Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson

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      In short, the concept of voice integrates theory and practice in several medieval liberal arts. The qualities of vocal expression were understood to be artful, in rhetorical delivery and in singing, as well as meaningful. Thus, discussions of voice in these treatises reveal the performative foundations of medieval knowledge practice. The alliance of knowledge and its delivery is perhaps best expressed in John of Salisbury’s introduction to the Metalogicon:

      Just as eloquence, unenlightened by reason, is rash and blind, so wisdom, without the power of expression, is feeble and maimed. Speechless wisdom may sometimes increase one’s personal satisfaction, but it rarely and only slightly contributes to the welfare of human society. Reason, the mother, nurse, and guardian of knowledge, as well as of virtue, frequently conceives from speech, and by this same means bears more abundant and richer fruit. Reason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plenteous harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions, and communicate the perceptions of the prudent exercise of the human mind.²⁹

      Far from a transparent medium of knowledge, voice here is generative and productive, “fecund.” Indeed, in the twelfth century, eloquentia (communication) came to be regarded as half of knowledge, complementing philosophia (content). Despite detractors who criticized the tendency toward garrulity in the champions of eloquence, voiced language was increasingly recognized as the medium of social negotiation, “an important part of a corpus of attitudes, behaviors, skills and science that kept civil society alive.”³⁰

      For lyric poets and audiences, the relationship between physical voice and literary or textual voice is codified in the rhetorical device of ethopoeia. The earliest known description of the figure appears in Aphthonius’s fourth-century Progymnasmata, a late antique rhetorical handbook: “Ethopoeia is imitation of the character of a proposed speaker. There are three different forms of it: apparition-making (eidolopoeia), personification (prosopopoeia) and characterization (ethopoeia). Ethopoeia has a known person as a speaker and only invents the characterization, which is why it is called ‘character-making’; for example, what words Heracles would say when Eurystheus gave his commands. Here Heracles is known, but we invent the character in which he speaks.”³¹ In Aphthonius’s definition, ethopoeia is the umbrella figure for all invented speech, with distinctions for the ontological status of the speaker. The ethopoetic speaker is “known” (a historical or literary figure) and alive, the eidolopoetic speaker is known and dead, and the prosopopoetic speaker is invented. There are further three modes of ethopoetic speech: affective, circumstantial, or a mixture of the two.³²

      The Progymnasmata gained new popularity in the early modern period following its 1572 translation by Reinhard Lorich, and no evidence exists of its use during the medieval period.³³ Yet grammatical and rhetorical treatises popular in medieval schoolrooms discuss the composition of ethopoetic speeches, often under one of the following figures: adlocutio, conformatio, sermocinatio, fictio personae, prosopopoeia.³⁴ In a rare medieval use of Aphthonius’s term, Isidore of Seville offers the following definition:

      We call that ‘ethopoeia’ whereby we represent the character of a person in such a way as to express traits related to age, occupation, fortune, happiness, gender, grief, boldness. Thus when the character of a pirate is taken up, the speech will be bold, abrupt, rash; when the speech of a woman is imitated, the oration ought to fit her sex. A distinct way of speaking ought to be used for young and old, soldier and general, parasite and rustic and philosopher. One caught up in joy speaks one way, one wounded, another. In this genre of speech these things should be most fully thought out: who speaks and with whom, about whom, where, and when, what one has done or will do, or what one can suffer if one neglects these decrees.³⁵

      Isidore’s definition expresses the idea that written representations of speech can vary according to both affective and social factors: status, occupation, gender, mood, and situation of address. The Rhetorica ad Herennium describes, under the figure of conformatio, “making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a definite form and a language or a certain behavior appropriate to its character.”³⁶ Priscian’s definition of adlocutio (“impersonation”) is ethopoetic:

      Impersonation is the imitation of speech accommodated to imaginary situations and persons.… Speeches of impersonation can be addressed either to particular persons or to indefinite ones.… There are simple forms of impersonation, as when one creates a speech as though he were speaking to himself; and there are double impersonations, as though he were speaking to others.… Always, however, be careful to preserve the character of the persons and times being imagined: some words are appropriate to the young, some to the old, some to the joyful, some to the sad. Moreover, some impersonations have to do with manners, some with passions, and some with a mixture of the two.³⁷

      Geoffrey of Vinsauf provides an example of the speech of a pope as a kind of “refining by dialogue” (expolitio per sermocinationem): “Oh how marvelous the virtue of God! How mighty his power! How great I now am! How insignificant I once was! From a small stock I have grown in a trice to a mighty cedar.”³⁸ Elsewhere in the Poetria Nova, Geoffrey parodies the figure. The discarded tablecloth grieves, “I was once the pride of the table, while my youth was in its first flower and my face knew no blemish. But since I am old, and my visage is marred, I do not wish to appear.”³⁹ With its focus on the particularity of experience, ethopoeia had a natural affinity for the rhetorical study of personal “attributes,” elaborated in Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars Versificatoria (1175) and the anonymous Tria Sunt (1256–1400).⁴⁰

      Schoolroom exercises in ethopoeia and related figures were practiced from late antiquity (Augustine won a contest for his speech voicing Juno’s rage at her powerlessness to keep Aeneas out of Italy) to the early modern period.⁴¹ In antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the figure was used to teach letter writing, and a few examples, in which ethopoeia appears among a broader range of rhetorical figures, survive from the later Middle Ages.⁴² This practice encouraged students, some of whom became poets, to think about evoking a character with a voice that conveys his or her particular experience of emotions, social codes, and mores. It is perhaps difficult for us, who largely expect literary voices to do these very things, to appreciate how specific a use of voice this is and, further, how it establishes a literary convention that synthesizes a character’s inner and outer life by means of his or her voice. Some of the most poignant passages in Chaucer’s long poems are ethopoetic interludes, from Criseyde’s lament for her lost reputation (“Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge”) to Dido’s lament in the House of Fame.⁴³ (This figure was considered particularly suitable for the representation of female grief.) Further, to a medieval rhetorician, the soliloquy and the dialogue existed on an ethopoetic continuum, the dialogue being a juxtaposition of alternating ethopoetic utterances.⁴⁴

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