ABSTRACT
In addition to the idea of “the public” understood as the superset of all individuals in a given society, Michael Warner has suggested that we should also consider a more rhetorical notion of publics.1 Publics in this rhetorically informed sense are discursively generated collectives that emerge as the result of being hailed or summoned into existence by the discourses that address them.2 Observing that such utterances provisionally constitute their audiences in the very act of apostrophizing them, Warner sees this style of public making as intrinsically poetic, a “world-making” enterprise that is essentially “subjunctive-creative” in that the addressee of such utterances is, while remaining indeterminate and open, nevertheless provisionally constituted within the rhetoric of the discourse itself.3 In the present chapter I consider the writings of Pietro Aretino and Thomas Nashe in light of Warner’s work on publics. I wish to call attention to how the poetic, rhetorically generative dimension of this type of public making is readily observable in the writings of Aretino and Nashe, in the specifi c styles of address their discourses typically employ, and in the modes of audience engagement they seek to construct and maintain. The skill with which Aretino and Nashe (called the “true English Aretine” by his contemporary Thomas Lodge)4 managed to project images of themselves as professional writers has been the subject of enduring critical attention, but what interests me here is how their works simultaneously project certain readerships, conjuring up imagined publics that are to a certain extent realized by virtue of the very act of their address.
