The rhetorical figure of compar or parison "... belongs to
the larger category of repitition, and repitition to the more general
category of rhythm - a structural effect with musical, visual, and even
tactile manifestations. Thus the figure of balance may be seen to assert
itself in a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines, notably Elizabethan
prose and verse, the geometries of landscape gardening, the sartorial
designs favoured by Elizabethan aristrocrats, religious and secular music
by the likes of Gibbons and Byrd, ...". As an example, English architecture
of the sixteenth century. 1
An asymmetrical architecture of a defensive feudalism passed into a new
Tudor architecture that emphasized the castle as a showplace. The
architecture shifted away from the inner court towards the exterior
landscape. An elaborate façade based upon bilateral symmetry that
reified the rhetorical figure of "compar" or "parison" to
support a hierarchically stratified aristocracy was now emphasized.
2
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