Ritualizing the word: Renaissance dramatizations of eloquence

This study has grown out of a fascination with the power that early modern England invests in language. To understand the nature of this power and the consequences of this investment, the study maps the transformation of the word "eloquence" from a term which describes language-use into an form of social ritual that helps to control identity, social status, and institutional power in Renaissance England. The analysis of rhetorical handbooks written by Thomas Wilson, Henry Peacham and George Puttenham, investigates how particular stories about eloquence display a tension between the power of mastering rhetoric and the uncontainable power of the word. These stories are reproduced and reconfigured in connection with ritualized behavior in selected tragedies of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Ford. In identifying eloquence as a participant in social ritual, this study considers how each playwright's theory of tragedy and tragic identity hinges on moments when the status of language seems radically unstable. In order to understand the scope of this issue, the study focuses more specifically on how dramatizations of eloquence function as a form of social control in the realm of legal institutions and legal theory, in representations of gender and ornament theory, and in more conventional theatrical space. An analysis of eloquence as drama, as story, and as ritual reveals conflicting investments in the manipulation of language as a means to authenticate experience and speaks to the varied and sometimes opposed theories of language in twentieth century intellectual thought as well.