“A Critic Who Makes No Claim”: Disrupting Lewis’s (In)Expert Rhetorical Flourishes

Abstract

This article shows us how C. S. Lewis offers an alternative way of framing expertise as he speaks and writes about his period(s) and text(s). This essay establishes that Lewis’s humility is, to some degree, a deliberately cultivated and rhetorically shrewd one. The self-characterization of childlike inexperience and humility is a traditional medieval rhetorical move of which Lewis is a master. Moreover, the irony of this humility has washed over commentators who believe Lewis’s claim to be no true Shakespearean scholar and who have all too readily sought to rescue Lewis from his reticence. This paper sets the record straight by resituating Lewis as an academic exploring medieval and renaissance texts from the inside out. It takes Lewis’s reticent remark at the beginning of his Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy (1942) as a case in point.

Keywords

• C.S. Lewis
• humility topos
• Hamlet