Rhetoric aimed to teach pupils how to argue persuasively and how to analyse other people’s speeches and writing in order to understand what they were saying, to reply to them effectively, and, at times, to learn from their use of language.

The renaissance of classical rhetoric can be characterized in three words: recovery, addition, and change. First it was necessary to copy and circulate the texts (after 1460 by printing them). The order in which the texts were recovered and the traditions of teaching established around the earliest known texts constrained the ways in which rhetoric could be thought about. Then rhetorical doctrine had to be adapted to changed social circumstances both by the way in which selected classical texts were grouped into syllabi and interpreted, and through the composition, especially in northern Europe, of new rhetoric textbooks. For most medieval and renaissance teachers rhetoric was about writing rather than speaking and the three classical genres, with their built-in assumptions about audience and context, did not really suit the newly important occasions of letter-writing and preaching. Some of the ways in which renaissance authors developed classical rhetoric resemble the approaches and techniques of classical adapters, though sometimes extending the approach to the point where the product becomes rather different. Some of what looks mechanical in renaissance rhetoric will generate writing which is surprisingly playful and creative.

The rhetorical legacy of the ancient world has proved particularly imposing. In antiquity Quintilian’s Institutes selected and organized the ideas of Greek and earlier Roman rhetoricians as a sort of classic canon. Even today the fourth edition of Edward Cobbett’s successful university textbook Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student assumes that the precepts of classical rhetoric (suitably selected, packaged, and adapted) can still teach the principles of good writing. The post-antique success of classical rhetoric is owed partly to the weight of what survives, partly to the perceived importance of instruction in the use of language (paired with the conceptual difficulty of making a new start on it), and partly to the circumstances in which learning and education were reborn.

Sixteenth-century England's two universities were of crucial importance in national life. One reason for this was the relatively high age-participation rate. By the last decades of the sixteenth century about 700 pupils annually (or just over one per cent of the male cohort) entered Oxford. They were drawn from the same social groups as those who attended grammar school: sons of prosperous husbandmen and yeomen, burgesses from the towns, country gentry, professional men and the lower ranks of the titled. At Oxford and Cambridge the future élite of the country were educated and became acquainted. University graduates went on to become priests, country gentlemen, school teachers, academics, royal servants, doctors, lawyers and tradesmen, as McConica's study of the records of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (which may not have been representative) indicates. The majority of the writers whose works are discussed in the later chapters of this book were members of the minority of the population who attended Oxford or Cambridge.

The Queen and her councillors took a personal interest in university affairs. Three times in her reign Elizabeth made a formal visitation of one of her universities. Each visitation lasted almost a week and necessitated the transfer of the machinery of government and the highest officers of state to Oxford or Cambridge. Elizabeth and her courtiers took care to be well-informed about what was going on in the universities. This was a consequence of the prestige of learning. Humanist theorists and their admirers who founded schools required educated school-teachers.

In 1605 Francis Bacon identified an excessive concern with words as one of the enemies of learning. In Bacon's reconstruction, Martin Luther, finding that no theologians in his own time would support his reforms, was forced to look to ancient authors for assistance.

The need to consult original texts led to investigations of language and delight in ancient expression. This enthusiasm for pure Latin was increased by hatred of the scholastics and their technical neologisms, and by the need to preach effectively to ordinary people.

Most Elizabethans had their strongest and most frequent contact with writing in the form of personal notes and memoranda, letters and legal documents. The composition of many of these documents involved questions of organisation and self-presentation, also sometimes of style, which registered rhetorical competences. We have seen that grammar school education taught pupils to collect sentences and examples in notebooks. Puritans encouraged note-taking as a way of absorbing and reflecting on the teaching of sermons. Margaret Hoby's Diary which records her prayers and church attendance frequently refers to writing in her ‘sermon book’ notes of sermons she has heard a day or two before. An increasingly centralised and bureaucratic decision-making process demanded collection of written evidence and retention of copies of letters. The victims of religious persecution (Catholic or Protestant) wrote narratives to strengthen the courage and hatred of their co-religionists. Since the materials available are so diverse and have rarely been studied before, this chapter will concentrate on a few, possibly atypical examples. At the same time, it is these materials which bring us closest to the experiences and thought-processes of individual Elizabethans.

My study of particular notebooks, letters and narratives will illustrate the impact of the rhetorical skills developed in the grammar school. Moral sentences, arguments, comparisons and political axioms found in books and sermons were collected in notebooks and reused in letters. As well as collecting fragments from texts, Elizabethans took notes of the overall structure of sermons and texts.

Parliament was the highest public arena of debate in Elizabethan England. In parliament gentlemen from the shires could watch the greatest officials of state explain their policies and legislative projects, sometimes in the face of critical arguments and counter-proposals. Thanks to the enthusiasm of seventeenth-century antiquarians quite substantial records of Elizabethan parliamentary speeches and debates survive, now collected and edited in three handsome volumes by T. E. Hartley. Parliamentary oratory enables us to examine the impact of humanist rhetorical training in practical life. At the same time rhetorical theory can help us understand the effect of individual speeches and the broader import of parliamentary discourse.

Many of the formal features of parliamentary speeches can be connected with rhetorical training. The format of long parliamentary speeches reflects a compromise between rhetorical teaching about introductions and structures derived from dialectic and the practice of disputation. Short debating speeches take their form entirely from dialectic and resemble interventions in university disputations. While the restrained style predominates in both kinds of speech, all the speakers employ amplification to mark important passages and to drive home arguments. Some speakers, especially later in the reign, cultivate a more elaborate style throughout. History plays a crucial role in longer speeches, with government speakers elaborating the contrast between Elizabeth's government and her inheritance from Mary, while other orators cite biblical and classical histories. Proverbs and moral sentences are very prominent in all types of speeches. Many arguments are elaborated with commonplaces and lively descriptions.