Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric

Abstract

From Brian Vickers in “A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies” Muir & Schoenbaum 1971 Edited & emphasis added (Patrick Imrie) I Rhetoric was for over two thousand years the most important discipline to anyone interested in literature. It was in existence as an art several centuries before Aristotle and it extended its influence on Western literature right up to the time of Wordsworth. It began life as a practical tool in the law-courts, for our earliest knowledge of rhetoric is as an aid to litigation (Kennedy) and it was developed and applied to politics in Greece and still more so in Rome. The Romans took especially seriously the importance of rhetoric in education, and although they derived the principle and much of their system from Hellenistic schools it was thanks to their thorough establishment of the rhetorical education throughout the Roman Empire that rhetoric established itself in both secular and Christian contexts strongly enough to survive the fall of that Empire and continue in vigour through the Middle Ages (Curtius, C. S. Baldwin, Faral), indeed gathering momentum in the Renaissance partly through the separate developments in Byzantium and their influx into Florence (Bolgar). In England rhetoric was persuaded with the same fervour as in other Humanist cultures (Howell) perhaps more so, because of the increasing role it played in education (Curtius, T. W. Baldwin). Indeed the English rhetoricbooks of the sixteenth century seem more inventive, more imaginative in their realization of the literary applications of rhetoric than their continental counterparts.