Jonson and the Neo-Latin Authorities for the Plain Style

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Probably at no point during the English Renaissance did the influence of neo-Latin writers upon English vernacular prose and poetry become so predominant as during the emergence of the rhetorical principles and practice of the plain style. The comprehensive descriptive treatises of classical poetic theory, such as those of Minturno and J. C. Scaliger, which were used extensively by the writers of English rhetoric books like George Puttenham and Henry Peacham the elder, did not recommend and defend so much as enumerate specific principles. Since the English rhetoric books were primarily concerned with methods of amplification and the more ornate stylistic conventions of the Continental literary movements, they were directed mainly at the courtly Petrarchan imitators and borrowed little from discussions of the plain style. This meant, of course, that one would have had to return to the Latin text of such general reference works as Scaliger's Poetices for information about the genus tenue or the genres which employed it, and even then such works often did little more than transpose their classical sources. The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting against the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson's Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style, since it describes a rhetorical position which he consistently practised in his own writing. Since he borrowed accurate descriptions of the style and its intentions from treatises of the men just mentioned, as well as from the famous works on the classical genres which employed the sermo by such scholars as Daniel Heinsius and Isaac Casaubon, the Discoveries can be described as a handbook of the new authorities on matters of style. Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson's stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590's on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century.