“If Thou Consider Rightly of the Matter”: Intent, Interpretation, and the Fear of Rhetoric
Last week, I looked at Julius Caesar as a case-study for understanding early modern fears concerning rhetoric during the late 16th and early 17th century. I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which Shakespeare was wary of the relationship between rhetorical provocation and the violent potential of the crowd. However, representations of rhetorical provocation such as Marc Antony only tell half the story when it comes to drawing a parallel to our contemporary moment.
Early modern English writers, though they are drawing a great deal of their thought on rhetoric from sources dating back to the Roman Republic, were writing under the watching eyes of an absolutist monarch, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I, as well as many contemporary European monarchs, were understood to be careful, well-trained students of political rhetoric, having been trained in the art of speaking as the embodiment of state power. This is part of why, with the possible exception of Jack Cade in The History of Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare’s rhetoricians are all styled in the vein of Marc Antony, and their capacity to manipulate the public to violent action is viewed as the product of a careful project of rhetorical manipulation. In our contemporary moment, this sense of conscious rhetorical provocation is less stable and as a result, slightly more challenging to address.
These works, as well as the underlying fear that colors the narrative of Henry II’s turbulent priest, are all contingent on the assumption that the careful suggestions of violence from the political leaders to their followers are all purposefully enacted by those leaders. They know exactly what their words will do. Marc Antony displays a concrete set of goals that he wishes the crowd to enact for him. He does not care how the crowd brings vengeance down upon Brutus and Cassius, he simply cares that his enemies suffer.
However, what do we do when it is less clear that the provocative speech and the fanning of violent tensions has an end-goal in mind? A common point of political discussion in recent months has concerned the degree to which President Trump is aware of the implications of his speech and to what degree individuals acting upon this speech are simply “misreading” his intent. When he calls the press “enemies of the people,” there is a frequent suggestion raised that these statements are not meant to be interpreted as calls to action.
The argument questions whether President Trump is a carefully Machiavellian rhetorician who knows precisely what he is doing when he makes these veiled threats, or if he is a raging bull in a china shop who only cares about the adulation of a crowd that legitimately enjoys the things he has to say about journalists and democrats alike. While, to a degree, this debate is present in most everything the President does, it takes on a relevance to discussions of rhetorical incitement to violence since these arguments so frequently hinge on concerns of motive and intent. In the popular narrative, and in the leveraging of his story, Henry II was not an angry man venting to no one in particular, he was a focused participant in the death of Thomas Beckett who knew exactly how his words were going to be interpreted by his followers. This shifts the focal point of the question away from the danger of focused and carefully constructed rhetoric to the dangers of rhetoric wielded like a hammer.
This then raises a second question; does it matter? If the result is the death of Thomas Beckett, does it matter whether Henry II truly wanted his knights to venture to Canterbury to have him murdered? Similarly, if journalists’ lives are being placed at risk, does it matter if President Trump was only attacking the press because he knew it played well to his base? In our contemporary moment, we are not given a clear affirmation like Marc Antony’s carefully constructed plot against the conspirators. Rather, the question that arises is a concern of intent against effect and the relationship between the two.
Without the help of a useful set of soliloquies documenting exactly how aware an individual is of the ramifications of their violent rhetoric, our contemporary moment places an increased scrutiny on whether a rhetorician is actively attempting to compel action or not. Therefore, the Comey moment is fascinating, as it becomes centered on a question of “proper interpretation” of a suggestion, implying that if Comey were to have interpreted “incorrectly” that would absolve Trump of all wrong-doing. This is mirrored less directly in responses to the recent instance of bombs being sent to key members of the Democratic Party and other vocal critics of the President. Individuals wishing to distance the President’s words from the action have positioned the attacks as a “misreading” or “misunderstanding” of Trump’s anti-media, anti-Democrat rhetoric.
With Henry II, it is assumed that we were not approaching the relationship between violence and rhetoric as one of interpretation. Here, there is a greater sense that the public debate is concerned with parsing out the meaning behind the words, as the possibility of misinterpretation is put on the table as a defense of the President’s involvement in these acts. In our moment, fears surrounding rhetoric are framed around interpretative questions more so than in past moments. The crowd in Julius Caesar is not guilty of misreading Marc Antony, as his intent is clear. In our contemporary debates, the certainty of the proper interpretation of inflammatory rhetoric is positioned as being as terrifying as the rhetoric itself, if not more so.
Next week, in my final post, I am going to turn slightly, towards a different kind of rhetorical provocation that troubles our current moment. In a public discourse increasingly defined by internet connectivity, these types of rhetorical strategies are becoming increasingly diffuse and increasingly anonymized. Looking at a case study of internet conspiracy theories, my last post will examine what happens when there is no singular individual concerned with the actions of a singular troublesome priest, but there is instead a legion of nameless, faceless voices collectively descending upon an invented troublesome priest.
Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.