This Heraldry in Lucrece' Face
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375210 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nancy J Vickers (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 171 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772128 |
| OpenAlex | W2319773068 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
The brief exchange between a governor and a lieutenant that figures as epigraph to this essay is curiously about the limits of description. As they stand in the stormy port of the isle of Cyprus (1.43) awaiting the Moor Othello (1.27), Montano and Cassio digress from appropriately warlike concerns to evoke Othello's exquisite and doomed bride, Desdemona. Cassio comments that she is so beautiful as to be beyond description: her charms surpass all praise that the rhetorician can muster; they cannot effectively be listed (blazoned) or captured in rhetorical conceits (quirks); indeed, even the most ingenious of poets (the ingener) would exhaust himself in attempting to do them justice.1 Cassio thus recites not only the strengths of Desdemona but also the weaknesses of a poetic tradition that, from the classics to the Renaissance modems, had celebrated the beauties of woman's body. Like Shakespeare's warlike exchange, that tradition was, in large part, the product of men talking to men about women. The canonical legacy of description is a legacy shaped predominantly by the male imagination for the male imagination. This is not, of course, to deny the possibility of the flattery poem; praising a woman to her face might well be intended as a preamble to seduction, as a maneuver for advantage. But in this essay, I will focus on those occasions in which men praise beautiful women among men, on the rhetorical strategies such occasions generate, and finally on some
Ancient history · Art · Heraldry · Linguistics · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,12 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2019 (11) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |