2Arthur’s linguistic exploits may be seen as a nod in the direction of the popular adage Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior, or “eloquence is superior to physical might”. In Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber of 1531, which had more than a hundred editions in several European languages by the 1620s, the motto is attached to a woodcut of Hercules Gallicus – Hercules captivating a multitude of people not by his physical strength but by his tongue. The connection between Hercules Gallicus and the boy Duke of Brittany in Shakespeare’s play is not an obvious one, but the stage spectacle of the child manipulating a hostile adult with the help of his tongue makes for a variation on the original motif that is conducive to theatrical surprise and thrill. The incongruity and reversal of expectations characterizing this tableau further inspire questions about the cultural formulation of rhetoric and how it inflects the construction of childhood. Before weighing these issues, a more detailed look at the scene is in order.

3At the beginning of the scene, even before he comes to learn about King John’s order, Arthur starts harping on his abject condition and tries several strategies in quick succession in order to elicit sympathy from Hubert. He is discerning enough to sense that Hubert is “sad” (iv.i.11) and makes use of this discovery to launch into a bout of self-pity. In the same breath, he emphasizes the authenticity of his sorrow by contrasting it with the affected melancholy of the prototypical innamorato: “Yet, I remember, when I was in France, / Young gentlemen would be as sad as night / Only for wantonness” (iv.i.14-16). Arthur homes in on the ground reality of his internment with startling perspicacity. Hubert is obviously shaken by what he calls in an aside Arthur’s “innocent prate” (iv.i.25), and resolves to “be sudden, and despatch” (iv.i.27). The boy further aggravates his discomfiture by an emphatic display of solicitude:

Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale today.
In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
That I might sit all night and watch with you.
I warrant I love you more than you do me. (iv.i.28-31)

4Arthur’s loving care for Hubert seems to be selfless, if a bit stilted and self-conscious, at this point. It makes for heady dramatic irony, for the audience has already seen the executioners who are now waiting in the wings. However, soon after Hubert shows him John’s written order for blinding Arthur, the boy recounts past services he voluntarily rendered to Hubert and demands adequate reciprocity (iv.1.41-52). Oddly enough, few lines earlier Arthur was eager to renounce his princely lineage and station in favour of the simpler and freer life of a shepherd. Now he emphasizes his pedigree to show that he had disregarded feudal hierarchy and stooped below his rank for tending to the lowly Hubert at the hour of his illness. What is more fascinating, Arthur himself anticipates the probable accusations of hypocrisy and astuteness against himself. He fluently spells out the charges in the process of pleading with Hubert, and even dares him to act on them:

Nay, you may think my love was crafty love,
And call it cunning. Do, an if you will.
If heaven be pleased that you must use me ill,
Why then you must. (iv.i.53-56; emphases added)

5It is quite clear that Arthur does not take the option of dignity and fortitude in the teeth of adversity that would be more in keeping with the mien of a future warrior and prospective king. Instead, he invents one excuse after another to weaken Hubert’s determination and defer the blinding.

6To begin with, when Hubert ignores his challenge and reiterates his determination to carry out the order, Arthur concocts an elaborate and fantastic description of the iron poker as a sentient and moral being that takes pity on him. The image obliquely but scathingly emphasizes Hubert’s cruelty:

The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears,
And quench his fiery indignation
Even in the matter of mine innocence;
Nay, after that, consume away in rust
But for containing fire to harm mine eye.
Are you more stubborn-hard than hammered iron? (iv.i.61-67)

7Unmoved, when Hubert signals the executioners to reveal themselves and do his bidding, Arthur cries out in sheer terror, “O, save me, Hubert, save me! my eyes are out / Even with the fierce looks of these bloody men” (iv.i.72-73). As Hubert takes the iron in his own hands, Arthur requests him to send away the executioners and promises to stay silent and calm. This move is guided by the intelligent conjecture that Hubert would not be as ruthless as a hardened, professional slaughterer. But as one of the executioners adds as a parting shot that he is “best pleased to be from such a deed” (iv.i.85), Arthur discovers a sympathetic soul in him and promptly reverses his request:

Alas, I then have chid away my friend!
[…] Let him come back, that his compassion may
Give life to yours. (iv.i.86-89; emphases added)

8Arthur then seeks to stimulate his adult adversary’s empathy, challenging him to imagine:

O heaven, that there were but a mote in yours [i.e., eyes],
A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair,
Any annoyance in that precious sense,
Then feeling what small things are boisterous there,
Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. (iv.i.91-95)

9When this strategy fails, Arthur offers his tongue in lieu of his eyes. Rebuffed by Hubert, he goes on to describe the iron poker as a sympathetic being that is more ethically predisposed than his human custodian – a comparison he had initiated earlier.

An if you do [rekindle the fire], you will but make it blush
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert.
Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes,
And like a dog that is compelled to fight,
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on.
All things that you should use to do me wrong
Deny their office; only you do lack
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends,
Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses. (iv.i.112-120)

10Of all the ruses and strategies that Arthur adopts to avoid being blinded, the invocation of the anthropomorphic iron seems to be the most embarrassingly contrived. Curiously, while all other tactics fail, the persistent contrasting of Hubert with the scandalized, sympathetic iron finally manages to dissuade him from injuring Arthur. The boy greets his decision with a pithy but sententious rhetorical flourish unlike a child: “O, now you look like Hubert! All this while / You were disguised’ (iv.i.125-126). However, it becomes clear from Act iv, scene i, that Arthur does not trust Hubert at all, notwithstanding the latter’s unconditional promise to protect him from King John. That is why the insecure and frustrated Arthur in a desperate bid to escape jumps from the prison walls and kills himself. In retrospect, he may be found speaking just as Volumnia advised Coriolanus to, “with such words that are but rooted in / Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables / Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth” (iii.ii.55-57).

12It is not justified to club Arthur indiscriminately with other child characters of the Shakespeare canon and justify their garrulity in terms of overarching historical or aesthetic parameters. Marjorie Garber does just that as she returns a sweepingly dismissive verdict on Shakespeare’s children. In her opinion,

• 6 Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare, New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 30.

Those [child characters] who do appear [in the plays of the Shakespeare canon] are both pert and malapert, disconcertingly solemn and prematurely adult: the Princes in the tower, whose uncle’s exasperation with them may be shared to a degree by the audience; Macduff’s and Coriolanus’ sons, both pathetically martial copies of their fathers; Mamillius, whose proposal to tell a ‘sad tale … for winter’ reveals an intuitive comprehension of the problems of Sicilia and of his own impending doom. These are not, by and large, successful dramatic characters; their disquieting adulthood strikes the audience with its oddness, and we are relieved when these terrible infants leave the stage. We may feel it to be no accident that almost all go to their deaths.6

13Pace Garber, Shakespeare's plays do not treat precocity in children as a monolithic and predictable given, and his precocious child characters are in fact amply individuated. For example, Arthur is obviously more perceptive and foresighted than Prince Edward of Richard III who for all his schoolboy wisdom about Julius Caesar is unable to figure out the danger awaiting him in the Tower of London. Similarly, Arthur is not shallow like the boy York of Richard III or Macduff Junior who can attempt impish wisecracks totally unaware of the looming political menace.

• 8 François Rabelais, Gargantua, Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel(...)

Then Eudemon [the page], asking leave of the vice-king his master so to do, with his cap in his hand, a clear and open countenance, beautiful and ruddy lips, his eyes steady, and his looks fixed upon Gargantua with a youthful modesty, standing up straight on his feet, began very gracefully to commend him; first, for his virtue and good manners; secondly, for his knowledge, thirdly, for his nobility; fourthly, for his bodily accomplishments; and, in the fifth place, most sweetly exhorted him to reverence his father with all due observancy, who was so careful to have him well brought up. In the end he prayed him, that he would vouchsafe to admit of him amongst the least of his servants; for other favour at that time desired he none of heaven, but that he might do him some grateful and acceptable service. All this was by him delivered with such proper gestures, such distinct pronunciation, so pleasant a delivery, in such exquisite fine terms, and so good Latin, that he seemed rather a Gracchus, a Cicero, an Aemilius of the time past, than a youth of this age.8

15As opposed to this, Arthur hardly enjoys the opportunity for a well-rehearsed and full-fledged ceremonial declamation. Needless to say, the contextual incongruity of Arthur’s bravura performance enhances its surprise value for latter-day readers.

16E.M.W. Tillyard has pointed out Arthur’s pleading to be a discrete rhetorical set-piece whose focus is exclusively aesthetic:

• 9 E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1944, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 238.

In itself the business over Arthur’s body [in Act iv, scene iii] is superb, but its energy and its freedom of style are quite alien to Arthur pleading with Hubert for his sight. This pleading is usually praised as very pathetic or condemned as intolerably affected. It is indeed affected, but to an Elizabethan audience would not have been intolerable. They probably enjoyed it as an exhibition of rhetoric; and as such it is finely built up, an elegant exercise into word-play, like many other scenes in Shakespeare. It does not, however, square very well with the more vigorous excesses of language [as exemplified by Philip the Bastard] [...] in fact it does not fit naturally into the play at all.9

• 12 Ibid. See also Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s (...)

‘presentation’ specifies an emotion or a state of mind, points to it, defines it, as if from outside; on the other hand, ‘impersonation’ enacts it mimetically. Weimann attributes presentation to an earlier form of drama, before the author took control of the stage with a view to creating an illusion of a self-contained fictional world. In this sense, Prince Arthur ‘presents’ his own pathos to Hubert and to the audience in a succession of conceits that we should not expect a modern child to utter.12

19This line of argument is quite insightful, but Belsey does not explain why ‘presentation’ and ‘impersonation’ should be taken as chronologically distinct and mutually exclusive modes of representation. If we see these modes as concurrent and present simultaneously in different layers of performance, the reading can be more nuanced. Weimann himself had earlier envisaged the early modern English stage as a fraught site of interaction between disparate paradigms and tropes of performance:

• 13 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimensi (...)

It is in this larger context of a transitional age that the popular theater, with its ritual heritage and its enchanting and disenchanting modes of mimesis, could make so powerful an impact on the nation’s drama and enhance the tension as well as the unity between “naturalism” and “convention.” The two modes, far from being mutually exclusive, helped to constitute the universalizing pattern in Shakespeare.13

20Belsey seems to suggest that the message conveyed by Arthur’s performance is that of his innocence, while the medium chosen for it is unmistakably eloquence. At least on the primary and material level of the theatrical apparatus, she would accept the scene as enacting the triumph of Arthur’s tongue. One has to therefore negotiate and analyze the signifier of eloquence, in which the play is so ardently invested, before one can impute innocence or otherwise as a signified to him. Here lies the relevance of the tableau of Hercules Gallicus.

21A part of the problem with Arthur lies in relating him as a child to the deceitfulness associated with rhetoric, and its anatomical metonym, the tongue. Whereas rhetoric formed an indispensable part of the early modern curricula, there was also a distinguished tradition of suspicion towards it. Even if we disregard Plato’s attack on rhetoric in Gorgias and Phaedrus, the rhetoricians themselves are often painfully aware that their art has great power to puzzle and mislead. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest humanist scholar, himself condemned the tongue in his Lingua, based on Plutarch’s treatise De Garrulitate. Side by side with the proliferation of rhetorical handbooks and style guides there was a constituency for encyclopedic and homiletic works on the tongue such as Jean de Marconville’s A Treatise of the Good and Evell Tongue (translated into English around 1592), George Webbe’s The Arraingnement of an Unruly Tongue (1619), Thomas Adams’s The Taming of the Tongue (1619), John Abernethy’s The Poysonous Tongue (1622), William Gearing’s A Bridle for the Tongue (1663), and Richard Allestree’s The Government of the Tongue (1674). These works would often use as their launch pad the renunciation of the tongue in James 3:3-8, which makes much of the small organ’s incommensurately huge power to rebel, delude and corrupt:

When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

23A famous pictorial representation of the spell-binding power of the tongue has been described by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589):

• 15 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Gladys Doidge Wilcock and Alice Walker, eds., Cambrid (...)

I find this opinion [about the seductive force of rhetoric], confirmed by a pretie devise or embleme that Lucianus alleageth he saw in the pourtrait of Hercules within the citie of Marseills [Marseille] in Provence: where they had figured a lustie old man with a long chayne tyed by one end at his tongue, by the other end at the peoples eares, who stood a farre of that chayne fastned to his tongue, ass who would say, by force of his perswasions.15

24As Puttenham correctly points out, the emblem has been described by the second century satirist Lucian of Samosata. In his short tract in Greek entitled Heracles: An Introduction, Lucian attempts a vibrant ekphrasis of a portrait of Hercules that he putatively came across during his sojourn in the land of the Celts:

• 16 Lucian, “Heracles: An Introduction”, in Lucian, trans. A.M. Harmon, 8 vols, Loeb Classical Library, (...)

That old Heracles of theirs drags after him a great crowd of men who are all tethered by the ears! His leashes are delicate chains fashioned of gold and amber, resembling the prettiest of necklaces. Yet, though led by bonds so weak, the men do not think of escaping, as they easily could, and they do not pull back at all or brace their feet and lean in the opposite direction to that in which he is leading them. In fact, they follow cheerfully and joyously, applauding their leader and all pressing him close and keeping the leashes slack in their desire to overtake him; apparently they would be offended if they were let loose! But let me tell you without delay what seemed to me the strangest thing of all. Since the painter had no place to which he could attach the ends of the chains, as the god's right hand already held the club and his left the bow, he pierced the tip of his tongue and represented him drawing the men by that means! Moreover, he has his face turned toward his captives, and is smiling.16

25As Lucian looks befuddled at the portrait, a friendly Celt comes to his rescue and deciphers the emblem for him in this fashion:

• 17 Ibid., p. 65, 67.

We Celts do not agree with you Greeks in thinking that Hermes is Eloquence: we identify Heracles with it, because he is far more powerful than Hermes. And don’t be surprised that he is represented as an old man, for eloquence and eloquence alone is wont to show its full vigour in old age…. This being so, if old Heracles here drags men after him who are tethered by the ears to his tongue, don't be surprised at that, either: you know the kinship between ears and tongue…. In general, we consider that the real Heracles was a wise man who achieved everything by eloquence and applied persuasion as his principal force.17

26As has already been mentioned, it was a popular theme in the emblem literature of the period. For example, seven different engraved compositions of the emblem can be located in seven editions of Andrea Alciato’s work: Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531), Emblematum libellous (Paris, 1534), Los Emblemas (Lyon, 1549; Spanish translation), Emblematum libri II (Lyon, 1556, with commentary by Sebastian Stockhamer), Liber emblematum [...] Kunstbuch (Frankfurt on Main, 1567, German translation by Jeremias Held), Emblemata (Leiden, 1591), Emblemata (Padua, 1621). Given the wide pictorial circulation of the motif, its familiarity in England is more than a fair possibility. More importantly, it enjoyed some amount of currency in England thanks to the tradition of humanist learning. Four decades before Puttenham, Thomas Wilson had mentioned the same emblem in The Art of Rhetoric (1553), with the difference from Puttenham that he more strongly required wisdom or reason to be the immediate source and correlate of eloquence:

• 18 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, in Wayne A. Rebhorn, ed., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, Itha (...)

[T]he poets do feign that Hercules, being a man of great wisdom, had all men linked together by the ears in a chain, to draw them and lead them even as he lusted. For his wit was so great, his tongue so eloquent, and his experience such, that no one man was able to withstand his reason, but everyone was rather driven to do that which he would and to will that which he did, agreeing to his advice both in word and work in all that ever they were able.18

27Arthur’s true peer in terms of garrulity is the page named Mote (or Moth) appearing in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who in fact has the largest number of lines for any child character in the Shakespeare canon. Incidentally, he plays the infant Hercules in the pageant of the Nine Worthies authored by Holofernes (Act v, scene ii). He is not allowed a single word because of the infancy he portrays – etymologically related to the inability to speak. Thus Mote physically and functionally is made to invert the image of Hercules Gallicus. On the other hand, Arthur introduces a variation on Hercules Gallicus only physically, not functionally. He can captivate and sway an adult with his eloquence, although he does not have the stalwart physical presence of a Hercules. Arthur is not shown as having “wit” (i.e., knowledge) and “experience”, which are claimed by Thomas Wilson to be essential attributes of the elderly Hercules. Puttenham makes the divergence more obvious as he expatiates upon the emblem:

• 19 Puttenham, op. cit., p. 142. Emphases added.

And to shew more plainly that eloquence is of great force (and not as many men think amisse) the propertie and gift of yong men onely, but rather of old men, and a thing which better becommeth hory haires then beardlesse boyes, they seeme to ground it upon this reason: age (say they and most truly) brings experience, experience bringeth wisedome, long life yeldes long use and much exercise of speach, exercise and custome with wisedome, make an assured and volluble utterance: so is it that old men more then any other sort speake most gravely, wisely, assuredly, and plausibly, which partes are all that can be required in perfite eloquence […]19

29One is likely to pass over these nuances if one works from a premeditated notion of childhood and childlike-ness. This tends to place Arthur in a no-win situation: if he has to operate as a child character on the stage he must establish his innocence and helplessness, in order to do so he must speak out, but if he speaks successfully in the stage idiom he is not a child. One way of transfixing Arthur in a state of unqualified innocence is to selectively read his adroit verbal manoeuvres as guileless outpourings and not as survival strategies. In conjunction with this, one may refuse to associate Arthur’s pleas with any coherent and long-standing construction of interiority that would be valid beyond the scene. This is the path taken by Hubert and other adult characters in the play, and ostensibly sponsored by the playwright. Another way to save him from the accusation of adult-like slyness and the taint of dubious rhetoric is to stress that his eloquence is a one-dimensional and formulaic device that is not inflected by the dramatic context. This is the path taken by most critics. It may be more worthwhile, this study has tried to suggest, to recognize that the character of Arthur makes sense as a child beleaguered by a hostile adult world and trying desperately to cope with it. Arthur cannot afford to smile indulgently at the captive of his eloquence and lead him in a leisurely fashion as Hercules Gallicus does. In the unenviable situation where Arthur finds himself, his tongue is the only weapon he is left with and he makes use of it for the sake of survival.