Abstract

The Elizabethan humanist's philosophy of language, deriving from Augustine and Erasmus, but decaying with literary and material revolutions in culture, produces from existential roots the rhetorical backbone of romance--fiction which reproduces communal values in the spirit of individual differences, imagines familiar experience in a "land of unlikeness," shadows free will's tragic power, invests personal speech with public consequence, and transforms ordinary or tragic endings into symbols of characters thriving charitably in worldly communities. ;Humanist rhetoric teaches the purpose of speech. Properly used figures of sound and sense build dialogue in mind and community. Contrariwise, Machiavelli manipulates public speech to satisfy private desire--the so-called "romance of power." Shylock's literally deficient "social contract" symbolizes conflicts between oral and written culture, which Portia's household economy would mend. Years after Guttenburg enabled reading to become a self-contained act, Erasmus must posit language's social end: "In the Beginning was the Speech." ;Sidney and Shakespeare configure communal fictions through lyric and narrative modes of speech which move audiences to participate wisely in decisions making character. Psychological and partisan problems are portrayed to move individual and institution to reform. Sidney anatomizes Astrophil's fruitless desire--turning Stella into a "cruel fair," love into lust, and lust to ashes, not fruit. Ostensibly wooing Stella, he attacks her. She becomes an object unable to respond. By alienating her rhetorically, Astrophil "paints his hell." ;Like Sidney, Shakespeare does not always explicate how prejudice or desire ends. The spectator performs the lesson of romance. The Winter's Tale elaborates what romance is. Leontes interprets every sign to support his perception of infidelity, whereas Perdita invents fidelity. Paulina the playmaker dissolves alienation by reproducing comic faith, personified in Hermione. Literary praxis performs "civill conversation" with that end. ;Rhetoric teaches, pleases, and moves. Romance motivates readers to imagine a second nature charged with "ethic and politic" ends. Rhetorical poets and audiences differ from "plain" speakers or readers as manufacturers or consumers of desire. Anglo-Saxon raedan, to advise, decays into our verb "to read." Fiction as political tree-stump or the quick fix of desire supplants the Elizabethan struggle to build communitas