The rhetorical coherence of Hooker’s Preface to the Lawes

Abstract

This study questions the current consensus that chapters eight and nine of the Preface to Hooker’s Lawes were added quickly on last-minute advice from George Cranmer for polemical purposes. In contrast, this paper argues for the Preface’s rhetorical unity by suggesting Hooker had a firm command of his dispositio [layout], and that the Preface we know is the one intended. The justification is threefold. First: the article claims that on textual grounds Cranmer’s ‘An Excellent Letter’ had little to do with the Preface despite claims to the contrary; rather, that letter influenced Hooker’s Dedicatory Epistle to Archbishop Whitgift in Book V of the Lawes. To demonstrate this, we will cite five textual relationships between those two texts. Second: we explain the break between chapters seven and eight of the Preface by seeing chapter eight as a form of the classical digressio. Finally, we highlight the thematic unity of the Preface and illustrate how the eighth and ninth chapters form a rhetorical climax.