As the presidential race grinds wearyingly on, I find myself fondly reminiscing about the Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, a congressman and senator for three decades. Perhaps he is best remembered as being crucial to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I remember him as a partisan for Tagetes erecta, the marigold.
For several years, Dirksen annually introduced a joint resolution proposing that the marigold be declared the national flower. He would always submit the bill with a bravura speech filled with metaphorical flair and charming hyperbole. “What a flower the marigold is,” he would begin. “It is as sprightly as the daffodil, as colorful as the rose, as resolute as the zinnia, as delicate as the carnation, as haughty as the chrysanthemum, as aggressive as the petunia, as ubiquitous as the violet, as stately as the snapdragon. It beguiles the senses and ennobles the spirit of man.”
But Congress never budged (the daisy, peony, and sunflower lobbies no doubt lay ready for ambush).
When Dirksen’s widow published an adoring book about him, she titled it The Honorable Mr. Marigold and summed up at its end: “He was awed by the beauty of the flower and the spoken word. He could cultivate them as no other man could.” Louella Dirksen also quotes an admirer of her husband who declared that it was “Dirksen the orator whom the country knew best” and that his sense of theater was unique. He was not afraid to work across the aisle, and his grateful colleagues named a new Senate office building after him just three years after he died in 1969.
I am nostalgic because such rhetorical sophistication seems to have vanished from our political scene. Imagine a marigold speech in today’s Congress! Such rhetorical joie de vivre, such whimsical but engaging cultivation of the spoken word, such sense of theater — all this is, as Shakespeare put it, dead as nail in door. Golden-tongued orators are no more, not even silver ones; we’re stuck with brass. Remember Mario Cuomo’s adage “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose”? No one has campaigned in poetry in 2016.
I recently ended four decades living in and teaching about the worlds created by Shakespeare, that champion cultivator of the spoken word. He achieved this supremacy by mastering all the dozens of rhetorical devices available to him. (It’s a happy coincidence, apropos Dirksen’s beloved marigold, that these devices were in the Bard’s day called flores rhetoricae — Latin for “flowers of rhetoric.”) Every play in his canon offers a bouquet of such flowers, and his most memorable characters become so by virtue of their extraordinary eloquence. We are seduced into lending them our ears.
We teachers cherish the hope that Shakespeare’s brilliant employment of the figures or devices of rhetoric will rub off on our students, make them in turn more effective speakers and communicators. His plays constitute a DIY manual for the art of persuasion; it is no accident that most all his plays hinge on well-executed, well-timed speeches of persuasion (the Latin word for such a speech is suasoria).
Shakespeare’s memorable suasorias are ubiquitous. Antony decisively wins his debate with Brutus before the plebeians with his oration, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” The noble Moor brilliantly defends his courtship of Desdemona at the beginning of Othello with a suasoria. One could say “To be or not to be” is an attempt at self-persuasion. The king is often heroically articulate in Henry V, not least at Agincourt: “The game’s afoot!/ Follow your spirit; and upon this charge/ Cry, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”
But where is the poetry in the 2016 presidentiad (Shakespeare was the champion neologist of all time, but this one was invented by Walt Whitman)? We seem to be witnessing the triumph of the glib, the rise of shorthand over the longhand of extended, rhetorically sophisticated argument. Sound-bites have replaced paragraphs; emoticons have replaced emotions. Why bother composing suasorias or hiring those harmless drudges called speechwriters when you have a Twitter feed? Christie to Rubio: “Dude, show up to work and vote ‘no.’”
In 1589 one George Puttenham published the first-ever English how-to-write-poetry manual, The Arte of English Poesie. This was just before Shakespeare began writing his sonnets and plays. The playwright must have pored over it — especially the lion’s share of its pages devoted to individual descriptions of the flowers of rhetoric — for he became a master at using them. Puttenham amusingly translates the often arcane Greek and Roman names for them: ironia becomes the “dry mock,” paronomasia, the common pun, is the “nicknamer,” and hyperbole is the “overreacher” or “loud liar.” If campaigns were floats, they would be decked out in this flower.
Shakespeare is particularly famous for several rhetorical devices: alliteratio (Puttenham calls this “affecting the letter”), ecphonesis (the “outcry” — there are more than 2,000 O’s in his plays, like “O brave new world” or “O, reason not the need!”), epitheton (choosing the most apt adjective or adverb), epizeuxis (repetition, like Othello’s “O blood, blood, blood!” or Lear’s five famous “Nevers”), circumlocutio (Puttenham says this is “when we go about the bush” — as Romeo does when he addresses his poison vial, “Come, bitter conduct, come unsavory guide”).
But the glory of Shakespeare are his metaphors and similes. Who is the true poet in Othello? Surely it is the Moor himself, whom Shakespeare makes a master imagist. To describe his jealous rage he delivers an extended simile comparing it to the “icy current and compulsive course” of the Bosphorus Strait. When he sees his error he bitterly consigns himself to hell: “roast me in sulphur!/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!” At the very end he speaks of himself as “one whose hand like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe.”
If Othello is this play’s poet, who is its politician? (Shakespeare always uses the word “politician” with a sneer; my favorite instance is when Lear sarcastically urges, “Get thee glass eyes,/ And like a scurvy politician, seem/ To see the things thou dost not": a perfect synopsis of the Republican debates so far.) Surely the play’s politician is Iago, that spinmeister so expert at conjuring alternate realities in the minds of others.
Shakespeare gives Iago much nonsense to disseminate, notably several bogus motives for his evil. He even speaks deliberate nonsense on several occasions Examples: “I am not what I am” or his very last line, “What you know, you know.”
At one point Iago says to Othello, “Men should be what they seem.” That is clear enough (you could say such authenticity has been Bernie Sanders’s main selling point). But then Iago adds, “Or those that be not, would they might seem none!” This is hard to parse, but Iago is just testing to see whether Othello has his wits about him. He well knows that if you utter nonsense with enough confidence — and add an exclamation point, Jeb-wise — you, too, can create an alternate reality.
The current campaign’s race to the bottom of the rhetorical barrel, of course, has been led by Donald Trump. Did you know “trumpery” was Shakespeare’s word for fancy garments or showy rubbish?
Which brings me back to Puttenham. Many common devices he describes capture Trump’s pugilistic stump style. Here are four: sarcasmus, the “bitter taunt … when we deride with a certain severity”; micterismus, the “fleering frump … when we give a mock with a scornful countenance … by drawing the lippe away, or shrinking up the nose”; antiphrasis: the “broad flout … when we deride by plain and flat contradiction”; charientismus, “the privy nip … when you give a mock under smooth and lowly words” (a figure ideal for Twitter).
Trump also has a knack for abominatio (the abusive insult) hurled ad hominem: loser, ugly, stupid, clueless.
Puttenham devotes a separate section to “vices” of rhetoric to be detested, and here we are also reminded of the Donald. Cacemphaton is “the figure of foul speech … such words as may be drawn to foul and unshamefast sense.” Acyron: “uncouth speech” that is “utterly repugnant” in civil discourse. Finally, there is the tent-pole rhetorical figure in Trump’s campaign: bomphiologia or “pompous speech,” which is using “such bombasted words, as seem altogether farced full of wind, being a great deal too high and lofty for the matter.” That is, hyperbole writ large.
Trump is a master bomphiologist. With relentlessly self-aggrandizing narcissism he has cornered the market on “huge.” His rhetoric of braggadocio reminds one of the biggest political loser in all Shakespeare, that “huge hill of flesh” Sir John Falstaff. He entertains himself—and us—all through the two Henry IV plays with his solipsistic vision of holding sway behind the future king’s throne. But his devotion to the pleasures of the frivolous tavern world — the equivalent being Trump’s reality-TV celebrity, golf resorts, and architectural trumpery — disqualifies him for government.
In Shakespeare’s world, the ego-driven Lord of Misrule must finally get his comeuppance. The “sweet creature of bombast” must finally be deflated. This comes in the famous “rejection” speech by Henry V banishing Falstaff from his court: “I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers./ How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”
In our political real world, I’m hoping this moment will come soon, though the hair in question is more reddish blond than white.
