Many facts contributed to make [the Elizabethan period] an age of rhetoric, and even of conflicting rhetorics; but we have long persisted in viewing it in the light of the violent reaction against what Huxley called "the pestilent cosmetic of rhetoric." It required, perhaps, the advent of such a successful devotee of the rhetoric of the second sophistic as James Joyce, to prepare the ground for a scholarly understanding of Elizabethan literature.