Oldal 61 [61]
RHETORICAL AND POETICAL CONVENTIONS
One of the most outstanding characteristics of these lines is that there is a
distinctive tension between the content and form of the utterance, since the
repeated phrase "I loue you" frames the seven-line-long passage describing
the inexpressibility of love, although every line can be read as an attempt to
define its meaning. The emphatic presence of the rhetorical figures highlighted
above signals that, in the first act, the characters of King Lear establish a special
manner of speech that Craig Kallendorf characterizes as “opaque” language,
which in his wording generates passages to be “looked at not through.”**! His
usage of this term means that the characters’ diction draws attention to its
own rhetorical construction, instead of focusing on the transparency of the
referential function of language. To return to the description of the rhetorical
complexity of Gonorill’s passage cited above, it is worth recalling that the third
book of Puttenham’s work divides tropes into the three distinct categories of
auricular, sensible, and sententious figures:
And that first sort of figures doth serue th’eare onely and may be therefore called
Auricular: your second serues the conceit onely and not th’eare, and may be called
sensable, not sensible nor yet sententious: your third sort serues as well th’eare as
the conceit and may be called sententious figures, because not only they properly
apperteine to full sentences, for bewtifying them with a currant & pleasant
numerositie, but also giuing them efficacie, and enlarging the whole matter besides
with copious amplifications.”
Of these three categories, Gonorill’s lines provide the most examples of aurical
figures. First, due to its syntactical position, the phrase “I loue you” can be
described in Puttenham’s terminology both as a prozeugma and a hypozeugma:
But if it be to mo clauses then one, that some such word be supplied to perfit the
congruitie or sence of them all, it is by the figure [Zeugma] we call him the [single
supplie] because by one word we serue many clauses of one congruitie [...] if it be
placed in the forefront of all the seuerall clauses whome he is to serue as acommon
seruitour, then is he called by the Greeks Prozeugma, by vs the Ringleader [...] But if
such supplie be placed after all the clauses, and not before nor in the middle, then
is he called by the Greeks Hypozeugma, and by vs the [Rerewarder].?*
Second, as the red fonts show, the second, third, fourth, and fifth lines start
with an asyndeton: “Ye haue another sort of speach in a maner defectiue
because it wants good band or coupling, and is the figure [Asyndeton] we call
231 Kallendorf: King Lear, 106.
232 Puttenham: The Arte, 133.
233 Ibid., 136-137.