But such arguments rely on what sixteenth-century writers and rhetoricians would have recognized as a partial version of the classical account of eloquence, which, as Derek Attridge points out in his seminal book on literature as “peculiar language,” “seems to be based on two mutually inconsistent demands—that the language of literature be recognizably different from the language we encounter in other contexts, and that it be recognizably the same.”20 Indeed, from its inception within the rhetorical theory of ancient Greece, eloquence has had as much to do with estrangement as with intimacy and familiarity. At the outset of his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle defines eloquence as the realization of common bonds in and through language: an orator succeeds in both his particular task and his larger social function by establishing “what seems true to people of a certain sort,” wooing men to consensus by accommodating his argument to “instances near their experience.”21 But when it comes to style, he acknowledges, the reverse holds true: the skilled speaker should make his “language unfamiliar, for people are admirers of what is far off, and what is marvelous is sweet.”22 In this regard, eloquence belongs not only to the poet-legislator who founds the rhetorical “commonplace” but also—even especially—to the outsider whose marginal glamour disturbs and dazzles that community.
Following Aristotle, rhetoricians parsed style ever more finely in an effort to adjudicate between the rival virtues of accessibility and wonder: Dionysius of Helicarnassus contrasted Attic simplicity to Asiatic flamboyance; Cicero’s triad of high, middle, and low styles assigned plainness to certain subjects and occasions and extravagance to others; Hermogenes’s seven-part taxonomy of stylistic “ideas” ranged from the fundamental virtues of clarity and distinctness to the more striking effects of dignity, solemnity, and brilliance. Such rubrics did not resolve the tension between likeness and difference within Aristotle’s account, however; on the contrary, they codified and elaborated it, enshrining strangeness as both the antithesis and the epitome of style.23
In other words, sixteenth-century English writers inherited a rhetorical culture that was doubly far-fetched: literally far-fetched in that it entailed a deepening investment in remote antiquity; but also far-fetched as a matter of principle in that it had long regarded eloquence as no one’s native speech. As Puttenham acknowledges in book 3 of his Arte, “there is yet requisite to the perfection of this arte, another maner of exornation, which resteth in the fashioning of our makers language and stile, to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mynde as the eare of the hearers with a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, disguising it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed.”24 Rhetoric and poetry might thus beautify and enrich English, conferring upon it the allurements of novelty and strangeness, but in doing so they threatened to deprive the vernacular of its most essential and widely acknowledged virtue, its status as the common—“the ordinary and accustomed”—tongue. Puttenham hastens to allay this anxiety: the cultivation of an eloquent style should, he insists, make the poet’s or orator’s words “nothing the more vnseemely or misbecomming, but rather decenter and more agreable to any ciuill eare and vnderstanding.”25 But classical precedent suggested that the effects of eloquence might in fact seem uncivil and misbecoming. Quintilian observes that Cicero’s own superlative eloquence led the decorous denizens of the Roman courtroom to applaud wildly, forgetful of their sober surroundings. “Nor,” Quintilian explains, “would his words have been greeted with such extraordinary approbation if his speech had been like the ordinary speeches of every day”:
In my opinion, the audience did not know what they were doing, their applause sprang neither from their judgment nor their will; they were seized with a kind of frenzy and unconscious of the place in which they stood, burst forth spontaneously into a perfect ecstasy of delight.
(Atque ego illos credo qui aderant nec sensisse quid facerent nec sponte iudicioque plausisse, sed velut mente captos et quo essent in loco ignaros erupisse in hunc voluptatis adfectum.)26
What Quintilian describes as being “unconscious of … place” and Puttenham allegorizes as “strange conveyance” is identified by both rhetoricians as the consummation of rhetorical skill—even though it is also an exact inversion of the sensitivity to local circumstance that is the essence of rhetorical wisdom: what the Greeks call to prepon and the Romans decorum.27 The eloquence that anchors men in place thus also transports them, turning the common language into something profoundly and singularly strange. In order to be recognized as such, eloquence must exceed to the point of superseding the very sense of communal identification it is tasked with creating.
As the myth of Orpheus itself suggested, the pressure of such irreconcilable impulses could prove violently disintegrative. The aboriginal orator presented himself to sixteenth-century readers in two guises: not simply as the voice that summons vagrant and bestial mankind into civilized communion but also as the half-mad, self-exiled singer who reviles marriage, dotes on boys, and plays his lyre to an inhuman audience of trees, stones, and wild animals. In book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the latter Orpheus faces a doom that is the antithesis of his earlier achievement: his scorn incites the Ciconian women to turn the instruments of agriculture and religion into blunt objects; they brandish “mattocks, rakes, and shouels,” as Arthur Golding writes in his 1567 translation, and batter the poet with “their thyrses greene … which for another use than that invented been.” In a gruesome inversion of Cicero’s fantasy of the gathering of scattered mankind, Orpheus’s bruised limbs are flung “in sundrie steds,” and his still-singing head, washed downstream from Thrace to Lesbos, is “cast aland” on a “forreine coast.”28
It is this antisocial, outcast Orpheus who presides over the most significant stylistic innovations of the late sixteenth century, so much so that outlandishness becomes not simply the point of departure for English authors but the point of arrival as well. Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe achieve renown by subjecting English to extreme elaborations, even deformations, in the name of eloquence. Rather than affirming vernacular literature as the medium of cultural and political synthesis, they foreground its departures from both ordinary speech and the decorums of classical rhetoric and poetry.
Far from mythologizing eloquence as a force that binds vagrant individuals into social communion, they allegorize its effects in narratives of willful unsociability, featuring protagonists whose astonishing powers of persuasion dislodge them from anything resembling stable community: Euphues’s witty tongue leads away from a home to which he can never truly return; Colin Clout retreats from pastoral fellowship into sullen isolation; Tamburlaine struts across the civilized world leaving rubble and ashes in his wake. These are paradigmatic figures of English style from the late sixteenth century, but they are hardly representatives of a “common tongue” around whom a new national community might form.
Nor are they meant to be. Throughout the sixteenth century, in theoretical treatises and literary works alike, tropes of intimacy and sociability, the traditional virtues of artful speech, were made to coexist with unexpectedly compelling fantasies of alienation, errancy, and disunity. The appeal of those fantasies stems