Abbreviations: S = sentence; P = paragraph. Asterisked terms should be looked up in Cuddon's and Preston's The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory or Holman-Harmon's Handbook to Literature or possibly a collegiate dictionary. The following components and terms are ones needed in the analysis of prose (nonfiction or fiction), and particularly this passage from More's History of King Richard III: prose*, prose rhythm*, diction*, figurative language*, absolute* (better explanations and examples can be found in a collegiate dictionary and collegiate composition handbook), alliteration*, amplification*, anaphora*, anastrophe*, antithesis*, antimetabole*, antistrophe*, antonomasia*, assonance*, asyndeton*, balance*, chiasmus*, climax* (and anticlimax*), connotation*, consonance*, denotation*, hyperbaton*, hypotaxis* (cf. parataxis*), isocolon* [see collegiate dictionary], litotes*, loose sentence*, metaphor*, parallelism*, periodic sentence*, polysyndeton*, simile*. Many of these components are discussed, with relevance to nonfiction prose, in a good collegiate composition handbook.. To intensively analyze a particular passage of prose, lightly number in pencil in the margin of the page both paragraph numbers and sentence numbers, using end punctuation marks to determine the ending of one sentence and beginning of the next.
 

    Because so much of Renaissance education, continuing from Medieval education, was oriented toward what today would be called the "language arts" (sunrise to sunset studying figures of speech and figures of grammar within Latin passages or producing them in Latin composition, and then translating into English) as well as influenced by Roman classics in their original Latin--including the prose of such masters as Cicero (often referred to in the era as "Tully," from his full name of Marcus Tullius Cicero), Seneca, Caesar, Tacitus, Livy, Sallust, and Quintilian (codifier, incidentally, of a considerable number of terms for figures of speech and grammar in his Institutes of Oratory, one of the sources of Renaissance rhetoric)--the prose of the era tended to be skillfully and often pyrotechnically rhetorical, as in the excerpts from the era's prose nonfiction and fiction works included in NAEL. See the excerpt editorially titled "Teaching Latin" from Roger Ascham's pedagogical text The Schoolmaster in NAEL, also of interest to Education majors or minors. (NAEL has a handy index of authors and titles at the end of each volume to simplify locating authors and titles.)
 

    More's history, picked up by later chroniclers such as Grafton and Hall, and transmitted via these sources to Shakespeare's Richard III, is biased, as all these works written in the Tudor era were (if the author knew what was good for him, such as not being executed), in favor of the Tudors and against those who had been in opposition to the Tudor regime. Thomas More had heard tales from Lancastrians (the "house" or family of Henry VII and following) injured by the Yorkist, Richard III; he also, as indicated in the NAEL intro, was quite involved in the government of the Tudor Henry VIII. Richard III was not a complete monster, physically or psychologically, though portrayed that way in Tudor history, to justify Henry VII's wresting the throne and life from Richard. Modern works of history and biography, from the 1960's onwards, correct and revise the depiction of Richard III familiar to many through Shakespeare's play and the multiple film versions of it. (A very amusing use of Shakespeare's Richard III occurs in the film version of Neil Simon's Goodbye Girl.) With reference to plays and films of them, Thomas More's eloquence is portrayed in the admirable play A Man for All Seasons (1961) by modern British playwright (cf. his Vivat Regina [197 ], about Elizabeth I) and screenplay writer (see his Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago) Robert Bolt. Two quite good film versions of A Man for All Seasons appeared in 1966 (multiple Academy Awards) and 1988.
 

General Questions

G1. The figure of grammar that tends to predominate in this excerpt is the balanced antithesis. What views of Richard III, Jane Shore, the London public (particularly male), the events and history of the time, and humanity generally are conveyed by this figure? What is suggested about More's values and perspective through the figures?

G2. One modern kind of literary criticism that has emerged from the 1970's through the present is feminist* literary criticism, which asks about literary texts basic questions often not consciously examined by either the authors of those texts or by later (male) literary critics. Such questions that could be asked about this excerpt are how the relationship between the genders is portrayed and what attitudes toward women are implied in it.

Specific Questions

S1. How does the balanced* antithesis* in S1 of P1 ("Now then, bye and bye") help more to suggest, describe, or define Richard III's duplicity?

S2. How does the structure of More's periodic sentence* in S2 of P1 ("And when he had a while laid unto her"), delaying its completion of the end, as well as the anticlimax*, help convey (a) Richard III's desperate, frustrated machinations, as well as (b) the ironic, satiric undercutting of Richard's scheming?

S3. What is the satiric or ironic function of the parenthesis in S3 of P1 ("And for this cause")? How does the participial addition at the end of S3 of P1 ("going before the cross . . .") through emphatic position accent a detail that will evoke a poignant or sympathetic response from the reader toward Jane Shore?

S4. How, exactly, is S4 of P1 ("In which she went") what technically today would be classified as a sentence fragment? How is it expressively or thematically or meaningfully used here? What other sentence fragments does More use in the excerpt? What generalizations can be made about kinds of sentence fragments regularly used by More (and other early British Renaissance prose writers)?

S5. How in S4 of P1 ("In which she went") does More use balanced antithesis to help convey or express (a) Jane Shore's admirability and (b) satiric criticism of the people around the lady?

S6. What contrasts are conveyed by the antitheses in S5 of P1 ("And many good folk")? How are alliteration* and consonance* used expressively or thematically in S5 of P1?

S7. What is More's favorite sentence opener in P1? How is this word, considering its grammatical category, appropriate for narrative and history?

S8. How does More use parallelism and the series sentence effectively in S1 of P2 ("This woman was born")? Where and how does More use the absolute phrase or absolute construction in this sentence?

S9. What specific and general ideas or concepts are suggested by More's repeated use of the contrastive (coordinate) conjunction as a sentence opener in P2?

S10. How does his repeated use of hypotaxis* in P2 (e.g., in the sentence openers "thus" and "for") suggest More's purposes and aims as a historian?

S11. How does More use antithesis* thematically throughout P2?

S12. How in par.3 does More use inverted sentence order or anastrophe* expressively or thematically in S7 ("Proper she was"), S11 ("Yet delighted men"), and S12 ("For a proper wit")? How does it help him to better describe certain qualities and effects of Jane Shore, rather than ordinary sentence order?

S13. How does More's anaphora* in S17-18 ("Where the King took," "Where men were") help convey or express the forcefulness and goodness of Jane's actions?

S14. How does the polysyndeton* in the last S of P2 (S21: "And finally in many weighty suits")--either . . . or . . . or--help suggest (a) More's attitude toward history and toward the job of historian, as well as (b) conception of the complexity of human nature? How are balance and parallelism used for similar purposes in this passage? How is polysyndeton used comparably in S1P2 and S6P2?

S15. How does More's use of litotes* in P3 ("not much less," "not worse proved") create irony as well as suggest the restraint of the scholar-historian and ironist?

S16. How are chiasmus*, antimetabole*, and antistrophe* used in the last part of the last S of P3 ("for at this day she beggeth") to create an overall evaluation of Jane and her surroundings? What tone is conveyed by these rhetorical figures here?