Chapter 3 - Court Talk

Summary

Court talk is not the style that early modern courtiers use to speak to one another. It is an ersatz substitute for that style, an outsider’s fantasy about insider talk. Taken from conduct manuals, prose romances, poems, and plays, court talk is an overdone approximation of how courtiers are imagined to speak. Tracking the efflorescence of this style, this chapter turns to the still-neglected plays of John Lyly, which sell to their audiences the fantasy that their highly decorated style was the argot of the Elizabethan court. It is a fantasy that prompts aspirants from the period to weave Lyly’s style into their own conversations, even though it is only an exaggerated version, an erudite caricature, of the way Elizabethan barons and lords actually spoke. The failure of court talk to approximate courtliness is exactly what makes it into a synecdoche for a burgeoning social imaginary that I call the courtly public sphere. Through its relentless isocola, court talk expresses what Lauren Berlant might call the “cruel optimism” of this social imaginary: the emptiness of its promise of belonging, and the impossibility of ever letting that promise go.