Abstract
The fundamentals of Ramism relate to correct reason, natural reason, and trained reason. The works of William Shakespeare testify to his creative appreciation of these fundamentals. At an intuitive level, this understanding does not differentiate between Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and William Shakspere of Stratford, but Oxford’s formal education supplemented his intuitive understanding of logic to a degree that Stratford’s minimal education did not attain. De Vere’s attainment relates to Ramus’s estimation of both the classical and the vernacular. Ramus defined three methodological laws (truth, justice, and wisdom). Giordano Bruno charged Ramus under the critique of pedantry. That charge requires dilution. Ramus’s influence on mathematics, especially as that effect pertains to England, begins that process.
“Method,” both in the form of “learning” and of “sagacity,” is the sovereign light of reason.
—Peter Ramus, Dialectique (135; Graves’s translation)
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Hickes remarks Cecil’s “plainness in familiar common words” (122).
- 2.
De Vere’s letters evidence his use of both forms of hypothetical proposition. In a letter to Burghley (March 1575), which conveys Oxford’s response to the news of Anne de Vere’s pregnancy, he uses the disjunctive form in abjuring the need to come home. “For now it hath pleased God to give me a son of my own (as I hope it is),” writes Oxford, “methinks I have the better occasion to travel sith, whatsoever becometh of me, I leave behind me one to supply my duty and service” (Cecil Papers 8/24). During Oxford’s subsequent estrangement from his wife, Burghley desired to bring his daughter to court, and his son-in-law accepted this wish as long as he (Oxford) was elsewhere. “But now I understand,” wrote Oxford to Burghley on 13 July 1576, “that your Lordship means this day to bring her to the court,” despite his son-in-law’s presence. A conjunctive phrase expresses the warning that follows: “Now if your Lordship shall do so, then shall you take more in hand than I have or can promise you” (Cecil Papers 9/15).
- 3.
When Théophile de Banos “wrote the Life of his famous friend and master,” remarks Buxton, “he dedicated it to Sidney not merely because of his own but because of Ramus’s affection and respect for Sidney” (45–46).
- 4.
“‘Gentle’ […] in sixteenth-century usage,” as Anderson emphasizes, “meant not ‘docile’ or ‘kindly’ but rather someone of the next highest caste above yeoman” (326).
- 5.
Ramus also grants a grudging legitimacy to enthymeme and sorites. Enthymeme is an abbreviated form of syllogistic logic in which one premise is not openly stated. Sorites is the paradoxical logic that arises from vague predicates.
- 6.
Ramus’s quotations come from Roland M’Kilwein’s The Logike of the Moste Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr.
- 7.
Amyot studied at the College of St. Barbara.
- 8.
Ramus “proposes for the king’s tutor, above all other excellent scholars, Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre, who has done much for his country” (qtd. in Charles Waddington 419).
- 9.
Bucer also communicated by letter with Cecil. See Basil Hall (146).
- 10.
In The First Part of King Henry VI, when Gloucester initially tries to persuade his nephew to marry, the king’s response has the air of a Cecilian ward: “Alas, my years are young;/And fitter is my study and my books” (5.1.21–22).
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Ramus’s Method. In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_4
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