• 1 For the topic of the hybridity of early modern English literature, and its larger cultural imperati (...)
• 2 Hermogenes’ rhetorical work, which had a preeminent role in Byzantine rhetorical education, was rei (...)

1Literary hybridity is arguably one of the most alluring traits of English Renaissance writing and a pressing subject of scholarly inquiry. The period’s fondness for mixed styles and genres is apparent in the most celebrated and innovative works of the period as well as in writings of different nature: Mary and Philip Sidney’s combination of metrical schemes in their psalm paraphrases, John Donne’s blending of obscure metaphors and florid styles in his Songs and Sonnets, or the merging of tragic and comic conventions in William Shakespeare’s plays attest a proneness to hybrid styles that was core to the emergence of English as a vernacular literary language. These texts had in common a transgression of propriety or decorum, this is, the correspondence between subject matter (res) and style (verba) that distinguished the status of a work of art. The bold mixture of these writings, typically referred to in relationship to modern-coined terms (such as ‘metaphysical’, ‘precieux’, or ‘baroque’ poetry to name some), has been connected by scholars to the experimental poetics emerging in late-sixteenth century literature – what Jenny C. Mann (2012) and Catherine Nicholson (2014) and have baptised as ‘outlaw’ or ‘eccentric’ poetry. However, there is a key piece of literary criticism that was central to the emergence and discussion of these hybrid styles which modern scholarship has systematically neglected.1 This is a treatise composed by a late Greek rhetorician called Hermogenes of Tarsus, and titled On Ideas of Style (περὶ ἰδεῶν). The textbook, which outlined the techniques to compose an array of stylistic forms in different combinations, became a key piece studied at university level, both in Cambridge and Oxford, and was integrated into a range of literary developments of the period. These included the emergence of mixed forms, such as tragicomedy, as well as the contamination of genres such as pastoral, lyric, and epic.2 This article examines the complex reception of this hitherto unknown, yet fundamental source of the hybridity of early modern English literature, specifically examining vernacular literary criticism composed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. I argue that On Ideas is a central piece of literary criticism and source of the hybrid styles of early modern England, and that its reception provides unique insight into the ways in which early modern authors understood the scopes and challenges of literary hybridity. Hermogenes’ English reception shows that writing in a mixed style would have been a means of consciously upholding a normative poetics: one that had a prominent place in the rhetorical theory formally taught in the early modern period. English vernacular criticism provides evidence of Hermogenes’ readership as well as the forms in which his theory of mixture was read in connection to the literary tradition, provoking radical understandings of poetic form.

• 3 For a review on available evidence, and controversies, about Hermogenes’ life, see Ruiz Montero 199 (...)
• 4 Five treatises have been attributed to Hermogenes: the preparatory exercises on rhetoric or Progymn (...)
• 5 Translations of the individual ‘ideas’ are mine, and are based on a range of early modern and moder (...)
• 6 Hermogenes’ scheme as a matter of fact integrated the Latin genera dicendi but enlarged it into its (...)
• 7 Hermogenes’ influence on the emergence of ingenious and obscure poetics in the early modernity is a (...)

2Hermogenes composed his rhetorical work in the second century C.E. He lived in Asia Minor, where he is said to have had a precocious and meteoric career as a rhetorician, and to have died at a young age.3 Amongst the five treatises that have been attributed to him, On Ideas of Style (Περὶ ἰδεῶν), one of the few certainly composed by Hermogenes, was dedicated to style or elocutio.4 The textbook outlined a rich scheme of seven forms or ‘ideas’ (ἰδέαι) of style: ‘Clarity’ (σαφήνεια), ‘Grandeur’ (μέγεθος), ‘Beauty’ (κάλλος), ‘Rapidity’ (γοργότης), ‘Character’ (ἦθος), ‘Verity’ (ἀλήθεια), and ‘Force’ (δεινότης).5 These ideas also had, in turn, sub-ideas, such as ‘Vehemence’ (σφοδρότης), ‘Abundance’ (περιβολή), or ‘Ingenuity’ (δριμύτης), resulting in a varied characterisation of at least twenty forms of style (see Figure 1). Crucially, Hermogenes pointed out that these ‘ideas’ could and should be mixed, such as in the oratory of Demosthenes or the epics of Homer, which included all styles and genres. Accordingly, his treatise defined the most important idea, ‘Force’ (δεινότης or deinotes), as mixed style, that combined all previous ideas in different proportions. In this, his multifarious theory seemed remarkably different from the theory of the three styles (genera dicendi) outlined in treatises by Cicero or Quintilian, and which dominated early stages of rhetorical education. The sophisticated high style, the easy-flowing middle style, and the simple low style, indeed suggested hierarchical arrangement and a limited stylistic range, which contrasted the remarkable variety that early modern readers could find in the great works of antiquity.6 Hermogenes, instead, presented his copious stylistic ‘ideas’ as fluid and performing qualities rather than fixed type, and provided a remarkable amount of detail on the topics, figures of thought, and figures of speech of each of them, as well as many examples coming from the rhetorical and poetic traditions. In its useful detail and greater flexibility his theory must have been remarkably alluring to early modern scholars, poets, and university students, even if it posed an emphasis on stylistic sophistication, ingenuity, obscurity, and mixture that contradicted precepts of clarity predominant in rhetorical manuals.7

• 8 The composition dates and authorship of the treatises attributed to them in the Renaissance, includ (...)
• 9 See also Fumaroli 1994, Monfasani 1976, 1983, and Vozar 2020.
• 10 This includes Shuger 1988 and Biester 1997, both of which are specifically interested in the recept (...)
• 11 Scholars have tended, following Debora Shuger’s influential work, to generalise the contribution of (...)
• 12 The lack of comprehensive discussions on Hermogenes’ theory in early modern literary criticism has (...)
• 13 The poetic afterlife of Hermogenes’ theory of mixture has not been addressed in a comprehensive stu (...)

3Hermogenes’ work constituted the culmination of a rhetorical strand conformed by post-Aristotelian Greek authors, such as Demetrius of Phalerum, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Longinus, whose vibrant early modern afterlife has received, in recent years, more sustained attention.8 This piece builds on work by Annabel Patterson (1970), Debora Shuger (1988, 1999), James Biester (1997), Dietmar Till (2012), and Micha Lazarus (2021), amongst others that have studied the vital legacy of this rhetorical tradition.9 These scholars have noted the extent to which late Greek works promoted a different conception of propriety than that of Latin authors such as Cicero or Quintilian, widening the number of stylistic types and placing a remarkable emphasis on obscurity and wonder that transformed conceptions of style in the early modernity. These studies, however, have omitted mixture as a distinctive, and probably the most ground-breaking dimension of this tradition and its legacy.10 They have also omitted the scale of Hermogenes’ single, and most important contribution to these literary developments – considering that, up to the first decades of the seventeenth century, On Ideas was by far the most influential and disseminated Greek work on style in England.11 Hermogenes, we will see, was standardly circulated and read yet not often discussed at length, in part due to the controversial stances of his stylistic theory.12 In showing the single most relevant contribution by Hermogenes to these stylistic developments, and reading the mixture of English literature from a rhetorical lens, I aim at showing the key contribution of rhetoric to the innovative literary culture of the early modernity, challenging common preconceptions that think of rhetoric as a purist, uniform, and conservative set of doctrines.13

• 14 Translation by H. R. Fairclough. These lines in Latin read: “Humano capiti ceruicem pictor equinam (...)
• 15 I have slightly altered the translation by H. Rackham here; the Latin lines read “aptum […] est, qu (...)
• 16 In words of João Adolfo Hansen, decorous texts produce reception acts which “also are normative, an (...)

5“If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if admitted to this viewing, refrain from laughing?”.14 The key question opening Horace’s Ars poetica (ll. 1-9) compared poetry and painting to illustrate the golden rule of decorum or rhetorical appropriateness – what Cicero defined as that “which is most suitable in a speech” (De or. III, 210).15 In the way in which the same colours and shapes are not suitable to represent different bodies and their many parts, the same styles are not suitable to all subject matters and occasions. Horace’s vivid comparison illustrates this rule presenting mixture as a key counterexample, the first defect that a poet should avoid. The indecorous painting or poem, his lines suggest, mixes the high and the low – the human head with the animal extremities – resulting in an incongruence which is both internal and external to the work of art. Hybrid works are indeed such not only in their internal configuration, as an assembly of a monstrous body. Yet, they also project this discordance into their context of production and transmission, since the poet’s misshaped assembly fails to please the circle of ‘friends’ (amici) correctly situated to judge the work’s perspective and world. This spectator, especially admitted, is the recipient of Horace’s normative text, a reader soon-to-be poet, a writer that can recognise the different ‘colours’ of the speech by applying styles according to their subject and audience, without hybridity and deformation. Mixture should be attributed, according to Horace’s lines, to effects only characteristic of the period’s lesser genres – such as satire – yet otherwise discarded as a sign of the poet’s lack of technique, a lack of literary competence that casts into the social.16

• 17 “ὁ τοίνυν Δημοσθένης ὅτιπερ κεφάλαιον ἦν τὸν πολιτικὸν ἠκριβωκὼς τὸ μὲν ὡς διὰ πάντων ἥκει πανταχοῦ (...)
• 18 “μῖξιν δὲ οὔτε λόγου οὔτε ἄλλου τινὸς τῶν πάντων οἷόν τέ ἐστι γνῶναι καλῶς ἤτοι ποιήσασθαι μὴ πρότε (...)

6Hermogenes’ On Ideas of Style, written more than two centuries later, presented mixture, instead, as a core value of both eloquence and literary excellency. Differing from Horace’s predicaments, in the introduction to his work Hermogenes explained that his seven styles or ‘ideas’ were to be grounded in the example of Demosthenes’ speeches, precisely because his writings presented a masterful combination of all the forms of style: “[t]his is the main point in reference to Demosthenes”, he argued, “he had so mastered political oratory that he was always combining styles everywhere” (Hermog. Id., A, 1, 216).17 In order to achieve Demosthenes’ eloquence, Hermogenes argued, orators could study his mixed style by identifying the individual forms from which this hybridity was produced: “this mixture, either of style or of anything else, cannot be recognised or created without first understanding each one of the elements from which this mixture results or might result (to understand grey, for example, we must first understand black and white)”, explained Hermogenes, “[o]ne who starts from this point can then easily go on to appreciate and describe individual authors, detecting their careful combinations, whether he wants to study and emulate one of the ancients or someone more recent” (Id., A, 1, 224-225).18 Thus, the mixed style of Demosthenes was useful both as exemplary of eloquence, and also as a repository of all the styles or ‘ideas’ that Hermogenes wanted to teach and systematise.

• 19 Translation by W. Rhys Roberts.
• 20 Cicero also makes this point in Orat. XXI, 70.
• 21 Translation by W. Rhys Roberts. The section reads: “ὁρῶμεν γὰρ πλὴν τῶν εἰρημένων χαρακτήρων ἐναντί (...)

7Such understanding of mixture as a prominent mark of eloquence had precedents in the main Latin and Greek rhetorical works that were available in the Renaissance. In On Literary Composition (Περὶ συνθέσεως ὀνομάτων) (20-10 B.C.E.), Dionysius of Halicarnassus had distinguished the ‘harmoniously blended’ (εὔκρατος) type of style, which consisted of a combination of the two other main types, the austere (αὐστηρός) and the polished (γλαφυρός). He defined this ‘blended’ style as a “relaxation and the intensification of these extremes” rather than “an equal distance from the two”, and as such this blended style was superior to the other two, deserving to “carry off first prize” (Comp. XXIV).19 Similarly, in De optimo genere oratorum (46 B.C.E), Cicero pointed out that an excellent orator is capable of combining the virtues of all the three genera dicendi, through simultaneously pursuing the three aims of eloquence (docere, delectare, and movere).20 One of the authors who excelled at this rhetorical combination, according to Cicero, was Demosthenes (Opt gen, I, 1-3). In On Style, (Περὶ ἐρμηνείας), Demetrius of Phalerum also pointed out that “any style may be combined with any other”, for example as when “[i]n the poetry of Homer […] as well as in the prose of Plato, Xenophon, Herodotus, and many other writers, great elevation is joined to great vigour and charm” (Eloc, I, 37).21 Significantly, Demetrius, Cicero, and Dionysius all related these mixed high styles to Demosthenes, in the domain of rhetoric, and some (as Dionysius and Demetrius), to Homer in poetry.

• 22 “Ἀκριβῶς μὲν οὖν, ὅπερ εἶπον, οὐκ ἦν εὑρεῖν παρ᾽ οὐδενὶ τῶν ἀρχαίων τὸ τοιοῦτον, ὅτι καὶ φύσει δήπο (...)
• 23 “ὅτε συμβουλεύοι, πάντῃ χωρίζων τοῦ δικανικοῦ τε καὶ πανηγυρικοῦ τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ μήθ᾽, ὅτε τι τῶν ἄ (...)
• 24 “καὶ τὰ μὲν ὑψηλὰ σφόδρα καὶ λαμπρὰ τῶν νοημάτων μεθόδοις τισὶν ἢ σχήμασιν ἤ τινι τῶν ἄλλων καθαιρῶ (...)
• 25 “καὶ ἕκαστα τῶν ἄλλων κατὰ ταὐτὰ μιγνὺς τοῖς οὐκ οἰκείοις οὐδὲ ἰδίοις αὐτῶν μέρεσι καὶ καταποικίλλω (...)

8Hermogenes certainly drew on this tradition. Nevertheless, it was only he who made mixture a core principle of eloquence, the theory upon which his classification of styles ultimately relied. In his introduction he did not only present mixture as a value, but he also described it as unavoidable: “strictly speaking”, he argued “it is not possible to find accurately in any of the ancient orators a single style, because it is clearly a mistake to use only one and not to vary one’s style” (Hermog. Id., A, 1, 222).22 Whereas some of the ‘ideas’ would have prominence in specific parts of a speech, they would be inevitably combined with others, and also overlap (Id., A, 1, 279). Accordingly, Hermogenes presented this combination of styles as happening in a variety of ways. First, he pointed out that it might involve a skilful combination of genres: “[w]hen [Demosthenes] gave a deliberative speech, for example, he did not separate it rigorously from a judicial speech or a panegyrical speech, but mixed the characteristics of all three in the same speech, regardless of what kind of oratory he was practising” (Id., A, 1, 216).23 Demosthenes could also provide dignity to trivial thoughts, or, conversely, a humble tone to lofty speeches: “[Demosthenes] can scale down excessively elevated and brilliant thoughts by certain approaches or figures or by some other means. Similarly, he can raise up and give vigour to thoughts that are trivial and of little importance” (Id., A, 1, 221).24 Ultimately, mixture provided Demosthenes’ speeches with rhetorical variety: “by mixing each of the other ideas with features that are not appropriate or peculiar to it, he diversifies his style and thus makes everything fit together and creates a unity in which all the various ideas are interwoven. Thus from all the beauties of style, this one, the Demosthenic, the most beautiful, has been created” (Id., A, 1, 221).25 This elevated mixture, understood as a beautiful configuration of a hybrid body, was the most difficult thing to achieve for every orator:

• 27 See Liddell-Scott-Jones’ lexicon, which lists the three classes of meanings of deinotes: I. “fearfu (...)

10This understanding of mixture as a core value of eloquence was further expanded by Hermogenes in the section dedicated to the seventh ‘idea’ of style, δεινότης or ‘Force’. Whereas in the poetic and rhetorical tradition, the polyvalent term ‘deinotes’ had encompassed varied meanings (including ‘terrible’, ‘fearful’, ‘forceful’, ‘powerful’, ‘clever’ and ‘skilful’), Hermogenes expanded this definition even further, introducing this last ‘idea’ as a mixed type of style.27 Thus, the opening section on the ‘idea’ of deinotes provided the following novel definition:

• 28 “εἰς δέον γὰρ καὶ κατὰ καιρὸν τῷ μεγέθει καὶ τῇ τραχύτητι καὶ σφοδρότητι κέχρηται ὁ Ὁδυσσεὺς αὐτῷ”.
• 29 “ἦ ὁ αὐτὸς νῦν μὲν δεινός, νῦν δὲ οὐ δεινὸς ἦν; ἐγὼ μὲν γὰρ κἀνταῦθα κἀκεῖ τὸν αὐτὸν εἶναί φημι καὶ (...)

11Hermogenes was aware that such a definition of δεινότης as a mixed style differed from its treatment in the rhetorical tradition, where it had been related to the agonistic style of Demosthenes’ public speeches. Nevertheless, he wrote in favour of his own understanding of the term using the Iliad as an authority. Homer, Hermogenes argued, did not only employ a language of deinos in the sense of ‘feared’, ‘great’, and ‘powerful’, but rather used it to expose Odysseus’ capacity for mixing styles. “[F]or his [Homer’s] Odysseus used Grandeur and Asperity and Vehemence when and as they should be used” (Hermog. Id., B, 9, 371), he explained.28 Hermogenes also added that Odysseus was able to compose speeches full of humour and pleasure when the occasion required (Id., B, 9, 371). Hence, he asked, “[w]as the same man forceful at times, but not at others? I would argue that the same man is speaking in all these passages and is using the same Force and the same craft, since he knows that it is necessary to use different kinds of style and is able to do so” (Id., B, 9, 372).29 By using the Iliad to explain and legitimise his own concept of δεινότης as mixture, Hermogenes made a significant claim regarding the styles of epic and, in general, any form of dignified styles, which he understood as a repository of all the ideas that a poet or orator could eloquently use. He also recognised the dignity of lesser styles – not only the registers of ‘humour’ and ‘pleasure’ but clearer, civic styles such as those found in Demosthenes’ private speeches – all of which could also be considered as different versions of δεινότης (Id., B, 9, 376-77). Hermogenes’ Homeric example thus put poetry at the centre of his theory of mixture, suggesting that literature had access to the same range and dignity than Demosthenes’ accomplished oratory. His astute example featuring Odysseus instead of Demosthenes blended the rhetorical and the poetic – addressing the hero’s mixed register both as a well-executed literary parliament, and as the exemplary speech of a rhetorician. Both heroic character and persuasive orator, Odysseus encapsulated the poetic and rhetorical scope of the polymorph style of δεινότης.

• 30 The Renaissance rhetorician Antonio Lull pointed this out in his De Oratione Libri Septem (1558), w (...)
• 31 Hermogenes’ understanding of δεινότης, which combined previous usage of the term (as in power, fear (...)

12Thus, Hermogenes’ theory of style emphasised mixture in a way that was unprecedented in the rhetorical tradition.30 His work engaged with mixture to outline his treatise’s methodology; to present it descriptively as an intrinsic characteristic of all speeches; and to prescribe it normatively as the desirable quality of forceful or persuasive styles. Thus, On Ideas of Style outlined a conception of decorum based on values such as hybridity, adaptation, and variety – rather than purity, hierarchy, or consistency. Consequently, even if the Hermogenean concept of δεινότης had evident resemblances to the Latin ‘decorum’ (as pragmatic adequacy of the style to the circumstances of the enunciation), its celebration of the mixed nature of writing deviated from the Horatian description of the decorous text as a unified and orderly body, and recognised the skill involved in the inclusion of different subject matters, tones, and traditions.31 This unique emphasis was recognised by early modern readers, who eventually presented Hermogenes’ multifarious theory of the ideas as the main counterpart to the three genres of style, recognising in the rhetorician’s work a radically different understanding of form.

• 32 Elizabethan book inventories in Cambridge and Oxford reflect this dissimilar readership, which I ha (...)
• 33 On Hermogenes’ introduction in Europe, see note 2.
• 34 Most of these references are noted in Patterson 1970, 20-26.

13Hermogenes was, in the words of T. W. Baldwin, the single “constant author” in Greek to be dictated for rhetorical instruction in the English Renaissance (Baldwin 1944, II: 62). His rhetoric’s wide circulation and central role in university instruction surpassed that of any other late Greek rhetorical authorities, including Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius of Phalernum and even the most familiar Longinus, whose reception was minor in comparison to Hermogenes at least until the first decades of the seventeenth century.32 English authors encountered his work in a range of continental editions in Latin and Greek, and also in Renaissance sources of wide circulation in England, including textbooks by George of Trebizond, Johannes Sturm, Antonio Lull, Juan Luis Vives, or Julius Caesar Scaliger, which described and discussed Hermogenes’ theory of style in detail.33 English scholars, educators, and poets such as Leonard Cox, Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, Francis Bacon, Thomas Nash, Gabriel Harvey, Richard Rainolde, John Hoskins, George Herbert, or John Milton all referred to Hermogenes, typically focusing on his stylistic theory.34 These authors’ engagement typically evidence first-hand reading of his work and an assumption of their readers’ knowledge of it – ranging from name-dropping or passing allusions, like to other familiar rhetorical authorities, to emphatic recommendations of his work for rhetorical training (as for example in the case of Cox, Elyot, Hoskins, Rainolde, Harvey, and Milton). Other writers such as Abraham Cowley or George Chapman also referred to particular ‘ideas’ in relation to specific authors or passages, without necessarily mentioning Hermogenes by name. All these writers typically engaged with his main Renaissance commentators too, showing the extent of his early modern dissemination.

• 35 Roman authors recognised that style could vary according to the different parts of the speech; for (...)

14Hermogenes’ doctrine of mixture, however, was much often less discussed in English literary criticism than it was in the continent. This is, on the one hand, a likely result of his prevalent role in higher-level rhetorical training: knowledge of Hermogenes’ rhetoric was presumably taken for granted – in the same way that works by Cicero, Aristotle, or Quintilian were. The wide availability of commentary on his work in Latin textbooks also probably hindered similar discussions in vernacular treatises, given that readers could find them systematised elsewhere by the most influential rhetoricians of the time. However, this lack of discussion also tells of the controversial stances of his stylistic theory – especially of his theory of mixture. Indeed, English vernacular textbooks typically displayed a purist conception of stylistic decorum based on the strict segmentation of the three types of style and their application according to the loci of persons, with a rigidity that was alien to their Roman models. Whereas Cicero or Quintilian recommended the flexible varying of the three types of style according to the different parts of speech, early modern treatises typically advised maintaining the same stylistic tone within the same work.35 In The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Thomas Wilson argued that “in all these three kindes [of style], the Oration is muche commended and appeareth notable when wee kepe us styll to that style which wee firste professed” (Wilson 1553, 90) and George Puttenham defined style as “a constant and continual phrase or tenor of speaking and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of the poem or history, and not properly to any piece or member of a tale” (Puttenham 2007, 233). Following Horace’s opening in his Ars poetica, William Scott also stressed the necessary unity of the body-poem:

• 36 Sheldon Brammall discusses Renaissance understanding of these works’ role in literary careers, with (...)

22In addressing the indecorous styles of mock epic and pastoral, both Scott and Puttenham recognised mixture as a criterion to define these works’ shared poetics, a principle involving a self-conscious literary programme. Rather than treating these small works as juvenilia, they presented them as significant literary endeavours pursuable “now and then” throughout their careers.36 In short, their remarks show that hybridity was, by the late sixteenth century, both an established literary phenomenon, and a criterion for distinguishing a common parentage for different works. Writing along these lines, Philip Sidney also listed a body of heterogeneous works coupling together “two or three kinds”, in his The Defense of Poesie, which both acknowledged, and reluctantly justified, a manifold tradition of literary hybridity:

• 37 The continental reception of Hermogenes’ theory of mixture is varied and frequently ambivalent, and (...)

27In discussing and justifying the use of higher styles in tragicomedy, pastoral, mock epic, or lyric, English authors drew on a strong tradition of continental works that used Hermogenes’ theory to validate the intrusion of high styles into lesser genres. These defences were generally controversial.37 A crucial example of this kind is Battista Guarini’s influential advocacy of the mixed poetics of tragicomedy – and, even more, of pastoral tragicomedy – first in Il Verato (1588), and later in Il Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica (1601). Disregarding Aristotle’s understanding of literary genre in his Poetics, Guarini argued that the mixture of pastoral tragicomedy relied on alternative Greek authors: “Nor is this my doctrine, mister Giasone”, he argued, “but that of Hermogenes, the famous maker of styles; who, praising the vague and beautiful mixtures made by Demosthenes, and Xenophon, and Plato, says that styles are mixed together in the manner of colors” (Guarini 1588, 27v). He further insisted that

• 39 Translation is by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. The original lines in Italian read: “l’amor (...)

28The “two famous rhetoricians” he referred to belonged to the late Greek tradition – Hermogenes and Demetrius. Both authorities were also fundamental sources for Tasso’s Discorsi del Poema Heroico, which used their theory to advocate for the epic status of brief amorous poems “such as the love of Leandro and Hero, of which Musaeus, the ancient Greek Poet, sung” and also that of “Alexander and Helen, described by Colluthus of Thebes”, among many others (Tasso 1597, 47).39 The heroic status of Hero and Leander was also endorsed in the Poetices libri septem, where Scaliger presented the poem as an eloquent example of the fact that epic did not always have to be long (Scaliger 1561, 12), and famously expressed his preference for Musaeus over Homer (Scaliger 1561, 215). He also justified both its small length and high style, describing it as liminal to tragedy (“quasi Tragoedia”) (Scaliger 1561, 144). In Spain, Francisco López Pinciano presented Hero and Leander as an example of brief epic (“epica breve”), and talked similarly of Homer’s Batrachomyomachia, which treats a low subject matter with a dignified style (“altamente de lo baxo”) (López Pinciano 1596, 273-274).

• 40 Góngora’s poems are often thought to be related to the hybrid narrative form that emerges in Englan (...)
• 41 “Estos modos obscurecen la oración y se oponen a la pureza, aunque son propios del estilo levantado (...)
• 42 “De la misma manera obscurece estos Poemas la figura circuición o comprehensión, causa principal de (...)
• 43 “Con todo eso, aun en materias humildes, por guardar el fin del asunto en la sublimidad, no desmaya (...)

29Another paradigmatic example of advocacy of the mixture of styles is that of the literary quarrel surrounding Luis de Góngora y Argote’s Soledades (1613), and Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613) – the former, a pastoral, and the later, a mythological verse narrative which would be described today as an “epyllion” or “minor epic”.40 The extremely obscure, erudite, and mixed style of both poems attracted virulent detractors such as Francisco de Quevedo, Juan de Jáuregui, and Francisco Cascales, who called this novel style “culterano” (a combination of “culto” [learned] and ‘luterano’ [Lutheran]) to ridicule Góngora’s heretic taste for neologisms. In answer to these attacks, the Spanish priest and theologist Pedro Díaz de Rivas composed Discursos apologéticos por el estylo del Polifemo y las Soledades (1624), a defence of Góngora that used Hermogenes to support the poet’s “new style”. Díaz de Rivas ground the poem’s obscurity in the Hermogenean understanding of ‘Grandeur’ or megethos, arguing that, “this obscurity is not to be condemned, because it is born from greatness, and therefore is not vicious, as Hermogenes himself points out” (Díaz de Rivas 1978, 144).41 Techniques condemned by detractors such as the poems’ “combined use of humble and sublime terms” and their inclusion of “many ancient terms”, “frequent use of tropes”, and “many hyperbathons [alterations of the syntactical order]”, were something to be praised rather than condemned, he added, as they were based on Hermogenes’ ‘idea’ of “Abundance” (Díaz de Rivas 1978, 143).42 This elevation of the style by means of obscurity was preferable to keeping a low style, he added, appreciating that Góngora, “even in humble matters, in order to maintain a sublime quality of its subject, does not fade, and keeps this tone, fleeing from a vulgar style” (Díaz de Rivas 1978, 142).43

• 44 The modern denominations “epyllia”, “minor epics”, or “Ovidian narratives”, have been used to denot (...)

30English literary criticism built upon this Hermogenean tradition, which presented mixture as the common feature of a series of small-scale works connected in their uplifting stylistic techniques and blurry generic affiliation. Tragicomedy, high-styled pastoral poems, epic love poems, or mock epic developed into new and eventually interrelated forms. The late sixteenth-century emergence of a body of brief narrative verse mixing genres and styles which modern critics have termed “epyllia” or “minor epics” is a crucial manifestation of this tendency.44 These mid-length works such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander or Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had, as Tania Demetriou (2017) has demonstrated, all pastoral, mock epic, late Greek love poems by Musaeus or Collutus, and also Ovidian epics at their many sources – yet, in the rhetorical front, their indecorous poetics was enabled by an Hermogenean strand of early modern poetry. Helped by Hermogenes, these forms were invested of a new dignity – a dignity that reached both the simple speech of shepherds and the ludic registers of erotic poetry, showing, more generally, that all poetic endeavours could be subject of elevated treatment and literary prestige.

• 45 “[M]istum autem Epicum, quod iccirco omnium est princeps: quia continet materias uniuersas” [Moreov (...)
• 46 “ita superiora praecepta vniversalia ex Epica maiestate mutuabimur, vt secundum cuiusque aliarum id (...)
• 47 “Quante parti hà’ l’Epica in versi? Molte [...] Troverete ancora Poesia mista dell’una e dell’ altr (...)
• 48 I have slightly altered Cavalchini and Samuel’s translation here, since their syntaxical reordering (...)
• 49 “No grave, no triste, no alegre, no feroz, no severo, no florido, & em todas as mais formas da oraç (...)

31The development of an English poetics justifying elevated styles in lesser genres had a flip side: an expansion of the writings admissible into the high styles of the heroic. Hermogenes’ definition of the seventh ‘idea’ as a mixed style, and his usage of Homer’s epics as an example, promoted an incorporative vein that enlarged the materials, characters, and traditions of heroic poetry. Following Hermogenes’ conception of δεινότης as a masterful combination of forms, a tradition of continental commentary seized the dignity of epic according to its cumulative scope. In his Poetices, Scaliger defined the heroic as the most excellent and universal genre given that it contained a mixture of all the modes and types of imitation.45 As such, epic constituted the excellent form from which the rules for all other smaller genres could be derived: “therefore, we will take from epic majesty the general universal precepts, so that such arguments can be adapted according to the nature of each of the [other genres’] ideas” (Scaliger 1561, 144).46 Scaliger’s understanding of epic as a mixed genre was similarly present in Minturno’s Arte poetica (1564) also thoroughly based on Hermogenes for its understanding of form. There he pointed out that epic contained many other forms, such as the elegiac, the epigrammatic, the hymnic, the bucolic, and even the amorous – the later embodied in his own Amor innamorato, a mixture of verse and prose, that treated heroic love (Minturno 1564, 3-4).47 This view was expanded by Tasso in his Discorsi del poema heroico which defended the mixed use of ‘ideas’ in epic and used Hermogenes’ theory to justify the intrusion of love lyric’s sweetness into the grandeur of the heroic. He explained this mixture as a combination of Demetrius’ magnificent and ornate forms, or in terms of Hermogenean Grandeur and Force, on one hand, and Beauty and Sweetness, on the other.48 In France, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas claimed that his Seconde Semaine was not “a purely epic or heroic work, but partly heroic, partly panegyric, partly prophetic, partly didactic” (Du Bartas cit. in Auger 2020, 13), and in Portugal, Manuel Galhegos praised the “heroic” [eroico] style of Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s Ulyssea, ou Lisboa Edificada (1636) as a combination of Clarity, Rapidity, Character, and Verity, arguing that “in gravity, in sadness, in happiness, in ferocity, in severity, in the florid, in all the forms of the oration [Pereira] showed great fineness” (Pereira de Castro 1636, sig. S4v).49

• 50 The manuscript version is currently at the British Library, under the title Genealogical and Histor (...)

36Both the manuscript and print versions of this passage include a marginal annotation by Carew, which repeats a single fundamental term: “Mixture.”50 Carew’s controversial claim about the hybridity of English language did not invoke Hermogenes’ name, however, his usage of the rhetorician’s theory is evident not only in this quote but elsewhere in the piece. There Carew used other Hermogenean concepts such as “Significancye”, “Easynes”, “Copiousnes”, and “Sweetnes”, the first two suggesting the ‘ideas’ of ‘Purity’ (καθαρότης) and ‘Distinctness’ (εὐκρίνεια), and the last two, closely resembling the ‘ideas’ of ‘Abundance’ (περιβολή), and ‘Sweetness’ (γλυκύτης). He presented these as the four qualities of style or “locutio”, in what was, by all means, an original account of the ‘virtues’ of style with an Hermogenean origin which would have been identified by seventeenth-century peers.

• 51 Carew’s incorporation of the Hermogenean “Abundance” as “Copiousnes” points towards the affinity of (...)

37According to Carew, the first two basic qualities, “Significancye” (clear meaning) and “Easyness” (syntactical order), relied on the many languages from which English originated, just like Latin and Greek were themselves “borne awaye the prerogative from all other tongues” (Carew 1904, 286). This multilingual composition of English worked at different levels – including “letters”, “woords”, and larger linguistic phenomena, such as proverbs, metaphors, and homonymity. The last two virtues, “Copiousnes” and “Sweetnes” were based on similar principles. For example, the “Copiousnes” of English relied on its “choice which is geven us by the use of divers languages”, among which Carew included the Saxon, Dutch, Danish, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Of course, Carew pointed out, English would select only the best qualities of other tongues, including vocabulary, figures, and even “all sortes of verses” that authors such as Philip Sidney or Richard Stanihurst borrowed “not shamfully” from other traditions. This selective incorporation resulted in English’s prominent “Sweetnes,” which surpassed that of all other languages: “wee in borrowing from them geve the strenght of Consonantes to the Italyan, the full sounde of wordes to the French, the varietye of termi[na]cions to the Spanish, and the mollifieinge of more vowels to the Dutch; and soe (like bees) gather the honye of their good properties and leave the dreggs to themselves” (Carew 1904, 293). Thus, these four qualities of English – “Significancye”, “Easynes”, “Copiousnes”, and “Sweetnes” – coalesced into the language’s constituent ‘mixture’, the culminating concept that ends Carew’s treatise and which he didactically highlighted in the margin.51

• 52 Brown uses this last expression in relationship to Marlowe’s style, arguing that “Marlowe’s work is (...)

42The reception of On Ideas in English literary criticism exposes, however, the inner contradictions articulating hybrid forms. On the one hand, the period’s educational practice encouraged and valued the use of techniques of variety and combination, a writer’s range and capacity of transiting between forms at will; on the other hand, these practices were inculcated amid a persistent suspicion of hybrid textualities. While the rhetorical tradition provided arguments in defence of the purity of styles and rigid conceptions of decorum, it also harnessed alternative rhetorical theories on the mixture of forms, such as Hermogenes’ influential model. This rhetorical tradition of hybridity was pervasive in early modern literature yet it was especially mastered by a university-trained elite, who (with Hermogenes) saw mixture as a mark of skill and status, a cultural credential that certified their rhetorical maturity. As such, stylistic mixture articulated a space for poetic experimentation and inquiry, which facilitated a destabilising poetics – a tendency towards an inversion of the values sustaining current views on literary decorum, which materialised as an ambiguous openness to generic range, an attribution of rhetorical fluency to simple characters, or a valorisation of love and eroticism as major literary themes. In presenting mixed verse as a result of literary skill and cultural capital, and pretending that hybrid poems as a matter of fact operated conforming to propriety, English writers recognised the bi-directional configuration of mixed textualities – their operation against and towards the grain of the hierarchy of forms. In this sense, I believe that this literary mixture was not ‘subversive’ or ‘self-marginalising’ per se, as Georgia Brown has suggested.52 If mixture enabled the inclusion of indecorous materials, it also involved a celebration of the institutional training that permitted these texts’ tactical incorporation of them – and indeed of their overall accomplished language. This strategic potential of mixture is precisely shown in the integration of Hermogenes’ theory by English literary critics – whose intelligent discussions show to what extent they could endorse prevalent views on decorum but also slip in, subtly, alternative stylistic theories that accounted for their erudition and innovative approach.