Four-fifths of ancient rhetoric is omitted in the Treatise. The nod is given to elocution. Invention is discussed, but only as a tool to assist the communicator in amplifying his ideas, as a means to spin out his thoughts to extreme lengths. Arrangement, memory, and delivery are overlooked. Accordingly, the Treatise neatly fits into the category of a Renaissance rhetoric on style. It is this school which recognized the traditional five Ciceronian parts of rhetoric, but considered style to be the most significant precept. The Treatise is not the first to support an emphasis wholly on style, nor the foremost. We know that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s works on rhetoric, and Quintilian’s Institutes discussed the significance of style, but they had a broad view. However, in England, about the time of Bede, arose a limited concept that rhetoric is mainly style, particularly that of the figures. It is this latter truncated version of rhetoric that the Treatise continues in the Renaissance. Rhetoric in Sherry’s work has lost its ancient meaning.
The Treatise is highly prescriptive. It was born in an age of rules. So much so, that the rhetorician who named his rules and tools was not out of rapport with the period. This accounts for the rigidity, the love of classification, and the schematic presentation of the work. It is nothing more than a highly organized dictionary of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance schemes and tropes. In fact, the major variation from previous Latin compilers is to be found in the headnotes relative to the various kinds of figures. Nor is it as thorough in handling the figures as its predecessors. It utilizes, however, the customary Greek and Latin terms and supplies a definition, but here the similarity with contemporaries and ancients ends. It is weak in amplification of examples during an age when amplification was practiced. Sherry economizes by selecting usually one example in support of a figure while contemporary cataloguers, and ancients for that matter, are more definitive.
Whether the work was ever popular within the schools or without is unclear. Probably it did not have extensive success because only one issue of the work appeared and a revised edition was brought out in 1555. By contrast, during the sixteenth century, Erasmus’ De Copia (1512) had at least eleven printings, Mosellanus’ Table (c. 1529) had at least eight editions, Susenbrotus’ Epitome (1541) had at least twenty printings, Peacham’s Garden (1577) had two editions, and Day’s Secretorie (1586) underwent at least five editions. Some of these works had new editions printed in the seventeenth century and would seem to reflect a greater public acceptance than the Treatise. Some were also written in Latin while Sherry moves in the vernacular. It still was an age of Latin, and Sherry in part recognized this by his alternate Latin and English movement in his second rhetoric on style published in 1555. Moreover, people seemed content to remain with the giants of the Renaissance, notably Erasmus and his De Copia instead of turning to a lesser light such as Sherry.
The Treatise does have merit. The work cannot be judged entirely by tallying its meager number of editions, its lack of thoroughness, or its artificial divisions. Its signal contribution rests upon the fact that it is a pioneering effort at permitting the figures to march, for the first time, in English. Here Sherry had an opportunity to provide the English reader with additional words, ideas, and material to be employed in vernacular communication. His efforts in his works on rhetoric, the two editions of the Treatise, provided the sixteenth century Englishman with the identical schemes and tropes which had been a heritage of the Latin language since antiquity. Hence the work can be called a complicated ordering of the figures, but it is also a sincere attempt to provide in English those figures which would lend ornateness to the expression of an idea.
To indicate that the Treatise was part of a continuing school of rhetoric, we must consider a few rhetoricians subsequent to Sherry’s work. Indeed, one notices the continuance of dictionaries of figures which carry the admonition that the usual manner of utterance was to be despised. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), although preserving the classical idea of rhetoric, also felt the definition of a figure employed in communication involved the uncommon. Twenty-seven years subsequent to Sherry, England again has a pure catalogue of the figures; this is Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence. More elaborate than the Treatise, it too suggests that rhetoric is decoration. Continued interest in the stylistic tools is also seen in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day’s The English Secretorie, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is achieved through using the figures.
When we look in the opposite direction, to works which preceded Sherry, the figures, definitions, and examples in the Treatise derive more from contemporaries than from the ancients. It relies extensively upon intermediaries. Sherry explains that Erasmus and Mosellanus will be major sources. Hence the De Copia, the Ecclesiastae, and the Tabulae de schematibus et tropis are used with regularity. Although further removed in time, the Rhetorica ad Herennium is the primary ancient source. But beyond this first-hand reliance on the ancients, examples from Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, to mention several, as well as definitions of the figures, depend heavily upon neo-classical intermediaries.
Appended to the text on the figures of rhetoric is a seemingly gratuitous section entitled “That chyldren oughte to be taught and brought vp gently in vertue and learnynge, and that euen forthwyth from theyr natiuitie: a declamacion of a briefe theme, by Erasmus of Roterodame.” This essay occupies almost two-thirds of the Treatise and receives its first English translation from the Latin at the hands of Sherry. William Woodward in his Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education gave us another English translation in 1904. One other translation, in German, by August Israel, is entitled “Vortrag über die Nothwendigkeit, die Knaben gleich von der Geburt an in einer für Freigeborne würdigen Weise sittlich und wissenschaftlich ausbilden zu lassen.”
The reason for the inclusion of the Erasmian essay is never clearly stated in the other sections of the Treatise. Nor do the other translators suppose a reason. From the internal evidence of the essay and from headnotes preceding it, we may assume that the purpose is one of supplying readers with an example of amplification of a brief theme, first illustrated in miniature, and then full blown into a long declamation. The essay does not appear to be illustrating the numerous figures discussed in the initial section of the work.
Of Sherry we know little. Beyond the dates in the DNB, we infer from his works that he had an intense interest in English and had a desire for his countrymen to communicate well in the vernacular. He was interested in religion, was most likely a Protestant, and hoped to continue an interest in religion which he developed in his youth. He was also a teacher. And although Latin was still a living language, the task of inculcating a new tongue in the students fell to the schoolmaster; Sherry was active in this capacity. This does not weaken an acclamation we possess of the man: “He was a Person elegantly learned.”
Herbert W. Hildebrandt