Parenthetical citations, sometimes serving to locate more
than one quotation, refer to Book and Chapter of Puttenham’s Arte of English
Poesie. Numbers in brackets are
endnotes.
With the decay in
the social value of public speaking and the general fading of the Classical
tradition, the role of oratory in education, once so prominent, has all but
vanished. Only a few generations ago,
the brightest secondary students competed in declamation competitions and
participated in Mock Trial exercises that would have been recognizable to an
ancient Athenian. For two thousand years
many wrote about rhetoric as the definitive art of the effective use of
language and drew examples from both poetry and speeches. Though there are significant exceptions, many
literary theorists have used the vocabulary of rhetoric from Rhetorica ad
Alexandrum, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian and Cicero,
through medieval writers like Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and
John of Garland. The most important
Elizabethan work in this lineage is George Puttenham’s Arte of English
Poesie (1589) which, though entirely concerned with poetry, employs the
concepts of earlier rhetorical manuals.
While Puttenham thus roots his work deeply in past authorities, he is
nonetheless able to use it to develop and express sophisticated, sometimes
novel, concepts. He is far more
pragmatic than theoretical, tolerant of contradictions in the interest of
presenting a full description view of poetry.
On a good many matters he is unwilling “to commit himself and holds the
balance between the contesting parties,” as a modern critic comments on his
posture regarding the use of rhyme and of learned vocabulary. [1]
Puttenham’s
rhetorical orientation was standard in his own day [2], but his use of it was
unusually pragmatic, rigorous, and productive.
He fully understands the arbitrary nature of the relation between
signifier and signified, noting, “speech it
selfe is artificiall and made by man,” [3] yet, in a dialectical gesture that
recurs throughout his work, he also says “VTterance also and language is giuen
by nature to man for perswasion of others.”
(I, 4)
A parallel
ambiguity is reflected in his opening claim that the poet is a “maker” and thus
in a way divine while at the same time being a “counterfaitor” who simply imitates
the world around since “Poesie an art not only of making, but also of imitation.” (I, 1)
Similarly he is elusive, or, rather, pleased to affirm both options, on
the old issue of whether a poet is born or artistic skill must be learned,
observing that poetic skill might “come by nature or by arte or by exercise.”
(III, 2)
Puttenham
declares that the poet must be inspired “by some diuine instinct, the
Platonicks call it furor.” (I, 1) This
special access to truth led to poets’ role as “Prophetes or seears” (I, 3),
giving birth then to religion since the first role of poetry is “the laud
honour & glory of the immortall gods.” (I, 9) Poets then created culture, civilization, and
all the arts and sciences.
Yet these grand
roles seem forgotten when he treats poetry as a courtly accomplishment. Puttenham, writing in the wake of Castiglione
[4], describes his work as is “fitter to please the Court then the schoole” and
claims that his “chiefe purpose herein is for the learning of Ladies and young
Gentlewomen, or idle Courtiers, desirous to become skilful in their owne mother
tongue, and for their priuate recreation to make now & then ditties of
pleasure.” (III,10) This paradoxically
studied off-handedness is surely itself a form of sprezzatura or Renaissance
“cool.” A wider gap could scarcely exist
than between this aestheticism and the pious author who defined the first
function of poetry as “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods,”
followed by cdelebrating princes, then “the praise of vertue & reproofe of
vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the reuealing of sciences naturall
& other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages
by perswasion.”
Only then does he accept also “the
consolation and repose of temperate myndes, finally the common solace of
mankind in all his trauails and cares of this transitorie life.” (I, 9)
The dialectical
nature of aesthetic language is also reflected, Puttenham recognizes, by
another sort of doubling, the operation of novel figurative language over the
inherited formulae of everyday speech.
In the gap between expected usage and artfully twisted figure is born
beauty and delight, new thoughts, and courtliness, an aristocratic cultivated
style. Puttenham calls “our ordinary
talke then which nothing can be more vnsauourie and farre from all ciuilitie.”
(III,2) According to him the beauty of
both women and poems depends upon their being “artificially handled.” “The discreet vsing”
of figures” in writing is like the use of ornament in clothing and “other
mechanicall artes” requiring taste. (III,1) He quotes Horace on changing fashions in
language as in other matters. (III, 3)
“Figuratiue
speech is a noueltie of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged
from the ordinarie habite and manner of our dayly talke and wri∣ting” (III, 10) Novelty seems a requirement since poetry’s
appeal derives from “a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, dis∣guising
it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed.”
(III, 1) Yet at the same time, every new
work is built upon the old and new fashions are often accepted, “though many
tymes worse then the old.” (I.7)
Poetry may not
only be in bad taste; it also may mislead, since the domain of poetry includes lying
as well as truth-telling, as Hesiod had had it in one of the earliest
formulations of art’s ambiguous character.
Puttenham cautions that “poesie should not be imployed vpon vayne
conceits or vicious or infamous.” (I, 8)
He dramatizes the negative potential of poetry with the cautionary story
of Hegesias (III, 8) whose words, according to Cicero [5], persuaded people to
suicide with his words.
Yet he feels that
it is not the failings of poetry, but rather a failure of appreciation by those
who should be its consumers that poetry has lost prestige since ancient times, in
spite of its once central place in all culture, to the extent that the poet is
labeled “light headed.” Poets as well as
“Poesie are despised, & the name become, of honorable infamous, subiect to
scorne and derision.”
He says that a poet, instead of being respected, is likely to be called “in
disdayne a phantasticall” man. (I, 8)
In the course of
his compendious volume, Puttenham provides a rich exposition of rhetorical
figures and an invaluable guide to the taste of his day, but the reader looking
for a coherent theory will find a wealth of ideas but little system. Thus language is said to be wholly artificial
and man-made as well as given by nature.
Poetry is wholly original, created as though by divine fiat and, at the
same time, imitation or “counterfeit.” Powerful
poetry is at once the result of a “divine instinct” and the imitation of
models. The ends of poetry could not be
more ambitious – praise of god and inculcation of morality – and yet it is also
a “priuate recreation” pastime for “idle Courtiers.” Poetic language must be fresh and novel, yet
it must also follow accepted models. A poet,
finally, he finds, might be valued as the most acute and inventive thinker, the
sort he calls “euphantasiote” but also might be “dismissed and derided.”
(III, 8) All these propositions may
indeed be true at once – art is more adept than other forms of discourse in
handling contradiction and ambiguity – but Puttenham is unconcerned with
delineating the tensions among these antinomies.
For him poetry’s
fallen status calls for a heart-felt lament resting on the notion of a bygone
Golden Age rather than a specific program for its returning to relevance. Even apart from the marvelous catalogue of
figures his book is a useful record of the ideas current in his day and what he
knew or took to be the opinions of the past.
The venerable study of rhetoric broadly conceived which had formed the
foundation of education for millennia underlies Puttenham’s careful work,
recording rather than reconciling the contradictions and mysteries that have
always characterized art. If he affirms
opposites, it is because only in that way might he provide an accurate picture
of his (and of our) lived experience of literature.
1. 1. Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (1930), 357.
2.
2. Among his predecessors extending the tradition
in England were Richard Sherry, A Treatise on Schemes and Tropes (1550),
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Angel Day, The English
Secretorie (1586), and Abraham Fraunce The Arcadian Rhetorick
(1588), and Henry Peacham The Compleat Gentleman (1622). Some critics, notably Sir Philip Sidney, focused,
somewhat defensively, on a moral defense rather than a broader view of art’s
ends and a technical analysis of poetic devices.
3.
3. Similarly, “SPeach is not naturall to man” (III,
3).
4.
4. Castiglione’s The Courtier, the influence
of which on Puttenham and others can hardly be overstated, had been translated
in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.
5.
5. Tusculan Disputations 1.83.
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