John Heywood Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Walter McCain, Jr.

Critical Essay by John Walter McCain, Jr.

SOURCE: “Oratory, Rhetoric and Logic in the Writings of John Heywood,” in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, February 1940, pp. 44-7.

In the following essay, McCain argues that even though many of Heywood's writings display his formal training in rhetoric and logic, the dramatist was adept at transcending rhetorical arguments to make his work aesthetically pleasing.

The formal learning of the Middle Ages included oratory, rhetoric,¹ and logic. These three subjects, the terminology of which was intricate and complex, were not always exclusive of one another; and all three were overformalized before the dawn of the Renaissance in England.

Deriving much of her culture from the Roman Empire and her Christianity from Rome, England naturally took over much of the scholasticism and formalism of the mediaeval schoolmen who—under the sponsorship of the Church of Rome—kept the lamp of learning aglow during those dark centuries after there...
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