Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition

S h a k e spe are , Rhetori c and C ognition

Raphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do ­characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? How do they manage to be so ­inventive when they are perplexed? Their dense, complex, articulate speeches at intensely dramatic moments are often seen as psychological  – they ­uncover, and investigate, inwardness, character, and motivation – and as rhetorical – they involve heightened language, deploying recognisable techniques. Focusing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Cymbeline, and the Sonnets, Lyne explores both the psychological and rhetorical elements of Shakespeare ’s language. In the light of cognitive linguistics and cognitive literary theory he shows how renaissance rhetoric could be considered a kind of cognitive science, an attempt to map out the ­patterns of thinking. His study reveals how Shakespeare ’s metaphors and similes work to think, interpret, and resolve, and how their struggles to do so result in extraordinary poetry. r a p h a e l lyne is a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567–1632 (2001) and Shakespeare’s Late Work (2007), as well as the editor (with Subha Mukherji) of Early Modern Tragicomedy (2007).

Sh ak esp e are, R hetoric and Cog n ition Ra pha el Ly ne

c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107007475 © Raphael Lyne 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare, rhetoric and cognition / Raphael Lyne. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00747-5 (hardback) 1.  Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Criticism and interpretation.  I.  Title. pr2976.l95  2011 822.3′3–dc22 2011020618 i s b n 978-1-107-00747-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Thomas and Sophie

Contents page viii

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe ’

1

2 Metaphor and synecdoche in cognition

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3 The drift towards cognition in rhetorical manuals

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4 A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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5 Cymbeline

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6 Othello

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7 The Sonnets

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8 Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

228 251 264

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Acknowledgments Some of the following offered me snippets or questions that led somewhere they probably weren’t expecting; others did sterling work reading drafts. In the hope that they’ll have some idea why, I thank: Gavin Alexander, Sarah Brown, Nick Chapin, Jo Craigwood, Ewan Fernie, Emma Firestone, James Harmer, Sarah Howe, Michael Hurley, John Kerrigan, Dan Jones, Simon Palfrey, Sophie Read, Tom Secretan, Ellen Spolsky, John Stubbs, Jennifer Wallace, and Rowland Wymer. Anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press made numerous excellent suggestions, for which I am very grateful. Many students at Cambridge, especially at Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), have helped me think about metaphor over the years. Sarah Stanton and Rebecca Taylor at Cambridge University Press have been supportive, patient, and generally excellent. Caroline Howlett was a wise and perceptive copy-editor. I once wondered whether it was purely conventional to say, after a list like this, that none of the people mentioned could be held responsible for any faults remaining in the book, which are entirely the fault of the stubborn author, and so on. I know now that it can be quite an important thing to include. I’ve understood but disobeyed some warnings, and at some points I’ve persisted in the face of good advice to the contrary: but all these conversations have been valuable. This book is dedicated to my children, who entirely deserve it. Enjoyable though it has been writing this book, they have offered the best sort of distraction and joy all the way through. None of it could have happened without Clare, to whom only my first book is dedicated, but to whom all of them should be.

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c h apt e r 1

Introduction: ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe ’

Macbeth is a fast-moving play, and as early as Act 1 the hero is faced with the terrible consequences of his actions. Although at this point the murder of the King is hypothetical, Macbeth is deeply unsettled by the prospect. This is made manifest in an intense soliloquy that could have led to a change of heart – we cannot know – had it not been interrupted by Lady Macbeth: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, And falls on th’ other. (1.7.16–28)1

Enter Lady Macbeth. Macbeth has worked himself into a position where he recognises the paucity of his motivation, and the magnitude of his victim’s merits. He is distracted from this meditation by the latest news. One thing that has often struck readers about this 1

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passage is the extraordinary simile at its heart: ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe’. The resemblance proposed by the word ‘like ’ doesn’t readily resolve into clarity after it is thought over. Once it seemed to me, for example, to be symptomatic of a special kind of spontaneity in Shakespeare’s language. Without imputing any actual lack of design in the creation of such a simile, I felt the effect was of an extravagant display of linguistic crisis. Reader and text, or perhaps reader and writer, find themselves at the edge of a precipice, where the abstract noun ‘pity’ clearly begs an appropriately energetic complement to ‘like’. The ‘naked new-born babe ’ effects a kind of rescue, in that the line continues past the point of crisis, and the simile itself expands onward, accumulating more strange and vivid material. The obscure aspects of its meaning, and the vertiginous quality in the reader’s experience, remind us of the expressive problems underlying such moments of dramatic intensity. In this book I want to explore another way of reading the challenges in this simile – its complexity, its apparent genesis, its consequences  – and many other comparable incidents. In some ways the approach is a more natural one: I shall treat the effort and invention involved as something achieved by the character speaking the lines. In other ways, it is relatively abstruse, in that I shall be seeing this as a cognitive achievement, or at least as something with a close relationship to cognition, to the ways in which the brain works. The point will be to recognise that at moments like this, Shakespeare represents his characters facing severe mental challenges: understanding their situations, and responding to them, both require great effort. Their approach to these challenges is poetic and rhetorical. They use the resources of poetry and of rhetoric, which in Shakespeare ’s time was a discipline giving rules for effective public speaking but also anatomising more generally the ways in which language could be made more effective.

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The similes and metaphors and other tropes that they use (all part of the realm of rhetoric) are the means by which they take mental command of the world, or fail to do so. Success and failure co-exist closely, as a character’s inability to find a good way of conceiving a given situation may yet happen in language which strikes the reader as powerful, or beautiful, or indeed as possessing some sort of poetic insight or knowledge. Macbeth’s ‘pity’ simile is a dazzling achievement from one angle, a tangled problem from another. As will be seen, there will be a tension between this approach and that of explication, and a consequent need to be precise about when something is deemed inherently and ultimately opaque, rather than just difficult to understand for a while before the pieces of a hermeneutic jigsaw are in place. Shakespeare ’s characters’ mental strains and stretches, then, must be conveyed in the strains and stretches of language: in the tropes of rhetoric. This book will pursue the connection between rhetoric and cognition, at times, beyond the boundaries of fiction, but it is in dramatic characters that it will most frequently and concretely be explored. To some extent this has become a problematic foundation for a critical argument. The concept of character was significantly battered over the course of twentieth-century scholarship.2 More recently, Margreta de Grazia has weighed in against potentially anachronistic attention to the presumed interiority of Hamlet.3 From a variety of perspectives the stability and unity of fictional persons have been compromised by attention to the dynamic work of language, and the operation of literature on its recipients and their societies. Given that this book sets some emphasis on the viability of a character as something that a theatrical audience in particular interacts with, it is necessary to place the argument in relation to evolving debates about character  – even if ultimately there will be an appeal to intuition. The arch-culprit of maligned character criticism

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is A.  C. Bradley, who, more than a century ago, produced some memorable targets for his opponents. Here he makes a remarkable set of suppositions about Iago: That he [Iago] is supremely wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will interfere with his right to that title. But to say that his intellectual power is supreme is to make a great mistake. Within certain limits he has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness, adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and they are narrow limits. It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue. But compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative Iago’s mind is, incapable of Napoleon’s military achievements, and much more incapable of his political constructions.4

Bradley is often very acute in the way he pieces together linguistic evidence, but here in an extreme form he demonstrates his tendency to treat literary characters as real people. ‘Within certain limits’ – within the fiction – the qualities described are evident, but the extrapolation required to imagine Iago on the same actual and metaphorical battlefields as Napoleon has come to seem perverse. Shakespeare’s characters, like all fictional figures, have special limits to their capability; they are not born free to determine themselves; only with great wariness can one transpose their traits to other situations. The Bradleyan tendency to synthesise, characterise, and conclude has suffered during subsequent theoretical turns in criticism. The central reference points from which observable characteristics emanate  – the things which constitute an integral essence of character – seem vital to his judgments. This way of thinking has undergone serious challenges in psychology, and yet more so in literary criticism. It seems wisest not to count on there being anything somehow below or behind the matrix of language and gesture

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that makes up a dramatic character, and so the relationship between one character and another, between them all and the play’s whole world of words, must be that bit more provisional. Some critics have noted the risk involved in this development. Tom McAlindon, for example, in a book lamenting the effects on Shakespeare criticism of post-structuralist thinking in particular, maintains that changeability and incompatibility of qualities – two things invoked at times against the possibility of a unitary idea of character – are (in, say, Cleopatra) facets of the very distinctiveness (indeed, unmistakeability) that might be the strongest guide towards accepting the viable separateness of a person on stage, or in a book.5 As it happens, my use of the notion of character, and my identification of spoken words with fictional thoughts appearing to belong to these separable figures, does not arise from an antipathy to theoretical developments or their suspicions about the coherence and integrity of fictional selves. However, it benefits from salutary reminders from McAlindon and others that apparently old ideas have resources that need not be ignored. Edward Burns has usefully constructed a more historically grounded ‘characterology’ that attends closely to theatrical technique.6 Christy Desmet’s approach to the notion of character takes a rhetorical turn that is highly suggestive for my argument. She endorses the ‘successful’ attack on the coherent fictional self in proposing that we appreciate characters as sites where ‘Rhetoric, Ethics, Identity’ (her subtitle) interact.7 By seeing characters as orators she is ingeniously able to focus on their emphatic, individual, characteristic presences, while also seeing them as manifestly constructed out of language. For her, different tropes – hyperbole, metaphor, proverb – come to look a bit like ways of thinking about things, but not exactly like thought processes (which is essentially the position to which I am leading). Yet more recently, the issues

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have been reappraised in a collection of essays entitled Shakespeare and Character. Here there is a rearguard in favour of taking on characters as such.8 The point is not to suggest that the tide is turning, but rather to note that the concept has the capacity to resist the tide, and to impress itself on readers and audiences nonetheless. William Dodd turns towards the ‘part-script’  – actors originally received manuscripts with only their lines and cues – as a source of inward coherence. Each character’s lines spent crucial time in close proximity to one another, separate from the play’s overall linguistic texture. Dodd looks at the evidence of revision in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet to explore ‘the scaffolding of the fictional interaction script’. It turns out to be ‘sturdy’: these plays are based, it seems, on a strong basis of interplay between these important units.9 Andrew James Hartley and Robert Weimann recognise that the body is the location of much characterisation; the visible physical boundaries of a body map onto – not simply of course – boundaries of personation.10 Leonore Lieblein proposes a more interactive definition, but still one that prizes presence and effect: A dramatic character in performance is not necessarily either unitary or static. Rather, the early modern experience of dramatic character [as attested e.g. in Heywood’s Apology for Actors] suggests that it is a product of an intersubjective communication among the person personated, the actor, and the audience.11

The collective impression gained from these essays is an encouragement to responding to what look like manifestations of character – as momentary, distinctive, emphatic, disoriented, challenged, and so on – in spite of doubts about treating them as having a sort of coherent reality to which the play is merely testifying. A telling intervention on the question of character comes in an essay by Graham Bradshaw. This essay is important to the next chapter of this book as well, because it tackles the relationship between

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twenty-first-century literary criticism and late twentieth-century ideas about metaphor in related disciplines. In ‘Othello in the Age of Cognitive Science’ Bradshaw examines the hero’s speeches and actions and asserts that ‘the poetic-dramatic representation of what is happening to and in Othello goes far beyond what the speaker knows or understands’.12 This is a telling corollary to the suggestions about Macbeth made above. What we are seeing is something that elicits the paradoxical preposition ‘in’ – something that seems to arise from a location underneath the costume, even though we know that under there we’d really find the actor. Invoking the actual inward – the person beneath the character – is not incidental. Part of Bradshaw’s argument bears on how these plays should be performed. If their great rhetorical discoveries are presented – in a realist idiom – as discoveries made by characters, then this is a misunderstanding. If an actor savours the concept of ‘pity’, and presents the ‘like a naked new-born babe’ simile as an apt and penetrating coinage (with self-congratulation combined with awe at the meaning unleashed), then this kind of rhetoric’s proper depth, well below the surface, is lost. This works against the instincts of some performers, as is evident in Lisa Moore’s account of playing Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Having a discovery onstage rather than filling the audience in is always the more interesting choice, so I let the Cupid argument occur to me piece by piece, and indeed Shakespeare makes the text build on itself there. He lets you figure it out like a math problem. Oohhh, that’s why Cupid is said to be a child! Because in choice he is so oft beguiled!13

This character’s cognitive richness is central to Chapter 4, so Moore is addressing the same metaphorical phenomena here. Shakespeare does not make it easy for actors, who have to find a way of relating to their words. So there is a potential tension between the thought

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of something underlying an actor’s performance, and the need to testify to that underlying process. This comes into the territory explored by Palfrey and Stern’s ground-breaking study of part-scripts, the system whereby actors received only their own lines and cues, so the play-text was typically distributed and divided rather than whole. As they conclude – this is the last paragraph of the book, and the last paragraph of the Macbeth section  – the tension observed above, between the actor’s wish to contain the character, and a critical feeling that some things cannot be spoken knowingly, is part of something extraordinarily creative: The part is written by the playwright, but it is written for the individual actor; unlike the full script, it is effectively meaningless, or a ghost of intended meaning, without the actor to give it body. But then, as much as it is the actor’s – owned by him, loved and nurtured into being by him – it is still never fully possessed by the actor. He cannot understand it all; he cannot know all of the things it alludes to; still less can he know all the matters it elides. Given the procedures and necessities of Shakespeare ’s theatre – various plays on at one time, limited private rehearsal, old plays unpredictably renewed  – it is obvious that no amount of tuition to an individual actor could ever have filled in all the gaps merely in his part; when we remember that a play might have thirty or more parts, we should realise just how many ‘surprises’ were likely to remain open. In the moment of its enacting, this kind of theatre has to remain potentially a thing of sudden, vertiginous, serendipitous discovery. Given no way to avoid this fact, Shakespeare very simply revelled in it.14

Such ‘discovery’ could take a number of forms; and the metaphor of vertigo nicely captures the metaphorical levels at which Shakespeare’s language may seem to operate. Speech recedes and reveals something lower down. Bradshaw’s approach accepts character as the source of what is said and thought, but proposes that we understand the concept better if we realise that characters’ speeches are not necessarily like people’s speeches; in effect, they represent thoughts as well as words.

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The point of this book is to open up these implications. In the first main section – Chapters 2 and 3 – the relationship between rhetoric and cognition will be explored, with a view to suggesting that rhetorical solutions to cognitive problems are not the preserve only of literature. In fact, cognitive scientists, philosophers of language, and rhetoricians have all in different ways stated, or suggested, or implied that the characteristic patterns of key rhetorical tropes have an intimate relationship with the way thought works. They do so to the extent that metaphor, metonymy, metalepsis, and others may be treated not only as ways of conveying the results of complex thought, but also as maps of the way complex thought might actually happen, inasmuch as that can be asserted with any confidence. The outcome of Chapter 3’s survey of rhetoric manuals will be a suggestion that rhetoric might be thought of as a kind of cognitive science, an attempt, often unwitting, to map the workings of the thinking brain. This will be given a particular context in the renaissance, since manuals of that period have what might be read as distinctive intimations of the thought that rhetoric could be a science of thinking even before it is a science of speaking. The main reason to focus on this period is that, as Chapters 4, 5, and 6 will explore, the affinity between rhetoric and cognition is a Shakespearean affinity, so its role in contemporary writing has particular pertinence. These chapters will develop the affinity between cognitive crisis and rhetorical extravagance that can be seen in Macbeth’s pity simile, and the implications of this affinity for the workings and significance of other plays will be at issue. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, and Othello, many kinds of rhetorical working-out emerge. These characters’ tropes enable them to summon up new ways of apprehending their predicaments: sometimes good ways, sometimes bad. Different characters manage different realities in different tropes. In the end, however, the point

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will not simply be to domesticate the interdisciplinary suggestions of Chapter 2 in literary-critical concerns: characterisation, mimesis, language. Rather, the intensity of these Shakespearean examples will enable a further suggestion of the affinity between rhetoric and cognition beyond his works. This does not mean that Shakespeare seems to endorse the idea that thinking happens in the form of language, or anything much like it, which would fly in the face of the nuances of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics recruited by Chapter 2. Rather, it means that Shakespeare seems to explore how the resources of rhetoric  – its special forms of language  – reveal things about thinking. Characters can only think in words, or perhaps in the implications of their words. This puts a limit on the extent to which we can impute to Shakespeare any views on the philosophy of language. Indeed, if Shakespeare has something so grand as a philosophy of language, then it is an implicit one worked out in the course of speech and action. It is only such as can be reached by means of representing characters who are not people – and I do not mean this allegorically; these characters are wholly characters, and are not ciphers for human beings. Ironically, this non-limiting limitation enables a speculative fluidity that fuels my sense that the implications of his displays of cognitive rhetoric might be congruent with the explorations in cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of rhetoric, that feature in the next chapter. What really holds these things together is the heuristic aspect of mental tropes. Heuristic is a usefully supple term, in that it can relate both to the solving of problems and to discovery. Those interested in cognition have suggested that metaphor in particular is a way we can model the brain’s efforts to solve problems and to deal with new situations and concepts, a connection that will be developed in Chapter 2. In Shakespeare, we see characters appear to solve their emergent problems by means of rhetoric. There is an important

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distinction to be drawn there between the language in which they seek to express themselves best (a more conventional understanding of rhetoric), and the creative means by which they work towards understanding. For Shakespeare, at key moments, rhetoric comes to look like a problem-solving process whose goal is to make sense of things that are not easily made into sense. It is worth noting here that this relates to what may be an obvious point. The things which elicit the greatest rhetorical energy in metaphor, simile, and other tropes are the things which are hardest to describe and address: love, death, and the like. The implication of this is that metaphor and simile (and other tropes) are manifestly heuristic in their nature: they facilitate attempts to express, and think about, the most important and challenging things in life. The concept of a ‘dead’ metaphor, one which seems to have lost its power to divert or adorn, needs modification. Such metaphors have often, one might say, proved so useful and effectual that they have become embedded and integral. The implicit aspiration of a cognitive metaphor might be to become part of everyday speech, rather than to remain arresting and outstanding. This helps explain further how great poetry might associate with moments of conceptual struggle. This attention to the cognitive quality of rhetoric is in key ways a new one, but (as will be said more than once) it is meant to act as a supplement or a subtext to more familiar accounts of Shakespeare ’s language, and to other ways in which the links between poetry and thinking have been suggested. In describing certain speeches as processes of thought, it will also come close to numerous things that critics have said in passing as they analyse the same characters and scenes. So it is worth outlining ways in which existing work on the topic approaches the territory I am exploring, and Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language is especially noteworthy for the comparable conclusions it reaches from a very different direction.15

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Kermode discerns a watershed in the development of Shakespeare ’s language. He argues that in Hamlet, and thenceforward, it takes a marked step into complexity and depth, and becomes less bound to the conventions of its time. Furthermore, representation of cognition in theatrical speech comes to the fore. Rhetoric seems to play two interlocking roles in Shakespeare’s Language. It is an art and thus a way of characterising one kind of style. So the more formally arranged earlier Shakespearean verse is more likely to be considered ‘rhetorical’ than the later verse. Rhetoric is also a toolkit of descriptive terms that proves useful throughout Shakespeare ’s work. Stefan Daniel Keller concludes differently in his study of Shakespeare’s use of rhetorical figures. Focusing on figures of speech rather than on tropes such as metaphor, he finds that their use does not wane as Shakespeare’s career develops. Rather they become more integrated into character, and less artificial.16 Kermode, however, is more engaged in assessing whether the rhetorical character of language comes to the fore in dramatic speech, as opposed to when its structuring influence is more deeply embedded. Kermode makes a comparison between the inwardness opened up by speeches in Coriolanus, in comparison with the rhetorical display, without the same revelation of psychology, in Titus Andronicus (p. 15). This is bound up with rhetoric, though; after outlining the tropes involved in Aufidius’s speech in 4.7 (leading towards the observation that ‘our virtues / Lie in th’ interpretation of the time ’, 49–50), Kermode describes ‘this new way of representing turbulent thinking’, which sometimes ‘takes the poet beyond the limits of reason and intelligibility’ (p. 16). The chronological watershed is not absolute in this respect, and a discussion of Bushy’s speech about grief in Richard II 2.2.14–27 finds that this character is ‘thinking’ (p. 41, his italics). Kermode ’s discussion is worth quoting at length:

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The exciting thing about Bushy’s speech is that in it we find Shakespeare struggling with a sentiment rendered stubborn by the circumstance that the speaker appears to be thinking, is doing his intellectual best to get his consolation across, and is getting slightly muddled in the process, the slight muddle being a by-product of the effort to represent intellection, or rather to do it. (p. 43)

‘Intellection’ will become a key word in Chapter 2, as it is a synonym for the rhetorical trope synecdoche as well as for thinking. By elaborating on the implications of such terms, and other interfaces between tropes and thought, I am following work like Kermode ’s, which turns intuitively to cognition as a way of explaining Shakespearean language. Critics who are more specifically focused on rhetoric also seem to approach the pattern of argument found in this book. Russ McDonald says resonantly that ‘the poetic figure is an instrument for apprehending and remaking the world’. As he sees it, Shakespeare ’s speakers ‘select or invent such metaphors and analogues for their experience’ in order to ‘capture the event or feeling or idea, to fix it in illuminating and memorable form’.17 McDonald also notes that these attempts may fail (p. 83). For him this is an activity of the imagination, but this is typically seen as a creative process undertaken as, more or less, a deliberate response. The step taken in this book, which is to consider how Shakespeare ’s dramatic language – and the science of rhetoric itself – might somehow represent things below the surface, is not McDonald’s business. The essay collection Renaissance Figures of Speech has a different agenda. Rhetorical tropes are seen as tools in the hands of writers, but they also have energy of their own. The tropes become part of the meaning they carry, achieving a kind of self-awareness. The essays in the collection thereby give rhetoric an animated quality that it risks lacking when seen as a learned armoury of tricks

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to adorn one’s speech. Again the move being made in the present book does not really arise in the course of this formalist-historicist collection.18 However, in Brian Cummings’s essay on metalepsis (which denotes a complex, extended metaphor), we do see ‘actors and spectators who are caught in the apprehension of their own mutual ­mortality’.19 Complex rhetoric is linked to a cognitive problem, a need to make sense of things, though again the parts of the argument are not assembled in the way I shall assemble them here. Cummings turns to Macbeth as a play in which the central figure is strikingly unable to corral simple, efficient thoughts to address his world, which takes us back to ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe ’. The recent ‘New Critical Idiom’ volume on Rhetoric by Jennifer Richards provides a further instructive example of how excellent work focused on the subject’s traditional terms can nevertheless open up some space for the sort of cognitive reading I am proposing. She turns the benefit of rhetoric inward, though her focus is more philosophical than cognitive: ‘its most valuable endowment lies in its flexible process of argument, which insists on the reversibility of all positions. Rhetoric is useful not only because it makes us “persuasive” but also because it makes us self-reflexive. In this aspect, it represents the beginning of critical thinking.’20 There is a difference between the sort of inquiry envisaged here, and the responsive heuristics at the heart of this book. This derives from her wish to open up a historical concept of rhetoric to the characteristics of something more like ‘rhetoricality’ in post-structuralism.21 However, in a way comparable to Chapter 3’s historical survey, Richards sees this modern-sounding emphasis as being present in much earlier rhetoric writings. She describes an ‘unanticipated alternative approach to rhetoric in antiquity [specifically, in Cicero’s De oratore]’ where ‘rhetoric is more than a taxonomy of linguistic devices and persuasive strategies; it also a process of argument, a way of thinking

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which understands that all positions are ultimately arguable ’. There will be further discussion of new and old ways of interpreting the rhetorical tradition in Chapter 2. This is a book about Shakespeare’s language, then, and it is also a book about rhetoric. These two fields meet in close analysis, at the point where readers seek to account for the effects of Shakespearean language by careful exploration of details. Rhetoric provides what can be a useful and supple terminology, with a rich history, to describe the phenomena being observed. Its vocabulary, however, runs the risk of seeming pedantic and slow-footed when it is a diagnosis of technique. There is a potential tension, a discrepancy of ­pacing, between the precision of analysis and the fluency of drama and poetry in action. By reconsidering tropes as cognitive in character, and by considering theatrical speech as thought in a way encouraged by an interdisciplinary appreciation of metaphor, this discrepancy becomes more meaningful. Close reading replays something that works at speed, offering insights into responses and apprehensions that arise in crisis, or pleasure, in the swift exchanges of practised social life, and in many other circumstances. In acknowledging this, I am aiming to validate rather than to undermine accounts of the myriad nuances of Shakespearean language, to assert the value of both fast and slow encounters with his dramatic poetry, and to consider the relationship between them. The majority of the book, and the remainder of the introduction, will focus on plays. The final chapter, however, will broaden the scope to consider Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The approach to metaphor being proposed here might seem more naturally at home in the study of drama, so it is worthwhile testing its potential in a different kind of writing. As it turns out, the exploratory voices of the Sonnets prove amenable, and offer their own versions of heuristic struggles. While it is tempting to see the scope extending far and

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wide, the particular qualities of these lyrics, and of Shakespeare ’s style in ­general, cannot be discarded. In the speech with which this chapter started, Macbeth finds himself struggling to deal with pity. Pity is a profound concept in general, and an especially vexed one for him. He is too full of the milk of human kindness in the first place, his wife alleges (1.5.17), and Duncan seems to prompt a sincere and deserved swell of emotion. Even Lady Macbeth is moved by the figure of the dead king (2.2.14–15). Pity is salvation, and it is an obstacle: no wonder it takes a lot of cognitive effort. It is instructive to compare Macbeth’s strain with another Shakespearean speech on a resonant abstract noun. This is Portia, in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, on mercy: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown. His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (4.1.184–97)

In this book there will be numerous rhetorical analyses of passages like this, and it should be said at the outset that this will not mean an exhaustive list of the tropes and figures deployed. In Chapter 2 I shall set out some criteria for organising the many tropes identified by rhetoricians, with a view to assembling a limited but functional

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toolkit for addressing the Shakespearean works dealt with in Chapters 4–6. In the two passages central to this chapter I shall limit myself to the familiar territory of metaphor and simile, and at times I shall paraphrase what might otherwise be described in a technical term. Mercy is no less complex than pity, but Portia has control over her thoughts about it. This is a question of timing – she has probably prepared this speech, and even if she is speaking extempore, she is doing so on the basis of a practised or innate facility that simulates preparation. It is also a question of perspective: the urgency of the situation impinges on her indirectly, so she can muster her thoughts on the crisis without feeling that crisis too deeply. Portia’s first simile  – ‘as the gentle rain from heaven’  – has so much aptness that it stands poised on the edge of glibness. It belongs as much to her attack on Shylock’s position, magnifying the unChristian obstinacy of his insistence, as to her own understanding of what mercy is. She goes on partly to personify mercy as something that can bless and be blessed, that can be mighty as well. It is always ‘it’, though, and ‘His sceptre’ (after, perhaps, a little mental adjustment) refers to the monarch and not to the abstract quality. Mercy returns to be magnified in comparison with royal power, and this leads to another metaphor: it [king-like] is ‘enthroned’. The circularity here is difficult to account for – we have already had ‘throned monarchs’ whom mercy becomes (meaning ‘suits’, but then it ‘becomes’ them in another sense), and now mercy is enthroned in ‘the hearts of kings’. The speech moves away from the monarch to elevate mercy as a divine seasoning for justice: Portia is laying it on very thick, making sure her audience appreciates their obligations to agree. Perhaps this thickness explains the emphasis laid on mercy as an attribute of temporal power performing at its best; but perhaps also this is politic, tuned in to the fact that the powerful often have motives to insist on the severity of the law, and might

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need reminding of the congruence of mercy with strength. Even though she is mostly in control of her brief here, the effort involved in holding these weighty things together is reflected in some complex rhetoric. That Portia’s speech and Macbeth’s speech are very different is obvious. Her resourceful courage in public (which might cause an incipient sense in the audience that her cleverness with ideological resonance could ultimately leave a sour taste) is not much like Macbeth’s chilling, perhaps panicky unfolding of emergent horrors. Of course, Shakespeare fits a different rhetoric to a different voice and a different situation. There is a stronger way, however, of expressing the difference. For the most part Portia’s rhetoric does what rhetoric should, and helps her frame a view of mercy in a persuasive way. Her simile and her metaphors package an understanding. In Macbeth’s pity simile – and not just because he is only persuading himself – rhetoric does something different. His tropes are the very process of his attempt at understanding. We know this, ironically, because he, and they, partially fail in this task: the incompleteness of the process means that the process is still visible. Or rather, this extract  – quoted now for the second time  – conveys the richness and complexity of pity, and its immense value for the speaker, in the partial success of an attempt to think it out in tropes: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

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That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, And falls on th’ other. (1.7.16–28)

The key rhetorical tactics deployed here are: the simile ‘virtues … like angels’; the extended simile ‘pity, like a naked new-born babe ’; and the ‘spur’ metaphor. The last is the simplest, which is not to say it is not dazzlingly imaginative, and indeed a little broken. Macbeth conceives his ‘intent’ as a horse, something which must be governed by means of a ‘spur’; but the only spur to fill the metaphorical gap is ambition, which takes on characteristics that are very unlike those of a spur. Nicholas Brooke, in an editorial gloss, is robust on how to read ‘vaulting’: Vaulting 1. leaping (on to a horse’s back); 2. leaping over a vaulting-horse (in a gym). Editors have offered a conflation ‘vaulting into the saddle and falling over the other side’, which seems to me absurd; the process is of the horse image dwindling from the splendour of the cherubim to a mere wooden horse as Macbeth’s vision expires.22

This is persuasive, but I think it abandons too soon the thought that ‘vaulting’ may be something that horses – metaphorically – could do, jumping over obstacles. Ambition no longer spurs, but rather leaps (self-spurring) and falls; and in the course of that leap it comes to look more human than equine. The problem ambition causes for the governance of intent is made vivid by a metaphor that becomes over-extended. The two similes are connected. The first is emphatic and emotionally charged. Duncan’s virtues stand up against the murder; they do so strongly, with moral purity, and loudly, like angels with trumpets (or here, since virtues have trumpets even less than they have voices, metaphorically ‘trumpet-tongu’d’). This is powerful,

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but (relative to what follows) it is under control. As a process of cognition, there is no moment of manifestation here, no moment where the heuristics are revealed in failure: in configuring the moral battle he faces, Macbeth needs to see Duncan’s virtues as the right kind of adversary, and he does so. Pity, as has been said, poses a greater challenge. Macbeth’s attempt to think about it generates a strange simile: the naked new-born babe. Pity is precious and innocent, but this does not fully justify the first connection, let alone its extension, in which the babe rides the wind (or the ‘blast’ of a trumpet) like a vengeful angel, and propagates itself ‘in every eye ’ by means of a trumpet-blast (or a gust of wind). The first simile becomes material for the second to work with: angels return, and so (probably) do the trumpets. In being worked on, it becomes more opaque: ‘the sightless couriers of the air’ are the winds, but even if it just said ‘winds’, the contribution made by the ‘cherubin, hors’d’ would be troubling. Finally, it is feasible enough to imagine a wind-borne message causing physical as well as emotional tears, but harder to see how these tears might, in return, ‘drown the wind’. The simile has, perhaps, like a storm, blown itself out. It is not too difficult to map this in a basic psychological way: Macbeth tries to address something he knows to be innocent in a way he fears he isn’t, but finds that it proves violent and horrific in the maelstrom of his thoughts, not least because he recognises that pity relates to the moral punishments that surely await. Attempts by earlier editors to gloss this passage demonstrate its difficulty. The task of an editor in such circumstances is awkward: their idiom is usually explanatory, and their goal is to enable readers to gain comprehension and to read the text without obstacles. This simile can hardly be anything other than an obstacle, in the best possible way, so their efforts can prove paradoxical. Some editors make what seems to be a prudent and justifiable choice, by concentrating

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on the parts of the simile rather than its overall rationale. Brooke, in the Oxford Shakespeare edition, provides concise definitions of particular words, dismisses a few more fanciful interpretations, but leaves his discussion of the simile overall to a section of his introduction (on which, more below).23 The Applause Shakespeare version, edited by R. A. Foakes, and with a ‘theatre commentary’ by John Russell Brown, includes in this commentary an interesting account of how an actor might work through the speech: Commentary on such a soliloquy cannot be precise. The actor has to yield mind and being to its sequence of images, its syntax, and its rhythms and metre, and so strive, like Macbeth, to survive with the sense of what he says always intact. Whether spoken with nerve-wracked speed, or with deep and painful deliberation, the dominant impression will be one of struggle followed by some degree of resolution.24

As I read it, the connection between ‘survive ’ and intact ‘sense ’ is not quite clear – how much does survival mean remaining sensible? This seems to me a productive uncertainty, in that the actor and the reader are engaged in a process which might have its own rationale, or which may just involve a rhetorical kind of survival, where the only goal is to connect enough words together, to get past the moment of having to think about pity, and to find another topic on which more clarity might be possible. As an attempt to interpret the speech, however, this reads it as a ‘sequence ’, and thus perhaps a verbal experience that does not rely on our ability to summarise it. Kenneth Muir, in the Arden Shakespeare, aims to tackle the simile as a whole, but hardly says what he thinks is happening at all: 21. Pity] R. Walker, op. cit., p. 55, notes that ‘the babe whose brains the shedevil would dash out is pity, striding the blast of the storm of evil’. 22. Striding] i.e. bestriding.

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Blast] Wilson comments: ‘i.e. (a) of the trumpet, (b) the tempest of horror and indignation aroused by the deed’. But I do not understand how Pity – and still less how a naked new-born babe – can stride the blast, i.e. the sound, of a trumpet. But ‘blast’, by a hidden pun, was doubtless suggested by trumpet-tongu’d – and perhaps Wilson meant this.25

Walker is cited for the link he makes between the babe imagined here, and the one Lady Macbeth imagines killing (to demonstrate her commitment to an oath, and a plan) later in the scene. This connection is too neat. There are lots of babies and children in Macbeth, and they are indeed connected, but with no particular one matching another, and the whole collection embodying the despair and horror of the play’s combination of sterility and evil. More importantly, the only explanation it offers is that this relates to something that comes later. While not insignificant, this effaces the possibility of what is meant right now. Similarly, the comment on ‘blast’ becomes a comment on Wilson, suggesting that he might have been mixed up by the mixed-up blasts, trumpets, angels, and babes. Muir does not answer the question implied by his not understanding how pity, or a babe, can bestride any kind of blast. For an editor in glossing mode, this simile’s cognitive failure is a severe test. A. R. Braunmuller provides more annotation in the New Cambridge Shakespeare. His discussion of ‘blast’, ‘cherubin’, and ‘sightless couriers’ elegantly captures their interaction and their context in Shakespeare’s time.26 His note for the ‘newborn babe ’ [sic] simile as a whole is less clear, but just as astute: 21–2 newborn babe … heaven’s cherubin The alternative offered here between an image of vulnerability (‘babe’) and one of heavenly power (‘heaven’s cherubin’) at first seems confused, but the compressed images join together Macbeth’s future opponents: Banquo’s children, who will succeed to Scotland’s throne (see 1.3.65), and the near-divinely endorsed forces (see 4.3.240–2) that will drive Macbeth from that throne.

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The fact that babies are particularly charged in Macbeth, as nemeses, and as absences, is fair enough. It seems to me less congenial to bring in a belief expressed by Malcolm later in the play, that their army will be supported by God (‘the pow’rs above / Put on their instruments’ are the lines referred to, 4.3.238–9 in the Riverside). Macbeth’s fear of martial angels is more easily explicable by the fact that he is a military man contemplating a terrible sin. This quibble aside, Braunmuller’s gloss encourages us, with good reason, to recognise that the patterns of metaphor in a Shakespeare play often work outside the limits of character and chronology, and justifying what is said here, by a given person, might need recourse to the larger system of language in a play. I think in this case it is possible and desirable to situate the complexity in an individual cognitive crisis, but this is not the only way of addressing it. In addition to opening up this strong, but perhaps problematic interpretation of the simile’s components, Braunmuller also refers the reader to the work of Cleanth Brooks and Helen Gardner: a critical landmark from an earlier generation, and a notable response. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn is one of the central texts of the ‘New Criticism’ of the mid twentieth century. It embodies New Critical interest in close analysis, in patterns of imagery within a text (in preference to any external connections it might suggest), and a taste for the ambiguous. Its analysis of this passage focuses on the many babies in Macbeth, and how they bear on the simile, and also on the central paradox, which is that pity is both fragile and frightening.27 The purpose of this section is not to gather everything said about this speech, but rather to explore some of the problems faced by editors in explanatory mode. Brooks’s analysis, however, has some historical significance. Its version of ambiguity allows literary meaning to be disassociated from a speaker’s heuristic activity, by making the play as a whole the source and measure

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of a metaphor’s complexity. Two particular responses to his analysis of the Macbeth passage have special pertinence here. Helen Gardner opposes his resistance to syntheses and decisions. For her, the innocence of pity and the fear of retribution are nothing like so discontinuous. She argues that, for Shakespeare, the tenderest emotions carried great power: The naked babe ‘strides the blast’ because pity is to Shakespeare the strongest and profoundest of human emotions, the distinctively human emotion. It rises above and masters indignation. The cherubim are borne with incredible swiftness around the world because the virtues of Duncan are of such heavenly beauty that they command universal love and reverence … The babe merges into the cherubim, not because Shakespeare means Macbeth to be feeling both pity and fear of retribution at the same time, but because Shakespeare, like Keats, believes in ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’.28

One need not share Gardner’s commitment to authorial intention, historical context, and inductive comprehension to recognise the value of this argument. Assertions of inconsistency and ambiguity may result from the reader failing to understand the underlying coherence. As I read it, the value of pity does indeed motivate, and fit with, the rapid escalation from a baby to cherubs to vengeful angels and beyond. Gardner recognises that this escalation, even if it can be accounted for without recourse to mystifying irony, resides in high emotion. My sense is that she does not attend enough to the nature of explicability under strain, to the fact that resistance to explicability, even if it can be overcome, is still a property of the text. Nicholas Brooke’s account of the passage in the introduction to the Oxford edition of Macbeth is instructive. It notes first that ‘the process … is all-important’ and ‘startling in its strangeness’.29 He then argues explicitly against Brooks, who (Brooke says) ‘concluded as though the significant image-train resolved the superficial strangeness’. He thinks (and I think) that it does not: ‘it is not simply

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the individual images that are strange, but the very structure in which they emerge, and explanation must not dispel that’ (p. 9). He goes on to identify the qualities of the speech, which leads to suggestive implications about the rhetorical process involved: ‘The whole passage is, of course, constructed out of metaphor, but in a peculiar way: the vision is a self-sustaining structure of words closely related by juxtaposition, but not by syntax’ (p. 10). At this point, however, Brooke develops an argument  – not unlike Braunmuller’s  – that these words should be thought of as the play’s rather than the hero’s (pp. 10–12). He acknowledges that to say this about a central character is a bold step, but nevertheless claims that to reconcile these words with his character ‘would make him a poet, and depend on the same fallacy as believing that because most of Shakespeare ’s characters speak in blank verse they are all poets’ (p. 10). The banality of the fallacy raised at the end here may be telling. It is indeed naïve to think that the verse characters speak is mimetic in the plainest sense: inasmuch as there was an event like this, which is now being dramatised, it was not thus. It is so naïve that critical argument cannot really start there. Characters speak in verse, and this is a convention that we do not attribute to a quirk of the fictional world being represented. However, they speak different verse from one another, so some proportion of their verse-speaking is in character. Even more obviously, when there is a pattern of metaphor that spreads throughout a play, and a map of eloquence that transcends character, there are still varieties of metaphor and eloquence, and there are still different relationships between characters and their eloquence, and between characters and the metaphors that are in some ways common property. Macbeth says things differently; if it can be proved that he does not, it still makes a difference that Macbeth is the character through which the words emerge. Even in the most extreme case of inter-subjective metaphor – and the ‘naked

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new-born babe’ probably isn’t it – it seems wrong to abandon something so basic to playgoing as the distinction between voices. Brooke’s argument is important, because we should avoid assuming that characters possess their words  – just as it seems wise to remember that real people don’t have entirely independent ownership of much that they say. However, it should not marginalise the possibilities offered by the idea that any metaphor might be, in certain aspects of its deployment, connected to its speaker’s apparent cognition. We still need to wonder why characters at their most intense and introverted should speak so creatively and flamboyantly. For a theatre audience, engaged in a vivid moment, the intuitive choice must surely be to respect the individual characters’ separateness, and to see the words originating from these individuals. Plays may of course reward those who explore how language can transcend the gaps between represented fictional figures. However, as was outlined above, criticism has shied away from appraising characters as characters, largely from a prudent fear of the fallacies that result from treating them like real people, as well as in pursuit of the opportunities that lie in appreciating other patterns in drama. This book takes what has become a counter-intuitive approach and gives the characters a large stake, and great credit, for their words and what they represent. It is telling, then, that Gardner sought to explain the coherence of the metaphor as something Shakespeare thought, whereas Brooke saw it as something meaningful in the play as a whole, developing Brooks’s patterns of imagery but then separating them from characterisation. Neither of them credits Macbeth with enough of the effort. The speech is a representation of an anxious moment of selfinquiry, where an emerging feeling, pity, is subjected to scrutiny. This takes the form of the similes and metaphors outlined above, but characterising them as inwardly functioning rather than outwardly

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expressive resolves many of the difficulties of explication into an interest in how their failures are discoveries of sorts. While they do not achieve lucidity, they do approach a kind of self-knowledge as the knotted conflict of Macbeth’s tropes maps out his troubled mind. His rhetoric is, indeed, epistemological as well as heuristic: it is a form in which he can try to know the strained world in which he finds himself. In this book, then, the emphasis will be on characters as the sites of represented cognition, partly because of an interdisciplinary interest in the possibility that rhetoric and cognition may be related, and partly because of a literary-critical conviction that Shakespeare’s characters do not simply or readily recede in favour of a play-wide network of language. In Chapters 4–6 there will be great variety in the rhetorical tactics and strategies by which very different characters  – Bottom and Helena, Imogen and Belarius, Othello and Iago, and many others  – react to extreme situations. The individuality of these heuristic rhetorics reinforces the thought that, in representing characters thus, Shakespeare ’s plays suggest something about how rhetoric and cognition relate. People don’t talk like this; but they may think like it.

C h apt e r 2

Metaphor and synecdoche in cognition

In this chapter I hope to elaborate upon the connection between rhetoric and cognition suggested by Macbeth’s simile. It is necessary to reiterate that this will remain fundamentally an argument about, or at least leading towards Shakespeare, in whose works the two are intimately, heuristically associated. However, this Shakespearean phenomenon will also be taken, to some extent, as revealing or proposing something that spreads beyond Shakespeare ’s works into the disciplines of rhetoric and literary criticism more generally, and indeed into ideas about how language and thought work. This chapter will, I hope, be usefully poised. On the one hand, it is committed to the assertion that rhetoric and cognition might be associated even outside Shakespearean (or other) drama – outside a sphere where characters can only think anything in language or in a hypothetical form that is inferred through language as a fictional necessity (i.e., put simply, to say X, this character must be thinking Y). On the other hand, it acknowledges the limit of that assertion. Interdisciplinary theories of metaphor, conceptions of the brain in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, and renaissance rhetoric intersect in suggestive parallels, tellingly shared patterns, and momentary flashes, rather than being reconciled in a fully coherent and complete way. These intersections nevertheless survive the challenges posed by historical distance and varying models of language and cognition. Even without setting out a unifying theory, if 28

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such a thing is truly achievable, it is possible to suggest that in our reading of Shakespeare a rapprochement, if not a unification, comes into being. Modern minds meet renaissance rhetoric in these plays. We have to think through what is being said. Much of the most energetic work that brings cognition and rhetoric into conjunction has been done in relation to the single most discussed trope: metaphor. It has been invoked so widely that its connection to the rest of rhetoric has been eroded. Nonetheless here it operates very much in proximity with related and overlapping features of the discipline. Rhetorical theory maps out the numerous ways in which speech can be varied and adorned. There are consistent if not entirely stable divisions between different sorts of variation and adornment. A particularly significant one is that between tropes and figures, or sometimes between tropes and schemes, when ‘figures’ is used as a term covering both. The difference can be paraphrased as follows: a trope describes a pattern in which thoughts are developed, which can in turn, to good effect, be reflected in language; a figure is a manipulation of language in order to achieve an additional effect (e.g. by altering the word order, playing with sound, etc.). This distinction is not universal, and it is not an especially stable one, relying as it does on a convenient but questionable distinction between thought and language. However, it usually enables a helpful division between features of rhetoric that are more liable to have a special cognitive dimension, and those which are not. A typical list of the more cognitive tropes might include the following: Metaphor (a word is replaced by one which is like it in some way: ‘we see well’, for ‘we understand well’) Metonymy (a word is replaced by one which shares one of its qualities: ‘the crown’ for the monarchy – but this is one of the most difficult tropes to pin down)

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Synecdoche (a word is replaced by something which is a part of it, or something plural is replaced by a singular  – blade for sword, hand for worker) Catachresis (a word is replaced by something which is not really like it, though the result can usually be understood – saying ‘human power is short’, when you do not measure power in time) Metalepsis (a word is replaced by something conceptually quite distant from it, which requires a leap of thought, or a series of steps of thought, to understand – ‘accursed soil that bred my woe’ – it is quite a journey from the human causer of woe to the land from which he came) Antonomasia (a proper name is replaced by another means of naming – the Virgin Queen) Onomatopoeia (as in the bark of a dog, but also the murmur of waters)1 The expansion beyond metaphor broadens the boundaries but all these tropes operate as forms of substitution, combination, and/or juxtaposition. They link and they overlap. The ‘murmur’ of water is onomatopoeic, for example, but it is also metaphorical, as a sound from the human voice is transposed onto another medium. The last two tropes are relatively particular – antonomasia, like onomatopoeia, arises in specific and often conventional circumstances. The remaining quintet  – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis, and metalepsis – is suggestive. One might (in the light of metaphor’s primacy in the general discourse, where it has become separated from its rhetorical peers) see them all as nuances of metaphor. Metonymy and synecdoche are niche versions of metaphor, with things attenuated into their parts and aspects. Metalepsis and catachresis represent the flowering of metaphor into extended

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resemblance, the former so far as to become complex or abstruse, the latter so far as to break. Alternatively, one could take synecdoche as the initial principle. The movement from part to whole drives other tropes as well. The metaphorical ‘see ’ for ‘understand’ arises by means of a shared part (the notion of something being perceived) linking the two wholes. The metaleptic ‘soil’ relies on more part-to-whole transitions. The catachretic ‘power is short’ actually works more simply. In this case the same shared part might be suggested (the notion of a limit) but the result is paradoxical. In this context catachresis, incidentally, does not seem like a broken metaphor, but rather like an adventurous (though perhaps risky) means of generating novelty. As will emerge in this chapter and the next, metaphor and synecdoche are the key tropes, most liable to be understood in terms of thought, and most amenable to rhetoricalcognitive analysis. However one arranges the relationship of the tropes to one another, they seem like an interlocking and productive group, designed to open up and account for a range of possibilities in the resemblances between things. This is all the more the case because the distinctions between them can be hard to establish. It is difficult, for example, to outline characteristics for metonymy that correspond to a truly distinct zone separate from both synecdoche and metaphor. Deciding whether something is catachresis or metalepsis can come down to judgment rather than logic. This distinction supposes that a complex trope creates a graded series of decisions in the receiver, whereas experience suggests that some easily explicable metaphors require a lot of thought, while some logically broken catachreses actually commend themselves smoothly to the reader or listener. In the examples considered at length in the later chapters, as it happens, the term used will almost always be metaphor. This is for two main reasons. First, metaphor, even strictly speaking, is

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usually the appropriate term. Second, in practice it is usually better to evaluate a trope’s effect in context than to work out meticulously what can be a fine line between metaphor and (say) metalepsis. One other term will be used nearly as often as metaphor, and that is simile. Although similes will not play much of a role in this ­chapter, it is worth outlining now how they will fit – not least because a cognitive-heuristic simile, ‘pity like a naked new-born babe ’, has already been so prominent. The term ‘simile ’ will be used somewhat broadly in subsequent chapters, to cover a wider range of ­comparisons and parallels than the strictest definition would allow. The point (as with the term ‘metaphor’) is again to be effective rather than pedantic, and to recognise that a cognitive-heuristic quality arises in explicit comparisons and analogies as well. Similes are sometimes separated from the tropes above because of the evident difference entailed in the word ‘like ’ or ‘as’. Something that is set up as a comparison between two explicitly separated things seems to be of a different order from metaphor, which makes that comparison without such a barrier or bridge. The study of simile and metaphor is a rich field. Since Aristotle similes have sometimes been considered as ­varieties of metaphor.2 Recently the difference between the two tropes has been explored by those in and around cognitive science as well as linguistics: the difference can be tested in experiments.3 For the purposes of this study, however, the need to explore the difference is rather less, and the tendency of numerous observers to see similes as much like metaphors is generally encouraging. For in relation to the cognitive heuristics of rhetorical tropes – and to most of the disciplines in which their ramifications will be considered – the work done in a simile is the same as the work done in a metaphor. The form in which it is expressed makes a difference to many things, and no literary critic can ignore the way that the comparative ‘like’ or ‘as’ negotiates similarity and/or

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dissimilarity in a way that metaphor does not. It does not necessarily make a difference, however, to the implied problem-solving effort that it derives from, and that it actually does. So while the group of tropes being fostered here (synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, metalepsis, and catachresis in particular) excludes simile, the characteristics of most of them (synecdoche excepted) will be seen in similes, which can be extended like metalepses, broken like catachreses, and so on. The next task of this chapter is to bring rhetoric and cognition into further contact, and it has a straightforward starting point by way of one of its two key tropes, synecdoche. For a literary critic reading about cognitive science, this particular rhetorical figure often proves surprisingly suggestive given its undervaluation in rhetoric and literary criticism. Attempts to explain the workings of the brain make use of laboratory experiments on human subjects, evidence from neurology, conclusions drawn from computer modelling, and the scientists’ ability to create descriptive tools (for instance, analogies). In memory, for example, various processes require the connection of parts (fragmentary cues, where one part of something is offered to an experimental subject) and wholes (the remembered item that the cue elicits). Experiments are often complex and ingenious, but the part / whole dynamic is basic to how memory is seen to work by contemporary psychology.4 In vision and visual recognition – and more generally in the study of the senses – parts and wholes are again at issue. Intuitively we know that our images of the world are sometimes generated from fragments  – misrecognitions, for example, result when wholes are generated incorrectly from suggestive parts.5 The work of the brain, then, as it is seen by psychologists, involves many different kinds of part-to-whole transitions; and it seems reasonable to assume that the ones we are aware of are complemented

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by countless ones of which we consciously know nothing. The evolutionary point is obvious: at the fringes (for example) of perception, each hint of a noise causes an associative response. Does this fill out into the tread of a wild animal or an intruder? Encountering all these parts and wholes, in my case at least, made the rhetorical trope of synecdoche come to mind – as it happens, by a kind of synecdoche, because something in what I saw recalled the rest of something I knew. As will be seen in the next chapter, it is neither the most prominent nor the most valued trope, and when it is explained it seems rather idiosyncratic and self-involved, not contributing very much. However, its resemblance to the work of cognition may require some reassessment. For now, however, this serves as the first intimation that rhetoric and psychology may have something in common. This would be much less consequential were it not for further intersections between rhetoric and cognition that result from the pervasive power of metaphor. It is present as an underlying concept, and often explicit, in the work of cognitive scientists as they try to generalise about the way the brain works. The barely fathomable number of neurons, and connections between neurons, lends itself to models that stress complex, recursive, discontinuous, and parallel relationships.6 Synecdoche maps onto the tree-like diagrams of neural networks trying to capture the associative work of the brain. Metaphor can be a way of capturing shifts and capabilities that cannot feasibly be mapped out by means of binary logic or two-dimensional diagrams. Scholars actively working on the relationship between literature and cognitive science have been particularly keen to propose metaphor as a common currency: a fundamental part of creative language, and a basic tool in mental activity. Raymond Gibbs’s The Poetics of Mind sets up a close correlation between the workings of thought and characteristics of poetics, in

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which metaphor features prominently.7 The work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner has, for many readers, the capacity to revolutionise our understanding of metaphor. In their work two crucial characteristics have emerged. First, metaphor is conceptual – that is, it arises from the way the brain organises and explores concepts; second, it is embodied – that is, it arises from the brain’s responses to our bodily experiences of the world. Lakoff and his collaborators are known for their capitalised metaphorical fields. An example like ‘AFFECTION IS WARMTH’ traces a range of expressions connecting the two (‘warm-hearted’, a ‘cool’ reception) back to physical associations and to the interactions of neural structures, rather than to attempts at better linguistic expression.8 Metaphor in language, then, arises from the evolved interface of the brain with the world, and records the ways in which we think through problems and opportunities. It is most active in relation to the things that prove most challenging. In this book the importance of the conceptual side of metaphor, rather than the embodied side, will be paramount. As has already been evident in the discussion of Macbeth, the aim here is to explore literary means of representing thought when it struggles to take shape. Lakoff and Turner implicitly acknowledge the fertile connection in the title of More Than Cool Reason, which is taken from a moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.6) that will be central to Chapter 4. They share an interest with this book in what could be seen as the contribution made by imagination to reason, and they offer a vivid new way to see metaphor reaching back into its origins in the formation of concepts. The potential for metaphor to illuminate difficult questions in psychology is attested in revealingly varied work.9 Its potential is being explored pertinently in the field of cognitive linguistics. This wide-ranging area of study brings together the structures of language and the workings of the brain, and the many consequences of

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the theory that there is no special language module – that language is bound in with other cognitive structures. As they also explore how metaphor and figurative language may arise from, and give insights into, the brain’s capacity to respond creatively, William Croft and Alan Cruse offer numerous suggestions that chime with the present argument.10 Their account of the ‘life-history’ of a metaphor recognises the different kinds of importance that one might acquire over time. Rather than lapsing into a ‘dead’ metaphor (bereft of the capacity to be arresting in a literary context), a metaphor may be consummated by its transition into something commonplace (pp.  204–6). This is the point at which a metaphor achieves its potential to reconceive something. Their account of the difference between metaphor and simile proposes possible discriminations – a simile is an ‘implicit metaphor’, and a simile ‘is interpreted by translating it into a metaphor’ (p. 212) – without eroding the overlapping cognitive functions that, as has already been mentioned, are assumed here. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner are associated with a particularly pertinent aspect of the field: the theory of conceptual blending.11 This aims to outline a physical model of how the brain may create functional metaphors for dealing with imaginary or hypothetical situations, or for generating creative solutions to new problems. Turner and Fauconnier define conceptual blending as a deep cognitive activity that ‘makes new meanings out of old’. The brain brings things together and thus produces unpredictable new combinations, and they take this as at least an analogy for literary creativity.12 The ‘blend’ where two concepts meet and form something new happens in a hypothetical ‘space’ arising from the neural structure of the brain. There is no actual space being imagined, but hypothesising one allows Fauconnier and Turner to point a way in which things already thought can interact to produce something new. In its

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combination of creativity, language, and neuropsychology, this is an innovative theory. In other ways, it is quite simple, which is part of its strength. At this point the literary scholar might intervene with a number of thoughts about metaphor. One might be that metaphor is a complex and very varied thing in language and literature; but conceptual blending theory benefits from that, because the multiple potential of metaphor opens up more possibilities in the blended thought. Another might be more difficult to deal with: if metaphor and metonymy (important here as they are to Gibbs) are embraced by cognitive linguistics, why not other tropes of rhetoric? In particular synecdoche is again compelling. The space of conceptual blending sees parts of things encountering one another; parts and wholes are integral and basic to the process. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a number of attempts to connect Shakespeare with cognitive science. These are usually exploratory, with a view to inaugurating what promise to be lively new perspectives. At the time of writing, it is difficult to tell what kind of impact they might have. Theorists of performance have used the theory of conceptual blending to examine the experiences of audiences and the practice of acting.13 Other studies focus primarily on texts, and for that reason share more priorities with the present study, but they also show telling differences. Philip Davis’s book Shakespeare Thinking connects Shakespeare ’s characteristic verbal creativity with experiments that test the brain’s excitation when faced with certain verbal phenomena  – for example, nouns made into verbs (‘functional shift’). The effectiveness of his language is explained with reference to the workings of the brain: That is why when the language in Shakespeare takes a complicated shape across the lines, you know you are in the presence of primary evidence – not paraphrase, but the structuring of the mind itself. You fly blind in Shakespeare: you hear and feel the mental shifts and changes and twists and

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turns, and you are not told in advance when they are coming or in retrospect what they are called. But you know you have followed some formative evolutionary move.14

As Davis acknowledges, the richness of the Shakespearean text makes it difficult material for scientific experiments that need to isolate phenomena in order to discern and measure them. Nonetheless, experiments with types of language like the ones at the heart of his book (which examined neurological reactions to ‘functional shift’ in specially created instances) can suggest a physical level at which complex literary effects might operate. The claim that poetic language reflects the deepest structures of mental activity strikes a chord with my argument about tropes. Here Davis seems resistant to the thought that poetic effects can be named as they might be by rhetorical analysis. Later in the book he brings rhetoric into the picture (only to set it aside) in relation to a speech of Hermione ’s in The Winter’s Tale (‘The bug which you would fright me with’, 3.2.92ff.): That sort of formulation could come out of almost any sixteenth-­century book of rhetoric, but here it is as though Shakespeare spontaneously ­reinvents rhetoric as natural speech in the process of taking form. (p. 54)

For me there is a suggestive interplay between the kind of thing one could analyse with technical language, and the kind of thing one could attribute to fundamental structures in the brain. Davis’s juxtaposition has one context displacing another, whereas it might be possible to see them in a more complementary, more mutually informing parallel. The conclusion from cognitive linguistics, and from the broader rhetorical context that follows in this chapter and the next, is that there is an affinity between figurative dramatic language and a struggle to make sense of things and to respond to traumatic events. To see (as Davis does here) a coincidence of profound

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and beautiful language, which can be described in terms of tropes, with a moment of manifest thought process, might be quite natural – part of the rich, strange nature that Shakespeare is representing. Mary Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain is noteworthy both for its bold application of scientific ideas, and its careful negotiations with literary-­critical assumptions.15 Here cognitive science and the cultural environment are in constant dialogue: Crane sees them in collaboration, creating and altering meaning. Shakespeare ’s uses of certain powerful and repeating metaphors are explored in the light of this dialogue, and the texture of his language is read in relation to key determinants acting on it, namely the presences of these images in early modern English culture, and the brain’s systems for managing concepts. Crane’s work manages to be both historical and textual in its application of what has come to be called ‘cognitive theory’. Dense groups of words (‘pen’, ‘pitch’, ‘pine ’, ‘pinch’, et al. in The Tempest, for example) are show to relate to one another not through an orderly semantic system, but rather through a knotty web of sound and sense and spatial organisation that testifies ultimately to the struggles of the brain to make sense of the world. The question that separates one cognitive critic from another is sometimes ‘whose cognition?’ For Davis the one most involved in the process of reading and meaning is the reader’s. The only other mind, or brain, undeniably (if problematically) involved in the work is its author’s, and Crane’s book pushes in this direction. Both reader and author are powerful but difficult constructs, and to these my study adds a third: the character. By situating the thinking in the fictional mind of the character, and at the same time in the workings of the play itself (somehow poised between the writer and reader), my attention is on process and hypothesis rather than on explanation and diagnosis. The hope is to witness cognitive patterns, as it were, in the wild, when they are most exposed, but not to tame

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them. Literature and – especially – drama come to seem like ways in which to think about thinking at its most complex. Graham Bradshaw’s essay on Othello has already been mentioned in Chapter 1. One of its key points is that literary critics have been surprisingly slow to register the potential of new theories of metaphor for the analysis of literary language.16 A recent issue of The Shakespeare International Yearbook edited by Bradshaw had a special section on ‘Shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Science ’.17 This included several innovative essays linking advances in metaphor theory with the plays themselves.18 The combination has been tested before, in a pioneering book by Ann and John Thompson published in 1987. In Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor they raised some of the aforementioned ideas  – and others  – to see whether they could impinge on Shakespearean questions. The conclusions of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By proved illuminating in considering time metaphors in Troilus and Cressida.19 Thompson and Thompson posited the metaphors came from ‘a generally-shared’ source, and argued that as their account developed Shakespeare ‘recedes as someone who is expressing his own thoughts about time through the mouths of his puppet characters’ (p. 42). My emphasis in this book is not focused on the repeated, structuring metaphors of plays, and so has less at stake in what is ‘generally shared’; nonetheless their experiment is a very pertinent one. The other crucial difference between Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor and this book is that the former has no particular connection to cognitive science; metaphor is seen as a feature of language rather than a component or driver of thought. Recent work linking cognitive science to literary criticism provides the motive for a reappraisal of its findings. In another chapter the Thompsons approach parts, wholes, and bodies in Hamlet in the light of an unusual but highly suggestive

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rhetorical context. They cite the work of a group of Belgian semio­ ticians known as ‘Groupe μ’, who conclude – as I have proposed above – that metaphor might be considered as the result of multiple synecdoches.20 It is worth elaborating on this group’s reconfiguration of rhetoric in this chapter, partly as prelude to the history of rhetorical manuals mapped out in the next. Their motive is to do better than earlier versions, and to produce more scientific ­divisions between the tropes and figures.21 Synecdoche and metaphor are both types of ‘metasememe ’, ‘a figure that replaces one sememe [unit of meaning] by another’ (p. 28); the latter are composed of multiple examples of the former (see particularly pp. 106– 14).22 In the Groupe μ scheme it is also worth noting that similes and comparisons are seen as different in degree from metaphor (denoting weaker equivalence), rather than different in kind (pp. 116–18). From a very different direction, then, this General Rhetoric arrives at a scheme not unlike the one I am advancing as a way of appreciating the heuristic, cognitive dimension of Shakespearean ­language. Synecdoche is foundational and generative; ­metaphor and ­simile are closely related; metonymy is liable to overlap with both ­synecdoche and metaphor. Ultimately my aim is not to reorganise the tropes, since rhetoric seems to look different, and might lend itself to different taxonomies, depending on which of its various functions and potentials are at issue. The Thompsons wrote another essay exercising the Groupe μ scheme, this time about Othello.23 The many hands and hearts of this play are seen as buried synecdoches, liable to be pieced together and extrapolated, sometimes under the influence of Iago. The disastrous false recognitions and false synecdoches that result parallel many things in Chapter 6, which is concerned with the metaphorical tangles of that play. They make an acute point about synecdoche that results from an observation that the concept of

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‘imagery’ does not apply to a trope that rarely seems to furnish pictures: Synecdoche is a low-foothills figure rather than a prominent feature of the poetic landscape, and synecdoches involving the human body tend to seem so natural as to verge on invisibility. Most of our examples are so modest, so unobtrusive, so ‘easy’ in Hoskins’ sense, that they fail to attract the conscious attention of editors of the play, let alone that of audiences or readers … Usable synecdoches tend to be stereotyped or idiomatic, as is demonstrated in the synecdoche literature by worries over why ‘sail’ can easily stand for ‘ship’ while ‘rudder’ cannot. A far-fetched metaphor stimulates thought; a far-fetched synecdoche provokes incomprehension. (p. 62)24

This is a highly perceptive passage outlining characteristics of synecdoche that will be of continuing importance in the next chapter. It even includes its own challenging metaphor. In what ways are mountains made up of foothills? The uncertainty here means that this formulation only partly endorses Groupe μ’s constructive arrangement of synecdoches and metaphors. The Thompsons are concerned with the problem of gradation in the figure, with the way it is either automatic or broken. They don’t make my additional speculative step: to connect this with this trope ’s shared patterning with the bases of thinking. I suggest that this is because the apparent likely result is a complex descriptive categorisation of things one might observe in literature – a field-guide – rather than what I hope to provide: something more tuned in to literary processes. A bit more recently Elizabeth Hart turned to cognitive linguistics and evaluated its potential in literary criticism. For her, it offered a way of operating between the strictures of structuralism and poststructuralism, by eroding the distinction between literal and metaphorical and positing ‘a system of language powered chiefly by metaphor’ and ‘a ground for language in the experiential’:

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It gives us tools with which critics can – to a degree unrealized by either New Critical or deconstructive methods  – demystify figurative language and thereby better describe its effects. By the same token, it also opens that middle space in the dichotomy between determinacy and indeterminacy currently assumed by much literary theory.25

In addition to characterising the productive position that such an approach might create for the critic, Hart also suggests that the process of close reading might be energised by cognitive linguistics. The potential to ‘demystify figurative language ’ does not deny complexity and ambiguity, but pushes aside a more debilitating refusal to eludicate what a metaphor might be trying to achieve in the world, or in the fictional world. It is telling that, despite the successes of Shakespeare’s Brain in bringing a cognitive approach to the details of literary language, Mary Crane wondered in a 2009 article how cognitive literary studies might offer more reinterpretations of texts.26 As has already been seen – and will be seen from Chapter 4 onwards – this study is based on a premise that a theory of metaphor (and tropes in general) inspired by cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual blending should indeed open up new detailed readings of passages and poems. Alternatively, it might provide more thorough corroboration for intuitive observations made by earlier critics about the thoughtfulness of Shakespearean speech. This is primarily enabled by the juxtaposition of what is meant by thinking in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, with what looks like thinking in literary characters. This chapter turns to other moments in critical and philosophical writings about metaphor in order to identify affinities, sometimes almost unwitting, with the thesis being developed here. This survey is necessarily selective, since metaphor has proved so provocative, but it aims to gather a range of ways in which scholars have reached partial intersections with the argument of this book. Some

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have opened up the possibility of the connection I am making, but without proposing such a deliberate reappraisal of well-known rhetorical tropes as forms of thinking rather than as forms of expression.27 I. A. Richards’s influential The Philosophy of Rhetoric is best known for its formulation of metaphor as ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle ’  – where ‘tenor’ is the thing that needs to be expressed, and ‘vehicle ’ is the means by which it is expressed in the metaphor.28 His book has more to offer, and his description of metaphor as an intimate communicative practice, and its structure as something dynamic, is very suggestive, and has not particularly been taken up by scholars of renaissance rhetoric. Richards removes some of the hierarchy, priority, and chronology implicit in many definitions of metaphor, including many from the period. Typically, there is an idea to be expressed, and the metaphor provides a means of doing so that is essentially in service to the idea. For Richards, who sees metaphor in practice, in discourse, the ‘vehicle’ is part of the communication involved just as the ‘tenor’ is. Further, throughout his work there is an assumption, mostly but not only implicit, that metaphor and thought are linked. He sees language working associatively, as a system of connections that resembles associative models of cognition. The advances in thinking about metaphor described already have had less manifest impact on literary criticism than might be expected, given that metaphor is always acknowledged to be fundamental to poetic language. It has been embraced as an interdisciplinary topic, and essays from different perspectives have sometimes been gathered together. The impression remains that these congruences are rather fleeting. In a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry in 1978 there was a telling impasse combined with an overlap – the result perhaps of genial disciplinary cross-purposes  – between the philosopher Donald Davidson and the literary critic Wayne Booth. Davidson’s essay ‘What Metaphors Mean’ is poised. He evinces an interest in the

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communicative power and stretching nature of metaphor – ‘Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator.’29 However, he is austere about the meaning of a metaphor: A metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, beyond the literal). This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. (p. 32)

Davidson is rigorous about the lack of special content in a metaphor; it makes us see one thing as another without carrying any unique cognitive load beyond the literal, or ‘ordinary’ meaning.30 This chapter’s survey centres on approaches to metaphor that suggest its exploratory, heuristic ­potential in thought, rather than the factors that bear upon it in communication. For Davidson, and for others in philosophy and linguistics, the focus is on the meaning a metaphor carries between two agents, and how it is received, rather than what it might be reaching after. Nevertheless, he touches upon a number of issues already established here. Developing his resistance to the idea that metaphors cause a semantic challenge in themselves, he questions the assumption that ambiguity is a typical property: The ambiguity in the word, if there is any, is due to the fact that in ordinary contexts it means one thing and in the metaphorical context it means something else; but in the metaphorical context we do not necessarily hesitate over its meaning. When we do hesitate, it is usually to decide which of a number of metaphorical interpretations we shall accept; we are seldom in doubt that what we have is a metaphor. (p. 35)

It is, of course, very difficult to be categorical about such hesitations and decisions. Nonetheless the juxtaposition of intuitive speed and explicatory delay is one that will recur in this book. Davidson also

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takes on the relationship between metaphor and simile, and concludes that the key difference is simply that similes are more explicit (pp. 38–40) – not that they entail any more fundamental distinction. This he shares with Booth’s essay that follows in the special issue of Critical Inquiry: It is curious that the difference between metaphor and simile, essential in the study of some kinds of metaphor, seems here to become extremely unimportant. It is perhaps true that adding a ‘like’ or ‘as’ to the catfish picture [an example cited earlier in the article] will weaken it somewhat. But this addition does not change the nature of the picture, and one is not surprised to find that classical theorists, unlike many modern philosophers with different purposes in view, have seen the choice between simile and metaphor as minor, as depending simply on whether the speaker profits from seeming more or less daring.31

Although Booth’s perspective is a highly sophisticated one, it seems to me that the double-edged position he articulates (the lack of difference is ‘curious’, but also ‘not surprising’) is natural for a literary critic encountering rhetoric as seen from a non-literary perspective. The fact that simile and metaphor might be effectively equivalent is both intuitively acceptable (because of the way they affect readers) and counter-intuitive (because of the unavoidable presence of that ‘like’ or ‘as’). Booth reserves the right to assert that in a metaphor ‘more is communicated than the words literally say’, and he credits the speaker with a ‘task’ of ‘yoking’ (p. 54). Like Davidson, he avoids suggesting that special meaning is contained, but he focuses on the communication involved, in which energy is created by work, and a metaphor can still (as it was for Richards) be greater than the sum of its parts. One of the key revivals of rhetoric in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular relevance to its role in the generation of ideas, came in the work of Chaim Perelman.32 He drew inspiration

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from, and made connections with, the classical tradition.33 His formulation of a ‘New Rhetoric’ aims to define a means of arguing well, and it has more in common with philosophical dialectic than with the characteristics of the tropes as they are embraced by literary scholars. Nonetheless, he represents a significant strand of thinking about rhetoric, which recognises its patterns as tools for the process of inquiry. On the terms of my argument, this brings together the rhetorical and the heuristic, if not exactly the cognitive. Robert Scott’s idea of ‘epistemic rhetoric’ (i.e. using the patterns of rhetoric to explore how we know things) and Richard McKeon’s ‘architectonic’ view of rhetoric likewise aim to harness its structures as a means of intellectual discovery.34 The 1970s and 1980s proved a rich period for other explorations of rhetoric as a means of, and a model for, addressing philosophical questions.35 Perelman was one inspiration, but the works of Paul de Man (asserting the epistemological value of metaphor as a way of knowing the world) and Richard Rorty (combining the philosophy of language with pragmatics) were also part of the environment that produced such studies.36 In fact the entwining of rhetoric and inquiry has a longer history, with Giambattista Vico a particularly significant figure.37 The flourishing of the idea in the late twentieth century, however, is interestingly coincident with the development of brain science and cognitive linguistics, and their implications for the relationship between rhetoric and cognition. Another philosopher of metaphor who has embraced its capacity to develop and extend the human intellectual repertoire is Hans Blumenberg. His work explores ‘nonconceptuality’  – the value in deep-set metaphors which, when analysed, reveal a great deal in their nuances and repetitions. For Blumenberg, this has greater as well as different value when compared to the results of a direct philosophical approach to concepts as such.38 This anthropological approach (anthropological, because it is focused on how people and

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societies work) might usefully be set alongside an explicitly ideological approach to underlying social metaphors, such as that of Andrew Goatly. In his book Washing the Brain, he teases out the political and ecological bias in widely accepted metaphors (e.g. quality is wealth / money; Hamlet is a very rich play) that exert a pernicious effect.39 Metaphors are a kind of thinking here, but they are involved in the deep inflection of thoughts more than in the heuristic process, the experience of the reactive moment, that will be the concern of the later chapters. Metaphor has provoked a great deal of debate, some of which has moved towards embracing its role in making thoughts. I have already suggested that the pattern described by synecdoche (part to, or for, whole) might have a fundamental place in cognition. Cognitive linguistics embraces the ways in which metaphor and metonymy, which are in effect two other kinds of substitution of one thing, or one aspect of a thing, for another, might help us understand how thought works. It is perhaps worth emphasising that this is not referring to conscious thought, to what we think we are thinking, but to processes that happen earlier and deeper in the process of trying to understand things. These metaphors and synecdoches happen responsively; they are not deployed. If the overlap between patterns and terms is taken to one logical conclusion, then two ostensibly separate disciplines may have a great deal in common. If rhetoric turns out to be so useful in ­furnishing terms to those interested in cognition, perhaps these terms in rhetoric are already concerned with cognition – perhaps rhetoric may be doing something unexpected, mapping thought. In the longer run, this book is fuelled by the thought that it is not a ­coincidence that at least three rhetorical tropes  – synecdoche, ­metonymy, and metaphor – have this potential. These philosophical accounts of metaphor and rhetoric offer various kinds of corroboration for a challenging premise, that parts of

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rhetorical theory have such a pertinent overlap with cognitive patterns that they are, in effect, a kind of cognitive science before such a thing was considered. To overcome the gap in terms here would require a synthesis between two periods’ philosophies of language and thought. Renaissance rhetoricians may offer fleeting suggestions of structures and patterns that a modern reader might recognise from theories of cognition derived from neuroscience. From a scientific perspective this may reflect empirical observations and intuitions that intimate a biological truth  – how neural pathways operate – that applied then as now. From within the humanities this induces anxiety by ignoring what might be seen as epistemic contradictions: in what ways can it be meaningful to talk about brains and neurons in relation to Shakespeare?40 This is an interdisciplinary as well as a historical problem, and yet even if it can be solved, it need not be for the purposes of my argument. First, the place of cognition in rhetoric might be seen as a discontinuous one currently catching the light in a certain way, and there is no need to shape it teleologically – no need to make the connections into a story that leads to the present-day brain. Second, as was said above, I have no sense that Shakespeare represents thinking in this way with a view to proposing something about the nature of the mind or the philosophy of language per se. These patterns and resemblances arise in the course of storytelling, character development, and mimesis, and from within that set of motives they offer out their implications. It would be Quixotic to try to reconcile the parts of such an argument completely, and even more so given that the principal target of the process – Shakespeare – does not encourage this sort of synthesis. Nonetheless, the potential illumination on both sides of the juxtaposition justifies perseverance. The main goal is a greater understanding of Shakespeare’s works, and how they may reward close reading. One key thing to show in this respect

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is that works of rhetoric actually do imply some sort of cognitive component in the tropes they describe and exemplify. This can only be surreptitious and is hardly acknowledged in the statements of purpose of the key treatises. Nevertheless it offers the beginnings of communication across the historical and conceptual gap. In embracing sometimes fleeting signs that rhetoric relates to thinking, and is in effect a kind of proleptic cognitive science, the point is not to unseat the more familiar idea of rhetoric as a guide to eloquent and persuasive speech. This is what renaissance writers and their classical predecessors expressly understood it to be, notwithstanding the surreptitious hints that I shall engage with in Chapter 3’s survey. Furthermore, in seeing it as a science of eloquence and persuasion, they were seeing it as something supremely effectual and significant. My argument is a supplement – a particularly Shakespearean supplement – to numerous existing studies of renaissance rhetoric that take this view. Brian Vickers has written in defence of the value of the full range of its rules and categories.41 For Vickers, renaissance rhetoric is a functional, active art of expression and persuasion. He defends its integrity against those who only treat a narrow canon of figures – at times, metaphor alone – and against those who embroil rhetoric in antagonism with other disciplines, especially philosophy. This study has less antipathy to such theoretical approaches, but still recognises the value of what to some readers seem like arcane lists of figures and tropes, and the coherent purpose behind them. Richard Lanham’s The Motives of Eloquence is another classic study, viewing what he calls ‘homo rhetoricus’ as a kind of social self in the period.42 Where Vickers emphasises the value and effectiveness of rhetoric in action, Lanham focuses on the excitement and energy of composition, seeing this as a renaissance trait. Other scholars of early modern rhetoric combine sympathy for its main and ostensible purpose with other, sometimes paradoxical

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conceptual concerns. Wayne A. Rebhorn argues that renaissance rhetoric is about power, and subjugating the listener.43 However, it also proves ambiguous, with the rhetoricians imagining orators as figures with characteristics of insiders and outsiders, of the masculine and the feminine, and with touches of the grotesque. Peter Mack’s study of Elizabethan rhetoric is exhaustive within its own terms without often coming close to the concerns being developed here. Rhetoric is seen as a means of structuring writing, in close conjunction with education and especially dialectic.44 Within this scholarly idiom – as perhaps for Ann Moss and Mary Thomas Crane in their work on humanist practices  – the ‘structuring of thought’ refers to an active process and not to something more descriptively engaged with the deeper origins of new or problematic thinking.45 For Mack, ‘comparison, metaphor, simile, vivid description, antithesis’ are concerned ‘with descriptions, comparisons, and copia’ (p. 300). In relation to theology, for example, he maintains that ‘rhetorical education both contributes to the achievement of Elizabethan religious writing and offers us ways to understand it’ (p. 290), but this does not mean that metaphor or simile or any other trope is credited with a conceptual contribution – with the capacity to advance or confuse a debate through its capacity for innovative work. Mack makes a pertinent point by comparing the numbers of editions of the key manuals that are the basis of Chapter 3. The ones most prized by literary critics (Puttenham especially, and Peacham) are only printed once (in Peacham’s case, once each for the 1577 and 1593 versions). Others – Angel Day’s and Thomas Wilson’s, for example – are printed many times. The emphasis in the Elizabethan market is on practicality, on the presentation of rhetoric as a toolkit for public speaking and writing. There is much to be said, then, for studies of rhetoric that take on its own explicit terms an activity involved in social conduct. Nonetheless, as will be seen later, in rhetorical writings there are hints

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of some sort of coherence between the explicit project (describing ways of speaking more persuasively) and a covert project to explore the workings of the mind. This does not mean that the mind works in language, or does not, just that the relationships between items in the systems share certain patterns.46 Nor does it rely on a particular theory of how the mind and/or brain should be thought about, or how they might relate. In rhetorical theory there seems to me to be an early attempt to observe and categorise the brain’s (or mind’s) dealings with complex material. It is not an organised attempt, however, with its terms and boundaries in place; it is unacknowledged, sporadic, but still suggestive, and perhaps remarkably insightful. Here, however, the next priority is to explore particular tropes – metaphor and synecdoche, in relation to Shakespearean thought processes. Hamlet’s soliloquies are both a central and an extreme case for thinking about rhetoric. They are outstanding set-pieces of language, full of complex and resourceful application of the tools of the discipline, yet it can be hard to see them as persuasive, effectual speeches that achieve something tangible in the world. At this point in the argument they seem an apt place to register further the Shakespearean consequences of a shift of emphasis in the consideration of rhetoric. In the end the point to be made seems almost an obvious one (though not one without consequences, and perhaps here with more precision): Hamlet’s tropes at times seem not to persuade anyone, even himself, and instead they seem to be devoted to mustering and arranging thoughts.47 Early in the play, Hamlet turns to a familiar metaphor (the world as a garden) and expands it, within the context of an attempt to sum up his predicament: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden

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That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! (1.2.133–7)

The four adjectives in the first line here approach the world from different angles; they are a means of appraisal, seeing which term catches the light. Hamlet’s ‘Fie on’t! ah fie!’ is more than just an exclamation. It is also a kind of cognitive re-booting, striving to restart a better apprehension of the problem. This seems to lead to the garden metaphor, with its horticultural elaboration. Hamlet’s garden is one at a precise stage. It has become overgrown with inferior plants, with potentially serviceable ones having gone to seed. This suggests a problem that can be solved with a return to more effective husbandry, but this does not prove the case in Hamlet’s own circumstances. The way that the thought arises, after the string of adjectives being tried out, and a frustrated shake of the head, adds to the impression that this rhetorical moment captures Hamlet’s attempt to think well, rather than it being the result of him speaking well. This treats soliloquies very differently from James Hirsh’s study of Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. He makes a tripartite distinction: between ‘audience-addressed speech’, ‘self-addressed speech’, and ‘interior monologue’.48 His rather prosaic agenda is to insist on these categories, to prefer the first two and especially the second in Shakespeare, and to resist the notion that soliloquies reveal inwardness and innermost thoughts. The distinction is too plain. It is particularly awkward because it rests on the philosophical problem that one cannot know another person’s thoughts. While this is (as Hirsh argues, p. 29) surely part of the fascination and horror of Othello, since we cannot adequately understand Iago, it rashly treats dramatic characters as if, like people, they have innermost thoughts. They do not, so in their cases the words they speak in soliloquy constitute the deepest level we can reach, even though they seem so

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emphatically performed at times. Hirsh also raises realism as an issue: ‘a self-addressed speech is less a departure from our possible experience than an interior monologue’ (p. 45). But although it is true that we do not overhear people’s thoughts in life, this is something widely featured and attested in the experience of fiction. Indeed, the loose thoughts Hirsh thinks he is dispensing with actually testify to the readiness readers and audiences show when they think they are experiencing insights into thought processes. Evidently my notion of cognitive rhetoric rests on an attitude towards dramatic character very different from his. In Hamlet’s next soliloquy he again has to attempt an understanding of his situation. Unlike the Player, Hamlet cannot contrive extreme emotion, despite his cause. He has to figure his own humiliation. The point about his attempt is not that it lacks the eloquence of some of Hamlet’s best moments, but more that the tropes seem tangibly to be summoned up to fill a cognitive gap, rather than to express something in a more effective way: Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’ the throat As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this? Ha, ’swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ’a’ fatted all the region kites With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! Why, what an ass am I! (2.2.572–82)

The questions are repetitive, and the rhetorical advantage to be gained by this repetition is small, if the purpose is to be more impressive or persuasive. If the purpose is cognitive and heuristic,

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then they have a function, although they do not seem successful: in trying out these different versions of the challenge being put to him, Hamlet is searching for a good way of conceiving it. There is some yield for this effort: a robust tone (‘Ha, ’swounds’), and in keeping with it, a robust metaphorical field turned to the moment. The birdworld provides an unflattering image of himself (‘pigeon-liver’d’) and an image of the forces that should feast on his defeated enemy (‘all the region[’s] kites’). In between these, however, there is no image of the crucial contest, no metaphors for an effectual Hamlet or a beatable Claudius. The need to configure the world in tropes is evident, but the attempt does not produce, for the speaker, renewed momentum. The descent into a series of adjectives – as in the previous quotation – is again a means of appraisal. Here, however, there is little sense of productive problem-solving; repetition stalls the process. It ends when Hamlet grasps at a new, but simple, metaphor for himself. By calling himself an ‘ass’, Hamlet seems to concede defeat. In the Folio text there is another interjection before the final line quoted above – ‘Oh Vengeance!’ This looks like another attempt to break a cycle, with an unelaborated key word that embodies his purpose as well as his problem: reinstated in the text, it might seem briefly to help. The same qualities are evident in abundance in the ‘To be or not to be’ speech – not surprisingly, given that this, more even than the other soliloquies, takes on a difficult hypothetical dilemma and tries to work it through. James Hirsh considers this a feigned soliloquy, designed to be overheard by those spying on Hamlet.49 I am sceptical about this, but this play does make it difficult to know such things – whether madness is real or feigned, and whether remarks are unguarded or carefully designed. This is a case in which to acknowledge that the cognitive quality in rhetorical tropes is often one of several sorts of commentary to which a speech might be amenable.

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There is a lot going on here. Hamlet might be concealing as well as revealing himself, performing within the fiction; but nonetheless there is a relationship between his words and the conceptual challenge he faces. Fortune has ‘slings and arrows’, and troubles are a ‘sea’: as has been seen already, the indirections of metaphor are a means of improving the directness of thought. The key metaphorical connection of the speech causes some weighty pauses: To die, to sleep – No more, and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep – To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there ’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. (3.1.59–67)

It is hard to think about death straight on, but the metaphorical death-sleep manoeuvre has consequences that bring their own problems. (There is also something of metonymy in it, as there is in the sleep-dream transition, though neither is easily categorised as a strict metonymy.) The idea of sleep offers welcome displacement of some aspects of death, but it allows the possibility of posthumous nightmares. Twice, Hamlet savours the die / sleep pair, apparently pausing as he sets it up. Once he seems to offer it more confidently – ‘in that sleep of death’ – and eloquently, as rhetoric should. Here, though, it has other work to do, in the necessary, profound consideration of suicide. The speech’s central metaphor, then, is easily seen as cognitive and heuristic, from the character’s point of view. It is as important here as anywhere to register that this speech’s metaphors are massively successful in numerous ways. Readers have savoured the energy and insight of these lines, and have rightly credited their

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rhetorical leaps with epistemological value and a remarkable apparent exposure of inwardness. Recognising again the sense of process, their heuristic struggle, and how this relates to the character’s ongoing predicament, does not undercut this poetic achievement. Rather it enhances the vertiginous sensation of reading something that is working on so many levels at once. If the purpose of playing is to hold a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet proposes (3.2.20–2), then rhetoric in the theatre may imitate life – may be, in Aristotle’s term, mimetic – as well. The metaphor of a mirror seems an excessively plain analogy for the rich workings of drama, and these tropes offer a representation of something below the surface, beyond the reach of a mirror. This fits with an impression left by Hamlet’s own formula: the mysteries in his predicament require more than visual replication. He knows this, and in his advice to the Player he is being ironic. Dramatic language, then, might move between what in reality would be separate activities, thinking and speaking, but which in the theatre can be entwined and complementary. These extracts from soliloquies are offered in support of a general and straightforward observation, that some aspects of Shakespearean rhetoric encourage us to recognise that not all of it can easily be explained as a means of outward expression. In these cases it has seemed as if rhetorical tropes are the means by which Hamlet seeks to think through his situation. A further step back leads to a point made already: a study of these tropes in the abstract (like a rhetorical manual, for example) would serve as a map of Hamlet’s ways of thinking difficult thoughts  – a map that would work for other characters too. And perhaps for people, as well  – for here indeed is the rub. Heuristic cognitive rhetoric is a feature of Shakespearean drama, but its relationships to observations about cognitive science, and to writings about rhetoric themselves, require us to recognise that it need not be limited to that context.

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Before moving on from Hamlet, a play that forces metaphor and cognition into contact in a number of ways, it is necessary to account for its special relationship with synecdoche as well. Jonathan Baldo has written about its propensity for the trope, and its usefulness as a way of figuring the legitimacy of the monarch.50 The king is a part that stands for the whole; this establishes a pattern for a claim to represent the country, but it also opens up the possibility of refutation. If the people do not understand the country in the king – and perhaps that understanding should be as immediate as in rhetorical synecdoche, if it is not to seem strained and perverse  – they can oppose him. In the play the trope serves most of all to explore disconnection, as things fail to add up. This has a heuristic dimension: synecdoche appears as a means by which characters try to posit unity and connectedness, and repeated synecdoche represents the failure of that process, where understanding is thwarted at a series of turns. Ophelia is the speaker who resorts to it most tellingly, and in her hands it becomes the trope of failed recognition. While we can see how the parts and the wholes connect, and sometimes they are very conventional – this is not a case where the trope falls flatly into obscurity – they do not solve the problems they face. The whole Hamlet that she wishes to reconstruct, or just to construct, is elusive: O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck’d the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh; That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth

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Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (3.1.150–61)

The pairings in the second line are scrambled – it must be the soldier’s sword, it should probably be the scholar’s tongue, and thus it follows that it is the courtier’s eye. The synecdoches (which are as much part of whole, as part for whole, here) vary in their simplicity and, thus disordered, they demonstrate what Ophelia says is a complete disintegration in Hamlet. The disorder gives the impression that this trope is being used heuristically as well as expressively: she is trying to think through what has gone wrong, but cannot take full account of it. These synecdoches (which are shading into metonymy and metaphor at times) continue – ‘rose ’, ‘glass’, ‘mould’ – all ‘quite, quite down!’ These parts are related a little more abstrusely to the wholes, and the result is difficulty in interpretation alongside a vivid representation of her confusion. As she says, ‘To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!’: squaring up past and present is impossible, and composing a complete picture is too. This outline of the struggle to contain experience in a rhetorical thought process illuminates only part of what is happening in this theatrical moment. Shakespeare’s language draws on and elicits the power of the voice, physical gestures, and other aspects of speech and performance that cannot be ignored amid the head-down precision of close reading. The point here, after all, is to reconcile a technical close reading with the immediacy of drama, by reconsidering what a trope might convey. Her inability to match up the parts and the whole is not just the result of Hamlet’s lost prowess. Ophelia also finds it difficult to piece together a complete image of his physical presence: My Lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d,

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She is talking to her father here, and identifies Hamlet respectfully as ‘Lord Hamlet’. Her confidence in that identification is not what it seems, however. As she begins to relate the parts of his appearance that might get across to her father what bothered her, they take on their own lives. They do not work as rhetorical synecdoches because they do not replace the whole, which has already been named; however, they appear like misfiring cognitive synecdoches because each part is meant to elicit, as well as convey, something beyond itself. However, the doublet, hat, stockings, garters (lack of ), shirt, and knees remain separate, and do not reveal the crucial inference. Finally she faces up, in her memory, to the most fearful thing, his ‘look’. The switch into the present sense (‘comes’), while not particularly uncommon in narrative, here suggests particular vividness in the recollection. None of these things leads to the character’s understanding as a complement to the indubitable power of the image evoked. Ophelia is disoriented but not enlightened by what she can assemble of, and infer about, Hamlet’s plight. There is a striking contrast between her attempt to assemble a whole out of parts, and Hamlet’s, when he faces his mother with pictures of her two husbands. Reproachfully he points out the parts of old Hamlet’s face, and expects them to convey the power of his father’s presence (as he sees it) and to add up to more than their sum: Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.

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See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten or command, A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. Look you now what follows: Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear Blasting his wholesome brother. (3.4.53–65)

‘This was your husband … Here is your husband.’ The contrast between the two is meant to be revelatory, though its effect disappoints the Prince. The switch from past to present is also reminiscent of Ophelia’s mobile sense of time (‘T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see’). The picture records the past, but for Hamlet the old King is newly present. This is the scene in which, unlike her son, Gertrude fails to see her husband’s ghost – he is still in the past for her. The whole man he is able to assemble, remember, and still witness, is impossibly real for him, but not so for her. The grace on the brow, the curls, the eye, and so on, are supposed to elicit, and to add up to ‘A combination and a form’, but for Gertrude they do not. At the end, Old Hamlet is supposed to stand ‘wholesome ’ in contrast to Claudius, who is merely an ‘ear’, a mildewed piece of corn that rots the things around it. The word ‘ear’ rebounds, though, and recalls the former king, and the route by which the fatal poison entered his body, rather too vividly. It seems that these things do not quite add up for Hamlet either. His father’s ghost, his father’s memory, either or both of these things should link by cognitive synecdoche to the act of revenge, but they do not. In this scene the problem appears from another direction. It is difficult to think about Old Hamlet and

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Claudius head-on, and the indirect tool brought to bear is the synecdoche. Its heuristic nature, as in so many Shakespearean cases, is revealed most of all by the fact that it fails to solve the character’s epistemological problem. Both Baldo and Acheson derive their interest in synecdoche as a trope of representation – one thing represents another, a part represents a whole, the king represents a kingdom – from the trope ’s rehabilitation in the work of Kenneth Burke. He was one of several late twentieth-century thinkers (including Paul de Man, mentioned above, and Harold Bloom) who have brought rhetoric, philosophy, and poetics together.51 Burke’s approach to rhetoric is as part of discourse in practice, and a ‘pentad’ (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) by which he seeks to understand how language works in different situations. The key section of his book A Grammar of Motives sets up ‘four master tropes’, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.52 He takes this as heuristic in nature: My primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of ‘the truth’. It is an evanescent moment we shall deal with – for not only does the dividing line between the figurative and literal usages shift, but also the four tropes shade into one another. (p. 503)

They are, then, tools for thinking with. In Burke ’s ambitious scheme the master tropes – despite his point above, which chimes with things already said in this chapter, that they ‘shade into one other’ – all have different ‘literal or realistic applications’ in the search for truth: For metaphor we could substitute perspective; For metonymy we could substitute reduction; For synecdoche we could substitute representation; For irony we could substitute dialectic. (p. 503)

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When Burke comes to elaborate on how synecdoche works as representation we end up rather far from the rhetorical figure, the sail that represents the ship. For him, truth-seeking synecdoche means the use of ‘simplificatory’ or ‘reductive ’ hypotheses as means of opening up the full target of inquiry: E.g., think of the scientist who, in seeking an entrance into the analysis of human motivation, selects as his ‘informative anecdote ’ for this purpose some laboratory experiment having to do with the responses of animals. Obviously, such an anecdote has its peculiarly simplificatory (‘reductive ’) character, or genius – and the scientist who develops his analytic terminology about this anecdote as his informative case must be expected to have, as a result, a terminology whose character or genius is restricted by the character or genius of the model for the description of which it is formed. He then proceeds to transfer (to ‘metaphor’) this terminology to the interpretation of a different order of cases, for instance from animals to infants and from infants to the acts of fully developed adults. (p. 510)

The concept of ‘representation’ connects with Baldo’s discussion of a trope for monarchy. It also gives synecdoche a function in generating ideas. Burke is exploring an analytical mode of conscious, outward thought process, rather than the sort of cognitive manoeuvres with which this chapter started. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to find this sort of expansionist rhetorical thinking, taking its tropes outside persuasive speech and into the structure of thought. The Shakespearean intersection is enhanced by a network of ideas, sometimes rather diverse ones, which suggest this affinity is not only a literary phenomenon. The next chapter traces a line through canonical writings about rhetorical tropes, and identifies what seems like a faultline in the ostensible purposes of the practice. Further support for the possibility that rhetoric maps cognition as much as speech can be found in the broader field of rhetoric, and it may go all the way back to Plato. His Phaedrus includes a famous passage telling the fable of

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Theuth and the invention of writing. The story involves anxiety that writing will ruin people ’s thinking, and in particular their memories: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented not an elixir of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction.53

The things at issue here  – language and thought  – are of central interest to philosophers. In the Theaetetus Plato brings them very close together – thought, Socrates says, is ‘the talk which the soul has with itself ’.54 As one might expect, this Phaedrus passage has elicited polemical commentary of many different kinds.55 My own reading is tuned in to a classic knot in thinking about rhetoric: how to value language and its expressive powers in relation to the ideas in, or behind, or underneath it. Rhetoricians have always had a good deal to lose in separating these things out. While the glamour and power suggested by an ability to express any idea, however bad, in fine words have been attractive, more often rhetoricians have ­rallied to defend the coherence of words and thoughts. This can be an opening into a mapping of rhetoric onto the texture of thought, which is my interest here. This part of Plato’s dialogue concerns writing rather than language or speech, and in any case to propose that rhetoric maps cognition could only mean something very different in ancient Greece. However, I think this dialogue intimates the sudden recession of rhetoric’s claim to deal with words in favour of a deeper and more inscrutable claim to map out thoughts. The revealing moment derives from a particular idea of language:

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Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself. (p. 565, 275d–e)

We are asked to accept the idea that written words have no inherent proprietary meaning; they are vessels without agency. As has already been said, this chapter has not aimed to evaluate or reconcile philosophies of language, though it is worth noting that fundamental questions about the agency of thinking, where and when it happens and how this relates to language, are at issue here as they are in many aspects of the link between rhetoric and cognition. The main point is to register the often discontinuous propositions relating to rhetoric and thought. These partly anticipate the modern configuration of tropes and thoughts that I began with, but it is better not to portray this teleologically: rhetoric’s cognitive dimension emerges in different periods, in different contexts, to differing degrees. It very often seems surreptitious; that much is consistent. Plato moves on from his doubts about the integrity of words to consider the users of words, and how their words relate to what they know: A man must know the truth about all the particular things of which he speaks or writes, and must be able to define everything separately; then when he has defined them, he must know how to divide them by classes until further division is impossible; and in the same way he must understand the nature of the soul, must find out the class of speech adapted to each nature, and must arrange and adorn his discourse accordingly, offering to the complex soul

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elaborate and harmonious discourses, and simple talks to the simple soul. Until he has attained to all this, he will not be able to speak by the method of art, so far as speech can be controlled by method, either for purposes of instruction or of persuasion. (p. 571, 277b–c)

In this scheme rhetoric relates to cognition in two ways. It relates to the listener’s cognition, in that the speaker must find appropriate ways of expressing himself, and these depend on the listener’s capacity. Other Greek rhetoricians share this interest in the psychology of the listener.56 In Phaedrus rhetoric also relates to the speaker’s cognition, because the mapping of the thing to be expressed seems to happen in the process of knowledge as well as in the construction of language. The usual order of rhetoric is intact, but there is a telling interest, at this early point in the tradition, in the structure of inquiry. This chapter  – with Shakespeare always at least implicit  – has fleshed out the possibilities of the cognitive-heuristic idea of rhetoric. It turns out to strike various chords with certain currents in cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy, as well as with rhetorical writings themselves. The prompts offered to literary analysis by the work of Lakoff, Johnson, Fauconnier, and Turner are central, but wider contexts and ramifications have been considered. This is not, and has never been, a straightforwardly coherent and explicit story. Rhetoric is not readily embraced as a medium for understanding cognition, and this selective account has ranged widely to find suggestions and implications of the persistence of its central theme. Its strongest exponents saw to that, when they adapted its central claims to the intellectual environment in which they wrote – so powerfully that they exerted a strong influence, and still continue to do so. However, rhetoric need not only be (and, as before, it needs to be emphasised that ‘only’ here is by no means a synonym for ‘merely’) a theory of public speaking. It can also be a theory of thought – a description of how we deal with some of the

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most severe cognitive challenges – even if it does not offer ways of completing this proposition, by reconciling thought and language across history. The next chapter turns to a series of rhetoric manuals to consider their intimations of this idea. Again the focus will be on two tropes for the most part: the ever-present metaphor, and the undervalued synecdoche.

C h apt e r 3

The drift towards cognition in rhetorical manuals

This chapter undertakes an alternative history of rhetorical manuals with renaissance England as culminating point and principal focus. The goal is to tune in to incipient hints that rhetoricians in Shakespeare’s cultural milieu are perceiving, or claiming, that their discipline patterns thoughts as well as the means of communicating them. Rhetorical treatises and manuals have much at stake in implicitly or explicitly recognising that their tropes might not just be adorning their material, but may in fact be expressions of the genesis of the thoughts behind that material. They stand to gain in that their discipline might be elevated by the grandeur of such a claim, but they stand to lose in the potential dilution of their already compelling purpose. The word ‘behind’ above – thoughts behind words – is a metaphor, a way of presenting a complicated tangle, just as a chronology – thoughts before words – would be. This vexed question in the philosophy of language, as has been said, will not be answered in the discussion that follows. It is not really broached by the crucial passages, because they do not impinge on the central premises of the treatises involved. They do, however, suggest potential and discoveries beyond their explicit scope – the kind of thing that the flourishing of rhetoric in drama might bring out all the more. These works have not always been read sympathetically because of a sometimes understandable feeling that they are rather pedantic. As a result, the dynamic nature of the word ‘rhetoric’ is often harnessed 68

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in modern scholarship and theory without particular allegiance to the details of the ancient discipline, its rules, its warnings, its categories and subcategories. The point here is of course to respond to these details and the purposes behind them, but also to note that sometimes the impatient or quizzical feelings of modern readers may reveal meaningful problems in the rhetorical tradition. These ­technicalities terms might sometimes be undervalued because they are taken on what seem to be their own terms. Reading between the lines leads to characteristics and possibilities (in metaphor and synecdoche especially) that can enhance the range of tropes’ activities, giving rhetorically informed close reading a different kind of reach. The two main tropes that emerged from the previous chapter are the sites of the most energetic possibilities. It might nonetheless be possible – beyond the scope of this study – to connect other aspects of rhetoric with the patterns underlying and arranging cognition. Other figures, which can be very different from metaphor, might also map out ways in which thinking works. Aposiopesis, for example – the trope where the flow of speech or writing is cut off (‘one more step and I’ll …’) – could probe the sometimes necessary truncation of thought processes, or the value of leaving something unexplored. Even something as mechanical as anaphora  – where the same words are repeated to begin successive clauses  – might testify to some sort of exploratory or categorical structure, wherein thoughts are managed and perhaps also instigated. Furthermore, rhetoric has much more to it than a list of tropes and figures, but it is not feasible to see how pace, gesture, tone of voice, and other bodily components of the art might be drawn into this particular project. These things belong so much to the arena of performance and persuasion, but they are also bound into experience and are ways of responding to the kinds of challenges faced by Shakespearean characters in later chapters. As will be seen in some of the claims made

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in this chapter, rhetoric reaches a long way into language and intellectual life. Choosing metaphor and synecdoche, but also related tropes, focuses on the key topics, but not the only possible ones. Roland Barthes offers several good starting points in his essay ‘The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Mémoire’.1 This is composed of amiable but sharp-eyed musings, moving in and out of the language of classical and neo-classical rhetoric. From Barthes’s perspective, rhetoric represents the authority of the past, some of which persists almost inexplicably, and he is essentially resistant to it. It elicits wary, but often affectionate engagement. Although his premise is different from mine, Barthes too is intrigued by the relationship of the tropes to thoughts and words. He is sharp with what he calls rhetoric’s ‘frenzy of classification’, and impatient with busy distinctions between tropes and figures, figures of thought and speech, and so on (pp. 84–7). Barthes is unsympathetic to early rhetoricians’ desire to anatomise their art in order to explain and share its powers, and relatively just in relation to later, more dogmatic applications of the rules. He makes a pertinent observation about the irreversibility of the rhetoric-manual genre: No book allows us to make the converse trajectory, to proceed from the sentence (found in a text) to the name of the figure; if I read, so much marble trembling over so much shadow, what book will tell me this is a hypallage, if I do not already know this? We lack an inductive instrument, useful if you want to analyse the classical texts according to their actual metalanguage. (p. 87)

Rhetoricians do it the other way round: they name hypallage and then offer examples of it. While this does not make much difference to rhetoric’s prescriptive function, it does make a difference to its descriptive use. The problem may be the discontinuity between the technical precision (sometimes illusory) of the names of the figures, and the laboured paraphrases required to move in the other direction. Nonetheless rhetoric and especially rhetorical manuals have gained

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from the unidirectional nature of their authority. Fundamentally it has evolved into a toolkit to be memorised and applied, rather than a finder’s guide for tropes in the field. One more good question posed by Barthes relates to the function of the figures and their presence in manuals. He notes  – and this characteristic will be important later in this chapter  – how rhetoricians emphasise that all their technical wizardry occurs spontaneously in natural speech: How are we then to reconcile the ‘natural’ origin of the figures and their secondary, posterior rank in the structure of language? The classic answer is that art chooses the figures (with regard to a just evaluation of their distance, which must be measured ), it does not create them; in short the figured is an artificial combination of natural elements. (p. 89)

By ‘secondary language’ Barthes means language used for the sake of illusion, for evading taboos, and for making things other than themselves. And yet some of the most recherché parts of that secondary language are deemed natural. Barthes’s explanation comes within range of recognising that tropes are figures of thought in a cognitive sense, ‘natural elements’ to be accessed and moulded by art. He gets close to this again when he writes about ‘inventio’, one of the stages in rhetorical composition: Inventio refers less to an invention (of arguments) than to a discovery: everything already exists, one must merely recognize it: this is more an ‘extractive ’ notion than a ‘creative ’ one. This is corroborated by the ­designation of a ‘place ’ (the Topic), from which the arguments can be extracted and from which they must be brought: inventio is a progress (via argumentorum). (p. 52)

As Barthes notes, one of the problems in the reception of rhetoric has been an over-emphasis on the ‘third part of the technè rhétorikè known as lexis or elocutio, to which we are accustomed to pejoratively reducing rhetoric because of the interest the Moderns have

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taken in the figures of rhetoric, a part (but only a part) of Elocutio’ (p. 83). His stress on ‘inventio’ leads him to assert the element of ‘discovery’ and ‘the extractive’ at the basis of rhetoric. It is not an enormous distance from this to the thought that rhetorical tropes find and trace the patterns of thought, rather than preceding the patterns of speech. What Barthes sees as a paradox – he is, after all, fundamentally doubtful about the philosophy of language implied by positing ideas existing before language – may be a subtext or a tangent, rather than a contradiction or an omission. In the writings of renaissance rhetoricians and their classical forbears it is possible to discern intimations of the cognitive qualities of rhetorical tropes. The classical works lie behind the claims made for rhetoric in later periods and share some repeating patterns that are generally germane to the argument here. It is noteworthy how much weight is attributed to rhetoric. Its exponents place their discipline at the centre of intellectual life, rather than at its performative edge. They extend this beyond the practical implications of rhetoric and into moral territory. Perhaps a surreptitious awareness that rhetoric to some extent maps out thought may lie behind the confidence with which Cicero, and Quintilian in particular, equate the orator and the good man.2 Good words and good thoughts are intimately associated. Classical rhetoricians also consider the relationship between rhetoric and the mind  – especially the emotions  – from another angle. Aristotle’s Rhetoric has a telling interest in emotional effects; early on, then, it was recognised that rhetoric enhanced persuasiveness by working on the hearer’s cognition, and not just by adorning the truth of the written word.3 A key idea in classical writings on the subject was, as Barthes noted, the pervasiveness and ubiquity of rhetoric as a discipline. This is mostly, of course, the result of a need to emphasise its efficacy on

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a large scale in order to promote the skill and interest of the writer and his work. However, the extent of these claims cannot always be explained completely in this way. In Cicero’s De Oratore, his most substantial work on rhetoric, a bold claim is couched within a more sweeping and general gesture: Sed ei haec maior esse ratio videtur quam ut hominum possit sensu aut cogitatione comprehendi, est etiam illa Platonis vera et tibi, Catule, certe non inaudita vox. Omnem doctrinam harum ingenuarum et humanarum artium uno quodam societatis vinculo contineri: ubi enim perspecta vis est rationis eius qua causae rerum atque exitus cognoscuntur, mirus quidam omnium quasi consensus doctrinarum concentusque reperitur.4 [But if this appears to be too vast a theory for the senses or the thought of human beings to be able to grasp it, there is also the truth enunciated by Plato, which you, Catulus, have undoubtedly heard, that the whole of the content of the liberal and humane sciences is comprised within a single bond of union; since, when we grasp the meaning of the theory that explains the causes and issues of things, we discover that a marvellous agreement and harmony underlies all branches of knowledge.]

Throughout history opponents of rhetoric characterise it as a process of adornment, and a discipline preceded by any real substance involved. The rhetorician’s response is to assert interconnections, in this case generally bringing in all ‘ingenuarum et humanarum artium’, but elsewhere, more modestly, giving rhetoric a role in the bringing-to-life of an idea. The words chosen to convey that interconnection  – ‘consensus … concentus’, that is, agreement (feeling together) and harmony (singing together) – neatly capture the interface between thinking and speaking (or writing). This is something that happens both deliberately and spontaneously. Cicero brings rhetoric and thought into close contact, without of course saying – even in the available terms – that rhetorical tropes describe key forms in which the brain works.

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Nonetheless, it is possible to find implications, even in classical works, that writers perceived uncanny qualities in rhetoric that placed it closer to the bases and origins of intellectual endeavour – in the fabric of mental processes themselves. When Cicero turns, in De Oratore, to metaphor, he notes that it is not only the rhetorically trained who use the trope: Quem necessitas genuit inopia coacta et angustiis, post autem delectatio iucunditasque celebravit. Nam ut vestis frigoris depellendi causa reperta primo, post adhiberi coepta est ad ornatum etiam corporis et dignitatem, sic verbi translatio instituta est inopiae causa, frequentata delectationis. Nam ‘gemmare vites’, ‘luxuriem esse in herbis’, ‘laetas esse segetes’ etiam rustici dicunt. Quod enim declarari vix verbo proprio potest, id translato cum est dictum, illustratum id quod intellegi volumus eius rei quam alieno verbo posuimus similitudo. (iii.xxxviii.155, pp. 120–2) [It sprang from necessity due to the pressure of poverty and deficiency, but it has been subsequently made popular by its agreeable and entertaining quality. For just as clothes were first invented to protect us from cold and afterwards began to be used for the sake of adornment and dignity as well, so the metaphorical employment of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment. For even country people speak of ‘jewelled vines’, ‘luxurious herbage ’, ‘joyful harvests’. The explanation is that when something that can scarcely be conveyed by the proper term is expressed metaphorically, the meaning we desire to convey is made clear by the resemblance of the thing that we have expressed by the word that does not belong.]

Cicero goes on to ask a pertinent question, namely why a ­metaphor should give pleasure. He gives two main reasons: the pleasure of cleverness and mental adventure, and the way metaphors appeal directly to the senses. This fits with his initial emphasis in the passage above, which strikes an interesting but partly self-defeating analogy – it is hard to see how a rhetorician would really want to liken the value added by metaphor to the value added by fancy clothes (perhaps even ones conferring ‘dignitatem’). There is some discontinuity

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between the ‘delectationis’ into which metaphor has developed, and the image of ‘etiam rustici’ employing metaphors. It is not clear what these rustics are adding to the argument being developed; the explanation that follows is really about how metaphor works, rather than the significance of the fact that even those without an interest or training in rhetoric still use metaphor. It is as if, in the midst of a story of evolution and growing sophistication, Cicero notes in passing something that tends in an altogether different direction.5 The argument from cognitive linguistics would be that even the simplest people use metaphor not because their expressive needs outstrip their language, or because they take pleasure in rhetoric, but because metaphor and other tropes are the forms in which thought works without any sense of it being performed. The examples taken from Shakespeare also suggest that a cognitive rhetoric is a means of addressing the challenges of complex experiences. Synecdoche is also of particular interest, because in rhetorical writings this figure is most often described in terms of thought. Its etymology in different languages tends to enable this turn. In Greek synecdoche means ‘taking together’, and already the emphasis is on reception, and the activity of comprehension, rather than on something wrought on words. Comprehension and comprehensibility are often at issue in synecdoche. Writers are engaged by the way it seems to work so fundamentally, perhaps because it tracks the way that parts and wholes are related in various basic mental functions. In Latin ‘intellectio’ emulates the Greek etymology  – it can also mean ‘take together’. Now, however, the link with ‘understanding’ is strong, since that is frequently the way the word is used in Latin. As will be seen, English versions (intellection, conceit) share this property. This trope names itself as a cognitive operation, and it is not surprising, then, that it is the place where under-­acknowledged aspects of rhetoric come to the surface. The other points at which

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rhetoricians hint that they are pursuing a kind of cognitive science tend to occur during the demarcation of tropes from figures (broadly, figures of thought from figures of speech). The reason for this, perhaps, is that they reach for terms to explain the naturalness, the automatic nature of tropes in language, and this reaching leads towards momentary insights into the role of metaphor, synecdoche, and others in thought. The Rhetorica ad Herennium is no longer thought to be by Cicero. In the renaissance it often was, and it offered them something no other of his works did: a schematic setting-out of the figures of rhetoric of the kind their own manuals tended to imitate. (In De Oratore, for example, his speaker Crassus playfully rushes through a select list and tells his interlocutor Cotta that he knows it all already.6) Here too there are versions of the problematic idea that the tropes of classical rhetoric are found in unsophisticated language: Harum omnium denominationum magis in praecipiendo divisio quam in quaerendo difficilis inventio est, ideo quod plena consuetudo est non modo poetarum et oratorum sed etiam cotidiani sermonis huiusmodi denominationum.7 [It is harder to distinguish all these metonymies in teaching the principle than to find them when searching for them, for the use of metonymies of this kind is abundant not only amongst the poets and orators but also in everyday speech.]

The paradox of the rhetorical manual emerges neatly here. A work presenting itself as a means to add things to language confesses that these things are already there in spontaneous abundance. The categories by which one might arrange planned metonymies come preblurred by practice in the world. This paradox is widespread, and sometimes actually fundamental to rhetoric’s claims to paramount value. It may also reveal the cognitive nature of classical rhetoric,

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which repeatedly (if sporadically) discovers that what it might be doing is describing the way thought works. Whereas in the preceding passage from the Rhetorica ad Herennium metonymy is the trope in question, in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, as in Cicero’s De Oratore above, it is metaphor which generates the same idea: Incipiamus igitur ab eo, qui cum frequentissimus est tum longe pulcherrimus, translatione dico, quae μεταφορα Graece vocatur. Quae quidem cum ita est ab ipsa nobis concessa natura, ut indocti quoque ac non sentientes ea frequenter utantur, tum ita iucunda atque nitida, ut in oratione quamlibet clara proprio tamen lumine eluceat.8 [Let us begin, then, with the commonest and by far the most beautiful of tropes, namely, metaphor, the Greek term for our translatio. It is not merely so natural a turn of speech that it is often employed unconsciously or by uneducated persons, but it is in itself so attractive and elegant that however distinguished the language in which it is embedded it shines forth with a light that is all its own.]

The crucial new term here is ‘non sentientes’ – metaphor is often deployed without conscious realisation. Again this serves the rhetoricians’ ends by identifying their tropes as the bases of thoughts, rather than as superficial adornments. However, it also complicates matters by undermining the notion that rhetoric is a science of speech and writing, and a practical tool. It is worth distinguishing sentience from thought here; in cognitive science, and cognitive linguistics, the work of metaphor is done at a level of thought that is not acknowledged actively by the thinking subject (as Quintilian describes here). This casts unexpected light back on to Shakespearean rhetoric, and Hamlet’s soliloquies in particular: perhaps some of these rhetorical pyrotechnics are somehow representations of nonsentient thought, or the initial formation of expressible thought in the mind’s processes. So Quintilian’s probing discussion can be extrapolated to endorse the possibility that dramatic language, in

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these cases, achieves far more than a mirror held up to nature, or its aural equivalent; it delivers the depths of character. Synecdoche also attracts comment of a related kind in Quintilian. It too is linked to everyday speech – ‘cotidiani sermonis’: Quod genus non orationis modo ornatus, sed etiam cotidiani sermonis usus recipit. Quidam synecdochen vocant et cum id in contextu sermonis quod tacetur accipimus; verbum enim ex verbis intelligi, quod inter vitia ellipsis vocatur: Arcades ad portas ruere. Mihi hanc figuram esse magis placet; illic ergo reddetur. (viii.vi.21–2, p. 312) [This form of trope is not only a rhetorical ornament, but is frequently employed in everyday speech. Some also apply the term synecdoche when something is assumed which has not actually been expressed, since one word is then discovered from other words, as in the sentence, ‘The Arcadians to the gates began to rush’; when such omission creates a blemish, it is called an ellipsis. For my own part, I prefer to regard this as a figure, and shall therefore discuss it under that head.]

The Loeb editor’s note to this passage cites Virgil (Aeneid, 11.142) for the line, and boldly (perhaps too boldly) rebukes Quintilian for ‘a false explanation of the historic infinitive, as involving the omission of some such word as coeperunt’. (That is, Quintilian seems to think there is a modal verb missing, like ‘coeperunt’, they began, whereas alternatively the historic infinitive might be self-standing.) The pleasure and success of rhetoric are seen here to derive partly from the familiarity of its techniques in daily life and the way sophisticated uses extend their scope. The hidden mission of the rhetorical treatise, however, is to probe the quotidian and the untrained in terms of a rarefied mode of speaking which bears the imprints of activity in the

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brain. It is worth noting – and easy to miss, as the practice is so familiar – that poets are often cited to illustrate tropes. In this case there is a clash between the example and the reference to everyday speech. Elsewhere the clash is between the literary example and the practical purposes understood to underlie the rhetorical art. The examples from Hamlet cited above would fit poorly in the role, and yet their iconic nature might make them compelling. This suggests an inconsistency between the manuals and their principal sources – which (I think) suggests a further discontinuity in rhetoric’s self-presentation, when persuasive speech is emphasised rather than creative thought. Within the technical discourse it is difficult to admit that rhetorical tropes might fundamentally be at home in literature, and that they may map out poetry’s special ways of knowing and apprehending the world, when so much of the emphasis is on public efficacy and translating practical arguments into an appealing form. As has been said, synecdoche is the figure that causes rhetoricians to discuss thought, almost as if by accident. This is seen in Quintilian, where the crucial word ‘intelligamus’ (from ‘intellego’, connected to ‘intellectio’) distinguishes this trope from metaphor: Nam translatio permovendis animis plerumque et signandis rebus ac sub oculos subiiciendis reperta est. Haec variare sermonem potest, ut ex uno plures intelligamus, parte totum, specie genus, praecedentibus sequentia, vel omnia haec contra. (viii.vi.19, p. 310) [For while metaphor is designed to move the feelings, give special distinction to things and place them vividly before the eye, synecdoche has the power to give variety to our language by making us realise many things from one, the whole from a part, the genus from a species, things which follow from things which preceded; or, on the other hand, the whole process may be reversed.]

Synecdoche need not be inherently truer to the brain’s patterns than metaphor (though it may be more basic) but it is the trope around

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which the manuals make incidental discoveries. In Quintilian’s account metaphors are acts of marking (‘signandis’) and placing (‘subiiciendis’), but in synecdoche, the focus switches from an action done to words (‘variare … potest’) to the first-person plural and an act of perception. This must not be overstated: a modern sense of understanding, and of thought, belongs to a view of interiority which is not like that of the Roman world, or of the renaissance, and here the understanding is a designed effect. Nonetheless the interplay between ‘synecdoche’ and ‘intellego’ is suggestive, especially when it is remembered that Quintilian’s readers would have been well aware of the etymological niceties in Greek and Latin. In the Rhetorica ad Herennium a long section on synecdoche seems to harp on the governing Latin term and its verbal cognates: Intellectio est cum res tota parva de parte cognoscitur aut de toto pars. De parte totum sic intellegitur: ‘Non illae te nuptiales tibiae eius matrimonii commonebant?’ Nam hic omnis sanctimonia nuptiarum uno signo tibiarum intellegitur. De toto pars, ut si quis ei qui vestitum aut ornatum sumptuosum ostentet dicat: ‘Ostentes mihi divitias et locupletes copias iactas.’ Ab uno plura hoc modo intellegentur: ‘Poeno fuit Hispanus auxilio, fuit immanis ille Transalpinus; in Italia quoque nonnemo sensit idem togatus.’ A pluribus unum sic intellegetur: ‘Atrox calamitas pectora maerore pulsabat; itaque anhelans ex imis pulmonibus prae cura spiritus ducebat.’ Nam in superiore plures Hispani et Galli et togati, et hic unum pectus et unus pulmo intellegitur; et erit illic deminutus numerus festivitatis, hic adauctus gravitatis gratia. (iv.xxxiii.44–5, p. 341) [Synecdoche occurs when the whole is known from a small part or a part from the whole. The whole is understood from a part in the following: ‘Were not those nuptial flutes reminding you of his marriage?’ Here the entire marriage ceremony is suggested by one sign, the flutes. A part from the whole, as if one should say to a person who displays himself in luxurious garb or adornment: ‘You display your riches to me and vaunt your ample treasures.’ The plural will be understood from the singular, as follows: ‘To the Carthaginian came aid from the Spaniard, and from that fierce Transalpine. In Italy, too, many a wearer of the toga shared the same sentiment.’ In the

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following the singular will be understood from the plural: ‘Dread disaster smote his breasts with grief; so, panting, from out his lungs’ very depth he sobbed for anguish.’ In the first example more than one Spaniard, Gaul, and Roman citizen are understood, and in this last only one breast and one lung [meaning, one pair of lungs]. In the former the quantity is minified for the sake of elegance, in the latter exaggerated for the sake of impressiveness.]

Only at the very end does the usual formula, wherein a rhetorical figure is the result of action done to words, actually appear. The rest of the time there seems to be a kind of relish in the repetition of intellego / intellectio, as if the automatic nature of synecdoche ’s workings has an uncanny appeal. It is worth noting again that synecdoches could be imagined that did not work automatically. For example, a sail or a mast readily elicits a ship, but a deck or an anchor might not. If synecdoche becomes obscure then the understanding being implied does not follow. As has been said already, the value of complexity in a synecdoche is much less than the value of complexity in a metaphor; synecdoche is handled specially and carefully for a reason. Part of the relish with which the Rhetorica ad Herennium treats this section may arise from its etymology – a Latin word matches the Greek so neatly, but also diverts meaning in a telling direction. In English books on the subject the etymological line towards mental territory continues. This trope is again the one that opens up the idea that rhetoric is a forerunner of cognitive science. The English tradition must include Erasmus, despite him writing in Latin (and not being English), since so much of the succeeding tradition builds on his work. In De Copia he considers synecdoche briefly: Vehementer aduivabit copiam et synecdoche, quam quidam intellectionem vocant, quoniam aliud ex alio intellegimus, ut cum ex uno plures intelligimus. [Synecdoche is extremely useful. Some people call it intellection, because we understand one thing from another, like understanding many from one.9]

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He uses the word ‘understand’ (parts of the Latin verb intellego) throughout, until the final sentence which reads ‘we deduce the thing signified from the sign’. Understanding may come across as a swifter process than deduction, but the focus in both cases is on the recipient and on their cognitive activity, rather than on the speaker or writer and what they are doing with words. By contrast, when writing about metonymy, Erasmus has words denoting ‘use ’ and ‘indicate’ (D7r–D7v; pp. 339–40). Although this is not so different from synecdoche, it still seems like a trope of enhancement or ornament. Synecdoche is the place where rhetoric seems to encounter a paradox – that a trope seems most vivid as something apprehended rather than as something deployed. Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) was the first rhetorical treatise in English.10 It covers a long list of tropes and figures, and it does so with revealing changes in emphasis and tone. When discussing ‘Garnishyng’, for example, Sherry depicts the relationship between writer and reader as one of intention and reception: Garnishyng as the word it selfe declareth, is when the oracion is gaylye set oute and floryshed with diverse goodly figures, causyng much pleasaunt­ nes and delectacion to the hearer: and hath two kyndes, composicion and exornacion.11

Although Sherry’s treatise is a humanist project in the tradition of De Copia, and he includes a translation of a speech by Erasmus, his terms here could have been used by Chaucer. This image of rhetoric is clearly bounded by prevailing conceptions of thinking and writing. Elsewhere in the work, however, these conceptions are questioned and modified by the act of expounding rhetoric itself. As was said above, etymology opens up space for a mind-oriented rethinking of synecdoche. When Sherry considers ‘Metaphora’ (the

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marginal heading), his explanation moves first to a Latin equivalent, then to an English one, and then to the detail: Translatio, translacion, that is a worde translated from the thynge that it properlye signifieth, unto another which may agre with it by a similitude. And amonge all vertues of speeche, this is the chyefe. None perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the thyng before oure eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affeccions, none maketh the oraction more goodlye, pleasaunt, nor copious. (C4v)

‘Translacion’ implies active modification of the word, and this returns Sherry to the enthusiastic tone, and the topic (effectiveness in moving the hearer) of his description of ‘garnishyng’. When he tackles ‘Synecdoche’ (the marginal heading is again the Greek word), however, the emphasis is different, though the etymological technique is similar: Intellectio, Intelleccion when one thyng is understand by another that is of the same maner and kynd, and this is done many wayes. When bi the whole is understand a parte: as Abraham set a calfe before them, for calves fleshe. (C6r)

The subsequent types are all governed by the verb ‘understand’ in the first example – the next is ‘By a parte the whole, as …’, and so on. This word, unlike ‘intelleccion’, is not of Latinate origin, and understanding is fundamentally a mental phenomenon, whereas the Greek and Latin terms, as has been seen, can entail a more externalised ‘taking together’. It is important not to overstate the writerly passivity of understanding in comparison with ‘translacion’, and indeed to remember again that the ramifications of what is meant by ‘mental’ are not stable across history. Nonetheless there is a difference between metaphor and synecdoche which Sherry’s definitions reveal. It is easy to connect metaphor with the pleasure and interest of the reader: the attention is diverted, extended, and enriched. Synecdoche’s

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contribution to the experience is more difficult to ­elucidate. There is a parallel effect of unfamiliarity, but perhaps also there is something more inscrutable, a pleasurable harmony between innate recognition (making wholes from parts) and the trope in the text. So Sherry’s discussion of these two tropes involves an intriguing contrast, one partly generated by etymology, partly speaking to a difference in their natures, and partly suggesting a broader intimation that rhetoric is a science of the mind, or rather the brain, as well as of speech. The idea of ‘understanding’ also appears in the definition of ‘Metalepsis’ (the marginal heading in this case): Transsumptio, Transsumpcion, is when by degrees we go to that that is shewed, as: he hyd hym selfe in the blacke dennes. By blacke, is understande ful of darkenes and consequently stepe downe, and verye depe. (C5v)

The switch to seeing a rhetorical figure as something read rather than written is diverting. Metalepsis, too, is a figure that causes attention on the enigmatic process of comprehension, though it is easier to set out (as with metaphor) how the tracing of abstruse connections adds to the experience of reading. Synecdoche may be a special trope which attests to particularly fundamental patterns in the workings of the brain, but the other tropes also have their equivalents in thought. Here metalepsis shares something else with synecdoche, namely an ease of comprehension that rhetoricians find it hard to account for. Sherry explains, by stages, why ‘blacke dennes’ works; if one were to model the reader’s reception of the phrase, however, one might find it hard to describe either difficulty or stages. Just as with synecdoche, this trope works not simply, but with the speed of thought. Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553) shares the Anglicised version of the key trope’s name (‘intellection’) with Sherry and with

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other succeeding versions. He does not use ‘understand’, however, as a further naturalisation of the term: Intellection, called of the Grecians, Synedoche, is a Trope, when we gather or judge the whole by the part, or part by the whole. As thus: The King is come to London, meaning therby that other also be come with him. The French man is good to keepe a Fort, or to skirmish on Horsbacke, whereby we declare the French men generally. By the whole, the part thus. All Cambridge sorrowed for the death of Bucer, meaning the most part. All England rejoyceth that Pilgrimage is banished, and Idolatrie for ever abolished: and yet all England is not glad but the most part. The like phrases are in the Scripture, as when the Magians came to Hierusalem, and asked where hee was that was borne King of the Jewes. Herode start up being greatly troubled, and all the Citie of Hierusalem with him, and yet all the Citie was not troubled, but the most part. By the signe wee understand the thing signified: as by an Ivie garland, we judge there is wine to sel. By the signe of a Beare, Bull, Lyon, or any such, we take any house to be an Inne. By eating bread at the Communion, we remember Christes death, and by faith receive him spiritually.12

The difference between ‘gather’ and ‘judge’ is significant. If a synecdoche’s point is ‘gathered’, this suggests a kind of harvest, but perhaps one that happens naturally: a synecdoche is a ripe figure, presenting its fruit. If it is instead to be ‘judged’, then this suggests that it requires effort to unscramble. For Wilson, the truth may appear to be somewhere between; or perhaps the implications of ‘gather’ (that synecdoche is such a natural process) are difficult to square with rhetoric’s self-image. The examples he chooses are typical in that they work as if by intuition, without apparently requiring effort. The Arte of Rhetorique is also instructive because it demonstrates the problem in expecting a rhetorical manual of the period to engage with, or name, its apparent interest in the cognitive quality of the discipline. For, as well as their primary, practical purposes, these works often have other things to do. In Wilson’s case, as in the analysis of this trope, theology repeatedly impinges. His examples

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show synecdoche at work in various ways, but in sharp-edged statements that threaten to derail progress. His use of the Communion to illustrate a particular kind of synecdoche is bold – in Catholicism a greater faith in the real presence might have suggested another, simpler form of part-for-whole thinking.13 In this case Wilson refers to a kind of symbolic synecdoche where true transubstantiation does not occur. He writes that ‘All Cambridge sorrowed for the death of Bucer’ means ‘the most part’, and, yet more pointedly, that ‘All England rejoyceth that Pilgrimage is banished, and Idolatrie for ever abolished’ carries within it the recognition that ‘England is not glad but the most part’. These quibbles and divisions illustrate rhetoric but concern heresy. The penalty for finding oneself on the wrong side of such questions could be torture and death. Wilson may be doing this to show the urgency of the student’s task: there are acts of persuasion that are needed at the very moment. It could alternatively suggest that Wilson’s topic is under pressure from urgent events and situations that intrude upon the book-as-classroom. For humanists rhetoric’s role was to be in counsel  – which invites an opposite attention (outward) from the cognitive field. The last thing to say about the Bucer example is that it reads like a manufactured example, and a rather forced one at that. When an imaginary speaker claimed that ‘All Cambridge sorrowed’, the assumption must be that this was a piece of propaganda designed to enliven an audience, and not to draw attention to the ‘most part’ behind it. Many rhetorical examples designed for the purpose struggle to embody their tropes in a clear and simple way, though Wilson takes more liberties than most. His discussion of metonymy opens up less controversy, though the forced theological turn is there: Transmutation helpeth much for varietie, the which is, when a word hath a proper signification of the owne, and being referred to an other thing, hath an other meaning: the Grecians call it Metonymia, the which is divers waies

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used. When we use the author of a thing, for the thing itself, As thus: Put upon you the Lord Jesus Christ, that is to say, be in living such a one as he was. The Pope is banished England, that is to say, all his Superstition and Hipocrisie, either is or should bee gone to the Devill, by the Kings expresse will and commandement. (N1r)

Here there is more relish than challenge: the personal slight to the Pope resulting from the banishment of ‘all his Superstition and Hipocrisie’ is something Wilson expects his readers to enjoy. This has a flavour of the schoolroom, and these popular, contemporary analogies surely did sharpen interest.14 Writers are drawn towards suggestive links with thought also when undertaking general definitions of what tropes are. The key moments in these definitions follow in part from the ideas in Cicero and Quintilian that the central tropes of rhetoric appear in normal and untutored speech. Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) gives a double-edged definition of a trope. First, Fraunce emphasises that tropes emerge ‘convenientlie ’ from natural meanings, suggesting an affinity between rhetoric and thought that is germane to this chapter. Then, however, he describes the presumed origins of tropes in practical terms: A Trope or turning is when a word is turned from his naturall signification, to some other, so convenientlie, as that it seeme rather willinglie ledd, than driven by force to that other signification. This was first invented of necessitie for want of words, but after continued and frequented by reason of the delight and pleasant grace thereof.15

When he comes to discuss the tropes in detail and by example, Fraunce does not deviate from the assumption that rhetorical variety is the result of intention and practice – and the rather stilted narrative of ‘necessitie’ (want of words requiring new ways of saying things) followed by ‘delight’ is conventional too. For that brief moment, however, where the trope emerges ‘willinglie ’, he could

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be seen to penetrate the enigma of tropes such as synecdoche and metaphor, which can seem natural even while also seeming complex. This is not always the case; there is less of this quickness in Angel Day’s The English Secretary, a letter-writing manual, which has two main versions, those of 1586 and 1599. In the second edition Day added, under a new title-page, A Declaration of al such Tropes, Figures or Schemes, as for excellencie and ornament in writing, are speciallie used in this Methode.16 Like Fraunce, Day presents individual rhetorical figures as intentional acts of the speaker. Unlike Fraunce, his language when discerning one kind of figure from another does not make this turn towards innermost concepts. Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence builds on works such as Sherry’s, and adds both detail and conceptual discussion. The second edition of 1593 is of most interest for this purpose: it goes into greater detail, and adopts a more emphatic tone in relation to the key questions at issue.17 In his account of metaphor Peacham explicitly investigates its cognitive aspects: It is apparant that memorie is the principall efficient of a Metaphore, for being the retentive power of the mind, it is the treasure house of mans knowledge, which as it possesseth the formes of unknowne things, so is it readie at all times to present them to mans use, as often as occasion, and cause does necessarily require. As for example, he that hath seene a caterpiller eating and devouring the tender buds and blossomes of trees and plants, and after this shall see an idle person living by the spoyle of other mens labours, is put in mind to call him a caterpiller: he that hath seene a gulph or gaping sinke, swallowing a continuall streame or mightie quantitie of water, and afterward shall see a man consuming his substance and patrimonie in prodigalitie and riot, is put in mind to call him a gulph of patrimonie or a sinke of wealth. It is to be confessed notwithstanding, that memorie worketh not alone in the framing of translations, but hath exact judgement alwayes to helpe her, for memorie presenteth the former part of the comparison, and judgement applieth the later, for a man may easily remember what he hath seene, but yet

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if he want discreete judgement, he cannot aptly compare to it the thing that he now seeth although there be some fit similitude between them, and also some necessarie occasion to use it: and therefore ample knowledge, perfect memorie, and exact judgement joyning together in one mind, are the principall and especiall causes of all apt and excellent translations. (C2r–C2v)

As well as being easily remembered, metaphors spring from memory. Here Peacham organises his model of rhetorical thought in a way that resembles cognitive linguistics and other attempts to understand problem-solving and creativity via the analogy of metaphor. In the brain, new connections are formed by partial intersections. The essential mechanism for this is synecdoche: one aspect of something acts as a memorial cue for the whole of something else. The consequences of these synecdoches take the forms of metaphor, metonymy, catachresis, and the other key tropes. Peacham’s speculation on the nature of metaphor, then, pushes towards something like conceptual blending. The place of tropes in the apprehension of reality is strongly heuristic. Although the ‘caterpiller’ is presented as a word, its genesis seems to respond to the need to think about something that has been witnessed, as much as the need to convey it to someone else. Its investigation of the source of new thoughts (‘the formes of unknowne things’) resonates tantalisingly with a key quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that will feature in the next chapter. Theseus decries the ability of lovers, madmen, and poets to conjure up the ‘forms of things unknown’ (5.1.15) with their imaginations. Perhaps Shakespeare is recalling Peacham’s formulation, but it is more solid, and no less significant, to assert that both writers are investigating the same cognitive quality here: the ability to think new thoughts by means of metaphor. The passage quoted above appears in the 1593 edition but not in the shorter 1577 version, which goes straight on to memory as a discrete topic and an analysis of its kinds and sources. Peacham’s

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revisions are extensive enough that the later text is really a different work altogether. However, it is suggestive to note that many of the additional passages share the speculative, broadening quality of the memory-metaphor linkage. In another new section, Peacham ponders ‘The use of Metaphors’: Apt Metaphors have their manifold frutes, and the same both profitable and pleasant, which is a thing well known to men of learning and wisedome. First, they give pleasant light to darke things, thereby removing unprofitable and odious obscuritie. Secondly, by the aptnesse of their proportion, and nearenesse of affinitie, they worke in the hearer many effects, they obtaine allowance of his judgement, they move his affections, and minister a pleasure to his wit. Thirdly, they are forcible to perswade. Fourthly, to commend or dispraise. Fiftly, they leave such a firme impression in the memory, as is not lightly forgotten. (D3r)

Like other rhetoricians, Peacham has his own emphases and innovations in deploying familiar patterns of thought. For the most part he shares the usual points, but he starts somewhere a little more energetic. Giving ‘pleasant light to darke things’ is not so different from standard views of this trope, but it has heuristic implications that more purely persuasion-based, or adornment-based, models might neglect. Turning then to the removal of obscurity defuses this as much as it clarifies it. This section on ‘Use ’ (like another complementary one on ‘Caution’ in use) is a standard part of the 1593 expansion. Metaphor has a witty and revealing extra new section, on ‘The Comparison of Metaphors’: Metaphors in respect of their perspicuity, and light which they give, may well be compared to the starres of the skie, which are both the comfort of the night, and the beautie of the firmament. 2. In respect of their aptnesse to make descriptions, they are not onely as pleasant colours of all kinds, but also as ready pensils pliable to line out and shadow any maner of proportion in nature. 3. In respect of their firme impression in the mind, and

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remembrance of the hearer, they are as seales upon soft waxe, or as deep stampes in long lasting mettall. (D3r–D3v)

With the possible exception of the third, which is somewhat confined by conventional figurations of the memory as a surface to be impressed, these comparisons are dynamic and unresolved. If metaphors give light and perspicuity, this suggests penetrating beams; starlight, however, as Peacham says, offers more comfort and beauty than additional visibility. The second comparison starts almost too obviously: rhetorical ‘colours’ are well known, so the ‘aptnesse to make descriptions’ starts on expected territory. The subsequent ‘pensils’, however, are less stable. Now metaphor seems like a basic tool rather than the source of pleasantness. The comparisons here – predominantly made in the form of similes – might be seen to originate in the kind of heuristic processes that are my concern in this book. The result here is (as elsewhere) multiple manoeuvres around the challenging and complex concept. Despite the thought-provoking aspects of what seem to be emergent, responsive insights in Peacham, there is a need to restrain the trans-historical temptation. These patterns are not merely coincidental, and their existence adds substance to Shakespeare ’s heuristic rhetoric and to the notion that rhetorical theory has a cognitive aspiration at some level. However, Peacham is not anticipating neural pathways and their part-to-whole connectivity; nor of course is he proleptically fleshing out the rhetorical aspect of cognitive linguistics. His work illuminates rhetoric within its own terms first and foremost. It is notable that in the earlier passage he goes on to say that it must be ‘confessed’ that ‘memorie worketh not alone ’: judgment is required to make a metaphor work, though there may be a difference between the conception and the deployment of a trope. Peacham invokes the faculty psychology that, later in this chapter, will be configured around rhetoric by Francis Bacon. Reason, or

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judgment, is one of the parts of the divided consciousness (memory and imagination being the typical complements in the brain’s ventricles) in the period’s prevailing theory.18 Peacham privileges judgment, which is in keeping with the way he resists the etymological drift of synecdoche: Synecdoche, in Latine called Intellectio, that is, an understanding, and it is a forme of speech by which the Orator signifieth more or lesse by a word, which the proper signification doth not expresse: and it is by putting the whole for the part, or the part for the whole. (E1r)

The orator takes control, and signifies ‘more or lesse ’, with the trope as his tool. Whereas most writers make synecdoche sound like something almost uncannily comprehensible, Peacham stresses pitfalls. The speaker must be careful not to confuse his listeners: The Orator useth this figure chiefly when he is well persuaded concerning the wisedome of his hearers, that they are of sufficient capacitie and understanding to collect his meaning, whereupon he maketh the bolder to remove his speech from the vulgar maner of speaking to a figurative forme, whereby he giveth it a grace which otherwise it should want, forcing the understanding of his hearer to a deeper consideration of the sense and meaning. (E1v)

Soon after he reiterates that ignorant (and also captious) hearers will misunderstand synecdoche if it is used in the wrong context (E1v). Although the advice is sensible, there is something slightly farcical in imagining an audience that does not realise that the ‘hand’ doing the work is connected to a person. This over-scrupulous explanation suggests, perhaps, that Peacham senses that in synecdoche there is something strange at work – a cognitive process that is not amenable to the rhetorician’s tactics of exposition and explanation. Nonetheless, Peacham’s treatise goes unusually far towards acknowledging a cognitive quality in rhetoric, and towards an idea of rhetoric as a cognitive science before the terms were really available. Like

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those working in later disciplines, he is most energised by metaphor, the trope that has always seemed particularly productive and ubiquitous. Rhetoric comes to look like a map of thought, and a map of thought extracted from, and applied to, language in a very complex form. This might not have anything obvious to offer conventional modern cognitive science, but rhetoric is nevertheless a mature discipline that has found a set of solutions and terms to account for phenomena in language and thought, and has done so in relation to a kind of material (complex and elaborate speech and writing) to which the laboratory is not well suited. As such ancient rhetoric might indeed supplement interdisciplinary thought about the brain. Nowhere does synecdoche appear more vividly than in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Puttenham’s etymological acumen, and his energetic turn of phrase, both animate his discussion: Then againe if we use such a word (as many times we doe) by which we drive the hearer to conceive more or lesse or beyond or otherwise then the letter expresseth, and it be not by vertue of the former figures Metaphore and Abuse [catachresis] and the rest, the Greeks then call it Synecdoche, the Latines sub intellectio or understanding, for by part we are enforced to understand the whole, by the whole part, by many things one thing, by one, many, by a thing precedent, a thing consequent, and generally one thing out of another by maner of contrariety to the word which is spoken, aliud ex alio, which because it seemeth to aske a good, quick, and pregnant capacitie, and is not for an ordinarie or dull wit so to do, I chose to call him the figure not only of conceit after the Greeke originall, but also of quick conceite. As for example, we will give none because we will speake of him againe in another place, where he is ranged among the figures sensable apperteining to clauses.19

The usual Latin version of synecdoche is ‘intellectio’, but Puttenham’s use of ‘conceit’ looks back to an alternative, some derivative of ‘concipio’, which also means ‘take together’. This

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word can also apply to a thought, apparently a more active one than ‘understanding’. Of all the words used for the trope, this suggests the most discursive and hypothetical of processes; ‘conceit’ seems at home in a world of humanist dialogue and role-playing. The addition of ‘quick’, however, is very telling. He says this is because ‘it seemeth to aske a good, quick, and pregnant capacitie ’ to understand the trope – a parallel to Peacham. Perhaps this is a sign that Puttenham felt the classical quality of this particular trope, famous from epic ships and the like, might seem quite distant from his English readers. It may also indicate that English rhetoricians were less confident in their readers than Roman ones: they could not take understanding for granted. It is possible, however, that the addition of ‘quick’ might also indicate that this ‘pregnant capacitie ’ is widespread and indeed somehow inscribed in the figure itself. To maintain that synecdoche is the figure of ‘quick conceite ’ because of its curious level of inherent comprehensibility is to read against Puttenham, as he argues elsewhere that the trope is complex. His description, however, is rather self-defeating: Now for the shutting up of this Chapter, will I remember you farther of that manner of speech which the Greekes call Synecdoche, and we the figure of quicke conceite who for the reasons before alledged, may be put under the speeches allegorical, because of the darkenes and duplicitie of his sence: as when one would tell me how the French king was overthrowen at Saint Quintans, I am enforced to think that it was not the king himselfe in person, but the Constable of France with the French kings power. Or if one would say, the towne of Andwerpe were famished, it is not so to be taken, but of the people of the towne of Andwerp, and this conceit being drawen aside, and (as it were) from one thing to another, it encombers the minde with a certain imagination what it may be that is meant, and not expressed: as he that said to a young gentlewoman, who was in her chamber making her self unready. Mistresse will ye geve me leave to unlace your peticote, meaning (perchance) the other thing that might follow such unlasing. In the olde time, whosoever was allowed to undoe his Ladies girdle, he might lie with

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her all night: wherfore the taking of a womans maydenhead away, was said to undoo her girdle. (p. 163)

His three examples actually lack the ‘darkenes and duplicitie ’ attributed to them. The first two imagine misunderstandings that would never happen  – context and in-built lucidity mean that nobody would think that the French king has turned up to fight alone. The last example portrays a situation in which the participants and any onlookers, readers, or hearers, would all know exactly what was meant by an unlaced petticoat. Innuendo is a subset of synecdoche (though this, and the other examples, overlap a little with metonymy). Puttenham portrays himself as reluctant in being ‘forced to think’ something, but it is hard to believe in the force required. Later Puttenham compares the obscurity of synecdoche with that of another trope, noema: Speaking before about the figure wee call him Quicke conceit because he inured in a single word onely by way of intendment or large meaning, but such as was speedily discovered by every quicke wit, as by the halfe to understand the whole, and many other waies appearing by the examples. But by this figure [Noema] the obscurity of the sence lieth not in a single word, but in an entier speech, whereof we do not so easily conceive the meaning, but as it were by conjecture, because it is wittie and subtile or darke, which makes me therefore call him in our vulgar the Close conceit as he that said by himselfe and his wife, I thanke God in fortie winters that we have lived together, never any of our neighbours set us at one, meaning that they had never fell out in all that space, which had been the directer speech and more apert, and yet by intendment amounts all to one, being nevertheless dissemblable and in effect contrary. (pp. 192–3)

Notably, he makes synecdoche sound a bit more natural here, ‘speedily’ rather than forcefully making its point. Even noema is imagined only in situations where understanding follows naturally – a husband and wife of forty years share ‘close conceit’ rather than excluding one another. Puttenham has a problem with these tropes: they

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should be obscure, but aren’t. The way he argues round the issue is very instructive, as it indicates an unwillingness to face what may be a crucial truth, that rhetoric is not straightforwardly a matter of invention and comprehension – that it might at times map thoughts even more than linguistic techniques. These manuals can take a selfdefeating turn when they manufacture examples to fit principles, rather than configuring themselves the other way round. The thing that limits many of these texts in their exploration of what rhetoric might be is their focused project. These are educational guides with a practical purpose, and grander conceptions of what their material might mean – especially ones as historically alien as I am proposing – are of course unlikely. It is not impossible, however, to find a writer from the period considering rhetoric within a broader system of knowledge that might enable it to move outside the boundaries set by utility. Francis Bacon, for example, discusses rhetoric as part of his wide-ranging project to find consistent aims and procedures in the whole of knowledge. It has been claimed that metaphor is as fundamental implicitly to his philosophy as it is explicitly so for Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur.20 In general Bacon’s rhetoric has been studied in relation to the early modern view of the mind, on the one hand, and to its efficacy in public life on the other.21 An extended discussion in The Advancement of Learning might, however, contain hints of the kind of recognition explored above, though without specific reference to the tropes themselves. Bacon starts from a sceptical position, because the tendency of unconstrained rhetoric is to obscure the path to truth, rather than to clear it. His definition of rhetoric is justly famous  – ‘the duty and office of rhetoric is, to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will’ – but it works with three interacting mental categories that in this chapter will not be unpacked.22 The emphasis on the hearer’s ‘will’ and the need to move it is common to much

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rhetorical theory since Aristotle and Plato, and is itself a reflection of the cognitive role of rhetoric. It has an affective purpose in relation to the mind and emotions of the target. Bacon’s depiction of the speaker’s thought processes, though, relegates the rhetorical operations to a partial role: this discipline arbitrates between two capacities and enables them to operate most effectively. Despite this, Bacon’s view of rhetoric strikes chords with the idea that it may shadow the functions of cognitive science, because he is committed to the idea that the prevailing structures of learning and thinking provide analogies for one another at different levels and in different fields. Hence, when he comes to define the decorum of rhetoric, he comes close to arguing in his third paragraph that it reflects the structure of thought: And therefore it was great injustice in Plato, though springing out of a just hatred to the rhetoricians of his time, to esteem of rhetoric but as a voluptuary art, resembling it to cookery, that did mar wholesome meats, and help unwholesome by variety of sauces to the pleasure of the taste. For we see that speech is much more conversant in adorning that which is good, than in colouring that which is evil; for there is no man but speaketh more honestly than he can do or think: and it was excellently noted by Thucydides in Cleon, that because he used to hold on the bad side in causes of estate, therefore he was ever inveighing against eloquence and good speech; knowing that no man can speak fair of courses sordid and base. (p. 257)

The correspondence between thoughts and rhetoric here is said to be moral in nature. This connects the cognitive quality of rhetoric with a vital debate faced by writers on the subject: whether their discipline can be condemned for adorning bad ideas as much as good ones. Bacon holds, as many rhetoricians have, that its tendency is towards good, but this is often done rather brusquely, and for modern readers it can seem as if the problem is being sidestepped rather than addressed. However, this contention that rhetoric cannot

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contrive honesty deserves to be taken seriously, given that it is used (as here) by authors who do not take things lightly without good reason. Considering rhetoric as a description of the structure of ideas, as well as a presentation of their finished forms, actually offers a way to rationalise this, if not a complete solution to its problems. Rhetoric is bound to thoughts: they do not lie behind it, as it can seem, but are in fact conceived within it. At least it cannot straightforwardly be blamed for corrupting or gilding things that would otherwise be themselves. Of course, Bacon is not writing about figures such as metonymy, metalepsis, and the like, but rather about the overall persuasive mechanism. Nevertheless it seems notable that he urges faith in an essential correspondence between good style and the truth emerging from the intellect. This indicates the persistence of the Roman idea that rhetoric is bound up with all the other worthwhile activities of the mind. To end with Bacon is to end somewhat outside the mainstream of this chapter. Although he appears sympathetic to some aspects of the rhetorical outlook that has been traced here, he does not make anything shaped like metaphor or metalepsis into a foundation for his own considerations of how thinking works, or should work. He stands apart from most of the rhetorical writing of his time, where the cognitive-heuristic dimension appears to emerge like some sort of hidden pattern in the weave of taxonomy. Certain tropes are like flaws that reveal how the whole machine is put together; they hint at the mechanisms by which things are conceived in the mind. We might think of these as physical mechanisms, influenced as we are by neuroscience, but for renaissance writers the phenomenon is observed at a sort of remove, in the patterns of language. This does not degrade the insight, but it explains why it can have proved so surreptitious. This chapter’s survey of a subtext in the history of rhetoric has sought to question what a trope is, in order to bolster

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and contextualise a parallel reconsideration in literary close reading. The innovative approaches to metaphor in various fields outlined in Chapter 2, and the propositions about dramatic language and thought made in Chapter 1, now have a historical dimension. In Shakespeare’s time, too, rhetoric could take a kind of cognitive turn. In the next part of the book, the resultant possibilities for close analysis of his work will be pursued at greater length.

C h apt e r 4

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The main consequence of the connections made in the previous chapters is a different way of reading some of the more dazzling but abstruse passages in Shakespeare. The richness of Shakespeare ’s language, and the potential for tension between its extraordinary energy and the concept of mimesis  – the representation of reality  – is opened up by the observation that its tropes are in more than one way involved in the process of thinking as well as the results of speaking. In the four chapters that follow there will be some unusually extended discussions of the intricacies of language. If these tend towards tediousness at times, then at least the exhaustiveness has a point. In some of these dramatic moments it will end up seeming most plausible to assume that these metaphorical tangles leave the audience with an impression, rather than a precise anatomy, of what might be drawn out in a heated dramatic moment. Nevertheless the contribution of these tangles to such moments still needs to be considered carefully, because no one rhetorical crisis is quite like another. One speech in particular obliges this play’s inclusion. It represents an extreme example of rhetorical cognition, and a stark contrast with Macbeth and his thoughts on pity. In both cases the attempt to comprehend things better is a kind of failure; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is a comical failure. Bottom wakes up under the illusion that he is still rehearsing a play. He soon 100

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notices his friends have gone, and then he turns to think about his dream: When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is, ‘Most fair Pyramus.’ Heigh-ho! Peter Quince! Flute the bellows-mender! Snout the tinker! Starveling! God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t’ expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had, but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be call’d ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.1.200–19)

In Shakespeare’s Language Kermode would place this play before the watershed after which the relationship between language and inward struggle becomes richest. In this chapter there will, however, be assertions about its cognitive rhetoric that parallel those made about later plays in the two chapters that follow. There is an overall difference in the fluency with which the language of those later works opens up the fabric of thought, though in A Midsummer Night’s Dream too there are moments where conversational and declamatory and cognitive tropes interweave. In comparison, for example, with Iago and Othello, Bottom moves somewhat ponderously, and without the same intensity or introversion. As the previous chapter showed, rhetoricians liked to trace their techniques into the speech of simple people, but it would be wrong to present Bottom as a basically patronised voice. His metaphorical apprehension of his predicament proves effectual. He starts with negatives: nobody will ever be able to recount what has happened to him, and he cannot make sense of it. What

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he then searches for – wittingly or unwittingly – is a way past this predicament. The speech records and conveys a kind of heuristic cognition in a manner surprisingly close to – though different in so many ways  – Hamlet’s soliloquies. This comes in an unexpected but brilliantly pragmatic form. First he faces himself and defiantly denies himself: you’d have to be an ass, metaphorically, to tell the story of him being an ass, actually, and the collision of the two things distances him from what happened.1 Then, by mixing up the senses (eye / heard, ear / seen, hand / taste, etc.), Bottom actually finds a way out of an impasse that results from sensing impossible things. These lines are a Biblical travesty, scrambling 1 Corinthians 2.9 (where the point is that no eye has seen, nor no ear heard, the things which God has for those who love him).2 Rhetorically speaking, this is a kind of multiple catachresis; heuristically speaking, it opens up a gap between himself and the understanding of his dream. This is developed further by the tongue / conceive and heart / report confusion: he will not say what he has been thinking, and by clashing the two things together he removes the need to ­reconcile them. (And, incidentally, he touches upon a question in the background of this whole book: where do conceiving and reporting meet?) He prises himself away, so that when he comes to imagine the resultant ‘ballet’ (i.e. a ballad), he thinks himself absent from it – ‘Bottom’s Dream’, but ‘no bottom’. We never hear it sung: perhaps here Bottom is still reconstituting reality, imagining actually that the dream and the play are entwined. They both end, and Bottom emerges triumphantly himself. That was Bottom’s attempt to process his experiences. The task of summarising all – or at least, many – of the magical events of the midsummer night goes to Theseus. Hippolyta offers that they are ‘strange’ (5.1.1), but he sees them as characteristic of three deluded types of ‘seething brains’: ‘the lunatic, the lover, and the poet’

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(5.1.7). He sceptically deems the events recounted to be inventions with a revealingly rhetorical character. The cognitive quality of Shakespeare’s language is not confined to soliloquy or introverted public speech like Ophelia’s. It also arises in what looks like conversation. However, for the most part Theseus’s speech is a pronouncement, but with incipient hints of the resourcefulness of tropes in thought: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! (5.1.9–22)

Theseus aims to contrast the fictions of imagination and fantasy to the work of ‘cool reason’. He makes a distinction between these different mental operations, and finds that the former, the enemies of reason, produce the characteristic absurdities of love, madness, and poetry. The dynamics of this triad, and how they reflect on the Duke, are as complex as one might expect, given how often the play intersects with these connected strands. When the fantasies themselves are examined there are rhetorical characteristics in evidence. Outlining these tropes gives insight into the scornful figurations of Theseus’s attack, but also into the imaginative thought processes that he seems to emulate as well as disparage. The first

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wayward thought, the madman’s, is to see more devils than Hell can hold. This is hyperbole, though misguided. The lover’s, which is to see ‘Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’, intersects with catachresis (using words out of context), irony (saying the thing which is not), and metaphor  – though from Theseus’s perspective the connection is false. The poet’s eye moves from earth to heaven, and thereby tracks the path of metalepsis, wherein far-fetched comparisons are made, and ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ (as was noted in Chapter 3, this chimes fascinatingly with Peacham’s definition of metaphor). In each case the manoeuvres made are from the speaker’s perspective the very height of misguidedness, but from another perspective they track the paths of key cognitive tropes. The same is true of the final two imaginative leaps, from ‘some joy’ to ‘the bringer of that joy’, and the nocturnal mistaking of bush for bear. These are both metonymies: the first clearly, the second less so. It depends on the idea that at night some quality of a bush may elicit the idea of a bear (and so synecdoche and metaphor may be equally appropriate figures, depending on how the path from part or quality to whole is conceived), which is falsely but metonymically conjured up. In Theseus’s view this is the work of an overactive imagination, but in fact, surely, this is something we are all aware of doing, when the brain fills in gaps around something half-seen. Indeed, at this point of the speech the gesture ‘how easy’ is aimed more generally, as Theseus searches for another rational explanation for the amazing story he has heard. His speech, then, features a series of imaginative thoughts that can be expressed in the terms of rhetoric. For him, they represent falsehood, but for the audience, they are the characteristics of the world of fairies, and fiction, in which we have a great deal invested. They are also plainly within the realm of supposing and speculation: aspects of thoughts we all

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recognise. Hippolyta’s rejoinder, curtailed by the entry of the very lovers she is describing, makes a vital point: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (5.1.23–7)

A collective experience, like the lovers’ night in the forest, or the audience’s in the theatre, can create, or discover, special truth in the metaphors. Theseus resists the poetics of mind. He does not want to admit a metaphorical tendency in the apprehension of reality, or an exploratory, cognitive quality to the language out of which his world, and the play, are constructed. Hippolyta’s reply reminds us to take the transformative power of metaphor and imagination seriously even amid all the playfulness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In his book on the play David Young makes a strong contrast between metaphor as conceived in rhetorical writings of the time, and the transformative possibilities opened up by Shakespeare. This speech is composed of such metaphors, but also about such metaphors.3 It has also been seen by R. Allen Shoaf as a key moment in Shakespeare’s relationship with simile. In his study of Shakespeare ’s constant development of nuanced and challenging resemblances and parallels, the discussion of ‘the poet’s eye’ is ‘the first theorization of the theater of likeness that Shakespeare composes’.4 Evidently, then, it has already been recognised that A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its varied textures of reality and linguistic apprehensions, is concerned with a rhetorical way of thinking about the world. This recognition is enhanced by evidence of revision in the cre­ ative process behind the play. Mislineation in the early editions

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has led scholars to suggest, convincingly, that the lines about the poet were added to the manuscript from which the Quarto text was printed. A speech pointing out the faults of the lover and the madman became one through which to appreciate the strange inventive power of the poet.5 A revision like this does not seem like a relatively marginal afterthought. It suggests heightened attention and a kind of discovery as the play began to reflect upon its own medium. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then, there is perhaps Shakespeare ’s most explicit engagement with cognitive rhetoric. As well as the repeating spectacle of characters trying to deal with disorienting experiences, we also find a reflection on the roles of metaphor and simile in that very process. These things are ubiquitous in Shakespeare, but this play acknowledges them as directly as any other. Critics have come close to pinning down cognitive-heuristic characteristics, then, but they have also reflected more broadly on the turbulent language of the play. Montrose ’s classic essay explores ‘figurations of power’, forms of thinking (positively and negatively) about power and subservience. Language and tropes stretch towards these ‘figurations’.6 For Christy Desmet, women and men are put into a state of conflict by rhetoric; Helena and Hermia find ways around the conventional exclusion of women from the discipline with contrasting tropes (such as hypallage).7 For Jay Halio, the play’s language is disordered, difficult, reaching away from its immediate purposes.8 Theseus is right to imply that lovers deploy a greater range of rhetorical heuristics than most. They tend to require a greater range than most, because the experience of love is a profound and disorienting one. The play gives ample opportunity for this to flourish, especially in the person of Helena, but also in very varied contexts. Sometimes the language of love is notably conventional, though richly metaphorical. It is striking that in two key cases this

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occurs when the speaker’s voice is unusually framed. Demetrius expresses himself fulsomely when he wakes to see Helena with drug-altered eyes: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne? Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow! That pure congealed white, high Taurus’ snow, Fann’d with the eastern wind, turns to a crow When thou hold’st up thy hand. O, let me kiss This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss! (3.2.137–44)

Like Bottom’s eye-tongue-hand-heart discussion quoted at the beginning of this chapter, this speech arises after a character wakes from a magical sleep. Demetrius might need a little extra cognitive effort to take in his situation, and the intensity of his new passion is suited by his rhetorical register. Much of it is conventional, but it seems new to him. His wholly changed way of addressing reality is conveyed – and, of course, achieved – in the flamboyant but familiar metaphors unleashed here. It is not without ingenuity: the ‘snow’ / ‘crow’ rhyme and the exotic landscape enhance the energetic analogy being struck, though the whiteness of snow and the blackness of a crow are themselves typical. This, and the ‘seal’ (which probably denotes a promise more than anything else), show that even Demetrius, who for most of the play is blunt and unimaginative, can thrive in the rhetorical heuristics of love. The second exponent of extravagant convention to be considered, however, does not thrive. This is Thisby, who delivers a speech to the dead Pyramus that manages to be both poignant and hilarious at the same time. In the next chapter, Imogen’s rhetorical extravagances over Cloten’s corpse will show that even the most eloquent lovers can find themselves in cognitive and linguistic crisis

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at moments such as these. Her heuristic efforts, and Thisby’s here, are on the surface: These lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks, Are gone, are gone! Lovers, make moan; His eyes were green as leeks. O Sisters Three, Come, come to me, With hands as pale as milk; Lay them in gore, Since you have shore With shears his thread of silk. Tongue, not a word! Come, trusty sword, Come, blade, my breast imbrue! [Stabs herself] And farewell, friends; Thus Thisby ends; Adieu, adieu, adieu. [Dies] (5.1.329–46)

These lines are twice-scripted: Shakespeare writes how the mechanicals would write this passionate moment. Despite these ironic layers, the interaction of rhetoric and crisis comes through. The ‘lily lips’, ‘cherry nose’, and ‘yellow cowslip cheeks’ are all wrong  – either Thisby’s metaphors have gone awry or, more awfully, Pyramus’s dead body is damaged beyond convention. His eyes ‘were ’ green as leeks: who knows, and who dares to think, what they look like now? Later in the speech the colours are lined up better as Thisby manages to evoke a tragic juxtaposition of colours (the white and red of milk and gore) in her bitterness towards the fates. It is still clumsy – ‘shore / With shears’ should raise a laugh – but it is powerful nonetheless, not least because this shifting, resolving pattern of colours denotes a kind of effort in her thinking. During Thisby’s

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speech, through the clouds of mangled language perpetrated by the players, we see signs of something truly affecting: a fictional cognition with limits, and with a fraught relationship with convention, mustering some sort of response to a tragic event. Here as before the achievement of poetic language should not be set aside while heuristic problems are being analysed. Thisby’s speech can be moving and thrilling even as its gaps open up; we can explore the details of the process without forgetting the alchemical result. Several of the most vivid moments of heuristic rhetoric relating to love in the play are Helena’s. Of the four young lovers from Athens, she is the most expressive and perhaps the most appreciative of the strange turmoil that surrounds them. In the eyes of Puck and the fairies, one mortal is much like another. It is telling, then, that Shakespeare chooses to make Hermia and Helena physically so different, assuming that the harping on one being tall and fair, the other being small and dark, is not a surreal ruse.9 There is a fine line between seeing this as descriptive of performance conditions (because the boy actors available were physically distinguished in this way) and as a challenge to performance conditions (in that it anticipates the practical dilemmas that might result from such a distinction). In the magically altered eyes of Demetrius and Lysander, the two women can be exchanged as well, so it is not surprising that they should compare themselves to one another with such intensity. The manifest differences are not enough to account for the deeply felt changes in fortune. The contrast is not just physical by any means. At a pivotal meeting in the play’s first scene, they capture the experience of love in very different rhetoric. Hermia promises devotion to Lysander by invoking an ominous precedent: My good Lysander, I swear to thee, by Cupid’s strongest bow, By his best arrow with the golden head,

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Shakespeare, rhetoric and cognition By the simplicity of Venus’ doves, By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves, And by that fire which burn’d the Carthage queen When the false Troyan under sail was seen, By all the vows that ever men have broke (In number more than ever women spoke), In that same place thou hast appointed me To-morrow truly will I meet with thee. (1.1.168–78)

She invokes some typical, and some less typical forces, but she does so without the same metaphorical energy that will be seen in Helena. She swears by Cupid’s bow and arrow, which seems conventional; then by the ‘simplicity’ of Venus’ doves (which suggests a paradoxical purity in sincere erotic passion); then by the pyre on which Dido (the ‘Carthage Queen’) killed herself – but surely also here this ‘fire ’ suggests the metaphorically burning passion that made her fall for Aeneas. These examples acknowledge, in a discontinuous but astute sequence, that passion is dangerous. Finally she swears by the vows of faithless men, whereby she faces a further danger of her situation, and the legions of wronged women. Her perspective on love is multi-faceted and shrewd: she is resigned to an element of victimhood, but the balanced and processed tone of her speech suggests she sees a certain kind of control in conscious resignation. After Lysander leaves, Helena arrives. In response to a friendly greeting from Hermia, in which she is called ‘fair Helena’, she unleashes a metaphorical torrent. Whereas the examples of cognitive crisis considered so far (Macbeth’s, and Bottom’s) have been spoken alone, this one is truly in conversation. As the audience sees it, her words are manifestly addressed to Hermia. This does not mean that the rhetorical tropes cannot function as means of understanding as well as of expression, though they may be different.

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Helena proves to be remarkably candid and unguarded in dialogue, and Hermia struggles to understand her friend as she unfolds more than just her words: Call you me fair? That fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair, O happy fair! Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue ’s sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. Sickness is catching; O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go; My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I’ll give to be to you translated. O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart! (1.1.181–93)

‘Fair’ prompts some musing on the word, as adjective and noun, that is poised between a sardonic mauling of Hermia’s term, and an inward meditation on its reverberations. Helena’s speech does not settle into conversation here, and the same could be said of her next lines (‘Your eyes … appear’). In Chapter 1 the conventions of dramatic speech were considered briefly – what does it mean to say that people do not talk like this? Even after recognising that Helena’s metaphors need not be thought of as a realistic representation of how friends discuss their boyfriends, one can still say that this is disengaged from her addressee in an unusual way, and to an unusual extent. It is not only in Shakespearean soliloquy that we might see dramatic language seeming to represent the processes of thought and to expose cognition in action. ‘Your eyes’ suggest that the address is direct, but of course Hermia might well just stand there while the rhetoric spins around her.

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In plays people do not speak in a normal way, but they also reply and interact in special ways too: so we might see characters responding to cognitive heuristics on occasions. Helena is close to conventional praises of eyes and tongues in poetry, but her distracted intensity as it expands (‘when wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear’) suggest that she needs it to do more work – to strive unsuccessfully after effectual insight into why Demetrius loves Hermia instead. She continues, tenaciously, to experiment: the ‘catch’ metaphor that follows – if favour is like a sickness, then it can be caught, and perhaps the things that gain favour (eye and tongue) can be caught as well – is another attempt to conceive the painful mystery of love, and it extends as far as the ‘bated’ Demetrius. (This word can mean caught, as in ‘baited’, but it primarily means ‘omitted’ here.) Helena’s rhetoric is desperately ingenious, but in the end she is still appealing to translation, or education, as means whereby she can simply be Hermia, and solve the problem like that. As before, it is important to savour a delicate balance. Attending to the cognitive failure of Helena’s speeches does not take anything away from their feats in conveying and imagining a world; rather it makes the experience of poetic knowledge all the more intense. The productivity of metaphor here  – of concepts blended together in response to a troubling situation  – conveys the individual character’s unusual cognitive characteristics. It is also strikingly tuned in to the play that will emerge from this crisis. Bottom is later ‘translated’ (3.1.18). As we have seen, he will wonder what an eye, an ear, and a tongue might do; and the sickness of love will be freely caught. As was also seen, in the previous chapter, ‘translation’ can be synonymous with metaphor: Helena’s commitment to the power of rhetoric extends even to a hypothesis that she herself can be transformed by metaphor. This nexus enriches the imaginative power of the distinct character more than it disperses it: not

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everyone can speak to, and for, the play like this. Very soon after this meeting, Helena speaks alone about ‘how happy some o’er other some can be’ – how unequal fortune is. Her thoughts are prompted by the poignant dialogue between sameness (when she compares her essential beauty to Hermia’s) and difference (how they are regarded by Demetrius, and why): How happy some o’er other some can be! Through Athens I am thought as fair as she. But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so; He will not know what all but he do know; And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes, So I, admiring of his qualities. Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste; Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste; And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil’d. As waggish boys in game themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjur’d every where. (1.1.226–41)

Her speech is insightful and (in comparison with her outburst towards Hermia) controlled, for the most part. It starts out with self-knowledge that looks outward towards the rest of the play. Her account of doting love’s ability to transpose ‘things base and vile … to form and dignity’ anticipates Theseus, who will later decry lovers, and others, for just this error. It is telling that she (and he) describe a kind of metaphorical category shift: transpose, translate, and metaphor are all etymologically linked. Her account of Love ’s blindness, and Cupid’s wings, is probing: the valuation of ‘eyes’ versus ‘mind’ is not obvious. In particular, the blindness of Cupid might

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conventionally be a comment on the fact that lovers let their eyes deceive them. In Helena’s internal logic, however, eyes see things as they are, whereas minds are the sources of distorted reality. (This, again, is suggestive in the context of the play, where Demetrius’s eye ends up altered, and in the context of cognitive rhetoric, since she makes the mind such an agent in apprehending reality.) The element of discovery here, as she works out to her satisfaction why Cupid is figured as a child, is a kind of heuristic approach to the heuristics of rhetoric: she wants to understand why the metaphor works. In the end, she adds her own twist, allowing a child’s susceptibility to playful cheating to transform into the cheating itself (done by other boys, after all), and then to escalate into perjury. This is followed by – and perhaps its degree of rhetorical licence leads to – the most intense metaphorical sequence of Helena’s speech. Thinking again on the pain of lost love, Helena half-­appropriates a classic Petrarchan pairing of ice and heat: For ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine; And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, So he dissolv’d, and show’rs of oaths did melt. I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight; Then to the wood will he to-morrow night Pursue her; and for this intelligence If I have thanks, it is a dear expense. But herein mean I to enrich my pain, To have his sight thither and back again. (1.1.242–51)

The initial image of passion comes in the surprising form of ice – the hail of oaths poured down by Demetrius before he ever saw Hermia. The heat comes not from the male lover’s passion but from the rival’s appeal, and this causes the metaphor to fill out into dissolution and melting. Melting and dissolving are the two key ways in which

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solids become liquid, but they are different processes, although the distinction (the OED shows) is less clear in Shakespeare ’s time than it is (among the scientifically scrupulous, anyway) in ours. Her first attempt to pursue the metaphor reaches the wrong image – heat does not make ice dissolve – but of course the rich interplay of solidity and liquidity, heat and ice, is all the more powerful for its unruliness and unpredictability, as Helena tries again to contain her plight in rhetoric. Ironically, this soliloquy shows her (with this last exception) taking more control over her tropes as she organises reality around her. The last turn of the speech, though, gives a different impression. After what seems like a rueful and reflective account of love, she suddenly decides to betray her friend and tell Demetrius of her flight. The decision is impulsive, and its consequences far from predictable: it dazzlingly gives the lie to the partial impression that Helena has achieved a more seasoned appreciation of love. Later in the play Helena unleashes a rhetorical volley at Hermia, when she begins to suspect that all three of the other young Athenians have conspired to humiliate her. She reminisces about the special loyalty her old friend should owe her. The speech has the length and the meditative intensity of a soliloquy, and yet Hermia is supposed to listen to it. Initially Helena confronts her with accusations that she has disloyally forgotten the past, but then she launches into florid reminiscence. It is hardly surprising that Hermia pronounces herself ‘amazed’: h elena We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

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Shakespeare, rhetoric and cognition But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So with two seeming bodies, but one heart; Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one, and crowned with one crest. And will you rent our ancient love asunder, To join with men in scorning your poor friend? It is not friendly, ’tis not maidenly. Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it, Though I alone do feel the injury. h erm ia I am amazed at your passionate words; I scorn you not; it seems that you scorn me. (3.2.203–21)

Hermia does her best: she knows that she is suspected of some scorn, and she knows that the speech has been hostile to her. Otherwise, it seems to her all amazement and passion. For the reader, however, amazement and passion are undertaken in the form of metaphor and simile. Things open up with the sudden acceleration into the simile ‘like two artificial gods’.10 The scene imagined is one of innocent, intimate play, making something pretty while singing something pretty, but in Helena’s mind this shared bond now stands for so much that she deploys a simile that tries to elevate the scene sufficiently. It is set aside in favour of another tack, introduced by a searching ‘as if ’. The two bodies are seen to grow together in their fellowship, ‘like to a double cherry’, an extravagant but explicable blend of concepts. In this speech, it is worth noting, some of the achievement should be seen as persuasive, in that she is trying to remind Hermia of something she appears to have forgotten. Her friend’s incomprehension, and the sense of struggle and process involved, make it possible also to see this as a cognitive activity with a heuristic purpose: this is how Helena is thinking through her plight. The cherry simile, and perhaps also the earlier scene of art, and the flower being

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depicted, achieve one further outlet that captures the paradox of their unity: the heraldic shield, with two coats of arms, that represents their ‘ancient love’. The poignant note struck by ‘it is not friendly’, as Helena comes to an end, offsets all the rhetorical effort here. This is Helena’s way of mentally dealing with a sharp predicament (wherein the mysteries of love are deepened by magical manipulation), as well as her way of communicating it out loud. It is not only Hermia who finds Helena difficult to understand. Her encounters with Demetrius are confrontations between a sort of uncomprehending obduracy, and a self-abasing overflow of emotion. Curiously, Helena does not emerge from these too humiliated, perhaps because the young man’s lack of comprehension suggests a cognitive as much as an emotional gap. Again we see rhetoric working hard to figure and refigure an emotional crisis. Demetrius does not seem really to have access to this process, and he responds to the basic things in Helena’s words: h elena You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; But yet you draw not iron, for my heart Is true as steel. Leave you your power to draw, And I shall have no power to follow you. d em etri us Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair? Or rather do I not in plainest truth Tell you I do not nor I cannot love you? h elena And even for that do I love you the more: I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your love,

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Her first escalating metaphor starts from adamant, which is not attracting iron (though magnetic, it is a base metal), but rather steel (a more refined thing altogether). Demetrius is understandably incredulous, or uncomprehending, hoping that ‘plainest truth’ might get them somewhere. This and his rejection only cause Helena to pursue another analogy for her dejected state: a fawning, beaten dog. Her response to his question, ‘And even for that do I love you the more’, is self-explanatory, and speaks to a paradox of love that is more or less commonplace. Her continuation (‘I am your spaniel’, etc.) is not requested by Demetrius or the situation, and while it ends up with a question for him, it really seems self-generating – a sort of mental commentary on events, an associative discourse in parallel to reality, and an attempt to explore, by means of metaphor, a better (or more satisfying, which might mean a worse) way of experiencing the situation. In Helena’s case, this is spoken out loud, which is inherently unusual, though curiously appropriate in a play. It makes her an extraordinary participant in dialogue, capable of far-reaching insight into the linguistic and thematic texture of the play, and capable also of making herself seem perverse and obsessive. The critic’s experience of nuances to be unfolded, and the audience ’s experience of a vivid flow of passion, are wonderfully entwined. Later Shakespearean characters may well take this further, but some of that extraordinary achievement is gathering here. Helena stands out among the four young lovers for her intense rhetorical struggles with the world of the play. Outside their tangled web there are many other cognitive characteristics in evidence. The contrast between the fairies and the mechanicals is extreme in many ways, and this is evident in the way their speeches convey heuristic encounters

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with the dream-like, magical world. For Titania, Oberon, Puck, and the rest, there is actually no problem to be solved in metaphor. From their perspective, the things that happen rarely require metaphors and similes to make them comprehensible. This communicates itself to the reader as a kind of insouciance, where things may or may not be metaphorical, since we cannot pin down what is real and what is not. This is a world where pathetic fallacy may not be a fallacy at all: These are the forgeries of jealousy; And never, since the middle summer’s spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. (2.1.81–92)

Titania’s famous complaint against Oberon starts with what they have not been doing, a list that culminates in a line of rich metaphors – ‘dance our ringlets to the whistling wind’ – that are rather hard to evaluate. In the fairies’ world, we could imagine an animated wind actually whistling, rather than seeing this as metaphorical. The natural consequences of their ‘brawls’ cause the reader further uncertainty that Titania seems not to share at all. We do not know whether the winds and rivers should be attributed the agency and emotion imagined here, so the nature and extent of the metaphor is unclear. Some of the same uncertainty (again, ours, not hers) persists as the speech continues: The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

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Shakespeare, rhetoric and cognition Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable. (2.1.93–100)

The ox is easier to resolve, and seems only a familiar kind of agent in the process of yoke-stretching. The ploughman responsible appears in the next line, having wasted his effort. The rotting of the corn also seems like something we should understand as happening to the corn, rather than as the result of the corn’s umbrage. The fold, the crows, the nine men’s morris, are also only very slightly imaginable as active in the events described. Finally in this section, the ‘wanton green’ is primarily thus because of the wantonness brought to it by fairy frolics; but in this case the ‘green’ is part of a natural world responding to the fighting between Titania and Oberon. It is infused with a special liveliness (which is both cognitive and ontological) in the fairies’ responsive, interacting world. In the last section of the speech, we see further iterations of the same metaphorical process. Titania describes, without anxiety, a landscape which may or may not be animated in response to, rather than as a result of, her actions. In comparison with mortals’ difficulty establishing an epistemological basis in the dream-world, she finds it easy. This is how it seems at this point in the play at least; later we will see her harshly exposed by Oberon’s trick. Mortals do, however, find themselves drawn into her picture of natural disorder: The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest. Therefore the moon (the governess of floods), Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound.

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And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (2.1.101–17)

Fairy insouciance has a sharp edge here. The sequence of her logic seems to be that as a result of her quarrel with Oberon, the seasons are indistinct, which means the mortals are not celebrating as they should. This makes the moon angry, and this causes ‘rheumatic diseases’. These seem like mortal afflictions; mortals are taking some of the blame, and the consequences, for a fairy mess. The moon’s agency has different associations from those of a river or a wind: its connection with the goddess Diana (and/or Cynthia), and its place in astrology, make it more conventionally acceptable – but here too there is still the lingering issue of how literally to think about this living world. We might still have to negotiate whether ‘as in mockery’ is purely a descriptive simile, or whether winter is indeed being funny; and whether the seasons are now ‘changing’ by choice rather than by nature. In the end Titania claims joint, parent-like responsibility for all the ‘evils’, but the speech is compelling and beautiful: this is partly because it is poised so delicately within and outside a maelstrom of agency in the unnatural-natural world. In contrast with this, the mechanicals are inexperienced in, and unprepared for, the challenges posed by the forest. They are not

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used to it, but they are also different kinds of being who think in different ways. At the outset, Bottom and his friends are so unable to shift between reality and fiction, between reality and metaphor, that they fret about anything beyond the literal. The representation of moonshine in their play, for example, requires drastic solutions: sn o ut Doth the moon shine that night we play our play? botto m A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine. q ui n c e Yes; it doth shine that night. botto m Why then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window (where we play) open; and the moon may shine in at the casement. q ui n c e Ay; or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine. (3.1.51–61)

Plan A is for moonshine to represent itself. Plan B is more imaginative, but Quince’s attempt at allegory does not satisfy him, and he assumes it will need to be explained. (His malapropism, ‘disfigure’, shows us that the explanation will only add to the trouble.) With such a commitment to the literal, the mechanicals cannot be expected to attain a supple understanding of the fairies’ manipulations of the world. As it turns out, Bottom, who is as obtuse as any of his friends, proves an able enough respondent, given the extremity of his experience. His cognitive achievement is idiosyncratic but considerable. The mechanicals have the weaver’s transformation revealed to them

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by Puck in flamboyant mode. Like Titania, he demonstrates an easy relationship with metaphor, and the world: I’ll follow you, I’ll lead you about a round, Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier: Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire, And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn. (3.1.106–11)

He will ‘be’ a horse, hound, hog, bear, and fire, but then he will make sounds ‘like’ these things. For Puck, being these things really, or metaphorically, and being like these things (as a kind of simile), are not completely distinct within fairy ontology.11 So it is not surprising that when Bottom is an ass, in addition to being like an ass, this causes more consternation to his friends than to Puck: botto m Why do they run away? This is a knavery of them to make me afeard. Enter Snout. sn o ut O Bottom, thou art chang’d! What do I see on thee? botto m What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you? Exit Snout. Enter Quince. q ui n c e Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated. Exit. botto m I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me; to fright me, if they could; but I will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will walk up and down here, and I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid. (3.1.112–24)

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The mechanicals manage to be clumsy and obvious even when they are articulating a rhetorical apprehension of a challenging reality as clearly as anyone else manages in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Between Bottom and his friends, we see simple jokes arising from conventional metaphors about asses (‘to make an ass of me ’). But while Bottom sees metaphorical asses and yet can’t see the real one, Quince’s choice of word – ‘translated’ – bridges the gap. Metaphor and translation are etymologically equivalent: they denote something carried across. Somehow, Quince knows that metaphor holds a kind of key to understanding the literary logic of the dream world. Bottom is not the only one of the mechanicals, then, who seems acutely tuned in. Close rhetorical reading might uncover clumsiness of one sort, but it also highlights the spontaneous effectiveness of their thinking. The transformed Bottom has to deal with a situation that provides various challenges. At the same time as he is coming to terms with the new ass-like inclinations he wants to gratify, he has to learn how to deal with Titania and her fairies. The Queen instructs her servants in erotic and beautiful words which are characteristically fairy-ish in their portrayal of a translated reality: Be kind and courteous to this gentleman, Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies, To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies. (3.1.164–74)

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This seems like it must have a metaphorical component, but Titania, most likely, is talking about lighting bee-thigh tapers with a glowworm’s eyes, and using butterfly wings as fans, as really and literally as anyone could. Size does not matter in a fairy’s dynamic outlook. As the fairies greet him and offer him their service, Bottom sets about a tricky social interaction: botto m I cry your worships mercy, heartily. I beseech your worship’s name. c o bweb Cobweb. botto m I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb. If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you. Your name, honest gentleman? peaseblossom Peaseblossom. botto m I pray you commend me to Mistress Squash, your mother, and to Master Peascod, your father. Good Master Peaseblossom, I shall desire you of more acquaintance too. Your name, I beseech you, sir? m ustard s eed Mustardseed. botto m Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath devour’d many a gentleman of your house. I promise you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Mustardseed. (3.1.179–96)

This should strain his mental resources, but he adapts with admirable ingenuity. He starts out by asking for the fairies’ names with an

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exaggerated tone of respect. The names give him something to work with. We can see what is happening here: the audience is not lost in, nor dazzled by, these heuristic tropes. Rather we might be engaged by how they build a triumph of sociability. The play patronises Bottom in these scenes in some ways, but his facility in handling an extreme version of a standard predicament is impressive. Cobwebs are used to bind cuts, so Bottom makes a simple transition from the name to a familiar use, and this quasi-metaphorical link, via association, makes him feel comfortable enough to move on. Peaseblossom’s name does not evoke uses, but Bottom is able to link it with other words from the same category (squash, peascod), and to conceive them as a family. Synecdoche is filled out by metaphor, and this again creates a comfortable social moment, where he pays what seems to be appropriate respect. Mustardseed comes to stand for all mustard, which provokes thoughts of roast beef and watering eyes. Here again the rhetorical manoeuvre (synecdoche and metaphor again) operates at a low level. Bottom does not really achieve a significant apprehension of his surroundings, but his puns and associations serve a basic heuristic purpose. They enable him to interact and to become part of a social situation, which is a meaningful achievement. Approaching tropes in the way proposed in this book is not only a means of exploring inward intensity; it can also turn to little miracles of inter-personal life. When we next see Bottom with the fairies he is a great deal more comfortable. Indeed, he has adapted to a social situation wherein he orders them around. Their names are no longer distracting, and they are dubbed ‘Mounsieur’, with what seems like the haughty jollity of an authority figure, instead of the appeasing ‘Master’ and ‘your worship’ in their first encounter: botto m Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp’d humble-bee on the

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top of a thistle; and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and, good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not, I would be loath to have you overflowen with a honey-bag, signior. Where ’s Mounsieur Mustardseed? m ustard seed Ready. botto m Give me your neaf, Mounsieur Mustardseed. Pray you, leave your curtsy, good mounsieur. m ustard seed What’s your will? botto m Nothing, good mounsieur, but to help Cavalery Cobweb to scratch. I must to the barber’s, mounsieur; for methinks I am marvail’s hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch. (4.1.10–26)

When he addresses Cobweb Bottom is now enthusiastically, floridly, physically, and yet still prosaically, engaged in the fairies’ version of reality.12 Like Titania, he is interested in a honey bag, though he proposes that the bee should be killed to obtain it. Mustardseed (whose ‘neaf ’ is his fist) and Peaseblossom are expected to scratch him (4.1.5– 9), an ignominious job, and Bottom even seems to get Peaseblossom’s name wrong at the end, calling him ‘Cavalery Cobweb’. As he ponders his scratching, he recognises himself metaphorically to be an ass, but still thinks the barber might have a solution to his facial hair. He has managed to reconcile himself to his transformed circumstances to good effect, but he has done so without actually achieving any understanding of it. His cognitive rhetoric, accordingly, is based on simple analogies and word-play, rather than on tropes that entail a conceptual shift that could actually offer insight.

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Titania, of course, is oblivious to the pomposity and the scratching, and remains in her lyrical mode. The conversation that follows shifts between the two ways of encountering their strange natural world: that of the ass-mechanical (plain and simple), and that of the fairy (beautiful, and deploying metaphors which may not be metaphors at all): ti tan i a Or say, sweet love, what thou desirest to eat. botto m Truly, a peck of provender; I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay. Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow. ti tan i a I have a venturous fairy that shall seek The squirrel’s hoard, and fetch thee new nuts. botto m I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas. But, I pray you, let none of your people stir me; I have an exposition of sleep come upon me. ti tan i a Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away. [Exeunt Fairies.] So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee! (4.1.30–45)

Titania is tuned into her world’s possibilities, but Bottom’s needs are too basic to bother with the ‘venturous fairy’ and the ‘squirrel’s hoard’. Titania’s vivid images of embraces – likened to woodbine, honeysuckle, ivy, and elm  – again portray an animated natural world in which agency and intention may be found in trees. Her erotic comparisons are, as a result, all the more charged. In this

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encounter there is a remarkable overlap between a situation of basic comic bathos (as Bottom reacts in such a banal way to such a perversely seductive episode), and a situation where a nuanced cognitive and ontological gap between the two is exposed and explored. Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently. Alternatively, characters speak differently so we infer that they think differently. Here the comparison goes further: rhetorical analysis becomes cognitive, epistemological, and ontological. This chapter started with Bottom waking from his dream and trying to work his mind round it. Immediately before that speech, the Athenian lovers undergo the same process. They turn to the obvious metaphor, and to varieties of blurred and double vision: d em etri us These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. h erm i a Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When every thing seems double. h elena So methinks; And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own. d em etri us Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you think The Duke was here, and bid us follow him? h erm i a Yea, and my father. h elena And Hippolyta. lysan d er And he did bid us follow to the temple.

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(4.1.187–99)

We never see them recount their dreams, just as we never hear a performance of ‘Bottom’s Dream’. Shakespeare ’s play is, one could say, the recounting and the performance. Stephen Fender interprets a change in the lovers’ language as a change in their awareness of the world. They have found themselves and their rightful partners, and now ‘a new rhetoric in which manner and matter at last become fused’. He thinks this arises because ‘they have left behind their theories of love, their certainty that they know exactly what they are doing’.13 This does not wholly capture the tentative and probing way they acknowledge the new day, and plan to reconsider their experiences. For these lovers, as for Bottom, one cognitive achievement will be to rejoin everyday life and to leave the dream behind. So the failure to return to such matters is part of what a transitional episode like this one needs to achieve. Demetrius’s first move is to use a simile to place the events far away, like ‘mountains turned into clouds’. Such a horizon is safely difficult to contemplate. For Hermia and Helena a different analogy (doubleness – of vision, and ‘Mine own … not mine own’) suggests their sharper and more open encounters with contrasting reality. Helena, though, is no longer her discontented self, now satisfied with a simple, concrete simile, ‘like a jewel’. Demetrius rejoins the conversation with an attempt at practical questions and stable categories, and eventually manages to piece together justification for the idea that they are awake, and should move on. In this last example, as in the first, we see how representations of thought-in-action can work in Shakespeare. Even though these

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are not intense soliloquies, they can still feature attempts to solve cognitive problems through rhetorical tropes. A Midsummer Night’s Dream poses unusual challenges, because it involves metaphorical images and manipulations of reality as part of its plot and its world, and not just as part of its language. It features characters who are unusually able and unusually unable to apprehend this. We see Titania’s insouciant affinity with magic, Helena’s emotional rapidity, Bottom’s resourceful commitment to stolid reality, and Theseus resisting expansive speculation. There are numerous things in the play that season and enrich its comic delight: the energy of all its serious thinking is a vital one of these.

C h apt e r 5

Cymbeline

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the process of rhetorical thinking is most manifest when it fails to solve all the emergent problems smoothly. It requires some resourceful use of catachresis for Bottom to think his way, more or less, out of an epistemological crisis. There is a moment of similar intensity in Cymbeline, when Imogen wakes after a drug-induced sleep (a repeated motif, and perhaps not surprisingly so, given how exposed cognition is, in such a predicament). Like Bottom, she starts out partly unaware of where she is. Like him, she finds herself having to take account of her surroundings and what has been happening. As with him, the rhetorical manoeuvres of her thought do not lead to a correct understanding: Yes, sir, to Milford-Haven, which is the way? I thank you. By yond bush? Pray how far thither? ’Od’s pittikins! can it be six mile yet? I have gone all night. Faith, I’ll lie down and sleep. [Sees the body of Cloten.] But soft! no bedfellow! O gods and goddesses! These flow’rs are like the pleasures of the world; This bloody man, the care on’t. (4.2.291–7)

She has been dreaming, it seems, of her journey to find her husband. The man lying near her should not be her bedfellow – Posthumus should  – and as we shall see, thoughts of her proper companion 132

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infiltrate her attempts at comprehension. Her tool for trying to take in a scene wherein she is strewn with flowers, and there is also a headless man, is a simile. The flowers and the corpse come to resemble and stand for the vicissitudes of life: as such, they take places in a pattern and actually complement one another. The simile is extravagant and strange, and this is characteristic of Imogen, whose first solution to distance, for example, is to wish for a horse with wings (3.2.48). But it is also curiously pragmatic. The first sights are pro­ cessed, and she can move on: I hope I dream; For so I thought I was a cave-keeper, And cook to honest creatures. But ’tis not so. ’Twas but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing, Which the brain makes of fumes. Our very eyes Are sometimes like our judgments, blind. Good faith, I tremble still with fear; but if there be Yet left in heaven as small a drop of pity As a wren’s eye, fear’d gods, a part of it! The dream’s here still; even when I wake, it is Without me, as within me; not imagin’d, felt. (4.2.297–307)

Like Bottom, she seeks to deny her dream of an inexplicable interlude. She conceives the imagination as a mixture of a ‘bolt’ (of lightning, perhaps, but then of a crossbow) and ‘fumes’ (which are the material, the ‘nothing’, out of which the bolt and its target are made). Unlike Bottom, she is unable to move on with this kind of strategy, and her dream persists. She constructs a parallel between the blindness of eyes and the blindness of judgment – but despite proposing this double reason not to believe what she sees, she cannot look away: ‘The dream’s here still.’ We are closing in, now, on what seems to her to be a creeping realisation, but which is actually a developing misprision. Her

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drastic misrecognition of the dead body – found lying next to her, where her husband, the object of her search, should be – is about to emerge. She cannot keep away from the topic of vision  – her assessment of the modicum of heavenly pity she requires returns, inevitably, to sight, if only ‘a wren’s eye’. In this speech there seems to be an interplay between intended and unintended heuristic tasks of cognitive rhetoric. She wants to make things normal, to think her way out of the situation, but instead she is busily constructing the worst possible news: A headless man? The garments of Posthumus? I know the shape of ’s leg; this is his hand, His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, The brawns of Hercules; but his Jovial face – Murder in heaven? How? ’Tis gone. Pisanio, All curses madded Hecuba gave the Greeks, And mine to boot, be darted on thee! Thou, Conspir’d with that irregulous devil Cloten, Hath here cut off my lord. To write and read Be henceforth treacherous! Damn’d Pisanio Hath with his forged letters (damn’d Pisanio) From this most bravest vessel of the world Strook the main-top. (4.2.308–20)

She poses the question herself: how does she link the corpse and its well-known clothes? Imogen is astute enough not to assume that clothes secure the identification on their own, even within the theatre, where costumes participate in the creation of identity as well as demonstrating it. The audience has seen Cloten coming up with his plan – a plan that, at its conception, seems perverse, but like many things in Shakespeare’s late plays, it has a providential role to play. Imogen sets about solving the question by means of metaphors – which distract her – and synecdoches – which delude her.

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Recognition relies so often on synecdoche: we see part of something, and then we know all of it. In describing the parts of an admired body, comparative metaphors and analogies establish worth while also refining definition. Here these two things combine disastrously, and indeed bizarrely. The parts of the body are too readily extrapolated to denote the whole; and their physical characteristics are too readily imbued with qualities (‘Mercurial’, ‘Martial’, Herculean) they cannot demonstrate while dead. Imogen remains as creative as ever, wittily noting that the absence of a Jovial face suggests ‘Murder in Heaven?’, characterising Hecuba’s curses, and hers, as metaphorically ‘darted’, imprecating against letters. She also imagines Posthumus as the ‘main-top’ of the world-as-ship. The key thing about this metaphor is perhaps that it relates to a vivid image of him leaving on a ship (as will be discussed below): her restless imagination has produced something both grand and personal. Within all this imagination, though, there is an error which might seem incredible: how could she mistake Cloten for Posthumus? This suggests something about the thwarted intimacy of the couple; maybe she does not know his body well. It suggests something about the precarious nature of dramatic identity, and doubts as to who owns the body, the actor or the role; it may also suggest that identity in general can be hard to assert or verify with certainty. Most of all it shows how the heuristic capacity of cognition, even in the case of someone so skilled in its tropes as Imogen, can crack under strain. This is the place to start, because it is the place that brings a manifestation of the affinity between rhetoric and cognition most vividly to the fore. Throughout the play, though, Imogen has been responding to events in language full of invention and discovery. Simon Palfrey describes her as a ‘maverick mix of facileness, obduracy, self-subversion, and true love, who comes closest to the play’s

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erratic sense of unresolved possibilities, latent conflicts, and uneasy rapprochements’.1 He goes on to note that a ‘febrile use of metaphor’ is one thing that creates ‘a politically restless genre which offers a robust and often irreverent challenge to providentialist or conservative teleology’. For him, then, Cymbeline as a play, and its central character, are adventurous in language in a way that questions orthodoxy in plot and politics. My approach to her language tends to see it as immediate and intuitive in the challenges it offers, which brings it closer to Peter Platt’s interest in misprision and the marvellous, and characters’ wondering responses to the incomprehensible elements of the play.2 It is apparent, though, that critics have recognised the spontaneity and difficulty of the play’s rhetoric, the very qualities this chapter aims to address. Imogen is a special case in the imaginative apprehension of reality, and not just in linguistic expression. Like Helena, she is a figure whose stretched and strained language reflects – and creates – her challenged thoughts. In Cymbeline we seem to be drawn further into the structures of her thinking, rather than witnessing expulsions of heuristic tactics like those that result from Helena’s emotional crisis. The result is dazzling poetry, but there is no conflict between this achievement and the more prosaic heuristic failures; the two are naturally connected, as rhetoric must go further to meet its most severe targets. Imogen’s farewell to Posthumus has already been mentioned. Her ambition as she attempts, metaphorically, to solve the problem of his departure, is astonishing: i m o g en I would thou grew’st unto the shores o’ th’ haven, And questionedst every sail. If he should write, And I not have it, ’twere a paper lost, As offer’d mercy is. What was the last That he spake to thee?

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It was his queen, his queen!

i m o g en Then wav’d his handkerchief? pi san i o And kiss’d it, madam. i m o g en Senseless linen, happier therein than I! And that was all? pi san i o No, madam; for so long As he could make me with this eye or ear Distinguish him from others, he did keep The deck, with glove or hat or handkerchief Still waving, as the fits and stirs of ’s mind Could best express how slow his soul sail’d on, How swift his ship. i m o g en Thou shouldst have made him As little as a crow, or less, ere left To after-eye him. pi san i o Madam, so I did. (1.3.1–16)

How do you grow unto a shore, or question a sail? To labour the question in analysis of its rhetorical constitution enriches rather than belies the fact that, as readers of Shakespeare, we revel constantly in this unleashed potential. As was mentioned in Chapter 2, the distinction between catachresis (a broken metaphor), metalepsis (a metaphor that requires layers of explanation), and metaphor itself, is often not clear. In Imogen’s case, the boundaries are broken by the expansiveness of her optative and exclamatory rhetoric. A sail is a classic synecdoche for a ship; perhaps questioning a ship means

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questioning those aboard. For Imogen, every question from Pisanio embodies her, and everything about the sea embodies Posthumus: love crosses the rhetorical gap. And to grow is to expand, so this is a kind of movement, especially since Imogen is expanding herself through her messenger, filling the distance between her and Posthumus. The speech builds towards an extraordinary visual sequence, but along the way Imogen’s rhetorical and cognitive fertility is evident as she dispenses similes (‘As offer’d mercy is’) and metaphors (the happiness of linen) as a matter of course. Everything can be touched by her sense of significance. It is Pisanio who first describes the receding sight of her husband, who waves ‘so long / As he could make me [distinguish him] with this eye’. At some point there is a limit of vision, but Imogen seeks to cross it. First she reduces Posthumus by means of comparison (‘As little as a crow, or less’) that actually serves to retain him as something smaller but still present. Then she goes further: i m o g en I would have broke mine eye-strings, crack’d them, but To look upon him, till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; Nay, followed him till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat to air, and then Have turn’d mine eye and wept. But, good Pisanio, When shall we hear from him? pi san i o Be assur’d, madam, With his next vantage. (1.3.17–24)

She thinks her way through the visual barrier. First she takes a contemporary quasi-scientific metaphor for vision – the eyestrings that enabled the eye to make an image of its target – and imagines them

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breaking, but still enabling vision. When this is not sufficient, she imagines a kind of vanishing that still results in sharpness (the needle) and then liveliness (the gnat). Finally the gnat disappears into ‘air’, which nevertheless seems to connect with the tear in her eye, since it is the product of a process in which he ‘melted’. The tropes here work out a fantasy wherein Imogen solves the problem of separation by means of visual impossibilities. It seems to console her. Imogen’s intensity in perception has of course been noted by critics. Cynthia Lewis has written about the ‘modes of misperception’ in Cymbeline, recognising the play’s unusual investment in the way its heroine shifts the focus of her attention.3 Lisa Hopkins relates the play’s interest in vision to that of visual artists, overlaying their ways of representing the world, and achieving perspective, on Shakespeare’s. Imogen’s comparison of Cloten (and Posthumus) to Greek Gods is, Hopkins argues, part of an artistic way of seeing.4 My emphasis is more on the mind’s eye, on the construction of vivid imaginary scenes, and far less on materiality. However, metaphor is of course a means of linking, or offsetting, the material and the immaterial, so the two approaches have more in common than might at first appear as they try to fathom Imogen’s pace of thought and insight. It is remarkable that, in Act 1 Scene 3, having reached the emotional outcome of this process of ‘diminution’, she should be able to gather herself so quickly. ‘But, good Pisanio’ sounds like an abrupt change of direction in the middle of a line, though it might be preceded by a pause. This might fit a character who combines the impulsiveness of youth with her cognitive gifts; but it may also suggest the extremely present nature of events as Imogen experiences them. This results in candour, commitment, and insight, but also in skittishness, and error. While lost in the memory of watching Posthumus leave, it is more like she has been inwardly involved,

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than truly speaking to Pisanio. Having changed focus, she reminisces again: i m o g en I did not take my leave of him, but had Most pretty things to say. Ere I could tell him How I would think on him at certain hours Such thoughts and such; or I could make him swear The shes of Italy should not betray Mine interest and his honour; or have charg’d him, At the sixt hour of morn, at noon, at midnight, T’ encounter me with orisons, for then I am in heaven for him; or ere I could Give him that parting kiss which I had set Betwixt two charming words, comes in my father, And like the tyrannous breathing of the north Shakes all our buds from growing. (1.3.25–37)

Up to a point, this is a scene that should cause a feeling of charmed indulgence in the audience, as it does in Pisanio. But Imogen should not be patronised: her way of thinking is powerful, and can prove dangerous, and at the very least (even here) its intensity can be disarming. When she says she had ‘most pretty things to say’, then, this should raise a chuckle, since she has already proved herself ­capable of waxing lyrical at length. It should also, though, evoke the prospect of a parting-scene that we regret missing (as she does too). She moves into a fairly conventional account of absence, but in her outlook a plan to think of one another, and greet one another, at an appointed time, leads to a more vivid ‘encounter … in heaven’ than usual. It seems possible for her to think across gaps, and even though the rhetorical manoeuvres that contrive that crossing can be outlined with a sceptical demeanour by a critic, the immediacy and effectiveness of her poetry remain. Finally, she strikes an odd note, aiming a somewhat uncontrolled metaphor (the north wind chilling

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the young plants) at her father. Again a double-edged response seems possible: there is some immaturity, or petulance here, though her father is in the wrong. There is also a kind of visionary intensity, where the moment, and the metaphor, are both strongly present for this character. Pisanio is an important interlocutor for Imogen because he represents her husband’s interests, and thus her husband. His lower social status means he is conditioned to listen rather than to question, and his earnest responses give her things to work on. Later in the play, the pair have an unequal discussion as they react to Posthumus’s accusations and his order that Pisanio should kill Imogen. She is, as ever, the dominant speaker: True honest men being heard, like false Aeneas, Were in his time thought false; and Sinon’s weeping Did scandal many a holy tear, took pity From most true wretchedness. So thou, Posthumus, Wilt lay the leaven on all proper men; Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjur’d From thy great fail. – Come, fellow, be thou honest, Do thou thy master’s bidding; when thou seest him, A little witness my obedience. Look I draw the sword myself, take it, and hit The innocent mansion of my love, my heart. Fear not; ’tis empty of all things but grief. Thy master is not there, who was indeed The riches of it. Do his bidding, strike. Thou mayst be valiant in a better cause, But now thou seem’st a coward. (3.4.58–73)

The speech starts with what are, for her, standard rhetorical manoeuvres. The shift of focus towards examples of falsehood in epic, the noun-to-verb shift of ‘scandal’, and the isolated but still energetic idea that Posthumus will ‘leaven’ all others, are all building up her

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spirit. The gesture of suicide (‘I draw the sword myself ’) is aimed at a stronger metaphorical sequence: the ‘innocent mansion of my love ’ (i.e. her heart) from which the ‘master’, and thus its ‘riches’, is absent. The development of the metaphor starts with what seems like flamboyance but shifts towards an emphasis on emptiness and dispossession. Imogen is another Shakespearean character whose speech twists and turns like thought, and yet it still operates in conversation. Again we need to see dramatic language remaining interactive and outward while also representing a process of cognition. Not surprisingly, Pisanio is no more persuaded by Imogen that he should commit murder than he was by his master’s letter. His blunt denial stimulates further rhetorical extravagance. Its purpose, and effect, are heuristic in a different way from the other examples explored thus far. Her metaphors figure and refigure the horrendous situation caused by Posthumus’s letter, but the iterative process does not really narrow things towards a solution. Up to a point, the metaphors are alternatives that she and Pisanio might embrace, thus hastening the end, death, that she thinks she wishes for. We might also impute to the repetitive process a kind of cycling disbelief, where restatement tries, but fails, to make sense of it all: pi san i o

Hence, vile instrument! Thou shalt not damn my hand. i m o g en Why, I must die; And if I do not by thy hand, thou art No servant of thy master’s. Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand. Come, here ’s my heart: Something’s afore’t. Soft, soft! we’ll no defence, Obedient as the scabbard. What is here?

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The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus All turn’d to heresy? Away, away, Corrupters of my faith! you shall no more Be stomachers to my heart. Thus may poor fools Believe false teachers. Though those that are betray’d Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor Stands in worse case of woe. (3.4.73–87)

‘Cravens’, like ‘scandals’ above, makes a new verb from (in this case) an adjective; ‘stomachers’ is another piece of linguistic invention. (The Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare with the first use – with this meaning – of ‘craven’ (verb) and ‘stomacher’; ‘scandal’ (verb) is also not cited before 1592.) This is tame in comparison with her image of the body and heart opening like a scabbard – the natural place for a sword, and of course (as Shakespeare probably knew) the Latin for scabbard is ‘vagina’. These are selfdefeating heuristics in a way, because this and the other reconceptions of the suicidal impulse are unsuccessful. Her discussion of the theology of suicide owes something to Hamlet, who mentions the ‘canon ’gainst self-slaughter’ (1.2.131–2). He does it in a soliloquy, whereas her thoughts are strangely shared. It also breeds further metaphors, wherein Posthumus’s letter becomes ‘scriptures’ prone to ‘heresy’. The last turn of Imogen’s cognitive process involves yet more ingenuity, and yet more despair: And thou, Posthumus, That didst set up my disobedience ’gainst the King My father, and make me put into contempt the suits Of princely fellows, shalt hereafter find It is no act of common passage, but A strain of rareness; and I grieve myself To think, when thou shalt be disedg’d by her That now thou tirest on, how thy memory Will then be pang’d by me. Prithee dispatch,

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Imogen knows that she will be vindicated, and takes some vengeful satisfaction that Posthumus will come to realise this, and indeed that he will be discarded by the Italian mistress that she suspects must be distorting his judgment. The word used here – ‘disedg’d’ – initiates thoughts of pain, and sharpness, and knives, that culminate in the metaphor of herself as a lamb, and Pisanio as the wished-for butcher. The presence of the knife in her thoughts presses upon her portrayal of a repentant Posthumus, and brings her back to the present problem. Pisanio must be incredulous as well as horrified at the way yet another inventive metaphor rebounds on its speaker, and on him. Imogen has made her cognitive challenge a challenge for him. Pisanio, of course, is not the only person Imogen speaks with. A different interlocutor can create different conditions for rhetoric and cognition. When she meets Jachimo, the scheming Italian searching for proof of her invented infidelity, she is the one outmanoeuvred by words: i m o g en You are as welcome, worthy sir, as I Have words to bid you, and shall find it so In all that I can do. jac h i mo Thanks, fairest lady. What, are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes To see this vaulted arch and the rich crop Of sea and land, which can distinguish ’twixt The fiery orbs above, and the twinn’d stones Upon the number’d beach, and can we not

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Partition make with spectacles so precious ’Twixt fair and foul? i m o g en What makes your admiration? (1.6.29–38)

‘As welcome … as I / Have words’ might, in this speaker’s case, promise the extraordinary – but it is clear here that Imogen means something much more limited and public and conventional. Although Jachimo and Imogen share a facility with extravagant metaphor, that is as far as the comparison goes. For the Italian is perverse, deceptive, and obfuscatory, where Imogen is candid and communicative – even if what she seeks to communicate are thoughts that defy easy comprehension. Eyes are again the subject of rhetorical invention, but this speech is ornate and dense, with several words clearly (‘crop’, ‘twinn’d’, ‘number’d’, ‘spectacles’) – and others less clearly – operating as metaphors. Imogen experiences the incredulity that others feel around her. Jachimo surges on rather than answering her question, trying to convey the (feigned) intensity of his amazement that men do not value such women by abandoning the eye as the site of blame, and moving on, via judgment and appetite, to the will: jac h i m o It cannot be i’ th’ eye, for apes and monkeys ’Twixt two such shes would chatter this way, and Contemn with mows the other; nor i’ th’ judgment: For idiots in this case of favour would Be wisely definite; nor i’ th’ appetite: Sluttery, to such neat excellence oppos’d, Should make desire vomit emptiness, Not so allur’d to feed. i m o g en What is the matter, trow?

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The cloyed will – That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub Both fill’d and running – ravening first the lamb, Longs after for the garbage. i m o g en What, dear sir, Thus raps you? Are you well? jac h i mo Thanks, madam, well. [To Pisanio.] Beseech you, sir, Desire my man’s abode where I did leave him. (1.6.39–53)

The monkeys, apes, and idiots are merged into strange scenes of choice in which they perform correctly, because so little judgment is required to prefer Imogen. In refusing to blame appetite, since even appetite would recognise Imogen’s worth, he becomes over-involved in the metaphor of desire vomiting ‘emptiness’. His metaphors for ‘will’ – the attribute of men that he blames – are yet more convoluted: an overflowing tub, and then a ‘ravening’ beast which moves onto gross food after the tenderest morsels. Imogen does not follow any of this, and perhaps Jachimo fails in this attempt to turn her mind; he does seem to exit the declamatory mode quite abruptly, turning his mind to practical matters. Perhaps, though, he has not failed: this is part of his persuasive strategy, how he gains her confidence, and how he penetrates her privacy. In being so disordered, and revealing what seems to be cognitive confusion, he has disarmed Imogen. Later we find that she does indeed trust Jachimo enough to insist that he tells her the truth about ‘what concerns me ’, preferring to have ‘timely knowing’ of what she thinks will be ‘certainties’ (1.6.93–8). He responds again with a parade of abstruse metaphors

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and analogies, before he begins to unfold his lies about Posthumus in Rome: Had I this cheek To bathe my lips upon; this hand, whose touch (Whose every touch) would force the feeler’s soul To th’ oath of loyalty; this object, which Takes prisoner the wild motion of mine eye, Fixing it only here; should I (damn’d then) Slaver with lips as common as the stairs That mount the Capitol; join gripes with hands Made hard with hourly falsehood (falsehood, as With labour); then by-peeping in an eye Base and illustrious as the smoky light That’s fed with stinking tallow: it were fit That all the plagues of hell should at one time Encounter such revolt. (1.6.99–112)

How can lips bathe on a cheek? How can a soul be forced to an oath? How does the eye’s motion get imprisoned? The sharpness of this episode may partly be that within Imogen’s rhetoric we are prepared to create answers to these questions, or we impute them to her own probing, creative tendency in language. She can think her way across gaps with candour and enthusiasm; Jachimo lays traps. When he comes to capturing the baseness of Roman sexuality he proves tellingly effective: ‘as common as the stairs / That mount the Capitol’ conveys filthy, degraded bodies and accommodates their tendency to ‘mount’. ‘The smoky light / That’s fed with stinking tallow’ is a truly foul way of describing an eye, which also evokes the seamy world in which such acquaintances are made. This is part of Jachimo’s devious personality, and it may be a way of striking some sort of chord in Imogen. She is ill-equipped to see through a rhetorical complexity that has little to do with cognitive

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intensity. However, there is also, it seems, some truth in the contrast, and Jachimo is actually stirred by Imogen in relation to his own degeneracy, if not Posthumus’s. His eventual redemption starts here. When he stalks her bedchamber finding tell-tale details to convince people he has been there with her consent, his complex rhetoric has numerous facets. The situation is challenging because he must not be caught; because he must remember things (and so metaphors and similes have a mnemonic function); because it is headily erotic; and perhaps because he is beginning to revolt against what he is doing. Again his overblown style is striking, and appalling: The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-labour’d sense Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes ere he waken’d The chastity he wounded. Cytherea, How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch! But kiss; one kiss! Rubies unparagon’d, How dearly they do’t! ’Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o’ th’ taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids, To see th’ enclosed lights, now canopied Under these windows white and azure lac’d With blue of heaven’s own tinct. (2.2.11–23)

Jachimo rapidly associates himself with another night-stalker, and sets a vivid, epic scene for himself. The metaphor in ‘waken’d / The chastity’ is multifaceted. It is partly euphemistic. In another sense, Tarquin’s rape physically woke Lucrece from her sleep; she is represented here by metonymy as ‘chastity’. In another, the rapist’s temptation is to think that the rousing of chastity is actually the arousing of chastity: perhaps Lucrece was awakened to desire in the process. Jachimo drastically reinterprets the famous story behind

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Shakespeare’s own The Rape of Lucrece. After this edgy moment, he becomes flamboyantly conventional: she is Venus (Cytherea), her breathing is perfume, her skin and lips are so archetypically white (lily) and red (rubies) that they are not even named. And then he becomes less conventional  – not by refraining from comparison, but by creating a more intense scene wherein the flame is attributed an inclination to look under her eyelids, which are ‘these windows white and azure lac’d / With blue of heaven’s own tinct’. It is paradoxical for them to be both ‘canopy’ and ‘window’, a paradox enriched by finding sky-colours in the lids; the sky, after all, is both canopy and window for the world. Jachimo starts up quite abruptly after this, reminding himself of his mission. In dwelling on Imogen’s eyes, he seems distracted; perhaps also he is trying to find an image that captures his wish for her not to see him, and yet also to reward his gaze with a look in return. Here Jachimo’s rhetoric, sometimes florid but familiar, and sometimes manipulative, seems more heuristic. He then begins to write down details, but is still drawn to consider the sleeping body, and to attempt to apprehend it in tropes: But my design! To note the chamber, I will write all down: [Takes out his tables.] Such and such pictures; there the window; such Th’ adornment of her bed; the arras, figures, Why, such and such; and the contents o’ th’ story. Ah, but some natural notes about her body, Above ten thousand meaner moveables Would testify, t’ enrich mine inventory. O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her. And be her sense but as a monument, Thus in a chapel lying! (2.2.23–33)

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The décor is listed without embellishment: having turned away from Imogen, who is harder to think about, he can be factual. He knows, however, that intimate information about her will be most compelling – metaphorically, it will ‘testify’. After this he becomes swept up in a knot of metaphor and implication: sleep, death, lying, a statuesque monument, and a chapel – a place of rest in various senses. It seems as if the stillness of sleep is a desirable attribute for her body, but the closeness of death sharpens the simile of the monument, and reminds us of the disastrous consequences of Jachimo’s plan. This is immediately followed by another comparison, which paradoxically overturns a famously difficult task. It should indeed be hard to remove her bracelet – the bracelet should serve as an allegory of her marital bond – but this is not how it happens: Come off, come off;

[Taking off her bracelet.] As slippery as the Gordian knot was hard! ’Tis mine, and this will witness outwardly, As strongly as the conscience does within, To th’ madding of her lord. On her left breast A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip. Here’s a voucher, Stronger than ever law could make. (2.2.33–40)

The rhetoric here captures (and constitutes) the process by which Jachimo explores the complexities of his point of view. The ‘Gordian knot’ comparison marvels at the gap between an event and its meaning. The next one (‘As strongly as the conscience does within’) follows from this; now he is working with the problem that an object can be taken to betray someone’s moral nature. This bracelet is nothing like Imogen’s conscience, except in that it signifies strongly, though in an unruly and dangerous way. The simile used to describe

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her mole is rather different. It is neatly mnemonic in function, helping him retain the detail by finding a comparison; and it is also intimately placed on her body, so much more eloquent (as he says) even than the bracelet. The precise simile (‘like the crimson drops / I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip’) suggests uncomfortably careful scrutiny and thought. The second half of the speech is dominated by a metaphorical sequence (‘pick’d the lock’, ‘treasure’, ‘riveted’, ‘screwed’, ‘shut’, ‘spring’) that combines metal, fixing, and sealing. It points in three directions – towards the door to Imogen’s privacy that he has opened, then towards the door to his own memory, and then safety: This secret Will force him think I have pick’d the lock and ta’en The treasure of her honour. No more: to what end? Why should I write this down that’s riveted, Screw’d to my memory? She hath been reading late The tale of Tereus; here the leaf ’s turn’d down Where Philomele gave up. I have enough; To th’ trunk again, and shut the spring of it. Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning May bare the raven’s eye! I lodge in fear; Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here. (2.2.40–50)

Perhaps Jachimo does not really seem to consider the double-edged terms; but perhaps he does, for the speech’s ending is notably tense. His images are florid, but they (just about) suggest a kind of panicky triumph. The self-dramatising complacency with which he describes Philomel (who was violently raped in the myth, but here ‘gave up’) gives way to a more exhilarated momentum. The heaven and hell juxtaposition here could be trite, but it manages not to be. Jachimo seems like a tragic hero, properly lodged in fear, like Hamlet with his riveted memory, or Macbeth, trapped behind hell-gate.

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There is a stark contrast, then, between the rhetorical heuristics of Imogen and Jachimo. The former seems drawn to energetic ways of solving impossible problems. The latter explores his own fascination and self-disgust. What they have in common is something more fluently present here than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though it does arise there, namely the tendency to shift between speaking and what looks more like thinking. The other comparisons for Imogen are all men too; and Jachimo is not the only one who reveals selfdestructive and self-serving turns of thought. Cloten is presented as a clumsy thinker, but his language has some sharpness. However, the thought process it embodies is idiosyncratic, and disturbing: If she be up, I’ll speak with her; if not, Let her lie still and dream. [Knocks.] By your leave ho! I know her women are about her; what If I do line one of their hands? ’Tis gold Which buys admittance (oft it doth), yea, and makes Diana’s rangers false themselves, yield up Their deer to th’ stand o’ th’ stealer; and ’tis gold Which makes the true man kill’d and saves the thief; Nay, sometime hangs both thief and true man. What Can it not do, and undo? I will make One of her women lawyer to me, for I yet not understand the case myself. By your leave. [Knocks.] (2.3.64–76)

He starts out rather chivalrously and it is almost sweet to see him letting her ‘dream’. The knocking, and the ‘ho!’, should probably be done very loudly, which rather undermines the act of kindness. Then he moves into more familiar mode, assuming that greed is people ’s key motivation. Gold provokes further metaphorical expansion – it is something in which he finds value, so it requires greater cognitive effort – and it takes him onto darker topics that are

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close to his heart: sex and violence. The first heady combination is represented in and, most of all, achieved by an adventurous metaphor (‘Diana’s rangers’, yielding their ‘deer’ – (dear) chastity) that helps him conceive a monetary route to Imogen’s bed. The second is less pertinent to his immediate situation, which makes it seem all the closer to the hasty heart of his inclinations. Money uncouples law and morality, something he really marvels at: ‘What / Can it not do, and undo?’ Cloten’s last metaphor in this speech sees him step back from such intensity as he acknowledges that he is not really in control of his project. The ‘lawyer’ and the ‘case ’ may arise from the bribed judgments of the previous few lines; but they may just as well arise from an inward acknowledgment that details and structures escape his perverse and impulsive way of working, and thinking. Later in the same scene Cloten angrily turns on Imogen when he thinks about her preferring Posthumus to him. His speech touches on matters relating to love that could attain spiritual resonance. For him, however, they remain physical: You sin against Obedience, which you owe your father. For The contract you pretend with that base wretch, One bred of alms and foster’d with cold dishes, With scraps o’ th’ court, it is no contract, none. And though it be allowed in meaner parties (Yet who than he more mean?) to knit their souls (On whom there is no more dependancy But brats and beggary) in self-figur’d knot, Yet you are curb’d from that enlargement by The consequence o’ th’ crown, and must not foil The precious note of it with a base slave, A hilding for a livery, a squire’s cloth, A pantler – not so eminent! (2.3.111–24)

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The word ‘contract’ is well chosen, but in Cloten’s mind it cannot become more than a venal arrangement. He cannot get past the monetary aspects of the poor birth of Posthumus, and his metaphors of upbringing pair breeding and fostering with ‘alms’, ‘cold dishes’, and ‘scraps’. It is hard to see emotional content here: these food words could, in other hands, carry something more than simply physical meaning, but here they do not. His metaphors of union are also conventional – to ‘knit’ and to ‘knot’, but they clash together in sound and in their simple incompatibility. Knit and knot are just different ways of tying things together, with no hint of mystical appreciation. Finally he takes symbols of nobility – the crown, and heraldic livery  – and imagines them sullied by the poor blood of Imogen’s husband. Again it seems as if his understanding of these things is limited to their physical properties. The crown is metal and the livery is ‘cloth’; he cannot see beyond these surfaces, which are where, for him, meaning resides. The development and combination of metaphors are not just the ways in which he expresses himself; they are how he thinks. Posthumus, despite being the centre of the main love-plot, does not get much chance to speak at length. Our insights come at extreme moments where his character is stretched to a point which we might hope to be uncharacteristic, though this seems a dangerously charitable assumption. One speech in which he is faced with a cognitive challenge comes when he has to deal with what he thinks is evidence of Imogen’s infidelity: Is there no way for men to be, but women Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, And that most venerable man which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seem’d

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The Dian of that time. So doth my wife The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance! Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d, And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with A pudency so rosy the sweet view on’t Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her As chaste as unsunn’d snow. (2.5.1–13)

The words of coinage (‘stamp’d’, ‘coiner’, ‘counterfeit’) seem like standard tools to express the problem of authenticity in people. Here Posthumus fixes the idea in rhetoric rather than conceiving it there. When he moves on from general imprecation to consider the act in more detail, his language and the heuristics involved become more energetic. Her chastity towards him makes a hideous contrast with the apparent ease of her recent seduction. Posthumus focuses on the colours of modesty: the spring-like red of a blush, capable of warming the ancient wintry God, and the white of snow. The latter is a comparison with the quality of metalepsis: the resemblance of her chastity and sheltered virgin snow is explicable but needs more than one step. His memory of her chastity, poised between nostalgia and a new aggrieved frustration, recedes when he turns to think about Jachimo. The speed with which he must have worked horrifies him and needs some rhetorical thinking-through. The simile that follows shows – and plumbs – the depths of his disgust: Perchance he spoke not, but, Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one, Cried ‘O!’ and mounted; found no opposition But what he look’d for should oppose and she Should from encounter guard. Could I find out The woman’s part in me – for there’s no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm

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The boar is grossly physical and embodies both the random, impossible nature of Imogen’s infidelity, as well as its strange perfection, embodying paranoid and misogynist fears. The boar is bestial as the act must have been; it is full of acorns – gorged with food – but also full in its acorns (testicles). This fertile image fits with it being ‘German’ (as in, german, relating to seed and heredity)  – but the national origin is also vividly over-detailed, as Posthumus cannot help thinking too much about the scene in his mind. The boar ‘found no opposition’ where it should have, and the simile is completed when it takes him back to Imogen, who should have said no. Instead of ‘no’ the imagined scene ’s word is ‘O’, a gross exclamation from Jachimo (partly in his guise as boar) that serves as a lewd synonym for the vagina. It is also a groan from Posthumus, as his fears whirl round one another into a perfect circle. From this point on Posthumus reverts to imprecating against women, a mode with readily available terms and tropes: the generality is easy, but he needs heuristic help to conceive, or misconceive, the specific event. Here we are seeing things he does not actually want to think about, but which he cannot remove from his mind. Posthumus’s solution to the problem is to write to his servant, ordering him to kill Imogen. As we have seen, Pisanio’s affection for Imogen is profound enough that he cannot consider following the order. His reaction to the letter does not show the rhetorical excitement of Imogen’s speeches, but there are still signs that his speech reveals the mental tropes by means of which a heuristic achievement (solving a problem; discovering the answer) arises:

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How? of adultery? Wherefore write you not What monsters her accuse? Leonatus! O master, what a strange infection Is fall’n into thy ear! What false Italian (As poisonous tongu’d as handed) hath prevail’d On thy too ready hearing? Disloyal? No. She ’s punish’d for her truth, and undergoes, More goddess-like than wife-like, such assaults As would take in some virtue. (3.2.1–9)

Here the metaphors are expressive rather than heuristic: ‘monsters’, ‘infection’, ‘poisonous-tongu’d’, ‘assaults’. To say ‘more goddesslike than wife-like’ looks very conventional (admirable women elevated to the divine) but is not self-explanatory. Are goddesses known for their forbearance? More, perhaps, for fighting back. Pisanio knows that Imogen is special, but he does not really know how she is special. He tries something, but does not get much closer. As his speech continues, and he questions further how such a terrible letter could be written, he reaches for another trope that reveals and betrays something: How look I That I should seem to lack humanity So much as this fact comes to? [Reading.] ‘Do’t; the letter That I have sent her, by her own command Shall give thee opportunity.’ O damn’d paper, Black as the ink that’s on thee! Senseless bauble, Art thou a feodary for this act, and look’st So virgin-like without? Lo here she comes. (3.2.15–22)

The paper is ‘damn’d’ and ‘black’: this (like several mentioned earlier) is a cognitively unproductive metaphor, though it does have an expressive yield. However, seeing the letter as a ‘bauble ’ (and

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thus incongruously trivial and decorative), and then a ‘feodary’ (imposing agency on it), and ‘virgin-like ’ in appearance, seems to attempt something more ambitious. Pisanio needs to bring together the letter’s physical smallness with its role in a terrible plan. The metaphor ends up mixed; and the words ‘virgin-like ’ resonate with Posthumus’s accusations. One could suspect Pisanio of a deep-set sympathy with misogyny – he cannot get past a fear of false chaste appearances. It seems surer to see his attempt to understand the significance of the letter running into the essential impossibility of the task: it is beyond his rhetorical capacity to make Posthumus meaningful again. The play faces most of its characters with secrets, revelations, and impossibilities, so it is not surprising that so many of them struggle to find the tropes by which to apprehend their world. Even those who are keeping the secrets have this problem. Belarius knows that his supposed sons are really the sons of the King, so he also knows what to make of their apparently incongruous nobility when it surfaces in the midst of their rustic lives. His awareness of the metaphorical ‘sparks of nature’, and his recognition that ‘their thoughts do hit / The roofs of palaces’, even as they ‘bow’ in caves, suggest that he too is wrestling with something – perhaps the guilt of his action, or the mystery of nature and nurture (3.3.79–84). That their thoughts are fitted to palaces might be a more straightforward metaphor for their nobility, were it not that it is how things should actually be. Later he calls them ‘princely’ – another accurate adjective disguised as a metaphor – and then goes on into expansive natural comparatives (‘as gentle / As zephyrs’, ‘as rough … as the rud’st wind’, 4.2.171–4) as he ponders the strange essence of royalty, which circumstances cannot hide. It is perhaps a great help to the audience that Belarius discusses the boys’ real birth twice, so we are not unnecessarily confused later. However, the repetition may also

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be explained by its cognitive function: he says these things twice because he cannot stop thinking about them, and the speaking is the thinking. The culmination of all these rhetorical heuristics comes when the King finally sees things as they really are. This includes Belarius’s secret, the worth of Imogen’s marriage to Posthumus, and the evil of the Queen, all in a short space of time. Recognition is not just a matter of knowing; it is also a matter of cognitive apprehension. The King takes account of the new reality by means of a necessarily extravagant metaphor – a metaphor through which he thinks differently about everything: c ym beli ne

Guiderius had Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star, It was a mark of wonder. belari us This is he, Who hath upon him still that natural stamp. It was wise nature’s end in the donation, To be his evidence now. c ym beli ne O, what, am I A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother Rejoic’d deliverance more. (5.5.363–70)

The audience’s wonder at the tell-tale sign and the family reunion is matched by the culminating metaphor: ‘A mother to the birth of three’, and an extraordinarily happy one. Cymbeline actually asks the question that elicits the metaphor: this is the most public piece of on-the-spot cognitive heuristics in the play, and one in which the King bears a special responsibility. He needs to come up with an understanding that can knit together his family and the whole of

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Britain, and this he does, magnificently. In becoming their mother, he fulfils and doubles himself, while also restoring the crucial missing figure to everyone’s lives. The King offers to solve everyone ’s cognitive problems at once. This might even include the audience, which is faced with a closing scene of coincidence and contrivance that does not settle easily into one tone. The power of poetry, and of a metaphor that unlocks problems, spreads outwards. This scene also sees Imogen searching for a metaphor to capture her joy, and to enable her understanding of a new situation. Cymbeline – perhaps rather disingenuously, although it is at least politic – points out that the recovery of her brothers means she is no longer his heir: c ym beline

Blest pray you be, That, after this strange starting from your orbs, You may reign in them now! O Imogen, Thou hast lost by this a kingdom. i m o g en No, my lord; I have got two worlds by ’t. O my gentle brothers, Have we thus met? O, never say hereafter But I am truest speaker. You call’d me brother, When I was but your sister; I you brothers, When we were so indeed. (5.5.370–8)

‘Orb’ as a version of celestial motion, and ‘orb’ as a symbol of temporal power, merge in Imogen’s resourceful opposition of the ‘worlds’ she has gained to the kingdom she has lost. There is no reason to doubt that her delight and fascination in her brothers make them worlds to her; it is worth noting as well, though, that the obstacles to her marriage to Posthumus diminish if she no longer carries the future of the monarchy. This is implicit in the next turn of the

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scene. After a brief exchange in which it is established that Imogen has indeed already met her brothers, and that they had an inkling of their affinity, the King responds with more wonder: O rare instinct! When shall I hear all through? This fierce abridgment Hath to it circumstantial branches, which Distinction should be rich in. (5.5.381–4)

After this, he asks a natural series of burning questions about Imogen’s experiences, which he then curtails: But nor the time nor place Will serve our long interrogatories. See, Posthumus anchors upon Imogen; And she (like harmless lightning) throws her eye On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting Each object with a joy; the counterchange Is severally in all. Let’s quit this ground, And smoke the temple with our sacrifices. (5.5.391–8)

Cymbeline makes two more rhetorical achievements here. First, he recognises the depth and complexity of the story yet untold by means of two conflicting metaphors (either of which may properly be considered a catachresis or metalepsis). The abridgement has been ‘fierce’, and it also has ‘branches’. The conflict here strongly suggests the King’s integrity and awareness that he must gain more understanding before he can truly be free of the past. There is further conflict in his description of Posthumus, ‘an anchor’, and Imogen, somehow ‘harmless lightning’, as they embrace. His apprehension of Posthumus seems incisive: the traveller has recognised his true harbour, and has come to rest. His apprehension of Imogen is properly appreciative. Her gaze and her understanding transform

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the things they alight upon: Cymbeline finds a way of capturing this, and in doing so, shows that the play’s twists and turns have ceased. Cymbeline, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, subjects many of its characters to severe examinations. Instead of magic, there are mysteries and wonders that result from human fallibility and the workings of providence. The process of cognition takes place in the speeches of characters who inevitably think in language. The striking thing, again, is the point at which we witness the process. Imogen is the most pressing example, but other characters too are seen trying to achieve an account of the nature of things, and sometimes they fail to do so. In the stretches and strains of language in the more achieved accounts, and in the crises of those which do not really work, we can see a profound affinity between rhetorical tropes and the resources of thought, between beautiful dramatic poetry and the struggle to make sense of emerging events. They are both part of the multifaceted epistemology of Shakespeare ’s dramatic poetry: both the patterns of heuristic tropes, and the experience of wonder caused by remarkable rhetoric, are ways of understanding the play and its world.

C h apt e r 6

Othello

Goats and monkeys! (4.1.263)

Othello makes this exclamation after welcoming Lodovico to Cyprus. The decorum of this official moment has already been interrupted by his dismissal of Desdemona (‘Hence, avaunt!’, 260), and the Venetian official is led to wonder immediately afterwards ‘Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient?’ (264–5). It is not clear to what extent ‘Goats and monkeys!’ should be spoken aside. Possibly at this point Othello doesn’t care, and the observers are shocked enough by his actions (‘What? strike his wife?’, 272) that his words don’t add a great deal. Perhaps a phenomenon observed in previous chapters arises here too: at a moment of cognitive intensity, onlookers only partly perceive and hear what is happening. ‘Goats and monkeys!’, however, seems a long way from the probing metaphors and similes of Imogen and Helena, or the unifying discovery of Cymbeline-as-mother. This can still be read as a kind of heuristic process, but it is the end of one that has gone disastrously wrong. The hero’s all-in-all sufficiency, infiltrated by Iago’s preternatural control over the metaphors of cognition, degenerates as the play progresses. The result is a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking, rather than having any capacity to address emerging events. 163

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Critics have often discussed the psychological complexity of Othello, and it is much more liable to be attributed insights into such complexity than A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. Here in a tragedy the examination of tortuous thoughts seems part of the play’s dark duty, rather than a disorienting but delightful enrichment. With its scouring introspections and sharp-edged interpersonal dynamics it has frequently given readers and audiences a sense of inward exposure. Critical accounts have focused more on epistemology (knowledge and proof ) and the emotional aspects of power and persuasion. At times their insights have turned towards what this book would claim as a more cognitive interest. Philip McGuire treats the play as an ‘assay of reason’ and his priorities are epistemological. However, at the end of this essay he sees Othello as an exploration of ‘the limits of intelligence and rational cognition in the face of violent passion, deception deftly and most intelligently practised, and the reality of rationally inscrutable human evil’.1 This chapter’s approach to the play tends, in keeping with what has gone before, to strip out the implications of ‘rational’ and ‘intelligence’, but it shares an interest in the responsive aspect of the play’s dramatised thinking. The classic epistemological account of the play is by Stanley Cavell. From the perspective of the proof-seeking individual, the route to Othello’s crisis results from the risk involved in relying on someone else: That the integrity of my (human, finite) existence may depend on the fact and on the idea of another being’s existence, and on the possibility of proving that existence, an existence conceived from my very dependence and incompleteness, hence conceived as perfect, and conceived as producing me ‘in some sense, in [its] own image’ – these are thoughts that take me to a study of Othello.2

In the play, as Cavell acknowledges, the process by which proof is tested and troubled involves cognitive and linguistic turbulence. As

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he says, ‘Othello’s mind continuously outstrips reality, dissolves it in trance or dream or in the beauty or ugliness of his incantatory imagination’ (p. 128). In the light of the interplay between ‘dream’, metaphor, heuristics, and comprehension being pursued in this book, Cavell here seems to suggest the all-important move from an epistemological focus to a cognitive one. For Cavell and others language proves a vital means of conveying thoughts, and character more generally. And yet Peter Holland’s survey of the means by which character might be conveyed, and through which we might approach it, picked out language as surprisingly under-explored.3 This has indeed been a fruitful field before and after Holland, as Erin Minear says: We have known (say, since G. Wilson Knight’s ‘The Othello Music’) that Othello’s language, call it his imagination, is at once his, and the play’s, glory, and his shame, the source of his power and of his impotence.4

The purposeful slippage here – ‘call it his imagination’ – captures how readily language and thought associate themselves for Shakespeare’s readers. They can do so in many ways. In his account of Iago’s linguistic manoeuvres, William Empson traced the mobility of the word ‘honest’ and its implications.5 The crucial difference between his project and this, is that he situates the play of possibilities in the mind of the author, rather than seeing it as a facet of the play somehow produced by characters. In what has become another classic account, Stephen Greenblatt emphasises the skill in ‘improvisation’ which enables Iago to dominate Othello through empathy.6 Like Katharine Eisaman Maus, who sees Othello and Iago ‘reading themselves into one another’, Greenblatt suggests the mobility and spontaneity with which language, character, and action relate in the play.7 More recently Joel Altman has emphasised further Iago’s ‘masterful exploitation of the sign’s capacity to equivocate ’.8 Altman situates

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him in a long history of psychology that goes back to Protagoras and Gorgias, which accentuates contingent, even fortuitous interactions, non-referential language, and probable knowledge (p. 23). Iago is equipped to navigate the stage-world and to take Othello through paths of probability until he reaches what should have been an impossible conclusion. Altman’s book also unites rhetoric and epistemology in a way which, I think, suggests the potential in a cognitive approach. In Reuben Brower’s Hero and Saint there is what looks like a conventional assessment of how rhetoric and psychology relate in the play: ‘the metaphorical course of the transformation can be traced through marvellously apt imagery’.9 He then discusses the animal metaphors that will be central to this chapter. Here, though, the aim is to go beyond thoughts being ‘traced through’ metaphor, and to see them as more dynamically connected. Brower himself notes that the question of how to understand what we are hearing in the play is not straightforward: Othello’s language is rhetorical, yes, but vividly expressive of the suffering of deep damnation. How literally Shakespeare and his audience regarded such rhetoric, we cannot know. It is possible that they were more sophisticated in their response than we: they were so used to this sort of language in sermon and play. Of one thing we can be certain, that Shakespeare is conveying through the metaphor of damnation one of the essential moral experiences, the painful discovery that human impulses for good can by a mysterious process turn into something evil and destructive. (p. 28)

Here the sense of ‘discovery’, and the difficulty in assessing how such language might have impinged on its first audiences, are both resonant. The implications of ‘discovery’ are vital in the argument being developed in this book, in that a different sort of activity (cognitive, heuristic) for rhetoric is being considered. The question of audience is not so much at stake, but Brower’s thought that Shakespeare ’s

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first audiences would have been experienced in hearing the development of metaphor is probably apt. However, this does not mean they would have found that any of the key rhetorical crises being considered here resolved into clarity; they may actually have been more attuned to unravelling convolutions. Peter Platt’s study of Shakespearean paradox features Othello prominently as a play in which a trope seems like a form in which to think, more than a form in which to express thoughts better.10 His account of a whole culture of paradox is historically grounded but, at least implicitly, it seems open to the possibility that paradox shadows a responsive, heuristic mechanism that helps construct a sense of the world. Although her topic is relatively nearer to my concerns, Marion Trousdale takes an approach very different from mine in her book Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians. She looks at how a rhetorical environment (‘method’; means of expression; consciousness of rhetoric’s effects on language) conditions the way things get done in literature. For her rhetoric is the public art that it is for many other interpreters. In Othello, however, one character takes unusual control of that process: To be aware, as Harington is in his commentary on Ariosto and as Shakespeare is in Love’s Labour’s Lost, that love and arms is a theme that can be varied rather than a doctrine that must be believed, is to know ultimately with Iago how to gull an ignorant Moor. But it is also to take just pride in the accomplishment itself and to show a virtuoso’s exhibition of technique.11

This suggests that any rhetorical awareness could be complicit with vicious deception. The key thing is that she recognises that Iago’s detachment from the mobility of metaphor enables him to harness it and even impose it on Othello. The fine line between, on the one hand, poetic ‘accomplishment’ and ‘exhibition’, and on the other, vicious gulling, is ultimately crossed in this play. At times

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metaphorical resources and poetic language relinquish both cognitive function and expressive beauty. ‘Goats and monkeys’, as will be seen, represents the collapse of a world of linguistic potential into a brutal and bestial mess. It is the culmination of a series of animal metaphors and similes in the play, several of which convey a fear that the boundaries of humanity are uncertain, and permeable. Like some other key words used by Othello, these two are inherited directly from Iago. This is an attempt at a summary of the world, then, but also a memory of his trusted ally’s formulation: What shall I say? Where’s satisfaction? It is impossible you should see this, Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say, If imputation and strong circumstances, Which lead directly to the door of truth Will give you satisfaction, you may have ’t. (3.3.401–8)

Here Iago is manoeuvring round the issue of ocular proof, guiding Othello towards accepting something other than clear sight of the act of adultery itself. He needs to control the definition of ‘satisfaction’  – twice a pivotal word  – and he finds a rhetorical way of making the paradoxical journey from ‘imputation’ through the ‘door of truth’. This last metaphor is a very mobile one: do we let truth out or do we enter into it? The door admits and excludes. This ambiguity is revelatory in that it tells us a poetic truth about truth, but it is also part of an obfuscatory scheme within the fiction. Iago uses similes and metaphors to create a double-edged conditional: on practical terms, ‘were they’ introduces the notion that while they may be perfectly lustful, they are not so foolish as to be caught; and

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yet the condition ‘were they’ is compelling to Othello. Of course they are this lustful, and the comparisons are absorbingly intense. The fools-gross-ignorance-drunk sequence is complex and effects a productive elision of ignorance and foolishness: if it seems wise to know, then to accept knowledge becomes more desirable. Iago causes Othello epistemological problems by means of these tropes. The concept of lustfulness is devolved into some of its many metaphorical vehicles. ‘Hot’ and ‘salt’ are relatively straightforward, offering piquancy to different senses. ‘Prime ’ is more difficult. The OED (prime, adj., III.6) designates it ‘sexually excited, lustful’, but the Othello reference is the only citation. The definition is derived from context or, more particularly, from what Iago wants it to mean. As will be seen in more detail below, he has a prodigious ability to define the significance of metaphors, so it is fitting that here he is able to determine, to the satisfaction of Othello, the audience, and the OED, that the firstness and excellence in the word ‘prime ’ denote sexual over-forwardness. The parallels are introduced by shifting versions of the concept of sexual sin, and the animals stand self-explanatory. They are all by-words (since the wolves are in heat  – ‘pride’) for slackened physical restraint, but tellingly they become even more self-standing as Othello takes them on from Iago. His ‘Goats and monkeys’ are a concentrated, collapsed version of the similes and metaphors with which he was drawn into losing faith in Desdemona. It remains a little difficult to categorise what Iago is doing here in relation to the way rhetoric might work in Shakespearean drama. On the one hand, this is an act of persuasion, a use of rhetorical tropes to enhance the impact, emotional and intellectual, of his point of view. On the other hand, it plays a part in Othello’s efforts to address his predicament in thought. One way of resolving this is to suggest something not yet observed, and perhaps very special to the play: we see here, and elsewhere, Iago in effect

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doing Othello’s cognitive heuristics (his conceptual blending) for him. The ensign is able to invade the thought processes by which his general comes to terms with the world, and thus is able to change his whole relationship with it. Although this is the most important journey made by these bestial analogies in the rhetorical-cognitive process of the play, it is worth noting that Othello refers to himself as a potential goat earlier in the scene: No! to be once in doubt Is once to be resolved. Exchange me for a goat, When I shall turn the business of my soul To such exsufflicate and blown surmises, Matching thy inference. (3.3.179–83)

At this point, to be goat-like is to be credulous. There is a lot of lexical energy in ‘exsufflicate’ (an ornate way of saying inflated or blown out – ornate enough to be misrecorded as ‘exufflicate ’ in the Quarto and Folio texts) and ‘blown’ (which might suggest additionally fly-blown).12 The metaphorical reverberations of these animals convey that it is not easy for Othello to invest in the total emptiness of his incipient suspicions. There is more to these words than just hot air. Nevertheless, at this point he separates himself from the world of beasts. Soon after this, in the same scene, another animal seems closer to the hero’s self-image: O curse of marriage! That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapour of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses. (3.3.268–73)

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‘Toad’ and ‘goat’ share phonemes but not a lot else; the skittish and over-passionate goat contrasts with the squalid toad. There is still a change, though, because now the condition being implied has shifted. Whereas before if Othello were credulous [which he isn’t] then he might as well be a goat, now if Desdemona is unfaithful [which she might be] then he would rather be a toad with nothing to boast of. The animal state becomes desirable as the human state degrades. This early configuration of beasts and humans precedes Iago’s insidious similes and then Othello’s exclamation, ‘Goats and monkeys!’, that collapses the whole distinction. This is not a simple progression, but the descent of heuristic metaphor into shortcircuited self-fulfilment is visible elsewhere in the play: this tragic configuration of the rhetoric of thinking is sharply different from that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Cymbeline. The hero’s descent from control and integrity into chaos over the course of the play is manifest, of course, in the way he speaks. This trajectory is made clear by the inclusion of his beautifully expressed account of how he wooed Desdemona with beautiful expression. In front of the Senate in 1.3 Othello recounts his recounting of dangers. The ‘battles, sieges, fortunes’ (130) are literal, not metaphorical; the ‘hair-breadth scapes’ (136) need not be suspected of exaggeration; the ‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (144–5) leave us a little disoriented, because they are either true or false – it is hard to see what slight embellishment could be doing here. The point here is that the speech starts with truthfulness that is only slightly brittle, before (turning to Desdemona’s response, the more controversial point) it takes a metaphorical turn: These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline; But still the house affairs would draw her thence,

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Shakespeare, rhetoric and cognition Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse. Which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively. I did consent, And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer’d. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful. She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d That heaven had made her such a man. She thank’d me, And bade me, if I had a friend that lov’d her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. (1.3.145–66)

This is a rhetorical speech in the traditional sense: long, measured, and wrought, it aims to win an audience ’s assent through the deployment of style. It may also be a rhetorical speech in the sense I am outlining in this book: a representation of a process of thinking, where tropes are working towards comprehension and insight. The fact that there is some doubt in the matter unites Othello with, say, Imogen, but where in her case the candour required to do the two things at once is a source of strength, in Othello it tends towards vulnerability. The fact that he is invested in the moment he is describing, and still working to assimilate it, is suggested by the almost embarrassing vividness when he quotes Desdemona towards the end. It comes across as an extraordinarily clear memory, going beyond appropriate testimony, especially when he recounts her request, poised between innocence

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and coquettishness, as to whether he has a friend to tell the same story. The speech’s metaphors share this double-edged, and even counter-productive quality. The charge against him is that he wooed unlawfully, and the thing he seeks to refute by this narrative is that he used magic. ‘This only is the witchcraft I have used’ (169): the literal becomes metaphorical (the magic of love and stories), and he is proved innocent. It partly helps his cause to present Desdemona as ‘greedy’ in the way she devoured his discourse, as this captures the extent of her participation.13 However, drawing attention to a female appetite risks alienating a patriarchal audience; again perhaps the metaphor is partly involved in bringing Othello to terms with his own astonishing good fortune. Similarly, the strong idea of a ‘pilgrimage’ might seem to launder his life ’s journey into a worthy search for a precious object to venerate. As a public statement, though, it might seem blasphemous, or idolatrous, or just hyperbolic. This might just be risky (though effective) rhetorical tactics, but it might also derive again from Othello attempting to process his good fortune into a form he can understand, although ultimately his allegiance to Desdemona as an object of worship undoes itself. These are not the only metaphorical turns in the speech – the ‘pliant hour’, the ‘world of sighs’ (this perhaps more settled and conventional) deserve mention. They are the two, however, that demonstrate how Othello’s rhetoric is poised between the persuasive and the heuristic, inward and outward. As will be seen, this tendency leads to moments of incomprehension later in the play, where Desdemona in particular cannot disentangle thoughts and words. It also opens him up to Iago’s ability to infiltrate the deeper processes of rhetoric, to twist words at their source – or rather, to twist thoughts. The evocation of magic and witchcraft in 1.3 comes as part of a larger tension in the play. In his

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long speech Othello reacts to Brabantio’s charge in a formal legal setting, but in 1.2 he reacts in a more face-to-face fashion. Magic and the metaphorical are linked here as they are in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but in Othello the fecund playfulness is replaced by an inward struggle. Brabantio’s opposition to the match may derive from various social fears and prejudices, but it seems telling that he associates it so strongly with a dream: Strike on the tinder, ho! Give me a taper! Call up all my people! This accident is not unlike my dream, Belief of it oppresses me already. Light, I say, light! (1.1.140–4)

Brabantio does not occupy much time in the play, but he is not a typical father opposing his daughter’s marriage. His death is mentioned at the end (5.2.204–5), and no cause is cited to offset the assumption that it happens as a result of losing his daughter to Othello. His first appearance suggests dark, brewing depths, where a real-life emergency (rather understated as an ‘accident’) is tested for its substance against a ‘dream’. Brabantio’s inner life seems strangely intense. This is followed through in the next line where it seems most likely that he is still dwelling on his ‘dream’ – life again merely corroborates a festering belief in night-time visions. The last line, calling for ‘light’, suggests that Brabantio’s depths are unusually linked to the currents of the play: this word will resonate when Othello kills Desdemona. In the next scene, when Brabantio makes his accusation of witchcraft, there is a revealing interaction between the public and outward (open denunciation; procedures of the law) and a persistent sense that some of his rhetoric belongs to a turbulent inner process:

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O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter? Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her; For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound, Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunn’d The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have, t’ incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou – to fear, not to delight! Judge me the world, if ’tis not gross in sense, That thou hast practis’d on her with foul charms, Abus’d her delicate youth with drugs or minerals That weakens motion: I’ll have’t disputed on; ’Tis probable, and palpable to thinking. (1.2.62–76)

Here the metaphors of society and the metaphors of love cause friction. For example: for Othello to be a ‘thief ’, then Brabantio’s daughter must be something which can be taken and ‘stow’d’. Since woman-as-object could be seen as an assumption underlying Elizabethan as well as Venetian society, then the character of ‘thief ’ changes. A similar friction might be in evidence in the ‘chains of magic’. If there is magic involved here, then the chains need not be metaphorical – they might be magical. If the magic is a metaphor for unscrupulous seduction, then the chains are part of that metaphor too. The ‘foul charms’ are another contribution: ‘charm’ is poised between actual magic and the pseudo-magical power of love. His fear of the ‘sooty bosom’ (this time the metaphor is more straightforward) inclines the love-as-magic metaphor towards actuality, but it is not as simple as this; the distinction in Othello is not secure. The collision of law and erotic metaphor has two surprising consequences. One is that Brabantio, in this speech, suddenly switches his frame of reference from law to philosophy. Having presented a

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theory, he says ‘I’ll have’t disputed on’, which primarily suggests a legal activity, but might also bring to mind a logical or philosophical disputation. The legal side is consistent with the next key word, ‘probable’, but then so are logic and philosophy. The final turn, though, ‘palpable to thinking’, gives a sense that Brabantio is still turned inward even as he shouts in public. ‘Thinking’ is made to seem strangely physical by the adjective. The other surprising outcome is that Othello deploys a theatrical metaphor to demonstrate his intention to be peaceful while due process is observed: Hold your hands, Both you of my inclining, and the rest: Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it Without a prompter. (1.2.81–4)

Metatheatre has the capacity to trouble the relationship, within the fiction, between what is real and what is not. In turning towards ‘cue ’ and ‘prompter’ to capture his self-control and his awareness of the situation, Othello leads the audience to think more sharply and strangely. Claiming autonomy while drawing attention to his fictionality might risk compromising his agency, but the effect is different. In Hamlet the player’s speech impresses the prince with commitment, even when rational cause is lacking (see 2.2.550–87). Here there is an intimation of the same thing: with very little cause, the hero takes an extreme option, demonstrating that he will do his part absolutely and without scruple. If the occasion arises, he will devolve thinking, and he will take his cue. The theatrical metaphor suggests more, rather than less, investment in the action being imagined. One further twist in this manoeuvring around magic and metaphor, legal charges and erotic language, comes when Othello describes the incriminating handkerchief. Magic arises again, still

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connected to love’s rhetorical register, and still offering a problematic relationship with what we are supposed to believe in the play: That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give; She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it, ’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it, Or made gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me; And bid me, when my fate would have me wiv’d, To give it her. I did so; and take heed on’t, Make it a darling like your precious eye. To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition As nothing else could match. (3.4.55–68)

This speech is involved in a process of giving meaning to an object. Two things are happening at once: first, we are hearing the story of an object, and the past events that give it significance; second, something is being generated from scratch on the stage, and an innocent prop with no inherent pretensions is being given arbitrary value. No wonder Desdemona is doubtful when she responds. Othello falls short of saying the word ‘magic’ up to this point: the Egyptian was ‘a charmer, and could almost read / The thoughts of people ’. As was seen in Brabantio’s speech above, ‘charm’ reserves other meanings, and she can only ‘almost’ read minds. So the power of the object is not really pinned down. Desdemona needs to know more: d esd em ona

Is’t possible?

oth ello ’Tis true; there’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl, that had numb’red in the world

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The story she is being told stretches possibility and truth, but Desdemona is now facing epistemological chaos. Earlier Othello refuted the charge of magic and partly (‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ excepted) reassured the Venetians that his exoticism could be domesticated. Now, suddenly, he opens a window into unmitigated otherness, where the key word ‘magic’ is rapidly capped by a ‘sibyl’ whose ‘two hundred compasses’ defy hyperbole, and whose ‘prophetic fury’ is literal. The hallowed worms and virgin mummy seem outside the compass of rhetoric: either it’s real, or it isn’t, but the magical-metaphorical balance of the play has become very strange. Desdemona’s incomprehension in other parts of the play resembles that of Hermia and Pisanio observed in earlier chapters: faced with cognitive metaphors which are not her own, she struggles to keep up. Her situation is different because of what is at stake, because the metaphors are directed at her, and because some of those wielded against her by Othello have been given to him by Iago. The most striking difference is that the concept of heuristics seems debased; these metaphors are more likely to make problems than to solve them, and their discoveries are false. Othello, then, offers a counterpart to a benign view of rhetorical cognition. In 4.2 Desdemona is faced with her husband’s emotional turmoil and

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asks ‘Why do you weep?’ The answer is more than she could have bargained for: Had it pleas’d heaven To try me with affliction, had they rain’d All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head, Steep’d me in poverty to the very lips, Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes, I should have found in some place of my soul A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me The fixed figure for the time of scorn To point his slow unmoving finger at! Yet could I bear that too, well, very well; But there, where I have garner’d up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life; The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up: to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cestern for foul toads To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin – Ay, here look grim as hell! (4.2.47–64)

He responds with a metaphorical torrent that sweeps all before it. A rain of ‘sores and shames’ from heaven seems conventional enough, but combined with a liquid excess of poverty (‘Steep’d’) and a liquid dearth of patience (‘A drop’) the significance of water is unstable. He goes on to figure himself as a ‘current’ running from a ‘fountain’ which might as well be a foetid cistern in which squalid toads reappear, now even more grossly knotting and ‘gendering’ (i.e. ­engendering, breeding). What he has to say is not exactly ­illogical, and it is indeed a powerfully poetic unfolding of the experience of jealousy  – a constant, and varying, drowning. But it is not communicative; it belongs more to Othello’s troubled thinking, and his attempt to force it on to Desdemona. The key trope not yet

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mentioned is the personification of ‘the time of scorn’ – which the Riverside glosses reasonably as ‘a scornful world’. The concept of the ‘fixed figure’ does not offer a great deal, except as the target for a ‘slow unmoving finger’. These two adjectives do not interact obviously, as perhaps the Folio compositor felt when setting ‘and moving’ instead. Othello is trying perhaps to bring together how individual and yet how universal his predicament seems; again the trope achieves something towards this, but not in a lucid form. Desdemona seems, after this speech, to start from scratch with an appeal based on her essential honesty. This may be a version of the disconnection seen in earlier chapters: she is not party to everything happening in Othello’s speeches. On the other hand, it may be that she partly understands him and her query fears a negative answer. The irony is that the word ‘honest’ is as much Iago’s word as any other in the play; she is on enemy territory. Othello responds with further dynamic rhetoric: d esd emona I hope my noble lord esteems me honest. oth ello O ay, as summer flies are in the shambles, That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed! Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst never been born! (4.2.65–9)

His gloss on ‘honest’ takes him into the natural world. Flies are not honest; nor are they technically dishonest. The point is that morality is no longer applicable in the new universal order that Othello now trusts. Fertility and generation are in a state of spontaneous combustion, stages in life-cycles overlap one another: ‘quicken’ means ‘come to life’ after the eggs are planted (i.e. ‘blowing’), but

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‘quicken’ is reminiscent of ‘prime’ above, a new word for sexual awakening. Othello grabs for the ‘weed’ metaphor as another way of trying to understand Desdemona – again fertile, promiscuous, uncontrolled – but it leads instead to beauty. His heuristic failure is suggested by the despairing ‘would thou hadst never been born!’ However, Othello makes another attempt at capturing Desdemona in rhetoric. A truly effective metaphor, after all, might enable him to take greater control of his world-view: d esd em ona Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed? oth ello Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, Made to write ‘whore’ upon? What committed? Committed? O thou public commoner, I should make very forges of my cheeks, That would to cinders burn up modesty, Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed? Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks; The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, Is hush’d within the hollow mine of earth And will not hear’t. What committed? Impudent strumpet! (4.2.70–81)

The ‘fair paper’ offers a conventional potential in its contrast between white clarity and sinful blots. Through it Othello expresses an essential disconnection between what he sees and what he thinks he knows. His perspective on this paradox is limited; as the progress of his speech reveals, it goes yet deeper. As he dwells on the word ‘committed’ it metamorphoses from a factual query to a kind of gateway into moral horror. Othello’s disconnection recurs then, with his cheeks-as-forges metaphor (an incendiary blush of shame), and the personifications of Heaven and the moon and the wind, all

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weaving around Desdemona’s sin without actually addressing it. His cognitive-rhetorical resources are considerable, but here again they demonstrate no heuristic outcome. It is a sensory explosion – hearing (‘speak thy deeds’, ‘will not hear’), taste and touch (‘kisses all it meets’), vision (‘winks’), and smell (‘stops the nose ’) – but this does not generate an impression, because it is based on nothing. The concept of empty rhetoric is familiar when rhetoric is thought of as persuasive speech or writing; here it has a cognitive counterpart. As has already been said, Othello’s cognitive rhetoric might be predisposed to destructive expansion, but Iago has an extraordinary ability to manipulate others’ thinking. This is manifest in words, but these words – as this book argues – are a representation of mental processes in action. Early in the play he bamboozles Roderigo with a discussion of virtue. The response is ‘It cannot be ’ (1.3.333), because he missed both the irony and the penetrating depth of Iago’s assault on morality and integrity: Virtue? A fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up tine, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manur’d with industry  – why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the beam of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion. (1.3.319–32)

Tempting though it may seem in the context of this book, the ‘fig’ is not a bizarre attempt to conceive virtue in metaphor; it refers to an obscene hand gesture. The argument he advances has conventional qualities. Seeing the self as a garden to be cultivated creates what Honigmann’s notes in the Arden edition call a ‘mock sermon’.14 The

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extension of the metaphor first and foremost develops the irony: as the plants pile up, the ornateness of the argument for self-regulation becomes a little self-defeating. The prudish tone at the end (‘this that you call love’) is matched by a quibbling turn towards the horticultural ‘sect or scion’ (a cutting, or a graft). Despite all this playfulness, there is something incisive and accurate about this as a self-portrayal, at least. Iago can say with unusual confidence that ‘the power and corrigible authority’ lies in his will. His gardening metaphor works on Roderigo by overloading him with complexity, but it also offers some heuristic insights as a way of conceiving Iago’s own extreme attitude towards self-fashioning. It seems appropriate that there are two textual cruces in the speech. The Riverside’s ‘tine’ (wild grass, OED ‘tine’, n.4 ) seems more liable to be ‘weeded’ than Honigmann’s ‘thyme’; both seem reasonable variations on ‘Time’, which is the word in Quarto and Folio. Opting for ‘tine’ makes Iago’s mental husbandry more obviously constructive; to exchange hyssop for weeds is pure profit, whereas to exchange it for thyme suggests a choice based on inclination. Perhaps ‘thyme ’ introduces an appropriate edge: Iago’s real interest is in control, not betterment. The other crux is ‘beam’, referring to the bar in a set of scales from which items and weights are suspended. Quarto has ‘balance’, which is close in meaning – and Honigmann chooses this word. Folio has ‘braine’; the Riverside’s rationale is that this unfeasible word is a possible misreading of ‘beame ’, which indeed it is. Iago challenges editors as well as listeners. The resonant point that emerges from his playing with Roderigo is the notion of intellectual and emotional control. Iago sees himself as separate from cognitive heuristics; words and thoughts, in himself and others, are objects to be arranged. When we see him talking to Desdemona in Act 2, he (revealingly) describes the operation of creative expression. Again he is being ironic, turning the tables

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on her attempt to pass anxious time in banter, but something profound is suggested: d esd emona I am not merry; but I do beguile The thing I am by seeming otherwise. – Come, how wouldst thou praise me? i ago I am about it, but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze; It plucks out brains and all. But my Muse labours, And thus she is deliver’d. If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, The one’s for use, the other useth it. (2.1.122–30)

By this point we know that Iago is a very unwise choice for a partner in witty diversion. Desdemona likes his aphorism when it comes, though, and asks for another. Even at this early point in the play the audience must feel anxious at her self-exposure. Attention falls less readily on the strange lines with which Iago describes the genesis of his witty couplet. He is describing the work of invention, the process by which praises, and by implication other kinds of speaking and thinking, come about. He uses a pregnancy / labour metaphor that seems quite conventional, but his other configuration for creativity is less familiar. He evokes a kind of self-emptying: a witticism is a sticky, entrapping thing (birdlime; used to catch birds), and it removes everything (‘brains and all’) with it. ‘Frieze ’, coarse wool, gets stuck: ‘as birdlime does from frieze’ doesn’t actually describe a separation at all. So here Iago is evasively in control of both the stickiness of thoughts, and their separability from some sort of integral self. This flexibility proves dangerous when it enables him to manoeuvre thoughts into and out of Othello’s fragile world-view. When

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he contemplates his plan to twist the hero’s perceptions in 2.3, Iago uses relatively predictable metaphors to apprehend the process he is planning, but the combination is challenging: For whiles this honest fool Plies Desdemona to repair his fortune, And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor, I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear – That she repeals him for her body’s lust, And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor. So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. (2.3.353–62)

The language of reparation takes a legal turn as Iago links up the primary ‘repair’ with ‘pleads’, ‘repeals’, and then ‘credit’. The word ‘repeals’ is an interesting one: the OED gives Othello as the only citation for ‘Obs. Rare’ 3d., ‘To try to get (one) restored’. ‘Repeal’ seems, on the OED’s evidence, to have held some additional potential for Shakespeare; he is the only citation too for both reflexive and figurative uses of 3b. ‘To recall (a person) from exile ’. Perhaps its phonetic overlaps with the peal of a bell, with peeling-as-uncovering, give it additional vividness. For Iago, however, inventiveness, and the weaving of a metaphor, are not the signs of heuristic effort. Rather they are the signs of plotting – of creating something elaborate and inescapable. Into the legal framework Iago pours pestilence – a ready metaphor for corrupted thinking and deceit – with the result that metaphors begin to propagate more strangely towards the end of the extract. Virtue becomes ‘pitch’, and goodness a ‘net’, two complementary-contradictory ways of imagining entrapment. Whereas in Cymbeline the probings of rhetorical tropes helped Imogen conceive romantic impossibilities, in Othello they seem to

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enable, in their mobility, the meticulous construction of intolerable mental situations for other people. This is Iago’s gift: the transferral of twisted cognitive patterns. The pestilence poured into Othello’s ear even seems like a metaphor for cognitive metaphor itself. Othello partially realises this is what is happening. Rather than focusing on what Iago knows, he relentlessly pursues what Iago thinks, and finds himself drawn into compelling conjecture. After Iago has echoed his word ‘indeed’ (3.3.101), brilliantly allowing Othello himself to contemplate the dreaded ‘deed’, without even having to extract it from the longer word, he notes the pressure exerted by repetition: By heaven, thou echo’st me, As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. (3.3.106–8)

He has configured things wrongly. The metaphorical monster (the monster also looking like a metaphor for cognitive metaphor itself ) is being transmitted by means of the echoes. In the Quarto text this is in the third person, and Othello does not confront Iago outwardly with the thought that he is hiding something. It is telling that this does not make a great deal of difference. There is some analogy between this and the conversations between Helena and Hermia described earlier. The distinction between inward tangles and outward expression is not a stable one in Shakespearean drama, and the confrontation between Othello and Iago has become so intimate as to cross over niceties of representing sociability. The concept of the ‘monster’ becomes a powerful one, appearing in adjectival form when Iago invents Cassio’s sleep-talk: oth ello O monstrous! monstrous!

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Nay, this was but his dream.

oth ello But this denoted a foregone conclusion. i ago ’Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream, And this may help to thicken other proofs That do demonstrate thinly. oth ello

I’ll tear her all to pieces. (3.3.427–31)

The metaphorical coup de grace here is the use of such solid and tangible words (‘thicken … thinly’) to simplify issues of proof and doubt. Othello is inclined to credit monstrosity by this point in the scene, and Iago can easily enhance his own credibility with mild protest – ‘this was but his dream’. The key thing is that Othello is now equipped with an idea, a metaphor, that forgoes conclusions: something monstrous is afoot and this comes before the truth. The word’s history in the play – we also see Iago use it almost tauntingly as a way of ironically disparaging jealousy (‘the green-ey’d monster’, 3.3.166)  – shows this. It has collapsed into itself to the extent that its heuristic potential is swallowed up. The Riverside text here follows the Quarto in giving line 429 to Iago, where the Folio has it as a continuation of Othello’s speech. This seems a sensible decision, though as above (with the third person / second person change) it is telling that it does not make an enormous difference: Iago has overtaken the hero to this extent. Other words suffer the same fate. Othello’s repetitiveness, and his use of numinous words to characterise the world without providing any illumination, go beyond ‘goats and monkeys’, and ‘monstrous’, to ‘blood’, a few lines later. Strikingly, a thrice-repeated ‘blood’ is

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closely followed by what looks like a more familiar attempt to trope oneself into insight: oth ello O, blood, blood, blood! i ago Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change. oth ello Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Nev’r feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall nev’r look back, nev’r ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (3.3.451–60)

‘Blood’ looks like a metaphor searching for productive multivalence, but all it can do is circle round its own cognitive self-­sufficiency: what it does not represent, it stains and assimilates. Again Iago is confident enough to urge patience and to savour the irony of suggesting that Othello’s mind may change. In the Quarto text, the long simile ‘Like to the Pontic sea’ is absent. It seems most likely that this is part of Shakespeare’s revision of the play – that he has added it when updating the play behind the Folio text. The key thing is how emphatically performed this is: this is not an attempt at self-knowledge, but at self-construction. As such, it produces a contradictory effect: while the impressive tidal analogy, propelled by a succession of clauses, begins to capture the unwavering natural power of his compulsion, the end point falls away. Where does a tide go, with no ebb? The concept of being swallowed, as Othello suggests his mind’s progress will be by his revenge, applies awkwardly to a tidal flow. In revising the play, then, Shakespeare has

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chosen to complement the hero’s collapsed rhetorical cognition – an intimation of his short-circuited thoughts – with a performance of intellectual process. Othello’s ability to place himself in a realm of metaphor remains, but it now seems – appropriately – like a supplement, or an afterthought.15 As the play draws to a close, the rhetorical crises in Othello’s cognition appear in some of his most famous lines. Words with multiple resonance are juxtaposed in what looks like a search for emergent meaning, but in fact their predetermined force destroys all that potential: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, And smooth as monumental alabaster. Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men. Put out the light, and then put out the light: If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me; but once put out thy light, Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither: I’ll smell thee on the tree. (5.2.1–15)

The comparisons here – whiter than snow, smooth as alabaster – remain on the surface and lack heuristic purpose. More striking are two words that acquire enormous but brittle responsibility. ‘Cause ’ is self-corroborating: repeated three times, it endorses itself without need of further reference. The repetitions of ‘light’ also reinforce one another, with Othello’s cognitive resources now knitting things together that could deliver new apprehension  – the light-as-life

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metaphor in particular  – but end up only spiralling downwards. The sequence ends up with a thwarted metaphor: the rose seems so conventional in its beauty and its fragility, and the sensory friction when ‘smell’ leads to a kiss makes it seem even less effectual as a means of thinking about Desdemona. The inward-turning resonances of ‘goats and monkeys’ have already been mentioned. They come at the end of a speech in which Othello again creates repetitions that suggest escalating commitment and significance while they demonstrate diminishing semantic potential. The difference in Act 4 Scene 1 is that he is actually talking to others, or at least in the presence of others. Iago’s tactic  – implanting words that falsely suggest their own integrity – seems to him like it might work on his listeners: Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn. Sir, she can turn, and turn; and yet go on And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep; And she’s obedient, as you say, obedient; Very obedient. – Proceed you in your tears. – Concerning this, sir – O well-painted passion! – I am commanded home. – Get you away; I’ll send for you anon. – Sir, I obey the mandate, And will return to Venice. – Hence, avaunt! [Exit Desdemona.] Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, to-night I do entreat that we may sup together. You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. – Goats and monkeys! (4.1.252–63)

It is very poignant to see how Othello has been drawn into a perverse world-view. ‘Turn’, ‘weep’, and ‘obedient’ are all spoken several times with an apparent implicit thought that their Iagoesque subtexts will spontaneously emerge. Lodovico cannot, of course, realise that now for Othello ‘turn’ denotes the fundamental

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immorality of his wife and all women, that ‘weep’ said twice means crocodile tears, or something even stranger, and that ‘obedient’, by the third iteration, has completely changed its force. In the end Othello’s rhetorical modes separate into functional public utterance (‘I do entreat that we may sup together’) and the expletive inwardness already discussed. When talking to the Venetian officials Othello is unsuccessful in passing on his way of thinking to others. At a moment of crisis in the final scene another character, Emilia, is drawn further into repetition and semantic contraction. Her protest on Desdemona’s behalf is derailed by a surprising detail: oth ello She was false as water. em i li a Thou art rash as fire, to say That she was false. O, she was heavenly true! oth ello Cassio did top her; ask thy husband else. O, I were damn’d beneath all depth in hell, But that I did proceed upon just grounds To this extremity. Thy husband knew it all. em i li a My husband? oth ello Thy husband. em i li a That she was false to wedlock? oth ello Ay, with Cassio. Nay, had she been true, If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I’ld not have sold her for it. (5.2.134–46)

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The two antagonists swap parallels as they compete to define Desdemona. The situation is not quite the conventional one (foolish, jealous husband disparaging women as so many do) that Emilia expects. Othello repeats a word – which she turns back on him, and then hears again – that points in an unexpected direction: ‘husband’, meaning Iago. While Emilia is passive in taking on his requests for the handkerchief, she is active in response to this. Othello finishes with a florid hypothesis, deploying emphatic rhetoric to try to convey the intensity of his commitment to faithfulness. In this case perhaps the actor should savour the ‘entire and perfect chrysolite’ as something that – to Othello – seems persuasive and impressive. In fact Emilia is possessed by the one word that, in the manner of this play, has stuck in her consciousness and begun to turn around itself: em i li a My husband? oth ello

Ay, ’twas he that told me on her first: An honest man he is, and hates the slime That sticks on filthy deeds. em i li a

My husband!

oth ello What needs this iterance, woman? I say thy husband. em i li a O mistress, villainy hath made mocks with love! My husband say that she was false? oth ello

He, woman: I say thy husband; dost understand the word? My friend, thy husband, honest, honest Iago. em i li a If he say so, may his pernicious soul

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Rot half a grain a day! He lies to th’ heart: She was too fond of her most filthy bargain. (5.2.146–57)

There are two differences between the Quarto and Folio texts that matter here. The key word ‘iterance’ is ‘iteration’ in Quarto, which does not make much difference to the meaning, but might suggest a kind of heightened attention to this word in the process of rewriting the play. The other is that lines 151–4 (‘O mistress … honest Iago’) are absent in Quarto – perhaps also the result of authorial revision. As will be seen, the accumulation of further repetitions, and especially the word ‘honest’, plays a significant part in the scene. Again the possibility that Shakespeare reworked and enhanced the quality being observed here is a pressing one. Emilia is reduced to repetition, almost like Othello himself, except that for her the implications of the word are metamorphosing as she speaks, rather than collapsing. Nonetheless the heuristic aspect is evident: she now has to think of her husband in a completely different way, to the extent that there is no metaphorical structure in this process. Othello invokes the debased word ‘honest’, her husband’s deceptive epithet, by way of clarification, but its capacity to mean anything has disappeared, even when repeated. He also tries to measure this honesty in terms of Iago’s revulsion for ‘filthy deeds’, but the sticky slime imagined testifies most of all to his own gruesome inward disgust. It is striking that Othello is impatient with repetition: ‘What needs this iterance?’, ‘dost understand the word?’ He is unaware of the parallel with his own cognitive journey, and also far beyond the point at which Emilia now struggles, coming gradually to see that things are not at all what they seemed. Her last words in the passage above are densely metaphorical – the soul rotting like grain rots; lying measured in terms of a physical and metaphorical heart; love as a disastrous purchase. This seems a little like

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rhetoric-for-emphasis and a little like rhetoric-as-cognition: most of all it seems like an outlet for mental and linguistic tension that has been building through the repetitions of ‘husband’. As the scene continues, and Othello’s degeneration increases, he continues to combine different kinds of rhetoric. Sometimes the heuristic, cognitive version, which has featured so much in the book thus far, arises alongside the more public persuasive kind, and this play’s own special brand of collapsed metaphor. In response to Gratiano’s query (‘What is the matter?’) he begins in the grand style: Behold, I have a weapon; A better never did itself sustain Upon a soldier’s thigh. I have seen the day That with this little arm, and this good sword, I have made my way through more impediments Than twenty times your stop. But (O vain boast!) Who can control his fate? ’tis not so now. Be not afraid though you do see me weapon’d; Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt And very sea-mark of my utmost sail. Do you go back dismay’d? ’Tis a lost fear; Man but a rush against Othello’s breast, And he retires. Where should Othello go? Now – how dost thou look now? O ill-starr’d wench, Pale as thy smock! when we shall meet at compt, This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl? Even like thy chastity. (5.2.259–76)

The opening seems almost epic: the hero focuses on his weapon and begins to tell its story. There is some analogy – albeit a brief one – with the shields of Achilles and Aeneas, scenes of great ekphrasis (descriptions of works of art, or decorated objects, in Iliad 18

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and Aeneid 8 respectively) in classical poetry. But the tone turns tragic, as he contemplates ‘who can control his fate?’ Then there is a sequence not in Quarto – from ‘Be not afraid’ to ‘O, ill-starr’d wench’. It seems in keeping with the Pontic tide analogy struck above, that the revised text should give Othello more in the way of (thwarted) rhetorical heuristics, combined with self-presentation. He tries to make the horrific scene work like the logical end of something – life ’s voyage. The line-up of potentially helpful nautical metaphors (‘journey’s end’, ‘butt’, ‘sea-mark of … sail’) proves not to be so meaningful, or so final, as it might have been. Ultimately the tropes that prove insightful in this situation are the simplest. ‘Pale as thy smock’ is plainly descriptive. ‘Cold … even like thy chastity’ ends up at the fundamental truth that has eluded Othello for so long. ‘Cold’ actually turns out to be a productive repetition, physical coldness and metaphorical moral purity coinciding. The orderliness briefly attained here is, of course, intolerable, and Othello flies into self-castigation: O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead! O, O! (5.2.276–82)

Another kind of compact, repetitive eloquence emerges as he cries out her name, ‘O’, and ‘dead’. Yet another oscillation takes him into horrific insight: all he has done, and is, collapses ultimately into nothing – ‘O’.16 And yet his ability to speak, to weave language into narrative, has not left him. The switch into the third person made earlier in the speech – ‘Where should Othello go?’ presages the way

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Othello steps out of himself in his final self-portrait (5.2.338–56). That speech contains an anti-rhetorical challenge (‘Speak of me as I am’) that he himself fails completely: ‘one who loved not wisely but too well’ is a contentious aphorism that defies readers and audiences not to reject it completely. Autobiography and suicide are elided in simile  – he has been ‘like the base Indian’, and he smites himself ‘thus’, just as he smote ‘a malignant and a turban’d Turk’ (a figure who is a kind of metaphor for Othello himself ). The twists and turns of the play’s rhetoric have a final flourish in his dying words: I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee. No way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. (5.2.358–9)

Again, repetition gives words the chance to resonate and gain efficacy. Having done this earlier in the play as hapless victim, failing to control his own cognitive process and failing to discern words or thoughts, now he effects something more resourceful. This kisskill-kill-kiss pattern is that of another rhetorical figure, the chiasmus, which can seem to hold things in poised apposition or in an intimate relationship. It tends towards introverted closure. Othello and Desdemona are united in death by the word ‘kill’, now shared; and the first and last kisses are equated. An audience may not be able to accept this neatness logically, but it works emotionally; the return of repetition magnifies the effect by reminding the audience of the helpless spirals in which the hero has been trapped. Othello is a play where the cognitive and heuristic characteristics of rhetorical tropes in dramatic language look very different from those of the comic and romantic worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. There human beings struggle to make sense of their environments, but ultimately metaphors and reality settle into beneficial configurations. Incomprehension and metaphorical

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excess, and the incidental discoveries of language, are part of a process that leads to wonder. It is very different in this tragedy. The slippages when human cognition is out of kilter with emerging experience can be disastrous. The special predicament of Othello is that Iago invades the cognition of the hero and removes his capacity to think productively in tropes. The result is extraordinary compression, where words, like black holes, draw everything in with enormous expulsions of energy.

C h apt e r 7

The Sonnets

Thus far the capacity of Shakespeare’s language to explore the structures of thought by rhetorical means has been seen as a dramatic phenomenon. Naturally so: the meeting of a challenge (somehow to represent what is going on in the mind) and an opportunity (a burgeoning range of theatrical speech styles) leads to speeches that are not simply speaking. Broader questions remain, of which one – whether this is a specifically dramatic phenomenon – will be tackled in this brief chapter on the Sonnets. The emphatic embodiment of action, words, and thoughts is of course implicit in the cognitiveheuristic content of plays. Nevertheless, it still proves possible for a poem – perhaps a poem engaged in a particular mimetic challenge, and especially a lyric charged with articulating an intense emotion – to resemble something like thinking in a cognitive rhetoric. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are in fact an ideal place to pursue this possibility. They are frequently driven by metaphors (expanded into conceits), they face repeating cognitive crises (how to handle the young man and the dark lady and the emotional turmoil they cause), and they are vividly voiced by a speaker who often takes a strong position – at times a dramatic position. As in earlier chapters there will be a tension between an attempt to appreciate the whole poem, to capture (without simply summarising) concerted effects, while also attending to local perturbations. Here too there is a need to acknowledge that it will be necessary sometimes to quibble about 198

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the coherence of a metaphor or simile while implicitly or explicitly acknowledging that it may be marvellously effectual even without matching its parts. The example of Sonnet 23 serves to demonstrate a kind of basic model of how a Sonnet might share the cognitive-heuristic characteristics identified before, namely, that it should appear to use rhetorical tropes as means of creating an understanding of life, rather than of expressing a pre-existing conception. Within the fiction of the poems, the goal underlying each Sonnet is to make some sort of persuasive impression on its ostensible recipient. However, just as it was possible to identify problems and blockages in the heuristic efforts of Macbeth and Othello, so it is also possible to find rhetorical struggles of this sort in the Sonnets. As in the plays, the moments where tropes are unable to gain purchase on experience are the best indications that the poetic thinking is ongoing, and struggling to culminate. Sonnet 23 sets out to conceive the speaker’s incapacity as like that of an actor: As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put beside his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart, So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love’s rite, And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay, O’ercharged with burthen of mine own love ’s might. O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, Who plead for love, and look for recompense, More than that tongue that more hath more express’d. O, learn to read what silent love hath writ: To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

In comparison with Macbeth likening pity to a naked new-born babe, this is a measured set-piece. However, it is not completely arranged.

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The poem is ‘O’ercharged’ (8) like the lover, constructing an initially vivid story that ends up quite unsteady. The framing conceit is that an actor might be ‘unperfect’ in his lines out of fear (3), but that he might nevertheless contrive a performance with his ‘books’. The problem is that the primary association of ‘book’ (i.e. poems like Sonnet 23 itself ) is overlaid on another kind of book – a prompt book that could help an ‘unperfect’ actor back onto the right track. The artful poem stands at odds with the suggestion of tongue-tied performer. The advice to ‘hear with eyes’ recalls Bottom’s sensory catachresis on waking from his dream, though here it sounds neater at first, and fills out what Katherine Duncan-Jones calls the ‘artful sophistry’ of line 10 (where ‘dumb’ and ‘speaking’ combine oxymoronically).1 Most importantly, the actor is joined by a ‘fierce thing’ which is full of ‘rage’. As will be seen, the idea of inner thoughts that struggle to emerge in words is broached by different Sonnets in different ways. As well as dealing with extremes of love, the speaker is tackling the problems of ‘eloquence’ (9). The short-lived actor, so resonant with Shakespeare’s career and with the embodied cognition of the plays, proves wonderfully suggestive at the outset, but the efficacy of the trope in capturing the predicament is discovered in its collapse as much as in its construction. The ‘fierce thing’ is an unruly partner, and the word ‘rage’ is carefully pitched. A reader could manoeuvre towards one of its less pejorative meanings (‘Poetic, prophetic or musical inspiration or enthusiasm’, OED 8; ‘Martial or heroic spirit; valiant ardour, fervour, or indignation’) but the connotations of madness, lust, and anger are inescapable. The poem’s turn towards reading, ‘silent love’, and ‘fine wit’ cannot quieten the strange aspects of the Sonnet’s two attempts to figure the speaker’s plight. It is important to note that Helen Vendler sees this poem as ‘built on one of Shakespeare’s most impregnable logical sequences’. She sees a more equal balance between the ‘actor’ and the ‘fierce thing’:

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‘one is tongue-tied when one has either too little or too much to say’.2 However, it still seems accurate to observe that forgetting, and being ‘o’ercharged’ are not straightforward psychological opposites, and the poem may be more complex than she allows. It is possible that it is therefore all the more truthful in its difficulty: the predicament is not easy to experience or express. Although an initial premise for this chapter could be that the Sonnets might elicit thoughts of cognition less readily than the plays, in fact critics have often attempted to unfold the ‘inwardness’ of the poems.3 Bruce Smith, for example, has tried inventively to tease out their particular linguistic and psychological tangle of pronouns, subjects, and verb voices.4 Critics have also sought to close the apparent gap between poetry and theatre, by saying, in more and less specific ways, that the Sonnets are dramatic. Manfred Pfister makes a deliberate comparison with the sort of psychological heuristics that have been considered in this book so far: The impression most of them convey is not of a speaker at one with himself delivering a calmly thought-out speech, the result of careful premeditation. The impression we get is rather like that which we get from Hamlet’s, Lear’s, or Macbeth’s greatest soliloquies – the impression of witnessing a speaker struggling towards some solution to his problem, towards some truth or self-knowledge.5

The key point here, of course, is that the Sonnets (and the soliloquies they resemble) are not seen as already thought-out, but as thinking in process. The argument in this chapter will follow on from previous chapters in focusing on meditation rather than premeditation. Heather Dubrow is usefully sceptical about the equation between sonnet and soliloquy: The soliloquy immediately presents itself as a parallel to and an inspiration for Shakespeare ’s unusual approach to the sonnet, and in certain respects

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the comparison is an illuminating one. The speaker in Shakespeare ’s Sonnets often seems to be thinking aloud, to be at once speaking audibly and meditating. But, as the passages that I have cited suggest, in one crucial way the Sonnets differ from the soliloquies that are so frequently embedded in their author’s plays: the soliloquy normally takes place at a unique moment and is often provoked by a clearly defined event that has preceded it, whereas most of the Sonnets are signally lacking in those types of particularization.6

In comparison with sonnet sequences by Drayton, Petrarch, and others, she argues, Shakespeare’s shows a striking lack of ‘events’ and ‘unique moments’. While there may be a process of meditation, it will not be so manifestly and specifically responsive as those found in plays. Indeed, some of the Sonnets are challengingly repetitious, and yet their attempts to construct effectual thoughts in metaphors still bear comparison with the dramatic rhetoric examined thus far. The sonnets and plays have been brought together also by Patrick Cheney, who sees Shakespeare innovatively modelling himself as a ‘poet-playwright’.7 Cheney’s Shakespeare is an author with an eye on posterity and a plan for his achievements; this makes a useful counterbalance to critical accounts that prefer contingency and spontaneity. My exploration of his use of rhetorical resources owes something to both: in particular, these tropes are anything but haphazardly deployed. The Sonnets have also proved amenable to scholars working in the light of cognitive poetics. In Lakoff and Turner’s More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor there is a section on the Sonnets.8 Per Aage Brandt picks up from this study and notes that the complex maps of metaphor that Lakoff and Turner produce seem to describe a ‘basic grammatical and semantic reading [that they think tends to] precede literary interpretation’.9 In this book it has been necessary to acknowledge the different speeds at which reading can work, and that some of the more painstaking analyses

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are tracking twists and turns that impinge on the reader or audience in a less methodical fashion. However, it may be possible to hold rhetorical analysis and interpretative reading a bit closer together. In Brandt’s essay on Sonnet 147, another difference in approach is evident: the outcome of his cognitive-poetic approach is a thematic map of the sonnet  – something writer and readers share.10 This takes the communicative nature of metaphor, and its summarisable nature, as given. In comparison with these cognitive-poetic analyses the approach taken here will try to integrate the complexity of interpretation with the pursuit of patterns in metaphor in a way rela­ tively similar to the analyses in previous chapters of the dynamic turbulence of dramatic speech. Rather than focusing on what might be seen as typical dynamics as the Sonnets sharply and strangely grope towards effectual metaphors and similes, this chapter will seek out sequences of poems that make an issue of the conjunctions between speech and thought and rhetoric. The 1609 book of Sonnets has a number of coalescences, or more arranged deployments of poems, where similarities of language and topic lead readers to propose patterns and narratives. Each poem is unique, and yet the collection is characterised by distended repetitions that put some of its strongest metaphors into crisis. One of the most evident sub-groups is the ‘rival poet’ group (78–86), but before that a later cluster of poems, straddling the ‘young man’ and ‘dark lady’ groups, proves a telling place to think about poems as thoughts. Although not linked by a single theme Sonnets 126–30 seem to build on and answer one another, and there is a sense of movement through the group as the sequence as a whole undergoes its most significant shift of focus. Sonnet 126 is the last of the sonnets to the young man, and accordingly it seems retrospective rather than inaugural. It contains several metaphors and metaphorical fields that have already appeared

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in the sequence, and which are pushed and stretched in old and new ways. Since this transitional poem has twelve rather than fourteen lines, there is the further possibility of an enervated impression, but the eventual result is a sense of sprung tension: O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle[,] hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st; If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack) As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May Time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure, She may detain, but not still keep her treasure! Her audit (though delay’d) answer’d must be, And her quietus is to render thee.

This Sonnet is textually complex. The word ‘sickle ’ in line 2 has attracted a great deal of comment. Duncan-Jones and Burrow associate it with death conceived as a kind of harvest – the ‘sickle hour’ in which things are cut down.11 This seems more convincing than the Riverside’s retention of the 1609 Quarto’s comma after ‘sickle ’. (This would mean Time holding three things, the third being an hourglass.) The poem is quoted here without the two pairs of brackets that seem to denote where its final couplet should have been. If included, they draw attention to curtailment and, by enclosing empty space, they suggest a terminal absence. Of course they may more mundanely be a kind of caret mark from the printer: something just seems to be missing, in the light of the fourteen-line template. Burrow notes that the verb ‘render’ often takes two objects, so there is a sense of suspension as we wait to find out what has been rendered to ‘thee’ (the young man). This actually makes the truncation seem more effective and purposeful: the end doesn’t come at

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the simple, natural point. Duncan-Jones makes the vital observation that couplets and closure are not synonymous. Many have a ‘recoiling, inconclusive quality’. As she argues, Sonnet 126 rounds things up without rounding things off.12 The poem’s metaphorical fecundity is locked in paradox in the first four lines. Time is conceived as a personified ‘Time ’, then as an emblematic ‘glass’ and a partly emblematic (and perhaps even synecdochic) ‘hour’; the passing of time is conceived as moonlike (‘waning’ very often associates with the moon as well as with general diminution – and a crescent moon is sickle-shaped) and plantlike (‘withering … grow’st’). It is Nature’s ‘audit’, however, that really anchors the poem. The early manoeuvres are (like so much in the Sonnets) arresting as they shift their angles, but – under the criteria established in the earlier chapters  – they do not yield the poem’s speaker or reader a way through or out of the poem. In the fifth line, however, a robust sequence relating to authority – Nature, ‘sovereign mistress’, ‘minion’, ‘detain’ – shades into a financial reckoning: ‘treasure’, ‘audit’, ‘render’, and ‘quietus’ too. The last word is in fact the metaphor that achieves a ‘conceptual blend’ that seems almost to consummate the poem somewhat early. The primary meaning is OED 1, ‘an acquittance or discharge granted on payment of a debt; a receipt’, which fits easily with the verb ‘render’. However, OED 2a, ‘a release or respite from life; an ending of life, death; something that causes death’, is engaged as well. The OED’s first reference for this meaning is Hamlet, where the prince uses it in the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy: ‘When that he may his full quietus make, / With a bare bodkin’ (3.1.77–8). Dating the Sonnet in relation to the play is not straightforward, but it seems possible to say that the poem’s use of the word moves a little in that direction, and that the Latin ‘quies’ (rest), at least, is part of the word’s contribution. It seems that the financial term resonates

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unexpectedly and delivers an alternative to the cycles of time and process (‘wretched minutes’) in which the sequence has both thrived and atrophied. The end seems sudden, and suddenly appropriate. This way of interpreting its metaphorical texture – as a process aiming at expressive progress (increasing heuristic lucidity), though capable of other kinds of knowledge and effectiveness – is congruent with the analyses of dramatic language earlier in the book. This poem makes a discovery in the development of its language; these metaphors are not just adornments. The next poem is the first of the ‘dark lady’ Sonnets, and it seems to have a different rhetorical character when set alongside its predecessor. The gap between 126 and 127 might need careful handling. Possibly modern readers should concede the uncertainties of the poems’ arrangement, and should not overstate the significance of this proximity. On the other hand, the contiguity of these poems in printed editions requires an assessment of the resulting friction. Sonnet 127 is both a bracing restart, appealing to proverbial and traditional registers, and a return to some welltravelled territory: In the old age black was not counted fair, Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name; But now is black beauty’s successive heir, And beauty slander’d with a bastard shame, For since each hand hath put on nature ’s power, Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face, Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow’r, But is profan’d, if not lives in disgrace. Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black, Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack, Sland’ring creation with a false esteem: Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, That every tongue says beauty should look so.

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The first line gives some extraordinary, if short-lived, ventilation. Given the claustrophobic tangle into which blackness and desire will soon develop, the gesture towards ‘the old age ’, the space drawn between the attitudes of past and present, seem particularly broad. Blackness strongly discerns this poem from what has gone before, though ‘beauty’s successive heir’ is a phrase that could easily have come from the ‘procreation sonnets’ (1–17), which advise the young man to have children. The poem’s metaphorical steps (‘false borrowed face’ as a means of transforming foul to fair or vice versa; a bower as a suitable location for beauty; ‘holy’ and ‘profaned’; ‘raven’ as a complement to ‘black’; ‘mourners’, ‘mourn’, and ‘woe ’) follow naturally. The overall shape of the Sonnet turns round the paradox that the lover has changed the rules, leaving fairness now something to be lamented. The poem might be deemed successful in key ways: it emphatically turns the focus of the Sonnets towards the dark lady, and it takes blackness as a premise and engineers a rhetorical framework that sets it off advantageously. In comparison with other poems it lacks the intensity and cognitive vividness that come with less delivery of this sort, but more strain in the metaphors and similes. Expressing it like this may be too clear-headed in allocating success and failure to different Sonnets; it seems risky to imply that a poem might be deliberately less energetic, in some way, than its neighbour. However, it might be beneficial to see it as an achievement of a speaker – to separate the lyric ‘I’ from the poet, and to treat it somewhat dramatically. The poem’s lack of rhetorical-heuristic explosiveness is a function not of authorial distraction, but of the situation from which it arises. There is another striking contrast in the next poem. It starts with another gesture towards a certain time (‘How oft’, which suggests continuing particulars rather than the far-off past) and moves

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into a conceit based on music. This starts confidently, but turns back on itself in the end: How oft when thou, my music, music play’st Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand. To be so tickled they would change their state And situation with those dancing chips, O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, Making dead wood more blest than living lips: Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

As will be seen in Sonnet 130, the couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet can seem to shrug off a poem’s rhetorical convolutions. One way of conceiving this, is that the lips that arise in line 12 prove too candid and compelling for the elaborate musical metaphor, and they return again in the final line. They have already appeared in line 7, so they need to be acknowledged. The couplet dispenses with the conceit in favour of something more tangible. In this account, then, the kiss is the antithesis of the sonnet, an event that offers to step outside the sequence, though it does not. Another way of seeing it runs as follows: the unfolding of the musical metaphor moves through its ingenious pathway as if in a series of probing feints, each rhetorical subtlety aimed at reconciling pursuit and objective. Ultimately the escalating physicality of the poem thus looks like an achievement of a metaphorical process trying to rearrange frustration. This duality, wherein metaphor is a medium of progress as well as deferral, is crucial to the Sonnets, which prove both dazzling and enigmatic. As

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in earlier chapters, where heuristic failure in key speeches had to be considered alongside their insight and effectuality in other senses, there is a tension between the way Shakespeare ’s language gets somewhere, and the way it does not. The musical instrument (usually taken to be the piano-like virginals) is highly amenable to the sort of nuanced probing that the sonnet form enables. Duncan-Jones sees this as an ‘ingenious elaboration’ of a conceit that was already ‘well-worn’ by this time.13 The ‘wiry concord’, for example, allows the literal wires (strings) some sonic potential as well as a kind of proprietary agency over the harmony (‘concord’) being created. The rapid shift from ‘music’ as a metaphor for the lover, to music as a literal activity, is filled out and extended by the introduction of the parts of the instrument (the ‘jacks’, or keys), which then get their own metaphorical ability to ‘kiss’ (which takes the poem to its underlying interest). After this, the poem gets rather dynamic, as the speaker’s lips yearn for a ‘harvest’ (the fit reward for their effort), wood can be bold, lips blush, and then words packed with motion (‘tickled’, ‘dancing’, ‘walk with gentle gait’) are appropriate both to the gathering innuendo and to the underlying attempt to solve a difficult problem.14 There is an alternative version of this poem, in which the key variants are ‘dear dearest’ for ‘my music’ (1), ‘keys’ for ‘jacks’ (5, 13), and ‘touched’ for ‘tickled’ (9). None of these makes an enormous difference to the reading being developed here. If this is an earlier version of the poem, then one conclusion that might be drawn is that Shakespeare was highly attentive to the musical conceit, and in revision he introduced its trigger (‘my music’) and some of the more destabilising variations on the theme. If (as Burrow believes) the manuscript version is a later version, with differences that result from a copyist, then less can probably be made of it.15

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Dramatic characters are more easily interpreted as the sites of thinking: the thought that plays involve an imitation of intellect and emotion goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics.16 It is more difficult to do this in relation to the first-person voice of a lyric. However, one response to this problem might be to stress again the dramatic quality of the poetic voice in the Sonnets: all such poems present themselves as occasional to some extent, but these may suggest that their perspective is situational, changing, and thus more readily a place in which to conceive the process of cognitive heuristics. This poem, like 126 (and others that will be considered later in the chapter) is a tense mixture of an attempt to create something in rhetoric, and an attempt to escape something rhetorical. Sonnet 129 has a reputation for convolution and its speaker is intense and troubled. However, its capacity for insight, for containing knowledge, is not undermined by a recognition that its rhet­ orical sequence does not lead to persuasive or adorned lucidity in its ostensible purpose (understanding lust). The poem itself draws attention to this in its couplet, ‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well, / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’ This offers an uneasy distinction between something ‘well known’ (inwardly acknowledged, intimately felt) and a consequent active ability to ‘know well’ what to do with the result. The individual’s experience, like the poem’s anatomy of it, is profound and powerful, but this does not have what would seem like a practical yield. This is a lyric example, then, of the sort of dramatic rhetoric described earlier in the book. The couplet follows a poem in which it is hard to tell where metaphors start and finish: Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

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Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme, A bliss in proof, and prov’d, a very woe, Before, a joy propos’d, behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well, To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

In the first line, ‘expense’ and ‘waste’ seem to want to expand into further ramifications, but the ‘spirit’ and ‘shame ’ are at this point poised between abstraction and a deflating innuendo. If ‘spirit’ is taken to imply semen, then the poem’s erotic potential seems to be spent by the fourth word; actually the tension and abstraction continue. For lust to be ‘murd’rous’ it must to some extent be personified. The hunting of lines 6–8 gives physical form to the moral path being traced through the poem; the collocation of ‘mad’ at the end of line 8 and ‘Mad’ at the beginning of line 9 suggests a continuing momentum, but line 10 proves pivotal. After the lexical quibbling of ‘Had, having … to have’ there is no further metaphorical outcome, no physically vivid target. Instead, the word ‘extreme ’, already seen in line 4, is repeated. This is, perhaps, the key word of the whole poem. Conventionally a metaphor involves the juxtaposition of conceptual and physical: the need to conceive and express the former is achieved by means of the latter (and this can be reversed). ‘Extreme’ falls perfectly between the two. Spatial in character, it is not particular enough to be physical; at home around moral concepts (especially when modifying them) it does not identify one in itself. ‘Extreme’, then, abdicates from one kind of elucidatory insight even as it magnificently discovers another, where physical and moral experience are joined and confounded at the

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same time. Vendler says the word is ‘carefully chosen’ and ‘the only productive word from the early torrent of self-accusation’ (p. 552). The following lines anticipate the couplet by combining resonantly contrasting keywords (‘bliss … woe’, ‘joy … dream’) with the language of logical organisation (‘proof, and prov’d … propos’d’). The outcome is an arresting mixture of the inexpressible maelstrom of desire with some clear moral processing. The tangles of the rhetorical process express a human predicament from the inside. Sonnet 128 coupled an elaborate conceit with the emphatic and undeniable ‘lips’. Sonnet 129 drew attention to the problems of proof and knowledge as it attempted to organise, as well as testify to, erotic experience. Sonnet 130 hides its sharp combination of these characteristics behind an innocuous, and ironically conventional, denial of convention. It provides a kind of ventilation after the intensity of 129, and its opening propositions refreshingly incorporate a series of familiar objects: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know, That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare.

The poem holds up the business of poetic comparison to scrutiny, testing the relationship between the suggestible mind’s eye and the

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terms of comparison. At a basic level of irony, the mistress ends up being visible only through the prisms of the analogies being denied. The exercise of imagining eyes which are really nothing like the sun, or a voice which is less pleasing than music, ends up playing on the fact that we cannot avoid thinking about suns, and sun-like qualities of eyes, when offered them like this. Or we resort to something apparently more banal, but which is actually the core of the poem: we try very hard to think about something entirely real, a person who evades poetic analogy by not being part of a poem at all. This challenge is reoriented by the penultimate line, in which the words ‘I think’ wrest back subjective opinion, and the ability to define the woman in question. The final line of the poem suggests a comparative evaluation of the incomparable with women who have themselves been the object of false comparison. This does not come across, however, simply as remarkable ingenuity in a witty unravelling of typical poetic practice. It is anchored by ‘I think’, and ends up, again, suggesting an intense subjective knowledge to which the resources of a sonnet give vivid access by exploring the difficulty of conceiving it in words. There is a sharp juxtaposition – in the poem, but most of all in this account of the poem – between straightforward rhetorical manoeuv­ res and the powerful discovery of first-person experience. It might be best to be wary about overstating the significance of a two-word phrase, ‘I think’. However, the thirteenth line builds up to it by invoking heaven, and it has a capacity to resonate once its contrast with all the poem’s conventions is savoured. One of its resonances is with the most famous ‘I think’ in philosophy, Descartes’s cogito [ergo sum]; ‘I think [therefore I am]’.17 This epoch-making assertion of the primacy of inner experience as a means of constructing a view of reality is adduced as a comparison for Shakespeare mostly in relation to tragedy, especially Hamlet. The hero’s scepticism and inward intensity

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make him seem like a harbinger of a world-view that turns ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (2.2.244–5) into a constructive premise. By comparison, Sonnet 130 seems slight, but also remarkably efficient in counterbalancing a world of senses and associations with the mind’s particularity. The big difference is that Shakespeare’s poem does not posit a kind of reasoning mind here, but rather something passionate and idiosyncratic. This is different from Descartes, but not philosophically inane: the lover knows he exists because he has his own passionate feelings. In Sonnet 131 the phrase ‘I think’ appears again. The poem presents the lady as ‘tyrannous’ and ‘cruel’ (1–2), and notes that while others deny her beauty, the speaker emits ‘A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face’ (10). Black is ‘fairest in my judgment’s place’. The key word ‘judgment’ partly continues the metaphorical thread that links tyranny to law and execution, but it also links up the ‘thinking’ of line 10 with the final line: ‘And thence this slander [that she is not beautiful] as I think proceeds’. There is something perverse and dazzling about the argument developed, wherein the speaker defends her beauty and ends up saying that her cruel deeds must have ruined her reputation in general. There is also a further allusion to thinking, to the process of cognition. This feels like rather a faint echo of Sonnet 130, in that the intervention of the individual’s thoughts and opinions is less energetic, but an echo nonetheless. So Sonnet 130 comes to look like a special node in the sequences, alongside its predecessor poems. The sub-sequence from 126 to 130 suggests the ways in which Shakespeare’s lyric poetry can, like his plays, bring poetic expression and intense, troubled thought into conjunction. The Sonnets, then, are drawn into this book as examples of the friction between the tools of rhetorical inquiry and the predicaments encountered in passionate situations. Their recurring crises of love are naturally

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amenable to metaphor; such a distended sequence piles repetition upon recurrence, and hampers any poem’s attempt to deliver momentary elucidation. The ‘rival poet’ Sonnets (82–7) also contain particularly pointed anxieties about poetic language, and also complicate the relationship between poetry and thinking. Two aspects of rhetoric interact here: metaphors seem poised between heuristic cognition and emphatic expression. There is some of the disorienting intensity and immediacy seen in Helena, Imogen, and Othello, but also an attention to how language can contrive feeling. The designation of a ‘rival poet’ group is well established in criticism but it is worth recognising its boundaries.18 The key poems for this chapter are 82–7, because here there is the rise and fall of a challenging disavowal of the resources of rhetoric, which are the preserve of the inauthentic rival. The rival looms a little earlier in the sequence. Sonnet 78 introduces an ‘alien pen’ (line 3) that threatens the poet’s special relationship with the young man, and 79 and 80 continue to lament that the speaker is no longer alone in his devotion. Sonnet 81 starts in a way that proposes continuity and contrast with the poem or poems before. Its first word ‘Or’ (‘Or I shall live your epitaph to make / Or you survive when I in earth am rotten’) is a disorientating way to begin a poem even when it is revealed to be, in effect, one half of an ‘Either … or’ construction. At least, it discourages the reader from seeing this Sonnet as a singular thing belonging to an occasion, and ensures its relationship to others. Accordingly, the poem revisits one of the sequence ’s prevalent themes, the immortalisation of the beloved. Its innovation lies in its shift from ‘epitaph’ (1), ‘memory’ (2), ‘grave ’ (7), and ‘monument’ (8), to a more sensory world (‘eyes’, ‘tongues’ engaged with the commemorative poem), and thence to ‘breath’. Line 10 finds a metonymic way of describing living people (‘breathers’), and the final line describing where ‘you shall live ’ (‘Where breath

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most breathes, even in the mouths of men’) establishes the common medium in which both life and spoken verse exist. The sudden physicality, enhanced by the lexical attentiveness (three cognates of ‘breath’), shakes the reader from the routine. The contrast between this and the beginning of 82 is striking. The opening line (‘I grant thou wert not married to my Muse ’) comes across, like the opening lines of 127 and 130, as an invitation to shift the focus and expand the scope. The poem in general explores very different territory from the one before. By tackling the concept of a rival poet, it puts the process of poetic praise into potential disrepute (if it can be misused by someone else). This has telling effects on the possibility of rhetorical heuristics: I grant thou wert not married to my Muse, And therefore may’st without attaint o’erlook The dedicated words which writers use Of their fair subject, blessing every book. Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue, Finding thy worth a limit past my praise, And therefore art enforc’d to seek anew, Some fresher stamp of the time-bettering days. And do so, love; yet when they have devis’d What strained touches rhetoric can lend, Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathiz’d In true plain words by thy true-telling friend: And their gross painting might be better us’d Where cheeks need blood, in thee it is abus’d.

The conceit of a lover being ‘married’ to the muse of the poet who praises him is carried through in ‘dedicated’ (line 3) and ‘blessing’ (4). The marriage denied in the first line remains, with some irony, a one-way commitment. The second quatrain includes the passing metaphor of ‘fair in knowledge ’ and the more energetic but isolated ‘fresher stamp’ (which suggests print, poetry’s newer

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medium, as well as a more general mark of novelty). In the third quatrain there is a distinction between the ‘true-telling friend’ who speaks ‘true plain words’, and the new rival. Line 10 is wittily crammed with metaphors (touch, in the sense of OED 10a, an application of artistic skill, being strained; rhetoric lending; rhetoric lending touches). The overall effect is daring, because it is risky to expose the preceding eighty-one sonnets to the scrutiny being implied. Of course, there is self-rebounding wit at work here, an ironic protestation about plain speech that is not so far from the primary argument of Sonnet 130. The couplet elevates the poem from this distinction and brings the contrast of rhetorical styles into the intense rhetorical world that has been characteristic of Shakespeare ’s speakers thus far. The ‘painting’ (cosmetic adornment carried out in poetry) and ‘blood’ (vigorous, beautiful appearance) make a suggestive combination, but other elements of these lines – the bluntness of ‘gross’, ‘used’, and ‘abused’ especially – prevent this seeming like an artfully turned and resolved riposte to the absent opponent. ‘Painting’ and ‘blood’ are too bitterly entwined in jealousy, and the final clause seems almost to be spat out. In the next poem, we see that painting is a lingering and challenging idea. Having the lover re-depicted in another’s words seems to nag. Over the course of the first quatrain, however, there is a change from a venomous first couplet, with an inelegant and spiteful repetition, to the smoother fourth line. In the terms of cognitive heuristics, this is attributable to the speaker finding a productive metaphor with which to reconceive the situation. The Sonnet yet again proves a form in which one or more rhetorical possibilities can rise and thrive, or fall, and the poem shifts away: I never saw that you did painting need, And therefore to your fair no painting set;

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There is an obvious risk attached to deeming anything in a literary text deliberately defective in some way – and this is notably acute in Shakespeare ’s case. Both the hostility (in naming the defect) and generosity (in attributing a purpose to said defect) invite disagreement. This first line, however, gives this impression: the modal ‘did’ makes the line seem like a struggle. Line 3 feels its way towards the ‘exceed’ / ‘tender’ / ‘debt’ financial metaphors that seem to settle the poem down. The bracketed ‘or thought I found’ concedes in advance that the success will not be total, and also opens, briefly, the way to an appreciation of the subjective element that has already been identified in Sonnet 130 and elsewhere. The monetary terms are not exhausted yet, but the poem becomes more acute: And therefore have I slept in your report, That you yourself, being extant, well might show, How far a modern quill doth come too short, Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow. This silence for my sin you did impute, Which shall be most my glory being dumb, For I impair not beauty being mute, When others would give life, and bring a tomb. There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, Than both your poets can in praise devise.

The sleep of line 5 suggests both the poet’s restraint in propagating the young man’s reputation (‘your report’) and the consequent loss of liveliness in the young man’s opinion. The second quatrain’s double ‘worth’ is restrained in comparison with the more energetic rhetorical processes of many other sonnets, and especially in comparison with the passionate tangles produced by dramatic speakers under pressure.

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The impression here is of scrupulous and careful arrangement, almost wariness around the fertility of metaphor, because now it might be coming from a rival source. In the last lines the argument for plain style, for unadorned representation, is made more powerfully than in the previous poem. Although the couplet, notable for its alliance of the two poets in their failure, seems conventional in citing the inexpressibility of the beloved’s liveliness, the twelfth line conveys a palpable anxiety about poetic expression. The others ‘would’ give life – this seems sincere – but their methods are radically counter-productive. Here the speaker scores points against his rival, but testifies to sharper fears about the self-generating nature of rhetorical expression. Sonnet 84 clearly rejoins the same fray. It starts with a rhetorical question and the assertion that the declaration ‘you alone, are you’ is unimprovable. The ‘you are’ complements ‘I think’: these two minimal verb phrases are the inexpressible that the Sonnets try, not quite indefatigably, to express. In this poem the principle is asserted further, but as ever, inevitably, the poem acquires metaphor as it proceeds: Who is it that says most, which can say more Than this rich praise, that you alone, are you, In whose confine immured is the store Which should example where your equal grew? Lean penury within that pen doth dwell That to his subject lends not some small glory, But he that writes of you, if he can tell That you are you, so dignifies his story. Let him but copy what in you is writ, Not making worse what nature made so clear, And such a counterpart shall fame his wit, Making his style admired every where. You to your beauteous blessings add a curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.

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The last couplet seems vituperative – the attempt to conduct a poised assessment of the mimetic challenge is of course caused by jealousy. After the initial question something is conceived as a ‘confine’ in which the ‘store’ is ‘immured’ (line 3), as a building where natural plenty is kept. Primarily this seems to refer to the true praise, ‘you are you’ (a further simplification in line 8 of a formula that was already simple in line 2), which has everything necessary within it. This ‘confine’ is picked up in the ‘pen’ of line 5: primarily this means a writing implement, and the phonically connected ‘penury’ denotes a meanness of expression. It also, however, suggests another storage place, but now counter-productively penurious. ‘Store ’ is a translation of the Latin word copia, which meant resources in various senses, but in Renaissance England it was most readily associated with rhetoric. Erasmus’s De Copia remained a key text (as was discussed in Chapter 2). So the means of poetic description are of course embroiled in the attempt to establish that the lover’s worth is self-contained. This is also evident when, in lines 9–10, there are further elaborations on the idea that ‘you are you’. Both are metaphorical. An imitation may be a ‘copy’, but what is ‘writ’ in a person is a metaphor, and perhaps a metalepsis. Copying nature may be the goal, but ‘clear’ is not self-standing or even self-explanatory. Its various nuances (manifest; famous, from Latin clarus; transparent) are suggestive but unruly. These metaphors are not outlandish; indeed, they are almost familiar enough (especially within the turbulent language of the Sonnets) to blend into the background. However, they do not quite do so: this poem carries through its task, to enhance the familiar practice of advocating simplicity, made more edgy by the rival with his own skills. In doing so, though, it evokes enough of the difficulty of metaphor to give the impression that the speaker here, like dramatic speakers in earlier chapters, is in the process of thinking as well as arguing.

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In the light of this assertion it seems telling that Sonnet 85 ­pivots around the fifth line, ‘I think good thoughts whilst other write good words.’ This ironically refutes the eloquence of the first quatrain: My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still, While comments of your praise, richly compil’d, Reserve their character with golden quill And precious phrase by all the Muses fil’d.

The speaker is able to enhance the depiction of ‘precious phrase ’ with the relatively opaque opening to line 3. ‘Reserve their character’ might need amending, and all commentators grapple with the line, but as it stands it suggests treasure-like hoarding (‘Reserve ’, filling out the richness theme) of a written ‘character’. Perhaps the convolution is explained by the speaker’s protestation of plainness; avarice might be endemic to the world of artful elaboration. Perhaps this enigmatic opening is meant to disorient the reader and thus place the straightforwardness of line 5 under threat. Because, of course, it is far from straightforward. To accept that good words and good thoughts can simply be separated, that one side can be like an ‘unlettered clerk’, but the other side more lucid or truthful, is challenging. And yet the rest of the poem seeks to keep it afloat: I think good thoughts whilst other write good words, And like unlettered clerk still cry ‘Amen’ To every hymn that able spirit affords In polish’d form of well-refined pen. Hearing you prais’d, I say ‘’Tis so, ’tis true,’ And to the most of praise add something more, But that is in my thought, whose love to you (Though words come hindmost) holds his rank before. Then others for the breath of words respect, Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.

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As in Sonnet 81, ‘breath’ becomes the focus of attention. Up to a point, the expelled air carries only empty words here, and not the life-force of the thing being described. However, ‘breath’ does not simply lapse into this negative meaning – it must retain some of that liveliness. ‘Dumb thoughts’ also seem double-edged: at one level, natural and obvious, but at another, hard to conceive. It is difficult to imagine or explore a wordless thought: this is a problem already contained in the over-simplicity of line 5. The minimal phrases ‘’Tis so’ and ‘’Tis true ’ join ‘You are ’ and perhaps ‘I think’ as keystones in the Sonnets’ alternative anti-­rhetoric. They do not prove as effectually expressive as the speaker purports to have hoped. The rival poet Sonnets as a group gesture after a kind of authentic expression, and they aim to cast rhetoric only as a means of adorning and falsifying. In the course of doing so they end up revealing that this is an artificial schism, that the separation of thought and words is a problem, and that the means of constructing rhetorical tropes shadow the means of achieving insights.19 In Sonnet 86 the emerging crisis of the rival poet sequence takes another turn. The interaction between the rival’s rhetorical efforts and the speaker’s plainness becomes all the stranger, in a poem that makes even more of an issue of its own metaphorical adventure. It finishes with a couplet that proposes the crucial contrast: ‘But when your countenance fill’d up his line, / Then lack’d I matter, that enfeebled mine.’ This is ambiguous, in that it seems mainly to mean that in the absence of his beloved his lines lacked matter, but it could also mean that the beloved is something that enfeebles his writing. (This depends on whether ‘that’ is a simple relative pronoun, or whether it suggests consequence – ‘with the result that it …’.) It is also doubly metaphorical, in that the rival’s poetic line is conceived as a vessel to be filled with matter, and the speaker’s as something with strength that might be weakened. These are unobtrusive but not inert metaphors.

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In the opening lines of the poem, by contrast, the rhetorical activity is much more obvious: Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?

The adjectives in the first line (‘proud’, ‘great’) show that this is a sardonic reflection on the rival’s eloquence. Lines 3–4 to some extent continue onward with mixed and extravagant metaphor (‘ripe’, ‘inhearse’, ‘tomb’, ‘womb’), but the shift of focus towards the speaker’s own ‘thoughts’ is difficult to resolve. It seems incongruous to persist in the rival’s mode when being self-reflexive. On the other hand, the metaphors (a ship sailing after riches; a strange mixture of death and growth) are ambitious and end up seeming confounded. This poem – and it is not alone in this respect – mingles several voices. One of these can be the cognitive-heuristic, dramatic voice, and here the metaphors struggle to hold together as they conceive the two poets. The poem’s midsection is strangely over-dramatic as it places them in a world of ghosts and fear: Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast; I was not sick of any fear from thence.

The shift from ‘spirit’ to ‘spirits’ almost seems desultory. The expansion into supernatural ‘nightly’ conspiracies, with the speaker’s poetic voice (the ‘verse’ again separated from its maker) ‘astonished’ by the dark forces at work, seems inflated and rather adrift

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from the unfolding jealousy plot. To see this as an unconvincing interlude in this poem again points in two directions: towards the thwarted manoeuvres of cognitive rhetoric, or towards the satirical turn against the rival poet. Either way the poem – like such a reading – is full of risk. The temptation, from the beginning, to invest in the ‘proud sail’, to see this as a conceit to savour, is absolutely part of the reader’s experience of the poem. As with the dramatic examples considered earlier in the book, the different sorts of value there may be in poetic expression must be borne in mind. It is not easy to assess the interaction between a thrilling readerly engagement and cooler close reading. However, this does not undermine the thought that Sonnet 86 takes the risk of deliberate self-defeat further than the others. Sonnet 87 announces its new direction with an emphatic ‘Farewell’ – not, as it turns out, to the young man, but to the tangle with the rival poet. It also ends with a contrast between the ‘dream’ of love (13) and the loveless ‘waking’ (14) into which the speaker appears to be proceeding. As Duncan-Jones says, ‘the rival poet is forgotten, but all is not well with the friends’ (p. 284). As if to complement this new purposeful turn, the poem weaves a complicated commercial conceit: Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know’st thy estimate; The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving. Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking, So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgment making.

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Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

The words that build the metaphorical coherence here – ‘dear’, ‘possessing’, ‘estimate’, ‘charter’, ‘wealth’, ‘releasing’, ‘bonds’, ‘determinate’, ‘granting’, and ‘riches’ – come thick and fast. The potential for a stable reckoning is there: perhaps the poem can indeed come to terms with a kind of bankruptcy, and perhaps the metaphorical field can help organise the situation as it is apprehended. Instead, the ‘gift’ of line 7, which could have connected with the established scheme, proves too suggestive. It spawns cognates (‘gav’st’, ‘gav’st’, ‘gift’, elegantly completing a chiasmic pattern in lines 9–11), and brilliantly veiled opposites (both ‘mistaking’ and ‘misprision’ connect to ‘take’, the opposite of ‘gift’). The concept of the gift is of course a rich one in philosophy and anthropology.20 Here it operates simply in one sense, as an alternative system of valuation and exchange, when held alongside the commercial ‘bonds’ of the first half of the poem. But it also operates more subtly, as a continuation of that metaphorical sequence that unfolds to complex and counterproductive effect. Like Sonnet 23, with which the chapter began, Sonnet 87 offers an elaborate conceit but allows it to be both productive and unproductive. Negatively put, the poem fails to manage its rhetorical resources in such a way that its point is only partially achieved and delivered. This interpretation of a poem’s ‘point’ being self­consciously banal, there is of course a positive perspective: the richness but also resistance of the metaphors demonstrates their capacity to capture the tractable and intractable in passionate experience. Each poem, and the sequence as a whole, is a process, and readers are engaged by attempts to form thoughts even more than by the results. In the Sonnets, as in his plays’ beautiful yet perplexing speeches, Shakespeare creates a cognitive rhetoric.

Conclusion

A cognitive approach to metaphor and simile proved suggestive, in the preceding chapter, as a way of exploring the ways in which the Sonnets achieved their dazzling insights into emotion partly by means of rhetorical stretches and strains. The experience of rhetoric might seem to be essentially different in a poem, when compared to the dynamic embodiment of the theatre. In fact, the kind of close analysis being explored in this book translated across sufficiently well to provide an answer to its opening question: is cognitive rhetoric, in Shakespeare, a predominantly dramatic phenomenon? Perhaps not. This brief conclusion offers an opportunity to consider another emerging question, which is, whether this should be seen as a predominantly or uniquely Shakespearean phenomenon. In proposing a negative answer – and thus the extendability of the approach – the point will not be to undermine the extraordinariness of Shakespeare’s language. No other writer has been described so persistently in the terms that motivated the study – no other body of criticism so often pronounces itself astonished by the variety and complexity of poetry that, nevertheless, constantly provides vivid characters and compelling stories. The works chosen are here for a reason. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, and Othello, there are special cognitive challenges, and particular configurations of challenging scenarios, extreme feelings, and creative expression. 226

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However, any number of other plays could probably have been brought into view: there are more tortuous confusions in tragedies, resourceful responses in comedies, and aspects of both in histories and romances. Shakespeare consistently takes language and mimesis beyond the simplistic implications of a mirror being held up to nature. The kind of assertions being made about the explosive and sometimes implosive metaphorical intensity of dramatic and poetic language are as natural to Shakespeare as to anyone else, and if anything far more. Nonetheless, there is no reason why other writers might not be amenable to the same way of thinking. Other dramatists, in less frequent but no less pivotal moments of introspection – in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine  – might depict their characters speaking beyond speech. Perhaps the complex similes and metaphors of a poem such as Paradise Lost, with its constant bewildering attempt to see heavenly things in earthly terms, might deliver comparable attempts to construct a new means of apprehending the world, only to see them struggle. Webster, Marlowe, and Milton all (like Shakespeare) wrote in a culture where rhetoric was so much part of education and public life. However, there may actually be no need to think of this as a renaissance phenomenon, since metaphor and simile, the core of this study and of the work in cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics that inspired it, have spread far beyond the bounds of the field of rhetoric. This is, in the end, a book about Shakespeare, and the point here is to be open-minded rather than acquisitive. This book has suggested another way of explaining why Macbeth says pity is like a naked new-born babe, but the possibilities of bringing together rhetoric and cognition in literary criticism have not been exhausted.

Notes

C hapter 1 Introducti on: ‘ pi t y, like a naked new-bo rn bab e ’ 1 All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, general ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2 See W. L. Godshalk, ‘Shakespeare and the Problem of Literary Character’, PSYART, 9 (2005): www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2005_­godshalk01. shtml, a useful survey and consideration of influential scepticism about the concreteness of character. Taking on influential works such as Harry Berger, Jr, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) and Alan Sinfield, ‘When is a Character Not a Character? Desdemona, Olivia, Lady Macbeth, and Subjectivity’, in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1992), Godshalk recognises the strength of these arguments and the risks associated with their counter-intuitive quality. 3 Margreta de Grazia, ‘Hamlet’ Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; repr. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 193. 5 Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus ‘Theory’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 8–11. 6 Edward Burns, Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (London: ­Macmillan, 1990). 7 Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), pp. 3–9. 8 Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, eds., Shakespeare and Character (Basing­ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). One key essay in this volume is

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Michael Bristol, ‘Confusing Shakespeare’s Characters with Real People: Reflections on Reading in Four Questions’, 21–40, an intelligent and straightforward rationalisation of some aspects of the tendency. 9 William Dodd, ‘Character as Dynamic Identity: From Fictional Interaction Script to Performance’, in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Yachnin and Slights, 62–79, quotation from p. 73. 10 Andrew James Hartley, ‘Character, Agency, and the Familiar Actor’, in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Yachnin and Slights, 158–76, and Robert Weimann, ‘The Actor-Character in “Secretly Open” Action: Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage’, in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Yachnin and Slights, 177–93. 11 Leonore Lieblein, ‘Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Early Modern Character’, in Shakespeare and Character, ed. Yachnin and Slights, 117–35, quoting p. 132. 12 Graham Bradshaw, ‘Othello in the Age of Cognitive Science ’, Shakespeare Studies (Shakespeare Society of Japan), 38 (2000), 17–38, quoting p. 33. 13 Lisa J. Moore, ‘Transposing Helena to Form and Dignity’, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland, 1998), 453–71, quoting p. 464. John Gillies, ‘Stanislavski, Othello, and the Motives of Eloquence’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgson and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 267–84, considers another character who is crucial to this book in related terms. The challenge, as Stanislavski saw it, was how to act Othello without ‘a wrong line of passions posing’, p. 276. 14 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 493–4. The speech from Macbeth that is at issue in this chapter is included as an example of a repeated ‘simple ’ psychological effect, where we see the hero’s ‘confusion or prevarication resolving into coherence and decisiveness’ (p. 466). The other examples of this interesting aspect of Macbeth are more persuasive. 15 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane, 2000). Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. 16 Stefan Daniel Keller, The Development of Shakespeare’s Rhetoric: A Study of Nine Plays (Tübingen: Francke, 2009). Heinrich Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004) is another fine study of the discipline in Shakespeare’s time, which illuminatingly sets Shakespearean speeches against the frameworks of rhetorical practice.

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17 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 82. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) is another study interested in how rhetorical tropes (as defined in manuals and plays) can be means of exploring larger structures. Menon sees many of the tropes that will feature in my study  – metaphor, metonymy, catachresis, metalepsis, and also allegory – mapping varieties of sexual desire. 18 Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 19 Brian Cummings, ‘Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Adamson, Alexander, and Ettenhuber, pp. 217–33. I have also benefited greatly from reading John Stubbs’s Ph.D. thesis, ‘The Rhetoric of the Farfetched and its Bearing on Shakespeare ’ (University of Cambridge, 2006). 20 Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric (New Critical Idiom Series) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 176. In Chapter 2 Richards’s insightful summaries of numerous contributions to rhetorical thought will be cited at the appropriate points. 21 In Rhetoric, Richards defines and problematises ‘rhetoricality’, p. 131, and explores the concept particularly in Nietzsche, pp. 132–4. 22 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 119. 23 Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Brooke, p. 118. 24 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. R. A. Foakes, with a theatre commentary by John Russell Brown (New York: Applause Books, 1996), p. 33. 25 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 39. ‘Walker’ is Roy Walker, The Time is Free (London: Andrew Dakers, 1949), and ‘Wilson’ refers to J. Dover Wilson’s edition of Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947). 26 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 132–3. 27 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), pp. 21–46. See also Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, pp. 207–9, on this passage – though it is not one of the places where he turns most explicitly towards cognition. ­Interestingly

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one application of cognitive linguistics to Macbeth finds metaphors working as a sort of substructure not entirely unlike those valued by New Criticism. See Donald C. Freeman, ‘“Catch(ing) the Nearest Way”: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor’, in Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, ed. Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, and Peter Verdonk (London: Routledge, 1999), 96–111. See also Freeman’s ‘“According to My Bond”: King Lear and Re-Cognition’, Language and Literature, 2 (1993), 1–18. As later chapters will show, I attend to the presence of metaphors in their immediate dramatic moments. 28 Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 60; see pp. 53–61 for the whole discussion. 29 Brooke, ed., The Tragedy of Macbeth, p. 8. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. C h ap ter 2 Metaphor and syn ecdo c he in cognition

1 Some of the examples are adapted from Angel Day, The English Secretary [… with A Declaration of such Tropes, Figures, and Schemes…] ­(London: C. Burbie, 1599), pp. 77–9. There are differences in definition and examples in all the manuals. 2 In Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (London: Heinemann, 1926), iii.ix.11–13 simile is straightforwardly described as a kind of metaphor. Steve Nimis, ‘Aristotle’s Analogical Metaphor’, Arethusa, 21 (1988), 215–26, and Michael Israel, Jennifer Riddle Harding, and Vera Tobin, ‘On Simile’, in Literature, Culture, and Mind, ed. Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2004), 123–35, both start from the relationship between simile and metaphor in Aristotle, but develop arguments in very different contexts. 3 See John M. Kennedy and Daniel L. Chiappe, ‘What Makes a Metaphor Stronger than a Simile?’, Metaphor and Symbol, 14 (1999), 63–9; also their ‘Are Metaphors Elliptical Similes?’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29 (2000), 371–98. See also Sergey Zharikov and Degre Gentner, ‘Why Do Metaphors Seem Deeper Than Similes?’, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. W. D. Gray and C. D. Schunn (Fairfax, Va: George Mason University, 2002), 976–81. Tony Veale and Yanfen Hao, ‘Learning to Understand Figurative Language: From Similes to Metaphors to Irony’, in Proceedings of

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the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. D. S. McNamara and J. G. Trafton (Austin, Tex.: Cognitive Science Society, 2007), 683–8, use an electronic corpus to explore the variety of similes. Finally the special issue Metaphor and Beyond, Poetics Today, 20.3 (1999), ed. Monica Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman, includes a number of pertinent articles. The editors’ ‘Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction’, 383–96, is a valuable survey that touches upon numerous key ideas that are tackled or implicit in this chapter (e.g. the erosion of the difference between metaphor and simile, ‘members of the same cognitive category’, 385). 4 For an introduction, see Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice, rev. edn (Hove: Psychology Press, 1997), or Elizabeth Ligon Bjork and Robert A. Bjork, Memory (San Diego and London: Academic Press, 1996). 5 On which, see Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999) and Steven Yantis, ed., Visual Cognition: Key Readings (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000). 6 A recent example is Gerald M. Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). Earlier Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1992) provided some of the impetus behind Ellen Spolsky’s Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), one of the most resourceful literarycritical books inspired by modern cognitive science. 7 Raymond W. Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Gibbs is also the editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Alongside essays (by authors featured elsewhere in these notes) dedicated to extending the reach of metaphor, this collection includes much more sparing accounts of its operations, such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre ­Wilson, ‘A Deflationary Account of Metaphor’, 84–105, which focuses on the requirements of pragmatic understanding rather than the possibilities open to literary audiences and readers. Their interest in the lack of difficulty posed by certain metaphors strikes a chord with the different speeds of understanding and explication that arise, at times, in this book. 8 An accessible version of their approach can be found in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of ­Chicago

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Press, 1980), and George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Gerard Steen, Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach (London and New York: Longman, 1994) builds usefully on Lakoff. Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) traces the development of the field since Metaphors We Live By. 9 See, for example, Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10 William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 193–221. In addition to the sections mentioned next, see also pp. 216–20, on metaphor and metonymy. 11 See Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). See also Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), and Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In his article ‘The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature’, Poetics Today, 23 (2002), 9–20, Turner makes fruitful connections with the classical tradition of rhetoric. Peter Stockwell, ‘The Cognitive Poetics of Literary Resonance ’, Language and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Cognitive Science, 1 (2009), 25–44, demonstrates that such approaches can illuminate literary nuances. 12 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, ‘A Mechanism of Creativity’, Poetics Today, 20 (1999), 397–418, quoting 397. See also Margaret A. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), an intriguing exploration of ‘creative connectionism’ – how the structure of cognitive activity enables new originality. 13 Bruce A. McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008) is a superb introduction to the field. Bruce A. McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006) includes a range of perspectives, while Amy

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Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010) and Rhonda Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (London: Routledge, 2008) further demonstrate the potential of cognitive theory in performance studies. 14 Philip Davis, Shakespeare Thinking (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 30. 15 Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Her essay ‘Macbeth and Binary Logic’, in The Work of Fiction, ed. Ellen Spolsky and Alan Richardson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 107–26, part of an excellent collection, further shows the potential in her approach. See also the Introduction to Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), xiii–xxiv, which uses theories of the organisation of memories in the brain as an analogy for the repeating appearances of certain objects in Shakespeare. Kinney’s Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespeare’s Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) complements Shakespeare’s Webs in its exploration of how unseen objects become parts of webs of thought. 16 Graham Bradshaw, ‘Othello in the Age of Cognitive Science ’, Shakespeare Studies (Shakespeare Society of Japan), 38 (2000), 17–38. 17 Shakespeare Studies Today, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Mark Turner, The Shakespeare International Yearbook 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 18 Of these, perhaps the most thought-provoking for my argument here are Turner’s introduction; Graham Bradshaw, ‘Precious Nonsense and the Conduit Metaphor’, 98–122, which is wonderfully flexible in assessing the contribution cognitive metaphor might make to his interpretation; Donald C. Freeman, ‘Othello and the “Ocular Proof ”’, 56–71, which looks at blended metaphors (e.g. seeing as understanding) in the play; and Mark Turner, ‘The Ghost of Anyone ’s Father’, 72–97, which is about how ghosts are apprehended by networks of conceptual blends. 19 Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 13–46. 20 Thompson and Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor, pp. 89–131.

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21 Groupe μ (J. Dubois, F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Pire, H. Trinon), A General Rhetoric, trans. Paul B. Burrell and Edgar M. ­Slotkin (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 [Originally published as Rhétorique Générale, 1970]), p. 16. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. See Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 123–5, especially on Gérard Genette ’s essay ‘Rhetoric Restrained’ (‘La Rhétorique restreinte’, 1970), which regrets the limitations imposed on rhetoric, e.g. by Groupe μ, when it is reduced to a plan of tropes in which metaphor becomes hegemonic. 22 Metonymy is grouped with metaphor and also explained as the result of ‘co-possession’ and ‘co-inclusion’ – so although metonymy overlaps with synecdoche it might also be explained, like metaphor, as the result of multiple synecdoches (Group μ, General Rhetoric, pp. 120–1). 23 Ann and John Thompson, ‘“To Look So Low as Where They Are”: Hand and Heart Synecdoches in Othello’, Southern Review, 19 (1986), 53–66. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. 24 The reference to John Hoskins means his Directions for Speech and Style (1599), ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935). See pp. 8–12 for a discussion of the key tropes. As I see it, this practical account does not make the speculative moves that are marshalled in the next chapter. 25 F. Elizabeth Hart, ‘Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor’, Mosaic, 29 (1995), 1–23, quoting 21. See also A. S. Byatt’s illuminating essay ‘Feeling Thought: Donne and the Embodied Mind’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah ­Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 247–57, which tackles Donne’s language partly in the light of Lakoff and Johnson. 26 Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of the Political Unconscious’, Representations, 108 (2009), 76–97, esp. 76–7. 27 Michael Billing, ‘Psychology, Rhetoric, and Cognition’, in The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 119–36, is more about social psychology than cognitive science, but it is important for starting to make a case that classical rhetoric has something to offer to the broad field of psychology. See also two online articles by Brent Dean Robbins: ‘The Psychology-­Rhetoric Relationship: A Brief Historical Sketch’,

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Notes to pages 44–47

http://­mythosandlogos.com/psy-rhet.html; and ‘On the History of Rhetoric and Psychology’, Janus Head, 3.1 (2000), www.janushead. org/3-1/brobbins.cfm. 28 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. John Constable (London and New York: Routledge, 2001; first published 1936). 29 Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 31–47, quoting 31. 30 Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 33, 46–7. 31 Wayne C. Booth, ‘Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation’, Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 49–72, quoting 55. 32 In particular, see Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). 33 Bruce Comiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), returns the compliment, identifying the interests of modern rhetoricians in the Sophist tradition. See Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 22–3. 34 The founding article of Robert L. Scott’s is ‘On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic’, Central States Speech Journal, 18 (1967), 9–16. Barry ­Brummett’s ‘A Eulogy for Epistemic Rhetoric’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76 (1990), 69–72, argued that the idea had waned, but in the same issue Richard A. Cherwitz and James W. Hikins, ‘Burying the Undertaker: A Eulogy for the Eulogists of Rhetorical Epistemology’, 73–7, and Thomas B. Farrell, ‘From the Parthenon to the Bassinet: Death and Rebirth along the Epistemic Trail’, 78–84, argued otherwise. ­For a way into Richard McKeon’s approach, see Richard McKeon, Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, ed. Mark Backman (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1987). 35 John Lyne, ‘Rhetorics of Inquiry’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985), 65–73, surveys ways in which rhetoric (rather loosely defined) has been seen as a way of asking and answering questions. Edward L. Murray, ‘The Significance of Rhetoric in Human Science Research’, Journal of Phenomenological Research, 15 (1984), 169–95, sees rhetoric as an alternative to logic, a more communal way of arriving at truth. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980) mounts a defence of rhetoric in philosophy. Taking a different view of the history of rhetoric, Calvin

Notes to pages 47–48

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O. Schrag, ‘Rhetoric Resituated at the End of Philosophy’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 (1985), 164–74, says that rhetoric is still important as part of finding new ways of being philosophical. 36 Paul de Man, ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 13–30, argues that the epistemological limitations that could be identified in figurative language are the same as those proper to all language. Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 140–56 tackles De Man with a particularly interesting discussion of Brian Vickers’s negative response. James L. Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) usefully links up the ‘rhetorical scepticism’ (p. 26) of Sophocles and Euripides with postmodernism and De Man. Janet S. Horne, ‘Changing the Subject: Rorty and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory’, in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 235–50, provides a useful orientation of Rorty’s pragmatics with various strands of rhetoric (e.g. epistemic rhetoric, and ‘rhetoric of inquiry’). 37 See Giambattista Vico, On The Study Methods of our Time (1708), trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Vico opposes the seventeenth-century, Descartes-inspired prejudice against rhetoric and eloquence. For Vico, the goal to express truths in plain language, rather than to capture their complexity in a persuasive form, was a debilitating one. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-­Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. ­Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello ­(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), might also be cited for its openness to the potential in metaphor to initiate and develop meaning at a deep level. 38 See Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), and for a broader account of his work, David Adams, ‘Metaphors for Mankind: The Development of Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991), 152–66. 39 Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007). See also his The Language of Metaphors (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), an introduction that reveals what a linguist makes of Lakoff et al., but focusing largely on typology.

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Notes to pages 49–52

4 0 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), has been extremely influential in promoting the idea that the renaissance episteme – its means of knowing the world – is fundamentally different from ours. A prosaic rejoinder might be that in the wrong hands this leads to unnecessary mystification as well as salutary estrangement. 41 Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), especially pp. 435–79 on the work of Roman Jakobson, Gérard Genette, Paul de Man, and others. 42 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). 43 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Another study that sees rhetoric interacting with less obvious conceptual territory is Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), which links rhetoric and reading to prudence (‘reading … is itself a form of prudence’, p. 182) and scepticism as problems in meaning. 44 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Although it is somewhat tangential to the argument in progress here, there is an excellent chapter on a very significant concern: the Anglicisation (or not) of tropes designed to capture effects in classical languages; see pp. 95–102. James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), is another strong collection of essays illuminating the discipline in context without tackling a cognitive dimension. 45 See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 46 Rhetorical theory may indeed be a place to pursue renaissance versions of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, Chomskyan linguistics, or Jerry Fodor’s views (or Hilary Putnam’s) on the philosophy of language. Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth Century Study of Language (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), demonstrate some of the possibilities.

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However, my sense of the interface between Shakespeare, rhetoric, and cognition is that the profundities of the relationship between language and thought are vaulted over because in his true subjects, within fiction (whatever their capacity to represent things outside the fiction), the distinction does not exist. 47 My approach diverges quickly from Eric P. Levy’s Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), which focuses on the development of concepts through the power of reason, but I do so without denying the presence of an inquiry into reason and reasoning in the play. Hamlet is receptive to, and critical about, thinking of many sorts. 48 James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), p. 13. 49 Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, pp. 231–77 and pp. 370–434, devotes a great deal of time to discussing this soliloquy and its treatment across history. 50 Jonathan Baldo, ‘Ophelia’s Rhetoric, or, Partial to Synecdoche ’, Criticism, 37 (1995), 1–35. See also Katherine O. Acheson, ‘Hamlet, Synecdoche and History: Teaching the Tropes of “New Remembrance”’, College Literature, 31 (2004), 111–34. 51 Bloom’s trope-oriented poetics is illuminated by Peter De Bolla, Harold Bloom: Toward Historical Rhetorics (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), which connects Bloom to the history of rhetoric. 52 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1945), 503–17. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. Burke develops his ideas about synecdoche in The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), where he puts forward the idea that synecdoche is a ‘basic’ figure of speech, which plays a part in many aspects of language and thought. See Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 160–75, on the importance of political difference to Burke ’s scheme. David Tell, ‘Burke ’s Encounter with Ransom: Rhetoric and Epistemology in “Four Master Tropes”’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 34 (2004), 33–54, explores the correspondence between Burke and John Crowe Ransom, who resisted in particular the blurring together of scientific and poetic applications of the tropes. Tell argues (p. 33) that for Burke rhetoric is ‘a core epistemological practice operative in every discovery of “truth”’.

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Notes to pages 64–72

53 Plato, Plato with an English Translation, vol. i: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Harold North Fowler (London: Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 563 (275a). 54 See Plato, Plato with an English Translation, vol. ii: Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 189e. The equation between the terms (dianoeiesthai and logos) is of course deceptively simple. 55 For example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–84, develops Derrida’s central idea of difference / différance of meaning. Thomas S. Frentz, ‘Memory, Myth, and Rhetoric in Plato’s Phaedrus’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 36 (2006), 243–62, interprets the key passages differently, and emphasises self-knowledge as a key focus in Plato  – a point that is suggestive for my argument. See Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 23–31, on Plato. She argues that defenders of rhetoric cast Plato as a crucial opponent by placing too much emphasis on the Gorgias dialogue, while taking less note of Socrates’ softer line on rhetoric in later work. 56 See Charles P. Segal, ‘Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 66 (1962), 99–155. Sophistic rhetoricians are very interested in their effect, and in the tangible moveable thing on which rhetoric works. C h a p t er 3 The drif t towards c o gni ti on in rhetoric al man uals 1 Roland Barthes, ‘The Old Rhetoric’, in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988; L’aventure sémiologique first published Paris: Seuil, 1985), 11–94. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. There is an excellent and appreciative discussion of Barthes’s essay in Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 126–9, and indeed earlier in the book, where she suggests he is ‘premature in announcing the demise of rhetoric’, p. 9. 2 See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920–2), vol. iv, pp. 354–81, xii.i. 3 See Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, i. ii. 3–6, pp. 16–17, on how persuasiveness depends at least partly on the speaker’s character, and on his

Notes to pages 73–86

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 ability to move the emotions of the listener. James J. Murphy, ‘The Metarhetoric of Aristotle, with Some Examples from his On Memory and Recollection’, Rhetoric Review, 21 (2002), 213–28, makes the case that Aristotle probes – and never finishes probing – the nature of rhetoric. 4 Cicero, De Oratore, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1960), iii.vi.21, vol. ii, p. 18 (subsequent quotations from Book iii are also in vol. ii). 5 Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 62–3, considers De Oratore an under-rated work. It does not come across as a particularly effective practical manual, but it portrays rhetoric as a critical, philosophical method in the tradition of Socrates and Plato, and is thus a significant contributor to Richards’s argument. 6 Cicero, De Oratore, iii.liv.207–lv.209, vol. ii, pp. 164–6. 7 [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), iv.xxii.43, p. 337. 8 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, viii.vi.4, vol. iii, p. 302. 9 Erasmus, De Copia, in Literary and Educational Writings 2, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 341. Latin quotations are from Des. Erasmi … De Duplici Copia Verborum et Rerum (London: John Kingston, 1569), here fol. E1r. In one of the best studies of ‘copia’ (in Erasmus and beyond), Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 3–34 on ‘Copia’, and pp. 125–56 on ‘improvisation and inspiration’, captures the dynamic and unpredictable qualities of language as it is conceived and practised in the renaissance. Emphasising the cognitive component of rhetoric may intersect with this, in that it offers a rationale for the ways that something as technical as a rhetorical trope may seem to be so wired into reception and perception. 10 See Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 64–72, on English renaissance manuals. For her, these are style manuals, focused on elocutio without moral or philosophical projects. 11 Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes Very Profytable for the Better Understanding of Good Authors (London, 1550), C3r. 12 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), N1r. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. 13 Sophie Read’s Ph.D. thesis, ‘The Rhetoric of Real Presence in the Seventeenth Century’ (University of Cambridge, 2008), uncovers the ways in which various tropes were used to figure the eucharist in the period.

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Notes to pages 87–96

See also her article ‘Lancelot Andrewes’s Sacramental Wordplay’, Cambridge Quarterly, 36 (2007), 11–31. 14 Mark E. Wildermuth, ‘The Rhetoric of Wilson’s Arte: Reclaiming the Classical Heritage for English Protestants’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 22 (1989), 43–58, argues that Wilson’s aim is to improve preaching; these examples may, then, furnish material as well as embodying a method. 15 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London: Thomas Orwin, 1588), A2v. 16 This has the appearance of a separate work, but it is mentioned on the overall title-page of The English Secretary [… with A Declaration of such Tropes, Figures, and Schemes] (London: C. Burbie, 1599), and the collation follows on from earlier parts of the work. The first edition was The English Secretorie (London: Richard Jones, 1586). 17 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Jackson, 1593). Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. The first edition is The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Jackson, 1577). 18 E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975) is a good introduction to the psychological faculties. 19 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 154. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text. 20 Stephen H. Daniel, ‘Myth and the Grammar of Discovery in Francis Bacon’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 15 (1982), 219–37, makes the ambitious claim that ‘Bacon’s view parallels claims of Derrida and Ricoeur that metaphors construct the text of the world.’ The key reference point in the work of Jacques Derrida is ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, 6 (1974–5), 70–6, and see also Paul Ricoeur, ‘Creativity in Language: Word, Polysemy, Metaphor’, Philosophy Today, 13 (1973), 97–111. 21 See Karl R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric: Or, The Art of Applying Reason to Imagination for the Better Moving of the Will (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), for the key material. Wallace’s Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man: The Faculties of Man’s Soul: Understanding, Reason, Imagination, Memory, Will, and Appetite (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1967), explores the categories between which Bacon sees rhetoric moving  – and usefully thus sets out the vast difference between the early modern conception of the mind, and the one governing modern cognitive science. Lisa

Notes to pages 97–106

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J­ ardine, Francis Bacon and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 216–26, discusses rhetoric as fundamentally ‘insinuative’ – her emphasis is on its work in the world. John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) ranges widely but offers a provocative account of how Bacon saw a wide range of disciplines to be fundamentally concerned with the moving of nature (p. 12). Brian Vickers, ‘The Myth of Bacon’s “Anti-Humanism”’, in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 135–58, counters the notion that Bacon is anti-rhetorical. 22 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 257. C h a p t er 4 A Midsummer Night’ s Dream 1 This ‘metaphor literalised’ is considered in the light of animal metaphors, metamorphosis, and Ovidian intertextuality in Sarah Carter, ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic Registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12.1 (May 2006), http://purl.oclc.org/emls/12–1/cartmnd.htm. 2 Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 52–70, cites this passage as part of a general endorsement of the energy in the mechanicals’ language and thought, which are too often disparaged. She notes that the passage from Corinthians has a current of ‘profound spiritual levelling’. 3 David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 162–6. He seems ready to talk about Theseus’s speech as composed of thoughts, though conceives these as being expressed in speech. 4 R. Allen Shoaf, Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness (Washington: New Academia, 2006), p. 116. 5 See Janis Lull, ‘Textual Theory, Literary Interpretation, and the Last Act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Critical Essays, ed. Kehler, 241–58. See also Peter Holland’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 257–65. 6 Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, Representations, 2 (1983), 61–94.

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Notes to pages 106–130

7 Christy Desmet, ‘Disfiguring Women with Masculine Tropes: A Rhetorical Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Critical Essays, ed. Kehler, 299–329. 8 Jay Halio, ‘Nightingales That Roar: The Language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 137–49. It is also worth mentioning here Mark Stavig, The Forms of Things Unknown: Renaissance Metaphor and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995). Stavig identifies systems of metaphor and sees in them a mappable thematic network. The approach here does not deny the potential in such metaphor-maps, and in asserting the value of the particular, does not always work at the expense of more accretive qualities. See also Anne E. Witte, ‘Bottom’s Tangled Web: Texts and Textiles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 56 (1999), 25–39, on one particular thematic network. 9 Joan Stansbury, ‘Characterization of the Four Young Lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 56–63, finds more ways in which the lovers are not as interchangeable as is sometimes claimed. 10 On which, see Shoaf, Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness, p. 117: ‘the parting of these likes’, the discovery that similitudes can disappear, is prominent in the play. 11 See Edward Burns, ‘“Two of Both Kinds Makes up Four”: The Human and the Mortal in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in ‘Divers Toyes Mengled’: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. Michel Bitot, Roberta ­Mullini, and Peter Happe (Tours: Rabelais, 1996), 299–309, for an illuminating examination of fairy ontology and consciousness as seen in their freedom from human measures and their different attitude towards number. 12 Lina Wilder Perkins, ‘Changeling Bottom: Speech Prefixes, Acting, and Character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare, 4 (2008), 41–58, addresses the adaptability of Bottom. On the one hand, he seems to be resolutely consistent, and yet his speech prefixes (Bottom, ­Pyramus, Clown) shift as his role shifts. The tension between change and persistence unites the character and the actor. 13 Stephen Fender, Shakespeare: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 46.

Notes to pages 136–165

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C hapter 5 Cymbeline 1 Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). In Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 99–115, I argued for the need to confront some broadly conservative tendencies in Shakespeare’s late plays, to some extent opposing Palfrey’s argument that linguistic energy amounts to political activity. However, I also recognise the pertinence of his argument in relation to this chapter. 2 Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous ­(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), especially pp. 139–52 on Cymbeline. 3 Cynthia Lewis, ‘“With Simular Proof Enough”: Modes of Misperception in Cymbeline’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 31 (1991), 343–64. 4 Lisa Hopkins, ‘“It is Place which Lessens and Sets Off ”: Perspective and Representation in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 10 (1999), 253–68. On vision in Shakespearean romance more generally, see Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work, pp. 30–54, and Anne Barton, ‘“Enter Mariners, Wet”: Realism in Shakespeare’s Last Plays’, in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 182–203. C hapter 6 Othello 1 Philip C. McGuire, ‘Othello as an “Assay of Reason”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), 198–209, quoting 209. 2 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 127. There is an interesting turn against Cavell (who grounds his arguments about character in the period’s scepticism) in Martha Ronk, ‘Desdemona’s Self­Presentation’, English Literary Renaissance, 35 (2005), 52–72, which puts it in the context of a crisis in the use of images. Desdemona creates emblems of herself (e.g. the willow) and thereby negates herself – denies she is who she is. She ‘represents her own subjectivity’, 69. 3 Peter Holland, ‘The Resources of Characterization in Othello’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), 119–32, esp. 122–3. He mentions, approvingly, Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Rhetoric of Character Construction: Othello’, Shakespeare Survey, 34 (1981), 61–72.

246

Notes to pages 165–170

4 Erin Minear, ‘Music and the Crisis of Meaning in Othello’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 49 (2009), 355–70, quoting 356. The reference is to a chapter entitled ‘The Othello Music’ in G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 109–35. 5 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 218–49. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 222–54. 7 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 125. 8 Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of ‘Othello’: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 8. 9 Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 10. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. 10 Peter G. Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Aldershot: ­Ashgate, 2009), especially pp. 86–93. On p. 46, n. 91, Platt cites Philip Davis’s Shakespeare Thinking, which offers further encouragement that a cognitive aspect to paradox is within the scope of his book’s implications. For further examples of the dynamic potential of tropes in the play, see Patricia Parker, ‘Shakespeare and Rhetoric: “Dilation” and “Delation” in Othello’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: ­Methuen, 1985), 54–74, and Michele Marrapodi, ‘“Let her Witness It”: The Rhetoric of Desdemona’, in Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi and Giorgio Melchiori (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 220–44. 11 Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (London: Scolar Press, 1982), p. 170. 12 Graham Bradshaw, ‘Othello’s Exsufflations’, in Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham, ed. Andrew Lynch and Anne M. Scott (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 73–89, traces further ramifications of the word, linking it to St Augustine ’s discussion of exorcism and thus to Othello’s experience as a convert to Christianity. The key thing in this essay for the

Notes to pages 173–201

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a­ rgument here is that in Bradshaw’s argument the word and the concepts attached to it operate in an imagined mental space that is not under Othello’s control. 13 On Desdemona’s and other Shakespearean ears, see Heather James, ‘Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), 360–82. 14 Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. Honigmann (London: Thomas Nelson, 2000). 15 It is worth noting Melanie Ross’s treatment of the ‘Pontic sea’ simile in ‘Conceiving Jealousy: Othello’s Imitated Pregnancy’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41 (2005), 1–17. Ross sees its ‘muddy, eddying flow as an effort to capture the immediacy of extempore speech on the page, the yearning to simulate “presence” in writing’ (13). From another direction this gets at the feeling that the simile is more of a deliberate performance than much of the hero’s rhetoric. 16 This is neatly captured in Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘The “O” in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness’, in ‘Othello’: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 347–62. Vitkus concludes that ‘the meaning of “O” is transformed during the course of the play, turned from fullness to emptiness, and as this metamorphosis occurs, Othello himself is reduced to nothing’ (p. 360). C hapter 7 The Sonnets 1 Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997). 2 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 137. The discussion of Sonnet 23 is on pp. 136–40. Vendler, like some other editors, deviates from Q by substituting ‘looks’ for ‘books’ in line 9. The change is unnecessary and its replacement of an interest in reading poems with the mute eyes of the beseeching lover does not seem any more consistent with the rest of the poem. 3 Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘The Matter of Inwardness: Shakespeare ’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999), 305–24, is an excellent introduction. Schoenfeldt is acutely aware of the different languages of inwardness in the poems, and how they are unlike ours.

248

Notes to pages 201–209

4 Bruce R. Smith, ‘How Should One Read a Shakespeare Sonnet?’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 19 (2009), http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-19/ smitsonn.htm. Although the essay’s wide-ranging approach does not often line up with mine, it does take on aspects of cognitive science. 5 Manfred Pfister, ‘“As an Unperfect Actor on the Stage”: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare ’s Sonnets’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. Eva MullerZettelmann and Margrete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 207–28, quoting p. 218. 6 Heather Dubrow, ‘Shakespeare’s Undramatic Monologues: Toward a Reading of the Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981), 55–68, quoting 62. See also Dubrow’s Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 169–257, which is full of insights into the key tropes and structures within the Sonnets. 7 Patrick Cheney, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also his Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and the earlier essay ‘“O, Let My Books Be … Dumb Presagers”: Poetry and Theater in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2002), 222–54. Sonnet 23 is prominent in the essay. 8 Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason, pp. 26–34. 9 Per Aage Brandt, ‘Metaphors and Meaning in Shakespeare ’s Sonnet 73’, in Shakespeare Studies Today, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Mark Turner, Shakespeare International Yearbook 4 (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 123–31, quoting p. 124. 10 Per Aage Brandt, ‘Cognitive Poetics and Imagery’, European Journal of English Studies, 9 (2005), 117–30. 11 Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 12 Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 350, pp. 62–3. 13 Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 355. She cites Ben ­Jonson, Every Man Out of his Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3.3.105–11, for an indication that it seemed over-familiar. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, sees Sonnet 128 as playfully dependent on synecdoche, ‘the trope par excellence of reduction’, p. 544. In the end (the discussion runs pp. 544–7) the synecdochic wit gives way to the ‘totalization’ of the ‘lips’.

Notes to pages 209–225

249

14 Evidently I do not share Stephen Booth’s unsympathetic reading of the poem, in which he says that ‘Shakespeare works so hard for it [sexual innuendo] and is so thwarted by the facts of harpsichord playing that the result is a mere labour of cleverness’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 439. The ‘labour’ seems to me a more substantial thing. 15 See Burrow, ed., The Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 636: ‘The variants … illustrate how 17th-century miscellanists modified details which they found obscure or inapplicable to their own circumstances.’ On the manuscript poem see R. H. A. Robbins, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128’, Notes and Queries, 14 (1967), 137–8. 16 For the Poetics, see Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). The precise translation of the key terms is not a simple matter, but dianoia (intellect) and ethos (moral character) are among the things with which a good representation of a character should be consistent. 17 On which, see Peter Markie, ‘The Cogito and its Importance ’, in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115–39. Again Stephen Booth is notably negative about this poem: ‘a winsome trifle ’ with ‘no aim but to be funny’ (p. 454). His point of view is a useful corrective to excessive philosophical enthusiasm, perhaps, but it does not give the emerging subjective voice much value. 18 A telling recent intervention in debates about the context of the rival poet Sonnets comes in MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Francis Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets’, Review of English Studies, 56 (2005), 224–46. It is not necessary to accept Jackson’s dating of the rival poet Sonnets (1598–1600), or his emphasis on the causal role of Francis Meres’s comparisons between poets in Palladis Tamia (1598), to see the strength of his argument that a number of poets (perhaps Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson), rather than one specific rival, are implied. 19 On ‘’Tis so, ’tis true’, and the voices within the Sonnets, see George T. Wright, ‘The Silent Speech of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. Schiffer, 135–58. 20 On the gift in the Sonnets see Alison V. Scott, ‘Hoarding the Treasure and Squandering the Truth: Giving and Possessing in Shakespeare ’s

250

Note to page 225 Sonnets to the Young Man’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), 315–31. However, the potential in the word – only hinted at here – is best illuminated by Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990), and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

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Stansbury, Joan, ‘Characterization of the Four Young Lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 56–63. Stavig, Mark, The Forms of Things Unknown: Renaissance Metaphor and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995). Thompson, Ann, and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987).   ‘“To Look So Low as Where They Are”: Hand and Heart Synecdoches in Othello’, Southern Review, 19 (1986), 53–66. Trousdale, Marion, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (London: Scolar Press, 1982). Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). Vitkus, Daniel J., ‘The “O” in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness’, in ‘Othello’: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 347–62. Witte, Anne E., ‘Bottom’s Tangled Web: Texts and Textiles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 56 (1999), 25–39. Wright, George T., ‘The Silent Speech of Shakespeare ’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. Schiffer, 135–58. Yachnin, Paul, and Jessica Slights, ed., Shakespeare and Character (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).

Index

Brown, John Russell 21 Brummett, Barry 236n.34 Burke, Kenneth 62–3, 239n.52 Burns, Edward 5, 244n.11 Burrow, Colin 204, 209 Byatt, A. S. 235n.25

Acheson, Katherine O. 62, 239n.50 Adams, David 237n.38 Altman, Joel 165–6 anaphora see under rhetorical tropes antonomasia see under rhetorical tropes aposiopesis see under rhetorical tropes Aristotle 32, 97 Poetics 57, 210 Rhetoric 72, 231n.2 Bacon, Francis 91, 96 The Advancement of Learning 96–8 Baddeley, Alan 232n.4 Baldo, Jonathan 58, 62, 63 Barthes, Roland 70–2 Barton, Anne 245n.4 Berger, Harry, Jr 228n.2 Bible, the 102 Billing, Michael 235n.27 Bjork, Elizabeth Ligon 232n.4 Bjork, Robert A. 232n.4 Blair, Rhonda 234n.13 Bloom, Harold 62, 239n.51 Blumenberg, Hans 47 Boden, Margaret A. 233n.12 Booth, Stephen 249n.14, 249n.17 Booth, Wayne 44, 46 Bradley, A. C. 4 Bradshaw, Graham 6–8, 40, 234n.18, 246n.12 Brandt, Per Aage 202–3 Braunmuller, A. R. 22–3, 25 Briggs, John C. 243n.21 Bristol, Michael 229n.8 Brooke, Nicholas 19, 21, 24–5, 26 Brooks, Cleanth 23–4, 26 Brower, Reuben 166–7

Carter, Sarah 243n.1 catachresis see under rhetorical tropes Cave, Terence 241n.9 Cavell, Stanley 164–5 Cheney, Patrick 202, 248n.7 Cherwitz, Richard A. 236n.34 Chiappe, Daniel L. 231n.3 Cicero 72, 87 Cicero, De Oratore 14, 73–5, 76, 77 Comiskey, Bruce 236n.33 Cook, Amy 234n.13 Crane, Mary Thomas 39, 43, 51 Croft, William 36 Cruse, Alan 36 Cummings, Brian 14 Daniel, Stephen H. 242n.20 Davidson, Donald 44–6 Davis, Natalie Zemon 249n.20 Davis, Philip 37–9, 246n.10 Day, Angel, The English Secretary 51, 88, 231n.1 De Bolla, Peter 239n.51 De Grazia, Margreta 3 De Man, Paul 47, 62, 237n.36, 238n.41 Dennett, Daniel 232n.6 Derrida, Jacques 96, 240n.55, 242n.20 Descartes, René 213–14, 237n.37 Desmet, Christy 5, 106

264

Index Dodd, William 6 Donawerth, Jane 238n.46 Donne, John 235n.25 Drayton, Michael 202 Dubrow, Heather 201–2, 248n.6 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 200, 204, 205, 209, 224 Edelman, Gerald M. 232n.6 Empson, William 165 Erasmus, Desiderius, De Copia 81–2, 220 Euripides 237n.36 Farrell, Thomas B. 236n.34 Fauconnier, Gilles 36–7, 66 Fender, Stephen 130 Fludernik, Monica 232n.3 Foakes, R. A. 21 Foucault, Michel 238n.40 Fraunce, Abraham, The Arcadian Rhetorike 87–8 Freeman, Donald C. 231n.27, 232n.3, 234n.18 Freeman, Margaret H. 232n.3 Frentz, Thomas S. 240n.55 Gardner, Helen 23, 24, 26 Genette, Gérard 235n.21, 238n.41 Gentner, Degre 231n.4 Gibbs, Raymond 34, 37, 232n.7 Gillies, John 229n.13 Goatly, Andrew 48 Godshalk, W. L. 228n.2 Gorgias 166, 236n.33, 240n.55 Grassi, Ernesto 236n.35 Greenblatt, Stephen 165 Groupe μ (J. Dubois, F. Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Pire, H. Trinon) 41–2, 235n.21 Halio, Jay 106 Hao, Yanfen 231n.2 Harding, Jennifer Riddle 231n.3 Hart, F. Elizabeth 42–3 Hartley, Andrew James 6 Harvey, E. Ruth 242n.18 Hikins, James W. 236n.34 Hirsh, James 53–4, 55, 239n.48 Holland, Peter 165, 243n.5

265

Homer, Iliad 194 Honigmann, E. A. 182–3 Hopkins, Lisa 139 Horne, Janet S. 237n.36 Hoskins, John 42 Directions for Speech and Style 235n.24 Israel, Michael 231n.2 Jackson, MacDonald P. 249n.18 Jakobson, Roman 238n.41 James, Heather 247n.13 Jardine, Lisa 242n.21 Johnson, Mark 35–6, 40, 66 Jonson, Ben, Every Man Out of his Humour 248n.13 Kahn, Victoria 238n.43 Kastely, James L. 237n.36 Keller, Stefan Daniel 12 Kennedy, John M. 231n.3 Kermode, Frank 11–13, 101 Kinney, Arthur F. 234n.15 Knight, G. Wilson 165, 246n.4 Kövecses, Zoltán 233n.8, 233n.9 Lakoff, George 35–6, 40, 66, 202 Lanham, Richard 50 Levy, Eric P. 239n.47 Lewis, Cynthia 139 Lieblein, Leonore 6 Lull, Janis 243n.5 Lyne, John 236n.35 Lyne, Raphael 245n.1 Mack, Peter 51, 238n.44 Markie, Peter 249n.17 Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine the Great 227 Marrapodi, Michele 246n.10 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 165 Mauss, Marcel 250n.20 McAlindon, Tom 5 McConachie, Bruce A. 233n.17 McDonald, Russ 13 McGuire, Philip 164 McKeon, Richard 47, 236n.34 Melchiori, Giorgio 245n.3 Menon, Madhavi 230n.17

266 Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia 249n.18 metalepsis see under rhetorical tropes metonymy see under rhetorical tropes Milton, John, Paradise Lost 227 Minear, Erin 165 Montrose, Louis Adrian 106 Moore, Lisa 7–8 Moss, Ann 51 Muir, Kenneth 21–2 Murphy, James J. 238n.44, 240n.3 Murray, Edward L. 236n.35 Nietzsche, Friedrich 230n.21 Nimis, Steve 231n.2 onomatopoeia see under rhetorical tropes Ortony, Andrew 233n.9 Palfrey, Simon 8, 135–6 Palmer, Stephen E. 232n.5 Parker, Patricia 246n.10 Patterson, Annabel 243n.2 Peacham, Henry, The Garden of Eloquence 51, 88–93, 94, 104 Perelman, Chaim 47 Perkins, Lina Wilder 244n.12 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 114, 202 Pfister, Manfred 201 Plato 97, 240n.53 Gorgias 240n.55 Phaedrus 63–6 Theaetetus 64 Platt, Peter 136, 167 Plett, Heinrich 229n.16 Protagoras 166 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie 51, 93–6 Quintilian 72 Institutio Oratoria 77–80, 87 Ransom, John Crowe 239n.52 Read, Sophie 241n.13 Rebhorn, Wayne A. 51 Rhetorica ad Herennium 76–7, 80–1 rhetorical tropes anaphora 69 antonomasia 30 aposiopesis 69

Index catachresis, 30–1, 33, 89, 102, 104, 132, 137, 161, 200, 230n.17 metalepsis 9, 14, 30–2, 33, 84, 98, 104, 155, 161, 220, 230n.17, 230n.19 metaphor passim metonymy 9, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 41, 48, 56, 59, 62, 76–7, 82, 86–7, 89, 95, 98, 104, 148, 230n.17, 233n.10, 235n.22 onomatopoeia 30 simile passim in chapters 4–7 but see especially 2, 11, 17–27, 32–3, 36, 41, 46, 51, 105, 231n.3, 231n.2 synecdoche 13, 30, 31, 33–4, 37, 41–2, 48, 58–63, 69, 75–6, 78–86, 88, 89, 92–6, 104, 126, 134, 137, 205, 235n.22, 239n.50, 248n.13 Richards, I. A. 44, 46 Richards, Jennifer 14–15, 235n.21, 236n.33, 237n.36, 239n.5, 240n.55, 240n.1 Ricoeur, Paul 96, 237n.37, 242n.20 Robbins, Brent Dean 235n.27 Robbins, R. H. A. 249n.15 Ronk, Martha 245n.2 Rorty, Richard 47, 237n.36 Ross, Melanie 247n.15 Schoenfeldt, Michael 247n.3 Schrag, Calvin O. 236n.35 Scott, Alison V. 249n.20 Scott, Robert L. 47, 236n.34 Segal, Charles P. 240n.56 Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream 7, 35, 89, 100–31, 132, 133, 136, 152, 162, 163, 164, 171, 174, 178, 186, 196, 200, 215, 226 Antony and Cleopatra 5 Coriolanus 12 Cymbeline 132–62, 163, 164, 171, 172, 178, 185, 196, 215, 226 Hamlet 3, 6, 12, 40, 52–62, 77, 79, 102, 151, 176, 213 Macbeth 1–2, 3, 7, 8, 14, 16, 18–27, 100, 110, 151, 199, 227 Othello 4, 7, 53, 101, 163–97, 199, 215, 226 Richard II 12–13 Romeo and Juliet 6 Sonnets 15–16, 198–225, 226 The Merchant of Venice 16–18

Index The Rape of Lucrece 149 The Tempest 39 The Winter’s Tale 38 Titus Andronicus 12 Troilus and Cressida 40 Sherry, Richard, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes 82–4 Shoaf, R. Allen 105 simile see under rhetorical tropes Sinfield, Alan 228n.2 Smith, Bruce 201 Sophocles 237n.36 Sperber, Dan 232n.7 Spolsky, Ellen 232n.6 Stansbury, Joan 244n.9 Stavig, Mark 244n.8 Steen, Gerald 233n.8 Stern, Tiffany 8 Stockwell, Peter 233n.11 Stubbs, John 230n.19 synecdoche see under rhetorical tropes Tell, David 239n.52 Thompson, Ann 40–2, 239n.50 Thompson, John 40–2, 239n.50 Tobin, Vera 231n.2 Trousdale, Marion 167

267

Turner, Mark, 35–7, 66, 202, 233n.8, 234n.17 Veale, Tony 231n.3 Vendler, Helen 200–1, 212, 248n.13 Vickers, Brian 50, 237n.36, 238n.4, 243n.21 Vico, Giambattista 47, 237n.37 Virgil, Aeneid 78, 110, 194 Vitkus, Daniel J. 247n.16 Walker, Roy 21–2 Wallace, Karl R. 242n.2 Waswo, Richard 238n.46 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi 227 Weimann, Robert 6 Wildermuth, Mark E. 242n.14 Wilson, Deirdre 232n.7 Wilson, John Dover 22 Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique 51, 84–7 Witte, Anne E. 244n.8 Wright, George T. 249n.19 Yantis, Steven 232n.5 Young, David 105 Zharikov, Sergey 231n.3