When Shakespeare's fellow dramatist Ben Jonson referred in his memorial poem published in the First Folio to the poet's "small Latin and less Greek," he meant that Shakespeare had the typical grammar school education of his time. In her Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, Columbia UP, 1947), Sister Miriam Joseph describes the typical grammar school day as follows:

According to Sister Joseph, the aim of the "program of studies" pursued by Elizabethan schoolboys during such an arduous day was "to enable the student to read, write, and speak Latin, to acquaint him with the leading Latin classics and a few of the Greek, and to infuse into him sound moral and religious principles. The method prescribed unremitting exercise in grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Grammar dominated the lower forms, logic and rhetoric the upper. In all forms the order was first to learn precepts, then to employ them as a tool of analysis in reading, and finally to use them as a guide in composition." Through such a method, Elizabethan students learned the over two hundred figures of speech set forth in Latin handbooks of rhetoric written by Susenbrotus, Erasmus, and Quintilian, figures described in English handbooks by such writers as Thomas Wilson, Abraham Fraunce, Henry Peacham, and George Puttenham.

Sister Joseph demonstrates convincingly that the knowledge of the rhetorical figures (along with a knowledge of the precepts of logic and grammar and an array of Classical writers) laid the basis of much of Shakespeare's poetic art. Elizabethan writers accepted Quintilian's definition of figura (figures) as:

As Brian Vickers has shown, these figures were neither dry formulae nor empty ornaments; rather, they were what he calls "pockets of energy," "representations of human emotional and psychological states" (Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (New York and London: Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1970, 121).

With one exception, the major Elizabethan rhetoricians employed the traditional division of figures into tropes and schemes. A scheme is based on a deviation from the ordinary pattern of words, while a trope is based on a deviation from the ordinary and principal signification of a word. In his Classic Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Third Edn., (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), Edward P. J. Corbett explains the mechanism behind figures this way: "Both types of figures involve a transference of some kind: a trope, a transference of meaning; a scheme, a transference of order."

A FEW RHETORICAL FIGURES

Anaphora: Beginning a series of clauses with the same word.

Anastrophe: Unusual word order.

Antanaclasis: Repeating a word, shifts from one of its meanings to another; a pun:

Antithesis: Sets contraries in opposition to give greater perspicuity by contrast, as when Lord Rivers tries to comfort the widowed queen Elizabeth:

And plant your joys in living Edward's throne.

Anthypophora: A reasoning with the self, asking questions and answering them oneself, as Falstaff does in his catechism of honor:

Aporia: A doubting or deliberating with oneself, as when having prearranged that Buckingham should offer him the crown, Richard III poses as the reluctant candidate and addresses the people for whom this scene is staged:

Brachylogia: Omission of conjunctions between words.

Catachresis: A figure that we would call an implied metaphor; this is the wrenching of a word, most often a verb or an adjective, from its proper application to another not proper, as when one says that the sword devours.

Chronographia: The description of times.

Dirimens

Copulatio:

Enallage: Deliberate use of one case, person, gender, number, tense, or mood for another.

So saucy will the hand of she here (A&C, 3.3.98)

Encomion: High praise and commendation of a person or thing by extolling the inherent qualities or adjuncts:

Epizeuxis: Repetition of words with none between.

Hypallage: The application of words is perverted and sometimes made absurd:

Hysteron Proteron: Puts first that which occurs later.

Isocolon: Structure in which phrases or clauses are of equal length and usually of corresponding structure, as in Nathaniel's euphuistic comments to Holofernes:

Metonymy: Substitution of subject for adjunct, or adjunct for subject.

Optatio: An ardent wish or prayer.

Parenthesis: Simply the insertion of a phrase in parenthesis.

Prosopopoeia: The attribution of human qualities to dumb or inanimate creatures.

Synecdoche: A trope that heightens meaning by substituting genus for species, species for genus, pat for whole, whole for part.

Threnos: A lament.

Topographia: The description of places.

Zeugma: One verb serving a number of clauses.