Gendered rhetoric in Renaissance drama: Female agency and the problems of persuasion

One might assume that rhetorical theory---a discipline invested in taxonomizing, categorizing and defining the best means to produce eloquence---would have a clear and consistent body of knowledge from which to master the art of persuasion. This is not the case; far from being clear and consistent, rhetorical theory is rife with contestable issues, and has been throughout its history. The conflicts that plague rhetoric emerge at the faultlines of what counts as rhetoric and who figures in its production. Gendered Rhetoric in Renaissance Drama: Female Agency and the Problems of Persuasion is simultaneously a critique of the discrete field of rhetoric as well as a reading of the cultural repercussions of these fissures in rhetoric in the English Renaissance. It specifically interrogates the dialogue between rhetoric and representation--the ways that dramatists, themselves trained in the rhetorical tradition, explore the conflicts within rhetoric through representations of persuasive female characters. Renaissance dramatists often expose the fissures in rhetorical theory through female rhetors, enabling a reading of social agency for female characters. Indeed, problems of persuasion emerge as the very conditions for creating female agency in a range of early modern plays, such as: kairotic improvisation in the anonymously written The Arden of Faversham, the use of ornament in William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the evocation of pathos in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and rhetoric's civilizing function in Ben Jonson's The Magnetic Lady. This study contributes to the revision of the history of rhetoric, the reading of the representation of that history through literature, and the examination of female agency as it is imagined and disseminated as rhetorical on the early modern stage.