This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.
Post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream assume that the play celebrates the freeing-up of female sexual desire from neurotic inhibitions or disciplinary norms. But this is incompatible with what we know historically about 16th-century society’s investment in female chastity. This paper addresses the problem of this incompatibility by turning to Shakespeare’s use of forensic or legal rhetoric. In the Roman forensic rhetoric underlying 16th-century poetics, probable arguments of guilt or innocence are ‘invented’ from topics of circumstance, such as the Time, Place or Manner of the deed. The mysterious Night, Wood and Moonlight of Shakespeare’s play can be seen as making sexual crimes (violence, stealth, infidelity) take on the form of probability and fairy agency. The play thus brilliantly represents the stories of Theseus’s notorious rapes, abandonments and perjuries as fearful ‘phantasies’ or imaginings experienced by Hermia and Helena. This explains how the Victorians could interpret the play as a chaste, childlike ballet, while moderns and postmoderns take it to be a play about psychological repressions working against the free play of sexual desire.
This chapter traces the origins of deductive mathematical proof in classical Greece by drawing on the tradition of Jean-Pierre Vernant and G. E. R. Lloyd. It first considers how certain rhetorical concepts, methods, and patterns were instrumental to mathematical proof before discussing various cognitive modes, or stations, in historical development. The streetcar-named-Desire metaphor is used to examine certain cognitive aspects of the narrative, along with the linearity and nonlinearity of the narrative surface. The chapter then explores the role of narrative and poetic storytelling in the process of demonstration in Greek forensic rhetoric, along with the use of chiasmus and ring-composition as cognitive tools. Finally, it shows how both the macrostructure and the microstructure of the first proofs in Greek deductive mathematics were affected by forensic rhetoric, as this was shaped under the influence of the cognitive mechanisms of narrativity and the forms of poetic storytelling.
This article addresses the problem of veracity in ancient historiography. It contests some recent views that the criteria of truth in historical writing were comparable to the standards of forensic rhetoric. Against this I contend that the historians of antiquity did follow their sources with commendable fi delity, superimposing a layer of comment but not adding independent material. To illustrate the point I examine the techniques of the Alexander historian, Q. Curtius Rufus, comparing his treatment of events with a range of other sources that reflect the same tradition. The results can be paralleled in early modern historiography, in the dispute between J. G. Droysen and K. W. Krüüger on the character of Callisthenes of Olynthus. Both operate with the same material, but give it different ““spins”” according to their political perspectives. There is error and hyperbole, but no deliberate fiction.
In this chapter, Blanshard examines one of the peculiarities of deliberative practice in the Athenian democratic governmental system, namely the tendency for decision-making to occur within the supportive presence of a network of peers. No major life decision, whether it related to the marriage of children, the sale of property, or the arrangements of funerals, was taken without wide consultation among friends and family. This means that when individuals were forced into situations of decision-making without the presence of their support networks, those decisions became, at the least, unsettling and potentially traumatic. One of the few occasions where we find such isolated decision-making is the Athenian lawcourt. The process of jury-sortition, combined with randomized seating allocation within the lawcourt, meant that the Athenian juror when he sat to deliberate was uniquely alone. Analysis of forensic rhetoric reveals how orators played up this sense of isolation and confusion.
AbstractThis essay challenges the received idea that Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, the eighth-century Arabic translator of the Kalīla-Dimna fables, added the Trial of Dimna, the sequel to the first story of the Lion and the Bull, in order to let morality win in the end. The analysis of this sequel's synopsis shows the absence of morality and how the ruler uses the judicial to manipulate public opinion and to redress his politically-damaged image. The essay also shows that the sequel's main purpose and use is to give a practical demonstration of the art of forensic rhetoric, casting Dimna as a pre-eminent and redoubtable sophist. TheAnvār-i Suhaylīversion, the fifteenth-century Persian rewriting by Vā’iz Kāshifī, on which the essay is based, also engages with the philosophical conundrum oftasdīq, which seems absent in the Arabic versions of the text.
This chapter explores how the rhetoric of the Roman forum shaped humanist education in sixteenth-century England as demonstrated in the textbooks of Erasmus, Leonard Cox, Richard Rainolde, John Brinsley, and others. Through the influence of a small number of Roman rhetorical manuals widely read by these schoolmasters and their students, including the Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De inventione, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, legal principles and procedures, such as status, circumstances, artificial and inartificial proofs, and topical argumentation, impact not only the full range of writing exercises derived from the progymnasmata, from the preliminary theme and epistle to the advanced declamation, but reading practices as well.
Written at the time of the accession of a Scots king to the English throne, Henry V has been called a ‘succession play’. Yet although critics have discussed the play’s representation of Ireland and Wales, its representation of Scotland goes unmentioned. This chapter argues that Henry V’s chronicle sources and dramatic precursors are profoundly engaged with England’s disputed claim to legal overlordship of Scotland, revived by England’s invasion of Scotland in the 1540s and thereafter by various legal treatises on the Stewart succession. Shakespeare’s success in effacing the Scottish dimensions of his historical sources is a triumph of the dramatic use of forensic rhetoric to shift legal questions of national sovereignty into apparently universal questions of inwardness, conscience, and ‘character’.
The Shakespearean unscene: Sexual phantasies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream