ABSTRACT
Strangeness is at the heart of the crossover between the theatre’s material and poetic registers. This chapter accordingly builds on the religious inflections of strange speech in discussing the term’s relevance to rhetorical construction. Both Cymbeline and The White Devil make strangeness central to the relationship between visual and verbal displays in the playhouse, and “strangeness” is the site at which the different media of performance combine and overlap. Exploring the uses of the term “strange” in contemporary rhetorical manuals and poetic style guides, the chapter lays out the notion of “rhetorical strangeness”: the contortion, confusion, and suspension of certainty in the language and syntax. This feature of the plays prompts characters to question the persuasive force of stylised language, while suggesting that its strange powers are paradoxically both desirable and undesirable.
