For Henry Only

The South Central Modern Language Association

Niccolò Machiavelli by Silvia Ruffo-Fiore Review by: Paul G. Reeve The South Central Bulletin, Vol. 43, No. 4, Studies by Members of SCMLA (Winter, 1983), pp. 132-133 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3187263 . Accessed: 07/07/2013 23:20

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132 THE SOUTH CENTRAL BULLETIN Winter, 1983

BOOK REVIEWS Continued

complicated relationships. Thus, the Comus entertainment in September of 1634, Hunter tells us, is "somehow a response" to the scandalous events which led to Castlehaven's execution in 1631 and left a cloud over the marriage-linked Spencers and Egertons. In creating this "family piece" as a response to family commission, Milton dramatized the Augustinian notion that "true chastity was a mental condition that could not be altered by physical assault," but he may have responded "too enthusiastically," Hunter suggests, because three passages stressing chastity are omitted from the Bridgewater manuscript and thus in all probability from the 1634 performance.

Hunter's "tentative promptbook" is based primarily on the 1637 first edition with differences from the Bridgewater manuscript indicated in footnotes; and he maintains that Milton had a Ludlow performance in mind as he composed the work. Hence Comus was not written as "a piece ofpoetry" that Henry Lawes might freely adapt to the Ludlow scene. Since Hunter contends that the performance occurred in the inner bailey and not in the Great Hall, traditionally accepted as the site, his stage directions address the outdoor scene of the castle bailey. The most surprising change in Hunter's promptbook is an opening song by the "Daemon" that is extracted from the play's epilogue. In light of Hunter's research, his promptbook entices production.

In an appendix Hunter offers additional evidence that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was written to celebrate the wedding of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley. Even though his evidence is convincing, the reader may wonder why Hunter appended this article to his brief Comus study. Its brevity notwithstanding, this carefully researched book offers valuable insight.

Albert W. Fields University of Southwestern Louisiana

J. R. LeMaster, FirstPerson, Second (poems). Madras, India: The Poet & Tagore Institute of Creative Writing International, n. d. 55 pp. $5.00.

All of us, individually and culturally, wear masques - those we create for ourselves and those created for us. When we look at ourselves we see both the masque of I and the masque of you, something like staring into a mirror and recognizing the reversed image somewhat distorted by the thickness of the glass. In addition, all relationships share a common masque of the particular bonds formed - especially the sum total of all human relationships.

J. R. LeMaster's new collection of poetry, First Person, Second, in three parts ("The Soul as Pretender'," "The World as We Have Made It," and "Things as They Should Be") expertly examines the universal masque (man and his world as they view each other) on both a physical and spiritual basis. The result is a discovery oftheIandyou of selfand the I and you collectively - the mirror and the real, the reflection and the reflected.

When the masque is lifted, as this poet does, we get a deeper understanding of the very face that molds the skin, and when the light shines through, the skin itself. LeMaster lifts the skin and sometimes finds the real in the face and sometimes in the space beyond the mirror's glass. First he says, "I will throw open / the gates of the poem" (in "Only the Tiger"); he continues this development in "Flesh Only," and "Manner."

It is suggested that the ultimate human conquest, the search for the "unknown shadows" (in "Manner"), would be to hang the self canvas in such a way that the light would shine through the masque and the man, the shadow and the man, as one - the painting as the painter. The echo, of course,is to W. B. Yeats ("How can we know the dancer from the dance?"). LeMaster adds another dimension to the concept- in particular, that the real is neither the dancer nor the dance but both combined with the light and dark which create them, as in "The Clown Who Dances Sprightly" and "The Bushes at Stonehenge."

Two other forms of the masque need to be mentioned - the masque that is life and the one that is death, the light and the dark. Neither, according to LeMaster, is quite the way we see them, as he points out in "All Day They Called" and "Our Words Flow." "Death," he says, "is not a lover's dream.... Death ... is perfect love" ("All Day They Called").

First Person, Second is a major work by a very gifted poet. It opens new vistas, word by word, line by line, to areas with which we need to concern ourselves. One hardly need mention LeMaster's technical accuracy; he has long been a craftsman who refused to settle for less than perfection in his work.

Lee Pennington University of Kentucky

Jefferson Community College

Silvia Ruffo-Fiore, Niccol6 Machiavelli. Twayne's World Authors Series, No. 656. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. x + 179 pp. $14.95

Machiavelli was a Renaissance man, not only chronologically, but also in the scope of his accomplishment. He was a scholar and a man of action, a philosopher and a diplomat, a poet and a politician. Silvia Ruffo-Fiore has set for herself the forbidding task of presenting a critical overview of Machiavelli's life and work in a mere 144 page of text. Ruffo-Fiore describes her approach in the "Preface": "This critical overview surveys [Michiavelli's] writings, particularly stressing their literary qualities, in order to adjust popular, stereotyped views and to make his works more clearly understood and appreciated" (p. vii).

This is quite an ambitious program, and yet it does narrow the focus a bit. Ruffo-Fiore's emphasis on the "literary and rhetorical dimensions" (p. vii) of Machiavelli's work gives her a handle on this imposing body ofmaterial. It also results in some interesting insights, such as her analysis of "The New Prince as a Mythic Hero" (pp. 34-37). In this subchapter, Ruffo-Fiore points out that the enduring interest in Machiavelli's The Prince is due in large measure to "Machiavelli's portrayal of the new Prince, which blends the qualities of the historical, literary, and mythic definitions of hero" (p. 34).

What sometimes seems missing in this literary and rhetorical approach is a sense of Machiavelli's intellectual milieu. Of Machiavelli, C. S. Lewis observed, "The Elizabethans, I believe, understood him much better than the subtle moderns." The Elizabethans understood that Machiavelli represented a challenge that put their world at risk. The moderns, subtle or not, live in a world where Machiavelli's vision of the secular state prevails. It is, therefore, difficult at this late date to grasp exactly what all the furor was about- why Machiavelli was so widely reviled, why his name became a synonym for perfidy, why he became identified with Satan himself, "old Nick."

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Winter, 1983 THE SOUTH CENTRAL BULLETIN 133

Machiavelli, like Galileo a century later, represented a threat to established authority. Each of these innovators shucked off the metaphysical trappings of his science and relied wholly on empirical evidence. It was not merely his recommendation in The Prince of perfidious and cruel political behavior that earned Machiavelli his name, but his complete disregard of the metaphysical foundations of political authority.

As Lord Acton said, "The authentic interpreter of Machiavelli is the whole course of later history." In choosing to focus on the literary and rhetorical dimensions of Machiavelli's work, Ruffo-Fiore has hit upon a topic that the course of history has been relatively silent on. Machiavelli has been interpreted and re-interpreted for each epoch, and this history is sketched by Ruffo-Fiore in her concluding chapter, "The Legacy of Machiavelli." But interpretation has been confined largely to the character of the man and of his thought. Even in the consideration of his literary and dramatic works, Ruffo-Fiore comments, "thoroughgoing analysis of his dramatic techniques, symbols, themes, language, and imagery has taken second place to the power of his ideological vision" (p. 111). Ruffo-Fiore's approach to Machiavelli's works is a worthwhile undertaking well executed, and while the scope of the book is necessarily limited, the "Selected Bibliography" provides a guide for further reading.

Paul G. Reeve Vanderbilt University

William E. Tanner and J. Dean Bishop, ed., Rhetoric and Change. Mesquite, Texas: Ide House, Inc., 1982. iv + 217 pp. $15.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).

Readers familiar with the annual symposia in rhetoric (1974-80) sponsored by the Federation of North Texas Area Universities and the Department of English of Texas Woman's University will surely welcome this collection of thirteen essays, many of which are drawn from the symposia. The editors not only arrange them effectively, but also offer as an introduction (Part One) an overview of directions and insights in rhetorical study over the past several decades. In this lead essay, "Reform Amid the Revival of Rhetoric," Tanner and Bishop establish the frame ofthe anthology and provide useful touchstones for students of rhetoric from Adams Sherman Hill's The Principles of Rhetoric (1895) to Janice M. Lauer's (and others) Four Worlds of Writing (1981).

The essays themselves (Part Two through Five) address both pedagogical and theoretical issues, ranging from the study of literary uses of rhetoric to the role of rhetoric in problem-solving, creative writing, and composition. Part Two, "Voices of Change," contains two essays: Edward P. J. Corbett's "Rhetoric, Whether Goest Thou?" and Winston Weathers' "The Value of Rhetoric to the Creative Artist." Corbett's essay, a diagnostician's estimate of the "health" of rhetoric, paints a guarded but optimistic picture of the state of rhetoric and the potential for rhetorical study in a society dominated by visual media. For Winston Weathers, a veteran contributor of rhetorical studies and creative work, the discipline of rhetoric is a necessary prelude for young writers to creative activity. "By refusing to recognize rhetoric as a legitimate part of artistry," Weathers argues, "the creator handicaps himself and, alas, comprises the very role of art in our society" (pp. 32-33).

Part Three, "Aristotle Astray," offers three essays on the limits of traditional rhetorical theory. The first of these, Jacques Barzun's "The Rhetoric of the Arts," challenges many recent "schools" of criticism based on what Barzun calls "misplaced abstraction," a flaw which leads critics to reduce art to a set of principles, archetypes, or symbols that ultimately ignore both artifact and artist. The effect of such extreme reductivism, Barzun contends, is that art become governed by a sort of "mechanical determinism." Wilbur Samuel Howell, in his essay "Peter Ramus, Thomas Sheridan, and Kenneth Burke: Three Mavericks in the History of Rhetoric," provides a brief description of Aristotle's Rhetoric and an analysis of the ways in which Ramus, Sheridan, and Burke have departed from it. Kenneth Burke himself, in his "Motion, Action, and the Human Condition," explores the nature of action (language) and its relationship to motion (matter), as well as symbolic action (roughly, non-literal language) as an extension of motion.

Parts Four and Five, "From Intention to Invention" and "Squiggles on a Moebius Strip," respectively, include several essays on literature as well as pedagogical and theoretical pieces. The range of authors and titles indicates the variety: Martin Steinmann, Jr., "Speech Acts and Rhetoric"; Frank J. D'Angelo, "Up Against the Wall, Mother! The Rhetoric of Slogans, Catchphrases, and Graffiti"; Richard L. Larson, "The Rhetoric of the Written Voice"; Richard E. Young, "Methodizing Nature: The Tagmemic Discovery Procedure"; W. Ross Winterowd, "The Three R's: Reading, Reading, and Rhetoric"; Gerald J. Prince, "Questions, Answers, and Narrative Legibility: A Structuralist Heuristic"; Kay Parkhurst Easson, "'Description as Cosmos'; Blake's settings in Milton"; and Thomas O. Sloan, "Beauty's Spouse's Odd Elysium: Barth's Funhouse."

That the editors have had such a broad range oftopics and authors from which to choose indicates two things: first, the eclectic nature of contemporary rhetorical investigation; and second, the quality of the interest and participation in the symposia in rhetoric for which they were largely responsible.

Douglas M. Catron Iowa State University

Ron Thomas, The Latin Masks ofEzra Pound. Studies in Modern Literature, No. 4. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Press, 1983. xvi + 180 pp. $34.95.

Not long after his termination as a teacher at Wabash College in 1908 (he sheltered a chorus girl), Ezra Pound headed for Europe. It was, he thought, goodbye desert and hello oasis. If oasis proved mirage, Ron Thomas indicates in The Latin Masks of Ezra Pound, it was due in no small measure to a pair of world wars ( = History), the first of which soured Pound on England and her Establishment, and the second of which ended his prospect of becoming Italy's (and fascist Mussolini's) modern epic poet.

Between 1908 and 1917 Ezra Pound, Idaho's poet, "Halley's comet," sought poetic identity through the Latin Masks (personae) of Catullus as lyric/satiric and Propertius as dramatic/erotic. After 1917, Pound switched to the Ovid of the Metamorphoses as his model in a long series of poems designated as The Cantos. Fired by ambition to rival Virgil, author ofan epic which appeared to have established a polity (the Roman imperium), Pound used Ovid as a resource for his personal poetic program: to oppose Hellenism (the

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