ABSTRACT
The use of analogies is characteristic of various sixteenth-century discourses, providing for a proliferation of the conjunctions as and like. The compilation of commonplaces in Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia, for example, in which similes abound, points towards both a long tradition of analogic, pre-Cartesian thought inherent in corporative societies and its unprecedented plenitude and omnipresence in Elizabethan culture. It is as if a given idea, observation, or tenet could not rest convincingly on its own feet, as if solitary signifiers were suspected of being unable properly to carry the weight of the argument or thought without the support of a plethora of analogies that later ages might consider redundant. There seems to have been only a brittle divide between the confident assertion of a universal wholeness into which the individual view fitted neatly and the self-conscious conjuring up of a totality of correspondences without which the case in point might appear untenable. This was especially true at a time when organicist thinking, though rarely openly challenged, was becoming so seriously undermined that analogies, by definition not quite congruent with what they refer to, could not infrequently produce a superfluity of meaning which influenced the original set of ideas or purposefully served as a stratagem in narrative discourse. Francis Meres, while quite innocent of having made use of the latter possibility, in his eagerness to assemble as many quotations as he could, as well as some observations of his own, under one locus communis invited (perhaps unwittingly) a heightened sense of discernment in his readers by offering them some strange, even contradictory examples. Thus, under the heading of Matrimoniall Society(!), the wife's obedience is emphasised by the following analogy:
The Viper being the deadliest of all serpentes, desireth to engender with the Sea Lamprey, & by hissing doth bring ye Lamprey out of the vast ocean, & so the Lamprey engendereth with ye poysonfull viper; so a wife must beare with her husbande, though he be rough and cruell. … Hee doth strike thee, thou must beare him: he is thy husband; he is a drunkard, but he is ioyned by nature unto thee. He is fierce and implacable, but he is thy member, and the most excellent of all thy members. But as the Viper doth vomite out his poyson for the reverence of engendering: so a husband must put awaie all fierceness, roughnes, cruelty, and bitternes towardes his wife for the reverence of union.
(Meres, 1598, 13–23)