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My chosen passage for emphasis in tomorrow’s class:

4.1.17–35

Princess

Nay, never paint me now.

Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow.

Here, good my glass, take this for telling true;

Fair payment for foul words is more than due.

Forester

Nothing but fair is that which you inherit.

Princess

See, see, my beauty will be saved by merit!

O heresy in fair, fit for these days!

A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.

But come, the bow. Now mercy goes to kill,

And shooting well is then accounted ill.

Thus will I save my credit in the shoot:

Not wounding, pity would not let me do’t;

If wounding, then it was to show my skill,

That more for praise than purpose meant to kill.

And, out of question, so it is sometimes,

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,

When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,

We bend to that the working of the heart;

As I for praise alone now seek to spill

The poor deer’s blood, that my heart means no ill.

What I like most about this passage is the density of thought in the Princess’s language. At first she ensnares the forester in a rhetorical trap by making him seem to deny that she is fair, then catching him out as if he were a flatterer. She posits a “heresy” in the word fair – the heresy being that “beauty,” like beatitude, can be apparently purchased through action and even direct payment. From this paradox of fair and foul, she proceeds to another in which mercy goes forth to kill. This paradox engenders yet another, expressed in economic terms of “account” and “credit”: if she shoots well, it might count against her. We return next to praise, the theme with which she began. She now notes that praise can motivate men and women to do evil. Having questioned first the ability of praise to render the foul fair, and now she seems to posit the ability of praise, or love thereof, to render the fair foul.

But this all smacks of interpretation on a higher level. To get back to our main task, I’m interested in how Shakespeare gets inside of language here. Last week I talked in class about his tendency to pull apart figures of speech, but perhaps another way Shakespeare creates the impression of thinking through language is when his characters create logical paradoxes through the manipulation of words, even stringing several of them together, as above. I am struck by how often in Shakespeare language is not just the medium of expression of thought, but very explicitly is the medium of thought itself. In other words, the Princess’s thoughts seem to proceed from language as much as her language seems to proceed from thought. I hope that makes some sense.

More prosaically, I’m a bit confused about how exactly to understand “for praise, an outward part, / we bend to that the working of the heart.” Is the “outward part” an appositive to “praise,” or is it the object of “bend”? She states a few lines later that her “heart means no ill” in the hunting – but if we bend to the working of the heart, does this not mean that we yield to it? Is it that the heart, while meaning no ill, desires praise, and that it is this positive desire, rather than a negative feeling of ill, that we respond to? What is the heart really doing here?

See you all soon.

Will Dingee

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, I feel that Biron’s profession of love to Rosaline in Act 5, Scene 2 is worth emphasizing for our upcoming discussion of rhetoric:

Biron:

“O, never will I trust to speeches penned,
Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,
Nor never come in visor to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song.
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical — these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them, and I here protest
By this white glove — how white the hand, God knows —
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.
And to begin, wench, so God help me, law!
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.”

Rosaline:

“Sans ‘sans’, I pray you.” (5.2.402-416)

To get the ball rolling, there are a few aspects of this exchange that I think should be considered in the context of the rhetoric that we have been reading this week:

• Biron shifts from a high, relatively Latinate register toward the beginning of this passage, evident in words such as “affectation” and “ostentation,” to a lower rhetorical style, evidenced by “in russet yeas and honest kersey noes.” This somewhat demonstrates the spectrum of high, mean, and base rhetorical styles put forth by Puttenham, Wilson, and by numerous authors referenced in the chapter we read this week in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Granted, Biron’s high (and low!) rhetoric is empty and shallow, which Rosaline points out moments before, “But that you take what doth to you belong, / It were a fault to snatch words from my tongue” (5.2.381-382), as well as above with her exasperated “sans ‘sans’, I pray you.” What Puttenham warns about borrowed language, that “generally the high style is disgraced and made foolish and ridiculous by all words affected, counterfeit, and puffed up” (p237), seems to appear in Biron’s speech.
  • Moreover, Biron’s claim of parasitic “maggot ostentation” when referring to his previous rhetoric, especially when considered in the context of theft, may shed some light on a potentially troublesome and fraught relationship between languages, not only between but also within rhetorical styles. For example, Puttenham writes of “usurped Latin and French words” (Arte p231, see 36n). Do rhetorical choices illuminate persons’ understandings of how their self- and national-identity exists relative to their surrounding listeners?
• Biron’s presumably lower rhetorical style, which opens with “My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw,” is clear and monosyllabic, but can be viewed as rhetorically problematic all the same. For example:
  • His usage of French socially elevates his speech (see line 5.2.416n in Love’s Labour’s Lost OUP) from what Wilson would consider plain to puffed up “ouersea language.” Biron thus seemingly undermines his own rhetorical project of lowering his register from “figures pedantical” to “russet yeas and honest kersey noes.”
  • Yet, Rosaline’s response, “sans ‘sans’, I pray you,” reiterates Biron’s rhetoric for the very purpose of putting a stop to it, thereby legitimizing the utility of using “sans” to mean “without” here. Where, then, does Biron’s French rhetorically leave him relative to Rosaline’s dry humor?

I will provide a bit more detail on Wednesday to set up my (hopefully) more in-depth discussion questions, which will appear on a handout that I will bring to class. On said handout, I will also be bringing in some outside material and some etymological findings that may be fun to consider in light of the above.