ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the revival of rhetoric in early modernity, both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The first section explores the fate of the ‘art’ of rhetoric as it is represented in the handbook tradition. It considers, first, the narrowing and adaptation of the Roman art in Renaissance manuals and, second, the increasing resistance to the theorization of ‘good’ speech and writing in the eighteenth century which led to the valorization of ‘common sense’ as the only standard the writer should follow. However, in the Renaissance rhetoric was not only an art; it was also a training programme, for boys at least, one which involved the practice of arguing on different sides. In the second section, I consider how this classroom practice is understood by literary critics to inform the structuring of Shakespeare’s drama; I also consider whether this is a practice that can be seen to extend beyond the Renaissance public theatre, to literary writings which explore an argument, or take part in a debate. Rhetorical training is a masculine privilege, yet, this does not mean that its techniques and effects are practised only by those who attended grammar school and university. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is not the product of an intense rhetorical training
in the way that Shakespeare’s plays are, but her reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is drawn upon in this novel, undoubtedly informs its structure, as well as its preoccupation with assessing the eloquence of contrasted characters: Dr Frankenstein and his monstrous Creature. In the final section of this chapter we return to the problem of rhetoric conceived too narrowly as an art to explore how its rejection in post-Romantic writing shapes an important stage in literary history, mainly the privileging of the poetic imagination unshackled from rhetorical rules. And yet the advice that accompanies this, as I will argue, also makes ‘rhetorical’ good sense.
