Republicanism, tacitism and style in English drama: 1585–1608

In the sixteenth century, both on the Continent and in England, Cicero served as a pre-eminent model for rhetorical style. Reacting against the veneration for Cicero’s rhetoric, late Elizabethan authors experimented with an ‘anti-Ciceronian’ style, imitating the writings of Seneca and Tacitus rather than those of Cicero. Whereas in the middle decades of the twentieth century the contrast between Ciceronian and anti-Ciceronian styles provided the dominant framework for studies of early modern prose, more recent commentators have offered compelling criticisms of this distinction. In response, this dissertation provides an alterative account of the anti-Ciceronian style, arguing that it can be characterized as an epigrammatic ‘sententious’ style. Adopting a historical formalist approach, this dissertation examines the political context of the sententious and Ciceronian stylistic movements. While sententious writing was associated with Tacitean political attitudes, the Ciceronian style was linked to the republicanism of its namesake. Accordingly, early modern dramatists, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Kyd, used the sententious style to convey Tacitean restraint, whereas Ciceronian rhetoric expressed republican outspokenness. In a series of recent studies on republicanism, Quentin Skinner has shown that early modern republicans were committed to a distinctly classical conception of liberty. Applying Skinner’s views on political philosophy to drama, this dissertation reconceives the role of republicanism in early modern drama, showing that the classical republican notion of liberty is explored in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard II, Jonson’s Sejanus and several plays by Marlowe, Daniel and Chapman. This dissertation changes our understanding of both early modern rhetorical style and also the dramatization of republicanism and Tacitism