A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), a familiar work of the Renaissance, is primarily thought of as a sixteenth-century English textbook on the figures. Yet it is also a mirror of one variation of rhetoric which came to be called the rhetoric of style. As a representative of this stylistic school, it offers little that is new to the third part of classical rhetoric. Instead, it carries forward the medieval concept that ornateness in communication is desirable; it suggests that figures are tools for achieving this ornateness; it supplies examples of ornateness to be imitated in writing and speaking; it supports knowing the figures in order to understand both secular and religious writings; it proposes that clarity is found in the figures. In short, the work assisted Englishmen to understand eloquence as well as to create it.

Four-fifths of ancient rhetoric is omitted in the Treatise. The nod is given to elocution. Invention is discussed, but only as a tool to assist the communicator in amplifying his ideas, as a means to spin out his thoughts to extreme lengths. Arrangement, memory, and delivery are overlooked. Accordingly, the Treatise neatly fits into the category of a Renaissance rhetoric on style. It is this school which recognized the traditional five Ciceronian parts of rhetoric, but considered style to be the most significant precept. The Treatise is not the first to support an emphasis wholly on style, nor the foremost. We know that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s works on rhetoric, and Quintilian’s Institutes discussed the significance of style, but they had a broad view. However, in England, about the time of Bede, arose a limited concept that rhetoric is mainly style, particularly that of the figures. It is this latter truncated version of rhetoric that the Treatise continues in the Renaissance. Rhetoric in Sherry’s work has lost its ancient meaning.

The Treatise is highly prescriptive. It was born in an age of rules. So much so, that the rhetorician who named his rules and tools was not out of rapport with the period. This accounts for the rigidity, the love of classification, and the schematic presentation of the work. It is nothing more than a highly organized dictionary of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance schemes and tropes. In fact, the major variation from previous Latin compilers is to be found in the headnotes relative to the various kinds of figures. Nor is it as thorough in handling the figures as its predecessors. It utilizes, however, the customary Greek and Latin terms and supplies a definition, but here the similarity with contemporaries and ancients ends. It is weak in amplification of examples during an age when amplification was practiced. Sherry economizes by selecting usually one example in support of a figure while contemporary cataloguers, and ancients for that matter, are more definitive.

Whether the work was ever popular within the schools or without is unclear. Probably it did not have extensive success because only one issue of the work appeared and a revised edition was brought out in 1555....