Too Talian 2017

The Seventeenth Century
ISSN: 0268-117X (Print) 2050-4616 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsev20
Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the

poetics of figuration in the English revolution
Jacob Tootalian
To cite this article: Jacob Tootalian (2017): Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and
the poetics of figuration in the English revolution, The Seventeenth Century, DOI:
10.1080/0268117X.2017.1335610
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2017.1335610
Published online: 04 Nov 2017.
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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2017.1335610
Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of

figuration in the English revolution
Jacob Tootalian
Department of English, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Though English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity Hobbes; rhetoric; poetics;
between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the metaphor
tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in
the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvest-
Downloaded by [DUT Library] at 05:28 08 November 2017
ment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed

understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects.
Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal
truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to
metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English
Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to
Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of lan-
guage’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes
of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to
the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the
process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a
philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.
Of all of the derisive responses that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) inspired, John
Eachard’s was arguably the most artful.1 Pitting the English everyman Timothy against
Philautus, a self-loving Hobbesian caricature, Eachard’s satirical dialogues of the early
1670s dramatized the antagonism believed to be the central plank of Hobbes’s philo-
sophy, depicting an intellectual exchange always on the verge of unravelling. Eachard
used this form to take aim not only at Hobbes’s ideas, but also his mode of expression.
In order to deflate the philosopher’s “affected garbs of speech” and “starch’d
Mathematical method”, he has Philautus rail against “abominable, metaphorical-
similitudinarian-Rascals” only then to confront him with the double standard of his
own figurative indulgences.2 Hobbes himself had averred that “the light of human
minds is perspicuous words”, holding geometry up as a model for plain philosophical
prose.3 At the same time, he not only invested Leviathan with a complex pattern of
figurative imagery, but also wrote a literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”
(1650), extolling the intellectual power of poetic expression. To Hobbes’s seventeenth-
century critics, there was a fundamental contradiction within this approach to language.
Eachard highlights the most brazen instance of his apparent hypocrisy, arguing that
Hobbes’s praise of poetry in the “Answer to Davenant” used precisely the same
CONTACT Jacob Tootalian jtootalian@usf.edu Department of English, University of South Florida, 4202 East
Fowler Ave., CPR-107, Tampa, FL 33620
© 2017 The Seventeenth Century
2 J. TOOTALIAN
language he had once employed to laud geometry.4 When Timothy raises this critique,
the obtuse Philautus retorts, “To Poetry? that’s very like Geometry indeed!”5 Though
this exclamation was intended to expose the absurdity of Hobbes’s discursive principles,
it touches upon a salient feature of his intellectual project. Hobbes had come to
recognize that the rigorous pursuit of philosophical truth required an investment in
the poetics of figuration.
Despite his reputation as a scourge of metaphor, Hobbes understood the power of
figurative expression. While recent scholarship has come to see his embrace of tropes
and figures in Leviathan as part of a larger reinvestment in rhetorical thought, critics
have tended to subordinate poetic representation to rhetoric, without regarding it as a
distinctive art of its own.6 Quentin Skinner, for instance, casts Hobbes’s treatment of
poetics, especially in the “Answer to Davenant”, as further evidence of his commitment
to rhetorical eloquence.7 At key moments in his philosophical prose, though, Hobbes
distinguishes himself as a poet, crafting figurative images – like the Leviathan itself –
that aim to exceed the parameters of rhetoric as it was understood in the period.
Scholars have been inattentive to this feature of Hobbes’s writings, largely because
they have followed the lead of early modern humanists who treated poetics as an
extension of rhetoric, especially where figurative expression was concerned.8 The dis-
tinction, of course, was a blurry one and the two arts indeed were not wholly separable
from one another. In early modern prose, tropes like metaphor and its associated forms
did serve as an essential tool for rhetorical eloquence. Handbooks such as the humanist
Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) catalogued these linguistic
devices accordingly, noting that “they belonge to Eloquucion, whyche is the thyrde
and pryncipall parte of rhetorique”.9 Yet, some of the major classical sources that
humanism drew upon, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratia,
acknowledged that figuration had an intrinsically poetic inclination. Even as he urged
users of rhetoric to enrich themselves through the study of poetry, Quintilian cautioned
that “poets are not to be imitated by the orator in every respect, not, for instance, in
freedom of language or unrestrained use of figures”.10 Early modern thinkers implicitly
understood this distinction. Listing devices like metaphor and “other potent Tropes and
Figures”, Henry Reynolds conceded that “those floures (as they are called) of Rhetorick”
are “much properer sure, and more fitly belonging to Poësy then Oratory”.11 Figuration,
with its capacity to exceed literal sense, was seen to be a powerful resource for the poet
who, in Sir Philip Sidney’s formulation, “nothing affirmeth”.12 While early modern
prose writers sought to obtain assent to the rhetorical assertions they made, often
concealing the imaginative craftsmanship behind their arguments, poets relied upon a
shared awareness of the artifice of their fictions. Similarly, a metaphor, a trope that
describes one concept in language conventionally applied to another, was understood to
communicate its meaning by prompting readers to reach beyond its surface particulars.
Thus, even as figuration aided in the work of rhetorical affirmation, it always remained
potentially poetic, awaiting only an act of acknowledgement to open up the wide scope
of possibilities lurking within it. The danger of poetic possibility was the source of the
tension in its relationship to rhetoric, motivating Quintilian’s note of caution in the use
of tropes and figures for persuasive expression. Hobbes, though, saw opportunities in
highlighting the poetic dimensions of figuration. While Skinner has shown that, in the
midst of the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth century, Hobbes first reacted
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 3
against and then returned to the rhetorical commitments of his humanist education,
this account does not register the way in which the subtle distinction between rhetorical
and poetic meaning informed Hobbes’s figurative practice. The distinctive role of
poetics has often been marginalized in the perennial conflict between rhetoric and
philosophy in the Western intellectual tradition. As Walter Ong suggests, “in the
confusion of poetic with rhetoric and with demonstrative logic, it is always poetic
which tends to disappear”.13 However, Hobbes did not allow the poetic dimensions of
his figurative practice to remain hidden behind Leviathan’s rhetorical eloquence.
Adopting a Sidneian understanding of poetics as more than merely verse, Hobbes
tapped into its self-conscious distance from affirmative truth, treating artfulness as its
defining feature. At his most dynamic, Hobbes allowed the blatant fictiveness of some
of his figures and tropes to transcend rhetorical assertion. He used poetic representa-
tion’s emphasis on its own crafted structures to help his readers see the visible signs of
language’s art and seize upon those signs as a shared foundation for collective knowl-
edge. By accentuating the poetry of figuration, Hobbes sought to forge cultural con-
sensus for an interpretive community that had been fragmented by the English
Revolution.
It was, after all, the attention to language’s poetic dimensions that had invigorated
the conflicts of the seventeenth century, often transforming polemical debates into
charged explorations of textual hermeneutics. Developing Stephen Greenblatt’s insight
that a sign of power in the period was “the ability to impose one’s fictions on the
world”, Ronald Corthell has suggested that early modern prose was gripped by “a
struggle for control of representation (whose text is fictional, whose nonfictional?)”.14
That struggle was persistently expressed through the interpretation and reinterpretation
of figurative language, particularly in the debates of the Revolution. On the polemical
battlefield, reformers and revolutionaries exposed the poetic nature of influential tropes
that undergirded early modern English culture, opening them to revision and subver-
sion. While John Milton’s radical experimentation with the poetics of polemic is
perhaps the most memorable, other revolutionary writers, such as Charles Herle and
Henry Parker, also tapped into the poetic artifice of figurative expression by committing
a radical act – they dared to call a metaphor a metaphor.15 While such royalists as
Dudley Digges, Henry Ferne and David Jenkins were at pains to vindicate their world-
view by affirming the literal truth of the images that supported it, Hobbes was unique
among that faction in his willingness to exploit figurative effects to conservative ends.
Skinner has argued that Hobbes often confronted his ideological rivals aiming “to
accept their basic premises and then to show that completely different conclusions
can equally well be inferred from them”.16 I contend that he adopted this approach not
just conceptually but textually, using figuration as a form of poetic revision, turning a
revolutionary approach to metaphor against itself.
The section below begins by tracing Hobbes’s effort to untangle the relationship
between poetry, rhetoric and logic. Hobbes was acutely aware of the tension between
the linguistic arts as it was expressed in the classical tradition, especially by Aristotle.
While his initial rejection of the humanist intellectual scheme sought to purify philo-
sophical demonstration from any figurative equivocations, Hobbes’s approach to lan-
guage became more nuanced over time, as can be seen in Leviathan’s acceptance of
tropes that “profess their inconstancy”.17 The second section then explores how Hobbes
4 J. TOOTALIAN
built this strategy into an explicitly articulated poetics in the “Answer to Davenant”.
Whether William Davenant’s epic Gondibert motivated him or merely provided the
occasion for his poetic turn, it was in his literary-critical exchange with Davenant that
Hobbes challenged the conventional invocation to the muse. Likening the inspirational
goddess to the hollow figure of a bagpipe, he sought to disenchant the concept of the
poetic imagination, demonstrating in the process the philosophical utility of language’s
figurative dimensions. The final section then locates Leviathan’s central image within
the hermeneutic debates of the revolutionary period. As parliamentarian writers high-
lighted the poetic status of the timeworn tropes of monarchy, Hobbes reinvigorated the
conventional body politic by transforming it into the Leviathan. Conjuring a monstrous
image empowered by the self-conscious profession of its own poetic nature, he har-
nessed the participatory function of figuration’s artifice, seeking to instill a shared sense
of understanding in a kingdom that had been torn apart by dissent.
Consequences from speech

Those readers of the first edition of Leviathan who were able to make it past the
dazzling frontispiece would have kept turning the pages of the volume to find another,
albeit more austere, graphic representation. Inserted after Chapter 9, “Of the Several
Subjects of Knowledge”, there is a broadsheet marked with printed instructions for the
binder to “Place this Table between folio 40. and 41”.18 The insert features a tree
diagram that stems from “SCIENCE, that is, knowledge of consequences; which is called
also PHILOSOPHY”, branching out across the sheet to depict a map of the whole structure
of the intellectual enterprise as Hobbes saw it.19 Hobbes’s table in Leviathan is visual
evidence of his contribution to the tradition of shifting, splitting and grafting the
categories of human thought. So much of the theoretical work of early modern
minds happened at this architectonic level; by laying out the arts in a hierarchical
format, the period’s thinkers intimated the nature and scope of their intellectual
interventions.20 Hobbes’s version of this scheme is notable for its subordination of
the linguistic arts to natural philosophy. It also braces together poetry, rhetoric and
logic with a fourth, innovative category, “The Science of JUST and UNJUST”, referring to all
four as the “Consequences from speech”. Though the table straightforwardly discerns
between poetry’s ends of “magnifying, vilifying, &c”., rhetoric’s objective of “persuad-
ing”, logic’s goal of “reasoning”, and this new science’s singular aim of “contracting”, the
text of Leviathan makes clear that the relationship between these discursive conse-
quences was not as settled as the sharp ramifications on the broadsheet would suggest.21
While much scholarly attention has focused understandably on Hobbes’s invention
of the discourse of the social contract, his treatment of the more familiar categories of
poetry, rhetoric and logic suggests much about his engagement with the long and vexed
history of figurative language’s hermeneutic status, especially as it was passed down
from the classical tradition. As Ong has argued, from antiquity onward, poetics was
often subordinated to rhetoric or philosophy in the effort to enshrine one or the other
as the dominant intellectual mode. Though Aristotle saw the value of these arts to his
larger philosophical project, the discussions of poetic figuration in the Organon, the
Rhetoric and the Poetics suggest its fraught position. While logic aimed to establish
necessary truths and rhetoric appealed to probable impressions, poetics could use
feigned artifice to explore the frontiers of possibility.22 Recognizing the poetic nature of
figuration, Aristotle celebrated the poet as one uniquely equipped to use metaphor well,
a feat that required “the perception of similarities” or (in a more felicitous and
figurative translation) “an eye for resemblances”.23 While figuration in general included
a wide variety of devices, metaphor was the most iconic of tropes in Aristotle’s view,
exemplifying figurative expression’s dynamic operations.24 After all, the Aristotelian
definition of metaphor was quite capacious. Hobbes, who produced the first English
translation of the Rhetoric, conveyed Aristotle’s view that “[a] Similitude differs from a
Metaphor onely by such Particles of Comparison, as these, As; Even as; So; Even so, &c.
A Similitude therefore is a Metaphor dilated; and a Metaphor, is a Similitude contracted
into one Word”.25 With this expansive range, metaphorical language could appear in
different forms within discourses of all kinds, and yet its poetic character remained a
source of anxiety. In the Topics, Aristotle warned against the use of tropes in logical
demonstration, asserting that “a metaphorical expression is always obscure”.26 He also
cautioned in the Rhetoric that persuasive speech should avoid the overuse of figurative
comparisons, advising, in Hobbes’s translation, that a similitude can be effective so long

as “it be not too frequent; for ’tis Poeticall”.27 This concern did not end with Aristotle. It
persisted in Cicero’s advice that a metaphor ‘ought to have an apologetic air’ and
Quintilian’s warning about the “unrestrained use of figures”.28 The poet’s broad licence
to figure forth images of any kind was seen as a threat to the integrity of writing that
aspired to affirmative truth. However, early modern humanists tended to dismiss or
ignore that threat, focusing instead upon Cicero’s more sanguine assertion that “the
poet is a very near kinsman of the orator”.29 That sentiment was echoed throughout the
period, from Thomas Elyot’s “defendyng of oratours and poetes” in the same breath in
The Book Named the Governor (1531) to Ben Jonson’s playful turn of the pronounce-
ment, calling the poet “the neerest Borderer upon the Orator” in Timber (1640).30
Though Hobbes’s approach to language was thoroughly invested in the humanist
tradition, he was not content to rest upon the convergence of poetics with rhetoric.
As he began to reject some of humanism’s basic assumptions about knowledge, Hobbes
also explored the poetic nature of figuration that had been so apparent to classical
theorists.
Before crystallizing into the scheme represented in Leviathan’s visual diagram,
Hobbes’s effort to reorganize the map of human knowledge took a variety of forms.
He had initially inherited the studia humanitatis through his humanist education, the
set of intellectual categories that marginalized scholastic logic, highlighting moral
philosophy and history and treating rhetoric, with its handmaid poetry, as the chief
faculty uniting all of the arts.31 By the 1630s, though, Hobbes had begun to move away
from this tradition. He was among a cohort of early modern thinkers, which included
Francis Bacon, whose commitment to the natural sciences motivated varying degrees of
scepticism toward rhetorical resources in particular.32 Hobbes’s translation of Aristotle,
A Briefe of the Arte of Rhetorique (1637), shows signs of his growing distrust of
eloquence.33 It also signals his early awareness of the thread of classical theory that
had acknowledged the strain between the linguistic arts. Englishing Aristotle’s sugges-
tion of the “Poeticall” character of tropes and figures, Hobbes seems to have understood
the threat that the poet’s artistic devices posed to arguments wielded by polemicists and
philosophers. By the 1640s, as England descended into civil war and hermeneutic
6 J. TOOTALIAN
conflicts began to infect political discourse, Hobbes’s reaction against his humanist
formation manifested in such works as The Elements of Law (1640) and his “Critique of
De Mundo” (1642–43). It is in these writings that the picture of Hobbes as an
archphilosopher scornful of the infelicities of figurative language was formed. His
discussion of the “four legitimate ends of speech” in the “Critique of De Mundo”
foreshadows Leviathan’s ‘Consequences from speech,’ albeit with significant
differences.34 Poetry, rhetoric and logic appear in both versions, but Hobbes had not
yet, in this earlier form, developed the discourse of the contract, retaining instead the
discipline of history. Though he listed these arts side by side, Hobbes insisted upon a
solid demarcation between them, arguing that the objective of a philosopher
is not to impress [others], but to know with certainty. So philosophy is not concerned with
rhetoric. Again, its students seek to know the necessity of consequences and the truth of
universal propositions: therefore philosophy is not to do with history, and much less with
poetry, for the latter relates deeds of great moment, and it deliberately sets aside truth.35
Conceiving of the philosophical enterprise as the search for absolute certainty, Hobbes
devalued the epistemic worth of the other arts. In the process, he sought to marginalize
the utility of figurative expression. Banishing tropes and figures from philosophical
discourse, he declared that “all metaphors are (by profession) equivocal”.36 Hobbes
could see the impact of metaphors misperceived or manipulated in the prose controver-
sies of the Revolution, and so he treated metaphorical insight as, not a sign of poetic
genius, but a defect of the fanciful man who “delighteth himself” in “finding unexpected
similitude in things, otherwise much unlike”. In this view, it is the excessive imagination
that generates “those grateful similes, metaphors and other tropes, by which both poets
and orators have it in their power to make things please or displease and shew well or ill to
others, as they like themselves”.37 Where earlier humanists had aligned rhetoric and
poetics in the effort to vindicate the rhetor’s power, Hobbes simplified and distinguished
these arts – the one designed “to move our hearer’s mind toward performing something”,
the other “to glorify [certain] deeds” – while still assigning them an equal share in the
forms of meaning that fall beneath the standard of philosophical certainty.38
Reformulating the discursive arts in contrast with the humanist emphasis on rhetoric
and its adjunct poetics, Hobbes sought a surer path to knowledge that could resist the
upheavals of human conflict by marginalizing figurative language.
Such linguistic starkness, though, proved unsustainable for Hobbes. As seventeenth-
century intellectual culture moved toward John Locke’s recognition of the limitations of
certainty “where Probability only is to be had”, Hobbes too developed a more dynamic
understanding of language’s connection to truth, leading him to revise his sense of
figurative expression.39 Leviathan represented a significant evolution in the way that
Hobbes thought about philosophy’s relationship not just to rhetoric, but also to
poetics.40 Recognizing rhetorical eloquence as a tool that could both inform and exhort
philosophical truth, Hobbes also began to understand the distinctively poetic potential
of tropes. For all of his worry that “metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words”
could operate “like ignes fatui”, the fool’s fire of discourse, Hobbes conceded that
certain forms of figurative expression were “less dangerous, because they profess their
inconstancy”.41 Metaphorical imagery is poetic precisely because it is conspicuously
inconstant, violating the conventional logic of expression by explicitly borrowing
language from a foreign concept. Bacon had used similar terms to describe “how fickle
and inconstant a thing fiction is”, as he described the challenge of interpreting “Poeticall
fables”.42 Both figures and fictions signify poetically when they make their audiences
aware of their artifice, demanding a level of interpretation that reaches beyond the
images that they feign. While the expert use of rhetoric sometimes conceals the art
within language in order to obtain assent to a position, poetic representation promises
to expose that art, cultivating a transparent approach to philosophical truth that could
allow writers and readers to participate in a shared form of understanding.
Hobbes seized upon the profession of inconstancy as a characteristic unique to the
poet’s insight, applying it to situations in which metaphorical language had failed to
disclose itself as figurative. He brought this insight to bear on a concept critical to his
understanding of collective knowledge, one that was deeply implicated within the
debates of the Revolution – the question of conscience.43 Throughout the 1640s,
godly reformers as well as republicans justified their actions on the grounds of indivi-
dual conscience. In Areopagitica, Milton implores, “[g]ive me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.44 Hobbes would
later characterize such invocations as “an amazing plague” that infected England.45 In
Leviathan, he argues that the mistaken pretence of conscience derived from a failure to
read a metaphor as a metaphor. Insisting that the epistemic claim made by the term
“conscience” more properly refers to shared knowledge, Hobbes argues that “[w]hen
two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one
to another; which is as much as to know it together”. Conscience as a collective faculty
promised to guard against the solipsistic irrationalities of individualism. Within a
conscientious community, each person is accompanied by “fittest witnesses of the
facts of one another, or of a third”, and because of this participatory oversight “it was
and ever will be reputed a very evil act for any man to speak against his conscience”.
Marking the word as a forgotten metaphor, Hobbes highlights its figurativeness in
order to breathe new life into it. Since its initial association with epistemic participation,
“[a]fterwards, men made use of the same word metaphorically for the knowledge of
their own secret facts and secret thoughts”. Those who have forgotten that conscience
had been metaphorized into a subjective faculty have since begun “rhetorically” to say
“that conscience is a thousand witnesses”.46 The rhetorical reuse of the metaphor
concealed the true meaning of “conscience”, perpetuating the error. Hobbes’s reinter-
pretation of the word, though, attends to the figurative layers that had accreted around
it, recovering what he believed to be its more original and apt usage. This passage in
Leviathan is remarkable for the way in which it exemplifies an instance of poetically
invigorated interpretive practice in the process of expressing the very principle of
collective knowledge that motivates such interpretation. Rather than scorning meta-
phor, Hobbes championed a shared form of poetic discernment that remained alive
to it.
Indeed, most of Leviathan’s moments of scepticism toward figurative language are
qualified by Hobbes’s recognition of the link between poetic insight and collective truth.
This sentiment is particularly apparent in the treatise’s catalogue of the formal features of
various genres of expression, proceeding from a poem to a history, an oration to a
pleading, and arriving at the kind of discourse that Leviathan is primarily concerned
with, philosophical demonstration. Hobbes makes clear that “[i]n demonstration, in
8 J. TOOTALIAN
counsel, and all rigorous search of truth”, metaphors are “utterly excluded. For seeing
they openly profess deceit, to admit them into counsel or reasoning were manifest
folly”.47 Hobbes follows Aristotle’s Topics in advising against metaphorical expression
within demonstration. Yet, he appeals to another Aristotelian notion to create a powerful
exception, licensing figuration’s capacity to build consensus around philosophical truth.
Hobbes explains that “sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt
similitude; and then there is so much use of fancy”.48 Observing the superficial distinction
that Aristotle marked between metaphor and similitude – in which “a Metaphor, is a
Similitude contracted into one Word” – Hobbes liberates the philosopher to draw upon
figurative expression, asking only that it be accessed in the conspicuous and precise form
of an “apt similitude”. Professing their inconstancy, elaborated similitudes are more overt
than the concealed form of metaphor strictly defined. They are, as Aristotle’s Rhetoric
suggests, more “Poeticall” and therefore much more conducive to Hobbes’s pursuit of
truth. The most profound example of an apt similitude in Hobbes’s work is the Leviathan
itself, his poetic revision of the conventional body politic. He also used this technique to
reconceptualize the poetic imagination itself, denying writerly claims to prophetic
inspiration by likening such invocations to the empty image of the bagpipe that he
conjures up in his “Answer to Davenant”. Hobbes’s more mature theory of figurative
language suggests that what actually makes figures meaningful are their transparent
communicative principles. In this sense, figuration is fundamentally a poetic exercise.
The recognition of a trope’s poetics furthers the connection between writer and readers,
deepening their shared conception of the ideas under discussion. Harold Skulsky has
argued that figurative expression “requires a tacit social contract”, specifically citing
Hobbes’s work to illustrate the communitarian dynamics that allow figures and tropes
to operate. “Figurativeness”, Skulsky explains, “is an opportunity to renew the sense of
language as an instrument of collective purpose”.49 In acknowledging the dangers of a
society fragmenting into rival interpretive factions, Hobbes recognized that the poetic
artificiality of tropes could expose and transcend the erroneous conventions that had kept
the English language and culture in turmoil. If the Revolution threatened to return
England to the state of nature, then poetic figuration, with its capacity, in Sidney’s
words, to create a “second nature”, promised to bring it true peace.50
The conceaved possibility of nature

In the opening passage of the “Answer to Davenant”, Hobbes presents himself as a
philosopher venturing beyond his area of expertise, declaring, “I am not a poet”.51
Responding to the preface that Davenant, a fellow exile at the Continental courts,
penned for the unfinished epic Gondibert, Hobbes’s humble claim ignores the work
he had done translating Euripides and poetically celebrating the Earl of Devonshire in
Latin hexameters; it also fails to foresee the work he would later do Englishing the Iliad
and the Odyssey and versifying his own life. While he may not have identified primarily
as a poet, Hobbes was certainly not lacking in poetic insight. Even as he was working on
Leviathan, Hobbes had done Davenant, in the poet laureate’s words, “the honour to
allow this Poem a daylie examination as it was writing”.52 Davenant and Hobbes’s
literary-critical exchange was published even before the three completed books of
Gondibert went into print. Though it puzzled later readers like John Eachard,
Hobbes’s treatment of poetics foreshadowed many of the concerns that would drive
literary thought from the Restoration onward.53 Moreover, Hobbes’s theories of poetry
also informed his own figurative practice in prose.
Lauding the great impact of the poetic imagination, Hobbes’s “Answer” seems at first
to echo the sentiment he articulates in Leviathan, that imaginative power, as generative
as it is, is still only effective when guided by philosophical judgment. He asserts that “so
farre forth as the Fancy of man, has traced the wayes of true Philosophy, so farre it hath
produced very marvelous effects to the benefit of mankind”, attributing a great deal of
human production to “the workemanship of Fancy, but guided by the Precepts of true
Philosophy”.54 Imaginative insight is explicitly qualified in these celebratory lines.
However, Hobbes goes further. He argues that
where these precepts fayle, as they have hetherto fayled in the doctrine of Morall vertue,
there the Architect (Fancy) must take the Philosophers part upon herselfe. He therefore
that undertakes an Heroique Poeme (which is to exhibite a venerable and amiable Image of
Heroique vertue) must not onely be the Poet, to place and connect, but also the
Philosopher, to furnish and square his matter.55
His pronouncement exceeds even Sidney’s celebration of “the peerless poet” for giving
“a perfect picture” of “whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done”.56 Hobbes
suggests that poetics offers more than just the capacity to illustrate philosophical
precepts. With the ability to “furnish and square”, not just “place and connect”, a
poetic intelligence generates insights of its own. Hobbes thus assents to Aristotle’s
suggestion that figuration reveals connections between “things that are related but not
obviously so”, a quality it shares with “philosophy” in which “it is characteristic of a
well-directed mind to observe the likeness even in things very different”.57 While he had
omitted this passage from his adumbrated translation of the Rhetoric, Hobbes’s
“Answer” acknowledges that poetics can be more than just a means for transmitting
philosophical truth. It can also secure the linguistic foundation of philosophical inquiry,
extending it beyond its limitations.
As Hobbes came to recognize a congenial relationship between poetic expression and
philosophy, he still insisted upon certain representational guidelines. One of the
qualities he admired about Davenant’s Gondibert was its avoidance of the fantastical
exorbitances of fiction. Listing the supernatural trappings of romance, a genre that often
pushed poetic possibility to its limits, Hobbes establishes a guiding principle for
poetics58:
There are some that are not pleased with fiction, unlesse it be bold not onely to exceed the
worke, but also the possibility of nature: they would have impenetrable Armours, Inchanted
Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron men, flying Horses, and a thousand other such things
which are easily feign’d by them that dare…. Beyond the actuall works of Nature a Poet
may now go; but beyond the conceaved possibility of Nature, never.59
Hobbes prescribes “the conceaved possibility of nature” as the mimetic rule for poetic
invention. As Sidney suggested, poetic representation is capable of producing a “second
nature”, a form of reproduction that liberates the poet to go beyond the “actuall works
of Nature”. Yet, Hobbes is careful to restrain the poet from roaming within Sidney’s
“zodiac of his own wit”.60 Circumventing the liberty of individual fancy, Hobbes
appeals to the term “conceaved” as a form of collective knowing, not unlike his
10 J. TOOTALIAN
metaphorical clarification of “conscience”. The Hobbesian poet must imagine within

the bounds of a shared sense of possibility. Notably, he avoids the word “probability”,
which could have been used as a synonym for “conceaved possibility”. Over the course
of the seventeenth century, “probability” associated as it was with rhetorical thought
became the preferred term for literary critics, even those indebted to Hobbes.61
Davenant’s “Preface”, in fact, defends what he calls “probable fiction”, and his later
collaborator John Dryden would assert that it is “not the business of a Poet to represent
truth, but probability”.62 The embrace of this critical terminology signalled a fusion
between poetics and rhetorical accommodation, one that was influenced by Aristotle’s
assertion that in fiction “plausible impossibility is preferable to an implausible
possibility”.63 Hobbes, though, asserted a more direct connection between philosophy
and poetic possibility, establishing a collective epistemology that avoids the reiteration
of customary opinions that might fragment an interpretive community. Hobbes’s
“conceaved possibility of nature” frees poetic expression from rhetorically flattering
the flaws of the world as it is, celebrating instead the poet who paints new worlds that
cultivate greater participation through greater artistic transparency.

Hobbes’s standards for fiction also inform his approach to figures and tropes.
Figuration both aspires to “the conceaved possibility of nature” and seeks to instill it
in excessive forms of speech. Commending the “admirable variety and novelty of
metaphors and similitudes”, Hobbes asserts that such alterations in language allow
human interpreters to maintain a meaningful engagement with what it is that they
express. He explains that when “the Phrases of Poesy, as the ayres of musique with often
hearing become insipide”, then the reader is left with “no more sense of their force,
then our Flesh is sensible of the bones that susteine it”. Like the embodied imperception
of having a skeleton, linguistic consistency can actually undermine understanding. To
correct against this discursive inertia, language has to be brought to life from time to
time to help a community of readers recognize its presence. “As the sense we have of
bodies, consisteth in change and variety of impression”, Hobbes argues, “so also does
the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words”.64 For all of his
insistence on a rigorous vocabulary for proper demonstration, Hobbes does not believe
that a single effort is sufficient to maintain language’s integrity. He calls, not for more
words, but for a more figurative approach: “I meane not in the affectation of words
newly brought home from travaile, but in new (and with all significant) translation to
our purposes, of those that be already received; and in farre fetch’t (but withal, apt,
instructive and comely) similitudes”.65 Figuration is the engine of linguistic renewal.
Expanding upon Leviathan’s acknowledgement of the power of an apt similitude,
Hobbes demonstrates that a sensitivity to poetics can help cultivate language’s epistemic
capacity. Hobbes’s infamous diffidence toward figures and tropes is motivated by a care
for how words signify and how their meanings can be shared. It is precisely this passage
in the “Answer” that Skulsky cites when he asserts that figurative meaning can restore a
community to collective knowledge.
The most significant example of such a figurative revaluation in the “Answer to
Davenant” is Hobbes’s deconstruction of the metaphor of the muse – the early modern
master trope of the poetic imagination. Celebrating Davenant for dispensing with the epic
invocation in Gondibert, Hobbes demonstrates that the poet has adhered to the “con-
ceaved possibility of nature” even where it offends the conventions of classical tradition.
Davenant, as he reports in his preface to the poem, avoids the custom that Homer
engaged in, who in his great epics ascends into “immortal conversation” as he “inter-
rogates his Muse, not as his rationall Spirit but as a Familiar, separated from his body”.66
Davenant implies that Homer misunderstood the invocation as something more than a
metaphor for imaginative power. Belief in spiritual inspiration as the source of creativity
was a central feature of the vates, the prophetic poet of the classical tradition that writers
like Milton resurrected as a model in the seventeenth century.67 Hobbes, though, chal-
lenged the very notion of inspiration in Leviathan, and Davenant made good on that
challenge in Gondibert.68 Though Hobbes forgives the indiscretions of ancient poets who
were staying true to nature as their culture “conceaved” of it, he could not extend that
historicist amnesty to early modern Christians.69 Hobbes implies that England’s prelates
and presbyters had aimed for the same inspired pretensions as poets had. Likening these
foolhardy clerics to “unskillful Conjurers, that mistaking the rites and ceremonious parts
of their art, call up such spirits, as they cannot at their pleasure allay againe; by whom
stormes are raysed, that overthrow buildings, and are the cause of miserable wrackes at
sea”, he insinuates the ways in which “[u]nskillful divines” contributed to the chaos of the
Revolution. It was they who abused language, corrupting the definitions of words to
accommodate the subjective revelations of inspiration.
The remedy, in Hobbes’s view, is not the rejection of imaginative expression but the
exercise of a poetics infused with the “conceaved possibility of nature”. He demon-
strates this principle by countering false conceptions with a poetic trope of his own:
But why a Christian should think it an ornament to his Poem, either to profane the true God
or invoke a false one, I can imagine no cause but a reasonless imitation of Custom, of a
foolish custome, by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature and
his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe.70
Hobbes employs the apt similitude of the bagpipe to expose the absurdity of the poet
who submits himself to be puffed up and deflated melodiously by a false god. The
bagpipe image had strong associations in both the traditions of religious polemic and
poetic criticism. In a Reformation broadside that circulated on the Continent in the
sixteenth century, a demon straddles the shoulders of a monk, forcing air through a
tube in his ear while expertly using his claws to finger the tone holes of the brother’s
fluted nose.71 It is an image of empty influence, reducing the man to a hollow tool
manipulated by a malevolent force. The bagpipe symbol developed further significance
in the English Revolution. As an instrument associated with Scotland, polemical writers
sometimes employed it to critique the threat of Scottish Presbyterianism.72 The unique
physics of the bagpipe as a music-making device also made it ripe for use in satirical
discussions of poetic expression.73 These lines of significance converge in Hobbes’s
trope, refashioning the bagpipe to make an incisive point about both spiritual authority
and poetic practice.
Hobbes’s experimentation with the bagpipe model of the imagination fully materi-
alizes its conditions and thereby dismantles the pretences of clerical and vatic inspira-
tion. He engages in a practice that Peter Lund calls “his bathetic literalization of
metaphor”, using the conspicuous artifice of poetics to expose an erroneous
concept.74 Ever aware of the material references built into the language of abstract
ideas, Hobbes manages to defuse the conventional metaphor of the muse. He refigures
12 J. TOOTALIAN
it along the lines suggested by other satirical uses of the bagpipe image, highlighting not
just the emptiness of the poet as instrument but also the ontological absence of a
supernatural player. Hobbes ridicules a poetic speaker who gives himself over to
inspiration by a force that manifestly does not exist. The humour of the moment,
though, is tempered by the dangerous consequences of such foolishness. As his allusion
to the “unskillful Conjurers” shows, going through the motions of a false belief can have
destructive effects. It is precisely this concern that motivates Hobbes’s deepest scepti-
cism about the undisciplined use of the imagination. He articulates this critique,
though, in order to make the case for a productive application of poetic artifice. As
his celebration of Davenant demonstrates, a poet can express meaning with even greater
insight than the pretence to spiritual authority would allow. Hobbes’s philosophy rests
on the fundamental premise that all of humanity might, through industry, attain to a
collective understanding that is only as legitimate as it is shared. Where inspiration
offers a retreat into individuality and transcendence, Hobbes’s “conceaved possibility”
rests in collectivity and material immanence. He achieves this revision through a

masterful turn of phrase, a poetic expression that revalues poetic expression itself. It
was this technique that Hobbes brought to bear not only in his considerations of poetic
theory but more profoundly in his intervention with one of the most powerful images
governing early modern English society – the body politic.75
Nothing … to be compared with him

Katherine Attie suggests that in the Revolution “the conventional meaning of the body
politic, so numbingly cliché, became radically destabilized, hence in need of radical
revision”.76 She locates this destabilization in the moment of the regicide. However, in
the years running up to Charles I’s execution, the body politic trope had already come
under a great deal of interpretive pressure, as royalists and parliamentarians sought to
redefine it, and other figurative symbols of the kingdom, in ways that served their
ideological objectives. Writers who supported parliament’s challenge to the king’s
prerogatives did so by harnessing the figurative nature of the traditional iconography
of the state. In Leviathan, Hobbes seems to have recognized the forces at work on the
body politic and turned them in the direction of political absolutism instead of repub-
licanism. While Attie contends that “the metaphor itself, in Hobbes’s hands, becomes
something real and eternal”, the body politic’s radical transformation into the Leviathan
is not a process of strict literalization; Leviathan aspires to an enduring political order
by being poetically explicit about the figurative terms of its central trope.77
Raia Prokhovnik has posed the question that preoccupies all scholarship interested in
the titular image of the treatise: “What would Leviathan lack, without the allegory?”78 To
see Leviathan without the Leviathan, we need look no further than Hobbes’s earlier
writings. The Elements of Law, in so many ways Leviathan’s first draft, has no organizing
metaphor, though it does gesture periodically to the body politic. In it, Hobbes explains
that the kind of social union he describes “is that which men call now-a-days a body
politic or civil society; and the Greeks call it πόλις, that is to say, a city; which may be
defined to be a multitude of men, united as one person by a common power, for their
common peace, defence and benefit”.79 In placing the “body politic” alongside the ancient
Greek term polis, Hobbes gestures at, without elaborating, the layers of alternative
nomenclature for the state, suggesting the arbitrariness of the names given to things.
However, this notion remains undeveloped throughout the treatise, and Hobbes only
makes oblique references to the physiology of the body politic. As Skinner suggests of
Hobbes’s early prose, “[s]o far is he from wishing to exploit the resources of ornatus
[figurative ornamentation] to help us ‘see’ new connections that his figures and tropes are
almost invariably familiar to the point of triteness”.80 Aspiring to discursive austerity,
Hobbes overlooked a linguistic opportunity in his earlier work, but in Leviathan he
returned to a more considered approach to language. Having used the figure of the
bagpipe to reconceptualize his sense of the poetic imagination, Hobbes came to realize
that his political philosophy needed, not a benign pattern of commonplace references to
the state, but a more dynamic figuration that would poetically embody its artificial power.
As Hobbes watched the English Revolution unfold from afar, he would have seen the
role that figurative images played in the making and remaking of a social order. The
evolution in his philosophy of language certainly suggests his growing skepticism
toward efforts to reject the metaphorical dimensions of discourse. Though none of

their interventions ultimately prevented the regicide, royalists in the period had been
eager to solidify all manner of images associated with monarchy. Dudley Digges, for
instance, invoked the age-old connection between kingship and fatherhood, insisting
most emphatically that the king is “Pater patriae, a common Father to all without a
Metaphor”, whose powers were not merely virtual but “truly transferred”.81 Digges
asserts that the analogy holds “without a Metaphor”, treating, as Victoria Kahn
explains, the paternal kingship model as “a real metaphor, even a literal or corporeal
one”.82 Digges intends what he says. In his view, the likeness between father and king is
metaphysically true, and therefore no metaphor at all. Royalist writers frequently made
recourse to this strategy with different monarchical conceits, relying upon the possibi-
lity of real signification even when they stopped short of Digges’s degree of insistence.
Just as the pamphleteer Henry Ferne had argued that “the power of Kings was as of
Fathers”, so too did the learned judge David Jenkins rely upon the integrity of the body
politic, testifying that “always the Assent of the King giveth the life to all, as the soul to
the body”.83 These affirmations, echoing centuries-long traditions of monarchical dis-
course, had even greater ontological weight in the midst of the Revolution.
Such arguments, though, were met with opposition by parliamentarians who took
aim at this royalist strategy, calling attention to the very figurativeness that it was
designed to forestall. As one of parliament’s most prolific polemicists, Henry Parker
accused Judge Jenkins of figurative misinterpretation, arguing that he “thinkes the King
is a head to the Parliament simpliciter, or phisicè”.84 Confusing the connection that
Jenkins makes (switching soul for head), Parker suggests that the state’s resemblance to
an organic body is only meaningful in an associative sense, explaining that the king is
not simply or physically the head, “he is so but secundum quid, or metaphorisè”. In
Parker’s view, the figurativeness of the trope marks its limitations, for if the king “were
such a head to the Politick Body, as the true head is to the naturall Body, the body could
have no subsistence without him”.85 Another parliamentarian pamphleteer, Charles
Herle, took a similar interpretive approach in his confutation of Henry Ferne’s paternal
comparison. Herle’s critique was even more systematic than Parker’s, deconstructing
the whole programme of royalist literalization. He declared, in a precept that encapsu-
lates the larger parliamentarian approach to figuration in prose, that “Alegoryes are no
14 J. TOOTALIAN
good arguments, they onely illustrate as farre as the likenesse holds”. Exposing the faulty
associations that Ferne and other royalists had insinuated through their appeals to, not
just paternity, but also bodily integrity, he asks a pointed question: since a king “should
governe with the wisdome of a head”, does it mean “therefore he may governe not only
without the consent, but without the Counsell of the rest of the Members as the head
doth?”86 Herle’s questions trace the implications of monarchical tropes, forcing his
readers to consider precisely what they are assenting to when they accept a point of
figurative resemblance. Calling such comparisons instances of allegory – a term that
George Puttenham defined as “a long and perpetuall Metaphore” usually “extending to
whole and large speaches” – Herle and other parliamentarians developed a productive
wariness toward figurative expressions implicated within early modern discourse,
resisting the effort to treat those significations as real.87
Hobbes’s approach to figuration resembles the strategy of revolutionary writers more
than it does the royalist impulse toward literalism. As he reinvigorated the conventional
trope of the body politic in Leviathan, Hobbes showcased the artificiality of its figura-
tiveness. The treatise, after all, begins by noting the way in which human art traces
nature: “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of
man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial
animal”.88 Despite the close relationship Hobbes suggests between nature and art,
imitation does not consist of pure reflection. As early modern poetic theorists attested,
mimetic creation is capable of constructing artifacts that differ from, perhaps even
excel, the productions of nature. Hobbes taps into that dynamic as he highlights the
artificiality of the state, building a poetic representation of a political community that,
by virtue of its metaphorical quality, could convey both its power and its limitations. He
explains, “For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in
Latin CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than
the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended”.89 While invocations of
the body politic figure by other early modern writers strived to show the ways in which
it closely parallels the structure of the body natural, Hobbes emphasizes how his
Leviathan outmeasures human corporeality. Though he lists the correspondences
between the Leviathan and the human body – from sovereignty, which “is an artificial
soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body” to counsellors, “by whom all things
needful for it to know are suggested unto it”, as “the memory” – Hobbes nonetheless
makes clear that the state is designed to excel nature.90 Stephen Hequembourg has
described Leviathan’s central image as “an exercise in controlled inconsistency”.91
While, as Hequembourg demonstrates, Leviathan is not candid about the way its
portrait of a natural body departs from Hobbes’s own materialist convictions, the
treatise is explicit about the metaphorical character of its master trope. The body of
the Leviathan may be blessed with the pretence of a soul, but the rest of its structure
conforms to a version of the “conceaved possibility of nature” that Hobbes thought his
readership could productively entertain. Presenting a model of the state that he and his
audience could share, Hobbes aimed to build an image that would be recognized as
explicitly figurative.
Though he calls his trope “an artificial man” and his frontispiece depicts a creature
with a human shape, albeit a gargantuan one, the name “Leviathan” conjures up a
corporeal nature of a different kind. The Leviathan of scripture was a primordial sea-
creature at home in the chaos of the deep. Early modern linguists speculated that its
name derived from a Hebrew compound of the terms “to couple” and “a Serpent, or
Dragon”, which members of the Westminster Assembly presumed was “because by his
bignesse he seemes not one single creature, but a coupling of divers together; or because
his scales are closed, or straitly compacted together”.92 Hobbes, preoccupied as he was
with fashioning “unity” out of a “multitude”, must have found these qualities of the
creature attractive.93 Furthermore, he would have been aware of its specifically figura-
tive association with positions of political power. One comparative dictionary of the
period listed the term’s metaphorical connotations: “Per Metaphoram, princeps, rex”.94
As a creature, the Leviathan offered Hobbes a provocative vehicle for conveying the
subtle dynamics of his political theory, not only for the meanings already built into it,
but also for the way in which its metaphoricity could not be ignored. As Samuel Mintz
contends, Hobbes gave his treatise “a ‘poetic’ name”.95 Though much of the imagery of
the text retains the familiar form of the human body – a structure that Hobbes and his
readership would have felt, in the most intimate sense, to be the experiential paradigm
of creaturely wholeness – Hobbes titled the treatise Leviathan, underscoring the possi-
bility of a corporeal form both stranger and greater than the small, bipedal, land-
dwelling body that his readers would have expected. He forced them instead to imagine
a dimension of nature that could not be taken for granted, transforming the conven-
tional body politic into something larger, more powerful, perhaps monstrous, but
unmistakably figurative.96
Never receding into a literal signification, the Leviathan’s metaphorical resonance
allows it to embody and thereby illustrate the political community’s power. Hobbes
explains the dynamic of this “comparison” in his direct citation of the Book of Job, the
part of scripture in which the sea-creature was first described: “God, having set forth the
great power of Leviathan, calleth him King of the Proud. ‘There is nothing,’ saith he, ‘on
earth, to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every high
thing below him, and is king of all the children of pride.’”97 In their scriptural context,
these lines support God’s argument that Job is unable to comprehend divine power,
which holds sway over even the most gigantic and potent of worldly creatures. Hobbes
turns the description to emphasize the Leviathan as the most superlative being in the
material universe, using the colossal beast to represent the state’s paradoxically bounded
expansiveness. An absolutist commonwealth remains of the earth, and yet it excels
every other earthly thing. Such a state constitutes the greatest expression of social unity,
encompassing a population of subjects so fully that there is “nothing … to be compared
with him”. Hobbes’s unconventional version of the body politic ensures that the larger
social body is not limited to the form of the individual bodies that compose it. Defined
as beyond comparison, there is an imaginative leap that separates people from the state
to which they are bound. That leap is a poetic one. Through a figurative performance
that constitutes the creation and maintenance of an enduring political community,
Hobbes demonstrates the productive power of metaphor itself.
The Leviathan is, in Hobbes’s terminology, an “apt similitude”, an instance of a
“metaphor dilated”, a figurative expression designed to open human understanding.
For a philosophy that required collective participation, poetic figuration proved to be
a force for both conceptualizing and enacting the state. Hobbes could not risk the
security of a commonwealth on the fragile foundations of literalism. Though in his
16 J. TOOTALIAN
tree of human knowledge he marks the language of “contracting” as separate from

the poetic power of “magnifying, vilifying, &c”., the figurative actions made through-
out Leviathan, especially in the construction of the titular trope, complicate that
division. As Skulsky suggests, figuration entails “a tacit social contract”. Hobbes
explains that “a sign by inference of any contract is whatsoever sufficiently argues
the will of the contractor”.98 Poetic meaning consists of sufficient consent, requiring
only that a standard not unlike that of “conceaved possibility” be achieved. It is in
this sense that Kahn, comparing him to Milton in her discussion of social contract-
ing, argues that it is Hobbes who proves to be “the radical constructivist, the radical
poet or “maker” (to use Sidney’s phrase)”.99 Rather than merely complementing his
approach to rhetoric, though, Hobbes’s strategic use of poetic figuration was invigo-
rated by its productive resistance to some of the key impulses behind rhetorical
assertion. Tapping into the specifically poetic capacity to renew a community’s
collective conceptions, Hobbes used the Leviathan trope to figure forth the artificial
“second nature” of civilization.
Skinner casts the development of Hobbes’s philosophy as a return to humanism’s

commitment to rhetoric, and by extension to poetics. Hobbes, though, never
neglected the friction between rhetorical concealment and poetic exposure in the
way that earlier humanists had. Both his austere reaction against the studia huma-
nitatis and his renewed embrace of the linguistic arts beyond logic were informed by
a keen and generous sense of language’s distinctive ends. Attending to the con-
spicuously fictive structure of poetic representation, Hobbes remained acutely aware
of the interpretive dynamics surrounding figuration in philosophical prose, and he
developed strategies not only to mitigate the dangers of figurativeness but also to
exploit its opportunities. As royalists faltered in their efforts to make certain
cherished metaphors come true, Hobbes witnessed the power of parliamentarian
prose writers who were able to harness the figurative dimensions of language to
achieve their aims. Resisting the fear of metaphorical deception, he explored the
self-conscious craftsmanship of poetic figuration, unleashing its capacity to instill
collective understanding within an interpretive community. While the years follow-
ing Leviathan’s publication were haunted by the spectre of “Hobbism”, Hobbes’s
critics, like Eachard, did not understand that at the heart of his thinking was a
theory of language designed to build a more durable system of shared knowledge. In
the midst of a Restoration settlement struggling to banish the intellectual and
linguistic foibles of the previous decades of conflict, many failed to see that the
man Dryden called “our Poet and Philosopher of Malmsbury” had fashioned a
revolutionary approach to figuration designed to subvert a revolution.100 For
Hobbes, there was philosophical truth to be found at the place where poetics
diverges from rhetoric.
Notes
1. On the reception of Hobbes’s philosophy, see Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan and
Parkin, Taming the Leviathan.
2. Eachard, Mr. Hobbs’s State of Nature, A5v; Eachard, Some Opinions, 165.
3. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, 26.
4. Eachard, Some Opinions, 200–2, refers to an actual textual parallel between Hobbes’s
‘Answer to Davenant’ and his De Cive. See Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant”, 49; and
Hobbes, “De Cive”, 3. Though Eachard mentions the 1647 Latin edition of De Cive, the
linguistic similarity comes through in the 1651 English translation.
5. Eachard, Some Opinions, 200.
6. For Hobbes’s approach to figurative language, see Wilson-Quayle, “Resolving Hobbes’s
Metaphorical Contradiction” and Musolff, “Ignes Fatui or Apt Similitudes?” On rhetoric
and philosophy in Hobbes, see Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 152–81;
Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan; Cantalupo, A Literary Leviathan; Prokhovnik,
Rhetoric and Philosophy; and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric.
7. Skinner explicitly associates poetics with rhetoric, noting the impact of Hobbes’s relation-
ship with Davenant in its emphasis on the “importance of the rhetorical arts – especially
the art of poetry”, Reason and Rhetoric, 430.
8. On the close interrelationship between rhetoric and poetics in early modern humanism,
see Hardison, “The Orator and the Poet”, and Kinney, Humanist Poetics.
9. Sherry, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, A6v.
10. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, 10.1.28, 252.
11. Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes, A3v. Reynolds voices the intimate connection between
poetics and figurative devices, which remained only implicit in most early modern
theories, but he quickly qualifies that point in order to assert his own idiosyncratic
argument that sought to separate these “Accidents of Poësy” from his neo-Platonic
conception of “the Forme and reall Essence of true Poësy”, A3v–A4r.
12. Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry”, 98.
13. Ong, “The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic”, 26.
14. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 13 and Corthell, “The Subject of Nonfictional
Prose”, 6.
15. On poetry and polemic in Milton’s prose, see Turner, “The Poetics of Engagement”.
16. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 209.
18. Hobbes, Leviathan, Yale University Library, Early English Books Online, 40–41. All other
citations refer to the Curley edition.
20. On early modern efforts to reorganize the categories of knowledge, see Ong, Ramus,
Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.
21. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Curley, 48. On the significance of contracts in the period with
particular attention to Hobbes, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts.
22. See Ong, “The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic”, 24–25. Aristotle suggests in the Poetics
that “the poet’s task is to speak not of events which have occurred, but of the kind of
events which could occur”, advising that poetic fictions should remain “possible by the
standards of probability or necessity”, The Poetics of Aristotle, 1451a, 40. Aristotle’s
attempt to articulate best practices for the poet appeals to rhetorical and philosophical
criteria, implicitly acknowledging that poetic art is not inherently bound by these
standards.
23. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, 57. The latter translation comes from Poetics, in
Aristotle in 23 Volumes.
24. On the centrality of metaphor in Aristotle’s figurative theory, see Kirby, “Aristotle on
Metaphor”.
25. Hobbes, “A Briefe of the Art”, 110. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 229.
26. Aristotle, Topics, 139b, 526.
27. Hobbes, A Briefe, 110. See Aristotle, 1406b, On Rhetoric, 229.
28. Cicero, De Oratore, 3.41.165, 129.
29. Ibid., 1.16.70, 51.
30. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, 52v; Jonson, “Timber”, R2v.
18 J. TOOTALIAN
31. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 215–49. On humanist rhetoric as a philosophical
commitment, see Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy.
32. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 250–303.
33. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 256–57. On Hobbes’s translation of the Rhetoric, see
Ong, “Hobbes and Talon’s Ramist Rhetoric”; Zappen, “Aristotelian and Ramist Rhetoric
in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan”; and Wildermuth, “Hobbes, Aristotle, and the Materialist
Rhetor”.
34. Hobbes, De Mundo Examined, 25.
35. Ibid., 26.
36. Hobbes, “The Elements of Law”, 20.
37. Ibid., 50.
38. Hobbes, De Mundo Examined, 25.
39. Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane, 3. See Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in
Seventeenth-Century England. Skinner qualifies Shapiro’s treatment of Hobbes in
Reason and Rhetoric, 357 n.127.
40. On Hobbes’s return to eloquence, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 327–75.
41. Hobbes, Leviathan, 22, 26.
42. Bacon, The Wisdome of the Ancients, a6r, a5v.

43. On the significance of conscience to theories of metaphor, see Feldman, “Conscience and
Concealments of Metaphor”.
44. Milton, “Areopagitica”, 560.
45. Hobbes, “Vita Carmine Expressa”, qtd. in Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography, 121.
46. Hobbes, Leviathan, 36.
47. Ibid., 39.
48. Ibid.
49. Skulsky, Language Recreated, 13.
50. Sidney, 66.
51. Hobbes, “Answer”, 45.
52. William Davenant, “The Author’s Preface”, 3. On Hobbes and Davenant, see Hillyer,
Hobbes and his Poetic Contemporaries, 19–50.
53. Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy, 56–104, argues that Hobbes’s “Answer” is more
aptly seen as a “transitional” statement between Renaissance and neoclassical criticism.
See also Cope, “Dryden vs. Hobbes”.
55. Ibid., 49–50.
56. Sidney, 74.
57. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1412a, 250.
58. On Hobbes’s approach to the problem of romance, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 134–70.
60. Sidney, 66.
61. See Patey, Probability and Literary Form, 134–68.
62. Dryden, The Indian Emperour, A3v.
63. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, 1461b, 63.
65. Ibid. See Cook, “Thomas Hobbes and the “Far-Fetched””.
66. Davenant, “The Author’s Preface”, 3.
67. See Britnell, “Poetic Fury and Prophetic Fury”.
68. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 270.
69. Donnelly, “The Great Difference of Time”, argues that a historicist sensibility was a
central feature of the neoclassical principles of Hobbes and Davenant.
71. Bartrum, German Renaissance Prints, 95. My thanks to Timothy Harrison for noting this
connection. While some have interpreted the broadside by the artist Eduard Schoen as an
anti-Lutheran satire – Luther having been a tonsured monk – all of the extant prints that
include textual content are aimed at Catholic monasticism. A similar image may also be
insinuated by the title of the book “The Bishop’s Bagpipes”, which appears in Rabelais’
imagined catalogue of the library at Saint Victor’s abbey in Gargantua and Pantagruel,
152.
72. See, for instance, Weldon, Terrible Newes from Scotland, 4; Ward, An Answer to a
Declaration of the Commissioners of the Generall Assembly, 4; Anon, The Presbytery;
Harrison, Nahash, 10; and Heath, “Satyr 2”, in Clarastella, 6.
73. Taylor, “The Author’s Description of a Poet and Poesie”, in The Nipping and Snipping of
Abuses, used the bagpipe trope to lampoon a particular kind of creative ignorance,
bemoaning that the “liberall minds” of the “best Poets” had fallen into disesteem
“Whilest Bagpipe-poets stuft with others winde, / Are grac’d for wit, they have from
them purloined”, Cr.
74. Lund, “The Bite of Leviathan”, 839. See also Keiser, “Very Like a Whale”.
75. See Daly, “Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking”.
76. Attie, “Re-Membering the Body Politic”, 498.
77. Ibid., 504.
78. Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy, 196.
79. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 104.

80. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 308.
81. Digges, The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects, 61. Digges had also expressed the same position
earlier in An Answer to a Printed Book, 5.
82. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 108.
83. Ferne, Conscience Satisfied, 9; Jenkins, The Vindication of Judge Jenkins, 7.
84. Parker, The Cordiall of Mr. David Jenkins, 7. On the significance of the soul versus the
head in the body politic trope, see Hequembourg, “Hobbes’s Leviathan”.
85. Parker, 7.
86. Herle, An Answer to Doctor Fernes Reply, 16–17.
87. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 156.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., 3–4.
91. Hequembourg, 21.
92. Downame, Annotations upon All the Books, a3r.
94. See Schindler, Schindleri Lexicon Pentaglotton, 246.
95. Mintz, “Leviathan as Metaphor”, 3. See also Malcolm, “The Name and Nature of
Leviathan”.
96. On metaphor and monstrosity in Hobbes, cf. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal
Languages, 113–76.
98. Ibid., 83.
99. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 221.
100. Dryden, Sylvae, a1r.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jacob Tootalian is a visiting faculty member in the Department of English at the University of
South Florida. His research revolves around the relationship between literature, rhetoric, and
20 J. TOOTALIAN
science in the early modern period. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Mists
and Uncertainties: Poetic Figuration and English Scientific Prose, 1640-1667.
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The Seventeenth Century

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Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the

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Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of

ment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed

Consequences from speech

comparisons, advising, in Hobbes’s translation, that a similitude can be eﬀective so long

The conceaved possibility of nature

metaphorical clariﬁcation of “conscience”. The Hobbesian poet must imagine within

cultivate greater participation through greater artistic transparency.

rests in collectivity and material immanence. He achieves this revision through a

Nothing … to be compared with him

toward eﬀorts to reject the metaphorical dimensions of discourse. Though none of

tree of human knowledge he marks the language of “contracting” as separate from

Skinner casts the development of Hobbes’s philosophy as a return to humanism’s

42. Bacon, The Wisdome of the Ancients, a6r, a5v.

79. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 104.

1 (2013): 21–36. doi:10.1080/0268117X.2012.757944.

Turner, J. G. “The Poetics of Engagement.” In Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s

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