TUDOR STYLE: ORNAMENT, PLAINNESS, AND WONDER (NA 367-69)

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex

verbal signals. (The contemporary equivalent would be the ease with which we deal with complex visual signals, effortlessly

processing such devices as fade-out, montage, crosscutting, and morphing.) In 1512, Erasmus published a work called De copia

that taught its readers how to cultivate "copiousness,'' verbal richness, in discourse. The work obligingly provides, as a sample,

a list of 144 different ways of saying "Thank you for your letter."

In Renaissance England, certain syntactic forms or patterns of words known as "figures" (also called ''schemes") were shaped and

repeated in order to confer beauty or heighten expressive power. Figures were usually known by their Greek and Latin names, though

in an Elizabethan rhetorical manual, The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham made a valiant if short-lived attempt to give them English equivalents, such as "Hyperbole, or the Overreacher" and "Ironia, or the Dry Mock." Those who received a grammar-school education throughout Europe at almost any point between the Roman Empire and the eighteenth century probably knew by heart the names of up to one hundred such figures, just as they knew by heart their multiplication tables. According to one scholar's count, William Shakespeare knew and made use of about two hundred.

As certain grotesquely inflated Renaissance texts attest, lessons from De copia and similar rhetorical guides could encourage prolixity and verbal self-display. Elizabethans had a taste for elaborate ornament in language as in clothing, jewelry, and furniture, and, if we are to appreciate their accomplishments, it helps to set aside the modern preference, particularly in prose, for unadorned simplicity and directness. When, in one of the age's most fashionable works of prose fiction, John Lyly wishes to explain that the vices of his young hero, Euphues, are tarnishing his virtues, he offers a small flood of synonymous images: "The freshest colors soonest fade, the teenest [i.e., keenest] razor soonest turneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with moths." Lyly's multiplication of balanced rhetorical figures sparked a small literary craze known as "Euphuism," which was soon ridiculed by Shakespeare and others for its formulaic excesses. Yet the multiplication of figures was a source of deep-rooted pleasure in rhetorical culture, and most of the greatest Renaissance writers used it to extraordinary effect.

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Elizabethans were certainly capable of admiring plainness of speech—in King Lear Shakespeare contrasts the severe directness of the virtuous Cordelia to the "glib and oily art" of her wicked sisters- and such poets as George Gascoigne, Thomas Nashe, and, in the early seventeenth century, Ben Jonson wrote restrained, aphoristic, moralizing lyrics in a plain style whose power depends precisely on the avoidance of richly figurative verbal pyrotechnics. . . . . But here and in other plain-style poetry, the somber, lapidary effect depends on a tacit recognition of the allure of the suppleness, grace, and sweet harmony that the dominant literary artists of the period so assiduously cultivated. Poetry, writes Puttenham, is "more delicate to the ear than prose is, because it is more current and slipper upon the tongue [i.e., flowing and easily pronounced], and withal tunable and melodious, as a kind of Music, and therefore may be termed a musical speech or utterance."