[In the following essay, Brink analyzes the structure of Nosce Teipsum in terms of the rhetorical theory of Davies's day.]

Although respected by poets like Pope, Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke, Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum has not fared well in modern academic criticism.¹ Scholars have concentrated almost entirely upon identifying possible classical and continental sources for the poem.² Alexander Grosart, Davies's nineteenth-century editor, initiated this quest for sources by claiming that the content of Nosce Teipsum was highly original. The effect of making originality the central critical issue, however, has been to shift attention from the specific form of the poem to its general intellectual background. In addition, Nosce Teipsum is a very long poem containing one elegy of forty-five stanzas and another of 436 stanzas. Understandably, this length would discourage the kind of close stylistic analysis which might explain the attraction that Nosce Teipsum has had for practising poets. It is important, then, that we discover the principles of structural patterning which organize the poem so that we can divide it into manageable units for literary analysis.

Since it has been customary to regard Nosce Teipsum as a prosy compendium of Elizabethan knowledge, we have paid little attention to the structure of the poem. There is, however, a complex rhetorical pattern which connects the two parts of Nosce Teipsum: the structure of the first elegy, ‘Of Humane knowledge’, is explained by the sixteenth-century concept of the Delphic oracle as a riddle. The rhetorical purpose of this elegy is to stimulate the reader's awareness of man's enigmatic nature and to pose for him the problems of acquiring self-knowledge. The structure of the second elegy, ‘Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof’, closely follows the traditional format of a classical oration. This poem answers the riddles of the first elegy, and its function is to resolve the reader's doubts so that he can rejoice in the self-knowledge he has gained. Largely because of this second elegy, Nosce Teipsum provides us with an impressive example of the influence of rhetorical theory upon the structure of a Renaissance poem.

The structural relationship between the two elegies is suggested by the general title of the work, Nosce Teipsum: This Oracle expounded in two elegies. Instead of discussing the general tradition of self-knowledge, as is the case with many of its sources, the poem is specifically concerned with first presenting the riddle of the Delphic oracle and then solving it. For a sixteenth-century reader the term oracle had certain traditional associations. As we know, classical oracles involved a question put to the deity and an enigmatic answer. This format was preserved in ‘neo-classical’ eighteenth-century anthologies in which an oracle was considered both a question and an answer.³ However, sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century discussions of oracles consistently emphasize their ambiguity and obscurity. For example, Robert Chambers, a contemporary critic and imitator of Davies, uses ‘oracle’ and ‘riddle’ as synonyms in his A Christian Reformacion of Nosce Teipsum: ‘Know thy selfe was an Oracle delivered by the Devill to the Heathens and Infidells of whose knowledge he was soe well assured. That the more they labored to reede the Riddle the farther they errd from the trewe understandinge thereof.’⁴ This concept of the oracle as a riddle or enigma had literary as well as philosophical application. We find classical oracles used to illustrate figures of ambiguity in both poetic and rhetorical handbooks. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, describes amphibologia as writing or speaking doubtfully and then explicitly associates this figure with the Delphic oracle.⁵ In The Garden of Eloquence (1593) Peacham also defines oracle as an enigma and uses classical oracles to clarify his explanation of the riddle.⁶

To this general background, we can add specific evidence that Davies's contemporaries associated Nosce Teipsum with the concept of the Delphic oracle as a riddle. During the Middle Temple Christmas revels of 1597-8, one of Davies's enemies used allusions to Nosce Teipsum to satirize the young poet's social pretensions. He was handed a shield inscribed with a sphinx and the motto, Sum Davus non Oedipus, while the tune, ‘The Tanner and the King’ was being played.⁷ As Philip Finkelpearl has suggested, the song and the motto from Terence with its bilingual pun are a jibe at Davies's social origins: he is davus, the clever son of a tanner, not Oedipus, a king and philosopher.⁸ The shield inscribed with a sphinx, however, included Nosce Teipsum in the satire. The sphinx traditionally represented ignorance of self, and Oedipus could solve its riddle because he understood himself and the nature of man.⁹ By implication, Davies was not Oedipus and did not know himself even though he had written a poem about self-knowledge. The nature of these satiric allusions indicates that Nosce Teipsum was regarded as an attempt to solve the riddle of the Delphic oracle. It is the concept of an oracle as a riddle which underlies the structure of the first elegy and explains its rhetorical purpose.

The function of the first elegy accounts for its brevity. Since Davies's purpose is to pose dilemmas rather than provide answers, his argumentation is reserved for the second elegy. The relationship between form and rhetorical purpose is also suggested by the absence of an invocation in the first elegy although the second contains two. Instead of stating his theme or invoking a muse, Davies begins by asking a paradoxical question:

Why did my parents send me to the schooles
          That I with knowledg might enrich my mind?
          Since the desire to know first made men fooles,
          And did corrupt the roote of all mankind?(10)

This initial question establishes the unresolved tone of the first elegy, a tone which Davies sustains by repeated use of interrogative figures up to and including stanza 22. The effect of these figures, which are principally unanswered questions, is to keep us aware that the persona is unable to solve the riddle of self-knowledge. Even a brief survey of this technique suggests how conscious Davies's intentions were. The first question is phrased as the personal dilemma of the author; however, in stanza 10, the audience is included in the self-questioning. This stanza uses erotema, an interrogative figure expressing strong denial or affirmation, to affirm that ‘we their wretched Off[s]pring’ repeat the sins of Adam and Eve.¹¹ He returns to this figure in stanzas 14-17 asking, ‘What can we know? or what can we discerne’ after examining all the learned volumes ‘which yeeld mens wits both helpe and ornament’.

To demonstrate the universality of man's predicament, Davies cites classical parallels to the ‘curious wish’ which caused the biblical fall in stanzas 11-13. These myths show how the desire to know may lead to torment, futility, or destruction, and in each case, he uses hypophora, an interrogative figure in which the speaker answers his own questions. Stanza 22 contains the figure pysma which involves listing many questions in one place. This stanza also represents the climax of the questions which shape the first half of this elegy. The soul can give no judgement of herself: ‘nor how, nor whence, nor where, nor what she is’. These questions are left unexamined in the first elegy, but each of them is answered in the second. The use of these interrogative figures for internal development reinforces the overall structure of the first elegy which is that of a riddle or question.

Stanzas 23-35, which present a contrast between external and internal knowledge, prepare us for the introduction of ‘Affliction’ as an instructive force. According to Davies, we study astronomy and geology attempting to understand the ‘moving of each spheare’ and the ‘ebs and flouds of Nile’ while we forget the ‘subtill motions’ of our hearts. Affliction, however, forces us to look inward. The poet-narrator tells us that

This Mistresse lately pluckt me by the Eare,
          And many a golden lesson hath me taught;
          Hath made my Senses quicke, and Reason cleare,
          Reformd my Will, and rectifide my Thought.

(stanza 39)

Although this stanza contains an autobiographical reference to Davies's expulsion from the Middle Temple, it does not represent an irrelevant intrusion of the personal experiences of the author.¹² ‘Of Humane knowledge’ began by asking why the poet's parents sent him to school, and stanza 39 reinforces the circular movement of the poem by alluding to this initial question. Like a school mistress, affliction has plucked him by the ear and taught him ‘many a golden lesson’. She does not, however, answer any of the questions summarized in stanza 22 concerning the nature and origin of the soul; instead she prepares him for the lessons he will learn in the second elegy by forcing his attention inward.

The imagery patterns of stanzas 36-8 are crucial in preparing us for the figurative journey into ourselves which occurs in ‘Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof’. When affliction begins her wars, the ‘Mind contracts herselfe, and shrinketh in’; this inward movement is reinforced by the images of stanza 37. The contracting movement of the imagery culminates in stanza 42:

She within Listes my raunging minde hath brought,
          That now beyond my selfe I list not go;
          Myselfe am Center of my circling thought,
          Onely myselfe I studie, learne, and know.

This stanza summarizes the structure of the entire first elegy. After the initial question, we have an eight-stanza narratio of the fall of all mankind through the curiosity of our first parents. The poem concludes with an eight-stanza narratio of the narrator's personal experiences with affliction. The range of the subject matter has contracted from the fall of all mankind to the personal experiences of the poet. Appropriately, the poet's thought is ‘circling’ because each question leads to yet another question. Affliction has quite literally brought his ranging mind within lists. Now he does not seek to avoid painful self-knowledge by occupying himself with external facts: ‘Onely myselfe I studie, learne, and know’.

The concluding three-stanza acclamation presents the narrator's realization that man is ‘a proud and yet a wretched thing’. The subterfuges we use to keep ourselves from self-exploration have been exposed, and we are faced with the grim fact that our bodies are mortal and our heavenly minds are corrupted in wit and will. Recognition that the soul has the power to know all things is tempered by awareness that the power is not the actuality; that the human spirit is blind, ignorant, and thrall to the least and vilest things. This acclamation is a memorable statement of human ambiguity, and, as such, it moves us to the realization that man is a contradiction and human life a riddle.

The second elegy enables us to solve the paradoxes with which the first elegy concludes. Davies immediately introduces imagery of light and sight which contrasts with his previous emphasis upon darkness and blindness. The imagery of stanzas 18-21 further develops the relationship between the two elegies. In stanza 18 we are told that to judge herself, the soul must transcend herself ‘as greater Circles comprehend the lesse’. The dominant imagery of the first elegy was that of slowly contracting puzzles, figuratively represented as a circle, and this contraction was reinforced by emphasis upon fading light. With the assistance of divine light, the second elegy will enable us to transcend the circle of ourselves and, like the poet-narrator, to see ‘each subtill line of [the soul's] immortall face’ (stanza 21).

‘Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof’ is responsible for the impression that Nosce Teipsum is loosely structured, and its organization is indeed confusing unless we realize that Davies's rhetorical purpose rather than the thematic logic of his argument is the organizing principle of the poem. The division between the discussion of the soul and the arguments for immortality is thematically suggested by the title and is also indicated in the text: the description of the soul concludes with an acclamation celebrating man and God's kindness to man in stanzas 270-3; the second part of the elegy contains a six-part proof of immortality and a refutation of arguments against immortality. Inevitably, the arguments presented in the refutation repeat the proof and parts of the description of the soul as well. This sequence of proof (confirmation) and rebuttal (confutation), however, parallels the traditional order and parts of a classical oration and suggests that the structure of the second elegy was strongly influenced by rhetorical theory.

Before pursuing the implications of a rhetorical format, we should briefly consider the problems which arise when the poem is read as a thematically-organized argument. Davies begins with a definition of the soul in relation to the body; stanzas 101-74, however, do not centre thematically upon the soul and its relationship to the body; instead they discuss the fall of man, original sin, and free will. After this seventy-three stanza excursus, he devotes only fifteen stanzas (175-89) to three very important issues concerning the relationship between the soul and the body. He then turns to an analysis of the inner workings of the soul in stanzas 190-269. This extensive description might help to define the soul, but it does not lead logically to the argumentation concerning immortality. Separation of the definition of the soul and the description of its parts, two topics which would logically follow each other, leads to repetition. Davies argues that the soul is more than a perfection of sense in stanzas 53-68, and in stanzas 64-8 he specifically explains how the soul relates to the senses; he covers the same points, however, in stanzas 193-7. It is thus easy to see why the poem, approached as a thematically-organized argument, might seem to be a disorganized compendium of Elizabethan knowledge.

When Davies arranged the parts of the second elegy, however, he appears to have had the conventional parts and structure of a classical oration in mind. The first twenty-one stanzas contain an invocation to divine light (6), a summary of controversial definitions of the soul (10-12), and an invocation to the deity (16-20). They represent the ‘entrance’ of the oration, and their function is to invoke divine assistance in order to solve the riddles of the first elegy which, significantly, began with a question rather than an invocation. This section is followed by a lengthy two-part narration which defines the soul (22-100) and describes its ‘history’ or origin (101-74). Stanzas 175-89 also constitute a unit because the condensed arguments in these fifteen stanzas all concern the relationship of the soul to the body. Their rhetorical function is to shift our attention from the ‘history’ back to the relationship between the soul and the body in preparation for the description of the inner workings of the soul. They are a summary of the major propositions of the poem as well as a transitionary section: God placed the soul in the body so that man would partake both of God and of the world; the soul fills the body as the morning light fills the air; the soul exercises her powers differently on different objects so that her effects are diversified. These general propositions summarize the themes of the history, definition, and description of the soul (division) as well as providing a transition from the theological orientation of the history to the more psychological focus of the division.

The divisio in a classical oration was supposed to delineate areas of agreement and disagreement between the speaker and the audience. Davies, however, uses the division (190-269) figuratively to divide the soul into its parts. To avoid any confusion, he tells us that this division is artificial; there are not three souls, but one, and any separation of them is figurative:

Yet these three powrs are not three Soules, but one;
          As one and two are both contain'd in three,
          Three being one number by itselfe alone;
          A shadow of the blessed Trinitie.

(stanza 269)

This procedure of figuratively dividing the soul into its constituent parts for the purpose of analytical discussion was later used more dramatically by John Donne. In his first Anniversary, ‘The Anatomy of the World’, Donne presents an ‘anatomy’ which is both a literal dissection and an analytical division of a personified abstraction. Although less striking than Donne's ‘anatomy’, Davies's ‘division’ uses a similar rhetorical procedure.

The internal organization of the division is somewhat problematical. Davies devotes forty-nine stanzas to the power of sense, nineteen to the intellectual powers, and five to what he calls the vegetative or quickening power. Of the forty-nine stanzas used to describe the power of sense, more than half concentrate on the external instruments of sense: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The five senses receive more weight in this discussion than all of the intellectual powers—reason, understanding, opinion, judgement, wit, and will—taken together. This emphasis is not explained by the argument of the poem that the soul is a spirit and lives eternally. Consequently, it is possible that this description of the five senses was expanded because it gave Davies the best opportunity to create the illusion of a literal as well as an analytical division. There is evidence, however, that the descriptions of the five senses were particularly admired by Davies's contemporaries even though a modern anthologist would not be likely to select them as models of rhetorical excellence. Of the twenty-six stanzas Davies devotes to the senses, eighteen were reprinted in Englands Parnassus (1600).¹³ In fact, quotations from Nosce Teipsum represent most of the material included in this section of the anthology. So it is possible that Davies regarded these passages as a rhetorical tour de force.

After the division, Davies presents a six-part proof of immortality in stanzas 174-357: (1) man's desire for knowledge; (2) the motion of the soul which is never satisfied on earth; (3) contempt for death in the better spirits; (4) fear of death in the wicked spirits; (5) general desire for immortality; (6) doubt and disputation which indicate the ability to conceive of immortality. These arguments are arranged with the strongest points at the beginning and end while the weakest are placed in the middle of the proof.¹⁴ In addition, the sixth argument, that the existence of disputation proves the ability to conceive of immortality, provides a logical transition to the confutation (358-420) which disputes the arguments against immortality. Then, in stanzas 421-7 Davies parallels the three essential powers of the soul (quickening, sense, and reason) with the three stages of life (pre-natal, life, after-life). This summary links the description of the soul with the arguments for immortality, and it is followed by an acclamation (428-36). The summary and acclamation are then the conclusion or peroratio of the poem.

To clarify this structure, we can outline the parts of the poem in relation to rhetorical conventions. The suggested elements of a speech varied somewhat in number: Quintilian suggests five parts while Cicero, in De Inventione, discusses six.¹⁵ The seven parts recommended by Thomas Wilson in The Arte of Rhetorique are closest to the form used by Davies:¹⁶

As the above outline suggests, Davies departs from Wilson's format by using a two-part narration in which the soul is defined and its history is discussed.

In his definition of the soul, Davies argues at considerable length that the soul is a spirit separate from the body. What may seem to us an unnecessarily long and even repetitious definition is partially explained by his rhetorical intention. The elaboration is a purposeful attempt to convince us of the accuracy of his definition by copious examples rather than by precise terminology. The following passage from Quintilian throws some light on this procedure:

8. Though I hardly dare to dissent from Cicero, who, following many authorities, says that definition is always concerned about a thing itself and something else … yet I consider that there are, as it were, three species of it …

15. What great necessity, indeed, has a pleader of such preciseness of definition? If I do not say Man is an animal mortal and rational, can I not, by setting forth his numerous qualities of body and mind, in words of a wider scope, distinguish him from the gods or from brutes?

(Book VII, Chapter iii)¹⁷

Although Davies follows Cicero's procedure by defining the soul in relation to the body, he also sets forth man's numerous qualities of body and mind in arguments of a wider scope to distinguish the precise characteristics of man's soul.

The second part of the narration, the history of the soul, narrates the creation, and it is probably the section least relevant to the rhetorical structure of the second elegy. The fall of man had already been discussed in the first elegy, but this first discussion explained the fall as the result of the ‘curious wish’ of our first parents. Theologically, this was not entirely conventional. In his A Christian Reformacion of Nosce Teipsum, Robert Chambers objects to this interpretation, insisting that eating the forbidden fruit, disobedience and gluttony, caused the fall.¹⁸ It is possible that Davies returned to the subject of the fall in the second elegy partially to anticipate and to counter the objections of his more conservative contemporaries. For our purposes, however, Davies's rationale for including this section is less important than its function.

The first description of the fall considered man in relation to the sin of our first parents, but the second description focuses upon God in relation to original sin. Davies's rhetorical organization required that the treatment of the fall in the first elegy be presented as a paradox: ‘the desire to know first made men fooles’. The function of this second discussion is to account for that paradox and to supply us with an explanation of the divine order underlying the fall. Davies does this by explaining that original sin is not personal but real and hereditary. The explanation is particularly interesting because it includes allusions to the common law: if the father's crime is capital, ‘in all the blood, law doth corruption make’ (stanza 156). This reference to the bill of attainder leads to the following justification of God's order:

Is it then just with us, to disinherit
                    The unbourne Nephewes, for the Fathers fault?
                    And to advance againe for one mans merit,
                    A thousand heires that have deserved nought?
          And is not Gods decree as just as ours,
                    If he for Adams sinne his sonnes deprive,
                    Of all those native vertues, and those powres,
                    Which he to him and to his race did give?

(stanzas 156-7)

This defence of God's justice, presumably influenced by Davies's own legal background, suggests the rationality of his approach even to a highly theological problem.¹⁹ In addition, his skilful use of questions to present his comparatio enables him to avoid antagonizing both conservative and liberal members of his audience. He evades the awkward position of presuming to defend almighty God. Yet he also counters liberal objections to the injustice of original sin by pointing out that hereditary rights to property, a legal institution which his audience would regard as essential to social order, could result in glaring inequities. By implication, God's decree of original sin is just as basic to moral order as man's laws are to social order; Davies's rhetorical questions, however, convey this suggestion without the dogmatic tone which would result from direct statement.

Davies also argues that God could not prevent the fall of man because such an intervention would have destroyed the order of things and would have deprived man of freedom of the will. In a memorable stanza describing the fall, he asks:

Could Eves weake hand, extended to the tree,
          In sunder rent that Adamantine chaine,
          Whose golden linkes effects and causes bee,
          And which to Gods owne chaire doth fixt remaine.

(stanza 142)

Later, in stanzas 169-70, Davies observes that without freedom of the will, man's love for God would not be voluntary; it would be like the love which chained Ulysses to Circe's island. Man must be free: ‘without a moving mind, ❙ Which hath a judging wit, and choosing will’, he would not be man:

So that if man would be unvariable,
          He must be God, or like a Rocke, or Tree;
          For even the perfect Angels were not stable,
          But had a fall, more desperate than wee.

(stanza 172)

Stanza 173 concludes the ‘history’ as it began with a reference to God, and by alluding to curiosity it relates the above justification of divine order to the human view of the fall presented in the first elegy.

Because it explains the fall from a more enlightened perspective than that of the first elegy, the ‘history’ of the soul is necessary to the poem as a whole. Even though the ‘desire to know first made men fooles’, man's ‘moving mind’ is the attribute which makes him man. The second elegy celebrates man's striving to know the truth within a Christian humanist framework, and the ‘history’ of the soul affords an example of how well Davies integrates the classical and Christian traditions. There is no sense of strain in his rapid movement from the image of Eve in the garden to the adamantine chain of causes and effects; nor does it seem incongruous when he contrasts man's voluntary love for God to Ulysses's ‘enchaind’ love for Circe. His effortless justification of original sin by analogies between God's law and the common law is, however, perhaps most striking. The comparison, which probably derives from his legal experience, seems to be original; even so, we do not feel that it is unconventional. The poem so skilfully develops within its rhetorical structure that Davies's own ideas and those suggested by the Christian humanist tradition become one inseparable argument.

If we approach Nosce Teipsum as a rhetorical work, a poem in which the cumulative effect upon the reader is of primary importance, we realize that each part performs an essential function in creating the final effect. Davies poses the riddle of human self-knowledge in the first elegy and solves it in the second; we move from darkness and ambiguity to light and clarity as we discover the answers to the puzzles of the oracle and psychologically resolve the contradictions with which the first elegy concludes. When we have understood the nature of the soul, its history, and its parts, we are prepared for this second acclamation which represents a celebration of man:

O what is man (great maker of mankind)
          That thou to him so great respect dost beare?
          That thou adornst him with so bright a mind,
          Mak'st him a king, and even an Angels peere?
O what a livelie life, what heavenly power,
          What spreading vertue, what a sparkling Fire,
          How great, how plentifull, how rich a dowre,
          Do'st thou within this dying Flesh inspire.

(stanzas 270-1)

The shadow of mortality, ‘this dying Flesh’, remains with us even during this splendid acclamation. The confirmation and confutation which follow are intended to show us that the soul lives eternally and to convince us that we should think of death as a birth. In the conclusion, Davies says: ‘And when thou goest to die, ❙ Sing like a Swan, as if thou wentst to blisse’ (stanza 432). The rhetorical structure of Nosce Teipsum is designed to lead us to this triumphant conclusion.

Notes

1. See Pope's Essay on Man and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14. The best study of the poetic texture of Nosce Teipsum is still T. S. Eliot's essay ‘Sir John Davies’, reprinted in Elizabethan Poetry, edited by Paul J. Alpers (Oxford, 1967), pp. 321-6. Theodore Roethke discussed Davies's influence upon him at a symposium at Northwestern University in February 1963, and also referred to Davies in ‘How to Write Like Somebody Else’, Yale Review, 48 (1959), 336-43. These talks have been reprinted in On the Poet and his Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr (Seattle, Washington, 1965), pp. 18-27, 61-70. See also Roethke's ‘Four for Sir John Davies’, a series of poems which first appeared in The Waking.

2. For possible continental influences, see Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Davies' Sources for Nosce Teipsum’, PMLA, 36 (1923), 745-69, and George T. Buckley, ‘The Indebtedness of Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum to Philip Mornay's Trunesse of the Christian Religion’, MP, 25 (1927), 67-78, and an objection, Walter Peery, ‘Three Souls Again’, PQ, 28 (1948), 92-4. The classical influence is discussed in a full-length study by E. H. Sneath, Philosophy in Poetry (New York, 1903) and by Margarete Seemann, Sir John Davies: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1913). The complexity of the tradition to which the poem belongs is best suggested by Eliza G. Wilkins, ‘Know Thyself’ in Greek and Latin Literature (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1917) and by her The Delphic Maxims in Literature (Chicago, 1929).

3. For example, see The Athenian Oracle: Being an Entire Collection of All the Valuable Questions and Answers in the Old Athenian Mercuries (London, 1728) and The British Apollo: Containing Two Thousand Answers to Curious Questions (London, 1726).

4. R. H. Bowers, ‘An Elizabethan Manuscript “Continuation” of Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum’, MP, 58 (1960), 11-19 (p. 14). See also Sir Thomas Browne, Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, second edition, 4 vols (London, 1964), III, 101-10, for commentary on the obscurity of classical oracles.

5. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, edited by Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 260.

6. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by William Crane (Gainesville, Florida, 1954), p. 29.

7. Le Prince d'Amour, or The Prince of Love with a Collection of Several Ingenious Poems and Songs by the Wits of the Age (London, 1660), p. 83.

8. For a discussion of the revels and participants, see Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 45-61.

9. The sphinx has the face of a beautiful woman because nothing deludes a man like a beautiful woman; the feathers signify the wings of Icarus or presumption, and the feet of a lion symbolize pride. See Agidius Albertinus, Konigreich und Seelengejaidt, edited by Rochus Liliencron, Deutsche National-Litteratur (Berlin, 1884), pp. 26-9. Regarding the association of the sphinx and Oedipus specifically with the Delphic oracle, see Emblemes d'Alciat, de nouveau Translatez en François vers pour vers joute les Latins (Lyon, 1549), p. 232. For further discussion of the implications of this allusion, see my article, ‘The Composition Date of Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum’, to appear in Huntington Library Quarterly, 37 (1973-4).

10. The Poems of Sir John Davies, edited by Clare Howard (New York, 1941), p. 113. All quotations will be taken from this facsimile edition of the first editions in the Henry E. Huntington Library; stanza numbers will be given in parentheses. The usage of ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘u’, and ‘v’ has been modernized.

11. The definitions of interrogative figures which follow in the text are based upon Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), pp. 105-10.

12. ‘Memorial Introduction’, in The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, edited by Alexander Grosart, (London, 1876), I, xxiv-xxviii.

13. See Robert Allot, Englands Parnassus, Scolar Press Facsimile (Menston, 1970).

14. (Cicero), Ad Herennium, III.ix.17. Compare Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, V.xii.14, where this arrangement is called ‘Homeric disposition’.

15. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, III.ix.1 (edited and translated by John Watson (London, 1907), p. 240) and Cicero, De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, I.xiv.19.

16. Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), edited by G. H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), p. 7.

17. Quintilian, Institutes, ed. Watson, pp. 36, 38.

18. Bowers, ‘An Elizabethan “Continuation” of Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum’, p. 15.

19. For a similar approach, see Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Part 1, Section 13, where he acknowledges that the oracle is the ‘counsell … of the Devill himselfe’ but adds that had ‘God read such a Lecture in Paradise as hee did at Delphos, we had better knowne our selves, nor had we stood in feare to know him’. Browne concludes that ‘in matters cognoscible and framed for our disquisition, our Industry must be our Oracle, and Reason our Apollo’ (Works, ed. Keynes, 1, 21).