ABSTRACT
For two millennia before Shakespeare’s time, rhetoric had been one of seven pillars of education: the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). “Per quam figuram?” What figure are you using? was the frequent question asked by instructors in Elizabethan Latin grammar schools. Which of Susenbrotus’ one hundred thirty-two rhetorical schemes, tropes, devices, and figures are you using?
In the Middle Ages, logic was valued over rhetoric as philosophers used tortured reasoning to align Christianity with Aristotle and the ancients. Erasmus’ influence referred education back to the “pure stream” of classical literature, artfully presented through rhetoric. Logic is the ideas. Rhetoric is the packaging, salesmanship, and persuasive presentation of the ideas. Rhetoric is fraught with danger because it can persuade evil as well as good, but, as we know, very few ideas get purchased without good salesmanship.
This chapter delves a bit into some of the fun of figuring out which rhetorical figures Shakespeare was using in any of his thousands of lines of poetry, and it looks at the centuries-long connection among poets, lawyers, and actors—all accomplished persuaders and deceivers. It also defines the figures in Quintilian’s chapter on physical rhetoric, or “the bodily incarnation of the inward mind”: actio—acting.
