The 2019 William B. Hunter Lecture of the scrc: Paleness versus Eloquence: The Ideologies of Style in the English Renaissance

Abstract

This essay considers the contrast between plainness and eloquence in some canonical English (secular) lyrics and plays from Wyatt through Shakespeare. Its claim is that in the relevant body of work, and in the culture as a whole, each of the styles bore a specifiable ideological charge. It shows that English secular poetry and drama in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was profoundly aware of the ideologies associated with the two levels or kinds of style, and profoundly divided in its commitments. In lyric poetry, this is true in Wyatt at the beginning of the sixteenth century and of Sidney at the end. In drama, Shakespeare is profoundly aware both of the styles and of the ideologies with which they are associated. He uses and also critiques both of these in the poems and the plays. Othello is the culmination of both the use and the critique.