Sir Walter Raleigh’s Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts by John Parker, Carol A. Johnson
Abstract
112 RHETORICA On the whole, while his critical assumptions need to be supplemented with recent scholarship on orality, literacy, and the history of education, Purcell's work is useful because it summarizes material which is not easily available to most undergraduate students. His discussion of the content of the poetic manuals will be helpful to those who are not familiar with Latin, or whose libraries do not contain the printed editions of the texts, some of which are out of print or only available in microfilm (e.g., Catherine Yodice Giles' Ph.D. dissertation, the only English translation of Gervasius of Melkle/s Ars poética; Traugott Lawler's edition and translation of John of Garland's Parisiana poetria; and Evelyn Carlson's translation of Eberhard the German's Laborintus, her 1930 M.A. thesis). The appendix of figures, with definitions, is especially useful, along with the bibliography of sources relat ing to the poetic treatises. In a subsequent edition, the author might consid er including a chart comparing the classical definitions of these figures with those in the medieval poetic manuals, to illustrate how the medieval manu als depart from the classical tradition, a point which Purcell emphasizes. However, undergraduate students who seek broad outlines and neat categories for material must be cautioned, just as Purcell shows, that mate rial frequently resists tidy schematization; that principles of grammar and rhetoric overlap in figurative language; and that medieval poetics adapts and transcends classical theory in a variety of ways. Illustrations of how this theory operates in poetic texts and cultural contexts, and in relation to various views of language change and interaction, are needed to support the critical assumptions in this book. William Purcell has made an impor tant beginning in an area which has long been overlooked in the history of composition and literary criticism: medieval poetics, a field in which the criteria for measuring orality and literacy await further study. Elza C. Tiner John Parker and Carol A. Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts (Minneapolis, MN: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1995), ii + 79 pp. Sir Walter Raleigh's speech from the scaffold, October 29,1618, in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, has lived long as an "exit" speech of con siderable historic importance, especially familiar to students of British public address. It was included in David Brewer's older anthology and in Reviews 113 the excellent An Historical Anthology of Select British Speeches.1 Scholars of the history of rhetoric do not need to be told that one of the initial steps in their explorations is to answer the question, "What did that orator really say?" Whose version, manuscript or printed, was the closest to the event, and how reliable are the available versions? We remember how Thucydides dealt with the problem in the fifth century BCE: "With references to the speeches in this history, . . . some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the vari ous occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said."2 So what did Pericles and others really say? Only when the step of description is accomplished as well as possi ble, can the rhetorical critic with the greatest meaningfulness enter into sound analysis and insightful evaluation. With painstaking and thorough scholarship, Parker and Johnson dig deeply into their chosen terrain. They construct a succinct and wellwritten sketch (pp. 1-11) of the man and his role in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. "Entrepreneur, politician, poet, historian, explorer, colonizer" (p. 1), Raleigh was a central figure in his time, a time when "the line between dissent and treason was not always apparent" (p. 5). Parker, Curator Emeritus of the James Ford Bell Library, and Johnson, Assistant Professor in the University Library, enter into a microscopic, forty-three-page comparison of the eight available printed versions of the...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
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- 1997-01-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.1997.0032
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