Brady Jensen
ENG 450
12/9/2012
Preface:
I must confess that this is my second attempt at this project. When I first began, I intended to try to reconcile rhetoric and literature, but after a couple hours of attempting to compile and arrange my thoughts, I became aware that that is something which, at the present time, I have not sufficient knowledge to do justice. While the importance of such a work could be valuable, it will have to wait until a time when I find myself more informed about rhetoric as a whole. I will not be surprised if that work becomes the focus of some of my later academic research, but for now, I must be content to make do with what I have at my disposal and give the work at hand the attention that it deserves.
Shakespearian Rhetoric
“Then rhetoric does not treat of all kinds of discourse?” (Plato 122). The question seems simple enough; and when Gorgias responds with “no,” I think that most readers (especially rhetoricians) give a slight cringe. In fact, it seems clear that rhetoric does cover all forms of discourse including literature. I must, therefore, admit at finding myself quite at a loss when I first thought about the connection between literature and rhetoric. This thought first occurred to me as I was reading through Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life wherein he says, “Wit is too besieged in the [Shakespearian] Sonnets by a strict restraint of ethos and pathos; logos reigns almost unchallenged” (85). While this statement contains only some of the most basic rhetorical terms, I found myself caught off-guard. Thus inspired, I was determined to delve into the topic of rhetoric and literature using the Shakespearian Sonnets as my starting point. In the research, I came across several points that drove me to consider the sonnets as forms of epideictic rhetoric, and expanding on that principle, I will explore several of the sonnets and their epideictic properties. Within this analysis, I hope to explore what components of the sonnets most (if not all) readers connect to which helps to make these verses so timeless.
While the realm of rhetoric is large enough as to create an entire book about Shakespearian sonnets, I intend to focus on one facet of Aristotle’s three types of rhetoric, epideictic rhetoric. Epideictic rhetoric focusses on topics of praise and blame. While reading through the sonnets and the criticism around them, I became aware of four focusses within the sonnets. The first is the collection of sonnets about the fair youth who Bloom suggests is a fusion of the earls of Southampton and Pembroke (46). The second is the dark lady; the third the rival poet, both the dark lady and the rival poet, Bloom suggests, are composites of multiple individuals; and the fourth, Shakespeare himself. I will apply a rhetorical analysis to each of these (even though there is some cross over) in an attempt to demonstrate some of Shakespeare’s rhetorical use and complexities.
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and swell in lovers’ eyes.
--55
This poem, praising both the fair youth and the poet, starts by the poet praising himself. “This powerful rhyme,” shows the poet’s confidence in himself and his works. By starting the poem with this ethos, Shakespeare attempts to build trust with the youth, especially since the speakers, who for this kind of analysis, we must assume is the same, or nearly the same, as the poet, addresses the subject directly as “you.” This second person turns the poem (though many of the poems are structured in this way) into a direct address where there is a special relationship between the poet and the subject. Shakespeare makes another appeal to self-praise in lines 10-11, “your praise shall still find room/ even in the eyes of all posterity.” By containing both the praise of the youth and the poem itself in the phrase “your praise,” Shakespeare makes the two inseparable, relying on his own ethos to pass the praise of this friend down to future generations. Another rhetorical device that continues throughout the sonnet is Shakespeare’s use of the topic of fear. By continually referring to death, war, burning, and the Apocalypse, Shakespeare uses fear as a way to drive the youth to find comfort in his verses. This pathos almost forces to the reader to find shelter in the praise of the poet because that is the only thing the poem left on which to hold. Finally, in the final line “you... swell in lovers’ eyes,” leads me to conclude that this phrase is to function as an enthymeme. Because the youth is never referred to by anything other than the second person personal pronoun, the reader is able to insert whomever he or she wishes into the poem. In fact, I believe that the sonnets as a whole would be entirely less successful if they were to address individuals more specifically. The second person address leaves openings throughout the sonnets which allows for readers to feel included and to be able to move beyond the simple praising of one individual Shakespeare seems to have in mind and instead to substitute infinite combinations.
Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,
But now my gracious numbers are decayed
And my sick Muse doth give another place.
I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen,
Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue and he stole that word
From thy behaviour, beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek: he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
Then thank him not for which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee thou thyself dost pay.
--79
In this sonnet, one which addresses the rival poet, there are three distinct attitudes, one towards the rival poet, one towards the muse, and the last towards the poet himself. Within the poem, we see the poet take both sides of an epideictic speech, both praise and blame. Throughout the entire poem, he is consistently praising the muse. Even when the muse abandons him, he cannot help but say that the muse in the right for looking for someone “worthier” than himself. This leads us to the poet’s attitude regarding himself. Much different than the preceding, and one of the later poems, the poet humbles himself compared to the muse. This submission to, what can be interpreted as divine inspiration, or some unexplainable creative drive, appeals to the pathos of the audience in the form of pity. A reader who sympathizes with the speaker will be more likely to take the poet’s side against the rival especially with the description with which Shakespeare paints the rival poet. Shakespeare moves towards the opposite end of the spectrum of epideictic rhetoric when describing the rival. Most apparent is the pecuniary diction. Starting from line 8 and continuing through the end, we see words such as “robs”, “pays”, “lends”, “stole”, “afford”, and “owes.” This diction functions in two ways. The first is that Shakespeare equates the rival poet with being a thief of the muse’s qualities and therefore anyone who supports him or reads his work is aiding and abetting in the theft. Since no one wants to consider themselves a thief, Shakespeare drives a wedge between this rival poet and his potential, or existing, audience. Secondly, it introduces the topic of wealth. It was first used against the rival poet, and now it functions to elevate the gifts of the muse. The creativity that she can bestow upon the poets is something equivocal to money. This is something with which more of the poet’s readership will be able to identify compared to trying to quantify creativity. So by addressing the quality of the muse, the rival poet, and Shakespeare himself, and then introducing monetary terms, the audience is going to want to support the ‘better’ person in this poetic contest.
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
--138
This sonnet about the dark lady is different from the other three sonnets because it addresses another individual without a form of a second person personal pronoun. In fact, there seems to be a great distance in this poem between the poet and the subject. But instead of distance, the poet and subject are closer than they appear, as Bernard elucidates, “Shakespeare’s sonnets are heavily suffused with [a] neo-Petrachan strain” which “glorifies the poetic act itself” as a form of “self-flattery” (79). Even in the love poems, “focus shifts from the lady to the poet” (79). At no point in the process are the readers allowed to forget the poet, but instead, they are constantly reminded of the poet himself. As the poet can narrate both sides of the poem, his and hers, “we are auditors of a dramatic performance,” this is more clear than in the two previous sonnets (Fraser 418). This structure allows for the reader to understand that neither side seems to be acting maliciously. Instead, we see the appeal to “the pathos of the lovers’ plight” from both sides (Bernard 82). Both the speaker and his love just want to be happy, and that is something with which an audience can sympathize. Even in their shared delusion that the lies can lead to timeless happiness, they try to find happiness in the imperfections by convincing themselves that neither of them are lying. It is a very human reaction to attempt to eke out happiness even in the most dire of circumstances. This leads to the topic of love and forces the reader to question under what conditions love can exist, and by proposing answers to the questions, the readers are enthymematically applying their own lives to the situation. And finally in the couplet, we get the pun on the verb to lie (I know there is a rhetorical term for this, but the BYU website doesn’t work so well when you are trying to go from definition to term). This pairing leaves us, even at the very end facing the duality between the good and the bad, the reward and the sacrifice. The poet seems willing to ask the questions but refuses to leave us with any answers.
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part,
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read:
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, my self, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
--62
In the final sonnet in my selection, Shakespeare takes some time to praise himself. There is obviously very little in the sonnet besides that; but I think that this is an example of the poet exuding ethos. When we couple this sonnet with his other works that rely on the confidence that his verses will withstand time, we see some of that vanity that lives inside all of us in Shakespeare. This conclusion is seconded when you take into account that the poet realizes that this self-love is a sin, he recognizes that this is bad, yet, at the same time, he believes that only his verse will withstand time; he is therefore left with no other choice by to praise himself. As Perelman describes, “To understand an orator [or poet], we must make the effort required to render his discourse coherent and meaningful. This effort requires goodwill and respect for the person who speaks and for what he says” (1397). It seems like self-praise for its own sake, but in the beginning, Shakespeare didn’t have the worldwide reputation that he now possesses, so he was forces to create the “goodwill” and “respect” himself in the verses themselves.
Perhaps that after this analysis it is obvious that there is very little (if any) distance between the study of rhetoric and poetics. However, I would suggest that poetics should be viewed as a branch of rhetoric rather than two equivalent forces. Rhetoric is obviously abundant in the Shakespearian sonnets, and perhaps is Shakespeare was less of a rhetorician, he never would have been capable of writing anything worthy of passing down for hundreds of years. In fact, it could be argued that the tendency of Shakespeare’s work to be handed down and read so consistently is due to the fact that Shakespeare is one of the greatest rhetoricians that ever lived. Whether he was aware of the formal application of his rhetoric or if it was just an inherent knowledge of language may never be known. But despite the complications of being able to know the extent of Shakespeare’s genius, perhaps an in depth examination of Shakespearian rhetoric would be beneficial to academia’s understanding of rhetoric as a whole.
Works Cited
Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Baldwin, Charles S. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Interpreted from Representative Works. Gloucester, Mass.: Macmillan, 1959. Print.
Bernard, John D. ""To Constancie Confin'de": The Poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets." PMLA 94.1 (1979): 77-90. Print.
Bitzer, Lloyd F. "The Rhetorical Situation." Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1-14. Print.
Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011. Print.
Fraser, Russell. "Shakespeare at Sonnets." The Sewanee Review 97.3 (1989): 408-27. Print.
Perelman, Chaim. "The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning." Modern and Postmodern Rhetoric (1970): 1384-409. Print.
Plato. Essential Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Barns & Noble Classics, 2005. Print.
Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Print.
Struever, Nancy S. "Shakespeare and Rhetoric." Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 6.2 (1988): 137-44. University of California Press. Web.
