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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.
