Sense and Sententiae

Abstract

This essay aims to rethink a rhetorical microgenre: the “sentence” or sententia, a brief maxim usually stating a moral principle. My aim is to show that rhetorical sentences entail more flexible cognitive and interpretive acts than has usually been recognized. I read the theory and practice of the sentence alongside that of legal maxims, arguing that these small forms can cast a useful light on each other. I focus in particular on literary characters who misuse sentences in ways that prompt inferences about them that go beyond anything they either could or would say themselves. The act of sentence-making entails a judgment that balances the content of the statement against the context in which it is made; that judgment has analogues in law, in both equitable interpretation and the theory of fictions; in literature, that legal hermeneutics is put to work for the construction of character, conscripting what cognitive science calls “mentalizing” for the projection of a kind of inwardness fashioned out of the materials of common opinion. The essay ends by arguing that connecting rhetorical sentences to legal maxims allows us to think seriously about the relationship between legal and literary fiction as it shapes Shakespeare’s Hamlet.