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RHETORICAL AND POETICAL CONVENTIONS
it is guite probable that a work rendering Latin and Greek rhetorical terms
digestible even for non-highly educated readers would have been a desirable
reading for Shakespeare.
In addition to the arguments presented above, there is one more practical
reason why this chapter focuses on Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie.
I assume that a close reading of the Shakespearean text and the study of
the application of rhetorical patterns would reinforce the idea that he knew
Puttenham’s work. Indeed, I propose that the influence of The Arte of English
Poesie on King Lear is clearly perceivable in the case of the 1608 Quarto edition
in the presence of the non-conventional examples described in the handbook
and occasionally even in the similarities between the wordings used by the
two authors. In order to argue in support of this hypothesis, in this chapter,
I analyze two particular “trial scenes” of decent courtly speech and behavior,
the love contest and the mock trial of Lear’s daughters, as they appear in the
1608 Quarto.
DECENCY OF PUBLIC SPEECH: THE LOVE CONTEST SCENE
In a 1999 article, William Dodd explains at length the relevance of the
love contest scene to the public discourses of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries by focusing on “some of the tensions that existed
between personal and political in the governmental theory and practice of
Elizabeth and James.”*!* As I intend to use his article as a background to my
findings, it seems useful to summarize his main points before focusing on the
operation of rhetorical figures in the text of Shakespeare’s play. Dodd claims
that the public image of Queen Elizabeth was based on familiar roles, such
as the mother of the Church, wife to the country, and lover of courtiers, all
of which involved emotional engagements in the field of politics and often
resulted in public confessions of love, which thus became “typical of the
queen’s manipulative technique.”””? Comparably, James I also discussed the
transmission of royal power in familiar terms in his writings, such as the
Basilikon Doron, and he established himself predominantly as a father-figure
even when conferring on issues of governance. According to Dodd, what makes
both monarchs similar as far as their attitudes towards political power were
concerned is “the tendency to divorce the symbolic or theoretical dimension
of royalty from the material realities of rule.”””°
218 William Dodd: Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1?, Shakespeare
Quarterly 50 (1999), 481.
29 Thid., 483.
220 Thid., 484.