The Rhetoric of Concealment

Abstract

Demonstrating how struggles over gender and class were mediated through formal properties of writing, The Rhetoric of Concealment offers a new framework for the discussion of court literature and middle-class literature in the English Renaissance. Rosemary Kegl offers powerful new readings of works by Puttenham, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Deloney and considers an array of other texts including journals, gynecological and obstetrical writings, misogynist tracts, defenses of women, prescriptive literature on companionate marriage, royal proclamations, and town histories. Kegl's readings center on a recurrent rhetorical gesture in the work of each author-riddling disclosure in Puttenham' s The Arte of English Poesie , the language of rebellion and dismemberment in Sidney's Arcadia , the network of insults in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor , and the collection of proverbial wisdom in Deloney's Jack of Newbury . In each case, Kegl asks what sorts of gender and class relations such gestures pro mote. She analyzes how rhetorical gestures help to mediate the relationships between, on the one hand, new forms of economic exploitation and, on the other, the possibilities and constraints afforded by absolutist rule, popular rebellion, the development of guilds, and the power of the courts and of town government. Kegl also traces interrelationships between such rhetorical gestures and the gendered division oflabor, the situation of propertied widows, and the prosecution and punish ment, in ecclesiastical courts and in shaming rituals, of women's verbal and sexual excesses. By way of conclu sion, she takes up recent work by Karen Newman and Richard Halpern to speculate on the role that Renaissance historical criticism may play in contemporary cultural studies.

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