Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-00

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This essay will look at the development of one proto-Vice figure, Back-biter, as he appears in two East Anglian playtexts from the fifteenth century,(1) The Castle of Perseverance and the N-Town "Trial of Joseph and Mary" share this character, and although his roles in the two plays are not the same, his functions derive from the same potentialities--potentialities enlivened by rhetoric. This examination will begin by discussing the earlier Castle of Perseverance and follow with a discussion of the N-Town "Trial" play in an effort to show the impact of the dissident quality of Backbiter's rhetoric--indeed, Backbiter as rhetoric--upon the operations of the plays.

Although his role in The Castle of Perseverance (circa 1425) has not seemed significant to many previous students of the morality tradition, Backbiter (also referred to as Detractio in the speech-headings and as Flibbertigibbet at lines 775, 1724, and 1733) occupies a complex position in this early English play.(2) Backbiter is not simply a "bad" figure in the play who leads Mankind away from the path of righteousness and into sin in the same way that the Bad Angel and Covetousness do; on the contrary, this messenger of the World, the relative brevity of his appearances notwithstanding, manages to "serve" Mankind by bringing him to Covetousness--and hence sin--and to subvert the authority of his evil superiors by pitting them against each other, pulling it all off without suffering punishment. Backbiter crosses--transgresses--boundaries between what is ostensibly good and evil in the play and renders those boundaries susceptible to ambivalence in the process. More is at stake here than comic appeal. The medium Backbiter uses and, indeed, embodies allegorically and dramatically, to transgress these boundaries is language. An examination of Backbiter's language in The Castle of Perseverance demonstrates the extent to which he represents the coalescence of rhetorical views on detraction and the uses of rhetoric in general in order to present the audience with a conception of evil that is at once highly rhetoricized and markedly ambivalent and, further, the extent to which this rhetorical ambivalence is an index of Backbiter's moral positioning as a representative of evil in the play who suffers no retribution for his wrongdoing.(3) A discussion of some of the rhetorical background behind Backbiter will be followed by a consideration of his allegorical and rhetorical representation in the play as evidenced by his relationship with the audience, with Mankind, and with the "bad" figures.(4)

The first thing that needs to be established by way of background is a sense of the parts of rhetoric as they would have been understood by an educated medieval English audience. Two classical texts, the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's De inventione, are especially good sources to draw upon for this summary because they were widely known in England during the medieval period.(5) An excerpt from De inventione, for example, provides such an encapsulation of rhetoric:

partes autem eae quas plerique dixerunt, inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. Inventio est excogitatio rerum verarum aut veri similium quae causam probabilem reddant; dispositio est rerum inventarum in ordinem distributio; elocutio est idoneorum verborum ad inventionem accomodatio; memoria est firma animi rerum ac verborum perceptio; pronuntiatio est ex rerum et verborum dignitate vocis et corporis moderatio. [The parts of it, as most authorities have stated, are Invention, Arrangement, Expression, Memory, Delivery. Invention is the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one's cause plausible. Arrangement is the distribution of arguments thus discovered in the proper order. Expression is the fitting of the proper language to the invented matter. Memory is the firm mental grasp of matter and words. Delivery is the control of voice and body in a manner suitable to the dignity of the subject matter and the style.](6)

All the main parts of rhetoric as they were understood by medieval English rhetoricians are described in this passage.(7) Used as a template for constructing eloquent expressions designed to persuade an audience, this rhetorical framework is general enough to be deployed in a wide range of situations. Such general applicability did not go unexamined, as a look at an explicitly Christian conception of rhetoric will show.

Another element of the rhetorical background behind Backbiter lies in Augustine's De doctrina Christiana.(8) This important work was widely copied throughout the Middle Ages and would almost certainly have been available to the author of The Castle of Perseverance.(9) This "metarhetoric" as James J. Murphy calls it, draws on the Roman rhetorical tradition set out in De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and places that tradition into an overtly Christian context.(10) It is at the beginning of Book IV of this "defense of Ciceronian rhetoric"(11) that Augustine, writing about the reasons for cultivating rhetorical competence, mentions the general applicability of the discipline that is a key to understanding Backbiter's representation:

Cum ergo sit in medio posita facultas eloquii, quae ad persuadenda seu praua seu recta ualet plurimum, cur non bonorum studio comparatur, ut militet ueritati, si eam mali ad obtinendas peruersas uanasque causas in usus iniquitatis et erroris usurpant? (12) [The power of eloquence--so very effective in convincing us of either wrong or right--lies open to all. Why, then, do not the good zealously procure it that it may serve truth, if the wicked, in order to gain unjustifiable and groundless cases, apply it to the advantages of injustice and error?](13)

The interesting thing about this excerpt is the anxiety it communicates over the ambivalence of rhetoric itself. Couched in this call to rhetorical arms is a recognition that the art of eloquence can be plied for good or evil ends, and that its effectiveness is not diminished in either case. Rhetoric, for Augustine, is both a useful tool and a dangerous weapon. This observation, itself a small part of the argument of Book IV, is important because it firmly establishes an attitude towards rhetorical practice that ascribes a polymorphous quality to language, one that is just as susceptible to deployment as a web of shifting sites of evil as it is of acting as a stable expression of Christian theology.(14)

This concept of rhetorical ambivalence is linked to the last important element behind Backbiter's representation: the tradition of the "sins of the tongue" of which backbiting or detractio forms a part.(15) Every bit as technically complex as the Ciceronian rhetorical framework known to medieval rhetoricians, these sins of the tongue are likened to a tree by the author of The Book of Vices and Virtues and are further subdivided into ten "branches":

But we wole sette ten chef braunches pat comep of pis tree of wikkede tonge: ydel, auauntyng, losengerie, apeyre a man bihynde hym, pat is bakbityng, lesynges, forswerynges, stryuynges, grucchynges, rebellynges, blasphemye, pat is speke euele of God.(16)

What this system looks like is a detailed framework for the identification and classification of evil uses of rhetoric. It can be read as an attempt to delimit the ambivalent quality of rhetoric by mapping the various kinds of "deviation from discipline" that evil eloquence constitutes. This is not to say that it comprises a kind of anti-rhetoric that is in binary opposition to the Ciceronian tradition as it was understood in the Middle Ages. Rather, it inheres within the very heart of the ambivalence of that tradition; it is rhetoric used for evil ends. Backbiter, in name and in representation, comes directly from this complex conceptual web, and it is to him that this essay now turns.

Backbiter enacts this conceptual web of rhetoric not just in his speeches but in his name, or, rather, names, as well. When this dramatized allegorical and rhetorical abstraction first appears in The Castle of Perseverance at line 647 as the World's "messenger" he tells the audience his name is "Bacbytere" (659). This is significant because his name indicates that he is a performer of actions as well as a dramatized representation of an abstraction, that is backbiting.(17) His name tells the audience that he stands for sins of the tongue and that he commits them as well. This appears to be straightforward enough until one notices that in the Latin speech headings that are used throughout The Castle of Perseverance Backbiter is referred to as "Detraccio" (e.g. 647 s.h.). Detractio, or detraction, is a rhetorical abstraction within the framework of the sins of the tongue (and, by implication, within the framework of Ciceronian rhetoric), and can be translated into English as "backbiting." Although it is true that this designation would not be available to an audience viewing a performance of the play and that the Latin speech headings are a convention of the manuscript, it is nevertheless the case that at some level of textual production someone saw Backbiter as susceptible of being read both as a dramatized perpetrator of sins of the tongue and as a rhetoricized abstraction, and registered that reading consistently in the form of the Latin speech heading. To complicate matters even further, he is also referred to by a third name at lines 775, 1724, and 1733: "Flypergebet" or "Flibbertigibbet" in modern English. One of the meanings for this Middle English word, an "onomatapoeic representation of unmeaning chatter,' is a" chattering or gossiping person" (OED).(18) Thus, Backbiter's names classify him not only as a performer of verbal action and as a representative of ordered rhetorical abstraction, but also as the embodiment of rhetorical action that deviates from discipline and means--in a loaded sense--nothing.(19) The most important point to take from these observations is that these three names are not entirely synonyms for each other and that they work to represent Backbiter in a shifting and non-symmetrical fashion that highlights his simultaneous inherence within superficially differentiated sites of rhetorical power. All of this ambivalence takes place at the level of Backbiter's name; it is in his speeches that this polymorphous figure appears at his most rhetorically and morally ambivalent.

Backbiter's opening lines, delivered directly to the audience, function dramatically as...

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