Rhetoric is the final art of language. Having learnt to speak and reason, students discover how to beautify their words and make them persuasive. Only then are they fully equipped to take the stage as gentlemen. Holdsworth explains the indispensability of ‘Oratory’, ‘without wch: all the other learning though never so eminent is in a manner voide & useless, without those you will be bafled in your disputes, disgraced, & vilified in Publicke examinations, laught at in speeches, & Declamations’. Succeeding her sister arts, rhetoric is the grand finale, by which one learns how to express what one thinks clearly and convincingly. It is therefore the art that deals most fully and explicitly with the human act of speaking, with the production of impressive, sensible words and with the audience.

While rhetorical presentation of language is rooted in standard linguistic assumptions, it probes them and exposes points of vulnerability that cause concern about language in general. For example, tropes expose the fragility of the semantic contract that joins words to meanings; the essence of a trope is that it pulls words apart from their designated meanings, and applies them elsewhere. The deeply rhetorical culture in which early-modern elites are entrenched unmasks language in a way that simultaneously impresses and horrifies them.

What is early-modern rhetoric? Despite the proliferation of vernacular treatises on rhetoric in the later sixteenth century and their continued production throughout the seventeenth, it is still the ancients to whom students are officially and enthusiastically guided.