Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, Kastril, violent, quarrels, rhetorical, accomplishment, legal, oratory
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civil conduct in his autobiography, makes a direct comparison between the two:
It is a generall Note That a mans witt is best shewed in his answer and his valour in his defence, that therefore as men learne in Fencing how to ward all blowes and thrusts which are or can bee made against him, Soe it will bee fitting to debate and resolue before hand what you are to say or doe vpon any Affront giuen you.
Although Cherbury had a reputation for pursuing violent quarrels, his consideration of strategies of riposte has impeccable pedagogic credentials. He cites his authorities as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s De Oratore and Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria; clear evidence that the defence of one’s reputation through rebuttal was a skill associated closely with rhetorical accomplishment and might indicate a well-rounded education.
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That he cites three of the most influential classical authorities upon legal oratory throughout the Renaissance perhaps also indicates that for him, and for his contemporaries, the use of both wit and violence to defend one’s good name were deemed sciences that offered alternatives to legal proceedings.
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Swordsmanship and rhetorical dexterity are similarly linked together as components of a cultivated urbanity in the criminal underworld of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610). In this play the would-be gentleman, Kastril, who appears in the dramatis personæ as ‘the angry boy’, is particularly keen to learn how to “manage a quarrel, fairly,/ Upon fit terms”; or as Face puts it, the “rules to give and take the lie by” (III.iv. 18-19 and 36-7).
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The importance attributed to acquiring such skills suggests the existence of a poetics of
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The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury Written by Himself, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (OUP, 1976), p.28. On Cherbury’s reputation see Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), p.80.
55 See, for instance, Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978), p.21. Lodowick Bryskett complains of precisely this phenomenon: “But yet these goodly defenders of this abuse [duelling] say, that a man, both by order of nature, and by the opinion of Philosophers, may well repulse any iniury by his owne vertue, and not by law”, A Discovrse of Civill Life (printed for Edward Blovnt, 1606; repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; NY: De Capo, 1971), p.77. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
56 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. F. H. Mares (Methuen, 1982).
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