In the late sixteenth century, just as England began to assert its integrity as a nation and English its value as a literate tongue, vernacular writing took a turn for the eccentric. John Lyly’sEuphues: The Anatomy of Wit(1578), Edmund Spenser’sShepheardes Calender(1579), and Christopher Marlowe’sTamburlaine the Great(1587) loudly announced their authors’ ambitions for the English language, but in their extravagant ornamentation, obscure archaism, and violent bombast they stood at a seemingly deliberate remove from the tongue whose reputation they helped to secure. Indeed to some early critics, the inaugural achievements of what Richard Foster Jones...

A rich body of criticism attests to the imprint left on Renaissance writers by their grammar-school education in classical literature,¹ but a basic feature of this pedagogical program has received little attention: in order to promote their vision of Latinity, sixteenth-century humanist pedagogical theorists first had to reinvent English. As Ardis Butterfield points out, the training bestowed on educated Englishmen from the medieval period through the sixteenth century gave them “much greater eloquence and indeed fluency in [Latin] than they possessed in the vernacular”; far from representing a reversion to a more natural voice, writing in English “was thus a...

As Thomas Elyot reminds readers ofThe Boke named the Governour, rhetoric was the foundation of the earliest commonwealths: “[I]n the firste infancie of the worlde, men, wandring like beastes in woddes and on mountaines, regardinge neither the religion due unto god, nor the office pertaining unto man, ordred all thing by bodily strength: untill Mercurius (as Plato supposeth) or some other man holpen by sapience and eloquence, by some apt or propre oration, assembled them to geder and perswaded to them what commodite was in mutual conuersation and honest maners.”¹ When Elyot surveys sixteenth-century England, he is therefore dismayed...

Reprinted in some twenty editions in the decades following its initial publication,Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit(1578) made John Lyly the most influential prose writer of the late sixteenth century.¹ The richly ornamented, densely patterned style of Lyly’s romance produced a popular sensation, a host of imitators, and a distinctly mixed set of critical responses: for every Francis Meres, whose litany of English authors in his 1598Palladis Tamianamed “eloquent and wittie Iohn Lilly” as one of “the best . . . amongst vs,”² there was a Gabriel Harvey, who bluntly declared, “I cannot stand . . ....

No writer labors more conspicuously to claim the mantle of exemplarity than the “new poete” ofThe Shepheardes Calender, who presents himself to readers as the latest to walk a hallowed and well-trod path to literary glory. As E. K.’s introduction to the 1579 poem reminds us, pastoral is the time-honored birthplace of poetic excellence, the “nest” of literary ambition: “So flew Theocritus, as you may percieue he was all ready full fledged. So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges. So flew Mantuane, as being not full somd. So Petrarque. So Boccace; So Marot, Sanazarus, and also...

Part 1 ofTamburlaine the Great(1587–88) forcefully inverts Spenser’s vision of the English poet as exile, recasting him as a violent intruder. Christopher Marlowe, a recent arrival to the professional London theater, invited audiences to see in the audacious progress of his barbarian hero the image of his own poetic daring, claiming Tamburlaine’s legendary conquest of the East as a vehicle for his campaign to enlarge the boundaries of English verse: “From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, / We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War,” promises his...

The period of theoretical and formal innovation that we now claim as a point of origin for modern literary history appeared to its immediate successors as a dead end. Neither the ministrations of Latin-speaking nursemaids nor the rigors of double translation succeeded in naturalizing classical eloquence in Renaissance England. No English compiler of tropes and figures achieved the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Quintilian, nor did rhetoric long maintain its reign as the queen of the liberal arts: as early as 1605, Francis Bacon looked back with disdain at the sixteenth century’s “affectionate study of eloquence”; by...