6 - Shaping a rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2010
Summary
Ambivalence towards learning and learned language carries on throughout and beyond the reign of Elizabeth. In fact the anxiety about language becomes even more evident as English nationalism becomes more dominant, and a flood of rhetorical handbooks bursts into print in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Richard Helgerson notes the conflict between aspiration and uncertainty that underpins Spenser's rhetorical question in a letter of 1580 to Gabriel Harvey: ‘Why a God's name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?’ (Forms of Nationhood, pp. 1-4). The metaphor renders possession of the language coterminous with possession of the kingdom. The cultural project implies the political project, and the political project seeks affirmation through cultural practice.
The kingdom, as we have seen, was increasingly seeking to consolidate the status of empire, in the primary sense of owing no allegiance to any power beyond itself. The Act in Restraint of Appeals had claimed such status in 1533 (p. 80 above), and the Elizabethan church settlement, together with the beginnings of colonial enterprise, had begun to create the material basis for a claim to ‘empire’ in both senses (sovereign power and extensive territory). Empires, of course, traditionally need to keep the barbarians and their languages at bay; but the problem for England, as implied in chapter 5 above, was defining the barbarians. Traditionally, Western Europe as a whole looked to the Latin of classical empire as a model of eloquence; but the debate on translating the bible highlighted the extent to which specific aesthetics implied specific religious affiliations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England , pp. 141 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998