I’t "THEATER OF THE SELF": PERSONA AND THE RHETORIC OF CHARACTER IN THE PROSE OF SIR THOMAS BROWNE Carol D. Stevens A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1978 a © 1978 CAROL DADDAZIO STEVENS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED li ABSTRACT Each of Sir Thomas Browne's prose works has its own speaking voice or persona, which is an idealized and conventional composite of characters. This study demonstrates how the personae are created by descriptive methods which are analyzed in classical and Renaissance rhetoric texts and typified by the character sketches of Theophrastus and his English counterparts. While the function of persona varies from work to work, assuming most importance in Religio Medici and Christian Morals and least in Urne-Buriall and Garden of Cyrus, all of Browne's formal masks have one element in common: they show that the final goal of the self is, ideally, always God. This analysis focuses on aspects of persona which reflect conventional types (e.g., physician, antiquarian, moralist) and which are created by methods which approximate those used by the writers of the characters. In some cases, Browne's character- portraiture of himself seems directed at creating ideal or good types in direct contrast to negative stereotypes perpetuated by the character sketches. Such is the case with the ideal Godly physician of Religio Medici. The study stresses the universality of Browne's Ill public personae, providing some guidelines for distinguish­ ing the autobiographical from the conventional where both appear in the first person. IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S Listing everyone who has helped me during the preparation of this dissertation would be impossible, but I would like especially to thank certain mentors and friends without whose aid the study could not have been completed. The members of my committee, in particular Dr. Edgar F. Daniels, Dr. James L. Harmer, and Dr. Virginia E. Leland, have guided the study with patience, wisdom, a,nd enormous tact. I am also indebted to Dr. Lowell P. Leland, and to the members of the Bowling Green University Library Circulation Staff, especially Sherrill Grey. Because friends have been so consistently encouraging, the period of research and writing has been a pleasure. Special thanks are due to Lowell and Virginia Leland, who opened their home to me during the summer of 1976 for a period of uninterrupted research. Tom and Penny Wymer and Kathleen Spencer have also provided constant mora,l support, as have friends and colleagues at Oakland University, in particular Ron Sudol, Cordell Black, Marty Lewis, Peter Evarts, and Lynette Gadsden. Laurence Krieg typed the final draft, and Martha Krieg spared him V to do it. Finally, to David Stevens 1 owe love and gratitude for patience, encouragement, practical advice, and sanity. The faults in this study are mine; what is good belongs to these people and others. To all of them: My recompense is thanks, that's all; Yet my good will is great, though the gift be small. (Pericles III.iv) VI For David Stevens, Virginia Leland, Kathleen Spencer sine quibus non vil TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION............... .. .1 CHAPTER I. A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE CHARACTER SKETCH ... 4 II. THEOPHRASTUS, BROWNE, AND THE CHARACTER . 34 III. THE GODLY PHYSICIAN IN RELIGIO MEDICI AND LETTER TO A FRIEND . 53 IV. THE SAINTLY ANTIQUARIAN IN HYDRIOTAPHIA AND GARDEN OF CYRUS........................ 97 V. THE AGING MORALIST IN CHRISTIAN MORALS . 123 VI. SIR THOMAS BROWNE OF NORWICH IN THE LETTERS 142 CONCLUSION..................................... 155 NOTES................................................ 158 LIST OF WORKS CITED 170 1 INTRODUCTION In 1642 Andrew Crooke issued a pirated edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. In December of that year Sir Kenelm Digby read Browne's work and set down his reac­ tions to it immediately. Religio Medici,thus received its earliest critical commentary before its authorized publica­ tion in 1643. Scholars from that day to the present have been drawn to Browne's prose, commenting frequently and at length upon the prose style and the engaging personality of the author. Recently Joan Webber, in The Eloquent "I": Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose, has suggested that Browne's prose style is intimately related to his presenta­ tion of self. Her analysis considers the Religio as "spiritual autobiography,"1 but her work provokes specula­ tion that the sophisticated "I" of Religio Medici (and perhaps of other works written by Browne wholly or in part in first person) is actually a literary construct, an image or mask created by the writer not simply to reveal autobiographical data but to be used as any fictional or poetic character might be: to clarify a theme, to espouse a point of view on behalf of an author or in contradiction to him, to perform significant action, to delight and 2 instruct. This point of view is supported by C. A. Patrides, who, in his introduction to a recent edition of Browne's works, suggests "that it is an error readily to identify the narrative voice of Religio Medici with its author."2 Taking Webber's argument that the self is the conscious center of Religio Medici as a "given," the next question must be: what is the precise nature of that self? If the self is a literary construct, a persona, in fact, what is the nature of that persona? What are the literary conven­ tions which determine the specific forms in which it is created? What functions does it perform? To a certain extent, careful examination of Browne's first-person prose reveals characterization not simply of Thomas Browne, physician of Norwich, but of a "Godly Physician" in his ideal form, a "Saintly Antiquarian," an "Aging Moralist." In short, from this point of view, Browne often appears to be doing in the first person what the writers of the Theophrastan and, later, the English charac­ ter essay were doing in the third. The purpose of this study is to isolate and examine elements of character description in the first-person portions of Sir Thomas Browne's major prose works in order to determine whether and how they shape his personae into structural unifying principles. Several steps are necessary to accomplish this purpose. Since certain early works of 3 rhetoric provide guidelines for descriptio personae, a brief review of those guidelines will help to identify the components and methods of the character sketch in both the Theophrastan and English forms. It will then be necessary to establish Browne's familiarity with those methods, to analyze a possible character sketch as it exists in the pure third-person form in Browne's minor Latin prose, and, finally, to examine his use of character methods—structures, topics, and rhetorical devices—as they appear in selected major prose. A brief analysis of Browne's familiar correspondence will provide autobiographical data and demonstrate a use of first person which does not involve character or persona. 4 CHAPTER I A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE CHARACTER SKETCH Sir Thomas Browne's self-descriptions may not actually be character sketches, but the same classical rhetorical patterns which describe the characters of Theophrastus exert a profound influence on Browne's work. A brief survey of the rules governing character portraiture in ancient Greece and in Renaissance England helps to illumi­ nate the origins of Browne's self-descriptive techniques. The character sketch (or character essay) may be defined as a usually brief and pithy, sometimes epigrammatical portrayal of a recognizable moral, ethical, social, or occupational type. The classical Theophrastan characters are simple and relatively easy to analyze. The development of the English character sketch, strongly but only partially influenced by the Greek form, is far more complex, and the rhetoric of the English character is, hence, more subtle and varied. The original characters, composed by Tyrtamus (Theophrastus' true name) in the fourth century B.C., probably as illustrations of passages in Aristotle's Ethics, deal primarily with moral and ethical types, but some of them (e.g., "Oligarchia, the Oligarchical Man" and "Opsimathia, the Late Learner") at least touch upon 5 social and professional types as well. As defined by Benjamin Boyce in his comprehensive history The Theophrastan Character in English to 1642, the character as practiced by Theophrastus is an "attempt to sketch the typical manifesta­ tions in human nature of some one quality of character."1 The writer’s usual method is to name a moral quality in the abstract, to define it briefly, and then to develop a precise portrait of a person dominated by this trait, a portrait "built up entirely of details of what the man does or says, usually in apparently random order, as seen or heard by an impersonal observer."2 For example, the character of "Agroikia, the Boor" begins with a concise definition of boorishness: "an unseemly lack of civilized behavior" in one translation, "uncivilized ignorance" in another.3 We are then given a sequence of actions performed by a typical boor: he eats garlic and pungent spices, exhales the fumes in crowded placed, then asserts that the smell is "sweeter than perfume"; he is loudmouthed, would rather confide in servants than in family or friends, hitches his garment up above his knees when he sits down, thus exposing himself, gawks at ordinary sights, feeds himself and his animals at the same time, seduces servant- girls, "sings in the public bath¿and drives hobnails into his shoes."1* The original character essay, as may be noted from this typical example, Is not a heavily literary or 6 erudite form; it depends upon broadly drawn caricature.