Milan Dragicevich was in town recently and I got to attend one of the workshops based on his new book, The Persuasive Actor: Rhetorical Power on the Contemporary Stage. So brilliant! Fifteen years ago, Milan was the one who first got me hooked on rhetoric and fascinated by the way Shakespeare and tens of thousands of his peers practiced it.
Rhetoric 
had already been at the core of education for two thousand years when Will Shakespeare was in school. It was one of the three pillars of the Trivium, which defined the first stages of education for every child, in schools called “trivial” schools—essentially what we now call elementary schools. The Trivium was grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Grammar (reading and writing) was the most basic, of course, and in the Middle Ages logic was elevated slightly above rhetoric because of the tortured attempts to make biblical teachings conform to the classical philosophers, mostly Plato and Aristotle.
But by the time Shakespeare went to school, rhetoric was ascendant. This is because of the impact of the curriculum designed by Erasmus. In its most simple terms, logic is IDEAS and rhetoric is the PACKAGING of ideas. Rhetoric is persuasion. Rhetoric is salesmanship. People can be persuaded, for better of for worse, of both fine ideas or foolish ones: wise and beneficial ideas or deadly ones. Erasmus knew that people tend to “buy” ideas that are well packaged, and he was intent on “selling” the classics to all educated persons. He truly believed that all knowledge and all wisdom could be found in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
There are hundreds of rhetorical figures (also called devices, schemes, or tropes) that date back to the 5th century BC and the Sophists in Greece. Shakespeare learned most of his from Grammaticae artis institution by the German humanist, Johannes Susenbrotus, published in 1539. In his Epitome troporum Susenbrotus defines one hundred and thirty-two tropes and figures and gives examples of their use in ancient and contemporary literature. A few of them may be at least vaguely familiar to us today, but many won’t even pass spell check. How about apophasis, or zeugma, ekphrasia, anthypophora, anaphora, epistrophe, epanalepsis, anthimeria, chiasmus, epizeuxis, catachresis, anadiplosis, or hendiadys?
I’ve either peaked your interest or lost you. Either way, I’ve only scratched the surface. And, no, I can’t define them all myself, but I guarantee Shakespeare could. In my book, Good Behavior and Audacity, the chapter on rhetoric is called “Per quam figuram,” because that was the daily question a headmaster asked his students when they were speaking or writing: “What figure are you using?” And you can be sure they had to give a correct answer or answer for it!
The more you learn about them the more you understand the mystifying brilliance of the poetry of Shakespeare and dozens of his peers.
I have a pretty good chapter explaining the use, history, practice, and teaching of rhetoric, but I’m having to revise it (yet again!) after Milan’s workshop. If you’re interested, his book is a great place to start!
born, Erasmus was writing clever little plays in Latin, called colloquies, to be performed by schoolboys like Shakespeare to de Pizan1practice Latin conversation; and those playlets were full of whip-smart women sparring with their rather dull male counterparts. There’s Maria, who trades witty barbs with her suitor, Pamphilus, in Proci et puellae (lover and lass), a colloquy that sounds a whole lot like Beatrice and Benedict, Rosalyn and Orlando, Tatania and Oberon, or Viola and Orsino. There’s Xanthippe, the shrew in Uxor (marriage) who must absolutely have been the inspiration for Kate. There’s Lucretia in Adolescentis et scorti (the teenager and the whore) from whom Falstaff gets some of his best lines. There’s the sassy, ugly cook, Margaret, in Convivium poeticum (the poetic feast), who mouths off at all her pretentious poetical guests when they question her choice of lettuce in their salad and predates any one of a number of Shakespeare’s opinionated servants, female and male. There’s the brilliantly educated Magdalia in Abbatis et eruditae (the abbot and the learned woman), modeled on Sir Thomas More’s daughter Meg, who can’t keep from laughing at her foil, an ignorant and venal abbot. Finally there is Fabulla, in Puerpera (the new mother) who argues the artist Eutrapelus to the wall when he infers that she is lucky to have a baby son rather than a daughter. 
He finally says of her, “I see that you are bent on single combat. For that reason, I think I’d better yield for the present … for where wars are fought with words, not even seven men are a match for one woman.” It’s a quote I’ve thought of often several times watching the recent democratic candidates in their debates!
much about the history of medieval and early Renaissance feminism. Erasmus and Shakespeare surely were not the only ones who celebrated smart women, but there are not many representative models of such women in the available literature of the time. My sister-in-law turned me on to Christine de Pizan, who, one hundred years before Erasmus, earned her living as a poet, biographer of a king, and writer of The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies.