Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The third book of George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie is devoted primarily to the part of rhetoric called elocutio, adornment or style. In the sixth chapter, which treats the various levels of style, Puttenham warns against using affected and “puffed up” words in the high style, for such wordscannot be better resembled than to these midsummer pageants in London, where to make the people wonder are set forth great and ugly giants marching as if they were alive and armed at all points, but within they are stuffed full of brown paper and tow, which the shrewd boys underpeering do guilefully discover and turn to a great derision. (165)This passage is remarkable for its apparent hostility to carnival. It faults the use of affected and exaggerated words by comparing them to the grotesque giants who often appeared in pageants on St. John's Day (June 21), satirizing those giants by stressing how little they contain, just as puffed up words have “more countenance than matter” (165). Distancing himself from “the people,” whom he indicts here for their gullibility, their susceptibility to feel a naive type of “wonder” in response to such shows, Puttenham evinces what would appear to be a non-traditional or “modern” sensibility marked by skepticism and distance from the rituals and ceremonies of the past. Carnival here seems mere show, surface without substance, easily exposed to ... log in or subscribe to read full text