ABSTRACT
Written by and for a privileged group of educated readers, Elizabethan poesy was allied to the rhetorical arts and claimed as the inheritor of the Ciceronian plea that rhetoric should teach, delight and move. 1 This endeavour was to be accomplished through the skilful use of figures and tropes, rhetorical flourishes which had the potential to restore eloquence to a post-lapsarian world mired in a linguistic muddle of ‘galimaufrey and hodgepodge’. 2 Poesy can therefore be understood as setting itself up in opposition to forms of cultural production which lack a rhetorical, Latinate foundation. As Roger Chartier has noted, however, when we go looking for well-defined boundaries between cultural forms, those ‘cultural cleavages’ which would allow us to differentiate between social groups, we instead find evidence of ‘fluid circulation … blurred distinctions’. 3
