Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

rhetorical structure of a speech – exordium , probatio, narratio and peroratio . The most famous classical apologia were those of Xenophon and Plato, describing the trial of Socrates. But the most generically important precursor for the autobiographical apology was Isocrates’s Antidosis, a speech he made in defence of a rather spurious accusation that he had been corrupting the Athenian youth (clearly meant to mimic the charges against Socrates), which takes Isocrates’s own biography to launch a wider defence of the ethical purpose of rhetoric in the Athenian state, and the dangers to Athens and to Greece of Isocrates’s detractors. In other words, Antidosis uses the story of Isocrates’s life both to defend his own character and public service, and to expound his political philosophy. 33 Apologia and apologetics were the preserve of religious controversialists from late antiquity to the high middle ages, while in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, apology flourished with the self-conscious classicizing scholarship of humanists, and the ad hominem character of so much sixteenth-century religious polemic. But one particular tract influenced Essex’s Apologie : William of Orange’s Apologie or Defence … of his role in the Dutch revolt, which treatise was widely circulated in Europe, with printed English translations appearing in 1581 and 1584. Ostensibly this was a ‘defence’ of William’s formal condemnation as a rebel by the Spanish crown, with a bounty on his head, and against the slanders that attended that proscription: ‘that men of so great countenance, should so farre and so vilely debase their greatnes … falsely to backbite and to slaunder, it hath seemed vnto me altogether necessarie to speak’. 34 But through the autobiographical lens, the treatise uses William’s personal viewpoint to frame a wider justification of the revolt itself; the text thus acts as a call to arms against Spanish tyranny. ‘William’ presents himself as a patriot, and a true lover of his country against the Spanish, whose foreignness is a component of their malevolence. The binary of liberty and tyranny is a persistent leitmotif, while the peroration calls on readers who ‘beare any loue to the countrey’ to ‘with one hart … imbrase the defence of this good people … for the good, and preseruation, of your selues, your wiues and children, and all sacred and holie thinges’. 35

33 Isocrates, On the Peace. Areopagiticus. Against the Sophists. Antidosis. Panathenaicus, trans. George Norlin, Loeb Classical Library . (Cambridge, MA, 1929), pp. 179-366. 34 The apologie or defence of the most noble Prince William, by the grace of God, Prince of Orange … (1581), sig. B3r. 35 The apologie or defence . sig. Pv.

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