Exploring the Artistic Character of Rhetoric

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hetoric – ars bene dicendi – is, according to the antique definition, the art of speaking and writing well, adequate to the situation, proving morality and the desire to obtain an effect, an expression which can attract the general interest. According to W. Jens, it contains both the theory (ars rhetorica, the art of speaking), as well as the practice (ars oratoria, eloquence). Rhetoric created, as theory (rhetorica docens), a multitude of categories to produce (and analyse) some efficient texts. According to Jens’ definition, the rhetoric is a certain valoric quality (bene) which supersedes the grammatical quality of a simple correctness in speech (recte). This special valoric quality forms the artistic character (ars) of rhetoric.

Persuasion was at the centre of definitions of rhetoric in the manuals that taught Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rhetoric, according to Aristotle in his The Rhetoric, was the faculty of observing on any given case the available means of persuasion. Phaedrus who was highly influenced by Socrates, says in his dialogue that “the intending orator is under no necessity of understanding what is likely to be thought just by the body of men who are to give judgment; nor need he know what is truly good or noble, but what will be thought so, since it is on the latter, not the former, that persuasion depends.” Plato sets up in his dialogues what would become the key views of the anti-rhetorical prejudice: the philosopher is concerned with the true and the just, while the rhetorician struggles only to appear just. Persuasion is portrayed as duplicitous and separated from

Aristotle argues that the goal of this approach is to know the truth more fully, “we must be able to employ persuasion…. On opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may better be able to confute him.”
The Elizabethans seem to have been proud of their language. In Musophilus, for example, Samuel Daniel wrote that Eloquence “[D]ost mange, guide, and master th’ eminence / Of men’s affections, more than all their swords.”
In a prefiguration on the British Empire, he argues that it is one’s language that enables one to rule: “And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what stage shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T’ enrich unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in th’ yet unformed Occident May come refined with th’ accents that are