ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to orient students of Shakespeare who have little or no scholarly expertise in rhetoric and dialectic, while guiding these and other readers toward areas of emerging interest. Longaville, a lord, has fallen in love with the lady-in-waiting Maria and has written her a sonnet that he is now reading aloud. But the sonnet's opening lines are less about love than about persuasive force. In its classical form, rhetoric was a body of theoretical and practical knowledge about speech-writing and speech-making. It flourished in the ancient city-states, most famously Athens and Rome. The ancient art of dialectic was more specialized than that of rhetoric, with more restricted purposes. Whereas an orator could enlist the passions to persuade a general audience, a dialectician sought to convince an intellectual opponent using prescribed forms of reasoning. Forensic, or judicial, rhetoric has attracted increasing interest in recent years as a shaping influence on the Elizabethan drama.
