Performing Arguments

Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama

Series: 

Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama proposes a fresh performance-centered view of rhetoric by recovering, tracing, and analyzing the trope and tradition of aestheticized argumentation as a mode of performance across several early ludic genres: Middle English debate poetry, the fifteenth-century ‘disguising’ play, the Tudor Humanist debate interlude, and four Shakespearean works in which the dynamics of debate invite the plays’ reconsideration under the new rubric of ‘rhetorical problem plays.’ Performing Arguments further establishes a distinction between instrumental argumentation, through which an arguer seeks to persuade an opponent or audience, and performative argumentation, through which the arguer provides an aesthetic display of verbal or intellectual skill with persuasion being of secondary concern, or of no concern at all. This study also examines rhetorical and performance theories and practices contemporary with the early texts and genres explored, and is further influenced by more recent critical perspectives on resonance and reception and theories of audience response and reconstruction.
Copyright Year:
2024
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-53530-5
Publication:
04 Mar 2024
Hardback
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-53529-9
Publication:
15 Feb 2024
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Maura Giles-Watson (ALB-Classical Studies, Harvard; PhD-English, U of Nebraska) teaches early drama and performance studies at the University of San Diego. Her articles have appeared in Early Theatre, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, and essay collections. She directs the Tudor Plays Project, a digital humanities research program.
“The volume's arguments are clear, well organized, and thoroughly documented and supported by a significant number of primary sources. Of particular value for those in the performing arts is the final chapter, which concerns formal rhetorical argumentation and declamation in Shakespeare's dramas, with a particular focus on the so-called problem plays. An insightful epilogue reframes the volume as an exploration of the encounter between rhetoric and theatre. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Graduate students through faculty; professionals.” — K. J. Wetmore Jr., Loyola Marymount University , in: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 62/3 (2024), p. 246.
Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

1 Toward a Performance-Centred Perspective on Rhetoric
 1 Guiding Principles

 2 Rhetorical Aesthetics and Epistemics

 3 Ethos and Ethopoeia

 4 Ludic Agonistics


2 The Argument Is the Action Rhetoric, Poetry, and Premodern Performance Culture
 1 Introduction

 2 The Aesthetics of Disputatio

 3 Varieties of Rhetorico-Poetic Performance

 4 ‘When Is a Text a Play?’


3 Rhetorical Theatre Middle English Debate Poetry in Performative Perspective
 1 Introduction

 2 Rhetoric, Poetics, and Performance

 3 Recovering Rhetorical Theatre

 4 Reconstructing Rhetorico-Poetic Performance

 5 The Performability of The Owl and the Nightingale

 6 Representation and Ethopoeia in Wynnere and Wastoure

 7 Unsettled Questions: Lydgate’s Disguising at Hertford


4 Chamber Theatre Tudor Humanist Debate Interludes and the Participatory Audience
 1 Introduction

 2 The Thomas More Circle and Rhetorico-Theatrical Aesthetics

 3 “An Interlude!”

 4 Chamber Theatre and the Activated Audience

 5 Reconstructing Tudor Performance Spaces and Audience Experience

 6 The Foure pp and Religious Satire

 7 The Play of the Wether: Improvisation and Satire at Court

 8 A Play of Love and Mock Legal Argumentation

 9 Conclusion


5 “Who Shall Be Most Right?” Ethos, Eloquence, and Argumentation in Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Problem Plays
 1 Introduction

 2 Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Culture

 3 Fields of Argumentation in the Dramatic Frame

 4 Debate in the ‘Rhetorical Problem Plays’

 5 The Moral Argument in Measure for Measure

 6 Pseudo-legal Debate in The Merchant of Venice

 7 Political Debate and Sexual Politics in Troilus and Cressida

 8 The “Sweet Smoke of Rhetoric” in Love’s Labour’s Lost

 9 Conclusion


Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Research institutes; academic research libraries; specialist faculty and post-graduate researchers; theatre historians and practitioners; researchers in rhetoric and argumentation.
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