The Stoic Consolatio and Shakespeare

Abstract

Though Shakespeare's liking for Stoic commonplaces of the sort that one finds in the prose works of Seneca, Plutarch, Cardano, and Justus Lipsius no longer needs to be pointed out and though interesting evidence has recently been assembled1 of Shakespeare's utilizing the forms and principles of traditional Renaissance rhetoric, there is one rhetorical pattern used by Shakespeare, itself a development from Stoic prose models, which seems not to have caught the eye of modern students. This is the consolatio or “Paramythia … a forme of speech which the Orator vseth to take away, or diminish a sorrow conceiued in the minde of his hearer”, as Henry Peacham defined it in 1593.