Language-based approaches

Abstract

We might start by reminding ourselves of the crucial Renaissance ideal of decorum. This may be defined as an assumption that particular vocabularies and particular styles were appropriate to particular genres. The genres were generally those used by Greek and Roman writers. Elevated genres, epic and tragedy, demanded to be written in a high style; lesser genres, pastoral and satire for example, should be dressed out in a middle or low style (Sidney 1973, p. 133ff.; Puttenham 1589, p. 123ff.). It was, moreover, the convention that these high styles should deal with people of high ‘degree’ or social rank, which meant that the hierarchy of genres reflected hierarchies in society. An author’s choice of particular words, therefore, might derive not from their presumed exact relation to things in the world, but from a word-hoard circumscribed by the genre that had been chosen, and by the expectations of the audience. As Dr Johnson wrote, ‘Our opinion … of words, as of other things arbitrarily and capriciously established, depends wholly upon accident and custom’ (1960, p. 9). Shakespeare, of course, notoriously refused to be bound by the rules developed by his neoclassic contemporaries, often writing what Sidney decried as ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ (1973, p. 135), but, like all Renaissance writers, depended for many of his linguistic effects on his audience’s stylistic expectations.