ABSTRACT
Rhetoric has long failed to receive the critical attention it justly deserves. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. One of them is that the knowledge of Elizabethan rhetoric was comparatively poor. Though its major representative, Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1553), was made accessible again as early as 1909 in G. M. Mair's thorough, though by present-day standards not entirely satisfactory edition, this was to remain an isolated landmark for several decades. 1 A lack of source-texts did not, however, prove to be the only reason for the lasting disinterest in rhetoric. Of equal, if not greater, importance were the contempt and disrepute into which this discipline had fallen under the sway of idealistic philosophy. Ever since Plato's criticism of sophistic rhetoric, it was reputed to be a technique of illusion and delusion, a notion that has been transmitted by Kant, Hegel, and their followers up to the present time. But not enough that this technique (techne. ars) was discredited as such; it was also reduced, at first to stylistics and then to the so-called rhetorical figures, the totality of which was regarded as a rather random compilation. Thus in the first half of the 20th century, Shakespeare criticism still tended to be philosophically and psychologically biased, and it generally excluded rhetorical or stylistic perspectives and categories. Even publications on the history of Renaissance criticism like those by Joel E. Spingarn (1899), Charles Sears Baldwin (1939), or J. W. H. Atkins (1947) 2 did not restore rhetoric to its ancient rights but, rather, referred to it incidentally as an antecedent to poetics.
