The rhetoric of concealment

by Rosemary Kegl

Demonstrating how struggles over gender and class were mediated through formal properties of writing, The Rhetoric of Concealment offers a new framework for the discussion of court literature and middle-class literature in the English Renaissance. Rosemary Kegl offers powerful readings of works by Puttenham, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Deloney and considers an array of other texts including journals, gynecological and obstetrical writings, misogynist tracts, defenses of women, prescriptive literature on companionate marriage, royal proclamations, legal records, and town charters. Kegl's readings center on a recurrent rhetorical gesture in the work of each author - riddling disclosure in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, the logic of unsound bodies and buildings in Sidney's Arcadia, the network of insults in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, and the collection of proverbial wisdom in Deloney's Jack of Newbury. Asking what sorts of social relations such gestures promote, she analy