Sir Thomas Elyot Research Articles

“She dances featly”: Dance as Rhetoric in Act 4, Scene 4 of The Winter's Tale

In The Muses' Concord, James H. Jensen observes that rhetorical theory and practice ground all the arts of the Renaissance era (47). This connection is evident in the discourse of rhetorical and dance performance shared between Classical rhetoric treatises and Renaissance dance manuals, which leads one to understand both arts equally as forms of ordered and measured language. The recognition and perspectives of dance as a form of rhetoric contribute much to our understanding of the culture's awareness and economy of nonverbal communication. The shared elements of rhetoric and dance can be observed in the sheep-shearing festival scene of The Winter's Tale (4.4). A rhetorical reading of this scene conveys the rhetorical quality of dance, as well as its dramaturgical function. Framing this reading is a cultural and historical context that delineates the association between dance and rhetoric as it was understood by Quintilian, Sir Thomas Elyot, and Ben Jonson. Indeed, Perdita's corporeal eloquence communicates an air of nobility out of place in the rustic setting of this scene and misplaced within this assumed peasant. Because Perdita's true identity is discovered soon after (5.2), this scene, with its covert comingling of peasants and aristocrats and its graceful spectacle, can be understood as a pivotal moment that moves the play from its discordant beginning to its harmonious end.

Shaping the Conversation: Madeleine de Scudéry's Use of Genre in Her Rhetorical Dialogues

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

<i>Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words</i>. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

Thomas More and Charles V Part III / III Such a worthy councellour

More’s retirement at Chelsea after his resignation lasted less than two years, a time which he devoted to write his books of controversy (especially during 1533), while trying to keep himself away from public life. The life of the ex-Chancellor contrasts with the Emperor’s frantic activity in Italy, Spain and Northern Africa. As the situation of Catherine of Aragón worsened, the possibility of war between England and Charles V became more and more real. And yet, a careful revision of available data proves that the Emperor never considered this course of action seriously: his real concerns were the Turks, the strengthening of his alliance with the Pope to face Lutheranism, and the ever hostile Francis I. As an epilogue to this research, I will bring into consideration the Emperor’s words of praise about the English Chancellor, as reported presumably by Sir Thomas Elyot.

Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer. Gabriele Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. viii + 440 pp. $135.

Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer. Gabriele Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. viii + 440 pp. $135.

Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer by Gabriele Stein (review)

Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer by Gabriele Stein (review)

Richard III’s Baby Teeth

Richard III’s Baby Teeth

Thomas Elyot : du courtisan disgrâcié à l’éducateur plébiscité

The purpose of this paper was to bring Sir Thomas Elyot (1490–1546) out of oblivion. In this perspective, we mentioned important biographical elements – his reputation as a self-taught man, his involvement in the circle of humanists meeting at More’s home in Chelsea, his career as a lawyer, his beginnings at court and his quick fall into disgrace. Then we tackled his career as a writer resulting from his disgrace. We evoked not only his three best sellers The Boke Named the Governor, Latin-English Dictionary and The Castle of Helth but also more obscure works – political pamphlets and moral treatises which rooted him undoubtedly into the fight against tyranny. As this fight cannot be won without the irreproachable training of the élite, we focused then on the education of young noblemen to which he devoted the beginning of his first work. The reading of the first book of The Boke Named the Governor gave us the opportunity to discover a true humanist but also a modern man who raised questions that are still topical.

The Concept of the Person in Eric Voegelin's Early Philosophy (1922-1934)

The concept of the person in Eric Voegelin's early philosophy was developed in a reception, among others, of the works of Othmar Spann, H. Bergson, Sir Thomas Elyot, Stefan George, Max Scheler, and St. Augustine. It involved critically distancing himself from the Neo-Kantianism of German Staatslehre (Kelsen, Weber).

Language in migration: multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics

The limit: music needs no translation. Lyric poetry: closest to music and posing the greatest difficulties for translation. –Walter Benjamin, ‘Translation For and Against’1 With the Warsaw Express,...

Jennifer Summit . Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 343. $35.00.

This intriguing and massively researched book traces the idea of the library from the late Middle Ages well into the early modern period. The first chapter deals with the libraries used by John Lydgate: those of Duke Humfry and of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds; the second with the “lost libraries of English humanism,” focusing on Thomas More, Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Elyot. From here Jennifer Summit moves on to postmonastic Reformation libraries, notably that of Matthew Parker, where her dominant argument is that “Reformation library making is .… aligned with and even contingent upon the act of library breaking”; thence she proceeds to the Cotton Library and its use as a source of evidence, with the rather extravagant claim that Robert Cotton “invented the idea of the archival source.” Finally, she investigates Francis Bacon's attitude toward libraries. He deplored them as the antithesis to the laboratories of observation for the advancement of learning, even as he deployed the classifications of knowledge that library catalogues had defined.

Hamlet's dramatic arras

The suspense of Hamlet 3.4 has everything to do with what is behind the arras. Summoned to Gertrude's closet after staging The Mousetrap, Hamlet hears a noise behind the arras and, assuming it to b...

George Puttenham's Lewd and Illicit Career

George Puttenham's Lewd and Illicit Career Steven W. May Two works establish George Puttenham's claim to our attention as a significant Elizabethan writer. He is best known as the probable author of The Art of English Poesy (1589), a book unanimously considered by scholars "the central text of Elizabethan courtly poetics."1 Of secondary importance is Puttenham's A Justification of Queene Elizabeth in Relacion to the Affaire of Mary Queene of Scottes. Puttenham's claim to this defense of Mary's beheading is based on two undisputed attributions among its dozen known manuscript copies.2 A third work, his Partheniades, is a collection of original poetry that he wrote for the Queen. Despite its potential relevance to our understanding of Puttenham's idea of courtly poetics, scholars have all but ignored this work. His biographers, distracted by their concern over whether or not he was responsible for The Art, have gradually filled in much of his life story, yet not as fully as readily available sources permit. Moreover, with the deposit of the Jervoise of Herriard papers at the Hampshire Record Office during the 1960s, an invaluable new source of biographical information about the Puttenham family has come to light.3 In aggregate these records create a three-dimensional portrait of George Puttenham, a portrait not easily reconciled with the established stereotype of The Art's court-wise and sophisticated author. Spouse abuse, sexual slavery, and multiple excommunications from the Church of England all figure in Puttenham's revised biography. The graphic, sometimes lurid details of his life story may not finally decide the authorship question, yet they affect significantly the received understanding of all the writings attributed to him. George Puttenham was the second son of Robert Puttenham of Sherfield-on-Loddon, Hampshire, and his wife Margery, the sister of Sir Thomas Elyot. In November 1546, at age sixteen, he matriculated from Christ's College Cambridge, but did not take a degree. He was admitted to the Middle Temple on August 11, 1556. By early 1560 Puttenham had married the twice widowed Lady Elizabeth Windsor, a local heiress whose manor of Herriard was located just ten miles south of the Puttenham [End Page 143] family seat at Sherfield. She separated from George in the spring of 1575, then spent more than a decade trying to coerce him into paying the alimony awarded her by the Court of Arches. In May 1588 the Crown granted George two leases in reversion, no doubt in gratitude for his authorship of the Justification. Richard Field published The Art in 1589 without indication of authorship but prefaced by a dedication to Lord Burghley. Puttenham died in London very late in 1590 or in early 1591. Puttenham's admission to the Middle Temple was a pivotal event in his career. His membership was probably influenced by the fact that both his uncle, Sir Thomas Elyot (d. 1546), and brother-in-law, Sir John Throckmorton, were Templars. But George did not attend the Inns of Court for merely social reasons. As a younger son he needed a livelihood, and his subsequent career shows that he was well-versed in English law, a background he no doubt acquired during his years at the Middle Temple.4 His knowledge of the law also encouraged George to initiate and pursue many of his lawsuits, while tempting him to make decisions and take risks that skirted the exact letter of the law, thus eliciting many of the legal proceedings filed against him. Puttenham's legal training ended prematurely, however, with his marriage to Lady Windsor, a circumstance also directly connected with his Middle Temple affiliation. Elizabeth's second husband, William, second Baron Windsor, was a professional lawyer and bencher of the society at the time of Puttenham's admission. Windsor died in August 1558, and George married his widow less than two years later (Cokayne, 12.797), not without Throckmorton's assistance, for Lady Windsor later lamented to the Privy Council that she had agreed to the match "onlye by the perswasion of Sr Iohn Throckmorton." She added that when she married him, Puttenham was not worth forty shillings and lacked "any porcon of livinge." (HRO, 44M69...

:Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation

1. The Long Divorce of Steel: Tyranny and Political Culture in Henry VIII's England POETRY AND THE CULTURE OF COUNSEL: THE 1532 IWORKES OF GEFFRAY CHAUCER/I AND JOHN HEYWOOD'S IPLAY OF THE WETHER/I 2. A Gift for Henry VIII 3. The Signs of the World: The 'Wondrous' Divisions of the early 1530s 4. Reading Chaucer in 1532 5. Thynne and Tuke's Apocrypha 6. Mocking the Thunder: Henry VIII, Jupiter, and John Heywood's iPlay of the Wether/i 'TO VIRTUE PERSUADED'?: THE PERSISTENT COUNSELS OF SIR THOMAS ELYOT 7. Sir Thomas Elyot and the King's Great Matter 8. iThe Boke Named the Governor/i: Good Kingship and the Royal Supremacy 9. Tyranny and the Conscience of Man: Elyot's Dialogues, 1533-34 10. From Supremacy to Tyranny 11. The Apotheosis of Sir Thomas Elyot THE DEATH OF COUNSEL: SIR THOMAS WYATT AND HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY 12. Sir Thomas Wyatt: Poetry and Politics 13. Tyranny Condemned: Wyatt's Epistolary Satires 14. Wyatt's Embassy, Treason, and 'The Defence' 15. Pleading With Power: Wyatt's Penitential Psalms 16. 'Wyatt Resteth Here': Henry Howard and the Invention of Resistance 17. Writing under Tyranny: Wyatt, Surrey, and the Reinvention of English Poetry

Virgil and Bacon in the Schoolroom

Virgil's Georgics is an elusive text and scholars have consistently sought to gain some kind of interpretive purchase on it by driving it into the dirt. The desire to read the Georgics in this fashion—to track its hexameters towards the horizon line of the English countryside, or into the reforming programs of institutions such as the Royal Society's Georgical Committee—has dominated recent accounts of the poem's early modern legacy. This particular approach to the Georgics has yielded valuable insights concerning the transformations to which literary texts (and indeed the practice of interpretation) are susceptible. Douglas Chambers, for instance, has argued that seventeenth-century georgic is characterized by a desire to "extend the exegesis of Virgil's text into the practice of agriculture."1 We can detect in this particular act of exegetical extension a response to Virgil's self-presentation in the Georgics as poet-preceptor, and an attempt to recast conventional claims about the instrumentality of literary texts. This pragmatic version of georgic may constitute a direct response to the educational legacy of Virgil's poem. From Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Francis Bacon to John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and a host of English schoolmasters, adventurous readers explored and codified the epistemological resources of the Georgics. These readers consistently understood the poem's formal structures and discursive logic in relation to the educational institutions that sponsored first encounters with literary texts. Their efforts suggest that we need to reassess the kind of cultural work in which Virgil's poem has been said to be engaged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Given its relatively stable position in grammar-school curricula throughout this period, we would do well to inquire how and to what purpose the poem became enmeshed in a network of self-reflexive educational discourses, and how this pedagogical mode relates to the more familiar versions of georgic that emerge during the course of the seventeenth century.2 When Virgil's poem is reimagined by agrarian reformers and green-thumbed gentlemen, its nascent agricultural legacy is the offspring of an educational fantasy. Accordingly, the following discussion pursues the Georgics into the schoolroom rather than the fields. [End Page 161] I. "The Rurall Part of Virgil" In The Book Named the Governor (1531), Elyot praises Virgil as a poet whose variety makes his poems uniquely suited to the education of children. He anatomizes the benefits of a curriculum that includes all three of Virgil's canonical poems, but his praise for the Georgics can be read as a statement about the goals to which instruction in literary texts might aspire: In his Georgics, Lord, what pleasant variety there is; the divers grains, herbs, and flowers that be there described, that, reading therein, it seemeth to a man to be in a delectable garden or paradise. What ploughman knoweth so much of husbandry as there is expressed? Who, delighting in good horses, shall not be thereto more inflamed, reading there of the breeding, choosing, and keeping of them? In the declaration whereof Virgil leaveth far behind him all breeders, hackneymen, and skosers. Is there any astronomer that more exactly setteth out the order and course of the celestial bodies, or that more truly doth divine in his prognostications of the times of the year, in their qualities, with the future estate of all things provided by husbandry, than Virgil doth recite in that work? If the child have a delight in hunting, what pleasure shall he take of the fable of Aristeus; semblably in the hunting of Dido and Aeneas, which is described most elegantly in his book of Aeneid.3 It is difficult to account for the terms in which Elyot praises the poem (to say nothing of his odd suggestion that "the fable of Aristeus" is just the thing for the child who delights in hunting) without reference to the theory and practice of humanist pedagogy.4 Although at least one modern classicist interprets Elyot's remarks as proof of his utter...

Narrative and Persuasion in Early Modern English Dictionaries and Phrasebooks

The dictionaries (and phrasebooks: the distinction is sometimes a very fine one) made in the early modern period were intended to be read more or less consecutively. They told stories, and they persuaded their readers to adopt beliefs and perform actions. Sir Thomas Elyot's Dictionary of 1538, for instance, argued for the importance of learned men, and particularly of Elyot himself, in the state; this argument was made more strongly in Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus of 1565. Polyglot dictionaries suggested the interchangeability of ideas from one language to another, and therefore had irenical implications. So did two seventeenth-century phrasebooks, Marten Le Mayre's of Dutch (1606) and Roger Williams's of Narragansett (1643), both of which promoted very specific agendas of peacemaking and missionary work. John Cowell's censored Interpreter (1607) argued for absolute monarchy, and Henry Manwayring's SeaMans Dictionary (1644) for English naval expansion. Each of these wordbooks served a political function as well as a linguistic one: they were meant to change people's lives.

Flattery in Shakespeare's Othello : The Relevance of Plutarch and Sir Thomas Elyot

COMPARATIVE ??????? Volume 35 No. 1 · Spring 2001 Flattery in Shakespeare's Othello: The Relevance of Plutarch and Sir Thomas Elyot Robert C. Evans££ T Tow to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend" is the title of one of JL _LPlutarch's most famous Moralia, but the phrase could just as easily be the subtide of Shakespeare's Othello. Flattery and false friendship were topics that preoccupied many people during the Renaissance, a period in which private connections were even more important than todayin determining a person's economic success, social status, and even his deeper sense ofself-worth. We pride ourselves, in the present era, on objective measurements of merit, including impartial testing, "blind" reviews, and the detached assessments of disinterested peers. Of course, establishing personal connections—winning friends and influencing people—is hardly unimportant even now, but in the early modern period the process of achieving (and maintaining) social status and social security depended crucially on earning the trust and respect ofothers.1 2 Comparative Drama Plutarch's essaywas designed to address a crucial problem: how could one determine whether a person who seemed a friend was really a friend in fact? This dilemma was much more puzzling than it might at first appear, since Plutarch (and many others) insisted that the most skillful and dangerous flatterers were also the least obvious, and were extremely difficult to distinguish from true comrades. Spotting an obvious flatterer was easy, but discerning a clever one was a much harder task. Shakespeare's lago, of course, is one of the cleverest false friends of all time, and indeed Marvin Rosenberg has argued that it is only Othello's friendship with lago that can explain the abruptness and depth of the Moor's transformation from a noble and respected commander to the tragic killer ofa deeplyloving wife. "What," Rosenberg asks, "could subvert such nobility? And betrayitinto murder? Only . . . betrayal bya friend so close, so trusted, that Othello has no choice but to listen to him."2 In this essay I plan to focus in close detail on one ofthe most crucial scenes of such betrayal in the play—act 4, scene 1. 1 hope to show, with some precision, how that scene depicts lago acting successfully as exactly the kind of false friend with whom Plutarch and so many others were so much concerned. Finally, I hope that this detailed discussion of Othello and lago will help complicate our sense of the characterizations Shakespeare offers ofeach figure. Othello is less a foolish dupe who falls victim to the connivings of a Satanic Machiavel (as some critics have alleged) than a basically (ifflawed) good man betrayed by an apparently good friend.3 I Before proceeding to a close discussion ofthe opening scene ofact 4, it may be worth asking a few simple questions that seem not to have been veryfullyaddressed: could Shakespearehave read Plutarch's famous essay? Might a reading ofthat essay have helped influence his depiction of lago? We know that Shakespeare was enormously influenced by Plutarch's other writings in crafting many ofhis other plays; is it possible that Plutarch also influenced Othello7. Asking these questions is simple enough, but answering them is not. Fortunately, though, one hardly needs to prove that Shakespeare could have read Plutarch's essay in order to show that ideas similar to Robert C. Evans3 Plutarch's could easily have influenced his thinking. In fact, part ofmy purpose here is to itemize (apparently for the first time) some of the texts Shakespeare might have known that may have influenced not only his thinking but also the thoughts ofhis audience as they contemplated the problem ofhow to tell a flatterer from a friend. Plutarch's essay would have been easily available to Shakespeare in the edition ofthe Moralia translated by Philemon Holland and published in London in 1603. Shakespeare, by that year, had already demonstrated a profound interest in Plutarch's historical work, the parallel Lives, in the edition translated by Sir Thomas North from the French of Jacques Amyot. It is therefore easy to imagine that he would have been extremely interested in the appearance of an English version of the Moralia in 1603. It is possible, in...

Henry VIII's Divorce: Literature and the Politics of the Printing Press

During the period of Henry VIII's divorce crisis, a political and literary rivalry developed between Thomas Berthelet, the king's printer, and the Rastell family, kinsmen of the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More and quasi-official printers in their own right. This study recounts the text-by-text progress of the feud. It describes how Berthelet represented Henry as a prudent philosopher-king, taking the advice of scholars and theologians on anulling his marriage, and on limiting the Church's power (texts include A Glass of the Truth, rumoured to be by Henry himself, and the works of Sir Thomas Elyot). In response to the king's press campaign, the Rastells' dialogues and dramas staged the kind of wise counsel that Henry ostensibly welcomed (John Rastell's A New Book of Purgatory, Skelton's Magnificenceamong them), observing the rules dictated by the king's public image and urging him towards greater conformity with that image than divorce or declaration of royal supremacy would allow.J. CHRISTOPHER WARNERis Associate Professor of English at Le Moyne College.

Fashioning Gender: Cross-Dressing in Spenser’s Legend of Britomart and Artegall

Close parallels between Britomart’s experiences as a knight in the House of Malacasta and those of Artegall as a serving maid in the city of the House of Radigund suggest that Spenser regarded the crossing of traditional boundaries between the genders as a formative stage in the process by which each attains its own perfection. Britomart’s tendency to excessive “frowardness” is gradually tempered by her adventures among men in Books III–V, much as Artegall’s tendency to “forwardness” is moderated by his encounters with women. Though the poet generally portrays his idealized female characters as less forward by nature than the men they love, he follows humanists such as Sir Thomas Elyot in arguing that both genders are perfected in “virtuous and gentle discipline” by drawing toward the same Aristotelian mean. Although Spenser shares with other male writers of his age several of the attitudes toward gender-crossing noted in recent scholarship on Elizabethan medical treatises, marriage manuals, and stage plays, he also calls into question traditional distinctions between masculine and feminine in ways that deserve more scholarly attention than they have so far received.

"It lak'th but life": Redford's Wit and Science, Anne of Cleves, and the Politics of Interpretation

In The Boke Named the Gouernor (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot upholds the merits of staged comedies, arguing that they be undoutedly a picture or as it were a mirrour of man's life, wherin iuell is nat taught but discouered.1 Elyot's comment proves particularly fitting in regard to John Redford's play Wit and Science, for not only does the play use both a portrait and a mirror as stage properties, it also exploits its audience's investment in these objects to create a drama that represents as well as reflects its viewers' concerns. The play's advice on the proper attainment of knowledge a subject that would presumably concern its schoolboy performers, the Children of St. Paul's leads most critics to classify Wit and Science as an educational morality. For the play's audience at court, however, a performance of Wit and Science would produce associations with far more tangible political matters, ones that critics of the play have heretofore overlooked. Though many commentators have pointed out the play's similarities to the romantic quest,2 few have considered the play as a vehicle for advice on the subject of courtship and marriage. Such matters would undoubtedly interest most sixteenth-century courtiers, but those watching Wit and Science would be particularly interested given the difficulties that their reigning king, Henry VIII, experienced in making and maintaining marriages. The travails that Wit undergoes in his pursuit of Science, moreover, bear a striking resemblance to the events that led to Henry's disastrous marriage to, and subsequent annulment from, Anne of Cleves. Both Henry's courtship and the one in Redford's play, after all, rely on portraits as a means of introducing one prospective mate to another, and, in both cases, the subjects of these portraits fail to match their painted depictions.