The Play of Quotation and Commonplace in King Lear

Abstract

It is a commonplace that the Renaissance was a culture built upon commonplaces. Its literary works were constructed by the imitation of the forms and topoi of a small range of approved classical authorities, while the letters and speeches which enabled ordinary social intercourse were built up from the rhetorical strategies taught at school and the handy sententiae and bons mots noted down in the theatre or the study. The culture of the maxim and the motto found its most extensive expression in the Adagia of Erasmus, a collection which assembles from the classics and the Bible and the idiom of proverbial lore (albeit in the learned languages) a fund not only of material which enables speech but also of authorities which give it sanction. For whether a commonplace such as corrumpunt bonos mores colloquia prava or dulce bellum inexpertis comes down to us with an author’s name or simply the authority of learned repetition, it carries weight through our very recognition of it, and additionally commends itself to the memory through its rhetorical form — its pithy shape, its alliteration, the useful way in which it fits a Latin metre. But if the commonplace enables speech, it also constrains speech through the tyranny of custom. The Adagia particularly in the more substantial essays, rescue important ideas from being merely familiar, because the easy repetition of dulce bellum inexpertis or dulce et decorum est pro patria mori prevents scrutiny of the idea and the interests of those who promote it: often Erasmus will play one proverb off against another; often he will point to the way slogans and honorific titles are used to persuade by deception. The very proliferation of words, proverbs, topoi for discussion, can be debilitating. There are always those whose power depends upon the proliferation of words, such as the scholastic theologians in the Moriae Encomium who keep the real demands of the gospel at bay by inventing abstruse topics of debate. And there are always those readers who would rather hear about proverbs than about substantial matters of war and peace.