Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered by Robert Cockcroft (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 779 drama of neighbourhood life; although their clientele is often assumed to have been predominantly male, Brown finds evidence in plays, ballads, and the popularity of folk heroines such as Mother Bunch to support a view of alehouses as more sexually mixed environments. In the three chapters that follow, she considers jests featuring cuckoldry, jests that show women retaliating against male violence, and examples of female rogue literature: some seem intended to appeal to women, while others are highly susceptible to feminist interpretation or appropriation. Finally, she considers the changing fortunes of the Griselda story, and finds that it tends not so much to recommend unquestioning submission as to open up space fordebate about the limits of wifely obedience. In some versions of the story,afterall, this obedience extends to acquiescence in apparent infanticide. Brown avoids psychoanalytic or Foucauldian theory as means of interpreting jests, instead emphasizing their radical, destabilizing potential. Jests evidently gave women access to images of female rebelliousness: we find women not only answering back to their husbands, but beating them up, covering them in excrement, or disparaging their sexual equipment ('The length of a snayle', p. 114). A lecherous priest is robbed of a testicle, a tripe-wife of her pubic hair. Brown does not always make it clear, however, whether the context of individual jests implies a female audience, or whether she is reading 'against the grain of their antifeminist satire' (p. 177). Furthermore, although Brown emphasizes 'the close relationship between stage comedies and the culture of the street' (p. 55), I sometimes found it difficultto understand the precise nature of the relationship she posits, as with her explanation of how 'the female rogue pamphlet plays a key role in charging the circuits ofparody, political satire, and topical allusion' in The Alchemist (p. 163). However, these are minor gripes. Better a Shrew is not only an entertaining read; as a qualified corrective to assumptions about early modern women's powerlessness and cultural disenfranchisement it is both salutary and cheering. London South Bank University Tom Rutter Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered. By Robert Cockcroft. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. x + 209pp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-80252-7. Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing is a brave book that does not deliver completely on its promise and at times proves to be difficultreading, but the attempt is laudable in itself and will, if nothing else, reinvigorate rhetorical approaches to early modern writing. In his book Robert Cockcroft challenges the contemporary opposition between reason and passion, seeking to demonstrate that ethos, pathos, and logos are more closely related in early modern texts than their contemporary critics recognize. For this reason, passion can be reconstructed by rhetorical means, giving us, as readers, a stronger and more accurate sense ofthe emotions called forthby texts of the period. To figurethe dynamic relationship between rhetoric and emotion, Cockcroft employs as his master metaphor an 'emotional laser': 'The energy built up between mirrors in a laser tube, patterns the progressive intensification of emotion between persuader and persuadee (more easily managed face to face, but quite capable of development between writer and reader)' (pp. 74-75). In pursuit of the logic of early modern passions, Cockcroft employs a method of 'double analysis', by which he analyses the operations of his emotional laser through two sets of vocabulary: classical rhetoric and what is, somewhat confusingly, called the 'new rhetoric', by which Cockcroft means not the theory of Chaim Perelman, but schema theory and other linguistic models. A second, and perhaps less successful, goal is to critique the judgements passed on the same texts by contemporary critics. 780 Reviews Rhetorical Affectis plagued by a number of problems, mostly but not exclusively of a structural nature. One is that Cockcroft will often introduce exemplary passages for close reading in early chapters, then direct his attention elsewhere, not returning to the passage upon which he and readers have just lavished such focused attention until the fifthand final chapter, where all the various threads of argument come together. Unfortunately, the reader has by then long forgottenwhat was said about the passage in previous chapters. This problem is exacerbated by...