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RHETORICAL AND POETICAL CONVENTIONS:
SHAKESPEARES ARTE OF POESY IN THE LOVE
CONTEST AND THE MOCK TRIAL SCENES
—os —
This chapter studies the microrextual layers of the 1608 Quarto in order
to gain further insights into Shakespeare’s poetic practice as a playwright.
In it, Iconsider how the knowledge twenty-first century readers gain from
Early Modern books on rhetorical and poetical conventions could shape our
understandings of Shakespeare’s compositional skills and methods. Ihe study
of Renaissance formal rhetoric and its influence on the contemporaneous
practice of drama writing began to attract the attention of literary historians
only at the end of the twentieth century. One of the possible reasons for this
lack of scholarly interest, as Heinrich F. Plett, mentioned in passing in the
introduction, explains, is the fact that the primary texts of sixteenth-century
books on rhetoric were republished and thus made accessible only at the
beginning of the twentieth century.” To my knowledge, among the handbooks
that scholars on Shakepeare have studied, there is one particular handbook,
The Arte of English Poesie, that offers an excellent overview of English courtly
rhetoric, but it has not received as much academic attention as it would rightly
deserve.
Although it was published anonymously by Richard Field in 1589, since the
publication of the critical edition of this text in 1936, Puttenham’s authorship
has rarely been questioned.*™ As the dedication reports, it was written for the
entertainment of the members of the royal court: “[...] it was by the Authour
intended to our Soueraigne Lady, the Queene, and for her recreation and
202 Heinrich F. Plett gives a comprehensive summary of the influence of the scholarly rediscovery
of Renaissance rhetoric on twentieth-century Shakespeare philology in his essay Shakespeare
and the Ars Rhetorica, published in his book: Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture, Berlin—New
York, Walter de Gruyter, 2004, 415-434.
203 For a detailed discussion of the question, see B. M. Ward: The Authorship of the Arte of English
Poesie: a suggestion, The Review of English Studies 1:3 (1925), 284—308; and also Gladys Doidge
Willcock — Alice Walker: Introduction, in George Puttenham: The Arte of English Poesie, eds.
Gladys Doidge Willcock — Alice Walker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936, ix—cx.
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