Enargeia: Renaissance rhetoric and poetics in Petrarch, Bale, and Shakespeare

Certain Renaissance authors thematize the conditions of representation of their works, mimetically presenting their own representational strategies and failures. Three who do, Petrarch, John Bale, and Shakespeare, also represent different historical moments in Renaissance poetic theory. Theoretical discussion of their works is here framed by theories of representation developed by classical and Renaissance rhetoricians as well as by the contemporary theorists Murray Krieger and W. J. T. Mitchell. However, there are substantive differences among these theories: contemporary (post-)structuralists theorize language as semiotics, as a system of signs; Ciceronian rhetoricians are more interested in what Paul Ricoeur calls semantics or discourse analysis. Contemporary Renaissance literary criticism may thus rely on insufficiently historicized theories of language, as a partly historical, partly theoretical review in chapters one and two shows.;The subject of chapter three is Petrarch's Secretum, a Latin dialogue that deploys Augustinian theories of psychology and language to elicit the indeterminacies of linguistic reference recognized as crucial to an understanding of his poetics. The Protestant bishop and playwright John Bale's plays, discussed in chapter four, unmask devotional images as deceptive illusions, but risk the destabilizing of all authority and meaning. Bale uses the figure of the sodomite as a scapegoat to overcome the threat to authority latent in his own (un)maskings.;Bale also represents a transition between late medieval and Renaissance theories of poetics and representation, in which interest shifts from the referential to the affective aspects of language. Chapter five shows that between Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and its sources in the "Ingannati family" lies the Italian and English novelle, which develop a "copious" rhetoric that relies on enargeia, vivid word-painting, to move emotions, relativizing the fixed structures of order and reason that frame the action of Italian Plautine comedies. The dissertation calls for reconstruction of the poetics in use in the Renaissance (its theories of rhetoric and hermeneutics) and elucidation of the philosophical and linguistic import of these theories in Renaissance terms. Literary theory based on such methodologies will be materially grounded, but will be able to yield a poetics of the work's response to its historical situation.