrophe often takes the form of granting permission, submitting for consideration, or simply referring to the abilities of the audience to supply the meaning the speaker passes over. Epitrophe can either be biting in its irony or flattering in its deference. Go ahead, make my day.]

Similarity and Dissimilarity. The Tudor rhetoricians called the general figure of similitude homoeosis and distinguished as its species icon, parabola, paradigma,… Icon is a figure which paints the likeness of a person by imagery. Richard describes himself through icon.
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades. (R2, 3.3.178) (143)

Parabola is a moral or mystical resemblance, … Timon himself relates the event in a sort of parable.
Alcibiades. How came the noble Timon to this change?
Timon. As the moon does, by wanting light to give.
But then renew I could not, like the moon;
There were no suns to borrow of. (4.3.66) (143)

Paradigma, an argument from example judging the present from the past, (144)

The figure allegory continues a metaphor through an entire speech, as when Iago observes:
Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. (Oth., 1.3.322) (145)

Catachresis, a figure which we would call an implied metaphor, is the wrenching of a word, most often a verb or an adjective, form its proper application to another not proper, as when one says that the sword devours. This figure, like the use of nouns as verbs, and the formation of compounds and negatives, is in Shakespeare’s hands a vital creative instrument with which he forges sudden concentrations of meaning, and secures the compression, energy, and intensity which characterize great poetry.
Lent him our terror, dress’d him with our love (MM, 1.1.20)
Your ears… so fortified against our story (Ham. 1.1.31)
I will speak daggers to her, but use none. (Ham. 3.2.414)
A sponge… that soaks up the King’s countenance (Ham, 4.2.16)
Methinks My favour here begins to warp (WT, 1.2.365)
‘Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse (Tim, 3.4.14)
[misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor] (146)

Comparison: Greater, Equal, Less. Arguments form the greater, the equal, and the less are employed with force and frequency in Shakespeare’s plays.
Beholding Ophelia bereft of reason, Laertes is pierced with an argument stronger than reason could utter.
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,
It could not move me thus. (Ham, 4.5.168)
Macbeth… argues from equals.
I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (3.4.136) (148)

Auxesis is a figure which advances from less to greater by arranging words or clauses in a sequence of increasing force, …
Polonius enumerates the stages by which, he is confident, Hamlet became mad.
And he, repulsed, a short tale to make,
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves. (2.2.146) (150)

Meiosis belittles, …often achieved through a trope of one word, may range from bitter scorn to light derision.
Hamlet: What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? (3.1.131)
Celia [to Rosalind of Orlando] I found him under a tree, like a dropp’d acorn (AYLI, 3.2.247) (152)

Paradiastole is a figure which extenuates in order to flatter or soothe.
Yes, lion-sick, sick of proud heart. You may call it melancholy, if you will favour the man; but, by my head, ‘tis pride. (T&C, 2.393) [This wine is light vs This wine is bodiless, watery]. (152)

Charientismus is a figure through which one mollifies threatening words by answering them with a smooth and appeasing mock.
Coriolanus. What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourself scabs?
2.Citizen. We have ever your good word. (1.1.168)

Catacosmesis is the ordering of words from greatest to least in dignity… (152)

Epanorthosis, or correction, amends a first thought by altering it to make it stronger or more vehement.
Iago. I see, sir, you are eaten up with passion.
I do repent me that I put it to you.
You would be satisfied?
Othello. Would? Nay, I will. (3.3.391) (153)

By the figure dirimens copulation a point is added to balance or outweigh what has already been said… (153)

Emphasis is a figure which gives prominence to a quality or trait by conceiving it as constituting the very substance in which it inheres. Shakespeare apparently liked this figure, for he uses it frequently with swift and supple ease.
Prospero [to Caliban] Shrug’st thou, malice? (Tem., 1.2.367) (153)

Synonymia iterates the same thing in many words of the same meaning, to increase its force, as when Macbeth, informed that Fleance has escaped the murderers sent to kill him, realizes the significance of this news to himself.
But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears. (3.4.24) (154)

Exergasia, or exploit, augments by repeating the same thought in many figures.
Florizel. [to Perdita] I take thy hand—this hand,
As soft as dove’s down and as white as it,
Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fann’d snow that’s bolted
By th’northern blasts twice o’er. (WT, 4.4.373) (154)

an introductory narrative to open a speech, called paradiegesis,
Hear me, grave fathers—noble Tribunes, stay,
For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent
In dangerous wars whilst you securely slept.
For all my blood in Rome’s great quarrel shed,
For all the frosty nights that I have watch’d,
And for these bitter tears which now you see
Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks,
Be pitiful to my condemned sons. (Tit., 3.1.1) (155)

Cause and effect, antecedent and consequent are relations vital to dramatic structure. As a playwright keenly alive to this fact, Shakespeare draws arguments from the four causes—efficient, material, formal, and final—but most often from the last, since motives deeply affect both character and plot. (156)

Metalepsis is a figure which attributes a present effect to a remote cause, as when Isabel exclaims to Claudio:
There spake my brother! There my father’s grave
Did utter forth a voice. (MM, 3.1.86)
This figure serves Hamlet’s cast of though as he watches the grave diggers.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?... (5.1.223) (159)

Antisagoge is a figure, based on antecedent and consequent, which joins to a precept a promise of reward and to its violation, punishment.
Do’t, and thou hast the one half of my heart;
Do’t not, thou splitt’st thine own. (WT, 1.2.348) (160)

Polyptoton, namely, the repetition of words differing only in termination. Shakespeare uses this topic and figure with cogency.
Duke. Spirits are not finely touch’d But to fine issues. (MM, 1.1.36)

A third aspect of a word or notation is its ambiguity, its capacity to signify more than one meaning. The distinction between the various meanings of a word is included by Renaissance logicians among the forms of division. Therefore to play upon the various meanings of a word represented an intellectual exercise, a witty analysis commended and relished by Aristotle, practiced by Plato and by the great dramatists of Greece, esteemed and used by Cicero, employed by medieval and Renaissance preachers in their sermons, regarded as a rhetorical ornament by the Elizabethans, but frequently despised as false or degenerate wit from the eighteenth century to the present day. In The Spectator, No. 61, for May 10, 1711, Addison sketches the history of puns. Although he admits the high regard in which they were held by all rhetoricians and by both classical and Renaissance writers, and notes their frequency in the most serious works such as Bishop Andrewes’ sermons and Shakespeare’s tragedies, he concludes that they are blemishes discovered in writers of genius… (164)

Rightly to appreciate Shakespeare’s puns, one should regard them as examples of four highly esteemed figures of Renaissance rhetoric—antanaclasis, syllepsis, paronomasia, and asteismus… (165)

Antanaclasis is a figure which repeating a word shifts from one of its meanings to another.
1.Page. [of singing] We kept time, we lost not our time.
Touchstone. By my troth, yes! I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song. (AYLI, 5.3.38) (165)

Syllepsis is the use of a word having simultaneously two different meanings, although it is not repeated.
Rosalind. [I dwell] here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat. (AYLI, 32.354) (166)

Paronomasia differs from antanaclasis in that the words repeated are nearly but not precisely alike in sound.
Touchstone. [to Audrey] I am here with thee and goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths. (AYLI, 3.3.7) (166)

Asteismus is a figure of reply in which the answerer catches a certain word and throws it back to the first speaker with an unexpected twist, an unlooked for meaning. It usually has a mocking or scoffing character, …
Cloten. Would he had been one of my rank!
Lord. [aside] to have smell’d like a fool. (Cym. 2.1.17) (167)

We need only recall Donne’s punning on his own name at the very climax of his solemnly serious and moving “Hymn to God the Father” to remind ourselves how much a play on words was then esteemed.
Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. (RJ, 3.1.101) (168)

Although the ordinary function of words is to mirror thought, there are occasions when words are employed rather to veil meaning than to reveal it openly. Consequently the figures of deliberate obscurity, enigma, noema, and schematismus, depend on notation. … A simpler example of enigma occurs in Coriolanus, where the figure is explicitly named.
1.Citizen. You have deserved nobly of your country, and you have not deserved nobly.
Coriolanus. Your enigma?
1.Citizen. You have been a scourge to her enemies; you have been a rod to her friends. You have not indeed loved the common people. (2.3.94) (171)

Noema is an obscure and subtle speech. Hamlet employs this figure, along with asteismus, in a veiled complaint and subtle threat to the king.
King. How fares our cousin Hamlet?
Hamlet. Excellent, i’faith; of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, promise-cramm’d. you cannot feed capon so. (3.2.96) (171)

Alcibiades uses schematismus, or circuitous speech, in addressing the senators of Athens, for he covertly reprehends their tyrrany toward his friend by praising the contrary virtue.
I am an humble suitor to your virtues;
For pity is the virtue of the law,
And none but tyrants use it cruelly.
…O my lords,
as you are great, be pitifully good. (Tim, 3.5.7-52) (172)

Although interest in the clash of ideals is perennial, it was an outstanding characteristic of Elizabethan literature. Whether the contention was that of man against man in debate or of thought against though within a man, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists made full use of logical argumentation to develop conflict, which lies at the very heart of drama. (174)

The simplest arguable relations of propositions are contradiction, contrariety, and conjunction. Since the first two have been touched on in Chapter III, only the third will be discussed here. A mere conjunction of propositions may occasion doubt or disagreement. …
A conjunction of propositions is the true only if all of its parts are true. It is false if any part is false. (175)

Shakespeare’s characters are easily at home with the syllogism and its parts. …
Although the syllogism underlies all reasoning, it seldom appears in discourses in full, explicit form. Shakespeare has a few fully stated syllogisms, for example, Timon’s answer to his faithful steward Flavius expressing his complete misanthropy.
Flavius. Have you forgot me, sir?
Timon. Why dost ask that? I have forgot all men;
Then, if thou grant’st th’art a man, I have forgot thee. (4.3.479) (177)

Usually only two of the three propositions of a syllogism are expressed, while one is merely implicit. Such an abridged syllogism is called an enthymeme. Malvolio, reading the letter which Maria has written in Olivia’s hand in order to gull him, quotes a proposition, supplies a minor premise, and infers the hoped-for conclusion.
‘I may command where I adore.’ Why, she man command me: I serve her; she is my lady. Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. (TN, 2.5.126) (178)

In that form of enthymeme in which one of the premises is omitted there is a strong tendency to accept the conclusion without scrutinizing the missing premise on which the argument rests. For example, the plebeians, swayed by Antony speaking of Caesar, readily take for granted the conclusion he desires:
4. Plebian. Mark’d ye his words? He would not take the crown.
Therefore ‘tis certain he was not ambitious. (JC, 3.2.118)
They do not question the implicit major premise, A man who refuses the crown is not ambitious. (178)

The most usual form of enthymeme or abridged syllogism is that which states the conclusion first, supported by the major or the minor premise. Rhetoricians called this the figure aetiologia, a reason given for a sentence uttered, as when Hamlet, in directing that the players be well provided for, gives a reason which expresses Shakespeare’s esteem of his own profession.
Let them be well us’d; for they are the abstract and brief chronicle of the time. (2.2.547) (179)

The figure syllogismus, even more abridged in form, presents a single vivid suggestion, from which the mind leaps to the desired inference without adverting to the process of reasoning which underlies it. … For example, when the fool in Lear admonishes Kent,
Sirrah, you were best take my coxcomb,
The full implication is: You are a fool. A fool wears a coxcomb.
Vivid and clear in implication and all the more stimulating for their brevity… (180)

A sorites is a chain of reasoning, a series of abridged syllogisms or enthymemes. A sorites normally involves repetition of the last word of each sentence or clause at the beginning of the next,
[To Orlando] For your brother and my sister no sooner met but they look’d; no sooner look’d but they lov’d; no sooner lov’d but they sigh’d; no sooner sigh’d but they ask’d one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the rememdy: and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage. (AYLI, 5.2.35) (180)

A disjunctive syllogism has for its major premise a disjunctive proposition expressing alternatives, one of which the minor premise affirms or denies, while the conclusion in consequence affirms or denies the other.
The disjunctive syllogism is important in Hamlet. The prince must know wither the ghost is “a spirit of health or a goblin damn’d” (1.4.40). Hamlet later puts the issue more concretely: either the king will unkennel his guilt, or the ghost is a damned spirit (3.2.85). The king does unkennel his guilt by his agitation at the play, thus supplying the minor premise. Hamlet thereupon concludes that the ghost is not evil (186)

Practically identical with the disjunctive syllogism is the figure which the rhetoricians called apophasis, whereby all alternatives are rejected except one. (187)

In contrast to apophasis, the figure prosapodosis rejects none of the alternatives, but supports each with a reason. (188)

The most complex form of reasoning is the dilemma, a compound syllogism having for its major premise a compound hypothetical proposition and for its minor premise a disjunctive proposition. (188)

Fallacious Reasoning. Fallacies are either formal or material. Formal fallacies are those which violate the rules of the syllogism and therefore yield no valid conclusion, even when the premises are true. The most common formal fallacy is that which ignores the necessity of using the middle term in its full extension in at least one of the premises, as when Portia remarks of one of her suitors, the bibulous German:
I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a sponge. (MV, 1.2.107)
The implied syllogism is: A sponge drinks. He drinks. Therefore he is a sponge. Portia’s metaphor is the more piquant because of the fallacy. (191)

Material fallacies are those which have their root in the matter, that is, in the terms of a syllogism which appears to be formally correct. Logicians distinguish thirteen material fallacies, six occasioned by the ambiguity of language and seven by a false assumption hidden in the thought. (191)

Most common of material fallacies is equivocation, the use of the middle term in two different senses. Equivocation therefore involves one of the figures of ambiguity, usually antanaclasis, and provides lively repartee.
Desdemona. Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?
Clown. I dare not say he lies anywhere.
Desdemona. Why, man?
Clown. He’s a soldier; and for one to say a soldier lies is stabbing. (Oth, 3.4.1) (192)

In the fallacy of amphibology the ambiguity lies, not in a word, but in the grammatical construction. An amusing instance occurs in The Winter’s Tale, where the clown tells Autolycus:
But I was a gentleman born before my father; for the King’s son took me by the hand and call’d me brother; and then the two kings call’d my father brother. (5.2.150)
In the passage preceding this, gentleman born has been used repeatedly as a phrase meaning born a gentleman, but here born links itself to before, making the remark ludicrous. The fallacy of amphibology, often present in oracles, permits them to be interpreted in more than one way, so that they may be accounted true, whatever the result. (193)

The four other fallacies rooted in ambiguity occur less frequently. The fallacy of composition assumes that what is applicable to individual members of a group is applicable to the group. This fallacy seems to underlie Malvolio’s attitude in wanting to bind his Puritanical ideas on all. Sir Toby objects:
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (TN, 2.3.123) (194)

The fallacy of division is just the reverse of composition. No instance of Shakespeare’s use of it has been observed by the present writer. (194)

The fallacy of accent appears when the true significance of a word is altered by pronunciation, and a wrong conclusion drawn, (194)

The fallacy of accident results form the false assumption that something which belongs only to a substance may be attributed to an accident or adjunct of that substance, or contrariwise. For example, when two countrymen discover Henry VI, who has been deposed, and arrest him as an enemy of King Edward IV, to whom they have sworn allegience, Henry asks them whether they have not broken their oaths to be true subjects to him. One answers:
Sinklo. No; for we were subjects but while you were king.
Henry. Why, am I dead? Do I not breathe a man? (3H6, 3.1.80)
Here the question is whether the oath of allegiance attaches to the substance, the man who still lives, or to an accident, the quality of kingship. (194)

Most common of the fallacies of false assumption is the confusion of absolution and qualified statement, called secundum quid, which assumes that what is true in some respect is true absolutely, or contrariwise. Thus, when Hamlet asks whose grave the clown is digging, the clown takes Hamlet’s question in the absolute sense. [Hamlet errs b/c corpse is man only in qualified sense, as man must live.]
Hamlet. What man dost thou dig it for?
Clown. For no man, sir.
Hamlet. What woman then?
Clown. For none either.
Hamlet. Who is to be buried in’t?
Clown. One that was a woman, sir; but rest her soul, she’s dead.
Hamlet. How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. (5.1.141)
Hamlet recognizes the knave’s persistence in taking in an absolute sense a word uttered in a qualified sense. (195)

The fallacy of begging the question is present when the conclusion, or question to be proved, stated in the same or in equivalent words, is used in the proof and stands as one of the premises.
Fool. The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
Lear. Because they are not eight?
Fool. Yes indeed. Thou wouldst make a good fool (1.5.38)
Begging the question is said to be an especial failing of women, as Lucetta admits even while she offers it as her reason for thinking Proteus best among Julia’s suitors.
Julia. Your reason?
Lucetta. I have no other but a woman’s reason;
I think him so because I think him so. (TGV, 1.2.22) (199)

The fallacy of many questions consists in demanding a simple answer to a complex question. Thus, Somerset asks questions of Richard Plantagenet so couched as to demand the answer yes. Ot answer either yes or no would involve Richard in difficulties. He answers by making distinctions and thereby avoids the snare.
Somerset. Was not thy father, Richard Earl of Cambridge,
For treason executed in our late king’s days?
And by his treason stand’st not thou attainted,
Corrupted, and exempt from ancient gentry? …
Richard. My father was attached, not attainted;
Condemn’d to die for treason, but no traitor. (1H6, 2.4.90-7) (199)

Cacosistaton is an argument which serves as well for the one side as for the other. The gravediggers discuss the decision granting Christian burial to Ophelia, who has drowned herself. The argument which won leniency is the very one of which they, with a touch of the grotesque, complain.
2.Clown. Will you ha’ the truth an’t? if this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’Christian burial.
1.Clown. Why, there thou say’st! And the more pity that great folk should have count’nance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christen. (Ham., 5.1.26) (201)

To put another into such a position that whatever he says must needs be said amiss was called pseudomenos, … Mercutio does this when he seeks to forestall credence in Romeo’s dream before Romeo has had an opportunity to tell it:
Romeo. I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio. And so did I.
Romeo. Well, what was yours?
Mercutio. That dreamers often lie. (R&J, 1.4.50) (201)

Disputation. The figure aporia is a doubting or deliberating with oneself. (214)

Anthypophora is a reasoning with self, asking question and answering them oneself,
Iago uses this figure to inflame Roderigo against Cassio, effectively supplying the answers to his own questions as to whether Desdemona will tire of Othello and turn to another (2.1.223-53) (214)

By the figure anacoenosis the speaker asks counsel of his hearers, (215)

Synchoresis is a figure whereby the speaker, trusting strongly in his own cause, freely gives his questioner leave to judge him,
Brutus is so confident of rectitude in the killing of Caesar that he will let the adversary judge the cause
Our reasons are so full of good regard
That were you Antony, the son of Caesar,
You should be satisfied. (JC, 3.1.224) (215)

By the figure procatalepsis a speaker confutes the objection which his opponent is likely to make, (215)

Paromologia is a figure whereby one admits something unfavorable to his own position and then brings in a point which overthrows what was granted. Thus Menenius admits in part the charge of Sicinius against Coriolanus, but overthrows his conclusion, that Coriolanus ought therefore to be put to death.
Sicinius. He’s a disease that must be cut away.
Meneius. O, he’s a limb that has been a disease:
Mortal, to cut it off; to cure it easy. (3.1.295) (216)

Concessio is a figure whereby the speaker grants a point which hurts the adversary to whom it is granted, …
Falstaff. Boy, tell him I am deaf.
Page. You must speak louder. My master is deaf.
Justice. I am sure he is, to the hearing of anything good. (2H4, 1.2.77) (216)

Similar to concessio is metastasis, the turning back of an objection against him who made it. …
Oliver. Get you with him, you old dog!
Adam. Is ‘old dog’ my reward? Most true, I have lost my teeth in your service. (AYLI, 1.1.85)

Daisyrmus is a figure whereby an opponent’s argument is depraved or made ridiculous through base similitude. (218)

By the figure antirrhesis one rejects an opponent’s argument or opinion because of its error or wickedness. Thus Imogen indignantly rejects Iachimo and his fabricated testimony…
Away! I do condemn mine ears that have
So long attended thee. If thou wert honourable,
Thou wouldst have told this tale for virtue, not
For such an end thou seek’st, as base as strange. (Cym, 1.6) (219)

Commoratio is a figure whereby one seeks to win an argument by continually coming back to one’s strongest point, as Shylock does when he keeps insisting that Antonio pay the penalty and forfeit of the bond (MV, 4.1.36-242). (220)

Similar to commoratio, and often joined to it, is epimone, the repetition of the same point in the same words, somewhat in the manner of a refrain, as when Othello in a jealous frenzy repeatedly demands the handkerchief. (220)

Apoplanesis is a figure of disputaiton whereby one seeks to evade the issue by digressing to another matter. it is a characteristic dodge of Falstaff, who habitually seeks escape in starting holes of evasion…
Justice. Sir John, I sent for you before your expedition to Shrewsbury.
Falstaff. An’t please your lordship, I hear his Majesty is return’d with some discomfort from Wales. (2H4, 1.2.115) (221)

Pathos is that form of persuasion by which one endeavors to put the auditor into whatever frame of mind is favorable to one’s purpose. ... The practical measure of a speech or a play is its effect on the hearer, as Hamlet appreciates.
The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. (2.2.632)
Iago is one who understands the value of pathos in argument, and he knows well that passion colors judgment. Having wrought Othello to a pitch of jealous frenzy, he realizes that a mere show of tangible evidence will serve his turn, for
Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proof of holy writ. (3.3.322) (242-3)

To move to laughter is one way of disposing hearers favorably toward the cause one has in hand. … Pathos in drama is effected less often by humor than by indignation, scorn, hate, sorrow, pity, desire, wonder, joy—powerful in persuasion. (244)

Aposiopesis is the sudden breaking off of speech, as when Lear, beside himself with rage because Goneril and Regan deny his need of even one retainer, exclaims:
I will have revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! (2.4.282) (245)

Thaumasmus is the particular name given to an exclamation of wonder. Coming upon his former master, Timon, in the woods, the faithful steward Flavius exclaims:
O you gods!
Is yond despis’d and ruinous man my lord? (Tim, 4.2.464)

By erotema, or rhetorical question, … (246)

Apostrophe is literally a turning of speech form the persons previously addressed to another, sometimes to a thing or an abstraction personified.
Mark Antony turns aside from his talk to the assassins and speaks to Caesar’s corpse. (247)

In contrast to apostrophe, which by direct address conveys the immediacy of the present, anamnesis is a recital of matters past, most often of woes or injuries. (248)

Apocarteresis is the casting away of all hope in one direction and turning to another for aid, as when Hermione, seeing that Leontes is preconvinced of her guilt, turns her hope to the gods. (249)

Optatio is an ardent wish or prayer. Perhaps the best-known instance of it in Shakespeare is the cry of Richard III, “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (R3, 5.4.7), uttered on the battlefield when he is eager to find Richmond and slay him.
Lear, in the storm, moved by the primal strength of the elements, which searches hearts, calls on wickedness to disclose itself.
Emilia desires that heaven punish the knave who has abused Othello and wrought him to unfounded jealousy. (249-50)

Closely akin to optatio is vehement supplication, called deesis, or obtestatio.
Probably the most fearful supplication in all of Shakespeare is Lady Macbeth’s invocation of the spirits of evil, which appears to be nothing less than a plea to be possessed by demons. (1.5.41) (251)

Not far removed from supplication is mempsis, a complaint against injuries and a craving for redress. (251)

If wrongs or sorrows cannot be averted, they may be placated or assuaged. Of the three figures concerned with their alleviation, the first is paramythia, which seeks to console or to diminish sorrow. Titus Andronicus assures his son Lucius that he ought to rejoice rather than grieve at his banishment from Rome. (253)

Medela is a figure which seeks to palliate by conciliatory words the offenses of a friend when they can neither be defended nor denied. Thus Alcibiades admits but extenuates his friend’s faults. (253)

Philophronesis seeks to mitigate by gentle speech and humble submission the anger of an adversary whose might is too great to be overcome. Mark Antony resorts to this figure immediately on learning of Caesar’s murder, in order to gain a safe interview with the assassins. He sends his servant with this message to Brutus: (253)

In contrast to figures that seek to placate are those that mock and taunt. Mycterismus is a scornful mock, sometimes accompanied by facial gesture, as drawing the lip awry. The tribute remark how Coriolanus mocked them in precisely this manner.
When it is conveyed by words without facial gesture, mycterismus is a subtle rather than an open mock.
Hamlet comments scornfully on his mother’s hasty marriage.
The funeral bak’d meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. (1.2.180) (254)

Sarcasmsus is a more bitter taunt than mycterismus, a more open mock. Antony seizes an opportunity to scoff at Brutus.
Brutus. Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius.
Antony. In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words;
Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart,
Crying ‘Long live! Hail, Caesar!’ (JC, 5.1.29) (255)

Not far removed from mocks and taunts are accusations and reprehensions. By the figure epiplexis, or percontatio, one asks questions, not in order to know, but to chide or reprehended. Thus with scathing questions Coriolanus denounces the tribunes for having incensed the people against him after he had begged and obtained their voices for the consulship. (256)

Upbraiding another for ingratitude or impiety constitutes onedismus, a figure which Shakespeare uses with intense vehemence. Suffering from Goneril’s ingratitude, Lear wishes her to have no child, or else one that will
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpant’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child! (1.4.308) (256)

By categoria one lays open the secret wickedness of another before his face, as Hamlet does when he accuses his mother of
Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty; (257)

Proclees is a figure whereby one provokes an adversary to the conflict by a vehement accusation or by a confident offer of justification. (257)

Bdelygmia is a figure whereby one expresses hate or abhorrence, usually in a few words, as Lear does when he exclaims to Osward, Goneril’s steward,
Out, varlet, from my sight! (2.4.190) (258)

Threats and curses abound in Shakespeare’s works. By the figure cataplexies one threatens plagues or punishments, … Cleopatra’s use of the same figure to threaten the messenger who brings her news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia.
Hence,
Horrible villain! or I’ll spurn thine eyes
Like balls from me. I’ll unhair thy head!
Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire and stew’d in brine,
Smarting in ling’ring pickle. (AC, 2.5.62) (259)

The figure eulogia pronounces a blessing. (261)

Paeanismus expresses exuberance of joy. (261)

Ethos is the persuasion exerted upon the minds and hearts of the audience by the personal character of the speaker, causing them to believe in his sincerity, his truth, his ability, his good will toward them. Both logos and pathos promote ethos, for people more readily believe and trust a speaker who reasons clearly and cogently and who creates in them a friendly and sympathetic attitude toward himself and what he has to say. Spontaneous and genuine feeling in him begets a like feeling in them and convinces them of his sincerity.
There are four figures that promote ethos by revealing the sincerity and good will of the speaker. (272)

By means of the figure comprobatio a man commends the good he sees in the judges whose confidence he wishes to win. (273)

By parrhesia one is humbly respectful of, if necessity demands, courageously outspoken in addressing those whom he ought to reverence or fear on a matter which concerns them or those near of them. Thus Paulina respectfully but fearlessly comes before Leontes to speak of his conduct toward his queen. (273)

By syngnome one expresses forvieness of injuries. (274)