This essay reveals the ways a representative handful of early modern rhetoric manuals disseminate a formative, civilizing ideology that render them a crucial resource, as well as a point of contention, for other cultural expressions of verbal eloquence in the service of the commonwealth. As a case study that expressly tackles the civilizing agenda of rhetoric, Ben Jonson's The Magnetic Lady depicts a hero-orator who ostensibly enables civic harmony, and yet the play problematizes his “magisterial wit” by introducing doubt about both the use of rhetoric to guide society and the kind of society emerging from such efforts. Furthermore, by interrogating early modern rhetorical treatises’ depictions of the civilizing orator alongside Jonson's dramatic representation, I explore the ways a gendered and classed subject, whose polymorphous speech I ultimately theorize as “female noise”, parodies and thus exposes the corruption underlying rhetoric's civilizing agenda. The reconciliation gestures of the play are the...