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5 - Rhetorical Redescription and its Uses in Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2018

Quentin Skinner
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

I begin with the two earliest English handbooks in which the technique of rhetorical redescription is named as paradiastole and defined. The first is Henry Peacham's Garden of Eloquence of 1577; the second is George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie of 1589. Peacham lists the technique among the figures of amplification used to ‘garnish matters and causes’. He considers it immediately after discussing meiosis – to which it is said to be ‘nye kin’ – and he defines it as follows:

Paradiastole … is when by a mannerly interpretation, we doe excuse our own vices, or other mens whom we doe defend, by calling them vertues.

Puttenham pursues the comparison between meiosis and paradiastole at greater length. When you ‘diminish and abbase a thing by way of spight or mallice, as it were to deprave it’, this is an instance of meiosis. The contrast with paradiastole is then spelled out:

But if such moderation of words tend to flattery, or soothing, or excusing, it is by the figure Paradiastole, which therfore nothing improperly we call the Curry-favell, as when we make the best of a bad thing, or turne a signification to the more plausible sence: … moderating and abating the force of the matter by craft, and for a pleasing purpose.

Puttenham later reiterates that, whereas meiosis – which he labels ‘the disabler ’ – has the effect of denigrating what is described, paradiastole is used to exculpate. When we employ rhetorical redescription ‘to make an offence seeme lesse then it is, by giving a terme more favorable and of lesse vehemencie then the troth requires’, then such ‘phrases of extenuation’ are not instances of meiosis but ‘fall more aptly to the office of the figure Curry favell’.

Both Peacham and Puttenham are self-conscious about the need to rework the conventions of classical rhetoric for their Elizabethan audience, an aspiration most clearly reflected in Puttenham's efforts to domesticate the outlandish names for the figures of speech inherited by the Roman rhetoricians from their Greek authorities. But at the same time they remain heavily dependent on the body of ancient treatises in which these figures had first been anatomised.

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From Humanism to Hobbes
Studies in Rhetoric and Politics
, pp. 89 - 117
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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