Is the Ars Rhetorica for the Good? The Rhetorical Ethics of More, Shakespeare, and Bacon in the English Renaissance

The dissertation argues that Thomas More, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon deliberate about the nature of rhetoric and the ethics that ought to govern it by dramatizing multifaceted acts of persuasion. In the English Renaissance, some thinkers believe rhetoric to be a byword for honeyed speech that conceals flattery and lies. This view coexists uneasily with a great enthusiasm for rhetoric, alternatively understood to be a justice-seeking art that only the morally good orator can effectively utilize. More, Shakespeare, and Bacon dispute these polarized views of rhetoric in their heuristic representations of speaking that appropriate aspects of both the influential classical Roman and Christian rhetorical traditions and that navigate between the Roman advocacy of a utilitarian ethic and the Augustinian insistence that falsehoods can never be justified as means of persuasion. The project first assesses the rhetorical ethics of Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine, as well as the continuum of available opinions about rhetoric in the English Renaissance milieu. It then asserts that More depicts his master sophist, Richard III, as a perversion of the classical ideal orator in The History of King Richard III. Richard's surprising inability to persuade reveals the future Lord Chancellor's Augustinian confidence that sophistry is weaker than apt, true words. Initially, it appears that Shakespeare's Richard III and Othello, unlike More's History, suggest the superior power of unethical speakers in Shakespeare, but the project's examination of Cymbeline demonstrates that an ethical Shakespearean orator such as Imogen, in rhetorical situations that deliberately evoke the aforementioned plays, can forestall tragedy with Ciceronian words and pseudo-Augustinian piety. Finally, in the treatment of Bacon's New Atlantis, it is contended that, unlike the rhetorical ethic implied in More and Cymbeline, Bacon's representations advocate for the renewal of Quintilian's Roman ethic and for a gnostic---rather than Augustinian---rhetoric in which the cooperative model of persuasion is rejected in favor of seductive words.