Plotting and Edification in Shakespeare and Wotton

Abstract

A close study of the rhetorical shaping of speeches in 2 Henry iv and Coriolanus, reveals that Shakespeare shaped his speeches, particularly those of the main characters in accordance with a rhetoric that emphasises them by a judicious placing of verbal repetitions. In so doing his practice coincides with Humanist ideals of composition and with Marlowe’s use of figurative rhetoric in his plays. This type of plotting is a prominent feature of Elizabethan compositional practice. Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architecture (1624) today appears as a rearguard attack on the aesthetics of 16th and early 17th–century Italy, when he had been James i’s Ambassador to Venice, and an intended defence of the ideals of his youth. Rather than returning to London with a work praising the maraviglia and novelty of Italian art forms, he criticises the incipient Baroque taste on moral grounds and favours the utilitarian and civic art forms of the 15th Century. Form suited to content and function is the ideal of an art that relies on inner design rather than excessive ornament. These are also the ideals of Elizabethan poetics between Wills and Sidney. Wotton’s work is in many ways a time capsule, but like the plotted speeches in Coriolanus, it preserves an Elizabethan aesthetic that suggests how Shakespeare was inspired by Early Renaissance Italian aesthetic ideals, although with an awareness of recent developments in poetics and style, as is seen in 2 Henry iv.