This chapter looks at Thomas Moore’s attempts to maintain a midway point between post-Napoleonic conservatism and emerging radical reform movements. It looks at his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the context of wider debates about the nature of Whiggism and its suitability to the political moment. Moore’s attempts at moderation ran aground on the shores of Irish history, as his work increasingly moved to prose in order to make explicit political tensions that had been implicit in his poetry.

This chapter recovers the work of Charles Phillips, a barrister known for his florid rhetorical style. It looks at his argument with the Edinburgh Review about the proper nature of ‘legitimate eloquence’ within the context of wider tensions in post-Napoleonic Britain around the democratisation of public speech. Oratory was now considered potentially radical, even anarchic, which gave a greater urgency to defining and policing Irish speech.

This conclusion looks at cultural debate in the 1830s to consider the way in which the earlier decades of the nineteenth century were already being historicised by writers and intellectuals aware that they were entering a new literary age.

This chapter looks at Maria Edgeworth’s writings on Edmund Burke from 1805 to 1814, culminating in her novel Patronage published in that year. It looks at the reputation of Burke and the charges against his style by the Irish writer George Ensor as a way of thinking about how Burke’s mixed style of rhetoric may have influenced Edgeworth’s fictional practice. The relationship between rhetoric and realism is considered, as well as reasons for Edgeworth’s fall from literary favour in later years.

This chapter looks at the work of John and Michael Banim, who emerged as important Catholic novelists in the late 1820s. Their work attempted to capture the energy of O’Connellite politics in fiction, blending rhetorical set pieces with melodramatic incident. Public speech and oratory become centrally important to their work, and the influence of Richard Lalor Shiel on John Banim in particular becomes clear on reading his work.

This chapter looks at a minor controversy in the life of Charles Robert Maturin to consider his work in the light of sectarian tensions during the ‘Second Reformation’: the energised push by the Church of Ireland to convert the Catholic population in the 1820s. The role eloquence plays in Maturin’s work will be looked at and considered in relation to wider issues surrounding religious rhetoric and Gothic writing.

This introduction provides an introduction to the historical and theoretical frameworks for looking at Irish literature in the Romantic period. It considers the place of the Irish language in characterising Irish eloquence, and argues that British critics also linked Irish eloquence to Gothic excess. It introduces some of the main authors that will be looked at in greater depth later, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, and Charles Maturin.

This chapter looks at the work of Sydney Owenson, focusing on two novels, The Wild Irish Girl and Woman; or Ida of Athens. It considers the way in which Owenson crafted a powerful model of female eloquence in response to the perceived failures of more mainstream political speech. It looks at the legacy of the Volunteer movement of the 1780s as well as the Irish-language background of her work. It also notes the publication of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, an important rhetorical treatise, and the links between his work and Owenson.

Chapter 4 examines the translation of ancient Greek oratory, focusing on Demosthenes and Aeschines. John Christopherson’s Latin manuscript version of Against Leptines (c. 1544) highlights the force of rhetoric in Tudor warfare and politics. Thomas Wilson’s The … orations of Demosthenes (1570) draws on Demosthenes’ call to arms against Philip II of Macedon to warn against his namesake, Philip II of Spain, presenting Demosthenes as a model for Elizabethan counsellors. Wilson also played a key role in the posthumous publication of a Latin translation of the same speeches by Nicholas Carr to continue the campaign against Philip of Spain, though Carr’s translation had its origins in a manuscript that equates oratory with the political liberty and popular rule of ancient Athens and the Roman republic. John Osborne’s English manuscript translations of Demosthenes’s Against Leptines (1582) and Aeschines’s On the Embassy (1583) apply ancient Greek oratory to the political debate of the Elizabethan House of Commons and give a remarkably positive account of Athenian democracy.

A prevalent idea in scholarship on Athenian politics of the classical period is the assumption, based on figures like Pericles and Demosthenes, that political leadership depended on the ability to give good advice and communicate well with fellow citizens in the Council and Assembly. Without necessarily challenging this assumption, the present chapter focuses on a mechanism for attaining political leadership that has received less attention: gift-giving to both individual citizens and the entire community. Athenians with political ambitions built networks of followers (clients) through private gifts, but the phenomenon has not been fully appreciated because of the supposition that nothing comparable to the Roman patron/client relationship existed in the Greek polis. This chapter focuses on the case of Demosthenes.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

This chapter examines how poet, orator, and early speech therapist John Thelwall engages with embodied materialist models of involuntary, yet autonomous, utterance to support his lifelong belief in the necessity of free and active speech. It investigates how Thelwall’s work presents both politicised notions of the speaking body and a physiological and sometimes pathologised understanding of political silencing and argues that Thelwall’s later elocutionary work develops a concern with embodied speech already fundamental to his more overtly political writing, resulting in a theory of speech production and impediment which remains suggestive of a radical politics in its materialist conception of the human body’s operation and agency. Drawing on his unpublished ‘Derby Manuscript’, the chapter considers how Thelwall’s cross-disciplinary theory of ‘rhythmus’, which positions the elements of elocution as fundamental physical laws, rather than practical or cultural rules, gives credence to the notion of speech as a materially potent force.

Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.

The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.

The third chapter covers the span of Roman oratory, from its first (lost) beginnings to the importance of Greek models, to its full flourishing in the work of Cicero. It emphasises throughout how central to Roman aristocratic life the art of good speaking was, how competitive an art form it was, and that the people were sophisticated auditors. Cicero necessarily dominates the discussion, but we try to capture the style of a few others, including Cato the Elder.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.