widely acknowledged to be itself in process.
The facile answer to a call for a new rhetoric is that those who study in the modern period, as well as the many great writers through the ages learned from teachers who believed in and taught mechanicist rhetoric and themselves employed the tools of classical rhetoric in order to oppose it. Consider the case of verbal decorum and classical technique as employed by Shakespeare in Macbeth. In the early part of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is wholly treacherous, but she speaks more or less as a queen, in blank verse, through the scene in which she returns from the King's chamber. By the time she sleepwalks herself across the stage, however, she has gone utterly bonkers, and not incidentally, she is speaking in prose. To be sure, the difference between prose and poetry as used by Lady Macbeth does not constitute the only power of the play. But Shakespeare has quite intentionally personified in Lady Macbeth a classical rhetorical device to drive home a psychological truth. This is a tool
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