Page 53 [53]
OCR
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. +5] +
