The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England

Abstract

This study makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians’ words and readers’ actions; and that positive examples are never actionable. They serve, rather, as aspirational models of readers’ own posthumous biographies—like Alexander the Great envying Achilles for Homer’s writing of his life. This study defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation depend. It charts their operations through Philip Sidney’s poetics, Edmund Spenser’s poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts on and for Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. It expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones; and it historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The first full-length study in three decades of the rhetoric of moral exemplarity and of Prince Henry’s textual representations, The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from ‘the problem of metonymy’: the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. As this problem also besets historicist literary criticism, which is subject to corrections from the archive, this study recognizes that its argumentative rhetoric is itself exemplary.