Brief Overview of Argument and Style

1. Brief Overview of Argument and Style “Friendship should come before anything.” “Ingratitude is chief among all vices.”“A liar needs to have a good memory.” “Do not laugh at anyone.” “Nothing is worse than poverty.” “Nothing is sweeter than liberty.” Emphasis on Moral Maxims in Elizabethan Pedagogy

2. texts by Erasmus, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Aesop at the heart of the curriculum. • Students were taught to imitate superior examples which they were instructed to collect in a notebook for future reference. • the progymnasmatawas a composition guide divided into sequence of 14 composition exercises beginning with the early reading material in myths and fables culminating in the proposal for a law. • In addition, students were instructed in the art of letter writing, using a guide by Erasmus. Erasmus demonstrated 195 different ways you could express the sentence “your letter pleased me greatly.”

3. Students were trained in the 5 skills of rhetorical speech: • Invention: the assembly of the material of the speech • Disposition: placing the material in the appropriate structure • Elocutio: the style of the speech crafted in the most effective words • Memory: memorizing the speech • Delivery: the use of voice and gesture.

4. Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique(1553) • Angel Day's The English Secretorie(1586, 1592) • George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) • Richard Rainolde’sFoundacionof Rhetorike (1563).

5. The Elizabethan florid writing style is known as Euphuism, named as such after John Lyly’s title protagonist from “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” (1578) and “Euphues and His England” (1580). Lyly employed an ornate aesthetic style drawing upon proverbs and mythology and marked by an attention to sound and rhythm, alliteration and assonance and a host of figurative language along with antithetical pairings in alternating patterns in order to highlight opposition and contrast.

6. “Seeing thou wilt not buye counsel at the first hand good cheape, thou shaltbuyerepentaunce at the second hande, at such an unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy harde heart.”

7. “I have read (saith he) and well I believe it, that a friend is in prosperity a pleasure, a solace in adversity, in grief a comfort, in joy a merry companion, at all times an other I , in all places the express image of mine own person; insomuch that I cannot tell whether the immortal Gods have bestowed any gift opun mortal men, either more noble or more necessary than friendship.”

8. “Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe, and although I cannot see in thee less wit than I was wont, yet do I find less honesty. I perceive at the last (although being deceived it be too late) that musk though it be sweet in the smell is sour in the smack, that the leaf of the cedar tree though it be fair to be seen, yet the syrup depriveth sight—that friendship though it be plighted by the shaking of the hand, yet is shaken by the fraud of the heart. But thou hast not much to boast of, for as thou has won a fickle lady, so thou has lost a faithful friend.”

9. The Restoration and John Dryden’s prose style reacts against the Euphuistic style as heralding immoral or intemperate excess. The age marked by a woman monarch and highly stylized prose was castigated by male successors in court. Dryden made his reputation by celebrating powerful men in the nation such as Oliver Cromwell. John Dryden (1631-1700).

10. Dryden’s preface to ReligioLaiciprivileged a simple style wherein “the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic...The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion....A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.”

11. Founded in 1660, The Royal Society was a committee designed to improve and standardize the English language and included Dryden, John Evelyn and Thomas Sprat. • Sprat considered the Euphuistic style as “diseased.” The ideal style should “reject all amplifications, digressions and swellings of style” in order to “return back to a primitive purity and shortness.”

12. In The Future of Progress Condorcet argued: • “The sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason: when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments, will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear among us.”

13. . • On Being Brought From Africa to America • "Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye,  "Their colour is a diabolic die."  Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,  May be refin'd and join th'angelic train.  • Phillis Wheatley (1770).